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

Going to his house seemed a bit risky, though.

‘No, let’s eat out,’ she said. ‘If you’re really nice, you can cook me dinner next time.’

As if there would be a next time.

Rafe drove the jeep down the drive and parked it outside the workshop. He always felt a surge of pride when he looked up at the big sign on the doors: berlin bikes – custom made motorcycles.

So far as the locals were concerned, this was simply a small business run by the two Berlin brothers. But to bike aficionados, Berlin Bikes ranked up there with Orange County Choppers. The Berlin brothers had more clients in the US and the rest of Europe than anyone in Avalon would believe.

Jeff’s jeep was in his spot and Karen’s car was parked up at the house. The house itself was lit up. Karen had the gift of homemaking. When she and Jeff had first moved in, the house had been nothing but an empty shell; five years later, it was a home. With Christmas approaching, string lights twinkled from the eaves, while Scandinavian-style decorations made the wooden interior cosy and bright.

Only the other day Karen’s mother had rolled up with yet another bag of red gingham hearts to hang on the tree, causing Jeff and Rafe to exchange amused grins.

‘I’ll never understand these Avalon women,’ Rafe muttered.

‘Best not to try to understand them – just love them, that’s my advice,’ Jeff said.

Jeff’s love for an Avalon woman was the reason they were all there. She’d been pregnant with their first child when he had the accident. Not many people survived motorbike collisions with drunk drivers, so Jeff was lucky to be alive, but the spinal injury he’d suffered had left him paralysed from the waist down.

It changed all their lives. Jeff and Rafe had originally planned to set up their own business in California, home of custom-bike culture. But with a husband confined to a wheelchair and a new baby, Karen needed the support of her family in Avalon. So Rafe had given up his dream of life in Los Angeles and the brothers had set up Berlin Bikes in the small Irish town instead.

‘You’re looking pretty pleased with yourself,’ Jeff said, pencil in one hand as he expertly rotated his custom-made wheelchair round the specially lowered design table where he was working on a new commission from a guy in Switzerland.

Rafe grinned. ‘You could say that, bro. I’ve met this amazing girl in the coffee shop …’

On Saturday morning, Mara had the most marvellous lie-in. Waking to a sunny but crisp December morning, she put on her fluffy socks to go into the kitchen in search of coffee. There was no sign of Danae. It had to be one of her mysterious Saturdays, Mara thought, with a little irritation. Why wouldn’t Danae confide in her? What secret could be that bad?

Noticing a book lying in the middle of the kitchen table, she pulled it towards her and opened it.

Danae was on a familiar journey, one she’d taken every single month for the past eighteen years.

Normally she drove straight to the nursing home. On her arrival she’d go into the kitchen, where she’d make herself a cup of tea and the cook would give her a bowl of soup or whatever the residents were having for the day. They all knew Danae well, she’d been going there so long.

Today she’d been too tired to complete the journey without a break. Instead she’d stopped along the way for a cup of tea and a scone that she covered with butter and jam, to give herself a hit of sugar. Anything to pep her up. The thought of darling Mara reading her diary left her feeling absolutely shattered.

She was a slow driver and it was twelve o’clock by the time she drove up the manicured driveway to Refuge House. It was a charitable trust nursing home, so any money that was made from the inhabitants went straight back to the old-fashioned building with two modern wings on each side. Beautifully maintained, warm, kind, loving. If a person needed nursing home care, this was one of the best places to have it. Danae knew that. A lot of her salary went into making sure that Antonio would be looked after.

When his mother, Rosa, had been alive, she’d contributed. After she died, no more money had come in from the Rahill family. Danae knew it was because Antonio’s brothers wanted her to shoulder the cost of keeping him in a private nursing home. After all, it was thanks to her that he’d ended up there.

In the front hall, the smell was the same as always: the vaguely institutional smell of cabbage and cleaning products. Every surface gleamed. The floors were polished. Each rung of the staircase to the first floor had been burnished till it glowed. Up there lived the ambulant residents and the elderly who were in full command of their senses. There was a scent of beeswax mixed with lemon oil in the air.

Antonio was downstairs in an area that nobody called the locked ward. It was simply ‘downstairs’.

‘My husband’s downstairs,’ a person might say if they met Danae in the visitors’ room and she’d nod, knowing what that meant.

Downstairs was where people who needed twenty-four-hour care lived. These were the patients with dementia or brain injuries; they would never be able to live on their own. They only got out into the garden under supervision. Gentle walks with kind members of staff. So for their safety, the downstairs was locked, but nobody called it that; it was part of the ethos of Refuge House.

There was a receptionist on duty who looked up when she came in.

‘Danae, how lovely to see you,’ she said, before pressing the buzzer that allowed access to the rest of the building.

The code to get in downstairs was a rotating one. There were three separate four-digit codes; if you tried the first one and it didn’t work, you’d try number two and then number three. Today it was number two. The door pinged open and Danae went in.

It was always busy downstairs. There’d be music playing, sometimes jazz, sometimes dance tunes from the 1950s and 1960s. The people with dementia loved those songs. Music was often the last sense to go. People who didn’t know who their family were and couldn’t recognize themselves in the mirror – their eyes would light up when they heard Elvis singing ‘Wooden Heart’. They’d smile and try to dance a few steps clumsily across the room.

