Homecoming (15 page)

‘Gran, do you know how to set up documents and stuff like that? ‘Cause I can key in whatever you want,’ Gillian offered.

Eleanor thought of all the things she wanted to write.

‘No, my dearest, I’ll type it in myself. You’re never too old, right?’

At the window of the cosy apartment in Golden Square, Eleanor thought back to that day. What age had Gillian been? Fifteen, sixteen?

She was such a loving girl. Never talking back or sassy to her parents. Not a saint, either. But a smiling person who walked into a room and made it a happier place.

When you were fifteen, your grandmother seemed ancient. Older than time itself. But Eleanor hadn’t felt old then, for all that she had to have been knocking eighty.

Age was a state of mind, she liked to say then. She and Ralf enjoyed doing crosswords and sudoku. They adored quiz shows, and many a holiday had been spent playing Trivial Pursuit.

Granted, Ralf took a handful of pills in the morning and his knees were so arthritic, he creaked when he got out of bed.

Eleanor herself suffered from high blood pressure.

‘It’s familial,’ said her doctor when she calmly pointed out that she was the least stressed person she knew. ‘Take the drugs, Eleanor. It’s not a comment on your mental state.’

Despite all of that, she hadn’t felt old. Until now.

She’d gone to the doctor in Golden Square to have her blood pressure checked yesterday, and had sat in the waiting room with the only person she’d seen around who was of her vintage. Eleanor was not used to chatting with strangers in the doctor’s waiting room, but nobody had told Pearl Mills that. A small, white-haired lady, Mrs Mills was accompanied by her son, a giant of a man who was clearly mentally disabled. Pearl had smiled broadly at Eleanor when she arrived.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Pearl. This is Terence. You must be the lady who has taken Carolyn Taylor’s flat.’

Within five minutes of talking to Pearl, Eleanor was overcome with enormous sympathy for Pearl’s bravery.

‘Terence and I will be going to Lourdes later this year,’ Pearl confided as they waited in the simple room decorated with calming pictures of landscapes.

Eleanor didn’t know much about the Marian shrine, so Pearl told her all about it and the comfort she got from it.

‘The people helping the invalids are wonderfully kind,’ Pearl said. ‘It’s like my burden is shared when I’m there. Not,’ she added quickly, putting a hand on Terence as if he might be offended, ‘that it’s a burden, really, but you know, taking care of him can be hard.’

Eleanor wanted to cry at the bravery of this frail woman with her huge burden and her even bigger heart.

Terence was calm enough sitting there, although Eleanor wondered was he always so placid and how tiny Pearl might manage such times. He was deaf, Pearl explained, and his limited speech was very hard to understand, but Pearl understood and talked to him gently.

‘Is it expensive to go to Lourdes?’ Eleanor asked, then regretted it.

Pearl’s tiny wrinkled face had fallen. ‘Very,’ she said. ‘We haven’t much money, you know, and it’s hard to stretch what little we have to fill all the gaps. But we’ll manage. I have to give him all I can. While I’m still here.’

There was silence, the sort of silence Eleanor was well used to. In therapy, huge things could be said and then a silence was required as the speaker considered the enormity of what they’d just uttered out loud.

‘That must be a big worry for you,’ Eleanor said neutrally.

‘Oh yes.’ Pearl patted Terence again. Her eyes shone brightly with unshed tears. ‘Who will look after him when I’m gone? They have good homes for people like Terence, you know, but I couldn’t send him there. He’d be lost without me. I’ve always taken care of him.’

At that moment, Eleanor thought despairingly of her mother’s book. There was much in it about death, although Eleanor had avoided those parts when she’d been flicking through it. She knew her mother’s words would help. They were written from the heart, all her lessons on life, pain, happiness and food. But right now, Eleanor couldn’t bear to read the lessons. She was grieving too much.

Then the doctor had poked her head round the waiting-room door and Pearl had gone in with Terence, leaving Eleanor on her own, thinking.

Eleanor realised now she was staring out into Golden Square again instead of working on her diary for Gillian.

