The House on Willow Street
Cathy Kelly
The warm, engrossing new novel from the No. 1 bestseller, Cathy KellyWelcome to Avalon: a quaint, sleepy town on the Irish coast. Nothing has changed here for generations – least of all the huge mansion on Willow Street; the house in which sisters Tess and Suki Power grew up.Now, years later, Tess is trying to save her marriage protect her glamorous sister Suki who has come back home, dreams shattered. Similarly, Mara Wilson is seeking refuge from a broken heart at her Aunt Danae’s house. And Danae, the inscrutable postmistress, is hiding some dark memories of her own.Now that the big house is up for sale, change is blowing on the cold sea wind. But before they can look to the future, these four women must face up to the past…
CATHY KELLY
The House on Willow Street
Copyright (#ulink_472840f1-278c-55a2-ab9f-cf411e480f4e)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2012
Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Source ISBN: 9780007373611
Ebook Edition © September 2012 ISBN: 9780007373642
Version: 2017-10-28
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
To my darling husband, John, and our wonderful sons, Dylan and Murray. And the Puplets of Loveliness, Dinky, Licky, Scamp, who were there for all of it.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u47b0c5be-4879-5e96-a1d7-8723ff875def)
Copyright (#u63d988c9-1f2c-5b9b-9cda-8b26a7d7e815)
Dedication (#u5fa68153-5db9-5936-8bae-0d957fc343a7)
Prologue (#u95a178dc-1e1a-54cf-9272-6f9881c45607)
Autumn (#u51472df0-a89c-59be-8940-740cf5980cca)
Chapter One (#u628a6ce7-01bc-5eff-8764-11026c801331)
Chapter Two (#u522994d0-605f-50c6-88f0-ea47fabe9c72)
Chapter Three (#u1dec6ab0-35c7-5fd9-a92c-ca25a79f57aa)
Chapter Four (#u643ccfe9-b118-5eab-9375-488f4403369a)
Winter (#uc36a49f7-3e8d-5402-b608-3a6b80179c07)
Chapter Five (#ue879923a-795b-53ba-a70d-756bb83d8ca5)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Spring (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_9c2d426f-d196-563b-9fe5-1ab1f702383f)
Danae Rahill had long since learned that a postmistress’s job in a small town had a lot more to it than the ability to speedily process pensions or organize money transfers.
She’d run Avalon Post Office for fifteen years and she saw everything. It was impossible not to. Without wishing to, the extremely private Danae found herself the holder of many of the town’s secrets.
She saw money sent to the Misses McGinty’s brother in London, who’d gone there fifty years ago to make his fortune and was now living in a hostel.
‘The building work has dried up, you know,’ said one of the little Miss McGintys, her tiny papery hands finishing writing the address she knew by heart.
Danae was aware the hostel was one where Irish men went when the drinking got out of control and they needed a bed to sleep in.
‘It must be terrible for such a good man not to have a job any more,’ she said kindly.
Danae saw widower Mr Dineen post endless parcels and letters to his children around the world, but never heard of him getting on a plane to visit any of them.
She saw registered letters to solicitors, tear-stained funeral cards, wedding invitations and, on two occasions, sad, hastily written notes informing guests that the wedding was cancelled. She saw savings accounts fall to nothing with job losses and saw lonely people for whom collecting their pension was a rare chance to speak to another human being.
People felt safe confiding in Danae because it was well known that she would never discuss their personal details with anyone else. And she wasn’t married. There was no Mr Rahill to tell stories to at night in the cottage at the top of Willow Street. Danae was never seen in coffee shops gossiping with a gaggle of friends. She was, everyone in Avalon agreed, discreet.
She might gently enquire as to whether some plan or ambition had worked out or not, but equally she could tell without asking when the person wanted that last conversation forgotten entirely.
Danae was kindness personified.
And yet a few of the more perceptive residents of Avalon felt that there was some mystery surrounding their postmistress because, while she knew so much of the details of their lives, they knew almost nothing about her,even though she’d lived in their town for some eighteen years.
‘She’s always so interested and yet …’ Mrs Ryan, in charge of the church cleaning schedule and an avid reader of Scandinavian crime novels, tried to find the right words for it, ‘… she’s still a bit … distant.’
‘That’s it exactly,’ agreed Mrs Moloney, who loved a good gossip but could never glean so much as a scrap of information from Danae. The postmistress was so tight-lipped that the KGB couldn’t have got any secrets out of her.
For a start, there was her name: Danae. Completely strange. Not a proper saint’s name or anything.
Dan-ay, she said it.
‘Greek or some such,’ sniffed Mrs Ryan, who was an Agnes and proud of it.
‘I don’t even know when her husband died,’ said Mrs Moloney.
‘If there ever was a husband,’ said Mrs Lombardy.
Mrs Lombardy was widowed and not a day passed without her talking about her beloved Roberto, who grew nicer and kinder the longer he was dead. In her opinion, it was a widow’s job to keep the memory of her husband alive. Once, she’d idly enquired after Danae’s husband, because she was a Mrs after all, even if she did live alone in that small cottage at the far end of Willow Street with nothing but a dog and a few mad chickens for company.
‘He is no longer with us,’ Danae had said, and Mrs Lombardy had seen the shutters coming down on Danae’s face.
‘Ah sure, he might have run off with someone else,’ Mrs Ryan said. ‘The poor pet.’
Of course, she looked different too.
The three women felt that the long, tortoiseshell hair ought to be neatly tied up, or that the postmistress should maintain a more dignified exterior, instead of wearing long, trailing clothes that looked second-hand. And as for the jewellery, well.
‘I always say that you can’t go wrong with a nice string of pearls,’ said Mrs Byrne, in charge of the church flowers. Many years of repeating this mantra had ensured that her husband, known all over town as Poor Bernard, had given her pearls as an anniversary gift.
‘As for those mad big necklaces, giant lumps of things on bits of leather, amber and whatnot …’ said Mrs Lombardy. ‘What’s wrong with a nice crucifix, that’s what I want to know?’
Danae was being discussed over Friday-morning coffee in the Avalon Hotel and Spa, and the hotel owner, one Belle Kennedy, who was very light on her feet for such a large and imposing lady, was listening intently to the conversation.
Belle had ears like a bat.
‘Comes in handy when you have a lot of staff,’ she told Danae later that day, having dashed into the post office to pick up a couple of books of stamps because the hotel franking machine had gone on the blink yet again and someone hadn’t got it fixed as they’d promised.
‘I swear on my life, I’m going to kill that girl in the back office,’ Belle said grimly. ‘She hasn’t done a tap of work since she got engaged. Not getting the franking machine sorted is the tip of the iceberg. She reads bridal magazines under her desk when she thinks no one’s around. As if it really matters what colour the blinking roses on the tables at the reception are.’
Like Danae, Belle was in her early fifties. She had been married twice and was long beyond girlish delight over bridal arrangements. It was a wonder the hotel did such good business in wedding receptions, because Belle viewed all matrimony as a risky venture destined for failure. The only issue, Belle said, was when it would fail.
‘The Witches of Eastwick were talking about you in the hotel coffee shop this morning,’ she told her friend. ‘They reckon you’re hiding more than pre-paid envelopes behind that glass barrier.’
‘Nobody’s interested in me,’ said Danae cheerily. ‘You’ve a great imagination, Belle. It’s probably you they were talking about, Madam Entrepreneur.’
Danae’s day was busy, it being a normal September morning in Avalon’s post office.
Raphael, who ran the Avalon Deli, told Danae he was worried about his wife, Marie-France, because she had an awful cough and refused to go to the doctor.
‘“I do not need a doctor, I am not sick,”’ she keeps saying,’ he reported tiredly.
Danae carefully weighed the package going to the Pontis’ only son, who was living in Paris.
If she was the sort of person who gave advice, she might suggest that Raphael mention his mother’s cough to their son. Marie-France would abseil down the side of the house on a spider’s thread if her son asked her to. A few words in that direction would do more good than constantly telling Marie-France to go to the doctor – something that might be construed as nagging instead of love and worry.
But Danae didn’t give advice, didn’t push her nose in where it didn’t belong.
Father Liam came in and told her the parish was going broke because people weren’t attending Mass and putting their few coins in the basket any more.
‘They’re deserting the church when they need us now more than ever,’ he said, wild-eyed.
Danae sensed that Father Liam was tired of work, tired of everyone expecting him to understand their woes when he had woes of his own. In a normal job, Father Liam would be long retired so he could take his blood pressure daily and keep away from stress.
Worse, said Father Liam, the new curate, Father Olumbuko, who was strong and full of beans, wasn’t even Irish.
‘He’s from Nigeria!’ shrieked Father Liam, as if this explained everything. ‘He doesn’t know how we do things round here.’
Danae reckoned it would do Avalon no harm to learn how things were done in Nigeria but kept this thought to herself.
Danae nipped into the back to put the kettle on and, from there, heard the buzzer that signalled a person opening the post office door.
‘No rush, Danae,’ said a clear, friendly voice.
It was Tess Power. Tess ran the local antique shop, Something Old, a tempting establishment that Danae had trained herself not to enter lest she was overwhelmed with the desire to buy something ludicrous that she hadn’t known she wanted until she saw it in Tess’s beautiful shop. For it was beautiful: like a miniature version of an exquisite mansion, with brocade chairs, rosewood dressing tables, silver knick-knacks and antique velvet cloaks artfully used to display jewellery.
People were known to have gone into Something Old to buy a small birthday gift and come out hours later, having just had to have a diamanté brooch in the shape of a flamingo, a set of bone-handled teaspoons and a creaky chair for beside the telephone.
‘Tess Power could sell ice to the Eskimos,’ was Belle’s estimation of her.
It was from Belle that Danae had discovered that Tess was one of the Powers who’d once owned Avalon House, the huge and now deserted mansion overlooking the town that had been founded by their ancestors, the de Paors, back in feudal times.
The family had run out of money a long time ago, and the house had been sold shortly before Tess’s father died. There was a sister, too.
‘Wild,’ was Belle’s one-word summation of Suki Power.
Suki had run off and married into a famous American political dynasty, the Richardsons.
‘Quite like the Kennedys,’ said Belle, ‘but better-looking.’
After spending three years smiling like the ideal politician’s wife, Suki had divorced her husband and gone on to write a bestseller about feminism.
To Danae, student of humankind, she sounded interesting, perhaps even as interesting as Tess, who was quietly beautiful and seemed to hide her beauty for some unfathomable reason.
‘Hello, Tess, how are you?’ asked Danae, emerging from the back room with her tea.
‘Fine, thank you.’ said Tess. She was standing by the noticeboard, clad in an elderly grey wool sweater and old but pressed jeans. Danae had only ever seen her wear variations on this theme.
Tess had to be early forties, given that she had a teenage son, but she somehow looked younger, despite not wearing even a hint of make-up on her lovely, fine-boned face. Her fair hair was cut short and curled haphazardly, as if the most maintenance it ever got was a hand run through it in exasperation in the morning. Despite all that, hers was a face observant people looked at twice, admiring the fine planes of her cheekbones and the elegant swan-like neck highlighted by the short hair clustered around her skull.
‘I wanted to ask if I could stick a notice about my shop on your board, that’s all.’
‘Of course,’ said Danae with a smile.
Normally, she liked to check notices to ensure there was nothing that might shock the more delicate members of the community, but she was pretty sure that anything Tess would stick on the board would be exemplary. The vetting system had been in place since some joker had stuck up a card looking for ladies to join Avalon’s first burlesque dance club:
Experienced bosom-tassel twirlers required!
Most of the ladies of Avalon had all roared with laughter, although poor Father Liam allegedly needed a squirt of his inhaler when he heard.
‘How’s business?’ Danae asked.
Tess grimaced. ‘Not good. That’s why I’ve typed up the notices. I’m sticking them all over the place and heading into Arklow later to put some up there too. It’s to remind people that the antique shop is here, to encourage them to bring things in or else to come in and shop. The summer season used to be enough to keep me going, but not any more.’ She looked Danae in the eye.
Danae kept a professional smile on her face. Although she didn’t know her well, she sensed that Tess was not the sort of person who’d want sympathy or false assurances that everything would turn out fine in the end, or that the antique shop would stay open when other businesses were going under because of the recession.
Instead, she said: ‘Chin up, that’s all we can do.’
‘That’s my motto exactly,’ Tess said, breaking into a smile.
Her large grey eyes sparkled, the full lips curved up and, for a moment, Danae was reminded of a famous oil portrait of an aristocratic eighteenth-century beauty, with fair curls like Tess’s clustered round a lovely, lively face. Someone who looked like Tess Power ought to have plenty of men interested in her, yet the most recent local gossip had it that her husband had left her and their two children.
Still, appearances could be deceptive. Danae Rahill knew that better than most.
When she’d shut the post office for the day, Danae headed home. She loved her adopted town. It was very different from the city where she’d grown up. After her father died, she and her mother had lived in a cramped three-room flat on the fourth floor of an old tenement building. They’d shared the bathroom with everyone else on that floor. Poverty had been the uniting factor in the tenements. People put washing and bags of coal on their balconies instead of window boxes.
Everyone should have been close, but they weren’t – not to Danae’s family, at least. Danae’s mother created a barrier between them and their neighbours.
‘We’re better than the likes of them,’ Sybil would say every day, after some fresh embarrassment, such as having to queue for the toilet because the Mister Rourke from number seven had a gyppy stomach thanks to a feed of pints on payday. ‘Tell them nothing, Danae. We don’t want other people knowing our business.’
As she grew older, Danae found other reasons to keep her own counsel.
When she’d first moved to Avalon, Danae had spent every spare moment exploring the pretty town, tracing its history in the varying architectural styles. Originally it had been a village consisting of a few grace-and-favour cottages for workers from the De Paor estate. These tiny brick homes arranged in undulating lines on the hillside were currently much in vogue with city dwellers who wanted a seaside hideaway. There were few other buildings that dated back to that period, one exception being the Avalon Hotel and Spa, which Belle ran. The rest of the town was a hotchpotch of American-style wooden houses built by a 1930s developer near the seafront, with a couple of modern housing estates and pretty, small-windowed Irish cottages scattered here and there.
Danae’s cottage was on the sparsely populated southern side of Avalon, right at the top end of Willow Street, a long, steep road that wound up the hill. The only neighbouring buildings were the ruins of a medieval abbey, which sat to her right, and Avalon House, which loomed behind her. Huge granite gateposts with battered iron gates marked the entrance to the once tree-lined avenue. Many of the trees were gone now, damaged like the great house itself, which had sat empty these last ten years.
Below Willow Street lay the sweep of Avalon Bay with its horseshoe-shaped sandy beach, which had been drawing seaside-loving holidaymakers to the area for many years.
Avalon was a resort town with a population of about five thousand at most during the winter, swelling to at least three times that figure in summer. Two caravan parks on the dunes were home to many of the visitors; those with money went to The Dunes, a beautifully kept site where a hundred, mainly privately-owned mobile homes, sat in splendour amid pretty little gardens. Further up the beach lay Cabana-Land, host to as many caravans as the owner could squeeze in and scene of much partying, despite signs warning ‘no barbecues on the beach’.
The steep hillside where Danae lived was a very different landscape to the rest of the town. Here, wild rhododendrons grew in drifts and the Avalon woods began, a vast hardwood forest planted many centuries before by Tess Power’s ancestors. Danae’s cottage was surrounded by a lush garden hidden from the sea winds by a crescent of trees, among them ash and elders, with one oak she was sure wouldn’t last the winter. She liked to rest her fingers on the cracked bark, feeling the lifeblood of this ancient giant throb into her.
Ferns that wouldn’t grow anywhere else in Avalon thrived in the sylvan sanctuary of her garden, while the winter roses bloomed with glorious blossoms. Her daffodils and crocuses came up weeks before anyone else’s, and the tiny sea orchids that only grew on the spiky grass on the sea dunes ran riot, forming wild clumps everywhere in the shelter of Danae’s domain.
When she got out of the car and opened the gate to the garden, Lady, a dog with the silvery grey fur and luminous pale blue eyes of a timber wolf, ran towards her, followed by the hens, clucking loudly as if to tell her their news. Danae hugged Lady first, then patted the hens’ sleek feathers, careful to pet all eight or else there would be jealousy.
Cora, the latest battery hen she’d rescued, was wildly jealous of the others. Having received two weeks’ daily nurturing from Danae, Cora had clearly decided that Danae was her saviour and favouritest person ever. She was still quite bald from her two years as a battery hen, but her personality shone through her strange haircut.
The funniest of the hens was Mara. Named after Danae’s niece, Mara was a sheeny Rhode Island Red who had been rescued by the local ISPCA. She was a flibbertigibbet of a creature, all fluffy bloomers and ruffled wing feathers at the slightest noise. Occasionally she would opt to remain in the henhouse at feeding time, waiting to be coaxed out like a reluctant diva, while in high winds she would climb atop the henhouse and stand there clucking like a female Heathcliff, impervious to the weather.
‘She’s completely mad,’ Mara pointed out when her chicken namesake introduced herself by landing on top of Mara’s lime-green Fiat Uno and sitting there in delighted splendour like the Queen of the Nile, wings stretched out. ‘Is that why she’s called after me?’
‘No!’ Danae laughed. ‘She’s beautiful and she nestled against me instantly the first time I met her. That’s what did it for me. Plus,’ Danae went on, ‘she’s a redhead and her flame shines brightly.’
Mara, who was eccentrically unique and had fiercely red hair that rippled around her face like glossy lava, grinned.
‘As excuses go, that’s perfect,’ she’d said.
Mara hadn’t been to visit for far too long, Danae realized as she petted the hens. There had been talk in her brother’s family of an engagement between Mara and a man at work, which was anticipated ‘any day now’, according to Morris, Danae’s younger brother.
The wind had begun to howl through the forest and there were swollen, dark clouds overhead. There would be no stars visible tonight. Danae loved staring up at the night sky, seeing the Great and Little Bears, the rippling Orion’s Belt and, her favourite, Cassiopeia. The spikily drawn big W was the first constellation she’d ever identified all those years ago, when she used to sit on the fire escape in the hostel and stare out, unseeing, at the darkness above.
One night, someone had handed her a tissue to dry her eyes and had started gently pointing out the stars until Danae’s tears had stopped falling and she found herself looking at something instead of staring at nothingness, seeing only her own pain. That night had been a watershed for Danae. It had been the first time she’d emerged from the pain to look at the world and to hear another human being taking the time to be kind to her. That night had marked the first time in years she’d allowed anybody to comfort her.
Years later, the stars still had the power to touch her deeply. It was impossible to look up at the heavens without feeling that you were a mere fragment of the great universe, and that one day, the problems that beset you would mean nothing. Few tears could survive that realization.
