The House on Willow Street

If she could only hold the tears and the anger in until she was alone, Mara told herself, she’d be fine.

The fairy lights sprinkled around in the trees gave the place a storybook feel. It was such a pretty venue: the old castle with its turrets and its coat of arms, the huge hall ablaze with candles, the giant heaters outside on the verandah surrounded by mini-lanterns. It was the perfect setting for an autumn wedding.

She shivered as she crossed the stone flags to stand under a heater.

This could have been me, thought Mara with a pang of sorrow. I could have been the bride surrounded by my family, wearing old lace, rushing upstairs to the four-poster bed of the bridal suite to make legal love to my husband for the first time.

Instead, she was facing a taxi ride to a B&B in the local village, because the family had snaffled all the castle bedrooms. Her room in the B&B was tiny and freezing, situated under the eaves, and the bed was a small, creaky double – she’d sat on it earlier and the crank of springs was so loud it had made her bounce up again with fright. If she’d lost her mind and taken another guest back for a wild night of casual frolicking, the B&B owners would undoubtedly bang on the door to get them to keep the noise down because of the bed springs.

‘I thought you’d be happy,’ said a slightly plaintive voice.

She wheeled around in shock. Jack stood beside her.

Mara closed her eyes to the lovely view and wondered if Jack had always been this emotionally unevolved? What kind of man would assume that she’d be happy to be at his wedding to the woman for whom he’d dumped her? But perhaps Jack could assume that.

She hadn’t had tantrums when he’d left. She’d taken it like a grown-up. Dignity was the preserve of the ordinary girl, she’d decided.

‘Why isn’t it me here tonight?’ she asked now as, from inside, she could hear the wedding band strike up another tune.

‘Ah, Mara, now’s not the time for this—’ Jack began.

He had his tormented face on. Mara knew his every expression. The sallow handsome face could take on so many different looks, and she’d seen them all.

‘Now is exactly the time,’ she said quietly. ‘Tell me – what does she have that I haven’t?’

The instant the question was out, she regretted it. The answer could have been eight years, bought breasts and much longer legs.

Jack reached into the jacket of his suit and took out a single cigarette. He was supposed to have given up. Tawhnee was very anti-smoking. Nothing had convinced Mara that she’d lost him as much as Jack’s agreeing not to smoke any more. If Tawhnee could do that, she could do anything.

‘It’s only the one,’ he muttered, cradling his fingers around a match to light the cigarette, then inhaling like a drowning man reaching the surface.

‘You’re a great girl, Mara …’ he said.

‘Why do I think there’s a but coming?’ she said with a hint of bitterness.

‘You know me so well,’ he said, laughing softly.

‘Not well enough, apparently.’

‘I didn’t mean to fall in love with Tawhnee,’ Jack said, after he’d smoked at least half of the cigarette.

‘It just happened,’ Mara said. ‘That is such a cliché, Jack.’

‘That’s me: Mr Cliché,’ he joked.

‘Very funny. So what’s the BUT. The but that I don’t have.’

She wanted him to say it. Because you were never The One, Mara. Because I was continually looking over your shoulder and then Tawhnee came along … She wanted him to tell the truth instead of the lies he clearly had been spouting when they were together.

‘There’s no “but”. You’re perfect,’ Jack said.

‘If I’m perfect, why didn’t you stay with me?’

‘I don’t know. She came to work for us, she’s stunning – not that you’re not stunning too,’ Jack said hastily.

‘You told me you liked the way I looked, and then you go and fall in love with a woman who is the complete opposite of me,’ she said. Except for the boobs, she thought grimly. In addition to her supermodel sleekness and legs up to the armpits, Tawhnee had gravity-defying boobs. The office women were convinced that Tawhnee had had a boob job. The office men didn’t care.

Jack said nothing.

Mara wasn’t to be deflected. ‘I want to know why,’ she said. ‘That’s all. Why you’ve married Tawhnee when, despite two years with me, you never even so much as asked me what I thought about marriage? It’s because I wasn’t the one, isn’t it? I was simply the one you could play around with while you waited for her to show up.’

It wasn’t as if Mara had been pinning her hopes on a wedding, but the longer she went out with Jack, the more she began to think that such an event might happen one day. She was sure that he loved her as much as she loved him. That Jack Taylor, a man who could have any woman he wanted, had really chosen a petite red-head who’d thought she was ordinary for years until she’d met him, and he’d told her she was special. She’d begun to believe all the things he’d said.

That she was the sexiest woman he’d ever met. And the funniest. And the most beautiful … Except he’d never asked her to marry him.

Four months after she’d found out he was cheating on her, he’d announced his engagement to Tawhnee. Today, a mere two months later, they were married.

‘You didn’t talk about marriage either,’ he bleated. ‘I didn’t think you were the kind of woman who’s into all that sort of thing’.

‘What gave you that idea?’

Jack had one last card. ‘Tawhnee said she wanted to get married. She said it on our first date.’

‘Really?’ said Mara, sigh and word wrapped into one.

Was that what it would have taken? If Mara had told Jack she was the marrying kind of girl, instead of the let’s-go-to-bed-and-have-fun sort of girl, would it have been her today in the long white dress?

