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

Anneliese, I feel scared and anxious. Please tell me I’m not going gaga, will you?

It would sound too strange, definitely senile. She dreaded losing her mind: it had happened to so many people she knew. Even lovely, lively Vivi had succumbed and was now in the nursing home outside town. Laurel Gardens, it was called. A gentle-sounding name for a place Lily never wanted to be.

The diary…Her mind kept drifting back to it. If only she’d phoned Izzie after all. Izzie would know the right thing to do. Darling Izzie, who’d said she was going to New York to live, no matter what.

‘I don’t care if I’m living on threepence and sleeping in a teeny apartment where you couldn’t swing a hamster, never mind a cat,’ she’d said all those years ago. ‘I’ll be doing it IN NEW YORK. You went and lived abroad, Gran, you must know what I’m talking about?’

Lily had nodded. ‘You’re right, Izzie darling, forgive me. I’d forgotten.’

‘Gran, you never forget a thing,’ Izzie had laughed.

Sitting now in the sunlight, Lily wished that weren’t so true. It might be nice not to remember.

She thought so much about the past nowadays. Did that mean she was very close to the end of her life? Did the voices of the past come to warn her? She saw them all in her dreams now: Mam, Dad, Tommy, Granny, Uncle Pat, Jamie, Robby and her beloved Alice. Alice was the worst. No parent should ever have to bury a child. The place where Alice had been was a part of her heart that Lily couldn’t bear to touch, even now that Alice was twenty-seven years gone.

There had been so much death in her life, Lily reflected. All those young, healthy people dying because a bomb had landed nearby, or men shipped home with injuries everybody could see, and scars on the inside where nobody dared to look but that killed them just the same.

As a girl who’d grown up in the countryside, Lily was familiar with death. There had been no question of keeping children away from the coffin at a funeral – everyone, young and old, bent to kiss the icy forehead of the corpse nestled in its wooden box. Lily had sat quietly at wakes and listened to old songs sung and watched the dead being mourned. But she’d never seen an actual person die until those first days on the wards.

She’d been amazed to find that life didn’t ebb out of people with a fanfare – it slipped away quietly, leaving nothing but a body growing colder as the doctor moved swiftly on to the next patient. It was only much later, when the bloodied gauze and instruments were being cleared up and the amputated limbs were being carted off to the incinerators, that anybody had time to tidy up the dead patients.

Lily used to find herself thinking about them later, when she’d be sandwiched between the girls – Maisie and Diana – drinking hot tea in the tea rooms, or sharing pink gins – then she’d allow herself to remember. Of course, remembering was always a mistake.

Each young man could be her younger brother, Tommy, who was somewhere in the Mediterranean, she thought, although he couldn’t tell her in his letters, and her mind would leap to the what ifs – what if it was him lying cold on a table…

Which was why they’d all order another round of pink gins.

‘Nil bastardi carborundum!’ Diana would cry, which was dog Latin for Don’t let the bastards get you down.

Despite all the death, they’d been so young that they didn’t think about dying themselves. Death was for other people. They were going to be lucky and, just in case, they’d live each day to the full.

And now, death was waiting for her, except that she wasn’t afraid to go. That was the one great gift of old age: readiness to move on. There was nobody left for her to take care of. Nobody would sob that it was too early when she died. God had let her live to care for her baby; she would have to thank Him for that, if she saw Him. Although she might be heading for the other place, the one with fire and the Devil. Lily grinned to herself. She wasn’t afraid of the Devil, he’d been laughing in her ear for years.

If everything she’d heard in churches all her life was true, she’d meet all the people she’d loved in the past. Like her darling Alice. Letting Alice go had been the hardest thing she’d ever had to do.

Lily closed her eyes against the sun and let herself dream until it all turned dark inside her head.

SIX (#ulink_92784c55-e90c-5cc4-ba62-15f2e4d6691c)

Four miles away, Anneliese was in her kitchen clumsily making strong tea in the hope that it might wake her up. She’d slept badly again, staring at the alarm clock for much of the night, and had only dropped off to sleep when dawn began creeping over the horizon.

Now, she was dressed and determined to go for a walk along the beach to get her out of the house, but her head felt heavy and muzzy. Normally, she might have sat down on the porch and read a book or a magazine until she felt more energetic, but she couldn’t enjoy those pleasures now. Every magazine she picked up had some article in it that pierced her.

Yesterday, a seemingly innocent magazine that came free with the daily newspaper had carried an interview with an actress starring in a film about infidelity.

Sickened, Anneliese had thrown the whole magazine into the bin.

