Homecoming (27 page)

‘That’ll cost you,’ he said. ‘It’s going to take at least forty minutes.’

‘I can pay,’ said Rae, waving the twenty at him.

The cab, an old Escort smelling so strongly of car freshener that it made Rae nauseous, set off down the street. Rae didn’t look back. There was no looking back any more.

When dinner was over, Rae shooed Will off to take care of his mother.

‘I’ll tidy up,’ she said.

‘You’re so good.’ He dropped a kiss on to her forehead.

No, thought Rae, I’m not good at all. I’ve kept a huge secret from you for years.

Upstairs, the letter lay hidden in an envelope in her bedside drawer. Though she’d taken it out from time to time to touch it, she hadn’t phoned the number. She wasn’t sure she was able to do that yet.

She’d waited so many years for news of Jasmine, and now the news was here, she was frightened. What if her daughter hated her? What if Will and Anton would hate her for keeping this secret from them? Rae couldn’t bear to think of them all hating her for her actions all those years ago.

13
Spring Equinox

Golden Square resembled an Impressionist painting now spring was thoroughly underway. When Eleanor looked out of her window, she gazed on to an explosion of colour as the trees thrust new buds up to the sun, and flowers burst into bloom. The song had been wrong, she decided: there were more than forty shades of green; there were hundreds, from the acid yellows illuminated by sunlight, to rich viridians and glossy olives as tiny leaves shot out and buds unfurled on sprawling branches.

The growth of trees hid some of the square from her view and it wasn’t as easy to see the houses on the opposite side. The plus side of this was that the warmer weather and the beauty of the garden square meant that people walked there in the evening, whereas in the colder months, only the dog walkers and people with small children ventured in.

This evening, Rae from Titania’s Palace was out walking with her husband. Eleanor had been watching Rae with interest. She’d seen her often in the café and once, when she’d bumped into Pearl Mills and her son in the square, Pearl had spotted Rae rushing down the street and had waved at her.

Rae worked for a local charity, Pearl explained, and Eleanor remembered that Connie had told her that.

‘She’s so very kind and she’s never in too much of a rush to listen to you. Lots of people don’t bother with you when you’ve got troubles,’ Pearl added darkly. ‘But Rae does.’

Eleanor watched Rae rush across the square morning and evening, dark hair flying, full of energy for both her jobs. Not many people worked full time and volunteered so many of their precious leisure hours with a charity. Eleanor wondered what was behind Rae’s commitment to Community Cares: a sense of social duty or something darker, something painful from her past? She decided that Rae was simply one of those wonderful people who had a social conscience.

Connie was easier to read. For a start, Eleanor saw her regularly and they had become tentative friends.

Not because of Eleanor’s overtures, she admitted to herself. It was Connie who seemed determined to befriend her.

Since that first meeting, Eleanor had had dinner and afternoon tea in Connie and Nicky’s apartment.

‘It’s so pretty,’ she’d said that first time she’d come to tea – less of a commitment than dinner. Eleanor still felt too raw to let people into her world too quickly.

‘You’ve got a flair for decorating, Connie.’

‘I’ve told her that,’ Nicky said, ‘but does she believe me? No.’

Eleanor had liked Nicky, although she’d expected not to. Nicky appeared so glowingly confident that Eleanor thought she’d be a bit insufferable. Eleanor liked people with a bit of doubt inside them: pain rubbed off the hard edges somewhat.

But for all her confidence, Nicky wasn’t a bit hard-edged. Instead, she was that rare creature: happy within herself and genuinely kind.

And very funny.

She kept both Connie and Eleanor amused with stories from the world of publishing.

The managing director’s nephew had written a book and it had arrived in Peony Publishing like an unexploded bomb.

The short straw had gone to Nicky, who’d had to read the novel and report back.

‘Which would have been fine, if it had been anyone but Dominic’s nephew,’ Nicky explained.

It had taken Nicky precisely fifteen minutes to decide she hated it. The nephew was a stranger to grammar, clearly felt that spell checking was for the little people and hated full stops. If he could make a sentence run on for an entire paragraph without a full stop, he was happy. Arrogance bounced off the page. It was not an enjoyable reading experience.

