The Honey Queen

He mentioned, too, that he had a sister, Meredith.

‘She lives in a pretty swanky apartment in Dublin,’ he said, ‘and runs an art gallery with someone else. None of us get to see her much.’

‘Oh.’ The words slipped out: ‘Do you not get on with her?’ Meredith seemed to be the one flaw in the Byrne family.

‘No, I get on with her fine,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘She’s changed, that’s all. I think she got caught up caring about the wrong sort of stuff. Money, labels – you know, that type of thing. I miss her, actually, but she’s moved on from us.’

Peggy detected a flash of something in his eyes: not rancour but sadness.

Though their own children had all flown the nest, his parents still had a teenager in the house: David’s cousin Freya. His face lit up when he talked about her.

‘Crazy like a fox,’ he said. ‘Knows everything. Fifteen going on thirty-seven. Myself and the lads keep an eye on her, because there’s no knowing what she might get up to next.’

‘Why does she live with your mum and dad?’ Peggy asked, not wanting to sound too much like a grand inquisitor but utterly fascinated all the same. Hearing about the family was like basking in the glow of their loving normality. Besides, asking questions was a great way of distracting people from asking about her, and the more she knew David, the more she didn’t want him to know her truth.

‘My dad’s youngest brother, Will, died in a car crash and his wife, my Aunt Gemma, had a nervous breakdown. I don’t know what the psychiatrists called it but that’s what happened,’ David said sadly. ‘She never recovered from his death. Not that anyone would recover from that,’ he added, ‘but afterwards, she literally ceased to function. She’d always been an anxious person but she simply went to pieces. Freya was their only child and, after a while, when it became apparent that Gemma wasn’t functioning, Mum stepped in and said Freya couldn’t live like that any more. Gemma would forget to buy food, forget to cook dinner, forget to get Freya from school, that sort of thing. So Freya’s with Mum now and it’s brilliant. She keeps Mum young, Mum says. We all get a great kick out of her. Gemma’s doing much better now, too. She can’t work, though, but she sees Freya all the time, things are good there.’

Peggy loved hearing about his family. Apart from poor Aunt Gemma, they sounded nice and normal: the sort of family she’d love to have been a part of. That’s when she knew the fantasy was over and that she had to listen to the voice telling her she should end it. Normal wasn’t for her. She’d screw up normal. She was probably a lot more like Aunt Gemma than anyone else in David’s grounded family. Not that she was likely to forget to buy food or cook – Peggy was incredibly organized and seldom forgot anything – but she was far from normal.

‘Now you know all about me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you, about your family.’

Peggy had a well-rehearsed story about a small family who lived in a bungalow in a town in the centre of the country: a gentle mother who loved needlework and knitting, and a father who was a mechanic. He’d come from a farming background, while her mother had been born in Dublin’s city centre.

‘No brothers or sisters, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’d have loved to be part of a big family like yours. I’m jealous. I was such a tomboy when I was younger, climbing trees with the boys, having fights!’

Normally, people lapped up this story and laughed at the notion of Peggy getting into fights. It was a perfect distraction and nobody had ever questioned the truth of it. Until now.

David’s brow furrowed.

She looked at the face she wanted to touch, so she knew each contour and felt a yearning gap inside. It had to end and soon.

‘I can’t see you having fights,’ he said finally. ‘You’re too gentle. You’re joking, surely?’

Peggy summoned up a smile in the middle of her misery. ‘No, I was a tomboy, honestly.’

‘Apart from the knitting and sewing, then,’ David said, still looking as if he didn’t believe her.

‘Oh, yes, apart from that,’ Peggy agreed.

He was too clever, too able to see inside her, she thought. How had he got inside her head so quickly?

In bed that night, unable to sleep, she practised different ways of telling him it was over: ‘I’m too young, David, too young for the picket fence and the two-point-five children.’

Even in her head, the mental David had an answer to that argument: ‘How do you have two-point-five children? I’ve always wondered.’

She’d never left anyone properly before. She’d had dates and boyfriends over the years, but nothing serious, nothing that couldn’t be undone by packing up and moving on. She had no experience of how to handle this.