She spent the evening inside by the fire, with some knitting on her lap and Lady asleep at her feet. Outside, the wind howled ferociously and rain beat down on the roof with a fierce tattoo. At five minutes to midnight, Danae opened the back door and stared out at the storm that was battering the trees in her garden. From indoors, the howling wind and torrential rain had sounded as if they were going to lift every slate from the roof and hurl the very house itself into the sea. But once she’d stepped outside, into the eye of the storm, the torrent felt instantly calmer. It was only when she was standing on the wet grass, feeling the whip of the wind on her cheeks that she felt safe.
A storm this elemental demanded respect. A respect that could only be shown by standing in the midst of it, not cowering beneath man-made roof or hiding behind stone walls.
The noise was different outside the house: rain landed more softly on grass and danced lightly on bronzed leaves. Without windows to wail against, the wind lashed the circle of ancient trees in Danae’s garden. But the trees fought back, unbending. Their leaves whipped, their branches flexed, but the trunks stood immovable.
Danae walked stiffly across the small lawn to the largest, oldest tree, her beloved oak with its barrel trunk. Under the shelter of the giant oak, Danae leaned back and felt Lady’s cold nose reach questing into her hand.
Lady wasn’t afraid of storms. Her gleaming eyes shone up at her mistress with utter devotion.
Danae wasn’t afraid of storms, either. It was the same with the dark. People who’d never felt the pure darkness of life itself were scared when night fell. People who understood the darkness knew that lack of light wasn’t the problem.
Lightning rent the sky and even Lady quivered at the sight.
Something was happening, Danae decided. That was what such wild September storms signified: newcomers and a change. A change for Avalon.
Danae was no longer scared of change. Life was all change. Endlessly, unrelentingly. And all she wanted was peace, but it never came.
Autumn (#ulink_8f4aab5b-ec89-5e20-a7c2-5bc96875e592)
Chapter One (#ulink_83d044f5-61a7-560c-8e69-e98dafdc3585)
Early mornings in Avalon were among Tess Power’s favourite times of the day. On a weekend, nine-year-old Kitty would sleepily climb into her bed and snuggle up to her mother. And sometimes – only sometimes, because he often forgot – Zach would bring her a cup of tea in bed. This would never happen on a weekday like today, when Zach remained buried under his duvet until she hauled him out to go to school.
‘Teenagers need extra sleep, Ma,’ he’d plead. ‘It’s official: I read it on the Internet. Ten minutes more …’
Anything to do with her two beloved children made her happy – unless it was detention for Zach or an argument with Kitty over eating any foodstuff which could be classed as a vegetable: ‘I hate broccoli and tomatoes and all greens, so there!’
That aside, Zach and Kitty’s existence made Tess giddy with happiness. But there was something special about weekday mornings like this one, when she would slip out while the children were still sleeping and take Silkie, the family’s fawn-coloured whippet, for a walk in the woods beside the home where she’d grown up.
Up here with the wind whistling around them it felt as if Tess and Silkie were the only creatures in the world. As they approached the abbey ruins, Silkie suddenly turned and ran with easy greyhound grace over fallen leaves and twigs in the direction of the great house. Tess hesitated a moment before following. Even though she came up here almost every day for a bit of early morning meditation while gazing out to sea, she rarely went too close to Avalon House.
It was nearly two decades since she had left her old home, had watched it sold to strangers, knowing how desolate her father would have been if he’d lived to see it. And despite that lapse of time the pain had not lost its edge, so she tended to steer clear of the house, rarely venturing into the grounds, let alone inside.
Silkie, thrilled with this rare adventure, had found a path through the undergrowth. Tess didn’t know what was drawing her towards Avalon House, but she followed, picking her way gently through the brambles and briars that had taken over the beautiful gardens her father had worked so hard to maintain. He had loved that garden, and it was strange that neither Tess nor Suki, her older sister, had shown even the slightest interest in gardening. Back then, they’d looked on gardening as a grown-up’s pastime. Now, Tess found that the smell of freshly dug earth took her back to the lovingly tended gardens of the house at the end of Willow Street and awakened an overwhelming sense of loss.
Stop being so melodramatic, she told herself briskly, lots of people have to move from the house they were born in!
Yes, that was the attitude. Show some Power backbone.
She marched on, determined to have a good walk. She was perfectly able to approach the house and look at it and check how far into disrepair it was falling. The American telecoms millionaire who’d bought it ten years ago had lost all his money and now there was no chance that he and his wife would come here to restore the house to its former glory.
Avalon House was not the most beautiful piece of architecture, but it was certainly majestic, and its hotchpotch of styles reflected the fluctuating fortunes of the de Paors. There was a Victorian great hall, a Norman tower that nobody was ever allowed in because it was a danger zone, and a crumbling Georgian wing. The entire place was shabby and decaying when Tess and Suki were children. They’d lived in the most modern part of the house, which dated back just over a century; despite the vast space, the only inhabitable parts of the old building were the kitchen, the library with its panelling and huge fireplace, and the back stairs that led to the bedrooms.
The De Paor fortune had long since vanished, leaving no cash for fires or modern heating. As a child, Tess had been conditioned to turn the lights off and to put as many blankets as she could on the bed to keep out the icy breeze that wound up from the coast to the house on the hill. Kids from the village school used to tease her about her big home, but once they’d actually been there, they were less likely to do so.
However, none of her schoolfriends had Greek goddesses, albeit crumbling and dressed with lichen, in their gardens. Nor did they have an eighteenth-century family silver teapot (one of the last items to be sold) or huge oil paintings of dusty, aristocratic ancestors staring down at them from the gallery. Her father had held on to the paintings till the end, convinced they were worth something.
Now Tess knew better. None of the portraits had been by important painters, and no one had been interested in paying a vast sum for someone else’s ancestors.
Yet the house and the name had meant something in Avalon, and people had instinctively placed Tess in the category of elite. It didn’t matter that her clothes were threadbare or that she had jam sandwiches for lunch, she was a De Paor, although the name had been anglicized to Power many years before. She lived in a big house. Her father wore elegant, if somewhat tatty, riding clothes to the village shop and spoke in clipped British tones.
Only one person in her younger life had ever seemed impervious to the patina of glamour about her name and her home: Cashel Reilly.
Tess didn’t do regrets. Didn’t believe in them. What was the point? The past was full of hard lessons to be learned stoically, not memories to be sobbed over. But it was a different story with Cashel Reilly.
How ironic to be dwelling on memories of Cashel and heartbreak when she’d come here this morning to have a serious think about Kevin, herself and the separation.
Nine months earlier, when the cracks in their marriage became too wide to pretend they weren’t there, she and Kevin had both agreed that counselling should help. One of her husband’s better qualities was the way he was open to ideas other men wouldn’t dream of countenancing. There had never been any danger of him dismissing her suggestion that they see a marriage counsellor.
‘We love each other,’ Kevin said the day she’d suggested it, ‘but …’
That ‘but’ contained so much.
But we never spend any time with each other any more. But we never make love. But we lead separate lives and are happy to do so.
The counsellor had been wonderful. Kind and compassionate and not hell-bent on keeping them together no matter what. As the weeks went by – weeks of date nights and long conversations without argumentative statements starting ‘You always … !’ – Tess began to face the truth she’d wanted not to see.
Their marriage was over. Living with Kevin was like living with a brother, and had felt so for years.
There was no fierce passion. If she was entirely honest, there never had been. Kevin was the man she’d fallen for on the rebound. She’d been twenty-three then, still a romantic, vulnerable. Now, at the age of forty-one, she no longer dreamed of a knight on a white horse racing to save her. Nobody saved you, Tess had discovered; you had to do that yourself. Yet some part of her longed for the sort of love that had been missing from her relationship with Kevin right from the start. You couldn’t rekindle a love that had never existed. It was a sobering thought. Reaching that decision meant breaking up their family, hurting Kitty and Zach.
All the while, Tess felt guilty because she wondered whether she had done the wrong thing by marrying him in the first place. But their marriage had given her Zach; now a tall and strong seventeen-year-old, with a mop of dark hair like his father. And Kitty, nine years old, was the spitting image of her aunt Suki at the same age, with that widow’s peak and the pale blonde Power hair streaming down her back in a silky curtain. These days, Suki’s lustrous mane owed more to the hairdresser’s bottle with its many shades in the platinum spectrum. Tess’s own hair resembled their mother’s, a muted strawberry blonde that gave her pale lashes which she couldn’t be bothered to dye, despite Suki’s urging.
Kitty, Suki and Tess shared the delicate Power bone structure, the heart-shaped face that ended in a dainty pointed chin and the large grey eyes.
Many times over the years, Kevin had told her she was beautiful, as if he couldn’t believe his luck in finding this aristocratic flower with her tiny frame, hand-span waist and long legs. She couldn’t quite believe him, though. She’d only believed one man who’d told her she was beautiful.
With six months of counselling behind them, Tess and Kevin had agreed on a trial separation, in case they were wrong, in case being apart would make them realize what they had after all.
‘This isn’t for ever,’ Kevin told Zach, who’d sat mutinously, head bent down and dark curls covering his eyes.
‘Bullshit,’ Zach muttered, loud enough for both adults to hear. ‘I think it’s stupid.’ He’d sounded more like his little sister than a seventeen-year-old. ‘You want a divorce and you’re trying to pretend to us that you don’t.’
‘I’ll only be down the road in Granny’s house, in the flat at the back. She hasn’t rented it out for the summer yet, so it’s mine. Ours,’ Kevin corrected himself. ‘You’ll see as much of me as you see of me here.’
Kitty had gone and curled up on Kevin’s lap so she resembled a small creature, nuzzling against him.
Tess had been on the verge of insisting that they forget it, abandon the whole painful business of separation, when Kitty had fixed her with a firm gaze and said: ‘Can we get a kitten, then?’
In the three months since Kevin had moved out, Tess had found that single motherhood was more difficult than she’d expected. Kevin had always been fairly hopeless when it came to housework, but now that he was gone, she’d realized how much another adult added to the family, even if the other adult appeared to do little apart from arriving home expecting dinner and tousling Kitty’s hair affectionately as she got her mother to sign her homework notebook. He used to put out the bins, deal with anything electrical and was the one who went round the house at night, locking doors and checking that the windows were shut. Now that she had full responsibility for these tasks herself, Tess realized the value of Kevin being there, always kind, always good-humoured, another person with whom to sit in front of the television at night. Someone in the bed beside her. Someone to talk to about her day.
In the first week of his being gone, she’d felt the relief at their having finally acted on the fact that they’d never really been right for each other and the children had been the glue holding them together. Only separation would tell them the truth.
And then the questions had come: had she been stupid? Perhaps they should have continued with marriage counselling, not decided so quickly that separation was a good plan.
Was it such a good plan, she wondered. Had been wondering for some time.
Silkie came and lay down on her feet, a signal that she was getting bored.
‘Time to go, pet,’ Tess said, with a quick glance at her watch. ‘Nearly a quarter past seven, let’s go home and haul them out of bed.’
Tess had brought Zach and Kitty up here a few times; not on her walks with Silkie, though. Instead, they’d gone through the huge, rusty iron front gates, which local kids had long ago wrenched open, and up the beautiful avenue lined with trees. She’d wanted her children to see their birthright.
‘This is where your aunt Suki and I used to live with your darling granddad.’
Granddad was a bit of an unknown to both her children as he’d died before they were born. The only grandparent they knew was Helen, Kevin’s mother. Granny Helen liked to play Monopoly, got very upset when she lost, and could be counted upon to give fabulous presents at Christmas.
Zach had been twelve the first time Tess took him to Avalon House. He’d looked at it in awe, pleading to go inside and see the rooms.
‘It’s huge!’ he’d said, eyes wide with amazement. ‘Nothing like our house, Ma.’
‘I know,’ said Tess cheerfully. It was hard trying to be cheerful as it hit her that, after generations of owning, Avalon House was no longer theirs. It wasn’t the size, the fact that it dwarfed their own tiny house ten times over, that made her mourn the loss. It was the sense that this had been home. This was where she’d been so happy as a child until … until it had all gone wrong.
Kitty had been much younger when she first took an interest in the house.
‘It’s a palace, Mum,’ she’d said delightedly when they arrived. ‘It’s as if Cinderella could arrive here in her pumpkin coach with horses and silvery plumes coming out of their hair.’
Tess had laughed at her beautiful eight-year-old daughter’s fabulous imagination; in Kitty’s world even a crumbling old moss-covered ruin of a house could be sprinkled with fairy dust and transformed into a palace.
‘Why don’t we live here?’ Kitty wanted to know.
Tess was used to straightforward questions. Children were so gloriously honest.
‘The house was in my father’s – your grandfather’s – family for a long, long time, but the family fortune was nearly gone when your grandfather inherited it. When I was born there was only a teeny-weeny bit of money left. Big houses cost a lot because the roof is always leaking, so your granddad knew we would have to sell. He and I were going to move to a small cottage in the village – the one we live in now – but he got very sick and died, so I had to sell Avalon House and move all by myself.’
‘Oh, Mum,’ said Kitty, throwing her arms around her mother’s waist. ‘You must have been so sad.’
Tess’s eyes had teared up. ‘Well, I was a bit sad, darling, but Zach came along and then you, so how could I possibly be sad when I had my two beautiful angels?’
‘Yes,’ said Kitty, instantly cheered up. ‘Can I see your bedroom, Mum? What was it like? Was it very princessy?’
Tess thought of all this now as she made her way round the back of the house, following on Silkie’s trail through the brambles. The old knot garden, created by her great-great-grandmother, was nothing more than a big mound of thistles. The walls surrounding the orchard were in a state of collapse. Tess could understand why nobody wanted to buy Avalon House; beautiful as it was, perched high on the hill overlooking Avalon and the sea, it would cost an absolute fortune to make it habitable again. Soon it would go the way of the Abbey and be reduced to a pile of stones, and the past would be buried with it.
Tess pulled up sharply. Told herself there was no point thinking about the old days. The future was what mattered.
‘Come on, Silkie,’ she said briskly, then she turned and headed away from the house. Soon, the beautiful sweep of Avalon Bay opened out in front of her and picking up speed she strode down the drive. There was a lot to do today. She didn’t have time to get lost in the past.
Zach’s bedroom smelled of teenager: socks, some new, desperately cheap aftershave he adored, and the musky man/boy scent so different from the little boy smell she used to adore.
‘Time to get up, love,’ she said, giving his shoulder a shake and putting a cup of tea on his bedside locker.
A grunt from under the covers told her he was alive and sort of awake.
‘I’ll be back in ten minutes with the cold cloth if you’re not up,’ she warned. She’d used the cold cloth on her sister too. Years ago, the threat of a cold, wet flannel shoved under the covers had been the only way to get Suki out of bed of a morning.
Kitty was easier to wake. Tess kissed her gently on the cheek and made Kitty’s favourite cuddly toy, Moo, dance on the pillow for a minute, whispering ‘Time for breakfast!’ in Moo’s bovine voice.
By eight, both of her children were at the table, Kitty chatting happily and Zach bent over his cereal sleepily.
Silkie, happy after her walk and breakfast, lay under the kitchen table, hoping for crumbs.
The next hurdle for Tess was making Kitty’s lunch while simultaneously eating her own breakfast and checking that whatever she’d taken out of the freezer the night before was on the way to defrosting for dinner.
‘Why don’t we fall off the Earth if it’s round and it’s in space?’ Kitty wanted to know.
Tess considered this. ‘It’s gravity,’ she said. ‘There’s a magnetic pull …’
She stalled, wondering how to explain it all and trying to dredge the facts from her mind. Kitty asked a lot of questions. At least the heaven and angel phase was over, but she feared that ‘Where do babies come from?’ wouldn’t be far away.
‘Can you explain why we don’t all fall off the Earth, Zach, love?’ she begged her son.
He looked up from his bowl. ‘Gravity, Newton, Laws of Physics. Don’t ask me, I dropped physics last year.’
‘What’s physics?’ said Kitty. ‘Is it a person who can see the future? Julia says her mum’s always going to physics. She says they might win the lottery, but only on a Wednesday night. Do we do the lottery, Mum?’
‘No,’ said Tess. ‘But we should,’ she added, thinking of their bank balance.
‘We could do it on Wednesday,’ Kitty said, ‘with my pocket money.’
‘You’ve spent all your pocket money,’ teased Zach.
‘Have not.’
‘Yes you have.’
‘I have money in my Princess Jasmine tin,’ Kitty replied haughtily. ‘Loads of money. More than you.’
‘She probably does,’ remarked Tess, putting a plate with two poached eggs in front of her son. Zach’s appetite had gone crazy in the past year and he hoovered up food. Since breakfast was considered the most vital meal of the day, she was trying to get him to eat protein each morning, even though he said eggs made him ‘want to puke’.
‘No puking,’ Tess instructed. ‘You’ve got games today.’
When she’d dropped Kitty off at school and deposited Zach at the bus stop, she came home and spent half an hour tidying the house before she left for work. She loved her children’s rooms in the morning when they were safely in school. Even Zach’s teenage den, with its lurking, smelly sports socks balled up under the bed.
On all but the most rushed days, she felt a little Zen enter her soul when she went into the rooms of the two people she loved best.
The added peace came from the fact that her darlings weren’t actually there, so she could safely adore them and the idea of them – without being asked for something or told she was unfair, that all the other kids had such and such, that really, if she could only lend him some pocket money, an advance …?
Kitty had been right at breakfast: she probably did have more money than Zach. He was forever lending fivers to other people or spending on silly things.
Kitty’s bedroom was still a shrine to dolls, soft toys with huge eyes and Sylvanian creatures with complicated houses and endless teeny accessories that were forever getting lost.
‘Mum, I can’t find the cakes for the cake shop!’ was a constant refrain in the house and Tess had spent ages on her hands and knees with Kitty, looking under the furniture for minuscule slices of plastic cake, with her daughter’s lovely little face anxious at the thought of Mrs Squirrel not being able to run her cake shop.
This morning, Tess did a bit of sorting out in the Sylvanian village, then moved on to close the half-opened drawers and tie back the curtains before tidying the dressing table There was growing evidence of the emergence of Kitty’s tweenage years with silvery bracelets and girlish perfumes in glittery flacons clustered on the table. Moo, Kitty’s cuddly cow, loved to greyness, had a place of honour on her pink gingham heart cushion and it was Tess’s favourite job to make the bed and enthrone Moo on the cushion, ready for that night.
It didn’t matter that on the way to school Kitty could loudly sing along in the car to questionably explicit pop songs that made Tess wince: as soon as it was time for bed, Kitty morphed back into a nine-year-old who liked to snuggle under her pink-and-yellow-striped duvet, hold Moo close and wait for her bedtime story with the clear-eyed innocence of a child.
Once it was all tidy, Tess gave the room one last fond glance and moved on to Zach’s room. Zach’s domain was painted a lovely turquoise colour, but these days, none of the walls were visible because of posters of bands, footballers and Formula One drivers.
