The Ballroom Café (9 page)

Debbie took Ella’s hand. ‘Please, I cannot take this. You hardly know me.’

‘I know you enough to know you will cherish it, and it’s the only type of jewellery you will wear.’

‘How do you know all this?’

Ella turned over Debbie’s hands. ‘There are no marks from rings and I have never seen you wear a necklace.’

‘Can you tell me what I’m thinking as well?’

‘I will need a few more days for that,’ Ella answered solemnly, and they both giggled.

‘Time for me to hit the high road,’ Iris said, elaborately downing the rest of her liqueur.

Debbie hugged Ella. ‘Thank you for making this birthday so special.’

Debbie squeezed her elbows and Ella felt suddenly lonely.

‘On time in the morning, mind you.’

‘Without a doubt.’

When Ella heard the front door bang gently, she stood back from the windows, watching Iris and Debbie walk down the old avenue, too busy chatting to even look back. The bile of loss rose up inside her, so she moved away to put the chairs up on the tables and mop the floor.

Debbie turned up at Roscarbury the next day with the brooch pinned to the multicoloured thin scarf she liked to wear loosely around her neck. Ella did not show her surprise and she did not say she had expected it to be for good wear only. Iris readied the outside tables and Debbie the upstairs café. Ella cut thick slices of coffee cake, making sure to press a candied orange slice into the icing.

Roberta, for the most part, hovered out of the way, leaving notes for her sister beside the kitchen ovens.

The health inspectors will be calling on you soon. Do your customers know when they eat your cake that your kitchen is so filthy? R.

Ella scribbled a caustic reply.

My side of the kitchen is perfectly clean. It is the drunk on the second floor who does not clean up after herself. E.

She has stolen your jewellery. R.

Butt out. Mind your own beeswax. E.

May Dorkin was always the first to arrive. Because she was visiting somebody’s house, May never arrived empty-handed but always had a small plate of homemade scones or a small, sweet cake. Ella accepted the gift each morning with a fixed smile and a polite thank you.

‘May, you know you shouldn’t. You will have some?’

‘I will not. I will have the chocolate cake. One of these days, I am going to get your recipe; it is delicious.’

Ella laughed before going behind the screen to the kitchen, where she threw May’s offering in the bin.

‘The hens are going to develop a real sweet tooth,’ she fussed.

Ella saw James McDonagh park his tractor and jump from the seat as she served a customer at the centre window seat. She hurried behind the counter to Debbie.

‘I don’t want to have to talk to McDonagh. Will you serve him?’

‘What if he asks for you?’

Ella looked agitated. ‘I will stay behind the service screen. Just say I am too busy.’

When he came in the door, James McDonagh was on his mobile. ‘A latte,’ he said, gesturing to Debbie.

As she prepared the coffee, he asked after Ella. ‘Will you tell her my mother sends her regards?’

Behind the screen, Ella sat on the bin, biting her nails. ‘I am sure she does. He is only here to see me fail. Walking in here as if he owned the place,’ Ella muttered, jumping up and marching onto the ballroom floor. Her teeth grinding with determination, she walked over to James McDonagh. ‘Excuse me for disturbing you, Mr McDonagh, but could I have a word in private, downstairs?’

‘James. Call me James, Miss O’Callaghan.’

Ella led the way to the front drawing room.

‘Mr McDonagh. Thank you for frequenting the Ballroom Café, but it will not be requiring your custom.’

‘That is a bit harsh, Miss O’Callaghan. We are, after all, still family.’

‘I am not related to you. The day my husband died is the day I stopped having any connection with your family. Tell your mother she might be Michael Hannigan’s sister, but she is no friend of mine.’ Her voice was prim and her mouth so pinched she was spitting out the words like bullets.

‘My mother is ill and wondered would you visit. She wants to make things right.’