Two days later, she was so preoccupied trying to come up with a way to end it that she somehow found herself agreeing to go back to his house for dinner on their third date.

‘The lads are out for the evening – I almost had to bribe them. They want to see this woman I can’t stop talking about,’ he told her on the phone.

Peggy beamed at the thought of David talking about her.

‘And I cleaned the house and told them that, if they messed it up, I would destroy Brian’s electric guitar and put Steve’s precious football jersey, the one signed by the Irish team, into the wash.’

They both laughed.

‘You’d never do that,’ Peggy teased.

‘What, you don’t think I can be cruel and dangerous?’ he said, laughing.

‘No,’ she said quietly.

How easy it would be to let herself fall further in love with this man and spend a lifetime with him. It seemed there would be no arguing, no fights, none of that constant tension in the house. But what if he changed? That’s what men did, and you had to know how to deal with that. Peggy already knew that she couldn’t. She was better off on her own.

‘What happened there?’ he asked, picking up on the change in her voice. ‘You sounded so sad. Tell me, please.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I can’t.’

‘There’s a lot about you, Peggy Barry, that I don’t understand. Yet,’ he added.

‘Gosh no, I’m very boring,’ she said lightly. It was her standard response and she’d used it during their first dinner, but she knew he wanted to know more now and that her made-up family background wouldn’t keep him satisfied for long.

‘Hey, Ms Knitting Shop Owner and future entrepreneur of the year,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you’re boring for one moment, but if that’s the story we’re running with right now, then being allegedly boring hasn’t turned out too bad for you.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ she said. ‘I’m trading the Beetle in next week for a Ferrari.’

‘Red or yellow?’ he asked.

‘Do they only make them in those colours?’ Peggy demanded. ‘Red is so obvious. If a guy gets a red Ferrari, he has to have pouffed-up hair, an open shirt, a medallion and a supermodel beside him.’

‘At least I’ve got the supermodel sorted!’ he joked.

On the night of their dinner date, David offered to pick Peggy up from her house but she suddenly decided that she might need to get away under her own steam.

‘No need for you to come out,’ she said brightly. ‘Give me directions and I’ll get there myself.’

‘It’s complicated if you don’t know the area – I’ll drive to the shop and you can follow me in your own car,’ he said.

She pulled up behind him as he parked the car outside one of a row of attractive townhouses. He came round and opened the car door for her then led her through a tiny front garden, and unlocked the door …

‘It’s not such a bad place really, for three men living alone,’ he said, as he showed her inside.

The house was very obviously a bachelor establishment. There was a big leather couch in the living room, the inevitable enormous television and fabulous stereo system, and a coffee table littered with papers and sports magazines.

‘Steve,’ he growled, moving swiftly to the coffee table and tidying the papers into a neat pile. ‘This was spotless this morning. He’s a menace.’

She couldn’t have imagined any of the other men she’d dated hastily organizing it all the way David did, sorting out the cushions on the couch.

‘Steve sits here eating breakfast and when he’s finished, he just goes off leaving all the papers left scattered around. I think he imagines we’ve a maid. That’s the only explanation.’

‘Is he an older brother or younger?’ said Peggy, looking at the family photographs crowded on the mantelpiece.

‘Youngest,’ David said, showing her a picture of a smiling young man holding a football. ‘I’m the second eldest after Meredith, then Brian, then Steve. Brian’s the one who’s getting married. He’s spending a lot of time in his girlfriend Liz’s flat so he doesn’t contribute as much as he once did to the mess, but he doesn’t tidy up any of it, either.’

‘It must be nice, coming from a big family,’ Peggy said idly, examining the photos. There were several big family groups. Three tall young men standing with an equally tall father and a shorter woman who was obviously David’s mother, big smiling face and fluffy white blonde hair clustered around her face. Beside them was a thin, dark-haired teenager wearing Doc Martens, ripped tights and a mini skirt, with a huge grin on her face. There was another young woman in some of the pictures.

She was always a little apart, a tall woman in her early thirties with long blonde hair and elegant, expensive clothes. In each one she was standing apart from the rest of the group.

