The Honey Queen (13 page)

Words failed her again. She looked out of the window, curious to see the part of Ireland where she had been born. On the approach to the airport on the final flight from London, she’d had an aisle seat and hadn’t been able to see much.

Now, she could see that the airport was built on a hill and as they drove away, Cork city and county were spread out before her. ‘I don’t feel that now,’ she went on truthfully. ‘I feel as if this is something special, something that most people don’t get to experience. So let’s go slowly and try to appreciate it.’

Beside her, Seth nodded.

At first, they drove in companionable silence, Seth occasionally pointing out places, the way he did on family trips to the pretty seaside village of Cobh, where Frankie’s sister lived.

‘My wife’s parents live on the other side of the city, in Kinsale – it’s a resort town, very picturesque, and full of gourmet fish restaurants,’ he said. ‘They’re all dying to meet you, Frankie’s family. Her mother’s a real live wire. I think she has some plan to take you to Dublin on the train and show you everything there too. I said I was going to take you to Beara, where our mother was from, and then Madeleine, who comes from Dublin, said you can’t possibly visit Ireland without going there. Not just yet, though,’ he added, in case Lillie felt overwhelmed.

Lillie thought about it. She had an open ticket and she could go home when she wanted to. In another week, she might be up for a trip to Dublin. This wasn’t like home; Ireland was a small country where you could easily drive from one side to the other in half a day.

‘I think I’d enjoy that,’ she said. ‘And Beara. I definitely want to see where she – Jennifer – came from. I want to know what she was like, what your childhood was like, everything.’

It was so easy to say it now, and yet she’d been so full of angst beforehand. This slender man with the sad dark eyes was clearly far more worried about her feelings than she was. He was going out of his way not to talk as if Jennifer McCabe had been his mother first and foremost. He wanted to share her.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell you everything,’ he said, and then paused as if he had something important to say, something he’d rehearsed. ‘I was a bit nervous that you’d be angry because she gave you away, that maybe you’d resent me for having had her as a mother when you didn’t … ’

Lillie was sure it was one of the hardest things he’d ever said.

‘No,’ she said, shifting in the front seat so she was facing him. ‘I’m not angry. Those were different times, I understand that. My mum and dad in Australia explained it to me. I know things weren’t the way they are now.’

They were driving through the streets of Cork now, and Lillie looked around with interest.

‘I’d love to take you all over the country,’ Seth said, sounding a bit more relaxed. ‘We’ve got mountains, castles, fairy forts – but no leprechauns, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh darn it,’ joked Lillie. ‘And there was me thinking I’d go home with a little green-clad creature and a pot of gold.’

The tension was broken. Suddenly they were talking so fast they were practically gabbling. Lillie was telling him about her two sons and her grandchildren – his great nephew and niece. About Sam, the final days. How he’d have wanted her to go to Ireland. ‘People always say that when someone dies, don’t they?’ she said. ‘“This is what he would have wanted” … Truth is, no matter how well you know a person you can’t really tell what they’d have wanted. All I can say is, I know Sam is in my heart, always.’ She touched her chest. Turning to him, she added self-consciously, ‘You must think I’m crazy. All these years and suddenly you’ve found yourself with a crazy sister!’

‘I don’t think you’re crazy at all,’ Seth said softly, and he took a hand off the steering wheel, laid it on hers and squeezed tightly. ‘I’m just so glad you’re here.’

They talked and talked. Soon they were driving through streets where houses clustered close together and trees lined the roadside. Seth told her about his family, about Emer and Alexei, the smartest, most wonderful kids that two parents ever had. He talked about Frankie, the love of his life, the most wonderful woman in the world.

As he said this, he was conscious that while true, his words were also misleading. Frankie remained the love of his life, but things had been so tough recently. How could he say any of that to a woman so obviously in pain after the death of her own husband?

‘You’re going to love her,’ he said, determinedly cheerful. ‘Everyone loves Frankie. You’d love the kids too, but they’re both away until July at least. Alexei is adopted, by the way.’ He shot a sideways glance at Lillie.

‘You’ve an adopted son?’ she said, delighted.

