There were signs and portents that Mary spotted early. When the work on the bungalow was finished, a vanload of furniture arrived over from England and Louisa was inside in her rooms getting them set up. And the first thing Mary saw when she went in to look was a desk piled with papers. Mind you, it was a lovely little bit of furniture. What you’d call an escritoire. Or maybe a bureau. Nice enough but, all the same, you could see it was a statement of intent.
Louisa had got the builders to turn the window into French doors that opened into the garden. They’d installed a little sink and a work surface in one corner of the room too, so she could make herself a cup of tea without coming down to the kitchen. All the same, she’d somehow managed to make the room seem bigger than it looked before. She’d had the walls painted a warm cream colour, where Mary had had flowery wallpaper, and her pictures were all a bit plain. No story to them.
She had no side table with framed photos on it, and no little rug or cushions that would make the bed look cosy. And no dressing-table either. Mary had had a triple-mirrored, bow-fronted one in there, with gilt handles shaped like tassels. Louisa preferred to do her face in her bathroom across the hall.
Johnny Hennessy had taken Mary’s old furniture off to auction for her. Though, with the amount he got and the auctioneer’s fees, he might as well not have bothered. A pretty penny Tom had paid for that stuff thirty years ago but, apparently, no one had any taste for proper quality these days.
There were bookshelves on the wall by the bed now, and a panelled Japanese screen around the kettle and things in the corner. And every stitch of clothing Louisa owned was hidden by sliding doors.
And the escritoire, piled with papers and Louisa’s slim silver computer, seemed to Mary to dominate the room.
She wasn’t quite sure how she’d expected things to be but she knew that it wasn’t this way. Louisa was still as charming and friendly as ever, and there were plenty of chats over martinis in the evenings, and meals together, and occasional walks on the beach. But the fact was that she and Jazz were wrapped up in Edge of the World Essentials. Which was a daft name for a business anyway, if you asked Mary’s opinion. Not that they ever did.
The three of them had been sitting in the kitchen once, when Louisa had said that Saira Khan, whose husband was manager in the call centre, was going to help them out with research and development. ‘She’s very knowledgeable about the cosmetic properties of herbs.’
Now, Mrs Khan was a nice enough woman. But she was from Pakistan. What would she know about things that grew in the nuns’ garden? But when Mary asked the question, Jazz just laughed. And then Louisa explained, kind of patronisingly, that Saira’s family had been making herbal cosmetics for generations. According to Jazz, they were planning to use some of Saira’s mother’s recipes for shampoo and hair conditioner, which sounded to Mary like a recipe for disaster. How did they know they wouldn’t give people allergies and hives?
Jazz had explained that everything had to go through all classes of microbial and stability testing before you could launch it as a product. But by that stage Mary was getting bored. She’d ended the conversation by putting the kettle on, declaring that, as far as she could see, they needed to think it through better.
After that Jazz and Louisa had tended to do their talking in Louisa’s flat. And now, with office space rented in the Convent Centre, they were seldom round at all. It was easy seen that while two was company three was a crowd.
Pat came back to the table with coffee and a plate of shortbread. When she moved the cups from the tray to the table coffee splashed into the saucers. That was Pat all over. She’d always been clumsy, and the way she was dabbing round now with a paper hankie would drive you mad. Still, at least she’d got hold of a jug of hot milk and asked for a proper sugar bowl.
With the table mopped, they sat down for a chat, looking out at the chilly garden. And Pat had more sense than to go asking why Mary had turned up today at her class.
21
It was surprising how quickly you got addicted to hot tea. From the moment Cassie had arrived in Ireland she’d realised that no plan could be made, or conversation had, without someone switching on the kettle. And by now she’d begun to feel that the first cup of tea in the morning was the best one of the day.
Since moving in to number eight, she’d tended not to take her morning shower till the others had got up and gone. Bríd and Aideen needed to get out of the house early, to open up the deli, and if Dan or Conor stayed over, the chances were that they’d be gone earlier still. With no need to dash off to work, Cassie was happy to take a cup of tea back to bed and wait till rush hour was over.
