Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (112 page)

‘It sounds nice,’ Gaynor said absently, still multi-tasking. ‘I didn’t think she’d get married so early, though. They don’t these days, do they?’

Connie didn’t want to talk about social mores in the younger generation. She wanted to confide in Gaynor, one of the few people she felt she could bare her soul to, about how Nicky’s forthcoming wedding was making her feel.

‘I’m thrilled for her, but it does make me think about Keith,’ said Connie quietly. She didn’t want Josie to hear. In her experience, teenagers were deaf at all moments apart from when some highly sensitive information was being imparted, whereupon their listening abilities cranked up to CIA standards.

‘Keith?’

Connie tried and failed to stifle her annoyance. ‘Yes, Keith – the man I was going to marry, remember?’

She needed to discuss this, to get it out of her system with someone who’d known Keith and what he meant to her. Perhaps then she could move fully on, the way she and Eleanor had discussed.

‘Oh God, yes, Keith.’ Gaynor didn’t stop what she was doing. In one swoop, she drained the whole pan of pasta.

‘You haven’t forgotten about him?’ Connie said, aware of a certain shrillness in her tone.

‘Of course not,’ Gaynor said. ‘But, Connie, that was a long time ago, you’ve moved on. I don’t know why you’re still even talking about him. You should have wiped that moron from your mind years ago.’

‘Yeah, kick him to the kerb,’ remarked Josie from the homework corner. ‘Like, old boyfriends are losers. Forget him and move on.’ She waved one hand in a complicated, MTV-inspired move that said:
It’s OVER, girlfriend!

‘I was going to marry him,’ hissed Connie, purposely ignoring Josie.

‘Years ago,’ said Gaynor, leaving the sink to throw the pasta into another saucepan.

‘Well, yes – well, no, actually. Only eight years ago.’ Connie did the mental arithmetic. She was thirty-nine now, she’d been thirty. ‘Nine years, OK, nine years but–’

‘–but,’ interrupted Gaynor, ‘you should have moved on.’

She stopped cooking, came to stand in front of Connie, and for the first time since her friend’s arrival, picked up her own wine glass and took a huge gulp. ‘Connie, I am bone tired of this conversation. Speaking as one of your oldest friends, I want to tell you that. Keith is long gone and you are still on your own because you haven’t moved on. You think you have, but you haven’t. You are stuck in the past and you have no interest in new men because nobody will ever match up to your mythical list of perfection. I don’t know how you came up with that list in the first place, because it’s not as if Keith was perfect, but you’ve set the bar so high, no man can ever match up to it.’

Connie forced herself to breathe. ‘Gaynor, that’s an awful thing to say. Of course I’ve moved on.’

‘You haven’t.’ Gaynor took another swig of her wine. ‘Kids,’ she roared, ‘do your homework in your bedrooms. I want to talk to Connie alone.’

‘New hair, Connie,’ advised Josie as she gathered up her books. ‘The long bob is so over.’

‘Her hair is fine,’ snarled Gaynor.

‘Mom, if she only got a proper cut, it would be fierce, but there’s no shape, no product…’ Josie finished with a shrug, as if to say
no hope.

‘Go, kids.’

They all shuffled off, leaving Connie and Gaynor behind.

‘I am your oldest friend,’ Gaynor said in a softer voice. ‘As soon as you told me that Nicky was getting married, I knew what it would do to you…’

‘It’s not doing anything to me,’ squeaked Connie. ‘That’s not what I wanted to talk about –’

‘It is, love.’ Gaynor put her hand on Connie’s, which somehow seemed even more ominous. ‘I told Pete you’d be in bits –’

‘You told Pete!?’

Pete was Gaynor’s husband. Connie had been with Gaynor the day she’d first met him, she’d been Gaynor’s bridesmaid, she’d taken Gaynor on her first post-baby weekend and left Pete taking care of six-month-old Josie. She adored Pete, but it was part of the fabric of their friendship that she and Gaynor could discuss him. She suddenly felt ridiculous to realise that, of course, it worked both ways. Gaynor would discuss Connie with Pete. They would talk about how poor, sad Connie would be miserable when her little sister got married and moved out.
Poor lonely Connie with three sets of twinkly lights over her dressing table
– Gaynor had seen them and said they were lovely, but
she
didn’t have twinkly fairy lights. She had photos of her children and a studio shot of her and Pete on their tenth anniversary.

