Homecoming

‘I’ve got nearly all the money saved,’ Mrs Mills added proudly. ‘Just another seventy is all we need.’

‘We’ll talk about it at the committee next week,’ Rae promised.

She was afraid that there wasn’t enough money this year to help send Terence to Lourdes. The CC’s list of clients had grown exponentially in the past couple of years. People who’d once donated money at the charity’s church collections were now asking for money themselves.

‘I understand.’ Mrs Mills put a tiny, pale hand on Rae’s. ‘Lourdes is low down the list, Rae, I understand.’

She didn’t look sad or upset, Rae realised with surprise.

‘What happens will happen.’ Mrs Mills finally let go of Rae’s hands. ‘I’ve got some chutney for you,’ she added. ‘A friend of mine gave me a couple of pots at Christmas.’

She bustled off into her kitchen and left them sitting alone with Terence. He didn’t smile or say anything. Terence lived in his own world. Lack of oxygen at birth, Mrs Mills explained sadly. He might have been handsome in another world, Rae reflected with pity. A strong, handsome man who could look after his elderly mother in her later years. Except Terence would always remain a child, the cared-for instead of the carer. ‘It’s lovely chutney.’ Mrs Mills appeared carrying two jars with fabric-covered lids.

Rae and Dulcie had been given many things over the years. Rhubarb from someone’s back garden, many hand-made cards from children, sometimes a few roses wrapped in tinfoil. It was always the people who had the least who wanted to give the most.

Rae put her jar into the small rucksack she used for CC visits, then she and Dulcie took their leave.

‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Dulcie said as they trooped down the concrete stairs, trying not to smell the ever-present scent of urine.

‘Yes, she’s wonderful,’ agreed Rae. ‘I don’t know how she copes, to be honest. Perhaps it’s easier to let your mind float off; easier than dealing with the daily reality, that’s for sure.’

Rae was still sitting on the bed, thinking about Mrs Mills when Will’s voice broke into her daydream. ‘Hi, love, I’m home.’

‘Coming,’ Rae replied.

She’d give Will some of the chutney to try. He loved cheese after dinner. When they were first married, Rae had teased him that cheese and crackers were the ‘posh person’s dessert’.

‘Oh yes, I suppose you had trifle in tin bowls?’ Will would joke.

‘Trifle? We couldn’t afford trifle!’ she’d say.

They’d never had dessert in the Hennessey household. A lot of the time, they didn’t even have dinner. Few days passed when Rae didn’t close her eyes and say thanks for the life she lived now. She was so grateful for all she had, but that gratefulness was tinged with sorrow over the past. And the past never left her.

4 Vegetables (#ulink_1fa6a1cb-a0b2-505f-8368-226a03129f44)

When my mam was dying, she only had one worry. That I’d look after my sister, Agnes. She never married and Mam knew that was hard on her, for all that Agnes used to say she had no use for men at all.

Except your father, Joe – she was fond of him. He was like a brother to her. But apart from Joe, Agnes liked to pretend she couldn’t care less what any man might think of her.

She had courted in her youth but the man she loved, Mikeen Clancy, had been killed in the War of Independence. He was twenty-five, as gentle a man as ever came out of County Galway, but gentleness doesn’t stop bullets. The light went out of Agnes after that. His mother and his family got to grieve, but there was no ring between Agnes and Mikeen. Only an understanding in their hearts. If you married a man, you were entitled to grieve when he died. Being hopeful of marriage didn’t count.

Agnes cried on her own at night. When they got Mikeen’s body back, nobody gave her a lock of his hair to keep.

It wasn’t easy, being a spinster in our parish. Yearslater, when we’d upped sticks and moved to America, it was all different. On the streets of Brooklyn, there were plenty of women without chick or child or man, and nobody pitied them. But in Kilmoney, a woman without a husband was in a different class altogether. A husband gave a woman standing in the community. With no husband, you might as well be a child.

In truth, there were few men as capable as my sister around. Nobody would run a house like Agnes, and she was so good to you, Eleanor, like a second mother. But I think she lost hope when Mikeen died, and no other man looked at her the same way when they saw her sadness.

She put a lot of her love into the garden. If she was down, she went out into the garden and pulled up a few weeds. When it came to vegetables, parsnips were her favourite. She liked to cook what we used to call green, white and gold – mashed parsnips and carrots with parsley on top. But her favourite dish was panroasted parsnips. A good housekeeper should always have a little bit of duck fat in her pantry and use that to coat the parsnips. Roast them until they’re crisp on the outside, speckled with black pepper.

