The House on Willow Street

He knew immediately that it was bad news.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s Mam – she’s dead.’

Cashel felt as if his body was in freefall down the side of the giant hotel.

‘Tell me,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Massive heart attack in her sleep. Dolly found her.’

Cashel paid for Dolly and three other nurses to take care of his mother. He’d wanted Anna to stay in her own home, even if the dementia meant she no longer recognized it. At least his money allowed him to do that much for her.

‘It doesn’t seem real,’ Cashel said to his brother. ‘Despite the dementia, despite everything, she was there …’

His voice tailed off. Their mother had been so strong, so courageous, like a lioness protecting her sons. Their father had been a man with a penchant for the bookmaker and the local pub. His bad back meant he wasn’t in work often, and any money he got, ended up in the pub or the bookie’s cash register. Without Anna Reilly, Cashel knew that he and Riach would have had no warm house, no education, nothing.

‘I know,’ said Riach, his voice soft. ‘Not real at all. But we knew this day would come, Cashel, and it’s better for her. She’d have hated this half-life, not part of this world and not part of the next one either.’

Cashel stood and leaned over the balcony, staring down towards Macquarie Park where people were walking, their lives untouched by his tragic news. He wanted to scream it out, to tell everyone what had happened. Cashel Reilly, once-divorced man of forty-six, regularly on rich lists and in financial columns for his business acumen, felt as if a part of him had been ripped out.

‘I’ll be home as soon as I can,’ he told his brother. One of the benefits of having a private jet. ‘Will you do the notices in the paper? We can talk about undertakers and all the rest when I get there.’

He found himself shuddering at the word ‘undertakers’. The world of death was upon them with all its traditions and rituals. Cashel had a sudden vision of St Mary’s in Avalon, sitting in the pew beside his parents at Sunday Mass.

‘Don’t fidget!’ his father would hiss, and Cashel’s mother would put her hand – soft, despite all the work she did – into his and let him know that he hadn’t really done anything wrong, that a bit of fidgeting was normal.

And now she’d be lying in St Mary’s in a big dark box. He’d be there mourning her without anyone to put their hand into his, and he knew how much that would upset her – how much it had upset her for so many years – that he was alone.

Today, it upset him too. And it made him think about Tess Power.

Anna had always loved Tess. There had been no issue between the woman who cleaned Avalon House and the daughter of the house. There might have been in many of the other big houses, but not there. It was partly to do with Tess and Suki’s father, a man who genuinely didn’t discriminate between those with money and those without. He was unlike most of his class in that respect.

Mr Power was cut from different cloth. He cared about people, from the men who worked on the estate, trying to stop the ravages of time and the weather from destroying the beautiful old house, to people like Cashel’s mother, who cleaned and sometimes took care of Tess and Suki. He always addressed Anna respectfully as ‘Mrs Reilly’ and spoke to her as if she were a duchess. And Anna, though she came from the poorest street in the village, spoke back to him in the same way. So it was no surprise that Anna and Tess were close.

But Cashel didn’t want to think about Tess Power. Not after all that had happened. He hoped she wouldn’t have the nerve to come to his mother’s funeral. The lady of the manor bestowing her presence on the funeral of a mere town person … He shuddered; no, he didn’t want to see her there.

October was not a good time for boutiques in small villages – or so said Vivienne, proprietor of Femme, the high-fashion boutique next door to Something Old.

The Christmas frenzy of wanting something new to wear hadn’t yet started and everyone was saving for Christmas presents.

‘The number of people I’ve had in this morning who rattled through the sale racks dismissively, then marched out again. It’s so depressing,’ Vivienne sighed. ‘They don’t even look at the full-price stock.’

She’d stuck the ‘Back in five minutes’ sign on the door and dropped into Tess’s for a cup of instant coffee and a moan. The two of them had been shop neighbours for ten years. Vivienne had done marvellously during the boom years when wealthy women thought nothing of paying a hundred euros for a sparkly T-shirt or twice that for a long, bewildering skirt with trailing bits here and there. Now, Vivienne said, they wanted a whole outfit for the same hundred euros.

Tess boiled the kettle and spooned coffee into cups in the back part of the shop and listened quietly to Vivienne’s lament.

The past couple of years had been tough, no doubt about it.

Once upon a time, she used to close the shop for the whole of January and open up again in February, with new stock, the old stock rearranged, and a spring in her step after the rest. She hadn’t done that for the last two years. These days, she couldn’t afford to close at all.

At least when the place was open, people came in, bringing warmth with them.

She carried the coffees back into the shop, having decided against telling Vivienne that a customer had bought a sweet 1910 marcasite brooch only that morning. Vivienne would take it personally.

‘No news?’ asked Vivienne.

‘Not a scrap,’ said Tess, smiling. It was a trick of hers: smiling fooled people into smiling back at her. It was infectious; a bit like yawning at dogs.

Vivienne perked up. ‘They’re doing a special offer in the supermarket,’ she said. ‘Two instant meals and a bottle of wine for twelve euros. Of course, Gerard hates instant meals.’ Gerard was Vivienne’s husband, a man who could be relied upon to bail the shop out when profits were low.

