The Month of Borrowed Dreams

by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  Finfarran hadn’t been strange to her: she’d holidayed at Mary’s bungalow every summer since she was a baby. But the thought of living there permanently had been a shock. Her mum and her nan had never got on brilliantly, and Jazz herself had always been a daddy’s girl. Besides, divorce was something that happened in other people’s families. Up to then she’d seen her parents’ marriage as rock steady. In the end it was Mary who’d made a pot of tea, sat down, and tried to explain things. But Jazz could tell she was floundering through a mass of half-truths and lies.

  It was Eileen who’d made St Enda’s bearable. Her assured air when she’d sauntered up and introduced herself had made Jazz assume she’d been sent officially to mentor the new girl. It hadn’t seemed likely that she was just being kind. Later on Jazz had discovered that assurance and kindness were Eileen’s defining characteristics. Shyer, quieter personalities found her overwhelming, but Jazz had her own streak of assertiveness fostered by an equally privileged background. So, in time, they’d found a balance.

  Eileen had been the perfect friend for someone screwed up and stroppy. Being cheerfully involved in her own affairs, she asked no intrusive questions, and a total lack of imagination meant that her instinct for kindness was never subverted by fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. And, unlike many of their schoolmates, she lacked the sense of tribalism that, at the start, Jazz had frequently fallen foul of. Instead of taking umbrage when the new girl dismissed camogie as a weird game for savages, Eileen had cornered her after school and asked if she played tennis. She had a court at home, she’d said, and a spare racquet. And if Jazz wanted to borrow some kit she had masses of T-shirts and shorts.

  The Dawsons’ home five miles out in the country had become an unlooked-for oasis in a desert of confusion. While Mary Casey’s bungalow was full of hidden tears and suppressed fury, Eileen’s house, with its shady lawns and tennis court, reminded Jazz of her grandparents’ home in Kent. JohnJo Dawson and his fat, chatty wife were nothing like Granny Lou or Grandpa George, but they were cheerful and hospitable, happy to let their daughter’s friend come and go as she pleased.

  Actually, her arrival had been a godsend for the Dawsons. The tennis lessons Eileen had from a coach each Wednesday were part of an attempt to live up to the house JohnJo had bought as an emblem of his success. So were the drinks parties on the Dawsons’ boat in Ballyfin marina, and the afternoon teas served by a Polish au pair. But few kids at St Enda’s played tennis, and biking five miles for a dainty sandwich wasn’t really their style. Back then, Eileen had needed a friend as much as Jazz did and, despite the differences in their personalities, her uncomplicated companionship had made them friends for life.

  As soon as the coffees and wraps arrived, Jazz put her elbows on the table. ‘Look, have you actually got your head around the practicalities of this wedding? Because it strikes me that by now I should be liaising on things with Aideen’s bridesmaid.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because otherwise, Eileen, it’s you and me doing the organising and Aideen having no say.’

  ‘We’re not organising. Not at this stage. We’re brainstorming.’

  ‘You texted to say we’re off to a wedding fair!’

  ‘Yes, but it’s just a fair. You know, champagne and canapés and lots of little goodie bags. It’s fun, that’s all. What’s the point of being engaged if you can’t have fun?’

  ‘But shouldn’t Aideen be having fun too?’

  ‘Well, of course, if she wants.’

  Eileen reached for her phone but Jazz stopped her.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to ditch the fair, and sit down instead with Aideen and discuss things?’

  There was a pause in which Eileen fiddled with her iPhone. Then she thrust it back into her bag. ‘Actually, I did ask Joe if he thought she’d want to come. He said she’s not the wedding fair type.’

  ‘If that’s the case, a fair isn’t the best point to start from.’

  ‘But who doesn’t like wedding fairs? She’d love it.’

  Jazz took a deep breath. ‘Well, if she would, shouldn’t you have asked her to come along?’

  ‘I thought you said I should cancel it.’

  ‘Oh, Eileen! What I’m saying is that double weddings are complicated.’

  ‘I know. I’m not stupid. Which is why I’ve decided we’re going to have a wedding planner.’

  Jazz blinked. ‘And that “we” would be you and Aideen, would it? You’ve asked her?’

  ‘Why are you being difficult?’

