Читать книгу Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday - Cathy Kelly - Страница 23

Stanley the estate agent had no gush left. There was, he had learned, no point. People either had the money or they hadn’t. And if they hadn’t, no amount of gushing and going into raptures over beautiful club fenders, stone fireplaces and plaster mouldings that had once been painted delicately by hand with gold leaf was going to make a difference. No, the sort of person with the money to buy and restore somewhere like Avalon House would not be susceptible to having their head turned by a eulogizing estate agent.

That certainly seemed to be the case where Cashel Reilly was concerned. An alpha male with knobs on, in Stan’s estimation. He’d arrived from Dublin in a Maserati Grand: a sleek, dolphin-grey, quite subtle-looking Maserati, but a Maserati nonetheless. Everything he wore, everything about him, reeked of money, power … and precisely zero patience with not getting his own way.

‘Have you been here before?’ said Stan, cautiously, wanting to figure out which way the ground lay. If what he’d heard was true, and Cashel Reilly really had grown up in the area, perhaps he’d lived here at some stage. It wasn’t as if there were any other houses in the town that fitted the profile … But no, the Powers had lived here. Stanley was a blow-in and didn’t know all the families properly. Perhaps Mr Reilly had visited a childhood friend who’d lived here. But looking at Cashel’s stony face, Stan decided it would be inadvisable to ask.

‘Yes, I’ve been here before,’ said Cashel.

Clearly a man who never used more words than necessary.

‘I won’t do the spiel then,’ said Stan.

‘No,’ agreed Cashel.

Stan used to love showing these old Irish houses in the days when people actually had money to buy them. It gave him such a buzz, pointing out all the original features to some delirious client with money to burn and an urge to spend it on historically correct plastering and historically correct painting of fiddly ceiling mouldings. They’d thrown money at these houses, thrown it. Now, you couldn’t shift this type of place for love nor money. Most clients didn’t have the wherewithal, and the ones that did weren’t about to spend it on some run-down pile without the benefit of central heating or modern plumbing.

Stan took a risk.

‘Since you’ve been here before, do you want to walk around yourself while I wait in the hall?’

He was rewarded with the glimmer of a smile.

‘Good plan,’ said Cashel. ‘I know my way around.’

There wasn’t a lot of furniture left in the old house, but Stan found a shabby-looking kitchen chair and pulled it out to the hall, sat down and began to go through his text messages. This Reilly fellow certainly seemed like the sort of bloke who had enough money to buy Avalon House, but whether he would or he wouldn’t, who could tell?

Having long since learned that what would be would be, Stan applied himself to his phone:

Yes, love, home for dinner, fish pie would be great, xx Stan

What astonished Cashel most was how different the house felt. As a child, it had been like some magical palace, home to the amazing Power family, Avalon’s gentry. Whether they were broke or not was immaterial: they could trace their ancestors back hundreds of years. Most people in Avalon would be lucky if they could go back three generations. The Reilly clan did not have a particularly long or noble family tree. When he was a teenager, that had upset him. Mainly because, by then, he had got to know the Powers and was aware of their long heritage. And felt slightly diminished by it.

Suki and Tess could boast a lineage of noble earls and kings. He and Riach were descended from a man who lived his life in the bookmaker’s shop or the pub.

Now, he was proud of his rootlessness. Proud of the lack of rich relatives. Everything he had achieved had been a product of his own hard work. There had been no family money to help him on his way.

Whenever he was invited to give talks to groups of youngsters on how he’d got where he was today, he’d conclude by telling them:

‘It’s not who you are that matters. It’s what you do with who you are. The blood running through your veins is the only blood that matters. When you go out into the world, you have the chance to leave the past behind.’

It was strange how the past seemed so close now as he began his tour of Avalon House.

He started off in the ground-floor drawing room, purely because it was one of the rooms he’d never seen as a child. The left side of the house had always been off limits, according to his mother and Tess. They were the grand rooms, relics of a bygone age when there had been parties and balls up here on the hill. He’d imagined glamorous titled ladies and gentlemen wandering around in evening dress, listening to scratchy gramophones and talking about hunting and estates in the colonies – the way he’d seen people behave at parties in the movies. To a boy whose mother had to clean other people’s houses to keep food on the table, it had seemed an alien and mysterious world.

Stalking past Stan the estate agent, sitting engrossed in his phone, he made his way to the kitchen. That was the room he’d always liked best; a big room, built in the days when many people had lived here, gentry and servants. The huge ovens remained, but the hooks from which saucepans and serving cloches had hung were all gone. Sold, he wondered, or stolen?

