Lessons in Heartbreak (33 page)

‘Yeah, she’s a fox,’ said the bartender.

The way he said it made Izzie feel about a hundred and ten years old. He was looking at Steffi with pure admiration. He
hadn’t looked at Izzie that way. Once, men in bars had looked at Izzie, taking in her curves and her beautiful hair, admiring the feistiness in her. Not any more. Her feistiness and her attractiveness had all been sucked out by Joe.

She put some money on the bar. ‘Keep the change,’ she said, her voice dull, and she walked out quickly before anyone could see her go.

Tamarin in late September was a breathtakingly beautiful month. Summer had been patchy, with rain squalls, as if the goddess who ruled summer had been fractious, had thrown her toys out of the pram and cast a pall over weddings and barbecues and parties. Then in September, her mood changed, bringing glorious sultry days. The drive from Waterford meant a road that cut through a sweep of hills and suddenly Tamarin lay in front of you.

Jodi wanted her mother to sit in the front seat beside Dan so she’d get the full effect of the beauty of Tamarin when they arrived, but because Aunt Lesley was on the trip too, Jodi’s mum had suggested that Lesley take the front seat.

‘You’re going to love this, Karen and Lesley,’ Dan said, purposefully cheerful as he looked back and winked at his mother-in-law.

Karen smiled at him but Aunt Lesley just gave her usual sour glare.

When her mother had suggested bringing Lesley on the much-talked-about trip, Jodi had groaned over the phone.

‘Mum, please, no. I’ve wanted you to visit for so long and Lesley will hate it.’

Three weeks of her mother was a pleasure for Jodi, but three weeks of her aunt would be the reverse.

‘You know your aunt’s been a bit down ever since Uncle Philly left,’ Karen said.

Jodi was only surprised it had taken her uncle so long to actually leave. The man deserved some sort of a medal for staying with her all those years.

‘I’ve got to cheer her up, Jodi. She’s my big sister, after all. We’ll have fun, don’t worry.’

Fun and her aunt Lesley were not words that went together, Jodi decided.

‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said to Dan later.

‘Nonsense,’ said Dan, who took everything in his stride. ‘It will be great. If my parents come too for a week, we’ll all have a blast. We haven’t all been together since the wedding.’

‘Right,’ said Jodi. She’d planned to show her mother around Rathnaree and talk to her about everything from the miscarriage to the research she’d been doing, but she couldn’t imagine doing that with Lesley.

Lesley had a way of trampling dreams and ideas underfoot. Jodi couldn’t see herself sobbing in her mum’s arms over the miscarriage with Lesley tapping her toe impatiently in the background. And she wanted to talk about it; talking helped.

She and Dan had gone to a miscarriage support group a couple of times and it had been the most enormous help. Just not feeling alone and hopeless, that was what made it so useful, Jodi thought.

But there would be no chance of talking with bloody Lesley here.

And then a thought had come to her: poor Anneliese was still very down, for all everyone else said she was getting over it and wasn’t she a marvel. If she asked Anneliese to come round with her, Mum and Lesley, then things might be bearable.

Anneliese would be the perfect person to accompany them – a catalyst, so to speak, for Lesley’s misery, and if she was with the three of them, then Anneliese wouldn’t have so much time to spend sitting on the beach looking sadly out to sea, which was where she appeared to spend most of her time.

Jodi was worried about her, but unsure what to do about it.

‘I can’t very well phone Izzie up and say, “Your aunt is crazy and has lost the will to live,” now, can I?’ she said to Dan.

‘Tell Yvonne,’ he replied. ‘They work together in the Lifeboat Shop and Yvonne would know what to do.’

Jodi thought of their chatty, scatty next-door neighbour and then of Anneliese, who didn’t take too many people into her confidence. Jodi felt honoured that Anneliese talked to her so much. Since that awful night they’d encountered the woman Anneliese’s husband had left her for, they’d become friends.

‘You’ve seen me at my worst,’ was how Anneliese put it.

Despite their closeness, she just knew that Anneliese would die of embarrassment if Jodi approached Yvonne about her behaviour.

But she had to do something. The past couple of weeks, she’d dropped in on Anneliese to update her on the admittedly slow progress she was making on the Rathnaree history and each time Anneliese had seemed even more disconnected and distant.

The only positive in Anneliese’s life was that she’d gone back to work in the garden centre outside town: at least that way she met people. But Jodi had an uncomfortable feeling that this wasn’t enough.

Everyone’s life had gone back to normal except for Lily’s and Anneliese’s. Izzie was in New York, Beth was happy in Dublin waiting for her baby to come along, and even Nell and Edward had been seen walking through Tamarin one night hand-in-hand, a fact which had scandalised a good part of the population.

