The Honey Queen (49 page)

‘I’m glad,’ Kathleen whispered.

‘She couldn’t come to the phone herself, but she asked me to phone you when she went into labour and she has. She gave me your cell phone number and I’ve rung that, but you didn’t answer.’

‘It’s on silent a lot,’ Kathleen said. ‘In labour? The baby’s coming?’

‘Yes, but everything’s fine. It’s a few days early, but you know babies. They come according to their own schedule.’

Fifi sounded so happy, so cheerful.

‘Is she in the hospital now? Who’s with her?’ asked Kathleen.

‘David and Opal,’ Fifi went on. ‘I don’t know if you’ve met Opal,’ she added tactfully. ‘She’s David’s mother. Peggy’s in good hands; Opal’s a very comforting person to have around. She was the one who was with Peggy when her waters broke, so she went with her in the ambulance.’

On the other end of the phone, Kathleen was clutching the receiver very tightly.

‘Peggy’s going to be fine, I promise,’ said Fifi, mistaking Kathleen’s silence for anxiety.

But Kathleen’s silence came from another place: a place of huge sorrow to think that her daughter was going to give birth with another woman by her side.

‘Kathleen!’ came a roar from the kitchen. ‘Who is it?’

She wasn’t sure where the strength came from. Certainly, she’d never had it before, not for all the years that Peggy and the women at work had been telling her to leave Tommy Barry before he wore her into the grave.

‘Can you give me your mobile number and tell me the name of the hospital she’s gone into?’ Kathleen whispered.

In the kitchen, she poured out Tommy’s tea and gave him a big slice of the fruit cake he’d decided he liked more than scones these days. It took longer to bake than scones, but it was worth it if it kept him happy.

Then she left the room and went to their bedroom with her mobile phone. Stored on it she had the number of Carola Landseer.

Carola was at her book club and couldn’t really hear properly because of all the talking.

‘Sorry, Kathleen, what?’ she roared.

‘I want to know if you meant what you said about helping me leave Tommy?’ hissed Kathleen, head half in the wardrobe so her husband wouldn’t hear her from the kitchen.

‘Dear God,’ said Carola, and Kathleen knew this was a prayer of thanks. ‘I said it and I meant it. Will I come now?’

‘Yes, please.’

It didn’t take her long to pack. She hadn’t many clothes and the precious memories of Peggy’s childhood were all in a box in Peggy’s room. Kathleen put them in another suitcase, along with some of the ornaments she’d collected over the years.

There was so little of her in this house, really, she thought. She’d always been too scared to buy things in case Tommy got angry. She’d feared his anger so much: it was almost as if his anger was a physical presence in the house, making her fearful and afraid to live.

But what sort of mother would let her only daughter give birth and stay away, purely in case her husband got angry with her? Tommy would get angry no matter what happened or didn’t happen. She would not stay around to witness any more of it. She was going to her daughter. As to what would happen afterwards … hadn’t Peggy offered her a place to stay? There was a way out of this life and she was taking it.

When Carola drove up, Tommy, unaware of what was going on, opened the door and gave one of his polite nods. Kathleen had long suspected that he was afraid of the tall, graceful woman, who now swept past him into the house, giving no heed to his, ‘What’s going on here?’

Kathleen was in Peggy’s room, looking around one last time.

‘Only three suitcases?’ said Carola in the commanding tones that made her such a successful chair of local charities.

‘Not much, is it?’ said Kathleen, shaking inside. Tommy had followed Carola into the room and was looking at Kathleen in amazement.

‘Tommy, be a good man and put these in the back of the car,’ commanded Carola.

Tommy did exactly as she’d asked. It took two trips and each time he left the room, Carola and Kathleen smiled at each other.

Then Carola took Kathleen by the arm and led her firmly from the house.

‘Where are you going?’ demanded Tommy.

Kathleen was shaking visibly now. He’d kill her for showing him up like this in front of the posh Mrs Landseer. But Carola had a good grip on her arm and she gave it a reassuring squeeze.

‘Get into the car, Kathleen.’

She opened the passenger door and handed Kathleen and her handbag in. Then she shut the door and clicked the lock shut with her keys.

From inside, Kathleen could hear her speaking.

