The Honey Queen
Cathy Kelly

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2013

Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

Jacket illustration © Nicholas Hely Hutchinson

Jacket lettering © Stephen Raw

Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007373673

Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007510948

Version: 2017-10-28

For my family, John, Murray and Dylan.

For Mum, Lucy, Francis and all my beloved family, and for the dear friends who are always there for me.

Thank you.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Part Three

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Six months later

Extract of The House on Willow Street

Keep up to date with Cathy

About the Author

Also by Cathy Kelly

About the Publisher

Part One

The atmosphere of the bees and the hive is determined entirely by the mood and personality of the queen bee. A calm queen will result in a calm, peaceful and productive hive.

The Gentle Beekeeper, Iseult Cloud

Prologue

Lillie Maguire kept the letter tucked into the inside zipped compartment of her handbag, a battered beige one Sam had bought her in David Jones one Christmas. The handbag was as soft as butter from years of use, and coins would slip down in the places where the lining had split, but she didn’t care: it was a part of him.

She had so little left of Sam that she treasured what she did have: his pillow, which still had the faintest scent of his hair, the shirt he’d worn that last day going into hospital, the engagement ring with its tiny opal bought forty years before. And the David Jones bag with the ripped lining. These were her treasures.

The letter was almost a part of the bag now: the edges curled up, the folds worn. She’d read it many times since it arrived a fortnight ago and could probably recite it in her sleep. It was from Seth, the half-brother she hadn’t known existed, and the one link to a mother she’d never known.

Please come, I’d love to meet you. We’d love to meet you, Frankie and I. You see, I’ve been an only child for fifty and then some years, and it’s wonderful to hear that I have a sister after all. I never knew you existed, Lillie, and I’m sorry.

I’m sorry too to hear about your husband’s death. You must be heartbroken. Tell me if I’m being forward for proffering such advice, but perhaps this is exactly the right time for you to come? Being somewhere new might help?

The one thing I can say for sure after all these years on the planet is that you never know what’s around the corner. I lost my job three months ago, and that was completely unexpected!

We’d love to have you with us, really love it. Do come. As I said before: I may be speaking out of turn because I’ve never suffered the sort of bereavement you have, Lillie, but it might help?

It was such a warm letter. Lillie wondered if Seth’s wife, Frankie, had a hand in the writing of it because there was such a welcome contained in it, and yet the wise woman in Lillie thought that Seth was probably still reeling at discovering her very existence.

The sudden appearance of a sixty-four-year-old Australian sister could mean many things to an Irishman called Seth Green on the other side of the world, but most shocking might be the knowledge that his mother, now dead, had kept this huge secret from him all his life.

Women were often better at secrets than men, Lillie had always felt. Better at keeping them and better at understanding why people kept them.

They knew how to say ‘don’t mind me, my dear, I’m fine, just a bit distracted’ to an anxious child or a confused husband when they weren’t fine at all, when their minds were in a frenzy of worry. What would the doctor say about the breast lump they’d found? Could they afford the mortgage?

Would their shy son ever make a friend in school?

No, a wise woman could easily make the decision that certain information would only bring pain to her loved ones, so why not keep all the pain to herself? She could handle it on her own, which meant they didn’t need to.

Men were different. In Lillie’s experience, men liked things out in the open.

So given a bit of time, Seth might feel entirely differently about the whole notion that his mother had borne another child before him, when she was very young, and had handed that child to a convent that had in turn handed her to a sister convent in Melbourne. It might just help him, if he were to meet that child.

An open-ended ticket, Lillie decided. That would be the right way to travel to see Seth and Frankie.

Martin, one of Lillie’s two grown-up sons, had set the whole thing in motion.

Soon after Sam’s death, Martin, who was tall, kind and clever, just like his father, had taken up genealogy and started spending many hours on his computer looking for details of his past. As a university history lecturer, he said he couldn’t believe he’d never thought to do it before.

‘It’s the history of our family, I should have taken this on years ago. What was wrong with me?’ he asked, running hands through shaggy dark hair that made Lillie’s fingers itch to get the scissors to it, the way she used to when he was a kid.

The thought of him as a child, of her life when he and his brother were children, made her breath catch.

When Martin and Evan were children, she’d had her darling Sam. Now he was gone. He’d died six months ago, gone to who-knew-where, and she was just as heartbroken as if it had happened yesterday.

No matter that Lillie told everyone that she was coping – her sons; her daughters-in-law, Daphne and Bethany; the girls in the book club; her best friends Doris and Viletta; her pals in the Vinnies shop where she put in a few volunteer hours a week – she wasn’t coping. Not at all.

On the outside, she could smile and say she was fine, really. But inside was different: the entire world had a Sam-shaped hole in it and she wasn’t sure she could bear to live with it any more.

In this new world the sky was a different blue: harsher somehow. The sun’s heat, once glorious, had a cruel quality to it. And the garden they’d both loved felt empty without the two hives Sam had kept for forty years: there was no gentle hum of bees lazily roaming through the flowers. In the early stages of his illness, Sam had given his hives to his best friend in the local beekeeping association.

‘I think they’re too much for you to handle, sweetheart,’ he’d told her as he watched, with sad eyes, while Shep carefully got the two traditional-style hives with their little pagoda roofs ready for transportation.

‘Shep could come in and open them every eight or nine days,’ Lillie had protested. ‘He does it when we’re on holiday, he could do it now.’

‘I think I’m worn out looking after them,’ Sam said. Lillie knew he was lying, but she said nothing. Deep down, Sam knew he wasn’t coming out of hospital, but he’d never tell her that. He’d always protected her and he was still doing it.

Now, afterwards, there were plenty of jars of honey in the pantry, but Lillie, who used to love a glossy smear of golden honey on wholegrain toast, couldn’t bring herself to open a new one.

Nothing tasted the same. The flat whites she loved from the little shop near the library tasted so strange that she’d asked the girl behind the counter if they were using a different coffee.

‘No, it’s the same. Fairtrade Java. Do you want me to make another one? No sweat.’

Lillie shook her head. Of course the coffee wasn’t different. She was different.

It must have been his father’s death that prompted Martin’s interest in the family tree.

Martin’s wife, Daphne, groaned good-humouredly to her mother-in-law about Martin’s passionate new interest. ‘Between Martin being permanently attached to the PC on genealogy sites,’ she said, ‘and Dyanne glued to hers on chat rooms, saying she’s only talking to school friends, when she’s supposed to be doing schoolwork, I should add, I could walk out and neither of them would notice.’ A cheerful and kind midwife, Daphne now appeared to have a second full-time job – keeping an eye on Dyanne, their fourteen-year-old daughter, who had recently discovered her power over the opposite sex and was keen to test it out.

‘There’s not much of my side of the family to research,’ Lillie said ruefully. At her age, she’d decided she was long past the pain of the concept that her birth mother had given her away as a baby. She’d always known that she was adopted, and at fifteen it had been achingly painful. At sixty-four it was merely a part of her past. ‘Adoption was different in those days, Daphne. I don’t think they put half of it down on paper. From the little bits I know, he won’t find anything from my side.’

Daphne smiled.

‘That won’t stop Martin. You know what he’s like: when he gets into something, he’s obsessed. The number one topic of conversation at dinner every night is either Martin’s latest haul of illegible records or how every kid in Dyanne’s class is going to a concert apart from her and it’s not fair that we don’t trust her, after all she’s nearly fifteen. We are a pair of fossils, she says. By the way, any chance you’d come to dinner on Friday?’

Lillie always said she was lucky to have such wonderful daughters-in-law.

‘It’s not luck,’ Daphne and Bethany would insist.

‘It’s because you’re the way you are. You never interfere,’ Bethany once told her.

‘But you know how to help when it’s needed,’ added Daphne.

Both of them knew girlfriends with mothers-in-law who needed to be locked up in high-security premises, if only there was a loophole in the legal system allowing for this. A special hard labour camp might be set up for those who continually brought meals over to their married sons’ homes ‘so they could eat proper food instead of takeout’.

Within weeks, Daphne had been proved right about her husband’s tenacity. Martin must have had termite blood somewhere in his genealogy because he’d burrowed into every crevice until he found out that Lillie had been given up for adoption in a Dublin convent by one Jennifer McCabe; father unknown.

Evan and Martin Maguire had conferred about this information, and then Martin had burrowed even deeper in the records to discover that Jennifer McCabe had subsequently married a Daniel Green, and from this union there was a son, Seth, now in his fifties.

Teaming up, just like they used to when they were kids, two years apart in age, Martin and Evan arrived at their mother’s home waving pieces of paper and airplane schedules.

They had her brother’s address and every detail they’d been able to glean about him from the Internet. Seth Green was an architect; he’d designed a school which had won an award, they told her delightedly.

‘What?’ Lillie stared at her sons, united in their happiness over this information.

‘We’ve found your brother!’ said Evan. ‘We haven’t contacted him yet, but we will if you say we can. He’s your family – our family. We’ll talk to him and then you can fly to see him. We’ll pay. Doris could go with you …’ Evan, cheerleader in the expedition, took after her with his strawberry blond hair and freckled Celtic skin. He had his father’s wonderful kindness too – it shone from his eyes. ‘Mum, the last six months or so have been so terrible for you. Maybe doing something new would help you recover from Dad’s death – not that you would ever recover,’ he added hastily. ‘But, you know …’

Both he and Martin looked at her expectantly, hoping and praying this plan would help. She could see it in their faces and she loved them for it, but it was all too much, too fast.

She might be able to smile at people from the safety of her Melbourne home, but away? In a foreign country with people she didn’t know and a brother who might hate the sight of her? As for Doris, she was so scared of flying there wasn’t a snowball’s hope in hell of getting her on a plane.

‘Let me get the iced tea out of the freezer and then we’ll talk,’ Lillie told her sons and left the room as fast as she could.

In her and Sam’s clapboard Victorian house with its pretty curlicued verandah and lush garden, the kitchen had been very much Lillie’s room. It wasn’t that Sam hadn’t cooked – his barbecue equipment had been treated as lovingly as a set of a carpenter’s tools, washed and put away carefully on the grill shelf after each use. But barbecuing was outdoor work.

The kitchen, with its verdant fern wallpaper, pots of Lillie’s beloved orchids on all surfaces, and the big old cream stove they’d had for thirty years, was her domain. She stood in it now and briefly wondered where the small tray was, where the tea glasses were. Shaken by the news that she had a brother, Lillie was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of loneliness. She and Sam had often talked of travelling to Ireland.

‘We could kiss the Blarney Stone and see if the Wicklow and Kerry Mountains are as beautiful as they say,’ Sam said.

‘As if you need to kiss any Blarney Stone,’ she’d teased back.

He’d known that she didn’t want to search for her birth family. That had been the dream of a younger woman.

I know it’s out of love, but why do people keep coming up with things to make me feel better, Sam? she asked now, looking up.

She didn’t know where he was or if he heard her, but talking to him helped. She just wished he’d answer in some way.

Grief was a journey; she’d read that somewhere. A person didn’t get over it, they moved through it. One of the worst parts was not knowing where she was on the journey or if she was on it at all yet. The pain was still so bad. Perhaps she was only at the entrance to the grief journey, buying her ticket, looking out at an endless plain in front of her where people were to be seen shuffling along in parallel lines, time slowed to a snail’s pace.

‘Mum—’ called Martin.

‘Hold your horses,’ she called back, finding the cheerful mother voice she’d always been able to summon. Her sons had their own lives and families. Mothers cared for their sons, they didn’t expect the sons to have to care for them.

She carried the tray of iced teas into the living room.

‘Show all the documents to me,’ she said, sitting between them on the big old couch with the plaid pattern. ‘A brother!’

Seth Green had immediately responded to Martin’s email. Martin printed out the reply and read it to her, but Lillie didn’t like this email business. She was a letter or a phone call person. How could you tell what sort of person was writing to you on a computer when you had no voice to listen to or no signature to consider? Seth was apparently happy to hear about her and that was just fine, but nonetheless she felt stubborn. Seth and Frankie could visit her if they wanted to. She was busy, she told her sons.

Then, a fortnight ago, Seth had sent a letter via Martin, the letter that nestled in her handbag and called to her so that she read and reread it many times a day.

Her adopted mother, Charlotte, the only mother she’d ever known, had often talked about Lillie’s background and all she knew of it. She’d told her how in 1940s Ireland illegitimate children and their mothers were so badly treated that most women were forced to give their babies away in tragic circumstances. A nun called Sister Bernard had been travelling to Melbourne to join the Blessed Mary Convent in Beaumaris and she’d taken baby Lillie with her for adoption. Mother Joseph, who was in charge of the convent, knew how much Charlotte and Bill wanted a baby after all the miscarriages, and so baby Lillie had come into their lives.

As Martin proudly handed over the letter to his mother, Lillie knew that he hadn’t considered the possibility that she might not want to see her birth family. She’d thought it wouldn’t bother her, but at that exact moment, she discovered that there was still a tiny place inside her that ached with the pain of rejection.

For two weeks she’d been carrying the letter in her handbag. This morning, just as she was about to drive to the park for a walk with Doris and Viletta, something had made Lillie open her handbag and take out the now worn letter one more time.

Her mother had often told her the Irish had a way with words and it was true. The letter was proof of that. Such warmth and such pure honesty all wrapped up together. And all from someone she had never met. Crazy though it seemed, it was as if this person thousands of miles away could see into her heart and understand the hopelessness inside. Lillie wondered again if it was partly written by Seth’s wife. Because whoever had written the letter had gotten through to her in a way that nobody else had since Sam’s death.

Please come … I may be speaking out of turn because I’ve never suffered the sort of bereavement you have, Lillie, but it might help?

She stood in the hall, lost in thought. Outside, the sun was blazing down. It hadn’t been the best summer but now that autumn had arrived, the heat was blistering. Nearly forty-two degrees on the beach the day before, according to the radio. Even as a child, Lillie had never been a beach bunny. Not for her the shorts, skimpy vests and thongs that her friends ran about in.

‘It’s your creamy Celtic skin,’ Charlotte would say lovingly, covering the young Lillie with white zinc sun cream.

Years later, as a married woman, Lillie had pretended irritation with Sam that he, despite also being of Celtic descent, was blessed with jet-black hair and skin that tanned mahogany.

‘You’re only pretending you’ve got Irish blood,’ she’d tease. ‘You came from Sicily, no question.’

Not a freckle had ever dusted his strong, handsome face and the only time his tan faded was as he lay wasting away in the hospital bed. His skin turned a dull sepia colour, as if dying leached everything from a person.

‘I’m sorry, love. I don’t want to leave you and the kids, the grandkids …’

Those had been almost the last words he’d spoken to her and she treasured the memory.

Lillie had struggled to find words to comfort him. Then it had come to her, a gift to the dying, the only thing she could give him: ‘We all love you so much, Sam, but it’s the right time to go, it’s safe for you to go. We don’t want you to suffer any more.’

Saying it and meaning it were two entirely different things. In her breaking heart, Lillie didn’t want Sam to die. She could now understand people who kept loved ones alive for years even when they were in a vegetative state from which there was no return. The parting was so final.

But people sometimes needed to be told to go. One of the hospice nurses had explained that to her. Strong people like Sam, who had fiercely protected their families all their lives, found it hard to leave.

‘They worry there’s nobody there to take care of you all,’ the nurse had said. ‘You need to tell him it’s OK to go.’

And Lillie had.

When Sam had been dying, the hours seemed to fly past because she knew they were his last.

Since then, time had slowed to a snail’s pace …

Now, standing in the hall, she rubbed her eyes furiously as more tears arrived. She was so tired of crying.

Her cell phone pinged on the hall table with a text message.

Are you coming walking today? I did my stretches and will seize up if we don’t start soon. I am leaning over our park bench and will be stuck like this. Doris xx

Lillie smiled as she put her hat on and grabbed a pair of sunnies from the table at the door. Doris could always cheer her up.

As soon as she rounded the corner at the community centre at the Moysey Walk, she saw Viletta and Doris gossiping happily as they half-heartedly did stretches ahead of their walk – five miles today.

It was a beautiful trail to walk. The girls had been walking along the beach, local parks and now, along the Moysey Walk for nigh on twenty years, long before everyone and their granny began extolling the virtues of walking. Today, autumn leaves were beginning to fall from the trees, and to their left, lay the glittering sea below. ‘Hi, girls,’ Lillie said, glad that her sunnies were hiding her eyes.

Hearing the faint catch in Lillie’s voice, Doris looked at her shrewdly. ‘You’ve just missed a gang of young rugby guys jogging,’ she announced, keeping her tone upbeat. ‘Viletta told them they had great muscle definition and they all went red.’

Viletta laughed. ‘I could be a cougar,’ she said with a put-on sniff. ‘They’re the hot thing in Hollywood – young blokes wanting older women.’

‘Older rich women, honey,’ said Doris, and Lillie joined in the laughter this time.

They walked two or three times a week, fitting it in between their chores and pursuits. Viletta, the oldest of the trio at sixty-nine, was a yoga buff and nobody seeing her in her walking sweats and simple T-shirt would imagine she was a grandmother of five. Her hair, she liked to joke, was the giveaway – pure white and falling poker straight down her back; she kept it tied in a knot for the walk. Doris, tall with salt-and-pepper hair and a tendency to roundness, regularly complained she wasn’t as fit as Viletta, who set the pace.

‘You get toned blokes in yoga classes and I get knee injections in the surgery,’ Doris would say in mock outrage. And Viletta would smile at the notion. She hadn’t looked at a man since her husband had died more than fifteen years earlier, for all her talk of cougars.