Being in here brought it all back though, especially seeing that familiar table, so big it was more like a refectory table from a monastery. He ran his hands over it, feeling the wood, willing some electrifying jolt of memory to leap up into his fingers, but there was nothing. After school, he and Tess used to sit here doing their homework while his mother cooked on the big gas stove. She didn’t know how to cook the sort of food that Tess’s father was used to, so she stuck to the food she knew: peasant food, like bacon and cabbage, barley and lamb shank stew. The food that Cashel had grown up on.

He used to help Tess with her homework. He was five years older and it was fun to help her; she was so sweet, so grateful. Suki, her older sister, never helped in any way. Not that Suki was ever big on homework, even when it was her own. She had made a name for herself in school, a name for being wild, untamed, not caring. She hung around with the most dangerous kids, the ones who had left school and were serving apprenticeships or working with their fathers. She didn’t want to be tied to people her own age, oh no. Suki Power had always wanted to be different.

He walked into the big scullery at the back, where the eggs used to be kept in the water glass to keep them fresh. The meat safe was kept there, a big green painted metal cage where piles of meat would sit on the shelves. Every time the dogs came past, they’d put their paws up and whimper and someone would have to slap them down. It was here in the scullery, the least romantic spot in the whole place, that he’d first kissed Tess.

It had been so innocent and unexpected. Because she was younger, he’d never seen her in that way. He’d loved her, but it had been the sort of love you feel for a kid sister; they got on so well, teased each other, laughed, joked.

And then came that summer day.

He’d been away, working in Dublin. When he arrived home, the house was empty, so he’d headed up to the Powers’ hoping to find his mother. Instead, he’d found Tess. She’d turned eighteen while he’d been gone. The skinny little kid with the lanky legs, the questioning eyes and the hair tied back in an untidy ponytail had vanished. In her place was a new Tess: taller, with a woman’s curves, and the face of a woman, with beautiful rounded lips. His mother had been nowhere to be seen, so he’d stood in the scullery with Tess, feeling strangely dumbstruck in her presence.

She behaved as if nothing had changed between them, chatting happily about leaving school, about her plans to go to college, about how Suki wanted to drop out of college because she was fed up to the tonsils of boring old studies. ‘You know,’ she said, laughing, ‘same old same old. And what about you? What’s it like in the big city? Come on, tell all – are there any fabulous girlfriends on the scene? Your mother will be delirious! She wants you to settle down, you know, Cashel. She wants the patter of tiny feet. Have you found your perfect woman up there in the city?’

Cashel remembered how he’d looked at Tess in that moment and thought with utter astonishment that she was the woman, how could he have not seen this before? Maybe it was the distance that had made it obvious. She’d grown up, he’d been away: suddenly he’d come back to this new woman.

‘No,’ he muttered, ‘no women.’

‘Oh, go on,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe that for a second.’

‘No really,’ he said. ‘What if I was saving myself for someone?’

‘Someone in Avalon?’ she said. ‘Tell me – who? Not Suki, please.’

He’d roared with laughter at that. No, not Suki. It was no secret that Cashel and Suki didn’t get on. They squabbled like two fighting cats whenever they were in the same room.

‘There might be a girl,’ he’d said idly, moving closer to her, wondering if she could see it in his face, in his eyes. He didn’t want to shock her, but surely she must feel it too, that electricity in the air?

She’d turned away from him, opening the meat safe to take out a leg of lamb for dinner. It looked heavy. He’d gone to help her, naturally. What else would he do? And their fingers had touched. That was when she felt it too, and she let go of the wrapped meat so that he was left holding it alone. Tess stared at him and said his name, although he couldn’t hear her; he just saw her mouth the words as if she’d been saying them into her mirror for years.

Cashel.

And he’d leaned forward and placed a kiss on her forehead because he didn’t want to frighten her, after all.

It was crazy to buy a house because of a scullery, but he wasn’t buying it because of that. No, Cashel Reilly hadn’t become as rich and powerful as he was today by doing things on a whim. Instead, he told himself he wanted to buy the old De Paor house as a declaration, a declaration that said I wasn’t good enough for the daughter of this house nineteen years ago when she rejected me, but now I’ve returned, and this house that the Powers lost, that has been gone from the family all these years, I can come back and buy it, just like that. With one phone call, I can have the money here.