This morning she made it while the others were scuttling round on the landing, and returned to her warm bed with its feather duvet and lavender-scented pillows. The former dining room at number eight made a perfectly comfortable bedroom now that a row of hooks had been screwed to the back of the door, and the little chest of drawers, carefully painted by Conor, was standing under the window.
Setting her mug of tea on the floor by the bed, Cassie sat back against the plumped-up pillows and balanced an A4 notebook against her knees. Today was the first meeting of the creative-writing group in the library and you were supposed to turn up with something you’d written yourself. ‘Anything at all, and any length’, according to the leaflet Pat had picked up in the library. And that, as Pat said, almost made things worse.
Cassie had visited with her in the flat above the butcher’s shop, and found the floor round the kitchen table strewn with balled-up pieces of paper. Seeing her in the doorway, Pat dropped her pen and made for the kettle. ‘Now! Haven’t you come exactly when I needed you, love. I’m demented here with the writing!’
Sitting down, Cassie had glanced sideways at Pat’s copybook. Most of what she could see was scribbled out. There were a couple of doodles in the margin, one of which looked like Bugs Bunny, and at the end of the page was a series of single words.
Before Cassie could read them, Pat was back at the table, closing the book. ‘Ah, there’s nothing there at all, love, only old scribbles. I can’t seem to write anything that makes sense.’
Over the inevitable cup of tea, Cassie had asked what she’d been trying to write about. ‘That’s the thing, love, I haven’t a clue. I mean, what Hanna said was to write something that would tell people who you are. But who’s going to turn up in Lissbeg Library that doesn’t know who I am?’
‘I guess she meant something personal. You know, like a window on your soul.’
Pat put her cup down in horror. ‘Holy God Almighty, love, do you think so? I mean, who’d want to do that?’
‘Well – writers, I guess. It’s kind of what they’re about.’
‘Do you tell me that?’
Cassie shook her head and laughed. ‘I’m the last one to ask. Honestly. And I bet you’ve read far more books than I have anyway.’
Pat looked thoughtful. ‘Well, do you know what it is, I’ve always been a reader. But I wasn’t thinking of writing books when I signed up for the group.’
‘No?’
‘Well, no.’ Pat’s face was screwed up with the effort of expression. ‘I’m not really sure what I was thinking. I suppose, maybe, I thought I might write a poem.’
‘Really? That’s awesome!’
‘No, but I don’t know could I do it, now that I’m sitting here. I just like reading poems sometimes. Have you ever read Keats?’
Cassie said she hadn’t.
‘I used read him a lot when the lads were young. Your dad was an awful noisy baby. He’d wake up roaring at night. And Ger needed his sleep, you know, with the weight of the work in those days. So oftentimes I’d take Sonny out and let him roar himself quiet.’
‘Out where?’
‘Oh, just out in the street, you know, where I’d have my eye on the windows in case Frankie woke up in the house. I used to sit on the side of the horse trough in the moonlight and I’d read Keats. It was a stroke of luck that
your dad was a summer baby. You wouldn’t go sitting out there this time of the year.’
Cassie had tried to imagine Dad as a baby, red-faced and roaring in Pat’s arms as she perched on the horse trough in Broad Street, reading poems.
‘I had a lot of them by heart by the time he was weaned.’ With her hands wrapped around her teacup, Pat gazed across the kitchen and began to recite.
‘Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite . . .’
‘Wow. What’s an eremite?’
‘I’ve no notion, love, I never found out. These days, you could google it.’
Cassie took out her phone and found it meant ‘hermit’.
Pat nodded. ‘Oh, right so. That makes sense.’
‘So what’s it about?’
‘Well, the way I see it, love, he’s looking up at the stars, like I was, and in one way he’d like to be like the North Star – you know, steady. Unchanging. But in another way he’d think that would be lonely. Hanging there like a hermit. Or like one of the nuns locked up behind in the convent, say. So, in the end he decides that love’s the thing that matters. If you’ve got someone to love, you see, you’ll never be left alone.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘Well, I liked it. I got great comfort from Keats, you know, and I sitting under the stars.’
