by Cathy Kelly
Bess loved Edward but there was no point staying married to him if this was what their future was going to be.
She had gone into their marriage with her eyes open, hoping for a full loving relationship and now this battle royale with Jojo was there like a splinter between them and it wasn’t going away.
She didn’t know how to deal with it, he didn’t know how to deal with it. What hope was there for them?
All Bess could think was that if she left it till after the party, then she might know what to do. Just a few weeks to go till the grand event in Lisowen. If Edward was still vacillating then, there would be no place for him in Bess’s life. She might not be a genius when it came to decoding people’s emotions but she knew when to get out.
And then …? Then she might see if she had any relationship with her daughter that was worth repairing.
Amy had lost four whole pounds. It had been an absolute nightmare because she hated diets, they reminded her of all those years when her mother watched her calorific intake like a jailer watches a prisoner. But she had done it. She had loaded her plate with vegetables, emptied her cupboards of nice things and gone for three-mile brisk walks every evening, although her walking had been slightly impeded by the fact that she had kept looking at her phone every few steps in case Clive had texted her. That was the problem with going out with a married man: you kept waiting for him to ring or text or do something to say he was there, that he was thinking about you.
Sometimes Clive dropped in with only a tiny bit of notice, so she couldn’t very well walk too far. What if he arrived at hers and she was gone?
She solved that problem by walking around the small park near her apartment twice. It was a full three miles and it meant that she was never too far from home. Everyone in Met-Ro had noticed the weight loss.
‘Look at you, babe,’ said Seanie, one of the guys from the buying team. ‘You look fabulous.’
‘How did you do it?’ everyone else wanted to know.
‘Weight Watchers, Slimming World, replacement meals, what was it exactly?’
‘Hard work,’ Amy informed them, shimmering in the compliments and the new-found confidence.
She had been working on her hair too. She’d bought this special new spray-on stuff that made her hair glossier and sheenier so that when she blow-dried it in the morning, it fell about her face in beautiful auburn waves.
She’d had her eye make-up done in a department store, the type of thing her mother had being trying to get her to do for years. It was incredible the difference that putting on your eyeliner in a different way made.
Apparently she had been doing it in a really old-fashioned way for years and she thought that worked, but the make-up artist – who looked about twenty – had given her a slightly scathing glance and said: ‘Seriously, you are still wearing that? It’s very hard to do a smoky eye like that, especially at your age, especially if you’re not a professional. Don’t you have YouTube? They have demos on there.’
Amy had felt about a hundred at the time, but now, four pounds down with her hair glossy and her new make-up on, and a few YouTube make-up demos up, she felt fantastic. Love was the ultimate makeover tip.
She bumped into Clive in the elevator at work. It was one of those magical moments when suddenly they were both in it on their own, and she almost couldn’t breathe. It was like being in Grey’s Anatomy, with McDreamy in the same elevator as Meredith, and she waited for Clive to do something, the way McDreamy would do. Say something cute, grab her as if he wanted to haul her off to the doctor’s on-call room … Instead he grunted.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘What’re you up to?’
‘Er, just trying to get windows done. I’m going to the Drumcondra store in half an hour and then I’m home this evening.’
She said it eagerly, hoping he’d pick up on what she was saying. She was home every evening, but she didn’t want to appear too needy, too much like a woman waiting for her married lover to see her. Not that he was properly married, because he had explained that he and Suzanne shared a marriage of convenience, they were waiting for the kids to be a bit older. It was complicated …
‘Yeah, right,’ muttered Clive, looking down at the figures on the iPad in front of him. ‘The Drumcondra store is coming on well. Just, you know, do your best work.’
The lift hit his floor and he got out. Amy should have got out too, but she stood there silently, still a little stunned, as the doors shut noiselessly.
Was that it? Was that all he had to say to her? ‘Do your best work?’ Not caring about the new make-up or anyone seeing her, Amy started to cry.
Edward Brannigan sat in the traffic on the way home from the office and tried to concentrate but it was hard. His mind felt, bizarrely, as it had during that maelstrom of emotion he’d gone through when Lottie was dying. At that time, his mind had refused to work the clear-cut way it always had in the past: instead, it was muddied and dull and it felt as if nothing was right.
Now, in the midst of all this trauma, he thought about that blissful time when he had been with Bess first of all, when he felt happy, so happy after the pain of losing Lottie.
It had been glorious to be in love again, to feel loved, to have another body beside him in the bed at night, not a body that he watched disintegrate with the enormous grief that had accompanied Lottie’s passing.
Nobody could prepare you for that: the death of your beautiful wife.
No talks with doctors, no kindness from hospice nurses, nothing.
When the person you had adored for so long was being taken away from you by bloody cancer, there was no comfort. Edward had never thought he’d be whole again because it felt as if a part of him was dying too. And he couldn’t explain this to anyone.
Jojo, Paul, Mick, Nora, Kit: they had all tried so hard to be there for him and they were there.
Nora particularly. Nora and Mick.
He didn’t know what he’d have done without them at that time because Jojo had done her best to be strong, but she had been so close to her mother and she had fallen apart with Lottie’s illness.
