‘That sounds absolutely lovely,’ agreed Gina, who knew that Bridget suffered with arthritis and was devoted to her elderly husband and family. ‘What about a sit-down three-course lunch and a special golden wedding anniversary cake?’ she suggested. ‘You won’t have to do a thing, as I can come along to serve and then disappear.’
‘Oh Gina, that would be grand!’ said Bridget. ‘Just grand.’
Gina smiled to herself. Kilfinn might be a small village, but thank heaven people still enjoyed family celebrations. She’d put a sign up near the counter in the shop for ordering her mince pies, Christmas puddings and chocolate-and-chestnut Yule logs. Busy in the café all day, she then turned around and baked at night, the smell of Christmas pudding filling the house.
‘You’re killing yourself!’ warned Paul, who was working night and day trying to complete a new kitchen for the O’Donovans, who lived about five miles away.
‘You’re a fine one to talk!’ she teased.
‘Gina, I heard something today from one of the electricians. He was talking about the café,’ Paul said, sounding worried. ‘He seemed to think that it was closing down and was going to be taken over by the pub next door.’
‘Norah wouldn’t do that!’ Gina argued. ‘She’d never agree to something like that!’
‘It’s probably only a rumour,’ he said softly, ‘but you know how these things spread!’
Gina was worried. What if it was true? Tomorrow she’d go and ask Norah about what was going to happen to the café and talk to her about taking it over …
Norah was dozing in her chair. She seemed to sleep more and more of the time, like a lot of the residents in Beech Hill.
‘Norah, I need to talk to you,’ Gina said softly, sitting down beside her.
Over the next twenty minutes she carefully outlined her plans for the café, about doing it up. She explained how she would really like to rent it from Norah, or was even, if necessary, prepared to buy it.
‘You’ve run the café successfully all these years, Norah, but now I want it to continue,’ she explained. ‘I want to make sure it stays open and that Kilfinn has a place for people to come for their coffees and cakes.’
Norah was listening, but said nothing all the time Gina was talking.
‘I have to close my café …’ she said at last, her eyes welling with tears as she became agitated.
‘No, no, Norah – you won’t have to close the café,’ she soothed, ‘because I’ll rent or buy the place from you, then I’ll keep it open. We can work it out, don’t worry!’
Norah held on to her hand.
‘But Martin says I have to sell,’ she whispered, getting all upset. ‘He says that he’s looking after it.’
Gina tried to hide her own dismay and comfort Norah. If Norah’s nephew was the one going to rent out or sell the premises, then she would have to deal with him. She had his number and when she got home she’d phone him immediately.
Martin Cassidy admitted things were at an advanced stage with regard to the premises.
‘But I’m willing to rent it from Norah!’ she protested furiously. ‘I could easily take it over without any upset.’
‘I’m sure you could,’ he said smoothly, ‘but unfortunately, with Norah’s retirement due to her ill-health, the family and Norah have decided it’s better to sell the entire premises to pay for her ongoing care and medical expenses.’
‘But I can talk to the bank,’ Gina offered. ‘What kind of figure are you looking for?’
‘We have been advised by a local auctioneer that the building, even in the current climate, is worth about one hundred and fifty thousand euro.’
Gina gasped. She had factored in buying the ground floor, but had not even considered buying the whole building. It was far more than she had expected.
‘Please, Martin, let me have a chance to talk to my bank manager, see what we can come up with,’ she begged.
‘Very well, but we are close to making arrangements with another interested party,’ he said pompously.
‘Martin, for heaven’s sake – you know that Norah would want me to have the place, to have the café stay open! I heard that you were talking to the Armstrongs in the pub next door. Please just give me a chance to see about getting a loan first.’
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Nothing is going to happen for the next few days.’
‘Thanks,’ she said.
Gina didn’t sleep a wink, tossing and turning all night while Paul tried to get her to calm down. All her plans and hopes might come to nothing.
‘We’ll talk to the bank tomorrow,’ Paul promised after they had gone through their figures to see if they could manage such a loan. ‘Let’s just see what they say …’
Billy Wright, their local bank manager, listened to them but they could tell by his demeanour that getting a loan was going to be difficult.
‘Your projections are based on an increase in custom,’ he pointed out, ‘but what happens if this does not materialize?’
Gina tried to explain that she was sure that she could entice more customers to come to the newly done-up café and that she planned to open over the weekends.
‘Gina, when you factor in the costs of loan repayments and utilities, as well as local rates and insurance, are you sure this is a business capable of generating profit, let alone a very comfortable income?’ he asked, leaning across his mahogany desk.
‘It’s a good business,’ she insisted, ‘and I would also be using the café to attract catering business locally, which is something Norah never did, and we would rent out the flat upstairs.’
‘Well, that’s positive anyway,’ he smiled. ‘The bank is trying to ensure that businesses within a community stay trading, as there is nothing worse than a street of vacant shops!’
‘Kilfinn has enough empty shops,’ agreed Gina.
‘But there is one thing that I am very concerned about,’ Billy said, sounding serious. ‘There is a problem showing up on the system with regard to your credit-rating history.’