Lillie liked to amuse herself considering how the three of them must appear to strangers on their rambles: Viletta would appear to be the trainer, a lean, tanned woman urging her two more curvy friends on.

Though she didn’t have Viletta’s toned muscles, she didn’t look like a woman in her mid-sixties. That was most likely down to the hair, she reckoned: even a few greys in her thick strawberry blonde curls couldn’t diminish its warmth. Her Irish inheritance coming through. In the mirror she saw her face had become thinner since Sam’s death and underneath her iris-blue eyes were faint violet shadows. She hadn’t used make-up to hide them: vanity seemed so futile in the wake of her loss.

They were halfway into the walk and had settled into their regular rhythm when Doris managed to get herself beside Lillie, a few paces behind Viletta, who was storming ahead as usual.

‘You look a bit down, Lillie,’ she said conversationally. ‘Everything OK?’

Doris had known Lillie long enough to realize the effort required to maintain a smile on her face, a smile that would disintegrate the moment somebody put on their Poor dear, lost her husband voice or showed pity. Which was why Doris talked to her friend the way she’d always talked to her, in the same warm, vibrant tones.

‘I’ve been thinking about my brother in Ireland …’ began Lillie.

Beside her, she could sense Doris relax.

‘I’m going to Ireland to visit him and to find out about my birth mother,’ she said. There, it was done: she’d decided.

When Doris grabbed her and hugged her tightly, Lillie was so surprised she almost lost her balance.

‘I’m so glad!’ shrieked Doris, never one for volume control. ‘It’s exactly what you need. Oh, honey, I’m so glad!’

Lillie relaxed into her friend’s embrace. It felt lovely to be held. There were fewer people to do that these days. Her sons weren’t huggers, not the way Sam had been. Her hugs now came from her grandchildren. From Martin’s daughter, Dyanne, and from Shane, Evan’s seven-year-old, who held her tight and told her she was the best nanny in the world.

‘If I’d known you wanted to be rid of me that much, I’d have gone ages ago,’ she teased Doris when they separated.

‘Witch!’ said Doris, wiping her eyes. ‘I’m happy for you, Lillie. There’s no secret recipe for getting through what you’re getting through, but doing something different might add another ingredient to the pot, so to speak.’

Lillie nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking it over and over. Sam and I had talked about visiting Ireland, but I don’t think I’d ever have done it by myself at my age. But now Martin’s so excited about finding Seth and Dyanne’s desperately hoping the Irish relatives are rich so she can stay with them when she goes off on her big trip.’

Both women smiled. Dyanne was the same age as Doris’s grandson, Lloyd. Many amused conversations were had about their grandchildren, who were both going through an ‘I want to be famous’ phase, when they weren’t too preoccupied with ‘Can I have an advance on my pocket money?’

‘Are you stopping for a rest?’ Viletta called back to them.

‘No,’ yelled Doris, and they started walking again. ‘It’s going to be tough, Lillie, you realize that? You’ll be alone on a very emotional trip.’

Lillie nodded. She could rely on Doris for utter honesty.

‘I’m going to be fine,’ she said, and gave her friend a smile.

For the first time since Sam died, Doris caught a glimpse of peace in her friend’s iris-blue eyes.

‘Sam will be with me,’ Lillie added, touching one hand to her chest above her heart. Then her lips quirked in a smile like the Lillie of old. ‘I’m ordering him to come!’

Chapter One

Frankie Green woke bathed in cold sweat. The bedroom was dark and she felt so disorientated that for a moment she almost didn’t know where she was.

Her phone lay on her bedside table and she fumbled for it, pressing the button so that the screen lit up. With light, she managed to find her glasses and look at the time.

Two fifteen.

Oh hell, she thought. She had a hectic day ahead, she hadn’t been able to get to sleep for ages and now she was awake again.

Beside her, Seth was a long mound under the duvet, sleeping soundly, which was infinitely annoying. He didn’t have to get up in the morning.

Which wasn’t his fault, she reminded herself, as she did so often these days as a sort of guilty afterthought. He hadn’t joyfully decided to retire and let her continue working, he’d been made redundant three months ago and hated it. Yet, it felt like his fault that he could sleep late while she – now the major earner – had to haul herself out of bed come rain or shine.

Pushing back the duvet, she went into the horrible, poky bathroom she swore she would never get used to, shivering as the cool night air hit her soaked cotton pyjamas.

In the bathroom’s cold light, a tired, white-faced woman stared back at her from the mirror: dark hair plastered to her skull, face sheeny with damp, nightclothes sticking like a second skin.

She looked as if she’d been running through a rainforest for days. She looked – Frankie realized the correct word with misery – old.

Somehow, while she’d been busy trying to raise two children, run the Human Resources department of Dutton Insurance and be a wife to Seth Green, age had crept up on her. She’d been so busy working, doing school runs and making vast meals to freeze, checking homework diaries and worrying about exam results, mopping up teenage tears and making rare date nights with her husband, that the blur of her thirties had morphed into her forties and suddenly, here she was, forty-nine. Calcium, collagen, oestrogen – everything was leaching out of her. Soon all that would remain would be a dried-out husk and if she stood still long enough, she’d be stuffed in a museum as an example of tinder-dry womankind. Even her marriage felt dried out and empty. That was the worst thing and she couldn’t bear to think about it.

Is this all normal? she silently asked the mirror-image Frankie. If it was, nobody talked about it. Not her sister, not her friends. If only her mother was a bit normal, she might have asked her, but there was nothing normal about Madeleine. Her mother, pushing eighty and still fond of causing havoc, managed to be old in years without being old in any other way. Madeleine to most people, but plain old Mad to her two daughters, had never bothered with creams or unguents. In her forties, she’d lain in the back garden toasting herself under layers of coconut sun oil, happiest when she was nut brown. When hot pants were the ‘in’ clothes for teenagers, Madeleine had worn them herself, not caring that other mothers wore normal summer skirts and cardigans. If she passed a building site and somebody whistled, Madeleine would blow the builders a delighted kiss, while her teenage daughters, Frankie and Gabriella, would exchange horrified glances.

Why couldn’t Mother be more like other mothers?

As Frankie grew up, she began to appreciate her mother’s unconventional spirit but even so, she wondered at the secret of her parents’ long marriage. Eventually, Frankie decided that it worked because Dad was a placid person who managed by saying ‘that’s fine, dear,’ to whatever Madeleine wanted to do.

They still lived in a cottage in the fishing village of Kinsale, and when Madeleine went through her phase of ‘forgetting’ her costume when she went for her morning dip, Dad greeted people’s outraged comments by saying ‘Isn’t she a great woman for the swimming, all the same.’

Madeleine’s marriage guidance advice, if she offered it, would be to get married to a calm man in the first place, and then ignore him happily thereafter. Dad never seemed to get sad or tired. He was just Dad, content with his paper and the crossword, able to keep his spirits up no matter what happened, happy to let his wife be exactly who she wanted to be.

Beauty-wise, the sun had taken a cruel revenge on Frankie’s mother and now her face was more wrinkled than a very old crab apple. But in true Madeleine fashion, she didn’t mind in the slightest. She continued to wear bright-red lipstick and dye her grey hair a glossy dark brown and had no problem facing herself in the mirror.

Frankie’s mother was one of the happy people who liked what they saw when they spied their own reflection.

At Sunday lunches in Frankie and Seth’s house, Madeleine would happily discuss the way her hair was still silky and obedient, and say: ‘Frankie, I was thinking of getting a more angular bob in the hairdressers. Lionel says I’ve got the bones for it.’

Lionel was Madeleine’s hairdresser and, as far as Frankie was concerned, he clearly liked living on the edge, sending his older clientele out with styles their daughters wouldn’t dream of risking.

But maybe Lionel and his clients were right, Frankie thought gloomily. They didn’t worry about wrinkles – what was the point?

Frankie had been careful with the sun. She used serums and suncream. She read articles in magazines about the latest products, she never ventured out with anything less than a factor 25 moisturizer. And look at her now. She might write to all those serum and suncream people and tell them they should be fined for filling people’s heads with insane dreams. In the cold light of the basement bathroom, with bluish shadows under her dark eyes and a spiderweb of lines around them, she could have passed for eighty herself.

Maybe it was time she started visiting Lionel – the sort of deranged, angular haircut that Lady Gaga would baulk at might be the very thing. At least it would take people’s eyes away from her face.

Turning from the mirror, she stripped off her damp pyjamas and balled them up into the laundry basket. She dried off her hair and body, then, still using her phone for light because she didn’t want to wake Seth, found fresh nightclothes.

By the bed, she had lavender oil and she rubbed a bit on her wrists and temples. Nobody looked good when they woke in the middle of the night, she told herself, but at least she could smell good.

She was tired, that was all. But instead of going back to sleep, her mind began to race the way it so often did. The previous day at Dutton Insurance unfurled like a film reel, and she thought of all the things she ought to have done. Next, the following day’s meetings and potential problems began to roll out. The company employed nearly a thousand people, so as human resources director there was always something for Frankie to worry about.

Tomorrow – or rather today – she had to conduct five interviews for the position of deputy marketing director. Then there was a particularly tricky case of sexual harassment involving a woman in the motor insurance department and her boss. The claims department was in uproar over holiday policy, and the intervention of one of Frankie’s HR team had only succeeded in making matters worse, so that needed sorting out. And on top of that, one of the department heads wanted to take her to lunch to ‘pick her brains’ about something.

‘Lunch!’ she’d vented to Seth the previous evening as they sat at the kitchen table after dinner. Seth had cooked a very nice Thai curry and Frankie had eaten so much she’d had to open the button on her jeans. ‘I don’t have time for lunch! I’m supposed to run a team that isn’t actually big enough for the size of the company, recruit fabulous staff at high speed when required, and be free for lunch whenever some other executive wants to chat!’

‘You used to enjoy having lunches with the other executives,’ Seth said innocently.

‘That was when I had time for lunch. These days I barely have time to snatch a sandwich at my desk,’ she hissed. Did he understand anything?

‘There’s no need to snap,’ he said, with a hint of a snap in his own voice.

And of course, Frankie felt sorry for taking it out on him. But at the same time, she was angry. It seemed that she spent her life tiptoeing around male egos, both in the office and at home. Trying to allay other people’s worries when she was overwhelmed with her own. Sometimes Frankie felt it like an actual weight on her shoulders: worries about staff redundancies, about how pale and withdrawn Seth was, about how they were ever going to find the money to sort out the house.

The house. That was their biggest worry of all.

A dream Edwardian red-brick house with a large garden, Sorrento House has many unusual features the piece in the newspaper had purred. It had leapt out at them from the property supplement because Seth and Frankie had been talking about moving for years. They’d started married life in a narrow end-of-terrace house from the turn of the nineteenth century. When Emer and Alexei came along, they remodelled the place so that the front retained the period features, while the back was modern with a glass extension that Seth had designed, giving them a light-filled kitchen-cum-family room.

Much as they had loved that house, it was small. For years Frankie and Seth had talked about buying a big old house they could do up.

‘When Emer and Alexei are older,’ Frankie would say, during the mad junior school years when long division sums, homework and careful nurturing of delicate young souls took up every hour she wasn’t in the office.

‘When they’re settled, not an exam year,’ Seth would say when Emer and Alexei were teenagers, caught up in another phase of life where careful nurturing was required.

Then the previous July twenty-two-year-old Emer had finished college and decided to spend a year travelling the world. Inspired by his sister’s example, Alexei, just eighteen, had set off on a gap year with three school friends.

Looking back, Frankie could see that the whole moving house thing had come about as a coping mechanism for empty-nest syndrome.

She hadn’t wanted to stop being busy for long enough to think about her children leaving.

‘What if we moved house while you were away?’ she’d asked them. It had been June, and the four of them were sitting around the table in the light-filled kitchen, making the most of the last few weeks before her beloved children departed on their travels.

‘Go for it!’ said Emer.

Emer was the wild child of the family. She might have inherited her paternal grandmother’s strawberry blonde hair and bright blue eyes, but her eagerness for fun and adventure owed more to Grandmother Madeleine, Frankie thought ruefully. Still, four years at college, finishing with a masters in business studies, appeared to have calmed her down. At least, Frankie hoped it had.

‘It’s your turn to do things now, Mum,’ said Alexei gently. Her darling, thoughtful boy; she felt like leaping up from the table to give him a hug. Four years younger than his sister, he was gentler and quieter. There had been no baby after Emer and finally Frankie and Seth had turned to adoption. Since the small Russian boy with the blond hair, fine bones and a lonely look in his misty grey eyes had come into her life, Frankie had never ceased wanting to protect him.

The idea of Alexei travelling the world made her heart physically hurt. She’d thought taking care of small children had been hard, but nothing could be harder than watching those same children grow up and leave the nest.

‘It’s just a wild thought,’ said Seth, ever sensible. ‘We’d probably be insane to move. The economy’s so bad.’

‘The property market’s not great,’ Frankie agreed. ‘We should have done it years ago; we missed the boat.’

And then, alone in their family home with what seemed like the actual family part gone, they read about Sorrento House and went to see it.

What had made them fall for the place? Frankie remembered that first visit. It had been September – always the start of the year for Frankie, with its associations of back-to-school. The leaves on the trees were almost golden in the autumn light, and the beech tree with its bronzed leaves drooping outside the old stone pillars had given the house at the end of Maple Avenue a sort of faded glamour.

It brought to mind the endless leaves she’d gathered with the children for school projects, days spent trying to do leaf rubbings into copybooks, and the fun of decorating the house for Halloween, as Alexei and Emer eagerly discussed what costumes they’d wear that year.

If only they were here to see this, she thought sadly. But then she brightened up at the prospect of what a welcome home it would make, to arrive at this lovely house.

There was no doubt that the house was unusual. The porch and front door stood at a right angle to the façade, almost hidden behind great swathes of rhododendron that overran a garden at least three times the size of their old one.

The property agent was a man with a finely tuned sense of when not to speak, so he kept his thoughts to himself about the amount of work that needed doing. He’d learned the hard way not to say anything along the lines of ‘it needs updating’ because such words could prove fatal where potential buyers were concerned. Some people loved a challenge and were dying to get their hands on an industrial sander. Others thought you needed a hard hat and a guide to navigate the hardware shop.

So Seth and Frankie wandered around Sorrento House by themselves, seeing only the possibilities. The name itself called to them. Sorrento was where they’d gone on honeymoon.

The house, two storeys above a dark basement flat, had not been a single residence for years. The upstairs bedsits were miserably decorated in wallpapers at least thirty years old. On the ground floor, two of the bigger rooms, which Seth and Frankie could imagine transformed into gracious living rooms overlooking the garden, were divided in half with cheap plasterboard.

‘You’d think a person would be ashamed to put anyone in these rackety spaces,’ Frankie said in disgust, not even wanting to touch the filthy curtains half hanging on the windows.

Seth put an arm round her waist and steered her to face the long-neglected garden at the back.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Then close your eyes and imagine how it will all appear when we’re finished with it. A gorgeous kitchen, a bit like at home, but extended out into that long garden. Don’t you love those copper beeches and the apple trees? And see that maple in the far left corner? It’s changing colour – in a week or so it’ll be a glorious crimson.’

Frankie sighed. ‘If I close my eyes, I’ll realize we’re mad to even consider buying the place. We’ll have to get it checked for damp, then rip off all that wallpaper, tear up those hideous nylon carpets, paint every inch inside and out, and … oh heck, the windows—’ She looked down in alarm. ‘Do you reckon this frame is rotten? Are the windows on borrowed time?’

‘I’ve been checking with my penknife while you were upstairs just now,’ he said. ‘The windows are actually fine. So’s the roof, as far as I can tell. Otherwise, we really would be mad to buy it. It would still be a lot of work interior-wise, and of course the extension would take time, but I can see how it will all come together. We just need to sit down and work out the numbers. Think, it will be our dream home, love. Sorrento House. That sounds a bit grand. We could change the name. Sorrento Villa is nicer, more homely, don’t you think?’

The words ‘dream home’ combined with the vision of glorious Italian coast magically mingled in Frankie’s mind. She’d been brought up in Kinsale, a jewel of a town perched beside the sea, and her sister, Gabrielle, had chosen to live in the seaside town of Cobh, about half an hour from Cork.

Another plus was the location: Redstone. It was a part of the city that had gone from fashionable in the nineteenth century, to down at heel in the twentieth, but was now growing in popularity again thanks to the regeneration of the area.

Seth had a development map which showed that their house faced others that backed on to the allotments behind rows of one-time council houses, the St Brigid’s estate. ‘Part of the waste ground beside the allotments is being turned into parkland,’ he explained, ‘which adds value to the neighbourhood.’

After seeing the house, they went for a coffee at the crossroads, which was the centre of Redstone. The place sealed the deal for both of them.

‘It’s perfect,’ said Frankie wistfully, admiring the sycamores growing at the roadside.

‘Very nineteen thirties,’ mused Seth as they walked along hand-in-hand, deciding which place to go into. ‘Look at those façades.’ He pointed to one block decorated with period signage.

They admired the clothes boutique, the delicatessen with windows full of cheeses and all manner of exotic meats, they walked past a pretty pink-and-brown beauty salon, and finally settled in a coffee shop where they ate the best raspberry-and-almond muffins they’d ever tasted.

‘We can do it,’ Seth said, enthusiastically outlining his plans.

