The Rose Garden (23 page)

‘But what if it’s not enough?’ worried Gina as they put in their offer for Norah Cassidy’s.

They waited on tenterhooks to see if it was accepted. But the local auctioneer came back twenty-four hours later to say that they had received a higher offer from the other party and asked if they wanted to increase their offer.

The bank had been quite clear with regard to the amount that they could borrow.

‘We are not going to bankrupt ourselves over this,’ warned Paul before phoning the auctioneer to say they would not be making another offer.

Gina tried to keep herself busy, hoping that by some miracle they would be successful. She was just about to close the café on Thursday evening when Martin Cassidy called in.

‘I came in to tell you that my aunt has accepted an offer to buy the premises,’ he told her. ‘Norah has decided the café will close on the twenty-fourth of December. It will not reopen in the New Year.’

Gina couldn’t believe it. She took a deep breath, glad that there were no customers around as she grabbed hold of the counter. In a way she had been expecting this …

‘My aunt is very grateful for your support in running the business in her absence, and of course you will be paid proper redundancy based on the length of time you have worked here,’ he said coldly.

‘Thank you,’ she replied, trying to control her emotions. ‘I’m going to really miss working here. What is going to happen to the café?’

‘The Armstrongs from the pub next door have bought it,’ he told her, ‘but I am not sure what their plans are.’

After he was gone Gina locked up, then sat at a table in the window looking out on the village street. It was almost dark and she made herself a large mug of coffee and took a slice of the frosted walnut cake, watching as the shops closed down and their lights went off along the street. She really was going to miss this place and the customers. Taking out her phone, she texted Paul to tell him the news. She’d go and see Norah in a few days when she was less upset. She imagined the older woman would be distressed about seeing her business and home sold.

An hour later, as she was locking up, she saw Bernadette Armstrong getting out of her car outside the Kilfinn Inn.

‘Bernadette, I just heard that you and Tom have bought Norah’s!’ she said, trying to stay calm and composed.

‘I’m sorry, Gina. I know that you and Paul were interested in keeping the café, but Tom’s had his eye on the place for years,’ Bernadette said, stopping to talk. ‘He spoke to Norah a few times about it, but she’d always say it was her home and she’d no intention of selling while she was alive.’

‘Are you going to keep the café open?’

‘No, we’re not,’ she confided. ‘We already do teas and coffees and lunches in the pub, so there’s no point. Tom wants to extend the bar – with Mulligan’s closed he wants to make a kind of men’s snug with a fireplace at the back and add more space for customers in the front. Also, with our own crew, it would be good to have a bit of extra living space upstairs over the pub. The kids kill each other, so it will be great that they can each have a room now that they are getting older and need to study.’

Gina let out a breath. It made sense, as the Kilfinn Inn was a busy village pub with music sessions on a Saturday night and the Armstrongs and their four teenage children lived above it.

‘I’m sorry, Gina, about you losing your job,’ Bernadette said kindly. ‘I’ll be sad to see Norah’s shut, but I suppose times change, don’t they?’

‘Yes, times change,’ she said, trying not to give in to her tears of disappointment.

Talking to Paul that night, Gina realized that owning the café had been almost a dream, and for someone like her dreams didn’t usually come true. But she was determined not to let Norah down, and to ensure that Cassidy’s Café said a proper final farewell to all its customers before it closed. She would put on lunch specials and afternoon teas, and the café would do its best to attract all their old customers back for that final coffee or cake or meal. She would put fairy lights up and decorate the window and make it so appealing that no one could pass by without wanting to come inside and sit down …

THE TWENTY-FIRST OF NOVEMBER. MOLLY STILL COULDN’T
believe that today it was three hundred and sixty-five days, a full year, since David’s death. She would never get used to it, or be able to accept that David would never walk into the room, turn his key in the front-door lock, phone her, talk to her, or touch her ever again …

Molly would never forget that day – an ordinary day, a Tuesday morning … They’d had breakfast together, Molly making coffee, putting the washing in the washing machine, making smalltalk, listening to the morning news on the radio as David grabbed his warm jacket and left for the office where he had an early-morning meeting with a client. It was cold outside, ice on their cars …

Why didn’t she kiss him? Some mornings they did, automatically brushing their lips together to say goodbye as he left to go to work. But on that day they hadn’t … She played it over and over again, like a film on a loop, remembering every word, every gesture, wondering whether if the day had gone differently would David still be alive …

She was upstairs having a shower. Coming out wrapped in a towel she could see the flashing on her phone. She had missed eight calls and before she could even try to reply the house phone on her bedside table went.

