‘Are you going to be OK, Mum?’ Tessa asked, fussing around Florence Sullivan upstairs in the bedroom before she left. ‘I won’t be too long at my cookery class, and if you need me my phone will be on.’
‘Honestly, Tessa, will you stop all the worrying and go and leave me in peace? I want to watch EastEnders, and then that new detective programme on BBC. I’m quite capable of being left on my own at night, you know!’
‘I know,’ Tessa apologized, giving her elderly mother a hug while secretly checking that the portable phone was beside her bed, and that her personal alarm was on, and that she had a drink nearby, and that there was nothing that she could fall over underfoot.
Outside, as she pulled on her jacket and grabbed her car keys, Tessa Sullivan asked herself how she had become such a fusspot, constantly worried about her mother and what might happen to her! It had been two years since her mother Florence had suffered a heart attack and fallen down the stairs here at home. She’d given them all such a fright, and Tessa could remember racing through Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 1 with tears racing down her face as she tried to catch the last Aer Lingus flight back to Dublin from London that night. Her brother Donal had come back from San Francisco, and her sister Marianne had arrived from Hong Kong.
For a week the three of them had sat beside their mother’s bedside wondering if Florence could possibly survive such a massive heart attack. But their eighty-year-old mother was made of strong stuff, and a week later was sitting up in her hospital bed sipping a mug of tea, thrilled to see her three children together for once and back in their home town. She’d given them all a right fright, but the doctors and nursing staff made it quite clear that the next time she might not be so lucky, and that in their opinion Florence would no longer be able to live on her own.
It had come as a shock to them all, as up to now their mother had stubbornly defended her independence. They all knew that it was difficult for her, being a widow and having all her children living overseas, but she had become an intrepid traveller and loved visiting them: spending a few weeks in the US with Donal and his boys, or with Marianne and her young family in their luxurious home in Hong Kong. She loved her regular trips to London, too, and she and Tessa had travelled all over England: from the Lake District to the beautiful Regency town of Bath, from Cornwall to the home town of the Beatles in Liverpool. Florence Sullivan was interested not just in the places around her, but also the people. Now Florence faced two choices: she could go into an old people’s home, or one of the family would have to return home to care for her. Confining their mother to an old people’s home, they all decided, was not an option.
They had argued and reasoned and weighed up the implications for all of them. Donal had only just been made a professor lecturing in bio-chemistry at Stanford University in California. He couldn’t just go and throw up such a position, as it would be impossible for him to get a similar one back home. Also, since his divorce from Leigh Anne, if he wanted regular access to his two sons he needed to be in the US where he could see them regularly.
Marianne’s husband had a big job working for Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. They had a great house and lifestyle, and with a thirteen-year-old, a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old there was no question of Marianne being the one that could come home. So it had fallen on Tessa to volunteer to give up her job as a human resources manager at Bridgetown & Murrow and return to Dublin.
In her late thirties, Tessa was still single and childless and not even in a relationship, so it made utter sense as far as everyone was concerned that she throw her life up in the air and return to Dublin. She had sublet her pretty garden flat in Notting Hill Gate, and loaded up her cream and black Mini Clubman, and taken the car ferry back to Dublin to mind and care for their mother. With no dependants, the onus was on her to be the one to do the decent thing and put her own career and life on the back boiler. That had been almost two years ago, and somehow she had fallen into a dull pattern of routine and caring. She had managed to find a part-time job three mornings a week in a small recruitment company off Baggot Street. Two of those mornings Lilly, their Moldovian home help, came in to do a bit of cleaning and to care for Florence, while on Wednesdays Florence went to the local community centre’s over-seventies club, where there were activities organized and the old people got a three-course lunch. Minding her mother involved a fair bit of juggling but, with kind-hearted Lilly’s help and willingness to do a few extra hours the odd evening, Tessa somehow managed it.
She loved her mother – but she had sacrificed so much of her career and her freedom and financial independence by moving back to Ireland. She had tried to reconnect with many of her old friends from when she was younger, but most of them were married and busy with families of their own. She knew they pitied her. Some days she ached with regret for all the lost and wasted opportunities.
‘Mum, I won’t be long,’ she called, closing out the hall door.
It was raining slightly, and she put on the windscreen wipers as she reversed the car out of the driveway. She was rather nervous about tonight, and didn’t know why she had signed up for cookery lessons. It was hardly as if she was entertaining madly while living back home in the four-bedroom 1950s home in Mount Merrion where she grew up. Still, cookery had always interested her, and being able to produce good food with a bit of a twist was a skill she would really like to learn.
In London she had given a few small dinner parties but her repertoire of dishes was very limited, and now she had the chance she really wanted to change that.
Bored and lonely, Tessa had never imagined that at thirty-nine years old she would be back where she started! Back in Dublin, with no man in her life, no child and very little to show for the past fifteen years of her life except for some savings in the bank, a few designer clothes and shoes and a whole heap of regrets.
The traffic was awful – any kind of wet seemed to bring out the worst in Irish drivers – and she snailed along the Stillorgan dual carriageway and took the left lane and turned off for Blackrock and the Dun Laoghaire area. Seeing the round Martello Tower on the seafront at Seapoint, she turned immediately right and pulled up a few seconds later in front of the large house on Martello Avenue where the cookery class was being held.
She sat for a few minutes trying to get her courage up, watching her fellow students arrive … it was not quite as bad as she feared. Then, grabbing her handbag and notepad, Tessa took a deep breath and got out of the car.