Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday

‘Jack’s a fool,’ Pat from accounts said for about the fifth time that evening.

‘I’d go out with you tomorrow,’ slurred Henry, who sold higher class properties because he’d been to all the right schools and looked immaculate in navy pinstripe.

His wife, a frosted blonde who was equally posh and very kind, slapped him gently. ‘Don’t be silly, Henry. What about me?’

‘You could come too,’ Henry said happily.

‘I’m going to head off,’ Mara interrupted, before Henry could get on to the subject of threesomes.

‘Good plan,’ said Veronica, who worked with Mara and had her junior doctor fiancé in tow. He was asleep in his chair and someone had put a garland of flowers on his head. ‘You’ve done your bit.’ She got up to hug Mara. ‘We all think you’re so brave for coming,’ she whispered. ‘At least you’ve got two weeks before they’re back from honeymoon. Apparently, Tawhnee will carry on working with Jack for the next year, so you’ve got some breathing space to get your head around it all.’

Mara inhaled sharply. ‘Nobody told me that.’

Tawhnee was supposed to leave, that’s what Jack had told her in the early, painful days of finding out. Tawhnee would be leaving at Christmas.

‘Easier not to know, isn’t it?’ Veronica said.

No, thought Mara suddenly, it isn’t.

Her whole career at Kearney Property Partners was changing and nobody had thought to tell her. She was the silly, cuckolded girl who’d been so in love with Jack Taylor that she’d forgotten about herself. She’d handed him her heart and her job on a plate.

‘Thanks for telling me,’ she said to Veronica.

‘You’re so brave,’ Veronica said again. ‘Please, please, find yourself a total stud within the next two weeks so you can drag him into the office for lunch on their first day back from honeymoon. Ideally, you should be practically having sex with the stud on the reception desk when they come in.’

Mara laughed, thinking of movies where desperate women hired escorts for weddings and office parties so they wouldn’t be seen as hopeless cases. Perhaps she should have rented a hunk for tonight. Someone to look as if he couldn’t wait to rip her dress off with his teeth – even if he was being paid for it. But then that would be fake and, suddenly, Mara was in no mood for fake.

Like she was in no mood to go back into the office and pretend. She looked at all the smiling faces round the table, all wishing her well, and knew she wouldn’t be able to carry on working there for much longer.

‘See you all next week,’ she said brightly and whisked her jacket – vintage fake leopard print – off the chair.

Outside, she asked Reception to call her a taxi, and then hid in a big armchair near the door, hoping nobody from the wedding party would spot her escaping.

She rang Cici, who was out with some friends.

Mara whispered what Veronica had told her. ‘Even Veronica’s getting married,’ wailed Mara down the phone. ‘The whole world is at it. Was a law brought in making marriage compulsory and nobody told me about it?’

‘Don’t be daft. You don’t want to get married, not really.’

‘I do.’

‘You don’t. Jack’s a prat. Geddit? Jack’s a prat. He’d make you miserable. What if the two of you had got married and he’d met Tawhnee afterwards? What then, tell me?’

‘He’d still have run off with her,’ Mara said, feeling like the voice of doom in her own Greek chorus. ‘Does loving a shallow man make me shallow too?’

‘No, simply a typical woman,’ advised Cici, wise after several bottles of Miller. ‘You’ll feel better tomorrow and we’ll think of a plan to have fun, right?’

‘Right.’

The taxi driver told her she was a sensible girl to be going home early.

‘The town’s full of mad young women running around in this cold with no coats on. Young girls today, I don’t understand them. Nice to see a sensible one like yourself.’

In the back seat, Mara made assenting noises out of politeness. She wasn’t in the least bit sensible, she merely looked it and always had. Even at school, silliness was assumed to be an attribute of the tall, mascara’d minxes who wore their uniform skirts rolled up and had liaisons behind the bike shed. Everyone thought that small, quiet girls who did their homework had to be sensible, nice girls, even if they had wild red hair and a penchant for spending their pocket money on mad clothes.

In the B&B, the landlady was astonished to see a wedding guest home before eleven.

‘I’m working very hard and I’m exhausted,’ Mara said, because she didn’t want another person to tell her she was a rock of sense in a crazy world.

