The Month of Borrowed Dreams

by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  ‘Smoked salmon.’

  ‘Yum. With potato salad?’

  ‘No, but I did make brown bread.’

  ‘And, while I think of it,’ Jazz turned back the flap of her bag to reveal a cardboard box, ‘I got cheesecake from the deli. A slice of salt caramel and one of Morello cherry. We can arm-wrestle for them, if you like, or chop them into trendy tasting-portions.’

  ‘Or, in my case, put some away for tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t be such a wuss! I bet you haven’t eaten since lunchtime.’

  Looking at her daughter’s slender wrists and the bony shoulders under her expensive T-shirt, Hanna wondered when Jazz herself had last had a proper meal. Sustenance, she suspected, had become a matter of sandwiches wolfed at meetings, and far too much coffee. But, at twenty-three, Jazz could still revert from competent executive to stroppy adolescent so, wary of saying the wrong thing, Hanna laughed.

  They drove in convoy through the streets of Lissbeg where the first of the season’s tourists were out seeking pub music. Then they made their way along country roads to the clifftop field where Hanna’s house was. It was after ten o’clock in the evening and the edge of every fluttering leaf was still clear against the sky.

  The low stone house with its little rear extension stood at the top of the field, its back to the road and its front door facing the ocean. The narrow plot sloped steeply down to a boundary wall beyond which a grassy path followed the curve of the cliff: the path was only a few feet wide and the sheer drop to the waves below was breathtaking. Rounding the gable end of the house, Jazz called over her shoulder, ‘It’s still a lovely evening. Shall we eat outside?’

  ‘A bit chilly now the sun’s set. Let’s take some wine down to the bench first, though.’

  In the distance gulls were coasting on the wind and the faint trace of the lost sun glimmered on the horizon. As Hanna fetched wine from the kitchen, Jazz wandered down the field and climbed the stile to the wooden bench at the far side of the wall. Following with the bottle and glasses in her hands, Hanna watched her daughter settle on the bench and tip back her sleek head. With her hair streaming sideways, tugged by the wind from the ocean, Jazz’s thin shoulders visibly relaxed as she raised her face to the sky.

  Later, having sauntered back up the field, they sliced salmon and brown bread, piled salad onto plates, and sat down to eat. In addition to the small built-on bathroom and utility area, Hanna’s house consisted of just two rooms: her tiny bedroom and this open-plan living space with its kitchen at one end, fireplace at the other, and a table under the window looking out at the huge sky.

  Squeezing lemon juice onto a sliver of salmon, she looked across at Jazz. ‘How’s Louisa doing in London?’

  ‘Fine. I spoke to her this morning. She’s been networking with investors. In a nice Home Counties way, of course, and interspersed with visits to John Lewis’s.’ Jazz buttered a slice of bread. ‘Gosh, this is gorgeous. I’d no idea I was so hungry.’ Taking a large bite, she spoke with her mouth full. ‘She doesn’t seem to be seeing much of Dad.’

  ‘But isn’t she staying with him while she’s over there?’

  ‘Mm. But she’s always out doing things. Bank manager. Chatting up contacts. All good stuff. And brilliant from Dad’s point of view because he doesn’t have to be bothered with her.’

  ‘Oh, come on! She’s his mum and he adores her.’

  Jazz made a cynical noise and speared a slice of salmon. ‘So long as she needs no attention when he’s otherwise engaged.’

  Hanna gave up. Jazz was right. Malcolm did love his mother, just as he loved his daughter, but essentially he was selfish through and through. Yet despite all the revelations and recriminations they’d been through and dealt with as a family, she still felt Jazz should be spared that unvarnished truth.

  Jazz shrugged. ‘Look, Dad’s a demanding little boy disguised as a high-profile barrister. I know that. Granny Lou knows it. We all do, Mum. It’s cool.’

  Recognising a warning to back off, Hanna said it was great that Louisa was lining up investors. Jazz added a squeeze of lemon to her salmon. ‘Who knew that she’d turn out to be such a sharp businesswoman? At her age! And how lucky am I that she decided to set up Edge of the World Essentials. I mean Granny Lou! Twinset and pearls and croquet on the lawn!’

