The Mistletoe Matchmaker

by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  Pat sat down opposite him, glad of the warmth of the fire. She had a terrible urge to go and ring Mary, but that would be daft. She looked down at her own fingers, locked around her teacup. Suddenly she heard herself say she was sorry that Tom was dead.

  ‘Why so?’

  Her fingers tightened round the cup till the knuckles were white. ‘Don’t you know well that if he was alive you’d be round there talking to him?’

  Ger set his tea on the range and leaned towards her. ‘Haven’t I got you here to talk to?’

  That stopped Pat in her tracks and she looked up at him.

  His face twisted into a kind of rueful grin. ‘And, according to Cassie, I should have done it sooner. But how was I to know you were such a fool?’

  Pat set her own teacup down beside his. She didn’t feel like crying. It was more like she was choking. All those years when she’d turned to Mary and he’d turned to Tom. All kinds of memories they could have made that were never made at all. At this stage it didn’t matter why or how it had happened: what mattered now was that they still had time.

  Ger stood up and crossed the room to the window. Then, with his back to her, he asked what was in the paper bag.

  Pat looked round bewildered till she saw what he meant. ‘Mince pies. Cassie gave them to me. I thought we might take them to Frankie’s on Stephens’s Day.’

  ‘Couldn’t you and I have one here now by the fire?’

  Pat’s forehead creased. ‘Do you think you should?’

  ‘Name of God, woman, I’ve a heart condition, I’m not dying of obesity! It’s Christmas Eve, can I not have a mince pie?’

  Pat couldn’t remember a single year when they’d sat by the fire on Christmas Eve with mince pies. But that was the point, she told herself, and wasn’t it strange that Ger should see it? Now was the time to start making new memories . . . together.

  She went to the table and opened the box of mince pies. The golden rounds were sprinkled with icing sugar and, here and there, the dark delicious filling had bubbled up from under the pastry lids. Only a few moments ago her throat had been dry and aching, but now she found she was hungry for their sweetness, in the same way that she felt a new hunger for every last crumb of life she and Ger would share.

  As she piled the mince pies onto a plate, her eye was caught by Cassie’s sprig of mistletoe. Each pair of pale green tear-shaped leaves made a shape that looked like a wishbone. And each veined berry was so translucent you could see the hopeful seed nestling at its heart.

  Ger had gone back to his seat by the fire. With the mistletoe in one hand and the plate in the other, Pat crossed the room and set the mince pies down on the range to warm. Then she held the mistletoe over his head and bent down to kiss him.

  Epilogue

  Behind her, Cassie could hear the others laughing and drinking the brandy, and The Divil’s shrill bark as he struggled in Fury’s arms. Then the individual voices were lost as they drifted away to find new viewpoints from the roof. Staying where she was, Cassie reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. When Dad answered, she could see that he was sitting in his den.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart, what’s happening?’

  ‘Just calling to say hi because it’s Christmas Eve.’ She held up her phone to show him the falling snowflakes. ‘Look!’

  ‘It never snows in Ireland at Christmas time!’

  ‘Well, that’s what it’s doing right now.’ Moving the phone, she showed him the view of Broad Street. ‘See? Just like a proper Christmas card.’

  ‘Oh, my God! Where are you standing?’

  ‘On the roof of the old convent.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A lot of things have changed here, Dad. You need to come and see for yourself.’ She moved the phone so he could see Broad Street curving off into the distance. ‘Remember PJ the barman in the Royal Vic in Carrick?’

  ‘PJ? Is he still alive? What about him?’

  ‘He says he’ll make you an Old Fashioned when you come home to visit. Proper Canadian whisky with a touch of rye.’

  She heard him laugh and, turning the phone, she brought it back to take in the butcher’s shop. ‘See that lighted window? That’s where I’m going to be tomorrow. Having turkey and ham and Christmas pudding with Grandad and Gran. Will you call us? Honestly, Dad, I’m not being Min the Match. I know they’d love it.’

  Watching his face, she found herself almost holding her breath and praying. She didn’t know what had gone wrong in the past, and probably Fury was right that, in a way, it was none of her business. But she’d seen how Dad had reacted the time she’d called him from the flat. Pat had thought she hadn’t, but it was obvious that he’d hated the sight of the home he’d grown up in. Maybe since then, though, he’d come to see things as Fury did – that it’s best to make your peace with the past while the people you love are still here. Anyway, he gave her a crooked smile and said okay, that he’d call.

  ‘You will?’

  ‘If you really want me to.’

  ‘I really do.’

  ‘Then I will.’

  ‘Good. We’ll be waiting.’

  From the far side of the rooftop, Cassie could hear the others’ voices, shouting ‘Happy Christmas’ to the moon. When she ended the call, she put her elbows back on the icy parapet and stared down across the street at the golden square of light.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to my brilliant editor, Hannah Robinson, and to everyone at Harper Perennial New York, who has worked so meticulously on this edition of The Mistletoe Matchmaker, and to Markus Hoffmann at Regal Hoffmann & Associates.

  I also remain very grateful to all at Hachette Books Ireland, and, as ever, to my agent, Gaia Banks, at Sheil Land Associates, UK.

