by Cathy Kelly
He pressed a button on his phone and got through to the assistant that he and two other editors shared. ‘Miriam,’ he snapped, ‘I need to get to Cork to see John Steele asap. Check out flights for me, will you? I’ll mail him, tell him I’m dropping in.’
Twenty-Two
‘May your choices reflect your hopes,
not your fears.’
Nelson Mandela
Faenia Lennox liked to travel light. But due to weather considerations, she’d decided that she’d bring two medium bags to Ireland, nothing too heavy since she was flying from San Francisco to LA, to get the direct flight to Dublin.
There were no sign of her bags on the baggage carousel in Dublin. No sign of quite a lot of bags and an airport person was being harassed by irate passengers as he passed.
‘Yours lost too?’ said PJ, the young man beside her at the baggage carousel in the airport who’d looked at Faenia’s exquisitely cut short white hair, tanned but wrinkled hands, and guessed she had to be about sixty. She was alone and he felt he should help. His mother had drummed into him that it was important to give up your seat on the bus to an older person and this lady – and everything about her shrieked lady – was obviously older and not strong.
‘I can travel long distance with just cabin baggage but this time, I put a couple of bags through because of the weather. In this country, it’s better to be prepared for anything,’ Faenia said with her usual warm cheerfulness.
‘So you’ve been here before?’ PJ asked, satisfied with this explanation. She was good-looking for a woman of her age, he thought, but then, in California, it was hard to tell anyone’s age.
Women in cut-off shorts and halters could look mid-thirties from behind and then turn around to show off elderly faces with large fake lips and pillowy cheeks.
But this woman wasn’t like that. She might be sixty, he reckoned, but she had a youthful, energetic sense about her. She was almost sexy, he thought: then felt shocked at such a notion. He was only twenty-three.
She could be his mother.
His granny.
She was glamorous like a movie star and all that, what with the soft caramel sweater she was wearing and those amazing eyes, bluey green, and they weren’t coloured contact lenses, he reckoned. She wore subtle make-up and there again, she was nothing like his granny, who had a perm twice a year and only took lipstick and Revlon powder out for weddings, funerals and Christmas.
‘I was born here,’ said Faenia, still cheerful, even though it was half six in the morning and to PJ, the flight from LA had felt like a trek across the universe that had taken a month.
The queue for the plane loo had been too big and frantic in the hour before they landed, so he hadn’t even got to brush his teeth.
This woman looked like she was ready for anything, with that glossy smile, interested eyes and some sort of tribal necklace yoke on her neck.
‘You don’t sound it,’ PJ said, astonished. ‘No trace of an accent. How long are you staying?’
‘I don’t know. A few weeks or more, maybe. You?’
‘Home to stay,’ said PJ, who was coming home from LA after three years and had all his stuff in a rucksack and a battered suitcase he’d been given by his friend, Miguel, who said loftily that he would never need it again because he was staying in Tinseltown, come what may.
PJ had wished Miguel luck but didn’t hold out that much hope.
Acting was not as easy as everyone said it was, as it turned out. Tips from his waitering jobs were what had made life better in La La Land, as his father had called it. Tips, the golden sunshine and the golden girls, but golden girls wanted to be actresses too and were not interested in Irish actors who’d had bit parts at home and no parts at all in Hollywood.
‘Oh, happiness! That’s one of mine,’ she said, as a nice brown suitcase, nothing fancy though, was flung at high speed from the baggage chute.
PJ hauled it easily onto her trolley.
‘Thank you. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for that. I’d have ruptured some bit of me if I’d done it. I’m Faenia Lennox,’ said the woman, holding out her hand.
‘PJ Tallon,’ said PJ.
They talked idly while the baggage went round.
A Louis Vuitton bag sailed past.
‘If I had one of those, I wouldn’t put it in the hold,’ PJ said with a certain longing in his voice.
He’d gone out with a girl in LA who had a vintage Louis Vuitton handbag and had lovingly cared for it as if it were a small pet.
‘People are proud of their nice things,’ Faenia said thoughtfully, as an over-made-up woman in murderously high heels and tight leather trousers struggled to get the Vuitton off the carousel. ‘And I think if they’re feeling a bit insecure, it cheers them up to see proof that they earned this expensive bag.’
‘We all feel a bit insecure from time to time,’ PJ said ruefully as his battered suitcase made it round to their spot.
‘Isn’t it lucky that you and I are so well adjusted that we don’t need fancy suitcases to cheer us up,’ Faenia said. ‘I’m being collected once I’ve got my bags. Do you need a lift?’
Faenia sat in the back of the silver Mercedes as PJ and the driver got the luggage in the trunk. No, she couldn’t say trunk any more. She had to remember the European words for things. Boot, that was it. Eighteen years in Ireland, nearly forty out of it and she’d entirely forgotten the lingo. At home – well, in San Francisco – people still said she sounded Irish and she used to tell them about the lovely village, Lisowen, she came from.
It had been years before she’d done that.
Obviously, darling Chuck had known all about Ireland and her flight to New York, so too had Marvin and Nic. She had never wanted any secrets from the people she loved. But many of her American friends hadn’t probed when Faenia gently deflected talk away from why she’d gone to the US at such an early age – and why she never went home.
