What She Wants

No, she decided an hour later as she sprinted back to the office, trying to eat a Mars bar simultaneously because they hadn’t had time for lunch.

‘Did you buy anything?’ asked Yvonne as Hope slid into her seat behind the counter at one minute past two.

Hope shook her head. ‘Betsey was on a shoe shop trawl. We trekked round four shops and ended up buying the ones she’d tried on in the first shop. Pale blue leather and very dainty. Plus, we didn’t have time for a sandwich so I’ve just eaten a Mars bar,’ she added guiltily.

‘She’s a selfish cow, that Betsey,’ Yvonne remarked. ‘When she meets you for lunch, she knows she can swan off home and have lunch whenever she wants to but you daren’t have so much as a bag of crisps here.’

‘She just didn’t think,’ protested Hope, used to standing up for Betsey because Yvonne didn’t like her. They’d met once and it had been handbags at dawn. With her black curtain of hair and dancing green eyes, Yvonne was far too vampish for Betsey’s tastes. Plus, she was younger than Betsey. Yvonne hadn’t taken to Betsey much either, because she had a better job than Yvonne and kept boasting about it. Proof positive that trying to link up friends from different parts of your life didn’t work.

‘She just doesn’t care,’ Yvonne retorted. ‘She’s out for one person and that person is her. I bet you a tenner she’ll be the first one who’ll put her name down for a free holiday in Ireland with you. You wait and see, Madam Betsey will turn up with hubbie and kids, stay for a week and not lift a finger except to ask for more drink and another blanket for her bed.’

The thought had crossed Hope’s mind.

‘Well, if she’s so keen on the country, maybe we can do a swap and she can stay in the cottage while I live in her place back here,’ Hope remarked.

Yvonne shot her an inquisitive look.

‘You don’t want to go, do you?’

‘That obvious, huh?’ Hope stopped trying to look merry and let her face reveal how she felt: utterly depressed.

Yvonne’s bosom welled up with indignation like an enraged bullfrog. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You can’t go, Hope,’ she said, ‘not if you don’t want to. You’d be mad.’

A cluster of tourists, just disgorged from a tour bus, swarmed into the building society before Hope could answer.

Hope, Yvonne and Denise expertly changed travellers’ cheques for the hordes and engaged in a bit of friendly chatter. When they’d all cleared out, one of Hope’s favourite customers, a sweet little old lady who wore a fox collar wrapped around her neck come rain, hail or shine, arrived to discuss how much money she should take out of her account to go on holiday.

‘Where are you going?’ Hope asked Mrs Payton.

The old lady’s dark eyes sparkled under her felt hat. ‘The Greek Islands,’ she said. ‘I’m going with a friend. I haven’t been there since the Fifties. We’re going to do the Oracle at Delphi first. Can’t wait.’

My god, I’m turning into a boring old cow, Hope told herself as she processed Mrs Payton’s savings book. This woman is eighty if she’s a day and she’s all fired up about a trip to Greece, while I’m only thirty-seven and I’m whinging about going the short trip to Ireland.

When she was gone, Yvonne was busy with some teenage boys, and then a stream of people kept coming into the office, all with complicated business. It was nearly closing time before they had a chance to talk. Denise was making tea in the cubby hole kitchen behind the photocopier because they’d been too busy to have their afternoon tea break.

‘Don’t go,’ said Yvonne.

‘It’s not that easy.’ Hope was fed up with the whole subject.

‘It is,’ asserted Yvonne. ‘Can you imagine what you’ll feel like when you’re there if you’re this depressed now? You’ll be down the doctor looking for tablets for your nerves like a shot.’

Hope laughed. ‘I think I need tablets for my nerves as it is,’ she joked.

Yvonne didn’t laugh. ‘Yeah and you’ll be on double strength ones when you’re dying of depression next month. Think about it, you’ll be away from your friends, your sister, everyone. It’s not fair to expect you to go along with this.’ Yvonne scowled. ‘Men can be right bastards, you know.’

‘It is only for a year,’ Hope said.

‘Hope, you’re the sort of person who wouldn’t expect someone to sit through a two-hour film you’d like in case they didn’t enjoy it. You never ask anyone for anything. Matt’s asked you to do this huge thing and you don’t want to go but you don’t want to say no either. There’s a fine line between keeping the peace and getting walked on, as my mother would say. And what are you going to do? You love working, even here, you’ll go out of your head with no job. Matt’s asking too much.’

