The image on the screen was a black-and-white selfie in which Eileen’s eyes were a startling sapphire blue.
‘How cool is that? There are so many options! What d’you think?’
Without waiting for the others’ response, she swiped to the phone’s camera. ‘So what I thought was, let’s do a shot of the three of us and give us bright red lips!’
Her hair was expertly tousled and her makeup looked freshly applied. Evidently she’d prepared for this with an afternoon at a salon.
Out of the corner of her eye, Aideen saw Bríd looking annoyed. A long day behind the deli counter had left them both feeling knackered, and no app was going to make them look half as good as Eileen. Then, to Aideen’s relief, Bríd summoned a smile and nodded. ‘Okay, let’s do it but, for God’s sake, get a move on.’
Eileen bit her lip. ‘Oh, I’m sorry! Am I being awful? I didn’t mean to turn up at a bad time.’
Aideen felt dreadful. ‘Of course not. You haven’t. Anyway, I told you to come. Look, have a piece of cake first and we’ll do the photo in a minute.’
‘Not at all, I won’t. We’ll do it now. I’m in your way.’ She shuffled her chair, held out the phone, and the others leaned in on either side of her. ‘Okay, all together, big cheesy smiles!’
Having fired off a burst of shots, Eileen swiped through them on the screen. Each photo showed her looking even more fabulous, while Aideen’s and Bríd’s expressions ranged from fatuous to mad.
Catching Bríd’s eye, Aideen fought to keep from giggling. The addition of bright red lips was going to make the three of them look like characters in Burlesque, but Eileen seemed to think they were perfectly fine. Shrugging on her jacket and putting her phone in her bag, she enveloped Bríd in another hug and blew Aideen a kiss. ‘You’re both stars, and I’m so glad, and I’d love to stay but you’re up to your eyes and, besides, I have to fly because I’ve got another appointment. Check out the pic when I put it up. See you soonest!’
As the door slammed, Aideen halved the slice of chocolate cake, pushing a fork across the table to Bríd. They ate several bites in silence before Aideen spoke. ‘I am going to contain this, I promise.’
‘Don’t be daft, you’re the bride. I’m the one who’s supposed to deal with the crap stuff.’
‘But you can’t deal with Eileen. All you can do is play along, and I don’t want you to have to.’
‘What you mean is you know that if I took over, sparks would fly.’
‘All right, yes. And I don’t want them to. Eileen’s mad as a box of frogs, but she’s Joe’s fiancée, and Joe is Conor’s brother.’
‘So?’
‘I don’t want Conor upset.’
‘Oh, Aideen!’
‘What?’
‘There’s months of this ahead of you. You haven’t even set the actual date yet. If Eileen’s pushing you around over a stupid photo on Instagram, what’s she going to be like when you get to the real stuff? And, incidentally, when’s that going to happen? You can’t book a venue till you’ve settled on a date.’
‘I know. And I have asked her. But she’s awfully hard to pin down.’
Bríd abandoned the chocolate cake and started to clatter the plates onto a tray. Feeling a lump rise in her throat, Aideen put her head down and said nothing. Suddenly Bríd sat down again, her hands still gripping the tray. ‘We’re not at school now, you know.’
They’d all known each other at school, when Eileen had been a prefect while Aideen was a lowly junior. And when Bríd had been in fifth form Eileen had already left. Aideen sighed. Of course the obsolete pecking order should be irrelevant now, but maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe it was.
‘Ade, if you don’t want a double wedding, you’ve got to come out and say so.’
‘I do want one.’
‘Why? So Eileen’s dad will put money in the farm?’
‘Stop bullying me. It’s complicated. It’s not just about the money. And it’s not just about me. This is Conor’s wedding, too, and Joe’s his brother. And Eileen’s going to be my sister-in-law. I want us to get along. It’s about family, Bríd. My new family.’
Looking up, Aideen saw Bríd’s face. ‘Oh, don’t. I’m not saying you’re not family. I’m not. Of course you are. That’s why you’re my bridesmaid. And I’m not saying you’re not right about stuff because most of the time you are. But, honestly, Bríd, I’ve got to think about Conor. That’s what marriage is about.’
