The Honey Queen

Then the previous July twenty-two-year-old Emer had finished college and decided to spend a year travelling the world. Inspired by his sister’s example, Alexei, just eighteen, had set off on a gap year with three school friends.

Looking back, Frankie could see that the whole moving house thing had come about as a coping mechanism for empty-nest syndrome.

She hadn’t wanted to stop being busy for long enough to think about her children leaving.

‘What if we moved house while you were away?’ she’d asked them. It had been June, and the four of them were sitting around the table in the light-filled kitchen, making the most of the last few weeks before her beloved children departed on their travels.

‘Go for it!’ said Emer.

Emer was the wild child of the family. She might have inherited her paternal grandmother’s strawberry blonde hair and bright blue eyes, but her eagerness for fun and adventure owed more to Grandmother Madeleine, Frankie thought ruefully. Still, four years at college, finishing with a masters in business studies, appeared to have calmed her down. At least, Frankie hoped it had.

‘It’s your turn to do things now, Mum,’ said Alexei gently. Her darling, thoughtful boy; she felt like leaping up from the table to give him a hug. Four years younger than his sister, he was gentler and quieter. There had been no baby after Emer and finally Frankie and Seth had turned to adoption. Since the small Russian boy with the blond hair, fine bones and a lonely look in his misty grey eyes had come into her life, Frankie had never ceased wanting to protect him.

The idea of Alexei travelling the world made her heart physically hurt. She’d thought taking care of small children had been hard, but nothing could be harder than watching those same children grow up and leave the nest.

‘It’s just a wild thought,’ said Seth, ever sensible. ‘We’d probably be insane to move. The economy’s so bad.’

‘The property market’s not great,’ Frankie agreed. ‘We should have done it years ago; we missed the boat.’

And then, alone in their family home with what seemed like the actual family part gone, they read about Sorrento House and went to see it.

What had made them fall for the place? Frankie remembered that first visit. It had been September – always the start of the year for Frankie, with its associations of back-to-school. The leaves on the trees were almost golden in the autumn light, and the beech tree with its bronzed leaves drooping outside the old stone pillars had given the house at the end of Maple Avenue a sort of faded glamour.

It brought to mind the endless leaves she’d gathered with the children for school projects, days spent trying to do leaf rubbings into copybooks, and the fun of decorating the house for Halloween, as Alexei and Emer eagerly discussed what costumes they’d wear that year.

If only they were here to see this, she thought sadly. But then she brightened up at the prospect of what a welcome home it would make, to arrive at this lovely house.

There was no doubt that the house was unusual. The porch and front door stood at a right angle to the façade, almost hidden behind great swathes of rhododendron that overran a garden at least three times the size of their old one.

The property agent was a man with a finely tuned sense of when not to speak, so he kept his thoughts to himself about the amount of work that needed doing. He’d learned the hard way not to say anything along the lines of ‘it needs updating’ because such words could prove fatal where potential buyers were concerned. Some people loved a challenge and were dying to get their hands on an industrial sander. Others thought you needed a hard hat and a guide to navigate the hardware shop.

So Seth and Frankie wandered around Sorrento House by themselves, seeing only the possibilities. The name itself called to them. Sorrento was where they’d gone on honeymoon.

The house, two storeys above a dark basement flat, had not been a single residence for years. The upstairs bedsits were miserably decorated in wallpapers at least thirty years old. On the ground floor, two of the bigger rooms, which Seth and Frankie could imagine transformed into gracious living rooms overlooking the garden, were divided in half with cheap plasterboard.

‘You’d think a person would be ashamed to put anyone in these rackety spaces,’ Frankie said in disgust, not even wanting to touch the filthy curtains half hanging on the windows.

Seth put an arm round her waist and steered her to face the long-neglected garden at the back.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Then close your eyes and imagine how it will all appear when we’re finished with it. A gorgeous kitchen, a bit like at home, but extended out into that long garden. Don’t you love those copper beeches and the apple trees? And see that maple in the far left corner? It’s changing colour – in a week or so it’ll be a glorious crimson.’

Frankie sighed. ‘If I close my eyes, I’ll realize we’re mad to even consider buying the place. We’ll have to get it checked for damp, then rip off all that wallpaper, tear up those hideous nylon carpets, paint every inch inside and out, and … oh heck, the windows—’ She looked down in alarm. ‘Do you reckon this frame is rotten? Are the windows on borrowed time?’

‘I’ve been checking with my penknife while you were upstairs just now,’ he said. ‘The windows are actually fine. So’s the roof, as far as I can tell. Otherwise, we really would be mad to buy it. It would still be a lot of work interior-wise, and of course the extension would take time, but I can see how it will all come together. We just need to sit down and work out the numbers. Think, it will be our dream home, love. Sorrento House. That sounds a bit grand. We could change the name. Sorrento Villa is nicer, more homely, don’t you think?’

The words ‘dream home’ combined with the vision of glorious Italian coast magically mingled in Frankie’s mind. She’d been brought up in Kinsale, a jewel of a town perched beside the sea, and her sister, Gabrielle, had chosen to live in the seaside town of Cobh, about half an hour from Cork.

