Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (116 page)

‘But you must have opportunities, love. You must have.’

And Connie realised that her mother thought it was her own fault she was single, that she was rejecting men left, right and centre.

‘If you knew how many dates I’ve been on, how often I’ve gone to a party hoping tonight would be the night. I’m fed up with it.’ For a second, she thought of Gaynor discussing Connie’s list and how no man would ever reach its dizzy heights. ‘Men don’t come near me. If you know what I could do to make a difference, tell me.’

‘Men like to be looked up to,’ her mother began.

‘I’m too tall for anyone except a basketball pro to look up to me,’ Connie said.

‘Don’t wear heels, then!’

‘I don’t.’

‘You never wear floaty, feminine clothes. When you’re tall, you have to make an effort to look feminine,’ Barbara countered.

‘I can’t do feminine,’ Connie said. ‘I look ridiculous. You need to be petite and fairy-like to wear floaty things. That suits Nicky, but I look like I’m playing dressing up.’

‘Your dad and I would love to see you settled. I wonder –’ Her mother’s voice shook. ‘I wonder if it was anything I did wrong.’

Connie felt more tears threaten. She didn’t know why she’d bothered with make-up at all. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘it’s nothing
you did wrong. I’d love to settle down, but it just hasn’t happened. There are lots of women living alone nowadays. That’s the way life is. And I can’t torture myself for the rest of my days crying over it. I have to get on with it. Don’t be sad for me, Mum.’

Her mother’s face wobbled.

‘Really, don’t be sad.’ Connie pleaded. ‘I’m happy, honestly I am.’

‘But what will you do without Nicky?’

It was the one question Connie didn’t know the answer to. Nicky had already moved into the new apartment with Freddie. In school, when asked something she didn’t know, Connie was brave enough to say so. She was wise enough to realise that the best teachers were able to admit what they didn’t know as well as what they did. But right now, she knew it was time to lie.

‘I think it will be a whole new life for me,’ she said, crossing the fingers of one hand under the snowy tablecloth. ‘I’ve relied on Nicky and Freddie far too much. Being on my own will force me to get out more.’

‘Oh, love, I do hope so,’ said Barbara anxiously. ‘Your father and I have been worried about you, worried what this will mean to you. You take such good care of Nicky…’

As if on cue, Connie’s father ambled up, looking both happy and relieved.

‘You’re sure the speech was all right?’ he asked them both, for possibly the tenth time that evening. ‘The
Father of the Bride
booklet said to keep it short, and I know I went on a bit long, but I wanted them to get a picture of Nicky when she was a child, so they’d know what sort of girl she is.’

‘Arthur, it was perfect.’ Barbara smiled at him, a smile full of love despite her talk about how she’d never had it all.

Weddings were bittersweet, Connie realised. Full of joy for the bridal couple and anyone who was happy, and tinged with regret for everyone else.

Freddie’s parents were still devastated that their huge financial losses meant they hadn’t been able to give their son and his bride the deposit for a house, the way they’d always planned to. And there was Connie, watching her parents enjoy sheer happiness at seeing one daughter happily married, while with obvious awareness that the other daughter had no sign of even a date with a man on the horizon.

‘Dad, what you said was wonderful. Will you bring me for a whirl on the dance floor?’ Connie said.

As her father whisked her off, telling her that he was always bad at waltzing and if she wanted to lead, it was fine, Connie reflected that she was getting good at appearing stoic at weddings. First Sylvie’s, now Nicky’s. if she’d ever thought of a career on the stage, she was getting plenty of practice for it.

Nicky and Freddie went to the Canaries for their honeymoon. Connie went home to Golden Square and decided she’d join a walking club to help her get fit. Or perhaps she should go to the local swimming pool and do lengths a couple of times a week?

Either way, she wasn’t mouldering away any more at home alone. No, sir. She was going to live her life to the fullest. Start again, as Eleanor had said. She was going to embrace life and show everyone how fulfilled she was.

And perhaps show them that a woman didn’t need a man to be fulfilled. No, sir, on the double for that.