The rule was that Zach had to put clean sheets on his bed once a week and run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet. Since Tess had found the Great Cup Mould Experiments under the bed, he had to rinse out any mugs on a daily basis – and he was actually very good about doing it.
Seventeen-year-olds didn’t like their mothers tidying up their bedrooms. It was all part of the process of growing up. Like the part that said mothers had to let go. Tess knew that. Had known it from the first day Zach stopped holding her hand as they walked into the village school.
‘Ma – let go of my hand!’
He’d been seven and a bit at the time. Tall for his age, dark shaggy hair already ruffled despite being brushed into submission minutes earlier at home.
Tess had let go of his hand and smiled down at her dark-eyed son, even though she felt like crying. He was growing up. So fast.
‘Am I embarrassing you?’ she asked with the same smile that always shone through in her voice when she spoke to her son.
Because she adored him so much, she was determined that she would not be a clingy mother, not make him the vessel for all her hopes and dreams.
‘Yes!’ he’d replied, shrugging his schoolbag higher over his shoulder as a sign of his macho-ness.
Tess had watched him march into the classroom without giving her a second glance.
Ten years on, he still hugged her. Not every day, not the way he had as a small child. But he was an affectionate boy, and now that he towered over her, he’d lean down and give her a hug.
He called her ‘Ma’.
‘See ya, Ma,’ he’d say cheerily as he was about to leave the house for school.
He reminded her of his grandfather, her own beloved father. Zach had the same silver-grey eyes with lashes so black it looked as if he wore eyeliner. He had her father’s patrician features too, and his gentleness. For all that he played prop forward on the school rugby team, Zach Power was a gentle giant. All the girls in Avalon loved him. The ones he’d been to primary school with gazed at him with a combination of fondness and attraction. Tess could see that too: he also had the charisma of his father, the indefinable characteristic that would make women look at him always.
For the past two months he’d hauled the bins to the gate on Thursday night for the Friday-morning collection, trying to fill Kevin’s shoes. Every time he did it, Tess battled the twin emotions of pride and sadness.
Huge pride at him behaving like the man of the house, and sadness that it was necessary.
From the hallway below, Silkie yelped, eager for her next trip out – she knew her daily itinerary as well as Tess did.
Tess grabbed Zach’s laundry basket and went slowly downstairs. Silkie was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking forlorn.
‘I’ll put the washing on and we’ll go.’
Tess walked to work every day, come rain or shine. She and Silkie would set out from the house on Rathmore Terrace, through the garden Tess was always planning to spend many hours on but never did, and out the white wooden gate.
Instantly, Silkie would pull on the extendable lead, sticking her nose into the gatepost in case some passing dog had marked it.
‘Come on,’ Tess said most mornings. ‘No loitering.’
Every second house was home to one of Silkie’s friends, so there were delighted squeaks at the house of Horace, a Great Dane who lumbered over to greet her and then lumbered back to the porch to rest his giant bones; a bit of rough-housing with Rusty, a shiny black collie who loved games and had to be told not to follow them; a few tender doggy kisses with Bernie and Ben, twin cockapoos who could rip any neighbourhood dustbin apart in minutes and caused chaos when they were in their owners’ holiday home.
By the time she and Tess had come to the end of their street and turned down the hill on to the lane that led to Main, Silkie would be panting with happy dogginess.
Their next stop was St Ethelred’s, the oldest Presbyterian church in the country, where tour buses paused for tourists to take pictures of the twelfth-century building, the moss-flecked tombs and small crooked headstones. The graveyard was watched over by three towering oaks that were at least, according to the local tree man, two hundred years old. At this hour of the morning, the great wooden door under the arched porch was locked. The rector would be along at ten to open up, with Mrs Farquarhar-White following him in to bustle around and polish things.
On warm, sunny mornings, Tess would take the time to stroll into the grounds with Silkie, drinking in the serenity that inhabited this sacred space. Today, however, a breeze that felt as if it had come straight from Siberia ruffled Tess’s short fair hair as she stood at the church gate, so instead of going in she waited for Silkie to snuffle amongst the dog roses for any rabbits who’d dared to visit, then the two of them set off down the lane again.
Cars passed her by, some of the drivers waving or smiling hello, others too caught up in their morning routine to do anything.
Tess was happiest when the tourist season began to wind down and locals got their town back. With the school holiday over, the caravan parks had mostly emptied out and Avalon was beginning to fall back into the relaxed and gentle routine that would continue through autumn and into winter.
Not that she objected to the summer visitors – they kept the town going, and provided a bit of excitement for local teenagers. Cabana-Land – which used to be called The Park when she was young – had always had a reputation as party central. She remembered how, back in the early eighties, she’d longed to stay out late at The Park like her elder sister. Suki never paid any attention to the curfew imposed by their father. On summer nights she would shimmy down the drainpipe wearing her spray-on stone-washed jeans, with her sandals in her hand, hissing, ‘Don’t tell him or I’ll kill you!’ at a worried Tess as she peered down at her from their bedroom window.
There was a seven-year age gap between the two sisters and in those days, Suki and Tess had been complete opposites. Suki hated homework, was breezily unconcerned when she got into trouble at school, and by the time she reached her teens she had mastered the art of swaying her hips so that men couldn’t take their eyes off her as she walked through Avalon. She was taller than Tess, with the same blonde hair and the widow’s peak, inherited from their long-dead mother, and full lips that she made use of with a carefully practised pout.
Tess, on the other hand, was never late with her homework, fretted over whether she’d get top marks on her history test, and was never in trouble either at home or school. She was the pale version of her sister, chiaroscuro in action, with strawberry blonde hair, and a fragility that made her perfect for ballet classes – if only they could have afforded them.
The biggest difference between the sisters was that Tess loved living in Avalon, while Suki couldn’t wait to escape. She longed to live somewhere exotic, having failed to realize what Tess had grasped even as a child: that for the visitors who came from far-flung places, Avalon was exotic. City dwellers were charmed by the crooked main street with its scattering of gift and coffee shops and a single butcher’s. People from other countries thought that the high cross in the central town square with its working water pump and stone horse trough was adorable. They beamed with delight when grizzled old farmers like Joe McCreddin stomped out of the post office in his farming clothes and threadbare cloth cap with his trousers held up with baler twine, as if he’d been sent from central casting just for their amusement.
And they all loved Something Old, the antique and curio shop Tess had run for seventeen years.
Tess knew that her business had survived this long because she understood her clientele. She knew the pain of selling treasured heirlooms because money was in short supply.
‘My family owned a big old house which was once full of the most glorious antiques,’ she’d say, ‘and we never had a ha’penny. By the time I was ten, my father had sold just about everything of value, including old books, furniture and silver dating back two hundred years.’
Zach helped too. Tess took him along on all her calls to buy antiques, right from when he was a baby, strapped in his car seat, big round eyes staring out of a chubby face. People liked having a baby arrive: it made the painful process of parting with heirlooms a little easier to bear.
She and Zach would be invited in for tea, cake would be produced, then stiff old gentlemen would unstiffen and reveal how they hated having to sell the sideboard or the vase their great-granddad had brought back from India, but there was no other option.
Her success also owed much to her innate kindness and sense of fairness.
‘You’ll never make a fortune selling a Ming vase on after buying it for twenty quid,’ said one lady, who was delighted to find that her set of old china was actually a full and unchipped early Wedgwood, worth at least five times what she’d thought.
‘Money earned in that way doesn’t bring you luck or happiness,’ said Tess. She simply wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night if she’d conned anybody out of a precious piece.
As always, Tess felt a glow of pride in her town as she turned on to Main. Few of the visitors who stopped to admire the quaint shopfronts and exteriors were aware of the transformation that had taken place in the town ten years earlier, and the effort that had been put in by local businesses in order to achieve it. They had been forced to up their game by the construction of a bypass that stopped cars passing through the town on their way to Wexford. Belle, who at that time was the lady mayor as well as the owner of the Avalon Hotel and Spa, had started the ball rolling by calling a town meeting.
‘The caravan parks and the beach aren’t enough,’ she warned. ‘We need to revamp this town, brand it, put it on the map or we’ll all go out of business.’
Dessie Lynch, proprietor of Dessie’s Bar and Lounge (Come for breakfast and stay all day!), disagreed. ‘The pub’s doing grand,’ he blustered. ‘I’m making a fortune.’
‘People drinking in misery,’ said Belle with a fierce glare. ‘When all the locals have destroyed their livers and are sitting at home on Antabuse tablets, you’ll be out of business too.’
Galvanized by their strong-willed mayoress, local traders had set about tidying up the town; shopfronts were painted and a unifying theme was agreed upon – Avalon was to be restored to look like the Victorian village it had once been. The chip shop reluctantly gave up its red neon sign and now did twice the business selling old-fashioned fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. The council was squeezed until they came up with the money to clean the high cross and the stone horse troughs that surrounded it. The water pumps were repaired and repainted, and a team of locals volunteered to hack away the brambles that had grown up around the ruined abbey and graveyard high above the town to turn them into a tourist attraction too. There hadn’t been enough money to pay for research into the abbey’s history so they could print up booklets and make an accurate sign, but illustrated pamphlets had been printed for St Ethelred’s.
The result was an increase in the town’s business and a second term of office for Belle.
Drawing level with Dillon’s Mini-Market, Tess tied Silkie’s lead to the railings beside the flower stand. Immediately the whippet adopted the resigned expression she always used on these occasions: Abandoned Dog in Pain would be the title if anyone were to paint her. Tess knew that dogs couldn’t actually make their eyes bigger just by trying, but Silkie did a very good impression of it: two dark pools of misery taking over her narrow, fawn-coloured face.
Inside, Tess grabbed a newspaper and a small carton of milk. She nodded hello to a few of the other shoppers, then went to the counter where Seanie Dillon held court.
‘Grand morning, isn’t it, Tess?’ he said.
Seanie had a word for everyone, yet understood when someone was in a rush to open up their shop. He could wax lyrical on the village for interested tourists, telling them about that time the snow fell so heavily that several people got stuck inside the shop overnight and they all had a party with the roasted chicken, bread baked on the premises and an emergency cocktail made out of wine, cranberry juice and some out-of-date maraschino cherries.
‘Lovely day,’ Tess replied. ‘A soft day, as my father liked to call it.’
‘Ah, your father, there was a great man,’ sighed Seanie.
Tess took her change and wondered why she’d mentioned her father. She’d dreamed of him the night before; the same dream she always had of him, on the terrace of the old house with his binoculars trained on the woods behind, watching out for birds.
‘I’d swear I saw a falcon earlier,’ he’d say excitedly. He was fascinated by all birds but particularly birds of prey, which was surprising, given that he was the gentlest, least feral person she’d ever met.
Above all, he was interested in everything – politics, art, other people. He’d have loved Something Old, even if he’d have hated to see his daughter working so hard and still not making enough money from the business. He would have liked Kevin too and if he’d only been alive he would have never let her consider something as crazed as a trial separation.
Milk purchased, Silkie and Tess walked across the square and the last few yards up Church Street to her shop. She nodded hello to Mrs Byrne and Mrs Lombardy, who were out doing their morning shop, an event which always looked like a patrol of the area to Tess, as their eyes beadily took in everything and everyone. A bit of paint flaking off a flowerpot in the square, and they’d be up to report it to Belle in the hotel.
So far as Tess was concerned, the only negative to living in such a small community was that it was hard to have secrets. Since she and Kevin had separated, Tess had told the true story to a few people she trusted, hoping that this would stop any rumour-mongering. But who knew? That was the question. Would Mrs Byrne or Mrs Lombardy have spotted what was going on by now? They mustn’t have, Tess decided. Else they’d have stopped her to console her – and look for a smidge more information.
She smiled at the thought. She was happy in Avalon. Not for her the itchy feet of the traveller. Not like Suki, that was for sure.
Something Old occupied the bottom half of a former bakery. Upstairs was a beautician’s salon, and the scent of lovely relaxing aromatherapy treatments often drifted downstairs. Tess’s premises consisted of two large rooms with a bow window at the front, and then a smaller storage room at the back, along with a kitchenette, toilet and a lean-to where she kept old, unsellable stuff that she couldn’t bear to part with.
As soon as they were inside, Silkie made for her dog bed behind the counter. After her two walks, she would sleep there all morning quite contentedly. Tess carried on into the kitchenette where she boiled the kettle for her second cup of coffee.
Tess loved her shop. Not everyone understood its appeal. To some, it might have looked like the maddest collection of old things set out on display. But to connoisseurs of antiques and those who purred with happiness when they found four strange little apostle spoons tied up with ribbon or a delicate single cup and saucer of such thin china that the light shone through, Something Old was a treasure trove.
It was all too easy to while away the morning half-listening to the radio as she opened a box of items bought in a job lot at an auction. Tess had found some gems that way; pieces that nobody had realized were precious in the mad dash of the executor’s sale. Some just needed a bit of work to restore them to their former glory. Like the silver trinkets that were dull nothings until she’d burnished them to a glossy sheen, or the filigree pieces of jewellery tossed unnoticed in the bottom of a box, which could be delicately polished up with toothpaste and a cotton bud, to reveal the beauty of marcasite or the glitter of jet.
She had two boxes to open today, mixed bags from a recent auction, and as she went to collect them, she realized that the light on the answerphone was winking red at her.
Sometimes people rang asking if they could bring something in so she’d value it, or saying they had antiques to sell and perhaps she’d like to see them.
The answer machine voice told her the message had been left at nine the previous night. ‘Hello, my name is Carmen, I’m working with Redmond Suarez on a biography of the Richardson family in the United States, and I’m trying to contact a Therese Power or …’ the voice faltered. ‘Therese de Paor. Sorry, I don’t know how to pronounce it. We’re looking for connections of Ms Suki Richardson. If you can help, please call this number and we’ll ring you right back. Thank you.’
Tess stood motionless for a moment. Every instinct in her body screamed that there was something very, very worrying about this message.
If Suki knew of anybody working on a book about the Richardsons, the wealthy political family into which Suki had once married, then she’d have told Tess. The Richardsons were powerful people and if someone wanted to talk to anyone connected with the family, a note on their fabulous creamy stock paper would have arrived, possibly even a phone call from Antoinette herself – not that Tess had had any contact with the Richardsons since Suki’s divorce. But she was quite sure that, if someone was digging into the past, they’d have been in touch, loftily asking her not to cooperate. That was the way they did things, with a decree along the lines of a royal one.
But there had been nothing. No correspondence from the Richardsons, no mention of this from Suki herself.
No, there was something strange going on.
Chapter Two (#ulink_47d92b02-bf8f-5e40-93b4-33fca9c28852)
Suki Richardson stood in the wings at Kirkenfeld Academy and wondered why she’d agreed to trek all this way into the middle of nowhere in a howling gale.
As in so many of the colleges where she was asked to speak, the radiators were ancient and stone cold. Suki knew from years of delivering speeches in draughty halls that an extra layer made all the difference, so tonight, under her purple suit, she wore a black thermal vest.
‘Where does your idea for a lecture begin?’ an earnest young girl had asked earlier, probably hoping to steal a march on the second-year students by putting a direct question to Suki, author of the feminist tract on their Women’s Studies course. ‘Is it an idea previously addressed in your books, or something new?’
Suki had smiled at her, toying with the idea of telling the truth: It begins with the phone call telling me the fee for showing up. That and the latest bill.’
‘It’s an idea I’d like to explore further,’ she’d told the student in a husky voice thickened by years of smoking. She couldn’t tell the truth: that her days of making money from TV and book sales were over; that since Jethro she’d been broke; that the bank kept sending hostile letters to the house.
Life had come full circle: she was poor. Same as she’d been all those years ago, growing up in the de Paor mausoleum in Avalon, always the kid in the shabby clothes with the jam sandwiches for school lunch.
Suki shivered. She hated being poor.
The woman at the lectern coughed into the microphone and began:
‘Our next speaker needs no introduction …’
Under her carefully applied layers of Clinique, Suki allowed herself a small smile. Why did people kick off with that – and then, inevitably, follow it with an introduction?
Nevertheless, she enjoyed listening to the introductions. Hearing her accomplishments listed out loud made her seem less of a failure. The litany of things she’d achieved made it sound as though she’d done something with her life.
‘… at twenty-four, she married Kyle Richardson IV, future United States ambassador to Italy …’
Poor old Kyle; he’d had no idea what he was letting himself in for. His father had, she recalled. Kyle Richardson III had soon realized that Kyle IV had bitten off more than he could chew, but by then the engagement was in the Washington papers and they’d been to dinner in Katharine Graham’s house, so it was a done deal. The Richardsons were fierce Republicans, flinty political warriors and very rich. There had been many women sniffing round Kyle IV, or Junior, as his father liked to call him. Junior would inherit a whole pile of money, the company – highest-grossing combat arms manufacturer in the US, what else? – and possibly his father’s senate seat. It was the way things were done.
‘… the enfant terrible of politics published her debut polemic, Women and Their Wars when she was twenty-nine …’
The reviews had been fabulous. Being beautiful helped. As her publisher at the time, Eric Gold, had pointed out: ‘Beautiful women who write feminist tracts get way more publicity than plain ones. People assume that unattractive women turn feminist because they’re bitter about their lack of femininity. They’re intrigued when someone as gorgeous as you speaks out for the sisterhood.’
Nobody could accuse Suki Richardson, with her full cherry-red lips, blonde hair and a figure straight out of the upper rack of the magazine store of being bitter about her femininity.
‘… she was one of the most respected feminists of her generation …’
What did that mean – was and of her generation? That lumped her in with a whole load of greying, hairy-armpitted members of the sisterhood who’d written one book before sloping off into obscurity.
She’d expected more, given that Women and Their Wars was on the Women’s Studies foundation course here at Kirkenfeld College.
Realizing that the head of the faculty was looking at her, Suki forced herself to smile again. That damned book had been published years ago; she had written three more since then, yet Women and Their Wars was all anyone ever talked about. That and her marriage to Kyle Richardson, her years with Jethro, and the fact that she was beautiful.
How ironic that, for all her feminist credentials, she seemed doomed to be defined by the very things she railed against: her men and her looks.
Of course it didn’t help that the next two books she’d written had bombed spectacularly. She’d done a coast-to-coast tour for her last book and still nobody had bought it, despite her enduring countless visits to radio stations where she was questioned endlessly about the Richardsons and what they were really like.
At least people still wanted to hear what she had to say, particularly when she got on to her pet subject about women and children: ‘What is this rubbish about biological clocks? Younger women should have children, not older ones. If there’s one thing I hate it’s hearing about some movie star who reaches fifty, then realizes she hasn’t had kids yet and plays IVF roulette until she gets one. Kids need young mothers who can roll on the floor with them and play. Not older ones …’
But it seemed as if Suki Richardson’s diatribes had lost their appeal. Once upon a time, audiences used to tune in hoping that she would tear into some television host who dared question her or fellow panellists who didn’t share her views. Producers used to think she was TV dynamite. But not these days. She’d become invisible since the years with Jethro. Add to that the fact that her books were out of print, apart from Women and Their Wars, which was only available in selected college bookstores, and it all added up to one equation: penury.