More photos decorated the shelves loaded with CDs and video games. There was a Christmas shot, everyone except the tall blonde woman in Christmas hats at a table; and what appeared to be a family holiday snap, taken on a beach with everyone very wet because it was pelting with rain, but with genuine smiles for the camera. They all seemed so happy, so at ease with each other.

There was something almost voyeuristic about looking at these photos, Peggy felt: this was proper family life. She felt a void inside her.

‘Big families are great fun,’ David said. ‘It’s a support system, a team who are always there for you.’

She noticed that he didn’t say any of the stuff she’d half-expected him to say, like: ‘Big families drive you mad.’ No, he loved it, relished being part of it.

‘Is that your mum and dad?’ she said, pointing to the older couple all dressed up, smiles on their faces but still a bit stiff and formal in front of the camera, as if they weren’t entirely at ease with posing.

‘Yes, that’s their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We sent them to Crete. Mum hates flying, had to go to the doctor to get something to calm her down for the flight. Dad said she was funny because she took one tablet and fell asleep. He practically had to carry her off the plane.’

‘They look lovely,’ Peggy said wistfully.

‘They are.’ There was real warmth in his voice. ‘You’ll have to come and meet them. You could come for lunch next Sunday, if that’s not all going too fast? Mum would love that. Freya would love it too – I’m warning you, she’ll interrogate you. She’s a junior Miss Marple. Nothing escapes her.’

Peggy smiled at the vision of the teenager with the lumpy shoes as a Miss Marple.

‘Maybe I could come and meet your parents sometime?’ David said. ‘They need to know that their daughter isn’t dating a madman. I promise I won’t shame you dreadfully,’ he added, grinning.

‘Maybe,’ Peggy said, after an uncomfortable pause.

Ignoring this, David took her hand. ‘Come on, I’ll bring you into the kitchen.’

He led her into a kitchen painted blue and white, with jolly blue and white sprigged curtains over the sink and old stained-pine cupboards.

‘Mum and Freya did the decor,’ David said. ‘We keep thinking we’re going to change it. Steve wants to get one of those modern kitchens, shiny red cabinets and stainless steel splashbacks, but with Brian leaving to get married it’s difficult making decisions.’

‘It’s a bit old fashioned, but it’s nice,’ said Peggy.

The kitchen in her flat was nowhere near as pretty as this. It was full of odd freestanding bits of furniture. She was scared to look underneath in case there might be dead bodies or live mice. This sweet traditional kitchen was rather adorable and certainly sparkling clean.

‘We’ve got wine, tea, coffee, juice?’ said David. ‘What would you like before I start on dinner?’

‘Tea would be lovely,’ she said.

He boiled the kettle and Peggy leaned against a cabinet, watching him as he moved around the kitchen. He was so much taller than her, she thought absently, that she’d have to look up if he kissed her.

‘Excuse me,’ he said coming close, opening a cupboard right beside her. ‘Mind your head.’ He touched her gently as if to make sure the cupboard door wouldn’t hurt her. And then the cupboard was quite forgotten. Their eyes met, and in an instant his mouth was on hers and it was so tender and sweet that, for a crazy moment, she felt she was a flower opening in the sun.

Then Peggy wasn’t thinking any more. Their kisses grew hotter, suffused with passion and want. She buried her hands in his hair, pulling him to her. His hands slid down to her waist, fitting her comfortably against him.

After a few minutes, David’s long fingers began to undo the buttons of her cotton blouse. Peggy leaned back, letting him touch her, wanting him to.

But then he paused, took a step away from her, leaving her staring up at him, lost.

‘I’m sorry. Is this too fast?’ he asked. ‘It has to be right, Peggy. I don’t want to rush you. You’re too special, do you understand?’

Peggy had looked up at those azure eyes, darker now with desire.

He wanted it to be right for her. He wanted her to be happy, not rushed. How beautiful that was.

She reached for his hands and pulled them back to her blouse.

‘It’s right,’ she said softly. She laid her palms on either side of his face and drew his mouth to hers.

Peggy woke in David’s bed, wrapped in his arms, the duvet tangled around them. Outside it was still dark. She didn’t know what time it was, but she felt no panic at being somewhere different – only a sense of rightness at being beside him, a feeling she could honestly say she’d never felt before.

