The Honey Queen (5 page)

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 the 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’d 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.

P
eggy 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 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.