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

Izzie, you are a moron, she said out loud.

She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, threw back the covers and got up. No looking back: it was time to look forwards. It was after eleven. She’d slept for fifteen hours and she was hungry and thirsty.

Still in her T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, she went downstairs. There was no sign of Dad, but there was coffee in the pot and a note left on the counter beside the coffee.

‘Izzie, there’s food in the fridge. Hope the coffee’s drinkable when you get up. I’m on my mobile phone and I’m going to drop into the hospital later. Call me if you need a lift, otherwise, I’ll be back at one.’

Izzie drank her coffee, ate two rounds of Irish soda bread toasted and smothered with bitter marmalade, then showered and checked her messages on her BlackBerry. There was one from Carla, wishing her well, hoping that everything was OK, a couple more from people at work, another from Andy, who lived two apartments below her, saying he’d called and did she want to go to the movies with him and some friends?

She’d have to ring him later and tell him she was in Ireland. There was one from Stefan, about the SupaGirl! competition. More work, she’d pass that on to Carla. Nothing from Joe. Not that he’d ever emailed her before – he was far too clever to want electronic evidence of their fling, she thought acidly. But he had her email address, he could have mailed if he’d been that desperate to get in touch with her.

It seemed that when the going got tough, the tough found themselves other sex playmates. Thanks a lot, Joe, delighted to find out that you could last the distance.

Leaving a note for her dad on the counter – Gone to the hospital, probably see you there. In case I don’t, I’ll be back this afternoon – she stepped out the door and set off. She’d forgotten how small Tamarin was. One of the joys of Manhattan was that it was such a compact city compared to places like LA, but Tamarin was so wonderfully small, and she’d forgotten that. It was possible to walk from one side to the other in half an hour, and in the process one would probably have to stop ten times to talk to acquaintances.

As she walked, Izzie found herself wondering what it would be like to live in Tamarin again. Maybe that was the answer: get away from New York and all the toxic men she met, live somewhere simpler, where she belonged. But then New York was the perfect place to live if you didn’t feel you belonged anywhere else. Everyone belonged in New York.

Gran had never pushed her to come home. She wasn’t the sort of person who laid guilt trips on people. Not once, in all the years that Izzie had lived away, had her grandmother complained about Izzie not phoning, writing, visiting or moving home.

Walking through the town where her grandmother had lived most of her life, Izzie wished they’d talked about it.

Why was it that when someone was ill, you thought about all the things you hadn’t said? Up until now, Izzie was pretty sure she’d said everything, and yet there were some gaps in the conversation, gaps she wished she could fill.

‘Gran, I’m sorry I haven’t got married and had kids. I know you’d love to have great-grandchildren, and you’re so good with children. You were so good with me. But it just hasn’t happened.’

What else would she say?

‘How do you find love, Gran? You loved Granddad so much. But how do you know when you’ve got that and how do you get it? Was it easier when you were young? Did you get married more quickly? Is it because we date people and have sex and go off them and don’t have to marry them, is that the difference?’

Izzie thought she’d read somewhere that relationships where people lived together for years before they got married were more likely to end in divorce, than the reverse. It didn’t make sense.

Knowing the person by living with them seemed preferable, but Gran could hardly have lived with Granddad Robby before they’d got married. The net curtains in Tamarin would have been twitched off the windows in outrage if that had happened fifty-odd years ago. Yet they’d stayed together, even though going from singledom into marriage must have been a big leap at a time when women were virgins before marriage and the marital bed was a place shrouded in mystery.

Did people stay together years ago because it was preferable to splitting up?

Izzie had reached Harbour Square and she sighed with pleasure at the beauty of it. This really was the heart of Tamarin, had been for centuries when the local market was held here, where the salty-fresh smell of fish mingled with the heat of farm animals penned up to be sold. Now, there was no straw underfoot and the only creatures were the local dogs that congregated outside Dorota’s café with their owners, but the sense of timeliness continued. The squat palm trees reminded Izzie that once ships had sailed into the harbour from exotic climes. The wide boulevard style of Harbour Square was a legacy of the nineteenth-century Mayor Emmanuel Kavanagh who’d come from Argentina on a ship, stayed to marry a local girl, and planned the elegant expanse of the square to rival the airy open spaces of his beloved Buenos Aires.

Seagulls wheeled around in the sky, calling to each other as they considered where to sit and watch the fishing boats unload their catches.

It was a busy scene but never frantic. Tamarin had a calming effect on people: as if the very bricks of the town murmured a message that there was enough time in the day for everything, and if there wasn’t, whatever was left could wait till morning.

When she had a moment, Izzie decided, she’d come back and sit in Dorota’s and watch the town unfold around her, the way she used to when she was at school and would sit there with her friends gossiping and pretending they didn’t see the boys from school doing the same thing. For now, she only had time to buy a takeaway coffee of Dorota’s strong Colombian blend. Gran loved that coffee and Izzie decided that if she sat at her grandmother’s bed, the scent could drift over her. If Izzie’s voice had woken her up yesterday, maybe Izzie’s voice and that wonderful smell could wake her up today.

She never got to try her theory out because when she reached the hospital with her coffee cup in her hand, she saw her aunt sitting on a bench in the small hospital garden to the right of the ambulance bay. Anneliese didn’t notice her: she looked as if she wouldn’t notice a meteorite unless it landed directly on top of her. The hospital was built high up on the east side of the town and looked out at the harbour. Anneliese was staring out to sea blankly.

Watching her, Izzie fought the desire to go into the hospital and not confront whatever was troubling Anneliese. She didn’t have the energy for someone else’s pain. But that was the coward’s way out.

