Читать книгу The House on Willow Street - Cathy Kelly - Страница 6

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.