There was always lots of dancing. Finola, a small blonde nurse, was a great one for taking people up and giving them a whirl around the floor. Everyone loved Finola with her bubbly smile and her warmth. Today, Finola was feeding one of the oldest residents, a lady called Gwen who seemed so small and shrunken it was hard to believe she was actually able to breathe. She sat in a chair, her body cushioned against the hardness of the frame by a large sheepskin. Danae had often thought that the very, very old were like the very, very young. Babies were cushioned by sheepskin in beautiful buggies and frail old people needed to be cushioned when they were close to death.

‘Hi,’ said Danae quickly, keeping going. She didn’t want to stop today. She didn’t have the heart for smiling or chatting with any of the people who’d become her friends over the many years she’d been visiting.

There was no sign of Antonio. It was too cold for him to be out in the garden. The garden doors were shut, anyway. In one corner, the movement therapist was leading a small class; they had castanets and ribbons and were waving them wildly to the beat. They all looked so happy, gazing at their therapist’s face.

Danae turned into the corridor which led to Antonio’s dormitory. She peeped in, not wanting to intrude. Appropriate privacy was important in a place like downstairs. People were bathed and fed and taken to the toilet and had incontinence pads changed when required, but a person’s dignity was important, the director had always said, and Danae agreed with him.

There was only one man in the dorm, lying on his bed, his eyes closed, although Danae knew he probably wasn’t asleep.

In his bed, turned away from her, was her husband of thirty-five years. She took the chair and sat beside Antonio and reached out and held his hand, the way she had so many times before.

His brain injury had been so catastrophic that Antonio did not recognize her. He never would. The blows that had completely destroyed much of his brain had robbed him of all cognitive awareness. Yet when he lay sleeping, he looked exactly like the Antonio of old, merely an older version. The hair was grey along the temples where it had once been glossy black. Lines of age were etched into his face. Apart from that, he looked the same.

It was when he was awake that the injury became obvious: his mouth drooped to one side, his eyes looked at her with total incomprehension.

She sat holding his hand, stroking, hoping the morphine was taking away some of the pain he must be feeling. There was no drug for the pain she felt. There never would be. Science wasn’t that good. Guilt and agony reached places that no pharmaceutical could touch.

It was hard to explain fear to people who had never experienced it. True fear wasn’t jumping out of your seat at a tarantula in a scary movie or the thing under the bed in some horror flick. Such things had nothing to do with fear. To a degree, Danae had known fear in her childhood. A well-founded fear that she and her mother wouldn’t have the food and shelter they needed to survive. That was clear and present in her childhood.

But the fear with Antonio: that was a different sort of fear entirely, a fear that bleached into her very bones.

Before they were married, he’d seemed like a different man – happy, merry, kind, good-humoured, full of life, the sort of man everyone wanted at their party.

‘Let’s have Antonio along, he’ll sing us a few songs and play the piano,’ people would cry.

Danae loved that. She was the girlfriend and then the fiancée of this wonderful man. Antonio Rahill, half-Italian half-Irish, with flashing dark eyes, gypsy dark hair, pale skin. Black Irish, they called them. Thanks to his mother, he could speak fluent Italian. His second name was Luigi. A Calzone family name for decades. Antonio’s Irish father had wanted his son’s first name to be a good, Irish saint’s name, like Anthony. His mother had resisted. By way of compromise, he was christened Antonio.

He may have had a saint’s name, but Antonio was no saint. Danae hadn’t known that when he proposed, slipping the small ring with the tiny diamond in the claw setting on to her finger. The happiness she’d felt at that moment was overwhelming. This man loved her, loved her enough to marry her. There was to be none of the pain her mother had gone through, no succession of men. She would build a life with this one man, the man who loved her.

They had no money at first. After they married, they lived in a top-floor flat where the decor was at least twenty years out of date. But it was clean and dry, and it had great views out over the city.

She was a dreadful cook, Antonio would say.

‘Get my mama to teach you,’ he’d say, and she’d promised she would.

Danae could do any number of things with eggs, because in the bad old days, she and Sybil could always afford a few eggs. Omelettes, scrambled eggs – you name it, she could do it. With the help of Rosa, Antonio’s mother, she began to broaden her repertoire. Rosa was delighted that her son’s new bride wanted to learn how to cook like a proper Italian wife.

The first time she had showcased her newly acquired Italian cooking skills, Danae set the formica table with a sheet as a table cloth so they wouldn’t have to look at the horrible blue-and-yellow pattern. She lit two red candles, got out their best glasses – a wedding gift from Antonio’s uncle, who owned a restaurant. She’d struggled hard with cannelloni. For dessert, there was tiramisu, Antonio’s favourite. Or rather, his second favourite. The dish he loved most was sweet cannoli, but Danae wasn’t to attempt that one, Antonio insisted. There was no point. She could never reach the culinary heights of his mother. And Danae, who was used to being in second place, meekly agreed.

Danae had asked Antonio to bring some wine for this special occasion. She rarely drank herself, but the glasses were ready. A jug of water was on the table. The oven was set on low with the cannelloni keeping warm inside. Having checked and doubled-checked that everything was ready, Danae waited patiently.

Seven came and went, eight, nine … She began to worry that something must have happened. Eventually she rang the restaurant, fearful that she’d made a mistake and tonight wasn’t the night they’d agreed on, maybe he was still working. But no, he’d left hours ago. So she sat on the couch, a second-hand couch from another of Antonio’s uncles, until eventually she fell asleep.