The House on Willow Street

‘He’s from Nigeria!’ shrieked Father Liam, as if this explained everything. ‘He doesn’t know how we do things round here.’

Danae reckoned it would do Avalon no harm to learn how things were done in Nigeria but kept this thought to herself.

Danae nipped into the back to put the kettle on and, from there, heard the buzzer that signalled a person opening the post office door.

‘No rush, Danae,’ said a clear, friendly voice.

It was Tess Power. Tess ran the local antique shop, Something Old, a tempting establishment that Danae had trained herself not to enter lest she was overwhelmed with the desire to buy something ludicrous that she hadn’t known she wanted until she saw it in Tess’s beautiful shop. For it was beautiful: like a miniature version of an exquisite mansion, with brocade chairs, rosewood dressing tables, silver knick-knacks and antique velvet cloaks artfully used to display jewellery.

People were known to have gone into Something Old to buy a small birthday gift and come out hours later, having just had to have a diamanté brooch in the shape of a flamingo, a set of bone-handled teaspoons and a creaky chair for beside the telephone.

‘Tess Power could sell ice to the Eskimos,’ was Belle’s estimation of her.

It was from Belle that Danae had discovered that Tess was one of the Powers who’d once owned Avalon House, the huge and now deserted mansion overlooking the town that had been founded by their ancestors, the de Paors, back in feudal times.

The family had run out of money a long time ago, and the house had been sold shortly before Tess’s father died. There was a sister, too.

‘Wild,’ was Belle’s one-word summation of Suki Power.

Suki had run off and married into a famous American political dynasty, the Richardsons.

‘Quite like the Kennedys,’ said Belle, ‘but better-looking.’

After spending three years smiling like the ideal politician’s wife, Suki had divorced her husband and gone on to write a bestseller about feminism.

To Danae, student of humankind, she sounded interesting, perhaps even as interesting as Tess, who was quietly beautiful and seemed to hide her beauty for some unfathomable reason.

‘Hello, Tess, how are you?’ asked Danae, emerging from the back room with her tea.

‘Fine, thank you.’ said Tess. She was standing by the noticeboard, clad in an elderly grey wool sweater and old but pressed jeans. Danae had only ever seen her wear variations on this theme.

Tess had to be early forties, given that she had a teenage son, but she somehow looked younger, despite not wearing even a hint of make-up on her lovely, fine-boned face. Her fair hair was cut short and curled haphazardly, as if the most maintenance it ever got was a hand run through it in exasperation in the morning. Despite all that, hers was a face observant people looked at twice, admiring the fine planes of her cheekbones and the elegant swan-like neck highlighted by the short hair clustered around her skull.

‘I wanted to ask if I could stick a notice about my shop on your board, that’s all.’

‘Of course,’ said Danae with a smile.

Normally, she liked to check notices to ensure there was nothing that might shock the more delicate members of the community, but she was pretty sure that anything Tess would stick on the board would be exemplary. The vetting system had been in place since some joker had stuck up a card looking for ladies to join Avalon’s first burlesque dance club:

Experienced bosom-tassel twirlers required!

Most of the ladies of Avalon had all roared with laughter, although poor Father Liam allegedly needed a squirt of his inhaler when he heard.

‘How’s business?’ Danae asked.

Tess grimaced. ‘Not good. That’s why I’ve typed up the notices. I’m sticking them all over the place and heading into Arklow later to put some up there too. It’s to remind people that the antique shop is here, to encourage them to bring things in or else to come in and shop. The summer season used to be enough to keep me going, but not any more.’ She looked Danae in the eye.

Danae kept a professional smile on her face. Although she didn’t know her well, she sensed that Tess was not the sort of person who’d want sympathy or false assurances that everything would turn out fine in the end, or that the antique shop would stay open when other businesses were going under because of the recession.

Instead, she said: ‘Chin up, that’s all we can do.’

‘That’s my motto exactly,’ Tess said, breaking into a smile.

Her large grey eyes sparkled, the full lips curved up and, for a moment, Danae was reminded of a famous oil portrait of an aristocratic eighteenth-century beauty, with fair curls like Tess’s clustered round a lovely, lively face. Someone who looked like Tess Power ought to have plenty of men interested in her, yet the most recent local gossip had it that her husband had left her and their two children.

Still, appearances could be deceptive. Danae Rahill knew that better than most.

When she’d shut the post office for the day, Danae headed home. She loved her adopted town. It was very different from the city where she’d grown up. After her father died, she and her mother had lived in a cramped three-room flat on the fourth floor of an old tenement building. They’d shared the bathroom with everyone else on that floor. Poverty had been the uniting factor in the tenements. People put washing and bags of coal on their balconies instead of window boxes.

Everyone should have been close, but they weren’t – not to Danae’s family, at least. Danae’s mother created a barrier between them and their neighbours.

‘We’re better than the likes of them,’ Sybil would say every day, after some fresh embarrassment, such as having to queue for the toilet because the Mister Rourke from number seven had a gyppy stomach thanks to a feed of pints on payday. ‘Tell them nothing, Danae. We don’t want other people knowing our business.’

As she grew older, Danae found other reasons to keep her own counsel.