Self-awareness flooded through Connie.

‘I don’t want you to be sorry for me,’ she said hoarsely.

‘I’m not.’

‘You are! You, with your fabulous family and your
saucepans and –’ Connie waved an encompassing hand around the cosy kitchen with all its happy-family paraphernalia: kids’ drawings on the walls, school notes Blu-tacked on to the fridge, photos of the whole family on their summer holiday in Greece. ‘You have all this and I have twinkly lights over my dressing table. I’m a cliché, right? All I need now is to start adopting stray cats and I’ll be the perfect, mad unmarried woman. If I can get the cats to pee all over the house, so the whole place stinks of it, so much the better. The best bet would be if someone did a television show on people being mean to cats, and they ended up at my house with the seventysix cats I can no longer afford to feed so people could look at me and say “Didn’t she used to be normal?”’

‘I’m sorry,’ Gaynor said, horrified. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m so blunt, too blunt – I’m sorry, Connie.’

‘You’re right,’ Connie said bleakly. She got to her feet. ‘I hate to turn my back on your cooking, Gaynor, but I can’t stay. I’d be no company.’

‘Please don’t leave,’ Gaynor begged. ‘I put my foot in it, both my feet. Pete says I don’t know what I’m saying half the time, I just let my mouth run on –’

But Connie had her coat on. She didn’t want a goodbye hug, so she hurried to the door and waved. ‘I’ll phone,’ she said, and she made it out on to the footpath without breaking down.

Gaynor’s street was quiet now. It was after six in the evening and cars lined the street. Lights burned in all the houses and as she walked to her car, Connie could see family life going on in the homes she passed. There were kids watching cartoons, women walking in upstairs rooms with babies cradled to them, teenagers grumbling as they took the family dog out for a walk, doing their after-school duty. It all came down to this, didn’t it? Family. Marriage. A significant other. Without that, you were nothing.

There would have been no point explaining to Gaynor that
Keith had blocked her from moving forward, that she had sabotaged herself because she’d been hurt by him, and now she planned to change. No point explaining all that.

Gaynor was married with kids and she thought anyone who wasn’t, knew absolutely nothing. Connie’s inner journey would sound daft to Gaynor.

Connie slammed the door on her car and managed to extricate it from the tiny parking space without banging into any other cars. Gaynor’s words rattled round inside her head.

She would never be so hurtfully blunt. Why did Gaynor think she could speak like that to Connie? Had singledom become such a recognisable social handicap that people felt obliged or justified in commenting upon it? Couples always wanted to know when singles were going to meet a man, settle down and have babies – or had they decided she hadn’t a maternal bone in their body?

‘Yes,’ Connie wanted to say. ‘I hate sex, I loathe men and, as for children, I couldn’t eat a whole one!’

As she drove on to Golden Square, she started to cry. A grey pick-up truck was in the place where she usually parked outside her house. Connie glared at it, tempted to drive into it with rage. It would be easy. Just lean on the accelerator, push…

A man came out of a garden gate nearby, one of the big old houses that were mostly apartments. He moved towards the truck and Connie gave him her death stare. Stupid man!

It was the man with the red hair and the young daughter.

He turned and looked at her, as if he’d felt her piercing gaze, and then he ambled over to her car, making a motion with his hand to say
roll down your window.

Normally, Connie followed strict ‘all strangers are axe murderers’ rules but tonight, something devil-may-care took over. It would be a foolish axe murderer who’d attempt to get the better of her tonight. He’d get a few whacks with his own axe.

‘Yes?’ she barked.

To his credit, he didn’t blink but said: ‘I know you usually park here. When I got here and your car wasn’t parked, I thought you might be out. I’ll move to the back lane.’ There was resident’s parking on the lane behind the houses but it meant a longer walk to your front door, and most people tried to find a spot outside their door.

Under normal circumstances, Connie would have said no, don’t move, it’s fine. It was hardly her space, after all. Just that she liked to park there and was usually home in time to do so.

But tonight, reason had deserted her.

‘Good!’ she snapped and rolled up her window.

When he moved the truck, she parked and then stomped inside with her head held high.