Hope took her tea from Denise and thought of what Yvonne would say if she knew that Matt hadn’t really asked her anything: he’d told her, wheedled a bit, and had assumed she’d go along with it. She was so happy that he wasn’t having an affair, she’d said yes quicker than a hooker touting for business on a rainy night.

Yvonne would levitate with temper if she knew the truth. ‘My Freddie wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that,’ she’d say, and it was true. Freddie had to work hard to keep Yvonne. She was not the sort of person who got walked on. As far as Yvonne was concerned, if anyone was going to do any trampling over anyone else, she’d do it, thank you very much.

‘It’s what everyone dreams of, Yvonne,’ protested Hope. ‘Giving up the rat race to live in the country, spend quality time with the children and not work.’

‘Yeah right,’ said Yvonne grimly. ‘You and your winning the lottery dream. Except if you won the lottery and bought some palatial mansion down the road, you might not be working but you’d have the cash to do whatever you wanted and you’d be able to afford to have someone look after the kids if you wanted to get the chauffeur to drive you into town. You haven’t won the lottery, but I reckon Matt has.’

For the rest of the afternoon, Hope thought about leaving Witherspoon’s. She did love her job, Yvonne was right. She didn’t want to be some high flying executive like Sam but she enjoyed working, enjoyed having her own money and her independence, and liked meeting new people. Of course she adored the children, but surely she wasn’t a bad mother to want to combine loving them with a job?

Right on cue, the heavens opened as Hope ran, raincoatless, to her car after work. It was only a five-minute walk but by the time she wrenched the door of the Metro open and flung her handbag onto the passenger seat, she was soaked.

Shivering despite having the heater on at full blast, she drove home in worse than usual traffic. Yvonne didn’t understand. Yvonne was a blunt person who said what she thought. Hope was exactly the opposite. She longed for some way of telling Matt she didn’t want to leave Bath, but without the inevitable confrontation. Ideally, she wanted him intuitively to work out what she wanted, the way men did in films, and then agree that it was all a mad idea and that they should stay at home. No hassle, no arguments.

Only it wasn’t working out like that. Matt appeared to be taking her stoic silence for a thoughtfulness, as if she was busy mentally working out what the family would need to take. Why didn’t he see that she was upset? How could he be so blind?

The clock on the dashboard said it was six fifteen when Hope pulled up outside Your Little Treasures, not caring that she was double parked. Head down against the rain, she ran up the path to the glossy pillar box red door.

Marta was standing sentry in the small hallway, looking less Rottweiler-like than usual on account of her upswept hairstyle and a very un-Marta-like lacy dress. She was obviously going out for the evening.

‘You’re late,’ she snapped as Hope reached her.

The build-up of misery over the past few days came to a triumphant head in Hope’s mind. ‘So sue me,’ she snapped back with unheard of venom.

Marta took a step back at this unprecedented attack from the meek and mild Mrs Parker.

‘As long as it’s just this once,’ she muttered, giving Hope a wide berth.

Matt couldn’t remember when he’d felt this fired up over anything. Not the local television ads they’d won off a top London ad agency, not the excitement he’d felt when Hope had first become pregnant. Nothing had ever given him the buzz that this new adventure was giving him.

He arrived home with a bouquet of flowers for Hope and a bottle of rosé wine. She loved rosé. She was a bit unsure about the whole trip, but that was just Hope. Dear Hope, he loved her despite her nervousness about things and her fear of the unknown. She’d love Kerry when she got there.

Matt remembered when he was nine, and his parents, to whom he’d been an unexpected interruption in their marriage and careers, had shipped him off to Uncle Gearóid’s. At first, he’d hated the idea of leaving his home to travel to Ireland, but after that first summer, he’d wanted to go every year.

There was something magical about Redlion. Maybe it was the fact that Gearóid didn’t believe in rules so there was none of that palaver about being in by a certain time or eating three meals a day, but Matt had loved it.

