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October ripped through Avalon with unprecedented storms that made the sea lash the rocks at the edge of the Valley of the Diamonds, the prettiest cove on Avalon Bay. From Danae’s house, she could see the frothing of rough waves crashing into the shore. The last of the visitors had left Avalon and it was back to its off-season population of six thousand souls.
On Willow Street, another of the ancient willows had sheared from its roots overnight, like a piece of sculpture broken by a hurricane. Danae wished someone from the council would move it, put it out of its pain. She didn’t know why, but she felt these beautiful trees could feel pain like humans could. The magnolias in her garden appeared to have curled in on themselves, no bud ready to unfurl, and there was no scent of honey in the air at night from the honeysuckle, only the icy chill of winter approaching.
Danae’s walks with Lady were shorter affairs, as neither of them could cope with being out for long in such wild winds. She wrapped a scarf around her mouth when she walked because it felt as if the wind was trying to steal her breath.
‘You don’t like it much either, do you, darling?’ she said to Lady late one afternoon as they faced into the wind climbing the hill towards Avalon House. Above them, the for sale sign swayed perilously in the wind, dirty and battered from hanging there so long.
Lady’s favourite walk was over the stile into the woods that belonged to Avalon House, where she could cavort over fallen logs searching for rabbits and squirrels. A few months ago, the woods had been wild with the remains of sea aster and bell heathers, with the delicate purple heads of selfheal clustering here and there amid the leaves. But now, the flowers were gone and a wildness had taken over the place.
Lady loped on, knowing the way to go, past a couple of sycamores twisted towards the ground from decades of high winds. To the right were the ruins of the old abbey, nothing now but half a gable wall of ancient brick. Small stones sticking up around its grassy meadows were crude gravestones dating back to the time when people left a simple marker at a burial site instead of a grand headstone.
Danae found these little stone markers so touching: some dated from the Famine years and she could picture the hunger-ravaged mourners burying their loved ones, wanting to know where the grave was so they could return to pray there, if they lived that long.
On the other side of the abbey was a holy well where locals had been leaving prayers and offerings long before Christianity had claimed the well for St Edel.
Lady turned as they reached the abbey ruins and ran with easy grace over leaves and fallen twigs in the direction of the back of the great house, following the trail of another dog, Danae thought.
Even though there was nothing to stop her because some of the windows were glassless and open to the world, Danae had never been inside the house itself. She felt it would be disrespectful to the place somehow. Although she knew there were many who dismissed such things as hocus pocus, Danae was sensitive to atmosphere, She could tell that this house had known kindness and goodness in its day. And now there was a sense of sadness that no family lived here any more, the silence broken only by the wind in the trees instead of the sound of dogs barking or children laughing.
Calling Lady to her side, Danae turned to make her way back to Willow Street and home. Despite the wild beauty of the woods, she was suddenly anxious to leave this melancholy place. Or perhaps it wasn’t the place that was the problem but the time of year.
It had been in October that Danae got married and the month would forever remind her of a second-hand wedding dress and how hopeful she’d been as a young bride. Thirty years ago, she had known so little when she stood at the altar. Marriage back then was immersed in the ceremony of the Catholic church, with a dusting of glamour from the movies, where girls like the young Grace Kelly glowed on screen at her one true love. Marriage was till death do you part, your place was by your husband’s side. Good wives knew that.
Once the ring was on the bride’s finger, happiness was guaranteed – wasn’t it?
With the benefit of hindsight, Danae marvelled at her innocence. She should have known better: after all, she’d spent all those years living with her mother while a selection of ‘uncles’ trailed in and out of their lives, some kind, some not. And yet Danae had hoped that he was out there, her special one true love.
She’d been convinced that Antonio was the one, and had entered into marriage never doubting for a moment that they would be together for ever. How foolish could you get!
Young women today were made of stronger stuff and they knew more.
Or did they?
Her brother, Morris had phoned earlier and told her the latest news about Mara. The poor girl was devastated by Jack’s betrayal and there was nothing they could do to help her.
Danae had done what any big sister should do: she had listened and tried to offer comfort.
Morris was ready to go down to Galway and give Jack a piece of his mind or even a few slaps – fighting words indeed from Morris, a man who’d never slapped anyone in his life. ‘She pretends she’s fine, only she’s not,’ he said mournfully. ‘Girls today always try to pretend they’re strong for some reason, but Mara is such a softie, even though she lets on she’s as tough as old boots. Just a total softie.’
His voice trailed off then, but Danae resisted the urge to leap in with offers of help. She knew that if Morris wanted her to do something, he’d ask, though it was very rare that he did ask anything of her. She tried so very hard not to interfere in case she brought her own bad luck to Morris and his wife and children.
Yet she was so drawn to them. That warm and loving little family seemed to her to epitomize love at its best, and she had to try hard to keep some distance, otherwise she’d have been there all the time, haunting them, like a cold person trying to warm their hands at a fire. It made more sense to live on her own in Avalon with her beloved animals. She was the woman on the fishing boat, the Jonah: it was better that she stayed away and kept her bad luck with her.
