What She Wants (15 page)

me up because I haven’t declared that I’m not entitled to a married person’s tax allowance any more?’

After a year of not bothering, Virginia had made scones on the morning of her husband’s first anniversary. Her sons were coming to Clontarf for the day and she didn’t have anything in the house. The boys ate the scones with thankful smiles on their faces, grateful that their mother was finally coming out of the tunnel she’d been in. Virginia was astonished how easily she slipped back into her role of gracious hostess. On the outside, at least. She wondered if it had been she who’d died, how would Bill have coped? Would he have spent a year in mourning, worn down by grief and unable to take an interest in anything? Their first grandchild had been born just eight months ago, an adorable poppet named Alison who had her parents - Virginia’s eldest son, Dominic, and his wife, Sally - in thrall. Virginia had been godmother and managed to get through the christening service dry-eyed, despite crying inside at the thought of how happy she’d have been if only Bill had been with her. ‘He is with you, Ma,’ Laurence, the sensitive one, insisted. ‘Dad’s still here, watching over you.’ But he wasn’t with her. That was the hard thing. Virginia didn’t bother telling Laurence that his words of comfort did no good, he wouldn’t have understood. She’d gone to church all her life and yet now, when she needed it most, the very idea of God and the afterlife had deserted her. There was no sense of Bill anywhere except in her memory. She couldn’t feel him in the room with her, she took no comfort in going to church and talking to him. He was gone. It was over, that was it. And that really was the most awful part of her grief. That was why she’d sold the house in Dublin six months ago and swapped the suburban calm of Pier Avenue for a rambling old house in Kerry. The boys had been upset at first, Laurence had said she couldn’t run away. But Virginia

had told them she wasn’t running away: she just needed to start again, in Kerry, where she and their father had come from all those years ago and to where they’d always had this distant dream of returning. They’d both been farmers’ children, madly keen to get away. Kerry had seemed like the back end of nowhere when they were young. In their fifties, though, Bill and Virginia had thought they might like to retire back to where they’d come from, a place that didn’t seem anywhere near as dull and quiet to them now as it had when they were younger. They’d never been sure whether they’d go back to their homelands near Tralee where only a couple of relatives now lived, or whether they’d start again somewhere else in the county. Somewhere without second cousins once removed living down the road. Bill’s death made the decision for Virginia. She would sell the house and move to Kerry but far away from Tralee. She couldn’t face living near where they’d grown up, places redolent of their courtship and awash with memories of the first time they’d met at a dance in a small parish hall. No, that would be too painful. When she saw the advert for Kilnagoshell House in Redlion, a long way from Tralee and yet still in Kerry, her mind was made up. In May, fourteen months after being brutally thrust into widowhood, Virginia had up sticks and moved to the small Kerry village where she knew nobody and where, she hoped, nobody knew her. The rambling old house was in a good state of repair but could have done with some decoration as the previous owners were very keen on flock wallpaper and swirly, seasickness carpets. The wash hand basins installed in the bedrooms for the B & B guests didn’t suit the grand old house but Virginia had done nothing to restore its beauty so far. She felt weary enough from simply moving in. She didn’t have the energy to decorate or even remove the numbers on the bedroom doors. Besides, she had the rest of her life to do it, she thought sadly.

The boys were still getting used to the idea. Relief, Virginia felt, was a part of it. They had felt guilty with their interesting lives in London (Dominic and his wife, Sally) and Dublin (Jamie and Laurence) while their mother grieved in her suburban semi. She knew that Jamie and Laurence had shared a rota whereby each tried to visit her every couple of days, keeping in contact by phone the rest of the time to make sure she hadn’t downed a packet of sleeping pills in misery. Now she was hundreds of miles away, the duty visits would have to stop, which would be better for all concerned. She’d meant to give away most of Bill’s possessions when she moved, but she’d found herself unable to throw out his clothes. And thinking of the pleasure they’d given him, she hadn’t thrown out his precious clubs. Now she held Bill’s driver in her hands and tried to remember the all-important grip. Was it too late to take up golf at the age of fifty-eight? Bill would have loved her to. Maybe he could see her, was grinning with that irrepressible twinkling grin of his to see her holding his clubs in that professional manner. She liked the idea of Bill grinning wherever he was. The bell rang. Virginia raised her eyes to heaven. Tourists, she’d lay a bet on it. Kilnagoshell House had been a noted bed and breakfast establishment in the past and people with fond memories of it kept turning up on the doorstep, smiling and wondering if she had a double with bath for two nights and ‘do you still make that lovely black pudding for breakfast?’ When she’d moved into the house four months ago, she’d smiled apologetically in return, saying ‘sorry, no, it’s not a B & B any more.’ Now, she felt like throwing burning tar out the top windows and yelling ‘leave me alone!’ every time a fresh influx of visitors arrived with their five-year-old B & B guidebooks and hopeful expressions on their faces. It was beyond her why the owners had sold up in the first place. Judging from the amount of walk-in custom they were getting, even