She’d never kept a diary, not the way her mother had, and it was harder than she’d thought, this writing down of truths, even for a woman who’d studied human truths and how to impart them.

But there was so much she wanted to tell Gillian, so many lessons. She needed to do it before it was too late. All the things Eleanor had learned would be lost and Gillian would have to live her life without knowing.

That you could always change your mind.

That people were fundamentally good.

That guilt and self-doubt never helped anyone.

That you needed to love and respect yourself before turning your attention to anyone else.

Gillian had grown up being loved, and she seemed to know a lot of this, but Eleanor wanted to make sure. She wanted to pass her wisdom on, the way her own mother had done.

Since she’d come to Golden Square, Brigid’s voice was often in her head in a way it hadn’t been for years.

Even important dates reminded her of her mother.

It was coming close to Imbolg, the Celtic festival of light. Rebirth after the darkness of the winter.

It fell on the first full moon in February, signalling the end of the ice of winter.

Brigid had been very keen on the old Irish legends and stories, and Eleanor had grown up knowing them as well as she knew the stories of the saints they taught in school.

In Kilmoney at Imbolg it would still be cold with an icy wind racing in from the sea. Despite that, Mam, Granny and Aunt Agnes would decorate the house with the first wild flowers and would cook up a special feast that was for the women only. The men would go off down the road to play cards in Grimes’ bar while their womenfolk sat and talked up a storm, drinking strong tea and eating the leftover Christmas cake specially kept for the night.

It was the start of lambing and she could remember her father, Joe, being out in the freezing night helping with the early lambing. Sometimes, a sheep would reject her lamb and Eleanor’s father would carry the squirming soft bundle home, where it would be raised in the kitchen for a few weeks, bottle fed with an old bottle and a baby’s teat. Lambs looked so delicate but they were strong in reality, pushing at the bottle with those fiercely strong faces, urging for more and more milk.

Had life been more simple then? When it was harder merely to survive, did people get on with it and not tangle themselves in knots over who they were and why life had shaped them a certain way?

Eleanor no longer knew.

After a lifetime of thinking she understood life, she now felt as if she’d been nothing but a voyeur all along. As a therapist, she’d seen client after client and listened to their stories, yet she’d never really been part of their world. What had she done to help them? She didn’t know. She couldn’t even help herself now.

She must have been crazy to come on this trip to Ireland. She’d thought it would give her peace, but it hadn’t, not yet. Where would it all lead?

8
Soup

Your aunt Agnes got the most wonderful cookbook from Mrs Fitzmaurice.

Some foreign lady had left it behind in the big house, although Agnes and myself laughed at the notion of a real lady knowing the slightest thing about cooking. Not that I knew many ladies, but being in service in the big house, Agnes met them all. None of them knew how to cook, although they probably thought they did on account of all the time they spent discussing menus with their housekeepers. There could be seven courses easily at a meal, Agnes told us, with soups, salads, terrines, fowl, meat, syllabubs, ices.

The cookbook was French, written by a Madame St Martin, and we pored over it. There were sauces for everything and Madame St Martin insisted that copper-bottomed pans were an absolute necessity. We ignored that bit on account of not having copper anything. My best cooking pot had a heavy iron bottom that the gypsy metal man had put on for me. You could put a hard bit of lamb shoulder in there for hours without it ever getting overcooked, and at the end it would simply melt off the bone.

Madame St Martin’s chicken soup had loads of garlic in it and it was a miracle.

That winter, there was a lot of snow and Joe spent most of his time out in the byre with cows that were calving. He’d come in perished with the cold, and I got into the habit of having a pot of chicken soup on the range.

Up to then, I’d only known how to make a bit of gruel, so the chicken soup was a godsend.

Your aunt Agnes said we should write to Madame St Martin and tell her how well it had all gone, and I said that was a great idea. We never got round to writing that letter, but I like to think that every time we cooked her chicken soup, I said thanks in my heart.

