The House On Willow Street

by Cathy Kelly

  Cashel gazed at it for a few minutes. He didn’t know who was living there now, who owned it, who’d renovated it. He knew nothing. He didn’t want to know. His mother had known better than to raise the subject and then, in the last few years, she hadn’t been able to. What did he care about Avalon House anyway? What did he care about the bloody Powers? Suki and Tess, who between them had managed to rip his heart out all those years ago. No, he didn’t give a damn who lived there. That house was bad luck, bad luck to anyone who had anything to do with it.

  8

  Tess slipped into the back of the church quietly, not wanting Cashel to see her. She had spoken to Riach on the phone the day before and he had assured her it was all right for her to come to his mother’s funeral.

  “And Cashel knows about it?” Tess said, hesitantly.

  “He knows,” was all Riach would say. And Tess could read what she wanted into those words.

  That Cashel no longer cared, that Cashel was so grief-stricken it was immaterial, that Cashel had forgotten her . . .

  The church was full, with people standing at the back. Tess made her way a little to one side so she could see Anna’s coffin, which was covered in white flowers. Before the dementia had taken her, Anna had loved flowers and her garden. She and old Mrs. Maguire, who used to run the butcher’s shop, had both been avid gardeners; Tess had often found them discussing plants and cuttings together in Lorena’s Café.

  The whole of Avalon was in St. Mary’s church. Danae, resplendent in black velvet with a somber hat upon her long, tortoiseshell hair. Belle from the hotel, doing her best to look funereal but failing because really Belle always looked as though she had stepped off the stage. Even Dessie from the pub was there, which was unusual because funerals meant extra business and he’d be busy behind the bar, getting everything ready for the mourners to pour and cheer themselves up with a few stiff ones as soon as the service was over. A feed of pints seemed to help so many people get over the pain of death, Dessie would cheerfully tell anyone who’d listen.

  Tess was tall enough to see the Reilly brothers seated in the front pew. They towered over everyone else. Riach’s head was dark and Cashel’s . . . well, Cashel’s was almost the same as she remembered from all those years ago: dark, but now with a scattering of gray. It was strange, looking at the back of his head from this distance instead of being beside him, touching him.

  So many years had passed, but for a moment Tess felt again like the young girl she’d been when she’d fallen in love with him for the first time. She reached in her pocket for a tissue and found nothing.

  “Here,” said someone, thrusting a bit of tissue into her hand. “You need this. It’s a terrible day, isn’t it? But, sure, it’s a mercy that the Lord’s finally taken her, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is,” said Tess.

  And it was a mercy. Anna Reilly was not the sort of woman who’d have wanted to be trapped in a body with her mind somewhere else. It was a sad end for such a vibrant, bright woman.

  Father Liam was conducting the Mass and Tess rather thought that her old friend would have preferred the sweet Nigerian, Father Olumbuko, to conduct proceedings. Anna had never been conservative. She’d have liked the tall African priest with his gentle eyes, but she’d never known him, not properly. For the past three years, she hadn’t known anyone, including Tess.

  Funerals always made Tess think of other funerals, in the same way that weddings made her think of other weddings. Today, in the grand old church, she thought back to her father’s funeral in St. Ethelred’s, up the road. To outsiders, Irish funerals must have seemed strange, with their enormous crowds. Funerals were done differently in other countries, with only invited guests and nobody daring to go to the graveside. But here in Avalon, everyone wanted to turn up to pay their respects, and graveyards were generally full of mourners, teetering on gravesides, wondering if it was terrible to walk across the actual graves or should they stand on the edges?

  Death was a part of Irish life as much as birth was. The cycle of birth, death and rebirth was part of a pre-Christian, pre-Celtic Ireland that had lived on through the centuries. The rituals might have changed but the crowds remained constant.