  The company had been set up by Malcolm’s widowed mother, who’d decided her English country home was too big to live in alone. The decision had astonished Jazz, to whom Louisa had just been a granny. But Hanna hadn’t been surprised. She’d known there was far more to her ex-mother-in-law than her genteel appearance might suggest.

  It was Louisa who’d laid the social foundations for Malcolm’s stellar career as a London barrister by inviting the right people to the charming manor house in Kent, and creating a necessary network of obligation and support. It was a subtle process, requiring shrewdness, tact, and hard work. No one knew that better than Hanna, on whom the role had devolved as soon as she’d married. Giving up her cherished dream of being an art librarian, she’d spent most of her time supporting and advancing her husband’s career – until she’d found Malcolm sleeping with a woman she’d always believed was her friend.

  There was no doubt that Louisa was enjoying her new role in business, but Hanna knew that her taking it on hadn’t been entirely a matter of choice. Louisa could easily have retired in comfort on the proceeds of the sale of the manor, but instead she’d set herself the task of establishing yet another career. It was a duty as well as a pleasure, she’d told Hanna confidentially, crossing her elegant ankles and folding her hands in her lap: Malcolm’s disgusting behaviour had left Jazz rootless, and his late father would have wanted that put right.

  Jazz transferred a cherry tomato straight from the bowl to her mouth. ‘Oh, Mum, I never said. Dad’s put the London house on the market.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know. Weird. He must be having a midlife crisis. Louisa says he wants a flat in a glass box near the Tate Modern.’

  ‘But – he’s selling the house? How do you feel about that?’

  ‘Me? Fine. Why should I care?’

  Dozens of answers jostled in Hanna’s mind. Because it’s your home. The house you grew up in. Because you still have a room there – okay, a room where you probably keep three jackets and a hairbrush. But it’s your room. I painted the walls for you. I sang you to sleep there at night.

  It was she who’d found the tall Georgian house in the first place, and tirelessly worked to turn it into a home. She’d installed the oil-fired range in the basement kitchen and planted espaliered pear trees in the brick-walled garden, envisaging tea and sponge cake by the range on winter evenings, ice cream and lemonade on a sunny bench in summer.

  That work had been an act of faith in the first year of her marriage, after she’d miscarried a baby she and Malcolm had longed to have. She’d needed to believe she’d get pregnant again, and that next time things would be perfect. For months she’d scoured salvage yards, finding cast-iron baths and fire grates, a deep butler’s sink and cut-glass doorknobs. The reception rooms were hung with hand-printed paper, and the curving mahogany banister was sanded till it felt like silk, then polished with beeswax. It had taken nearly a year for the house to be ready, and by the time they moved in, Hanna had been in love with it.

  On their first evening there, she and Malcolm had wandered hand in hand till they came to the master bedroom, where Hanna had chosen soft grey fabrics to go with the sage-green walls. When Malcolm opened the door she’d seen a bottle of champagne in a silver wine cooler standing on the bedside table. He’d laughed at her astonishment.

  ‘Doesn’t it fit? It’s supposed to be Georgian.’

  It was, and it was perfect. As he’d poured the champagne, he’d told her how much he loved her, and the following morning he’d cancelled a meeting and they’d stayed in bed till noon.

  They’d been in their early twenties then, and it had taken eleven years and many tests and interventions be
fore Hanna conceived again. Yet she hadn’t become obsessive or disheartened. Instead she’d devoted herself to supporting Malcolm – caring for the house, where she threw networking dinner parties, and finding a cottage in Norfolk where his colleagues could come and spend relaxing weekends. In all that time she’d never questioned his love, or doubted that one day they’d have a child.

  She’d been sitting in the moonlit garden one night when Malcolm came home with a bouquet of white jasmine from Louisa. Hanna had breathed in the scent, and shown him the blurry scan she’d been given that day at the clinic. And together they’d decided to name their daughter Jasmine.

  Long afterwards, putting two and two together, Hanna had realised Malcolm’s affair had begun in the weeks when she herself had been choosing paints and fabrics for the London house. She’d found them there in bed together when Jazz was sixteen.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re worrying about me, aren’t you?’

