Читать книгу The House on Willow Street - Cathy Kelly - Страница 11

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. ‘She blames 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.’