As Pat came downstairs she noticed the guest-room door was open and, judging by the look of the kitchen, Cassie had eaten and gone out. It was practically lunchtime but Pat discovered she was craving a real breakfast. Not a fry or anything heavy but maybe some toast and an egg. She could scramble the egg, throw in a bit of parsley, and call it brunch.
Frankie had agreed to drop a few bits and pieces into the shop downstairs for her return, and Pat had fixed with Des, who worked behind the counter, to add rashers and leave the lot in her fridge before shutting up. She’d asked Frankie for milk, eggs, and a loaf, but on opening the fridge she discovered it was crammed. For a moment she was surprised. Then her powers of deduction overcame her jetlag and she turned on her phone.
There was a text from Mary Casey, sent the previous evening. I GOT YOU SOME FOOD IN YOU COULDN’T TRUST FRANK%1E CHANCES ARE HE@LL FORGET
A second message had followed immediately: YOU@@ BE DEAD TO THE WORLD AFTER THE PLANE ILL BE OVER WHEN YOURE UP
Mary, Pat’s oldest friend, never stooped to punctuation in texts and only used capital letters. She also held decided opinions on what other people ought to want and need. Opening the fridge again, Pat was dismayed by a large ring of black pudding, a dozen eggs, a basket of tomatoes, and far more milk and fruit juice than she and Cassie could consume in a week. In the breadbin she found a cake of Mary’s homemade brown soda bread and a box containing three Danish pastries. No bread appeared to have come from Frankie.
She had the box of pastries in her hand when the door opened and Mary entered the flat, complaining bitterly, as she always did, about the stairs. ‘I declare to God, it’s like climbing a ladder to get up here from the shop! And that stairwell’s black as the hob of hell! I could’ve missed my step.’
‘There’s a light switch at the bottom and the top, as well you know. And a window on the landing.’
‘Ay, well, it’s halfway up there’s a nasty turn in the stair.’
Dumping her bag on the kitchen table, Mary nodded at the pastries. ‘I got three of them because I knew you’d fuss about keeping one for Cassie. Put two out on a plate now and let’s have a cup of tea.’
Pat gave up on her vision of a modest egg on toast. There was no use arguing with Mary Casey, especially if you were tired. She was a woman who surged through life like a battleship, seldom regarding the trails of flotsam bobbing in her wake. But, also like a battleship, she exuded strength and inspired confidence, something Pat had learned at an early age. She and Mary had been to convent school in Lissbeg together, hung out round the horse trough in Broad Street with lads from the Christian Brothers, and married husbands who’d also been best friends.
Tom had died ten years or so before Ger, resulting in a slight coolness between Mary and Pat. The idea that her friend would retain a husband when her own had been snatched away had offended Mary. It was she who had been the golden girl of the foursome, a leader where Pat had been a mere follower. Yet Tom had been taken and Ger, who, in her view, was a poor stick, had been left. God’s failure to recognise the accepted hierarchy had seemed to Mary to be a deadly insult, and in the first years of her bereavement a sense of outrage had made her less close to Pat.
But with Ger’s death the relationship had readjusted. Mary had surged back into Pat’s life, brushing aside Cassie’s presence as irrelevant. A granddaughter might be all very well, and blood might be thicker than water, but only Mary could truly understand Pat. And Pat, who had long since analysed their friendship, had come to the wry conclusion that Mary was right. No one left alive in Lissbeg knew more about the dynamics of that complicated foursome, and no one knew more than Pat herself how powerful an ally her oldest friend could be when times got tough.
‘I saw Cassie leaving the library just now. Did we ever think we’d see the day, Pat, when your grandchild would be working for my daughter?’
‘I’m glad Hanna has a job for her.’
‘I’d say Hanna was lucky to get her. I hear young Conor’s left her in the lurch.’
Pat gave her a direct look and Mary immediately tossed her head defensively. ‘I’m not putting words into Hanna’s mouth. I’m only repeating what I heard on the street.’
‘Conor’s gone on a course.’
‘Well, that’s young people these days, isn’t it? Never content with what they’ve got but off looking for more. Mind you, they have great energy. Look at those.’ She waved her hand at the pastries. ‘Not that I’m that impressed by all this artisan nonsense but those girls at the deli make everything from scratch.’ Beating Pat to the pile of plates on the dresser, she whisked the pastries onto the table. There was a moment of unspoken jockeying about who would fill the kettle but, conceding that this was Pat’s home ground, Mary settled for a tart comment about keeping teaspoons in drawers. ‘You want to put them in a mug by the teapot and have them there to hand.’
Pat thought the better of mentioning dust. Any suggestion of an aspersion cast on Mary’s standards of hygiene could be lethal. Her bright pink bungalow on the main road to Carrick had been specifically designed to avoid the inconveniences of Pat’s flat, where visitors were entertained in the kitchen and you had to switch on a standard lamp if you wanted to read or sew. Mary hadn’t bothered with drains or that sort of thing. Those had been Tom’s province. She’d made sure she had double glazing and efficient central heating, a hi-spec kitchen separate from her lounge, and a bright light in the middle of every ceiling. She wasn’t getting any younger, she’d pointed out belligerently, and she was damned if she’d squint at a newspaper, or scrub an old range with a Brillo pad. She’d had enough of that in her youth when she and Tom started out.
