by Cathy Kelly
Fiona was a programmer at a hip tech firm in Dublin and appeared to have an endless supply of clever male friends to bring to family events. The anxious mother in Grace longed to see her daughter find one particular man she could settle down with, but she tried not to let on. Tonight, however, she was too tired to rein in her curiosity.
‘Found anyone you want to groom like a chimp yet?’ she asked, hoping it didn’t sound as if she worried about her only daughter being alone at the age of twenty-seven. At the same age, she herself had been married with one small child and pregnant with Fiona.
Fiona, as usual, laughed it off.
‘I’m choosy,’ she told her mother. ‘And no, it’s not because you’re divorced. Even if you and Dad were still happily married, I’d be choosy.’
‘Don’t be choosy for too long, darling,’ Grace said, grateful that Fiona hadn’t taken offence. There had been occasions when she’d got annoyed at her mother for touching upon what was clearly a sensitive topic. ‘I’m not trying to be intrusive, love, but I’d like to see you happy and settled with someone special …’
‘Mum! That’s entirely hypocritical coming from someone who lives on her own and hasn’t dated since blue eyeliner was in fashion.’
‘I have dated, as you well know,’ Grace replied, thinking of the handful of men she’d gone out with briefly over the years. It was strange how you became so used to one individual that you compared every other man with him. Somehow none of them had ever quite measured up to Stephen. It was getting on for three years since she’d been on a date, and deep down she felt there was a hint of cowardice involved – not that she’d admit it to anyone.
‘Besides,’ she added, ‘blue eyeliner is in again, according to some brave souls in the staffroom.’
‘Dating is in again too,’ Fiona reminded her sweetly. ‘There’s no reason you can’t give it a try, Mum. I don’t know why you aren’t on one of those online dating sites, looking for someone else. Just ’cos you and Dad split up doesn’t mean you can’t find true love. Dad has Julia. It is possible to find it more than once in your life.’
Was there a wistful note in her voice, or had Grace imagined it? The guilt that sometimes hit Grace swamped her now.
‘Maybe Michael’s going to ask Katy to marry him tonight, over dinner.’ Fiona changed the subject swiftly and Grace knew it was her fault. She shouldn’t have stuck her nose in. You couldn’t push people into falling in love.
Or stop them when they were falling out of it.
Grace brought her tea up to bed after turning off all the lights, including the fake Tiffany one she knew Stephen had hated.
She adored her cottage. It was very different from the three-bedroom house she’d shared with Stephen when they were married. His tastes had run to modern things – unusual light fittings made from Perspex, walls of glass, and big modern canvases – while Grace had been more of a woman for vast comfy couches in front of the fire and toile de Jouy wallpaper in the bedroom, with the bed covered in plumped-up beribboned pillows.
She certainly had that now, she thought wryly as she carried her cup of tea and her phone into the bedroom. It was a bower of prettiness, for sure – but there was nobody to share it with, apart from when the window cleaner peered in every few months and had a good look around.
‘That’s a lovely room you have up there, Mrs Rhattigan,’ he’d said once.
‘Thank you, Jimmy,’ Grace replied crisply, trying to ward off this conversation. It wasn’t that she thought she was a man magnet by any means, but over the years she’d found that when you were a divorced woman, the most unlikely men decided you were desperate for affection and threw themselves at you. They were always deeply offended and often rude when Grace discreetly threw them back.
‘I was thinking my wife would love that sort of wallpaper,’ went on Jimmy. ‘It’s coming up to her birthday and I could surprise her if I did up the bedroom. What would you call it? I never saw it before.’
‘I’ll write the name down for you,’ said Grace, relieved. What had she been thinking of – imagining that Jimmy fancied her?
In bed, she ran through the day in her head, and then found her gratitude diary and wrote in it:
1. Having two healthy children.
2. The nice phone call from the multiple sclerosis charity saying thank you for the children’s fund-raising last month.
3. Hector the debating teacher bringing home-made blackberry jam into the staffroom and giving everyone a pot because he was ill before Christmas and hasn’t been in since.