What was the point of trying to change your life? Nobody noticed. Even Gaynor thought she was a hopeless case with twinkly lights over her dressing table. She might as well sink into that hopelessness, forget about men and a future, and just buy the seventeen cats.

Olivia, who came to Kilmoney as a lady’s maid with one of the ladies in the big house, taught Agnes how to make rugelach and matzo balls. Joe’s mama loved them both, and Joe was astonished because he said she never used to like anything foreign – by which he meant anything that came from outside of Connemara- but I reckon that might have been his father’s influence. I never met his father, but he sounds like a man who wanted everything his own way.

Joe’s mama was such a gentle soul, she wouldn’t have stood a chance. Most likely it was Joe’s father didn’t like anything foreign and she just went along with that.

Olivia was a sweet girl, but sad. There had been a man she’d loved but he’d gone away, and she’d ended up working as a maid. She and Agnes were great friends, and many times, when Olivia’s mistress was in the big house for August, Olivia came to us for dinner.

Olivia cried when she saw the feast the first time she came. Myself and Agnes had done it all quietly and
Agnes had spent ages making a little candle holder with the seven candles like Olivia had told her about. The chicken soup was simple enough, a lot like my own mam’s broth but with more garlic and without the barley. There was no way I could get my hands on pomegranates. I did my best, but all Mikey Jr from the shop could come up with was oranges, and I made the cake with them instead. There wasn’t much call for pomegranates in our part of the world, and Mikey Jr was still talking about them the day we left for America. He did his best for Olivia, though. ‘She’s a fine-looking woman, for all that she’s not a Catholic,’ he said to me.

Which was almost a declaration of love for a man like Mikey Jr, married as he was to morning Mass, confession every Saturday and the life of the Little Flower of Lisieux.

‘Unleavened bread,’ said Olivia, walking round the table and touching it all reverently. Cooking is food for the soul, we agreed.

In Geraldine Kerrigan’s world, everything had a place. Once a thing slotted into that place, they were there forever. Like the car keys in the slightly cracked Belleek china bowl on the table in the hall.

Woe betide Juanita, Geraldine’s twice-weekly cleaning lady, if she moved them.

‘Juanita,’ Geraldine would say loudly. Juanita didn’t speak English too well and Geraldine liked to think that volume would improve matters. ‘Juanita, no keys on kitchen table. In the bowl! Bowl!!’

Sometimes, Geraldine spoke longingly of Red Oaks, her childhood home, where there had been several maids, not just one person coming twice a week to carelessly spray far too much furniture polish on the piano. Then she’d grow annoyed
with herself for getting all misty about the past. Her mother would have risen above it all, and so must she. That was true nobility: the ability to rise above all life’s trials. Her mother had been one of the Fitzgeralds of Lismore and dealing with tragedy and joy with the same stoicism was what the Fitzgeralds were known for.

But still, her mother had never had to deal with a series of foreign girls who only stayed for six months before moving on. Geraldine knew she was hard on the girls, which was why they left her employ so quickly, but really, how else did they expect to learn?

If they’d seen the amount of work a maid had to do in Red Oaks, they’d have been happy to tidy up Geraldine’s neat two-bedroomed townhouse in Howth.

In much the same way as the keys lived in the Belleek bowl, people had a place too. In Red Oaks, Mummy had entertained a lot and was very firm on the importance of protocol. Geraldine had grown up with a strong sense of social hierarchy.

Carmel De Vere, her friend from the bridge club, agreed with her.

Carmel had problems with the help too.

‘Veronika completely destroyed my cashmere twin set,’ she wailed.

The two women were sitting in Geraldine’s private room in the hospital the day before Geraldine was due to be discharged to stay with Rae and Will.

They’d already discussed Geraldine’s hip and how marvellous the surgeon had been, and how miraculously well it was healing four days after the surgery. Much consideration had been given to how much the hospitals had deteriorated since the demise of the matrons, and now they were on the familiar territory of domestic matters.

‘Nobody knows how to clean cashmere any more,’ Geraldine said mournfully. ‘Such a pity.’

‘I remember years ago buying Dawn one of those pretty Marks & Spencer’s cashmere cardigans for Christmas,’ Carmel said. ‘She washed it at forty degrees. Silly woman.’