‘Nobody left at home,’ she’d lied, and then felt a hollow emptiness at having lied so horribly.
There were people left at home but she was gone so long, had felt the guilt at having run off for so long, that she couldn’t go back.
Now, Isobel was using some magic to pull her back to Lisowen and the family.
But home was somehow still Ireland. Weird, that. She must tell Nic—
And then it hit her.
No Nic.
She had left one more message on Nic’s answerphone:
‘I love you and I want to be with you. It’s really up to you now, Nic. I’m going to be away for a while, so if you want to come to the house and get your stuff, work away.’
Faenia thought she might cry when she said that.
Nic would come and pick up the leftover things: clothes, books, whatever.
It was over. Who was she kidding with this last-ditch attempt at getting back together. She’d told Nic it was all or nothing.
Faenia was too old to settle for second best any more.
Once the bags were stashed, PJ and the driver settled into the car and PJ got into the reflective mood that hit people when home was only minutes away after entire years abroad.
‘My father will say I’ve wasted my time in America when I could have been in college studying business,’ PJ said wistfully. ‘He wants me in the family business, making it more commercially successful. He runs a builders’ suppliers. He wants to call it Tallon & Sons.’
‘And you don’t want to be the & Sons,’ said Faenia wisely.
‘No. Never did.’
‘You haven’t wasted your time in the States. No time spent anywhere is ever wasted. You’ve learned how to stand on your own two feet in one of the toughest towns around. You’ve worked, you’ve seen a bit of the world. You can find your own place, be happy to be home, tell them you’ve missed them and you can tell your dad what you’d like to do. Which is …?’
Please don’t say ‘more acting’, she thought. Having known many actors and lived in California for many y
ears, her opinion of acting was that it was similar to wanting to be a high-wire artist in the circus: better to admire from afar than actually put a toe on the wire one hundred feet above ground without a net.
‘It’s going to sound stupid,’ PJ said. ‘My dad would call it totally daft, but I’d like to be a drama teacher—’
Faenia beamed at him and PJ, thrilled to see someone approving, managed a hint of a smile back.
‘He likes what is safe and what he knows, but he also knows that you do what you want anyway. Hasn’t he had two years to get used to that idea?’ she said.
‘But when you’re home’ – PJ gestured out the window to a country that clearly looked familiar to him and like another planet to Faenia after living abroad for so long – ‘it’s like nothing’s changed. He’ll think: right, you failed at the acting, now it’s time to settle down with the business …’
‘You’ll find everything has changed,’ Faenia interrupted. ‘You’ve changed. You’ve learned a lot and now you’ve come home with this new plan and that’s it. You’re not looking for handouts. You know how to stand on your own two feet. You might be able to help your dad find the right man for his business. You’re a part of it all – just not in the middle of the family business.’
She could see PJ mentally trying out this new theory, telling his family his plans.
She could see those big, strong shoulders relax. He was a kind boy. He loved his family, worried about them.
She thought of her baby boy, born too early to live, the child that had died before he’d been born. That boy would be in his forties now, a lot older than sweet PJ here.
Would her life have been different if her son had lived? She might still be married to Chuck in the lovely ranch in Texas but they might never have had their own children and that would have been hard for Chuck. As it was, she’d nearly died when her baby had come so early and she’d been told other children were out of the question. In the end, that had eaten away at her and Chuck’s marriage like woodworm.
She’d grieved over her stillborn son, grieved over her marriage but she’d had her stepchildren – Lola, funny, irreverent and spectacularly kind in her own way, and Marc, grave and professorial, as different from his sister as possible.
They were her second husband Marvin’s grown-up children, and even though she and Marvin had been married only a few years before the dementia took him away into a place where none of them could reach him and he’d died three years later, Lola and Marc were a part of Faenia’s life and always would be.
But they didn’t worry about her the way PJ seemed to worry about his parents – Lola fondly called Faenia an Irish witch who was safe even in the worst areas of San Francisco.
‘You don’t need to carry concealed,’ she’d laugh, coming up tall and strong behind Faenia to hug her. ‘You just shoot gangbangers with one of those tough Irish glares and yell that you’re going to put a curse on them – those guys are gonna run. Same as you made boyfriends you didn’t approve of run.’
‘Wasn’t I right?’ Faenia said, a twinkle in her eyes.
‘Oh yeah, you were always right,’ Lola agreed. ‘Seeing the future: another part of your spooky Celtic repertoire.’
‘What about you?’ PJ said as the car came off the motorway and began winding round a spaghetti junction of slip roads. ‘When’s your family expecting you?’
‘Oh, they don’t know I’m coming,’ said Faenia, surprising herself with her cheerfulness. ‘It’s a surprise.’
‘You’re coming home and they don’t know?’
PJ was astonished. His mother would be up with a cooked breakfast ready to go and she’d texted him twice already to find out when he’d be near the house so she could look out for him. His younger brothers were going to be late into school because they were dying to hug him, and as for his father, well, PJ was going to say the acting thing hadn’t worked and he had more secure job training lined up.