‘That was when we were in Dublin and I lost my job,’ Paul explained carefully. ‘We fell into arrears with our mortgage, but we moved here and decided to sell the house. All the loans were cleared and paid in full. That was over two and a half years ago, and Gina and I have no loans now. We are home-owners with no mortgage.’
‘I’m sure that will all be taken into account by our credit committee,’ the bank manager said, shaking their hands as they left his office.
Coming home, Gina felt utterly exhausted with the stress of it all.
‘You sit down and relax,’ Paul ordered, making her put her feet up on the living-room couch. How could she relax with all that was going on?
‘And I’m cooking dinner tonight,’ he added. ‘My special – spaghetti and mince.’
As they sat at the table with the boys, having big bowls of pasta and salad and garlic bread, Paul opened a bottle of red wine.
‘Here’s to whatever happens!’ he said as he filled her glass.
‘But what happens if we don’t get the loan and I lose my job?’ she worried.
‘Ssshhh,’ he said calmly. ‘We have food on our table, a roof over our heads, two fine sons and each other!’
Gina looked at his kind blue eyes and his still-handsome face. With all Paul had gone through, he still had never lost his sense of optimism and ability to be happy. She knew he was right, that whatever happened would be for the best.
Chapter 45
GINA AND PAUL WERE DELIGHTED WHEN THE BANK CAME BACK A few days later to say they were prepared to give them a loan; however, it was for twenty-five thousand less than they had expected.
‘But what if it’s not enough?’ worried Gina as they put in their offer for Norah Cassidy’s.
They waited on tenterhooks to see if it was accepted. But the local auctioneer came back twenty-four hours later to say that they had received a higher offer from the other party and asked if they wanted to increase their offer.
The bank had been quite clear with regard to the amount that they could borrow.
‘We are not going to bankrupt ourselves over this,’ warned Paul before phoning the auctioneer to say they would not be making another offer.
Gina tried to keep herself busy, hoping that by some miracle they would be successful. She was just about to close the café on Thursday evening when Martin Cassidy called in.
‘I came in to tell you that my aunt has accepted an offer to buy the premises,’ he told her. ‘Norah has decided the café will close on the twenty-fourth of December. It will not reopen in the New Year.’
Gina couldn’t believe it. She took a deep breath, glad that there were no customers around as she grabbed hold of the counter. In a way she had been expecting this …
‘My aunt is very grateful for your support in running the business in her absence, and of course you will be paid proper redundancy based on the length of time you have worked here,’ he said coldly.
‘Thank you,’ she replied, trying to control her emotions. ‘I’m going to really miss working here. What is going to happen to the café?’
‘The Armstrongs from the pub next door have bought it,’ he told her, ‘but I am not sure what their plans are.’
After he was gone Gina locked up, then sat at a table in the window looking out on the village street. It was almost dark and she made herself a large mug of coffee and took a slice of the frosted walnut cake, watching as the shops closed down and their lights went off along the street. She really was going to miss this place and the customers. Taking out her phone, she texted Paul to tell him the news. She’d go and see Norah in a few days when she was less upset. She imagined the older woman would be distressed about seeing her business and home sold.
An hour later, as she was locking up, she saw Bernadette Armstrong getting out of her car outside the Kilfinn Inn.
‘Bernadette, I just heard that you and Tom have bought Norah’s!’ she said, trying to stay calm and composed.
‘I’m sorry, Gina. I know that you and Paul were interested in keeping the café, but Tom’s had his eye on the place for years,’ Bernadette said, stopping to talk. ‘He spoke to Norah a few times about it, but she’d always say it was her home and she’d no intention of selling while she was alive.’
‘Are you going to keep the café open?’
‘No, we’re not,’ she confided. ‘We already do teas and coffees and lunches in the pub, so there’s no point. Tom wants to extend the bar – with Mulligan’s closed he wants to make a kind of men’s snug with a fireplace at the back and add more space for customers in the front. Also, with our own crew, it would be good to have a bit of extra living space upstairs over the pub. The kids kill each other, so it will be great that they can each have a room now that they are getting older and need to study.’
Gina let out a breath. It made sense, as the Kilfinn Inn was a busy village pub with music sessions on a Saturday night and the Armstrongs and their four teenage children lived above it.
‘I’m sorry, Gina, about you losing your job,’ Bernadette said kindly. ‘I’ll be sad to see Norah’s shut, but I suppose times change, don’t they?’
‘Yes, times change,’ she said, trying not to give in to her tears of disappointment.
