A Week in Winter (13 page)

He was sorry that Rosie and Macken would not have such a lovely old granny figure in their lives. They would tell them all about her. One day, when he was being carried to this graveyard they would tell their own children about the great Miss Queenie, a good relic of an often stormy past in Ireland.

There were no Sheedy relatives, and Rigger was asked to put the first spadeful of clay on the grave. He was followed by Chicky and Orla. And the great crowd stood in silence until Dr Dai, who had a powerful Welsh baritone, suddenly sang ‘Abide With Me’ and they all filed back down the hill.

Tea and sandwiches were served in Stone House.

Gloria had hunted high and low for Miss Queenie and sat confused outside the front door, washing furiously.

As soon as Orla was busy passing the food around she recovered enough to realise how many people had attended. Brigid and Foxy had come over from London. Miss Daly had heard from somebody and she turned up with one of the French dentists who had now become a close friend. All the O’Haras were there, their previous animosity forgotten; all the builders, the suppliers, the local farmers, the staff of the knitting factory and Aidan, a solicitor from a nearby town, who was said to fancy Chicky.

Miss Queenie would have clapped her hands and said, ‘Imagine them all turning up for me! How very kind!’

Aidan drew Orla aside to tell her that Miss Queenie had made her will last week. She had left everything she owned to Chicky apart from two tiny legacies, one to Rigger and one to Orla.

He also asked Orla whether she thought Chicky might go out with him to dinner if he asked her nicely.

Orla said that maybe he should wait until Stone House had opened to the public. Chicky was very centred on that at the moment, but she reassured Aidan that there was nobody else on the scene.

‘I’d be no trouble,’ he told her.

‘God, isn’t that a great recommendation,’ Orla said, fervently looking at some uncles and the woeful Foxy.

‘Must say, Barbara and Howard did a great job on this place,’ Foxy said approvingly.

‘Didn’t they just?’ Chicky agreed.

Rigger was about to open his mouth and say how unhelpful they had been but Orla frowned. Life was short. Chicky had decided to play it this way. Let it go.

Only a few days to go and the first guests would arrive. They were nearly full. Only one room remained unoccupied. Orla and Chicky sat down every evening going over the list of people. They were coming from Sweden, England and Dublin. Some by car, some by train. Rigger had been alerted to everyone’s arrival times.

They went over the menus again and again checking that they had every ingredient. They tried to envisage all these people sitting around their table at night and assembling for breakfast each morning. They had left a selection of magazines and novels in the Miss Sheedy Room; they had maps and bird books and guide books at the ready. Wellington boots, umbrellas and mackintoshes were all available in the boot room.

Gloria had gradually got over her short period of mourning for Miss Queenie and returned to sit by the fire with a purr that would soothe the most troubled heart.

‘You have your running-away money now, Orla,’ Chicky said on the last evening.

‘I
always
had my running-away money,’ Orla said.

‘It’s just that I won’t hold you back. You’ve delivered everything you promised and more.’

‘Why is everyone trying to get rid of me?’ Orla asked. ‘Queenie was the same. The night before she died she said I couldn’t marry the seagulls and the gannets in Stoneybridge.’

‘And she was right,’ Chicky agreed.

‘But what about
you
? Aidan was asking after you.’

‘Oh, give over, Orla!’

‘I bet Walter would have liked you to marry again.’

‘Yes, indeed.’

‘So?’

‘So what? Grab Dr Dai from his wife? Take Father Johnson out of the priesthood? Go online offering “rich widow with own business”?’ Chicky laughed. ‘It’s
you
we are talking about. You’ve only one life, Orla.’

‘So what’s wrong with living it here for a while?’ Orla asked. ‘It would be more than a human could bear to go before we had the first year of running the place over us.’

Chicky sank back in her chair. Gloria stretched approvingly.

The grandfather clock in the hall struck midnight.

This was the day that Stone House would open its doors to the public. They wouldn’t sit alone in this kitchen for many a night to come.

They raised their glasses to each other, and outside the waves crashed on the shore and the wind whipped through the trees.

