The House on Willow Street

‘Cashel,’ said his brother’s voice.

He knew immediately that it was bad news.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s Mam – she’s dead.’

Cashel felt as if his body was in freefall down the side of the giant hotel.

‘Tell me,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Massive heart attack in her sleep. Dolly found her.’

Cashel paid for Dolly and three other nurses to take care of his mother. He’d wanted Anna to stay in her own home, even if the dementia meant she no longer recognized it. At least his money allowed him to do that much for her.

‘It doesn’t seem real,’ Cashel said to his brother. ‘Despite the dementia, despite everything, she was there …’

His voice tailed off. Their mother had been so strong, so courageous, like a lioness protecting her sons. Their father had been a man with a penchant for the bookmaker and the local pub. His bad back meant he wasn’t in work often, and any money he got, ended up in the pub or the bookie’s cash register. Without Anna Reilly, Cashel knew that he and Riach would have had no warm house, no education, nothing.

‘I know,’ said Riach, his voice soft. ‘Not real at all. But we knew this day would come, Cashel, and it’s better for her. She’d have hated this half-life, not part of this world and not part of the next one either.’

Cashel stood and leaned over the balcony, staring down towards Macquarie Park where people were walking, their lives untouched by his tragic news. He wanted to scream it out, to tell everyone what had happened. Cashel Reilly, once-divorced man of forty-six, regularly on rich lists and in financial columns for his business acumen, felt as if a part of him had been ripped out.

‘I’ll be home as soon as I can,’ he told his brother. One of the benefits of having a private jet. ‘Will you do the notices in the paper? We can talk about undertakers and all the rest when I get there.’

He found himself shuddering at the word ‘undertakers’. The world of death was upon them with all its traditions and rituals. Cashel had a sudden vision of St Mary’s in Avalon, sitting in the pew beside his parents at Sunday Mass.

‘Don’t fidget!’ his father would hiss, and Cashel’s mother would put her hand – soft, despite all the work she did – into his and let him know that he hadn’t really done anything wrong, that a bit of fidgeting was normal.

And now she’d be lying in St Mary’s in a big dark box. He’d be there mourning her without anyone to put their hand into his, and he knew how much that would upset her – how much it had upset her for so many years – that he was alone.

Today, it upset him too. And it made him think about Tess Power.

Anna had always loved Tess. There had been no issue between the woman who cleaned Avalon House and the daughter of the house. There might have been in many of the other big houses, but not there. It was partly to do with Tess and Suki’s father, a man who genuinely didn’t discriminate between those with money and those without. He was unlike most of his class in that respect.

Mr Power was cut from different cloth. He cared about people, from the men who worked on the estate, trying to stop the ravages of time and the weather from destroying the beautiful old house, to people like Cashel’s mother, who cleaned and sometimes took care of Tess and Suki. He always addressed Anna respectfully as ‘Mrs Reilly’ and spoke to her as if she were a duchess. And Anna, though she came from the poorest street in the village, spoke back to him in the same way. So it was no surprise that Anna and Tess were close.

But Cashel didn’t want to think about Tess Power. Not after all that had happened. He hoped she wouldn’t have the nerve to come to his mother’s funeral. The lady of the manor bestowing her presence on the funeral of a mere town person … He shuddered; no, he didn’t want to see her there.

October was not a good time for boutiques in small villages – or so said Vivienne, proprietor of Femme, the high-fashion boutique next door to Something Old.

The Christmas frenzy of wanting something new to wear hadn’t yet started and everyone was saving for Christmas presents.

‘The number of people I’ve had in this morning who rattled through the sale racks dismissively, then marched out again. It’s so depressing,’ Vivienne sighed. ‘They don’t even look at the full-price stock.’

She’d stuck the ‘Back in five minutes’ sign on the door and dropped into Tess’s for a cup of instant coffee and a moan. The two of them had been shop neighbours for ten years. Vivienne had done marvellously during the boom years when wealthy women thought nothing of paying a hundred euros for a sparkly T-shirt or twice that for a long, bewildering skirt with trailing bits here and there. Now, Vivienne said, they wanted a whole outfit for the same hundred euros.

Tess boiled the kettle and spooned coffee into cups in the back part of the shop and listened quietly to Vivienne’s lament.

The past couple of years had been tough, no doubt about it.

