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

The memory of her mother in that outfit, keys dangling from her belt, glasses on a ribbon round her neck, used to make Lily wince at the subservience of it all.

The Rathnaree housemaids liked their uniforms and the fact that it saved their own clothes.

Even Vivi, Lily’s best friend, liked hers.

‘Keeps my things nice, Lily,’ she said cheerfully, squashing her curls under the starched maid’s cap. ‘Will you ever tell me why you have such a bee in your bonnet about the uniform?’

‘I don’t,’ Lily would say, which wasn’t the truth at all.

Vivi was such an uncomplicated soul and Lily knew it would be impossible to explain that she hated the way putting on a uniform turned her into a piece of the furniture, which was what Lady Irene wanted: lots of blank-faced servants rushing around doing her bidding. Lily might have been born into the servant class, but she didn’t have to like it.

Lady Irene wouldn’t have forgotten to put expensive wrinkle cream on, Lily smiled to herself from her seat outside St Canice’s.

If ever there was a woman keen to keep the ravages of time at bay, it had been Lady Irene. In those long ago days when Lily worked in Rathnaree, creams like Izzie’s gorgeous Skin Replenish were definitely the preserve of the upper classes. An ordinary woman from the town would never wear any cosmetics, never mind expensive face cream. Lily’s mother washed her face in water and soap, and that was it. She tidied up Lady Irene’s walnut dressing table with its many potions and silver-topped bottles, but never expected to use such things herself.

Lily could remember herself at twenty, defiantly buying Max Factor cosmetics and arranging them on the windowsill beside her bed. She’d have loved Lady Irene to see them and understand that the girl from the cottage was as entitled to beauty as she was.

‘See, they’re not just for the likes of you, Lady Irene,’ she’d have said, holding up the Chinese Red lipstick she loved and painted on in the same way Joan Crawford wore hers, with that elongated, sultry bow. The Crawford Smear, they called it, and it was the devil to clean it off your mouth, leaving a dark red stain that made you look as if you’d been pigging out on raspberries.

Had she ever been that young and fierce? That angry? She’d hated the Lochravens and all they stood for then: wealth, privilege and a blithe, careless approach to life. Lady Irene was the worst. From the moment she got out of bed, leaving her teacup teetering on the edge of a dresser, casting off silken bedclothes on to the floor, the lady of the house went about her business with the unassailable knowledge that someone would be following behind, tidying up. Lily hadn’t cared so much when she was the lady’s maid following in her employer’s wake. She was young, energetic and with supple limbs: she could button her lip if need be. But how she’d hated it when her mother, Lady Irene’s housekeeper, was the one stooping and tidying up.

‘You’d think she’d pick up her things the odd time,’ Lily would say, scowling, when her mother came down to the big Rathnaree kitchen late at night, worn out with tiredness after her day but not ready to go home yet.

‘Hush,’ Mam would say, anxious lest anyone heard, although there were plenty of other people in the house who agreed with Lily and said nothing, but just took their wages. ‘Her ladyship wasn’t reared to tidy up after herself.’

‘More’s the pity,’ Lily snapped. She was fed up hearing how Lady Irene, a lady in her own right and not by marriage, had been raised in a palatial home in Kildare with three times the number of servants she had in Rathnaree. In the run-up to hunting house parties, her ladyship could be heard moaning about life at CastleEdward, where her mother, Lady Constance, had so much time to herself because the vast household almost ran itself.

‘Why doesn’t the stupid cow go back there, then?’ Lily would snap at Vivi.

From the vantage point of age, Lily was able to smile at the memory of her angry, younger self. At the time, she thought she knew it all, but she didn’t. She hadn’t understood that money and privilege didn’t buy escape from the pain of life. There were some things a person had to live through and nothing could ease the agony, be they lady’s maid or ladyship. They were all sisters under the skin.

The murmuring was louder in the church.

The congregation were reciting the Creed, Lily realised. In another ten minutes, the Mass-goers would be out and they’d fuss over Lily, worrying about whether they should call the doctor or not.

Lily’s friend Mary-Anne would twitter with anxiety at Lily’s mention of feeling light-headed, and would probably get faint with the shock of it all, and need to sit down herself. Everyone had to have a hobby and Mary-Anne’s was hypochondria. At eighty-six, she was a slave to her pills and a torment to her GP.

Lily was the opposite. She didn’t want a fuss. She’d move before everyone emerged, perhaps walk slowly out down the lower left side of the courtyard and on to Patrick Street. A cup of strong tea in Dorota’s might revive her.

She could sit and look out at the harbour and watch the fishing boats come in. Thursday was the day Red Vinnie – so called because of the bright red slicker he wore – brought in his lobster pots. Vinnie always had time for a chat and he’d talk of the seals he’d seen basking out beyond Lorcan’s Point, or the gulls with the strange yellow stripe on their wings the like of which he’d never seen before in his thirty-five years as a fisherman.

He was still young enough to find change shocking, Lily reflected. She’d lived long enough to see that there weren’t as many changes in life as people thought: the world moved on a cycle and everything came round again. Only someone of her age could see that. Wait long enough and the past had its turn again and became the present.

The past – Rathnaree, Lady Irene, dear Vivi – had been taking up space in her mind lately because of that sweet Australian girl who’d been so softly-spoken on the phone, scared of ringing such an ancient old dear as herself.

Jodi Beckett, the girl’s name was and she had a photograph, she said, of Rathnaree in 1936, of Lady Irene’s birthday party.