‘Elsie is in bits about it, of course,’ Morris went on. ‘Sheblames the girl Jack ran off with. Don’t suppose it matters much who you blame, it’s too late now. I wish you’d talk to her, Danae,’ he added. ‘Mara listens to you. She’s not going to listen to her dad. Elsie simply cries when she’s on the phone. To think I had that young pup here in our house …’
‘I’ll phone,’ she’d promised, without a moment’s hesitation.
As soon as she got home after her walk, Danae made herself a cup of tea, sat in front of the log fire and dialled Mara’s number.
Her niece sounded in remarkably good form on the phone, although Danae suspected she was making a huge effort to sound upbeat.
It was undoubtedly habit: she was so used to blithely saying ‘I’m fine’ when anybody asked her how she was feeling that she probably almost believed it herself. There had been a time when Danae had done exactly the same thing. It was surprisingly easy to convince people that your life was wonderful when it was the exact opposite.
‘I’m going to be on a career break soon,’ Mara said blithely. ‘I gave in my notice earlier this week. Apart from a few waitressing shifts, there’s not much for me here, but it’s nice to have some time off. Plus, Cici and I are thinking of doing a fitness boot camp one weekend.’ Before Danae could get a word in, she added, ‘No, don’t say anything about how I’ve never done any exercise up to now!’ Then she laughed, a slightly harsh laugh.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much, thought Danae. Speaking the truth harshly before anybody else did was an age-old defence mechanism. There was no point in explaining this to Mara, though.
Instead Danae said, ‘That sounds lovely. I’ve always wondered what exactly a boot camp is. Is it military instructors yelling at you to do sit-ups on the spot?’
‘I sincerely hope not,’ said Mara. ‘I can’t do any sit-ups at all, and I’ll be able to do even less if someone is shouting at me when I’m trying!’
They talked for a little longer, and then, claiming that she had to get ready to go out for the evening, Mara said goodbye, promising to phone her aunt soon.
‘You could come to Avalon for a visit,’ Danae suggested. ‘The feathered Mara would love to see you.’
Mara laughed, a genuine laugh, at that.
‘I hope the poor hen hasn’t been dumped by her boyfriend, too.’
‘There’s no rooster here,’ Danae replied. ‘They only cause problems.’
Mara laughed that harsh laugh again. ‘Ain’t that the truth! I’ll come soon, I promise.’
Danae hung up, convinced that all was not well with her niece. But she would wait until Mara came to her. That was her way.
Cashel Reilly was having breakfast on the thirty-fourth-floor terrace of the Sydney Intercontinental when he got the phone call. He liked eating on the balcony and staring over the harbour, watching the ferries cruising silently beneath him, passing the armadillo scales of the Opera House.
He’d drunk his coffee and eaten his omelette, and was reading the Sydney Morning Herald, having skimmed both the Financial Times and the Strait Times. It was only half seven, yet the club floor was already busy with business people having meetings and making phone calls.
Cashel disliked breakfast meetings. He preferred to enjoy his meal and then talk, rather than do both at the same time. His first meeting was at half eight in the office on George Street and his assistant had already left him notes.
His business was varied and remarkably recession-proof. Not that he didn’t occasionally dabble in high-risk investments, but the bulk of capital was tied up in the nano-technology firm in California, the enzyme research here in Australia, the computer intel business that spanned the globe. Gifted with a mind that roamed endlessly, he invested in the future, forever seeking new angles and new business opportunities, and it had made him a very rich man.
The plus of being so successful meant that any mild recession-led diminishment of his wealth was a mere ripple in the pond of Reilly Inc. He’d put the chalet in Courchevel up for sale not because he was strapped for cash but simply because he hadn’t been there in years. Rhona had been the skier. She’d loved nothing more than decamping to the chalet for weeks at a time, skiing all day and putting on her glad rags to party all night.
Cashel had enjoyed skiing. He was strong and agile, which helped, but he couldn’t get worked up over it the way she did, endlessly pacing herself on black runs.
It was one more thing that separated them. In the beginning, they’d happily told each other that ‘opposites attract’. By the end, they’d realized that opposites might attract but building a life together when you had so little in common was another matter.
He still owned the house near Claridges in London, the apartment in Dublin, a penthouse in New York on the Upper East Side, and the apartment in Melbourne, an airy fourth floor apartment off Collins, where he would wake to the somnolent rattle of the tram cars. Melbourne with its trees and boulevards reminded him strangely of home. On the face of it, Avalon was nothing like the city, yet there was an inescapable sense of history that they both shared.
Nowhere was that sense of history stronger than in the De Paor house.
Cashel could vividly recall the first time he’d seen the house properly, as a tall, skinny nine-year-old accompanying his mother as she went about her work as a cleaner. He’d been there before then, of course. Climbing the crumbling De Paor walls was a rite of passage for the boys in Cottage Row, where he and his younger brother, Riach lived. The Cottage kids, as they were known in the local national school, were always up for mischief, some worse than others. Cashel remembered the time Paddy Killen’s older brother got himself arrested for breaking and entering. Paddy had been delighted with this infamy, but Cashel’s mother had sat her two sons down on the kitchen chairs and told them that if they ever did anything like that, the police wouldn’t need to lock them up: she’d have killed them first.
When his phone buzzed, he answered without so much as a glance at the screen. Few people had his private number.
‘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.
