The House On Willow Street

by Cathy Kelly

  Everyone should have been close, but they weren’t—not to Danae’s family, at least. Danae’s mother created a barrier between them and their neighbors.

  “We’re better than the likes of them,” Sybil would say every day, after some fresh embarrassment, such as having to queue for the toilet because the Mister Rourke from number seven had a gyppy stomach thanks to a feed of pints on payday. “Tell them nothing, Danae. We don’t want other people knowing our business.”

  As she grew older, Danae found other reasons to keep her own counsel.

  When she’d first moved to Avalon, Danae had spent every spare moment exploring the pretty town, tracing its history in the varying architectural styles. Originally it had been a village consisting of a few grace-and-favor cottages for workers from the De Paor estate. These tiny brick homes arranged in undulating lines on the hillside were currently much in vogue with city dwellers who wanted a seaside hideaway. There were few other buildings that dated back to that period, one exception being the Avalon Hotel and Spa, which Belle ran. The rest of the town was a hodgepodge of American-style wooden houses built by a 1930s developer near the seafront, with a couple of modern housing estates and pretty, small-windowed Irish cottages scattered here and there.

  Danae’s cottage was on the sparsely populated southern side of Avalon, right at the top end of Willow Street, a long, steep road that wound up the hill. The only neighboring buildings were the ruins of a medieval abbey, which sat to her right, and Avalon House, which loomed behind her. Huge granite gateposts with battered iron gates marked the entrance to the once tree-lined avenue. Many of the trees were gone now, damaged like the great house itself, which had sat empty these last ten years.

  Below Willow Street lay the sweep of Avalon Bay with its horseshoe-shaped sandy beach, which had been drawing seaside-loving holidaymakers to the area for many years.

  Avalon was a resort town with a population of about five thousand at most during the winter, swelling to at least three times that figure in summer. Two caravan parks on the dunes were home to many of the visitors; those with money went to The Dunes, a beautifully kept site where a hundred, mainly privately owned mobile homes, sat in splendor amid pretty little gardens. Further up the beach lay Cabana-Land, host to as many caravans as the owner could squeeze in and scene of much partying, despite signs warning NO BARBECUES ON THE BEACH.

  The steep hillside where Danae lived was a very different landscape to the rest of the town. Here, wild rhododendrons grew in drifts and the Avalon woods began, a vast hardwood forest planted many centuries before by Tess Power’s ancestors. Danae’s cottage was surrounded by a lush garden hidden from the sea winds by a crescent of trees, among them ash and elders, with one oak she was sure wouldn’t last the winter. She liked to rest her fingers on the cracked bark, feeling the lifeblood of this ancient giant throb into her.

  Ferns that wouldn’t grow anywhere else in Avalon thrived in the sylvan sanctuary of her garden, while the winter roses bloomed with glorious blossoms. Her daffodils and crocuses came up weeks before anyone else’s, and the tiny sea orchids that only grew on the spiky grass on the sea dunes ran riot, forming wild clumps everywhere in the shelter of Danae’s domain.

  When she got out of the car and opened the gate to the garden, Lady, a dog with the silvery gray fur and luminous pale blue eyes of a timber wolf, ran toward her, followed by the hens, clucking loudly as if to tell her their news. Danae hugged Lady first, then patted the hens’ sleek feathers, careful to pet all eight or else there would be jealousy.

  Cora, the latest battery hen she’d rescued, was wildly jealous of the others. Having received two weeks’ daily nurturing from Danae, Cora had clearly decided that Danae was her savior and favoritest person ever. She was still quite bald from her two years as a battery hen, but her personality shone through her strange haircut.

  The funniest of the hens was Mara. Named after Danae’s niece, Mara was a sheeny Rhode Island Red who had been rescued by the local ISPCA. She was a flibbertigibbet of a creature, all fluffy bloomers and ruffled wing feathers at the slightest noise. Occasionally she would opt to remain in the henhouse at feeding time, waiting to be coaxed out like a reluctant diva, while in high winds she would climb atop the henhouse and stand there clucking like a female Heathcliff, impervious to the weather.