That was satisfying. The part of him that understood feelings and emotions and the dangers of letting revenge live on inside for ever, told him it was a mistake. But some deeper part, the animal part that was still hurt, told him it was the right thing to do.

Stan was busily scrolling through texts. It was a great time to get some work done. Arrange a time for a valuation, sort out who’d show the old Moloney place tomorrow. Property was a nightmare, these days, make no mistake.

‘I’ll take it,’ said Cashel.

Stanley felt his mobile phone fall out of his hands and clatter to the marble floor, where the battery pinged joyously out.

‘Right so,’ said Stanley, collecting himself and the scattered bits of his phone. Remain calm at all times was a good mantra for estate agents. They’d have champagne in the office when the sale went through. It had been years since they’d sold anything this big, years.

‘You’ll want it all done quickly?’ he ventured.

These alpha businessmen types wanted everything done quickly.

‘Of course,’ said Cashel. ‘I want to get the work started as soon as possible.’

Stanley thought of recommending his brother-in-law, master builder and currently unemployed, but thought better of it. He’d wait until the ink was dry first, then see about mentioning Freddie.

Less than a mile away, Kitty was doing her homework at the kitchen table, writing out her sums with the lead pressed so deeply into the paper that yet another pencil was in danger of breaking off. The pages underneath were all similarly engraved with sums from previous copybook pages. During homework time, Tess spent many moments wielding the pencil sharpener.

‘How are you doing, love?’ she asked, bending over her daughter to see how she was doing with her multiplication. Maths had never been Tess’s strong point, so she had to mentally run through each sum, using her fingers as an abacus, to see if her daughter was right.

‘Super. You’re nearly finished,’ she said.

Kitty made a ‘yeuch’ noise in reply.

‘I hate sums,’ she grumbled.

Tess had spent enough hours at parents’ events in the school, listening to the latest educational theories, to know that between the ages of eight and nine was when children decided what they ‘loved’ or ‘hated’, often based on the most random things.

She went straight into the recommended spiel: ‘But you’re so good at sums, Kitty,’ she said brightly. ‘Look at the lovely report you got last summer.’

Not entirely convinced, Kitty went back to indenting her pencil on to her copybook. ‘When’s Dad coming? He hasn’t been for dinner for ages. Why not? Are you fighting? What is for dinner – I’m starving.’

‘Your dad’s been busy, Kitty,’ Tess lied, wishing she had her own pencil to stick into something. She’d left Kevin two voicemail messages telling him he had to figure out what to tell the children, and he hadn’t replied. ‘We’ll see when he can come over, shall we?’

‘But we haven’t seen him in ages,’ Kitty went on. ‘He didn’t bring me home from Granny’s once this week.’

Tess had been grateful for that. It would have been too much to find Kevin sitting in her home mere days after he’d told her he was in love with another woman. But presumably this was all part of his avoidance-of-anything-difficult plan.

Clearly, Kitty knew something was wrong. Tess was pretty sure that Zach sensed it too, even if he hadn’t said anything. She would have to talk to Kevin and get him to agree to tell their children. Left to his own devices, Kevin would just carry on saying nothing.

And wait for her to do it.

‘I’ll phone Dad now, then,’ Kitty decided.

Tess sat helplessly at the table.

Kitty was back in two minutes, the portable in her hands: ‘Dad wants to talk to you,’ she said. ‘He’s taking us out to dinner on Friday, to Mario’s!’

Mario’s was a pizza restaurant, and Kitty’s favourite for the chocolate fudge desserts.

‘Great,’ said Tess. Perhaps he was planning to do it then.

‘Tess, help me out on this,’ he pleaded, the moment she got on the phone. ‘I’m not sure how to begin,’ he said sadly. ‘I don’t want them to hate me, and I don’t want to hurt them.’

Tess flattened down all thoughts of saying ‘It’s a bit late for that now.’ She was culpable too, she knew. But despite that, it was a bit rich for him to want her to tell Zach and Kitty about Claire so that they could all be happy families together.

‘How about Friday night?’ she said pleasantly.

‘We should do it together,’ he insisted.

Tess hesitated. Perhaps that would be best. A united front might help Zach and Kitty understand that, even if parents split up, they were together for their children. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you’re paying.’

She might have gone to bed that night and actually slept, if Helen, Kevin’s mother, hadn’t phoned right after Kitty had been put to bed.

‘Tess, I had no idea,’ she said, her voice catching. ‘I had no idea, honestly. It’s all such a shock.’

‘I know,’ Tess soothed, wondering why she was the one doing the soothing.

