Once in a Lifetime
Cathy Kelly
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009
Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2009
Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780007389346
Version: 2017-11-21
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For Dylan, Murray and John, with all my love
Table of Contents
Excerpt from The House on Willow Street
Star Bluestone had talked to bees all her life. She talked to her flowers too, murmuring to the rare yellow poppies she’d nurtured from seeds gathered in the old Italianate garden thirty miles away across the Wicklow hills. She and the young Kiwi gardener there had such great chats, he walking her through the orchard and reaching up to cradle a baby apple bud the way another man might touch a woman.
He understood that people who loved the soil talked to their plants and to the bees whose careful industry made their flowers bloom. Even though he was only thirty to Star’s sixty years, he didn’t think she was an eccentric old lady. Rather, he was impressed by Star’s encyclopaedic knowledge of plant life. His earnest, handsome face became animated when they talked.
When she watched this kind boy, Star always remembered fondly that good gardeners make good lovers. Nobody capable of the tenderness required to separate delicate fronds of fern for replanting would ever be heavy-handed with another person’s body.
It had been a few years since Star had lain in a man’s arms. She’d had many lovers, but the one she would remember for the rest of her life, the one whose memory was imprinted upon her skin, hadn’t been a gardener. He’d been a poet, although that wasn’t how most people knew him. To the world, he was a conventional man, handsome, certainly, with beautiful manners and an important job waiting