The Honey Queen (39 page)

She walked into the conservatory part of the kitchen, picked up a large marmalade cat from his spot on the window seat where the sun was gilding his fur, carried him over and deposited him on Meredith’s lap. ‘This is Marmaduke, obviously,’ Angelique said.

‘Obviously,’ said Meredith, astonished that she could joke.

She stroked Marmaduke gently, letting the calmness of the house soothe her, until Angelique put a cup and saucer of tea and a plate of shortbread biscuits, along with milk and sugar in front of her.

‘Take lots of sugar,’ said Angelique briskly.

She settled herself in a chair nearby.

‘Now, I’m going to spend five minutes telling you a story I haven’t told anyone for a very long time, and then you’re going to go away and wait till I phone to say if I’ve sold your clothes or not, right?’

‘Right,’ said Meredith, startled.

‘Years ago, before you were born I’d say, I was married and myself and my husband were in all the gossip columns. He was handsome, charming –’

Meredith smiled at this vision.

‘– and a cheat in every respect,’ finished Angelique. ‘When my daughter was three, he stole money from his father’s firm and ran off with his father’s secretary. He left me with no money, a huge mortgage and no hope of getting a penny out of him.’

Meredith stared at her.

‘I got by,’ Angelique continued, ‘by concentrating on my daughter and holding my head up. Yes, I felt hideously foolish to have fallen for him in the first place. And yes, it was all over the papers because people love reading about other people’s misfortunes. Nothing makes us feel more secure in our lives than knowing someone is worse off, apparently. I didn’t think it would ever end, but it did. Now, you need to do exactly what I did, Meredith. Concentrate on something you love and hold your head up. It will end one day and nobody will remember much about it except you and the other people who were conned.’

‘But it’s all gone—’ began Meredith.

‘The money?’ said Angelique. ‘You can earn more. Find what you love doing and do it. That heals the soul – it’s what I did.’ She gestured at her surroundings. ‘I would have lost this house, but by turning it into a second-hand clothes shop I found a way to hold on to it. Be inventive. You’ll think of something. And you’re only down when you think you are. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Now, that’s my advice.’

She produced a notebook and a silver pencil from a pocket. ‘Tell me your telephone number and I’ll phone you.’

Meredith obediently recited it.

‘Let yourself out when you’re ready, darling,’ Angelique added. ‘I’m going up to look at the clothes.’

Meredith drank her tea and ate two biscuits, all the while looking around at this beautiful home. She’d never heard a word of a scandal involving Angelique and yet, it had clearly been the cause célèbre of the day. Maybe there was some hope for her after all.

I
t turned out that having a weekend by herself wasn’t as much fun as she’d imagined, though Frankie had been full of enthusiasm when Seth and Lillie announced the time had come to visit their mother’s people in Kerry.

‘What a wonderful idea,’ she said. ‘You need to see everything, Lillie, understand what Ireland was like then.’

But Frankie wondered how Lillie would cope with seeing her mother’s grave. Perhaps it would add to her grief for her husband, Sam. Or maybe, Frankie reasoned, it would bring home to her the greatness of the loss of the mother she’d never known.

People handled things very differently, although from what she knew of Lillie, Frankie wasn’t sure if either scenario fitted the circumstances. Still, she wasn’t going to expect too much. Seth’s mother had been a wonderful person but perhaps Lillie didn’t appreciate that just yet.

Frankie was looking forward to having the house to herself – or the basement to herself, she thought grimly.

Lillie and Seth headed off on Friday morning and weren’t due back till Monday afternoon. Once they were gone, Frankie resolved to make the most of having the house to herself. She decided she would start by taking a walk around the whole property to look at exactly what needed doing and consider how it could be done on the cheap. It was the only option. She couldn’t bear to live in this squalor forever.

When she thought of the beautiful, albeit much smaller, house she and Seth had sold to move into this dump … Well, no point thinking about the old house now. They’d been mad to sell it. Mad and caught up in a dream of gracious living in a big old house and a big old garden, the two of them happily gardening side by side on sunny afternoons. It had been a stupid dream.

On Saturday morning, she’d woken early, thrown on some old clothes and, armed with a pen and her trusty notebook, she’d marched upstairs to inspect the disaster area she and Seth now called home.

