Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming

‘Dan, my husband, works in St Killian’s National School,’ Jodi explained. ‘He’s the new vice-principal –’

‘Oh, Mr Beckett! My little sister’s in sixth class. Now I know you!’ The librarian was thrilled. ‘You’re Australian, aren’t you?’

Jodi grinned. ‘Great bush telegraph round here.’

‘Works better than the broadband,’ the girl grinned back.

‘Tell me about it. I work in publishing and I’m going crazy trying to connect up. The engineer told me it was to do with being at the end of the line on our street, which doesn’t make sense.’

‘He says that to everyone, don’t mind him.’

A group of school children and their teacher on a mission to find out about Early Bronze Age settlement remains had arrived at that moment, and the librarian, smiling apologetically at Jodi, had turned to deal with their request. Jodi had made a few gestures to signify her thanks, and left.

She’d gone home with her precious photograph and that evening, when Dan arrived home, she’d told him about her idea.

‘You want to write a book about these people,’ he said, sitting down at their tiny kitchen table so he could study the photograph carefully. ‘Sounds good to me. Amn’t I always telling you that you should write a book?’

‘Yes, but I never had anything I wanted to write about,’ Jodi said, perching on his lap.

Dan put his arms around her and held her.

‘I’m sorry about today,’ she said. She’d phoned him at work when her computer had crashed for the third time, shouting that she was sick of this bloody town and it was all very well for him: he had a job to go to and people to see, but what about her?

‘It’s OK. I know it’s hard for you,’ Dan said, his lips buried in her hair. ‘I love you, you know, you daft cow.’

‘Love you too,’ she’d replied, allowing herself to feel comforted by him. Since the miscarriage, she’d felt so wound up, like a coiled wire spring, that she’d been unable to let Dan console her. Moving here for his new job was supposed to help, but it hadn’t. Here, in this watercolour-pretty town, she felt alien and out of place. Even their old home with the noisy-during-sex neighbours was better than this. She’d done the pregnancy test there: sitting on the toilet seat in their tiny blue ensuite with Dan hovering over her eagerly.

She’d been pregnant there. In Tamarin, she wasn’t, had never been. Might never be again.

And now this old photo had sparked a little of the old Jodi, had made her feel ever so slightly like she could be herself again.

She leaned against Dan and closed her eyes. She’d have to do some online searching. And sort out the laptop. No way could she begin proper research with a dodgy computer.

Two days later, she was standing in front of beautiful Rathnaree House with the scent of lavender in her head.

Jodi wandered around the deserted gardens, peering in the great windows, but she could see so little: the windows were filthy and shuttered from the inside. The gloom from within meant she couldn’t make out anything.

Prevented from entering the courtyard behind the house by a giant rusting gate, she stood with her hands on it, rattling it furiously.

She wanted to get inside, wanted to see Rathnaree and learn its stories.

Her list of people to see was growing. Ever since she’d told Dan about the photo, ideas had been bubbling out of her head. First, she needed to speak to someone who knew everything about the local area and would be able to put her in touch with the right people. Yvonne, who lived next door to them with her husband and two children, instantly came up with a long list of people who’d be able to help.

‘Lily Shanahan, she’s the one you should talk to. Nearly ninety but doesn’t look a day over seventy. There’s no case of her mind going, either, let me tell you. She’s as sharp as a tack but in a lovely way,’ Yvonne added quickly. ‘Her family worked for the Lochravens and so did she when she was younger, although I don’t think she was ever as keen on them as her mother. She was the housekeeper for years and that woman idolised Lady Irene. But Lily, she wasn’t a fan of Lady Irene’s to-the-manor-born carry on. Still, she’ll have some stories of Rathnaree for you, I’m sure. There isn’t much around here that she hasn’t witnessed.’

Jodi wrote it all down quickly.

‘Do you think I should call her family first, to see if she’ll talk to me?’ Jodi asked, thinking that such an old lady might get a shock if a strange Australian woman approached her.

‘Lord no. There’s no need for formality with Lily. I’ll give you her phone number,’ Yvonne replied. ‘She lives on her own out on the Sea Road. She has a home help these days to do little jobs around the house, but she’s very independent.’

‘She has family, though?’ Jodi still thought she might approach Lily via someone else. A ninety-year-old was bound to be frail and anxious.

