by Cathy Kelly
‘Shay, I love you, but I’m up to my ears in my own ruined life,’ Coco cut in. ‘I don’t have time for meandering conversations. I’m in the shop, Fiona’s with Cassie, and I’ve only got a couple of hours to sort stuff out. I don’t have time for chit-chat. What precisely are you phoning me for?’
‘I’m trying to find out how Cassie is, how the girls are. I talk to them at night but Cassie refuses to speak to me.’
Coco was silent for a beat. ‘Well, refusing to speak to you and refusing to see you are two entirely different things,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come and see her?’
‘If she doesn’t answer my phone calls she’s hardly likely to want to see me,’ said Shay.
‘OK then,’ said Coco, sounding exasperated. ‘I guess nothing is going to change. You’re a great guy, Shay, a lovely brother-in-law, but please, cop on.’
She hung up and Shay sighed. Whatever was going on in Coco’s life, she didn’t sound too happy either.
In the shop, Coco glared at the phone.
Men, she thought with fierce irritation. Why did they make everything so darn complicated?
Twenty-Two
‘A medical?’ said Elsa to the voice on the phone.
‘Yes, a medical,’ said the girl from the TV company. ‘I know it sounds a bit odd, Dr de Marco, but with the new show and a whole host of new investors, everyone’s being really cautious.’
Elsa sat in the lovely wing chair in front of the fire in her pretty home and looked around at all the things she’d collected over the years: the pictures, the books, the treasures from travel abroad. She and Mari had gone to India once on the cheap, and while the memory of poor Mari’s appalling stomach problems had receded, Elsa would never forget that amazing trip because of the beautiful Indian ornaments that were dotted around her room.
‘Are you still there?’ said the voice again.
‘Yes, I’m here,’ said Elsa.
She hadn’t spoken to her agent. Hadn’t said, ‘No, I can’t do that family reunited show because it will break my heart.’
‘Give me the details of who I have to talk to,’ she said crisply, professional as ever.
No point in breaking the news to this poor girl. She’d make the phone call to her agent tomorrow and be ready to face the onslaught of Stanley and Luigi wondering why she couldn’t take this incredible televisual break.
When she finally hung up the phone, she sank against the back of her chair and breathed in and out very deeply. This too will pass. She reached under her arm, past the cardigan she wore because it was getting colder, and felt the lump. It hadn’t gone away. Still there, obviously not any sort of infection, and given that she’d had a radical hysterectomy ten years before, it certainly couldn’t be hormones. Elsa knew she wasn’t going to do any TV show medical, but perhaps this was a message from above telling her she needed one anyway. She picked up her phone, dialled her GP and made an appointment.
Elsa knew that Dr Patel was an incredibly busy GP because there was a room full of patients waiting to see her and her partner, but never in all the years Elsa had been going to see her had she felt in any way rushed.
‘Come in, doctor,’ said Dr Patel, a little wicked smile on her beautiful face.
‘Thank you, doctor,’ said Elsa, continuing the joke.
They’d had a very good relationship over the years, with Elsa not needing to visit the doctor much in the last ten years after that dreadful two-year period when fibroids had made her life a misery.
‘So, what can I do for you?’ said Dr Patel, looking up at her patient.
‘I’m embarrassed to say it,’ Elsa began, ‘but I found a lump in my breast a little while ago and I couldn’t bring myself to come in and see you.’
‘As if it would go away if you left it alone?’ Dr Patel said, having changed rapidly from smiling to non-smiling. ‘Elsa, how could you do this?’
Elsa shrugged. ‘Stupid, I know.’
‘How long have you had it exactly?’ the doctor said.
‘A month,’ said Elsa reluctantly. ‘I of all people know you can’t put your head in the sand but I … I somehow did. Physician heal thyself.’
‘OK,’ said Dr Patel, smiling once again, but this time it was her let’s-reassure-the-patient smile. ‘Let’s examine you.’