It cost a lot to live the way she’d got used to living before she’d left Jethro: she had acquired a taste for designer clothes and the best restaurants. And Dr Frederik cost a bloody fortune; invisible, top-of-the-range cosmetic surgery did not come cheap. Not that a tweak and a mini droplet of Botox here and there didn’t fit in with feminism, but her public might think otherwise. God forbid that Suki Richardson should be outed as having resorted to Sculptra to keep her face looking young. Not after she’d publicly declared that ‘women should stop trying to stop the years! Wrinkles are the proof that we have lived!’
Unfortunately she had acquired a little too much proof of having lived. At forty-eight, she seemed to have more than her fair share of lines. Who knew that smoking created all those lines around the mouth?
And she’d probably have a whole new set of frown lines after the phone call from Eric Gold.
Eric had always been straight with her. She wished they were still friends, because he was one of the few people she could rely on to tell her the truth, even when it hurt.
‘I got a letter requesting an interview from this guy who’s writing a book about the Richardsons.’
‘Ye-s,’ said Suki.
She’d been enjoying a nice afternoon relaxing in her cosy house in Falmouth, lying on the couch watching TV.
‘He’s particularly interested in you. Says you’re mysterious. His words, not mine.’
Suki had stood up to get the phone: now, she groped for a chair to sit on.
‘You still there?’
‘I’m still here, Eric.’
‘Yeah, well, I told him he’d have to get clearance from you first if he wanted me to talk to you. After all, I was your publisher, the book’s still in print so we do business together.’
Once, Eric might have said I’m your friend, but not any more. Not that it mattered right now; there was no time to think about old friendships destroyed with someone out there talking about putting her in a biography.
Or autobiography, perhaps?
‘Is he writing it with Kyle?’ she asked hopefully.
That would be fine. Tricky, but fine. Kyle wouldn’t want to rock any boats, so he’d stick to the official story of their divorce: We were just two very different people who got married too young. We have the greatest affection for each other even after all these years.
There were plenty of nice photos of their marriage to illustrate a coffee-table book. They’d made a photogenic couple. Suki had moved her wardrobe up a notch, trying to fit in with the waspy Richardson clan – in vain, as it happened. Nobody could have impressed Junior’s mother, Antoinette the Ice Queen.
‘No.’ Eric’s mellow voice interrupted her fantasy. ‘It’s a Redmond Suarez book.’
Suki nearly dropped the phone but she managed to steady herself. Suarez was the sort of unofficial biographer to make a subject’s blood run cold. His work was always unauthorized – nobody would authorize the things he wrote. He invariably managed to dig out everything, every little secret a person had hoped would remain hidden. If he was trawling through the Richardson family, then they would all be shaking in their shoes. And so was she.
‘Oh God,’ she said.
‘Oy vey,’ agreed Eric. ‘Not good news for anyone involved, I take it.’
‘Well, you know …’ she said helplessly.
‘Yeah, I know. He says he’s researching now and will be writing next year with a view to publication in the fall.’
‘Nearly a year of research,’ breathed Suki.
Imagine what he could find out in a year! Suki hated research. That was one of the obstacles getting in the way of the new book. That and the fact that everything was riding on it.
‘I’ll get my assistant to scan the letter and email it to you,’ Eric said. ‘I won’t be cooperating, but you can bet your bottom dollar that other people will, Suki.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said dully. ‘Thanks for the call. How is … ?’ Too late, she realized she’d forgotten the name of his wife.
‘Keren,’ he said drily. ‘She’s great. Ciao.’
Suki winced as she placed the receiver on the cradle. Eric was one of those she’d burned during the Jethro years. It had all seemed so much fun at the time: living the high life on the touring scene, never returning phone calls, being too stoned to care about old friends. In turn, the old friends had moved on with their lives.
It was only after Suki had hung up that she realized he hadn’t asked her how she was or if she was happy. At least she’d made the effort, even if she couldn’t remember his damned wife’s name.
Her sister, Tess could stay friends forever. Tess had maintained contact with her old classmates from school, she’d go to dinner with them and have civilized conversations about life. Suki wouldn’t recognize any of her old classmates in a police line-up. It was crash and burn with old acquaintances where she was concerned. Always had been.
Suddenly, she became aware of the sound of clapping. Her introduction was over. It was time to stand up and do her thing, become the Suki who fought the feminist fight, not the Suki who was scared to the pit of her stomach.
Suki opted out of dinner with the faculty when someone suggested a vegan restaurant in town that served organic, low-alcohol wine. Give her strength! Screw vegans and all who sailed in them. She wanted pasta with a cream sauce or steak Diane, thank you very much.
Plus, she’d bet her fee that they’d order one glass of crappy organic wine each. Nobody drank any more. Two drinks and they were offering rehab advice, and she’d had enough of that to last her a lifetime.
Back in the horrible little hotel room the faculty had booked for her she took off her ball-busting purple trouser suit with satin lapels and hung it in the wardrobe. Her speech outfit scared the hell out of men; maybe because purple was such a sexual colour.
‘I hate that goddamn purple pant suit,’ Mick had said as she was leaving the house earlier that day to catch the train to Kirkenfeld.
He was leaning against the doorjamb of their bedroom, still in the T-shirt he’d worn in bed. He’d done what he did most days and just pulled his jeans and boots on. Even so shabbily dressed, he was incredibly attractive: part-Irish, part-Italian, part something else, with intense blue eyes and jet black hair. His band hadn’t landed a gig in over a month, so he spent a lot of time sitting on the porch, smoking weed and messing around on her laptop.
‘New song ideas, honey,’ he said when she tried to ask what he was doing.
She didn’t believe him.
They were so broke, yet she couldn’t ask him to get a regular job. It wouldn’t be fair. He wasn’t that sort of person.
‘Music is a calling, babe,’ he’d say. ‘I don’t turn up at nine like regular guys. I need the muse.’
No, it was no good depending on Mick, Suki thought as she changed into her brown sweatpants. She was going to have to sort out their lack of money by herself.
First, however, she needed a drink. She closed the wardrobe and went to check out the mini bar. It was entirely empty.
Please phone if you’d like the mini bar filled, said a plaintive little note on the top shelf. Damn straight she wanted it filled up. A stiff drink might help her unwind.
She ordered a double vodka tonic from room service. She’d have dinner downstairs with wine, and then, hopefully, she’d sleep. Provided she could get that damned Suarez book out of her mind.
Suddenly, even a boring night with the vegans sounded better than another evening of worrying herself sick.
Throwing open her suitcase – Suki never unpacked; what was the point for one night? – she began rifling through her stuff in search of the loose gold cashmere knit sweater she’d planned to wear tomorrow on the way home. That and her brown sweatpants would see her all right in this dump.
A petite young waitress delivered her drink.
‘Thanks,’ Suki said at the door, and scrawled her name and a big tip in the gratuity space, before taking her vodka and tonic off the girl’s tray. She always tipped well, no matter how broke she was. She’d done enough waitressing to appreciate the need. The faculty could afford a tip on her non-organic drink.
She added half the tonic and had it finished in five minutes. As the large dose of Stolichnaya, her favourite, hit her she finally began to feel buoyed up. The speech had gone well, they’d liked her. She still had it – why didn’t anyone realize that any more?
As she walked in to the sedate restaurant in the hotel, heads turned. They always did. Suki had been ultra blonde since she started using her pocket money to buy hair dye to lighten her natural fair colour. Now, at forty-eight her hair was a shoulder-length, swirling collage of honey golds. Her skin, too, was gold from the remnants of a summer tan and daily walks along the beach. The cheekbones and full lips that had been a siren-call to Avalon’s men all those years ago were holding up well. If anyone looked closely, they’d see the slight hooding of her eyes, but she didn’t want anyone to look closely. Her gold sweater hung sexily from one smooth, tanned shoulder. Suki’s clothes always appeared to be holding on to her body for a fragment of time, as if they might come off at any moment.
‘You’re sex incarnate, honey,’ Jethro had said in surprise the first night he met her, in the green room of the television chat show where they were both appearing.
‘You too,’ thought Suki, but she hadn’t said it. After all, she’d been invited on the show so she could skewer his rock band’s treatment of women in their videos.
And after she’d finished ripping him apart on screen, unable to stop herself staring at him hungrily all the while, he’d pulled her into his dressing room. It had been the best sex of Suki’s life, the best. Afterwards, there were always drugs, but that first time, it had been her and Jethro, pure and clean.
Mick was hideously jealous of her two years with Jethro, even though it had been over four years since she’d seen him.
The jealousy was understandable, Suki knew. Michelangelo O’Neill played in a small-town rock band who’d never made it, while Jethro was TradeWind, one of the most famous bands of the seventies and eighties. TradeWind performed in stadiums and Madison Square Gardens, and MTV had practically played them on a loop during their big years.
Mick and the Survivors had lost their residency in the Clambake Bar because the recession was biting, no matter what the folks in Washington said.
The effects of the vodka were telling her she needed another drink and something carb-laden for dinner.
‘Table for one,’ she said to the girl behind the desk, ignoring the man on duty. For all her outward sexuality, Suki Richardson had spent a lot of her life being wary of men.
At her table, she put on her glasses, took out a novel, a notepad and her pen – men were less likely to bother women when they had a pen and notebook – and set about trying to think her way out of trouble.
Through pasta starter, a steak so bloody that a good vet could have brought it back to life, and the hideous yet delicious concoction that was chocolate and banana caramel pie, she did her best to plan an escape clause.
She could throw herself on the mercy of Suarez: Don’t write about me, I was so young, I didn’t know what I was doing. I can tell you everything else about the Richardsons …
No, unlikely to work. She’d read his Jackie Kennedy book, his Nancy Reagan book and the Bush series. He’d have too many insiders telling him everything there was to know about Suki Power. And if she spilled on the Richardsons, they’d find out and her name would be mud.
Meet him and tell him the truth … ? Well, some of it. God forbid that she should tell the whole truth. Only Tess knew …
Tess. In that instant, Suki realized that all the damage limitation in the world wouldn’t fix it if Suarez got to Tess.
Not that her sister would say anything. Loyal to the end, that was Tess. No, Tess wouldn’t talk. But she was an innocent. If someone like Suarez turned up in Avalon, he’d ferret out the truth all right.
Suki’s lovely dinner began to churn inside her. There was nothing for it: she’d have to go home. Back to Avalon.
Not yet, though.
She didn’t have the money, and Mick was so down about the band having nowhere to play that she couldn’t go off and leave him, much as she wanted to escape sometimes. His sadness sapped her energy, made the house feel full of misery and apathy.
No, she’d phone Tess and talk to her. Tess would understand. They might be like chalk and cheese, but they were on the same wavelength.
She’d talk to her sister, figure out what this damn Suarez guy knew, and then take it from there. She couldn’t cope with her life going into freefall again. She simply couldn’t.
Chapter Three (#ulink_69b1f0f5-dc95-52f4-842a-827a0e31c01e)
She shouldn’t have come. Why had she come?
In the ballroom of a small, pretty castle outside Kildare, Mara Wilson stood behind a pillar and wondered if it wasn’t too late to sneak off. To pretend a migraine. Sudden onset of shellfish poisoning. A suppurating leg sore that could be fatal …
‘Mara, sweetheart! You came!’
Jack’s mother grabbed her in a hug and Mara knew the moment to escape the love of her life’s wedding was lost.
Resplendent in mother-of-the-groom cerise pink with what looked like half a flamingo’s plumage pinned on to her head, Jack’s mother, Sissy, was half crying, half laughing as she heaped affection on Mara.
‘It’s been so long since we saw you and we miss you. Oh, remember the fun we had, that Christmas. You’re fabulous to come today, one in a million – that’s what I told Jack: Mara is one in a million.’
Unfortunately, Mara thought, smiling back grittily, Jack Taylor had decided that he didn’t want to marry one in a million. He’d chosen someone else. Tawhnee, of the long, long legs, long black hair and olive skin that looked fabulous in virginal white. Mara had stayed discreetly at the back of the church for the ceremony, on the inner pew so she wouldn’t be in the bridal couple’s eyeline when they made their triumphant walk down the aisle. But even from inside, with a woman in a cartwheel of a hat outside her, she’d still been able to see her rival and the man Mara had loved.
Jack looked like … well, Jack. Handsome, louche, a man’s man with a naughty smile on his face and his fair hair chopped to show off the clean jaw. And Tawhnee resembled a model from a bridal catalogue. Gleaming café au lait skin, courtesy of her Brazilian mother, long black hair and a smile on her beautiful face. She was the perfect bride and as Mara stared at her she finally realized it was over: Jack had married Tawhnee. Tall, elegant Tawhnee, as opposed to short, curvy Mara. He’d never be with Mara again. It was all too late.
When Tawhnee had arrived in Kearney Property Partners straight out of college, she’d been assigned to Mara.
‘I can’t hand her over to any of the men,’ Jack had confided to Mara at breakfast one day when she’d stayed over at his place and they were having coffee and toast before rushing to the office.
‘Why not?’ Mara had demanded.
‘She’s too good looking. And young, very young,’ Jack had added quickly when Mara had poked him with one of her bare feet. ‘She’s just a kid, right? Twenty-three or -four. I need a woman to take care of her. I need lovely you to do it.’
‘Lovely me?’ Mara got off her seat and slid on to Jack’s lap.
He liked her body on his, her curves nestled against his hardness.
They’d woken at six and made lazy, sleepy love. She felt adored and sensual, like a cat bathed in the sun after a hot day. Jack didn’t invite her to stay over often and never mid-week, so it was a real treat.
‘Yes, lovely you,’ Jack said, and kissed her on the lips.
‘I’ll take care of her,’ Mara said, visualizing an innocent young graduate who’d gaze up to her new mentor. In fact, Mara had had to look up to Tawhnee, who was at least five nine in her bare feet. She was an object of sin in a dress and during the five days Mara mentored her, not a single man – from client to colleague – could set eyes on Tawhnee without their jaw dropping open.
‘It’s sex appeal, that’s what it is. Raw bloody sex appeal,’ Mara told Cici, her flatmate.
‘So? You’re not the Hunchback of Notre Dame yourself,’ snapped back Cici. ‘She’s nothing but a kid.’
‘You are not getting the picture,’ Mara said. ‘This girl is Playboy fabulous. I have no idea why she wants to work for us. She could earn a fortune if she headed to a go-go bar.’
‘She might want to make money from her mind,’ Cici pointed out loftily. ‘You’re labelling her. I was reading a thing on the Web about how beautiful women aren’t taken seriously and other women are jealous of them.’ Cici loved the Internet and had to be hauled away from her laptop late at night to get some zeds.
‘True. I’m being a cow,’ Mara said, sighing. ‘I’ll try harder.’
She didn’t have to. Tawhnee was suddenly and mysteriously whisked away to work with Jack.
He was director of operations. It was unusual for such a lowly trainee to be working with Jack, but as he said himself: ‘She needs to get to grips with this side of the business. What film should we go to see tonight? You pick. We’ve gone to loads of films I’ve picked. It’s your choice.’
In retrospect, she’d been very trusting. All the ‘let’s go and see a film’ and ‘shall we have dinner out’ had kept her fears at bay. Her boyfriend was being ultra-attentive, therefore there was no way he could be lusting after Tawhnee, even if every other man in the office was.
Like, hello!
And then it was too late.
Mara was under her desk, trying to find her favourite purple pen when two of the guys came into the office after an auction.
‘Lucky bastard,’ said one. ‘I wouldn’t mind doing the tango with Tawhnee.’
‘Yeah, Jack’s always had a way with the girls. I thought Mara had settled him down, but a leopard—’
‘—doesn’t change his spots,’ agreed the other one.
‘And she’s hot. An über babe.’
‘Mara’s lovely and she’s great fun but not—’
‘Yeah, not in Tawhnee’s league. Who is, right? Don’t get me wrong, Mara’s cute and she can look sexy, it has to be said, but she wears all those mad old clothes and she is short. Basically, compared to Tawhnee, she’s …’
‘Yeah, ordinary. While, Tawhnee, phew! She’s so hot, she’s on fire.’
‘Yeah, spot on. Tawhnee’s a Ferrari, isn’t she, and Mara … Well, she’s not, is she?’
Under the desk, Mara wanted to dig a hole so deep that she came out in another country. Another planet, even. She stayed where she was for a few moments, like an animal frozen in pain. It was hard to know what hurt most. The realization that Jack was indeed cheating on her with Tawhnee, or the knowledge that the men she worked with and lunched with and joked with saw her simply as an ordinary but occasionally sexy girl who liked ‘mad old clothes’. All those times she’d thought she’d pulled it off and camouflaged herself successfully into something different – something chic, elegant, stylish – with her fabulous vintage outfits, she’d been wrong.
Talent, kindness, laughing at their bad jokes … none of it meant anythingcompared to being tall, slim and hot. She was ordinary beside the Ferrari that was Tawhnee.
She waited till the phone rang to crawl out the other side where a handy filing cabinet hid her, and ran from the room to find Jack.
He was in his office alone, eyes focusing on his mobile, texting. At the door, Mara stared at him and wondered if she’d been nothing more than a diverting, wait-till-the-Ferrari-comes-along girl for him too.
He’d said he loved her, loved her shape, her petiteness; he’d called her his pocket Venus, and said he hated skinny women who nibbled on celery.
‘You grab life with both hands,’ he’d murmured when they were lying in bed after the first time they made love.
‘And I eat it!’ said Mara triumphantly, wriggling on top of him to nuzzle his neck. She’d never met anyone who shared her sensuality until she’d found him. They were so well matched in many ways, but none so much as when they were in bed.
For the first time in her life, Mara Wilson had met a man who loved her as she was – with the wild, red curls, an even wilder dress sense and an hourglass body, albeit a short one. Jack adored her 1950s clothes fetish. He told her she looked fantastic in fitted angora sweaters and tight skirts worn with red lippie, Betty Boop high shoes and eyeliner applied with a sexy little flick.
And all the while he probably thought she was ordinary too. She was his ordinary fling while he waited for something better to come along.
‘Yes?’ he said now, without looking up from his phone.
Mara said nothing and Jack finally flicked a gaze at the door.
‘Oh, hi, it’s you.’
Swiftly, he pressed a couple of buttons, deleting or getting out of whatever text he’d been writing, Mara realized. He smiled guiltily at her and that’s when she knew for sure. It took one look at his face to know the truth.
‘Is it true?’ she asked. ‘About you and Tawhnee?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said feebly.
‘Sorry? Is that the best you can do, Jack?’ she asked quietly. She wouldn’t shout. Not here. She would leave with dignity.
‘I wanted to tell you for ages,’ he insisted.
‘Why didn’t you?’
He shrugged.
Mara felt curiously numb. This must be shock, she thought.