Normally, such a book would merit a standard ‘thank you so much for submitting your novel but we feel it isn’t right for us and we wish you the best of luck with it elsewhere’ letter. How to handle the rejection when the author was a close relative of the publisher and his mother was going to France with Dominic in a month’s time was another matter entirely.

‘What did you do?’ asked Eleanor, fascinated by this moral dilemma.

‘I told the truth,’ said Nicky, surprised. ‘What else would I do? I said it wasn’t for me but perhaps another editor might like it, and that either way, it would need serious work.’

‘And Dominic wasn’t angry with you?’ Connie fretted.

‘No,’ said Nicky. ‘He’s good that way. More tea, Eleanor?’

Connie mothered her sister, Eleanor could see. This mothering had given her focus when she’d been abandoned by her feckless fiancé, but now that Nicky was going to be married herself, Connie was in limbo.

Eleanor felt the urge to help her, to guide. But that would mean taking down the walls Eleanor had put up to cope with her own pain. Was that wise?

She felt the same about Megan. They’d bumped into each other in Titania’s a couple of times, and Megan had taken her black Americano to sit with Eleanor and her crossword and green tea.

‘I hate that stuff,’ Megan had said, looking into Eleanor’s cup and wincing.

‘I prefer coffee too,’ Eleanor pointed out, ‘but I like to sleep.’

‘Good point,’ Megan agreed. ‘I’m sleeping better since I’ve started working at Nora’s. Birdie’s off in Spain and it’s fun, actually. Kevin, the other chiropodist, is a laugh. He keeps trying to get me out with his girlfriend for nights out.’

‘Work is good for the soul,’ Eleanor said calmly.

‘I thought that was inner peace?’

Eleanor laughed. ‘Inner peace is hard to come by, but work helps.’

‘You don’t work any more,’ Megan said thoughtfully.

Excellent point, Eleanor thought. ‘I’m too old to work,’ she said blithely.

‘You’re not too old to do anything.’

Eleanor smiled. ‘Thank you for the compliment.’

Then, to change the subject, because Eleanor didn’t like to discuss her inner thoughts with anyone, she took her travel brochures out of her handbag.

She was waiting till the weather got better to go on her trip West. Through the internet, she’d found a company that organised guided tours of the Western seaboard and they’d sent her their brochures.

We promise you the real experience of Ireland, not a fake, leprechaun-filled idyll, but a place where you’ll see everything from the moonscape of the Burren to the small, wind-swept islands off Connemara. Our tour guides know the area like the back of their hands and whether you’re interested in Ireland in general, or searching for the land of your ancestors, we’ll help you.

Eleanor loved the sound of it. Ralf would have loved it too, she thought wistfully. How often had they talked about this trip? Now she was doing it when he was gone. It didn’t seem right. They should have taken more holidays, should have worked less.

Somehow, fifty years had flown by and they’d never gone to find the small house where she’d grown up.

‘Are you going on a trip?’ said Megan, picking up one of the brochures, as Eleanor had hoped she’d do.

‘I’m thinking about it,’ was all she said.

Back home, she sat at her window seat overlooking the square and let the memories flood in. The brochure showed lots of pretty houses in the West, including a couple of paintedup thatched ones that didn’t spark any memories of her own home. She didn’t remember much about the house in Kilmoney. She could recall the size and warmth of the kitchen, the great heat given off by the fire and, later, by the black stove that cost so much and had revolutionised their lives. Many pots could sit on the top and boil, if the fire was strong enough, and there was a small oven for baking in. From out of its black maw would come fresh, steaming soda bread, which they’d cover with butter made by Mam’s own hands and finish off with a slick of blackberry jam from their own hedgerows.

She could still see the gleaming painted brown of the bench seats and could remember her mother down on her hands and knees polishing them. It was a small farm kitchen and yet it
shone
, no matter how often the sheepdog slunk in to lie under the table or how many muddy boots tramped in and out.

As a child, Eleanor used to sit on a stool with her feet resting on the iron ledge of the stove – the only part of it she was allowed to touch. To one side was the tall cupboard where the family bible lay, and where Mam kept her sewing things on hand for repairs or turning an old dress inside out when the outside became faded and worn.

On the other side of the stove was the shrine to the Sacred Heart, a dark print of a bearded, kind Jesus with one upraised palm facing out and with an opening in his chest where a burning flame blazed. Underneath was kept an actual burning flame in a tiny oil lamp with a crimson glass cover, its light flickering day and night in the kitchen.