He was sleeping deeply and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could make out his profile against the pale colour of his sheets. She had been to bed with other men, but she realized now that with them it had just been sex. Sometimes wonderful sex, she knew, but it had been purely mechanical. Bodies merging in mutual need, and when the lust was slaked, both parties had been happy to go their own way.

But this …

Peggy closed her eyes again and snuggled against David’s warm body. In sleep, he shifted so that he was wrapped more closely around her and she relaxed into the sensation. They hadn’t had sex, they’d made love. There had been lust and tenderness, true closeness, and now that she’d experienced it, Peggy knew the difference. If she stayed with David, she could have this. She could come home and lie in his arms at night: loved and sated. She could tell him about her day and he’d touch her face gently, and be glad or sad for her, depending on the circumstances. He would be her support in all things and Peggy, who’d had no experience of such a thing in her entire life, began to cry silently at the thought of what had to be done.

She hadn’t told him about her background, for all that he’d asked her. She hadn’t told anyone.

He’d asked her to lunch with his parents, but there was no way Peggy could go, she knew that. She should never have slept with David. She should never have gone out with him. Right at the beginning, she’d known that he was different from all the other men she’d been with. He was a good man. And she was …

Well, she wasn’t able for that sort of relationship. He would want two-point-five kids and the white picket fence, and Peggy couldn’t do that. She didn’t know how. She would mess it all up because you did what you’d grown up with, right?

Silently, she slid out of the bed and picked up her discarded clothes. She dressed in the bathroom, then tiptoed quietly downstairs. David’s wallet and keys were on the coffee table. She’d leave a note there, better to do that than go back upstairs with it and risk him being awake. She found a scrap of paper and a pen, and wrote:

David, I’m sorry but I can’t go out with you any more. You are a lovely guy and you deserve to be happy. Just not with me. It would be easier for us both if you don’t contact me. Please don’t come to the shop.

No hard feelings,

Peggy

She slipped the note into his wallet, so he’d find it easily, then left. It was the right thing to do.

Her priority should be the shop, she told herself as she drove home in the yellow glow of the streetlights. She had no time for someone like David. There could be no place in her life for him. She knew that and it was easier to end things now, before it went horribly wrong, which it would. It was bound to. So why was she crying?

Chapter Three

Sitting at the scarred wooden desk in front of the small window of her eyrie on St Brigid’s Terrace, Freya Bryne was smiling. She was reading an email from a sweet foreign gentleman – from Nairobi this time – who had a few million dollars to invest in her country and wanted her to assist him.

He was a prince, and due to problems in his country, and the fact that his father, the king, was under threat, he couldn’t invest it himself. But she could help …

She really did have the worst spam filter on the planet, Freya decided. No matter what she did, genuine emails ended up in her junk box and funny ones from people pretending to be investors or proclaiming that she’d won a lottery and all that was needed were her bank details and passport number, were forever popping into her inbox. She started to type a reply:

OMG, I can’t believe I’m writing to a real prince!!!! Mom is going to be, like, aced out! You have no idea how good a time this would be for us to have friends in new places – and a prince! Wow, as we say in Headache Drive. Mom hasn’t had a proper holiday since that incident with the airline company. She needed two seats and we thought that had been made plain from the start but no, she only got one and that sweet guy beside her – well, the feeling did come back into his arms a day later but it was very stressful for all concerned. Now, obviously, we have to visit before we work on this million-dollar deal – again, what LUCK! Mom has maxed out her credit card trying to buy the scratch card with the £25 million ticket and she needs a holiday. If you can get a hold of the royal plane, that would be perfect. Just remember: NO SUGAR ON BOARD. She might get her hands on some and … well, the less said about that time in the chocolate shop the better. We settled out of court, which was good for all concerned. But she is very partial to that South African creamy drink. Four bottles ought to cover it. We can stay in a nice hotel if you have recommendations, but from a financial point of view, do you have spare rooms in the palace? And any brothers? Mom is worried about marrying again but I read her tarot cards for her online today and by an AMAZING COINCIDENCE, it said she’d meet someone new …

‘Freya, lovie, it’s nearly eight,’ yelled her aunt Opal from downstairs. ‘I have scrambled eggs on …’

Opal’s voice trailed off. She was always trying to stuff Freya with protein in the mornings, while Freya was more of a coffee and a sliver of toast kind of person.