He was sure, from experience, that planning permission wouldn’t be a problem. He would design the new parts of the house, a builder he’d worked with would agree a reasonable price for the work, and Seth could manage the build himself. With two decent salaries coming in, they should be able to find the money.

‘Can you cope with living in the basement while we do up the rest?’ Seth asked her the day before the sale closed. They were walking through the property again, imagining grand neo-classical fireplaces from the salvage yard instead of the bricked-up fireplaces and hazardous two-bar electric fires that the previous owner had installed everywhere.

‘I can cope with anything,’ Frankie had said excitedly, eyeing up the kitchen and imagining how marvellous it would look when the extension was built and the whole room had been turned into an open-plan kitchen/breakfast room. She’d got an idea for a conservatory, too. She could just see a couple of huge planters filled with exotic ferns beside the imaginary doors. And the garden. Gardening had never really been her thing, but here there was so much possibility. Or there would be, once the jungle of weeds and wild brambles had been torn away.

I can cope with anything. Famous last words for sure.

A month after they’d moved into the basement flat of the newly named Sorrento Villa, Seth was made redundant by the big architectural practice where he’d worked for fifteen years. The company was in dire financial straits, the senior partner explained: they had no option but to downsize.

Shocked, Frankie recalled that same senior partner – Seth’s friend since college – at the previous year’s Christmas dinner, where much had been made of the company’s resilience in the shaky economic climate. A glass of red wine in his hand, the man had toasted each member of staff. Frankie had clapped loudest of all when he’d said ‘Seth Green, the man we all aspire to be,’ then raising his glass, ‘quietly professional, dedicated and loyal.’

Loyalty hadn’t gone both ways it seemed. Seth wasn’t a full partner, but on a high wage, so his name was at the top of the redundancy list.

If she was shocked, then Seth had been devastated.

‘I’ve failed you,’ was all he could say. Despite his years of hard work for the company he’d only been given the statutory legal pay-off. There was no vat of cash to help fund the work on Sorrento Villa. They had savings but it would be madness to plough them into such a project. ‘How will we manage financially?’ Seth asked in despair. ‘With the new house …’

‘We’ll manage,’ said Frankie, magically switching on the same positive tone that had worked so well during the children’s teenage years. ‘We’ll manage somehow.’

But inside, her stomach was churning with fear. How could they survive on only one salary? If only they’d stayed in their modest old house instead of thinking they were the sort of people who should own a detached Victorian red-brick villa on a half-acre site in Redstone. Christmas had been just over a month off, both children were staying away – Emer in Australia, Alexei in Japan – and she and Seth had to face a dark and depressing festive season on their own. Three months later, they were still far from managing.

Coping with anything had turned out to mean a husband who sloped around in sweatpants and could barely summon up the energy to walk to the crossroads for a daily newspaper. He’d lost his zest for life when he’d lost his job. All the great plans for the house now lay untouched under a mound of bills at one end of the kitchen table.

Redundancy had settled over their house like a heavy grey storm cloud.

Frankie, who had been responsible for setting up counselling sessions for Dutton employees following a series of redundancies at the company, now saw the problem from the other side of the table. Her husband was in despair.

Work doesn’t define women in the way it defines men, she remembered telling her team in the HR department at the time. Men find it hard to cope with being out of work.

Platitudes delivered straight from the most basic HR psychology books.

Those words were certainly mocking her now as she lay beside this shadow of the man who had been her husband, waiting for sleep to claim her. Sleep didn’t come.

It was the Sleep Theorem, she told herself. The number of hours you lost sleepless in bed was always in reverse proportion to the amount of work you had to do the following day. Eventually, she drifted into an uneasy doze filled with nightmares involving Emer and Alexei in danger, when she couldn’t run fast enough to save them. And darling Seth, once her mainstay in life, was watching it all and seemed paralysed into indecision.

At six the alarm went off. She woke exhausted and decided that, at that precise moment, the word for the day was shattered. While Seth carried on sleeping, she showered, dressed and had some muesli for breakfast before heading into work.

As she pulled into the underground car park of Dutton Insurance at seven twenty-five on that clear but cold February morning, Frankie felt a low drag of anxiety in the depths of her belly. Steeling herself for the day ahead, she grabbed her briefcase, got out of the car and strode towards the lifts.

The doors closed behind her with a satisfying swish. The inevitable muzak drifted into her head. She hated that music. The lifts from the car park were workmanlike and industrial. Important visitors to Dutton Insurance parked in a designated section of the car park and made their entrance through much more glamorous lifts. She pushed the button for the lobby, the lift shuddered and brought her up. She used to make it her business to run up the stairs at least once every day but these days she was too tired.

‘Morning, Mrs Green,’ said the fresh-faced security guard as she slid her recognition card into the slot on the barrier.

‘Morning, Lucas,’ said Frankie cheerily, suppressing the thought that he looked even younger than Alexei, standing there in his uniform as if ready to defend Dutton Insurance from invaders. The policemen were looking younger too. Was she finally at that age at which all the old clichés start becoming true? She headed across the Italian marble floor to the gleaming brass-fronted lifts that were the public face of the business.

These lifts were mirrored on the inside and Frankie could see herself from every angle.

As a girl, she had grown up confident in herself, confident in her tall, athletic body and never embarrassed about budding breasts or menstruation. In fact her only worry had been that her mother might run around brandishing a packet of tampons and screaming You’re a woman now! at the top of her voice when Frankie had finally had her first period.

Frankie had never dieted like the girls in her class at school, hadn’t denied herself food, had loved her body for the things it could do, the sports it could play. She was captain of the netball team and a fabulous long distance runner with those long, lean legs. In her teenage bedroom, she’d had a small haul of medals and trophies from track and field events.

For most of her life, her body had done whatever she asked of it and it never occurred to her to worry about curves here and there, or fine lines around her eyes.

Until now.

As she stood on her own in the lift, harsh lights accentuating every flaw, it struck her that the woman in the charcoal skirt-suit, the subtle pearl earrings, and the long, dark hair tied up neatly into a knot, looked old.

Frankie closed her eyes and waited for the lift to arrive at her floor, then marched out without another glance at herself. In her office, she switched on her computer and keyed in her password.

The instant messaging icon flashed that a message was waiting. It was from Anita, Frankie’s closest friend within the company, a mother of two who was second in command in the legal department. She clicked on it.

You in yet? Have gossip – not nice gossip.

Where are you? typed Frankie.

About to go to canteen. Need coffee. War when I left the house. Julie knows it’s my early day but she still hadn’t turned up when I was leaving, Clarice was on the kitchen floor screaming, Peaches was throwing baby porridge around and Ivan was glaring at me, as if it was my fault. I only got out by the skin of my teeth.

You should fire her if she’s late again. I told you about giving her written warnings.

It would be simpler to fire Ivan. Husbands are easier to come by than good nannies. See you in five?

Frankie grinned and set off for the canteen, walking at speed through the vast open-plan beige kingdom that was Dutton Insurance. She certainly didn’t believe that a husband was easier to come by than a nanny. Besides, Ivan was actually a sweetie. Francesca knew it was useless to point out yet again that Julie was invariably late, barely listened to half of what Anita said and was paid as much as the head of the UN Peacekeeping Force. Last time she had said this, Anita’s voice had veered into near hysteria as she protested that Julie was the one person in the world capable of managing her two children: ‘She’s been with us since Clarice was a baby and she’s the only person Peaches will settle with. Even Ivan’s mother can’t make Peaches go to sleep – and she had eight kids.’

‘Blimey, eight kids,’ said Frankie. She’d have loved more children herself, but not that many.

Anita was in the empty canteen pushing a tiny dark-red pellet into the trendy Nespresso machine that the Chief Financial Officer had installed on all the floors of the company two years before, when they’d achieved record profits, despite the state of the economy.

In ten minutes, the canteen – which served the executive floor – would be buzzing with people in early for the monthly status meeting, attended by representatives from all the divisions. It was a largely for-show meeting because all the real business was done behind locked doors, but the CEO was keen on making everybody feel a part of the team.

‘Have you heard anything?’ Anita said, as she waited for Frankie to get her coffee.

‘Heard what?’ Frankie said slowly, again feeling that low drag in the pit of her stomach.

It was obvious from Anita’s face that, whatever she’d heard, it wasn’t good news.

‘Heard that we’re in trouble, that there’s a takeover on the cards.’

‘Oh.’ Frankie reached for the nearest chair and sat into it. ‘Where did you hear it?’

‘Oh, the usual labyrinthine methods whereby gossip gets around. Someone in the executive dining room was overheard by one of the chefs who told his girlfriend on the third floor. I heard about it last night, haven’t been able to sleep. I mean, if we’re taken over by another company, loads of us are going to lose our jobs. What’ll I do? The mortgage is huge and we can only just manage it with both our salaries.’

She looked so distraught that Frankie, who had spent her working life mentoring colleagues, ignored her own shock and pain to comfort Anita.

‘Now listen here,’ she said, ‘it’s just a rumour. Companies thrive on that sort of stuff. Besides, whatever happens you can get through it. We can get through it. We’re made of stronger stuff. We’ve gone through childbirth! You had a ten-pound baby, Anita. There’s nothing you cannot cope with.’

The comment had the desired effect. Anita gave a snort of laughter.

‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said, shaking her head ruefully.

Baby Peaches had been a positive Goliath, taking after her tall, broad father rather than her petite five-foot-two mother.

‘I know there’s no medal for childbirth, but there should be,’ Frankie went on. ‘A ten-pound baby – you should get gold for that. No, platinum.’

They talked a while longer and then Frankie looked at her watch.

‘Time to move,’ she said, finishing her coffee. ‘Once more unto the breach and all that.’

She hurried back to her office, rumours of a takeover now adding to the turmoil in her mind. Stay focused, she told herself. Panicking never got anyone anywhere.

With the office still empty she decided to grab the chance for a speedy morning email to Emer and Alexei.

Beautiful Emer, currently in Sydney but thinking of moving to the US for a few months, was waitressing by day and putting years of piano lessons to good use by playing in the restaurant of a boutique hotel by night.

It’s incredible here, Mum, you’ve got to come out before I leave, she’d emailed only last week. I love it. The sun, the people. You’d love it too.

If Frankie, who had read many CVs in her time, had to come up with one word to sum up her daughter, that word would be light: the shining light that flowed out of her like the sun. Emer was vivid and sparkling and prone to mischief. Frankie had been the same as a child.

‘How come you always know, Mum?’ Emer would demand crossly when Frankie would take one look at her child’s eyes shining naughtily in her tiny little face. ‘You always know what I’m doing – have you got X-ray vision?’

‘Yes,’ Frankie would say gravely, suppressing the urge to laugh. ‘All mothers have it. As soon as the baby is born, kapow! – we are given the gift. I can see through ceilings. So I know you have been upstairs doing something verrry naughty.’ She’d drag out the syllables in pretend menace.

Emer was a kind person too, but in Sydney she was far removed from the pain in Sorrento Villa and it was out of the question to let on that there was a problem. That would only have her rushing home to help Frankie cope.

So when Emer telephoned and asked: ‘Dad sounds down on the phone, is he all right?’ Frankie made herself smile into the receiver and slipped into her cheery, buoyant tone.

‘No, love, he’s just relaxing, taking time off from being a wage slave.’

‘Has he started work on the house yet?’ Emer said.

In the background, Frankie could hear happy voices and could almost sense the sunniness of Emer’s new world. Wishing some of that sunniness would beam out of the phone and light up the gloom in her world, she upped the cheeriness a notch:

‘Not yet. We’re still discussing things. You know your dad, he wants it to be perfect. Now, tell me all about you, darling. What’s the weather like? It’s chilly here, I can tell you …’

It was a struggle to come up with snippets of cheerful news from home, so her emails followed the same tactic of swiftly shifting the focus from life in Redstone to the latest goings on in Sydney and Japan. It was a little trickier in Alexei’s case, because he was hugely intuitive and much more liable to pick up on things. While Emer took after Frankie, drawing on a tough nugget of strength buried deep inside of her, managing to stay positive no matter what, Alexei was a worrier.

She pictured him now, with his wide Slavic cheekbones, grey eyes and shock of blond hair, so different from everyone in the family. He might not have been born from her body, but he was very much the child of her heart. It had been a wrench, letting him go off on a gap year before college. The thought of her daughter travelling alone actually troubled her far less than the thought of her son venturing out into the world with three other boys for company. Emer had street smarts in abundance while Alexei was softer, much more vulnerable than his feisty sister, who’d signed up for a self-defence course months before she left.

‘Got to be able to look after myself, Mum,’ she’d said, showing off some of her techniques.

Alexei took after Seth: he was gentle, thoughtful and prone to staring into the distance when working out a problem, his mind drifting off to some higher plane just the way Seth’s did.

Seth. All her thoughts came back to Seth. If a person was supposed to get better at things over time, why didn’t that dictum hold true when it came to marriage? Perhaps, she thought, closing her personal email and opening up her business mailbox where fifty new messages had arrived overnight, a visit from Seth’s long-lost half-sister might succeed in lifting his spirits.

He’d been so thrilled when he got the email from Melbourne. Thrilled, with a tiny and utterly-to-be-expected element of shock.

‘I have a sister,’ he’d said in wonderment as Frankie leaned over his shoulder to read the email. As she carried on reading he’d sat staring at the email as if it was a thing of fantasy that might vanish at any moment. ‘I always wanted someone else when I was growing up, a brother or a sister. And I had one all along …’

Frankie hugged him, aware even then that she could support Seth over this, yet the words that would help him with the grinding pain of his redundancy escaped her. Her career as a human resources executive was built on a mastery of effective interpersonal skills, arbitration, mediation, appraisals, setting goals and accomplishing them … but when it came to Seth, instinct told her that there was nothing she could do for him. If he was going to crawl out of this misery, he would have to do it by himself. Without her help. And Frankie, who wanted to solve everyone’s problems, hated herself for that.

Chapter Two

Peggy Barry had spent a long time searching for the perfect place: a town far enough away from home for her to flourish – and yet near enough for Peggy to drive to her mother if she was needed. Her mother was the reason she hadn’t left the country altogether, but nobody, including Mrs Barry, had to know that. Peggy wanted to remain in Ireland in case one day her mother would accept the truth and phone her daughter. Until then, she travelled, searching.

Since she’d left home at the age of eighteen, an astonishing nine years ago, Peggy had lived in all of Ireland’s cities and many of its towns and still hadn’t found the perfect place.

She had almost resigned herself to the likelihood that it didn’t exist, that there was no town or village or suburb where she could feel as if she belonged.

‘What are you looking for exactly?’ the owner of the last bar she’d worked in had asked her.

Peggy had liked TJ, even though he wasn’t her type. Mind you, in the past year, nobody had been her type. Men and dreams of a future didn’t appear to work well together. Guys mistakenly thought that tall, leggy brunettes working in bars wanted quick flings and couldn’t possibly be serious about saving money for their own business or about waiting for the right guy to settle down with.

The bar – lucrative, loud, boasting a vibrant Galway crowd – had been quiet once the last stragglers had been sent home. TJ was cashing up and Peggy was cleaning. Her shift ended in half an hour and she yearned for the peace of her small flat two storeys above the dry cleaner’s, where there was no noise, nobody gazing drunkenly at her over the counter and telling her they were in love with her, and could they have two pints, a whiskey chaser and a couple of rum cocktails, please?

‘Sanctuary,’ said Peggy absent-mindedly in reply to TJ’s question as she went from table to table with her black plastic bag, bucket, spray and cloth. She’d already gathered up the ashtrays from the beer garden and put them to soak in a basin. The glass-washing machines were on, the empty beer bottles collected. The floor, sticky with alcohol and dirt, was somebody else’s problem in the morning.

‘Saying “sanctuary” makes you sound like a nun,’ remarked TJ.

‘OK, peace, then,’ Peggy said in exasperation.

‘If you want peace, you need one of those villages in the middle of nowhere,’ TJ said, reaching for another piece of nicotine gum. ‘Sort of place where you get one pub, ten houses and a lot of old farmers standing at their gates staring at you when you drive by.’

‘That’s not at all what I want.’ Peggy moved on to the next table. Somebody’s door key was stuck there in a glue of crisps and the sticky residue of spilt alcohol. Peggy scrubbed it free and went back to the bar, where she put it in the lost property tin. ‘TJ, you can’t run a business in a village in the middle of nowhere and I want my own business. I told you already. A knitting and craft shop.’

‘I know, you told me: knitting,’ TJ repeated, shaking his head. ‘You just don’t look the knitting type.’

Peggy laughed. She seldom told people about her plans for fear they’d laugh at her fierce determination and tell her she was mad, and why didn’t she blow her savings on a trip to Key West/Ibiza/Amsterdam with them? But whenever she did mention her life plan, it was astonishing how often people told her that she didn’t look ‘the knitting type’.

What was the knitting type? A woman with her hair in a bun held up with knitting needles, wearing a long, multi-coloured knitted coat that trailed along behind her on the floor?

‘I want to run my own business, TJ,’ she said, ‘and knitting’s what I’m good at, what I love. I’ve been knitting since I was small: my mother used to knit Aran for the tourist shops years ago. She taught me everything. I know there’s a market for shops like that. That’s what I’m looking for – somewhere to start off.’

‘You told me, but I’m not sure I believe you.’ TJ’s eyes narrowed. ‘What exactly are you running away from, babe? You should stay here. You’re happy, we appreciate you.’

What got a woman like Peggy trailing all over the place looking for peace? A man, he’d bet tonight’s takings on it. When women moved all the time the way Peggy did, a man was usually behind it all.