But Faenia was coming and nobody knew?
Faenia patted his knee in a kind way. ‘Perhaps stay, perhaps not. I kept it to myself because I might throw my family into cardiac arrest if I told them I was coming. It’s been quite a while.’
‘Since you visited? Well, air fares aren’t that cheap … When were you last home?’
PJ looked out the window at the streams of traffic.
‘Nearly forty years,’ Faenia said quietly.
Even the driver was lifted out of his professional silence.
‘Nearly forty years!’ he said. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘You’re both young,’ Faenia said. ‘That amount of time – well – it can fly by, you know.’
PJ caught the driver’s eye in the mirror. They were both in their twenties. Forty years sounded like for ever.
‘Isn’t the rain lovely,’ Faenia remarked, as a light March shower dusted the car with sparkling drops and a rainbow shimmered in the sky to their left.
PJ watched her looking out, clearly wanting to change the subject. He suddenly knew who she looked like: Faye Dunaway, that actress who’d been a great beauty in her youth and still had the shimmering hair and the great bones that made people want to look at her face.
PJ had discovered that while he was tall and handsome, with a body honed by time in the gym from training other people, he didn’t have the indefinable star quality that made people want to watch him. But this woman did.
The driver was heading to the part of the city where PJ had been born and raised. Traffic notwithstanding, they’d be there in a few minutes.
‘Give me your phone number, PJ,’ Faenia said, taking out a smartphone and deftly clicking into numbers and emails.
PJ recited his number and email.
Faenia gave him hers as the car pulled up smoothly outside PJ’s home. His father’s big white van with Tallon’s Builders’ Suppliers written on it sat on the drive.
‘Be firm,’ advised Faenia. ‘It’s your life to live, not anyone else’s.’
‘Thank you.’ PJ leaned forward and hugged her. It seemed like the right thing to do. ‘If you’re ever at a loose end, you know, give me a buzz and we could have a coffee or something,’ he said, a bit awkwardly.
‘I will,’ she said, with warmth in her voice.
He was halfway out of the car when he stuck his head back in. She’d probably never phone him and he just had to know.
‘Just one thing – why are you coming home now?’
‘My big brother’s seventy,’ she said. ‘I thought it was time.’ She didn’t say the rest of it.
‘Of course.’ PJ nodded, in a way he hoped implied that coming home for a birthday when you’d been away for forty years made perfect sense.
Maybe when you got older, things changed.
But he couldn’t see himself leaving for forty years, not ever, not under any circumstances.
His front door opened and there they all stood: his family. PJ felt the tug of love for them all.
That could have been it, he thought, waving as Faenia’s car began to slide off and he ran to hug his mother and his two little brothers at the same time.
Twenty-Three
‘I can only please one person per day.
Today is not your day.
Tomorrow isn’t looking good either.’
Anonymous
Jojo was in the shop without Elaine. The place was ghostly: only two customers had been in all morning and neither of them had bought anything.
Elaine would have sold them something, Jojo knew. But how could anybody buy anything off a saleswoman with a face full of tears just waiting to drop.
Perhaps Cari was right – she was on the verge of some sort of collapse. She’d texted Cari to apologise and they’d had a little texting conversation but it had been surface stuff: nothing real. As if they were both too scared to have a proper conversation again.
Now that she’d told Dad what was going on, he kept phoning every day, and dropped round several times during the week, glaring at Hugh when he saw
him as if it was all somehow Hugh’s fault.
‘You told your father?’ said Hugh in that neutral voice he was using all the time lately. It was as if he didn’t trust himself to speak normally.
‘Yes,’ said Jojo, as if daring him to query her.
She could do what she wanted. She was the one in pain.
But that wasn’t fair, she knew. Hugh was in pain too. Guilt rose in her. She hated how she was hurting Hugh. She’d go and see him at work, hug him, and maybe, maybe it would feel better …
A woman came into the shop idly and Jojo marched to the door.
‘Sorry,’ she said briskly. ‘Closing for lunch.’
‘But you don’t—’
‘We do today.’
Once, Jojo had taken any opportunity to drop into Hugh’s office and see him for lunch. That had been in the early, crazy days of their marriage, she remembered.
Now, she never did.
She found a space and a meter, had enough coins in her bag. All good omens. That’s what this decision was: a good omen.
Like Elaine reading their horoscopes in the papers in the morning.
She reached the old Georgian building where Hugh’s offices were, went in and slipped up the back stairs before the receptionist even spotted her. They could have lunch somewhere simple if Hugh was free. And if he wasn’t free, she’d wander round the National Gallery for a while till he had a spare half-hour.
Thinking all of this, she hurried onto his floor, past the desks and up to his office, the door of which was slightly ajar.
No meeting then.
Trying to put a happy smile on her face, a smile that said ‘I’m sorry, I need you,’ she pushed open the door.
Hugh stood at the window nearest the street, and with her arms around him and her face buried in his neck, was his old friend and colleague Elizabeth.
Hugh’s arms were around Elizabeth too, Jojo noted as if from afar.