Lily was now in Laurel Gardens, a large nursing home on the Waterford Road and apparently wonderful. As for Anneliese – well, she was stuck, it seemed to Jodi. Her life was frozen, not going forward, not going backwards, just stuck in a sad limbo.

‘I know it’s a cliché, but isn’t it all so green?’ said Jodi’s mum happily.

‘It’s very small though, Karen, isn’t it?’ said Lesley. ‘The way you talk about Tamarin, I thought it was a big place, Jodi, but it’s not. Sort of a two-horse town.’

Jodi didn’t look at her mother, but she knew, if she had, Mum would be shooting her an anguished
Sorry, but she is miserable over Phil
glance.

As Dan drove down through the streets of Tamarin, Jodi resigned herself to the fact that her aunt wasn’t going to be impressed. It was so different from home, from the sense of space in Brisbane. Tamarin was small, its houses clustered together in a way that was so very European, so Irish, lots of dwellings perched close beside each other as if huddling for warmth against the wind and the rain. And now, with the sun beating down, much of the town looked quaint and other-worldly. There were whole rows of houses, dating from the early nineteenth century, and the odd big house from a moneyed merchant. And further in, near the harbour, the fishermen’s houses, tiny, cramped and yet so pretty with their sea-blue doors.

Jodi loved it here now. Finding the photograph of Rathnaree had been the catalyst. Until then, she’d stood on the edges of the town and hadn’t become involved. And then she’d gone to Rathnaree, poor Mrs Shanahan had had a stroke, Jodi had met Anneliese and Izzie, and somehow she’d become tangled up in their lives and in the lives of the local people. She had friends here, a life here and she loved the strange charm of the town. If Lesley didn’t, that was her loss.

‘Here we are,’ Jodi said brightly, as Dan pulled up outside the Harbour Hotel. Tamarin boasted two hotels, a cluster of guest houses and several B&Bs. The Harbour Hotel was definitely the grandest of the bunch, although it was certainly in a different league to the Intercontinental in Sydney, which Lesley insisted was her favourite hotel.

Originally named the Tamarin Railway Hotel, back in the days when the trains had come this far out, it was a cheerful building, with long, wide windows, an entrance hall with two giant pillars and lots of flowers in pots going down the steps at the front.

Lesley glanced at it with a hard eye.

‘Cow,’ Jodi thought crossly.

She loved the Harbour Hotel. It was gorgeous inside, with a Laura-Ashley-meets-the-Ancient-Mariner style that meant lots of sprigged, floral soft furnishings and plenty of seafaring bits and bobs hanging around, including a giant fish hung over the fireplace in the lounge bar. Dan and Jodi were never quite sure if it was a real fish, despite the writing underneath it, or a plaster of Paris copy. It always looked far too vivid and cheerful to be an actual marine creature caught mid-breath.

When the pair were checked in, Lesley said she wanted to go to her room and lie down. Jodi and Karen looked at each other again. Jodi wanted to sit and talk to her mother, but she knew that probably wouldn’t be possible because Karen would be trying to take care of Lesley, who wanted no doubt to go upstairs and glare around her room, complaining that it wasn’t what she’d expected and she was jet-lagged and, really, what on earth was Jodi doing stuck here in the middle of nowhere in some God-forsaken town that didn’t even have its own airport.

It had been a source of great irritation that Tamarin didn’t have an airport because Lesley set great store by flying. That didn’t mean she enjoyed it; Jodi knew the flight from Australia
would have been a nightmare, what with her aunt growling at the poor stewardesses, because, no matter what they did, it wouldn’t be right. She glowered at her aunt. The excitement she’d felt over the past few weeks waiting for her mother was diminishing every second she spent in Lesley’s presence.

‘Lesley, you must look at this. I know you’re so interested in boats,’ Dan said suddenly and pulled her over to the wall, where there were several big framed pictures of old-fashioned ships coming into Tamarin harbour. Darling Dan, Jodi thought, he knew her so well. He knew her aunt was annoying the hell out of her.

‘Sorry, sweetpea,’ said her mum, giving her a hug. ‘She’s just tired. She’ll be fine tomorrow. We need a good sleep. It’s been a killer trip. We should have stopped over in Hong Kong, but I didn’t want to waste a minute away from you.’

‘I don’t want to waste a minute either, Mum. I know Lesley will be OK when she gets some rest,’ Jodie said, which was a kind fib between the two of them. ‘I’m just so glad you’re here. We’re going to have a lovely time and I want you to meet all my new friends. You’re really going to like Anneliese, too. She’s your age, actually.’

