The Ballroom Café (3 page)

Roberta stood beside her and slowly placed her kettle on the gas ring. She patted the tight bun at the back of her head, humming a tune to herself.

Her china teapot on the tray, along with a small jug of milk and a spoon holding three cubes of sugar, Ella walked past her sister and out of the room.

No word was spoken between the two, but this was not surprising: no word had been exchanged between the two sisters in decades. Those who knew the sisters well were aware of the hard frost, thick and deep, between them. It had, at one time, been the source of extreme speculation, but as the years went by, the interest of others in the travails of the O’Callaghan sisters receded.

Ella, on the way back through the hall, slapped down a reply on the table.

You give up the booze, I will tell Iris to give up the cigarettes. Pigs might fly as well. E.

She settled back in the drawing room and sipped her tea. The hot drink warmed her and she turned off the last bar of the electric fire. She listened to her sister fuss around the kitchen, tidying up her things: each mug and plate in its place and her provisions labelled ‘R’ tidy and in a separate cupboard. She stayed on in the drawing room because it was, this morning, the warmest room in the house. On a walnut table, framed photographs of the sisters were smeared with greasy dirt. Happy days when they played tennis on the grass in front of the house and had day-long picnics by the sea. There were only two frames that were polished regularly: the wedding photograph of their mother and father and the wedding-day picture of Ella O’Callaghan and Michael Hannigan.

She touched the picture glass, remembering the warm summer’s day they had exchanged vows. Swinging around to the congregation, the light flashing on the aurora borealis stones of her Weiss brooch, those in the front rows had predicted a happy and long union. Small but exquisite, the brooch was a cluster of flowers with big petals made out in brilliant white cabochon stones. Smaller, delicately coloured, sparkling aurora borealis stones peeped through the gaps. She had picked this brooch because it was the first her father gave her mother.

‘Young and foolish,’ Ella muttered, impatiently wiping the glass with the end of her skirt before carefully setting down the heavy silver frame in its place. She noticed the stranger lingering by the front door. Sighing impatiently, she stuck her head out the drawing-room French doors.

‘Have you come about the job?’

‘What job?’

‘Come in; keeping the door open is making a draught run through the house. I need help in the café. God knows, I could do with a good pair of hands. Are you interested?’

Ella O’Callaghan stepped back so she could sweep the length of her visitor. Nice-looking. Her silly years were definitely behind her and she might have half a sensible head on her. Her jeans were faded, washed too many times, and her hair was too long for a woman her age; she would have to tie it back.

‘Ma’am, I’m not looking for a job. I’m on vacation. Is the café open? The lady in the post office said it’s very good.’

‘I don’t need big signs when I have Muriel Hearty. You are too early. I have only just got the buns and cakes out of the oven and the tables have to be set yet. A girl from the town promised to help this week, but she has skedaddled: more money cleaning out rooms in the fancy hotel off the N11.’

‘I can help.’

Nervousness made Debbie’s voice sound too high-pitched.

Ella flustered with her apron strings, her cheeks pinching red with embarrassment.

‘Not at all. It is easily done, only a few tables. Give me an hour, maybe less.’

‘If you’re sure. I waited tables during vacation at my local diner. A while back, sure, but it’s like riding a bike, isn’t it?’

Ella grimaced, as if she had heartburn.

‘It is a very kind offer. Just for this morning, mind. My name is Ella. Ella O’Callaghan.’

She held out her hand and grasped the other woman’s firmly.

‘From America?’

‘Yes, Deborah Kading; call me Debbie.’

‘Roscarbury Café has only been open a few weeks. Just a few tables in the drawing room, but we are doing nicely. If I could only find proper help, it could be magic.’

She walked over and pushed open the heavy cream door. The walls were a dull gold and a chandelier hung low over four small tables with lace tablecloths. A leather couch veined with age was pushed up against the bay window; bulky armchairs blocked the front of the fireplace.

‘It is simple, but the food is good and we give an extra cup of coffee on the house, which goes down well with the ladies after Mass.’

Deborah walked over to a side window draped in heavy gold brocade curtains and overlooking the rhododendron grove.