Once upon a time, she used to close the shop for the whole of January and open up again in February, with new stock, the old stock rearranged, and a spring in her step after the rest. She hadn’t done that for the last two years. These days, she couldn’t afford to close at all.

At least when the place was open, people came in, bringing warmth with them.

She carried the coffees back into the shop, having decided against telling Vivienne that a customer had bought a sweet 1910 marcasite brooch only that morning. Vivienne would take it personally.

‘No news?’ asked Vivienne.

‘Not a scrap,’ said Tess, smiling. It was a trick of hers: smiling fooled people into smiling back at her. It was infectious; a bit like yawning at dogs.

Vivienne perked up. ‘They’re doing a special offer in the supermarket,’ she said. ‘Two instant meals and a bottle of wine for twelve euros. Of course, Gerard hates instant meals.’ Gerard was Vivienne’s husband, a man who could be relied upon to bail the shop out when profits were low.

Tess was used to Vivienne’s rants. She never let on that she too worried about money, that there was no one to bail her out, and now even the capital her father had left her had dwindled, despite its relative safety in the post office. Staring her in the face was the knowledge that before long she might have to give up Something Old and join an auction house – if she could find one that would have her. She didn’t have a degree in fine arts. Her college experience a million years ago had been in general arts. Her knowledge of antiques came not from books but from her love of old things and an affinity for them, but she had an expert eye and could generally tell a fake from the real thing.

‘Are these the best biscuits you have?’ Vivienne said, eyeing the plain biscuits.

‘Sorry,’ said Tess. ‘I did have a pack of amaretti biscotti, but they’re all gone.’

‘I need chocolate,’ said Vivienne, getting to her feet. ‘I’ll nip down to Ponti’s for a pack of chocolate ones. Back in a moment!’

It was ten minutes before she returned. After all that time, Tess expected her to turn up with cupcakes from the delicatessen and a couple of milky coffees from Lorena’s Café. However, when Vivienne arrived, panting from the walk up the hill to Something Old, she carried nothing but a pack of chocolate biscuits.

‘I got stuck, talking to Mr Ponti,’ she said, collapsing on to her chair. ‘Apparently, Anna Reilly died. One of the nurses found her dead this morning. Mr Ponti reckons it was a mercy, given how bad she was. I suppose the older son will be home for the funeral. I’ve met Riach, obviously, and his wife, Charlotte’s lovely, but I’ve never set eyes on Cashel – except in the papers. He’s a fine thing, I have to say. Is that bad of me? Saying he’s good looking when his mother’s only died? I suppose it is. Can you boil up the kettle again, Tess? This coffee’s stone cold.’

But Tess was no longer listening. She was thinking of the woman she’d known since she was a child, who’d been a friend to her even after the split with Cashel.

Nineteen years had passed, yet it remained as painful as ever to think about him. Tess closed her eyes, as if that would block out his face.

She saw him on television sometimes, talking about business. He looked as if he’d filled out over the years, with broad shoulders to go with his great height. He’d had a beard for a while, giving him a hint of Barbary pirate with his midnight dark hair and the slanting eyebrows over those expressive brown eyes.

On the day he’d told her how much he hated her, he was leaner, his face still youthful and full of hope.

When she looked at pictures of him now she saw someone who’d been knocked by life and whose face had taken on a wry, slightly wary expression as a result. The dark eyes were permanently narrowed and there were lines around them that should have made him appear older but somehow only succeeded in making Tess wonder if there was much happiness in his life.

His mother had come to see Tess a couple of years after she married Kevin. Zach had been a toddler at the time, and Anna had brought him a little sweater she’d knitted. It was blue with the red outline of a train embroidered on to it. Anna was a wonderful knitter. Tess could remember Cashel, tall and strong, in a cream Aran sweater his mother had made him. Tess used to lie against him and trace the complex patterns of stitches, marvelling at both the intricacy and the feel of his body through the wool. Everything had been so simple then, dreaming of the day Tess and Cashel would marry, Suki would be First Lady … And then it had all gone wrong …

Taking the little blue sweater from Anna, she had blurted, ‘It’s lovely,’ before dissolving into tears. Without a word, Anna had gently picked Zach up from his beanbag, dressed him in the tiny sweater, and handed him to his mother. It was the only thing which soothed Tess in those days: holding her beloved son and burying her nose in the fine tufts of dark hair on his small head.