  For a moment the vivid, accusing face looked exactly like Malcolm’s.

  ‘How many times do I have to say that you did the right thing? You found out Dad was a lying cheat so you grabbed me and whipped me off to Ireland. Okay, maybe it was a bit sudden, like The Bolter in a Nancy Mitford novel.’

  ‘Hang on, I was nothing like The Bolter. She was married about seven times!’

  Jazz giggled. ‘Whatever. It’s ages since I read the books.’

  ‘Where did you find them anyway? We didn’t have them at home.’

  ‘I dunno. I expect Granny Lou had them in Kent. Anyway, the point is that you made the right choice and it didn’t blight my life. And if I fussed a bit at the time, Mum, I got over it. So I wish you would.’

  Hanna hardly knew whether she felt like laughing or crying. Leaving Malcolm hadn’t been part of a conscious, responsible plan. She’d simply found him in her bed with Tessa Carmichael, one of his colleagues, and left for Ireland that evening with no plan at all. It was later that she’d discovered how long Malcolm had been cheating on her with Tessa, and realised there was no way back.

  But, whatever the provocation, plucking a teenager out of her home and school had been reckless. To make matters worse, she’d tried to conceal Malcolm’s betrayal from Jazz for far too long. Whatever Jazz might say now, the whole mess had been traumatic. And, no matter how much she’d wanted to, Hanna hadn’t been able to fix it: it had taken Louisa’s intervention, and the establishment of the business, to give Jazz her present sense of being rooted here in Finfarran.

  So, yes, she did worry, and often she felt guilty. But neither worry nor guilt had flooded her mind just now. Instead she’d seen sage-green painted walls, smelt beeswax, and remembered moonlight. The thought of her perfect bedroom and of blossom shining on the pear trees had, for a moment, blotted out all sense of the years in between.

  Chapter Three

  There was a movement by a clump of thistles in the ditch, and Jazz saw a pointed face blink in the spill from her car’s headlights. Pulling in at a farm gate, she switched off the lights and lowered the window to watch a badger cross the road a few yards up ahead. His powerful legs seemed too short for his heavy grey body, and his black-and-white face gleamed in the moonlight, like a mask. She knew he was aware of her because he’d turned his ponderous head as she’d stopped at the gateway. But he seemed untroubled by her presence. Instead of freezing or retreating, he continued his steady progress and, ducking his long snout into a mass of briars and nettles, disappeared into the farther ditch.

  It was a quarter to twelve and the night was so still that Jazz could hear the sound of cattle pulling grass in the field beside her. She was about to start the car again when a second stripy face appeared, framed by thistles, and with the same plodding concentration a smaller badger crossed the road at the same angle as the first.

  Jazz had read somewhere that successive generations of badgers would follow well-worn paths for centuries, steadily walking established routes despite obstacles and change. As far as she could remember, the underground systems they lived in were inherited as well. Hundreds of years of instinctive excavation must have gone into the tunnels that lay here beneath tarmac and turf. And this road probably hadn’t existed when forebears of the creatures she’d just seen had first stumped across what, by now, had become their ancestral territory.

  Pleasantly tired after her meal with Hanna, Jazz continued on her way home, still thinking about the private midnight world she’d glimpsed on the road. She wondered if new tunnels were dug when populations got bigger, or if badgers threw out extensions for the hell of it, like humans building conservatories and sheds. One thing she knew was that badgers’ tunnels and chambers could extend for half a mile and even more. They lived in clans and mated for life, though, so you could see why they’d like some elbow room in the home.

  Ten minutes later, when she got to the flat, she found Sam sprawled on the bed watching telly. He lowered the volume slightly as she came in. ‘Good dinner?’

  ‘Lovely.’ She walked round the silver mesh partition to put the box of cheesecake into the fridge. ‘God, I can hardly move in here, what’s all this?’

  Sam rolled off the bed and came to look. ‘That’s what we call washing-up.’

  ‘But couldn’t you have done it? And put it away, maybe?’

  ‘Sorry. It was just a tin of tomato soup. And stuff.’

  He tried to kiss her but she slipped past him, catching her elbow on the handle of a pan and splashing the front of her T-shirt. ‘Dammit!’