If anything, walking through the house made her more miserable than ever. The previous owner had certainly had an eye for ugly wallpaper. Either that or there’d been a job lot of disgusting mustard paint on offer the day he called in the paint shop. All the rooms’ woodwork were painted the same horrible, cat-diarrhoea colour.

How had they been so oblivious to the horror of it all? She remembered those early days when Seth had showed the building plans to anyone who’d even vaguely expressed an interest. And they’d been such beautiful plans, too. Seth really was a marvellous architect. Never sacrificing function to form and never overspending, understanding that people did not want to be bankrupted by the wild dreams of their architects.

She knew of one man in his office, a horrible man who’d actually been kept on, who was the master of making people spend at least twice what they’d planned to in the beginning. That was probably why he hadn’t been let go. He’d winkle money out of anyone.

She went back downstairs and sighed as she looked at the basement anew. Seth’s plans for this part of the renovation had been particularly clever: an unashamedly modern extension leading into a kitchen/dining area with huge glass walls. It had been fabulous and now they were far too broke to even think about it. But maybe, just maybe, she thought, looking round with new eyes, there were things they could do that wouldn’t cost too much.

Lillie had insisted that Dessie, their garden miracle worker, could do the heavy work, knocking down partition walls and ripping out sinks and things. Apart from some replastering and new plumbing, the place really just needed to have every wall stripped and everything painted. It was do-able, Frankie thought with mounting excitement. Seeing the way the garden had turned out had made her feel more cheerful about the prospect. Yes, the work would be painfully slow if they did it themselves, but they could do it. The fine furniture they’d need for such a house was off limits for cost reasons, but they’d get there eventually, furnishing rooms one by one as they got the money. It could be a labour of love.

But by Sunday the exhaustion was back, and with it the doubts. When Gabrielle rang to see if they might be free to come over for lunch, she leapt at the chance to get away from Sorrento Villa for a few hours.

‘Would you mind awfully if I came on my own?’ pleaded Frankie, longing to see Gabrielle. ‘The others are down the country looking up old relatives and I need you to myself so I can talk all this stuff off my chest. I’m more cheerful about the house, though, if that’s anything. I’m beginning to think that we could do it ourselves. Seth and Lillie have done such good work in the garden, you wouldn’t believe it. The house would take forever, but still.’

‘You sound so much happier,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Of course, come on your own, darling. We can have a proper sis to sis talk,’ said Gabrielle. ‘One o’clock, then. I’ll tell Victor he can go fishing.’

Parking her car in the driveway of Gabrielle and Victor’s wisteria-covered cottage with Georgia, the spaniel, barking madly at the car, Frankie realized with sudden clarity that
this
was what she’d wanted all along. This small but pretty house with its lovely gardens front and back and the sense that once inside the gates, you were in a different place of calm beauty.

If only Sorrento Villa looked like this, she’d be able to cope with anything, even this bloody menopausal darkness.

The hall contained the usual mess of coats draped over the banister. Frankie’s niece, Cameron, now twenty-one, was sitting on the stairs and talking volubly on the phone, pausing only to blow Frankie a kiss. She was a lanky, equally blonde version of her mother, dressed in the same sort of trailing T-shirt and tight jeans combo as Emer, and Frankie felt at once desperately lonely for her daughter.

Despite Skype, both her children were gone from her and it was so hard to deal with. The empty nest was the wrong description for how their leaving had made her feel. The ripped-apart nest might suit it better.

‘I’ve just made soup and salad,’ said Gaby once they were in the kitchen, but all thoughts of lunch were abandoned when Frankie suddenly burst into tears.

‘Sorry, I did say I was happier. Don’t know why I’m crying. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ she sobbed to her sister.

‘Is it difficult having Lillie there, do you think?’ Gabrielle asked, wisely.

Frankie shook her head. ‘It’s actually proof of the old adage about another woman keeping a couple together. Not,’ she said hastily, seeing Gabrielle’s eyebrows lift, ‘that Lillie is the
other woman
. It’s simply that having her around creates a buffer between Seth and me. She’s fitting into the whole place so much better than I am,’ Frankie sobbed. ‘I love Redstone and could see myself swanning down to the village with a basket on my arm, buying organic vegetables and waving hello to the butcher. Now, it’s Lillie who’s doing it. Everyone loves her.

