The House On Willow Street (11 page)

Anna had always loved Tess. There had been no issue between the woman who cleaned Avalon House and the daughter of the house. There might have been in many of the other big houses, but not there. It was partly to do with Tess and Suki’s father, a man who genuinely didn’t discriminate between those with money and those without. He was unlike most of his class in that respect.

Mr. Power was cut from different cloth. He cared about people, from the men who worked on the estate, trying to stop the ravages of time and the weather from destroying the beautiful old house, to people like Cashel’s mother, who cleaned and sometimes took care of Tess and Suki. He always addressed Anna respectfully as “Mrs. Reilly” and spoke to her as if she were a duchess. And Anna, though she came from the poorest street in the village, spoke back to him in the same way. So it was no surprise that Anna and Tess were close.

But Cashel didn’t want to think about Tess Power. Not after all that had happened. He hoped she wouldn’t have the nerve to come to his mother’s funeral. The lady of the manor bestowing her presence on the funeral of a mere town person . . . He shuddered; no, he didn’t want to see her there.

October was not a good time for boutiques in small villages—or so said Vivienne, proprietor of Femme, the high-fashion boutique next door to Something Old.

The Christmas frenzy of wanting something new to wear hadn’t yet started and everyone was saving for Christmas presents.

“The number of people I’ve had in this morning who
rattled through the sale racks dismissively, then marched out again. It’s so depressing,” Vivienne sighed. “They don’t even look at the full-price stock.”

She’d stuck the
BACK IN FIVE MINUTES
sign on the door and dropped into Tess’s for a cup of instant coffee and a moan. The two of them had been shop neighbors for ten years. Vivienne had done marvelously during the boom years when wealthy women thought nothing of paying a hundred euros for a sparkly T-shirt or twice that for a long, bewildering skirt with trailing bits here and there. Now, Vivienne said, they wanted a whole outfit for the same hundred euros.

Tess boiled the kettle and spooned coffee into cups in the back part of the shop and listened quietly to Vivienne’s lament.

The past couple of years had been tough, no doubt about it.

Once upon a time, she used to close the shop for the whole of January and open up again in February, with new stock, the old stock rearranged, and a spring in her step after the rest. She hadn’t done that for the last two years. These days, she couldn’t afford to close at all.

At least when the place was open, people came in, bringing warmth with them.

She carried the coffees back into the shop, having decided against telling Vivienne that a customer had bought a sweet 1910 marcasite brooch only that morning. Vivienne would take it personally.

“No news?” asked Vivienne.

“Not a scrap,” said Tess, smiling. It was a trick of hers: smiling fooled people into smiling back at her. It was infectious; a bit like yawning at dogs.

Vivienne perked up. “They’re doing a special offer in the supermarket,” she said. “Two instant meals and a bottle of
wine for twelve euros. Of course, Gerard hates instant meals.” Gerard was Vivienne’s husband, a man who could be relied upon to bail the shop out when profits were low.

Tess was used to Vivienne’s rants. She never let on that she too worried about money, that there was no one to bail her out, and now even the capital her father had left her had dwindled, despite its relative safety in the post office. Staring her in the face was the knowledge that before long she might have to give up Something Old and join an auction house—if she could find one that would have her. She didn’t have a degree in fine arts. Her college experience a million years ago had been in general arts. Her knowledge of antiques came not from books but from her love of old things and an affinity for them, but she had an expert eye and could generally tell a fake from the real thing.

“Are these the best biscuits you have?” Vivienne said, eyeing the plain biscuits.

“Sorry,” said Tess. “I did have a pack of amaretti biscotti, but they’re all gone.”

“I need chocolate,” said Vivienne, getting to her feet. “I’ll nip down to Ponti’s for a pack of chocolate ones. Back in a moment!”

It was ten minutes before she returned. After all that time, Tess expected her to turn up with cupcakes from the delicatessen and a couple of milky coffees from Lorena’s Café. However, when Vivienne arrived, panting from the walk up the hill to Something Old, she carried nothing but a pack of chocolate biscuits.

“I got stuck, talking to Mr. Ponti,” she said, collapsing on to her chair. “Apparently, Anna Reilly died. One of the nurses found her dead this morning. Mr. Ponti reckons it was a mercy, given how bad she was. I suppose the older son will be home for the funeral. I’ve met Riach, obviously, and his
wife, Charlotte’s lovely, but I’ve never set eyes on Cashel—except in the papers. He’s a fine thing, I have to say. Is that bad of me? Saying he’s good looking when his mother’s only died? I suppose it is. Can you boil up the kettle again, Tess? This coffee’s stone cold.”

But Tess was no longer listening. She was thinking of the woman she’d known since she was a child, who’d been a friend to her even after the split with Cashel.

Nineteen years had passed, yet it remained as painful as ever to think about him. Tess closed her eyes, as if that would block out his face.

She saw him on television sometimes, talking about business. He looked as if he’d filled out over the years, with broad shoulders to go with his great height. He’d had a beard for a while, giving him a hint of Barbary pirate with his midnight dark hair and the slanting eyebrows over those expressive brown eyes.

On the day he’d told her how much he hated her, he was leaner, his face still youthful and full of hope.

When she looked at pictures of him now she saw someone who’d been knocked by life and whose face had taken on a wry, slightly wary expression as a result. The dark eyes were permanently narrowed and there were lines around them that should have made him appear older but somehow only succeeded in making Tess wonder if there was much happiness in his life.

