by Cathy Kelly
Paul had FaceTimed Edward from New York that lunchtime when it was morning in New York and, as usual, it had lifted Edward’s spirits.
Heidi was growing all the time, and the impish smile on her tiny face reminded him of Jojo at a similar age.
‘See!’ she said loudly into the camera, thrusting a purple velour giraffe with orange spots at him. ‘Schaff!’
‘Yes, giraffe,’ said Edward, feeling his heart contract at the sight of that little sparkling smile, and the blonde fluffy hair in two haphazard bunches on either side of her head.
‘Morning, Edward, let me tell you, your granddaughter is into everything,’ Lena said, coming into focus on the camera and waving at her father-in-law. ‘She is a one-small-person demolition squad. Since she started toddling round the apartment, nothing is safe. But every corner is safety-covered, every plug socket has a safety plug and the blinds are unusable in case she gets one stuck around her neck …’
Edward could see Lena shudder at the thought, that bone-deep parental fear that the bogeyman of life would get your child.
‘I understand, honey. All parents think the worst but it will be all right,’ he said, assuming the figure of paterfamilias since Lena’s own father was not the sort of man to care much about sharp corners on things. Lena had been in school with Paul, and Lottie and Edward had known her family well. They had been so different as parents from Lottie and him: very drinky, out with their pals for wild weekends and happy for their kids to meander along whatever.
In a way, he could see that New York was an escape for Lena from the chaos of her family but it meant that he wasn’t getting to see his beloved Heidi. He and Bess had discussed a trip to New York once his birthday was over – a week of spending time with the family, maybe taking in a show. Another honeymoon with Bess, and with time spent with Paul, Lena and dear Heidi thrown in for good measure. He was sure Lena’s family hadn’t been over once since Paul and Lena had moved, and yet they’d made it to the Canaries at least twice a year. Never mind, he would never let them down.
‘Dad,’ said Paul, moving the iPad away from Heidi, who shrieked with rage as if she was in mortal peril at having her other favourite toy removed, ‘Jojo is pretty cut up about your party.’
Edward sighed. They were always your kids – even when they were thirty-four and married themselves like Jojo. ‘I know, son, but what can I do? I thought it would get better with time …’
‘It hasn’t, not really. And the venue of Lisowen is what’s really killing her because it’s where you and Mum had your twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.’
Edward loosened the buttons on the charcoal shirt that Bess had said, only that morning, made him look very handsome. Edward has kissed her on the lips and only the fact that they both had meetings to attend to meant he hadn’t dragged her upstairs to bed again.
‘Bess is having it there because it means so much to me,’ Edward said sharply, ‘in the same way your mother realised that.’
His son would probably never understand how it felt to be one of the peasants, poor beyond belief, denied education beyond the age of fifteen and forced to work on the small family farm. To have come this far from such a beginning was something Edward could not enunciate and yet both Lottie and Bess had understood it perfectly.
It would have been far handier for Bess to have the party in Dublin, handier because she wouldn’t have had to take two day-trip return plane rides to Kerry to go over endless details, to make sure it was all perfect. But she was doing it for him.
‘Your sister will come round, Paul,’ he said now, determined, sure of himself. He had fought all battles in his life and won, except the battle for Lottie’s life and in the end, it had been one of the few battles he couldn’t fight – he’d been there holding Lottie’s hand, sobbing, as she’d dealt with her cancer by letting go with grace.
‘I’ll talk to Jojo,’ he added, and the feelings of nervousness, so unaccustomed, began to creep in. Lottie had been the one for all sorts of tricky conversations in their house and how did a man explain to his daughter that he needed another woman after her mother? That he’d been lonely, that he couldn’t cope with being alone and then he’d found the right person. Because wasn’t there supposed to be only one right person?
When he’d met Bess, had seen her that night in the dinner, formally dressed and clearly used to holding herself back, he’d recognised a kindred spirit and yet one he was extremely attracted to. Bess had been nothing like Lottie, nothing.