‘Give me that cigarette.’

She plucked it from his fingers and took a long drag. She wasn’t actually a smoker, not really. When they’d been together, she’d had a few when they were out partying. Liking the idea of taking a cigarette from his mouth. It was such an intimate thing to do. But tonight, she wanted to do something self-destructive, and letting nicotine hit her was the only thing to hand. She’d promised herself she would not drink too much: to turn into the drunken ex at a wedding would be too humiliating.

She coughed and felt her guts loosen.

‘Yeuch.’ She stubbed the cigarette out on the balustrade.

‘I hadn’t finished with that!’ wailed Jack.

Mara patted his cheek. ‘That’s precisely what I said to Tawhnee, but hey, that’s life.’

Mara left him standing there. She collected her handbag from her chair, and smiled at the people at her table. They were colleagues from work and most of them had been so sweet to her.

‘Jack’s a fool,’ Pat from accounts said for about the fifth time that evening.

‘I’d go out with you tomorrow,’ slurred Henry, who sold higher class properties because he’d been to all the right schools and looked immaculate in navy pinstripe.

His wife, a frosted blonde who was equally posh and very kind, slapped him gently. ‘Don’t be silly, Henry. What about me?’

‘You could come too,’ Henry said happily.

‘I’m going to head off,’ Mara interrupted, before Henry could get on to the subject of threesomes.

‘Good plan,’ said Veronica, who worked with Mara and had her junior doctor fiancé in tow. He was asleep in his chair and someone had put a garland of flowers on his head. ‘You’ve done your bit.’ She got up to hug Mara. ‘We all think you’re so brave for coming,’ she whispered. ‘At least you’ve got two weeks before they’re back from honeymoon. Apparently, Tawhnee will carry on working with Jack for the next year, so you’ve got some breathing space to get your head around it all.’

Mara inhaled sharply. ‘Nobody told me that.’

Tawhnee was supposed to leave, that’s what Jack had told her in the early, painful days of finding out. Tawhnee would be leaving at Christmas.

‘Easier not to know, isn’t it?’ Veronica said.

No, thought Mara suddenly, it isn’t.

Her whole career at Kearney Property Partners was changing and nobody had thought to tell her. She was the silly, cuckolded girl who’d been so in love with Jack Taylor that she’d forgotten about herself. She’d handed him her heart and her job on a plate.

‘Thanks for telling me,’ she said to Veronica.

‘You’re so brave,’ Veronica said again. ‘Please, please, find yourself a total stud within the next two weeks so you can drag him into the office for lunch on their first day back from honeymoon. Ideally, you should be practically having sex with the stud on the reception desk when they come in.’

Mara laughed, thinking of movies where desperate women hired escorts for weddings and office parties so they wouldn’t be seen as hopeless cases. Perhaps she should have rented a hunk for tonight. Someone to look as if he couldn’t wait to rip her dress off with his teeth – even if he was being paid for it. But then that would be fake and, suddenly, Mara was in no mood for fake.

Like she was in no mood to go back into the office and pretend. She looked at all the smiling faces round the table, all wishing her well, and knew she wouldn’t be able to carry on working there for much longer.

‘See you all next week,’ she said brightly and whisked her jacket – vintage fake leopard print – off the chair.

Outside, she asked Reception to call her a taxi, and then hid in a big armchair near the door, hoping nobody from the wedding party would spot her escaping.

She rang Cici, who was out with some friends.

Mara whispered what Veronica had told her. ‘Even Veronica’s getting married,’ wailed Mara down the phone. ‘The whole world is at it. Was a law brought in making marriage compulsory and nobody told me about it?’

‘Don’t be daft. You don’t want to get married, not really.’

‘I do.’

‘You don’t. Jack’s a prat. Geddit? Jack’s a prat. He’d make you miserable. What if the two of you had got married and he’d met Tawhnee afterwards? What then, tell me?’

‘He’d still have run off with her,’ Mara said, feeling like the voice of doom in her own Greek chorus. ‘Does loving a shallow man make me shallow too?’

‘No, simply a typical woman,’ advised Cici, wise after several bottles of Miller. ‘You’ll feel better tomorrow and we’ll think of a plan to have fun, right?’

‘Right.’

The taxi driver told her she was a sensible girl to be going home early.

‘The town’s full of mad young women running around in this cold with no coats on. Young girls today, I don’t understand them. Nice to see a sensible one like yourself.’

In the back seat, Mara made assenting noises out of politeness. She wasn’t in the least bit sensible, she merely looked it and always had. Even at school, silliness was assumed to be an attribute of the tall, mascara’d minxes who wore their uniform skirts rolled up and had liaisons behind the bike shed. Everyone thought that small, quiet girls who did their homework had to be sensible, nice girls, even if they had wild red hair and a penchant for spending their pocket money on mad clothes.

In the B&B, the landlady was astonished to see a wedding guest home before eleven.

‘I’m working very hard and I’m exhausted,’ Mara said, because she didn’t want another person to tell her she was a rock of sense in a crazy world.

Then she went to her room, locked the door and allowed the tears to fall. Sensible and dumped – what more could a woman ask for?

Chapter Four

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. ‘She blames 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.