Now, sitting in Mary Casey’s kitchen, Pat told herself it was a great place for a chat. As soon as Hanna had dropped them off at the bungalow, Mary had whipped the kettle onto the stove and produced a grand cake. It was coffee and walnut, the kind that Pat adored and they never had at home because of Ger’s dentures. Mary stirred her tea with massive disapproval and declared that it would take more than a couple of goats to make Maggie’s place habitable. Everything about it was disastrous and always had been. Hanna-Mariah could say what she liked, but there was a kind of a look that she got on her face when she thought things had got out of hand. Like a hare caught in headlights. Had Pat ever seen it? It would give you a fright. Mary lowered her voice portentously. “I’m telling you this now, Pat, and I’ll tell you no more. However she expected that place to be, it wasn’t the way that we found it.”
“Ah sure, you’d never get a builder to stick to a schedule.”
“But look who she has working for her!”
Pat felt that a bit of fairness should be injected into the drama. “Well now, by all accounts Fury’s a good worker.”
“He’s a chancer and he always was one.”
Dumping a large slice of cake onto a rose-patterned plate, Mary pushed it across the table. “And wasn’t he great with Maggie Casey fifty years ago?”
“You’re not saying . . . ?”
“Would you have a bit of sense, girl—sure Maggie was in her seventies! What I’m saying is there was a pair of them in it. Fury never has a civil word for a soul, and you know yourself the way Maggie was.”
Pat picked a walnut out of her slice of cake and nibbled it appreciatively. “You always had a down on that poor woman and, do you know what it is, Mary Casey, I’d say you were a small bit jealous of her.”
She cocked her head at Mary, stirred her tea, and waited for the fur to fly. Mary smiled grimly. “Name of God, Pat Fitz, how long have you and I known each other? Did you really think I’d rise to that one?”
Pat shrugged. “Didn’t Tom have an awful lot of time for Maggie?”
Mary rose to her feet, stalked to the fridge, and returned with a can of whipped cream. Giving it a vigorous shake, she released a foaming mountain onto the side of Pat’s plate and then did the same to her own. Then, sitting down again, she applied herself to her coffee cake. The truth was, she told herself, that Pat Fitz was right. Tom was the most attentive husband you’d find in a day’s walk. All the same, she had resented it when, instead of devoting his spare time to his poor wife who had a right to it, he’d be round at Maggie’s place stacking turf or earthing up spuds or sitting for hours by the fire to keep her company. It drove Mary mad, but of course she’d said nothing. A fine way she’d look, giving out about Tom minding his aunt when he was her only relative. But, as soon as Hanna was old enough, she’d started sending her round to give Maggie a hand, so the jobs got dealt with that way. Mary was well aware that Hanna disliked the cross old lady as much as she did; but, as she said to Tom many a day, it did the child no harm to make herself useful. What she told no one was that Hanna’s own claims on Tom’s attention were annoying her by that stage, so by sending her round to Maggie’s place, she was killing two birds with one stone.
A blob of whipped cream dropped from Pat’s fork onto the table and Mary whirled off to the sink to get a dishcloth. No one had any idea of how much she missed Tom. She knew well that they all thought he had spoiled her, and perhaps he had. But she knew, too, that he had loved her from the moment that he’d seen her across the school yard in Crossarra, and that the day she had agreed to marry him was the happiest day of his life. It was the last thing he had said to her in that awful cubicle in the hospital with the cow-faced doctor standing over him, claiming him for her own. They had tried to put Mary out but they couldn’t move her. Tom had a hold of her hand and she was going nowhere, not if the heavens fell on the two of them and the earth cracked beneath her feet. She stood her ground against the lot of them. Then Tom pulled her down to him and said that to her about their marriage. And then he was gone.
