The Library at the Edge of the World

by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  With a grand gesture of contempt, Mary threw the onions in with the liver. Jazz sidled over with the bottle of wine.

  “How about a splash of this, then, Nana?”

  Ignoring her, Mary shook the frying pan vigorously, thickened the juices with cornstarch, and tipped the result into a heavy dish she had lined with streaky bacon. Jazz grinned, looked around for the oven gloves, and transferred the covered dish into the oven. Then, without being told, she switched the kettle on. Alcohol never appeared as an ingredient in Mary Casey’s cooking. In fact, it never crossed her lips before the stroke of nine, when she sat down for the evening news and weather forecast with her “little martini.” It was a ritual that Hanna remembered from the old days when the evening meal was called “tea,” not “dinner,” and Tom had carefully poured his wife’s drink into one of the cut-glass tumblers he’d bought for their wedding anniversary and joined her in front of the television with his own glass of stout. Now Mary joined Jazz and Hanna with a cup of tea, smoothing her apron over her knees and planting her elbows on the table.

  “Well, what’s the story, then? How was Cork?”

  This was the question that Hanna had been dreading. She hadn’t told her mother about her decision to go to London; instead she had invented an old friend’s birthday party in Cork and said that she’d stay there overnight. It was ridiculous not to have been honest but she’d been keyed up enough without having to face another row.

  “Ah, the drive home was a bit tiring.” She turned hastily to Jazz. “How about you? I suppose you’ve been telling your nan all the good stuff about Malaga?”

  “I’m fine. Why were you in Cork?”

  There was a pause. Glancing across the table, Hanna saw Mary Casey eyeing her sardonically. Obviously, her hasty change of subject hadn’t gone unnoticed. Hanna’s mind went into overdrive. She had no intention of explaining to her mother in front of Jazz that, far from being in Cork, she’d been in London. What was needed was an immediate diversionary tactic. So, taking a deep breath, she dropped her bombshell.

  9

  “Holy God Almighty, Hanna-Mariah Casey, are you out of your head or what are you?”

  The bombshell had proved effective. Ignoring her mother whose jaw had sagged above her teacup, Hanna spoke to Jazz who seemed equally gobsmacked.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything till my plans were more advanced but, since we’re all here together, tonight seemed the right occasion.”

  “But why didn’t I know you had a house?”

  Mary threw her eyes up to heaven. “Because she doesn’t have a house, she has a shed in a field at the edge of a cliff. And it should have been knocked down years ago!”

  Hanna continued to speak to Jazz. “The finance isn’t arranged yet. Or not formally. I’m filling in the forms tomorrow.”

  “Oh, Holy God in heaven, I reared an eejit!”

  This time it was Jazz who ignored Mary. “No, but really, Mum, how come I never heard you had a house here?”

  As Hanna poured herself another glass of wine she explained to Jazz that Mary was right in a way. It wasn’t a house really, it was more like four walls in a field. And she hadn’t given it a thought since she was a child.

  “But how could you just not think about it?”

  “Well, I hadn’t been there since I was little. Maggie died when I was about twelve and I’m not even sure that I took in the fact that she’d left it to me.”

  “And, what, you’ve suddenly remembered?”

  “Well, yes, I suppose so.” She wasn’t about to tell Jazz about her blind need for solitude after the row she’d had with Mary. Or the fact that she’d stormed away from the bungalow in a flood of angry tears. The truth was that the row with her mother had provoked a stab of grief for the loss of her dad, and, remembering him, she’d found herself drawn to Maggie’s place.

  It was Tom who had told her about her unlikely inheritance. They had just come home from Maggie’s funeral and she was helping him to stack packets of biscuits on a shelf. The coffin had seemed very small under the high roof of the chapel and most of the mourners hadn’t spoken to Maggie for years but were there out of respect for the family. Tom had changed his good black suit for the Fair Isle jumper he wore behind the counter, and, as he and Hanna stacked fig rolls, he told her about Maggie’s will. Hanna had been as incredulous then as Jazz was now. Her relationship with the old lady had largely consisted of curt commands to carry turf or wash the teacups and bitter complaints about the incursions of the hens, the cost of lamp oil and the nosiness of the neighbors. So the fact that Maggie had left her the house had astonished her. “But what would I want it for?” she had asked Tom, and her father had shrugged and smiled at her. “Life is long, pet. You’d never know what might happen.”

