‘Quiet now,’ her mother said as they crept down the stairs. ‘If you wake the landlord, there’ll be hell to pay.’ Sybil laughed, quietly. ‘Whatever’s to pay, we haven’t got the money for it.’
They’d made it out safely that time. Then on to the next place, the next town.
Sybil came from better stuff, she told her daughter. There were many stories about the good times in the past. Lovely times with servants and beautiful clothes and lovely meals. Always enough to eat.
‘Too much,’ Sybil would say. ‘Far too much. The waste!’
Danae’s mouth watered at the thought of food you could waste. They were living on a thin soup made of bones that her mother had beseeched from the butcher, saying it was for the dog. But we haven’t got a dog, Danae wanted to say, but she knew better. Her mother was also adept at digging up a few vegetables here and there from other people’s gardens.
‘They won’t miss them,’ she’d say. ‘Isn’t it a kindness to let someone else share a little of your good fortune?’
Each time they moved, Danae had brought her few books with her. Two on the lives of saints – her mother had been going to throw them out; the dratted nuns had given them to her. ‘Fling them in the fire,’ she’d said, ‘we might as well get some use out of them.’
‘No,’ cried Danae, ‘I like them. I like to read.’
So the lives of the Little Flower and Maria Goretti had been saved, along with the story of Edel Quinn and a copy of Wuthering Heights.
‘You’re a curious little thing, with your head stuck in a book there,’ said Mr Malcolm, one of the nicest men her mother had met up with.
‘I like to read,’ said Danae carefully, not really looking up into his eyes, because you never knew what sort of man Mother might bring home. Sybil never knew herself; that was the problem, Danae was beginning to see.
Sybil had never been what you would call a reliable narrator. All the stories of her past had to be taken with a pinch of salt because she was inclined to make her own role bigger or smaller, depending on circumstances.
When Danae had fallen out of the cot at the age of one, Sybil had barely been in the room at all, for goodness’ sake! A woman couldn’t spend her entire time watching a baby: she needed a bit of time to do her hair. The cat had taken much of the blame, on that occasion. When a chip pan caught fire and the whole house had been in danger of burning down, Sybil had risked life and limb to rescue her darling daughter. Any talk of the fire brigade’s involvement was glossed over, along with their reprimand for having two chip pans and a frying pan all going hell for leather on the one gas stove with the kitchen curtains flapping around nearby.
The fact that Danae had been left with a small burn on one leg was something she should be grateful for. If it hadn’t been for her mother’s speed, she could have been a lot worse off.
Sybil liked to be the heroine in every story. She was never happy until she was in the spotlight. It had taken Danae years to realize all this.
And then into their lives had come kind, jovial Bernie Wilson. He wanted to marry Sybil. Marry her and make an honest woman out of her, now that the baby was due.
Widows with children, Danae heard other women in the flats talking, were more likely to marry again rather than widows without children.
‘Men like ones who’ve been broken in, who know the score. And with chisellers, they know the score.’
But Bernie wasn’t like that: he was special.
Sybil was full of grand names for the baby, something to rival Danae.
‘Could we not have something nice and simple?’ said Bernie, ‘I was thinking Morris, if it’s a boy. That was my father’s name, God bless him. And maybe Alice, if it’s a girl?’
The baby had been Morris. Lying in her bed in the little cottage in Avalon, Danae recalled those years when she’d lived with Bernie and Morris as the happiest of her life. There had been stability then; a stability she’d never known before.
But for all her lack of clutter, on top of Danae’s big old wardrobe there were three boxes of things from the past.
In the first box was the diary she’d been asked to keep.
The second contained her wedding dress, carefully wrapped up in tissue paper – something she’d never been able to throw out.
In the third were her white satin shoes from the day, and her bouquet, also wrapped in tissue paper. She hadn’t thrown it. Somehow, in the wildness of the day and the excitement and the great drama of entering the Rahill family, no bouquet had been thrown.
Perhaps that had been the bad luck that marred the day, Danae thought. But no, the bad luck had been written in her life long before that. The bad luck meant she chose men the same way her mother chose them, for all the wrong reasons. Except her mother had finally found a good one in Bernie. Whereas Danae had made the worst choice of all right at the outset.
When she got home from Dublin, Mara hugged her aunt and said, ‘Whenever you’re ready to tell me, Danae, tell me. I love you, I wanted to understand so there wouldn’t be any danger of me hurting you inadvertently. The last thing I wanted was to upset you.’
Danae had stood in her niece’s embrace and closed her eyes.
‘You didn’t hurt me, love. I’m scared to talk about it. It was not a good marriage, not a good childhood either. That’s why your father and I are so different, because we have different fathers. Bernard, your grandfather, was a good man. Morris was lucky.
‘It was different for me when I was a child. Life was painful and my marriage was painful, that’s why I didn’t tell you. Give me a little time to get used to the idea of talking about it, and I’ll tell you. It shouldn’t …’ she paused, thinking of what Belle had said, ‘… be a secret.’
Later, she took down the box with the diary and the cuttings and all the various bits of paper relating to what had happened, and she laid them on her bed. They were all tied up with a black ribbon and Danae didn’t even want to undo the package. Opening it would be like letting a bad spirit out. As if the box was a genie’s lamp and undoing the ribbons was the spell that would release it into the world.
No, Mara could do it. As soon as Danae got up the courage to give the box to her. Mara could read everything, and then she’d know.
Because Danae didn’t think she had the heart to tell her beloved niece the whole story.
Did everyone in Avalon know, Tess wondered as she walked down the town to pick up a few groceries for dinner. Was everyone staring at her thinking, Poor Tess, her husband has left her and found someone else? Tess herself was never a person for gossip. It was partly her father. Dad had never been a gossiping sort of man. He’d quite happily walk into the village shop in the morning with scenes of wildness going on all around him and ignore it. Suki had once said that if half the town had been seen frantically kissing the other half of the town, he wouldn’t notice. He’d just go in and say, ‘Good morning, lovely day, isn’t it? I’m sure I saw a red kite out there this morning. Very unusual. Thought they were gone from Ireland. Terribly exciting!’ And then he’d wander off with his newspaper, not even looking at the scenes of bacchanalian craziness around him.
Consequently, Tess worked on the theory that life could be difficult and that you never knew what was going on behind the curtains. She’d learned this partly from living in the big house all her young life, when outsiders would assume the Power family ate off the finest Sèvres china with silver cutlery, when in fact they were all sitting around the kitchen table shivering like whippets