Tess was used to Vivienne’s rants. She never let on that she too worried about money, that there was no one to bail her out, and now even the capital her father had left her had dwindled, despite its relative safety in the post office. Staring her in the face was the knowledge that before long she might have to give up Something Old and join an auction house – if she could find one that would have her. She didn’t have a degree in fine arts. Her college experience a million years ago had been in general arts. Her knowledge of antiques came not from books but from her love of old things and an affinity for them, but she had an expert eye and could generally tell a fake from the real thing.

‘Are these the best biscuits you have?’ Vivienne said, eyeing the plain biscuits.

‘Sorry,’ said Tess. ‘I did have a pack of amaretti biscotti, but they’re all gone.’

‘I need chocolate,’ said Vivienne, getting to her feet. ‘I’ll nip down to Ponti’s for a pack of chocolate ones. Back in a moment!’

It was ten minutes before she returned. After all that time, Tess expected her to turn up with cupcakes from the delicatessen and a couple of milky coffees from Lorena’s Café. However, when Vivienne arrived, panting from the walk up the hill to Something Old, she carried nothing but a pack of chocolate biscuits.

‘I got stuck, talking to Mr Ponti,’ she said, collapsing on to her chair. ‘Apparently, Anna Reilly died. One of the nurses found her dead this morning. Mr Ponti reckons it was a mercy, given how bad she was. I suppose the older son will be home for the funeral. I’ve met Riach, obviously, and his wife, Charlotte’s lovely, but I’ve never set eyes on Cashel – except in the papers. He’s a fine thing, I have to say. Is that bad of me? Saying he’s good looking when his mother’s only died? I suppose it is. Can you boil up the kettle again, Tess? This coffee’s stone cold.’

But Tess was no longer listening. She was thinking of the woman she’d known since she was a child, who’d been a friend to her even after the split with Cashel.

Nineteen years had passed, yet it remained as painful as ever to think about him. Tess closed her eyes, as if that would block out his face.

She saw him on television sometimes, talking about business. He looked as if he’d filled out over the years, with broad shoulders to go with his great height. He’d had a beard for a while, giving him a hint of Barbary pirate with his midnight dark hair and the slanting eyebrows over those expressive brown eyes.

On the day he’d told her how much he hated her, he was leaner, his face still youthful and full of hope.

When she looked at pictures of him now she saw someone who’d been knocked by life and whose face had taken on a wry, slightly wary expression as a result. The dark eyes were permanently narrowed and there were lines around them that should have made him appear older but somehow only succeeded in making Tess wonder if there was much happiness in his life.

His mother had come to see Tess a couple of years after she married Kevin. Zach had been a toddler at the time, and Anna had brought him a little sweater she’d knitted. It was blue with the red outline of a train embroidered on to it. Anna was a wonderful knitter. Tess could remember Cashel, tall and strong, in a cream Aran sweater his mother had made him. Tess used to lie against him and trace the complex patterns of stitches, marvelling at both the intricacy and the feel of his body through the wool. Everything had been so simple then, dreaming of the day Tess and Cashel would marry, Suki would be First Lady … And then it had all gone wrong …

Taking the little blue sweater from Anna, she had blurted, ‘It’s lovely,’ before dissolving into tears. Without a word, Anna had gently picked Zach up from his beanbag, dressed him in the tiny sweater, and handed him to his mother. It was the only thing which soothed Tess in those days: holding her beloved son and burying her nose in the fine tufts of dark hair on his small head.

There was no need for them to be strangers, Anna had pointed out in her matter-of-fact way. Just because Cashel had stormed off saying he would never speak to Tess again, didn’t mean Anna had to follow suit.

‘We’ve known each other too long for that,’ she said in her firm, strong voice.

Anna Reilly had been unlike anyone else Tess knew. There were plenty of women with husbands who spent every waking moment in the pub and thought work was an occupation for those poor souls without an aptitude for betting on horses, but Anna did not allow this behaviour to beat her down. She was going to raise her boys as best she could, with or without Leonard Reilly’s help, and if that meant cleaning other people’s houses and scrubbing their doorsteps, so be it. The jobs she did in no way defined her. Her strength defined her.

Over the years, Tess often wondered whether Cashel knew that she and his mother had remained friends. In subtle ways, Anna would let her know when Cashel was home, and Tess understood that she wouldn’t be welcome in the house on Bridge Street until he’d gone.

‘You should have seen some of the houses he wanted to buy me,’ Anna joked when she showed Tess around it the first time. It was bigger than the place on Cottage Row that Cashel had grown up in, but not too big.

Through Anna, Tess had followed Cashel’s career from afar. At no time did Anna ask why it had happened that way, why had she broken Cashel’s heart. And Tess never tried to explain, for she felt certain that Anna wouldn’t understand. If it had been her darling Zach whose heart had been broken, Tess knew she’d find it hard to forgive. And yet Anna had been part of her life since she was a child; part housekeeper, part babysitter when it was required. She realized that Tess wasn’t heartless or stuck up, or any of the things Cashel had called her.