Stripped to the waist, Elsa lay on the couch, one arm raised, while the GP carefully palpated her breast. She checked the lump very carefully.
Is she spending an awfully long time examining it? Elsa wondered.
Then the doctor examined the other side, checking under her arms too.
‘Right, put your clothes back on, thank you,’ Dr Patel said in a cool, impersonal voice that Elsa knew spelled trouble.
She dressed as Dr Patel washed her hands, then came out from behind the screen and sat in the chair while the doctor finished typing a note on her computer.
‘I can’t say for sure,’ Dr Patel said, ‘but I feel that lump is a little iffy, Elsa.’
Elsa froze.
‘I want you to go to the one-stop breast clinic as soon as you can. They should have the results on the same day and they can take it from there.’
‘What do you mean, they can take it from there?’ asked Elsa.
‘Just if there is anything that needs to be taken care of, they can take care of it,’ Dr Patel said. ‘You can’t leave these things too long, Elsa.’ And then she stopped, as if she knew she shouldn’t say this. ‘As we all know, a large percentage of lumps are perfectly benign – cysts, other things – so don’t worry, just … We’ll get you in to see the people at the clinic and we’ll see what happens, OK? I’m sorry, Elsa.’
Elsa took the letter and shook her head. ‘Hardly your fault, doctor,’ she said, a smile nailed to her face.
If Elsa and Mari didn’t have work, they often met up on Wednesdays at one with a group for coffee. But when she went to their usual place, Mari found no sign of her friend with their gang. She tried to ring Elsa when everyone was having coffee and got her voicemail. Mari left a message.
‘Hi Elsa, hope you’re OK. Missed you today. Tell me what you’re up to, sweetie. Hope you haven’t got that terrible sore throat. There’s a dreadful one going around. Half the place is down with it. I’ve had two cancellations for lessons tonight. Yippee for me! Talk later. Love you. Bye.’
Elsa listened to the message the next day as she sat among the queues in the one-stop breast clinic in the hospital. There were so many women there and it seemed to be a first come, first served scenario, even though she’d been given an actual appointment. She’d brought some work with her: professional magazines she liked getting and the most recent report on new therapies for post traumatic stress disorder. She might not have a TV career anymore, but she had a private practice to keep going. However, Elsa couldn’t concentrate on work. Instead she looked around at the women waiting with her: young, old, middle-aged, many of them with partners or daughters or sisters or friends, people looking anxious no matter how hard they were trying to hide it.
Elsa didn’t feel nervous because she knew what this was: karma, the great reckoning. She’d never been able to make amends to the people she’d hurt and the end result was now here.
Despite her fear, there was a rightness about it all: we must pay for the pain we put others through.
When she was finally seen, she had a mammogram first and then the nurse brought her in to discuss the results.
‘Yes,’ the nurse said, ‘there’s a definite lump there. We need to do further tests. You had a hysterectomy and your ovaries out at fifty?’ she said, rereading the notes.
‘You think it’s cancer?’ blurted out Elsa.
The nurse looked at her seriously. ‘There’s a possibility,’ she said reluctantly, ‘but let’s not jump to any conclusions. Now, we’re going to do a needle biopsy here, so I’ll stay with you wh
ile that’s being done. It’s very simple. A small specimen will be taken from the lump. We’ll give you a local anaesthetic first, obviously.’
Seeing Elsa’s white face, she added: ‘It’s early days and the mammogram didn’t appear to show anything in your lymph nodes, which is excellent.’
Elsa felt pain when the needle went in for the biopsy. The needle itself looked big enough to tranquilise a horse. All she could think of was cancer. This could be cancer and that was OK. She deserved this. She had brought it upon herself. It was her fault for everything she’d done in the past.
‘Are you all right there, pet?’ said the nurse, holding her hand comfortingly as the doctor took the biopsy. Elsa refocused her eyes and stared at the woman who was being so kind to her, so helpful and determined to put her at ease and yet let her know what was happening.
‘I’m fine,’ lied Elsa. ‘Fine.’