  ‘Because you’re not getting the point. You can’t just go round making decisions because you’re the one with the credit card. Can’t you imagine how Aideen might feel?’

  Eileen pulled a face. ‘According to you, I’ve got no imagination.’

  ‘In this instance you don’t need it. You just need to sit down and talk to her.’

  ‘Okay, you’re right, I will. The thing is, I don’t really know her. Look, the double-wedding idea was Joe’s, not mine. But I’m totally cool with it. And I know she’s going to love this wedding planner. He costs a fortune but apparently he’s brilliant.’

  ‘You’ve booked him already, haven’t you?’

  Eileen made wide, guilty eyes at her. ‘He gets booked up, like, centuries in advance, Jazz, I promise you. He’s got a regular slot on morning TV.’

  Chapter Eight

  The sun pouring in through her bedroom window filled Hanna’s wakening consciousness with dust motes dancing in light. The room was just big enough to take her double bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and a built-in cupboard. As she wriggled upright against her pillows, she could see a pile of Brian’s clothes folded neatly on the chair.

  The sound of a boiling kettle made Hanna stretch luxuriously. It was Sunday, the weather was gorgeous, and there was a whole day of idleness ahead.

  Brian appeared round the door carrying two mugs. ‘Tea here or shall we go outside?’

  Faced with a choice between two equally pleasant prospects, Hanna hesitated so long that he put her mug on the windowsill and climbed back into bed.

  ‘Oi, I was making my mind up!’

  ‘Yes, and in the meantime this was getting cold.’

  She took her mug and settled herself back against the pillows. The tea was made exactly as she liked it. Brian’s, she knew, would be brewed black and have several sugars in it, a legacy, he claimed, of a lifetime of tea drunk on building sites.

  At forty-eight, he was four years younger than Hanna, a disparity that had bothered her at first. Having been the focus of gossip as ‘Miss Casey with the broken marriage’, she hadn’t fancied the role of a divorcée who chased younger men. Though, in fact, it was Brian who’d done the chasing. Famously solitary and uncommunicative, he’d pursued her doggedly despite all her qualms. But, unlike Malcolm, he’d never been manipulative. Instead he’d waited with what Hanna now felt had been superhuman patience while she’d offered a million excuses before admitting that she was just scared. To find love again after all she’d been through had seemed incredible, and to believe that this was someone she could trust had required a leap of faith.

  And here they were a few years later, propped against pillows in the sunlight, established as far as Finfarran was concerned as an actual, official couple. Yet, even here, she clung to a sense of emotional and physical privacy, fiercely cherishing her reclaimed independence. Although she and Brian never discussed it, they meticulously avoided leaving personal belongings in each other’s territory. Whereas Malcolm would have felt challenged by this, Brian understood. His long years of solitude had become a habit, and autonomy was as important to him as to her.

  There were so many things they were happy to share, though. As she finished her tea Hanna asked if he fancied a day in the garden. ‘I was thinking of digging a new ridge for the spuds.’

  Brian placed his mug on the floor and crossed his arms behind his head. ‘Truthfully? I’d hate it. I’ve been dreaming of a boot-free, trench-free day all we
ek.’

  ‘Okay. How about a picnic on the beach?’

  ‘Now you’re talking.’ He pushed back the duvet and swung his feet to the floor. ‘Maybe I’ll skip a shower and settle for a swim.’

  Hanna got up and reached for her kimono. ‘Have a shower while I chuck together a picnic. You can’t go out unwashed on a Sunday. What if we met a priest?’

  He pulled her close, loosening the belt she’d just tied and drawing back the coloured silk to plant a kiss on her shoulder. ‘We’re past praying for by this time. Imagine what your great-aunt Maggie would say if she saw what was going on under her roof.’

  Hanna laughed. ‘For all you know, Maggie Casey could have been a right goer. She certainly didn’t have much time for the priests.’

  His arms tightened, and Hanna briefly touched her forehead to his collarbone. Then she pulled away, retying her belt, and told him to have his shower. ‘If we go back to bed now we’ll miss the best of the day.’

  ‘That’s a value judgement. I’m not sure I share it.’

  ‘Well, be that as it may, bugger off to the bathroom. I’m going to root in the fridge.’