Meals were whenever Gearóid took it upon himself to open a tin of beans and nobody batted an eyelid when the nine-year-old Matt was brought into the local pub (shop at the front and small snug at the back) to have his first taste of porter. They’d gone on fishing expeditions, on wild adventures to the Beara Peninsula, where Gearóid had practically gone into a coma after a drinking session with a fellow writer in a small hillside dwelling that Matt’s mother would have disapproved of no end. Matt had grown up with a mistily romantic memory of sitting on cracked leather stools in the dim, stained snug, listening to farmers talking of their herds and the trials of bovine mastitis, while Gearóid and his cronies rambled on about novels and poems, their plans for being the next Yeats, and how they’d got a consignment of good quality poteen and maybe after the next round they’d take a ramble back to Curlew Cottage for a wee dram.

Gearóid, with his wild woolly hair, long beard and fondness for brown corduroy suits he got directly from Dublin, had been an idol to his nephew. He lived outside the system, he told Matt proudly, which was why he’d left his home in Surrey to travel to Kerry and become a writer. Taking the Irish version of his real name had been part of the fun. The one-time Gerry had become Gearóid, more Irish than the Irish, a man who could sing old Irish songs for hours on end and knew the location of every stone circle in Munster. Gearóid supplemented his income by giving tours to the hordes of tourists who came to Kerry searching for their roots, but, as he got older, his fondness for the jar meant he was quite likely to turn on them and tell them they were all a pack of feckers and should feck off back wherever they came from.

To his shame, Matt hadn’t visited for over four years and he’d felt terrible about the fact that when Gearóid had died, he’d been in the middle of a vital campaign and hadn’t been able to make it to Redlion for the funeral. He’d make it up to Gearóid, he promised, by becoming a writer. Turning his back on Bath and his career, albeit only for a year, was his tribute to his maverick uncle.

CHAPTER FOUR

Virginia Connell stood in the garage of her new home in Redlion, looked at Bill’s golf clubs and smiled wistfully. She’d hated those bloody things all their married life. Well, maybe not hated but certainly felt irritated by them. Every weekend, come rain or shine, Bill had played golf. A brilliant man, he never managed to remember anniversaries, parties and dates she’d put in his diary months before, but thanks to some male instinct, he never forgot an arrangement to play golf.

They’d never really argued about it. Virginia had been very self-sufficient; you had to be when you had three small children and a husband who worked away from home a lot, she always said briskly. When Bill forgot a date she’d made with him, she’d wag a reproving finger and tell him she’d reschedule when he had an opening in his diary. He’d grin, kiss her and promise they’d go somewhere really exciting, which they never did, naturally. Steak and chips in the local had been a treat. Virginia hadn’t minded. She loved Bill and he loved her in return. That was all there was to it. What did posh dinner dates matter when there was much more to life? She much preferred their quiet evenings in the local dunking chips into garlic mayonnaise to those high-powered affairs where Bill’s business partners insisted on bringing the entire company, plus wives, out to four-star restaurants. Virginia hated those nights where the conversation was brittle, every subject was a potential minefield and where the only fun was watching which of Bill’s partners could pretend to know most about wine.

The food was just as good in the pub and when she and Bill were alone together, they could relax and be themselves.

Over the years, Bill did his best to get her to learn golf. She laughed and said he was only suggesting it so they’d see each other in the golf club instead of blearily in the kitchen in the morning over coffee.

Virginia gently pulled the suede cover from his driver, stroking the polished club head and remembering how delighted he’d been when he bought it.

‘This is space age technology,’ he’d said gravely that glorious Saturday morning in April more than eighteen months ago, before going on to explain how he’d had a nine degree driver before but this one was eleven and a half.

‘And that’s better?’ Virginia had teased as she made them both tea.

‘It’s about the degree of loft…’ Bill had begun to explain before he noticed her grinning. ‘What am I explaining it to you for, you philistine,’ he laughed. ‘Some wives take an interest in their husband’s game.’

‘Yes, and some husbands get home occasionally,’ she retorted. ‘I’m thinking of having an affair if you don’t get home tonight before eight. Would you mind?’

Bill pretended to consider this, angling his grey head to one side and screwing up his brown eyes. ‘Could you have an affair with the golf pro?’ he suggested. ‘Then I might get preferential rates on lessons.’

‘No problem, darling,’ Virginia smiled. ‘Biscuit?’