Talking to Paul that night, Gina realized that owning the café had been almost a dream, and for someone like her dreams didn’t usually come true. But she was determined not to let Norah down, and to ensure that Cassidy’s Café said a proper final farewell to all its customers before it closed. She would put on lunch specials and afternoon teas, and the café would do its best to attract all their old customers back for that final coffee or cake or meal. She would put fairy lights up and decorate the window and make it so appealing that no one could pass by without wanting to come inside and sit down …
Chapter 46
THE TWENTY-FIRST OF NOVEMBER. MOLLY STILL COULDN’T believe that today it was three hundred and sixty-five days, a full year, since David’s death. She would never get used to it, or be able to accept that David would never walk into the room, turn his key in the front-door lock, phone her, talk to her, or touch her ever again …
Molly would never forget that day – an ordinary day, a Tuesday morning … They’d had breakfast together, Molly making coffee, putting the washing in the washing machine, making smalltalk, listening to the morning news on the radio as David grabbed his warm jacket and left for the office where he had an early-morning meeting with a client. It was cold outside, ice on their cars …
Why didn’t she kiss him? Some mornings they did, automatically brushing their lips together to say goodbye as he left to go to work. But on that day they hadn’t … She played it over and over again, like a film on a loop, remembering every word, every gesture, wondering whether if the day had gone differently would David still be alive …
She was upstairs having a shower. Coming out wrapped in a towel she could see the flashing on her phone. She had missed eight calls and before she could even try to reply the house phone on her bedside table went.
It was the police to say David had been in some sort of car accident and had been taken to the nearby regional hospital.
‘Is he okay?’ she kept asking again and again.
‘You need to come to the hospital immediately, Mrs Hennessy,’ advised the Garda officer.
They were sending a car for her. Barry O’Loughlin, a young Guard whose parents lived in the village, would drive her to the hospital. She was shaking as she got dressed, pulled on her boots and raced out to his car, her feet slipping.
‘He’s going to be fine,’ she kept saying, mantra-like, until she got to the hospital.
The A&E department sent her into the main hospital and up to the second floor.
‘My husband, David … David Hennessy, is here. They said that he was in a car accident.’
A doctor came out to talk to her. A beautiful, dark-eyed young woman from Pakistan, stylish and sympathetic, she made Molly sit down and sat calmly beside her to explain.
‘I’m afraid it is very bad news … the worst news … David is dead. He was dead when the ambulance crew came. It was very sudden – he died instantly.’
Molly refused to believe it. ‘No! No! No!’ she kept saying. ‘There’s been a mistake.’
The doctor brought her to a room where David lay on a trolley. He was absolutely still, eyes closed, all life gone from him, his skin already cold, and she knew when she kissed him and touched his cheek that the doctor’s words were true.
‘The car had pulled off the road, hit a hedge,’ she explained, ‘but you can see that there is only a slight abrasion on his forehead. There is also some bruising on his chest, probably from the safety belt, but otherwise very few injuries.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The autopsy will give us a better idea,’ the doctor said, ‘but we think that there is a good chance that David was already dead when his car came off the road, so he would have felt nothing.’
Molly was so confused, so upset.
Cara and Tim had come to the hospital immediately and Michael Quinn from the office had appeared, also offering to do anything he could to help. Emma and Grace arrived about two hours later, both shocked and hysterical, wanting to see their dad …
Molly remembered having to tell David’s family. His elderly mother, Maureen, who was in a nursing home, was barely able to take it in; his two brothers and sister were devastated by the news.
The autopsy results two days later showed that David’s death was the result of a brain aneurysm which must have suddenly burst, rather than the accident. He would have lost control of the car, which had hit the roadside hedge. The only consolation Molly gained was that nobody else was involved or injured, and from what the doctors said David had died immediately. There had been absolutely no warning and no saving him.
The shock and suddenness had been horrendous. She remembered lying in bed shaking and shivering, covered in blankets, her teeth chat
tering as she realized that she would never see the man she loved again.
She could barely remember the following days, but she had to be strong for Emma and Grace, who were distraught and overwhelmed by the sudden loss of their dad, and she also had to try to organize his funeral.
Somehow she’d got through the ritual of waking David at home in Mossbawn – their family and friends all equally shocked by his loss – and then the large funeral mass in their parish church and his burial in the nearby graveyard. She remembered being stunned by the fact that David, who had organized everything meticulously in his life, had bought a plot in Kilfinn’s cemetery a few years earlier and never said a word to her about it.
The following weeks and months had been a blur as she tried to cope with the massive void in her life that David had left behind, the loneliness of it unbearable. People had been good and kind, supportive, but she still felt so alone, raw with grief and loss. Then as the months went on, she realized that the world kept turning, the seasons came and went, spring, summer, autumn and now another winter … She could see it in the garden in Mossbawn.
Losing David had been heartbreaking and there were days when she questioned her will to go on, to continue living without him; but those days were fewer and fewer now as she began to take small step after small step towards building a life without him …
Father Darragh was saying an anniversary mass for the family this evening. David’s family were all attending and coming back to the house afterwards, but this morning she wanted to go to his grave on her own, have that time with him.
It was strange, but visiting the small graveyard on the other side of the village, which was protected by a grove of elms and overlooked a curving part of the hillside where cattle grazed in the springtime, Molly was comforted. The peace and quiet there, and the stillness, exuded the strong spirituality of a place where generation after generation of Kilfinn’s families lay buried. David had chosen well, for he was surrounded by the graves of neighbours and friends.
The Rose Garden Page 18