Cassie had left her turning over a new page in her copybook. Now, sitting with her own notebook on her knees, she scribbled a couple of hundred words about celebrating her nineteenth birthday with a meal of whale blubber and dried caribou.
It was only a ten-minute walk from St Finian’s Close to Broad Street so, that afternoon, Cassie walked down to pick Pat up for the writing group. When she stuck her head through the shop door, Ger’s assistant was working behind the counter. Moments later, Pat came downstairs.
As they crossed the road, Cassie asked where Ger was.
Pat shrugged. ‘He’s away off somewhere today, love. Probably Carrick.’
Cassie linked her along the pavement, through the gate to the courtyard and into the library. Having wondered again why Pat had joined a group that seemed to daunt her, she told herself now that the answer could be simple. Perhaps Pat just liked to keep herself busy, since Ger went out a lot.
The group gathered in the reading room off the library, and Hanna Casey, who seemed to be the facilitator, told them they were welcome. No one was to feel any pressure, she said. The purpose of the group was to share their work, swap feedback, and, if that proved helpful, maybe to workshop some ideas.
Cassie sat back and looked round the circle of chairs. There seemed to be no average age. Pat was beside her and Ferdia, the website guy, who was about her own age, was opposite. Beside him was a middle-aged woman wearing a hijab. Cassie had seen her before, in a corridor in the Old Convent Centre with Jazz Turner: they’d come out of an office, deep in conversation, and Cassie had gathered that they worked together. On the other side of Ferdia was a guy with ‘retired school teacher’ written all over him: he had a fountain pen, a leather-bound notebook, highly polished expensive shoes, and was wearing over-tailored smart casuals.
Hanna had just called the meeting to order and was suggesting that everyone should introduce themselves, when the door opened and a woman in her forties charged in. ‘Isn’t this about the height of me? I’m dreadfully sorry, Hanna. Everyone. And I swore I’d start off in time and wouldn’t be late! Our first session too! I am such an idiot! Really, I couldn’t be sorrier!’
Her cornrows had been braided by an amateur, and the henna that had been used on them had been left in far too long.
The woman thrust an arm into the depths of a large drawstring bag and failed loudly to find what she was looking for. Cassie, whose ear by now was attuned to the local accent, decided that, though she was Irish, she wasn’t from Finfarran.
‘Oh, God, this is too bad! I’ve come with nothing to write on.’
As Ferdia tore several pages out of a notebook and the woman in the hijab produced a spare biro, Cassie saw the others in the group exchange world-weary glances.
Having dropped the pages and stood on them, and then failed to get the cap off the biro, the woman took her seat again and tossed her head like a horse. ‘I’m sure we’ve all introduced ourselves. Have we? Well, everyone knows me anyway. Oh, no, you don’t, do you? I’m Darina Kelly! And you must be Pat’s granddaughter. Welcome to Ireland, Cassandra! I can’t say welcome to Finfarran because I’m just a blow-in from Dublin! You are Cassandra, aren’t you? Such a lovely name!’
After that it was inevitable that Cassie was first up to read.
‘. . . there was fireweed and saxifrage for miles and miles all around and I was there on a windy day, eating whale blubber and dried caribou with strangers. And I felt completely at home. Where is my home, though, really? The indigenous people whose traditional food I was eating wouldn’t call me Canadian, and I’ve never been to Ireland before. I wonder if I’ll find the answer here in Finfarran. But maybe that’s just what everyone thinks when they come home to the Land of their Fathers and wonder what “coming home” means.’
When she finished her piece everyone clapped politely and Darina proclaimed that it was smashing. Her only tiny critique, she said, was that ‘Land Of My Fathers’ was more properly a reference to Wales. ‘Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi . . .’ she began, in a shrill soprano. But Hanna stopped her.