24
Brian Morton considered his options. A chicken pasta bake in a foil tray covered in plastic or a carton of ridiculously expensive chowder with a bag of washed salad leaves. Neither looked appealing. There were the makings of a proper meal in the freezer in his flat but that would involve defrosting, assembling and cooking, and he was hungry now. Suppressing the unworthy and probably unfounded thought that there would have been something better on offer had he reached the supermarket sooner, he rejected both the chicken and the chowder and returned to his car empty-handed. It had been a blazing day with the prospect of a beautiful sunset so he might as well go home and change, grab some cheese and biscuits, and go walking. One of the compensations for living in Carrick was the wild hinterland of the peninsula beyond it. Another was the spectacular sunsets you could sit and watch from Finfarran’s western cliffs.
Back in his flat, Brian changed into hiking boots, picked up his camera and a windproof jacket and, having taken the elevator from the sixth floor to the building’s underground parking garage, set off on the road to Ballyfin. Despite the undoubted allure of its gourmet restaurants, Ballyfin itself didn’t interest him. Four or five miles outside Carrick he left the smooth highway and turned right, down a winding side road, making for his favorite perch in the lee of a huge boulder on a windswept cliff. The only building for miles around was a farmhouse in the distance, surrounded by barns and sheds. With one eye on the sky, Brian parked by a field, climbed the gate, and crossed the rough grazing. A group of sheep drifted out of his path, unsettled by his arrival. At the far side of the field he negotiated a few strands of barbed wire strung between wooden fence posts and made his way along the unprotected cliff edge above the ocean. After a bit of a scramble he reached the boulder and sat down with his back to it. His timing had been good. Here on the high promontory he could eat his crackers and Camembert, leaning against warm stone, and watch the sun go down from the perfect vantage point. With his boots planted in the tough, wiry grass, he groped in his pocket for the food, spread it out beside him, and stared out at the horizon.
It had been a vaguely irritating day, which was nothing new for Brian. He shared an office with pleasant people with whom he had little in common. Because the majority of them were about half his age, those who weren’t out every night looking for partners were either saving up to get married or coping with a houseful of kids. As a result, conversation around the office water cooler was limited. It would have been trite to dismiss his colleagues as unambitious, but for Brian, who had always thought of the four walls of a council building as the perimeter of employment hell, the ambitions that they did have were uncongenial. To grow up in a rural town that had all the pretensions and none of the sophistication of a city and then choose to settle down there seemed bizarre. Yet his colleagues had one thing in common; whether their work filled them with enthusiasm or provided an easy way to coast toward a pension, they appeared to be happy in their surroundings. All Brian could assume was that the footloose and fancy-free of their generation had made for the airports and the railway stations as soon as they’d finished their studies, while those who remained were eager to find workplaces close to their school friends and families.
At that age the idea of settling down at all had been anathema to Brian; and even now, biting into an apple he had discovered in his jacket pocket, the thought of his present nine-to-five job could almost make him cringe. On the other hand, he told himself, if he had to spend his days in Finfarran’s Central Planning Office, he was better off at a desk in the open-plan office than sharing a cubbyhole with either of his departmental superiors, one of whom could bore for Ireland and the other of whom was a drunk. A few years ago, when Brian had turned up in Carrick at the age of forty-six, he was ridiculously overqualified for the job that he’d applied for, so Con Short and Paddy Mackin, both in their mid-fifties, had dropped their usual bickering in order to keep him in his place. It was an allian
ce they continued today out of sheer force of habit. As the years passed and Brian had revealed no hidden agenda, everyone else in the department had stopped asking each other what on earth he was doing there—unlike Brian himself, who asked himself that question almost every day and never found a convincing answer.