Ella staggered back before shaking herself, rising up and covering the space between them in one long stride. ‘You tell your mother she was not there for me when I needed support. What she was good for was spreading the gossip and wrongly accusing me. I loved my husband, not that anybody in Rathsorney thought that by the time she was finished. Tell your mother she was responsible for my husband, her only brother, taking his own life: she has to live and die with that.’

James McDonagh retreated, his hands in the air. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger. Couldn’t you find something in your heart for my dying mother?’

Ella O’Callaghan, a woman who abhorred bad manners, spat on the ground, the glob of saliva landing on the rug to the left of James McDonagh. ‘Get out! Get out and don’t even come back to tell me that interfering bitch is dead!’ she choked.

James McDonagh would have answered but for the strong voice that interrupted from the doorway.

‘Please leave, Mr McDonagh, and realise that some pain of the past can never be assuaged.’

Roberta was standing straight, her walking stick propped behind her back. She stepped back to allow James McDonagh to walk past.

‘And please remove your tractor from Roscarbury Hall. It is quite unsightly,’ she added, as he quickly marched out the front door. Roberta looked at her sister, who had slumped into the armchair. She saw Debbie come down the stairs and she called her, closing the drawing room door as she did. ‘My sister is in a bit of a state. Will you bring her a coffee when you next come down?’

Debbie made to push past into the drawing room, but Roberta put a hand out to stop her.

‘She could do with a few minutes. Put a few sugars in the coffee, please.’

Roberta wrote a note, propping it against a jug on the kitchen table. The hall table was unthinkable during café hours; neither of the sisters wanted the nosey parkers of Rathsorney knowing their business.

You drew him down on us. How dare you? You have opened up our house to the public. What do you expect? Undesirables will come too. R.

Debbie presented Ella with a hot mug of sugary coffee. Ella said she might take a bit of time in her room. Mary McDonagh, Michael Hannigan’s sister, she had not heard from since her husband’s death. That she should try now to make amends for causing the pain that had festered and swelled over the last decades was no surprise.

Mary McDonagh was a pious, church-going woman who would leave nothing to chance in her quest to make it directly to the pearly gates. That she had done a wrong to Ella O’Callaghan all those years ago was clearly on her mind as a reason she might trip on the path. Ella remembered it was the Weiss yellow-framed flower brooch with the aurora borealis stones that set Mary off. A practical and dour woman, Mary McDonagh saw the alluring brooch at Ella’s neck. A small piece, a cluster of yellow crystals circling the iridescent stones of a little flower, it relied on the sparkling stones to give it a delicate brilliance that was both captivating and beautiful. For Ella it was exquisite in its simplicity. Mary McDonagh thought it was a very expensive piece of jewellery for the wife of a soldier to be wearing, especially when he was away. She took to visiting Ella at all times of the day or night when Michael Hannigan was on manoeuvres, and though she never collated any physical evidence of a woman cheating on her husband, she was convinced because of the different and extravagant pieces of jewellery she thought were flaunted. Mary McDonagh never raised her suspicions with Ella. If she had, she would have been told the truth: that Ella O’Callaghan, alone and under pressure, had found solace not in the arms of another man but in an old love affair – that of her father and mother.

Instead, Mary McDonagh discussed her suspicions with all and sundry; and in the telling, convincing herself so absolutely as to the veracity of her claims that they came to be fact. She took it upon herself to write to her brother as to the sorry state of events: that his wife was unfaithful. Michael Hannigan, grieving the death of his baby daughter, buckled, and within two days was found, his head half blown off, as he slumped beside his metal bed in the Army barracks.

It was not until his personal effects were dispatched to Roscarbury Hall that Ella saw the letter. When confronted, Mary McDonagh stood firm in the absolute certainty her brother was the aggrieved party in a sordid affair, which Ella O’Callaghan had concealed. If, in later years, she reconsidered her position, she never broached the subject with Ella, who had cut off all communications and banned the Hannigans from entering O’Callaghan property. Ella also reverted back to the O’Callaghan name.

