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

‘I’ll take it,’ said Cashel.

Stanley felt his mobile phone fall out of his hands and clatter to the marble floor, where the battery pinged joyously out.

‘Right so,’ said Stanley, collecting himself and the scattered bits of his phone. Remain calm at all times was a good mantra for estate agents. They’d have champagne in the office when the sale went through. It had been years since they’d sold anything this big, years.

‘You’ll want it all done quickly?’ he ventured.

These alpha businessmen types wanted everything done quickly.

‘Of course,’ said Cashel. ‘I want to get the work started as soon as possible.’

Stanley thought of recommending his brother-in-law, master builder and currently unemployed, but thought better of it. He’d wait until the ink was dry first, then see about mentioning Freddie.

Less than a mile away, Kitty was doing her homework at the kitchen table, writing out her sums with the lead pressed so deeply into the paper that yet another pencil was in danger of breaking off. The pages underneath were all similarly engraved with sums from previous copybook pages. During homework time, Tess spent many moments wielding the pencil sharpener.

‘How are you doing, love?’ she asked, bending over her daughter to see how she was doing with her multiplication. Maths had never been Tess’s strong point, so she had to mentally run through each sum, using her fingers as an abacus, to see if her daughter was right.

‘Super. You’re nearly finished,’ she said.

Kitty made a ‘yeuch’ noise in reply.

‘I hate sums,’ she grumbled.

Tess had spent enough hours at parents’ events in the school, listening to the latest educational theories, to know that between the ages of eight and nine was when children decided what they ‘loved’ or ‘hated’, often based on the most random things.

She went straight into the recommended spiel: ‘But you’re so good at sums, Kitty,’ she said brightly. ‘Look at the lovely report you got last summer.’

Not entirely convinced, Kitty went back to indenting her pencil on to her copybook. ‘When’s Dad coming? He hasn’t been for dinner for ages. Why not? Are you fighting? What is for dinner – I’m starving.’

‘Your dad’s been busy, Kitty,’ Tess lied, wishing she had her own pencil to stick into something. She’d left Kevin two voicemail messages telling him he had to figure out what to tell the children, and he hadn’t replied. ‘We’ll see when he can come over, shall we?’

‘But we haven’t seen him in ages,’ Kitty went on. ‘He didn’t bring me home from Granny’s once this week.’

Tess had been grateful for that. It would have been too much to find Kevin sitting in her home mere days after he’d told her he was in love with another woman. But presumably this was all part of his avoidance-of-anything-difficult plan.

Clearly, Kitty knew something was wrong. Tess was pretty sure that Zach sensed it too, even if he hadn’t said anything. She would have to talk to Kevin and get him to agree to tell their children. Left to his own devices, Kevin would just carry on saying nothing.

And wait for her to do it.

‘I’ll phone Dad now, then,’ Kitty decided.

Tess sat helplessly at the table.

Kitty was back in two minutes, the portable in her hands: ‘Dad wants to talk to you,’ she said. ‘He’s taking us out to dinner on Friday, to Mario’s!’

Mario’s was a pizza restaurant, and Kitty’s favourite for the chocolate fudge desserts.

‘Great,’ said Tess. Perhaps he was planning to do it then.

‘Tess, help me out on this,’ he pleaded, the moment she got on the phone. ‘I’m not sure how to begin,’ he said sadly. ‘I don’t want them to hate me, and I don’t want to hurt them.’

Tess flattened down all thoughts of saying ‘It’s a bit late for that now.’ She was culpable too, she knew. But despite that, it was a bit rich for him to want her to tell Zach and Kitty about Claire so that they could all be happy families together.

‘How about Friday night?’ she said pleasantly.

‘We should do it together,’ he insisted.

Tess hesitated. Perhaps that would be best. A united front might help Zach and Kitty understand that, even if parents split up, they were together for their children. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you’re paying.’

She might have gone to bed that night and actually slept, if Helen, Kevin’s mother, hadn’t phoned right after Kitty had been put to bed.

‘Tess, I had no idea,’ she said, her voice catching. ‘I had no idea, honestly. It’s all such a shock.’

‘I know,’ Tess soothed, wondering why she was the one doing the soothing.

‘I thought you were mad to separate in the first place,’ Helen sobbed. ‘Now look what’s happened: he’s got this new woman. Oh, Tess, it’s not right – not right for you, Kitty or Zach. Look at what all this separation nonsense has done!’

‘We both agreed to the separation, Helen, so it’s not all Kevin’s fault,’ Tess said, trying to say something comforting because she knew that Helen adored her and the children.

‘Yes, but you separated to fix things,’ wailed Helen, ‘not to find new people.’

Since this was largely what Tess herself thought, she hadn’t the heart to argue with her mother-in-law.

For the next ten minutes, Helen cried over the phone while Tess tried to find a way to end the call.

‘She’s only a young girl, you know,’ Helen sniffled. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him. Would you take him back, Tess, if it ended with this girl?’

Tess breathed out slowly. ‘Helen, love, it’s gone beyond that,’ she said, wondering if it really had gone beyond that. Could she take Kevin back if he asked?

Her mind flickered, as it so often had of late, to Cashel.

That had been real love and real passion, she realized now. A tornado of emotion compared to what she’d felt for Kevin. If she took Kevin back, it would be agreeing to a life of gentle, kind benevolence with him, the two of them returning to sharing a home but leading separate lives in so many ways.

Seeing Cashel at his mother’s funeral had made her remember the fierceness of her love for him. If only he hadn’t abandoned her, things might have been so different.

‘But now everyone knows,’ Helen went on. ‘I’ve never even set eyes on her, but when Agnes Ryan phoned me to say she’d seen my Kevin kissing this girl on the street outside the café, I was so shocked that I rang him straight up and asked him. That was the first I knew of it.’

Tess simmered. So much for the not-upsetting-you-by-bringing-Claire-out-on-the-streets-of-Avalon schtick.

‘Oh well, it’s out in the open now,’ Tess said. ‘Helen, pet, I have things to do, perhaps we can talk tomorrow?’ You might need to bail me out of jail for murdering your son for not telling his own children when other people have seen him snogging this woman in the town square.

She’d have to tell Zach now. News like that would be all around Avalon at the speed of light. Someone on Zach’s bus in the morning would be bound to have heard. He ought to know the facts himself.

Wearily, she went upstairs and knocked on Zach’s door. ‘Can I come in?’ she whispered.

As usual, a moment passed before he got up and opened the door. Tess wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing in there, but whatever it was required privacy, and it was her job to give it to him. The room smelled of socks, teenage boy and the new deodorant that he was spraying like there was no tomorrow.

‘Sure,’ he said.