The turquoise sky reflected the color of the ocean. There was a stone slab for a doorstep and beyond it a scrubby field sloped to the cliff’s edge, where a stone wall marked the boundary. Beyond that was nothing more than a grassy ledge clustered with sea pinks and a sheer drop to the churning waves below. The little house stood at the top of a narrow field with its back to the road and its door opening to the ocean. Hanna had pushed her way through a tangle of willow saplings and splashed through a muddy pool to scramble through a window in the lean-to extension at the back. Now, standing on the stone doorstep with her face to the sun, she could smell the damp odor of the derelict rooms behind her and the salt scent of the ocean as it thundered against the cliff.
It was forty years since she’d last stood on this threshold. The house behind her had always been dark and uninviting. Her great-aunt Maggie had lived here, a pinched redheaded woman always shooing hens out the door and bewailing the price of paraffin. When Maggie died she had left it to Hanna, who was then still only a child. And now, desperate to be alone, Hanna had come here almost by instinct with her hope for the future in her hand.
A gull screeched in the blue air and, close by, a thrush fluttered in a willow tree. There were brown and yellow snail shells scattered like gems on the doorstep. It was too late now to worry about the state of the neat court shoes she had worn that morning to the library. Drawn by the sound of the waves, she moved down the field. The grass was waist high in places and tasseled pom-poms tickled her elbows as she waded toward the huge arc of the sky. The low boundary wall built of field stones had fallen away here and there, so she approached it gingerly. Then, beyond a patch of flowering briars and a rusting fridge freezer, she found a place where the fallen stones made a low seat on the cliff above the ocean. High clouds were moving on the wind, and out where shining rocks pierced the waves foam glittered on the breakers. Hanna sat down, put her muddy feet on a cushion of sea pinks, and stared at the envelope in her hand.
Her heart had lurched at first but now she found herself considering the weight of the heavy, expensive paper it was made of, the typed address, and the stamp’s jewel-bright colors overlaid by the postmark. Turning it in her hand, she told herself that a letter was nothing but words on paper. But a librarian should know better than anyone how written words, moving through time and space, could change a person’s life. Two days a week she drove the county’s mobile library van from isolated villages to scattered mountain communities up and down the beautiful Finfarran Peninsula. She loved those long drives between high flowering hedges, and the thought of the books she carried and what they contained. For millennia, written words had conveyed dreams, visions, and aspirations across oceans and mountains, and as she steered between puddles and potholes she was part of a process that stretched across distance and time, linking handwritten texts from Egypt and Mesopotamia with the plastic-covered novels, CDs, and celebrity cookbooks lined up in the back of her van. Besides, those solitary hours on the road were oases of freedom and silence. And they were badly needed.
It was early-closing day at the library so Hanna had locked up and driven home slowly, not looking forward to another afternoon in her mother’s company. Mary Casey was generous, bighearted, and entertaining but she was also interfering, tactless, and a dreadful woman for sulking. Things had been different before Hanna’s dad, Tom, died about ten years ago. He doted on his wife and loved organizing treats and surprises for her. Hanna could remember them back in the 1970s setting out for dinner in a hotel in Carrick with Tom in his best blue suit and Mary, in pearls and new hairdo, giggling and flirting like a girl. Now, without anyone to spoil her, Mary’s charm was a lot less evident than her bossiness.
Of course, things were less frantic in the mornings now without a teenager hogging the bathroom, but it still wasn’t easy to drink coffee and enjoy toast while Mary Casey, the queen of the full Irish breakfast, was frying up rashers and black pudding. The breakfast battle had been raging ever since Hanna had turned up on her widowed mother’s doorstep, with her then sixteen-year-old daughter, Jazz, looking mutinous and two cases of unsuitable clothes, packed at random in a fury. Back then, having uprooted Jazz from their London home without explanation and descended on her mother without warning, Hanna was desperate to keep the peace. Mary took the view that no one under her roof should face the day without a proper lining to her stomach. Jazz, raised by Hanna on croissants and orange juice, had been outraged by the sight of a grand runny egg on a pile of fried white soda bread. So for weeks Hanna had bought yogurt for her daughter, grilled mushrooms for her mother, and tried to interest both of them in muesli. It was a complete waste of time. Mornings had continued to be hell and, though Jazz, who had just turned twenty, was now living in a flat-share in France and working for an airline, Mary was still cooking full Irish breakfasts. And Hanna, at the age of fifty-one, was stuck in a dead-end job and sleeping in her mother’s back bedroom.
Hanna had been born and raised in Crossarra, a few miles east of Lissbeg where she now worked in the library. But the house she’d grown up in was long gone. Her dad had kept the village post office with a grocery counter on one side of the shop and two gas pumps outside, and her mother had minded the till. Kids used to congregate there drinking red lemonade and eating chocolate, and people who came to post letters or collect pensions would lean on the counter chatting. If a car drew up while Tom was weighing a package or helping someone to fill in a form, her mother would take his place behind the post office grill and Hanna would be called to cut cheese or slice bacon while her father worked the gas pump. Casey’s had kept a little of everything, flour and tea and baking powder, apples and mousetraps, packets of biscuits and bull’s-eyes, vegetables, batteries, and marmalade. But now if people needed gas or groceries they went to Lissbeg, or to one of the supermarket chains ten miles away in Carrick where if you bought enough pasta and dish detergent you got a few cents off the price of the gas that you’d used to make the trip.
