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

‘Yeah, but you’re three thousand miles away and you’re broke too. I get it,’ Tess said sadly. ‘We should offer our services to some marriage counselling clinic. They could use us on their posters: Meet the Power Sisters, whatever you do, don’t do what they did – that way you’ll be happy.’

‘There’s one thing you never mentioned,’ Suki went on as if she hadn’t been interrupted. ‘Love. You haven’t talked about love, Tess. You miss Kevin and all that, but is your heart broken because he’s not there, or is it broken because there’s no one to share the chores and no one in your bed at night? Only you can answer that. If you decide that you do love him, then you have to fight the child girlfriend for him.’

For the first time that evening, Tess laughed. It was hysterical laughter, and once she started, she found she couldn’t stop. She tried to muffle her laughter in the pillows.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, coming up for air. ‘I had a vision of me and this lovely twenty-nine-year-old in hand-to-hand combat in the main square. Me whacking her through the pub window, bare-knuckled.’

‘Tell me when that bout’s scheduled,’ Suki said drily, ‘and I’ll book the first flight home.’

Winter (#ulink_c3d8e785-3b5f-54e5-831f-833a09503969)

Chapter Five (#ulink_74eecea1-9f94-5b0f-be45-54b6603e0d3e)

Coffee was Suki’s drug of choice these days. A silky Colombian macchiato with a hint of soya foam from the small coffee shop down the block. She’d pick up a cup to go and then take it out to the porch at the back of the house. Once a fine, albeit small, clapboard house owned by a local potter, it was prettily decorated and had several storm lanterns hanging from the porch roof. There was also an old peeling swing seat with a cushion that probably pre-dated the last ten political administrations, but it was the perfect place to sit in with her coffee and smoke the first of her ten cigarettes of the day.

The radio had forecast a fierce nor’wester that morning, and in the jungle of a backyard, the skinny trees shivered in the wind. Gardening was not Suki’s strong point.

Compared to the old cottage she’d got in the divorce settlement from Kyle, the view was nothing to speak of. There, she’d looked out over the fine sand of the beach, watching as the waves rolled over driftwood. She used to collect interesting pieces of driftwood; they complemented the pale blue of the cottage walls and blended nicely with the various bits of nautical paraphernalia Kyle’s mother’s decorator had added to the cottage when they’d first moved in.

In this house, with its wallpapered walls and mustardy cream paintwork, the driftwood looked dirty. It was all a matter of setting.

Another difference was the skyline: no Richardson had lived within hailing distance of the neighbours for decades. Neighbours were what poor people had. The rich could afford glorious isolation, and their cottage had been suitably solitary, the only one on the beach.

Here, on the edge of a small estate in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she had another line of houses behind hers. Rather than look at them, she stared up into the sky as she blew smoke out and sipped her coffee. It was a good time of the day for thinking.

Today, she needed to get groceries, pay some bills online and progress a little further with the book.

It wasn’t moving.

‘Do you write all the words?’ a woman had said to her at a cocktail party once. This had been back in the days when Suki had felt loved by the world, so she had merely smiled kindly and said, ‘Yes, I write all the words.’

Today, she’d have been less kind: ‘No, the Word Fairy comes in the night and does them. I just read them through in the morning to make sure she’s written enough. By the way, you need to go back to your village, ’cos they’re an idiot short.’

The Word Fairy wasn’t working at all these days.

Growing up in Ireland, she’d never been a morning person except in the summer holidays, when shafts of morning sun would slant in through the holes in the curtains in her bedroom. Sometimes, Suki would get a cup of tea from the kitchen – summer was the only time Avalon House wasn’t arctic – and then climb up the back stairs to the third floor, where a window led out on to the ersatz Norman battlements. Nobody but she and Tess ever went up there. Suki used to scatter her cigarette butts everywhere, until Tess brought up an empty baked bean can and it became the ashtray, occasionally emptied when it was overflowing. They had dragged two old cushions up to the window and on nice days, she and Tess could sit in comfort, hidden from the world, and gaze down from their lofty position at the top of Willow Street. They could see the comings and goings of Avalon, could see the line of caravans in Cabana-Land and the rocky spur to the right where children loved to explore in the daytime and where young lovers liked to make out at night.

Suki liked being near the sea. There was a claustrophobia in being land-locked. Sea and trees, they were her lodestones.

The beach at Avalon was so beautiful, the curve of the sand on one side, tailing off to a tiny cove covered with smooth rocks that shimmered in the sun. Valley of the Diamonds, it was called.

Once, a boy had taken Suki there. She hadn’t let him go all the way, whatever he told his friends. Suki Power was lots of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

Cigarette finished now, she made her way wearily upstairs to her office.

The office was really a glorified cupboard. Two years ago when she bought the house, the realtor had enthusiastically described it as ‘the nursery’. Suki had shot him an angry look at this description. Did he seriously think she was looking for a place to settle down and raise a family at her age? But the realtor was, she realized, a self-absorbed young man who was operating on auto-pilot, trotting out the same spiel whatever the house, whoever the client:

… through here the kitchen/diner, and look, an original wood-burning stove! And upstairs, conveniently placed next door to the master bedroom, a nursery!

