Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle

by Cathy Kelly

  I haven’t always got it right. Understatement! Star will tell you, if she’s still doing magic for beginners when you’re old enough to come looking for me. But I screwed it up plenty. So don’t do what I did, right? She’ll tell you. Your dad doesn’t really know it all because it might have broken his heart more than all this is currently breaking his heart.

  OK, tears there. I’m sad, but I am coping. I am saying this more for you than for me, actually. Star helped. She did this thing where she held me and I felt peace. I know I’m dying, but I felt this amazing sense of calm. It was like this love rushing all over me, making me think there was love waiting for me. I’m not scared of dying. Really not scared. And, Natalie, I have been scared in my life, believe me! It’s going to be OK. The only scary bit is leaving you. I don’t know how I’m going to do that. They’ll have to pry you out of my arms when I’m gone. You are why I want to stay forever. You, darling, you.

  But I won’t be alone when I go, I’ll be with my own mum.

  Hell, tears again. I grew up without a mother and it was the last thing I wanted for you. The difference is, you got a great Dad. That’s all I’ll say.

  If I was there, I’d be teaching you some of the stuff I learned along the way. Not that I learned it quickly–Jesus, no. Nobody learned as slow as me. I mean, lettuce learns quicker. But when I’ve learned it, it stays learned. Just as well, ’cos if you had to learn all I have twice, you’d be dead…well, that’s happening anyway.

  I wish I could write it all down beautifully but I have to do it my way, the Dara way. so this is it, condensed:

  * Be true to yourself. Sounds mad, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s true? But you’ll know when you get there, trust me on this.

  * Trust your instincts. I didn’t trust any part of me, so I discounted my instincts too. But when I thought about it, nine times out of ten, my original instinct had been right. I just hadn’t paid attention to it.

  * Be kind to yourself. Love yourself. Nobody else is going to be able to if you don’t first. It’s a hard lesson, that one, but important. If you love yourself, you won’t let anyone hurt you. Sounds so obvious, but you’d be amazed how long it took me to get that.

  You’re probably OK. Honestly. Despite your eyebrows/short legs…(put in whatever’s appropriate here). Because you will have something that gives you great mental anguish about not being right and occasionally it will give your anxiety something to hold tightly on to–that if it wasn’t for the eyebrows/short legs/whatever, everything would be great. They have nothing to do with it all whatsoever. People need something to worry about, like the 1950s needed Communism and then it was the Permissive Society. And one day, you will look back at an old photo of you and wonder why you worried about your eyebrows when you had so much going for you…When you do the looking back at the old photo, by the way, you’ll probably be dying and the great truth of life will be hitting you over the head like a sledgehammer that says the young and living don’t appreciate it and that only the old and about-to-die do. I’m trying to-by-pass all that for you.

  * Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

  * Only one person can change your life, and that’s you. Don’t wait for anyone else to do it, Prince Charming or otherwise. Be your own prince.

  * Fight for who you are. It takes a long time to find who you are, but when you do, take care of that person. She’s one of the most precious friends you’ll ever have.

  * Learn how to tell men you like them but aren’t interested sexually. So important this one.

  * Be kind to other women. It really works–most of the time. And even on those days when it doesn’t, it’ll make you feel better inside. And on the outside, actually! Because spite carves out things in your soul and it carves out things on your face too, the sort of lines that dermatologists say are from the sun or smoking, and are really from spite.

  * When you’re annoyed, don’t speak from that place inside yourself that nurtures all past hurts. That will just make it all worse. Speak out of love and a desire to make things better.

  * Learn how to say no. Practise. Say it at least once every day and, you know what? You’ll get better at it.

  * Sometimes, you can’t fix it. Other people, for example: you can’t fix them. You just have to decide whether it’s worth hanging around until they fix themselves–or, if it’s worth hanging around even though they may never decide to fix themselves. Your choice over the hanging around, but when it comes to the fixing, you have no power. There’s times when you just have to let go. Letting go works for a lot of life, actually.

  * What doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger. I just hope you don’t have to go through that process in the first place. But if you do, it’s true. Trust me.

  * Life seems so long when you’re in the middle of it, but when you know it’s going to end soon, you realise how little time we have on earth. Don’t waste it. Live for now. Not for tomorrow or yesterday. Now. You don’t know what will happen tomorrow, and yesterday is gone, so all you have is this moment. Enjoy it.

  * Make your choices matter. Do what makes you happy. Tell the people you love that you love them. Forget about waiting for a rainy day. Do it now.