It’s hard for you to imagine the hardship of those days when I was young, Eleanor. Housework wasn’t as easy as it is today. You’re used to me or Agnes heading to the shop for groceries or watching the coalman throw a sack of coal on the stoop, but in Kilmoney, everything we ate and everything we put on the fire we had to find ourselves.

From dawn till dusk, someone was working. If my mother wasn’t making bread, she’d be out digging vegetables in the garden. We’d have been lost without that little plot of land. Wide at one end near the turf stack and the road, it narrowed down into a sliver by the house where my mother grew rocket, because she loved it, and where Agnes had a rosebush that clung to the gable wall.

‘The Queen of Sheba’ was what she called that rose. It was creamy white, an old rose with many layers of petals like a doll’s skirts, and I’ve never found anything like it since. I’d know the scent at once if I ever smelled it again, but I never have, not in the garden shops or even in the florists.

I’d have loved a garden when we lived in Queens
in the old clapboard house, which is funny because, when I was young, I had no time for the garden at all. Worse than gardening was the field of turnips for the cattle.

Thinning turnips was what I hated doing most. You’d have an old grain sack tied round your waist like an apron, and you’d be on your knees in a long furrow with nothing ahead of you but lines of turnips. You’d start at dawn and you had to prick out half the young growth. The cattle ate the turnips and so did we. At least with potatoes you only dug up a few at a time, letting the fresh earthy smell overwhelm you as you hauled up a plant with the pale golden potatoes clinging to the roots. Turnip thinning took hours. By evening, your knees and your back would be in agony.

The meitheal was the best part of the summer work, when the local men combined forces to cut everyone’s hay for the winter – and woe betide us if it was a bad summer and the hay rotted in the fields.

On meitheal, the women of the house had to put on a fine feed. At lunch, myself and my mother would head to the fields with the tin flask of strong sweet tea and as many sandwiches as we could manage.

I can still smell the fresh scent of the hay when it was being stacked.

Do you know, it was simple then, now that I think of it. Today, we have all manner of geegaws to help us, but life’s more complicated in other ways. Looking back, I think we knew what was important about life then.

For the first time ever, Rae was grateful for her mother-in-law’s presence. Geraldine’s hip was so well healed, she was
walking around the house without wincing, and could have easily gone home to her own house. But Rae didn’t want her to. Geraldine was proving a welcome distraction.

‘You’re so kind to my mother,’ Will said every night as they lay in their double bed, sinking into the sheets after a long day. It was a time Rae normally loved, the feeling of the cool of the bed on her hot, tired body and the knowledge that Will was beside her. Now, like everything else in her life, it felt wrong. Wrong that she was lying here beside her husband with a huge lie on her conscience. Wrong that she hadn’t told him about Jasmine. Wrong that she was sure the only option was to go on keeping the truth from him.

‘She needs someone to look after her,’ Rae said, which was a neat way of deflecting him. She didn’t want to talk about how kind she was. What use was kind when she was a liar?

‘She’s not always easy,’ Will said, and Rae loved him for saying it, even if she couldn’t take comfort in it.

‘She’s just strong-willed, that’s all. Goodness, I’m tired.’

This was code for not wanting to make love. In the three weeks that Geraldine had been there, Rae and Will had only made love once. Rae had lain in bed with Will’s arms around her and she’d cried silently.

Will had stopped kissing her breasts when he’d become aware of her quiet tears.

‘What’s wrong, love?’ he’d asked anxiously.

‘It must be this getting older thing,’ she’d said, shocked at how easily the lie came to her.

‘We don’t have to make love,’ Will said, and moved so he was lying beside her, holding her. She could feel his erection against her and knew how aroused he was. But she couldn’t make love. The pure honesty of the act would make her break down altogether.

‘Thank you,’ she mumbled into his shoulder. ‘I’m just so tired.’ More lies.

‘You know you can talk to me about anything,’ Will said,
as he held her. ‘Has Mum been, you know, rude to you? I know how tactless she is…’

Rae shook her head. His skin was so warm and he smelled familiar. The Will smell she adored. How many times had they made love over the years of their marriage? She couldn’t remember and never before had she felt as if she was betraying him. It wasn’t only through sex with another man that a person could betray their husband. ‘Your mother’s been fine.’