His mother had come to see Tess a couple of years after she married Kevin. Zach had been a toddler at the time, and Anna had brought him a little sweater she’d knitted. It was blue with the red outline of a train embroidered on to it. Anna was a wonderful knitter. Tess could remember Cashel, tall and strong, in a cream Aran sweater his mother had made him. Tess used to lie against him and trace the complex patterns of
stitches, marveling at both the intricacy and the feel of his body through the wool. Everything had been so simple then, dreaming of the day Tess and Cashel would marry, Suki would be First Lady . . . And then it had all gone wrong . . .

Taking the little blue sweater from Anna, she had blurted, “It’s lovely,” before dissolving into tears. Without a word, Anna had gently picked Zach up from his beanbag, dressed him in the tiny sweater, and handed him to his mother. It was the only thing which soothed Tess in those days: holding her beloved son and burying her nose in the fine tufts of dark hair on his small head.

There was no need for them to be strangers, Anna had pointed out in her matter-of-fact way. Just because Cashel had stormed off saying he would never speak to Tess again, didn’t mean Anna had to follow suit.

“We’ve known each other too long for that,” she said in her firm, strong voice.

Anna Reilly had been unlike anyone else Tess knew. There were plenty of women with husbands who spent every waking moment in the pub and thought work was an occupation for those poor souls without an aptitude for betting on horses, but Anna did not allow this behavior to beat her down. She was going to raise her boys as best she could, with or without Leonard Reilly’s help, and if that meant cleaning other people’s houses and scrubbing their doorsteps, so be it. The jobs she did in no way defined her. Her strength defined her.

Over the years, Tess often wondered whether Cashel knew that she and his mother had remained friends. In subtle ways, Anna would let her know when Cashel was home, and Tess understood that she wouldn’t be welcome in the house on Bridge Street until he’d gone.

“You should have seen some of the houses he wanted to buy me,” Anna joked when she showed Tess around it the
first time. It was bigger than the place on Cottage Row that Cashel had grown up in, but not too big.

Through Anna, Tess had followed Cashel’s career from afar. At no time did Anna ask why it had happened that way, why had she broken Cashel’s heart. And Tess never tried to explain, for she felt certain that Anna wouldn’t understand. If it had been her darling Zach whose heart had been broken, Tess knew she’d find it hard to forgive. And yet Anna had been part of her life since she was a child; part housekeeper, part babysitter when it was required. She realized that Tess wasn’t heartless or stuck up, or any of the things Cashel had called her.

She’d been distraught when she first saw the signs of Anna’s decline into dementia. To ensure the old lady got the help she needed, Tess had phoned Riach, alerting him to the problem.

Like his mother, Riach held no malice for her. He was the one who made sure she could continue to visit his mother without revealing her surname to the nurses Cashel had hired.

“Cashel would go mad if he knew you were visiting her,” Riach told Tess.

“I know,” she said, her silvery-gray eyes cloudy. “But it’s not his business. It’s about me and your mother. We were friends.”

Now Cashel would surely be returning for the funeral, and for the first time in many years, they would come face to face.

Assuming Riach thought she should attend the funeral.

Suddenly Vivienne broke off munching through the biscuits, having spotted someone walking toward her shop window.

“Excuse me, Tess,” she said. “It looks as though I have a customer.”

The moment she was gone, Tess went to the back room to make a phone call.

Riach’s mobile rang so long, she thought she’d have to leave a message, but just as she was steeling herself for the voice mail announcement, he picked up.

“Riach, I am so sorry. I just heard about Anna. You must be devastated.”

“I am—we are,” he said. “I knew it was coming, but it still hurts. I want to cry, only I keep thinking how she’d hate me to cry.”

“She was a very strong woman,” Tess said, “but she’d have wanted you to mourn her, so cry away.”

“Yeah,” he said, and Tess could hear the slight hitch in his voice.

“Riach, I would like to be at the funeral, but only if you think it’s all right for me to come,” she went on. “I don’t want to cause any more pain. You’ve enough to deal with, without me—”

Riach interrupted her. “She’d have wanted you there,” he said.

“What about Cashel?”

“Cashel will have to get over himself,” Riach said shortly. “This will be a day for my mother and the people she loved.”

Tess unexpectedly found she had a lump in her throat.

“She did love you, you know,” he said.

“I loved her too,” Tess said, beginning to cry. “I’ll miss her so much. I know it’s better that she won’t have to endure the living hell she was in—”

“That’s what I said to Cashel,” Riach interrupted her. “I don’t know if he agrees, though. She was the one person he could come back to, you see. I’ve got Charlotte and the kids, he has no one.”

There was silence. A long time ago, Cashel’s
someone
had been Tess.

“You should be there, though,” Riach went on. “I’ll call you when it’s all organized. You’ll have to see him, but I’ll tell him you’re coming.”

Tess wasn’t sure what was worse—Cashel knowing in advance that she was going to his mother’s funeral, or him suddenly seeing her there after all these years.

That evening, just as Tess was locking up the shop, Kevin sent her a text.

WE NEED TO TALK,
the message said.
ARE YOU IN LATER?

She had an inkling of what he wanted to discuss. The depression in the building trade meant that even brilliant carpenters like Kevin—Tess had to admit that he was a genius at what he did—weren’t able to find work. Before he’d left, they’d sorted out the finances in a general way, neither of them touching the joint account but agreeing that, since Kevin would be living basically rent-free in his mother’s little apartment he could afford to put more money into the mortgage. Clearly that was now becoming too much.