It was the police to say David had been in some sort of car accident and had been taken to the nearby regional hospital.

‘Is he okay?’ she kept asking again and again.

‘You need to come to the hospital immediately, Mrs Hennessy,’ advised the Garda officer.

They were sending a car for her. Barry O’Loughlin, a young Guard whose parents lived in the village, would drive her to the hospital. She was shaking as she got dressed, pulled on her boots and raced out to his car, her feet slipping.

‘He’s going to be fine,’ she kept saying, mantra-like, until she got to the hospital.

The A&E department sent her into the main hospital and up to the second floor.

‘My husband, David … David Hennessy, is here. They said that he was in a car accident.’

A doctor came out to talk to her. A beautiful, dark-eyed young woman from Pakistan, stylish and sympathetic, she made Molly sit down and sat calmly beside her to explain.

‘I’m afraid it is very bad news … the worst news … David is dead. He was dead when the ambulance crew came. It was very sudden – he died instantly.’

Molly refused to believe it. ‘No! No! No!’ she kept saying. ‘There’s been a mistake.’

The doctor brought her to a room where David lay on a trolley. He was absolutely still, eyes closed, all life gone from him, his skin already cold, and she knew when she kissed him and touched his cheek that the doctor’s words were true.

‘The car had pulled off the road, hit a hedge,’ she explained, ‘but you can see that there is only a slight abrasion on his forehead. There is also some bruising on his chest, probably from the safety belt, but otherwise very few injuries.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The autopsy will give us a better idea,’ the doctor said, ‘but we think that there is a good chance that David was already dead when his car came off the road, so he would have felt nothing.’

Molly was so confused, so upset.

Cara and Tim had come to the hospital immediately and
Michael Quinn from the office had appeared, also offering to do anything he could to help. Emma and Grace arrived about two hours later, both shocked and hysterical, wanting to see their dad …

Molly remembered having to tell David’s family. His elderly mother, Maureen, who was in a nursing home, was barely able to take it in; his two brothers and sister were devastated by the news.

The autopsy results two days later showed that David’s death was the result of a brain aneurysm which must have suddenly burst, rather than the accident. He would have lost control of the car, which had hit the roadside hedge. The only consolation Molly gained was that nobody else was involved or injured, and from what the doctors said David had died immediately. There had been absolutely no warning and no saving him.

The shock and suddenness had been horrendous. She remembered lying in bed shaking and shivering, covered in blankets, her teeth chattering as she realized that she would never see the man she loved again.

She could barely remember the following days, but she had to be strong for Emma and Grace, who were distraught and overwhelmed by the sudden loss of their dad, and she also had to try to organize his funeral.

Somehow she’d got through the ritual of waking David at home in Mossbawn – their family and friends all equally shocked by his loss – and then the large funeral mass in their parish church and his burial in the nearby graveyard. She remembered being stunned by the fact that David, who had organized everything meticulously in his life, had bought a plot in Kilfinn’s cemetery a few years earlier and never said a word to her about it.

The following weeks and months had been a blur as she tried to cope with the massive void in her life that David had left behind, the loneliness of it unbearable. People had been good and kind, supportive, but she still felt so alone, raw with grief and loss. Then as the months went on, she realized that the world kept turning, the seasons came and went, spring, summer, autumn and now
another winter … She could see it in the garden in Mossbawn.

Losing David had been heartbreaking and there were days when she questioned her will to go on, to continue living without him; but those days were fewer and fewer now as she began to take small step after small step towards building a life without him …

Father Darragh was saying an anniversary mass for the family this evening. David’s family were all attending and coming back to the house afterwards, but this morning she wanted to go to his grave on her own, have that time with him.