Dawn was Carmel’s daughter-in-law, and the two women had spent many hours discussing her failings. Being hopeless at cooking and wildly amused at herself whenever she cremated a meal had topped the list of faults, until Dawn decided that forty-five was just the age to have a tummy tuck and breast implants. Privately, Geraldine thought Carmel would never recover from the shock.

‘You’re so lucky with Rae,’ Carmel went on, and Geraldine felt a twinge of guilt.

Carmel had met Rae many times and thought she was marvellous. Which she was, certainly in comparison with Dawn. But there was no easiness between Geraldine and Rae.

Geraldine knew in her heart that Rae would not relish having her mother-in-law for a three-week convalescence. But Geraldine was willing to put up with it if it meant she would be with her darling Will.

Besides, it was Rae and Will’s house or a nursing home. She’d never even contemplated staying with her daughter, Leonora. Heavens, no.

It would all be fine, though. Rae would do her best. She wasn’t exactly out of the top drawer of society, but she was kind. Heaven only knew how she’d turned out so well, given her background. Not that Geraldine liked to cast aspersions, but really, the Hennesseys were shocking. It appeared that Rae didn’t have much to do with her family, which was good, Geraldine felt.

As Carmel’s conversation followed a well-worn path about Dawn’s shortcomings, Geraldine put thoughts of Rae out of her mind and focused on Will. Mothers weren’t supposed to have favourites, but they did, didn’t they? Leonora had been too argumentative, too fond of her own way to be an easy child. As an adult, nothing had changed.

But her beloved Will made up for it. He was so like his father, the same kindness and gentleness.

‘I’m sure Will and Rae will spoil you,’ Carmel was saying, ‘and that’s what you need.’

‘Yes,’ said Geraldine contentedly, ‘that’s just what I need.’

The following day, Geraldine sat in the passenger seat of her son’s car and looked at 33 Golden Square without any fondness. She’d never liked the tall, white house. It was shabby somehow, and Rae should have cut down the wisteria years ago before it had taken hold of the porch. But no, Rae wouldn’t listen to reason.

‘Wisteria’s so pretty, it would be a shame to cut it back, like taking it out of its home,’ she’d said, or some such nonsense.

Ludicrous, Geraldine thought. Plants didn’t have homes, they went where they were told.

‘Did you tell the spiders you wouldn’t put them out of their homes too?’ Geraldine had said in response.

When Will and Rae had bought the house, it was a total wreck. Geraldine had advised them not to buy it. The place was infested with cobwebs, and the windows were black with dirt. Only the besotted would buy it.

Twenty-five years later, they were still here and the house had improved – well, it couldn’t have got any worse. The wisteria was still there, sprawling bigger than ever, with woody branches looped around the whole porch. Half the front of the house would have to be cut off if a person were to remove the wisteria now.

Rae did have a good touch with the garden, Geraldine conceded, but it was probably because she was from the country. Geraldine had never been to Rae’s part of the world, but she was sure it was one of those ugly little smallholdings with potatoes growing everywhere and nothing nice in the way of dahlias. Geraldine liked dahlias. They were so reliable.

‘I thought we could have Leonora round tonight for dinner,’ Will said as he helped his mother out of the car.

‘I don’t want any fuss tonight,’ Geraldine said. ‘I want to settle in, get my things around me. It’s hard leaving hospital and not going back to your own home, you know. If you could have moved in with me, I wouldn’t have to do this –’

‘Mum, this is the best way,’ Will said quickly. ‘Rae and I both want to look after you. I’ll phone Leo and tell her you’re too tired.’

‘Yes, do that.’

Geraldine allowed her son to steer her up the garden path as if she were already an invalid. It was soothing, being helped along like this. Will was such a dear boy.

Rae had obviously been waiting because she opened the door before Will could get his key in the lock.

‘Welcome!’ she said, and the scent of cooking wafted out of the open door behind her.

‘Rae, hello.’ Geraldine proffered one cheek for a kiss. ‘Is something burning…?’