  About the Author

  FELICITY HAYES-MCCOY was born in Dublin, Ireland, and graduated in English and Irish from UCD in the 1970s. She then built a successful UK-based career as an actress and writer, working in theatre, music theatre, radio, TV, and digital media. In addition to her successful Finfarran Peninsula series of novels, she is the author of two memoirs, The House on an Irish Hillside (UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012) and A Woven Silence: Memory, History & Remembrance, and of Enough Is Plenty: The Year on the Dingle Peninsula, a lifestyle book illustrated with her own photographs (Ireland: The Collins Press, 2015). She and her husband, Wilf Judd, divide their time between London and Ireland. With him she wrote Dingle and Its Hinterland: People, Places and Heritage (Ireland: The Collins Press, 2017).

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  Meet Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  About the Book

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  The Story Behind The Mistletoe Matchmaker

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  About the Author

  Meet Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  I’VE BEEN A professional writer all my working life and a reader for longer than I can remember. Along the way, my projects have included nonfiction titles; children’s books; original TV dramas and contributions to series (including Ballykissangel, the BBC’s smash-hit series, set in Ireland); radio soap operas, features, documentaries, and plays; screenplays; a couple of opera libretti; and interactive multimedia. But—given that my childhood was spent largely behind sofas, reading stories—I suspect it was inevitable that, sooner or later, I’d come to write a series of books about books, with a protagonist who’s a librarian.

  I was born in Dublin, Ireland, studied English and Irish language and literature at university, and immigrated to London in my early twenties. I built a successful career there, as an actress and then as a writer: in fact, it was books that led me to the stage in the first place, the wonderful Blue Door Theatre series by the English children’s author Pamela Brown. Back in the 1960s Dublin was famous for its musty, quirky secondhand book
shops beside the River Liffey. My father, who was a historian, was unable to pass the stalls that stood outside them without stopping and never came home without a book or two, for himself or one of the family. I still have the Nelson edition of The Swish of the Curtain that he bought me in 1963, with the price and the date penciled inside in his careful, elegant handwriting. It cost him ninepence, which I’m not sure he’d have spent so cheerfully if he’d known that his gift was going to make me an actress, not an academic. Still, I like to think he’d have been pleased to know that, thirty years later, as a writer in London, I successfully pitched and dramatized the Blue Door Theatre series for BBC Radio.

  To a certain extent, my Finfarran Peninsula series has a little of my own story in it. Though Hanna Casey’s is a rural background, like me she grew up in Ireland and moved to London, where she married. In 1986, I met and married the English opera director Wilf Judd, then artistic director of the Garden Venture at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Unlike Hanna and her ratfink husband, Malcolm, though, Wilf and I met as colleagues, and we continue to work together, sharing our love of literature, theatre, ecology, and design, and dividing our life and work between a flat in inner-city London and a stone house at the western end of Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula.

  In my memoir The House on an Irish Hillside I write about our Irish home on this real peninsula which, while geographically similar, is culturally quite different from my fictional Finfarran. One of the defining differences is that our West Kerry home is in what is called a Gaeltacht—an area where Irish, not English, is the language of everyday life. Gaeltacht, pronounced “Gwale-tockt,” comes from the word Gaeilge, which is often translated into English as “Gaelic.” And “Gaelic,” incidentally, is not a word ever used in Ireland for the Irish language!

  I first visited the western end of the Dingle Peninsula at age seventeen, not just to further my Irish language studies but because of a growing fascination with folklore. I was seeking something I’d glimpsed in my childhood in Dublin, a city kid curled on my country granny’s bed listening to stories. I’d begun to understand it as a student, ploughing through books and exams. And, on that first visit, I began to recognize something that, all my life, I’d taken for granted. The effect of thinking in two languages. Since then, partly through writing The Library at the Edge of the World, I’ve come to realize more deeply that my earliest experience of storytelling came from my grandmother’s Irish-language oral tradition; and that memories of that inheritance, married to my love of Ireland’s English-language literary tradition have shaped me as a writer.

  When Wilf and I first decided to divide our life between two countries, we weren’t escaping from an English city to a rural Irish idyll. Life can be stressful anywhere in the world, and human nature is universal. So, for us, living in two places isn’t about running from one and escaping to the other. It’s about heightening our awareness and appreciation of both.

  There’s a story about the legendary Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his warriors hunting the hills of Ireland. They chase the deer from dawn to dusk and then gather to eat, drink, and make music. As they sit by the fire, between tunes and talk, Fionn puts a question to his companions: “What is the best music in the world?” One man says it’s the cry of the cuckoo. Another says it’s the ring of a spear on a shield. Someone suggests the baying of a pack of deerhounds, or the laughter of a willing girl. “Nothing wrong with any of them,” says Fionn, “but there’s better music.” So they ask him what it is and he gives them his answer. “The best music in the world,” he says, “is the music of what happens.”

  Each time life and work take me from Ireland to London and back again, there’s a brief window—maybe just on the journey from the airport—when everything I see and hear becomes heightened. For an author, that’s gold dust. Focus sharpens, bringing with it a new sense of what it is to be alive. As my brain shifts from one language to another, I discover new word patterns, and reappraise those that are familiar. The contrasting rhythms of the two places provide endless entrance points for creativity; and, for me, the universality of human experience, seen against different backgrounds, has always been the music of what happens.