Getting no response to her comment on teaspoons, Mary slammed the dresser drawer and took a seat at the table. Pat brought the tea and looked round for her phone. ‘I suppose you want to see photos?’
‘Don’t you know I do! But, come here to me, how are you feeling?’
‘Jetlagged. Fine, though. It was a great holiday.’
‘And was the house nice?’
‘It was lovely. Mind you, we hardly saw Josie’s daughter, she works so hard. Erin’s a pet and she gets on great with Cassie, and Josie has a lovely little granny flat in the house. All on one level and, God knows, the poor woman needs it. I wouldn’t say she’d climbed a staircase for years.’
‘Isn’t that what I’m saying about Ger leaving you that stair to contend with?’
‘Ah, Mary Casey, you’re like a dog with a bone! There’s nothing wrong with my legs, or my lungs either. Poor Josie’s got emphysema and she’s using a walker.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Well, she’s ten years older than we are, if not more. Didn’t she leave Lissbeg in 1950? And Ger and I got engaged in 1962.’
Tom had proposed to Mary the same week, and Pat had gone off to Resolve that summer with a list of commissions for Mary’s trousseau almost as long as her own. Sweetheart necklines and Silhouette bras had featured, and, in Mary’s case, a spandex girdle to produce the right effect under her tussore-silk going-away outfit. It was Josie, Pat’s cousin, who’d fixed up the job in the factory and found Pat a place in the rooming house nearby. Meeting her again, Pat had been shocked by her condition. Since then she’d told herself that she ought to count her blessings. Her own health was grand and she’d no need to think about leaving her home. After a bottle of wine and a night of reminiscence, Josie had admitted she’d wept for the loss of her freedom, and feared becoming a burden to her daughter as she grew older.
Mary bit into a Danish pastry. ‘And tell me this, was the Shamrock Club the way you remembered it?’
‘Ah, listen, girl, some things never change. But you should see how big it’s got! There’s a new wing with a kitchen and a dining hall, and they have what they call a library now, where they run book clubs.’
Books weren’t really Mary’s thing. ‘So they’ve built a restaurant?’
‘Not at all, the dining hall’s just for members. But they had the kitchen redone lately and, Holy God, Mary, it must have cost a mint.’
‘Ah, they get great tax breaks in America. They probably wrote the whole thing off as charity.’
‘Well, you could be right because there was a plaque up saying the Canny twins had donated it.’
Mary’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are they Moss Canny’s sons?’
The merest flicker of a repressive glance showed Pat wasn’t going to be drawn into gossip, even if the story was more than fifty years old. Moss Canny had left Finfarran in the mid-1960s under a dark and unspecified cloud. Something about a property deal that went wrong. The word was that his family had clubbed together to get rid of him, possibly before the guards came knocking on the door. In America he’d become a solid citizen, and though he’d come back once or twice over the years, looking prosperous, he’d never stayed long. No one of Pat and Mary’s generation in Finfarran was likely to forget his story, though, and, since factual details were lacking, it had been embroidered over the years.
Pat poured the tea. ‘That’s right. Moss died a while back and the twins fell in for his construction business. They paid to have the old fittings pulled out and the club kitchen remodelled. Hang on, I have a picture.’ She showed Mary a photo taken on the night of the farewell party.
Mary’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Jesus, that’s some plaque, Pat. And wouldn’t all those steel units take the sight out of your eye!’
‘If you want to see plaques, take a look at this one in the library.’ With a snort of laughter, Pat showed her a shot of the chipped enamelled range. It had iron feet, a polished rail, a rotary damper on the ash-box door, and a large brass plaque above it, looking disturbingly like a coffin plate.
Mary squinted at the plaque. ‘“Brought from Finfarran by Denis Brennan AD 1956.” What’s that all about?’
‘Well, you can see for yourself. “Ancestral range of the Brennans of Crossarra”. Denis was the chairman of the Shamrock Club that summer I was there. Ninety if he was a day and worth a fortune.’
‘I suppose it might have come out of some house belonging to his people.’ Taking another bite of her pastry, Mary flicked a drift of golden flakes from her blouse. ‘Come here to me, though, what’s it doing in the library?’
‘Well, it used to be in the kitchen and they wanted it out when they did the renovation.’
‘So why didn’t they feck it in a skip?’
‘It’d be a brave improvement committee that’d dump the Brennan range. I’d say putting it in the library was a compromise. There’s a rake of Brennans still alive and kicking, and even the Canny crowd wouldn’t cross them.’
‘You’re making it sound like the Wild West!’
‘Ah, it’s just that they’re fierce invested in the Shamrock Club. Emotionally, I mean. It’s their link to home.’
‘But hasn’t Resolve been their home for donkey’s years?’
Pat laughed, but she didn’t reply. Mary, who’d never left Finfarran, couldn’t imagine the strange pull that the homeland had on an emigrant. Or the complex strands of guilt and resentment in the relationships between those who went away and those who didn’t. But she, with two emigrant sons and one who’d remained to build the family business, had an inkling: a knowledge augmented by that long-ago summer in Resolve. There’d been a time when she’d thought she might stay in the States herself and never come home again. But, in the end, she hadn’t been able to do that to poor Ger.