Lottie was fey, normally dressed as if she was fleeing the scene of a crime and had thrown on the first clothes to hand, and yet always looked beautiful, exotic, more lovely than any other woman he knew. She’d the most genuinely kind heart: was a mother warrior and the kindest human being he’d ever met.
Bess was shorter, curvier, a delicate pony to Lottie’s thoroughbred racehorse, yet Bess had fire in her eyes and he could see she was a sensual woman from the very way she moved. Edward, who had only had that one failed sexual encounter since Lottie died, had been shocked to feel that old desire stir in him when he’d spotted Bess at the dinner: she’d been wearing a formal black trouser suit, yet her blouse, a silky cream thing he was astonished to find himself fantasising about removing, was revealing. It was new, she’d finally told him weeks later: new and untested. She’d spent the evening wishing the buttonholes were tighter because the buttons, too small, kept escaping the holes and showing off hints of skin and full breast imprisoned in a white bra.
So many women had been throwing themselves at him since Lottie died, something he considered distasteful. Even Helen, his own sister-in-law, never his favourite person, had been flicking her lacquered blonde helmet of hair in his direction and saying archly, ‘We must find you a little friend, Edward,’ as if he needed a pet poodle that Helen herself would keep on a leash.
‘She means well,’ said Kit, his brother, and Edward had nodded but he was annoyed.
Nora wasn’t coming up with prospective dates like a pimp, was she? Nora had loved Lottie. Nora understood that he needed to grieve. But then he’d met Bess and meeting her hadn’t made him forget Lottie – nothing on earth could do that – but she had healed something inside him that he’d thought was gone for ever.
His sense of being a man, his sense of being desired again.
After one date, he’d known that he was considering what some might imagine the unthinkable – of finding someone else to love.
‘Men aren’t made to live alone,’ he’d told Mick, his younger brother one evening, when they sat on the big couch in Tanglewood where Edward had spent many a lonely evening, watching footie on the TV. ‘I’ve met someone else. I know you loved Lottie: I adored her, Mick, you know that, but this woman is funny and clever and I need that. Companionship, love, being with a woman, sharing life …’
His voice had trailed away because he’d half-expected Mick to storm out but then Mick had always been thoughtful, and after all, he was married to the most emotionally intelligent woman on the planet.
‘Nora said you’d need to marry again,’ Mick said gently. ‘She said all that, the stuff you said now. Said women can manage on their own but us lot, we need them. I’m glad for you, Ed, and Nora will be glad for you too. Who the heck are we to tell you to live alone when I have Nora and she has me? Neither of us have time for that sort of hypocrisy. You go and find your happiness. Lottie wanted that and, God knows, you’ve had enough pain.’
‘Thank you,’ said Edward, exhaling slowly, realising only then that he’d been holding his breath. ‘There’s nobody like Nora, is there?’ he added, feeling a wash of huge love for the sister-in-law who’d been best friends with Lottie yet still understood that Edward needed a life after her death.
Paul had understood too, Paul who was so happy in New York with his beloved Lena.
‘Go for it, Dad,’ Paul had said gruffly. ‘Mum would hate you sad, would hate any of us to be sad.’
But Jojo had been a different story.
&n
bsp; Stupidly, Edward had thought she would feel the same. Now he had his brother’s blessing, and Paul’s, and Nora’s, Lottie’s closest friend, he’d thought his darling daughter would get it, understand his loneliness.
But she hadn’t.
‘How could you?’ was all she could say, and then she’d raged against Bess, totally shocking Edward.
He could have called the whole thing off when Jojo had become so vehemently opposed to it and for a brief moment, he almost had.
He’d thought about going round to Bess’s apartment – Edward was never a coward, he would deliver the hard news in person, always – and tell her it was over. If his daughter couldn’t accept Bess into his life, then it would have to end. He’d picked up the phone and suddenly, he couldn’t do it.