  This was the second time in a week that Sam had left a pan soaking on the hob, and plates and dishes piled up in the sink.

  ‘Oh, no! Really, Jazz, I’m sorry.’ He dabbed at her T-shirt ineffectually.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s fine. It’ll wash.’ With a determined smile, she went and sat on the bed, which was supposed to be folded away as soon as you got up. Kicking her shoes off, she glared round crossly. The studio flat had seemed rather sweet when she’d rented it, but now, with Sam here as well, it was just cramped.

  Most days they were both out working and didn’t get home till fairly late at night. But two days a week, when Sam worked from home, the place became chaotic. While Jazz generally cleaned as she went along, he let things accumulate. So, by the end of his days alone in the flat, there were papers and mugs everywhere, and half-eaten plates of food on the rumpled bed. But, to be fair, Sam was big and so was his laptop, far too bulky for a console table exactly the width of her own carefully chosen MacBook. The bed was really the only space where he could work.

  They’d met in Carrick, Finfarran’s county town, which was about twenty miles from Lissbeg. While the centre of Lissbeg had once been a muddy cattle market, Carrick had grown up at the feet of an Anglo-Norman castle, which, as time went by, had made it the focus of far more genteel commerce. It retained a sizeable medieval cathedral, and an imposing courthouse, now the county museum. But unlike Lissbeg, which so far had no chain stores, its Victorian shopping streets had disappeared behind the plastic fascias of coffee shops and computer outlets. And its slightly dilapidated Georgian squares and terraces were jostled on all sides by ribbon development.

  Yet, from Lissbeg’s point of view at least, Carrick still had notions. Its tourist office had grandly styled it the ‘Gateway to Finfarran’s Glory’, and its chamber of commerce doggedly attended international trade fairs at which companies considering relocation were wooed by promised local-government tax breaks. Jazz found the Lissbeg–Carrick rivalry pathetic, but she recognised there were nuances in the relationship, which, as someone born and raised in London, she’d never understand.

  On the day she’d met Sam, she and her friend Eileen had been having coffee in Castle Street, and he’d been sitting alone at the next table, checking his emails. Eileen’s dad owned Dawson’s AgriProvision, the biggest business of its kind in the west of Ireland, and, with his fortune made, he was about to splash out on a lavish wedding for his daughter. Jazz had been ch
osen as chief bridesmaid and they’d met in Starbucks to discuss the latest twist in Eileen’s plans.

  ‘So, hang on, let me get this right. You’re making it a double wedding?’

  ‘That’s the plan. Me and Joe, Conor and Aideen.’

  ‘But when was this decided? And why?’

  ‘Well, you know Joe and Conor have been running their family farm, right? And their dad’s been off work forever because he tripped over a cow?’

  ‘Not quite the story as I heard it, but yeah.’

  ‘Well, my dad has offered Joe a job in the Dawson’s office in Cork. Management, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Oblivious to the amusement in Jazz’s voice, Eileen had nodded. ‘Which would leave Conor struggling to cope on the farm.’

  ‘Especially as he’s also my mum’s assistant at the library.’

  ‘I know, and he’s been faffing about for ages, trying to decide whether to stick with farming or go off and become a librarian.’ Eileen, who’d caught sight of her own eyebrows reflected in the window, frowned at them sharply before deciding that they’d do. ‘Anyway, the thing is that the farm can’t just be left to die the death. I mean, that’s what Joe says and I do see his point. So he’s going to cover the cost of a labourer’s wages. And Conor’s going to chuck the library thing and choose life on the farm.’

  ‘And when you say Joe’s going to cover the cost of a labourer, you mean your dad is.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What does Conor think?’

  ‘He’s over the moon. Because this settles things. Plus they’ve been saving up for about a year to get married, so Joe said why not have a double wedding and do the thing in style?’

  ‘And you’re up for that?’

  ‘Oh, come on! Why wouldn’t I be? I’m not a total egomaniac.’

  ‘Well, I admit that “the bigger the better” has always been your motto.’

  ‘Aideen and Conor are dotes and they could never afford a big do.’ At that point Eileen had slammed back her chair and gone to fetch more coffee, and the violent impact on Sam’s table had caused him to look up.