FIVE

      Lily Shanahan sat on a wooden bench in the tiny courtyard beside St Canice’s in Tamarin and let the April sunlight wash over her. It was nearly half ten and the courtyard was empty, apart from a couple of pigeons poking around the grey slab paving stones looking for crumbs. Everyone else was inside the church, listening to the gentle tones of Father Sean. Lily could hear the drone of the small Thursday-morning congregation murmuring along to the service.

      She’d been on her way into the church when she’d felt a little light-headed and had a strange compulsion to sit outside in the sun instead, and worship another way.

      You didn’t have to talk to God in a church. If He’d made the sun and the sky, it was only right to enjoy them. So she’d walked slowly to the wooden bench and decided she was taking a different sort of pew today.

      God would understand. The church would be warm and the stuffiness might make her light-headedness worse. St Canice’s was architecturally very beautiful but flawed when it came to heat and cold. In the winter, it was freezer-like, elderly radiators notwithstanding. In the warmer months, it became a hothouse and many a bride had found that it was fatal to dress the church with wedding flowers the night before the wedding, as even the buds that liked heat wilted in the fierce warmth of the church and slumped in their arrangements on the day itself.

      Once she’d settled herself on the bench, Lily took off her beige cotton hat and closed her eyes, turning her face to the sun. Before she’d left the house, she’d meant to use some of that expensive cream that Izzie had given her the last time she was home; marvellous stuff, Izzie had said.

      ‘Skin Replenish. Keeps wrinkles at bay. You should mind your skin, Gran.’

      Eyelids still shut tight, Lily smiled at the memory. Izzie didn’t come home often enough these days. She was busy with her life in New York and, while Lily missed her, she was able to accept it. Lily’s job as a grandmother standing in for Alice, Izzie’s dead mother, had been to give her darling granddaughter roots and wings.

      She used to say it to Izzie when Izzie got a fit of guilt over missing some big event in the Tamarin world:

      ‘Roots and wings, darling: that’s what love is,’ she’d murmur, and feel grateful that she had the strength to mean it and that the words comforted Izzie.

      Besides, there was no point saying that type of thing if you whined when the wings part meant the person built their own life away from you. Lily had no time for people who liked spouting such truths but didn’t like living them. It was the hypocrisy she disliked; like telling Izzie to get on with her life and then being discontented because she did.

      No, Lily wasn’t a woman for hypocrisy. Probably not a woman for expensive moisturiser either, she thought with a little chuckle.

      Izzie’s precious cream felt beautiful on Lily’s skin when she actually used it, but she’d generally left the house before she remembered and she could never be bothered going back to apply it. At her age, time, gravity and life had done damage that no expensive cream could fix – unless there was alchemy at work in the pretty glass jar.

      What was nice was that her granddaughter still thought her skin worth saving. Izzie, who worked with beautiful women with skin as velvety as newborn babies’, hadn’t written her off as an old woman.

      Some people did – as if wrinkled skin was an invisibility cloak. Like the maids’ uniforms of so long ago, Lily thought wryly. She’d learned that early on. Once a person slipped on a servant’s garb, they faded into the background.

      The maids’ uniforms in Rathnaree had been plain navy gabardine dresses with buttons up the back and a white collar that had to be laundered and starched to within an inch of its life. Lily’s mother, Mary, didn’t have to wear the same uniform because of her valued position as housekeeper and Lady Irene had provided her with two navy serge skirts – ‘From Harrods,’ Mary would say in awe at the very thought of owning a garment from a shop where the gentry themselves shopped.

      Mary wore the skirts with pristine white blouses and a grey woollen cardigan.

      The memory of her mother in that outfit, keys dangling from her belt, glasses on a ribbon round her neck, used to make Lily wince at the subservience of it all.

      The Rathnaree housemaids liked their uniforms and the fact that it saved their own clothes.

      Even Vivi, Lily’s best friend, liked hers.

      ‘Keeps my things nice, Lily,’ she said cheerfully, squashing her curls under the starched maid’s cap. ‘Will you ever tell me why you have such a bee in your bonnet about the uniform?’

      ‘I don’t,’ Lily would say, which wasn’t the truth at all.

      Vivi was such an uncomplicated soul and Lily knew it would be impossible to explain that she hated the way putting on a uniform turned her into a piece of the furniture, which was what Lady Irene wanted: lots of blank-faced servants rushing around doing her bidding. Lily might have been born into the servant class, but she didn’t have to like it.

      Lady Irene wouldn’t have forgotten to put expensive wrinkle cream on, Lily smiled to herself from her seat outside St Canice’s.

      If ever there was a woman keen to keep the ravages of time at bay, it had been Lady Irene. In those long ago days when Lily worked in Rathnaree, creams like Izzie’s gorgeous Skin Replenish were definitely the preserve of the upper classes. An ordinary woman from the town would never wear any cosmetics, never mind expensive face cream. Lily’s mother washed her face in water and soap, and that was it. She tidied up Lady Irene’s walnut dressing table with its many potions and silver-topped bottles, but never expected to use such things herself.

      Lily could remember herself at twenty, defiantly buying Max Factor cosmetics and arranging them on the windowsill beside her bed. She’d have loved Lady Irene to see them and understand that the girl from the cottage was as entitled to beauty as she was.

      ‘See, they’re not just for the likes of you, Lady Irene,’ she’d have said, holding up the Chinese Red lipstick she loved and painted on in the same way Joan Crawford wore hers, with that elongated, sultry bow. The Crawford Smear, they called it, and it was the devil to clean it off your mouth, leaving a dark red stain that made you look as if you’d been pigging out on raspberries.

      Had she ever been that young and fierce? That angry? She’d hated the Lochravens and all they stood for then: wealth, privilege and a blithe, careless approach to life. Lady Irene was the worst. From the moment she got out of bed, leaving her teacup teetering on the edge of a dresser, casting off silken bedclothes on to the floor, the lady of the house went about her business with the unassailable knowledge that someone would be following behind, tidying up. Lily hadn’t cared so much when she was the lady’s maid following in her employer’s wake. She was young, energetic and with supple limbs: she could button her lip if need be. But how she’d hated it when her mother, Lady Irene’s housekeeper, was the one stooping and tidying up.

      ‘You’d think she’d pick up her things the odd time,’ Lily would say, scowling, when her mother came down to the big Rathnaree kitchen late at night, worn out with tiredness after her day but not ready to go home yet.

      ‘Hush,’ Mam would say, anxious lest anyone heard, although there were plenty of other people in the house who agreed with Lily and said nothing, but just took their wages. ‘Her ladyship wasn’t reared to tidy up after herself.’

      ‘More’s the pity,’ Lily snapped. She was fed up hearing how Lady Irene, a lady in her own right and not by marriage, had been raised in a palatial home in Kildare with three times the number of servants she