in October, they could have run a hundred-bed hotel and still be busy. She put the driver carefully back in the golf bag and walked round to the front door where a gleaming people carrier was parked. Four people were standing on the gravel. One man was stretching aching limbs and another was hauling bulging suitcases from the vehicle. A small, dark-skinned woman was peering at a guide book, reading out bits in heavily-accented English, while a taller woman looked over her shoulder. ‘Can I help you?’ inquired Virginia. ‘Excuse me for not phoning,’ said the woman with the guide book. Italians, Virginia thought, judging by that lyrical accent with its exotic rolling consonants. ‘We hope you have rooms we can rent tonight.’ ‘I’m afraid this isn’t a bed and breakfast any more,’ Virginia said apologetically polite in spite of herself. The foursome looked crestfallen. ‘We have been driving for so long,’ said one of the men tiredly. ‘There is another place you can stay in the village,’ Virginia offered and went on to tell them about Mrs Egan’s De Luxe B & B down the road, just the other side of Redlion. No, it wasn’t in the guide books but if they needed somewhere in the locality, Mrs Egan would definitely have rooms. She felt sorry to be turning them away; they looked exhausted and she was no longer sure if it was fair to direct people to Mrs Egan’s premises. She’d met Mrs Egan in the butcher’s and hadn’t liked either the way she ordered the cheapest rashers for her breakfasts, or the way she snapped at the butcher himself, a friendly giant of a man who didn’t deserve to be given out to because he’d forgotten to put aside a leg of lamb for her. From what the constant stream of visitors said to her about Kilnagoshell, Virginia felt it had been a welcoming place where nothing was too much trouble and where the

owners wouldn’t have dreamed of giving guests fatty, cheap rashers for their breakfast. The foursome wearily packed up their belongings and waved at her as she watched them drive away. Virginia waved back, thinking that she mustn’t look quite as decrepit as she felt if these people wanted to stay with her. In her mind, she was still light years away from the tall, handsome Virginia Connell who’d always been perfectly dressed, not a silvery grey hair out of place as she helped out in the local Oxfam shop. That Virginia was the old one. The replacement was darker, sadder, with hollows under her hazel eyes and pain etched on every inch of her fine-boned face. She didn’t bother any more setting her thick hair in the gentle waves that managed to look so elegant: she tied it back in a taut knot. But that would have to change. She’d lived as a recluse for long enough and if she was to put a tentative foot back into the real world, she needed to look normal instead of like some loopy old dear with Miss Havisham tendencies. She closed the garage and went inside to the kitchen to pull on her walking shoes and old waxed jacket. The waxy smell always reminded her of Oscar. He’d been such a darling little dog, a soft fawn coloured spaniel with velvety ears and a melancholy expression that made him look like a dog from a chocolate box. Every weekday of his life at half eight in the morning, Virginia had taken Oscar for his walk and when the weather was wet, she’d worn this very waxed jacket. Oscar had only to see it to go berserk, circling her feet with delight, barking and bouncing deliriously. The jacket still smelled of him. Virginia still tortured herself with the thought that if only she’d kept walking him after Bill’s death, Oscar might have still been alive. It was her fault, all her fault. With enough exercise, Oscar wouldn’t have been so keen to escape the garden and run out onto the main road. She was glad that her local vet had offered to bury his silky little body in their plot in the mountains, otherwise he’d have been buried in the garden