‘I’ve got a headache. I’m going home now.
‘Of course,’ Jack said. ‘Take tomorrow too. Er, headaches can really get you down …’
She left and grabbed her things from her desk. The guys were chatting.
‘Hi, Mara, what’s up?’ said the one who’d called her ordinary.
She looked at him through the haze of numbness, then stumbled from the room.
Cici had volunteered to go with Mara to the wedding.
‘Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll look totally sad if I come with you. No offence, but coming with a female friend is like wearing a badge that says I’m a loser who couldn’t get a date. Brad Pitt is about the only man I could bring and not look like a sad cow.’
‘OK then, but promise me you’ll dance like there’s nobody watching,’ Cici added.
‘Isn’t that the advice from a fridge magnet?’ Mara demanded.
‘Fridge magnets can be very clever,’ her friend replied. ‘A clean kitchen is the sign of a boring person, and all that.’
‘True.’
There was a pause.
‘I always danced like there was nobody watching,’ Mara said mournfully. ‘Jack loved that about me. He said I was a free spirit. Although not as free as Tawhnee.’
‘She was obviously free with everything, from her favours to her skirt lengths,’ Cici said caustically.
Mara smiled. That was the thing about a good girlfriend: she’d fight your corner like a caged lioness. If you were injured, she was injured too and she remembered all the hurts and would never forgive anyone for inflicting them on you.
‘She has great legs,’ Mara admitted.
‘All people of twenty-four have great legs. It’s only when you get to thirty that your knees sag and the cellulite hits.’
Cici was thirty-five to Mara’s thirty-three and considered herself an expert on ageing issues. Mara could remember being mildly uninterested when Cici had complained about cellulite spreading over her thighs like an invasion of sponges. Then one day, it had happened to her and she’d understood. Was that to be her fate for ever – understanding when it was too late?
The wedding band were murdering ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’ when Jack appeared beside her, urbane in his dinner jacket.
‘Mara, you look wonderful.’
Mara had maxed out her credit card on a designer number from an expensive shop that catered for petite women. She’d been going to wear one of her vintage specials, but she hadn’t the heart for it: she’d show Jack and everyone else that she could do ‘normal’ clothes too. So at great expense, she’d bought a bosom-defying turquoise prom dress worn with very high, open-toed shoes. She’d curled her hair with rollers and clipped it up on one side with a turquoise-and-pink flower brooch. Her lips were MAC’s iconic scarlet Ruby Woo, her seamed stockings were in a straight line, and she knew she looked as good as she could. Not mainstream, no, but good. Not ordinary, she hoped.
‘Would you like to dance?’
Dance with Jack?
It must be a dream. A very strange dream, she decided. Soon, a big white rabbit would appear, along with a deranged woman screeching ‘Off with their heads!’ and possibly Johnny Depp wearing contact lenses and a lot of make-up.
Still, even if it was a dream, she’d go along. Nobody could think she was a bad loser if they saw her dancing with her former lover.
‘Of course,’ she said, beaming at him.
Smile all the time, had been Cici’s other advice. If you stop smiling, even for a minute, they’ll all be sure you’re going to cry, so smile like you are having the time of your life.
Amazingly, Jack seemed to be buying the fake grin and grinned right back at her.
Mara steeled herself for a speedy and guilty whisk round the dance floor. Tawhnee was sure to be watching, narrow-eyed. She might be young and beautiful, but she wasn’t stupid.
However, instead of the expected quick dance, Jack held Mara very close.
Mara’s ability to smile despite the pain inside cut off suddenly.
‘Don’t do that,’ she snapped at him.
‘Do what?’
He was still smiling, seemingly perfectly happy.
Jack loved a party and what he loved even more was one of his parties. His wedding party would therefore be the ultimate in all-about-himness.
‘Smile at me like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like you weren’t my boyfriend for two years and didn’t dump me for Tawhnee, like that.’
‘Oh.’
Even Jack’s skin wasn’t thick enough for that to bounce off.
They twirled some more, stony-faced now. Jack loosened his grip. Mara knew she should say nothing, but she couldn’t. Her mouth refused to obey. Instead of hissing You bastard! which had been on the tip of her tongue for some time, she demanded: ‘Why did you invite me?’
‘Why did you come?’ he countered.
‘Because if I didn’t come, everyone in work would think I was bitter and enraged.’
‘But—’
If Jack had been about to say ‘obviously you are bitter and enraged …’ some part of his brain kicked in and told him not to.
‘I wanted us to be friends,’ he said forlornly.
Friends! After two years of thinking he was the love of her life, now he wanted to be friends.
Suddenly, Mara no longer cared what it all looked like.
She pulled herself away.
‘Goodbye, Jack,’ she snapped, and stormed off in the direction of the French windows.
It was a cold evening, but because much of the castle’s beauty lay in its outdoors, lights lit up the patios where bay trees in pots were draped with giant cream bows.
If she could only hold the tears and the anger in until she was alone, Mara told herself, she’d be fine.
The fairy lights sprinkled around in the trees gave the place a storybook feel. It was such a pretty venue: the old castle with its turrets and its coat of arms, the huge hall ablaze with candles, the giant heaters outside on the verandah surrounded by mini-lanterns. It was the perfect setting for an autumn wedding.
She shivered as she crossed the stone flags to stand under a heater.
This could have been me, thought Mara with a pang of sorrow. I could have been the bride surrounded by my family, wearing old lace, rushing upstairs to the four-poster bed of the bridal suite to make legal love to my husband for the first time.
Instead, she was facing a taxi ride to a B&B in the local village, because the family had snaffled all the castle bedrooms. Her room in the B&B was tiny and freezing, situated under the eaves, and the bed was a small, creaky double – she’d sat on it earlier and the crank of springs was so loud it had made her bounce up again with fright. If she’d lost her mind and taken another guest back for a wild night of casual frolicking, the B&B owners would undoubtedly bang on the door to get them to keep the noise down because of the bed springs.
‘I thought you’d be happy,’ said a slightly plaintive voice.
She wheeled around in shock. Jack stood beside her.
Mara closed her eyes to the lovely view and wondered if Jack had always been this emotionally unevolved? What kind of man would assume that she’d be happy to be at his wedding to the woman for whom he’d dumped her? But perhaps Jack could assume that.
She hadn’t had tantrums when he’d left. She’d taken it like a grown-up. Dignity was the preserve of the ordinary girl, she’d decided.
‘Why isn’t it me here tonight?’ she asked now as, from inside, she could hear the wedding band strike up another tune.
‘Ah, Mara, now’s not the time for this—’ Jack began.
He had his tormented face on. Mara knew his every expression. The sallow handsome face could take on so many different looks, and she’d seen them all.
‘Now is exactly the time,’ she said quietly. ‘Tell me – what does she have that I haven’t?’
The instant the question was out, she regretted it. The answer could have been eight years, bought breasts and much longer legs.
Jack reached into the jacket of his suit and took out a single cigarette. He was supposed to have given up. Tawhnee was very anti-smoking. Nothing had convinced Mara that she’d lost him as much as Jack’s agreeing not to smoke any more. If Tawhnee could do that, she could do anything.
‘It’s only the one,’ he muttered, cradling his fingers around a match to light the cigarette, then inhaling like a drowning man reaching the surface.
‘You’re a great girl, Mara …’ he said.
‘Why do I think there’s a but coming?’ she said with a hint of bitterness.
‘You know me so well,’ he said, laughing softly.
‘Not well enough, apparently.’
‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with Tawhnee,’ Jack said, after he’d smoked at least half of the cigarette.
‘It just happened,’ Mara said. ‘That is such a cliché, Jack.’
‘That’s me: Mr Cliché,’ he joked.
‘Very funny. So what’s the BUT. The but that I don’t have.’
She wanted him to say it. Because you were never The One, Mara. Because I was continually looking over your shoulder and then Tawhnee came along … She wanted him to tell the truth instead of the lies he clearly had been spouting when they were together.
‘There’s no “but”. You’re perfect,’ Jack said.
‘If I’m perfect, why didn’t you stay with me?’
‘I don’t know. She came to work for us, she’s stunning – not that you’re not stunning too,’ Jack said hastily.
‘You told me you liked the way I looked, and then you go and fall in love with a woman who is the complete opposite of me,’ she said. Except for the boobs, she thought grimly. In addition to her supermodel sleekness and legs up to the armpits, Tawhnee had gravity-defying boobs. The office women were convinced that Tawhnee had had a boob job. The office men didn’t care.
Jack said nothing.
Mara wasn’t to be deflected. ‘I want to know why,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Why you’ve married Tawhnee when, despite two years with me, you never even so much as asked me what I thought about marriage? It’s because I wasn’t the one, isn’t it? I was simply the one you could play around with while you waited for her to show up.’
It wasn’t as if Mara had been pinning her hopes on a wedding, but the longer she went out with Jack, the more she began to think that such an event might happen one day. She was sure that he loved her as much as she loved him. That Jack Taylor, a man who could have any woman he wanted, had really chosen a petite red-head who’d thought she was ordinary for years until she’d met him, and he’d told her she was special. She’d begun to believe all the things he’d said.
That she was the sexiest woman he’d ever met. And the funniest. And the most beautiful … Except he’d never asked her to marry him.
Four months after she’d found out he was cheating on her, he’d announced his engagement to Tawhnee. Today, a mere two months later, they were married.
‘You didn’t talk about marriage either,’ he bleated. ‘I didn’t think you were the kind of woman who’s into all that sort of thing’.
‘What gave you that idea?’
Jack had one last card. ‘Tawhnee said she wanted to get married. She said it on our first date.’
‘Really?’ said Mara, sigh and word wrapped into one.
Was that what it would have taken? If Mara had told Jack she was the marrying kind of girl, instead of the let’s-go-to-bed-and-have-fun sort of girl, would it have been her today in the long white dress?
‘Give me that cigarette.’
She plucked it from his fingers and took a long drag. She wasn’t actually a smoker, not really. When they’d been together, she’d had a few when they were out partying. Liking the idea of taking a cigarette from his mouth. It was such an intimate thing to do. But tonight, she wanted to do something self-destructive, and letting nicotine hit her was the only thing to hand. She’d promised herself she would not drink too much: to turn into the drunken ex at a wedding would be too humiliating.
She coughed and felt her guts loosen.
‘Yeuch.’ She stubbed the cigarette out on the balustrade.
‘I hadn’t finished with that!’ wailed Jack.
Mara patted his cheek. ‘That’s precisely what I said to Tawhnee, but hey, that’s life.’
Mara left him standing there. She collected her handbag from her chair, and smiled at the people at her table. They were colleagues from work and most of them had been so sweet to her.
‘Jack’s a fool,’ Pat from accounts said for about the fifth time that evening.
‘I’d go out with you tomorrow,’ slurred Henry, who sold higher class properties because he’d been to all the right schools and looked immaculate in navy pinstripe.
His wife, a frosted blonde who was equally posh and very kind, slapped him gently. ‘Don’t be silly, Henry. What about me?’
‘You could come too,’ Henry said happily.
‘I’m going to head off,’ Mara interrupted, before Henry could get on to the subject of threesomes.
‘Good plan,’ said Veronica, who worked with Mara and had her junior doctor fiancé in tow. He was asleep in his chair and someone had put a garland of flowers on his head. ‘You’ve done your bit.’ She got up to hug Mara. ‘We all think you’re so brave for coming,’ she whispered. ‘At least you’ve got two weeks before they’re back from honeymoon. Apparently, Tawhnee will carry on working with Jack for the next year, so you’ve got some breathing space to get your head around it all.’
Mara inhaled sharply. ‘Nobody told me that.’
Tawhnee was supposed to leave, that’s what Jack had told her in the early, painful days of finding out. Tawhnee would be leaving at Christmas.
‘Easier not to know, isn’t it?’ Veronica said.
No, thought Mara suddenly, it isn’t.
Her whole career at Kearney Property Partners was changing and nobody had thought to tell her. She was the silly, cuckolded girl who’d been so in love with Jack Taylor that she’d forgotten about herself. She’d handed him her heart and her job on a plate.
‘Thanks for telling me,’ she said to Veronica.
‘You’re so brave,’ Veronica said again. ‘Please, please, find yourself a total stud within the next two weeks so you can drag him into the office for lunch on their first day back from honeymoon. Ideally, you should be practically having sex with the stud on the reception desk when they come in.’
Mara laughed, thinking of movies where desperate women hired escorts for weddings and office parties so they wouldn’t be seen as hopeless cases. Perhaps she should have rented a hunk for tonight. Someone to look as if he couldn’t wait to rip her dress off with his teeth – even if he was being paid for it. But then that would be fake and, suddenly, Mara was in no mood for fake.
Like she was in no mood to go back into the office and pretend. She looked at all the smiling faces round the table, all wishing her well, and knew she wouldn’t be able to carry on working there for much longer.
‘See you all next week,’ she said brightly and whisked her jacket – vintage fake leopard print – off the chair.
Outside, she asked Reception to call her a taxi, and then hid in a big armchair near the door, hoping nobody from the wedding party would spot her escaping.
She rang Cici, who was out with some friends.
Mara whispered what Veronica had told her. ‘Even Veronica’s getting married,’ wailed Mara down the phone. ‘The whole world is at it. Was a law brought in making marriage compulsory and nobody told me about it?’
‘Don’t be daft. You don’t want to get married, not really.’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t. Jack’s a prat. Geddit? Jack’s a prat. He’d make you miserable. What if the two of you had got married and he’d met Tawhnee afterwards? What then, tell me?’
‘He’d still have run off with her,’ Mara said, feeling like the voice of doom in her own Greek chorus. ‘Does loving a shallow man make me shallow too?’
‘No, simply a typical woman,’ advised Cici, wise after several bottles of Miller. ‘You’ll feel better tomorrow and we’ll think of a plan to have fun, right?’
‘Right.’
The taxi driver told her she was a sensible girl to be going home early.
‘The town’s full of mad young women running around in this cold with no coats on. Young girls today, I don’t understand them. Nice to see a sensible one like yourself.’
In the back seat, Mara made assenting noises out of politeness. She wasn’t in the least bit sensible, she merely looked it and always had. Even at school, silliness was assumed to be an attribute of the tall, mascara’d minxes who wore their uniform skirts rolled up and had liaisons behind the bike shed. Everyone thought that small, quiet girls who did their homework had to be sensible, nice girls, even if they had wild red hair and a penchant for spending their pocket money on mad clothes.
In the B&B, the landlady was astonished to see a wedding guest home before eleven.
‘I’m working very hard and I’m exhausted,’ Mara said, because she didn’t want another person to tell her she was a rock of sense in a crazy world.
Then she went to her room, locked the door and allowed the tears to fall. Sensible and dumped – what more could a woman ask for?
Chapter Four (#ulink_34760d7f-0019-5409-95d7-5ae027884a71)
October ripped through Avalon with unprecedented storms that made the sea lash the rocks at the edge of the Valley of the Diamonds, the prettiest cove on Avalon Bay. From Danae’s house, she could see the frothing of rough waves crashing into the shore. The last of the visitors had left Avalon and it was back to its off-season population of six thousand souls.
On Willow Street, another of the ancient willows had sheared from its roots overnight, like a piece of sculpture broken by a hurricane. Danae wished someone from the council would move it, put it out of its pain. She didn’t know why, but she felt these beautiful trees could feel pain like humans could. The magnolias in her garden appeared to have curled in on themselves, no bud ready to unfurl, and there was no scent of honey in the air at night from the honeysuckle, only the icy chill of winter approaching.
Danae’s walks with Lady were shorter affairs, as neither of them could cope with being out for long in such wild winds. She wrapped a scarf around her mouth when she walked because it felt as if the wind was trying to steal her breath.
‘You don’t like it much either, do you, darling?’ she said to Lady late one afternoon as they faced into the wind climbing the hill towards Avalon House. Above them, the for sale sign swayed perilously in the wind, dirty and battered from hanging there so long.
Lady’s favourite walk was over the stile into the woods that belonged to Avalon House, where she could cavort over fallen logs searching for rabbits and squirrels. A few months ago, the woods had been wild with the remains of sea aster and bell heathers, with the delicate purple heads of selfheal clustering here and there amid the leaves. But now, the flowers were gone and a wildness had taken over the place.
Lady loped on, knowing the way to go, past a couple of sycamores twisted towards the ground from decades of high winds. To the right were the ruins of the old abbey, nothing now but half a gable wall of ancient brick. Small stones sticking up around its grassy meadows were crude gravestones dating back to the time when people left a simple marker at a burial site instead of a grand headstone.
Danae found these little stone markers so touching: some dated from the Famine years and she could picture the hunger-ravaged mourners burying their loved ones, wanting to know where the grave was so they could return to pray there, if they lived that long.
On the other side of the abbey was a holy well where locals had been leaving prayers and offerings long before Christianity had claimed the well for St Edel.
Lady turned as they reached the abbey ruins and ran with easy grace over leaves and fallen twigs in the direction of the back of the great house, following the trail of another dog, Danae thought.
Even though there was nothing to stop her because some of the windows were glassless and open to the world, Danae had never been inside the house itself. She felt it would be disrespectful to the place somehow. Although she knew there were many who dismissed such things as hocus pocus, Danae was sensitive to atmosphere, She could tell that this house had known kindness and goodness in its day. And now there was a sense of sadness that no family lived here any more, the silence broken only by the wind in the trees instead of the sound of dogs barking or children laughing.
Calling Lady to her side, Danae turned to make her way back to Willow Street and home. Despite the wild beauty of the woods, she was suddenly anxious to leave this melancholy place. Or perhaps it wasn’t the place that was the problem but the time of year.
It had been in October that Danae got married and the month would forever remind her of a second-hand wedding dress and how hopeful she’d been as a young bride. Thirty years ago, she had known so little when she stood at the altar. Marriage back then was immersed in the ceremony of the Catholic church, with a dusting of glamour from the movies, where girls like the young Grace Kelly glowed on screen at her one true love. Marriage was till death do you part, your place was by your husband’s side. Good wives knew that.
Once the ring was on the bride’s finger, happiness was guaranteed – wasn’t it?
With the benefit of hindsight, Danae marvelled at her innocence. She should have known better: after all, she’d spent all those years living with her mother while a selection of ‘uncles’ trailed in and out of their lives, some kind, some not. And yet Danae had hoped that he was out there, her special one true love.
She’d been convinced that Antonio was the one, and had entered into marriage never doubting for a moment that they would be together for ever. How foolish could you get!
Young women today were made of stronger stuff and they knew more.
Or did they?
Her brother, Morris had phoned earlier and told her the latest news about Mara. The poor girl was devastated by Jack’s betrayal and there was nothing they could do to help her.
Danae had done what any big sister should do: she had listened and tried to offer comfort.