Women like Peggy, tall and rangy with those steady dark eyes half-obscured by curls of conker-brown fringe and a hint of vulnerability that she did her best to hide, were always running from men. Not that she couldn’t be tough when she was dealing with angry drunks pulling at her clothes and making suggestions. But she was soft inside, despite the outer tough-chick exterior and the black leather biker jacket and boots. Too soft. He wondered what had happened to her.

‘I’m not running,’ Peggy said, straightening up from the final table and facing him squarely. ‘I’m looking. There’s a difference. I’ll know when I find it.’

‘Yeah.’ He waved one hand wearily. The soft women who’d been hurt by men all said that.

‘It’s not what you think,’ Peggy insisted. ‘I’m looking for a different kind of life.’

But as she walked home that night, hand wrapped around a personal alarm in one pocket of her leather jacket, she admitted to herself that TJ was sort of right – only she would never tell him that. He thought she was running away from a man, and in a way she was. Except it wasn’t the ex-lover TJ undoubtedly imagined. She was running away from something very different.

On a beautiful February day, shortly after leaving the bar in Galway, an Internet property trawl led Peggy to Redstone, a suburb of Cork that somehow retained a sense of being a town.

On the computer screen, the premises near Redstone Junction had it all: a pretty, Art Deco façade, a big catchment area and lots of other shops and cafés nearby to bring in passing trade.

Now, as she drove her rattling old Volkswagen Beetle slowly through the crossroads, she felt a sense of peace envelop her. This might, just might, be the place she’d been looking for.

It helped that it was such a lovely day, the low-angled winter sun burnishing everything with warm light, but she sensed that she’d have liked the place even if it had been bucketing down with rain. There were trees planted on the footpaths, stately sycamores and elegant beeches with a few acid-green buds emerging, giving a sense of the country town Redstone had been before it merged with the city. The façade of one entire block was still dedicated to Morton’s Grain Storage, pale brick with classic 1930s lettering chiselled into the brickwork itself, although the grain storage was long gone and the ground floor had been converted to a row of shops that included a pharmacy, a chi-chi delicatessen-cum-café and a clothes shop. Peggy parked the car and walked back through the little junction, loving the black wrought-iron street lights with their curlicues where the lamps hung. It was impossible to tell whether they’d been installed a hundred and fifty years ago or were a more recent addition.

She loved the trees and the flowers planted diligently around them, probably by a team of local people involved in the Tidy Towns competition, she thought. They’d obviously chosen a host of bulbs, for now buttery yellow early crocuses and pale narcissi were sweetly blooming in wooden troughs at the base of each tree along both arms of the crossroads.

Nobody had ripped up the flowers or stubbed cigarettes out in the earth. The people here obviously admired how they brightened up the street.

Even before she’d looked over the premises for rent – a former off-licence, which had unaccountably gone out of business – she’d felt a kind of peace in Redstone.

The vacant property was a double-fronted shop with two large rooms out the back and a flat upstairs, should she wish to rent that too, the estate agent added hopefully.

The downstairs would need only cosmetic work, but the upstairs needed a wrecking ball, Peggy thought privately. The fittings were old and hazardous. Besides, living over the shop was a mistake, she knew that after working as a waitress in a Dublin bistro and living upstairs.

‘Downstairs is enough for me,’ Peggy said. ‘I don’t have a deathwish.’

The agent sighed. ‘Ah well, plenty of people are looking for bijou doer-uppers,’ he said over-confidently.

‘As long as the floor’s safe and they don’t come crashing down to my place when they’re using the sander,’ Peggy replied. ‘The landlord’s responsible.’

The agent laughed.

Peggy eyeballed him. What was it about a woman in tight jeans and a leather jacket that made people think you were both ignorant of the law and a pushover?

‘I mean it,’ she said.

The deal to rent the shop was signed five days later.

She found a small cottage for rent at the end of St Brigid’s Avenue, on a 1950s estate of former council houses, about a mile away from the shop. The house wasn’t overly beautiful with its genuine fifties decor, but it was all she could afford.

Peggy celebrated her new life with a quarter-bottle of champagne and a takeaway pizza in front of the cheap television-cum-DVD player she’d bought years ago. She slotted Sleepless in Seattle, her favourite film of all time, into the player, sipped her champagne and toasted herself.

‘To Peggy’s Busy Bee Knitting and Stitching Shop,’ she said, happily raising her glass before biting into the pizza. She’d achieved her dream and her life would be different from now on. The past was just that: the past. Then she settled down to watch Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks nearly but not quite miss each other, and she cried, as she always did.

The process of renovating the shop had to be accomplished as quickly as possible so she could begin trading. Peggy knew exactly what she wanted and loved the hard work of rolling up her sleeves and getting into it – discussing the finish of the shelving with Gunther, the carpenter and shopfitter, and working with a sign-maker to get precisely the signage she had in mind.

‘You certainly know what you want,’ the sign designer said. ‘So many people dither for ages over different styles.’

Peggy had smiled at her. ‘I’ve been planning this for a long, long time,’ she said.

But in spite of all the activity over paint, wood finishes and what shape to have on the cast-iron sign that hung at a right angle to the door, what Peggy hadn’t expected was to fall quite so much in love with Redstone itself.

She loved the small-town feel of it all, though it was nicer than any of the many towns she’d lived in through her life.

She loved the way people greeted each other cheerily.

‘How’s the leg, Mick?’ one man had yelled at another at the crossroads one morning as Peggy made her way to the shop.

‘Ah, you know,’ replied a tall elderly man with a stick and a small dog bouncing at the end of a lead. ‘Not up to line dancing yet, but some day. Did you ever get that thing sorted out?’

‘No,’ said the first man solemnly, adjusting his briefcase so he was holding it under the other arm. ‘It’s the timing, isn’t it? Still, I might yet!’

The lights changed and the man with the dog limped off in the direction of the small shopping centre tucked snugly away behind Main Street.

What was the thing, Peggy wanted to know. Why wasn’t it sorted yet? She had to control herself not to run and ask Briefcase Man, who was crossing the road and heading off in the opposite direction.

What was this madness that possessed her? Wanting to know about people? It was unlike her. She’d spent her entire life avoiding getting to know anyone. That way, they didn’t want to know you. Peggy was the girl who’d live in a town for a year, blending into the background as far as possible, remaining on the fringes of everyone’s lives. She’d spent too long as a solitary child to learn the gift of easy friendship as an adult. After a while, when she’d had enough, she would simply pack up her belongings and drive away. She had never allowed herself to put down roots. But for some reason here in Redstone she had an urge to belong, and belonging meant meeting people.

Because she was nice and early, there was plenty of parking outside the shop. She felt her spirits lift as they did every time her old blue Beetle shuddered to a halt at the kerb and she looked up to see the old-fashioned swing sign that read Peggy’s Busy Bee Knitting and Stitching Shop.

Nobody looking at this modest establishment with its fresh lavender paintwork and unfinished inside could imagine the sheer joy it already brought to its owner. It was still something of a miracle to Peggy. The miracle had involved years of hard work, hard saving and loneliness as she’d gone from job to job, getting experience in wool shops when she could, doing accountancy courses at night so she’d know how to run her own business, and working in bars or restaurants when she could get nothing else.

Now, she felt that all the sacrifices had been worth it. She, Peggy Barry, who had never been on any school’s most-likely-to-succeed list, had finally found exactly what she’d wanted all her life: a business doing what she loved best and financial independence. She was her own boss and she would never answer again to any man.

The money from her grandmother’s will – a grandmother she’d never even met – had been a godsend. The day the cheque arrived she had banked it in a high-interest account and then left it there, watching it grow year by year. Without that, she wouldn’t have been able to open her own shop.

Surveying her empire as she got out of the car, Peggy ran through the sums in her head. It would take only one or two more days at the most for Gunther, the carpenter, and Paolo, his apprentice, to finish. She’d considered several quotes before giving the job to Gunther. His had not been the cheapest, but he’d been the most professional of the carpenters she’d talked to, and he hadn’t given her a flirty grin, the way the young guy with the lowest price had.

As soon as the woodwork was finished, Peggy mused, she would clean all the dust from the shop and start painting the walls the same lavender as the outside—

‘How’rya, Peggy,’ yelled Sue from the bakery across the road as Peggy put her key in the shop door.

‘Hello, Sue!’ she called back.

Sue and her husband, Zeke, were always in at five in the morning. By the time Peggy arrived at half past seven, they were already halfway through their day’s work, baking organic breads and muffins to be delivered to shops and office canteens around the city.

Peggy enjoyed talking to them about the difficulties of setting up your own shop. And they’d been so helpful.

‘Advertise in the Oaklands News, don’t bother with the Redstone People. They charge twice as much and will mess up your advertisement every time,’ Sue advised. ‘Our ad for “hand-crafted cakes” turned into “dead-crafted cakes”. There wasn’t exactly a rush for them after that.’

‘What’s your web presence like?’ said Zeke.

‘A bit basic, but I’m working on it.’

‘Good. In the meantime, stick up your cards everywhere,’ he added, admiring the lavender-coloured notecards Peggy had commissioned with the shop’s name and pen-and-ink illustrations of wool and fabrics along with the shop’s address and fledgling website. ‘Be shameless. Ask everyone who has a noticeboard if you can put one up. Introduce yourself everywhere, even if you’re shy.’

Peggy had blushed to the roots of her dark hair. She’d spent a few days casting glances over at the bakery before Sue had marched across the road with a tray of muffins and said, ‘Welcome to Redstone. I thought I’d give you a week of staring at us like Homeland Security before I’d make a move. We don’t bite. Well, I might bite the odd time, but I only do it to Zeke and he’s used to me because we’re married.’

She had made it seem the easiest thing in the world to walk across the road and make friends but Peggy’s usual ability to put up a pleasant front seemed to have deserted her. It hadn’t ever been real, that was the problem. Years of moving from town to town had obviously taken its toll. The older you got, Peggy figured, the harder it was to put on a brave face.

That evening, Gunther had suggested that Peggy join him and Paolo for a Friday-night drink in the Starlight Lounge. Peggy, worn out cleaning the back room, which was full of junk and damp, had said yes straight away.

She was hungry, too tired to cook, and after a week of Gunther and Paolo, she was very fond of them and thought it might be nice not to eat on her own for once.

The Starlight Lounge was a quirky establishment about a quarter of a mile from the shop. The name and the decor didn’t quite match. The façade resembled a working men’s pub where women were only allowed in to clean up, while the inside turned out to be a confused combination of Olde Oirish Pub and fifties Americana, complete with mini jukeboxes in the booths.

‘My friend owns it,’ said Gunther when he saw Peggy looking round with amusement. ‘It’s a mess, I know. He was experimenting with styles …’

She admired the line of tiny disco balls on the ceiling behind the bar.

‘Crazy.’ Gunther shrugged. ‘He has no money now to do anything, but the bar food is good.’

Peggy chose a semi-circular booth with a round Formica-topped table. On the wall behind, a picture of Elvis hung beside a watercolour print of a forlorn Irish mountain. Gunther’s friend had clearly been trying to appeal to a very diverse audience, but it worked. Despite the mad decor, it was welcoming.

Gunther grabbed menus and studied his with total concentration while a languid bargirl lit the red lamp on the table. Paolo stood at the bar gabbling in Italian to some friends.

Glorious aromas drifted from the kitchens and Peggy realized she hadn’t eaten anything but an apple since breakfast.

‘What’s good?’ she asked Gunther.

‘The fish and chips,’ he said.

Peggy’s mouth watered. ‘Sounds good to me.’

By eight o’clock, Peggy had eaten cod coated in feather-light batter, and was considering a dessert, while a stream of Gunther and Paolo’s friends had come and gone after joining them for a drink.

Gunther was in no rush: his wife was at her mother’s with the children and Paolo was meeting his girlfriend in town at ten. The jukeboxes, disco balls and the house speciality cocktail, Starlight Surprise, were working their magic, and a few people were dancing close to the bar. Paolo was talking to a tall, athletic guy who’d arrived at the table. He couldn’t take his eyes off Peggy.

‘David Byrne,’ he said, leaning in to shake her hand.

‘Peggy Barry,’ she said, smiling.

He was good looking, but not really her type. Despite fighting it, she’d always been drawn to bad boys and David Byrne was clean-cut and good looking, the sort of guy who’d been captain of the football team, head boy and undoubtedly Pupil Most Likely to Succeed. He probably helped old ladies across the road, which wasn’t a bad thing – she helped old ladies across the road. But for some reason, those sorts of guys never lit her pilot light.

Up close, she could see how handsome he was, with dark hair, blue eyes and a stylish suit – even though he’d taken the jacket off and loosened his tie. Despite the clean-cut handsomeness, there was something indefinably interesting about him that Peggy, who’d spent years watching people from the sidelines, couldn’t pin down.

And then, when Paolo slipped out of the seat to take a phone call, David slipped in and she found herself sitting next to him. He kept staring at her as though he’d been searching for something all his life and she was it.

Utterly disconcerted, Peggy stared back. His eyes weren’t blue, as she’d first thought, but a green-tinged azure, and around the black of the pupil were striations of amber like shards of sunlight. She couldn’t look away. His gaze wasn’t predatory or sleazy. It said: Finally, I’ve found you.

‘Paolo says you just moved into Redstone,’ David said, smiling.

His voice was deep, gentle. And kind. How could you tell that from a voice? You couldn’t, but still, he had a kindness about him that drew her in. Jolting herself back to reality, she said: ‘Yes, I’m new to the neighbourhood. I’ve taken over the old off-licence – now, how could a place that sells drink go out of business!’

Oh heck, she thought, now I sound like a deranged boozer who needs alcohol 24/7. And to prove it, I have two cocktail glasses in front of me!

She tried to surreptitiously shove the empty cocktail glass behind the ketchup and sugar containers.

What was wrong with her? Her stomach was swooping as if she was on board a ship in a force-ten gale.

‘That off-licence was a bit of a dive,’ David said. ‘Back when I was a teenager, it was the hot spot for under-age drinking. My father warned me and my brothers to stay out of it or there would be hell to pay – which isn’t really much like my Dad.’ He grinned. ‘What sort of business are you setting up?’

‘A knitting and craft shop,’ said Peggy, back on familiar ground. She waited for him to say she didn’t look like a knitting type of girl.

‘My mother knits. She says it’s meditation,’ he said instead.

‘Yes!’ agreed Peggy, astonished. ‘That’s exactly what it is – nobody else ever gets that unless they are a knitter.’

‘I can see it on my mother’s face when she knits,’ he admitted. ‘So, it’s just you on your own in Redstone, not your … family.’

‘No, just me,’ said Peggy, eyes glittering now.

This gorgeous man was interested in her. She wasn’t imagining it.

‘No husband, then?’

‘No husband,’ agreed Peggy, loving this courtship – because that’s what it felt like.

‘No harem of men relying on you …?’ His eyes were glittering too now, looking directly into hers, making Peggy feel as if they were alone and he was saying something wildly sexy to her, even though he wasn’t and they were in a busy bar. It was that low, rumbling voice and the way he looked at her. As if he knew her already.

‘No male harem,’ she whispered.

He had evening stubble on his jaw, she noticed, as he loosened his tie some more and undid the top button of his shirt. Why was that so erotic?

‘Good. Could I persuade you to go on a date with me, then?’ he asked. ‘Since we’ve cleared up the harem situation.’

‘You don’t have any harem situation yourself?’ she asked, even though she knew he didn’t. Exactly how, Peggy couldn’t have said, but she was sure that this man had no other women in the background.

He shook his head. ‘No, nobody for a long time. I thought it was because I was busy with work, but it turns out I must have been waiting.’ He smiled at her.

‘That was a bit—’ Peggy had been about to say corny, but she didn’t. Because he’d meant it. Waiting for her.

‘—sorry, I nearly said “corny”, but it’s not corny and you’re not corny, it’s lovely,’ she said instead, and then thought how ridiculous that sounded. She took a gulp of her cocktail to hide her embarrassment but then realized she hadn’t wanted to look like Drinker of the Year, so pushed the glass away.

‘What work do you do?’ she asked, then added: ‘I mean, people always tell me that I don’t look like a woman who knits, but you didn’t, so I don’t want to guess wrong about you …’ She had to stop this babbling.

‘I run an engineering company,’ he said, ‘which is not boasting about being a captain of industry. I’m an engineer and I’ve set up on my own recently. Every cent of my money is being ploughed into the company, hence the reason I live with my two brothers instead of in a magnificent penthouse, where I could invite you back for a glass of vintage wine and impress you with my riches.’

‘I wouldn’t be impressed by that,’ said Peggy truthfully.

David smiled at her, azure eyes meeting her dark ones.

‘I didn’t think you would be.’ He put his head to one side and looked at her. ‘I understand why people say you don’t look like a person who knits,’ he said.

‘Why?’ she demanded.

‘You’re more like a faerie from the forest,’ he said, ‘a creature from a fable or from the old Celtic myths we used to learn in school. It’s the trailing hair the colour of wet bark and those big eyes watching me, and the sense that you might disappear at any moment …’

He leaned forward and gently brushed back a coil of hair that had fallen over one of her eyes.

Peggy could feel redness rising up her cheeks. He’d got one thing right: she did disappear whenever she wanted to. But not this time. For now, she was perfectly happy where she was.

Peggy Barry, tired of being alone but almost resigned to it because she knew from experience that alone was the only way to go, somehow crumbled. When David said he’d been waiting for her, his words had the ring of truth in them – and suddenly she realized that was because it felt as if she’d been waiting just for him.