  As she cut sandwiches and packed fruit in the kitchen she could hear him whistling cheerfully in the shower. It was strange, she thought, how she relished the contrasts her new life had brought. The emptiness of this house when she was alone gave her almost as much joy as the warmth of Brian’s presence. Maybe because, when she’d first moved in, the house had been her fortress, a place where she could hide and lick her wounds.

  She’d made the move as soon as Jazz had finished school and left home. The years spent in Mary’s bungalow had been fraught with unspoken tensions, and the longing to get away had increased as time went by. The little house on the cliff had been derelict then, and the field was a wilderness, but at least they were her own. As a child she had dug potatoes and run errands for her great-aunt with no idea that the old lady would leave her the place in her will. As far as Mary Casey was concerned, the bequest had been more of an insult than a gift, but for Hanna, who’d almost forgotten she’d been left it, the house was a refuge, and the months of restoration on a minuscule budget had done much to restore the confidence she’d lost since her divorce.

  The drive to the beach took less than ten minutes. They left the car and sauntered along a sandy path between marram grass and thistles till they reached a place where folds in the rocks made a kind of ladder. It was a bit of a scramble down to the beach, but it wasn’t high and, provided you kept up your pace, it was safe enough.

  This side of the peninsula was less rugged than the other, where the stony inlets that fringed the base of the sheer cliffs were mostly inaccessible. Here the horseshoe bay enclosed a sloping stretch of golden sand with a flat spit of rock reaching into the turquoise waves. Towing Brian, who was carrying the picnic in a backpack, Hanna waded upwards through sand that streamed behind her, the shifting surface revealing a darker, colder layer beneath. When they reached the point where the cliff met the spit they sat down against a boulder. Drawing her knees up to her chin, Hanna brushed away the shining flecks that clung to her bare feet. ‘I never know why I bother to do this. They only get covered in sand again, as soon as one moves.’

  Brian pushed a folded sweater behind his head. ‘Did you really dance on the spit with seals when you were a kid?’

  ‘Well, we jumped up and down and waved our arms to spook them. I told you. We wanted to hear the splashes when they lumbered into the sea.’

  ‘And there was me seeing a selkie dancing on fairy foam.’

  When Hanna snorted he turned his head and looked at her. ‘Why not? Look at you. Huge grey eyes. Dark hair. Alabaster skin.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Anyway, selkies are Scottish, not Irish.’ As soon as she’d spoken, she felt rueful. Compliments always unnerved her, but why be so ungracious when he was being nice?

  Brian reached out and touched her cheek with his finger. ‘It’s true, though.’

  ‘Fairly middle-aged selkie.’

  ‘Selkies are ageless. Anyway, your beauty is in the bone.’

  ‘Not the alabaster skin?’

  ‘Not just that. And if you don’t stick some factor thirty on it you’ll probably end up freckled as a hen’s egg.’

  He raised his own face to the sun and closed his eyes with a small contented grunt. Hanna looked down at his lean body and smiled. Lazy days on the beach like this were one of the pleasures of having returned to Finfarran. There was never any pressure. A picnic with Brian meant lounging, swimming, and wandering about peering into rock pools, exactly as it had meant when she was a child. The sandwiches might get sandy, or a sudden shower might result in a scramble for shelter, but Brian, with his long limbs and sun-bleached hair, was very different from Malcolm, whose dark hair, sleek as a seal’s back, never got wind-tossed. When she’d been married and her weekends were spent in Norfolk, they’d often take friends out on a yacht from Great Yarmouth. But, back then, the proper attire for men had been polo shirts, guernseys, and peaked caps worn at a rakish angle, and the picnics had come in a hamper, carried aboard by the skipper. Malcolm had liked his pleasures well organised.

  Plaiting her hair at the nape of her neck, Hanna wriggled out of her jeans and shirt and began applying the sunblock. As she adjusted the straps of the swimsuit she’d worn under her clothes, she asked Brian if he’d ever read Brooklyn.

  ‘Nope. I saw the film when it came out, though. Why?’

  ‘I’ve just remembered the bit about struggling to get into togs under a towel in 1950s Ireland.’

  Brian laughed. ‘Before my time.’