Winnie

O
f course Winnie would like to have married. Or to have had a long-term partner. Who wouldn’t?

To have someone there out for your good. Someone you could share with and eventually have children with. It was obvious that was what she wanted. But not at any price.

She would never have married the drunk that one friend had – a man who got so abusive at the wedding party that the ripples were still felt years later.

She would not have married the control freak, or the miser. But a lot of the men her friends had married were good, warm, happy people who had made their lives very complete.

If only there was someone like that out there.

And if there was, how could Winnie find him? She had tried internet dating, speed dating and going to clubs. None of it had worked.

When she was in her early thirties, Winnie had more or less given up on it all. She had a busy life: a nurse doing agency work, one day here, one night there, in the Dublin hospitals. She went to the theatre, met friends, went to cookery classes and read a lot.

She couldn’t say life was sad and lonely. It was far from that, but she would love to have been able to meet someone and know that this was the right one. Just know.

Winnie was an optimist. On the wards they always said she was a great nurse to work with because she always saw something to be pleased about. The patients liked her a lot – she always made time to reassure them and tell them how well they were doing and how much modern medicine had improved. She wasted no time moaning in hospital canteens that the men of Ireland were a sorry lot. She just got on with it.

She was still vaguely hopeful that there was love out there somewhere – just a little less sure that she might actually find it.

It was on her thirty-fourth birthday that she met Teddy.

She had gone with three girlfriends – all of them married, all of them nurses – to have dinner at Ennio’s restaurant down on the quays by the Liffey. Winnie wore her new silver and black jacket. She had been persuaded by the hairdresser to get a very expensive conditioning treatment for her hair. The girls said she looked great, but then they always told her that. It just hadn’t seemed to work in terms of attracting a life partner.

It was a lovely evening, with the staff all coming to the table and singing ‘Happy Birthday’, a drink of some Italian liqueur, on the house. At the next table two men watched them admiringly. They sang ‘Happy Birthday’ so lustily that the restaurant included them in the complimentary drink. They were polite and anxious not to impose.

Peter said he was a hotelier from Rossmore and that his friend was Teddy Hennessy who made cheese down in that part of the world. They came to Dublin every week because Peter’s wife and Teddy’s mother liked to go to a show. The men preferred to try out a new restaurant each time. This was their first visit to Ennio’s.

‘And does your wife not come to Dublin too?’ Fiona asked Teddy, quite pointedly.

Winnie felt herself flush. Fiona was testing the ground, seeing was Teddy available. Teddy didn’t seem to notice.

‘No, I don’t have a wife. Too busy making cheese, everyone says. No, I’m fancy-free.’ He was boyish and eager; he had soft fair hair falling into his eyes.

Winnie thought she felt him looking at her.

But she must not become foolish and over-optimistic. Maybe he could see that, of the four women, she was the only one without a wedding ring. Maybe it was pure imagination.

The conversation was easy. Peter told them about his hotel. Fiona had tales of the heart clinic where she worked. Barbara described some of the disasters her husband David had faced setting up his pottery works. Ania, the Polish girl, who had trained late as a nurse, showed them pictures of her toddler.

Teddy and Winnie said little, but they looked at each other appreciatively, learning little about each other except that they were comfortable to be there. Then it was time for the men to go and pick up the ladies from the theatre. The drive to Rossmore would take two hours.

‘I hope we meet again,’ Teddy said to Winnie.

The three other women busied themselves saying heavy goodbyes to Peter.

‘I hope so,’ Winnie said. Neither of them made any move to give a phone number or address.

Peter did it for them in the end.

‘Can I give you ladies my business card, and if you know of any other good restaurants like this you could pass them on to us?’ he said.

‘That’s great, Peter. Oh, Winnie, do you have a card there?’ Fiona said meaningfully.

Winnie wrote her email address and phone number on the back of a card advertising Ennio’s Good Value Wine. And then the men were gone.

‘Really, Fiona, you might as well have put a neon sign over my head saying
Desperate Spinster
,’ Winnie protested.