  Her father was so well loved that the whole town had turned out for his funeral, like today. Tess could remember her sister sobbing in the front pew as she knelt on one of the old embroidered kneelers. Suki had cried and sobbed and yet managed to check her mascara in the funeral car mirror as they drove back to the house, where tea, drinks and sandwiches were laid out.

  “Dad loved a party,” Suki had said. “He’d love this one. Did you buy enough drink, Tess? I might make us pink gins, wouldn’t that be lovely? Dad would like that.”

  At the time, Tess had been so grief-stricken that she’d simply gaped openmouthed at her sister and said nothing. How could she think of making pink gins when their father was dead? Darling, darling Dad. But then that was Suki all over: try and find the fun element to everything. The fun element meant you could avoid thinking about the actual sadness.

  For years, this had annoyed Tess beyond measure. Now, Tess felt sorry for her older sister. She didn’t think Suki had ever mourned their father properly; had ever mourned anything, for that matter. Suki didn’t do the past, she was too busy rushing toward the future with both hands held out, like a child about to receive a birthday present.

  Tess looked around the church today, at the couples and families who had come to pay their respects. She had nobody with her.

  A soprano launched into “Panis Angelicus” and Tess felt the tears well up inside. Music did that to her, grabbed her heart and twisted it. She had to stop thinking like this. It was stupid, futile. She’d think instead of Kitty and Zach. She’d hugged Zach this morning before he’d gone to school and he hadn’t pulled away and said, “Oh, Ma,” the way he sometimes did. It was as if he knew she was sadder than she should have been over the death of an old lady with dementia.

  Seventeen-year-olds were supposed to be totally self-absorbed, and Zach could be that way at times. Yet he was remarkably intuitive. She’d never told him about Cashel or why Anna Reilly was a special link with the past, but somehow, she thought he understood. He was a wise old soul, as Suki liked to say. Pity Suki hadn’t been to see them for so long, then, Tess thought crossly.

  Finally, the funeral was over and the priests, the coffin and the chief mourners were coming down the church. Tess tried to hide behind the crowd of people because she didn’t want Cashel to see her. She’d come to pay her respects to his mother, nothing more. The tradition at local funerals was for people to throng around the bereaved and offer their sympathies after the coffin was loaded into the hearse. Today, there were hundreds of people in a big crowd around the entrance of the church and it took Tess quite a while to emerge. She had no plan to go to the graveyard. Instead she was going to head back to the shop, which she’d shut for the morning. That was on her mind as she finally made it outside and looked instinctively toward the hearse where Cashel and Riach stood. At that instant, Cashel saw her.

  Tess was in the middle of a group of people pushing out of the chapel and yet she still felt as if she was all alone with Cashel’s harsh gaze upon her. Nobody else had ever looked at her the way he’d looked that last time, with revulsion in his eyes. And that was the way he looked at her now. Instinctively she winced as if she’d been struck.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she muttered, as she tried to escape the group of people coming down the steps toward Cashel and Riach. But the crowd was moving as one and Tess was carried inexorably toward the two brothers. Catching sight of her, Riach smiled sadly, before realizing that his brother was standing like a piece of granite beside him. Riach reached out for her, leaning past the crowd of mourners. Tess clasped his hands in sympathy, but she was too aware of Cashel beside him, glaring at her, and she pulled away quickly without saying anything.

  Turning back into the crowd, she jostled her way toward the steps of the church, where she co
uld see an escape route. Her heart was pounding and she knew her face was red and flushed. She shouldn’t have come. It had been a mistake. She could have mourned at Anna’s grave another time.

  Riach might have told Cashel she was coming, but that didn’t mean she was welcome.

  Tess barely saw the people she bumped into in her haste to disappear, until one of them spoke to her.

  “Tess, how are you?” ventured Danae, having noticed her flushed skin and shocked expression. “You look a little unwell.”

  “I’m fine,” stammered Tess, even though she knew she was anything but fine.

  She couldn’t stop now. If only she could make it to the shop. Silkie would be waiting for her, she could hold her tight and sob her heart out, then she would be fine. Right now all she needed was to be as far away from Cashel Reilly as possible.