Morris was ready to go down to Galway and give Jack a piece of his mind or even a few slaps – fighting words indeed from Morris, a man who’d never slapped anyone in his life. ‘She pretends she’s fine, only she’s not,’ he said mournfully. ‘Girls today always try to pretend they’re strong for some reason, but Mara is such a softie, even though she lets on she’s as tough as old boots. Just a total softie.’
His voice trailed off then, but Danae resisted the urge to leap in with offers of help. She knew that if Morris wanted her to do something, he’d ask, though it was very rare that he did ask anything of her. She tried so very hard not to interfere in case she brought her own bad luck to Morris and his wife and children.
Yet she was so drawn to them. That warm and loving little family seemed to her to epitomize love at its best, and she had to try hard to keep some distance, otherwise she’d have been there all the time, haunting them, like a cold person trying to warm their hands at a fire. It made more sense to live on her own in Avalon with her beloved animals. She was the woman on the fishing boat, the Jonah: it was better that she stayed away and kept her bad luck with her.
‘Elsie is in bits about it, of course,’ Morris went on. ‘Sheblames the girl Jack ran off with. Don’t suppose it matters much who you blame, it’s too late now. I wish you’d talk to her, Danae,’ he added. ‘Mara listens to you. She’s not going to listen to her dad. Elsie simply cries when she’s on the phone. To think I had that young pup here in our house …’
‘I’ll phone,’ she’d promised, without a moment’s hesitation.
As soon as she got home after her walk, Danae made herself a cup of tea, sat in front of the log fire and dialled Mara’s number.
Her niece sounded in remarkably good form on the phone, although Danae suspected she was making a huge effort to sound upbeat.
It was undoubtedly habit: she was so used to blithely saying ‘I’m fine’ when anybody asked her how she was feeling that she probably almost believed it herself. There had been a time when Danae had done exactly the same thing. It was surprisingly easy to convince people that your life was wonderful when it was the exact opposite.
‘I’m going to be on a career break soon,’ Mara said blithely. ‘I gave in my notice earlier this week. Apart from a few waitressing shifts, there’s not much for me here, but it’s nice to have some time off. Plus, Cici and I are thinking of doing a fitness boot camp one weekend.’ Before Danae could get a word in, she added, ‘No, don’t say anything about how I’ve never done any exercise up to now!’ Then she laughed, a slightly harsh laugh.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much, thought Danae. Speaking the truth harshly before anybody else did was an age-old defence mechanism. There was no point in explaining this to Mara, though.
Instead Danae said, ‘That sounds lovely. I’ve always wondered what exactly a boot camp is. Is it military instructors yelling at you to do sit-ups on the spot?’
‘I sincerely hope not,’ said Mara. ‘I can’t do any sit-ups at all, and I’ll be able to do even less if someone is shouting at me when I’m trying!’
They talked for a little longer, and then, claiming that she had to get ready to go out for the evening, Mara said goodbye, promising to phone her aunt soon.
‘You could come to Avalon for a visit,’ Danae suggested. ‘The feathered Mara would love to see you.’
Mara laughed, a genuine laugh, at that.
‘I hope the poor hen hasn’t been dumped by her boyfriend, too.’
‘There’s no rooster here,’ Danae replied. ‘They only cause problems.’
Mara laughed that harsh laugh again. ‘Ain’t that the truth! I’ll come soon, I promise.’
Danae hung up, convinced that all was not well with her niece. But she would wait until Mara came to her. That was her way.
Cashel Reilly was having breakfast on the thirty-fourth-floor terrace of the Sydney Intercontinental when he got the phone call. He liked eating on the balcony and staring over the harbour, watching the ferries cruising silently beneath him, passing the armadillo scales of the Opera House.
He’d drunk his coffee and eaten his omelette, and was reading the Sydney Morning Herald, having skimmed both the Financial Times and the Strait Times. It was only half seven, yet the club floor was already busy with business people having meetings and making phone calls.
Cashel disliked breakfast meetings. He preferred to enjoy his meal and then talk, rather than do both at the same time. His first meeting was at half eight in the office on George Street and his assistant had already left him notes.
His business was varied and remarkably recession-proof. Not that he didn’t occasionally dabble in high-risk investments, but the bulk of capital was tied up in the nano-technology firm in California, the enzyme research here in Australia, the computer intel business that spanned the globe. Gifted with a mind that roamed endlessly, he invested in the future, forever seeking new angles and new business opportunities, and it had made him a very rich man.
The plus of being so successful meant that any mild recession-led diminishment of his wealth was a mere ripple in the pond of Reilly Inc. He’d put the chalet in Courchevel up for sale not because he was strapped for cash but simply because he hadn’t been there in years. Rhona had been the skier. She’d loved nothing more than decamping to the chalet for weeks at a time, skiing all day and putting on her glad rags to party all night.
Cashel had enjoyed skiing. He was strong and agile, which helped, but he couldn’t get worked up over it the way she did, endlessly pacing herself on black runs.
It was one more thing that separated them. In the beginning, they’d happily told each other that ‘opposites attract’. By the end, they’d realized that opposites might attract but building a life together when you had so little in common was another matter.
He still owned the house near Claridges in London, the apartment in Dublin, a penthouse in New York on the Upper East Side, and the apartment in Melbourne, an airy fourth floor apartment off Collins, where he would wake to the somnolent rattle of the tram cars. Melbourne with its trees and boulevards reminded him strangely of home. On the face of it, Avalon was nothing like the city, yet there was an inescapable sense of history that they both shared.
Nowhere was that sense of history stronger than in the De Paor house.
Cashel could vividly recall the first time he’d seen the house properly, as a tall, skinny nine-year-old accompanying his mother as she went about her work as a cleaner. He’d been there before then, of course. Climbing the crumbling De Paor walls was a rite of passage for the boys in Cottage Row, where he and his younger brother, Riach lived. The Cottage kids, as they were known in the local national school, were always up for mischief, some worse than others. Cashel remembered the time Paddy Killen’s older brother got himself arrested for breaking and entering. Paddy had been delighted with this infamy, but Cashel’s mother had sat her two sons down on the kitchen chairs and told them that if they ever did anything like that, the police wouldn’t need to lock them up: she’d have killed them first.
When his phone buzzed, he answered without so much as a glance at the screen. Few people had his private number.
‘Cashel,’ said his brother’s voice.
He knew immediately that it was bad news.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s Mam – she’s dead.’
Cashel felt as if his body was in freefall down the side of the giant hotel.
‘Tell me,’ he said hoarsely.
‘Massive heart attack in her sleep. Dolly found her.’
Cashel paid for Dolly and three other nurses to take care of his mother. He’d wanted Anna to stay in her own home, even if the dementia meant she no longer recognized it. At least his money allowed him to do that much for her.
‘It doesn’t seem real,’ Cashel said to his brother. ‘Despite the dementia, despite everything, she was there …’
His voice tailed off. Their mother had been so strong, so courageous, like a lioness protecting her sons. Their father had been a man with a penchant for the bookmaker and the local pub. His bad back meant he wasn’t in work often, and any money he got, ended up in the pub or the bookie’s cash register. Without Anna Reilly, Cashel knew that he and Riach would have had no warm house, no education, nothing.
‘I know,’ said Riach, his voice soft. ‘Not real at all. But we knew this day would come, Cashel, and it’s better for her. She’d have hated this half-life, not part of this world and not part of the next one either.’
Cashel stood and leaned over the balcony, staring down towards Macquarie Park where people were walking, their lives untouched by his tragic news. He wanted to scream it out, to tell everyone what had happened. Cashel Reilly, once-divorced man of forty-six, regularly on rich lists and in financial columns for his business acumen, felt as if a part of him had been ripped out.
‘I’ll be home as soon as I can,’ he told his brother. One of the benefits of having a private jet. ‘Will you do the notices in the paper? We can talk about undertakers and all the rest when I get there.’
He found himself shuddering at the word ‘undertakers’. The world of death was upon them with all its traditions and rituals. Cashel had a sudden vision of St Mary’s in Avalon, sitting in the pew beside his parents at Sunday Mass.
‘Don’t fidget!’ his father would hiss, and Cashel’s mother would put her hand – soft, despite all the work she did – into his and let him know that he hadn’t really done anything wrong, that a bit of fidgeting was normal.
And now she’d be lying in St Mary’s in a big dark box. He’d be there mourning her without anyone to put their hand into his, and he knew how much that would upset her – how much it had upset her for so many years – that he was alone.
Today, it upset him too. And it made him think about Tess Power.
Anna had always loved Tess. There had been no issue between the woman who cleaned Avalon House and the daughter of the house. There might have been in many of the other big houses, but not there. It was partly to do with Tess and Suki’s father, a man who genuinely didn’t discriminate between those with money and those without. He was unlike most of his class in that respect.
Mr Power was cut from different cloth. He cared about people, from the men who worked on the estate, trying to stop the ravages of time and the weather from destroying the beautiful old house, to people like Cashel’s mother, who cleaned and sometimes took care of Tess and Suki. He always addressed Anna respectfully as ‘Mrs Reilly’ and spoke to her as if she were a duchess. And Anna, though she came from the poorest street in the village, spoke back to him in the same way. So it was no surprise that Anna and Tess were close.
But Cashel didn’t want to think about Tess Power. Not after all that had happened. He hoped she wouldn’t have the nerve to come to his mother’s funeral. The lady of the manor bestowing her presence on the funeral of a mere town person … He shuddered; no, he didn’t want to see her there.
October was not a good time for boutiques in small villages – or so said Vivienne, proprietor of Femme, the high-fashion boutique next door to Something Old.
The Christmas frenzy of wanting something new to wear hadn’t yet started and everyone was saving for Christmas presents.
‘The number of people I’ve had in this morning who rattled through the sale racks dismissively, then marched out again. It’s so depressing,’ Vivienne sighed. ‘They don’t even look at the full-price stock.’
She’d stuck the ‘Back in five minutes’ sign on the door and dropped into Tess’s for a cup of instant coffee and a moan. The two of them had been shop neighbours for ten years. Vivienne had done marvellously during the boom years when wealthy women thought nothing of paying a hundred euros for a sparkly T-shirt or twice that for a long, bewildering skirt with trailing bits here and there. Now, Vivienne said, they wanted a whole outfit for the same hundred euros.
Tess boiled the kettle and spooned coffee into cups in the back part of the shop and listened quietly to Vivienne’s lament.
The past couple of years had been tough, no doubt about it.
Once upon a time, she used to close the shop for the whole of January and open up again in February, with new stock, the old stock rearranged, and a spring in her step after the rest. She hadn’t done that for the last two years. These days, she couldn’t afford to close at all.
At least when the place was open, people came in, bringing warmth with them.
She carried the coffees back into the shop, having decided against telling Vivienne that a customer had bought a sweet 1910 marcasite brooch only that morning. Vivienne would take it personally.
‘No news?’ asked Vivienne.
‘Not a scrap,’ said Tess, smiling. It was a trick of hers: smiling fooled people into smiling back at her. It was infectious; a bit like yawning at dogs.
Vivienne perked up. ‘They’re doing a special offer in the supermarket,’ she said. ‘Two instant meals and a bottle of wine for twelve euros. Of course, Gerard hates instant meals.’ Gerard was Vivienne’s husband, a man who could be relied upon to bail the shop out when profits were low.
Tess was used to Vivienne’s rants. She never let on that she too worried about money, that there was no one to bail her out, and now even the capital her father had left her had dwindled, despite its relative safety in the post office. Staring her in the face was the knowledge that before long she might have to give up Something Old and join an auction house – if she could find one that would have her. She didn’t have a degree in fine arts. Her college experience a million years ago had been in general arts. Her knowledge of antiques came not from books but from her love of old things and an affinity for them, but she had an expert eye and could generally tell a fake from the real thing.
‘Are these the best biscuits you have?’ Vivienne said, eyeing the plain biscuits.
‘Sorry,’ said Tess. ‘I did have a pack of amaretti biscotti, but they’re all gone.’
‘I need chocolate,’ said Vivienne, getting to her feet. ‘I’ll nip down to Ponti’s for a pack of chocolate ones. Back in a moment!’
It was ten minutes before she returned. After all that time, Tess expected her to turn up with cupcakes from the delicatessen and a couple of milky coffees from Lorena’s Café. However, when Vivienne arrived, panting from the walk up the hill to Something Old, she carried nothing but a pack of chocolate biscuits.
‘I got stuck, talking to Mr Ponti,’ she said, collapsing on to her chair. ‘Apparently, Anna Reilly died. One of the nurses found her dead this morning. Mr Ponti reckons it was a mercy, given how bad she was. I suppose the older son will be home for the funeral. I’ve met Riach, obviously, and his wife, Charlotte’s lovely, but I’ve never set eyes on Cashel – except in the papers. He’s a fine thing, I have to say. Is that bad of me? Saying he’s good looking when his mother’s only died? I suppose it is. Can you boil up the kettle again, Tess? This coffee’s stone cold.’
But Tess was no longer listening. She was thinking of the woman she’d known since she was a child, who’d been a friend to her even after the split with Cashel.
Nineteen years had passed, yet it remained as painful as ever to think about him. Tess closed her eyes, as if that would block out his face.
She saw him on television sometimes, talking about business. He looked as if he’d filled out over the years, with broad shoulders to go with his great height. He’d had a beard for a while, giving him a hint of Barbary pirate with his midnight dark hair and the slanting eyebrows over those expressive brown eyes.
On the day he’d told her how much he hated her, he was leaner, his face still youthful and full of hope.
When she looked at pictures of him now she saw someone who’d been knocked by life and whose face had taken on a wry, slightly wary expression as a result. The dark eyes were permanently narrowed and there were lines around them that should have made him appear older but somehow only succeeded in making Tess wonder if there was much happiness in his life.
His mother had come to see Tess a couple of years after she married Kevin. Zach had been a toddler at the time, and Anna had brought him a little sweater she’d knitted. It was blue with the red outline of a train embroidered on to it. Anna was a wonderful knitter. Tess could remember Cashel, tall and strong, in a cream Aran sweater his mother had made him. Tess used to lie against him and trace the complex patterns of stitches, marvelling at both the intricacy and the feel of his body through the wool. Everything had been so simple then, dreaming of the day Tess and Cashel would marry, Suki would be First Lady … And then it had all gone wrong …
Taking the little blue sweater from Anna, she had blurted, ‘It’s lovely,’ before dissolving into tears. Without a word, Anna had gently picked Zach up from his beanbag, dressed him in the tiny sweater, and handed him to his mother. It was the only thing which soothed Tess in those days: holding her beloved son and burying her nose in the fine tufts of dark hair on his small head.
There was no need for them to be strangers, Anna had pointed out in her matter-of-fact way. Just because Cashel had stormed off saying he would never speak to Tess again, didn’t mean Anna had to follow suit.
‘We’ve known each other too long for that,’ she said in her firm, strong voice.
Anna Reilly had been unlike anyone else Tess knew. There were plenty of women with husbands who spent every waking moment in the pub and thought work was an occupation for those poor souls without an aptitude for betting on horses, but Anna did not allow this behaviour to beat her down. She was going to raise her boys as best she could, with or without Leonard Reilly’s help, and if that meant cleaning other people’s houses and scrubbing their doorsteps, so be it. The jobs she did in no way defined her. Her strength defined her.
Over the years, Tess often wondered whether Cashel knew that she and his mother had remained friends. In subtle ways, Anna would let her know when Cashel was home, and Tess understood that she wouldn’t be welcome in the house on Bridge Street until he’d gone.
‘You should have seen some of the houses he wanted to buy me,’ Anna joked when she showed Tess around it the first time. It was bigger than the place on Cottage Row that Cashel had grown up in, but not too big.
Through Anna, Tess had followed Cashel’s career from afar. At no time did Anna ask why it had happened that way, why had she broken Cashel’s heart. And Tess never tried to explain, for she felt certain that Anna wouldn’t understand. If it had been her darling Zach whose heart had been broken, Tess knew she’d find it hard to forgive. And yet Anna had been part of her life since she was a child; part housekeeper, part babysitter when it was required. She realized that Tess wasn’t heartless or stuck up, or any of the things Cashel had called her.
She’d been distraught when she first saw the signs of Anna’s decline into dementia. To ensure the old lady got the help she needed, Tess had phoned Riach, alerting him to the problem.
Like his mother, Riach held no malice for her. He was the one who made sure she could continue to visit his mother without revealing her surname to the nurses Cashel had hired.
‘Cashel would go mad if he knew you were visiting her,’ Riach told Tess.
‘I know,’ she said, her silvery-grey eyes cloudy. ‘But it’s not his business. It’s about me and your mother. We were friends.’
Now Cashel would surely be returning for the funeral, and for the first time in many years, they would come face to face.
Assuming Riach thought she should attend the funeral.
Suddenly Vivienne broke off munching through the biscuits, having spotted someone walking towards her shop window.
‘Excuse me, Tess,’ she said. ‘It looks as though I have a customer.’
The moment she was gone, Tess went to the back room to make a phone call.
Riach’s mobile rang so long, she thought she’d have to leave a message, but just as she was steeling herself for the voicemail announcement, he picked up.
‘Riach, I am so sorry. I just heard about Anna. You must be devastated.’
‘I am – we are,’ he said. ‘I knew it was coming, but it still hurts. I want to cry, only I keep thinking how she’d hate me to cry.’
‘She was a very strong woman,’ Tess said, ‘but she’d have wanted you to mourn her, so cry away.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, and Tess could hear the slight hitch in his voice.
‘Riach, I would like to be at the funeral, but only if you think it’s all right for me to come,’ she went on. ‘I don’t want to cause any more pain. You’ve enough to deal with, without me—’
Riach interrupted her. ‘She’d have wanted you there,’ he said.
‘What about Cashel?’
‘Cashel will have to get over himself,’ Riach said shortly. ‘This will be a day for my mother and the people she loved.’
Tess unexpectedly found she had a lump in her throat.
‘She did love you, you know,’ he said.
‘I loved her too,’ Tess said, beginning to cry. ‘I’ll miss her so much. I know it’s better that she won’t have to endure the living hell she was in—’
‘That’s what I said to Cashel,’ Riach interrupted her. ‘I don’t know if he agrees, though. She was the one person he could come back to, you see. I’ve got Charlotte and the kids, he has no one.’
There was silence. A long time ago, Cashel’s someone had been Tess.
‘You should be there, though,’ Riach went on. ‘I’ll call you when it’s all organized. You’ll have to see him, but I’ll tell him you’re coming.’
Tess wasn’t sure what was worse – Cashel knowing in advance that she was going to his mother’s funeral, or him suddenly seeing her there after all these years.
That evening, just as Tess was locking up the shop, Kevin sent her a text.
We need to talk, the message said. Are you in later?
She had an inkling of what he wanted to discuss. The depression in the building trade meant that even brilliant carpenters like Kevin – Tess had to admit that he was a genius at what he did – weren’t able to find work. Before he’d left, they’d sorted out the finances in a general way, neither of them touching the joint account but agreeing that, since Kevin would be living basically rent-free in his mother’s little apartment he could afford to put more money into the mortgage. Clearly that was now becoming too much.
