Homecoming

In Titania’s Palace, Megan Flynn sat with her empty cup and looked at all the people around her. Once, she wouldn’t have envied them anything. They had dull lives, she’d have told herself: the women with the grocery bags pooled around their feet, the young mothers with small children wriggling redfaced in high chairs, the men poring over crosswords or chatting just as avidly as the groups of women.

As she’d danced the night away in clubs and at wrap parties, posing for photographs and plotting with her agent about what she’d do next, Megan had thought these people were buried alive.

How could they not want to do what she did? How could they be happy in their humdrum lives?

But now she looked at them and she could see the lure of the simple life. They might have no excitement, but they were secure and happy in this cosy world of Golden Square.

None of them would be filled with anxiety at the prospect of the rest of their lives. None of them were waiting for someone to find them hiding out in Dublin. None of them had had their hearts broken. Or so she thought, in her self-centred way.

Was a boring life a good trade-off for that?

6 Mushrooms (#ulink_044efdd7-c593-5691-9eee-d36213e67f36)

Never underestimate the power of a simple mushroom. When I was young, Agnes and my mother would head off at dawn on summer’s mornings to search for mushrooms. Nobody thought of growing them in the vegetable garden along with the potatoes and cabbage. Mushrooms were the fairies’ gift to us, my mother would say: like soft pincushions scattered on the grass as the sun rose.

You had to be quick, mind, or else the cattle would trample them and they’d be gone.

Home with their pot of mushrooms, we’d put the fattest on top of the range and sprinkle a little salt on them. Roasted like that, with the heat rising up into the mushrooms and the pink pleated underbelly turning brown, they were the most delicious thing you’d ever eat.

They made a great feast with a bit of scrambled egg: a plate of earth brown mushrooms with the juices running out of them and the eggs like yellow clouds beside them.

Even now – and it’s a long time since I walked a green field to pick a wild mushroom – I can still tastethe freshness of one roasted on my mam’s range.

It was the simplicity we loved. Agnes had told us of the grand feasts in the big house, with sauces you had to stir for hours.

Hollandaise for asparagus was the fashion at the time in the grand houses. I’ve since tried asparagus and all I can say is, give me a roasted mushroom any day.

But the humble mushroom is proof that sometimes the best things in life are found growing wild and free right under your nose. Don’t rush so fast, Eleanor, that you can’t see the wild mushrooms around you.

Two weeks into January and the rains came. Rae wasn’t sure which was the lesser of two evils: the fact that the rain raised the temperature from an icy minus three in the early morning or the fact that at least when it was freezing, it didn’t rain.

Will was awake and reading when Rae woke up one mid-January morning with the sound of torrential rain bouncing off the windows. She peered at him sleepily, then looked at the clock. Only six thirty, still dark.

She wriggled over in the bed and snuggled up against him, loving the solid heat of his body beside hers. He was always warm. She wore bedsocks and fleecy pyjamas, which she’d learned to like when she was menopausal and prone to night sweats.

She’d hated the sweats. Waking up to a cool film of perspiration and with her hair stuck to her head as if she’d been swimming.

But she’d found the loss of fertility even harder. Menopause was one of those words she winced at. The end of fertility. There was something horribly final about it.

Even if she was too old to have a child now, the ability to have one was something precious.

And yet the ability to have children had brought her pain along with joy. Rae could never look at a baby in a pram without feeling a surge of an old pain rise up in her.

‘Hello, love,’ said Will.

‘You’re awake early,’ she murmured.

‘Couldn’t sleep. Did you sleep well?’

‘Really well. Sorry you didn’t.’

Rae lay for a moment more, doing what she’d done for so many years: gently nudging the past back into its box in her mind.

That done, she stretched luxuriously. She didn’t have to get up for another hour. Bliss.

She loved lying in, half-sleep. When Anton had been little, this had been the thing she’d missed the most: the dreaming time at weekends before she got up to face the day. Anton had been a particularly early riser. He was born when she was twenty-nine. He was now the same age she was when she’d given birth to him. She tried to imagine her beloved son as a parent – not that there was any sign of him settling down yet.

He’d be a gentle and thoughtful dad, she thought. He’d been the tallest of his class for years, built like a rugby player but totally lacking the rugby player’s ferocious sporting instinct. She’d always thought he’d work with animals in some way. She remembered the gentleness of him when he was sitting in the dog’s basket, stroking her silky ears. Instead, he’d turned that sensitive, thoughtful side into political analysis.

And he was happy. That was all she wanted, really.

She was lucky, despite everything that had happened. She must remember that.

Rae’s mind roved about, flitting into Titania’s and the morning ahead. Patsy from the hair salon wanted a table for ten at lunchtime and a cake for a birthday.

‘Candles?’ Rae had asked on the phone.

‘Definitely no candles,’ Patsy had answered in her raspy, smoker’s voice. ‘She’s gone beyond candles. But something with shoes would be nice. She loves shoes. They love you back, too.’

Rae laughed. She liked Patsy and her sharp, dry humour. Patsy was another person who hadn’t been brought up in happy-familyville, Rae was sure of it. There was a sense of kinship between them, even though neither had ever said a word about their past to the other. But sometimes, you knew.

Patsy never looked at Rae as if she were a comfortable married woman who helped out with Community Cares to fill her spare time. She understood that Rae was helping herself by helping other people, in the same way that Patsy helped the women who turned up at Patsy’s Salon sporting red eyes, black eyes and faces full of pain. Patsy welcomed them in, put the kettle on and made them beautiful. Beauty, like cups of tea in Titania’s, was sometimes more than skin deep.

‘I was thinking…’ Will put down his book.

Rae struggled out of her half-dream and sat up against the pillows. ‘You don’t want to hurt yourself, love,’ she teased.

In retaliation, Will stretched his long fingers under her armpit and found the tickliest place.

‘You win,’ she said, laughing.

‘I was going to suggest a fabulous holiday to cheer us up after the winter,’ Will said, ‘but seeing as you think I’m Mr Thicko…’

Rae leaned up and nibbled his ear. ‘Go on, Mr Thicko,’ she said, ‘you know I love you.’

‘Well, I was thinking – before I was rudely interrupted, that we haven’t had a holiday for two years. What about a cruise?’

Rae gave a little gasp of shock. She’d always wanted to go on a cruise, but cruising holidays always seemed too expensive whenever she’d idled away time looking at the prices on the internet.

‘Do you think we could afford it?’ she said. Inside, she was thinking that they must be able to afford it. Will was the finance person in their marriage. Even though she managed Titania’s, the café belonged to Timothy. He gave her budgets and sorted out cashflow. Rae herself had never been that comfortable about money.

Left to her, she and Will would never spend anything in case some catastrophe occurred and they ended up penniless. Her parents had been permanently broke. Her work with Community Cares showed her nothing but people who lived on the edge of the abyss.

‘I was looking at the bank statements on the internet last night,’ Will said. ‘We could do it this year, for sure.’

‘Yes, but would it be wise?’ she asked. ‘Who knows how long the economic downturn’s going to last. You’re not that busy, Timothy might turn round and close Titania’s…’ Rae felt the familiar twinge of money worries overcoming all thoughts of the holiday she’d always wanted.

‘Listen, we are doing fine financially, love,’ Will said. ‘We don’t spend money, Rae, we’re so careful. The downturn is here and, yes, I’m doing half the work I was a year ago.’ Will worked as an architectural technician for a local business and, as building work was at a standstill, he was working only on the company’s projects in the Far East. ‘But we’re fine. We have no mortgage, we could survive on half the money we’re earning now.’