  Now, forty years later, her own daughter was bombarding her with questions.

  “But why, Mum? And where is it?”

  “A couple of miles away, down from the site of the old shop.”

  “And you’re going to live in it?”

  “Well, yes. I mean, no. Not at once. I mean your nan’s right, it’s uninhabitable . . .”

  “It’s an old rathole that you wouldn’t leave a dog in for the night!” Mary stumped across the kitchen to pour herself another cup of tea. As soon as a fresh pot was made in her kitchen it went straight onto the stove on a low heat and stewed there till the next one took its place. She came back with the cup in her hand and clattered it onto the saucer.

  “And I’ll tell you this and I’ll tell you no more, Hanna-Mariah. You’re as daft as your great-aunt Maggie was and you’d want to get a grip on yourself!”

  This was exactly the reaction Hanna had expected. She grinned across the table at Jazz.

  “So, there you are. I’m as daft as my great-aunt Maggie was.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “Well, I get a small loan from the Credit Union and, with that and my savings, I restore the house and move in.”

  “Restore it? You mean climb ladders and heave bricks?”

  Hanna laughed. “Certainly not bricks, it’s built of stone. And I doubt if I’ll be climbing ladders. I’ll get a builder.” Hearing her mother snort derisively, she kept going, explaining to Jazz that the job wouldn’t be big or complicated enough to need an architect. It was just a matter of making sure that the roof and walls were sound, the windows and doors weatherproof, and the interior was made practical and comfortable. It would mean a new kitchen and a bathroom and she’d have to do something about heating it.

  “What did Great-aunt Maggie do?”

  “She just had the turf fire. She cooked on it, too.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!” Hanna remembered the bubbling pot hanging from a crane over the fire and the cakes of soda bread and floury scones that Maggie made in a pot oven. “She’d put them in an iron pot with burning sods on the lid and they’d bake beautifully.”

  Jazz giggled. “I can’t imagine you going all Earth Mother.”

  Hanna couldn’t either. But a basic kitchen wouldn’t cost much to install and she might keep the open fireplace. Even if she added some kind of central heating, a real fire would be lovely on winter evenings.

  As Mary banged around the kitchen Jazz continued to ask questions, most of which Hanna couldn’t answer. No, she wouldn’t need planning permission for the work she had in mind; well, maybe she would but she wasn’t sure yet. Yes, there was parking for the car; well, there was pull-in space by the road and she could arrange something better. She was pretty sure there was water all right, but the pump might not be working. The cost of the restoration? Well, how long was a piece of string? Out of the corner of her eye, Hanna could see Mary Casey mashing boiled turnip and carrots together in a pan, mixing in dollops of cream and sprinkling the mash with white pepper. Every inch of Mary’s back expressed rigid disapproval and the look on her face as she lifted the casserole out of the oven was a picture. Jazz asked about Maggie’s garden.

  “Is it
big? Was it landscaped?”

  Mary couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “Landscaped? God help your innocence, child, we’re talking about Maggie Casey! It’s the butt end of a field where she grew a handful of spuds. And I suppose your mother thinks she’ll have it dickied up in a fortnight, with nine bean rows running down to the edge of the cliff and a hive for the honeybee!”

  Clearly delighted to have disparaged Hanna’s highfalutin notions with a neat reference to the poet Yeats, she lifted the lid of the casserole and whirled away to get the spuds. Hanna managed to keep her temper. But only just.

  The meal was delicious, as Mary’s cooking always was. Not adventurous, and certainly not varied, but always thrown together with generosity and vigor and served up piping hot. When Jazz’s phone bleeped she fished it out of her pocket and checked the screen with a forkful of food in her hand.

  “Oh wow, Áine and Paula are home for the weekend! Can I borrow the car, Mum, and meet them in Lissbeg?”