  Cashel had often wondered what he’d do if he saw Tess Power again after all these years. He’d thought about it many, many times, wondering what he’d say to her. He simply hadn’t thought he’d see her at his mother’s funeral.

  And in that instant, that electric glance had told him that it wasn’t all over, that he’d never, ever forget.

  He wasn’t sure what he’d thought she’d look like: older, dried out, maybe. That’s what he’d wanted. For her to have diminished for having turned him down. And yet she was none of those things. Tess Power looked older, naturally, but despite the black clothes in honor of his mother, she had a glow about her. Her fair hair curled as wildly as ever, but it was short now, probably some chic salon’s work, a messy look that cost a fortune.

  She looked strangely more like her sister Suki than she used to, a little like the photographs of their long-dead mother, despite the Power coloring. When they were kids, she’d always looked different, softer than other girls, and she still did, but there was no mistaking those cheekbones, the full lips. Being older suited her: her face had lost the puppy fat of youth, enhancing the elegant beauty that had been there all along.

  He’d watched, stunned, as she’d come toward the group of people surrounding him and Riach. He had to hand it to her: Tess Power had guts.

  That morning, Riach had muttered about everyone in the town coming, including “all the old pals from school . . .”

  Now, Cashel realized what that phrase had meant: Tess.

  Mechanically, he shook hands and accepted condolences from the hordes of people lined up to talk to him.

  “I knew your mother, she was a wonderful woman,” they all said.

  “She’ll be sadly missed in the village.”

  “It’s a mercy really, Cashel, she wasn’t herself.”

  He let the words flow over him. People did their best in times of pain, they tried to find the right things to say, but when you were hurting it was all so meaningless.

  He remembered Tess and what it had been like all those years ago and the things his mother and Riach had said. They’d done their best to console him, but that too had been meaningless.

  “You’ve clearly made your mind up, so go. I suppose you’ll forget her,” Riach had said nineteen years ago, none too confidently.

  His mother had been more prosaic. “If you want to go off and leave Tess this way, Cashel, then you must do it. Remember that I’m here for you. Avalon is here for you. Wherever you go, you can always come back. And wherever you are, you’ll always have our love.”

  That love was being buried today.

  The funeral director, recognizing who was in charge, gave Cashel a nod to signal that it was time they left for the graveyard.

  Cashel nodded in return. It was time.

  A fine mist began to descend upon the graveyard as the ceremony ended. The gravediggers had moved forward to the edge of the grave, ready to start filling in the earth. Cashel couldn’t remember the last time he’d been at a graveyard ceremony. When he was a child, many kids of his age had been to every funeral their mothers had been to. It was the Irish way: children were taken to funerals, perhaps in an effort to help them understand the cycle of living and dying. In the countryside, there was no escaping death—it was everywhere. Animals were born and died, the pig you’d played with as a piglet was killed and turned into sausages, the scrawny chicken who’d never been a good layer ended up in the cooking pot. And people went back to the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  Anna hadn’t been one of the mothers who’d taken her children to the funeral of every Tom, Dick and Harry. But even so, Cashel had been to enough of them; he’d seen enough damp earth spilled on coffins. He was sorry now that they hadn’t considered cremation. He hated the idea of his mother lying in the damp earth, food for worms. But today was the sort of day she’d have relished when she was well: the day with all her friends around her and her beloved sons, too.

  Rhona hadn’t come, although his assistant had e-mailed her with the information. He wasn’t surprised; there had never been any real closeness between Anna and his ex-wife.

  Riach was busy talking to people, saying the right things, his wife at his side. Charlotte was dressed in black, like they all were; she was indeed a fine woman, with short dark hair and small, dark eyes that viewed the world with kindness and wisdom. She was a good wife to Riach, Cashel knew that. His mother had never needed to worry about her younger son’s choice in the marital stakes. She’d been so happy at Riach and Charlotte’s wedding day ten years before.