  ‘Mine, too, as it happens.’ As she made a face at him she realised with a rush of pleasure that the difference in their ages had become a cause for laughter, not concern. ‘So, what, you just threw caution to the wind and didn’t care?’

  ‘As far as I can remember we went in for a lot of skinny-dipping. That was when I was prepubescent, though, so perhaps it didn’t count.’

  Hanna knew very little about his childhood. She’d gathered that, unlike Mary Casey, his mother had been self-effacing, a typical company wife who’d followed her husband around a series of jobs in oil companies abroad. The family home in Wicklow had been sold when his father was offered a placement in Dubai. Brian and his sister had been sent to English boarding schools at the company’s expense. According to Brian, who’d only been twelve, school was an endless round of midnight feasts and cricket matches, and he’d spent the holidays with a couple of aunts in England whom he’d adored.

  ‘But didn’t you miss your parents?’

  ‘Well, we flew out and saw them too. But, no. It was a great school – a sort of grown-up version of Jennings and Darbishire – and I’d never really seen much of my dad at all.’

  ‘Gosh! I can’t imagine childhood without my dad there as a touchstone. At home he always played second fiddle to Mary, but he and I used to sneak off together and have fun. We were friends.’

  ‘I had a master at school who served that function. We still keep in touch.’

  Following her train of thought, Hanna had frowned. ‘You know what I can’t imagine either? A father not wanting to be there while his son grew up.’

  At that point Brian had turned his head and, fearing she’d touched a nerve, she’d said no more.

  It had often struck her that Brian’s fierce sense of personal privacy must be rooted in his self-sufficient childhood. That and what had happened in his late twenties, when his wife of only a few years had tragically died of cancer. It was a blow so sudden and brutal that he hadn’t been able to cope. Irrationally, he’d gone to ground, locking his door and refusing to answer his phone. As a result, his fledgling architectural practice had lost a big contract. And, stricken by guilt, he’d sold his home, pushed the proceeds in an envelope through his business partner’s letterbox, and disappeared without leaving a forwarding address.

  Three or four years ago, when Hanna had first met him, he’d st
ill been working in a council job he’d drifted into in Carrick, overqualified, truculent, and as lost and confused as she had been herself. They’d both come a long way since then, though, and one sign was the extent to which he enjoyed his new job as Finfarran’s County Architect. Now, looking at the relaxed, suntanned figure sprawled on the beach beside her, Hanna remembered his former tension and the constantly wary look in his hooded eyes. If ever she doubted his love for her she had only to think of the day on which he’d told her the story of his past. She’d known as soon as he’d opened up how much it had cost him to share it, and that he’d consciously let down his guard that day so she could lower her own.

  Chapter Nine

  The piece of paper said ‘Mrs Khan. Tearoom. 3:30’. The woman at the desk read it out loudly, as if Rasher was thick.

  Rasher took it politely. When he’d heard about the halfway house he’d been warned that places here were like gold dust and you needed to spend your whole time saying thanks. Probably this woman with the frizzy hair and the flowery shirt didn’t have the authority to kick him out. She was only a volunteer, like Mrs Khan, who was coming to ‘have a chat’ with him. Still, he smiled and thanked her. You got used to hot showers and a warm bed and not being pissed on, so he didn’t fancy ending up back on the street.

  One of the rules was that you couldn’t wear a hoodie with the hood up indoors. Another was that you had to be bang on time when they fixed you an appointment. There were a lot of appointments, and most of the time they’d do your head in. Rasher had had an assessment the other day from a woman who wouldn’t believe he wasn’t a minor. When he’d shown her his passport, taking care to be cheerful, she’d gone off with it, saying she’d need to check his status. But he knew that was fine. He’d had his eighteenth birthday a couple of weeks earlier, so no one could try sending him back to his mum.

  You had a choice of whether you had your chat in the tearoom or a cubicle. It was a no-brainer in his case. Being cooped up in a little curtained space with Mrs Khan, whom he’d never met, would have been weird. Anyway, the cubicles reminded him of hospitals. All those afternoons spent hanging round on plastic chairs doing his homework while he waited for Mum or Dad to finish a shift. And later on, when Dad was dead and homework no longer seemed to matter, all those nights in A & E waiting for someone to patch Mum up before taking her home to get smacked about by her new boyfriend.