When she’d first moved to Avalon, Danae had spent every spare moment exploring the pretty town, tracing its history in the varying architectural styles. Originally it had been a village consisting of a few grace-and-favour cottages for workers from the De Paor estate. These tiny brick homes arranged in undulating lines on the hillside were currently much in vogue with city dwellers who wanted a seaside hideaway. There were few other buildings that dated back to that period, one exception being the Avalon Hotel and Spa, which Belle ran. The rest of the town was a hotchpotch of American-style wooden houses built by a 1930s developer near the seafront, with a couple of modern housing estates and pretty, small-windowed Irish cottages scattered here and there.

Danae’s cottage was on the sparsely populated southern side of Avalon, right at the top end of Willow Street, a long, steep road that wound up the hill. The only neighbouring buildings were the ruins of a medieval abbey, which sat to her right, and Avalon House, which loomed behind her. Huge granite gateposts with battered iron gates marked the entrance to the once tree-lined avenue. Many of the trees were gone now, damaged like the great house itself, which had sat empty these last ten years.

Below Willow Street lay the sweep of Avalon Bay with its horseshoe-shaped sandy beach, which had been drawing seaside-loving holidaymakers to the area for many years.

Avalon was a resort town with a population of about five thousand at most during the winter, swelling to at least three times that figure in summer. Two caravan parks on the dunes were home to many of the visitors; those with money went to The Dunes, a beautifully kept site where a hundred, mainly privately-owned mobile homes, sat in splendour amid pretty little gardens. Further up the beach lay Cabana-Land, host to as many caravans as the owner could squeeze in and scene of much partying, despite signs warning ‘no barbecues on the beach’.

The steep hillside where Danae lived was a very different landscape to the rest of the town. Here, wild rhododendrons grew in drifts and the Avalon woods began, a vast hardwood forest planted many centuries before by Tess Power’s ancestors. Danae’s cottage was surrounded by a lush garden hidden from the sea winds by a crescent of trees, among them ash and elders, with one oak she was sure wouldn’t last the winter. She liked to rest her fingers on the cracked bark, feeling the lifeblood of this ancient giant throb into her.

Ferns that wouldn’t grow anywhere else in Avalon thrived in the sylvan sanctuary of her garden, while the winter roses bloomed with glorious blossoms. Her daffodils and crocuses came up weeks before anyone else’s, and the tiny sea orchids that only grew on the spiky grass on the sea dunes ran riot, forming wild clumps everywhere in the shelter of Danae’s domain.

When she got out of the car and opened the gate to the garden, Lady, a dog with the silvery grey fur and luminous pale blue eyes of a timber wolf, ran towards her, followed by the hens, clucking loudly as if to tell her their news. Danae hugged Lady first, then patted the hens’ sleek feathers, careful to pet all eight or else there would be jealousy.

Cora, the latest battery hen she’d rescued, was wildly jealous of the others. Having received two weeks’ daily nurturing from Danae, Cora had clearly decided that Danae was her saviour and favouritest person ever. She was still quite bald from her two years as a battery hen, but her personality shone through her strange haircut.

The funniest of the hens was Mara. Named after Danae’s niece, Mara was a sheeny Rhode Island Red who had been rescued by the local ISPCA. She was a flibbertigibbet of a creature, all fluffy bloomers and ruffled wing feathers at the slightest noise. Occasionally she would opt to remain in the henhouse at feeding time, waiting to be coaxed out like a reluctant diva, while in high winds she would climb atop the henhouse and stand there clucking like a female Heathcliff, impervious to the weather.

‘She’s completely mad,’ Mara pointed out when her chicken namesake introduced herself by landing on top of Mara’s lime-green Fiat Uno and sitting there in delighted splendour like the Queen of the Nile, wings stretched out. ‘Is that why she’s called after me?’

‘No!’ Danae laughed. ‘She’s beautiful and she nestled against me instantly the first time I met her. That’s what did it for me. Plus,’ Danae went on, ‘she’s a redhead and her flame shines brightly.’

Mara, who was eccentrically unique and had fiercely red hair that rippled around her face like glossy lava, grinned.

‘As excuses go, that’s perfect,’ she’d said.

Mara hadn’t been to visit for far too long, Danae realized as she petted the hens. There had been talk in her brother’s family of an engagement between Mara and a man at work, which was anticipated ‘any day now’, according to Morris, Danae’s younger brother.

The wind had begun to howl through the forest and there were swollen, dark clouds overhead. There would be no stars visible tonight. Danae loved staring up at the night sky, seeing the Great and Little Bears, the rippling Orion’s Belt and, her favourite, Cassiopeia. The spikily drawn big W was the first constellation she’d ever identified all those years ago, when she used to sit on the fire escape in the hostel and stare out, unseeing, at the darkness above.

One night, someone had handed her a tissue to dry her eyes and had started gently pointing out the stars until Danae’s tears had stopped falling and she found herself looking at something instead of staring at nothingness, seeing only her own pain. That night had been a watershed for Danae. It had been the first time she’d emerged from the pain to look at the world and to hear another human being taking the time to be kind to her. That night had marked the first time in years she’d allowed anybody to comfort her.

Years later, the stars still had the power to touch her deeply. It was impossible to look up at the heavens without feeling that you were a mere fragment of the great universe, and that one day, the problems that beset you would mean nothing. Few tears could survive that realization.