Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday. Cathy Kelly
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went to daily Mass and liked to say the rosary once a week. She never pushed religion upon her family, but they all understood Elsie’s devotion to the Virgin Mary. Letting Jack stay over had been a huge concession on her part.
And now Mara was back home, boyfriendless, having slept with said man and with her heart broken to boot. Great result, thought Mara. She was glad she’d decided to go to Avalon for a while before coming home: she’d have burst into floods of tears if she’d come here first. Here, Jack’s defection felt worse than ever.
She could hear the hum of the television from the sitting room. When Jack had been there, she’d seen the disapproval in his eyes at the amount of time her family spent in front of the box. Meals were often eaten on trays on their laps while watching the soaps. The Wilsons didn’t go to the theatre or frequent art galleries. They didn’t do any of the things that Jack’s family did.
He’d said nothing, except that her father was ‘salt of the earth’.
Mara had once been to his family home in Galway – modern, detached, with a lawn cut by a smiling man from Slovakia – where there was always someone round for dinner, where the walls were lined with books and where someone would play on the piano after dinner or else a conversation would start up about a show they’d all seen, a book tipped to win the Booker, a new play.
‘Nobody can ever better the genius of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World,’ Jack’s mother might say when she’d had her single martini with an olive in it.
A martini. Mara had stared open-mouthed the first time she saw the martini jug and the way everyone had just the one. Her father liked a glass of Guinness of an evening, but he’d never have it at home. He’d have it in Fagan’s down the road, where he went with his pals to talk about the racing or the state of the country and how it had all been different in their day.
Her mother didn’t drink, having taken the pledge when she was twelve. She was proud of her Pioneer pin: a sign of abstinence.
Mara was sorry she hadn’t taken a pledge and got herself a Man Abstinence pin.
‘I saw enough of what drink does to people,’ was all Elsie would say. But she didn’t mind Mara opening a bottle of wine for Jack when he was there, and never said a word about the new wine glasses coming into the Wilson home. They were bigger and more delicate than the ones Elsie kept in the good china cupboard, which were exactly like the ones they had for events in the bingo hall, where Elsie might have an orange juice.
With shame, Mara remembered feeling that her family were somehow inadequate beside Jack’s. No martinis before dinner, no talk of books and plays, no proper wine glasses.
How stupid and disloyal she’d been. Her family were wonderful, while Jack had turned out to be a complete fake.
She pushed open the sitting-room door.
‘Mara, my love!’ Her mother got to her feet and in a second, Mara was in the familiar and comforting embrace.
Elsie smelled of Blue Grass perfume, the only scent she’d ever worn. ‘I like it. Why would I want anything else?’ she always said.
‘I sat down to watch Dr Phil and he was talking about family – how’s that for coincidence?’
‘Oh, Mum,’ said Mara tremulously. ‘It’s lovely to be home.’
That evening, there were many conversations about Jack, Tawhnee and what had gone wrong. Opinion was mixed in the Wilson household about whether Jack was a cheating, conniving pig (Mara’s father), or an innocent man hijacked by a sultry beauty (Mara’s mother). Mara found herself trying to keep the peace between the two warring factions. She abandoned the effort when her brother Stephen mentioned that he’d met Tawhnee on a trip to Galway, where he’d joined Mara’s work crowd in the pub. He thought she was ‘hot’.
‘How can you say she’s hot?’ demanded Mara, vexed. ‘She ruined my life!’
Avalon had dulled the pain for her: here, it was as fresh as ever.
‘Exactly my point,’ said Elsie, who was bending over the oven, checking on her scones. Nothing like a bit of home baking to mend pain.
‘Don’t go letting Jack off the hook, now,’ insisted Mara’s father. ‘He was the one who took our beautiful daughter and ruined her.’
‘He didn’t exactly ruin me, Dad,’ said Mara, getting anxious. ‘Ruin’ sounded like a throwback to the days when evil men had their way with young women and then left them in the lurch. After which no decent man would have anything to do with them.
Maybe it had been a mistake to tell them everything. But how could she have kept it from them?
‘I never liked him,’ said Stephen from his position on the floor, where he was getting mud out of his football boots.
‘You never said a word to me!’ said Mara.
‘He didn’t like to, I’m sure,’ said her father grimly, shooting Stephen a fierce glare.
It appeared that after Jack’s visit to Dublin, the Wilson household had done nothing but speculate as to when Jack would ask Mara to marry him.
‘Well, she is hot, you can’t deny that, Mara,’ said Stephen, head still bent over his boots, oblivious to the dark looks from his parents.
Mara could tell from the tone of his voice that he was visualizing Tawhnee. She’d seen this happen to many other men, many other times. Jack included. Why was it that tall, slim women with enormous breasts had this effect on men? Was the male of the species really so easily distracted with physical things?
‘Does she have any sisters …?’ asked Stephen.
‘Oh God,’ muttered Mara crossly. He was only twenty-three, after all. Twenty-three-year-olds did not necessarily think with their brains. They weren’t always loyal, either.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Stephen, recovering. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Really sorry, Mara.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, Stephen,’ Mara sighed. ‘You’re not alone: I don’t think there was a single man in Kearney Property Partners who didn’t lust after her. In the beginning, Cici said I wasn’t being fair because she was so beautiful. Cici reckons beautiful women have it really tough because all other women suspect them of stealing their men.’
‘That Cici is a bright girl,’ said Elsie firmly. ‘She knew which she was talking about, that’s for sure, certainly when it came to that bitch.’
The other three members of the family gasped in shock: Elsie Wilson did not swear or utter vulgarities of any kind, so for her to come out with such an expression was highly unusual.
‘Ah, Mum,’ said Mara, conscious that the pain she felt on her behalf had poor Elsie in a muddle. ‘There’s no need to be upset. Cici wasn’t defending Tawhnee, she said all that before Jack ran off with her. Plus, he probably wasn’t the man for me anyway.’
‘He certainly didn’t deserve you,’ declared her father with thinly veiled anger.
‘I know,’ said Mara soothingly, and she realized that instead of her family consoling her, she was trying to console them. That was the way it had always been in the Wilson family: wound one of them and you wounded them all.
By bedtime that night, Mara decided she needed to get away early next morning or she’d go mad. All evening her father had alternated between treating her with kid gloves and telling her men were like fish in the sea.
‘Or buses,’ said her father. ‘Always another one along soon.’
Mara thought of the number 45, which came up their road. It had been notoriously unreliable ever since she could remember. If men were like the number 45, she was in big trouble.
‘Dad,’ began Mara, desperate to change the subject, ‘I wanted to ask you something. It’s about Danae …’
Seeing