She dialled his number. ‘Hello, Kevin. The answer to your message is yes,’ she said into the phone. ‘I’ll be in later tonight – where else would I be going?’ she laughed.
And on the other end of the phone there was a slight nervous chuckle that didn’t sound like her husband at all.
‘Yes. Where,’ he said.
‘It’s about money, isn’t it?’ Tess said finally. ‘Go on, tell me. You want to change things. Listen, Kevin, maybe …’ she paused, on the verge of saying, Maybe this has all been a mistake, maybe the separation has shown us what we really needed to know: that we were supposed to be together …
Something stopped her.
‘But we’ll talk about it tonight,’ she said breezily. ‘Do you want to have dinner? We’re having shepherd’s pie – not very exciting, I know, but I made double last week so I’m defrosting.’
‘I’m not sure … I’ll probably already have eaten,’ said Kevin.
‘OK,’ Tess replied, startled. Kevin loved her shepherd’s pie. Anna Reilly had taught her how to make it. And even though Tess could hardly claim to be a cordon bleu cook, she had mastered all the simple dishes she’d learned from Anna. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘What time do you want to come up? Before dinner or after? If you want to come after, could you bring some biscuits? I’ve run out and there’s nothing nice in the house to go with tea.’
‘Maybe after,’ Kevin said quickly. ‘And when Kitty’s gone to bed we can talk.’
It had been a strange day, Tess thought as she closed the shop and started to walk home with Silkie dancing around at her feet. The odd tone in Kevin’s voice. The news of Anna Reilly’s death. The thought of Cashel returning to Avalon. It had all shaken her.
In the nineteen years since Cashel had left, they’d met only once: a horrible stand-off in the pharmacy, he clutching at what had to have been one of Anna’s prescriptions, she trying to choose some small present for Vivienne for her birthday. It had felt like touching the live wire on an electric socket. Tess had been rooted to the spot, staring up at Cashel’s dark, stormy eyes. Stormy was the only word for them. He had lost that air of warmth and kindness he’d had when he was young. No, that was all gone. As he looked back at her, his jaw set, every inch of his body had been tense with repressed anger.
Tess had been about to say something, to break the horrible cycle. It was so long ago, she wanted to say, can’t we be friends? After all the time we spent together and being each other’s first love … But as she’d opened her mouth to speak, he’d given her a look of such venom that she’d felt it as intensely as if he’d pierced her side with a sword, then he’d turned and walked out.
And now he’d be back for Anna’s funeral. Nevertheless, Tess had to go. She wouldn’t be frightened away by him. Anna was her friend, her dear, dear friend. She had to go for her sake, and her father’s. He would have wanted her to go. That was what the Powers did. No matter how uncomfortable something might be, they went through with it anyway.
So no matter that Cashel would be glaring at her with those stormy eyes of his, Tess was going to be at that funeral.
On the way home, Tess stopped by her mother-in-law’s house to collect Kitty. Helen minded Kitty two days a week and Lydia, a childminder, picked her up from school the other three. Occasionally Kevin would finish work in time to drop Kitty home, but most of the time Tess went to get her.
Kitty loved going to Granny’s after school, not least because Granny was not too fussed about homework being done and was all too eager to fill Kitty with her home baking. As a result, come dinnertime Kitty would have no appetite, so she’d stare at the vegetables on her plate and moan, ‘I am not even a teeny-weeny bit hungry and I am not eating broccoli.’
Kitty wanted her mum to come into Granny’s and stay a while, as she often did, but today Tess felt so weary from the double-edged sword of hearing about Anna’s death and the thought of Cashel coming home and glaring at her, she couldn’t face it. ‘Sorry, Helen,’ she said. ‘I’d stay for a cup of tea, but I’m absolutely zonked tonight.’
‘No problem, love,’ said Helen. ‘See you tomorrow, chicken,’ she added, planting a big kiss on Kitty’s head.
At home, Tess checked her daughter’s homework, put the shepherd’s pie in the oven, sorted out vegetables, did a bit of tidying, emptied the dishwasher. All the normal everyday stuff. Zach came in tired from his day in school with a bag of books so heavy that Tess didn’t know why all schoolchildren didn’t have major back problems.
‘It’s fine, Ma,’ Zach protested, ‘I’m strong.’ He held up a muscle and flexed it. She laughed. He was strong. How amazing to think her baby had turned into this seventeen-year-old-giant.
‘I’m strong too,’ said Kitty, flexing her skinny nonexistent little-girl muscles.
‘Yes, you are, darling,’ said Tess. ‘Super strong. And you’ll get even stronger if you sit down here and eat your dinner.’
‘But, Mum, it’s shepherd’s pie. I hate shepherd’s pie,’ moaned Kitty.
‘Last night you said you hated roast chicken and you promised you’d be really good and eat your dinner tonight,’ Tess pointed out. ‘Come on now, you made a pinkie promise.’
If you hooked baby fingers and said ‘pinkie promise’, there was no going back on your word. A pinkie promise could not be broken.
‘OK,’ moaned Kitty, with all the misery of someone being forced into a ten-mile trek in the dark.
Zach wolfed down his dinner and came back for seconds, while Kitty pushed hers around the plate. Tess was too tired to argue with her.
‘Eat one bit of broccoli and you’re done.’
‘Do I have to?’ moaned Kitty.
Tess gave up.
She was washing the dishes when the doorbell rang.
‘That’s your dad,’ she said. ‘Will you get it, Zach?’
Zach hurried out to open the door. A few seconds later Kevin appeared on the threshold of the kitchen looking awkwardly around him as if he needed to be invited into the room.
‘Come on in, Kevin, sit down. Do you want a cup of tea? Did you bring any biscuits?’ she asked.
‘Erm, yes. Here, they are.’ He handed a package to Tess formally.
What was wrong, she wondered. He looked uncomfortable and unhappy. It had to be money. One of his big jobs had been cancelled, that must be it. How were they going to cope? Paying the mortgage was hard enough already. Now, with her business down on last year and Kevin’s income taking a dive, it was hard to see how they could manage. Maybe she really would have to give up the shop and try to find other work.
Kevin sat at the table and chatted to Zach and Kitty. He was like his old self with them, and that made Tess feel better. Children needed a father and she needed … Well, she liked having him around. She wasn’t in love with him, but she did care about him, and perhaps that was enough. All this talk about pure true love that would survive anything and still be as fiercely strong twenty years later – that was just fairy-story rubbish, or maybe movie-story rubbish. In movies, people adored each other for ever. Of course, in real Hollywood life, staying together for even seven years was considered a record-breaking marriage.
But in Tess’s life, normal life in Avalon, perhaps loving and respecting the man you were married to was enough. Everyone got irritated by their husband or wife. Everyone sometimes wondered if there wasn’t more to life. For a brief second, she thought of that wild passion she’d had with Cashel, then she reminded herself: look where that had got her. Wild passion didn’t last. Wild passion ended badly. No, security and love and raising a family together were the things that counted. She resolved to say it all when they were alone. As she made the tea, she rehearsed in her mind how she’d explain it:
Kevin, I’m sorry, I was wrong about the whole separation thing. It was a stupid idea, but it’s shown me that we should be together after all, that what we have is wonderful. Please come back and we’ll start again.
By the time the tea was ready, Zach was gathering up his gigantic bag ready to trundle off and do his homework.
‘Kitty, upstairs and get into your jammies,’ said Tess. ‘And don’t forget to brush your teeth. Then you can come down and watch twenty minutes of Disney Channel before it’s time for bed, OK?’
‘OK, Mum,’ said Kitty, running across to give her father a huge hug on her way out.
Instead of launching into whatever was worrying him as soon as Kitty was gone, Kevin stared deep into his cup, as if the secrets to life were contained therein.
‘I know what you’ve come to talk about,’ Tess said. ‘I understand. I mean, it’s difficult, obviously it’s going to be difficult, but other people have been through worse. We’ll manage somehow.’
Kevin looked up at her, incomprehension in his eyes. ‘You know?’ he said.
‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I guessed: the finances. We have to do something, don’t we? I really think I’m going to have to close the shop and get a job somewhere else.’
‘Oh Lord.’ He went quite pale, which was no mean feat because Kevin’s face was always weathered from being outdoors. ‘That wasn’t what I came here to say,’ he said.
‘Go on, then.’ Tess took another biscuit. He’d got them from the deli. A local lady named Madeleine made them and she really was the most marvellous person at baking. Her Christmas cakes were much in demand; the last couple of years she’d baked one for Kevin and Tess, wonderfully decorated with sugarcraft Santas, reindeers and penguins – all manner of Christmas things that Kitty and even Zach adored.
‘It’s not about money,’ Kevin said. He took a huge breath. ‘I’ve met someone else.’
‘What?’ Tess stared at him in utter bewilderment.
‘I didn’t mean it to happen this way,’ he said, ‘it just did. I don’t want to hurt you, Tess, or the children, but the fact that we separated and the fact that I met someone means that separating was the right thing to do.’
Her language skills finally came back to Tess. ‘What do you mean, “the right thing to do”?’ she said. ‘We separated to see if we wanted to be together …’ she could barely get the words out, ‘… not to go looking for other people.’
‘I wasn’t looking,’ he said. ‘It just happened.’
‘Nothing just happens,’ hissed Tess.
‘Well, this did.’ He ran his hands through his hair. It was always spiky. No hair product would ever make it flatten down and it grew like crazy. Once a month he went to the barber and got a short back and sides: three weeks later, it was wild as a bush again.
‘Who is she, this someone you met?’ Tess said. She pushed her tea and biscuits away from her. She didn’t want any form of comfort as she took in this horrendous turn of events.
‘Her name is Claire. Her parents moved to Avalon about a year ago. She’s lovely. She’s an illustrator – you’d really like her.’
‘Oh God, I can’t believe you said that!’ Tess said. ‘I’d really like her? Why? Is she like me? Does she have kids? Is she married? Divorced? What? Tell me.’
‘She’s a bit younger, actually,’ Kevin said. ‘And no, she doesn’t have children – although she’d love to. One day.’
And that’s when Tess thought she was really going to lose it. ‘A bit younger?’ she asked, enunciating every word carefully. ‘Exactly how much younger?’
Kevin moistened his lips. ‘She’s twenty-nine,’ he said.
‘Oh my God, twenty-nine!’ Tess got up and began to pace. ‘She’s twenty-nine. She’s Claire. She’s an illustrator. Don’t tell me: she’s got long blonde hair and wears cool skinny jeans and goes to rock festivals?’
‘Well …’ began Kevin.
‘She is, isn’t she? Why? Why did this happen?’ Tess said.
‘I did some work in her mother’s house and I met her. And as to why it happened …’ He held his hands out in supplication. ‘I don’t know why. All I know is that I met her, we had an instant connection and we went out. We’ve been out three times now – not here though. We’ve never been out together in Avalon. I didn’t want people to talk,’ he added, his tone pleading. ‘You know what this town is like. We went into Arklow, but people are going to see us together soon and I wanted you to know.’
‘And it’s serious?’
Kevin couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s serious.’
‘Do you know, I thought you were coming up here to tell me that you were having even more financial problems than we had been already and … oh …’ Tess shook her head. ‘I didn’t know what you were going to say, but not that. That wasn’t on the list.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The thing is, how do we tell the children?’
‘What do you mean, we tell the children?’ she demanded.
‘Well, we have to.’
‘We don’t have to,’ said Tess grimly, ‘you have to. And do you know what, Kevin, right now I think you’d better go. Just go. Get out of here.’
He got up and crossed the room, turning back at the door to say, ‘I’m really sorry, Tess. I never meant for it to turn out this way …’
‘Just go,’ she said wearily.
After he’d gone, she sat with Kitty through twenty minutes of something on the Disney Channel, although Tess would never have any memory of what it was: she was in shock. Instead, she held Kitty’s hand and tried not to cry. She wouldn’t let it all out in front of her daughter, she couldn’t. This would devastate the children. Zach had hated it when his father had moved out, and even though Kitty had coped in her own childlike way by asking for a kitten, she was like all young kids and hated change.
Tess had worked hard to make the separation appear perfectly normal by saying things like: ‘Grown-ups sometimes live apart for a bit and then it all works out again.’ How could she explain this? Nothing would explain this. Her family had broken into two pieces – and it was all her own fault.
At two a.m., when she had finally given up on sleep, she rang her sister in Massachusetts.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Tess whispered, not wanting to wake the children. ‘What’s gone wrong? We tried counselling. All the magazines and books say that when people love each other, counselling fixes it. When that didn’t work, I read that separation can shock you back into realizing what you might lose. You know: it’s make-or-break time. Kevin didn’t want to try that, it was me who said let’s give it a go, separation could work.’
‘That’s bull and you know it,’ said Suki, who was an expert markswoman in shooting straight. ‘Listen to me, Tess. I may have screwed up more relationships than you’ve had hot dinners, and I made a mess out of my only marriage, but I get the two facts that have been eluding you for the past few months: separation never leads to anything but break-up and people change. When you met Kevin, you were vulnerable.’
They were both silent and the gulf of the Atlantic Ocean felt huge. The two of them were the only ones who really knew just how vulnerable Tess had been back then. Vulnerable almost wasn’t the word. Tess had felt so horrendously alone. Her sister was in America, her father was dead, Cashel had gone and there was nobody else in her life.
‘You needed to be rescued. Now, you’re a grown-up. If any rescuing needs to be done, you do it yourself. So you’ve changed. When Kevin met you, he loved being the strong silent type who could take care of you. But you don’t need him the same way any more. That’s probably why he’s fallen for this Claire girl. She thinks he’s the strong man who’s going to take care of her, and he loves that.
‘And what those magazines and books of yours didn’t tell you,’ Suki added in a dictatorial voice, and Tess could imagine her sister saying this in a lecture on the differences between the sexes, ‘is that men are far less likely than women to stay alone after a break-up. I can’t recall the precise statistic off-hand, but a high percentage of widowers remarry within a year of their wife’s death. The same isn’t true of widows. Men don’t like being on their own, honey, and you sent him off into the wide, blue yonder on his lonesome.’
‘He was living in the granny flat behind his mother’s house,’ Tess hissed, ‘in the same town as me and the kids. He said he couldn’t wait for the separation period to be over because the minute we were apart, he knew we ought to be back together!’
‘What about you?’ Suki asked.
She’d always known the right and hardest question to ask, even when they’d been kids.
‘I was changing my mind,’ Tess admitted slowly. ‘It’s been lonely.’
‘I know what that’s like,’ Suki said quietly on the other end of the phone, so quietly that Tess only thought she’d heard it. Any other time, she’d have dived in and asked Suki what was wrong, being the good sister, trying to help Suki sort out another tangled romance in her hectic dating life. But tonight she wanted it to be about her. Tonight, Tess needed Suki to put that fabulous brain to use and help her sort this mess out in her head.
‘I was used to being married, Suki. Used to waking up with Kevin, used to the stuff he did. Now, I have to do everything – the grocery shopping, the cooking, sort out all the school stuff, work out all the bills. And Kevin gets to play couple-in-love with his child girlfriend. Whom I’m going to really like, apparently.’
Tess exhaled and lay back on her pillows miserably. ‘I still can’t believe he said that.’
‘Honey, I wish I could help you but—’
‘Yeah, but you’re three thousand miles away and you’re broke too. I get it,’ Tess said sadly. ‘We should offer our services to some marriage counselling clinic. They could use us on their posters: Meet the Power Sisters, whatever you do, don’t do what they did – that way you’ll be happy.’
‘There’s one thing you never mentioned,’ Suki went on as if she hadn’t been interrupted. ‘Love. You haven’t talked about love, Tess. You miss Kevin and all that, but is your heart broken because he’s not there, or is it broken because there’s no one to share the chores and no one in your bed at night? Only you can answer that. If you decide that you do love him, then you have to fight the child girlfriend for him.’
For the first time that evening, Tess laughed. It was hysterical laughter, and once she started, she found she couldn’t stop. She tried to muffle her laughter in the pillows.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, coming up for air. ‘I had a vision of me and this lovely twenty-nine-year-old in hand-to-hand combat in the main square. Me whacking her through the pub window, bare-knuckled.’
‘Tell me when that bout’s scheduled,’ Suki said drily, ‘and I’ll book the first flight home.’
Winter (#ulink_07f4e5ad-9e8b-5206-ba7f-1d939deb26a3)
Chapter Five (#ulink_a47084b5-e6da-5dee-b050-424b1d5d4665)
Coffee was Suki’s drug of choice these days. A silky Colombian macchiato with a hint of soya foam from the small coffee shop down the block. She’d pick up a cup to go and then take it out to the porch at the back of the house. Once a fine, albeit small, clapboard house owned by a local potter, it was prettily decorated and had several storm lanterns hanging from the porch roof. There was also an old peeling swing seat with a cushion that probably pre-dated the last ten political administrations, but it was the perfect place to sit in with her coffee and smoke the first of her ten cigarettes of the day.
The radio had forecast a fierce nor’wester that morning, and in the jungle of a backyard, the skinny trees shivered in the wind. Gardening was not Suki’s strong point.
Compared to the old cottage she’d got in the divorce settlement from Kyle, the view was nothing to speak of. There, she’d looked out over the fine sand of the beach, watching as the waves rolled over driftwood. She used to collect interesting pieces of driftwood; they complemented the pale blue of the cottage walls and blended nicely with the various bits of nautical paraphernalia Kyle’s mother’s decorator had added to the cottage when they’d first moved in.
In this house, with its wallpapered walls and mustardy cream paintwork, the driftwood looked dirty. It was all a matter of setting.
Another difference was the skyline: no Richardson had lived within hailing distance of the neighbours for decades. Neighbours were what poor people had. The rich could afford glorious isolation, and their cottage had been suitably solitary, the only one on the beach.
Here, on the edge of a small estate in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she had another line of houses behind hers. Rather than look at them, she stared up into the sky as she blew smoke out and sipped her coffee. It was a good time of the day for thinking.
Today, she needed to get groceries, pay some bills online and progress a little further with the book.
It wasn’t moving.
‘Do you write all the words?’ a woman had said to her at a cocktail party once. This had been back in the days when Suki had felt loved by the world, so she had merely smiled kindly and said, ‘Yes, I write all the words.’
Today, she’d have been less kind: ‘No, the Word Fairy comes in the night and does them. I just read them through in the morning to make sure she’s written enough. By the way, you need to go back to your village, ’cos they’re an idiot short.’
The Word Fairy wasn’t working at all these days.
