Once in a Lifetime (20 page)

‘Mum.’ He was beside her, holding on to her and they were both sobbing. ‘I never got to say goodbye, Mum,’ he was saying.

Ingrid felt the tenor of her tears change. She had to mother her son now and her own grief must take a back seat. She wanted to tell him that she’d never had a chance to say goodbye either, that David had left that morning and the heavens had given no sign that it would be the last time she’d say goodbye to him.

But now was not the time to dwell on that. Ingrid let her mothering instinct take over.

‘Your father adored you, Ethan,’ she said fiercely. ‘He died knowing you loved him and he loved you - never ever forget that.’

Eight

Sometimes, you can’t fix it. You just have to let go.

Three days after David’s death, Star sat on her verandah wrapped in the elderly cream woollen rug that had comforted the previous two generations of Bluestone women, clutching a tiny china cup of steaming rosehip tea to her breastbone. She loved the verandah, with its pale blue painted wooden slats, the gently creaking hanging seat she was curled up on, and the trailing honeysuckle and wisteria vines that clung around the wooden pillars like lovers. Two feet away, a curtain of rain lashed the garden, drenching the earth and flattening her herbs.

The night before, it had been a full moon and for the first time she could remember, Star hadn’t felt relief at the sight of the fertile, rounded moon in the sky. All her life, the moon had calmed her. It had such power over the earth, her mother used to say, regulating tides and women’s menstrual cycles.

Even seedlings planted in the run-up to a full moon thrived in a way they didn’t at other times of the month.

Inside the cottage, hanging on the wall above Granny Petra’s spinning wheel, was a very old pen and watercolour sketch of the twelve astrological signs. A many-pointed sun, like the one made famous by France’s Sun King, glowed crocus yellow. But

it was the moon that had always been the focal point for her.

It had been painted in some different medium; it seemed to shimmer like a base metal, appearing different from every angle. To Star’s eye, it was the most vibrant part of the picture.

‘Perhaps I should have named you Moon instead,’ Eliza Bluestone would say when she caught her daughter tracing small fingers across the gleaming moon in the picture.

‘I like being Star,’ Star said. ‘I might marry a man with Moon in his surname, then I could be Star Moon.’

Her mother hadn’t replied. Until she lost Danny, Star hadn’t realised that Bluestone women didn’t marry. There was no law to say this; no writing across the doorway to the wooden house on the headland, but it was true all the same. They didn’t marry.

They might, though, fall in love forever.

Star sighed and drank her tea. She needed to get ready for the funeral. Since she’d heard about David Kenny, when Lena phoned in tears telling her the news, Star had felt an ache inside her the like of which she’d never known.

Vibrant, poetic David Kenny - dead? How could that be?

When she’d hung up the phone, she’d gone outside and put her arms around the rowan tree she’d planted when David had left her life.

‘Are you happy?’ she murmured, her face close to the bark, breathing in the scent of the living wood.

She wanted her gifts of understanding to help her find him wherever he was, to communicate that he was at peace. But she felt no peace, just the roughness of bark against her cheek and a whisper of sadness.

Her magic was no help to her now. People had such a confused notion of magic: that it was a piece of trickery that could produce rabbits out of hats and kill men stone dead with a single look. Nonsense. The magic Star and her mother before her knew was a harnessing of what was already out there, a tapping into the energy of this glorious planet.

When Star had been tiny, her mother had done her best to

put it into words: ‘There’s a life force rushing round this world, swirling between every blade of grass and raindrop, and what we do is allow ourselves to close our eyes.’

Star, aged five, had closed her eyes obediently.

‘- to understand the world.’

‘Is it just us, Mama?’ Star wanted to know.

‘No, there used to be many more people who could do it.

Not so many now. If they turned off their wirelesses and sat listening to the earth around them, then they could. Of course, they’d have to open their minds, too.’

Star’s eyes shot open. Open mind and close eyes at the same timer’ Confusing.

‘Some people call it the sixth sense,’ her mother went on.