‘She’s the one you told me about, the woman whose husband left her?’ Karen asked. ‘How’s she doing?’

‘Well,’ Jodi paused, ‘not bad on the surface, but you might be able to get more out of her, Mum. She might talk to you. I don’t think she’s coping underneath the brave face, and I feel sort of responsible for her.’

‘You crazy girl,’ Karen said fondly. ‘You’re always getting yourself mixed up with other people and taking care of them, aren’t you?’

When they got home to Delaney Street, Dan sat down at the kitchen table to go over some work for school the next day, while Jodi went into the small second bedroom she was using as an office. If it had just been her mother visiting, Karen could
have stayed here, but Jodi drew the line at facing her aunt morning, noon and night.

She sat down at the desk and looked at her notes on Rathnaree and Tamarin. Jodi had just finished editing a book on Roman legends for her old employers and it had taken up a huge amount of her time, so the Rathnaree stuff had been shelved for a while. But she couldn’t resist flicking through her notes again. Her work schedule was now clear. The Roman book was finished and she had nothing else on except spending time with her mother. She could quite easily fit in some more research.

Not that it had been easy so far. The only easy bit had been researching the Second World War to find out what life would have been like in Tamarin then. Everything else was hard: in fact, the only analogy she could come up with was that it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Originally, she’d thought that finding out all about Rathnaree would be a simple task: finding clues laid out simply on a path, a bit like Nancy Drew unearthing information at high speed with minimum effort. But it hadn’t turned out like that. Instead of finding a great hoard of stuff, she’d found nothing but the odd mention of Rathnaree in newspapers and periodicals online in the library. It didn’t appear to be mentioned in any books about the War of Independence or further back.

She’d had no luck tracing the mysterious Jamie either. There were plenty of men named James in the parish records, but without a surname or some clue of the link to Lily or Rathnaree, the paper trail was stone cold.

The fact that the first person she’d tried to interview had suffered a stroke had shocked Jodi into retreating back into the simplicity of the internet, but eventually she realised she’d have to dig up information the hard way. She needed to talk to actual people again.

With Dan’s help, she’d drawn up a plan of action.

‘Dr McGarry is on the school board and so was his father before him,’ Dan said. ‘His father’s got to be in his eighties, but I don’t think much passes him by. He’d be good to talk to.’

She’d never got around to phoning him. But today, with nothing else to do, she decided to make the call.

Dr McGarry Senior was thrilled at the notion of talking to Jodi about the past.

‘Nobody wants to know about the past,’ he said. ‘It’s all future this and future that, but we can learn from the past too.’

‘That’s what I think,’ Jodi agreed. ‘Can we set up a time to meet?’ she asked, her diary in front of her.

‘I’m free now,’ said Dr McGarry eagerly.

Dr McGarry lived on the seafront in a tall narrow house with an attic converted so he could sit and watch the sea. Jodi followed him up there carrying a tray of tea and biscuits. A very old spaniel waddled up the stairs between the two of them, and sank panting on to the floor.

Once the tea had been dispensed, the doctor sat back in his chair.

‘Medicine was different during the Second World War,’ he intoned and Jodi could imagine him forty years before, leaning back in a similar chair in a lecture hall with students listening to his every word. He liked telling stories, she realised. No wonder he’d been so keen to talk to her. ‘The war changed everything. Before, we didn’t have penicillin. It’s hard to imagine now, isn’t it? There was sulfa powder – bless me, the old sulfa powder.’ He sighed and gazed into the distance. ‘We put it on wounds to fight bacterial infection. It didn’t always work, mind you. When penicillin came, I used to think of the people it could have saved. It was a wonder drug, really. We’d all heard about it and we were waiting for it, like a cure for AIDS today, I suppose. It was miraculous to us. Cut the rate of tuberculosis right down during the war, although it wasn’t
freely available outside the military until a few years later. It came into its own in Ireland in the fifties, you could say.’

‘What was the war like here?’ Jodi asked.

‘We didn’t have a war here, such as it was,’ he amended. ‘Ireland never got involved. We were neutral, or neutered as some people called it. What we had was described as “the emergency”. Terrible bloody name. Apologies for swearing, dear. Afterwards, when we knew it all and heard the stories, it was so limp calling it a bloody emergency. Millions of people died and we had an
emergency.
Very Irish. There was some rationing too but here, in rural areas, we didn’t go short for much. Forgive me.’ He collected himself. ‘I’ve gone off on a tangent as usual. Where were we?’