Then she went to her room, locked the door and allowed the tears to fall. Sensible and dumped – what more could a woman ask for?

Chapter Four (#ulink_f1ed6f07-97b0-5d9b-8ce1-992e5b13d68a)

October ripped through Avalon with unprecedented storms that made the sea lash the rocks at the edge of the Valley of the Diamonds, the prettiest cove on Avalon Bay. From Danae’s house, she could see the frothing of rough waves crashing into the shore. The last of the visitors had left Avalon and it was back to its off-season population of six thousand souls.

On Willow Street, another of the ancient willows had sheared from its roots overnight, like a piece of sculpture broken by a hurricane. Danae wished someone from the council would move it, put it out of its pain. She didn’t know why, but she felt these beautiful trees could feel pain like humans could. The magnolias in her garden appeared to have curled in on themselves, no bud ready to unfurl, and there was no scent of honey in the air at night from the honeysuckle, only the icy chill of winter approaching.

Danae’s walks with Lady were shorter affairs, as neither of them could cope with being out for long in such wild winds. She wrapped a scarf around her mouth when she walked because it felt as if the wind was trying to steal her breath.

‘You don’t like it much either, do you, darling?’ she said to Lady late one afternoon as they faced into the wind climbing the hill towards Avalon House. Above them, the for sale sign swayed perilously in the wind, dirty and battered from hanging there so long.

Lady’s favourite walk was over the stile into the woods that belonged to Avalon House, where she could cavort over fallen logs searching for rabbits and squirrels. A few months ago, the woods had been wild with the remains of sea aster and bell heathers, with the delicate purple heads of selfheal clustering here and there amid the leaves. But now, the flowers were gone and a wildness had taken over the place.

Lady loped on, knowing the way to go, past a couple of sycamores twisted towards the ground from decades of high winds. To the right were the ruins of the old abbey, nothing now but half a gable wall of ancient brick. Small stones sticking up around its grassy meadows were crude gravestones dating back to the time when people left a simple marker at a burial site instead of a grand headstone.

Danae found these little stone markers so touching: some dated from the Famine years and she could picture the hunger-ravaged mourners burying their loved ones, wanting to know where the grave was so they could return to pray there, if they lived that long.

On the other side of the abbey was a holy well where locals had been leaving prayers and offerings long before Christianity had claimed the well for St Edel.

Lady turned as they reached the abbey ruins and ran with easy grace over leaves and fallen twigs in the direction of the back of the great house, following the trail of another dog, Danae thought.

Even though there was nothing to stop her because some of the windows were glassless and open to the world, Danae had never been inside the house itself. She felt it would be disrespectful to the place somehow. Although she knew there were many who dismissed such things as hocus pocus, Danae was sensitive to atmosphere, She could tell that this house had known kindness and goodness in its day. And now there was a sense of sadness that no family lived here any more, the silence broken only by the wind in the trees instead of the sound of dogs barking or children laughing.

Calling Lady to her side, Danae turned to make her way back to Willow Street and home. Despite the wild beauty of the woods, she was suddenly anxious to leave this melancholy place. Or perhaps it wasn’t the place that was the problem but the time of year.

It had been in October that Danae got married and the month would forever remind her of a second-hand wedding dress and how hopeful she’d been as a young bride. Thirty years ago, she had known so little when she stood at the altar. Marriage back then was immersed in the ceremony of the Catholic church, with a dusting of glamour from the movies, where girls like the young Grace Kelly glowed on screen at her one true love. Marriage was till death do you part, your place was by your husband’s side. Good wives knew that.

Once the ring was on the bride’s finger, happiness was guaranteed – wasn’t it?

With the benefit of hindsight, Danae marvelled at her innocence. She should have known better: after all, she’d spent all those years living with her mother while a selection of ‘uncles’ trailed in and out of their lives, some kind, some not. And yet Danae had hoped that he was out there, her special one true love.

She’d been convinced that Antonio was the one, and had entered into marriage never doubting for a moment that they would be together for ever. How foolish could you get!

Young women today were made of stronger stuff and they knew more.

Or did they?

Her brother, Morris had phoned earlier and told her the latest news about Mara. The poor girl was devastated by Jack’s betrayal and there was nothing they could do to help her.