Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 1: Lessons in Heartbreak, Once in a Lifetime, Homecoming. Cathy KellyЧитать онлайн книгу.
a person who’d had a stroke might never recover. And all the pain Anneliese had inside her might remain bottled up there for ever.
As she drove, she let the tears flow, unchecked, down her cheeks. It wasn’t like the tears she felt with the panic attacks or the depression; those tears she tried to stifle, as if she could physically push them back into her body and stop the pain from escaping. But these tears for Lily were cleansing, they were a tribute.
Anneliese and Edward had always loved the road out to Rathnaree, which headed west of Tamarin along the top of the hill from where you could see the swathe of both Tamarin and Milsean Bays. Then the road dipped into woods and fields and parkland, bordered by huge hedges that stretched long tendrils out on to the road, making the road itself very narrow and forcing cars into the hedges in order to pass each other.
Lily’s house was the family home she had grown up in, a former forge that had once been a part of the huge Rathnaree estate. The Old Forge was no longer owned by the Lochraven family. They’d sold a lot of the land off years ago and now the house and the four acres of land it sat on belonged to Lily. That mattered a lot to her, she’d told Anneliese once.
‘I don’t think I’d be happy here if it was still part the Lochraven estate,’ she’d said. ‘I know it’s crazy. I’m old enough for it not to bother me, but there’s peace in the fact that it’s mine now, nobody else’s. There’s nothing like owning your own little bit of God’s green earth.
‘My mother, Lord rest her, would turn in her grave to hear me saying that. But I like the fact that it’s my own land and my own house. It gives me immense joy, actually, to own it.’
‘Why did the Lochraven family never give the house to your family?’ Anneliese asked. It didn’t quite make sense to her, that these incredibly wealthy people would never gift the homes to the loyal workers who had served them for years.
Lily had laughed loudly at that.
‘Oh, Anneliese, the number of times I wondered about that. I finally came to the conclusion that those sort of people don’t gift anything, that’s how they stay rich. They hold on to it and we’re just the peasants who do their bidding, working our fingers to the bone and getting nothing but a pittance in return. Well, I used to think that. Long ago. But I know a bit better now.’
There was something final about those last words, as if she didn’t want to be drawn on the subject of how she’d learned those lessons, but Anneliese had to know more. Thirty-seven years ago, Anneliese would ask anyone anything. She ploughed on.
‘Both your parents worked for them, didn’t they?’ she said.
‘My mother was the housekeeper from 1930 to 1951,’ said Lily. ‘Until she died, actually.’
‘She must have seen some amazing things, working in that big house,’ Anneliese added.
‘Oh, she saw lots of things, all right,’ Lily said. ‘She saw everything. That was how I learned my first French. Lady Irene used to say things like, “Ne pas devant les domestiques.” Not in front of the servants. I worked as a maid there for a while and I got used to hearing that. Lady Irene never seemed to realise that eventually some of us might learn French and know what she was saying. Lord, but my mother used to go mad if I’d give out about them,’ Lily added. ‘First, she’d be scared someone would overhear. Then she’d say: “Where’s your gratitude?”
‘I had no problem with gratitude. It was just that gratitude was a one-way street. My mother and my father worked hard up at Rathnaree and they just accepted that they’d never receive any gratitude for it. They got exactly what they were due, nothing more. The Lochravens liked to say their servants were part of the family, but they weren’t treated like that. They were just words, and words mean nothing. Oh, don’t mind me, Anneliese,’ she said. ‘I used to think if you were rich and from the gentry, you had it all. I know better now. Life hurts them the same way as it hurts us all.’
Anneliese thought of that now, as she turned off the road, up a narrow, hedge-lined lane to Lily’s cottage. It was such an enigmatic thing to say, but there had been a sense that Lily had a lot more to say if she were asked.
Anneliese wished she’d asked now. A person didn’t get to Lily’s age without learning a lot of life’s wisdom and, right now, Anneliese could have done with some wisdom. After losing her only child, Anneliese had never known how Lily didn’t curl up into a ball of bitterness and die.
It had been a long time since Lily’s home had been a forge but the name stuck: the Old Forge. Her father had been a blacksmith, the last in a long line of blacksmiths, who had come to work for the Lochravens. In his time, it had been a working forge, complete with picturesque horseshoe-shaped door and the tang of hot metal in the air. Eventually though, the forge itself had shifted to Rathnaree with its huge stables. Over the years, the original forge had been absorbed into the family home, until it was hard to tell where the forge ended and the house began.
There was a herb-filled front garden, because Lily loved herbs, and a fine big vegetable garden at the back that she no longer had the energy to dig or sow. When Lily’s husband, Robby, had been alive, the couple had kept cows and hens and Lily had become proficient at selling free-range eggs, making her own butter, doing anything to get by in the lean years when Robby hadn’t been able to find much work as a carpenter.
He was long dead, at least twenty years, Anneliese thought, remembering Lily on that bleak day in St Canice’s, when winter rain had lashed against the church’s stained-glass windows and Lily’s face looked as if it had been carved from the same wood as her husband’s coffin as she stood and stared at it.
All I’ve done is lost a husband, and he’s not lost for ever, he’s just run off with someone else.
She tried this idea out in her mind, seeing how it felt. Edward wasn’t gone for ever: he had just chosen to leave her. Was that worse or better than if he died? Because if he died, and he still loved her, she’d have that comfort to help her along as she dealt with the pain of being on her own. Yes, she grinned, feeling some crazy sense of relief, in the midst of all this madness, death certainly trumped separation.
On the outside, the forge looked much the same as it had in those pictures Anneliese had seen of Edward and Alice standing outside it as children, laughing as they stood beside the big rain barrel where Lily kept the water that the family used for everything from washing their hair to bathing. Inside it was different, full of character and warmth in the way only someone like Lily could fill a house, with lots of books and pictures of the family, and flowers, mixed with herbs from her garden, scenting the air. There was a beautiful bathroom too.
‘I always swore that, if I had to live in this house, I’d have an inside toilet,’ Lily used to tell Anneliese. ‘When we were kids, we were used to it, nobody had indoor toilets. Except up at Rathnaree; they had the most amazing bathroom installed for Lady Irene, all marble and mirrors replacing the old wooden panelling and a huge cracked tub. None of us had ever seen anything like it. I think everyone on the estate went in to have a look. It was just sheer luxury. I swore, one day I’d have a bathroom like that!’
And she had, thought Anneliese, with a smile. Well, it wasn’t quite like the fabled Rathnaree marble version, but it was pretty luxurious: pure white tiles and a swirling chocolate brown Deco pattern running along the edges. She was glad that Lily had had her lovely bathroom, it was nice at the end of your life to have had the things you dreamt of having. You could look at them before you died and say, ‘I wanted that when I was twenty, and now I have it!’
‘Stop,’ Anneliese said out loud. She was talking as if Lily was already dead, and she wasn’t. But Lily was very old, and maybe this was the way for her to go. Quickly was always better for the person who died, but it was horrible for those left behind. It would break Izzie’s heart if her darling gran died before she had a chance to say goodbye.
Anneliese wondered if she should have offered to phone Izzie to tell her the news. She had an idea from her last conversation with Lily that Izzie was away on a shoot: Mexico, New Mexico…she wasn’t sure about the place