This benevolent Jesus seemed at odds with the lessons she’d learned in school. Fire and brimstone and the terrifying world that was purgatory. Eleanor imagined it as an endless red place, where people crawled up through the fire, their only aid the prayers of the living – although quite what the practical help of these prayers might be, she didn’t know.

It would have been truly terrifying if her mother had backed up the fire and brimstone message. But Brigid didn’t. She was never in thrall to the power of the church. Eleanor could recall a visiting missionary priest coming to the house and being sent packing by her mother – an unheard-of event in the 1930s.

‘Stop with your talk of the devil!’ her mother had declared. ‘You’ll frighten the child. There’s enough pain on the earth without calling for more in the afterlife.’

The priest had stalked off, shocked.

Eleanor could still see his outraged face. Her mother had been courageous at a time when not many people argued with the clergy. But Brigid’s religion was a kinder, gentler one based around love, and she had a healthy respect for all faiths.

Along with tales of angels and saints, there were stories of the Celtic gods and goddesses, tales of the fairy people and their other world. Mam and Granny knew that, while man might build stone churches on the land, the very land itself was a source of huge power and possibility that no man-built creation could emulate.

The coming weekend would be the Spring Equinox, a time of awakening and fertility in the landscape. Once, people had celebrated the goddess Eostre, the earth goddess, by using eggs as a symbol of new life and rebirth. Some cultures, Eleanor recalled, had made dragons to carry for their celebrations.

She wondered what the Spring Equinox meant in Kilmoney now.

Ralf had been interested in the idea of dragons as processionary aids. He’d been interested in everything.

It was one of the many things she’d loved about him. He was never finished learning, whether it was a new word or a new idea in
Time
magazine.

‘Listen to this!’ was his mantra, followed by him reading something to her from the newspaper. He loved environmental articles, anything to do with space, and new scientific data.

He bypassed things on relationships. ‘You tell me everything I need to know, honey,’ he’d say to Eleanor, but if there was anything about new research on the brain, he’d read it with fascination.

‘Human beings are incredible machines,’ was one of his favourite sayings.

It was horribly ironic then that the first stroke had affected his brain so badly.

Eleanor hadn’t been with him that time, a fact for which she had never quite forgiven herself. She’d been getting her nails done, a vanity she rarely had time for, but they were due at a big party that weekend and she was making an extra effort. When she’d come home with a bag of fresh bagels from the man on the corner, she’d known instantly there was something wrong because there was no music in the apartment. Ralf lived his life with music in both back and foreground.

Chet Baker might be playing in the morning, and then Lena Horne would sound out in the afternoon. Bernstein and Sedaka would compete in any one day with Mozart. That day, Ralf was supposed to still be there when Eleanor got home, but there was no music.

‘Ralf!’ She ran through the apartment, fingers held aloft the way the manicurist told her to, and came upon him in their bathroom, lying on the floor.

‘My love, what is it?’ she cried, crumpling on to the floor beside him. When he tried to speak with a distorted mouth, she knew what it was.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Mum. It would have happened if you’d been here or not,’ Naomi said as they waited in the hospital.

Naomi looked so like Ralf: tall and with his brown eyes, warm olive skin and the Levine nose, narrow and aristocratic. When she cried, her dark lashes looked so long and spiky, it appeared as if she was wearing false ones. Recalling how Ralf used to call her Bambi when she was little, Eleanor began to cry.

Afterwards, the rehabilitation centre were so very kind to both Ralf and Eleanor.

The speech therapist warned Eleanor that Ralf might never recover his speech totally.

‘That’s fine,’ Eleanor said loyally. ‘As long as I have him with me.’

But it wasn’t so straightforward. Eleanor would have taken Ralf and loved him no matter what the stroke did to him. For him, it was different. The doctors had told them both about speech and language difficulties, about memory loss and difficulty learning new things. They’d spoken to both Ralf and Eleanor about this: there was no sense of telling her alone because the man beside her was no longer able to comprehend. There was no doubt that Ralf understood. His eyes followed her about the room when he sat in the wheelchair in the apartment. Tried to speak to her but the words came out jumbled up.