  They had got married in Rome—something which had pleased Cashel, because he knew there was no danger of bumping into Tess. It was stupid really. He’d been married to Rhona then, wealthy, obviously happy, with more money than they knew what to do with, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking about the small-town girl he left behind. Only his mother had ever seemed to be aware of the fact.

  “It’s all in the past, Cashel,” she’d told him as they posed for photographs.

  Riach had cracked a joke about Avalon being a match for the glories of Rome, and immediately Cashel’s mind had drifted back to his hometown and all that was there.

  “There’s no point in looking back. Her life has moved on and so has yours,” his mother had said shrewdly.

  “What do you mean, ‘her life has moved on’?” he’d asked, and then felt angry with himself for wanting to know. “No, forget that I asked. I don’t want to know.”

  “That’s good, then,” Anna Reilly had said. “It would be a terrible shame to be here in the Eternal City with your lovely wife and continually be thinking of Tess Power, wouldn’t it?”

  Yes, he’d thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he’d given a magnificent speech at the wedding lunch, talking about the wonderful times he and Riach had growing up in Avalon, omitting to mention their father’s drinking and his devotion to the bookmakers, and leaving out the friendship both brothers had had with the Power family. Wedding speeches were as much about what you left out as what you put in, he realized.

  Rhona had loved the wedding feast at the elegant palazzo. She hadn’t been born into money, any more than he had, but she enjoyed spending it. He worked out that her Gucci outfit probably cost as much as the bride’s wedding dress—probably a lot more, if he knew Charlotte—but then he had the money to indulge Rhona. And indulge her he did. Spending money on her was easy, easier than making their marriage work.

  “Isn’t it divine?” she said to him, as they circled the dance floor, her head resting lazily on his shoulder.

  “Yes, it is,” he said automatically, wondering what was wrong with him, why wasn’t he happy?

  By the time they got divorced, the writing had been on the wall for years. Both of them had gone out of their way to avoid being together until, finally, there was no pretending any more: it was over. Cashel signed the divorce papers feeling like a failure—not something he encountered much in his professional life.

  “Are you coming?” Charlotte asked him.

  His sister-in-law put her hand on his sleeve and the touch unmanned him. Cashel felt the tears burn up behind his eyes. Here in Avalon he
felt like the loneliest man in the world.

  The after-funeral teas and coffees were held in the Avalon Hotel, and Cashel found people he didn’t recognize talking to him at every turn.

  “Hello, Cashel, I’m sorry for your loss,” they’d say, and he would thank them and wonder who they were.

  He’d been gone so long, he knew nobody here.

  And there was to be no escape from reminders of Tess, either.

  An elderly lady with bifocals and a head of lovely silvery blonde hair hugged him and said she was sure he remembered nobody now, “. . . except the Power girls.”

  Unable to listen to any more of this, Cashel shoved his chair back. “I’m sorry, but I need to make some calls,” he said abruptly, and ignoring the startled expressions around the table he got up and left.

  The driver he’d hired was outside reading a paper in the car. He looked up in mild alarm to see his client marching out with a face like thunder. Cashel waved him away and walked down the hill, not really knowing where he was going, only that he had to get away. The aroma of freshly ground coffee drifted across from a café on the square that hadn’t been there in his day. Who was he kidding, he thought: nothing had been there in his day. Avalon was like a totally different town. Despite Riach and his family being there, Cashel felt as if the last true link to the place was gone. Riach could visit him anytime, anywhere. He’d send the plane for them. The kids would love it. There was no need ever to set foot in this town again.

  A wave of grief for his mother swept over him. He hadn’t been there for her. He’d paid for things, naturally, but he hadn’t been there, hadn’t been the person she’d call to ask about a fuse box or a shrub that needed to be cut back. Riach had been that person for her. Tess Power had taken all that away from him when she’d rejected him. Tess Power—it was her fault.