‘Yeah,’ Seth nodded, beaming. ‘Full circle, eh? We tried so hard after Emer, then in the end Frankie didn’t think she’d ever get pregnant again and we decided to adopt instead.’

‘I can’t wait to meet them all,’ Lillie said. ‘My new family.’

They’d reached Redstone now. Lillie was delighted by the pretty crossroads and Main Street, with its huge sycamores leaning over the road.

‘The trees are one of the things that drew us to this area,’ Seth told her. ‘You don’t get many trees growing in cities and towns in Ireland. Unlike Melbourne – I’ve looked it up on the Internet,’ he said. ‘I spent a lot of time looking, trying to imagine what your life would be like, but you never can work out what other people’s lives in other places are really like, can you?’

‘Probably not,’ said Lillie, then as they stopped at the traffic lights by a pretty coffee shop, a craft boutique, and a beauty salon with the name Bobbi spelt out in regal lettering, she asked: ‘Have you always lived here?’

‘No. And that’s where it all goes a bit downhill,’ Seth admitted. ‘We saw an ad for the house, came to see it in September and fell in love. We moved in a month later, full of ideas about how we were going to do it up, but work was keeping me busy at the time. I was planning to manage the job myself, see to it that we’d get everything done at cost.And then a month later, in November, I was made redundant. Retrenched, I think you call it. No chance of finding another job with the economy the way it is.’ He shook his head. ‘So now we’ve got this beautiful, rather wrecked house and we can’t afford to do it up. I’m here all the time but I don’t have the expertise. A lick of paint here and there isn’t going to fix it up.’

Seth wondered why he was spilling his guts to Lillie. But now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop.

‘Every day, I plan to start on the garden but I look out and all I see is a wilderness – and not a nice sort of wilderness, if you know what I mean. It’s overwhelming,’ he said with a sigh. It was strange, finding he could tell Lillie things he couldn’t tell his wife.

‘I could help you with the garden,’ Lillie volunteered. ‘I love gardens. I’m at my happiest surrounded by my roses.’

‘You wouldn’t be surrounded by roses in our garden,’ Seth said as they drove through the traffic lights and took a right turn along a pretty terrace called Lavender Road. After a few moments of weaving through the side streets he announced, ‘This is it: Maple Avenue. Ours stands out because it’s the one that looks as if it’s been recently vacated by squatters.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Lillie, looking with interest at the once handsome red-brick façade. ‘I can see exactly why you fell in love with it.’ She sensed the distress behind her brother’s humorous comments and saw he needed to be comforted.

She thought how Sam would have hated to be out of work. How it would have affected him as a man and she could see instantly that Seth was the same. It was there, written all over his face. Seth Green was not a man who could hide things, she thought fondly, and she liked him all the more for it. Sam had been the same. Every emotion had been written across that broad, tanned face.

He’d spoken the truth about the house. Lillie could see that, in its day, it must have been a beautiful grand residence. It was built in old red brick – not the brash modern kind that hurt the eyes but the dusty, old type that called to mind pretty Victorian houses with roses clambering all over the porch. Clearly some type of plant had grown around the front porch here, but all that remained of it were dead branches and rapacious ivy. Still, there was no doubt in her mind that the house, and even the disaster area that constituted the garden,
could
be restored to its former glory but it would take lots of money or huge amounts of time. And yet, the house was lovely despite the lack of care: like an old, grand lady who’d once been beautiful and could be again, if only care was lavished on her.

Seth didn’t take Lillie up the steps to the front door; instead they descended a perilous, moss-covered staircase to a basement door which required a shove to open it. It led into a large basement flat that had been painted creamy white in an effort to banish the darkness. Frankie and Seth had obviously done their best with it, she thought as she looked around: everything had been repainted, and the walls were hung with colourful paintings and photos of the family.

Happy faces smiled out of the photos: a girl with laughing blue eyes and a cascade of streaky strawberry-blonde hair standing beside a lanky blond boy with a shy smile. Emer and Alexei, Seth told her. His wife was a stunning woman, almost as tall as Seth – and he was only an inch or so shy of six foot. Everything about Frankie, from the mass of curling dark hair to the glowing eyes and high cheekbones, seemed to radiate energy and vitality.