‘There’s no word for that in the old Irish language, but my mother used to call it feth, the magic lore. It’s about getting in touch with what all people once had. That sixth sense we’re born able to do it.’

There was huge joy and comfort in being a true part of the earth, in sensing that a terrible storm was going to lash the coast before it came, or waking up into a golden September morning with a feeling that it was going to be a glorious Indian summer day where nothing would go wrong. But it could be horrible too. Star remembered the times women would creep to their door, pleading for help, and just by taking their hand to lead them to her mother, Star would instantly know there was a good-for-nothing wife-beater at home. Eliza Bluestone would do what she could, going to Sergeant Maguire or Father Hely and telling them something needed to be done soon before the husband ended up killing the woman. Sometimes the wife would come running back down the path a few days later, furious that the police had hauled her beloved away when really all he needed was someone to understand him.

When they’d gone, Eliza would sit on the verandah murmuring about responsibilities coming with gifts and how it was easier to be good at sewing or cooking - anything,

rather than this. But she’d apologise afterwards, sorry lest her words had upset Star.

‘It’s a great gift,’ she’d say, ‘a great gift. We’re blessed to have it.’

Their abilities in the realms of magic were different - Star’s was a pure gift of touch; when she took somebody’s hand, it came to her in a rush. Sometimes she saw high-speed footage of their lives, crammed into two seconds; other times, it was just one thing, one bright, shining pinpoint in their life: the birth of a child, or touching the cheek of a loved one. And then there were moments when she touched a hand and sensed darkness, as if somebody had pulled the shutters down, plunging her into gloom. Those feelings were the worst. She could see the hurt of the other person and, as it passed through her, she felt it too - her whole body aching as the other person’s pain bounced out of their soul into hers.

Eliza’s gift had been less immediate; she could read the lines of someone’s hand the way other people read a map, seeing lessons learned and lessons to be learned in every tiny crevice.

She could read tea leaves too, although she only did that for fun, with friends who she knew could take it.

According to Eliza, Star’s gift of seeing by touch was the most intense any Bluestone woman had had in the three hundred years they had lived on this bit of coast. Passing on tales of these gifts was part of the legacy; each woman revealing to her daughters and granddaughters the special abilities of all the Bluestone ancestors. Bluestone Cottage was a part of it, too: a creaking, living wooden receptacle of all the knowledge and wisdom of those who’d lived and loved there over the years.

Unfortunately, their magic could be somewhat blurry around the edges when it came their own lives. Or else Star would never have fallen in love with Danny or even with David, and she’d have been spared a broken heart.

‘Your heart has to break before it can open up properly,’

her mother told her.

It sounded so wise in speech but it hurt so much in reality.

Now, thirty-five years after David had gone from her life, Star wanted to feel something of him, to touch his spirit where ever he was, and she couldn’t.

His death had left its mark on her.

The day after she heard the news, she’d looked in the bathroom mirror and discovered that her blonde hair had turned entirely white. Without any lightening golden threads, the I effect was stark. Her face looked very pale, too, as if the frost , of old age had crept up on her in the night.

For years she’d lived without David Kenny, at peace knowing that he was happy, and content with her own life. People might think she was eccentric, yes, but her life suited her: the almost monastic seclusion of her home, the solitude of her work, the silence that came from living alone. She’d loved it. And now, she didn’t. She felt uneasy, unsettled. And she didn’t know why.

Charlie woke at dawn on the morning of David Kenny’s funeral, jolted awake by a hideous dream where Brendan and Mikey were being swept away from her in a raging river. She was in a tiny boat, screaming their names, reaching for them, I but the torrents were carrying them further away every second, she was losing them … She sat bolt upright in the bed, heart pounding, covered in a film of cold sweat.

The room was still murky in the morning dark and Brendan I was a duvet-covered lump beside her. With relief, she reached I out and touched him, barely resting her hand on his body in case she woke him up. It had been a nightmare, that was all. But it had felt so real.