Chapter Six
The place known as the Hag’s Glen was called Móinéar na Méine in Irish, which was why the site Brian Morton had bought there appeared on the map as ‘Moneymenny’. When you typed the Irish name into an online translator it came up as ‘the meadow of desire’, followed by stipulations that it could equally well be ‘the rough grassland of yearning’ or ‘the poor place of need’. But having spent years working in a council planning office, Brian was well used to anomalies thrown up by translations of Irish place names.
The origins of the Hag’s Glen name were a mystery, though Fury O’Shea insisted it was barely two hundred years old. The houses there had been abandoned, he said, back in the time of the Famine, but one old crone who’d refused to leave with her family had lived on alone.
‘And, what, people called her a witch or something?’
‘Not at all, man, she was a perfectly respectable woman. She just didn’t fancy taking the American boat. You couldn’t blame her at her age – they say she was pushing ninety. Anyway, she stayed on and lived till she died and they called it “the Hag’s Glen”.’
The trouble was that you couldn’t believe a word Fury said. He had a firm belief that architects, like dogs, had to be taught their place in a pack and, in this instance, it was well below the youngest labourer’s: Brian wasn’t just an architect but a blow-in to boot.
Well into his seventies, Fury O’Shea was a byword for eccentricity. Despite this, and Fury’s mendacious claim that he couldn’t do forms or estimates because he’d never learned to read, Brian always championed him as the best builder in Finfarran. And despite Brian’s refusal to be bamboozled by his posturing, Fury held that, for a blow-in from Wicklow, Brian was game ball.
Brian hadn’t argued about the name of the land he’d bought. There had been plenty of other things to argue about – including whether it was a proper place to build a house at all. And there were lots of people whose initial response was to tell him he was mad. Chiefly his colleagues in the planning office, who were rigorous in their capacity as professionals and bewildered when they talked to him as friends. Why would anyone make a planning application with so many inherent difficulties? And was he out of his mind entirely deciding to build in the back of beyond?
With boxes to be ticked, letters to be written, and endless justifications to be made in the course of the planning process, Brian could have fallen out with people he needed to have onside. But, by doggedly sticking to facts and containing his feelings, he’d jumped through all the required hoops and got his permission in the end. And now, long months later, the house in the Hag’s Glen was almost complete.
He’d discovered the upland river valley last summer, on a sparkling day when every blade of grass seemed tipped with light. Turning off the motorway halfway down the peninsula, he’d taken a road that ran between cliffs and forest, and struck inland along a farm track, planning a mountain hike. Having left his car near the farmyard, where a sheepdog had growled warningly, he’d set off across little fields that soon gave way to commonage studded with heather and furze. Then, following sheep paths, he’d zigzagged towards Knockinver’s northern shoulder.
The rising ground was treacherous in places, where old turf cuttings half filled with water were overgrown. Brian was absentmindedly wishing he’d brought a stick when a steep scramble took him to the rock from which he’d first seen the valley.
It was stunning. Broad-based and with curving sides, it tapered to a rocky cleft at its head, where the peat-brown river fell as a slender waterfall, b
efore widening into a broad stream. Grouped on the riverbank were the ruined walls of half a dozen dwellings. From his vantage point Brian could see that a spur from the track he’d taken as far as the farmhouse ran on round the base of the hill to the entrance of the valley. There couldn’t be more than five hundred yards between the fallen walls below him and the point where the spur petered out. Yet no farm or road would be visible from the valley and, except for the sound of the waterfall, there was no sound at all.
His hike forgotten, he’d climbed down, taking photos all the way. The soil in the valley was stony and the ruined buildings small, and he’d understood why it might have been called ‘the poor place of need’. But, for him, from that first moment, it was the meadow of desire. He’d known at once that he wanted to build a house there.