‘Hello,’ she said, sitting down beside her aunt.

‘Hi, Izzie,’ said Anneliese dully, then turned back to the sea.

‘It’s beautiful here,’ Izzie continued. When in doubt, make small talk.

Anneliese nodded. ‘Beautiful,’ she repeated.

Izzie took a deep draught of her coffee for moral courage. She figured that there was some problem in Edward and Anneliese’s marriage. She hoped it wasn’t serious. At home in New York, marriages flew into turbulence every day and such a thing was quite normal. But here, it felt different. As if the ‘till death us do part’ vow simply couldn’t be broken.

‘What’s wrong, Anneliese?’ she asked softly. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

She’d expected Anneliese to pause and to tell her slowly. But no. Still looking out to sea and in a voice filled with emotion and anger, Anneliese said: ‘Edward left me for Nell. You remember Nell, my best friend?’

‘What!’ said Izzie. ‘I can’t believe it. When?’

‘Nearly a week ago,’ said Anneliese, matter of factly. ‘I would tell you exactly how many days and hours, but that sounds too much like a smoker working out how long it is since her last cigarette, so I won’t do that.’

‘He left you for Nell?’ repeated Izzie.

‘I came home from Mass and they were together; not in bed together, although they might have been. It’s funny,’ Anneliese added, almost thoughtfully, ‘that sleeping with someone else is seen as the ultimate betrayal. Fucking someone else is believed to be the worst thing, isn’t it?’

Izzie winced at hearing her gentle, elegant aunt use such harsh, crude language. In all her life, she had never heard Anneliese speak in such a way.

‘But you know, fucking isn’t the worst thing,’ Anneliese went on. ‘The intimacy, the closeness, the sharing thoughts: they’re the worst things, that’s what I keep thinking every moment of every day. I keep thinking about what they were doing. Did Edward phone her or text her at night, saying, “How are you, darling? I’m bored, wish I was with you.” And knowing it was all because he wasn’t interested enough in me, I wasn’t enough for him.’ She turned to face her niece. ‘Can you imagine what that feels like, Izzie?’

Izzie wondered if her face was red with the flush of guilt. She had no idea what to say to help ease Anneliese’s pain. There wasn’t a lot she could say. But she had no right to say anything. Somewhere in New York was a married woman just like Anneliese and her husband was cheating on her with Izzie. He might have insisted he was no longer with his wife, but his actions proved otherwise.

‘And what did Edward say?’ Izzie asked, wanting to help, but knowing she wasn’t the right person to do it.

‘He didn’t know what to say. I asked him to leave and then, when he left the room, bloody Nell insisted that I’d known about them all along. Because any fool would have known if their husband was in love with somebody else,’ she said bitterly. ‘And that’s the thing, Izzie: I didn’t know. I really didn’t. After thirty-seven years of marriage, you think you know somebody. Of course, that’s the other hard thing, one of many hard things.’ Anneliese almost laughed and she sounded a bit crazy, Izzie thought.

‘There are so many horrible things, it’s hard to pin down the worst, but certainly one of the startling bits of information out of this entire situation is the realisation that you really don’t know anybody. I thought he loved me. More fool me.’

Anneliese was quiet for a moment. ‘God, Izzie, I hope you’re never betrayed like this. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I really thought Edward loved me. We’d been through quite a lot together and I thought we’d be together until the end. And now, it’s like everything wasn’t true, everything we did together was a big lie. I was looking at our lives one way and he was looking at it another way. Perhaps that’s where the expression rose-coloured glasses comes from,’ she said suddenly. ‘I had rose-coloured glasses on. I was looking at the truth and I simply didn’t see it. He must have been bored, fed up and hated me. Otherwise why would he want Nell?’

Izzie quickly scanned her mind for Nell. Nell was nowhere near as attractive as Anneliese. Her aunt had those huge blue eyes, a graceful face and the amazing silvery blonde hair that made her look like a fey, other-worldly figure. As if she might dance down the street and disappear like a mermaid into the water. Compared to her aunt, Nell was shockingly ordinary. What had Nell got that Uncle Edward wanted? None of it made any sense.

‘Did you tell Lily?’ said Izzie. She knew how close her grandmother was to Anneliese. Maybe that had shocked her grandmother so much it had contributed to her stroke. But Anneliese had clearly followed her train of thought.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I hadn’t. I was too ashamed and embarrassed and all the things you are, when your husband walks out on you for your best friend. Now, I’m sorry I hadn’t told her. That’s what I do every time I see her: sit down, hold her hand and tell her, because she has that warmth, that wisdom. You understand, Izzie: you know you can tell her anything. There can’t be too many nearly ninety-year-old women with her open-mindedness. I know Lily would have had no problem grasping the fact that myself and Edward had split up, and she’d have been there to tell me how to move on with my life. And I didn’t tell her because I was so ashamed, and now I may not ever be able to tell her.’

It was Izzie’s turn to be silent. The shame overwhelmed the guilt now. Guilt was too insubstantial an emotion for what she felt: it was pure shame.

All her life, she’d been against the idea of dating a married man, and yet Joe had got under her radar before she’d had time to put up the barriers, so that by the time she’d realised just how complicated it all was, before her moral compass cranked into action in her head, her heart was trapped.

Loving him was the only option.

Hearing Anneliese’s story was like having a magnifying mirror held up to the biggest blemishes on her face. She could see every giant pore and big spot. Anneliese’s story had magnified Izzie’s under the cruellest light.

Just as Anneliese had done, Joe’s wife might still think her husband loved her. That he was there for her, didn’t want anyone else to share his thoughts and dreams.