She was due back in five days to get the results. ‘Don’t worry too much,’ said the nurse. ‘You can’t do anything until we know the facts, OK? Remember: be positive.’
Elsa walked out of the breast clinic and all she could think of was that she’d known this day would come after all. You had to pay for your mistakes. And she wanted to pay.
Father Alex Wiersbowski turned up at Pearl’s house just as she was absentmindedly organising the place for the Thursday night poker club.
‘Come in, Father,’ she said, and stood back to let him enter.
Father Alex loved Pearl’s house. It reminded him of holidays before he’d joined the priesthood, a different time and a different life when his father still had hopes of him getting married and settling down.
‘You’ll be the last one to carry on the family name,’ his father had said.
Alex felt so guilty about that now. He knew that many families were so proud to have a priest in the family, and yet for his small Polish family there had been a sense that he was giving up something by giving his life to God.
‘Mrs Keneally, your house is so pretty,’ he said, as he always said. He’d come to talk about the charity fair but Pearl seemed to be miles away, which was so unlike her.
Daisy wriggled against him delightedly. She liked this man in his dark clothes. He never seemed to mind if she got fur all over him the way some people did, and if he was given cake, he always gave her a bit. All in all, he was the perfect sort of visitor.
‘Could we perhaps have a cup of tea?’ said Father Alex, who was used to visiting elderly parishioners who worried they were taking up too much of his time. ‘I can make it,’ he added, again used to elderly parishioners who were not so steady on their feet.
‘Nonsense, I’ll do it,’ said Pearl, and together they marched into the kitchen.
As Pearl rattled around in the cupboards, Father Alex noticed she seemed to be worryingly distracted. It was as if she couldn’t look him in the eye, and normally Pearl was one of those wonderful women who looked a person straight in the face, eyeball to eyeball, smiling, engaging.
Not at all like her sister Edie. He wondered, with a shudder, if Edie was there.
‘Your sister is around, no?’ he asked, as if Edie might leap out of a cupboard and rail against him for some church crime. Edie complained if the heating hadn’t been on long enough for early morning Mass, which made Father Alex, juggling a tiny budget, open and close his mouth like a goldfish. What did you say to a woman like that?
‘No,’ said Pearl, ‘she’s not. I’m getting ready for the poker club. Do you disapprove?’ she asked. ‘It is gambling, after all, and I don’t think the church is very keen on gambling.’
Normally Pearl would have said such a thing with a laugh in her voice, but she sounded so flat that Alex realised something was really wrong.
‘Please, Pearl – if I may call you Pearl – sit down. You seem a little upset, perhaps? I can make the tea if you tell me where everything is.’
Astonishingly, she did as he said. Pearl sat and pulled Daisy on to her lap, holding the little dog as if she was a talisman against misery. Father Alex thought he’d love a dog too but there was no way he could have one in the house what with Father McGinty being so erratic. He left all the doors open and would be sure to let any small animal out on to the road, where it would be killed.
Then there was the basic fact that priests got moved on every few years and there were many places where you couldn’t have a dog. What would he do then?
‘That cupboard over there, the teabags are in a steel canister,’ said Pearl.
In a few moments, he’d made a pot of tea for two and sat it down in front of them. He was too shy to wonder where Pearl kept her beautiful, home-baked biscuits.
Sometimes it felt odd to be a young man whose job was to counsel people far older and wiser. But Pearl appeared to be looking for something from him, so Father Alex sat and waited. Waiting was the key. If you waited long enough, people told you what was really on their minds.
‘Father, I did something a long time ago and I’m very ashamed of it,’ Pearl said.
Alex, who had heard many confessions before, was not surprised. All people had secrets, and sometimes things that people thought were absolutely dreadful were not so dreadful after all once they were taken out of the dark caverns of the mind and held under an open microscope in clear light.
‘Would you like to talk to me?’ he said. ‘I can hear your confession or we may just talk if that suits you better?’