‘This is a very lovely place.’

‘Thank you,’ Ella said quietly and moved quickly towards the sideboard. ‘You will find all you need here. We only serve tea and coffee in the best china cups. They were my mother’s. I am not sure she would be happy with the women of Rathsorney turning them over every day, but needs must. Three settings per table. I will be in the kitchen. Shout if you need any help,’ Ella said, walking smartly from the room, tightening her apron at the waist.

The sideboard door was stiff, so Deborah tugged it, making a sweet-smelling mahogany cloud puff around her. Stacks of china cups and saucers were neatly tucked together, plates to the side. Each was decorated with lilac and blue thistles, the stems rough, contrasting with the delicate bite of the china rims. She walked between the tables, carefully placing each setting, her hand hovering over every cup as it rattled into position. She was pulling out a drawer looking for cutlery when Ella came back in with two silver platters of cake, crumbly warm, arranged in neat rows, and scones, buttered and laid out flat. Two big flasks of coffee and tea she placed on the sideboard beside the platters.

‘They will be along in the next ten minutes. The old priest races through in a rush back to his bed. We have time for a cup before they descend on us.’

Ella did not ask but took two china cups and poured strong coffee, the aroma curling past them, fading into the mustiness of the room.

‘Can you just do this: set up a coffee shop?’

‘I don’t know, I just did it; if we don’t get extra money in, the house will fall down around our ears.’

‘It is very brave letting people into your home like this.’

Ella snorted loudly. ‘Stupid, more like, but it is not as if I have much of a choice.’

‘I would never have the nerve. I’ve been a teacher all my life and getting up in front of classes full of teenagers doesn’t bother me, but I could never do this.’

‘Necessity brings out all sorts of hidden traits.’

Ella jumped up when she heard the sound of gravel scrunching under the heavy but swift steps of the twelve ladies who bothered each morning to rise to hear Fr Hurley stumble too fast over his words, his eyes heavy with sleep still and his hair tousled at the top of his head.

‘You pick the seat near the window; that is the best,’ Ella told Debbie, ushering her along gently as the mumble of women chattering got louder.

Ella pulled open the side French doors, greeting each woman by name. The cold of the early morning air freshed out the room, settling on the pleated drapes at the window.

Each took a cup and saucer and lined up at the sideboard to help themselves, nodding politely as they passed Debbie and squeezing in too many to a table, so they did not have to share with a stranger. Aware of her intrusion, Debbie slipped out the French doors when the hum of chat in the room lowered to a contented level. Strolling down a side path, she stopped at the stone fountain to light a cigarette.

There was a faded quiet about the place, which she liked. It reminded her of home in Bowling Green, a house lost on the outside but brimming with memories. What a fraud she was. Rob Kading would never have let her work in the diner. The skirts the waitresses wore were too short, the shifts too late. Mr Peabody from out of town grabbed the waitresses’ butts.

The ladies of Rathsorney were a loud lot; she could hear them still, the lilt of their conversation fluctuating with the importance afforded to each subject. Muriel Hearty’s shrill could be heard above all others.

‘There you are. I thought you had left.’ Ella seemed out of breath.

‘I was daydreaming.’

Debbie stubbed out her cigarette quickly with her fingers, flitting her hands through the air to break up the smoke.

‘Won’t you come back to the house? The girls are heading and we can have tea and cake in peace.’

‘That’s kind, but I should be getting along.’

‘Maybe another morning? I hope you will come to the café again, though at the moment we are only open until eleven. Until I get my permanent help sorted.’

‘I hope you find someone soon.’

‘Yes. Enjoy your holiday.’

Ella watched her for a few moments, sauntering down the avenue, before she turned back for the house. If she got a nice woman like that to help out, she just might be able to hold off the bank. Spying Roberta lurking at her bedroom window, Ella hurried to the back stairs so that she would not have to hear her sister slap down another note. Already this morning she had made the hall table shake as she banged down two red notes in quick succession.

Taking in strays now, are we? Our mother and father would be ashamed of you. R.

