Linen sheets, she said, were the last word in luxury.
Sure we have linen sheets, my father said. And we did. The eight-stone bags that the flour came in were made of a coarse linen and when the flour was emptied into the flour barrel, Mam would unpick the bags, wash them, bleach them in the sun out in the fields, and then sew them up into sheets.
Mam had been taught to knit the thread the bags were sewn with into lace. When she got sick, I took over.
I used to think, if the likes of Mrs Fitzmaurice had to live in a small three-bedroomed cottage like us, now that would be hard for a person used to fine linen. But for us, we loved it. It was home. The Captain and Mrs Fitzmaurice never had children. She was always so interested in you, Eleanor, when you were a child, that I think she’d have liked a little one or two. So you see, I never understood us being poor. In my eyes, we had everything.
On a cold Wednesday evening in January, Rae Kerrigan stood on her tiny balcony overlooking Golden Square, and watched a girl with long dark hair walk along the east side of the square. The girl might have been twenty and with her hair and a long striped scarf trailing behind her, she reminded Rae of herself when she was young. The girl walked with the energy and determination of youth, long jean-clad legs striding along, carrying what looked like a huge rucksack easily. Rae had once had a similar scarf, and had been as slender, racing along with her dark hair flying.
Men probably loved the girl’s hair. Men had certainly loved Rae’s.
‘You look like Ali MacGraw in Love Story. Never cut your hair,’ one boyfriend had begged her, after a long night at a folk concert on the campus in Galway, when they were still drinking wine in her tiny bedsit at dawn. The modern Rae was able to smile ruefully at the memory. That was well over thirty-five years ago, at least, she realised.
The boyfriend would have been shocked if he saw that the long dark hair was now tawny and shoulder-length, streaked with hairdresser’s clever soft browns to hide the grey that had appeared when she’d hit forty. But her winged brows were still mahogany dark, flared over the deep-set warm eyes that contributed to Rae’s thoughtful, penetrating gaze.
Still, that boyfriend would have changed too over the years; he probably bore as much resemblance to the earnest young philosophy student with floppy brown curls as she did to the girl she’d once been. She’d be fifty-eight on her next birthday and her life had taken paths she could never have imagined back then.
Along the way, she’d got married, had her beloved son Anton, and she’d traded her career in human resources for something a little different. Despite what she’d thought all those years ago, everything had worked out. Well, nearly everything.
She’d once read a spiritual saying that encapsulated her early life: for your heart to open, it first has to break. Rae’s heart had certainly been broken, but she’d recovered, more or less.
The girl who’d prompted the memories reached the corner and was gone from sight. Rae hoped, for the girl’s sake, that she’d had an easier life than Rae had by the same age. She wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
She took a sip of her steaming tea. The sun was low in the sky and the light shone through the two sycamore trees outside the balcony, creating a soft acid green light on the front of her house. She loved to get a little fresh air in the evening. Just for a moment in the cooler weather, and longer in summer. Her favourite place was sitting on the tiny first-storey balcony on her narrow white house, with Golden Square spread beneath her, music coming from the open French doors behind her and a cup of tea in her hand.
The balcony was too small for any actual furniture. In fact, it wasn’t really a balcony, just a ledge off the master bedroom. But it was a glorious place to lean against the iron railings and think about the day.
Evening was muted. As if people’s voices were less harsh, cars moved more slowly along the streets and even the dogs barked in a more lazy manner. The closing down of the day, time to relax. Certain times of day should be bottled, she decided. A late afternoon like this one would be very therapeutic: in times of stress, take two sips of Quiet January Twilight, a drop of New Year’s Eve Excitement, and a large spoonful of Winter Dawn.
Pity it wasn’t that easy.
They were lucky, living in Golden Square. The houses surrounding the gardens were mainly beautiful old redbricks, with narrow three-storeys like Will and Rae’s, a couple of cottages and a line of 1930s villas thrown in, with one apartment block.
On one side of the square there was a swathe of local shops including a proper butcher’s and The Nook, which sold everything from aspirin to apples. There was a dry cleaner’s, a small restaurant that changed hands every year like clockwork, and the Old Claddagh Bar, the local pub, which still did a roaring trade in processed cheese sandwiches on factory sliced white bread.
Every year, the latest owners of the restaurant walked into the Old Claddagh, sniffed at the sight of the sandwiches and the tomato-shaped plastic ketchup container, and walked out happily, convinced that the local pub wasn’t much competition. They’d bring ciabatta and miso soup to the area, they thought, and nobody would go near the pub for lunch ever again. By the end of the year they’d be leaving with their tails between their legs as it transpired the locals liked processed cheese sandwiches with their pints at lunchtime and found ciabatta bread very hard and dry.
Nestled between The Nook convenience store and the Old Claddagh Bar was the only other eatery to have survived the restaurant curse of Golden Square: Titania’s Palace Tearooms, which Rae had managed for the past fifteen years. She could see it from her little balcony: a double-windowed shop painted a rich olive green with the name in cursive lettering in gold over the shop, and an old-fashioned cast-iron sign sticking out over the door: Titania’s Palace Tearooms.
The tearooms were still going strong, as Rae and Timothy, the owner, had long ago realised that keeping it simple and cosy worked. People could go into Titania’s Palace and sit quietly reading the day’s newspapers with nobody talking to them, if they wished, or they could enjoy warm company. They could eat cupcakes smothered in pink icing or low-cal bran muffins. Rae’s management theory was that once a customer experienced the welcome of Titania’s Palace they wouldn’t be able to resist coming again.
Rae loved the tearooms.
‘It’s peaceful,’ she told Will.
‘It’s noisy as hell when I go in there,’ he teased her gently.
‘But it’s nice noise, enjoyable noise,’ she pointed out.
And it was. The noise was of people enjoying themselves, talking, chattering, laughing, waving hello to so and so, all in the comforting atmosphere of the place. Her son Anton liked to say there was an invisible forcefield around the place, and once you entered, you were stuck in Kindland.
‘You have got to stop watching so much Star Trek,’ his father joked. ‘You’ll be learning Klingon next.’
On the drive of the house beside Rae’s, she could see her neighbour, Claire, coming in with a bag of shopping. Claire was wearing her pink velvet coat with the fluffy fake fur collar. She’d been wearing that coat for twenty years now. Rae could remember when Claire had acquired it. The coat had created quite a scandal among some members of the residents’ association, especially Prudence Maguire, who was hideously jealous of Claire’s bleached-blonde glamour and ease with her own sexuality.
Ironically, it was Prudence – who’d loudly prophesied juvenile delinquency and immoral lapses in everyone else – who was practically estranged from her family. Claire and Evan’s kids had grown into kind, caring people who appeared to have achieved happy lives. When Claire’s daughter, Rachel, turned up in the square with her family, car windows open and music blaring, the children piled out, laughing and giggling, dying to see their grandparents.
Rae’s eyrie and the sanctuary of the tearoom window meant she could see Prudence’s house a lot of