What he did know, however, was that introspection got him nowhere. So now, with his back to the warm stone, he concentrated on his immediate surroundings. Where else on earth could anyone wish to be? He was looking straight out to the west where the sky was a blaze of scarlet clouds and a path of light was beginning to shimmer across the ocean toward the setting sun. Half reaching into his pocket for his camera, Brian hesitated and clasped his hands around his knee instead. He had taken so many photographs of sunsets in the last few years that the walls of his rented flat in Carrick had become increasingly covered in them. Eventually, when the last square of magnolia paint had disappeared under yet another study in scarlet and gold, he had taken them all down and chucked them in the recycle bin. Trying to photograph the transcendental moment when the blazing disk disappeared into the ocean was ridiculous; in staring through a lens, the eye lost its peripheral vision while the scents and sounds that were part of the experience of a sunset were lost in the attempt to capture it. Now, remembering the blank walls of his sixth-floor flat pierced by scores of tiny pinholes, Brian tried to cancel out both experience and anticipation and concentrate on the present. The clouds were streaked with gold. The waves heaved sluggishly as the path of light that was falling across them broadened. Below him, the sound of the waves against the cliffs was like a drumbeat. Brian sat there facing the horizon as the sun disappeared into the ocean, the huge sky turned to mother-of-pearl and the edges of the cliffs curving away to the northwest darkened and softened. Then a chill breeze whipped the grass, scattering his biscuit crumbs and snatching the paper that had held the Camembert. Brian made a stab at the paper as it passed his right foot and pinned it to the ground with his heel. When he looked up again, the horizon was a dark smudge edged with silver and the path of light was gone.
He had planned a twilight walk along the cliffs but instead, as the wind from the ocean began to gain force, he got up and returned to his car. Cheese and crackers had made him more hungry, not less, and what he wanted, he realized, was a proper meal. But the idea of looking for a table for one in a restaurant in Ballyfin in high season was too much to contemplate, so he turned onto the main road and drove back to Carrick. He wasn’t just hungry, he was vaguely aggrieved. Whether or not it was true, he still had a feeling that the supermarket would have provided him with a decent dinner if that Casey woman hadn’t held him up. Of course he could have ignored her as he came out of the office, but her air of assertion was so obviously a cover for panic that he’d found himself offering to help. Now he told himself that he ought to have known better. People who took on more than they could handle had always been his bête noire; if they wanted to complicate their lives it was their own business but when they expected other people to rescue them it was infuriating. So, choosing to get involved was idiotic. He had even been aware at the time that here was a difficult woman because, while he couldn’t think where or why he had picked up the prevailing gossip, he knew that people disliked her. “Snooty’ was one of the milder epithets he had heard used to describe Hanna Casey, and, after their encounter today, he could quite see why. Yet, seeing her across the room at various presentations, or dodging through the traffic in Lissbeg, where she worked, he had approved of her straight back and the way that she wore her dark hair pulled back in an uncompromising plait. And, seen across his desk, her square hands with their short fingernails were attractive: a Chinese manicure shop had just opened in Carrick and every woman in town seemed to be sporting stick-on nails in garish colors that chipped or clicked when the wearer answered the phone or used a keyboard. Hanna Casey didn’t even wear a ring.
As he drove toward Carrick, Brian slowed down to allow a van to enter the stream of traffic from the opposite side of the road. It was emerging from the graveled driveway of a neon-pink bungalow that annoyed Brian each time he passed it. The van, which had ‘Fitzgerald’s Butchers, Lissbeg’ written on it, pulled across in front of him. The wizened little man driving it stared dourly ahead but the woman beside him, who was wearing a yellow oilskin anorak, gave a grateful wave. Acknowledging it with a nod, Brian drove on, wondering once again how on earth the lurid bungalow had ever been given planning permission.
In the butcher’s van, Pat shot a sideways glance at Ger. He had never been the kind of driver who acknowledged people on the road, but tonight he seemed even more wrapped up in himself than usual. Now, as they drove back to Lissbeg from Crossarra, he asked how Mary was.
“Ah, she misses Tom. All the time I’d say. And, though she’d never admit it, she’s upset now at the thought of losing Hanna. That bungalow was always too big for Mary after Tom died.”
“Sure, Hanna’s only moving down the road, woman, what are you talking about? And doesn’t Jazz turn up every ten minutes with a load of washing?”
Pat sighed. It was true enough and Mary Casey was luckier than most, but Ger never did understand what it was to have an empty nest. She pursed her lips and said nothing. After a moment he looked at her sideways and snorted.
“I suppose you’re mopping and mowing in your own mind again now about never seeing the kids in Toronto?”
“If I am it’s a waste of time for me.”
“Well now, that’s where you could be wrong.”