  About the Book

  The Story Behind The Mistletoe Matchmaker

  ONE OF THE best things about being an author is exploring aspects of lives and characters that differ from your own. I gave Hanna Casey my love of books, art, and libraries and, though she’s not a writer, my writer’s habit of analyzing her own and other people’s choices and motivations and immediately questioning her analysis. Unlike Hanna, though, I was never faced with a choice between a career and marriage, and I don’t share her complex family relationships. In fact, Hanna’s turbulent relationship with Mary and the extent to which she worries about Jazz arose in contrast to the facts that my own mother was my closest friend and that I myself don’t have children to worry about. I don’t live in a little town like Lissbeg either, although my Irish home is in a rural community on the rugged and stunningly beautiful West Coast. And, despite what people often assume, I don’t draw my storylines from real-life situations.

  Yet sometimes coincidences occur which make that assumption understandable. For example, while I was writing The Mistletoe Matchmaker, the village at the foot of our mountain was deep in plans to inaugurate a winter festival. It was something I didn’t realize till the book had gone off to be published, though I’m not sure everyone who’s asked me about it believes me when I say so.

  The village, which is by the ocean, is surrounded by outlying farms, and the festival, planned by its three pubs, hotel, and little shop, was a fundraiser to buy Christmas lights for its single, gently curving village street. It was a day-long event, held in November. They had music and food in the pubs; tables in the street selling fish chowder and punch; craft and art stalls in every available corner; and dancing and a raffle in the hotel. I couldn’t help carry tables or hang decorations because I was working on deadline, but I offered a selection of my books for the raffle and was delighted to see them tied up in ribbon among the stack of prizes.

  The day was crisp and sunny without a hint of rain and the high clouds were bundled up above the wintry mountain. The village shop, which sells everything from ice cream and kindling to vegetables and fresh-baked bread and cookies, has tables in front where neighbors meet to chat and have cookies and coffee. On the morning of the festival the shop was crowded with people who’d dropped by to sample sausages and burgers followed by crêpes served with local honey, freshly cooked to order for the occasion. Outside, the street was thronged with locals of all ages who’d arrived from all directions, chatting, eating chowder, and beginning their Christmas shopping in good time.

  Because the story of The Mistletoe Matchmaker centered on a winter fest in my fictional Finfarran, I’d been invited to hold the UK book launch in the hotel that afternoon, just before the raffle tickets were drawn and the music and dancing began. Helen Ní Shé, host of a popular daily Irish-language radio program, had agreed to emcee the event. I was honored that she’d accepted the invitation and that the owner of An Café Liteartha, a bookstore in Dingle town, had driven out along country roads with boxes of the book in the back of his van, passing cattle huddled round field gates and sheep gathered under hedges, just as I describe Conor’s trips in the Lissbeg Library van. Piles of copies were set out for sale on a table in the hotel lobby and, after Helen had made her generous, insightful speech to launch the book, I sat down to sign them. All around me neighbors and friends were chatting and laughing, drinking tea and sampling the little apple pies that, without warning, were whisked out from the hotel’s busy kitchen. I’d never had a book launch like it and I don’t think I could ever have a better one, and much of its joy lay in the fact that it took place as part of that community event.

  That year, at Christmastime, strings of lights, bought with the proceeds of the festival, gleamed gold, scarlet, and blue on both sides of the curving village street. And, a
fter the book launch, I found myself thinking of how many Irish Christmas traditions focus on the spreading of light in darkness. Here at the end of the Dingle Peninsula, candles glimmer in every window between the mountains and the ocean. They’re kindled at dusk each evening between Christmas Eve and the sixth of January, marking the twelve days of the traditional Christmas season. Nowadays, in many homes, the candles are lit by the flick of a switch, but in others they’re still made of wax and stuck in a hole in half a turnip. In the short, gray winter days holly is cut and carried indoors, the crimson berries and polished leaves making gleaming points of light in dark corners. And mistletoe, with its pale berries and leaves that look like wishbones, is hung over doors as a love token beneath which people should kiss if they find themselves crossing the threshold together.

  One of the oldest traditions here is to leave doors unlocked and fires burning brightly on the hearth the night before Christmas, offering rest and comfort to Mary and Joseph on their journey to Bethlehem, where Christ will be born. An expression of the importance of hospitality in rural Ireland, it also represents the ancient and universal instinct to offer warmth and light to travelers in winter. I think that I had it in mind when I wrote the scene at the end of The Mistletoe Matchmaker when Cassie looks down on Lissbeg and sees a bird’s-eye view of its lighted windows and gleaming snow-covered roofs. She stands in darkness, yet there for the taking is a shining welcome and a sense of coming home.

  Set in an Irish winter, the themes of this third Finfarran story are rooted in the ancient belief that at the heart of the darkest season of the year is all the light and sunshine of seasons to come. I hope you’ll enjoy it and that, for you too, it will feel like coming home.