  * Get down on your knees every day and say thank you. Even if you don’t feel grateful all the time, practise it, and one day you will appreciate all the good things. And that’s one of the greatest gifts of all.

  * It’s never too late to stop and change the way you’re going. Never. I did and look what I got–you and your Dad.

  Talking of your Dad, when you find a love like that and it’s a once in a lifetime love, hold on to him.

  I’m crying now, Natalie, I better stop. Star wants me downstairs because you need me. Did I tell you that? You’re downstairs with her and I’m upstairs trying not to cry writing this. I can’t write it with your dad or he just breaks down. He’s a wonderful Dad, but I guess you know that. I hope I finish this later but in case I don’t get to it, I love you, Natalie. Always have, always will.

  Mum

  Natalie searched the notebook but there was nothing else written there. Still, that was enough. Lessons for a lifetime. She held the notebook close to her chest. She’d cried as she read it, but now, she didn’t feel like crying. Tears were for sad things and this was so full of life.

  Natalie turned her face up to the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t know where you are, Mum, but I’m going to listen to every bit of that advice,’ she said. ‘I’m going to make you proud of me.’

  From outside, she could hear laughter and what sounded like champagne corks popping.

  She put the book carefully into her handbag and followed the noise to her friends. Rory would be coming soon and she didn’t want to miss any time with him.

  Copyright

  HarperCollinsPublishers

  77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

  Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2009

  Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

  The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  E
Pub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007389346

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  Homecoming

  Cathy Kelly

  To my husband, John, and to darling Murray and Dylan, with love

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  1 New Year

  2 Eggs

  3 Bread

  4 Vegetables

  5 Potatoes

  6 Mushrooms

  7 Imbolg, festival of light

  8 Soup

  9 Roasts

  10 Feasts

  11 Fish

  12 Other feasts

  13 Spring Equinox

  14 Irish Moss

  15 Holy Days

  16 The Queen of Sheba

  17 Food for the Turfcutters

  18 The Dairy

  19 The Wake

  20 Oats

  21 Herbs

  22 The Homestead

  23 Family reunions

  24 Weddings

  25 Beltane

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  1

  New Year

  It didn’t take long for Eleanor Levine to unpack her things in the apartment in Golden Square. She’d brought just two suitcases on the flight from New York to Dublin. For a simple holiday, two suitcases would probably be too much luggage. But for the sort of trip Eleanor planned, she was travelling light.

  When she’d arrived in the hotel in the centre of the city just two weeks before Christmas, the receptionist had just nodded politely when Eleanor said she might need the room for more than the three weeks she’d booked beforehand. Nothing shocked hotel receptionists, even elegant elderly ladies with limited luggage who arrived alone and appeared to have no due date to leave.

  Equally, nobody looked askance at Eleanor when she gently turned down the invitation to book for the full Christmas lunch in the hotel’s restaurant and instead asked for an omelette and a glass of prosecco in her room. After a lifetime spent in New York, a city where doing your own thing and not apologising for it was almost mandatory, it was comforting to find the same behaviour had travelled across the Atlantic to the country of her birth. It wasn’t what she’d expected, truth to tell. But then, it was so long since she’d been home, she didn’t really know what to expect.

  On the plane journey, still reeling from having left her warm, cosy apartment and her family behind her, Eleanor had thought about the Ireland she was about to see. She’d left over seventy years before in the steerage of a giant steamship, a serious eleven-year-old travelling to the New World with her mother and her aunt. Their belongings had fitted in a couple of cardboard suitcases, and her mother, Brigid, held the family’s meagre fortune in a purse round her neck.

  Now here she was, returning with several platinum credit cards, a line of letters after her name and a lifetime of experience behind her.

  Apart from Eleanor herself, only one thing had made both trips: her mother’s recipe book.

  Now that she’d put her toiletries in the master bedroom’s en suite bathroom, and had unpacked her clothes and books, she took a white shoebox out of the second suitcase.

  Her wedding shoes, white satin pumps from Christian Dior, had lived in the box for many years until she’d given them to her daughter, Naomi, for her prom night.

  Now her grand-daughter Gillian borrowed them from time to time, wearing them with the full-skirted vintage dresses that had been all the rage during Mr Dior’s New Look in 1947. Like many modern teenagers, Gillian loved wearing vintage and often visited her grandmother proudly bearing something she’d paid fifty dollars for, and which was a replica of something Eleanor had thrown out twenty years previously. Fashion comes full circle, Eleanor thought, smiling.