Scrabbling under the bed, Ella used her long umbrella to sweep in to the wall and push out the old Army tin box, rusted brown with age. Levering the side handles up, she wrenched hard to open it. A musty, dark smell of a long-dead man pushed past her. She moved his cigarettes and thick woollen Army-issue socks out of the way, along with the spare laces and the boot polish.

A copy of the
Evening Press
newspaper, which had been folded neatly, was at the bottom along with a small stack of letters. Michael Hannigan always had been an obsessively tidy man. He would have read his newspaper and folded it along the creases before taking out his rifle and wedging it tight between the back of the wardrobe and the wall, so when he pressed the trigger it blew half his head off.

A small group of letters contained all the notes Ella had sent him during his previous trips from home. On the top was Mary McDonagh’s letter, written in a careful and slow hand.

Castle Street,

Rathsorney,

September 2, 1959.

Dear Michael,

It is with a heavy heart that I write to you to inform you of the goings-on in Rathsorney. I am sorry to tell you your wife Ella is having an affair, by all accounts with a rich man who can buy her expensive jewellery to adorn herself. I don’t write on a whim but after careful consideration, and I know how devastated you will be by this news.

I know too that a woman who has lost her child in such tragic circumstances must not be right in the head and I have tried to take that into account. But, frankly, she is flaunting new jewellery every day, even at Mass.

I can’t have word reaching the McDonaghs. This could badly affect my prospects. What would they think of us all? People are beginning to talk. It is time you came home and controlled your wife.

I remain Your Loving Sister,

Mary.

That Mary, who had married soon after her treachery, should now want absolution for her sins, after living a happy and fulfilled life, made Ella O’Callaghan shake with anger. Afterwards came the wrenching tears, big wet drops of bitterness she had cried many times before. It lasted several minutes. With a familiar resignation, she went to the bathroom and sluiced her face with water before patting it dry. She redid her make-up, paying extra attention to her eyes. Before she returned to the café, she closed up the old Army box and pushed it hard into the far corner under the bed.

She smiled at Chuck Winters as she entered the café, and his heart skipped; she looked so vulnerable, so gentle. Placing his crossword on the table, he hoped Ella would stop to chat.

‘Wonderful cake, Miss O’Callaghan, as always.’

She nodded politely and he wondered why her eyes looked so troubled.

‘Won’t you take a break and we can discuss the recipe?’

Ella shook her head, but she smiled kindly at Chuck, whose complexion had deepened pink. She ducked in behind the screen.

‘Are all the orders out?’ she asked Debbie.

‘Yes. Don’t worry. And you?’

Ella faltered a little. ‘Fine. We should clear off some of the tables. Get a head start on closing.’

When Sister Marguerite burst in without knocking, her voice high-pitched, her body spinning across the room, Mother Assumpta knew something dreadful had befallen the community. She carefully replaced her pen on her desk and waited for the younger nun to get her breath. Marguerite reached behind Mother to the window ledge and switched on the radio, all the time whimpering like a dog that knows that trouble has visited.

‘Do you want to share with us why you want in particular to trace your mother, Debbie?’

There was a lull, and Mother Assumpta put her head in her hands, listening intently.

‘I dearly wish to meet her, before I die.’ Debbie’s voice was calm and steady. ‘I don’t want to go from this world not having met her or knowing about her.’

‘Are you going to die, Debbie?’

‘In a few weeks: things are going to start getting bad pretty soon. Gall bladder cancer.’

‘What can we do to help you, Debbie Kading?’

‘I want my mother, if she’s out there, to get in touch. I was born on April 15, 1959, and adopted by the Kadings of New York. Sister Consuelo of the Divine Sisters handled the adoption.’

‘Couldn’t the sisters help you?’

Debbie sighed deeply. ‘I’ve tried, but there’s no give there, not even in my case.’

‘Shouldn’t you be at home in the arms of your family at this moment?’

‘My mom isn’t around any more, and my father passed away two months ago. He didn’t even know about my cancer; I didn’t even know about it then.’

There was another silence, which the interviewer did not try to fill.