‘Her family are all lovely. There’s her nephew, Edward Kennedy, and his wife, Anneliese. I work with Anneliese in the Lifeboat Shop on Mondays. You say her name like it’s Anna-Lisa but it’s spelled an unusual way. It’s Austrian I think. They’re a gorgeous couple, Anneliese is a fabulous gardener. Green fingers, she has. Lily had a daughter, Alice, but she died, I’m afraid. Cancer. But Lily’s granddaughter, Izzie, she lives in New York and she works with supermodels. Not that you’d think it,’ Yvonne said, smiling. ‘Izzie’s very normal, despite the supermodels and everything. Lily more or less raised her, to be honest, and Lily is very down to earth.’

‘Do you have her granddaughter’s email address or phone number in New York?’ Jodi asked. ‘I could approach her first?’

‘Nonsense.’ Yvonne was brisk. ‘Go directly to Lily. You’ll love her – everyone does.’

‘She worked for the Lochravens, you said?’

‘When she was young, she did. But she went off to London to train as a nurse during the Second World War, and I don’t think she ever worked in Rathnaree again. It was all changed, anyway,’ Yvonne added. ‘Nothing was the same after that, my mother used to say.’

Jodi made a mental note to study more about WW2. There was so much she didn’t know and she didn’t want to interview the old lady without being sure of her facts.

She’d phone Lily Shanahan as soon as she got home, Jodi decided, giving the big rusted old gate one final shove. It remained unmoved and she could only look into one corner of the courtyard from where she stood.

She only hoped that Lily had a good memory. If she was almost ninety now, she’d have been seventeen or eighteen in 1936, the date on the photograph, and that was an awfully long time ago. Then again, Yvonne had said that age hadn’t diminished any of Lily’s faculties. Jodi hoped that was the case. There was something about Rathnaree that made her want to know more about it and the people who’d lived and breathed inside its walls.

THREE (#ulink_14a6b62a-cd66-51cd-b302-f0b11fd4d1a5)

Anneliese Kennedy sat down in the big armchair that faced the sea and picked up one of her old flower catalogues. There were always a pile of dog-eared catalogues on the white cane table beside the chair, ready to flick through when she hadn’t the energy for the newspaper.

Normally, her fingers had only to graze the pages for a feeling of contentment to flood through her. Pages of seeds illustrated with full-bodied blossoms made her think of hours spent in her garden, hands buried in the soil, nurturing and thinking about nothing more than nature.

Today, the magic wasn’t there. They were just a bunch of well-thumbed catalogues, and the hand that lay on them was veined with alligator skin and ragged cuticles.

‘You’ve such pretty hands, you should look after them,’ her mother had sighed some thirty-seven years before when Anneliese was a young bride and prone to plunging her hands into dishwater without the time or the inclination to think about wearing rubber gloves.

Anneliese was a high-speed sort of person. Not reckless, never. Quick, practical and deft. Gloves and hand creams were for her mother’s generation, not for a twenty-year-old with vast energy and a life to be lived.

‘Artist’s hands and green fingers,’ Edward said proudly as they stood in the front of the church the day their daughter, Beth, got married and Anneliese had spent hours tying barely unfurled blush pink roses into tiny posies for the pews.

Anneliese preferred growing roses in the comfort of the Tamarin Garden Centre to making them into bouquets, but she’d have tied the roses together with her teeth in joy at seeing Beth walk up the aisle.

Four years ago now, it had been the best day of her life, seeing Beth finally settled. Beth was like a rose herself: one of the rare antique tea roses that Anneliese and Neil, who owned the garden centre, liked to grow in the shelter of the giant greenhouse.

Madame Alfred Carrière, very beautiful to look at with a glorious scent, but also prickly, high maintenance and needing hours of tender care. The day Beth married Marcus – gentle, strong of heart and crazy about her – Anneliese knew someone else was going to be providing that tender care, or at least, sharing it with her.

If Beth was a rose, Edward was a tree, a rare oak, standing tall and strong against the sea wind. And Anneliese? When she’d met Edward, she was like a poplar: tall, slim and vibrant from the top of her fair head to the tips of her ever-moving toes.

But she didn’t know what she was any more. Time and life had changed her.

Once, when she’d started working in horticulture, she’d thought that the art of growing things was the answer to all questions. The earth taught you to be calm, to wait, that the cycles changed but it would all come round again: spring would follow a harsh winter, eventually. Nothing, not problems nor solutions, could be rushed – any more than you could rush the questing head of a snowdrop. The snowdrop would emerge sleepily into the air when it was good and ready.

That became Anneliese’s motto. Things happened when they were good and ready.

And now, it seemed, she was wrong. Totally wrong.