It was strange, but visiting the small graveyard on the other side of the village, which was protected by a grove of elms and overlooked a curving part of the hillside where cattle grazed in the springtime, Molly was comforted. The peace and quiet there, and the stillness, exuded the strong spirituality of a place where generation after generation of Kilfinn’s families lay buried. David had chosen well, for he was surrounded by the graves of neighbours and friends.

‘Good morning, Molly, ’tis a fierce cold day!’

She nodded to Dan White, the eighty-nine-year-old former postman, who was visiting his wife Lily’s grave. He came religiously every day.

Molly turned up to the section where David was buried.

She stood in the silence, listening to the wind and her own breathing, reading the writing on his headstone, leaving a bunch of bright winter pansies and some heather beside it.

Beloved. Beloved – her beloved …

Dan was right: it was cold – bloody freezing. She pulled her quilted North Face jacket tighter around her. She had a ham baking in the oven and when she got home would make some brown bread to serve with smoked salmon when everyone arrived back from the church.

Despite the cold it was peaceful here, in this place where her beloved, her David lay.

MOLLY HAD PLANNED TO DO A BIT OF TIDYING UP IN THE GARDEN,
but it had started to rain earlier and it had got heavier and heavier. Giving up the notion, she was engrossed reading
A History of Rose Growing
when Trish’s car pulled up outside.

‘Come inside out of the wet!’ she urged, opening the back door. ‘I’ve just made a pot of coffee. Is there some problem about the planning for the cottage? I’ve had Paul Sullivan working on repairing the roof all week and I thought that everything had got the go-ahead.’

‘It has nothing to do with the cottage, Molly,’ Trish said, sitting down.

‘Are you okay?’

‘No, I’m not … I’m stressed out about Libby’s wedding!’

Organizing a wedding was a bit of a marathon for everyone involved, but usually Trish was pretty calm and collected about things.

‘How are the plans coming?’ she ventured.

‘They’re not – that’s just it. Libby and Brian had put a deposit down on Foyle Castle in Tipperary, but they’ve just been told that the company that owns it has gone bankrupt and it’s had to close down. They have the church booked, the dress, everything practically done for their wedding, but now – nowhere to have a wedding!’

‘Oh my God! Trish, I’m so sorry!’

‘Larry’s going crazy and Brian’s parents … We are all so upset.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Molly asked, appalled by their predicament.

‘That’s the reason I’m here, Molly. I want to ask you something. If the answer is no, that’s absolutely fine – I’ll totally understand, but I promised Libby that I would at least ask you.’

Molly was intrigued.

‘When we were here at Grace’s twenty-first, Cara and I were just saying that this house was the perfect place for a big party or a wedding – and the thing is that we really need to find somewhere urgently … so we were wondering about here …’

‘Have Libby’s wedding here?’ she gasped.

‘Yes. I know it might sound a bit crazy, but it could work! Drinks and dancing in the orangery and eating in the dining room, like we all did at the party … It was such an amazing night!’

‘But you’d never fit everyone …’

‘Libby can scale things down – she’ll have to.’

‘Haven’t you tried the hotels in Kilkenny or the golf club? Or that new wedding barn place in Waterford?’

‘Molly – I wouldn’t ask you, but we’ve tried absolutely everywhere and everyone is totally booked out for at least a year.’

Molly didn’t know what to say.

‘We’d have it at home, but our own house is too small,’ she sighed. ‘The thing is that you are selling Mossbawn – which I know is awful for you, but maybe we could rent the house out for the day exactly the same as we were going to do with the castle?’

‘But Mossbawn is just a house. There are no big kitchens or proper bedrooms or facilities.’

‘It’s a lovely old country house and it was perfect for Grace’s twenty-first party. The food was amazing and with a big crowd it all worked so well,’ Trish reminded her. ‘We’ve been at so many lovely parties and dinners here over the years. For a wedding we can hire a caterer and people can stay in the hotel up the road or in some of the local B and Bs.’