Fiona shrugged. ‘He was nice. What was I to do, let him escape?’

‘Cheesemaking!’ Barbara reflected. ‘Very restful, I’d say.’

‘Mrs Hennessy . . . That has a nice sound to it,’ said Ania with a smile.

Winnie sighed. He was nice, certainly, but she was way beyond having her hopes raised by chance encounters.

Teddy rang Winnie the next day. He was going to be in Dublin again at the weekend. Would Winnie like to meet him for a coffee or something?

They talked all afternoon in a big sunny café. There was so much to say and to hear. She told him about her family – three sisters and two brothers, scattered all over the world. She said it was a series of goodbyes at the airport and tears and promising to come out to visit, but Winnie had never wanted to go to Australia or America. She was a real home bird.

Teddy nodded in agreement. He was exactly the same. He never wanted to go too far from Rossmore.

When Winnie was twelve her mother had died and the light had gone out of the house. Five years later her father had married again; a pleasant, distant woman called Olive who made jewellery and sold it at markets and fairs around the country. It was hard to say whether she
liked
Olive or not. Olive was remote and seemed to live in another world.

Teddy was an only child and his mother was a widow. His father had been killed in an accident on the farm many years ago. His mother had gone out to work in the local creamery to earn the money to send him to a really good school. He had enjoyed it there but his mother was very disappointed that he had not become a doctor or a lawyer. That would have been a reward for the long, hard hours she had worked.

He loved making cheese. He had won several prizes and it was a good, steady little business. He met a lot of good people and was even able to give employment in Rossmore to workers who might have had to go away and find jobs abroad. His mother, who had turned out to be a superb businesswoman after her years in the creamery, did the accounts for him and was very involved in the business.

Winnie told of her life as a nurse, and explained what it meant to be registered with an agency. You literally didn’t know where you were going to work tomorrow. It might be one of the big shiny new private hospitals; it could be a busy inner-city hospital, a maternity wing or a home for the elderly. In many ways it was great because there was huge variety, but in other ways it meant that you didn’t get to know your patients very well – there wasn’t as much continuity or involvement in their care.

They had both been to Turkey on holiday, they liked reading thrillers and they had both been the victims of well-meaning friends trying to fix them up on dates and marry them off. Either it would happen or it wouldn’t, they told each other companionably. But they knew they would meet again very soon.

‘I
have
enjoyed today,’ he said.

‘Maybe I could cook you a meal next time?’

His face lit up.

And after that he was part of her life. Not a huge part, but there maybe twice a week.

For several visits to her flat he left before midnight and drove the long road back to Rossmore. Then one evening he asked if she might agree that, perhaps, he could stay the night. Winnie said that would be very agreeable indeed.

Once or twice, they even went away for a weekend together but it had to be a short weekend. She soon learned that nothing could or would change his mother’s plans. Teddy could never be free on a Friday because that was the evening that he took his mother to dinner in Peter’s hotel.

Yes, every single Friday, he said regretfully. It was such a small thing, and Mam did love it so much. And when you thought about all she had given up for him over the years . . .

Winnie pondered about this to herself. He didn’t
seem
like a mummy’s boy, but she felt that he was nervous of introducing her to his mother. As if she might not pass some test. But this was fanciful. He was a grown man. She wouldn’t rush it.

Instead, she concentrated on the idea of their taking a little holiday together.

Winnie had heard about this place that was opening in the West called Stone House. The picture on the brochure had looked very attractive. It showed a big table where all the guests would get together in the evening, a cute little black and white cat sitting beside a roaring fire; it promised excellent, home-cooked food, and comfort, with walks and birdwatching and the chance to explore the spectacular coastline.

Wouldn’t that be a great place for her to go with Teddy? If only she could prise him away and break the hold of those precious Friday nights with his mother.

His mother!

She had better get the meeting over and done with before she suggested whisking the dotey boy off to the West of Ireland! But on the other hand, this place looked as if it might be really popular. Teddy would just love the idea when it was presented to him, and if it didn’t suit him she could always cancel the reservation . . .