She’d forgotten how nice coffee tasted. The richness on her tongue. Antonio, being typically Italian or half-Italian and half-Irish, had loved his coffee. They’d been drinking espressos and Americanos long before the rest of the country got round to finding them fashionable.
‘The thing is,’ Danae said, choosing to ignore her friend’s mild sarcasm, ‘Mara has now hightailed it off to Dublin to get the truth out of her father, and I don’t want him to tell her. Before I came to see you, Morris rang me to say that Mara wanted to know what had happened. It’s all my fault, I should never have let her come to stay here, I should never have suggested it.’
‘I’ll tell you what you should do,’ said Belle firmly. She reached out and took one of Danae’s slim hands in hers. Belle’s hands were big and strong and there was a pearl ring on one of them, her engagement ring and a wedding ring from her last husband. Her first marriage had been a disaster – hence her slightly cynical views on young love and early marriage. But she’d loved Harold, her second husband, dearly, even though rumour had it in the town that he’d died under mysterious circumstances – a rumour that enraged Belle every time she heard it. ‘Cancer’s very mysterious all right,’ she used to say grimly. Anyone who mentioned the rumour in her hearing never repeated it again; Belle made sure of that. She held on to Danae’s hand tightly.
Danae’s hands were long and slender and her jewellery was of a totally different type. On one hand, she had a strange silver ring with a beautiful turquoise stone in the middle of it. Her nails were never painted, merely filed short. She had sensible, workmanlike hands, and they were cold. Bad circulation, some might have said. Belle preferred the old adage of ‘cold hands, warm heart’, because she knew her friend had one of the warmest hearts ever. And yet it had been frozen for so many years because of the past.
‘What I want you to do is ring Morris, get him to put Mara on the phone, then say that when she comes back, you’ll tell her the whole thing.’
‘I can’t,’ protested Danae.
‘Yes, you can. It’s about time you shared the load. I knew it would be good to have Mara living with you. I knew she’d not rest till she found out.’
‘You’re like a bloody witch,’ said Danae crossly.
‘You’re calling me a witch?’ laughed Belle. ‘You with the long, streaky hair with the grey bits in it and the mad jewellery! You do realize that half the aul fellas up the mountains think you’re the witch, living on your own up there with that wolf-like dog and all the hens.’
For the first time Danae roared with rich, true laughter.
‘Oh Lord,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t it be great to be a witch if you could cast spells to make yourself happy and spells to make other people happy. Sadly, no, I’m no witch, as you well know. Just a little sad right now.’
‘You know the old saying, “A problem shared is a problem halved”? There’s a lot of truth in it. You’ve been keeping people out for a very long time, Danae. Now you need to let Mara in. What do you think she’s going to do? Hate you? Think any less of you? Course she’s not! She knows who you are. And if you tell her the whole story, the whole, truthful, painful story, trust me, she’ll understand.’
Danae nodded. She pulled her hand away and started searching in her handbag for a tissue. She almost never cried any more. She didn’t know how: it was as if all her tears had been cried out years before.
Belle handed her a tissue. ‘I’ve got a box of them on standby for the engaged couple. You’d be surprised at how many brides-to-be start weeping when they think about the wedding day. The grooms generally start to weep at the price of the wedding day, but the brides get all moony and delirious once they see the ballroom and we talk about the whole thing. Then, when I show them the wedding suite, well, it’s a toss-up between tears and swooning in ecstasy. Most of them want to book in there and then, stay the night and have a go at everything. That Jacuzzi bath is a brilliant thing; I’m so glad I got it installed. Anyway, you’ve got your orders. I know what’s good for you, even if you don’t. So you’re going to take my advice, aren’t you?’
Danae wondered how anyone ever managed to resist doing a single thing Belle ordered them to.
‘Yessir,’ she said, and she meant it. ‘That’s what I’ll do. I suppose she needs to know sometime. And if she runs away from Avalon, screaming … Well, I’ll have to get used to that.’
‘If you think Mara’s going to run away screaming when you tell her the truth, you don’t know what sort of girl your niece is at all,’ said Belle.
Back in the post office, Danae phoned Mara’s mobile and left a message.
‘Mara,’ she said tiredly, ‘I’ll tell you all about it. But give me some time to get used to the idea, OK? I’ll tell you, eventually, OK?’
That night, Danae lay in bed and thought about the past. She spent so much of her time trying hard not to think about it, but it was always there, every single month when she drove to Dublin: waiting for her in ambush.
Danae was not a woman for clutter. Her home had a few beautiful pieces she’d picked up over the years – a bit of driftwood from the beach, a lovely earthenware jug made by a local potter, some blue glass that she sometimes sat flowers in during the summer – but there was very little junk. It was the legacy of a childhood spent moving around, never staying in one place for long. Her mother had taught her there was no point in having much stuff because it only got in the way when you needed to get out in a hurry.
‘Better to be able to throw your few bits into a suitcase and be off,’ Sybil would say, as if this was a great gift.
Danae didn’t know any other way to live. The tenement on Summer Hill was where they’d lived the longest. Not that they put down roots there or made friends among the neighbours.
‘We’re better than the likes of them,’ Sybil would say, ‘never forget that.’
She never went to the laundry with the other women on washing day. Instead, she washed her lovely silk lingerie herself, draping it over a chair in front of the fire.
‘They’ll never have seen a pair of silk cami-drawers in their lives,’ Sybil would say, holding up a delicate peach garment with its exquisite lace.
Danae knew what the other women made of her mother. She’d heard them talking: ‘Thinks she’s Lady Muck,’ they’d say. ‘All fur coat and no drawers.’
But they were wrong. Regardless of what she might say, Sybil didn’t really consider herself above everyone else. The reason she tried so desperately to cling to a sense of superiority was because it was one of the few things left to her. Dignity was long gone. The men had taken that.
Big Jim was the first that Danae could remember. She must have been about three or four back then. She’d thought he was her daddy, because they all seemed to live together and other children had daddies. Then one night he came home in his cups and hit her mother such a clatter that she flew clean across the room and landed against the window like Danae’s beloved rag doll before sinking to the floor.
‘Daddy!’ shrieked the little Danae.
‘I’m not your father, you stupid child,’ he’d hissed at her. And then he left.
Danae had rushed to her mother’s side. But Sybil was made of the sort of stuff that said you didn’t cry, you didn’t need to be comforted. No, you got up on your own two feet.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, dragging herself up by the curtains, wiping the blood off her mouth with one hand. ‘Do you know, I think it’s time we moved out of here.’
‘But, but … we like it,’ Danae said fearfully. It was small, but she had her little bed in one corner, behind the chest of drawers, with the curtain around it. And she had her rag dolly, her only toy.
‘No,’