‘It’s all beautiful and glamorous, like people from a film,’ Jodi had added excitedly. ‘They’re standing in front of a fireplace with a tiger rug at their feet. I don’t like that because it’s a real tiger. It’s so cruel, but the rest is so amazing. The clothes are incredible, glamorous…’

It had been all that, Lily agreed, smiling wryly: very glamorous, although not so much so when you were the person sweeping up the ashes from those once-blazing fires at six on a cool morning, knees hard on the marble hearth, trying to be quiet lest you wake the household who wouldn’t care less about waking you if they needed something.

But that wasn’t the thing to say to the girl. Jodi, pretty name, so confiding too, had told Lily that she’d married an Irishman, who was the new deputy headmaster in the local secondary school. And that her great-great-grandparents had come from County Cork and her family in Brisbane considered themselves Irish and loved all things Celtic.

‘Investigating the past in Ireland is what I’m meant to be doing,’ Jodi had said on the phone. ‘I knew so much about Ireland before I came here. I love it.’

Lily thought of how the past got romanticised into the rich vibrancy of Technicolor and Hollywood, where the servants weren’t seen – except to doff their caps and be meekly happy with their peasant lot – and the rich got to be glamorous and have fun.

There were so many stories she could tell young Jodi about those times, but they might not be the stories Jodi was expecting.

Yes, there were silk gowns that bared pale, pampered backs, and the glitter of family diamonds and emeralds hauled out of jewellery cases for parties and balls. But that was only one side of the story. The less glamorous side was of whole families practically born into service by virtue of being born on the grand estates, families who were expected to have subservience in their blood. Except that not all of them wanted to wear a uniform, bob endless curtseys, and do the bidding of people who were exactly the same as them, except that the gentry had money behind them.

Lily knew that feeling all too well, because that was how she’d felt about the likes of Lady Irene.

She sighed, thinking of her younger self and all the anger and resentment she’d carried inside then. People now didn’t really understand class the way older people did. Money could buy you anything now. But then, money was nothing against the wall of the fierce class divide. When you were born one of the peasant class, you died that way too. Raging against such cast-iron barriers made little difference. Such complex memories weren’t what Jodi was anticipating.

‘I’ve made a start on the history of Rathnaree, but there’s not much about it. No books – isn’t that incredible? I’m sure you’ve so many stories and things. I’d love to hear them but…’ Jodi paused. ‘Only if you’d like to talk to me. I wouldn’t want to tire you out.’

‘Ah pet,’ Lily said kindly, ‘talking doesn’t tire me out. Let me look and we can talk about it all then.’

Jodi would love the box Lily had kept hidden in her spare room: full of letters, photographs and her precious diary, along with programmes from the theatre, menus, a fake gold compact that had once been filled with Tea Rose face powder, dried flowers from her tiny wedding bouquet, her old ration book, bits and pieces that made up a life lived fifty years before. When she’d been speaking to Jodi, Lily’s mind had instantly run to the box.

She’d taken it from its hiding place and put it beside her armchair in the sitting room, planning to open it up and look at its contents again. But somehow, she hadn’t. The box was still there, its dusty flaps closed.

Lily decided she’d meet the young Australian girl, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted the precious contents of her box out there in the world. There were secrets in there – nothing that would threaten the State, she smiled to herself. But secrets, nonetheless. Things she’d never told anyone.

There was just one person she’d trust with those secrets and that was Izzie.

Perhaps the best thing would be to write a note for Izzie and tape it on to the box so that one day, when Lily was gone, Izzie would find it. But then, maybe Izzie wasn’t ready for her grandmother’s secrets just yet.

Besides, Lily was sure Izzie had secrets of her own to occupy her. Izzie had been subtly different the last few times she’d phoned from New York: a little preoccupied, a little awkward, the way she used to be when she was younger and had something to hide.

‘Is everything all right, love?’ Lily had asked the last time they’d talked, on Sunday night.

‘Fine,’ Izzie had said in a brisk tone that reminded Lily, with an ache, of Izzie’s mother, Alice. Izzie sounded exactly like her mother when she spoke: the same soft tones, the same way of emphasising certain words so her voice flowed like water, rapidly and quicksilver. When Izzie’s voice had grown up, a few years after her mother’s death, it was sometimes unbearably poignant for Lily to hear her speak: it was like Alice come back to life.

They’d looked so different: Izzie was tall and strong with eyes like Lily’s own and the milky Celtic colouring that was set off by that marvellous caramel hair of hers. Alice had been small and fine-boned, with dark hair and the olive skin of Lily’s own grandmother, the fearsome Granny Sive.

Granny Sive was descended from the fairy folk, people used to say when Lily was a child, which was one way of saying they were scared stiff of her.

Lily had never been scared, though. Granny Sive had simply been uncompromising and different, a modern woman in olden times. No wonder they were all scared of her.

Granny Sive, now there was an old lady who’d have had a lot of great stories in her life.

What a pity nobody had come along to hear her tales.

Lily sighed. She hoped she’d done the right thing with the diary and the box. It was hard to know what the right thing was. But Lily had been feeling so unsettled since the phone call from Jodi Beckett. There was – how could she describe it – a sense of time speeding up, an urgency in her heart since then. Like she needed to phone Izzie and talk to her, but it would sound strange if she rang up mid-week and said she’d been feeling odd. Poor Izzie would think she was going gaga.

She’d phoned Anneliese the previous evening to say how she felt but Anneliese and Edward’s answerphone came on and she hung up without leaving a message. She hated answering machines, they were one of the modern inventions she’d never liked, and how could a person leave such a message on a machine anyhow?