He wanted Bess Reynolds in his life; wanted her warmth, her sharp humour, the softness she’d kept hidden for so many years. He’d wanted to curl up in bed with her at night and be soothed by her presence as she read books and he rattled the newspaper, peace stealing up on him at her presence.
So he’d chosen Bess and Jojo would not forgive him.
She would in time, he hoped. Time was a great healer, people said.
And then he thought of how time had made the cancer spread in Lottie, and he felt a chill.
In the Starbucks on her way home from work in Met-Ro, Amy Reynolds watched the barista squirt cream on top of her hot chocolate. He was cute. Dark-skinned, late twenties, a purring South American accent when he’d asked if she wanted the cream or not.
Amy didn’t know which country his accent was from, which made her feel as if she was guilty of racism in some way. She should know, not just label him as South American. It was a continent and saying he was South American was like saying she was European, too vague.
He had long hair tied up in one of those man buns that almost nobody but the exquisitely manly could pull off and a complicated tattoo on one brown, muscled forearm. Imagine that arm around her, holding her, muscles flexed as he purred at her in Spanish or Portuguese or …
Amy quickly looked away from the guy. She had got to stop reading romantic novels where the unexpected romance was a speciality.
Someone like the dark-skinned barista would never so much as look at her as anything other than as a customer waiting in line. Even when she’d been younger, his age. Especially not now she was thirty-two.
Other women were married at her age, had children, or careers, or something.
Amy could almost hear her mother’s voice, heavy with exasperation: ‘Amy, you have to settle down at something. You know at your age, I had you and was separated, and you don’t want to end up alone …’
Which was the point at which Amy tuned out. A person could only take so much of their mother reminding them that biological clocks pinged inexorably. Her mother reminding her that she might end up alone was a new variation on the theme.
New since her mother had met Edward Brannigan and turned from tough cookie with a single daughter into a different woman entirely. Now Bess Reynolds, well, Mrs Bess Brannigan, was like one of those girls who’d stomped around on campus with placards declaiming men, until they met the right guy – often entirely the wrong guy – and became loved-up creatures with blissful expressions on their faces from lots of sex, a warm body round them at night and someone to goofily admire them as they put their clothes on.
Bess Brannigan never mentioned how useless men were any more, not since she had met Edward who was, even Amy had to admit, a good-looking old guy in a sort of movie star way: that craggy face with a perpetual tan no matter the weather, and hazel eyes that shone with intelligence and interest in everything, and the silver hair that fell into place without a hint of any metrosexual grooming stuff.
It wasn’t as if her mother hadn’t met plenty of good-looking men before – she’d just jettisoned them before they got close because she Had No Time For Men. This was code for Amy’s Father Had Ruined It For Her.
And which Amy – who had done a module on psychology in her arts degree – knew was really code for how Granny Maura Sharkey, the toughest cookie ever to walk the planet, had been widowed young and had brought Bess up to believe that nobody could ever do it better than her and a man would definitely ruin it all.
It was quite amazing how the bitterness of one woman could screw up two generations so successfully.
Amy had once thought of writing a paper on this in college but hadn’t because she might have ended up in psychology, and her mother would have read her thesis and imagine that?
Poor Mum had meant well. Bess had never been given anything, had worked so hard to get where she was, while Amy had had all the best chances and yet … How could she explain to her mother that self-confidence was the one thing money/advice/hectoring couldn’t supply?
The things Amy wanted to do with her life weren’t even on Bess Reynolds’s, sorry Bess Brannigan’s, mental radar. That Amy had a rich inner life that might one day change everything but, then again, might not.
Because she wasn’t smart enough and she must have been mad to think that she could do this incredible job she wanted because so many people wanted it and she wasn’t special enough, was she? Never had been special enough.
Not special enough for a man to want to stay with her. Not special enough for her father to want to stay. Not even special enough for her mother to be proud of her, even though her mother said she was.