‘Your wife is leaving you, Mr Barry, and if you attempt to contact her or frighten her in any way, I shall be in touch with the police. I took the precaution of phoning them before I came here tonight, by the way. I have also informed my brother, who runs the family law firm. He tells me that he would be delighted to take on your wife’s case.’

Suddenly, Tommy became reanimated.

‘What case?’ he blustered. Inside the car, Kathleen winced.

Carola Landseer stared contemptuously at the man she had loathed since the first time she saw him verbally abusing his poor wife in the supermarket. That had been years ago and ever since, she’d spoken to Kathleen every week, telling her that if ever she needed to leave, to just phone.

‘My brother hates bullies, Mr Barry. It will give him great pleasure to see you ripped asunder for the way you have treated Kathleen. Please go inside your house and shut the door now, or I will phone the police.’

She held up her mobile phone. ‘It’s a moment’s work, Mr Barry.’

Tommy Barry glared at the car but his wife was looking down at her own mobile phone and was sending a text to the number Fifi had given her:

Tell my dear Peggy that I am on my way with my suitcases. She’ll understand. Kathleen.

Carola went to the driver’s side and stood with the car locked until Tommy lowered his eyes and went meekly into his lonely house and shut the door.

Only then did Carola unlock her car, hop into the driver’s seat and drive off.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ whispered Kathleen.

‘You’ve been so brave,’ Carola said. ‘You’re braver than a hundred lions.’

‘I don’t feel it.’ Kathleen felt something strange on her face. She reached up. She was crying. She never cried. Not any more. Crying was too dangerous because she always felt as if, once she started, she’d never stop.

‘Teddy’s going to drive you to Cork. He’s got to hand a paper into college by tomorrow, anyway. He’ll take you wherever you need to go. He’s not a bad driver for a twenty-four-year-old, I promise you.’

Kathleen reached over and put her hand on Carola’s.

‘I can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done.’

‘No,’ said Carola. ‘
You’ve
done it, never forget that. Now make that call.’

Kathleen picked up the phone Peggy had sent to her all those months ago and rang it.

‘Hello?’ said a male voice.

‘Hello,’ whispered Kathleen. ‘This is Peggy’s mum, Kathleen, could I speak to her?’

‘Yes!’ said the man eagerly. ‘I’m David, Mrs Barry. I’ll put you on to Peggy.’

There was some talking and then the noise of the phone being handed over.

In the delivery suite, just after the most horrendous contraction, Peggy Barry picked up the phone.

‘Mum?’ she asked tremulously.

‘I’m on my way, love,’ said Kathleen Barry. ‘I’m with Carola now. I’ve left your father. Carola’s son is going to drive me to Cork to be with you. I love you.’

‘Oh, Mum,’ said Peggy, clutching the phone in one hand and David’s large hand in the other. ‘I love you.’

Cathy Kelly is so friendly and such good company that it is ignoble to entertain the question that we have learned to ask about every celebrity: can she be as nice as she appears? Yes, she can, according to all reports. Kelly does not have, in that old-fashioned phrase, ‘any side’ to her. When she talks about her close and uncompetitive relationships with contemporary women writers, and when she explains that she finds it rewarding to mentor aspiring novelists, she is genuine.

This generous spirit is what readers respond to in Kelly’s fiction. Because she began her career at the time when ‘chick lit’ by young women writers was in vogue, she has sometimes been associated with that genre. But really her books, which have sold many millions of copies all round the world, are not all about finding Mr Right, but about friendship, resilience, and learning how to change. The warm atmosphere of her novels is closer in tone to the work of Maeve Binchy than it is to that of the writers whose names tend to be embossed on Day-Glo covers. ‘I don’t think I ever fitted quite into the Chardonnay thing,’ is how she puts it. Yes, the heroines in her first novel were looking for men; but one of them ended up on her own, with her children – a most unglamorous choice, some would think. ‘I would find a 20-something, chick-litty novel almost impossible to read now,’ Kelly says.

False starts

Kelly always wanted to write novels. Like many aspiring writers, she had a few false starts, one of them a plan she and her mother concocted to write a Mills & Boon novel. Like many others, they discovered that it was a lot harder than they had expected.

‘My mum had done a writing course, and I’d read plenty of Mills & Boons when I was growing up, so we decided we’d do it. We had a second-hand typewriter with a dodgy “e”. I’d go to college, and when I came home she’d have written in a notebook, in absolutely appalling handwriting, something like, “Heroine goes into room”, and then in brackets, “(Describe room)”. The heroine worked in the hotel business, about which we knew absolutely nothing.