‘Would you come to dinner with me tomorrow night?’ he asked.

Peggy nodded first, then said yes in a voice that sounded too faint to be hers, ‘I’d love to.’

Peggy felt jittery and wildly excited all the next day. She couldn’t concentrate on the task of cleaning the filthy back room and kept stopping and staring dreamily into space, returning to earth to find her bucket of soapy water stone-cold.

She found herself thinking of Sleepless in Seattle and how love could hit you in the weirdest way, like Annie, who knew she could never marry Walter, hearing Sam on the radio and knowing, just knowing, she had to meet him.

Peggy had seen it hundreds of times: when she had the flu, when she wanted cheering up, when she was happy, when she was so sad she thought her heart might break. And she’d loved it. But she didn’t think something like that could actually happen …

At lunch, she went to buy a sandwich from Sue, and stood in the queue gazing at the bread behind the counter until Sue had to say ‘Peggy’ loudly to wake her from her reverie. She’d never felt this before about a date, ever, and she wished she had someone to share her feelings with.

If only she could phone her mother and tell her she felt as if she’d found ‘the One’. Mum knew all about Sleepless in Seattle. They’d watched it together. But she couldn’t call. Just couldn’t.

By seven that evening, she’d had a long shower to wash the shop dirt from her skin, had washed and dried her mane of hair until it fell in waves around her shoulders, and had rubbed handfuls of almond body cream luxuriantly into her skin. All this preparation felt right. She wasn’t ordinary Peggy getting ready for a dinner – she was the woman David Byrne stared at as though she was a goddess.

She was Annie waiting for Sam.

When David rang the bell at five to seven, she rushed to open the door.

‘I’m sorry I’m early,’ he began, his gaze locked on hers.

‘I’ve been ready since half six,’ said Peggy in reply. There would be no games here. This was too serious, too wonderful.

‘You look beautiful,’ he said, eyes travelling over the old-fashioned teal chiffon blouse tucked into skinny jeans that made her long legs look longer than ever. She’d worn kitten heels because David was taller than her. Few men were. Walking beside him to his car, she felt like the faerie he’d talked about, fragile and beautiful. She didn’t know what it was to feel beautiful. There had been no compliments in her young life and so there was no foundation on which to build even a hint of belief in her own beauty. But with David’s eyes upon her and his hand holding hers, she felt as beautiful and desirable as any movie star.

He took her to a small French restaurant a few miles away where the atmosphere of those Parisian bistros she’d seen in films had been perfectly recreated. With its red-checked tablecloths, low lighting and candles dripping wax everywhere, it was the perfect venue for an intimate dinner and she wanted to clap her hands with glee when she saw it.

‘It got a bad review in the papers for being a cliché,’ David said as they ignored the menu and stared at each other over the candles on their table. ‘But the food is delicious and the staff are great. So what’s wrong with candles and red tablecloths?’

‘I love it,’ said Peggy happily. ‘Let’s eat all the clichés tonight!’

‘And hold hands across the table,’ he added, reaching forward to take her hand.

‘Yes,’ she said, folding her fingers into his.

The bistro staff came from a variety of countries around the world and could speak a lexicon of languages, but all of them could recognize diners wrapped in romance and oblivious to everyone else. So Gruyere-topped French onion soup, crusty bread, boeuf bourguignon and good red wine were delivered to the table silently, leaving the couple to eat and talk uninterrupted.

Peggy felt as if they were encased in a magical bubble which nothing could break: this evening was simply perfect in every way.

David wanted to know all about her – unlike so many of the men she’d met over the years, who were too caught up in determining their own wants and needs. He asked what films she liked to see, what food she liked to eat. He’d cook her dinner at his place, he told her as they drank their wine: all he needed was to get his brothers out of the house.

Then, when talk inevitably moved onto their backgrounds and he asked about her childhood, she gently batted him away: ‘Let’s forget everything except now,’ she said. ‘Tonight is all that matters.’

As she said it, she knew this wasn’t merely a ruse to stop him asking about her past. Suddenly, her life before him had ceased to matter. Whereas normally, it coloured everything. But this wonderful night with this wonderful man had changed all that.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like Interpol – I want to know all about you, Peggy,’ he said, and she smiled across the table at him, lean and rangy in a casual grey shirt.

‘Why are you calling the shop Peggy’s Busy Bee Knitting and Stitching Shop? There’s nobody less bee-like than you. You’re so calm and serene. You don’t buzz around.’

‘I don’t have a very good answer, I’m afraid,’ she said, finally giving up on the boeuf, knowing that she would feel full for a week. ‘My mother does wonderful embroidery and for a while she embroidered napkins for a gift shop. The lady who ran it, Carola, said my mother was the most artistic person she knew and told Mum to embroider whatever she wanted. Mum chose bees. They were beautiful. Each napkin was different because she said no matter how hard you tried, each embroidered bee ended up different, same as people.’

Peggy’s bubble of happiness quivered and she felt the familiar emotions welling up in her. Thinking about her mother always made her want to cry. Sitting here with this good, kind man, she wanted to tell him everything because he ought to know. But of course, she couldn’t.

‘Dessert,’ announced David, as if he could read her face and wanted to spare her thinking about whatever was clearly hurting her. ‘I don’t think it’s very French, but they make a wonderful cheesecake here.’

And the sadness passed. Peggy pushed it all out of her mind. She’d been alone for so long and she deserved this, didn’t she?

During that glorious week, they went out three times. The second date was to the cinema; on the way there, David walked on the outside of the pavement, he automatically paid for the cinema tickets, and stood back to let her enter the line of seats so she could pick the one she wanted.

He was gentlemanly, she decided, as the film began. Such a weird, old-fashioned word, but it suited him.

And there was no denying that she was intensely physically attracted to him. From the moment she’d spotted him walking towards her in the wine bar where they’d arranged to meet before the movie, broad-shouldered and handsome in a sweater and jeans, she’d found herself imagining that body close to hers. In the darkness of the cinema she experienced pure pleasure when David put an arm around her shoulders and whispered into her ear: ‘Are you enjoying the film?’

‘Yes,’ she said, although in truth she had hardly paid any attention to it. She’d been too preoccupied thinking about him, sitting beside her.

As the week went on, the real world forced its way into her head and reminded her that happy endings were for movies. She tried to dismiss the voice inside her head, telling her this, that it was better to stay away from people like David. The Davids of this world expected a girl to be normal, with an ordinary background and a loving family behind them. He wouldn’t know what to make of Peggy’s past. The voice said it was time to back off, to stop him from getting too close. The business ought to be her focus. She had no time for men. Even the nice ones couldn’t be trusted.

Persistent as the voice was, it was just possible to ignore it. Because David Byrne was trying so hard to prove that he could be trusted and because Peggy wanted the dream to stay alive for a little while longer.

He loved her beautiful shop when she showed it to him and said he and his brothers would give a hand with the painting. Due to lack of funds, Peggy had been planning to do it all herself.

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said, instinctively, aching inside at how hurt he looked.

In moments of clarity, she wondered how the hell she had attracted this gorgeous, decent man? His family sounded wonderful. The townhouse where he lived with his two brothers was only half a mile away from the home where they’d grown up in St Brigid’s Terrace, just round the corner from Peggy’s cottage. He and his two brothers often went home to Mum for Sunday lunch, he told her. On odd occasions – well, once a week, actually, he said ruefully – their mum turned up at the bachelor house to tut about the state of the place and do his brothers’ washing.

‘I keep telling her not to, but she insists on doing it.’

‘You do yours?’ she asked, thinking how utterly lovely this all sounded.

‘As I keep telling Brian and Steve, if they’re old enough to vote, they’re old enough to work the washing machine,’ David said.

He mentioned, too, that he had a sister, Meredith.

‘She lives in a pretty swanky apartment in Dublin,’ he said, ‘and runs an art gallery with someone else. None of us get to see her much.’

‘Oh.’ The words slipped out: ‘Do you not get on with her?’ Meredith seemed to be the one flaw in the Byrne family.

‘No, I get on with her fine,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘She’s changed, that’s all. I think she got caught up caring about the wrong sort of stuff. Money, labels – you know, that type of thing. I miss her, actually, but she’s moved on from us.’

Peggy detected a flash of something in his eyes: not rancour but sadness.

Though their own children had all flown the nest, his parents still had a teenager in the house: David’s cousin Freya. His face lit up when he talked about her.

‘Crazy like a fox,’ he said. ‘Knows everything. Fifteen going on thirty-seven. Myself and the lads keep an eye on her, because there’s no knowing what she might get up to next.’

‘Why does she live with your mum and dad?’ Peggy asked, not wanting to sound too much like a grand inquisitor but utterly fascinated all the same. Hearing about the family was like basking in the glow of their loving normality. Besides, asking questions was a great way of distracting people from asking about her, and the more she knew David, the more she didn’t want him to know her truth.

‘My dad’s youngest brother, Will, died in a car crash and his wife, my Aunt Gemma, had a nervous breakdown. I don’t know what the psychiatrists called it but that’s what happened,’ David said sadly. ‘She never recovered from his death. Not that anyone would recover from that,’ he added, ‘but afterwards, she literally ceased to function. She’d always been an anxious person but she simply went to pieces. Freya was their only child and, after a while, when it became apparent that Gemma wasn’t functioning, Mum stepped in and said Freya couldn’t live like that any more. Gemma would forget to buy food, forget to cook dinner, forget to get Freya from school, that sort of thing. So Freya’s with Mum now and it’s brilliant. She keeps Mum young, Mum says. We all get a great kick out of her. Gemma’s doing much better now, too. She can’t work, though, but she sees Freya all the time, things are good there.’

Peggy loved hearing about his family. Apart from poor Aunt Gemma, they sounded nice and normal: the sort of family she’d love to have been a part of. That’s when she knew the fantasy was over and that she had to listen to the voice telling her she should end it. Normal wasn’t for her. She’d screw up normal. She was probably a lot more like Aunt Gemma than anyone else in David’s grounded family. Not that she was likely to forget to buy food or cook – Peggy was incredibly organized and seldom forgot anything – but she was far from normal.

‘Now you know all about me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you, about your family.’

Peggy had a well-rehearsed story about a small family who lived in a bungalow in a town in the centre of the country: a gentle mother who loved needlework and knitting, and a father who was a mechanic. He’d come from a farming background, while her mother had been born in Dublin’s city centre.

‘No brothers or sisters, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’d have loved to be part of a big family like yours. I’m jealous. I was such a tomboy when I was younger, climbing trees with the boys, having fights!’

Normally, people lapped up this story and laughed at the notion of Peggy getting into fights. It was a perfect distraction and nobody had ever questioned the truth of it. Until now.

David’s brow furrowed.

She looked at the face she wanted to touch, so she knew each contour and felt a yearning gap inside. It had to end and soon.

‘I can’t see you having fights,’ he said finally. ‘You’re too gentle. You’re joking, surely?’

Peggy summoned up a smile in the middle of her misery. ‘No, I was a tomboy, honestly.’

‘Apart from the knitting and sewing, then,’ David said, still looking as if he didn’t believe her.

‘Oh, yes, apart from that,’ Peggy agreed.

He was too clever, too able to see inside her, she thought. How had he got inside her head so quickly?

In bed that night, unable to sleep, she practised different ways of telling him it was over: ‘I’m too young, David, too young for the picket fence and the two-point-five children.’

Even in her head, the mental David had an answer to that argument: ‘How do you have two-point-five children? I’ve always wondered.’

She’d never left anyone properly before. She’d had dates and boyfriends over the years, but nothing serious, nothing that couldn’t be undone by packing up and moving on. She had no experience of how to handle this.

Two days later, she was so preoccupied trying to come up with a way to end it that she somehow found herself agreeing to go back to his house for dinner on their third date.

‘The lads are out for the evening – I almost had to bribe them. They want to see this woman I can’t stop talking about,’ he told her on the phone.

Peggy beamed at the thought of David talking about her.

‘And I cleaned the house and told them that, if they messed it up, I would destroy Brian’s electric guitar and put Steve’s precious football jersey, the one signed by the Irish team, into the wash.’

They both laughed.

‘You’d never do that,’ Peggy teased.

‘What, you don’t think I can be cruel and dangerous?’ he said, laughing.

‘No,’ she said quietly.

How easy it would be to let herself fall further in love with this man and spend a lifetime with him. It seemed there would be no arguing, no fights, none of that constant tension in the house. But what if he changed? That’s what men did, and you had to know how to deal with that. Peggy already knew that she couldn’t. She was better off on her own.

‘What happened there?’ he asked, picking up on the change in her voice. ‘You sounded so sad. Tell me, please.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I can’t.’

‘There’s a lot about you, Peggy Barry, that I don’t understand. Yet,’ he added.

‘Gosh no, I’m very boring,’ she said lightly. It was her standard response and she’d used it during their first dinner, but she knew he wanted to know more now and that her made-up family background wouldn’t keep him satisfied for long.

‘Hey, Ms Knitting Shop Owner and future entrepreneur of the year,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you’re boring for one moment, but if that’s the story we’re running with right now, then being allegedly boring hasn’t turned out too bad for you.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ she said. ‘I’m trading the Beetle in next week for a Ferrari.’

‘Red or yellow?’ he asked.

‘Do they only make them in those colours?’ Peggy demanded. ‘Red is so obvious. If a guy gets a red Ferrari, he has to have pouffed-up hair, an open shirt, a medallion and a supermodel beside him.’

‘At least I’ve got the supermodel sorted!’ he joked.

On the night of their dinner date, David offered to pick Peggy up from her house but she suddenly decided that she might need to get away under her own steam.

‘No need for you to come out,’ she said brightly. ‘Give me directions and I’ll get there myself.’

‘It’s complicated if you don’t know the area – I’ll drive to the shop and you can follow me in your own car,’ he said.

She pulled up behind him as he parked the car outside one of a row of attractive townhouses. He came round and opened the car door for her then led her through a tiny front garden, and unlocked the door …

‘It’s not such a bad place really, for three men living alone,’ he said, as he showed her inside.

The house was very obviously a bachelor establishment. There was a big leather couch in the living room, the inevitable enormous television and fabulous stereo system, and a coffee table littered with papers and sports magazines.

‘Steve,’ he growled, moving swiftly to the coffee table and tidying the papers into a neat pile. ‘This was spotless this morning. He’s a menace.’

She couldn’t have imagined any of the other men she’d dated hastily organizing it all the way David did, sorting out the cushions on the couch.

‘Steve sits here eating breakfast and when he’s finished, he just goes off leaving all the papers left scattered around. I think he imagines we’ve a maid. That’s the only explanation.’

‘Is he an older brother or younger?’ said Peggy, looking at the family photographs crowded on the mantelpiece.

‘Youngest,’ David said, showing her a picture of a smiling young man holding a football. ‘I’m the second eldest after Meredith, then Brian, then Steve. Brian’s the one who’s getting married. He’s spending a lot of time in his girlfriend Liz’s flat so he doesn’t contribute as much as he once did to the mess, but he doesn’t tidy up any of it, either.’

‘It must be nice, coming from a big family,’ Peggy said idly, examining the photos. There were several big family groups. Three tall young men standing with an equally tall father and a shorter woman who was obviously David’s mother, big smiling face and fluffy white blonde hair clustered around her face. Beside them was a thin, dark-haired teenager wearing Doc Martens, ripped tights and a mini skirt, with a huge grin on her face. There was another young woman in some of the pictures.

She was always a little apart, a tall woman in her early thirties with long blonde hair and elegant, expensive clothes. In each one she was standing apart from the rest of the group.

More photos decorated the shelves loaded with CDs and video games. There was a Christmas shot, everyone except the tall blonde woman in Christmas hats at a table; and what appeared to be a family holiday snap, taken on a beach with everyone very wet because it was pelting with rain, but with genuine smiles for the camera. They all seemed so happy, so at ease with each other.

There was something almost voyeuristic about looking at these photos, Peggy felt: this was proper family life. She felt a void inside her.

‘Big families are great fun,’ David said. ‘It’s a support system, a team who are always there for you.’

She noticed that he didn’t say any of the stuff she’d half-expected him to say, like: ‘Big families drive you mad.’ No, he loved it, relished being part of it.

‘Is that your mum and dad?’ she said, pointing to the older couple all dressed up, smiles on their faces but still a bit stiff and formal in front of the camera, as if they weren’t entirely at ease with posing.

‘Yes, that’s their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We sent them to Crete. Mum hates flying, had to go to the doctor to get something to calm her down for the flight. Dad said she was funny because she took one tablet and fell asleep. He practically had to carry her off the plane.’

‘They look lovely,’ Peggy said wistfully.

‘They are.’ There was real warmth in his voice. ‘You’ll have to come and meet them. You could come for lunch next Sunday, if that’s not all going too fast? Mum would love that. Freya would love it too – I’m warning you, she’ll interrogate you. She’s a junior Miss Marple. Nothing escapes her.’

Peggy smiled at the vision of the teenager with the lumpy shoes as a Miss Marple.

‘Maybe I could come and meet your parents sometime?’ David said. ‘They need to know that their daughter isn’t dating a madman. I promise I won’t shame you dreadfully,’ he added, grinning.

‘Maybe,’ Peggy said, after an uncomfortable pause.

Ignoring this, David took her hand. ‘Come on, I’ll bring you into the kitchen.’

He led her into a kitchen painted blue and white, with jolly blue and white sprigged curtains over the sink and old stained-pine cupboards.