‘I’ll give you the full tour later,’ Seth said over his shoulder as he set her bags down beside the door on to the hallway and led the way into a big, low-ceilinged kitchen. It obviously doubled as their living room, because one end boasted two red couches and armchairs covered in floral throws set around a small wood-burning stove. ‘I’m sure you’re dying for a sit down. I’ll make you a cup of tea and then you can go and lie down for a nap if you like,’ he went on.

‘I don’t feel tired for some reason,’ Lillie said, wandering around, looking at everything. The house retained many of its original features, like the stately French doors that opened into the garden. She went across to them, saying: ‘Do you mind if I go outside?’

‘By all means. You must treat the place as your home, do exactly as you please,’ said Seth, busily filling the kettle.

Lillie turned the key and stepped into the garden, a long rectangle of untamed vegetation. At the end, she could just make out a stone wall with an arched gate built into it, probably the entrance to what had once been a peaceful retreat for the lady of the house a long time ago. There was no garden path, just rampant weeds, nettles and fierce brambles filling every inch as far as she could see, though some marvellous trees could be seen rising from the chaos.

Lillie breathed in the scent of earth that was at the same time familiar and yet different from the smell of her own garden at home. She could see why a non-gardener would be disheartened every time they looked out at this wilderness.

To her, the garden at least was fixable. Perhaps if she were to help Seth make a start on the garden it would give him a sense of purpose, restore his pride a little.

While they drank their tea, Seth showed her more photos.

‘Your family are beautiful,’ Lillie said, squeezing his hand tightly. ‘I wish Alexei and Emer were here so I could meet them.’

‘You will,’ said Seth confidently. ‘If not this time then next. If Emer’s still in Australia when you go home, she’ll go to see you. I think she’d have raced to Melbourne as soon as we told her about you, except that I wanted to meet you first. They’ll be back in July. Hopefully,’ he added. ‘I think Frankie’s scared they’ll be having so much fun that they’ll stay away for another couple of months.’

They spent the rest of the afternoon poring over family albums from when Seth was a boy, and he watched his new sister trace the contours of their mother’s face in the old black-and-white photographs.

‘You look just like her,’ he said, ‘maybe taller.’

‘I can’t imagine what it must have been like for her then,’ Lillie said wistfully. ‘I was never angry with her for giving me up because my parents, my adopted parents, they explained it to me. They talked about how there were plenty of Australian girls, too, who were shamed when they had babies without a husband. Can you imagine it – being made to feel like nothing because you’d brought new life into the world?’

‘What makes me sad is that I didn’t find out about you until now,’ Seth said. ‘That I didn’t get to know Sam and that you didn’t get to know our mother and that’ – she could see the tears in his eyes – ‘she kept this secret. How can you know somebody so long and they keep something of such great importance from you?’

Lillie laid a hand on his arm to comfort him. Despite her fears that she’d be consumed with bitterness towards him, she found herself instinctively reaching out to comfort him. The last thing she’d expected was to feel this sense of kinship with a complete stranger.

‘People keep secrets. And the longer a thing’s been kept secret, the harder it becomes to bring it out into the open. But the longer you live – and this is something I know all about, being older than you, my darling – the more you realize that the secrets aren’t important. It’s the love that’s important. She loved you. She loved me enough to give me away because she thought that was the right thing at the time. That’s all that matters.’

Seth studied his sister with her Celtic skin and its scattering of freckles. She had many wrinkles on her lovely face.

‘Signs of a lifetime,’ she said ruefully, realizing what he was looking at. ‘Plus too much time spent in the sun,’ she added. ‘They’re the lines of my life. I’ve got two best friends I go walking with and we joke about how we feel twenty-five until our knees start hurting. To me, the lines are proof of all I’ve learned. Viletta, now, she hates her wrinkles. She must spend a fortune on Retinoid or Retinal or whatever you call it.’

Seth looked blank.

‘It’s a cream that smoothes wrinkles,’ Lillie explained. ‘But I don’t want mine gone. They’re part of the package.’