I Knowing it was crazy but needing to do it anyway, she I slipped out of bed and tiptoed into Mikey’s room. The normal musky, old-sock smell of teenage boy was like perfume to her, and she felt the ripple of relief again as she saw her son sprawled in his bed, his marine camouflage duvet barely covering him. Gently, she fixed it, making sure he was warm, for it was a cold morning and the heating hadn’t come on yet.

Asleep, he looked even more like Brendan, the same gentleness in his face, the same freckles, the same dark hair that stuck up at all angles no matter how it was brushed.

She wondered what he looked like to other people, because to her, he was so infinitely precious that she could only see beauty. Everything about him was right, perfect. He was so gentle, so kind. Even the teachers said so.

That appalling nightmare she’d just had … Charlie shivered, as much from the cold on her damp skin as from her dream. It must have been brought on by the thought of today, David’s funeral.

Charlie, along with everyone else in Kenny’s, had talked of nothing else since his death a few days before.

How devastated Ingrid must be. At least she still had her children, but still…

With the empathy that Brendan loved in her, Charlie found herself trying to imagine the pain Ingrid was feeling: not in a voyeuristic way, but as if by doing so she could somehow send love and light Ingrid’s way.

Kitty Nelson had laughed like a drain when, as a teenager, Charlie had tried to explain her theory about empathy and human beings.

‘Empathy,’ said Charlie, ‘is like coils of smoke reaching blue tendrils into the air. If they’re let go, they can fly wherever they want, reach people, touch them and help. It’s a type of global love: the great unconscious doing good.’

Kitty had arched an eyebrow, shaded to perfection with her Dior pencil - Only Dior, darling, nothing else will do.

‘Global love?’ she’d enunciated, as though Charlie had been talking about cockroach love. ‘What a load of utter twaddle. The only global love I’ve heard of involved lots of drink, drugs and very loud Jimi Hendrix music. Where do you get your ideas from, Charlotte? That is the most awful nonsense I’ve ever heard.’ I Charlie had been careful to keep her notions about love and earthly frequencies to herself after that. She would have gone on to explain that being kind had a ripple effect, with one act of kindness creating another, and another, until there were waves and waves of them. But she said nothing.

Another unbearable thing about David’s funeral was that Kitty was determined to come. She’d known David, she said, from years back.

Charlie had been hearing this since she’d started working at Kenny’s, and had lived in fear that her mother might march into work one day and demand to see her old friend, David. It was just the sort of thing she would do, but luckily it had never happened. Today, though, she was convinced that the world should see she’d been a friend of David’s, even though she hadn’t seen him for years.

‘I knew his old girlfriend too - Star. Very full of herself,’

Kitty sniffed.

Charlie took this to mean that the unknown Star hadn’t been a fan of Kitty’s, and made no comment.

Purple would work: one of those full-length shearling coats that screamed the owner was filthy rich and oblivious to funeral etiquette.

Or pink, Schiaparelli pink, making her look wildly glamorous amid the dowdy hens in their black.

Once, Kitty Nelson would have painted her lips pink to match, but those days were gone.

It wasn’t so much that her lips had shrunk - although, to be honest, they had. It was the furrows around her mouth that made vibrant-pink-wearing a no-no.

Cigarette lines or life?

Kitty had met David in the early seventies, when he was still going out with that Bluestone girl. They’d moved in different

social circles: David and Star had hung around with artists and poets, while Kitty was pals with the feminists of the day. But sometimes the two circles overlapped. David had been considered a catch then, heir to Kenny’s, for all that he seemed to be turning his back on the family firm to be with Star.

Kitty had never taken to Star: she looked through you, Kitty felt. As if she could see exactly what you were thinking, particularly when it wasn’t a nice thought. Star had given Kitty one of those serene, knowing looks when Kitty had been flirting with David. Not that he’d responded, the idiot.

Few men resisted her in those days.

But David had taken Kitty’s purred, ‘You could buy me a drink some day, on our own,’ and gently batted it back to her: ‘That’s kind of you, Kitty, but no thanks.’