There was no need for them to be strangers, Anna had pointed out in her matter-of-fact way. Just because Cashel had stormed off saying he would never speak to Tess again, didn’t mean Anna had to follow suit.

‘We’ve known each other too long for that,’ she said in her firm, strong voice.

Anna Reilly had been unlike anyone else Tess knew. There were plenty of women with husbands who spent every waking moment in the pub and thought work was an occupation for those poor souls without an aptitude for betting on horses, but Anna did not allow this behaviour to beat her down. She was going to raise her boys as best she could, with or without Leonard Reilly’s help, and if that meant cleaning other people’s houses and scrubbing their doorsteps, so be it. The jobs she did in no way defined her. Her strength defined her.

Over the years, Tess often wondered whether Cashel knew that she and his mother had remained friends. In subtle ways, Anna would let her know when Cashel was home, and Tess understood that she wouldn’t be welcome in the house on Bridge Street until he’d gone.

‘You should have seen some of the houses he wanted to buy me,’ Anna joked when she showed Tess around it the first time. It was bigger than the place on Cottage Row that Cashel had grown up in, but not too big.

Through Anna, Tess had followed Cashel’s career from afar. At no time did Anna ask why it had happened that way, why had she broken Cashel’s heart. And Tess never tried to explain, for she felt certain that Anna wouldn’t understand. If it had been her darling Zach whose heart had been broken, Tess knew she’d find it hard to forgive. And yet Anna had been part of her life since she was a child; part housekeeper, part babysitter when it was required. She realized that Tess wasn’t heartless or stuck up, or any of the things Cashel had called her.

She’d been distraught when she first saw the signs of Anna’s decline into dementia. To ensure the old lady got the help she needed, Tess had phoned Riach, alerting him to the problem.

Like his mother, Riach held no malice for her. He was the one who made sure she could continue to visit his mother without revealing her surname to the nurses Cashel had hired.

‘Cashel would go mad if he knew you were visiting her,’ Riach told Tess.

‘I know,’ she said, her silvery-grey eyes cloudy. ‘But it’s not his business. It’s about me and your mother. We were friends.’

Now Cashel would surely be returning for the funeral, and for the first time in many years, they would come face to face.

Assuming Riach thought she should attend the funeral.

Suddenly Vivienne broke off munching through the biscuits, having spotted someone walking towards her shop window.

‘Excuse me, Tess,’ she said. ‘It looks as though I have a customer.’

The moment she was gone, Tess went to the back room to make a phone call.

Riach’s mobile rang so long, she thought she’d have to leave a message, but just as she was steeling herself for the voicemail announcement, he picked up.

‘Riach, I am so sorry. I just heard about Anna. You must be devastated.’

‘I am – we are,’ he said. ‘I knew it was coming, but it still hurts. I want to cry, only I keep thinking how she’d hate me to cry.’

‘She was a very strong woman,’ Tess said, ‘but she’d have wanted you to mourn her, so cry away.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, and Tess could hear the slight hitch in his voice.

‘Riach, I would like to be at the funeral, but only if you think it’s all right for me to come,’ she went on. ‘I don’t want to cause any more pain. You’ve enough to deal with, without me—’

Riach interrupted her. ‘She’d have wanted you there,’ he said.

‘What about Cashel?’

‘Cashel will have to get over himself,’ Riach said shortly. ‘This will be a day for my mother and the people she loved.’

Tess unexpectedly found she had a lump in her throat.

‘She did love you, you know,’ he said.

‘I loved her too,’ Tess said, beginning to cry. ‘I’ll miss her so much. I know it’s better that she won’t have to endure the living hell she was in—’

‘That’s what I said to Cashel,’ Riach interrupted her. ‘I don’t know if he agrees, though. She was the one person he could come back to, you see. I’ve got Charlotte and the kids, he has no one.’

There was silence. A long time ago, Cashel’s someone had been Tess.

‘You should be there, though,’ Riach went on. ‘I’ll call you when it’s all organized. You’ll have to see him, but I’ll tell him you’re coming.’

Tess wasn’t sure what was worse – Cashel knowing in advance that she was going to his mother’s funeral, or him suddenly seeing her there after all these years.