‘Mum and Freya did the decor,’ David said. ‘We keep thinking we’re going to change it. Steve wants to get one of those modern kitchens, shiny red cabinets and stainless steel splashbacks, but with Brian leaving to get married it’s difficult making decisions.’

‘It’s a bit old fashioned, but it’s nice,’ said Peggy.

The kitchen in her flat was nowhere near as pretty as this. It was full of odd freestanding bits of furniture. She was scared to look underneath in case there might be dead bodies or live mice. This sweet traditional kitchen was rather adorable and certainly sparkling clean.

‘We’ve got wine, tea, coffee, juice?’ said David. ‘What would you like before I start on dinner?’

‘Tea would be lovely,’ she said.

He boiled the kettle and Peggy leaned against a cabinet, watching him as he moved around the kitchen. He was so much taller than her, she thought absently, that she’d have to look up if he kissed her.

‘Excuse me,’ he said coming close, opening a cupboard right beside her. ‘Mind your head.’ He touched her gently as if to make sure the cupboard door wouldn’t hurt her. And then the cupboard was quite forgotten. Their eyes met, and in an instant his mouth was on hers and it was so tender and sweet that, for a crazy moment, she felt she was a flower opening in the sun.

Then Peggy wasn’t thinking any more. Their kisses grew hotter, suffused with passion and want. She buried her hands in his hair, pulling him to her. His hands slid down to her waist, fitting her comfortably against him.

After a few minutes, David’s long fingers began to undo the buttons of her cotton blouse. Peggy leaned back, letting him touch her, wanting him to.

But then he paused, took a step away from her, leaving her staring up at him, lost.

‘I’m sorry. Is this too fast?’ he asked. ‘It has to be right, Peggy. I don’t want to rush you. You’re too special, do you understand?’

Peggy had looked up at those azure eyes, darker now with desire.

He wanted it to be right for her. He wanted her to be happy, not rushed. How beautiful that was.

She reached for his hands and pulled them back to her blouse.

‘It’s right,’ she said softly. She laid her palms on either side of his face and drew his mouth to hers.

Peggy woke in David’s bed, wrapped in his arms, the duvet tangled around them. Outside it was still dark. She didn’t know what time it was, but she felt no panic at being somewhere different – only a sense of rightness at being beside him, a feeling she could honestly say she’d never felt before.

He was sleeping deeply and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could make out his profile against the pale colour of his sheets. She had been to bed with other men, but she realized now that with them it had just been sex. Sometimes wonderful sex, she knew, but it had been purely mechanical. Bodies merging in mutual need, and when the lust was slaked, both parties had been happy to go their own way.

But this …

Peggy closed her eyes again and snuggled against David’s warm body. In sleep, he shifted so that he was wrapped more closely around her and she relaxed into the sensation. They hadn’t had sex, they’d made love. There had been lust and tenderness, true closeness, and now that she’d experienced it, Peggy knew the difference. If she stayed with David, she could have this. She could come home and lie in his arms at night: loved and sated. She could tell him about her day and he’d touch her face gently, and be glad or sad for her, depending on the circumstances. He would be her support in all things and Peggy, who’d had no experience of such a thing in her entire life, began to cry silently at the thought of what had to be done.

She hadn’t told him about her background, for all that he’d asked her. She hadn’t told anyone.

He’d asked her to lunch with his parents, but there was no way Peggy could go, she knew that. She should never have slept with David. She should never have gone out with him. Right at the beginning, she’d known that he was different from all the other men she’d been with. He was a good man. And she was …

Well, she wasn’t able for that sort of relationship. He would want two-point-five kids and the white picket fence, and Peggy couldn’t do that. She didn’t know how. She would mess it all up because you did what you’d grown up with, right?

Silently, she slid out of the bed and picked up her discarded clothes. She dressed in the bathroom, then tiptoed quietly downstairs. David’s wallet and keys were on the coffee table. She’d leave a note there, better to do that than go back upstairs with it and risk him being awake. She found a scrap of paper and a pen, and wrote:

David, I’m sorry but I can’t go out with you any more. You are a lovely guy and you deserve to be happy. Just not with me. It would be easier for us both if you don’t contact me. Please don’t come to the shop.

No hard feelings,

Peggy

She slipped the note into his wallet, so he’d find it easily, then left. It was the right thing to do.

Her priority should be the shop, she told herself as she drove home in the yellow glow of the streetlights. She had no time for someone like David. There could be no place in her life for him. She knew that and it was easier to end things now, before it went horribly wrong, which it would. It was bound to. So why was she crying?

Chapter Three

Sitting at the scarred wooden desk in front of the small window of her eyrie on St Brigid’s Terrace, Freya Bryne was smiling. She was reading an email from a sweet foreign gentleman – from Nairobi this time – who had a few million dollars to invest in her country and wanted her to assist him.

He was a prince, and due to problems in his country, and the fact that his father, the king, was under threat, he couldn’t invest it himself. But she could help …

She really did have the worst spam filter on the planet, Freya decided. No matter what she did, genuine emails ended up in her junk box and funny ones from people pretending to be investors or proclaiming that she’d won a lottery and all that was needed were her bank details and passport number, were forever popping into her inbox. She started to type a reply:

OMG, I can’t believe I’m writing to a real prince!!!! Mom is going to be, like, aced out! You have no idea how good a time this would be for us to have friends in new places – and a prince! Wow, as we say in Headache Drive. Mom hasn’t had a proper holiday since that incident with the airline company. She needed two seats and we thought that had been made plain from the start but no, she only got one and that sweet guy beside her – well, the feeling did come back into his arms a day later but it was very stressful for all concerned. Now, obviously, we have to visit before we work on this million-dollar deal – again, what LUCK! Mom has maxed out her credit card trying to buy the scratch card with the £25 million ticket and she needs a holiday. If you can get a hold of the royal plane, that would be perfect. Just remember: NO SUGAR ON BOARD. She might get her hands on some and … well, the less said about that time in the chocolate shop the better. We settled out of court, which was good for all concerned. But she is very partial to that South African creamy drink. Four bottles ought to cover it. We can stay in a nice hotel if you have recommendations, but from a financial point of view, do you have spare rooms in the palace? And any brothers? Mom is worried about marrying again but I read her tarot cards for her online today and by an AMAZING COINCIDENCE, it said she’d meet someone new …

‘Freya, lovie, it’s nearly eight,’ yelled her aunt Opal from downstairs. ‘I have scrambled eggs on …’

Opal’s voice trailed off. She was always trying to stuff Freya with protein in the mornings, while Freya was more of a coffee and a sliver of toast kind of person.

Poor Opal didn’t understand. Apparently, at breakfast every morning the three boys had wolfed down food as if they hadn’t eaten for a week and now she felt that this was the correct way to feed Freya.

Desperate as she was not to hurt her aunt’s feelings, the thought of an egg in the morning turned Freya’s stomach.

She finished her email with a quick:

Reply soonest. We’ll start packing. Mom does tend to overpack but I am assuming this won’t be a problem on the royal plane, right? Hugs,

Cathleen Ni Houlihan

Freya grinned as she clicked send.

If only she could fly through the Internet like her email and perch on the computer of the man receiving it, to see his astonished face as he read it.

Just outside her window, she could see the blossom on the apple tree in the postage-stamp garden below. Behind the fence her uncle Ned had painted pale green the summer before, the council had started turning a scrap of deserted land into a proper park. The adjacent allotments would stay the way they were, despite the plans for the park, which was wonderful. Uncle Ned would have died if he couldn’t go to his allotment every day. She could see some of the plain but sturdy sheds from the window and the neatly planted allotments themselves. Ned grew tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes and all manner of salad greens on his. In the distance Freya could make out the spires and towers of the city, but it seemed a long way away, giving the sense that Redstone was out in the country instead of being part of town.

All in all, Freya felt that the view from the third-floor bedroom of the narrow house more than made up for the tininess of the room.

‘You’re sure it’s not too small?’ Aunt Opal had said anxiously four years ago when Freya had come to live with them. ‘Meredith wouldn’t have this room – she said it was a spiders’ paradise up here in the attic. Mind you, Steve was happy enough in here.’

‘I love it,’ Freya had replied. She wasn’t in the slightest bit scared of spiders for she had spent years taking them gently out of the bath for her mother and releasing them back into the wild. Now the bedroom had a DIY bookcase on one wall, and Freya’s own artwork on another. She’d painted the old wardrobe so it looked like part of Opal and Ned’s colourful garden down below, although Opal didn’t have any enquiring and abnormally large caterpillars on her flowers, or indeed, a Venus fly trap with a shy smile.

Freya checked her watch. Eight o’clock. Time to grab some toast and leave for school.

She clicked off her inbox, unplugged her phone and picked up her schoolbag. This rucksack contained her life, although it hardly looked the part: a greying canvas thing inherited from her cousin David, she’d decorated it with butterflies interspersed with gothic, dangerous-looking faerie creatures, all painstakingly coloured in – often in lessons – with felt-tip pens. She skimmed down the narrow stairs, light on her feet, racing past the second floor where her cousins’ old bedrooms were. Opal and Ned’s bedroom was the biggest, but it was still small compared to Freya’s old home. Not that she cared. Twenty-one St Brigid’s Terrace might be cramped and shabby, but the difference was that in this home she felt loved. Beloved. Something she hadn’t felt for a long time with Mum.

Opal was standing at the cooker in the kitchen that she, Ned and Freya had painted Florida sunshine yellow last Christmas.

‘Too bright?’ Opal had said doubtfully in the paint shop, as the three of them had looked at the colour chart.

Freya hated to see even the faintest hint of worry in her darling Opal’s face.

‘No such thing!’ she reassured her with a hug. ‘Yellow makes people happy, you know.’

And Opal, who would have done anything to make Freya happy, was satisfied.

The tiles on the kitchen splashback were a riot of citrus fruits far too fat to be normal and Opal herself had run up a pair of yellow gingham curtains on her old sewing machine.

‘Freya, love, good morning,’ said Opal now, her face creasing up in a smile as her niece flew into the kitchen. A small, plump woman with a cloud of silvery, highlighted hair, Opal had one of those faces that made everyone want to smile back at her. It didn’t matter that, as she neared sixty, her face was wreathed in wrinkles or that she didn’t walk as fast as she used to because of her arthritis. She was still the same Opal.

Freya had long since decided that her aunt was one of life’s golden people: someone from whom goodness shone like light from a storm lantern on a dark night. Someone who brought the best out in everyone.

‘Morning, Opal,’ Freya said and bent over to give her aunt a kiss on the cheek.

Freya wasn’t tall herself but Opal was really tiny.

Foxglove the cat, a black-and-white scrap that Freya had rescued near the allotments two years ago, sat on the radiator licking her paws. Freya gave her a quick stroke, which Foxglove ignored as usual.

Almost instantly Opal began to fret about Freya’s breakfast. It was a routine that the two of them played out every morning.

‘Look, pet, it’s after eight and you have to get going. You haven’t had a bite to eat or a drink of water, nothing. Honestly, I can’t let you out the door like this. You know they say that young people have to have a proper breakfast in them before they can study. Now I was doing eggs for your Uncle Ned and I can easily pop in a bit of toast and give you some …’

Opal went back to the cooker where she was stirring an ancient saucepan with a wooden spoon. Opal’s scrambled eggs were better than anyone else’s, fluffy clouds glistening with butter. But Freya had neither the time nor the appetite this morning.

‘Sorry, Opal,’ she said, popping a piece of toast out of the toaster, grabbing a knife from the drawer and spreading a hint of butter on it. She took a few bites and set it down on the table without a plate while she filled her water bottle from the tap, then reached into the fridge and snagged the lunchbox she’d packed the night before, stuffing it into her duffel bag. Finally she picked up the toast again. ‘Have to go, Opal, can’t be late.’

Opal sighed the way she did pretty much every morning.

‘Pet, I don’t feel I’m doing my job if you’re not eating properly,’ she began. ‘Your four cousins never left the house without their breakfast – and that includes Meredith and I have to say she was fussy about her food. But the boys …’

Freya gave her aunt a quick hug to stem the tide of how Steve, David and Brian could vacuum up meals at Olympian speeds.

‘Have to go, Aunt Opal. I know, the boys ate everything you put in front of them and still do. Don’t worry, I won’t starve. I made lunch last night. I’ve got to race in.’

‘Don’t forget to brush your hair, pet,’ Opal called after her niece.

As she swung out of the kitchen, Freya caught a quick glance of herself in the old mirror in the narrow hall. Dark eyes and the same long slim nose as her mother. Wild dark hair that reached to her shoulders and probably would have hung halfway down her back if it had ever gone straight in its life. She ran her fingers through it quickly. Brushing only made it worse. The top button of her shirt was open and the knot of her tie was too low. Someone in school would give out to her about it, but she’d deal with that when she got there. Freya didn’t worry too much about being given out to. There were certain people in life who felt their day was lacking something if they hadn’t remonstrated with at least four people. The vice-principal, Mr McArthur, who hovered perpetually just inside the main door of the school, was one of them. Freya was used to it now. She didn’t mind. Words didn’t really matter. Actions were what counted. And people like Opal.

‘See you this evening, Opal. This is my late day at school, don’t forget,’ she roared as she shut the door behind her.

The house was bang in the middle of a terrace of tall, skinny red-brick homes and to make up for the postage-stamp-sized patch of garden at the back, there was quite a sliver of front garden.

Opal had worked her magic there too. Pink was her favourite colour.

‘I’ve loved pink ever since I was a girl,’ Opal admitted bashfully to Freya when she’d moved in.

It had been summer then and despite how shell-shocked Freya had felt after the six months that had followed her father’s death, she’d noticed that her aunt’s garden was a riot of every shade of pink. From the palest roses tinged with sun-blush to outrageous gladioli with their vivid crimson flowers. There was no grass, only a scatter of gravel amongst which grew a selection of herbs and alpines. There were a few varieties of sedum here and there, busily colonizing entire areas, creeping towards the roses like marauding drunks at a party. The rose bushes were Opal’s pride and joy. This early in the year there were only tiny green shoots on the stems. During the winter months the colour in the garden came from the many varieties of shrubs that Opal and Ned had collected over the years. There were laurels, glamorous plants with dark green glossy leaves and heathers with golden fronds. When the boys had lived at home, Opal told her, they’d been heavily involved in the garden. Freya was pretty sure this wasn’t because they loved gardening but because they loved their mum. When she said, ‘Will someone go out and take the weeds from between the gravel,’ the boys would groan good-naturedly and do it. Now, of course, they lived two streets away in a three-bedroom rented townhouse that couldn’t hope to contain all their mess. Opal would go over once a week and get them to tidy it up and Freya kept trying to persuade her that this was a terrible mistake.

‘Aunt Opal,’ she would say (Freya only called Opal Aunt when she was remonstrating with her), ‘Aunt Opal, you are not doing the boys any favours. They need to learn to organize themselves. How else will they develop into clever wonderful men who will make marvellous husbands?’

‘Well, Brian’s going to make a marvellous husband already,’ Opal would insist. Brian was getting married at Easter to Elizabeth, a primary school teacher. ‘And you know what Steve’s like, God love him. He’s hopeless with the washing machine.’ Given that Steve was a computer programmer, Freya felt this was a particularly feeble excuse.

David was the most dutiful when it came to tidying up. The sensible, soft-hearted and handsome one who had inherited the best qualities of both his parents, David knew how to use the vacuum cleaner, knew that the same dishcloth could not be used for three weeks running and understood that toilets occasionally needed to have bleach poured down them. Freya couldn’t help smiling when she thought of David. Her best friend, Kaz, had a long-range crush on David because he reminded her of the guy who played the lead in Australia, and would go puce whenever David said hello to her.

‘He is so like Hugh Jackman, I wish he’d notice me,’ Kaz would wail.

‘You are many years too young for him, that’s why he doesn’t notice you,’ Freya would explain. ‘It would be like a first year fancying you.’

‘Eurgh,’ Kaz said. ‘Point taken.’

With a last fond glance back at the house with its shining turquoise front door, Freya swung out the gate. Ned had put his foot down when it came to painting the exterior woodwork. ‘I had to,’ he’d told Freya. ‘I mean, the whole place would be pink if I’d let her. Imagine the lads …’ His voice had trailed off into a shudder at the thought of his three big strong sons coming home to a pink palace. ‘At least turquoise can be sort of manly.’

Thanks to Opal, Freya knew everyone on the street. On one side was Molly, who liked to drop in every day on the hunt for sugar, a drop of milk, or the newspaper, because there was a nice article she’d heard about and wanted to read. Aunt Opal always said that if a day went past when Molly didn’t drop in for something, the world wouldn’t feel right.

On the other side was shy, sixty-something Luke, a widower who had vowed he would never remarry after his beloved wife had died.

‘Not that it stops some of the ladies on the road from dropping in with cakes and pies and things,’ Opal would say. ‘Poor Luke, he really does want to be on his own.’

‘Why don’t all the women realize that?’ asked Freya.

‘Some women think it’s unnatural for a man to live by himself,’ Opal said sagely. ‘They’re waiting for him to see he needs someone else. He’s such a dear, they’re all determined to be the one.’

Next to the beleaguered Luke’s house lived the Hiltons, a young couple who had managed to produce four small children in three years. Their garden – unlike Luke’s, which was tended by his lady admirers – was a disaster zone of overturned trikes, weeds taller than the children and a dead tree in a pot outside the front door where Annie Hilton had desperately tried to inject some beauty into the front of the house only to forget to water the damn thing. Freya had babysat the children a couple of times and she could understand why the tree was dead. Watering a tree had to come very far down Annie Hilton’s list of daily chores.