She paused. What else? She’d worried about Michael and Katy, about seventeen-year-old Ruby Morrison, about upsetting Fiona by asking about the men in her life.
That last worry was a nagging, anxious one, hiding in the recesses of her brain and ready to slither to the surface at weak moments. Why did a lovely girl like Fiona have no steady boyfriend? Like Grace, she was slim and dark-haired, and though Grace didn’t have a vain bone in her body, she knew she wasn’t bad-looking. Fiona had the same oval face, large, intelligent hazel eyes, and obedient silky hair the colour of polished mahogany. She was funny, interested in other people the way Grace was, interesting to talk to … It made no sense that she hadn’t been snapped up.
As for Fiona’s suggestion that Grace try online dating – well, that was crazy. Grace was happy as she was. Fine, so the house could seem lonely when she arrived home on winter’s nights, but weren’t single women the fastest-growing group in the Western world? She was normal, that was all.
She stared at her gratitude diary hopelessly. There had to be five things in it. Five.
She was so lucky; she had family, friends, a job she loved and a pension. She didn’t worry about every penny or how many slices of bread there were in a sliced pan the way some mothers in the school had to because of job losses in the recession. Compared to them, she had loads of things to be grateful for.
Finally she gave in and wrote:
4. I still have a job and a house and enough money to pay my bills.
5. Jimmy the window cleaner is not secretly lusting after me, which is an enormous relief.
Not the ideal things to write on a gratitude list, but they would do.
Four
Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. ANON
Katy Desmond had the radio on low as she and Michael drove home from the airport. He could sleep anywhere and was tired from the plane, so she said she’d drive.
She liked driving, was an excellent driver – even her father, a wildly critical person when it came to most people’s driving, said so. Most of all, she liked the fact that she was marrying a man who wasn’t threatened by her taking the wheel. She’d never seen her mother drive her father anywhere. Even after he’d had a few drinks at a dinner and Birdie hadn’t, Howard Desmond would insist on being in the driver’s seat. In the car and in life.
He was an entrepreneur with the Midas touch. Thanks entirely to him, Bridgeport Woollen Mills were known all over the world, and according to her mother, these days Howard needed three phones to keep on top of it all. Katy knew that she was one of the few people to whom her father deferred, but it was the deferral of besotted love.
She’d never have been able to work with him in the business if he’d bossed her around the way he did everyone else.
They had some ferocious rows in the office, when the rest of the staff flattened themselves against the walls and listened in awe as Katy argued with the boss. She often won the arguments, too.
As she explained to Leila, ‘Dad just needs someone to stand up to him, and once he sees your point of view …’
‘… eventually,’ Leila liked to tease.
‘Eventually,’ agreed Katy. ‘But he loves innovative ideas.’ She knew that his liking her innovative ideas was due to her being his daughter, but still. People needed to stand up to Dad. She wished her mother would.
When they’d been kids, Susie, Leila’s older sister, thought it astonishi
ng that Katy could ask the powerful and controlling Howard for anything, literally anything, and he’d get it for her. Susie, used to a life of second-hand everything, couldn’t understand why Katy didn’t ask for enormous birthday presents, given that her father would have happily bought the world for her if only she’d asked.
‘You could have had a pony if you wanted it,’ Susie had said on Katy’s twelfth birthday, when she’d been given a new bike. Susie, who was two years older and loved horses, desperately wanted a pony, but there was little money for such things in the Martin home. Their father was an invalid with a serious back condition, which meant he spent much of his time in bed. Their mother had had to become the breadwinner, and money was tight. Besides, Katy knew that even if they’d had the money for a pony, the fact that both girls helped their mother to care for their father meant there would have been no time to ride it.
‘I don’t want a pony,’ she’d pointed out.