Ferdia was up next, with six or seven lines of stuff that sounded like a computer manual. They ended in total silence, followed by a hasty round of applause. As it petered out, Ferdia explained, slightly resentfully, that he’d stuck to the letter of the instruction in Hanna’s leaflet. The lines were the beginning of a sci-fi novel he’d been writing for the last year or so, and he’d chosen them as typical of what he was all about. He had twelve drafts, each with a different ending, and was planning to self-publish them all as an interactive e-book, illustrated with GIFs.
Hanna’s deadpan response was pretty impressive.
The focus then moved to the guy with the fountain pen, who got to his feet and announced to the room that his name was Mr Maguire. He then read ten solid pages of stuff that Cassie didn’t listen to. Apparently no one else did either, because there was another long silence when he finished.
Closing his notebook, Mr Maguire sat down again. By this stage, Cassie thought she could see a gleam of annoyance in Hanna’s eye. Possibly things weren’t going quite as expected.
In the background, with the sound turned low, but just loud enough to be infuriating, Darina had found ‘Land Of My Fathers’ on her iPhone. It appeared to be a recording of a large crowd singing at a football match. Hanna cleared her throat ominously, and everyone looked elsewhere as Darina stuck the phone into her bag.
The woman in the hijab, whose name turned out to be Saira Khan, began by explaining that she’d joined the group in the hope of improving her English. She then read a short paragraph in what seemed to be perfect English, but her low, musical voice was so soft that Cassie heard hardly a word of it. It seemed to be about gardening.
She was followed by Darina Kelly who drew a large piece of paper, typed in double-spacing, out of the pocket of her tie-dye smock, and read steadily through six paragraphs of hateful glances, leaking breasts, and clotted menstrual blood. At the third expletive from the protagonist – who was a fisherman married to a wife who might have been a mermaid – Cassie heard Pat give a snort that was either hilarity or profound shock. The applause that followed the reading was effusive, though probably it was mostly an expression of relief.
In between the other readings Hanna had turned several times to Pat, who’d blushed and shaken her head. Now Hanna smiled at her again and suggested she take her turn. But, just as she’d done before, Pat shook her head emphatically. ‘I won’t, really, Hanna, no. Not this time anyway.
It was lovely listening, though, really. Everyone’s so talented. Anyway, I haven’t anything done. I couldn’t get round to it.’
But her hand, clenched in the fold of her skirt, was holding a piece of screwed-up paper. Later, as they left the library, Cassie jostled her affectionately. ‘You did write something, didn’t you? How come you didn’t read it to us?’
Pat shook her head again, insisting that she hadn’t.
‘Oh, come on, Pat. You have it in your hand. Let me see. I’m interested.’
Pat looked away for a minute, then unscrewed the paper. It was covered with writing but every line had been heavily scored out.
22
Conor was beginning to look forward to his two days a week out driving. The thing about the mobile library van was that it raised you almost as high off the road as if you were in a tractor. Well, higher than the Vespa, anyway, or his old Ford. You could bowl along with a great view over the ditches and fences, from Carrick all the way down to Ballyfin. And once you were on the back roads you could see into every field.
It was daft the number of people who were still spreading slurry in December – you could get a wild heavy fine for that or even end up in jail. Conor could remember sneaky bits of late spreading at home, back in the past. When his dad had been fit and working, some of the rules like that weren’t stuck to so carefully. But now that Paddy was fit for nothing but paperwork, everything had to be done according to the book.
That was kind of understandable. Paddy’s own state was the direct result of taking stupid risks. His accident had happened when he and Joe were inside in a pen with a cow that was in labour, and she’d turned on Joe, who was only half awake. Nine times out of ten, Paddy would have jumped the rail and been grand. But that day he’d tried to head her off while Joe got out first. Then, when he’d rolled over the rail himself, he’d landed on his back, and the insurance lads had just laughed at him when he tried to claim for the medical bills; it turned out that the cover he’d taken wasn’t nearly enough.
The Mistletoe Matchmaker Page 11