  “She’s completely mad,” Mara pointed out when her chicken namesake introduced herself by landing on top of Mara’s lime-green Fiat Uno and sitting there in delighted splendor like the Queen of the Nile, wings stretched out. “Is that why she’s called after me?”

  “No!” Danae laughed. “She’s beautiful and she nestled against me instantly the first time I met her. That’s what did it for me. Plus,” Danae went on, “she’s a redhead and her flame shines brightly.”

  Mara, who was eccentrically unique and had fiercely red hair that rippled around her face like glossy lava, grinned.

  “As excuses go, that’s perfect,” she’d said.

  Mara hadn’t been to visit for far too long, Danae realized as she petted the hens. There had been talk in her brother’s family of an engagement between Mara and a man at work, which was anticipated “any day now,” according to Morris, Danae’s younger brother.

  The wind had begun to howl through the forest and there were swollen, dark clouds overhead. There would be no stars visible tonight. Danae loved staring up at the night sky, seeing the Great and Little Bears, the rippling Orion’s Belt and, her favorite, Cassiopeia. The spikily drawn big W was the first constellation she’d ever identified all those years ago, when she used to sit on the fire escape in the hostel and stare out, unseeing, at the darkness above.

  One night, someone had handed her a tissue to dry her eyes and had started gently pointing out the stars until Danae’s tears had stopped falling and she found herself looking at something instead of staring at nothingness, seeing only her own pain. That night had been a watershed for Danae. It had been the first time she’d emerged from the pain to look at the world and to hear another human being taking the time to be kind to her. That night had marked the first time in years she’d allowed anybody to comfort her.

  Years later, the stars still had the power to touch her deeply. It was impossible to look up at the heavens without feeling that you were a mere fragment of the great universe, and that one day, the problems that beset you would mean nothing. Few tears could survive that realization.

  She spent the evening inside by the fire, with some knitting on her lap and Lady asleep at her feet. Outside, the wind howled ferociously and rain beat down on the roof with a fierce tattoo. At five minutes to midnight, Danae opened the back door and stared out at the storm that was battering the trees in her garden. From indoors, the howling wind and torrential rain had sounded as if they were going to lift every slate from the roof and hurl the very house itself into the sea. But once she’d stepped outside, into the eye of the storm, the torrent felt instantly calmer. It was only when she was standing on the wet grass, feeling the whip of the wind on her cheeks that she felt safe.

  A storm this elemental demanded respect. A respect that could only be shown by standing in the midst of it, not cowering beneath man-made roof or hiding behind stone walls.

  The noise was different outside the house: rain landed more softly on grass and danced lightly on bronzed leaves. Without windows to wail against, the wind lashed the circle of ancient trees in Danae’s garden. But the trees fought back, unbending. Their leaves whipped, their branches flexed, but the trunks stood immovable.

  Danae walked stiffly across the small lawn to the largest, oldest tree, her beloved oak with its barrel trunk. Under the shelter of the giant oak, Danae leaned back and felt Lady’s cold nose reach questing into her hand.

  Lady wasn’t afraid of storms. Her gleaming eyes shone up at her mistress with utter devotion.

  Danae wasn’t afraid of storms, either. It was the same with the dark. People who’d never felt the pure darkness of life itself were scared when night fell.
People who understood the darkness knew that lack of light wasn’t the problem.

  Lightning rent the sky and even Lady quivered at the sight.

  Something was happening, Danae decided. That was what such wild September storms signified: newcomers and a change. A change for Avalon.

  Danae was no longer scared of change. Life was all change. Endlessly, unrelentingly. And all she wanted was peace, but it never came.

  Autumn

  1

  Early mornings in Avalon were among Tess Power’s favorite times of the day. On a weekend, nine-year-old Kitty would sleepily climb into her bed and snuggle up to her mother. And sometimes—only sometimes, because he often forgot—Zach would bring her a cup of tea in bed. This would never happen on a weekday like today, when Zach remained buried under his duvet until she hauled him out to go to school.