Which wasn’t entirely true either. Bored now that she was recuperating well, Geraldine was becoming more irritable. Had Rae ever thought of sanding down the kitchen cabinets and painting them so they matched? Surely dogs weren’t allowed in the square’s garden off the lead? Geraldine had been looking out one day and seen a skinny girl with dreadful short hair letting two mongrel things run wild. One had done its business off the lead. Geraldine wasn’t sure which was worse, the dog being allowed off the lead or that the girl had bent to pick up the poop with a bag as though it were totally normal.

‘There aren’t many women who’d take their mother-in-law in with grace, don’t think I don’t know it, Rae,’ he said. ‘She’ll be gone soon anyway.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Rae, and thought how much harder it was going to be to hide how miserable she felt when his mother wasn’t there as an excuse.

On Monday, Leonora came to take Geraldine for a coffee.

‘I’m still not that mobile,’ Geraldine said testily as Leonora took her arm.

Rae hid a smile. Geraldine had been fine earlier and had taken a trip out to see Will in his office and to admire his work.

‘Oh, Mother, it’s been three weeks. If they’d taken your leg off, you’d be running around by now,’ Leonora snapped.

‘You’ve never had your hip done, so don’t talk like you know anything about it,’ retorted Geraldine. ‘You’ve no idea what I’m going through. At least your brother and Rae understand the pain I’ve been in.’

Rae held the door open patiently and said a small prayer of thanks that she wasn’t going with them. She’d been working in the tearooms all morning and was just taking a break before returning to Titania’s for the afternoon shift. But there was something she needed to look for while the house was empty.

It took ages for the pair to leave. ‘Hold my right arm, not my left,’ said Geraldine crossly to her daughter. ‘You keep forgetting I had my left hip done and you might bump into it.’

‘Fine,’ said Leonora in long-suffering tones.

They shuffled down the path, with Rae at the door, smiling and waiting until they’d reached the pavement. As soon as they had, Rae shut the door, ran upstairs and pulled the cord that opened the trap door to the attic. Reaching up, she pulled the folding stairs down and clicked them into place. She climbed up, flicked on the light and tried to remember where she’d left the box. The attic was a dumping ground for everything from toys to books, old clothes and Christmas decorations. Rae picked her way past Anton’s old tricycle and a box with silver and red tinsel sparkling out of it. Shoved in one corner was an old brown nylon suitcase that was so battered it was entirely unsuitable for travel ever again.

She unzipped it and groped through the old sweaters and thermal underwear she’d stored there. None of it would ever be worn again, but it was a hiding place for something precious. Anton’s baby clothes were in another suitcase. Rae had donated much of what he’d worn to Community Cares, but she’d kept a few things in memory of that time. Her groping fingers closed around a small, hard-framed handbag.

Rae’s hands shook as she opened it and took out a baby’s small pink vest. It had been old and second-hand forty-two
years ago. Now, it was rough with age but her fingers stroked it as it if were the finest silk. She hadn’t kept this vest in with Anton’s baby clothes. Keeping it separate was deliberate. Her two children were from two different lives.

She would not betray Jasmine’s memory by keeping her tiny vest with her brother’s things. And Anton might have thought it odd, too, to find an old woollen vest amongst his babygros. Here alone, she could do the right thing.

After all the weeks of having Geraldine, Rae was relieved to sit here on the attic floor alone and hold the worn old fabric to her face, trying to breathe in some scent from it. There was nothing but the musty odour of damp and age. And yet, as she held it, Rae felt the tears fall.

The door of the Blessed Helena Nursing Home was a sunshine yellow, as bright as a sunflower even on a misty day in May. The hostel occupied part of an old grain warehouse in Limerick and the only neighbours were a small garage and a feeding supply business. Across the road was a pub and then nothing but bare plots of land. Rae knew the existence of the hostel purely because their Civics teacher, the devout Mrs Flaherty, had dedicated many classes to explaining to the fourth years that young girls wouldn’t get pregnant if there weren’t spots like the hostel in the first place.

‘It’s calling to these unfortunate young girls, telling them that sex before marriage is allowed, when we all know that it’s not!’