  As soon as Hanna nodded, Jazz bolted the last of her meal and departed to take a shower. Hanna knew that the appointment with Áine and Paula meant a trip to the pub. But Jazz knew better than to drink and drive, and, anyway, Hanna told herself firmly, she was old enough not to be chivvied about by her mother. Heaven alone knew what she got up to in places like Rome and Malaga, so there wasn’t much point in fussing about a night out in Lissbeg. All the same, as Jazz swept through the kitchen twenty minutes later, Hanna found herself handing out a warning with the car keys.

  “Take it slow, love, all right? And don’t do anything stupid.”

  Jazz made a face at her, took the keys, and was gone.

  Hanna felt a wave of tiredness sweep over her. All she wanted now was an early night, but Mary crossed the kitchen with her martini glass and sat down in the armchair that stood by the washer-dryer. The chair looked as out of place in the room as the huge pine dresser, but she had insisted that it be positioned opposite the window so she could see who passed on the road. Now she fixed her eye on Hanna, who had been dreading this tête-à-tête.

  “Well, are you going to tell me about it?”

  Hanna gave in to the inevitable. “I went to London to speak to Malcolm.”

  “Didn’t I know fine well that it wasn’t Cork you were off to!”

  “Well, you were right, Mam, it wasn’t. I flew over and spent the night in London.”

  She was determined to give her mother the briefest possible version of the story. Nothing about Malcolm’s ludicrous assumption about why she had invited him up to her bedroom. Or how his browbeating manner had nearly reduced her to tears. As for his final line as he left the hotel room, the disdain in his voice had been so cutting that Hanna could hardly think about it. One part of her mind knew quite well that he was just posturing, but the memory still made her flinch and she had no intention of sharing it. She’d give her mother the facts on a need-to-know basis, and, whatever Mary might say to her, she wouldn’t lose her cool.

  As it turned out, Mary listened quietly and didn’t even try to interrupt. Hanna explained that she’d been thinking about the future and decided to ask Malcolm for the price of a house.

  “And he said no.”

  “Yes, Mam, he did. I know you think that I’ve let him get away with murder, but there it is.” She looked up at Mary. “And I can’t live here with you forever, Mam, you know that.”

  Mary Casey looked back at her. “I’ll tell you what I do know, girl, though I don’t know why I bother. You’ve gone and done it again.”

  “Done what?”

  “Flounced off and made some daft decision without thinking it through. Maybe there’s no point in flogging a dead horse. Maybe you’re right there and I’ve been wrong. But to take out some big loan and sink all your savings in Maggie’s place! What brought that on?”

  It was the first time Hanna had heard Mary admit that she might have been mistaken. Now, anxious to respond positively, she groped for words to explain herself. But it was hopeless. Anything she said would just sound like an attack. How could she tell her mother she was irked by her taste and felt stifled in her company? How could she describe her longing for solitude? Or communicate the sense of excitement she’d felt when her plan had flowered in her mind? She could tell that from Mary’s point of view, this was no different from the snap decision to leave London five years ago. But in her own head it was something different. After years of feeling paralyzed, she had finally seen a way forward. And then, sitting with Dennis Flood in the café in Carrick, she had found it was achievable. Even with a tight budget, she knew she could take it on; it was a tiny project compared to the work she had done on the London house and the cottage in Norfolk. In fact, far from being an arbitrary whim, it had felt like the fulfillment of a process.

  She tried to make Mary understand. “Of course it needs more thought, Mam, I know it does. And I won’t be moving at once. I mean, if you’ll have me, I’ll be here till the work is done and that’ll probably take ages. Months, anyway. I’ll have to make plans and budget and—well, you know yourself, these things take time.”

  “Don’t you know fine well that I’ll have you? You’re my daughter. You’ve a home here for life.”

  Hanna laughed ruefully. “Oh, Mam. Have a bit of sense. Can you see the two of us rattling round here forever, getting on each other’s nerves?”

  Mary Casey sniffed. “Oh you’ve noticed that, have you?”

  “Noticed what?”

  “That you’re not the only one in this house that likes things done her own way.”

