The House On Willow Street (18 page)

“I’m not sure,” said Danae, when in fact she was sure. She wouldn’t go.

She left the knitting shop with her purchases in her bag. There was only one more thing on her Saturday-morning agenda, and that was to drop into the Avalon Hotel and Spa to meet up with Belle. They’d become friends many years ago when both of them were new to the town. In those days some of the older folk had looked upon newcomers as blow-ins who wouldn’t properly be part of Avalon until they’d been there at least thirty years.

“We’re nearly there,” Belle used to joke, “eighteen and counting. Another ten and they won’t call us newcomers any more.”

After a time, though, it ceased to bother her. “I don’t really care what the aul ones think, do you?” she’d said to Danae recently. And Danae had laughed.

“You know full well I don’t care what
anyone
thinks,” she said. “They all think I’m mad anyway.”

“Oh, that’s for sure,” Belle had replied, “you’re the hermit lady who runs the post office and lives up high at the end of Willow Street. Sure,
you
have to be mad. No husband, no child—I was going to say ‘no chick nor child’ but I’d be wrong there. Goodness knows, you’ve enough chickens.”

Danae had felt a stab in her heart when Belle said it. “No, plenty of chickens,” she’d replied bravely.

She loved that Belle said what other people were afraid to say. Nobody else would voice the thought in her presence, though she was sure they all considered her odd, living way up there with only her animals for company.

Saturday mornings the two of them would share a quiet cup of tea and a scone in Belle’s office. They’d chat about their week and Belle would usually try to persuade Danae to come out somewhere over the weekend.

If it was a trip to the cinema or a meal out, just the two of them, Danae would generally agree to it. But she didn’t like anything that involved going out with other people. In the early days, Belle had thought it was because she was shy. “How can a shy person run the post office?” she’d demanded. Belle liked to get to the bottom of every mystery.

“I’m not shy,” Danae had said. “I like my own company, that’s all. I’m not good in crowds. I don’t like lots of friends.”

“I love loads of friends,” Belle had said. “Friends are what keep you going, Danae. When poor Harold died, I’d have gone mad if it wasn’t for my friends telling me it was all right to be angry with him for leaving me. Telling me it was all right to want to spend days in my nightie, staring at the television, eating biscuits like there was no tomorrow. Friends get you through stuff like that. How can you say you don’t need friends?”

“I didn’t say I don’t need friends,” Danae had said, a little sadly. Harold sounded so lovely: no wonder Belle missed him. “I said I’m not good with lots of people.”

It had taken eighteen years, but Belle had got the hint. Now the pair of them went out perhaps once a month to the cinema and then to dinner afterward. Belle had given up trying to make Danae meet new people. When Danae had told her the whole story—well, most of it—she’d understood why her quiet, dark-eyed friend was happiest on her own.

“Well,” said Belle, when they were sitting down in her office with tea and beautiful scones in front of them, “what’s the gossip? Any wild excitement in the post office this week?”

“Nothing really,” said Danae. “I told you Mara’s coming to visit in a few days?”

“Yes, that’s great,” said Belle, who was truly delighted. She’d only met Mara a few times, but she thought it would do her friend good to have someone staying.

“And I heard that Anna Reilly passed away,” Danae went on.

“I heard that too,” said Belle, who heard all that happened in Avalon within moments of it happening. “Poor Anna,” she said. “She was a great woman—strong.”

“True,” said Danae. She’d both liked and been slightly nervous of Anna Reilly. Before she’d succumbed to the dementia, Anna had always struck Danae as one of the few people who might discover her secret. There had been something in the way Anna looked at her with those shrewd, blue eyes, as if to say,
What’s your story? What’s your sadness? Tell me.

Danae found people like that unnerving. She didn’t want to tell anyone her secrets. She merely wanted to live in peace and forget about the past.

“I met her daughter-in-law, Charlotte, yesterday evening,”
said Belle. “God love them, they’re all very upset, even though Anna had long since ceased to be of this world. Dementia really is the long goodbye, God rest her. But it’s always a shock when someone dies.” Belle’s own eyes got misty and Danae leaned over and put a comforting hand on hers.

“How about we go out tonight, to the cinema?” Danae said, and Belle looked at her in astonishment.

“Mother of God and all the saints!” she declared. “I don’t think you’ve ever suggested going out. Danae Rahill, what’s wrong with you? Do you have a temperature? Is it the change of life?”

Danae laughed. “I’ve gone through the change of life already, darling,” she said. “No, I think it might be good for the two of us to get out so you’ll stop thinking about dear Harold.”

“True,” said Belle, “it’d be lovely to get out. But is there anything decent on? I only like thrillers if there are handsome men in them. And no weepies, either. Fun or gorgeous men, that’s what I like.”

“Ah, there’s bound to be something on in Arklow that’ll fit the bill,” Danae said. She didn’t let many people into her life, but when she did, she took good care of them. And she was going to take care of Belle. “We’ll look it up in the paper now and book it, right?”

The driver was silent. He’d tried idle chitchat as they’d driven away from Cashel’s Dublin house, but Cashel had told him that he’d be working in the back, making phone calls and reading papers, and the man had got the hint. In reality, Cashel had made his few phone calls halfheartedly. He didn’t want to speak to anyone today. His assistants in the offices in Dublin, London, New York and Sydney had told people that he’d be out of contact for a couple of days. He had
papers to read too. He’d long ago learned to read in the back of cars and limousines as he’d sped around the capital cities of the world. Driving had been something he enjoyed, but it was rare that he had the chance. Cashel Reilly’s time was too precious to waste driving himself anywhere; instead, other people drove while he worked. Other people did everything for him. It was, he thought with amusement, only a matter of time before some genius came up with a system whereby captains of industry could get someone else to work out for them in the gym too, while they concentrated on making yet more money.