But Nora and Mick … Despite himself and his pain, Edward smiled. They were amazing, the most incredibly together couple he knew, the perfect definition of a happy marriage.
He and Lottie had had a happy marriage, for sure.
They were very different: Lottie had been artistic, prone to wild enthusiasms for various projects, like her funny old Venus statue in the garden. He could remember her pure joy when the yogurt painting had transformed the statue into something covered in delicate green moss that made it look hundreds of years old.
That was Lottie in all her glory and fun and humour.
She had kept their home and their family together for so long and he knew he hadn’t been one of those men who took it all for granted: oh no. He’d thanked her, loved her, appreciated her.
Nobody could ever say that Edward Brannigan hadn’t appreciated his wife. No doubt about it, he’d been caught up with work sometimes and he hadn’t always been brilliant at being home on time, or even, probably, saying the right thing at the sight of the beautifully cooked meal she had on the table for him no matter what time he came in at.
But she’d flick her apron at him, often an apron covered with oil paint from a recent painting, and say, ‘Oi, Captain of Industry, the slaves need thanking!’ and he’d laugh, and say, ‘Sorry, really sorry. My mind was elsewhere, my love,’ and then he’d hug her, and his mind would still be halfway elsewhere but Lottie could cope with that. Total distance was what she would never have stood for but their love, complex and real, had allowed his mind and hers to race off in different directions to what fascinated each of them.
She had understood his drive to make Brannigan Engineering a big successful firm and she’d supported him all the way, the way he supported her art and her gardening, and any moment of madness in between.
And then, suddenly, she was gone. There was nothing to prepare a person for that. Not the pri
est at the funeral talking about how all the worries of the world were now gone from Lottie’s shoulders: how time, the thing everyone worried about most, didn’t matter to her now that she was at God’s side.
Edward had wanted to stand up at that moment during the funeral service and scream at the priest and say, ‘Time was not the biggest worry in Lottie’s life: worrying about her family had been the biggest thing, thinking of them, caring for them had been the important things, and just because she wasn’t there, if there was any after-world at all, she’d still be worrying about them.’
That was a problem with funeral services, certainly Catholic ones. Men who had never married or had children were expected to officiate over and understand the loss of a mother and wife to a husband and family, and deliver a sermon that made sense of that loss. These men had mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, but not children, not wives, not husbands.
Edward had raged internally against the funeral service but Nora and Mick had understood that, both of them had come to him after the funeral and laid a hand on him. It wasn’t Father John’s fault: ‘He’s a good man, he was just trying to say the right thing,’ Mick said gently.
Nora stood beside Mick, her hand soft on her brother-in-law’s arm in its dark suit and he felt comforted.
It was strange, Edward often thought, how he envied his younger brother Mick so much. Mick was a mechanic and had never earned big money. Edward had wanted to give him money over the years but Mick had stood firm. ‘If we need it we’ll ask,’ he’d say. ‘I am honoured by your kindness, Ed, but Nora and I like to do it our own way. Thank you, we appreciate it and if we need it, of course we’ll come to you.’
Nora was a woman in a million.
Bess, he knew, was a woman in a million too.
He had been so lucky to find her because he’d never thought he’d find any happiness after Lottie’s death and then she’d come along and he’d been able to laugh again.
He’d clutched at that with both hands, because he wanted to laugh, wanted to be happy, didn’t want to go home every night to a lonely house that reeked of the memories of other happier times.
If only Jojo understood that but it seemed she couldn’t.
Paul seemed to understand. Paul often phoned from New York and said: ‘Dad, I know it’s hard on Jojo but stay with Bess. She’s good for you, you need that. Jojo will come round.’
Yet Edward didn’t think Jojo would come round.
It was as if his marrying another woman was a betrayal too far and his beloved daughter could not cope with it. She couldn’t cope with the concept that life moved on and people were desperate to be loved, to feel comfort, to feel happiness – all the things that Bess brought him.
He loved Bess and he’d loved Lottie: what was wrong with that?
Was he supposed to choose between his daughter and his wife?
He didn’t know. It wasn’t a choice he could make and yet, if he had to, could he hurt Jojo any more than she’d already been?
Fourteen
‘Learn how to see. Realise that everything
connects to everything else.’
Leonardo da Vinci
Declan, twenty-four, sweet and green-behind-the-ears editor, swung himself into the chair in front of Cari’s desk and beamed at her.
‘So, what’s the story, Cars?’
He was the only person able to call her ‘Cars’ and get away with it. Partly because he was a delight to work with, eager to do anything no matter how boring, and partly because he insisted that people of his generation shortened all names and only boring old farts had a problem with it.
‘We’re texters. We say “gr8”,’ he pointed out. ‘You can’t be Cari, you’ve got to be Cars.’
‘Like James Joyce is JimJoy?’ said Cari.
‘Yeah, exactly.’
‘Heathen,’ shouted Cari, putting her hands over her ears.
Today, Declan – ‘call me Dec’ – was wearing a lilac dress shirt, purple tartan bow tie and a pair of beige jeans so skinny that Cari feared for his circulation. On his beanpole body, it all looked fine, though. Dapper, almost.