He didn’t get home before eight that night. He didn’t get home at all. He’d crashed the car on the twenty-minute drive home and the only thing to remain unscathed were his clubs, safely in the boot.

The front of the car was destroyed, as was her darling Bill. But he’d never felt the pain of the crash: he’d died from a massive heart attack, they told her. As if that made it better.

The police thought she’d like the clubs. Virginia threw them into the garage with fury because she needed to hurt something. She was in such horrific, numbing white pain that something or someone else must suffer. Bill’s precious clubs seemed like the only obvious candidates.

The boys, Dominic, Laurence and Jamie, all in their 20s now, had been wonderful, towers of strength through it all. They’d arranged the funeral because Virginia hadn’t been able to. For the first time in her life, the eminently capable and sensible Virginia Connell fell to pieces. She could barely make a cup of tea; she, who was known for her exquisite baking and fantastic Beef Wellington so tender you could cut it with a spoon. People phoned with shocked, murmured condolences and she barely heard them. Once, she left someone hanging on the other end of the phone while she went into the kitchen to try and boil the kettle. She hadn’t managed that either: boiling the kettle and managing to put a teabag in a cup was beyond her. Choosing what to wear in the morning was a momentous task. Remembering to brush her teeth was impossible.

She stopped bothering with her hair and it hung in dank grey curls around a drawn face that was the same shade of grey. Laurence had insisted on driving her to the hairdresser one day, three months after Bill’s death, shocked when he’d seen how terrible she looked.

‘I can’t go in,’ she said simply, sitting in the car outside the hairdresser in Clontarf with Laurence wringing his hands beside her. ‘What’s the point?’

To add to her misery, a month after Bill’s death, their beloved Spaniel, Oscar, had been run over. Without even Oscar’s warm, velvety body to comfort her as he lay on the bedspread and licked her hands lovingly, Virginia felt there was no point to the world at all.

Time was a great healer, Virginia remembered her mother saying. She didn’t agree precisely. Time didn’t heal, it numbed. Like a good anaesthetic, it made the pain more bearable but it never went away.

She’d never balanced the bank statements or talked to the insurance people about the car or the house contents. Bill had handled all that. When the letters surrounding his death began to flood in through the letter box, Virginia realized just how much Bill had done. She’d often teased him that he was a lucky man coming home to a clean, tidy house where there was always food in the fridge, ironed shirts in the wardrobe and plenty of toothpaste in the bathroom. Now, Virginia realized that he’d been just as busy on her behalf as she had on his. She’d never even seen a final demand bill for electricity or handled a single query from their accountant. Now, she had to open all the mail and deal with it herself, inexpertly and bitterly. Bitter because Bill shouldn’t have been gone in the first place. The phone was nearly cut off in those first six months because Virginia had taken to sweeping the mountains of post into a drawer, refusing to look at any of it. She couldn’t cope with the kindly meant letters of condolence and she didn’t want to cope with the stilted letters from the bank, the insurance people and the lawyers. There was so much to do when someone died. She could barely believe it. The awful irony was that Bill had left her a wealthy widow thanks to a huge insurance policy. He’d looked after her even in death. But money couldn’t compensate for the pain and the trauma that went with sudden death.

Bereaved people were suddenly supposed to lay aside their grief and deal with employers, the tax office, government departments, an endless list. It was cruel, cruel and unnecessary. She wouldn’t do it. A horrified Laurence had gone through it all one day, six months after his father’s death, when he’d discovered what she’d been doing.

‘Mum,’ he said wearily as he sat in Bill’s big recliner chair surrounded by opened envelopes and official looking letters, ‘you can’t go on like this.’

Virginia had shrugged listlessly. ‘Why not? It doesn’t matter any more. Nothing matters. And anyway,’ her eyes had a spark of life in them momentarily, a spark of fury, ‘what else can they do to me? Your father is dead. That’s the worst that can happen. Do you think I care a damn if they lock me up because I haven’t declared that I’m not entitled to a married person’s tax allowance any more?’

After a year of not bothering, Virginia had made scones on the morning of her husband’s first anniversary. Her sons were coming to Clontarf for the day and she didn’t have anything in the house. The boys ate the scones with thankful smiles on their faces, grateful that their mother was finally coming out of the tunnel she’d been in. Virginia was astonished how easily she slipped back into her role of gracious hostess. On the outside, at least.