In the 1980s, when Hanna married and settled in London, her father had sold the shop and built a new house. To an aging couple used to drafty rooms, an awkward kitchen range, and rattling windowpanes, the three-bedroom bungalow he built up on the main road was a dream retirement home. It had double glazing, central heating, a modern kitchen, and a bright light in the middle of every ceiling. Hanna, who loved old houses and period features, hated it. Each time she turned her car into the driveway she winced at the neon-pink walls and the blue-tiled entrance porch, proudly chosen by Mary. Screwed to a panel by the door was a large enamel shamrock. The clash of the pink walls, blue tiles, and lime-green shamrocks always set Hanna’s teeth on edge.
Beside the bungalow’s door was a plastic mailbox. Today as she’d lifted the lid her throat had tightened at the sight of the letter, with its familiar London postmark, addressed to “Ms. Hanna Casey, Crossarra, Co. Finfarran, Ireland.” Though she’d been expecting it for a week, she could hardly bring herself to take it from the box. Then she’d picked it up and steeled herself to open it. Seconds later, without warning, it was tweaked out of her hand.
That had been only an hour ago. Now, high on the cliff above the churning ocean, she looked again at the envelope that was splashed with her angry tears. She had swung round when it slipped from her fingers, and tried to grab it back. But Mary had fended her off.
“Mam! Do you mind?”
“How well you’re Mzz Hanna Casey, not Mrs. Malcolm Turner.”
“Well, I’m not Mrs. Malcolm Turner, am I? It’s been three years since the divorce, Mam, get used to it.”
“Oh, I’m well used to it, believe me. What I still don’t know is how you let it happen.”
“I didn’t let it happen. Malcolm divorced me.”
“After you’d been fool enough to give him the excuse.”
Hanna’s jaw set. “Mam, I don’t want to talk about it, okay? We’ve been through this a million times. I found him in bed with another woman. I took my child and left. What else was I supposed to do?”
“You could have stood your ground and made sure he paid handsomely.”
“I wasn’t thinking—”
“Don’t I know you weren’t? The way you weren’t thinking when you got pregnant after knowing him ten minutes.” Mary was in full flight now. “And then scuttling back home here after twenty years married in London! D’you know what I’m going to tell you, Hanna-Mariah? You’re a fool to yerself and you always have been.”
“Don’t call me Hanna-Mariah.”
“Your father sweated blood to give you an education. We had a grand little shop there for you to come into but, no, that wasn’t good enough. Off with madam to Carrick on her librarian’s course and then up to Dublin and away over to London. No holding you, no matter what I said. And your father paying out hand over fist all the way.”
Hanna grabbed the letter and pushed it into her bag. Her hands were shaking. Mary tossed her head.
“I know fine well what’s in that letter. Plenty of old lawyer’s guff and no money.”
For a moment Hanna controlled herself. Zipping her bag, she turned to go into the house. Then Mary pulled her back and shook a finger at her.
“I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again, you were robbed blind by that shyster. You gave up the chance of a good career when you married him. I don’t care how much money he’s put by for Jazz, he owes you too, girl.”
Suddenly something snapped inside Hanna. She grabbed Mary by the shoulders and screamed at her. “For God’s sake, Mam, would you ever mind your own business?”
“Ah Holy God Almighty, that I reared an eejit! You’re a fool, Hanna-Mariah Casey, and the whole world knows it!”
To her horror, Hanna found herself sobbing. Then she scrabbled in her bag, found her keys, and stumbled back to the car, desperate for silence and solitude but with no notion of where to go. Ten minutes later she’d forced her way through the long grass and willow saplings, splashed her shoes in the muddy pool, and scrambled through the broken back window of the only place on earth she could call her own.
The trouble was that Mary Casey was right. No sensible woman would have walked out of her family home without thinking, or announced when Malcolm divorced her that she didn’t want a penny of his money. Yet Hanna’s pride had been so hurt at the time that she wasn’t capable of being sensible. But now, with her daughter raised and out in the world, and faced with a future cooped up with Mary Casey, she had swallowed her pride and written to Malcolm without telling a soul. Surely, she’d said in her letter, he could understand her position? Surely the price of a place of her own wasn’t too much to ask of him? There was a little estate of new houses on the outskirts of Lissbeg, she’d said, knowing well that the cost of such a house would be nothing at all to Malcolm. What she didn’t know was whether or not he’d be willing to be magnanimous.
Far out where the gulls were wheeling, light flashed on the ocean. Held in her fist were the words on paper that would change the course of her life. Taking a deep breath she squared her shoulders and ripped the envelope open.