That evening, just as Tess was locking up the shop, Kevin sent her a text.

We need to talk, the message said. Are you in later?

She had an inkling of what he wanted to discuss. The depression in the building trade meant that even brilliant carpenters like Kevin – Tess had to admit that he was a genius at what he did – weren’t able to find work. Before he’d left, they’d sorted out the finances in a general way, neither of them touching the joint account but agreeing that, since Kevin would be living basically rent-free in his mother’s little apartment he could afford to put more money into the mortgage. Clearly that was now becoming too much.

She dialled his number. ‘Hello, Kevin. The answer to your message is yes,’ she said into the phone. ‘I’ll be in later tonight – where else would I be going?’ she laughed.

And on the other end of the phone there was a slight nervous chuckle that didn’t sound like her husband at all.

‘Yes. Where,’ he said.

‘It’s about money, isn’t it?’ Tess said finally. ‘Go on, tell me. You want to change things. Listen, Kevin, maybe …’ she paused, on the verge of saying, Maybe this has all been a mistake, maybe the separation has shown us what we really needed to know: that we were supposed to be together …

Something stopped her.

‘But we’ll talk about it tonight,’ she said breezily. ‘Do you want to have dinner? We’re having shepherd’s pie – not very exciting, I know, but I made double last week so I’m defrosting.’

‘I’m not sure … I’ll probably already have eaten,’ said Kevin.

‘OK,’ Tess replied, startled. Kevin loved her shepherd’s pie. Anna Reilly had taught her how to make it. And even though Tess could hardly claim to be a cordon bleu cook, she had mastered all the simple dishes she’d learned from Anna. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘What time do you want to come up? Before dinner or after? If you want to come after, could you bring some biscuits? I’ve run out and there’s nothing nice in the house to go with tea.’

‘Maybe after,’ Kevin said quickly. ‘And when Kitty’s gone to bed we can talk.’

It had been a strange day, Tess thought as she closed the shop and started to walk home with Silkie dancing around at her feet. The odd tone in Kevin’s voice. The news of Anna Reilly’s death. The thought of Cashel returning to Avalon. It had all shaken her.

In the nineteen years since Cashel had left, they’d met only once: a horrible stand-off in the pharmacy, he clutching at what had to have been one of Anna’s prescriptions, she trying to choose some small present for Vivienne for her birthday. It had felt like touching the live wire on an electric socket. Tess had been rooted to the spot, staring up at Cashel’s dark, stormy eyes. Stormy was the only word for them. He had lost that air of warmth and kindness he’d had when he was young. No, that was all gone. As he looked back at her, his jaw set, every inch of his body had been tense with repressed anger.

Tess had been about to say something, to break the horrible cycle. It was so long ago, she wanted to say, can’t we be friends? After all the time we spent together and being each other’s first love … But as she’d opened her mouth to speak, he’d given her a look of such venom that she’d felt it as intensely as if he’d pierced her side with a sword, then he’d turned and walked out.

And now he’d be back for Anna’s funeral. Nevertheless, Tess had to go. She wouldn’t be frightened away by him. Anna was her friend, her dear, dear friend. She had to go for her sake, and her father’s. He would have wanted her to go. That was what the Powers did. No matter how uncomfortable something might be, they went through with it anyway.

So no matter that Cashel would be glaring at her with those stormy eyes of his, Tess was going to be at that funeral.

On the way home, Tess stopped by her mother-in-law’s house to collect Kitty. Helen minded Kitty two days a week and Lydia, a childminder, picked her up from school the other three. Occasionally Kevin would finish work in time to drop Kitty home, but most of the time Tess went to get her.

Kitty loved going to Granny’s after school, not least because Granny was not too fussed about homework being done and was all too eager to fill Kitty with her home baking. As a result, come dinnertime Kitty would have no appetite, so she’d stare at the vegetables on her plate and moan, ‘I am not even a teeny-weeny bit hungry and I am not eating broccoli.’

Kitty wanted her mum to come into Granny’s and stay a while, as she often did, but today Tess felt so weary from the double-edged sword of hearing about Anna’s death and the thought of Cashel coming home and glaring at her, she couldn’t face it. ‘Sorry, Helen,’ she said. ‘I’d stay for a cup of tea, but I’m absolutely zonked tonight.’