in Pier Avenue and she hated to think of the new owners digging him up in some garden revamp and dumping him. ‘Get another dog, Mum,’ Laurence had advised. ‘You and Dad always had dogs, you need one. It’ll be company for you; go on, you really should.’ But Virginia wouldn’t dream of it. A dog was something to care for and she was far too afraid of losing anything else to commit to any new responsibilities. As it was, she was possessed of a great fear that something would take the boys, Sally or baby Alison away from her. A fat tear fell onto the jacket’s worn corduroy collar. Virginia wiped her eyes fiercely. She wouldn’t cry, she wouldn’t. She’d go for her walk and try and forget Oscar. She walked briskly down the avenue, past the beech trees with their glorious russet leaves. The last glow of autumn was still everywhere; trees and bushes holding onto their golden leaves, the single copper beech still a fiery bronze in the middle of the silver birches. In another month, the landscape would have changed totally, Virginia knew, with banks of leaves underfoot and every tree stark and bare against the hills. But for now, it was magnificent. She crunched through a stretch of road strewn with chestnuts. The boys had loved chestnuts, she thought fondly, picking one up and rubbing it until it gleamed like mahogany. Onto the main road, she marched firmly towards Redlion. Her house was a mile from the village and she’d decided that she should walk there and back every day, if only to buy a newspaper. It was all too easy to bury yourself and see nobody. She liked Redlion: it was quaint and somehow untouched. The winding main street, called, for convenience, Main Street, probably looked much the way it had fifty years ago, with small terraced houses on either side interrupted only by shops and pubs. There were three pubs, rather a lot for a small town, tourists were always saying in surprise. Virginia knew from experience that visitors were fascinated by the number of pubs in Irish towns. She remembered a friend of

Bill’s from London being astonished by that. They’d taken him on a short trip down to Kilkenny and he’d kept remarking on the fact that they’d driven through several tiny hamlets that consisted of a scattering of houses, but which still managed to support two pubs. ‘How do they stay in business?’ he’d asked Bill in bewilderment. Bill had laughed his warm, deep laugh and told his friend that he was in Ireland now and the usual rules didn’t apply. ‘There are different sorts of pubs for different people,’ Bill explained. ‘The old farmers might use one because it hadn’t changed since they were lads, and the younger people might go for another one with music and bar food. Real ould pubs only serve drink and cigarettes, you see. At the first sign of music, bar food or young women in short skirts, the ould fellas would take their custom elsewhere.’ Madigans in Redlion was a real ould pub in Bill’s definition of the word, Virginia thought. With its red and white lettering over the door and an elderly Guinness sign hanging outside, it looked like the pubs of her childhood. On her walks, she’d often seen men in heavy boots, farm clothes and old caps ambling in for a quick lunchtime pickmeup of porter. Her father, who’d been a farmer, had been fond of the odd lunchtime drink himself and she reckoned he’d have liked Madigans, which was the sort of place where you could happily go in with your trousers held up with baler twine and nobody would pay you the slightest bit of attention. The only part of the experience that required utter and complete attention was the pouring of the pint, which could take ten minutes of the barman’s loving art, meaning that wise drinkers ordered the next pint a good fifteen minutes before they’d need it, giving it that much needed time to settle. The Widows, on the other hand, was a modern phenomenon complete with a bar food menu as exotic as you’d find anywhere. It had traditional music nights, quaint Oirish interior decor straight out of The Quiet Man, and a proprietor

who understood that money in the pub business was trying to please all the people all the time. Virginia had been in there a couple of times and had marvelled at the modern take on an old-fashioned idea. Virginia had never walked as far as the third pub, which was right at the other end of the village over the humpbacked bridge. That would be her mission today, Virginia resolved: to walk right through the village. It would make it a longer walk, certainly three miles all told. She passed the painted sign that told her Redlion was twinned with a French town she’d never heard of. Redlion wasn’t at its best in the lashing rain but on a clear autumn day, the village was pretty and somehow timeless. Virginia walked past the chemist with its big side entrance for animal foodstuffs, past a row of whitewashed houses with a brightly painted blue one in the middle, and along past Lucille’s, a fashion emporium with a window display that changed weekly and was always wildly glamorous. This week, Lucille was showing off low-cut tops and mohair sweaters with an animal print theme. The centrepiece was a fake fur coat in dramatic leopard print with a matching Russian style hat. Virginia resolved to watch out for the ensemble at Mass. She wasn’t quite sure who actually bought any of Lucille’s extravagant outfits, but she knew she’d recognize anyone who did at fifty paces. She walked on, keeping her eyes trained firmly on the distance in case she met anyone on her side of the street. People were very friendly, always smiling and saying hello, but she didn’t want to get dragged into friendships, and answering a simple ‘isn’t it a grand day?’ could be disastrous. Replying would mean a full-blown conversation and she didn’t want to talk to people, she wanted to be left alone. It wasn’t hard today. The village was quiet. At this time of year, the tourists were few and far between. But Virginia knew that once Easter came, the place would be crammed with people stopping at the Widows for a plate of smoked salmon and a blast of traditional music. They clambered out