His flat in Carrick had never been more than a staging post, though somehow he’d found himself stuck there for years. Privacy was important to him and the impersonal low-rise apartment block provided plenty of that. In one sense the valley offered more of the same, but it was the wild beauty of the place that enchanted him, and the chance to design a space that was wholly his own. When he’d first brought Hanna up to the site, she’d understood exactly what he meant.
‘It feels like a haven. Or, no, since it’s you, maybe I mean an artist’s palette.’
Someone else might have bustled in and started telling him how he ought to design it. Hanna had sat beside him in silence as they drank in the view.
Fury had been scathing from the outset. ‘Name of God, do you know the cost of dragging the makings of a house all the way up there?’
‘I do.’
‘And you’re going to put in an access road, I suppose, and sink a well and generate your own power.’
‘That’s the plan.’
‘And you’ve noticed there isn’t a pint of milk to be had within miles.’
‘I have, yes.’
Fury, a scarecrow figure standing on the empty site in a torn waxed jacket, had thrown up his beaky nose with a sniff of disgust. ‘Well, you’re a fool, man. And I’m telling you that from the start, so don’t blame me later.’
‘You’re up for the job, though?’
‘Oh, I’ll take it, I suppose, if the money’s right. Anyone planning to build up here will want to have deep pockets, so be warned.’
They’d agreed on a notional price there and then, and shaken hands on it, something that Brian had no intention of letting anyone know. His colleagues would think that he’d lost what wits he had left to him, but he knew Fury of old. Arrogant and stubborn though the old man might be, he was honest to a fault, and nobody took a greater pride in his work.
Having spat on his palm and shaken hands, Fury had turned and tramped down the valley to where he’d parked his van next to Brian’s car. His little Jack Russell terrier, known as The Divil, flung itself barking against the windscreen as soon as it saw them approach. Ignoring him, Fury had leaned against the van and extracted a roll-up cigarette from behind his left ear. ‘Will we have a drink to seal the bargain?’
‘I suppose we should.’
‘Trust me, by the time this job’s over, you won’t have the price of this fag, let alone a drink.’
In a little pub over a couple of pints, with The Divil eating Tayto at their feet, Fury had cocked a shaggy eyebrow at Brian. ‘I wouldn’t have had you pegged as a man for romance.’
‘And now you have?’
‘Well, can you blame me? Jesus, you must have been reared on the Lakeland poets. Or Walter Scott.’
‘And there was I believing the story that you’ve never read a book.’
Fury shot him a sly grin. ‘You learned poetry by rote in my day. The master bawled out each line and the lads all gave them back.’
‘And Walter Scott?’
‘God, I loved that film Kidnapped. All them gloomy castles in dark, mysterious glens.’
‘Robert Louis Stevenson. Not Scott.’
‘Really?’ Fury scratched The Divil with his boot. ‘Well, that’s me. Illiterate. Still, I well remember the poems. “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came . . .”’
‘Browning. Not one of the Lakeland poets.’
‘Are you sure?’
Brian finished his pint and put his glass on the table. ‘When can you start?’
‘The job? Soon as you like.’
‘Because now that I’m good to go I want to get on.’
Leaning back in his chair, Fury had smiled knowingly. ‘You see, that’s what I mean. Romantic. You’re building a house for Hanna Casey, aren’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s no secret the two of you are an item.’
‘God, Fury, you’re a hell of an old gossip. No, I’m not building a house for Hanna Casey. She’s got a house of her own.’
‘Oh, right so. Well, maybe I’m the romantic.’
Pointedly refusing to rise to the bait, Brian had nodded at The Divil. ‘Will we have another round?’
‘My shout. You’ll probably go getting smoky bacon and he’s a salt and vinegar man.’
Over the second drink, they’d roughed out a broad schedule, starting with access and the generator, then working through the phases of the build. By the time The Divil had fallen asleep with his nose in his crisps packet, Fury had lost his customary air of languor and Brian himself had been itching to begin.
That had been more than a year ago, and in the following months he’d been consumed by the complexities of the task. Now, however, with the house only weeks from completion, he found himself focusing more and more on something he had to tell Hanna.