He looked pleased as Punch as he swung the wheel to take the turn to Lissbeg. You’d never know at all, he said, but they could both be swanning off to Canada for Christmas. Pat’s mouth dropped open but before she could ask any questions he shook his finger at her.
“Mind now, I’m making no promise. Least said soonest mended. But I had a good meeting today in Carrick, that’s all I’m saying. No, I’ll say more, I had a great one.”
Pat felt almost dizzy as she leaned back in the passenger seat. She had no idea what scheme Ger might have in the pipeline to produce this extraordinary prospect. Ger loved the notion of himself as a businessman, though she’d always suspected that half the time he was doing no more than dealing well at the cattle mart or maybe picking up the odd bit of land. But she had no doubt that plenty of money passed through his hands. And now, astonishingly, he seemed to be planning to spend some. It was fifteen years since Pat had last seen Sonny and Jim and her grandchildren. Only moments ago she had had no notion of when she might see them again. And it had only taken a few words from Ger to change everything. Speechless with gratitude, she turned and smiled at him, her mind racing ahead to shopping trips for suitcases and all the lovely presents she could choose and wrap and pack.
25
Jazz stretched, rolled over in bed, and contemplated the lazy hours ahead. With everyone in the flat working shifts, you could never be sure how your day would pan out, but this time the timing was perfect. She would have the place to herself for most of the day and in the evening her flatmates would all be home together. Carlos and Georgiou had offered to make dinner for the girls if Jazz would pick up the ingredients. Georgiou had left her a list to take to the market, with strict instructions about tapping the melons to check that they were fresh and buying the right sort of oregano. He was always deeply suspicious about the quality of French produce, which the others found hilarious. But he was a wonderful cook who was saving to train as a proper chef so, as he kept telling them, they were lucky to have him. Jazz’s plan, now that she’d finally decided to wake up, was to indulge in a long bath instead of a workaday shower and go to the market around noon, when she would have coffee in the town square as well as buy food for dinner.
Although she loved the teamwork and conviviality that went with her job, she prized these hours of solitude. When the others were home someone was always playing music or shouting from one room to the next and phones were always ringing. Now she rolled out of bed without both
ering to check her own phone and padded out onto the balcony. She had chosen a shared room for the pleasure of this tiny, railed space with its curling vine and its view of distant mountains seen between neighboring rooftops. She and her roommate Sarah seldom worked the same shifts so, in practice, it wasn’t really a room-share; and, anyway, they always got along. In fact, except for the occasional spat or sulk and the times when Georgiou raised the roof about the state of the oven, it was a remarkably successful household. You never knew how things might turn out when you got together via one of the notice boards at work, but this flat had worked well from the start. Jazz’s nan had gone ballistic, though, when she’d first heard about it.
“You’re moving in with a crowd of strangers you met on the Internet? Are you mad out of your mind or do you never read a newspaper?”
It had made no difference to explain that the notice board was on the staff section of the airline’s website: Jazz had even opened her laptop and demonstrated that the board could only be accessed by employees, who could only post on it via a moderator, but Mary Casey hadn’t been impressed.
Actually, Jazz’s mum had been the only one who’d been sensible. Her dad had gone all flinty-eyed when he heard about the flat-share and even offered to pay the rent for a place of her own if Jazz would back out of the arrangement. But then Dad hated her job at the airline anyway. They didn’t exactly argue about it. Dad didn’t do arguments, mainly, Jazz reckoned, because he couldn’t bear to lose them. Still, his flinty-eyed state had continued for several visits, so it was just as well that, early in life, she had taught herself to ignore it. Crossing Dad was a waste of energy, the best thing to do was to smile and go your own way. Sooner or later he’d give in and smile back, because he’d have no other option. Or, at least, that’s how it worked where Jazz was concerned; they loved spending time together, and, in the end, he could never bring himself to jeopardize that. Years ago he had told Jazz that the most important thing in life was to be happy. Even at the time, that had struck her as a dangerous kind of philosophy: unless you lived in a box, your happiness depended largely on other people; so if happiness mattered more to you than anything else, your life, whether or not you realized it, was largely in other people’s hands.
The Library at the Edge of the World Page 12