She no longer walked into the tiny room and thought of it wistfully as the nursery. Even though she railed against older mothers, there was still a tiny place inside her that mourned her own childlessness.

But she was beyond that ever becoming a reality. These days, the ‘nursery’ was more of an office-cum-torture chamber. The place where she went to suffer and stare at a blank screen, wondering how to fill the endless pages that stood between her and the next tranche of the advance from her publisher – money she needed so desperately.

When she emerged from the wasteland that had been her life on the road with Jethro, Suki had been broke. Not a penny remained of the divorce settlement from Kyle Junior; it had either gone up their noses or on her back, indulging a penchant for ridiculously expensive clothes, jewellery, cosmetic treatments to make her look younger. The pretty Maine cottage she’d been given as part of her alimony had been sold to pay the debts she’d run up, splashing money around, settling bar bills with bravado to show that she was a famous feminist writer and not just another groupie hanging around with TradeWind. Except that’s exactly what she was – another groupie.

What shamed her most was that she hadn’t come to her senses and walked out. She’d hung on until Jethro had tired of her and tried to pass her along to someone else.

The thought of that night still made her feel sick. The following morning, she’d packed her bags and gone.

Out of the ravages of all that, she’d tried to rebuild her life. One of the few old contacts prepared to return her calls was her agent, Melissa, who somehow landed her a two-book publishing deal.

The advance was about a quarter of what she’d got on her last contract, and that was for one book.

‘You’re lucky to be getting this much,’ Melissa had said with customary frankness. ‘I suspect they’ve agreed to publish your feminist politik book on the basis that, come the day you write the bestselling “I married into the Richardson clan, then toured with Jethro and TradeWind and came out the other side”, they’ll make their money back and then some.’

‘I’ll never write that story,’ said Suki quietly, thinking that she wasn’t entirely sure she had come out the other side of either of those periods in her life.

‘Never won’t pay the bills, honey,’ Melissa pointed out. ‘Keep it in the back of your mind. We can talk about it when you come to New York for our meeting with the publishers.’

Suki had no intention of devoting any part of her mind to that particular project. But in the meantime, another book had forced its way to the forefront of Suki’s mind: Redmond Suarez’s book on the Richardsons. If he lived up to his reputation and succeeded in digging out all her secrets, Suki knew she’d fall apart completely.

It was late afternoon when Suki finally admitted defeat, having deleted just about everything she’d written that day. She went down to the kitchen and found Mick, still wearing the T-shirt he’d slept in, the one with his band’s logo on the front. His eyes were heavy with sleep, as though he’d not long got up. Mick was muscular, tall and admiring – just Suki’s type. He was also, she had begun to suspect, more than a little hung up on her relationship with Jethro and TradeWind. She wondered if she was a trophy girlfriend for him: ‘I’m dating Jethro’s ex.’

Maybe not. But he was becoming quite proprietorial. Last night, when she’d told him she was flying to New York to meet with her agent and publisher, he’d immediately started dropping hints that he wanted to come with her.

It seemed he hadn’t given up, because his first words were: ‘We need a little vacation, babe.’

He was sitting at her pine kitchen table, studying Mr Chan’s Takeout Menu as if there was a possibility he would deviate slightly from what he always had, which was chicken chow mein and peanut noodles. Suki teased him about it all the time, but today she found his careful perusal of the menu irritating.

Neither of them had money for a ‘little vacation’. Any more than they had the money for takeout every damn night of the week. Mick couldn’t cook anything except barbecue, which he thought should be added into the Constitution as an amendment: ‘Every man should have the right to grill in his own backyard and down a few cold ones at the same time,’ he liked to say.

He rented a ground-floor apartment in an old house two blocks away and he didn’t have a proper outdoor grill, just a makeshift one that ruined at least half the food. His friend, Renaud, band drummer by night and tax accountant by day, had a propane grill, and a decent backyard to go with it.

Mick and Steve, the bass guitarist, liked to bitch about Renaud, saying he wasn’t a real rocker because he had a ‘civilian’ job. They were true musicians: they didn’t do day jobs.

Suki was expected to agree with this assessment, but the more the bills came and the more it seemed as if Mick was living off her ninety per cent of the time and contributing nothing, the more she envied Renaud’s wife, Odette, who had the money for facials, a personal trainer and perfect nails.

A month ago, Mick had moved a lot of his stuff into her house. Now he was subletting his apartment.

Suki knew that if they stayed together, she’d have to be the one who earned the money. Which was about as modern feminist as it got.

She also knew that she’d never be able to mention the fact that she was the breadwinner, any more than she could tell Mick that his band was going nowhere.

Instead, she was expected to attend any gig they managed to get and stand at the side of the stage clapping and whooping over-enthusiastically. Anything less would upset Mick.

‘I don’t think you liked the show,’ he’d said once, early on, when Suki and Odette had been talking near the bar instead of frantically leading the applause.

‘I loved it,’ said Suki automatically, because that was what you did with performers. Only promoters and managers got to tell the truth, Jethro once told her. He’d been remarkably knowledgeable and clear-sighted about the industry, for all his drug-absorption.