The Honey Queen

Are you coming walking today? I did my stretches and will seize up if we don’t start soon. I am leaning over our park bench and will be stuck like this. Doris xx

Lillie smiled as she put her hat on and grabbed a pair of sunnies from the table at the door. Doris could always cheer her up.

As soon as she rounded the corner at the community centre at the Moysey Walk, she saw Viletta and Doris gossiping happily as they half-heartedly did stretches ahead of their walk – five miles today.

It was a beautiful trail to walk. The girls had been walking along the beach, local parks and now, along the Moysey Walk for nigh on twenty years, long before everyone and their granny began extolling the virtues of walking. Today, autumn leaves were beginning to fall from the trees, and to their left, lay the glittering sea below. ‘Hi, girls,’ Lillie said, glad that her sunnies were hiding her eyes.

Hearing the faint catch in Lillie’s voice, Doris looked at her shrewdly. ‘You’ve just missed a gang of young rugby guys jogging,’ she announced, keeping her tone upbeat. ‘Viletta told them they had great muscle definition and they all went red.’

Viletta laughed. ‘I could be a cougar,’ she said with a put-on sniff. ‘They’re the hot thing in Hollywood – young blokes wanting older women.’

‘Older rich women, honey,’ said Doris, and Lillie joined in the laughter this time.

They walked two or three times a week, fitting it in between their chores and pursuits. Viletta, the oldest of the trio at sixty-nine, was a yoga buff and nobody seeing her in her walking sweats and simple T-shirt would imagine she was a grandmother of five. Her hair, she liked to joke, was the giveaway – pure white and falling poker straight down her back; she kept it tied in a knot for the walk. Doris, tall with salt-and-pepper hair and a tendency to roundness, regularly complained she wasn’t as fit as Viletta, who set the pace.

‘You get toned blokes in yoga classes and I get knee injections in the surgery,’ Doris would say in mock outrage. And Viletta would smile at the notion. She hadn’t looked at a man since her husband had died more than fifteen years earlier, for all her talk of cougars.

Lillie liked to amuse herself considering how the three of them must appear to strangers on their rambles: Viletta would appear to be the trainer, a lean, tanned woman urging her two more curvy friends on.

Though she didn’t have Viletta’s toned muscles, she didn’t look like a woman in her mid-sixties. That was most likely down to the hair, she reckoned: even a few greys in her thick strawberry blonde curls couldn’t diminish its warmth. Her Irish inheritance coming through. In the mirror she saw her face had become thinner since Sam’s death and underneath her iris-blue eyes were faint violet shadows. She hadn’t used make-up to hide them: vanity seemed so futile in the wake of her loss.

They were halfway into the walk and had settled into their regular rhythm when Doris managed to get herself beside Lillie, a few paces behind Viletta, who was storming ahead as usual.

‘You look a bit down, Lillie,’ she said conversationally. ‘Everything OK?’

Doris had known Lillie long enough to realize the effort required to maintain a smile on her face, a smile that would disintegrate the moment somebody put on their Poor dear, lost her husband voice or showed pity. Which was why Doris talked to her friend the way she’d always talked to her, in the same warm, vibrant tones.

‘I’ve been thinking about my brother in Ireland …’ began Lillie.

Beside her, she could sense Doris relax.

‘I’m going to Ireland to visit him and to find out about my birth mother,’ she said. There, it was done: she’d decided.

When Doris grabbed her and hugged her tightly, Lillie was so surprised she almost lost her balance.

‘I’m so glad!’ shrieked Doris, never one for volume control. ‘It’s exactly what you need. Oh, honey, I’m so glad!’

Lillie relaxed into her friend’s embrace. It felt lovely to be held. There were fewer people to do that these days. Her sons weren’t huggers, not the way Sam had been. Her hugs now came from her grandchildren. From Martin’s daughter, Dyanne, and from Shane, Evan’s seven-year-old, who held her tight and told her she was the best nanny in the world.

‘If I’d known you wanted to be rid of me that much, I’d have gone ages ago,’ she teased Doris when they separated.

‘Witch!’ said Doris, wiping her eyes. ‘I’m happy for you, Lillie. There’s no secret recipe for getting through what you’re getting through, but doing something different might add another ingredient to the pot, so to speak.’

Lillie nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking it over and over. Sam and I had talked about visiting Ireland, but I don’t think I’d ever have done it by myself at my age. But now Martin’s so excited about finding Seth and Dyanne’s desperately hoping the Irish relatives are rich so she can stay with them when she goes off on her big trip.’

Both women smiled. Dyanne was the same age as Doris’s grandson, Lloyd. Many amused conversations were had about their grandchildren, who were both going through an ‘I want to be famous’ phase, when they weren’t too preoccupied with ‘Can I have an advance on my pocket money?’

‘Are you stopping for a rest?’ Viletta called back to them.

‘No,’ yelled Doris, and they started walking again. ‘It’s going to be tough, Lillie, you realize that? You’ll be alone on a very emotional trip.’

