Mary Casey felt like a right fool. Louisa had sat down to the lunch table saying that Jazz was planning to drop by at three. And Mary had assumed it was for coffee. Well, why wouldn’t she? It never struck her that the child would be coming by for anything else. So she’d slipped into her bedroom and changed out of her slippers. Then, since the shoes with the kitten heel didn’t work with the blouse she was wearing, she’d put on her new cashmere jumper and her double string of pearls. Pearls, she’d assured herself, weren’t over the top. You had to wear them regularly if you wanted to keep their lustre; if you left them stuck in a box they’d just dry out. But what the whole thing actually boiled down to was that Louisa had been wearing a lovely pair of ankle boots, and you wouldn’t want your granddaughter sneering at your old tapestry slippers.
And then it turned out that Jazz was only coming by to take Louisa off to some meeting. She’d breezed in on the stroke of three, looked at the bubbling percolator, and glanced up at the clock. ‘Gosh, I’m sorry, Nan, we won’t have time for coffee. I’ve got a chap booked in for twenty past.’
But, thanks be to God, Mary had had her wits about her. And, better still, she hadn’t yet opened the packet of Mikado biscuits. So she’d tossed her head and carried it off with an air. ‘Actually, you’re right, love, there isn’t time, is there? I hope it’s okay to cadge a lift to Lissbeg?’
She could see Louisa wondering where that had come from. But before anything more could be said, she’d swept across the kitchen, collecting her keys and her phone. It was by the grace of God that she’d remembered Pat Fitz had a class today in the library. She could whip in there and no one would know that she hadn’t planned to from the start.
Once she was settled into the back of the car, she’d opened her phone and shot off a text to Hanna:
TELL PAT 1 MORE 2DAY # U CAN TAKE ME HOME AFTER
Mind you, sitting staring at a screen for an hour was the last thing she wanted. It was a small price to pay, though, if it came to saving face.
When she pushed open the door to the library, they were all gathered round the computers. And not one man among them, which was something Mary couldn’t abide. A man always brought a bit of grace to an occasion and added a bit of a challenge, but what kind of socialising could a person do in a crowd of backbiting women?
Pat Fitz raised her head when she saw her in the doorway, and Mary’s eyes dared her to say a word. Hanna was sitting up at her desk but Mary paid her no attention. She crossed the room with her chin up and sat down in an empty place. A good few people turned round and smiled and said they were glad to see her. What she could see when she nodded back was that one half of them was ancient and the other was scruffily dressed.
And here was Pat now, handing out orders like Sister Benignus – you’d almost expect her to go the whole hog and give a vicious yank to your hair. The situation was ridiculous. Mind you, neither of them had been great at the lessons when they were at school, but the fact remained that Pat had always looked up to her. That was how it had been: Pat waiting for instructions and Mary leading the way. And things would be no different now if Pat hadn’t gone off and taught herself to use a computer. Sure, anyone could do that. Stabbing crossly at a key marked Alt Gr, Mary told herself the whole thing was farcical.
All the same, she had an hour to spare after the class before Hanna would close the library so, since she and Pat hadn’t chatted for a week, they took themselves off to the Garden Café. You had to order from the counter, so Pat went up while Mary claimed a table. It wasn’t the kind of weather for sitting out in the nuns’ garden. Looking through the steamy window, Mary watched a cloud of little birds fluttering round the statue in the fountain. Someone must have waded through the basin of shallow water and poured birdseed into the stone saint’s outstretched hands. There was a bitter wind throwing the little birds sideways and, as far as Mary could see, half the seed was going to get blown away. Fair dos to whatever eejit had gone and put it there, though. This was no day to be trying to find your food out in the cold.
She had a neat little bird feeder herself, back at the bungalow. Johnny Hennessy from next door had hung it by the kitchen window for her the summer after Tom died. ‘You’d get great company from birds,’ he’d said, which Mary thought was plain stupid. She’d got used to looking for the flutter of wings, though.