Shelley and Rae never paid much attention to Mrs Flaherty in Civics. It wasn’t an exam subject and they were pretty sure that, even if it was, hostels for unmarried mothers was surely not on the curriculum.

‘She’s crazy,’ said Shelley. ‘Is it true the fifth years tried to get her to teach them the rhythm method of contraception and she went red in the face and screamed for the headmistress?’

Rae giggled. ‘I’d love to have seen that.’

In the back of the taxi that had cruised to a halt in front of the yellow door with Blessed Helena Nursing Home written on it, Rae remembered that conversation. It seemed a million years ago, when she and Shelley were friends, when she’d had a different life mapped out for herself.

‘This all right for you?’ the taxi driver said gruffly. He hadn’t said a word during the trip. Rae almost didn’t want to get out of the car, despite the nauseating air freshener. It was safe somehow, a link between the past and the future.

But there was no turning back. Whatever the baby inside her deserved, it wasn’t the Hennessey household. It was enough that one of them had been destroyed by Paudge and Glory. Rae’s child wouldn’t be.

‘This is fine,’ she said in a clear strong voice. Be brave, she told herself.

She paid and began to take her bags out. Again, he let her move it all herself.

‘Thanks,’ Rae said, but there was no reply. He sped off and she was left with her bags outside the yellow door.

She wondered would her father be home from the pub yet. Had they noticed she’d gone?

Then she stepped forward and rang the bell.

An elderly woman with the very short hair and unmadeup face of a plainclothes nun opened it and Rae felt her blood still. The nuns of her experience had little kindness for unmarried mothers. Several girls had left the school after becoming pregnant. None had ever returned and there was no mention of them in the way the previous year’s sixth years were mentioned at assembly prayers.

The woman’s shrewd eyes travelled down Rae’s body in her baggy school jumper and the jeans she’d pulled on before she left. The top button was undone but with the jumper over it, nobody noticed until now. Inside, Rae braced herself for the inevitable anger and disgust. If this was what she had to
endure to stay here, she would, because she had nowhere else to go.

And then an astonishing thing happened. ‘You’re welcome, my child,’ said the nun, holding out her hands and taking Rae’s. ‘I’m Sister Veronica.’

‘I’m Rae Hennessey,’ Rae said, her chin held high.

‘Come in, Rae,’ said Sister Veronica. ‘I’ll give you a hand with your things. Is there anybody with you?’

‘No,’ said Rae. ‘I’m alone.’

‘You’re never alone, God is always with you,’ Sister Veronica replied gently.

Rae stared at her. What a comforting thought. She hoped it was true, but she hadn’t had much reason to believe in the kindness of God thus far.

Whatever the nuns in school thought about unmarried mothers, the nuns and the women who ran the Blessed Helena Nursing Home had different views. Sister Veronica was kindness itself and while she took notes of all Rae’s details, there was no mention of shame or sin the way there would have been in school.

In her
old
school, Rae thought with a shock. She’d never be going back there now.

The hostel was simple yet homely. There was a large kitchen-cum-sitting room where the girls spent their time, two offices, a room where family members could come to visit, and upstairs there were two dormitory rooms along with several single rooms. There were no frills, the seats in the kitchen were old church pews covered with the multi-coloured crochet cushion covers Sister Veronica liked to make in the evening, and the single beds were made up with plain blankets and old white sheets. Despite the bareness of the place, everything was spotlessly clean.

But it was the flowers that Rae would always remember: Sister Veronica loved flowers and grew wallflowers in the tiny scrap of a garden behind the hostel. Old jam jars groaned with
the weight of lilac-and-white wallflowers dotted with greenfly. Their heady garden scent filled the air better than any perfume.

There were six girls in Blessed Helena, including Rae, and she was given a bed in the second dormitory alongside Carla, a tiny red-haired girl who was near her time, and Sive, who didn’t look pregnant at all and who stared silently at Rae when Sister Veronica showed her the room.

‘She doesn’t say anything,’ Carla informed Rae. She was resting on her bed and she patted the side of it for Rae to sit with her. ‘Come and visit with me and we’ll talk.’