  “Teenagers need extra sleep, Ma,” he’d plead. “It’s official: I read it on the Internet. Ten minutes more . . .”

  Anything to do with her two beloved children made her happy—unless it was detention for Zach or an argument with Kitty over eating any foodstuff which could be classed as a vegetable: “I hate broccoli and tomatoes and all greens, so there!”

  That aside, Zach and Kitty’s existence made Tess giddy with happiness. But there was something special about weekday mornings like this one, when she would slip out while the children were still sleeping and take Silkie, the family’s fawn-colored whippet, for a walk in the woods beside the home where she’d grown up.

  Up here with the wind whistling around them it felt as if Tess and Silkie were the only creatures in the world. As they approached the abbey ruins, Silkie suddenly turned and ran with easy greyhound grace over fallen leaves and twigs in the direction of the great house. Tess hesitated a moment before following. Even though she came up here almost every day for a bit of early morning meditation while gazing out to sea, she rarely went too close to Avalon House.

  It was nearly two decades since she had left her old home, had watched it sold to strangers, knowing how desolate her father would have been if he’d lived to see it. And despite that lapse of time the pain had not lost its edge, so she tended to steer clear of the house, rarely venturing into the grounds, let alone inside.

  Silkie, thrilled with this rare adventure, had found a path through the undergrowth. Tess didn’t know what was drawing her toward Avalon House, but she followed, picking her way gently through the brambles and briars that had taken over the beautiful gardens her father had worked so hard to maintain. He had loved that garden, and it was strange that neither Tess nor Suki, her older sister, had shown even the slightest interest in gardening. Back then, they’d looked on gardening as a grown-up’s pastime. Now, Tess found that the smell of freshly dug earth took her back to the lovingly tended gardens of the house at the end of Willow Street and awakened an overwhelming sense of loss.

  Stop being so melodramatic, she told herself briskly, lots of people have to move from the house they were born in!

  Yes, that was the attitude. Show some Power backbone.

  She marched on, determined to have a good walk. She was perfectly able to approach the house and look at it and check how far into disrepair it was falling. The American telecoms millionaire who’d bought it ten years ago had lost all his money and now there was no chance that he and his wife would come here to restore the house to its former glory.

  Avalon House was not the most beautiful piece of architecture, but it was certainly majestic, and its hodgepodge of styles reflected the fluctuating fortunes of the de Paors. There was a Victorian great hall, a Norman tower that nobody was ever allowed in because it was a danger zone, and a crumbling Georgian wing. The entire place was shabby and decaying when Tess and Suki were children. They’d lived in the most modern part of the house, which dated back just over a century; despite the vast space, the only inhabitable parts of the old building were the kitchen, the library with its panelling and huge fireplace, and the back stairs that led to the bedrooms.

  The De Paor fortune had long since vanished, leaving no cash for fires or modern heating. As a child, Tess had been conditioned to turn the lights off and to put as many blankets as she could on the bed to keep out the icy breeze that wound up from the coast to the house on the hill. Kids from the village school used to tease her about her big home, but once they’d actually been there, they were less likely to do so.

  However, none of her schoolfriends had Greek goddesses, albeit crumbling and dressed with lichen, in their gardens. Nor did they have an eighteenth-century family silver teapot (one of the last items to be sold) or huge oil paintings of dusty, aristocratic ancestors staring down at them from the gallery. Her father had held on to the paintings till the end, convinced they were worth something.

  Now Tess knew better. None of the portraits had been by important painters, and no one had been interested in paying a vast sum for someone else’s ancestors.

  Yet the house and the name had meant something in Avalon, and people had instinctively placed Tess in the category of elite. It didn’t matter that her clothes were threadbare or that she had jam sandwiches for lunch, she was a De Paor, although the name had been anglicized to Power many years before. She lived in a big house. Her father wore elegant, if somewhat tatty, riding clothes to the village shop and spoke in clipped British tones.