Rae laughed easily. ‘Goodness no, not yet, anyway, Geraldine.’ She opened the door to the living room, which she and Will had spent the past three nights organising. It had been transformed into a bedroom, complete with Anton’s bed – the transportation of which downstairs had nearly killed them both. There was a pretty little bedside locker from the spare bedroom, a vase of flowers on the mantelpiece, and a small fern beside the bed. The television was set at the correct angle so Geraldine could sit in bed and watch TV, and Rae had brought the kitchen radio in case her mother-in-law wanted radio too. There was a water jug, a glass, tissues and a box of biscuits on a low table, and extra rugs at the end of the bed in case Geraldine got cold. There had been something soothing about working so hard to get everything ready: it meant there had been no time to think about the letter or Jasmine.

Geraldine took one look at it all and sniffed. ‘It’s hard to be away from your own place,’ she said mournfully.

Rae patted her arm, managed a smile at Will and said blithely: ‘I’ll go and check on dinner.’

‘Mum doesn’t want Leo to come,’ Will said quickly. ‘She’s too tired, I’ll phone her and tell her now.’

Downstairs in the kitchen, Rae stirred a saucepan on the stove and put the kettle on to boil. Normally, Geraldine’s remarks would have made her furious, but not tonight. There were some plusses to being distracted. Compared to the turmoil that was going on in Rae’s mind, her mother-in-law’s mindless nitpicking didn’t register.

Besides, Rae knew in her heart that Geraldine wasn’t a malicious woman. Her problem was a tact bypass and the belief that saying what she thought was always the wisest option.

Since Rae’s plan to have Leonora over so that the Kerrigan family would have each other to talk to had backfired, Rae decided that music would help. In the great living-room revamp, the stereo had been moved into the kitchen, so when she served dinner a couple of hours after Geraldine arrived, Rae put a Vivaldi CD on at a level that was just above background music.

‘Isn’t it relaxing having classical music on during dinner,’ she said loudly, as Geraldine sat down.

There was no way Geraldine would criticise Vivaldi, Rae had decided. Classical music was always acceptable in her mother-in-law’s mind because it was a sign of culture, therefore Geraldine wouldn’t dream of saying to turn it down.

Rae closed her eyes as the joyous violins of ‘Spring’ rippled through the room. What was it about some pieces of music that just ripped into your soul?

But tonight the pure joy of Vivaldi merely highlighted the pain Rae was feeling inside. She hadn’t had a moment’s peace since she’d received the letter about Jasmine. It was like
opening up an old wound to find it hadn’t healed at all, was still as raw and agonising as ever.

She’d loved Jasmine with all her heart and giving her up for adoption had been the most devastating moment of Rae’s life. It was a devastation she’d carried alone, and now she simply didn’t know how she was going to tell Will or Anton about it.

Being tall made it easier to hide the baby bump. Rae often wondered, if she’d been short, how it would all have turned out. People would have known earlier, she might not have entertained the fantasy of keeping her baby, a fantasy that broke her heart.

As it was, she went to the charity box of school uniforms and got the biggest, baggiest navy sweater she could find.

The spring of 1969 wasn’t a time for baggy clothes for teenagers. All the other girls in Rathangan wanted to wear fitted, bum-skimming dresses and they adapted the uniform to make it fit this fashion.

There was war every day as girls arriving in school with heavily kohled eyes and skirts turned up to mid-thigh got sent to the headmistress for a lecture, from which they emerged sulkily unpinning their skirts. Rae had been one of them. But not any more. With her voluminous jumper over the long school skirt – carefully held up with safety pins and, later, by a belt – Rae Hennessey looked the image of a diligent pupil.

She worked harder than ever.

‘You don’t come out with us any more,’ Shelley complained to her. ‘You’ve gone all quiet.’

‘Studying,’ Rae said blankly. ‘I need to do well in my exams.’

There was a germ of an idea in her head: if only she could get top marks in her state exams, then she’d get a decent job when she left school and be able to take care of the baby. She would not live at home with her parents with her child,
never. She needed a ticket out of there and education was the key.

The baby would be born in September or October, she reckoned inexpertly. She’d leave school after the exams, get a job to earn money, and maybe, maybe it would all work out.

She was weeks away from the big exams in June when her mother confronted her.

Rae was just home from school, exhausted after hauling her heavy bags of school books around. There was no point leaving things in her locker when she was trying to revise at night.

Her father wasn’t home. Instead, her mother was in Paudge’s seat in front of the television, but she got to her feet when Rae came in.

‘You’re up the pole, aren’t you?’ Glory Hennessey folded her arms across her chest and her eyes raked her daughter’s body.