This unwelcome and oft-trodden pathway had the usual effect: Amy’s desire for sugar-laden caramel sprinkles on her coffee lit up the neurons in her brain like fireworks.
Sugar eased the pain, although she still had the guilt of her addiction. Some people were addicted to sex, others to drugs – trust her to be addicted to sugar. She wondered if she could order a pistachio brownie too … but then, she’d have to race home to eat it in her tiny apartment in Delaney Gardens where the acid-green buds on a sycamore tree were beginning to open just beside her bedroom window. Her home was the place where she could cook and eat what she wanted in privacy.
Starbucks, on the other hand, was public. Someone might see her and report back to her mother.
Amy had never been skinny and during her school years it had been her mother’s mission to change this. The house had been full of low-fat foods. Bess herself had eaten a diet modelled on one Granny Maura had copied from Jackie Kennedy’s White House diet – a staggeringly low eight hundred calories a day – but in the White House, it had been made by chefs, and whenever Amy had grown more Rubensesque, Bess had watched her daughter like a hawk to see that she kept to this unkeepable-to regime.
When she’d been a schoolgirl, it felt as if her mother had friends the way some countries had secret spy agencies. This network of spies managed to watch every move Amy made. Particularly every move that included food.
‘Oh, I heard from Gloria that you were in the ice cream shop in Glasthule having an ice cream sundae.’
‘Miriam spotted you and your pals in the waffle place. Do you know how many calories there are in one of those waffles with syrup?’
At sixteen, Amy had not been the tiny-waisted and slender-legged beauty of the historical novels she loved to read. She’d had no discernible waist and her breasts spilled out of her bras. Bess felt it was character-building not to buy a new, bigger bra for her daughter or a larger school skirt.
If Bess stopped fitting into a skirt, she cut out things she liked for a month: ruthlessly. She’d gone from taking sugar in her tea to taking none in just one move.
‘All it takes is discipline,’ she’d said, patting her flat stomach.
Why couldn’t Amy do the same? Then there would be no need of a new bra or new whatever.
It was simple, really, Bess said with earnestness.
And horribly, Amy knew that her mother wasn’t just saying this bitchily – she believed it to be true. If you wanted to stop eating sugar/take over the world/get an A-plus in higher level maths, all you had to do was simply work harder at it.
/> Nobody had handed her mother anything in life and she’d had to work so hard at everything to keep their life going when Amy’s father had left. Amy knew all this but it had made her mother tough, and Amy was the exact opposite of tough: she loved living in the world of her imagination and that world did not fit in with her mother’s vision of how to get a good, pensionable job or succeed in life.
When she’d been a teenager, Amy and her partners in crime, Tiana and Nola, discussed spy satellites and how parents knew what you were doing almost in real time.
‘My mother asks me every day if I met boys and if so, what did we do? It’s like the Salem witch trials,’ Tiana reported.
Her mother read the Bible with zeal, wore her knees out saying the rosary every night and had her own seat in the church where she went for nine o’clock Mass every single morning of her life.
Tiana’s problem was not a surfeit of sugar – it was a surfeit of Bible quotes for every happening and war breaking out if she missed the family rosary, said at eight every evening.
Tiana was the sole girl in a family of three boys and her mother was hoping, praying, that Tiana would have a vocation to be a nun.
‘Possibly one of those ones who get locked away and can’t see people except from behind a metal grille,’ Tiana said grimly. ‘That’s what she’d like. So I could be locked in praying and not be out in the world sinning with boys. Why is it that Catholic religious people, who are not supposed to think about sex, spend all their bloody lives thinking about it and trying to put the kybosh on it?’
Her real name was Emerentiana, after the female saint on whose feast day she was born in January. Even Tiana’s mother couldn’t get people to wrap their tongues around Emerentiana, so Tiana had stuck her heels in and insisted her name be a bit more pronounceable.
‘My mother would be delighted if I met a boy,’ Nola said. ‘She’s hoping someone falls in love with me for my mind and my sense of humour and my curves!’