Lillie nodded. She could rely on Doris for utter honesty.

‘I’m going to be fine,’ she said, and gave her friend a smile.

For the first time since Sam died, Doris caught a glimpse of peace in her friend’s iris-blue eyes.

‘Sam will be with me,’ Lillie added, touching one hand to her chest above her heart. Then her lips quirked in a smile like the Lillie of old. ‘I’m ordering him to come!’

Chapter One (#ulink_56dfd6c9-4e2d-5108-a5a6-ef8480107cbd)

Frankie Green woke bathed in cold sweat. The bedroom was dark and she felt so disorientated that for a moment she almost didn’t know where she was.

Her phone lay on her bedside table and she fumbled for it, pressing the button so that the screen lit up. With light, she managed to find her glasses and look at the time.

Two fifteen.

Oh hell, she thought. She had a hectic day ahead, she hadn’t been able to get to sleep for ages and now she was awake again.

Beside her, Seth was a long mound under the duvet, sleeping soundly, which was infinitely annoying. He didn’t have to get up in the morning.

Which wasn’t his fault, she reminded herself, as she did so often these days as a sort of guilty afterthought. He hadn’t joyfully decided to retire and let her continue working, he’d been made redundant three months ago and hated it. Yet, it felt like his fault that he could sleep late while she – now the major earner – had to haul herself out of bed come rain or shine.

Pushing back the duvet, she went into the horrible, poky bathroom she swore she would never get used to, shivering as the cool night air hit her soaked cotton pyjamas.

In the bathroom’s cold light, a tired, white-faced woman stared back at her from the mirror: dark hair plastered to her skull, face sheeny with damp, nightclothes sticking like a second skin.

She looked as if she’d been running through a rainforest for days. She looked – Frankie realized the correct word with misery – old.

Somehow, while she’d been busy trying to raise two children, run the Human Resources department of Dutton Insurance and be a wife to Seth Green, age had crept up on her. She’d been so busy working, doing school runs and making vast meals to freeze, checking homework diaries and worrying about exam results, mopping up teenage tears and making rare date nights with her husband, that the blur of her thirties had morphed into her forties and suddenly, here she was, forty-nine. Calcium, collagen, oestrogen – everything was leaching out of her. Soon all that would remain would be a dried-out husk and if she stood still long enough, she’d be stuffed in a museum as an example of tinder-dry womankind. Even her marriage felt dried out and empty. That was the worst thing and she couldn’t bear to think about it.

Is this all normal? she silently asked the mirror-image Frankie. If it was, nobody talked about it. Not her sister, not her friends. If only her mother was a bit normal, she might have asked her, but there was nothing normal about Madeleine. Her mother, pushing eighty and still fond of causing havoc, managed to be old in years without being old in any other way. Madeleine to most people, but plain old Mad to her two daughters, had never bothered with creams or unguents. In her forties, she’d lain in the back garden toasting herself under layers of coconut sun oil, happiest when she was nut brown. When hot pants were the ‘in’ clothes for teenagers, Madeleine had worn them herself, not caring that other mothers wore normal summer skirts and cardigans. If she passed a building site and somebody whistled, Madeleine would blow the builders a delighted kiss, while her teenage daughters, Frankie and Gabriella, would exchange horrified glances.

Why couldn’t Mother be more like other mothers?

As Frankie grew up, she began to appreciate her mother’s unconventional spirit but even so, she wondered at the secret of her parents’ long marriage. Eventually, Frankie decided that it worked because Dad was a placid person who managed by saying ‘that’s fine, dear,’ to whatever Madeleine wanted to do.

They still lived in a cottage in the fishing village of Kinsale, and when Madeleine went through her phase of ‘forgetting’ her costume when she went for her morning dip, Dad greeted people’s outraged comments by saying ‘Isn’t she a great woman for the swimming, all the same.’

Madeleine’s marriage guidance advice, if she offered it, would be to get married to a calm man in the first place, and then ignore him happily thereafter. Dad never seemed to get sad or tired. He was just Dad, content with his paper and the crossword, able to keep his spirits up no matter what happened, happy to let his wife be exactly who she wanted to be.

Beauty-wise, the sun had taken a cruel revenge on Frankie’s mother and now her face was more wrinkled than a very old crab apple. But in true Madeleine fashion, she didn’t mind in the slightest. She continued to wear bright-red lipstick and dye her grey hair a glossy dark brown and had no problem facing herself in the mirror.

Frankie’s mother was one of the happy people who liked what they saw when they spied their own reflection.

At Sunday lunches in Frankie and Seth’s house, Madeleine would happily discuss the way her hair was still silky and obedient, and say: ‘Frankie, I was thinking of getting a more angular bob in the hairdressers. Lionel says I’ve got the bones for it.’

Lionel was Madeleine’s hairdresser and, as far as Frankie was concerned, he clearly liked living on the edge, sending his older clientele out with styles their daughters wouldn’t dream of risking.