  Thousands of miles away from Gillian, Naomi and life in New York, Eleanor tenderly opened her box of treasures. None of them were treasures in any monetary sense. But as tokens from a life lived with great happiness, they were treasures indeed. There was a dyed black ostrich-feather mask from a Hallowe’en party, the silk ribbon still tied in a knot from the last time she’d worn it, half a century before. A single pressed rose was visible through the thin layer of tissue in which it lay. Ralf had given her the rose as a corsage one night at a ritzy white-tie affair at St Regis Hotel. Under the tissue, the dried-out petals were feather-light.

  There was the shell-like gold compact she’d been so proud of when she was twenty-five, the gold paint tarnished now and the pinky powder nothing but a dusty remnant on the inside rim. There was red lipstick in its black-and-gold case. Manhattan Red. It had been all the rage in 1944, a colour to brighten lips and hearts.

  There were love letters, too, from her beloved Ralf, some with humble elastic bands around them; others, bound with ribbon. He’d loved writing letters and cards. There was permanence in the written word, he’d believed. One was the letter he’d penned when their daughter, Naomi, was born, an incredible forty-five years ago.

  ‘I will love you and our daughter forever,’ he’d concluded. She knew it by heart. Eleanor’s fingers brushed the filmy folded paper but she didn’t open it. She couldn’t bear to see the words written in Ralf’s neat, precise hand. Perhaps she’d be too sad ever to read his letters again.

  There were drawings and cards from her daughter, Naomi, so infinitely precious with their big, childish writing. Though it seemed so long ago since Naomi had written them, they still made Eleanor’s heart sing. Naomi had been such a beautiful-hearted child and she’d grown up into an equally wonderful adult.

  The third important thing in her treasure box was another collection of writings: her mother’s recipe book. Originally, it had been covered with simple brown card but decades ago Eleanor had glued shiny Christmas wrapping paper on to the cover and now faded golden stars twinkled alongside burnished red and green holly sprigs.

  The extra pages, added over the years, made the book bulky, and a lavender wool crocheted rope kept the whole thing tied together. It was all handwritten in her mother’s sloping italics, sometimes in pencil which had faded with age, sometimes in the deep blue ink her mother had favoured.

  Like Ralf’s letters and Naomi’s innocent little notes in their awkward writing, the recipe book was a source of huge comfort, a talisman to be held close to her chest when her heart was breaking. It had comforted Eleanor all her life and it comforted her now.

  Nobody glancing at the battered recipe book would guess at the wisdom inside it. People, especially people today, thought that wisdom had to come from experts with letters after their names. Eleanor herself had plenty of those – the hoops psychoanalysts had to jump through meant half an alphabet could go after Eleanor Levine’s name.

  But two things had taught Eleanor that people with little academic history often knew more than the most scholarly person.

  One was her mother, Brigid.

  The other was her own vast experience of life.

  Eleanor was now eighty-three and she’d lived those eighty-three years with gusto.

  Brigid had taught her to do that. And so much more.

  Eleanor had been schooled at some of the finest universities in the United States, while her mother had scraped merely a few years of education in a tiny Connemara village school where each of the children had to bring a sod of turf every day to keep the fire alight. Yet Brigid had been born with all the wisdom of the earth in her bones and a kindness in her heart that meant she saw the world with a forgiving eye.

  During her years working as a psychoanalyst in New York, Eleanor had discovered that bitterness ate away at people’s insides just as effectively as any disease.

  People spent years in therapy simply to learn what Brigid O’Neill
had known instinctively.

  The recipe book was where she’d written all of this wisdom down for her daughter.

  At some point, the recipes and the little notes she’d written in the margins had taken on a life of their own.

  Brigid’s recipe book had never really been a simple book of how to cook. It was a book on how to live life, full of the knowledge of a gentle countrywoman who’d lived off the land and had to use her commonsense and an innate Celtic intuition to survive.

  Eleanor had often wondered if her mother had more spiritual awareness than normal people. Some sort of instinct that the modern world had lost and was always trying to regain. For certain, her recipe book contained a hint of magic. Perhaps it was just the magic of food and life.

  And really, food and life were so intertwined, Eleanor thought.

  Her mother’s life had been lived with the kitchen stove always nearby. Feeding people and nurturing them was a gift in itself. The old religions that made a point of the power of the feast had understood that. Food was about hope, rebirth, community, family and a nourishment that went beyond the purely physical.

  Like the mashed potato with the puddle of melting butter in the middle and spring onions chopped in that you ate when you were feeling blue. Or the chicken soup made when there was nothing to eat but leftovers, but which when mixed together with skill and love and a hint of garlic became a melting broth that would warm your heart.

  Or the taste of fresh berries on juice-stained lips in bed with the man you loved.