Connie hated February for two reasons: the winter gloom and Valentine’s Day. She did her best to ignore them both. During February, she never bought magazines because they were full of recipes for romantic dinners for two. Instead, she went to the local library every week and immersed herself in crime novels. Crime scenes, bodies, cops arguing with the Feds and a nice detective with personal problems and a case to solve. Perfect.

She also worked on her list. Her fantasy ideal man list.

Long legs.
Definitely.

Had to be taller than she was.

No children, ex-wives or former girlfriends he was still in love with.

Great sense of humour a must.

Fit, but not obsessed with the gym. Not a yoga person.

No insane mother in the background who didn’t like him dating people.
Connie had never personally gone out with such a man, but a colleague had, and Connie had told her right off that any man who’d cancel a night out because
‘Mummy isn’t in the mood to be left all on her own’
, was not a serious proposition for happiness.

All his own hair,
obviously. None of that comb-over or pernickety fluffed-up hair that couldn’t be touched. Connie had once, briefly, dated a man who was going bald and it was as if his entire life’s work was hiding this fact. Connie’s affectionate nature had been rebuffed because head-stroking wasn’t allowed in case it ruined the careful arrangement of the front of his hair. Tom was the man’s name and the romance hadn’t lasted. He spent much more time looking in mirrors than Connie ever did. He used a lot of hairspray on the fluffy bit of hair he had left at the front, and God forbid that the wind should blow it back to expose his forehead. Connie felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to keep seeing him. She liked people who were realistic. If you were going bald, it made sense to have one of those short haircuts and be done with it. Connie was realistic about herself: after all,
she
didn’t think she was Angelina Jolie, now, did she?

She liked working on her list. It was fun, a bit like having double chocolate chip cookies in bed with hot milk watching a soppy film. A guilty secret. Even talking about the list would be like admitting that she had given up on finding a real man and was now entering the realms of fantasy man.

It would be like saying ‘I love romance novels and costume dramas with Mr Darcy-ish men,’ and she could never own up to that because people would laugh at her.

Strangely, she’d wanted to tell Megan that first day in Titania’s Palace. She’d had the weirdest feeling that Megan would understand that it was easier to imagine a fantasy man than place any trust in the world of real men. And then she’d come to her senses. Saying she was pretty much done with love herself might have sounded defeatist.

Megan might have been bruised by love but she had time on her side. Time to find endless men and reject them.

Connie had no time left.

Without Mr Perfect, there would be no baby nuzzling into her breast, looking up at her adoringly. She never made a list about babies, their names, whether she wanted a girl or a boy: that would have hurt too much and too deeply. No, a fantasy list about a perfect man was a nice way to wile the hours away.

When Megan had come to Connie and Nicky’s for dinner shortly after they’d first met up, Freddie had been banished so the three women could have a female-only night.

‘I’d like to meet her,’ grumbled Freddie.

‘You will,’ said Nicky, ‘but she’s coming for a nice comforting girlie dinner because Connie says that’s what she needs, not to be looked at by someone who has seen her first film four times and used the freeze frame till he almost wore the DVD out.’

Connie had smiled at Nicky’s wonderful confidence: she trusted Freddie’s love for her and she trusted in her own sense of self. Nicky didn’t imagine that Freddie would be blinded by Megan’s looks or status.

Megan had been visibly anxious when she’d arrived, bearing a pot of white hyacinths as a gift.

But Connie’s huge welcome and Nicky’s impressed, ‘Oh, you are so tiny, even smaller than you look on the television!’ had instantly broken the ice.

‘You’re the teeny, tiny generation,’ Connie laughed. ‘I’m part of the Amazonian goddess generation and you pair are the small pixie generation. I hope you brought your appetite,’ she added to Megan, enveloping her in a big hug. ‘I’ve ordered deluxe pizza, garlic dough balls and coleslaw.’

‘Connie’s a slave to coleslaw,’ Nicky revealed.

‘And Diet Coke,’ Connie added, ‘as a sop to our figures. Well,
my
figure.’

It had been an enjoyable evening. Nicky and Megan got on like a house on fire, and only the fact that both Connie and Nicky had work the following morning broke it up before midnight.