Another plus was the location: Redstone. It was a part of the city that had gone from fashionable in the nineteenth century, to down at heel in the twentieth, but was now growing in popularity again thanks to the regeneration of the area.

Seth had a development map which showed that their house faced others that backed on to the allotments behind rows of one-time council houses, the St Brigid’s estate. ‘Part of the waste ground beside the allotments is being turned into parkland,’ he explained, ‘which adds value to the neighbourhood.’

After seeing the house, they went for a coffee at the crossroads, which was the centre of Redstone. The place sealed the deal for both of them.

‘It’s perfect,’ said Frankie wistfully, admiring the sycamores growing at the roadside.

‘Very nineteen thirties,’ mused Seth as they walked along hand-in-hand, deciding which place to go into. ‘Look at those façades.’ He pointed to one block decorated with period signage.

They admired the clothes boutique, the delicatessen with windows full of cheeses and all manner of exotic meats, they walked past a pretty pink-and-brown beauty salon, and finally settled in a coffee shop where they ate the best raspberry-and-almond muffins they’d ever tasted.

‘We can do it,’ Seth said, enthusiastically outlining his plans.

He was sure, from experience, that planning permission wouldn’t be a problem. He would design the new parts of the house, a builder he’d worked with would agree a reasonable price for the work, and Seth could manage the build himself. With two decent salaries coming in, they should be able to find the money.

‘Can you cope with living in the basement while we do up the rest?’ Seth asked her the day before the sale closed. They were walking through the property again, imagining grand neo-classical fireplaces from the salvage yard instead of the bricked-up fireplaces and the hazardous two-bar electric fires that the previous owner had installed everywhere.

‘I can cope with anything,’ Frankie had said excitedly, eyeing up the kitchen and imagining how marvellous it would look when the extension was built and the whole room had been turned into an open-plan kitchen/breakfast room. She’d got an idea for a conservatory, too. She could just see a couple of huge planters filled with exotic ferns beside the imaginary doors. And the garden. Gardening had never really been her thing, but here there was so much possibility. Or there would be, once the jungle of weeds and wild brambles had been torn away.

I can cope with anything. Famous last words for sure.

A month after they’d moved into the basement flat of the newly named Sorrento Villa, Seth was made redundant by the big architectural practice where he’d worked for fifteen years. The company was in dire financial straits, the senior partner explained: they had no option but to downsize.

Shocked, Frankie recalled that same senior partner – Seth’s friend since college – at the previous year’s Christmas dinner, where much had been made of the company’s resilience in the shaky economic climate. A glass of red wine in his hand, the man had toasted each member of staff. Frankie had clapped loudest of all when he’d said ‘Seth Green, the man we all aspire to be,’ then raising his glass, ‘quietly professional, dedicated and loyal.’

Loyalty hadn’t gone both ways it seemed. Seth wasn’t a full partner, but on a high wage, so his name was at the top of the redundancy list.

If she was shocked, then Seth had been devastated.

‘I’ve failed you,’ was all he could say. Despite his years of hard work for the company he’d only been given the statutory legal pay-off. There was no vat of cash to help fund the work on Sorrento Villa. They had savings but it would be madness to plough them into such a project. ‘How will we manage financially?’ Seth asked in despair. ‘With the new house …’

‘We’ll manage,’ said Frankie, magically switching on the same positive tone that had worked so well during the children’s teenage years. ‘We’ll manage somehow.’

But inside, her stomach was churning with fear. How could they survive on only one salary? If only they’d stayed in their modest old house instead of thinking they were the sort of people who should own a detached Victorian red-brick villa on a half-acre site in Redstone. Christmas had been just over a month off, both children were staying away – Emer in Australia, Alexei in Japan – and she and Seth had to face a dark and depressing festive season on their own. Three months later, they were still far from managing.

Coping with anything had turned out to mean a husband who sloped around in sweatpants and could barely summon up the energy to walk to the crossroads for a daily newspaper. He’d lost his zest for life when he’d lost his job. All the great plans for the house now lay untouched under a mound of bills at one end of the kitchen table.

Redundancy had settled over their house like a heavy grey storm cloud.

Frankie, who had been responsible for setting up counselling sessions for Dutton employees following a series of redundancies at the company, now saw the problem from the other side of the table. Her husband was in despair.

Work doesn’t define women in the way it defines men, she remembered telling her team in the HR department at the time. Men find it hard to cope with being out of work.

Platitudes delivered straight from the most basic HR psychology books.

Those words were certainly mocking her now as she lay beside this shadow of the man who had been her husband, waiting for sleep to claim her. Sleep didn’t come.

It was the Sleep Theorem, she told herself. The number of hours you lost sleepless in bed was always in reverse proportion to the amount of work you had to do the following day. Eventually, she drifted into an uneasy doze filled with nightmares involving Emer and Alexei in danger, when she couldn’t run fast enough to save them. And darling Seth, once her mainstay in life, was watching all and seemed paralysed into indecision.

At six the alarm went off. She woke exhausted and decided that, at that precise moment, the word for the day was shattered. While Seth carried on sleeping, she showered, dressed and had some muesli for breakfast before heading into work.