After a while he gave up trying to work, put his papers down and looked out the window at the changing landscape as the sleek, black car left the motorway and joined the road that would take them through Avalon.

Cashel felt, as he always did, the years peeling away. Nothing seemed changed here, and yet everything was changed now his mother was gone.

He and Riach had spoken on the phone early that morning:

“You’ll stay with us,” Riach had said. “Charlotte has a room ready.”

Normally, when Cashel went to Avalon, he stayed in his mother’s house. The luxury home he’d bought for her in the town; a far cry from the cramped, damp-ridden cottage he’d grown up in. He’d wanted to build her a mansion—no, better than a mansion—but she’d laughed and said, “Cashel, love, I’d be rattling around inside a place like that! No, a nice little house with proper central heating and no damp, that’d suit me.”

And because his mother was the one person he listened to, no matter what, Cashel had gone along with it. She’d had her little house, a lovely place with a beautifully landscaped
pocket back garden, so she could indulge her love of flowers and plants in a way that she had never been able to in Cottage Row. There, all they’d had was a communal back yard lined with coal sheds and dustbins, where kids kicked balls around when they got into trouble kicking balls around on the street.

It seemed strange not to be staying in the new house tonight, but he didn’t want to stay there without her. Tonight he wanted to be with his brother and Charlotte and their two beautiful children.

The driver came to a fork in the road and turned right, as Cashel had instructed. There were two ways into Avalon from this direction: the winding road along the coast, and the road that came over the hill. Cashel preferred the hill road with its view of the town, spread out like a cloak, and the beauty of the horseshoe bay with its white gleaming sands shining up at them. In the distance, on the hill, was the old De Paor estate and the beautiful woods surrounding Avalon House.

Cashel gazed at it for a few minutes. He didn’t know who was living there now, who owned it, who’d renovated it. He knew nothing. He didn’t want to know. His mother had known better than to raise the subject and then, in the last few years, she hadn’t been able to. What did he care about Avalon House anyway? What did he care about the bloody Powers? Suki and Tess, who between them had managed to rip his heart out all those years ago. No, he didn’t give a damn who lived there. That house was bad luck, bad luck to anyone who had anything to do with it.

T
ess slipped into the back of the church quietly, not wanting Cashel to see her. She had spoken to Riach on the phone the day before and he had assured her it was all right for her to come to his mother’s funeral.

“And Cashel knows about it?” Tess said, hesitantly.

“He knows,” was all Riach would say. And Tess could read what she wanted into those words.

That Cashel no longer cared, that Cashel was so grief-stricken it was immaterial, that Cashel had forgotten her . . .

The church was full, with people standing at the back. Tess made her way a little to one side so she could see Anna’s coffin, which was covered in white flowers. Before the dementia had taken her, Anna had loved flowers and her garden. She and old Mrs. Maguire, who used to run the butcher’s shop, had both been avid gardeners; Tess had often found them discussing plants and cuttings together in Lorena’s Café.

The whole of Avalon was in St. Mary’s church. Danae, resplendent in black velvet with a somber hat upon her long, tortoiseshell hair. Belle from the hotel, doing her best to look funereal but failing because really Belle always looked as
though she had stepped off the stage. Even Dessie from the pub was there, which was unusual because funerals meant extra business and he’d be busy behind the bar, getting everything ready for the mourners to pour and cheer themselves up with a few stiff ones as soon as the service was over. A feed of pints seemed to help so many people get over the pain of death, Dessie would cheerfully tell anyone who’d listen.

Tess was tall enough to see the Reilly brothers seated in the front pew. They towered over everyone else. Riach’s head was dark and Cashel’s . . . well, Cashel’s was almost the same as she remembered from all those years ago: dark, but now with a scattering of gray. It was strange, looking at the back of his head from this distance instead of being beside him, touching him.

So many years had passed, but for a moment Tess felt again like the young girl she’d been when she’d fallen in love with him for the first time. She reached in her pocket for a tissue and found nothing.

“Here,” said someone, thrusting a bit of tissue into her hand. “You need this. It’s a terrible day, isn’t it? But, sure, it’s a mercy that the Lord’s finally taken her, isn’t it?”

“I suppose it is,” said Tess.

And it
was
a mercy. Anna Reilly was not the sort of woman who’d have wanted to be trapped in a body with her mind somewhere else. It was a sad end for such a vibrant, bright woman.

Father Liam was conducting the Mass and Tess rather thought that her old friend would have preferred the sweet Nigerian, Father Olumbuko, to conduct proceedings. Anna had never been conservative. She’d have liked the tall African priest with his gentle eyes, but she’d never known him, not properly. For the past three years, she hadn’t known anyone, including Tess.

Funerals always made Tess think of other funerals, in the same way that weddings made her think of other weddings. Today, in the grand old church, she thought back to her father’s funeral in St. Ethelred’s, up the road. To outsiders, Irish funerals must have seemed strange, with their enormous crowds. Funerals were done differently in other countries, with only invited guests and nobody daring to go to the graveside. But here in Avalon, everyone wanted to turn up to pay their respects, and graveyards were generally full of mourners, teetering on gravesides, wondering if it was terrible to walk across the actual graves or should they stand on the edges?