Muriel Hearty says you are the laughing stock as far as Gorey, with your highfalutin ideas for a coffee house. R.

Her head thumping with the silent fuming of her sister, Ella moved swiftly to her room and her dressing table. The crows were bickering in the high trees. Closing her eyes, she imagined it like she had done so many times, every detail just right: the buzz of conversation, the ping of china cups, the crunch of the gravel as people came and went to her café, the old house humming with life.

Reaching into the silver jewellery box, she took out the green brooch. Shaped like a pansy flower but coloured inky black-green, her mother grumbled loudly it should have been purple, yellow or even all black. Bernie O’Callaghan wore it once with her dark coat, but it was never accorded another outing.

‘I like a flower to look like a flower,’ she said, clicking her teeth in annoyance that her husband should have wasted his money on something she could not like.

Ella loved the Weiss pansy, the green stones glistening and the darker crystals shimmering, outlining perfectly the curved petals of the flower. The centre was black, except for one green crystal shaped like a teardrop.

John O’Callaghan, when he entered into correspondence with the Weiss jewellers of New York City, also thought the idea of a pansy in varying green hues was both beautiful and different. Mr O’Callaghan ordered two brooches a year, from Weiss, New York. The family-run jewellers were happy to post the small parcel care of Rathsorney post office, so that Bernie O’Callaghan never fully realised the lengths to which her husband would go to show her he loved her.

In all the years, Ella only wore the brooch once. Intent on keeping it for a special occasion, she lost her moment. The time came when the only significant event left in her life was the funeral of her husband. Just before his coffin was taken from the house, she pinned the brooch to the wide collar of her black swing coat. Those who saw Ella that day said she never looked so pale, stylish, heartbroken or so alone.

Even after her parents died, there was a delivery from New York, as if the love of John O’Callaghan for his wife was indestructible. Ella still kept those brooches in the same small cardboard box they arrived in.

Muriel Hearty had run up the avenue, her forehead furrowed; she was stuttering her words. ‘I got it in yesterday and I saw Mr O’Callaghan going down the street. Next thing I was distracted; I should have called out to him. I will never forgive myself.’

Opening up the brown paper and separating the two folds of the lid to reveal the two brooches carefully wrapped in white tissue paper, Ella took out the topaz and orange rhinestone brooch. It would have perfectly matched her mother’s new burnt-orange coat, the one she had bought in Gorey and was saving for her birthday. The brooch, with a circle of smoky topaz and dull yellow stones was highlighted with deep orange rhinestones, which radiated, like shafts of sunlight, from a central topaz. Held to the light, the orange stones sparkled.

It was the other brooch that Ella adored: a simple square of clear stones that, when trapped in the light, threw out the colours of the rainbow. It would have sat so perfectly on the floaty dress her mother had fashioned for the night of the choral recital.

She had felt an anger rise in her, that Muriel Hearty had not stopped her infernal gossiping and run after her father.

Ella had dispatched a postal order for the amount of the brooches and also wrote to Mr Weiss as to the tragic accident, which meant no further pins would be ordered by the O’Callaghans of Roscarbury Hall.

A month later, Muriel Hearty had rushed up the driveway of Roscarbury, again in an agitated state of excitement. ‘It is another box,’ she shouted.

Even Muriel Hearty had been silenced when Ella ripped it open to reveal not one but two exquisite black brooches. The letter of sympathy attached was graceful and dignified. Ella took out the second brown box and looked at the two brooches. At the time, Roberta declined to accept her one, and though Ella never wore hers these days, in the first year after the death of her parents, she found comfort in the pin, which was a simple black flower.

Pushing the box to the back of the drawer, she pulled on her heavy coat. Stopping in the front hall to take out a small compact from her handbag, she strained to see in the tiny mirror. Carefully she powdered her face, shoving her powder puff in the creases under her eyes, for a moment squashing her wrinkles so she looked like the young Ella with the big, some would say sad, eyes.

Banging the back door behind her, she waved to Iris, not slowing her pace, moving quickly through the back yard to the well-worn path across two fields and through a small wood, to the cemetery.