‘No, I don’t want confession,’ said Pearl. ‘I don’t know if you can get absolution for this.’ She looked up at him and he was shocked to see such anguish in her eyes. ‘I made a mistake a very long time ago and it’s coming back to haunt me now. Not simply to haunt me, either, but to hurt two people I love very, very much. I just don’t know what to do.’
Father Alex sat and waited some more. He’d need a little more to work on but it seemed as if Pearl was finished. He began to think of the correct homily, one about how asking for forgiveness was key, when Pearl interrupted him.
‘I may come and talk to you one day,’ she said, ‘but perhaps not now, not when the gang are walking across the gardens, ready to bet everything they’ve got on a few hands of poker.’ And it was as if she’d removed the horrible thoughts from her brain and put back on a mask of calm.
‘I could go to the door and tell them to come later?’ he suggested.
‘No.’ Pearl put a warm hand on his. ‘You are a sweet young man, but no, that’s fine. I need to deal with this. Talking and crying about it won’t make it any better, will it?’
Father Alex found himself out in the street, wishing he had more tools to help people who were hurting.
‘So, how did it go?’ Dan was on the phone.
‘How did what go?’ said Red irritably to his brother. He was in his London office and was having a bad day. All his days were bad lately. He couldn’t think why. Maybe he needed a holiday.
‘With Coco,’ said Dan, who could do irritable just as well as his big brother.
‘She’s got a kid,’ muttered Red. ‘Or, to be more precise, she’s obviously seeing some guy who has a kid, so all those “she’s not seeing anyone” rumours were entirely wrong. I didn’t see any guy but it couldn’t have been her child, so what else, right?’
It still hurt. So much. Ridiculous to think he’d been holding a candle for her for so long only to have it snuffed out by a child. They could have had children by now: a couple of small ones whose faces would light up when they saw him.
‘Newsflash, bozo,’ said Dan. ‘That’s Josephine Kinsella’s little girl. Jo’s sick, had a stroke, they say, and Coco’s taking care of her daughter.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. Horrible story, although I hear Jo’s doing OK, but imagine having a stroke at that age …’
Red was out of his leather office chair so fast that it fell to the ground, bashing off the
window behind him.
‘What was that noise?’ said Dan curiously.
‘The sound of me being very happy,’ said Red triumphantly.
Coco was in the shop bright and early after dropping Fiona to school. She’d no plans to visit Jo in rehab today. She couldn’t go in every day and, to be honest, she was completely exhausted. She was on her own all day in the shop today, with not even Phoebe dropping in later to give her a hand, and there was so much to do. Phoebe and Alice were brilliant but only Coco could do the accounts and work out how well the business was doing.
Phoebe was trying to catch up with the college work she’d neglected since she’d started working for Coco. Plus she and Ian, a fabulous designer from Phoebe’s college who had come in and spent several happy hours examining how beautiful old garments were put together, were hatching some plot to help Phoebe’s mother make some money that didn’t involve farming.
‘Are you sure she’d like that?’ said Coco, wary of people interfering in other people’s lives.
‘My mother’s worked herself to the bone trying to run a sheep farm when she’s not made for it; not on her own, anyway,’ said Phoebe.
‘Phoebe’s mum is a size two, and not in a good way,’ put in Ian, who had been to the McLoughlins’ farm for a weekend and, apart from an unfortunate incident where one of the rams had run after him, he’d loved it: loved Phoebe’s mother, her brother and sister, the dog, and even Phoebe’s beloved chickens and ducks.
‘We’re trying to work out how she can keep the land, sell the sheep, and do something else,’ Phoebe said.
‘I have plans,’ said Ian mysteriously. ‘But I need to investigate small new industry grants, which is more complex than eighteenth-century dress codes. If only I’d stayed friends with that old boyfriend who did business studies.’
‘You had a boyfriend in business studies?’ demanded Phoebe.
Ian shrugged. ‘I was going through my “guys in suits” phase. I am so over it, though.’