‘No problem, love,’ said Helen. ‘See you tomorrow, chicken,’ she added, planting a big kiss on Kitty’s head.

At home, Tess checked her daughter’s homework, put the shepherd’s pie in the oven, sorted out vegetables, did a bit of tidying, emptied the dishwasher. All the normal everyday stuff. Zach came in tired from his day in school with a bag of books so heavy that Tess didn’t know why all schoolchildren didn’t have major back problems.

‘It’s fine, Ma,’ Zach protested, ‘I’m strong.’ He held up a muscle and flexed it. She laughed. He was strong. How amazing to think her baby had turned into this seventeen-year-old-giant.

‘I’m strong too,’ said Kitty, flexing her skinny nonexistent little-girl muscles.

‘Yes, you are, darling,’ said Tess. ‘Super strong. And you’ll get even stronger if you sit down here and eat your dinner.’

‘But, Mum, it’s shepherd’s pie. I hate shepherd’s pie,’ moaned Kitty.

‘Last night you said you hated roast chicken and you promised you’d be really good and eat your dinner tonight,’ Tess pointed out. ‘Come on now, you made a pinkie promise.’

If you hooked baby fingers and said ‘pinkie promise’, there was no going back on your word. A pinkie promise could not be broken.

‘OK,’ moaned Kitty, with all the misery of someone being forced into a ten-mile trek in the dark.

Zach wolfed down his dinner and came back for seconds, while Kitty pushed hers around the plate. Tess was too tired to argue with her.

‘Eat one bit of broccoli and you’re done.’

‘Do I have to?’ moaned Kitty.

Tess gave up.

She was washing the dishes when the doorbell rang.

‘That’s your dad,’ she said. ‘Will you get it, Zach?’

Zach hurried out to open the door. A few seconds later Kevin appeared on the threshold of the kitchen looking awkwardly around him as if he needed to be invited into the room.

‘Come on in, Kevin, sit down. Do you want a cup of tea? Did you bring any biscuits?’ she asked.

‘Erm, yes. Here, they are.’ He handed a package to Tess formally.

What was wrong, she wondered. He looked uncomfortable and unhappy. It had to be money. One of his big jobs had been cancelled, that must be it. How were they going to cope? Paying the mortgage was hard enough already. Now, with her business down on last year and Kevin’s income taking a dive, it was hard to see how they could manage. Maybe she really would have to give up the shop and try to find other work.

Kevin sat at the table and chatted to Zach and Kitty. He was like his old self with them, and that made Tess feel better. Children needed a father and she needed … Well, she liked having him around. She wasn’t in love with him, but she did care about him, and perhaps that was enough. All this talk about pure true love that would survive anything and still be as fiercely strong twenty years later – that was just fairy-story rubbish, or maybe movie-story rubbish. In movies, people adored each other for ever. Of course, in real Hollywood life, staying together for even seven years was considered a record-breaking marriage.

But in Tess’s life, normal life in Avalon, perhaps loving and respecting the man you were married to was enough. Everyone got irritated by their husband or wife. Everyone sometimes wondered if there wasn’t more to life. For a brief second, she thought of that wild passion she’d had with Cashel, then she reminded herself: look where that had got her. Wild passion didn’t last. Wild passion ended badly. No, security and love and raising a family together were the things that counted. She resolved to say it all when they were alone. As she made the tea, she rehearsed in her mind how she’d explain it:

Kevin, I’m sorry, I was wrong about the whole separation thing. It was a stupid idea, but it’s shown me that we should be together after all, that what we have is wonderful. Please come back and we’ll start again.

By the time the tea was ready, Zach was gathering up his gigantic bag ready to trundle off and do his homework.

‘Kitty, upstairs and get into your jammies,’ said Tess. ‘And don’t forget to brush your teeth. Then you can come down and watch twenty minutes of Disney Channel before it’s time for bed, OK?’

‘OK, Mum,’ said Kitty, running across to give her father a huge hug on her way out.

Instead of launching into whatever was worrying him as soon as Kitty was gone, Kevin stared deep into his cup, as if the secrets to life were contained therein.

‘I know what you’ve come to talk about,’ Tess said. ‘I understand. I mean, it’s difficult, obviously it’s going to be difficult, but other people have been through worse. We’ll manage somehow.’