And this summer, when she and Louisa would be sitting outside having breakfast, the birds got so tame that some of them came wanting pieces of toast. You couldn’t have them messing on the table, of course, but if you threw a crust down for them they were cute enough to run for it. Though you’d have to sweep up afterwards for fear that you might bring rats.
Mary’s mouth tightened. The lovely relaxed breakfasts with Louisa seemed to be over. And not just because the summer was gone and you couldn’t go sitting on the patio. Ever since she’d started this business with Jazz, Louisa’s days had changed. She was supposed to be a sleeping partner – the money behind the scenes while Jazz got on. Instead she was in and out at all hours, making calls and driving off to meetings. No time at all for a proper chat.
There were signs and portents that Mary spotted early. When the work on the bungalow was finished, a vanload of furniture arrived over from England and Louisa was inside in her rooms getting them set up. And the first thing Mary saw when she went in to look was a desk piled with papers. Mind you, it was a lovely little bit of furniture. What you’d call an escritoire. Or maybe a bureau. Nice enough but, all the same, you could see it was a statement of intent.
Louisa had got the builders to turn the window into French doors that opened into the garden. They’d installed a little sink and a work surface in one corner of the room too, so she could make herself a cup of tea without coming down to the kitchen. All the same, she’d somehow managed to make the room seem bigger than it looked before. She’d had the walls painted a warm cream colour, where Mary had had flowery wallpaper, and her pictures were all a bit plain. No story to them.
She had no side table with framed photos on it, and no little rug or cushions that would make the bed look cosy. And no dressing-table either. Mary had had a triple-mirrored, bow-fronted one in there, with gilt handles shaped like tassels. Louisa preferred to do her face in her bathroom across the hall.
Johnny Hennessy had taken Mary’s old furniture off to auction for her. Though, with the amount he got and the auctioneer’s fees, he might as well not have bothered. A pretty penny Tom had paid for that stuff thirty years ago but, apparently, no one had any taste for proper quality these days.
There were bookshelves on the wall by the bed now, and a panelled Japanese screen around the kettle and things in the corner. And every stitch of clothing Louisa owned was hidden by sliding doors.
And the escritoire, piled with papers and Louisa’s slim silver computer, seemed to Mary to dominate the room.
She wasn’t quite sure how she’d expected things to be but she knew that it wasn’t this way. Louisa was still as charming and friendly as ever, and there were plenty of chats over martinis in the evenings, and meals together, and occasional walks on the beach. But the fact was that she and Jazz were wrapped up in Edge of the World Essentials. Which was a daft name for a business anyway, if you asked Mary’s opinion. Not that they ever did.
The three of them had been sitting in the kitchen once, when Louisa had said that Saira Khan, whose husband was manager in the call centre, was going to help them out with research and development. ‘She’s very knowledgeable about the cosmetic properties of herbs.’
Now, Mrs Khan was a nice enough woman. But she was from Pakistan. What would she know about things that grew in the nuns’ garden? But when Mary asked the question, Jazz just laughed. And then Louisa explained, kind of patronisingly, that Saira’s family had been making herbal cosmetics for generations. According to Jazz, they were planning to use some of Saira’s mother’s recipes for shampoo and hair conditioner, which sounded to Mary like a recipe for disaster. How did they know they wouldn’t give people allergies and hives?
Jazz had explained that everything had to go through all classes of microbial and stability testing before you could launch it as a product. But by that stage Mary was getting bored. She’d ended the conversation by putting the kettle on, declaring that, as far as she could see, they needed to think it through better.
After that Jazz and Louisa had tended to do their talking in Louisa’s flat. And now, with office space rented in the Convent Centre, they were seldom round at all. It was easy seen that while two was company three was a crowd.
Pat came back to the table with coffee and a plate of shortbread. When she moved the cups from the tray to the table coffee splashed into the saucers. That was Pat all over. She’d always been clumsy, and the way she was dabbing round now with a paper hankie would drive you mad. Still, at least she’d got hold of a jug of hot milk and asked for a proper sugar bowl.
With the table mopped, they sat down for a chat, looking out at the chilly garden. And Pat had more sense than to go asking why Mary had turned up today at her class.