The terrace curved as it got towards the main road and Freya looked in, as she always did, at the house where Meredith’s one-time best friend Grainne lived. Meredith was the only one of the cousins Freya didn’t see regularly. In fact, Meredith was something of a mystery to her. And Freya didn’t care for mysteries.

Meredith was the eldest; she’d moved away from Redstone as soon as she left school, and hardly ever returned. Oh, she’d show up for a big event like Uncle Ned’s sixtieth birthday party, but Freya couldn’t quite get a handle on Meredith. She seemed to have distanced herself from her family, and Freya, who adored Opal and Ned and her three cousins, simply couldn’t understand it. Why would anyone blessed with such a wonderful family turn their back on it?

And the Byrnes weren’t the only people that Meredith had turned her back on. Since her divorce, Grainne was back living at home with her parents, along with Teagan, her sweet four-year-old daughter. Freya always said hello to Grainne and Teagan if she bumped into them on her way home from school. Although she was thirty-something, the same age as Meredith, Grainne looked about seventeen. She was always smiling as she walked down the road holding the back of Teagan’s pink bike as the child wobbled along on her stabilizers.

‘Any news of Meredith?’ she might ask occasionally, and Freya would fill her in on the latest details.

‘The gallery’s going very well, apparently. It’s the Alexander Byrne Gallery now – there was a big write-up in the paper about it.’

Freya didn’t let on that Opal had proudly cut out the clipping from the paper and put it in the scrapbook she kept about Meredith. Nor did she say that Meredith hadn’t rung to tell her mother of this great event, which implied that she was now a full partner in the business. No, Opal and Ned and the boys had had to read about it in the paper. ‘She was asking after you,’ Freya would lie. And every time she said it she’d wondered why, because what was the point of lying about it?

Meredith never asked about anyone. Her phone calls were brief, as if she only rang home out of a sense of duty. On the rare occasions she visited, she never asked about anyone in Redstone. It was as if, in leaving home, she’d somehow distanced herself from the place totally – and that included her old school friends. Still, it was worth the lie, Freya decided, just to see the smile on Grainne’s face.

‘Send her my love back, will you, and tell her we must meet up next time she’s in town. Explain I don’t get out to cool events like her gallery openings,’ Grainne would add. ‘Not with this little bunny here—’ And with that she’d grin down at Teagan, who’d dimple back at her.

Freya wondered yet again what had happened to Meredith to make her walk away. Although her cousin was perfectly friendly on the rare occasions they met, it was obvious that something had changed her. One day Freya was going to figure out what it was.

Freya’s ten-minute trip to school took her past the crossroads, and if she had the money for a takeaway coffee she’d stop at the Internet café, where cool-looking guys sometimes hung out. Freya noticed everything. She liked Bobbi’s beauty and hair salon, too. Bobbi was Opal’s best friend, going back years. Outwardly, she was the complete opposite of Freya’s aunt, in that she looked as tough as old boots, but under the patina of foundation, platinum hair and a killer glare was a woman with a heart of gold.

Deciding that she was too late for coffee today, Freya crossed over at the lights, walking past the new lavender-painted shop where the old off-licence had been.

The new shop was as different from Maguire’s Fine Liquors as it was possible to get. Maguire’s used to look as though it had been dipped in a combination of nicotine and scotch, and the smell of both swirled around it. The lavender of the new place looked fresh and beautiful; Freya imagined that when the shop finally opened for business it would smell of a combination of fragrant French roses and wild lavender. A cast-iron sign with swirly writing hung at ninety degrees to the shop over the glass door and the name was painted in the same writing above the large front window: Peggy’s Busy Bee Knitting and Stitching Shop.

Freya peered in and saw a young woman in workman’s overalls up a ladder, diligently painting the ceiling. Decorating was clearly not her profession because her rich brown ponytail was splattered with white paint.

As if she sensed someone watching her, the woman turned, saw Freya, and smiled at her.

Freya smiled back and toyed with the idea of going in and chatting, but she’d be late. She lengthened her stride, ran her fingers along the peeling bark of the oldest sycamore, and turned down the alleyway that was her shortcut to school. Out of the alleyway and across the road, she joined the heaving throng moving slowly towards the school building, blending in immediately: just one more small, dark-haired fifteen-year-old girl in clumpy shoes and an ill-fitting school uniform.

Chapter Four

The wedding invitation felt as if it was burning a hole in Opal Byrne’s handbag. It was the gold envelope that was part of the problem. Gold envelopes, rather. The sight of so many of them on the mat that morning had given her quite a shock, and she’d hastily gathered them up without a word to either Ned or Freya. There were the usual bills (brown envelopes), fliers (white envelopes), something tax-related (a brown, evil-looking envelope) for Brian and there, in the middle, like a bit of false fairy glitter come to St Brigid’s Terrace, the five gold envelopes.

Noel and Miranda Flanagan invited Opal and Edward Byrne to the wedding of their beloved daughter, Elizabeth, to Brian Byrne in the Church of the Holy Redeemer, Blackfields, Co Cork, and afterwards to a dinner in the Rathlin Golf and Country Club.

Opal’s mind had gone blank then. There was one for her and Ned – why hadn’t they called him Ned? Nobody called him Edward – except for his mother and she was dead, God rest her, and had never so much as set eyes on Liz’s parents. Another one for Freya and guest, although that was asking for trouble because Freya would do her best to find the least country-club-looking one of her friends and pitch up with him just for pure devilment. Freya had a hate/hate thing going on with Liz’s mother, and the wedding would be the perfect opportunity to up the ante.

And there was one each for David, Steve and Meredith plus guests, which Opal felt was for some reason an insult to Meredith and the boys, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on why yet.

Meredith had a flat – sorry, apartment – in the city with panoramic views, curtains that closed if you pushed a button and a sports car that had no room for groceries in the boot, not that Meredith was likely to venture into a supermarket. Miranda could have asked Brian for the address and posted the invitation to Meredith’s apartment but she hadn’t. She knew David and Steve’s address because it was the same as Brian’s. But no, she’d sent them all to St Brigid’s Terrace, which was the same as saying ‘You’re all from the wrong side of town, no matter how posh Meredith’s address is these days.’

That was it. That was the insult. Opal fumed quietly as she walked towards the shops.

Redstone was a suburb that had only recently been deemed ‘up and coming’ after years of being considered ‘the wrong side of town’. Opal had been raised half a mile from here and recalled how everyone had looked down on Redstone in those days. It was the place where men with ‘bad backs’ avoided earning a living and instead spent working hours listening to the radio in the bookies. The houses were lined up in terraces and women stood chatting over the fence as they hung the washing out.

That was how it was between her and Molly next door. As soon as she saw Opal out at the line with her laundry basket, Molly would come out with a cup of tea for her and they would talk.

Now that Ned had taken early retirement from the bus depot, he might come out to do a bit of pottering in the garden and Molly would make him tea, too.

Not everyone was as lucky with their neighbours, Opal knew.

St Brigid’s Terrace had changed a lot over the years. During the boom, property prices had gone up wildly on the terrace and in Redstone in general. Several new housing estates had been built on the fields beside the old lightbulb factory, which had been turned into an apartment complex with electric gates. And the crossroads in the centre of Redstone no longer boasted four pubs, two chippers and a bookie’s. Instead, there was her friend Bobbi’s beauty salon, a delicatessen, the bakery, a mini-market that sold expensive ready-meals, two cafés, a bank, a boutique that sold outrageously priced clothes, and the wool and craft supplies shop that was due to open soon. Opal was thrilled about that because she loved knitting.

Opal’s mother wouldn’t have recognized the place. She wouldn’t have recognized Opal either, now that she had highlights in her hair every few months.

Freya had made her do that.

‘Aunt Opal, I can see bits of grey. It’s not a good look,’ Freya had said kindly the year before.

It was funny, Opal thought, that after raising three sons and one daughter, it was the niece she’d taken into her home who was lighting her life up now that she was within striking distance of sixty.

Freya brought her home the first daffodils of February; it wouldn’t have occurred to the boys to do such a thing. Freya was the one who noticed when Opal’s ankles were swollen on Sundays and made whoever was over for Sunday lunch pitch in and help out so their mother could sit down.

Meredith would have noticed too, Opal thought loyally, but she was always too busy to drop in to see them at weekends. The boys were different. They liked a good feed on a Sunday. She invited Meredith to these lunches but Meredith rarely came. When she did, she barely ate. She was so slim that Opal worried her daughter wasn’t eating properly.

Opal was quite sure that cooking wasn’t Meredith’s strong point. She’d refused to do Home Economics in school. Even back then, her mind had been set on loftier things. Whenever she thought about Meredith, Opal felt a sense of failure. They didn’t have mother-and-daughter days out the way some of her friends did. Meredith had never suggested they go away for a weekend to one of those spa places, though she knew Meredith liked those stone treatments and suchlike. Opal had never been herself and, to be honest, she wouldn’t have cared for it. But she’d have gone if Meredith asked her. Except Meredith didn’t ask.

Opal grinned as she thought of her niece. Freya was a different kettle of fish altogether. She probably knew how to do all sorts of mud baths at home herself. There was nothing Freya didn’t know. Opal thought of herself at fifteen and what a naive, bewildered young thing she’d been. And look at Freya, clever as anything and kind with it. Lord, she’d better not show the wedding invitations to Freya. Freya would instantly understand the insulting code behind Miranda’s addressing of the envelopes. She’d probably phone Miranda and say something. Above all else, Opal hated people saying things.

By now, she was nearing the crossroads. She walked past the bus stop with a nod and a brief ‘hello’ to the two old fellas sitting there, Seanie and Ronnie. They were always sitting there. Freya joked that they never actually got a bus anywhere. They just liked to watch the workings of the village carry on around them, smoking Woodbines and commenting on life, the universe and everything.

‘Grand day, isn’t it, Opal?’ said Ronnie. ‘Aren’t we blessed with the fine weather?’

‘We are indeed,’ agreed Opal.

‘And isn’t it a lovely day to be sitting here taking it all in?’ said Seanie happily, with an expansive wave of his hand, as though sitting on a seat at a bus stop at the side of the road in a small suburb outside Cork was on a par with sitting on a private jet and flying off somewhere fabulous for the day. The height of excitement and all a person could ask for. Freya thought the two of them were wonderful and quite often she squashed in between them for a chat.

Opal suspected she took the odd Woodbine too and smoked it, although she’d yet to catch her at it. That was the thing with Freya: you never caught her doing anything bad. Perhaps she’d trained the men to grab the cigarette out of her hand as soon as any of her family came into view. Opal had tried sniffing Freya’s clothes for the telltale smell, but Ned smoked five cigarettes a day, and even though he did it outside the back door, that confused matters. Besides, once Freya set her mind to do something, she just did it.

Opal passed the bakery and waved to Sue in the window, whom she could see arranging a big batch of bread on the shelves. Opal loved the bread in the shop, especially all of the different fancy ones with olives and rosemary in them. There hadn’t been anything like that when she was a kid. But it was expensive. She walked on by and went into the dry cleaner’s. Moyra was sitting there as usual, head in a book. She looked up with a smile when Opal came to the counter to hand over her things – a bag that included a pair of good navy trousers belonging to Brian. She’d had to smuggle them out of the house without Freya seeing, because there’d have been war if Freya spotted the contents of the bag.

‘Aunt Opal, what are you doing, taking Brian’s things to the dry cleaner’s?’ Freya would have demanded. ‘He’s well able to do it himself. And if he can’t for some mad reason, there’s always Liz. Doesn’t she have hands, legs and a car? What’s wrong with her?’ Freya liked Liz, though she didn’t think it was right the way she let Miranda get away with being rude to Brian’s family. Since the organization of the wedding had begun to gather pace, it was getting harder for Freya to hide her dislike of Brian’s future mother-in-law.

Opal had also brought a couple of ties belonging to Ned and a jacket that Steve had somehow managed to get curry sauce on. Lord knows, that was never going to come out, but Moyra said she’d do her best.

After the dry cleaner’s, Opal got the paper and some milk in the corner store. Then she crossed the road to the gleaming peony pink and chocolate façade of Bobbi’s Beauty Salon. She hadn’t planned to drop in, but she wanted to share her upset over the gold envelopes with someone who’d put it all in perspective. If anyone could do that, it was Bobbi.

She and Bobbi had been friends since they were four-year-olds in pigtails, shocked by the harsh world of junior infants – or ‘low babies’ as they used to call it in those days. Fifty-five years had flown by since then. Bobbi had built up her empire to the beautiful salon she now ran with her daughter, Shari.

‘It’s not an empire, Opal,’ Bobbi would say fondly and yet proudly whenever Opal used the term.

‘’Course it’s an empire,’ Opal would respond on the rare occasions when she went in to have something done. ‘Look at it, it’s beautiful.’

And it was. Lovingly decorated by Shari’s husband, the salon was a haven of loveliness.

Bobbi’s husband Richard hadn’t turned out to be as solid as Opal’s Ned. He’d run off with one of the junior stylists many years ago. But Bobbi hadn’t flinched, she’d held her head high. A small woman, like Opal, there was steel behind the platinum curls that framed her face.

‘He’s not getting a ha’penny out of this business,’ Bobbi had insisted – and he hadn’t.

Richard still turned up from time to time, normally to borrow money, and occasionally, Bobbi lent him some.

‘He is Shari’s father, after all,’ was all she’d say.

Today, Bobbi was at the front desk with her glasses on, scanning the appointment book when Opal walked in.

‘Hello!’ said Bobbi, looking up delightedly. Then, with a canny look at her friend’s face, she added: ‘What’s up?’

Bobbi could read Opal’s face like a map.

‘Well …’ began Opal.

‘Come through.’ Bobbi abandoned the appointment book. ‘Let’s have tea. You can tell me what’s happening in private. Caroline,’ she called to a stylist, ‘take over the desk.’

The back room was decorated in the same pretty pink brocade wallpaper as the rest of the salon. Bobbi had seen the inside of too many places where the staffroom looked as if the owner didn’t care about where the workers had to sit for their breaks.

‘Let’s make it pretty,’ she’d said. ‘I want the staff to see how important they are to the business.’

Three years previously, when the salon had last been redecorated, the staffroom had undergone a complete transformation too. There was a big couch in one corner. One of the young beauty therapists was sitting there now, muttering on the phone in a language Opal didn’t understand.

‘Right, pet, how are you?’ Bobbi went straight to the kettle while Opal put down her handbag and sank into one of the chairs at the table. ‘Didn’t think I’d see you today. What’s happened?’

Opal found the gold envelopes in her handbag and handed them over.

‘This is what’s wrong,’ she said. ‘I don’t know, I just have a bad feeling about the wedding. Not about Liz – she’s a lovely girl, no question of that – but the wedding itself …’ Opal sighed. ‘I’m not sure I’m able for it. Miranda’s making it into such a production that you’d swear nobody ever got married before. We had “hold-the-date” cards in December, then there was weeks of discussion about bridesmaids. According to Brian, Miranda flew herself and Liz to London for their dresses – I haven’t even looked for one, and the wedding’s just round the corner. Now this. Gold envelopes that cost a fortune.’

Bobbi placed a cup of steaming tea in front of her friend and passed her the milk and sugar. ‘We’re down to custard creams,’ she said, handing over the packet of biscuits. ‘The chocolate ones have all run out. There was a bit of a crisis early on this morning.’

She looked in the direction of the distressed girl on the phone.

‘Boyfriend trouble.’

Bobbi always knew what was going on in her staff’s lives. She lowered her voice so the girl on the phone in the corner couldn’t hear. ‘Poor Magda, she’s been going out with this dreadful, dreadful lout who treats her like muck. She gave him the boot yesterday and this morning she’s in floods of tears because he turned up outside the flat last night roaring drunk and yelling, “Take me back, I promise I’ll change.”’

‘Oh no,’ said Opal, feeling the girl’s pain as if it were her own.

All her life, people had told Opal to stop being so sensitive to everyone else’s problems. Freya was the only one who said: ‘Opal, stay exactly as you are – it’s what makes you so special.’

‘Here I am complaining about a silly wedding and that poor thing’s miles away from home—’

‘Now, Opal, there’s nothing you can do for Magda. I had a pot of tea with her. I opened the chocolate biscuits and I told her what her mother would tell her if she was here instead of in the Czech Republic: that man will bring her nothing but trouble. But despite all of that, she’s on the phone to him now. Going back to him. You can only tell a girl so much. I don’t know why the loveliest girls always find the worst men, but they do. Anyway, between the jigs and the reels, the chocolate biscuits went. The custard creams aren’t bad, though.’

Bobbi sat down with her own tea, took a bite of biscuit then set it aside to examine the gold envelopes. ‘Oh hello,’ she said, examining the copperplate writing on the front. ‘These must have cost a bob or two. Clearly they’re not skimping on anything.’

‘They have the money,’ Opal said.

‘Just because you have the money doesn’t mean you have to let everyone know you have the money.’ Bobbi’s tone was scathing.

She looked at the third envelope and got it in an instant. ‘Even Meredith’s one is addressed to your house,’ she said. She kept flicking. ‘And David’s and Steve’s. That was a low blow.’

‘I thought so too,’ said Opal. ‘It’s as if—’

‘—as if she’s saying, You lot are common, low-class muck and all of you come from the wrong end of the city. I get it,’ said Bobbi grimly.