She wondered if it had been she who’d died, how would Bill have coped? Would he have spent a year in mourning, worn down by grief and unable to take an interest in anything? Their first grandchild had been born just eight months ago, an adorable poppet named Alison who had her parents – Virginia’s eldest son, Dominic, and his wife, Sally – in thrall. Virginia had been godmother and managed to get through the christening service dry-eyed, despite crying inside at the thought of how happy she’d have been if only Bill had been with her.

‘He is with you, Ma,’ Laurence, the sensitive one, insisted. ‘Dad’s still here, watching over you.’

But he wasn’t with her. That was the hard thing. Virginia didn’t bother telling Laurence that his words of comfort did no good, he wouldn’t have understood. She’d gone to church all her life and yet now, when she needed it most, the very idea of God and the afterlife had deserted her. There was no sense of Bill anywhere except in her memory. She couldn’t feel him in the room with her, she took no comfort in going to church and talking to him. He was gone. It was over, that was it. And that really was the most awful part of her grief.

That was why she’d sold the house in Dublin six months ago and swapped the suburban calm of Pier Avenue for a rambling old house in Kerry. The boys had been upset at first, Laurence had said she couldn’t run away. But Virginia had told them she wasn’t running away: she just needed to start again, in Kerry, where she and their father had come from all those years ago and to where they’d always had this distant dream of returning.

They’d both been farmers’ children, madly keen to get away. Kerry had seemed like the back end of nowhere when they were young. In their fifties, though, Bill and Virginia had thought they might like to retire back to where they’d come from, a place that didn’t seem anywhere near as dull and quiet to them now as it had when they were younger.

They’d never been sure whether they’d go back to their homelands near Tralee where only a couple of relatives now lived, or whether they’d start again somewhere else in the county. Somewhere without second cousins once removed living down the road.

Bill’s death made the decision for Virginia. She would sell the house and move to Kerry but far away from Tralee. She couldn’t face living near where they’d grown up, places redolent of their courtship and awash with memories of the first time they’d met at a dance in a small parish hall. No, that would be too painful. When she saw the advert for Kilnagoshell House in Redlion, a long way from Tralee and yet still in Kerry, her mind was made up. In May, fourteen months after being brutally thrust into widowhood, Virginia had up sticks and moved to the small Kerry village where she knew nobody and where, she hoped, nobody knew her.

The rambling old house was in a good state of repair but could have done with some decoration as the previous owners were very keen on flock wallpaper and swirly, seasickness carpets. The wash hand basins installed in the bedrooms for the B & B guests didn’t suit the grand old house but Virginia had done nothing to restore its beauty so far. She felt weary enough from simply moving in. She didn’t have the energy to decorate or even remove the numbers on the bedroom doors. Besides, she had the rest of her life to do it, she thought sadly.

The boys were still getting used to the idea. Relief, Virginia felt, was a part of it. They had felt guilty with their interesting lives in London (Dominic and his wife, Sally) and Dublin (Jamie and Laurence) while their mother grieved in her suburban semi. She knew that Jamie and Laurence had shared a rota whereby each tried to visit her every couple of days, keeping in contact by phone the rest of the time to make sure she hadn’t downed a packet of sleeping pills in misery. Now she was hundreds of miles away, the duty visits would have to stop, which would be better for all concerned.

She’d meant to give away most of Bill’s possessions when she moved, but she’d found herself unable to throw out his clothes. And thinking of the pleasure they’d given him, she hadn’t thrown out his precious clubs.

Now she held Bill’s driver in her hands and tried to remember the all-important grip. Was it too late to take up golf at the age of fifty-eight? Bill would have loved her to. Maybe he could see her, was grinning with that irrepressible twinkling grin of his to see her holding his clubs in that professional manner. She liked the idea of Bill grinning wherever he was.

The bell rang. Virginia raised her eyes to heaven. Tourists, she’d lay a bet on it. Kilnagoshell House had been a noted bed and breakfast establishment in the past and people with fond memories of it kept turning up on the doorstep, smiling and wondering if she had a double with bath for two nights and ‘do you still make that lovely black pudding for breakfast?’