The library books by her bed were no help either: she’d never realised she’d been so drawn to novels about relationships. If asked, she’d have said she read everything, but all the books she’d taken from the library, with the exception of a thriller and an autobiography of Marie Antoinette, had dealt with families, couples and the relationships therein.

She had her second cup of tea outside on the porch. It was a beautiful sunny morning with a feeling of real warmth in the air and when she set off for her walk, Anneliese didn’t bother with her light rain jacket. Her grey fleece was enough; she’d soon warm up. If she walked along the beach away from Tamarin, right down to the outcrop of rocks that marked the end of little Milsean Bay and back, she’d have walked two miles. That would be enough to warm her up.

As she left, she noticed several people on the town side of the beach, more than the normal morning dog walkers. Anneliese strained to see what was going on. There were definitely six or seven people gathered together on the high ground between the two bays and it was as if they were looking out to sea for something.

A boat. Oh no, she thought. A fisherman’s boat had gone missing. It was the awful fear that haunted any seaside town.

Once a boat went missing, the whole community came to a stop, as people prayed, the air and sea rescuers searched, and families sat numb. Anneliese could remember a vigil being held in the church once, when a boat with three generations of fishermen capsized; what felt like all of Tamarin had crowded into the wintry cold of St Canice’s, as if the intensity of prayer could carry the boat and its crew back home. It hadn’t. Only one of the crew had returned when his body had been washed up on the rocks five miles south.

She had no business to be feeling low when all she’d lost was a husband – who still lived – while some pour soul in Tamarin was readying herself for the real loss of a man.

Although Anneliese felt too raw to deal with the pain of a fishing crew lost, she felt a responsibility to walk down to the people on the beach. She was a local and if help or vigil was needed, she had to be there too.

But as she walked quickly through the sand, down to the damp swathe of the beach, she realised that the people weren’t looking desolately out to sea: they were looking at something in the water.

‘What is it, Claire?’ she asked a woman who lived several miles inland and who was often on the beach walking three black-and-white collies who danced around the surf in delight.

‘Hello, Anneliese,’ the woman said. The dogs were at her feet, whimpering because they wanted to keep walking and not stand. ‘It’s a whale, look. She’s come in too far and now she can’t seem to get out.’

‘Poor whale,’ said someone else, moving so that Anneliese could stand on the highest part and see for herself.

There, in the waters of Tamarin Bay, was a dark shape circling in slow, aimless arcs. It was huge, had to be, because they were easily half a mile away from the shape and it was easily visible. Just as Anneliese was wondering how anybody could tell for certain what the creature was, it moved gracefully up in the water, a gleaming mound of darkest, silky blue, and she could see that it was clearly some sort of whale.

A tall fountain of water sprayed up from the whale’s blowhole before the huge mammal sank back beneath the waters of the bay.

‘They rise when they’re in distress,’ said a voice, explaining. ‘She won’t know what to do.’

Anneliese hadn’t noticed the man before in the group of local people. He could be taken for a fisherman in his dark pants and bulky sweater, but she knew most of the fishermen and she’d never seen him before. He was tall and grizzled looking enough to be one of them, with a greying beard that matched thick, slightly too long, hair.

‘What should we do?’

‘I’m sorry to say, there’s not an awful lot we can do,’ he said.

‘But there must be!’ said Anneliese, furious at the resignation in his voice. Didn’t he care? That poor whale was like her: lost and alone, and now nobody wanted to help. It just wasn’t good enough. ‘Has anyone phoned the maritime wildlife people to tell them about her?’

‘That would be me,’ the strange man said. ‘I’m the local maritime expert. I’m living in Dolphin Cottage.’

Dolphin Cottage was less of a house and more of a barn, nestled among the sand dunes on Ballyvolane Strand, the next horseshoe-shaped bay up from Milsean. A squat wooden building, painted blue by man and washed beige by God, Dolphin House was one of the local houses that were permanently rented out.

‘I’m Mac,’ he added. ‘Mac Petersen.’

Anneliese glared at him, not taking the hand he held out. She’d done polite all her life: she wasn’t doing it any more.

‘And you can’t do anything to help?’ she snapped.

‘When whales become stranded in shallow harbours, they often die,’ he said, calmly ignoring her rudeness.

‘So this is it?’ Anneliese demanded, waving her arms to encompass the whole group. ‘Us standing around watching her die? That’s great. Well done Mr Marine Specialist.’

As she turned to see the whale’s dark shape move silently through the water again, Anneliese felt more empathy with the great creature than with any of the human beings around her. They knew nothing. Pain, loss, fear – they knew nothing about it. But the whale, circling in fear, she understood.