But because his little girl ought to have the best of everything, and a pony was on his mental list of Things Girls Should Have, Howard had bought Katy a pony the following year. Unfortunately, she’d soon found that the adorable animal she’d spent six months riding wasn’t even vaguely under her control when he got spooked and decided to bolt around the training arena in the stables.
‘You should get back on the horse,’ Daddy had said crossly, when she’d announced that she was giving up riding.
‘I did,’ Katy replied spiritedly. She hadn’t a fearful bone in her body. ‘But I think I’m going to try something new. You ride him if you want.’
Eventually cars had replaced ponies, and naturally, as soon as she was old enough to get her driving licence, Katy had been given a brand-new red Mini Cooper with gleaming leather interior.
‘If you weren’t my friend, I’d hate you because you get everything,’ sighed Susie as she and Leila were driven around Bridgeport by Katy at a jerky fifteen miles an hour on the car’s maiden voyage.
‘But now we can go places without waiting for the bus,’ said Leila happily.
‘Or lifts,’ said Susie, who still couldn’t drive because she had no money for lessons and because her mother never had time to teach her.
‘Yeah, lifts,’ agreed Leila, glancing swiftly across at Katy from the passenger seat.
She and Susie practically never got lifts. Their mum was so busy looking after their dad that they didn’t like to bother her, and in any case the Martin family car was so old that extra journeys might have pushed it over the edge. The only thing holding it together was a combination of rust, spray paint and their mother’s prayers. Every journey was taken with the sense that at any moment the car might come to a juddering halt in the middle of the road and never go again.
‘It’s an adventure,’ their mum used to say cheerfully on the rare occasions when she drove the three of them anywhere.
‘I love adventures,’ Katy would say, being loyal to her friends.
She was lucky, she knew, looking over at Michael snoozing happily in the passenger seat. She’d grown up with enough money so that finances hadn’t ever been a problem. The Desmond cars were replaced every other year. Dad would never have tolerated a member of the family driving an old banger like the Martin car.
Michael moved in his sleep.
‘Are we there yet?’ he asked, and Katy laughed.
‘No, go back to sleep, darling.’
Birdie Desmond, wife of the great and charismatic Howard and mother of Katy, was searching for her phone. She wanted to send a Darling, hope you’ve both enjoyed Paris text to Katy and Michael, although she wasn’t sure when their flight had got in. Was it first thing, or were they at the airport in Paris still?
A small, slight woman with a head of long silvery hair, at first glance Birdie could have been taken for any age between sixty and eighty. In reality she was on the cusp of her sixtieth birthday.
Her few friends bemoaned her lack of interest in self. She did nothing to conceal the ravages of life, her skin wind-blown from spending so much time in the garden – or perhaps from constant exposure to the full-blown gale of being at Howard’s beck and call. She didn’t seem to care about such things, but she was happy enough, they decided. Wasn’t she?
Birdie found Howard’s American phone on the windowsill in the den – he now had three phones: one for Europe, one for Asia and Australia, and one for the US. He was always leaving them under cushions in his armchair after having a Scotch and soda before dinner, and then forgetting about them.
But then, she reasoned, Howard had so many things on his mind. And she had so little in comparison.
‘I wish I could sit at home all day and relax,’ he would say in the evening when, whisky in his hand and the scent of dinner in the air, he’d put his feet up on the low table in the den and stare out at the beautifully maintained garden.
Birdie, who did most of the gardening herself, cleaned the house with help from the youthful Morag from the village, walked Thumper, her beloved dog, and spent hours rattling tins for a score of needy charities, as well as shopping for and cooking Howard’s meals, would say nothing.
Howard was so clever with the business and it was thanks to him that they had this lovely house, she’d remind herself. Think of all the people who had nothing. The people who’d lost their jobs and could barely feed their families. She knew enough about that from her charity work. No, she had so much to be thankful for.
She and Howard lived in the rambling Vineyard Manor, an old but perfectly updated house with five glorious acres of garden, where Birdie spent so much of her time. The problem with a house this big was losing things – like her phone when she wanted to text Katy. She often wasted ages in the morning phoning herself on the house phone in order to track her mobile down, listening carefully for buzzing noises because she always muted the sound at night.