  Only one person in her younger life had ever seemed impervious to the patina of glamour about her name and her home: Cashel Reilly.

  Tess didn’t do regrets. Didn’t believe in them. What was the point? The past was full of hard lessons to be learned stoically, not memories to be sobbed over. But it was a different story with Cashel Reilly.

  How ironic to be dwelling on memories of Cashel and heartbreak when she’d come here this morning to have a serious think about Kevin, herself and the separation.

  Nine months earlier, when the cracks in their marriage became too wide to pretend they weren’t there, she and Kevin had both agreed that counseling should help. One of her husband’s better qualities was the way he was open to ideas other men wouldn’t dream of countenancing. There had never been any danger of him dismissing her suggestion that they see a marriage counsellor.

  “We love each other,” Kevin said the day she’d suggested it, “but . . .”

  That “but” contained so much.

  But we never spend any time with each other anymore. But we never make love. But we lead separate lives and are happy to do so.

  The counselor had been wonderful. Kind and compassionate and not hell-bent on keeping them together no matter what. As the weeks went by—weeks of date nights and long conversations without argumentative statements starting “You always . . . !”—Tess began to face the truth she’d wanted not to see.

  Their marriage was over. Living with Kevin was like living with a brother, and had felt so for years.

  There was no fierce passion. If she was entirely honest, there never had been. Kevin was the man she’d fallen for on the rebound. She’d been twenty-three then, still a romantic, vulnerable. Now, at the age of forty-one, she no longer dreamed of a knight on a white horse racing to save her. Nobody saved you, Tess had discovered; you had to do that yourself. Yet some part of her longed for the sort of love that had been missing from her relationship with Kevin right from the start. You couldn’t rekindle a love that had never existed. It was a sobering thought. Reaching that decision meant breaking up their family, hurting Kitty and Zach.

  All the while, Tess felt guilty because she wondered whether she had done the wrong thing by marrying him in the first place. But their marriage had given her Zach; now a tall and strong seventeen-year-old, with a mop of dark hair like his father. And Kitty, nine years old, was the spitting image of her aunt Suki at the same age, with that widow’s peak and the pale blonde Power hair streaming down her back in a silky curtain. These days, Suki’s lustrous mane owed more to the hairdresser’s bottle with its many shades in the platinum spectrum. Tess’s own hair resembled t
heir mother’s, a muted strawberry blonde that gave her pale lashes which she couldn’t be bothered to dye, despite Suki’s urging.

  Kitty, Suki and Tess shared the delicate Power bone structure, the heart-shaped face that ended in a dainty pointed chin and the large gray eyes.

  Many times over the years, Kevin had told her she was beautiful, as if he couldn’t believe his luck in finding this aristocratic flower with her tiny frame, hand-span waist and long legs. She couldn’t quite believe him, though. She’d only believed one man who’d told her she was beautiful.

  With six months of counseling behind them, Tess and Kevin had agreed on a trial separation, in case they were wrong, in case being apart would make them realize what they had after all.

  “This isn’t forever,” Kevin told Zach, who’d sat mutinously, head bent down and dark curls covering his eyes.

  “Bullshit,” Zach muttered, loud enough for both adults to hear. “I think it’s stupid.” He’d sounded more like his little sister than a seventeen-year-old. “You want a divorce and you’re trying to pretend to us that you don’t.”

  “I’ll only be down the road in Granny’s house, in the flat at the back. She hasn’t rented it out for the summer yet, so it’s mine. Ours,” Kevin corrected himself. “You’ll see as much of me as you see of me here.”

  Kitty had gone and curled up on Kevin’s lap so she resembled a small creature, nuzzling against him.

  Tess had been on the verge of insisting that they forget it, abandon the whole painful business of separation, when Kitty had fixed her with a firm gaze and said: “Can we get a kitten, then?”