‘She’s palled up with the woman who owns the hair salon,’ Frankie went on, ‘and the people at the bakery. She helps this old lady who can’t get out much, and she’s in cahoots with just about everyone, from the fellas at the bus stop to some fifteen-year-old girl whom she keeps telling me is “an old soul” because she’s so wise.’

Her sister listened sympathetically as Frankie poured out all her troubles.

‘She says she’s started work on the garden because she doesn’t want to take advantage of us – and you have to come to see what they’ve accomplished, because you wouldn’t believe the transformation. We have a lawn and shrubs, and Seth is booked in to do a beekeeping course. Lillie’s like this angel coming in and fixing all the problems.

‘She offered to move out for the rest of the time she’s here, but Seth won’t hear of it. “You’re my sister and you’re staying,” he told her. He wouldn’t mind in the slightest if I pushed off,’ Frankie finished miserably.

Gabrielle looked at her sister, stunned by the outburst. She’d never seen Frankie so sad or so unsure of herself.

‘Don’t assume it’s all over just because you’re in the middle of a difficult period,’ she said. ‘All marriages need work.’

‘Yours doesn’t!’ said Frankie.

Gabrielle rolled her eyes up to heaven. ‘’Course it does,’ she said. ‘You’re shocked because this has never happened to you before, but we all go through difficult times. You’ve just been too busy up to now to have things lose their shine. Marriage takes work.’

‘That’s just it,’ said Frankie. ‘I don’t think Seth wants to be married to me any more. I’m so bad-tempered, and I was hopeless when he was made redundant. He wants out, I can tell.’ Then she burst into tears again.

Away from the lovely elegance of Maple Avenue, Lillie found the wild landscape of rural Kerry very different. As a true Australian, she’d travelled far around her beautiful homeland. When the boys were teenagers, she and Sam had taken them on a never-to-be-forgotten trip to the Outback. The photographs, a couple of which she carried with her, still made her smile. There, land stretched out an infinite distance, broken up by nothing but gum trees, with a vast horizon reaching into the pale, pale blue sky.

Seth had kept to the main road to begin with, with glimpses of houses and side roads that were not unlike Redstone and Maple Avenue. But then they had turned off into a series of winding narrow roads lined with hedges made of briars, brambles and trees.

‘What happens if you meet another car?’ she asked curiously. ‘There’s no way to get past.’

Seth grinned at her. He seemed at home, more relaxed, in this rugged, mountainous landscape.

‘When that happens,’ he said, ‘one of you has to decide to go backwards. The people around here are used to it. The roads get narrower than this, believe me.’

Today was only the first part of the journey. Their mother had been brought up on a remote farm on the Beara Peninsula, a beautiful rocky place where the Atlantic lashed against the coast. Here the roads were even narrower and they were as likely to meet a tractor as another car. To Lillie, used to the concept of vast open farming, where sheep and cattle roamed over thousands of acres, the tiny, rocky fields with their rusty five-bar gates were very strange.

‘It must be hard to make a living as a farmer here,’ she said, looking around.

Seth agreed. ‘I wouldn’t want to do it myself. Even the cows don’t have a lie-in on Christmas Day and Saturdays.’

Lillie laughed. ‘Tell me, what was it like when you visited here as a child?’ she asked. ‘It must have been so different from your life in Cork, so …’

‘Alien?’ he offered. ‘Yes, it felt strange. But my mother,
our
mother, was so at home here, and that was enough. I fitted in because she fitted in and she made it all work so easily.’

Lillie was silent for a while as they drove. The hedges were growing sparser, and soon they were replaced by stone walls that didn’t appear to be held together by cement or mortar. The land seemed perilous, inhospitable, dotted with the same grey rocks that made up the walls. Like the trip to Seth’s old home in Cork, all this was helping her think of her mother as a real person now. Before she’d come to Ireland, Lillie’s mother had been a distant, far away person. Like a phantom or a fairy in a children’s story.

Now Lillie thought of her as real, a flesh-and-blood woman who had such strength of character she was able to make her shy and sensitive son fit in when they visited from the city. The image Lillie had carried around all her life of a frightened, scared young girl who’d been forced to give her baby up receded a little. What had her mother really been like? How had someone raised in this desolate landscape been both frightened enough to give up her child and strong enough to go through with it?