She finally found it in the china bowl near the front door that held the keys.
‘I’m going to tie you to me with gardening string,’ she muttered at it as she checked her messages. There was a text from Katy and she opened it happily.
Mum, ring me when you get this. We’ve just got home from Paris. Good news, not bad!
Birdie’s mind instantly went to their engagement. What else could it be? Michael had been hell-bent on taking Katy to Paris for the thirteenth official year of their relationship – despite young love starting in the most innocent way in junior school, Howard had insisted that both of them were sixteen before they were allowed go out properly.
Heart beating with excitement, she rang her daughter’s mobile.
‘Katy, lovey, how are you? What’s the good news?’ she said as soon as the phone was answered.
But it wasn’t her daughter. It was Michael.
‘Birdie!’ he responded with pleasure. ‘Katy’s in the shower. We were on such an early flight, she only had five minutes in the hotel one. Give me a moment and I’ll get her.’
‘Everything’s all right, is it?’ Birdie asked, the words flying out of her mouth before she could stop them. ‘Sorry, I realise Katy said it wasn’t bad news, it’s just I worry …’
‘It’s all fine,’ said Michael gently. ‘I promise I’ll always take care of her for you.’
‘Thank you, I know,’ said Birdie, feeling stupid.
Where did this fear come from, this constant anxiety that something bad was going to happen? Her brothers weren’t like that, although they’d been the apple of their father’s eye while Birdie, shy and quiet, hadn’t.
‘Stop being such a little mouse, Birdie!’ he’d roar with irritation, which naturally had the opposite effect.
‘I had a bad night’s sleep, Michael,’ she lied now to cover her silliness, because that was all it was really: silliness.
But there was no response from the other end, only muffled sounds, as though Michael had clamped his hand over the phone while he interrupted Katy’s shower. Birdie could make out the hiss of water, and then it suddenly ceasing.
‘Mu
m,’ said Katy, ‘I’m putting you on speaker phone. Michael and I have some news.’
Birdie sank on to the bottom step of the stairs in the hall. Thumper, the family golden retriever, backed in beside her, angling his too-wide rear against her and looking back beseechingly. Pet me, pet me.
‘We got engaged! Michael asked me to marry him—’
‘And she said yes!’ Michael broke in joyously.
‘What else could I say?’ Katy said, laughing.
‘That you wanted to hold out for a better offer!’ Michael joked.
‘Mum, there is no better offer, is there?’ said Katy.
‘Lovey, I am so happy for you, for both of you,’ Birdie said tearfully. ‘He’s a good man.’
‘Careful, he can hear you!’ warned Katy.
‘I know, and he’s still a good man, one of the best,’ Birdie told her daughter. ‘This isn’t good news, it’s wonderful news. Have you set a date?’
‘Well …’ said Katy slowly, ‘we want to do it soon, not wait for three years or anything. I was thinking of June, because it’s my birthday. I know that’s only five months away, but we can do it, and then …’ She paused before blurting, ‘We want to take a year off to travel. Backpacking, see the world before we settle down for good.’
‘Oh,’ said Birdie, feeling the fear again. Her heart fluttered in her chest: the frantic rattle of sheer anxiety. Such dreadful things happened to young people on gap years.
‘We’ll be fine, Mum. Perfectly safe. I’ll be with Michael, remember. He’s built like a tank, who’s going to hurt us? I’ll text and email all the time,’ Katy added gently. ‘I promise. I know you worry.’
‘Of course you’ll be fine,’ Birdie said, holding a shaking hand over her heart as if she could somehow calm its wild thrumming. ‘I am sorry I didn’t travel myself,’ she added bravely. As if she’d have had the courage.
‘We have a favour to ask, though, Birdie,’ said Michael. ‘Katy wants the wedding at the Vineyard – I know it’s a big ask, to have a wedding in your house, but—’