‘I have no idea how two people can write a book together, it’s beyond me. So of course we couldn’t do this desperate thing. And then, hilariously, my father decided that he was going to write a Mills & Boon too, because his father had written songs. He’d never even read one.

‘Then, when I was in my early 20s, the news editor of my paper told me about someone he knew who was allegedly a scout for publishers, and they were looking for writers. I met this guy, who turned out to want clogs and shawls novels. I doubt very much if the industry ever worked like this, in fact I’m quite sure it didn’t, but I went home very excited. I did loads of research, but I didn’t read those sorts of books, and after a while I realised that I couldn’t do it.

‘I made the mistake of telling everyone about it. So for two years people kept asking, “How’s the book?”, and I’d have to say, “I’ve written about two pages”.

‘So when I finally started writing properly, I thought, “We won’t do Mills & Boon, we won’t do clogs and shawls: just write something that you’d want to read.” That was the only way to go.’

She worked for 13 years at the
Sunday World
in Dublin, and ‘loved’ journalism, mostly. ‘I was hired as a news reporter, and I was an appallingly bad news reporter, because I was quite shy – you wouldn’t think it now! My friends had been nerdy, bookish kids, who are exactly the wrong kind of people to be tabloid journalists. I hated asking people emotional, personal questions that I would have found hurtful. Sometimes, you need to put your foot in the door, and it would kill me. I’d go back to the office – there would have been some horrendous tragedy, and I’d have had to talk to the people involved – and they’d ask, ‘What age were the victims?’. I couldn’t ask those questions. Sometimes I’d lie, and say that I’d asked that question but that people didn’t want to answer.

‘But I liked writing features, on subjects like poverty, and prostitution, and child abuse. I was interested in the stories behind the news stories, in the people. I think if I’d stayed in journalism I’d have been someone who crusaded in a particular area.’ She also worked for a while as an agony aunt.

Starting out

The discipline of journalism helped her when she came to write novels, ‘Because you have to sit down and work – someone would say, “We want 400 words – yesterday!” The difficulty I found was that I’d come into the office after writing at the weekend, and I’d find it very hard to get back into writing a 400-word story, with a short snappy intro and a joke at the end.’ But, having learned how to get on with writing rather than agonising over it, she was able to write her novel in the evenings, after work, and at the weekends. It was no hardship, she says. ‘I’d say to myself, “I’ll just write for half an hour”, and three hours later I’d still be at it. I worked in an open-plan, small living room and dining room, on a second-hand kitchen table, and on a second-hand computer. My beautiful dog would be on the couch, wanting another walk, and it would be 10 o’clock at night. It was a wonderful escape.’ (After the death of this dog, a Labrador called Tamsin, Kelly dedicated her novel
Best of Friends
to her.)

A friend of Kelly’s knew someone at Poolbeg, the Irish firm most associated with the ‘production line’ mentioned earlier – it had published novels by, among others, Patricia Scanlan, Marian Keyes, and Sheila O’Flanagan. Kelly sent off the novel, ‘long before I had finished it’. Three months of silence ensued. ‘I thought, “I must be an idiot, and this is just confirmation of the fact”. My friend said, “Ring them”. I said, “If they had wanted the book, they would have rung me”. Anyway, in the end I did ring them, and they said, “We liked it, yeah”. Poolbeg sold the British rights to Headline, which was later to publish O’Flanagan’s novels too.

This first novel was
Woman to Woman
, about two friends, one of whom discovers that her husband is having an affair, while the other, unmarried but with a gorgeous boyfriend, learns that she is pregnant. Two further novels followed before Kelly decided to leave journalism to become a full-time writer; she also moved from Poolbeg and Headline to HarperCollins, which in the past 11 years has published 11 books by her, all bestsellers.

Writers are, on the whole, a competitive crowd, jealous of the successes even of, and sometimes particularly of, friends. But Kelly’s generation of novelists appears to be immune from this trait. Kelly and Marian Keyes are particularly close: Keyes, who has suffered a well-publicised battle with depression, clearly has found Kelly a supportive and cheering friend, while Kelly has gained from Keyes encouragement in her writing.