‘Bia don lá dubh,’ as Agnes used to say. Food for a black day.

Connie O’Callaghan wasn’t sure at what point she’d become a professional single woman. But she was reasonably sure of precisely when other people had accepted her as such. It was around the time of her thirty-ninth birthday, nearly a year ago, when people had stopped telling her about this or that man they knew who was ‘gorgeous, just right for you’ and started inviting her to events without a plus one.

When she was in her early thirties, after she’d split up from her fiancé Keith, people did their best to fix her up with every single man within a fifty-mile radius.

She’d gone on dates with a few guys from the bank where her cousin worked, but nothing had come of it, apart from a greater understanding of what actuaries really did, courtesy of one man who had no other conversation.

There had been several dinner parties where she’d arrived and surveyed the men, wondering which one was the ‘fabulous man, simply fabulous’, and every time her guess had been wrong.

He had never been the one she liked the look of. Invariably he turned out to be the one she’d assumed lived with his mother, had a stamp collection and had never been on a date before.

Men were produced for her like rabbits out of a magician’s hat. But it hadn’t been love at first sight on either side.

Connie hadn’t just relied on blind dates in those early, post-Keith years. There was no staying at home with a DVD box set and a tub of ice cream, either. No, she’d been out there looking for love.

There had been scuba-diving weekends. Connie wondered whether she’d made a mistake, learning to dive in rugged Donegal where the icy grip of the Atlantic meant that, once you got out of the water, you put on your heaviest jumper, something thermal and very possibly a woollen hat to get the heat back into your body. Nobody had ever fallen in love with a woman across a crowded pub when that woman had cheeks puce from exposure and dressed like she’d just come in from a polar expedition.

Connie was too sturdy to look good in polar outfits. She was at her best in nicely slimming dark denim jeans with a silky top in indigo or sea blue to bring out the pale blue of her eyes, and with her cloudy dark hair loose around her face.

The art class she’d tried hadn’t been successful either. There were far more women at it than men, and at least three-quarters of the men were there because their heart attack rehab therapists had suggested watercolour painting as an ideal way to enjoy a less stressful existence.

Against her better judgement, she’d gone on a yoga weekend. The men there were amazing: so flexible they could tuck their feet behind their ears, should the occasion demand it. But it seemed as if worshipping at the altar of Hatha-toned bodies turned them off anyone with a slight overspill on the waistband of their jeans.

‘I don’t think I’m too fat,’ Connie had grumbled to her oldest friend, Gaynor, on the phone once she got back from Hatha Heaven. ‘But I felt it there. At least when I’m doing the stand-like-a-tree pose, my upper thighs are nice and chunky, so my other foot has something to wedge itself into. Skinny people can’t do that, can they?’

Gaynor was her sensible married friend. Gaynor never talked on the phone after seven at night, which was when Connie liked to phone people, as Gaynor was doing the endless things related to getting the children to bed. Sometimes, Connie felt tired just talking to Gaynor about the whole nighttime routine.

‘When I’ve got Niamh in bed, she keeps getting out and wanting a drink or a wee, and even though Charlie’s allowed to go later, it takes so long for him to brush his teeth, and by then, Josie wants to talk to me. She likes talking just before she goes to sleep, and now she’s in secondary, she needs to talk. Well, they do, don’t they?’

Connie sometimes found it hard to sort herself out in the evening. How on earth did Gaynor manage? It was like running a huge corporation and making sure everyone in it had clean teeth, clean pyjamas, the correct teddies and all their emotional needs sorted.

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ she said.

‘Nonsense,’ said Gaynor briskly. ‘You’d be able to, if you had to.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

It was easier to say that. Easier than picturing herself with a child of her own. Her own child to hold and love forever. No, it was too painful to imagine that, because she wasn’t going to get it. So she cut off all thoughts of children.

She worked with kids every day, but they were teenagers and if anything was destined to put a person off the concept of motherhood, it was facing thirty bored teenage girls five times a day in St Matilda’s.

Gaynor had never tried to set Connie up with men.

‘She’s got too much sense,’ said Nicky, Connie’s younger sister. ‘Blind dates are so insulting. It’s like saying you can’t find a man on your own and a third party has to step in to fix you up.’

Connie was nine years older than Nicky, and occasionally it seemed that those nine years were an enormous chasm.

She had never felt insulted by people trying to find a Mr Right for her. When the man in question was a bit odd, she did wonder if her friends knew her at all, but she appreciated that they were doing their best.