Chapter Seven
Jazz glanced down at the nuns’ garden. One of the nicest things about her office was having this desk by the window. It overlooked a fountain where water gushed from stone flowers round the feet of a statue of St Francis. The shallow basin with its broad rim was the centre point of the garden, in which the carefully tended herb beds were separated by box hedging and narrow gravelled paths.
Although an old wall had been taken down to make an entrance from Broad Street, the nuns’ garden still retained a sense of cloistered tranquillity: the visual rhythms of its formal layout were soothing, and the trees were full of birdsong. Each morning one of the volunteers who worked there waded through the water to pour birdseed into the weathered saint’s extended hands.
This ritual, begun by the nuns, must by now have become part of the birds’ communal memory. As Jazz watched, a flight of goldcrests swooped from an alder to the fountain, pecking and snatching at the food and whirling back to the trees. The flurry of gold and olive plumage echoed the colours of the stained-glass roundel in the window at her elbow. It would be hard to think of a better place to work.
The door opened and Saira Khan stuck her head in, asking if Jazz was free.
‘Sure, come on in. I’m due to have lunch in the café with Eileen but I’m not moving till I see the whites of her eyes. She’s twenty minutes late already.’
Saira murmured that Eileen must be very busy. ‘Weddings take a lot of work.’
‘Oh, she thrives on wedding stuff. She just doesn’t know the meaning of turning up on time. Did you want to say something?’
‘It won’t take a minute.’ Saira sat down. ‘Don and I have been running through the list of our growers.’
Jazz nodded. Saira’s family in Pakistan had made herbal cosmetics and cures for generations. She’d been a volunteer in the nuns’ garden before she was offered a research-and-development job at Edge of the World Essentials, and was proving an invaluable liaison point between Don, who managed production, and his suppliers.
‘Well, I’ve tracked down more local people who garden organically and either grow herbs already or are willing to begin. Right now we are fine, of course, with what we buy from the garden here and our other current suppliers. So this is looking ahead.’ Saira glanced at a notebook she’d opened on her knee. ‘But I’ve noticed that we’re building a really diverse list. A
t one end of the spectrum I have young people who’ve gone organic because of concerns about the environment, and at the other I have pensioners who’ve never thought of gardening any other way. So I thought this might be a story for a magazine. Or one you could use on the website? A kind of “Meet Our Growers” feature.’
Jazz was already three steps ahead of her. ‘Could we get attractive photos? Things we could blow up and use on marketing material. Shop displays, say?’
‘Well, yes. So long as you’re not expecting people who look like fashion models. Johnny Hennessy must be eighty and he doesn’t have many teeth!’
‘He has a wonderful face, though. And a gorgeous garden. I can see how this would work.’
‘I’m glad.’
As Saira got up to go to the door she turned back, looking thoughtful. ‘Some of the younger growers have kids, who’d be very sweet in photos.’
Jazz laughed. ‘I’m supposed to be the sales and marketing person, remember? But you’re absolutely right. Images that span generations would be great. Leave it with me and let’s talk about it again.’
Saira agreed and left the room, her sandalled feet moving as softly as those of the nuns in the past.
Jazz was still at her desk by the window when she saw Eileen bounce through the entrance from Broad Street. She reached the café just as Eileen bustled back out.
Eileen waved. ‘There you are! I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve ordered wraps and coffees. Let’s find a table by the fountain.’
The Garden Café didn’t do table service, but that wouldn’t bother Eileen. Unerringly, she’d have spotted a member of staff willing to break the rule and bring out a tray. Somehow she always got her way, yet no one could fail to like her.
As Jazz sat down at the sunny table she remembered the first day they’d met. It was halfway through the spring term at St Enda’s in Lissbeg – a rotten time to turn up as a new girl – and, standing with her back against the school wall, she still hadn’t taken in what was happening in her life. All she’d known was that, when they’d turned up the previous week on her nan’s doorstep, Mary Casey hadn’t been expecting them.
The Month of Borrowed Dreams Page 4