  There was a pause. Despite what she had just said about them getting on each other’s nerves, Hanna had always seen herself as the sensitive one and her mother as too thick-skinned to be hurt. Now Mary looked at her shrewdly. “I’m not a fool, girl, even if I reared one, and I can do without my own daughter looking down on me day and night.”

  “Mam!”

  “Leave it, Hanna. We both know the truth of it. And now that Jazz has left, you might be right in thinking we’d be better apart. The Dear knows that your poor father always said that you and I were the spit of each other. So maybe there is only room for one of us under the one roof.”

  10

  Conor was on his own at the desk in Lissbeg when Tim Slattery, who was the county librarian, strolled into the library. Miss Casey was at a Health and Safety refresher session in Carrick, which is where you might think Tim Slattery would be too, thought Conor, since that’s where his office was. But he seemed to spend a lot more time having meetings up and down the peninsula than sitting in the County Library. He was short and kind of thickset, with a big brush of iron-gray hair and a pompous way of talking. He dressed kind of weird as well, like an old fellow that wanted to be trendy. Today he was in a three-piece suit with a colored handkerchief stuffed in his breast pocket and a huge watch on his wrist, like a deep-sea diver’s. But whenever Conor saw him he seemed to be wearing a new watch, sometimes chunky and waterproof, occasionally slim and Day-Glo and usually equipped with the latest functions for checking his heart rate, or monitoring how far he was above sea level. Dan Cafferky, who was a great one for the put-downs, called him The Time Lord. But Miss Casey would hit the roof if she heard that, so even in his own head, Conor tried to stick to Mr. Slattery.

  As soon as the door opened he shoved his phone under the desk. He hadn’t been using it or anything, but you wouldn’t want to give the boss man a bad impression.

  Mr. Slattery flicked his hankie round the corner of the desk and then, hitching his tweedy thigh onto it, knocked over Miss Casey’s pencils. Conor, who had stood up to greet him, saw that he wasn’t going to get a handshake. So he sat down again.

  “Miss Casey’s not in, then?”

  Conor didn’t know what to say to that. Surely Mr. Slattery knew where Miss Casey was since the memo about the Health and Safety session had been sent from his email address? But it might be rude to remind him. And his memos might actually get sent by some lowly staff guy in Carrick. Anyw
ay, an answer didn’t seem to be required. Swinging his foot, which was shod in some class of a crocodile, Mr. Slattery announced that he’d dropped in to Lissbeg on the way back from a meeting in Ballyfin and that he’d wanted a swift word with Miss Casey. There was no hurry, though, he’d send her a text or talk to her next time he’d see her. Conor opened his mouth to offer to take a message. Then he closed it again. According to gossip, the boss man ran his department as if he was M out of a James Bond film, so he’d no mind to risk being told to remember his own lowly status. Instead he smiled and said no problem. Upon which, the phone that he’d shoved under the desk rang loudly.

  Conor grabbed it, saw it was a text from home, and hit the power button. Then, feeling that he had to explain himself, he said he’d had a bull.

  “I mean, the farm has a bull. A new one. A cow just calved.”

  And it was brilliant, he said. Because he’d been worried about not being there. Because his brother was clumsy at the calving.

  Mr. Slattery blinked, presumably having forgotten Conor’s part-time status. Then he stood up and gave a laugh out of him.

  “Talk about multitasking! Next time I’m here I must remember to ask for an anthrax shot!”

  Conor smiled politely. Then, as the tweedy back disappeared through the door, he shook his head in amazement. Wouldn’t you think if a man was going to crack a joke that he’d try to put a bit of sense in it? Carefully sliding Miss Casey’s pencils back into their pot, he told himself The Time Lord was an eejit. Sure, there hadn’t been a case of anthrax in Finfarran since God himself was a boy.

  Miss Casey arrived an hour or so later with the latest Health and Safety booklet and a newly designed MIND YOUR STEP sticker for the library door. She also had a pot of flowering lavender. Conor watched her moving the pot from the desk to a windowsill.

  “So what does that do, protect the readers from vampires?”

  Miss Casey repositioned the flowerpot on her desk. “I saw it in Carrick and thought it would look nice.”