‘I thought you were mad to separate in the first place,’ Helen sobbed. ‘Now look what’s happened: he’s got this new woman. Oh, Tess, it’s not right – not right for you, Kitty or Zach. Look at what all this separation nonsense has done!’

‘We both agreed to the separation, Helen, so it’s not all Kevin’s fault,’ Tess said, trying to say something comforting because she knew that Helen adored her and the children.

‘Yes, but you separated to fix things,’ wailed Helen, ‘not to find new people.’

Since this was largely what Tess herself thought, she hadn’t the heart to argue with her mother-in-law.

For the next ten minutes, Helen cried over the phone while Tess tried to find a way to end the call.

‘She’s only a young girl, you know,’ Helen sniffled. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him. Would you take him back, Tess, if it ended with this girl?’

Tess breathed out slowly. ‘Helen, love, it’s gone beyond that,’ she said, wondering if it really had gone beyond that. Could she take Kevin back if he asked?

Her mind flickered, as it so often had of late, to Cashel.

That had been real love and real passion, she realized now. A tornado of emotion compared to what she’d felt for Kevin. If she took Kevin back, it would be agreeing to a life of gentle, kind benevolence with him, the two of them returning to sharing a home but leading separate lives in so many ways.

Seeing Cashel at his mother’s funeral had made her remember the fierceness of her love for him. If only he hadn’t abandoned her, things might have been so different.

‘But now everyone knows,’ Helen went on. ‘I’ve never even set eyes on her, but when Agnes Ryan phoned me to say she’d seen my Kevin kissing this girl on the street outside the café, I was so shocked that I rang him straight up and asked him. That was the first I knew of it.’

Tess simmered. So much for the not-upsetting-you-by-bringing-Claire-out-on-the-streets-of-Avalon schtick.

‘Oh well, it’s out in the open now,’ Tess said. ‘Helen, pet, I have things to do, perhaps we can talk tomorrow?’ You might need to bail me out of jail for murdering your son for not telling his own children when other people have seen him snogging this woman in the town square.

She’d have to tell Zach now. News like that would be all around Avalon at the speed of light. Someone on Zach’s bus in the morning would be bound to have heard. He ought to know the facts himself.

Wearily, she went upstairs and knocked on Zach’s door. ‘Can I come in?’ she whispered.

As usual, a moment passed before he got up and opened the door. Tess wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing in there, but whatever it was required privacy, and it was her job to give it to him. The room smelled of socks, teenage boy and the new deodorant that he was spraying like there was no tomorrow.

‘Sure,’ he said.

He was dressed in an old faded sweatshirt and jeans. They both sat down on the bed and Tess was silent for a moment, wondering how the hell she was going to broach the subject.

‘What’s up, Ma?’ he said. ‘You look like somebody’s died.’

‘No! Don’t be silly,’ she said, going into mummy mode.

Mummy mode meant that if the sky was falling in, Mummy would say, ‘No, it’ll be fine. We’ll sort it out. There’s bound to be a solution somewhere.’

‘When your dad came over the other night, he had something important to talk about.’

A wary look stole over Zach’s face. ‘He wants to get divorced?’ he said.

‘Well, not exactly. Why did you think that?’

‘He’s been different the past month … happier,’ Zach said. ‘Before, he used to keep saying how much he missed being at home, and I felt angry at you for the whole thing. But then, he was really happy. I figured it out. He’s seeing someone else.’

Wish you’d told me, Tess thought. Then I wouldn’t have been the last to know.

‘You’re very intuitive,’ she said, patting his arm and repressing the desire to lie on his bed and cry. ‘I suppose there’s always the risk that this could happen when two people split up …’

‘But you weren’t supposed to split up. You didn’t need to split up,’ Zach said. ‘That was your idea. I heard you talking about it.’

He sounded angry now and Tess felt the weight of guilt upon her.

‘I thought it was the right thing to do,’ Tess said.

‘Not for us, it wasn’t,’ Zach said accusingly. ‘Not for me and Kitty. We were a family, before. Now we’re not.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Whatever,’ he muttered.

Tess tried to put her arm around him, but he shrugged it off.

‘Do you want to meet her?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he snapped. He put his headphones into his ears, which was teenager-speak for ‘conversation over’. Normally that would have been Tess’s cue to deliver a mild lecture on rudeness. Tonight, she let him be.

They sat together on the bed for a few moments, Zach with his eyes closed, then Tess got up and left the room, closing the door quietly.

He was right: it was her fault.