Growing up in Ireland, she’d never been a morning person except in the summer holidays, when shafts of morning sun would slant in through the holes in the curtains in her bedroom. Sometimes, Suki would get a cup of tea from the kitchen – summer was the only time Avalon House wasn’t arctic – and then climb up the back stairs to the third floor, where a window led out on to the ersatz Norman battlements. Nobody but she and Tess ever went up there. Suki used to scatter her cigarette butts everywhere, until Tess brought up an empty baked bean can and it became the ashtray, occasionally emptied when it was overflowing. They had dragged two old cushions up to the window and on nice days, she and Tess could sit in comfort, hidden from the world, and gaze down from their lofty position at the top of Willow Street. They could see the comings and goings of Avalon, could see the line of caravans in Cabana-Land and the rocky spur to the right where children loved to explore in the daytime and where young lovers liked to make out at night.
Suki liked being near the sea. There was a claustrophobia in being land-locked. Sea and trees, they were her lodestones.
The beach at Avalon was so beautiful, the curve of the sand on one side, tailing off to a tiny cove covered with smooth rocks that shimmered in the sun. Valley of the Diamonds, it was called.
Once, a boy had taken Suki there. She hadn’t let him go all the way, whatever he told his friends. Suki Power was lots of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
Cigarette finished now, she made her way wearily upstairs to her office.
The office was really a glorified cupboard. Two years ago when she bought the house, the realtor had enthusiastically described it as ‘the nursery’. Suki had shot him an angry look at this description. Did he seriously think she was looking for a place to settle down and raise a family at her age? But the realtor was, she realized, a self-absorbed young man who was operating on auto-pilot, trotting out the same spiel whatever the house, whoever the client:
… through here the kitchen/diner, and look, an original wood-burning stove! And upstairs, conveniently placed next door to the master bedroom, a nursery!
She no longer walked into the tiny room and thought of it wistfully as the nursery. Even though she railed against older mothers, there was still a tiny place inside her that mourned her own childlessness.
But she was beyond that ever becoming a reality. These days, the ‘nursery’ was more of an office-cum-torture chamber. The place where she went to suffer and stare at a blank screen, wondering how to fill the endless pages that stood between her and the next tranche of the advance from her publisher – money she needed so desperately.
When she emerged from the wasteland that had been her life on the road with Jethro, Suki had been broke. Not a penny remained of the divorce settlement from Kyle Junior; it had either gone up their noses or on her back, indulging a penchant for ridiculously expensive clothes, jewellery, cosmetic treatments to make her look younger. The pretty Maine cottage she’d been given as part of her alimony had been sold to pay the debts she’d run up, splashing money around, settling bar bills with bravado to show that she was a famous feminist writer and not just another groupie hanging around with TradeWind. Except that’s exactly what she was – another groupie.
What shamed her most was that she hadn’t come to her senses and walked out. She’d hung on until Jethro had tired of her and tried to pass her along to someone else.
The thought of that night still made her feel sick. The following morning, she’d packed her bags and gone.
Out of the ravages of all that, she’d tried to rebuild her life. One of the few old contacts prepared to return her calls was her agent, Melissa, who somehow landed her a two-book publishing deal.
The advance was about a quarter of what she’d got on her last contract, and that was for one book.
‘You’re lucky to be getting this much,’ Melissa had said with customary frankness. ‘I suspect they’ve agreed to publish your feminist politik book on the basis that, come the day you write the bestselling “I married into the Richardson clan, then toured with Jethro and TradeWind and came out the other side”, they’ll make their money back and then some.’
‘I’ll never write that story,’ said Suki quietly, thinking that she wasn’t entirely sure she had come out the other side of either of those periods in her life.
‘Never won’t pay the bills, honey,’ Melissa pointed out. ‘Keep it in the back of your mind. We can talk about it when you come to New York for our meeting with the publishers.’
Suki had no intention of devoting any part of her mind to that particular project. But in the meantime, another book had forced its way to the forefront of Suki’s mind: Redmond Suarez’s book on the Richardsons. If he lived up to his reputation and succeeded in digging out all her secrets, Suki knew she’d fall apart completely.
It was late afternoon when Suki finally admitted defeat, having deleted just about everything she’d written that day. She went down to the kitchen and found Mick, still wearing the T-shirt he’d slept in, the one with his band’s logo on the front. His eyes were heavy with sleep, as though he’d not long got up. Mick was muscular, tall and admiring – just Suki’s type. He was also, she had begun to suspect, more than a little hung up on her relationship with Jethro and TradeWind. She wondered if she was a trophy girlfriend for him: ‘I’m dating Jethro’s ex.’
Maybe not. But he was becoming quite proprietorial. Last night, when she’d told him she was flying to New York to meet with her agent and publisher, he’d immediately started dropping hints that he wanted to come with her.
It seemed he hadn’t given up, because his first words were: ‘We need a little vacation, babe.’
He was sitting at her pine kitchen table, studying Mr Chan’s Takeout Menu as if there was a possibility he would deviate slightly from what he always had, which was chicken chow mein and peanut noodles. Suki teased him about it all the time, but today she found his careful perusal of the menu irritating.
Neither of them had money for a ‘little vacation’. Any more than they had the money for takeout every damn night of the week. Mick couldn’t cook anything except barbecue, which he thought should be added into the Constitution as an amendment: ‘Every man should have the right to grill in his own backyard and down a few cold ones at the same time,’ he liked to say.
He rented a ground-floor apartment in an old house two blocks away and he didn’t have a proper outdoor grill, just a makeshift one that ruined at least half the food. His friend, Renaud, band drummer by night and tax accountant by day, had a propane grill, and a decent backyard to go with it.
Mick and Steve, the bass guitarist, liked to bitch about Renaud, saying he wasn’t a real rocker because he had a ‘civilian’ job. They were true musicians: they didn’t do day jobs.
Suki was expected to agree with this assessment, but the more the bills came and the more it seemed as if Mick was living off her ninety per cent of the time and contributing nothing, the more she envied Renaud’s wife, Odette, who had the money for facials, a personal trainer and perfect nails.
A month ago, Mick had moved a lot of his stuff into her house. Now he was subletting his apartment.
Suki knew that if they stayed together, she’d have to be the one who earned the money. Which was about as modern feminist as it got.
She also knew that she’d never be able to mention the fact that she was the breadwinner, any more than she could tell Mick that his band was going nowhere.
Instead, she was expected to attend any gig they managed to get and stand at the side of the stage clapping and whooping over-enthusiastically. Anything less would upset Mick.
‘I don’t think you liked the show,’ he’d said once, early on, when Suki and Odette had been talking near the bar instead of frantically leading the applause.
‘I loved it,’ said Suki automatically, because that was what you did with performers. Only promoters and managers got to tell the truth, Jethro once told her. He’d been remarkably knowledgeable and clear-sighted about the industry, for all his drug-absorption.
‘Honey,’ she told Mick now, ‘New York is business. You know the cost of hotels there. I’m going to fly in and out the same day. Let’s have our vacation another time.’
He picked up her cell phone to call the takeaway.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘You want boiled or fried rice?’
Manhattan had once been Suki’s favourite place in the world. The glitter, the hum of excitement, the sense that anything was possible. She’d arrived the summer she was nineteen and she couldn’t wait to get her first waitressing job, didn’t care that she had to share a barely furnished house with eight other Irish college students in the Bronx. She was there – in the city that never slept. And she, Suki Power, was going to conquer it.
She’d been back to Manhattan many times during the years when Women and Their Wars was on the bestseller lists, and while she was with Jethro. Sometimes, they stayed in Jethro’s vast apartment on Park Avenue, but more often they flitted from hotel to hotel. Jethro was addicted to hotel living. He didn’t know how to boil a kettle and, if he thought about it at all, probably assumed the sheets were thrown in the garbage after being taken off his bed every day. He’d lived a normal life once, but that was a long time ago. He’d been a star so many years that he couldn’t or wouldn’t remember it.
Today, as the forever altered skyline came into view from the airplane window, she knew that another love affair was over. New York had moved on without her. Younger people with clear, unbroken hearts now stalked the glittering city. Strangely, this made her feel older than any line on her face did.
Her appointment with the publisher was at two and she was meeting her agent, Melissa, for lunch beforehand.
‘I’ll order something for us in my office, Suki. I’ve got a West Coast conference call at twelve. We won’t have time to go out,’ Melissa informed her when it was all being set up.
Suki knew what that meant: the Suki Richardson account made so little money, taking her out to lunch was no longer financially viable.
The old Suki would have raged about being treated badly.
The new Suki said ‘fine’.
She had a long way to go to become the goliath she’d once been, if she could ever get back there.
When the adrenalin was flowing, Suki felt a match for anybody: when she’d been on television all the time, when boys in Avalon had lusted after her, when she was Kyle Richardson’s wife, when she was with Jethro … But for herself, in herself, she didn’t know the last time she’d felt truly confident. That scared her like nothing else. If she could no longer fight, what would become of her?
The offices of Carr and Lowenstein had once occupied half of a suitably grand brownstone, but when they’d joined forces with a theatrical agency, they’d all moved into a glass tower. Suki spent the time in the elevator on the way to the forty-fifth floor fighting vertigo, a feeling which worsened when she stepped into the sheeny lobby, which was all reflective surfaces, to emphasize how high up they were. The reception had just-big-enough olive trees in planters in every corner and the silvery-green walls were massed with photos of the agency’s most famous and highest-earning clients.
In the Jethro days, he told her the record company people put photos of TradeWind on every wall of their office and played their latest album whenever they visited.
‘Flipped the switch to play another band as soon as we left, man!’ pointed out Stas, the band’s lead guitarist.
‘Sure did,’ agreed Jethro, unconcerned. ‘That’s business, nothing personal.’
Suki saw no photos of herself on the walls of Carr and Lowenstein. Not even an itty, bitty one. And it did feel personal.
The receptionist, a Cosmo-girl vision dressed in nude shades with Lincoln Park After Dark nails, didn’t bother to feign a polite smile as she took Suki’s name and told her to wait. The receptionist knew everything. Who was on the up, who was on the way down.
No picture on the wall and no smiles from Cosmo-girl. It all told a story.
Suki sat on a couch and felt the panic rise. Her career was over. She was broke. There was nowhere left to go and the most dangerous man in the dirty biography business wanted to write about her and the Richardson family. Suki didn’t want all the mistakes she’d made in her life turned into trash-biography horror. It would destroy any credibility she’d got left.
The terror which had been building since Eric Gold first told her that Redmond Suarez wanted to write the book exploded fully into Suki’s body.
‘Which way is the women’s room?’ she asked Cosmo-girl.
‘Straight down the hall and second left,’ said the girl with barely a flicker in Suki’s direction.
Tess would have introduced herself and made the girl smile, Suki thought. Tess was beautiful and yet she’d had that gift of being able to stop other women from hating her. Suki had never mastered it. Men loved her, women were wary of her.
Why was she thinking about Tess so much? It had to be all the worry over the book and how it all linked up. The past, Avalon, all the things she’d tried to forget, all the secrets.
In the women’s room, she locked herself in a stall, put down the toilet seat lid and sat. A Xanax for nerves, some Tylenol for the headache that was rumbling at the base of her skull and one of her prescription antacids to quell the bile that seemed to rise so easily these days. She washed it all down with her bottle of water. That all these ailments were stress-related didn’t pass her by, but Suki knew there was no easy fix when it came to stress. She was broke, so that stress wasn’t going away anytime soon. And the book …
The women’s room door slammed and Suki got up, flushed the loo loudly to imply she wasn’t in there taking cocaine – which she would have been, back in the day – and came out.
She slicked on some lip gloss and walked back up the hall as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Act as if, she thought.
Melissa Lowenstein was a tall, striking woman who favoured tailored pantsuits worn with a single large piece of costume jewellery. Today’s was a striking orange Perspex brooch on one lapel.
‘Suki, great to see you,’ she said, shaking hands.
Melissa didn’t go in for continental air kissing. ‘Gives some men the wrong idea,’ she’d told Suki once. ‘Kissing can make them think it’s fine to put a hand on your butt. Kissing blurs all the rules. So I keep it simple. No kissing anyone, no touching – and no messing if they overstep that line.’
Suki found this approach strange. She liked seeing the flicker of admiration in men’s eyes, liked using her sexuality as part of her personal arsenal of weapons. But it was different for Melissa, she realized: Suki was the talent, the performer, whereas Melissa had to do deals with men. Totally different.
At Melissa’s small boardroom-style table, lunch was set up for two: some deli cold cuts, bagels, salad and diet sodas.
They sat and helped themselves, even though Suki wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry. The Xanax was kicking in and now she wanted a strong coffee, preferably a macchiato with foam, and a cigarette, then she’d relax totally. But instead she made up a plate of salad and poured herself a diet drink.
‘How’s the book going?’ Melissa asked.
Suki had already worked out how she was going to answer this.
‘Slowly,’ she said. There was no point in lying to Melissa. She was about to explain all the issues which were clouding her head: money worries, the damn Suarez book, and point out that if she was earning more money, then she could concentrate …
‘What’s wrong?’ rasped Melissa, bonhomie gone, suddenly looking panicked. ‘You’ve given the publishers the outline, Suki. That’s what they’ve paid for. Reuben is a big fan of yours, he turned down Women and Their Wars all those years ago and he still regrets it. That’s money in the bank for you, but the publishers won’t keep waiting for ever. Past glories have got you this far, now you have to deliver – on schedule. My ass is on the line with this. Your due date is in three months and they’ve had nothing so far. What’s going on?’
Suki could feel the hand holding the glass of soda shake at Melissa’s lengthy outburst. The fear rose in her again.
‘It’s Redmond Suarez,’ she said. ‘He’s writing a book about the Richardsons. He’s interested in me. I’m so stressed about all of this, I just can’t write.’
The words, once blurted out, had the effect of making Melissa sit back and smile with relief.
‘Suki, relax, honey. This is good, better than good. This is a publicist’s dream. I get that you’re worried. Nobody wants a guy like that writing about them. Suarez is a sewer rat – but people are interested in sewer rats. No matter what he says, it will be good for your profile. A little of that high-class Wasp stuff can only do you good. Plus, Reuben is going to flip with joy. He’s always had a thing for the old Republican Mayflower types like the Richardsons and he’d like nothing better than to see them red-faced with embarrassment – if WASPS can go red, that is. Money can’t buy it!’ She beamed. ‘This is all good. Why didn’t you tell me before?’
Melissa began eating her bagel again and Suki somehow found the strength to put her glass down. ‘I need a coffee,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat.’
Melissa flipped a switch on the desk phone and asked for coffee. ‘Hurry, Jennie, we’ve got to be out of here at forty after one to get to Box House by two.’ Then she turned back to Suki. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘what have you heard about the Suarez book? Have you talked to the Richardson family about it yet? I presume they know? Bet they do.’
‘I haven’t talked to them,’ Suki said, ‘but they’ll know. They always know everything.’
That she knew for a fact.
By the time they got to Box House Publishing – another monolith of sheeny glass – Suki had drunk two coffees, plastered a nicotine patch on her arm in lieu of cigarettes, and taken another half Zanax. She was feeling no pain and the face she examined in her compact mirror was looking good. Tranquillizer-induced good, she knew, but that was fine. Who cared where the relief came from, right? She raked her blonde hair back from the widow’s peak in place of combing it, and applied more eyeliner and fire-truck red gloss.
‘Is Suarez interested in the Jethro years?’ Melissa asked as they went up in the elevator.
‘Not sure,’ said Suki, unconcerned in her happy bubble. ‘Not yet, anyhow. Jethro’s people would have the lawyers on to him like a shot. It’s always hard to nail down facts with bands like TradeWind. The tabloid rumours are so wild, nobody cares what another biography would say. Jethro never speaks, never denies, never apologizes.’
She knew that from personal experience. When Jethro had moved on, she’d never heard from him again, despite their having shared a bed for more than two years.
Today’s meeting was with her editor, the marketing team and the cover department. They were all at least fifteen years younger than Suki and Melissa, but Suki tried to tell herself she didn’t care. When she’d started out as a writer, these kids were still in strollers. How could they know what she stood for with their talk of modern covers and what people wanted?
It turned out that they had heard about the Suarez book and everyone was pretty perky at the prospect.
‘It’s what people want to read, the inside story,’ breathed one particularly young girl in opaque pantyhose and a skirt so short she’d have been told she was ‘asking for it’ when Suki was young.
Suki had railed against the ‘asking for it’ mantra all her life. Women should be able to wear what they want, be what they want. But as she’d found to her cost, it hadn’t quite worked out that way. When you looked like you were asking for it, you sometimes got it – and that had the potential to destroy you.
Decades on, female politicians were still criticized for what they wore, though nobody would do that to male ones. Yet here were these young women with careers wearing clothes that seemed to say ‘one more inch and you’re at my crotch’.
Suki shook her head to rattle these crazy thoughts out of it and tuned back in. They’d moved on to the subject of e-books, blogging tours and the fact that Suki’s interesting past made her a person of interest to both the books and feature pages.
She continued to intermittently tune in and out until the meeting came to an end. Still in a Zanax-induced daze, she made her way back down to street level. On her way to hail a cab, she passed a gaggle of young girls wearing what looked to her like fancy dress costume: dark pantyhose, tight denim shorts, unflattering sneaker boots, long open shirts and skimpy stomach-baring T-shirts with writing on them. The clothes were not revealing as such, but they did, Suki realized, highlight the female body. Some guys laying cable watched the girls and Suki watched the men. She had never worn clothes like that when she was their age, but the body-conscious dresses and high boots she’d dressed in back then were designed to achieve the same result.
After the no-nonsense style of Melissa, who’d made such a statement, Suki felt almost shocked by the girls. And she was unshockable, wasn’t she?
In Women and Their Wars she’d written about female empowerment and the glass ceiling. At the time, it had been a hot topic. Not any more. Though the glass ceiling remained, no one seemed interested. Feminist writers had devoted entire books to topics such as body image, sexuality, the power of motherhood – and what difference had it made?
Young girls still chose clothes that would make men want to sleep with them. Older women wanted to have both a career and babies. Women of all ages wanted to look attractive to the opposite sex and not show any sign of growing old, ever. Nothing had changed at all.
Suki held out a hand to hail a passing cab. When it drew up, she saw her own image reflected in the windows: a woman with a nest of tousled blonde hair and full lips stained with red gloss. The perfect image of wanton sexuality.
In the back of the cab, she wiped the excess red off with a tissue.
The plane was delayed and she had to wait an hour at the gate with nothing to read but notes of the meetings and a magazine she’d bought that morning. She liked the empowering stuff and snippets about mindfulness or meditation. She didn’t do any of it; so far as Suki was concerned, reading about it was enough. The articles calmed her, as if the information was seeping into her bones.
One day, she promised herself, she would give this stuff a try. Maybe when the book came out and she had some money. Perhaps then she’d go to Avalon and spend time with Zach and Kitty. They were growing up and she was missing so much of it. She’d been close to Zach when he was younger: he’d been so sweet, so wise, despite being a kid. Suki had felt the warmth of both Tess and their father’s kindness in the boy and she’d adored being with him.
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