In his hands, he carried the latest slushpile: the unsolicited manuscripts that people sent in. Unlike many other publishers, Cambridge Ireland had a policy of accepting unsolicited ones and there were many people who’d set their hearts on becoming a writer, so that some weeks, the office received as many as twenty manuscripts.
In most publishers, different departments took different types of book but in a small publishing house like the office in Ireland, the editors coped with all genres.
He arranged the piles on her desk.
‘OK, I’ve divided them according to my tried and tested system,’ he said. ‘This pile’ – he indicated two – ‘are the ones where the writers use random capitals, say they are a cross between Scott Fitzgerald/ Maya Angelou/Beckett and say they don’t want to be edited because it’s all perfect.’
‘Only two?’ said Cari sarcastically. Sometimes in a month they got as many as ten people who felt that their work was already at such a high standard that the only thing required was for the publisher to print it up, jam any old cover on it, and ‘Hello, Booker Prize’.
‘This one is special,’ Dec added, pulling the top one off and handing it to Cari. ‘The lady is Irish, has never set foot in the US, isn’t a person of colour – important point, that – and yet she feels that her novel about a family living through racism in the Deep South during the Jim Crow years really works on an emotional level. Oh yeah, and she doesn’t read, either, which she thinks will help as she won’t be stealing anyone else’s ideas. Or “Ideas” as she puts it herself.’
‘Lovely!’ said Cari with insincerity. She never ceased to be astonished by the number of people who wanted to write books without having actually read any and who were wildly proud of the fact.
Cari glanced down the letter. ‘She can’t use the spell-check on her computer, either,’ she added, skimming. She put the letter back. ‘Definitely send those to Gloria.’
Gloria was their best reader, a retired editor who said she no longer had the energy to edit, and yet could always write charming notes to the more delusional of the would-be authors. Cari simply couldn’t do it any more because the people often wrote back, full of outrage, to tell her she was passing up the chance of publishing an award-winning, fabulous, bestseller! Plus, what did she know, anyway? Oh, and a plague on all her houses, while they were at it.
‘It might be a work of towering genius,’ Cari sighed. ‘Who knows?’
‘I did skim the first chapter and er, perhaps not,’ Dec said. ‘Zora Neale Hurston it ain’t.’
‘Now these’ – he pointed to the middle pile – ‘all sound intelligent and promising, many genres, all can use spell-check, and several of them awkwardly say they aren’t sure are they mad or not to be sending a book in at all.’
‘Give me that half of that pile,’ said Cari, reaching.
She loved letters where the author had anxiety about their work: it was the true sign of something that might be special, she thought. The people who couldn’t write for toffee and only had a passing acquaintance with the possessive case were always the ones who thought they were geniuses, deigning to send their book in before whisking it off to Hollywood where Steven Spielberg would be begging them for film rights, you wait and see.
‘This pile is crime.’ Dec paused. ‘I, er didn’t know if you wanted to see any crime because …’
‘Because John Steele dumped me like a hot potato?’ said Cari cynically.
Seeing Dec’s stricken face, she apologised. ‘Sorry. I’m just blowing off steam and you’re very kind. I love crime, always will. Give me that pile too.’
‘Which leaves me with the mummy porn,’ said Dec sadly, ‘and one fantasy/sci-fi thing, which is the first of a series, apparently.’
The last pile of scripts was enormous. The number of people desperately trying to recreate the success of the Fifty Shades series w
as exponential and Dec and Cari took turns in trundling through red rooms, purple rooms and nipple clamps, until Dec said he was never going to eat a mussel again because he couldn’t bear to think of what had been done to one in The Billionaire’s Purple Bedchamber.
‘OK, deal,’ said Cari, relenting. ‘Let’s split the crime and the mummy porn, and you do the fantasy as I’m the only non-Game of Thrones person on the planet.’
‘That’s not fantasy,’ said Dec, shocked. R.R. Martin was his absolute hero. ‘It’s, it’s …’ Words failed him. He simply could not describe R.R. Martin’s genius.
‘Whatevs, as you young people say. If you’re not keen on something, pass it along to Gloria, and if you are keen, pass it along to me, right?’
When Dec was gone, Cari arranged the pile of manuscripts and took five to take home that night. Some editors hated reading unsoliticted manuscripts but Cari didn’t. There was that buzz, a ripple that ran through you when you found the perfect one. Her mind ran, unbidden, to the time she’d first read John Steele’s first manuscript. The thrill, the sense of the hairs standing up on the back of her neck …
One editor she knew swore she felt almost orgasmic when she found a good book, a story the editor had subsequently blamed on all the wine that had been consumed at the conference when she’d told everyone.
‘I never meant it like that—’ she’d said, puce with mortification.
‘We know you didn’t,’ everyone else said, smirking.
Cari turned to her emails, flipped past ones she could delay until the next day, replied to one setting up a phone call with a writer who was struggling with a deadline – surprise, surprise – and then saw one from Gavin. Marked both urgent and with one of the little red arrows that indicated that it needed to be done immediately, if not sooner.
Sighing, Cari opened it.
‘Cari,
Can you send me editorial notes on last two John Steele books. I need them.