‘I shouldn’t let it upset me so much,’ Opal went on, ‘but it did. I thought I’d come down and tell you and you’d make me feel better. Because I’m so angry and it’s wrong to be like that. If you’re angry, you put anger out into the universe …’

Bobbi reached out and held her friend’s hand. ‘Pet, I’d say the Dalai Lama would feel the urge to slap Miranda’s smug face if he spent any time with her, so stop feeling guilty about it. Concentrate on how wonderful it is that Brian’s getting married. Once he’s done it, they’ll all be marrying. Think of how often you worry about the three of them and why they haven’t settled down.’

Bobbi deliberately didn’t mention Meredith here. If there was any sign of Meredith settling down, they knew nothing about it and Bobbi was aware just how hurt Opal was to be cut so efficiently out of her daughter’s life.

She went on: ‘Liz is a wonderful girl and she and Brian adore each other. But you have to face up to the fact that her mother is a complete cow – there’s no point in beating around the bush here. Nothing ever pleased that woman in her life and you can bet she won’t be happy till she’s upset someone about this wedding. Let’s just decide here and now that it won’t be you or Ned, right?’

Opal nodded.

‘We’ll get your dress sorted and make you look a million dollars. I’ll be looking a million dollars too. We’ll show Madam Miranda that we might not have been born with silver spoons in our mouths but we know how to enjoy a day out.’

‘Yes,’ said Opal, ‘that’s what we’ll do. It’ll be a great day, and then life will go back to normal.’

‘Not quite normal,’ Bobbi pointed out. ‘She is going to be your fellow granny, remember that. As soon as Brian and Liz start having children, the granny wars will be under way, you versus her. And, let’s face it, the girl’s mother gets the most time with the grandchildren.’

Opal’s sweet face fell again.

‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ Bobbi muttered. ‘It’ll be fine. Do you think Meredith will come to the wedding?’ she asked, desperate to change the subject.

‘Heavens, I don’t know. I was talking to her a couple of weeks ago and she sounded very busy, you know, going to art fairs and things like that.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Bobbi meaningfully. ‘With all the travel she does, you’d think she’d make it down this way once in a while.’

‘I know,’ said Opal. ‘But she’s a successful woman, she’s got her own life.’

It was a well-worn subject and Bobbi had learned to leave it be or risk upsetting Opal.

‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘when are we going shopping for your dress? We’ll have a brilliant day, you and I. I’m really looking forward to it.’

‘Me too,’ said Opal.

Of course, Meredith wouldn’t be joining them on the big adventure to buy Opal a suitable mother-of-the-groom dress. That hurt, but Opal didn’t let on. She wouldn’t hear a word said against Meredith.

‘I tell you what,’ said Bobbi, who could tell all this as plainly as if it were written on Opal’s face, ‘we’ve a spare appointment this morning. Will we give your hair a wash and blow-dry? Cheer you up? Always works with me,’ she said, patting her own curls, brightened with a lustrous dose of platinum once a month. ‘On me, naturally.’

Usually Opal said no to these offers, but today she thought how good it would feel to lean back and have somebody gently massage shampoo into her hair, letting all her cares and worries drift down the sink with the suds. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Thank you, I’d love that.’

‘Great,’ said Bobbi. ‘Let’s get you started. You’re not to worry about the wedding.’ Behind her back, Bobbi crossed her fingers. ‘It’ll all be fine. At least Brian and Liz are right for each other.’

They glanced at the red-eyed girl sitting on the sofa, still talking earnestly on the phone.

Chapter Five

When she got to Singapore, Lillie emailed Doris. She tried phoning first and left a message on her friend’s cell phone because Doris didn’t pick up. Lillie had felt terribly lonely on the flight from Melbourne to Singapore and now she was there with three hours to hang around, she felt like a lost soul walking around the airport. She kept seeing couples everywhere, people the same age as her and Sam enjoying themselves. The plane had been full of them, laughing happy people flying all over the world together and she was there alone feeling herself growing smaller and tighter like a little gnarled nut.

And so she found a seat and typed out an email:

Hi Doris,

I’m glad we had those silver surfer lessons at the library, at least I can use this thing. You’re only about my fifth email ever. Just thought I’d drop you a line … that sounds wrong, doesn’t it? That’s what we used to say with letters. I decided to say hello because I’m in Singapore airport on my own. It’s very lonely and I’m sorry I’m here. I’m sorry I came, sorry, sorry, sorry. I know Martin and Evan mean well and everything but I’d be better staying at home. Travelling alone is a very sad thing. Sorry to be dropping all this on your head, Doris, but you did say I could.

Love,

Lillie

The second part of the flight wasn’t as bad, partly because she was so exhausted trying to get comfortable in the upright seat that she actually fell asleep for a while.

The boys had wanted to upgrade her to business class.

‘Mum, you’re sixty-four, you need to stretch your legs out. You could get DVT,’ said Evan, but Lillie wouldn’t hear of it.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it’s a ridiculous amount of money. I’ll go the way we—’ She stopped herself. ‘I’ll go the way your father and I always went: economy.’

She’d have liked one of those business-class beds now, but at least she was on the outside of a row, so she could get up and walk around the plane between her intermittent periods of dozing. It had grown quieter, more peaceful, once the food had been served, the lights had been dimmed and people began to fall asleep. The stewards and stewardesses were finally sitting down, taking their break. With most of the plane quiet, she didn’t feel quite so alone as she stood outside the bathroom waiting her turn, stretching her legs and wriggling her ankles the way the video they showed had told her to do.

Inside her head, Lillie found herself talking to Sam again.

I hope this is a good idea, Sam, she told him. You’ve got to look after me. Please, my love, I need you. I wish that you were a presence beside me. I wish I was a psychic so I could feel that you’re there instead of this nothingness: that’s what scares me. You’d have told me to do this. You’d have told me to go and see Seth and Frankie, meet the family. You’d have loved it, you’d have come too and it would have been so different. The fun we’d have had. We might have stayed over in Singapore for a couple of nights in a posh hotel, done the tour. I don’t want to upset you. You wanted me to be OK and I said I would be. I told you to go. But it’s so hard without you …

The toilet door clicked open in front of her and somebody stumbled out. Lillie didn’t really want to go to the loo but she locked herself in anyway, put the lid of the toilet down and sat, just to be here on her own and cry. Was she mad, coming on this trip?

She coped at home because she was among the familiar things, among familiar people, but so many thousands of miles away from home, how could she not feel lost?

Worst of all, that niggling thought that she’d been deftly shoving to the back of her mind kept wriggling its way to the fore: what if she felt bitterness when she met Seth? What if all she could think of was that their mother hadn’t given him up for adoption?

Lillie had never been a bitter person, but then, she’d had her beloved Sam. While he was alive, she’d had so much love in her life, that she was able to give love and kindness to other people.

‘You’re an earth mother,’ Sam told her once, ‘always finding lost souls to help and pulling them close.’

‘Do I drive you mad with my schemes to help people?’ she asked thoughtfully. Sam had never said anything like that before and she felt a hint of worry that he was tired of her endless good works. A colleague in the charity shop had once given her advice on balancing healing other people with taking care of her family: ‘Lillie, you’re one of life’s givers. Mind that you don’t neglect your own family. Much as they’ll admire you for being a good person and helping others, they still want to know that they come first. They’d rather have you home making dinner than out saving the world.’

Lillie had tried always to bear that in mind, but when Sam told her she was an earth mother she wasn’t sure whether this was a good or a bad thing in his eyes. So she’d asked him.

‘No, chicken,’ he said, smiling. ‘I love you for it. You can’t stop yourself: that’s what you do. Why should I change you?’

In the cramped plane toilet, she dried her tears and hoped she was still the earth mother her husband had loved. She’d hate it if his death had changed that and she no longer had anything left to give.

Seth Green drove to the airport with so many thoughts and feelings crowding each other that he had to force himself to concentrate on the road ahead.

The whole business of finding out he had a sister had reawakened the huge sorrow at the loss of his wonderful, kind mother.

He’d always adored her. Even when other boys muttered in school about how their mothers drove them mad, and were always wittering on about wearing coats in cold weather and having a decent breakfast, Seth had never had a bad word to say about Jennifer. She was gentle and endlessly calm. He could picture her now with her strawberry-blonde hair framing that round, smiling face and those beautiful flower-blue eyes.

It was hard to believe that this loving woman had given up her first child and then carried that huge secret locked inside her the rest of her life. Of course, she’d given birth to Lillie a long time ago, a time when the past wasn’t just another country, it was more in the line of another planet altogether. A planet where women did not give birth to children outside marriage and keep them. Such babies were symbols of shame to be bundled off as quickly as possible, regardless of the mother’s feelings in the matter.

He’d often wondered how the young Jennifer McCabe had summoned up the courage to marry Daniel Green – a Jew, though admittedly non-religious, when her family were Catholic. That, too, must have been scandalous at the time. Perhaps in light of the ‘sins’ she’d committed according to the tenets of her own unforgiving Church and society, Jennifer had simply resolved to defy convention and marry the man she loved, irrespective of religion.

Seth pulled up at a set of traffic lights and checked the clock on the dashboard. He still had plenty of time.

The secrecy of it all was what had shocked him the most. He couldn’t imagine his mother as a scared teenager because the woman he’d known had always been so strong. She’d dealt with many things through the years, even taking in his father’s elderly aunt Ruth, a woman who’d never recovered from her years in a concentration camp. Ruth had somehow survived but a huge part of her spirit had been crushed. When she’d become old and frail, it had been Seth’s mother who’d taken such care of her, understanding the nightmares and the fear that never left. Jennifer was the one who’d go in to comfort Ruth in the middle of the night, changing her nightgown, being gentle and kind, sitting with her until Ruth drifted into sleep.

His mother had also been a very honest, straight person: ‘Be truthful, Seth,’ she would tell him. ‘Whatever it is you’ve done, always tell the truth.’

Yet she hadn’t told him the truth – or rather, she’d avoided telling him the whole truth – about herself.

When the email arrived from Lillie’s son, carefully worded, trying to find out information about his mother, Seth had been astonished. Frankie, of course, had been thrilled, fascinated and full of enthusiasm. It was the way his wife was.

‘You’ve a long-lost half sister!’ she’d said delightedly. ‘How wonderful! Do you suppose your father knew? I doubt there was any way of knowing where the baby went or if there were any records linking her to your mother. It’s an amazing thing to happen now though, isn’t it, finding out?’

‘I suppose so,’ he said, although, as with so many things involving his wife, it was taking a little longer for the information to sink into his head than into hers.

Frankie responded to everything so readily, her quicksilver brain processing facts at high speed. His no longer seemed to work so fast – something that he suspected irritated her these days. Seth felt that these days, his very existence irritated his wife.

He knew their marriage was going through a bad stage – something that they’d never encountered before – but he felt too broken to attempt to fix it. All he could do was let things take their course and hope that he and Frankie would come through it all.

And then the email had come with news of Lillie’s existence.

Frankie had been so … well, Frankie-like about it.

‘Lillie must come to stay. I know this place isn’t great for guests, but we can fix up a room for her somewhere,’ she’d said firmly.

It was only when Frankie began searching for the phone book, saying, ‘What’s the dialling code for Melbourne? We must ring this Martin now, and then get Lillie’s number and phone her,’ that Seth found his voice and said Stop.

He had a sister – ‘half’ didn’t matter: she was his sister – and she’d been out there in the world all along when he thought he was an only child. He thought he was pleased, although it was all still being processed in his head, but he wanted to do things slowly, all the same. He needed time to get used to the idea.

‘Her son emailed. He might get a shock if we just ring,’ he said to Frankie. ‘Plus, there’s the time difference. We can’t ring now. Let’s email back.’

‘Well, she obviously wants to get in touch or she wouldn’t have agreed to her son doing this. It’s only natural that she should want to meet you, that must be the whole point of it, that’s what people do,’ said Frankie eagerly. ‘Who better to tell her about your mother? She’s sure to have lots of questions. And aren’t you curious to see her – find out what she’s like, what she looks like? I can’t wait to tell Emer and Alexei. They’re going to be so excited – just think, a whole new branch of the family they never knew existed. I’ll send them an email right away.’

‘We should probably take it slowly,’ Seth counselled. He worked out the dates. ‘Lillie’s sixty-four, ten years older than me.’

Frankie frowned slightly. He’d noticed that she didn’t like hearing how old he was. She’d suddenly become touchy about anything to do with age. When her driving licence had come up for renewal the previous month she’d been tight-lipped as she filled in the form, attaching an admittedly not very flattering photo of herself.

‘Bloody photo machines,’ she’d said, staring at it crossly. ‘Makes me look as if I’m about ninety and sitting on a stool of nails.’

‘You’re a mere sprite of forty-nine,’ Seth had said, trying to cheer her up. ‘Talking of which, we should organize something for your fiftieth next—’

‘No!’ Her shout startled them both. Recovering, she said lamely: ‘Sorry. I just meant that we don’t have the money, that’s all. It’s a lovely thought and all, darling. But no.’

So Seth added age to the list of things he and Frankie didn’t discuss any more.

Age, the house, the state of the garden, and how it was no use him even trying to get a job, because who would want to employ him? That in particular drove her insane. She refused to accept that losing his job had transformed him from a man with a career to a man with nothing.

It was so enormous, so emasculating. Frankie simply didn’t understand. The discovery of Lillie’s existence was all the more wonderful, because at last they had something they could talk about.

When Lillie’s son responded to their email by saying that his mother didn’t do emails, and that a letter would be the best way to talk to her, Frankie had flung her hands up in despair.

‘A letter,’ she groaned. ‘Nobody writes letters any more.’

‘Lillie probably does,’ said Seth, smiling. He wondered whether his sister’s handwriting would resemble the curling, light hand of their mother, as though an angel had danced across the page. And then he realized that, without his mother to teach her, Lillie probably wouldn’t write like that. Wasn’t handwriting a product of environment?

‘We’ll ask her to stay,’ Frankie went on. ‘He doesn’t mention whether other members of the family would be interested, but we should invite them too. We’ll have them all,’ said Frankie, as if this was the most obvious thing in the world.

‘Let’s start with Lillie,’ Seth said firmly.

His wife had always been generous and enthusiastic. Frankie’s glass wasn’t just half-full, it was brimming – and she wanted to share it with everyone. It was what made her so good with people and so good at her job. Nobody could resist an HR boss like Frankie.

It didn’t make her so easy to live with when you didn’t have a job, though.

He knew she couldn’t help contrasting his handling of the situation with the way she’d behave if her job was suddenly snatched out from under her. Frankie would go at it like a whirling dervish, turning everything upside down, tossing aside any obstacles that planted themselves in her path.

Her enthusiasm for Lillie’s visit had swept aside Seth’s reservations. But now that the time had arrived, they were starting to creep back into his mind. After all, this wasn’t a long-lost relative returning after a time away. This woman had never known her birth father and mother. She had been cast out of her homeland and sent to the other side of the world for adoption. What was she going to make of Seth, the child her mother had kept close?

Seth drove slowly into the airport car park, took the ticket from the machine and circled the floors of the multi-storey until he found a parking spot. He did everything slowly now. It was as if life itself had wound down. During the day, he watched TV and there’d been a programme on redundancy and its effect on people. He had all the worst symptoms and then some. With nothing being built because of the recession, nobody had any use for an architect, especially a fifty-four-year-old one. Even if a job did appear on the horizon, he was far too old and too qualified to start somewhere new and was, therefore, unemployable.

Slipping the parking ticket into the pocket of his navy corduroys, he walked towards arrivals. He was early enough to get a coffee and a paper, to sit and wait. Lillie’s son had emailed him a photograph so he would know what she looked like. It had been taken at a family gathering. Two strong Celtic-looking men – his nephews, he realized with a jolt – were standing beside their parents. Lillie appeared to be as tall as Jennifer had been and with similar colouring; she was standing beside a man who must have once been tall but looked to have shrunken, turned in on himself. He was smiling though.

Dad’s only been dead six months, Martin had said in his email. We think this is wonderful for Mum – finding you and going to stay with you. It’s really generous of you. Obviously, it’s been painful for everyone since Dad died, but particularly for Mum. They were married over forty years. I hope it all works out. Just email or phone if there’s any problem or if Mum gets upset. We’ll fly her home in an instant. I know you said she can stay indefinitely, and thank you for that. Mum wants to recompense you both for her visit.

Don’t worry, Seth had replied, we’ll take care of her, I promise. She can stay as long as she likes and I won’t hear of her paying anything. She’s family.

He hoped they’d be able to fulfil the promise of taking care of Lillie. Now that she was nearly here, he hoped he’d be able to love her. But it would be strange.

He’d read his paper from cover to cover and the coffee cup had been dispatched into a litter bin by the time people started trailing through the arrivals gate. Seth scanned the faces, wondering if he’d recognize her from the picture. He had made a sign with Lillie Maguire written on it, just in case, but he felt self-conscious standing there holding it. When he saw her, approaching slowly as if walking was hard for her, he knew her instantly. This woman pushing the trolley with two mismatched suitcases could only be his sister. She wasn’t as tall as he’d thought, but he was struck at once by the resemblance to his mother. It hadn’t been so noticeable in the picture but now, seeing her in the flesh, freckled from the Australian sun and wearing a bright coral top, it was as if he was looking at Jennifer. She, too, had worn her hair tied up in a bun with bits trailing around her face. Lillie’s eyes were the same as his mother’s. Even her mouth was the same, soft and curving in a sweet expression.

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