Poor Opal didn’t understand. Apparently, at breakfast every morning the three boys had wolfed down food as if they hadn’t eaten for a week and now she felt that this was the correct way to feed Freya.

Desperate as she was not to hurt her aunt’s feelings, the thought of an egg in the morning turned Freya’s stomach.

She finished her email with a quick:

Reply soonest. We’ll start packing. Mom does tend to overpack but I am assuming this won’t be a problem on the royal plane, right? Hugs,

Cathleen Ni Houlihan

Freya grinned as she clicked send.

If only she could fly through the Internet like her email and perch on the computer of the man receiving it, to see his astonished face as he read it.

Just outside her window, she could see the blossom on the apple tree in the postage-stamp garden below. Behind the fence her uncle Ned had painted pale green the summer before, the council had started turning a scrap of deserted land into a proper park. The adjacent allotments would stay the way they were, despite the plans for the park, which was wonderful. Uncle Ned would have died if he couldn’t go to his allotment every day. She could see some of the plain but sturdy sheds from the window and the neatly planted allotments themselves. Ned grew tomatoes, strawberries, potatoes and all manner of salad greens on his. In the distance Freya could make out the spires and towers of the city, but it seemed a long way away, giving the sense that Redstone was out in the country instead of being part of town.

All in all, Freya felt that the view from the third-floor bedroom of the narrow house more than made up for the tininess of the room.

‘You’re sure it’s not too small?’ Aunt Opal had said anxiously four years ago when Freya had come to live with them. ‘Meredith wouldn’t have this room – she said it was a spiders’ paradise up here in the attic. Mind you, Steve was happy enough in here.’

‘I love it,’ Freya had replied. She wasn’t in the slightest bit scared of spiders for she had spent years taking them gently out of the bath for her mother and releasing them back into the wild. Now the bedroom had a DIY bookcase on one wall, and Freya’s own artwork on another. She’d painted the old wardrobe so it looked like part of Opal and Ned’s colourful garden down below, although Opal didn’t have any enquiring and abnormally large caterpillars on her flowers, or indeed, a Venus fly trap with a shy smile.

Freya checked her watch. Eight o’clock. Time to grab some toast and leave for school.

She clicked off her inbox, unplugged her phone and picked up her schoolbag. This rucksack contained her life, although it hardly looked the part: a greying canvas thing inherited from her cousin David, she’d decorated it with butterflies interspersed with gothic, dangerous-looking faerie creatures, all painstakingly coloured in – often in lessons – with felt-tip pens. She skimmed down the narrow stairs, light on her feet, racing past the second floor where her cousins’ old bedrooms were. Opal and Ned’s bedroom was the biggest, but it was still small compared to Freya’s old home. Not that she cared. Twenty-one St Brigid’s Terrace might be cramped and shabby, but the difference was that in this home she felt loved. Beloved. Something she hadn’t felt for a long time with Mum.

Opal was standing at the cooker in the kitchen that she, Ned and Freya had painted Florida sunshine yellow last Christmas.

‘Too bright?’ Opal had said doubtfully in the paint shop, as the three of them had looked at the colour chart.

Freya hated to see even the faintest hint of worry in her darling Opal’s face.

‘No such thing!’ she reassured her with a hug. ‘Yellow makes people happy, you know.’

And Opal, who would have done anything to make Freya happy, was satisfied.

The tiles on the kitchen splashback were a riot of citrus fruits far too fat to be normal and Opal herself had run up a pair of yellow gingham curtains on her old sewing machine.

‘Freya, love, good morning,’ said Opal now, her face creasing up in a smile as her niece flew into the kitchen. A small, plump woman with a cloud of silvery, highlighted hair, Opal had one of those faces that made everyone want to smile back at her. It didn’t matter that, as she neared sixty, her face was wreathed in wrinkles or that she didn’t walk as fast as she used to because of her arthritis. She was still the same Opal.