Right on cue, the heavens opened as Hope ran, raincoatless, to her car after work. It was only a five-minute walk but by the time she wrenched the door of the Metro open and flung her handbag onto the passenger seat, she was soaked.
Shivering despite having the heater on at full blast, she drove home in worse than usual traffic. Yvonne didn’t understand. Yvonne was a blunt person who said what she thought. Hope was exactly the opposite. She longed for some way of telling Matt she didn’t want to leave Bath, but without the inevitable confrontation. Ideally, she wanted him intuitively to work out what she wanted, the way men did in films, and then agree that it was all a mad idea and that they should stay at home. No hassle, no arguments.
Only it wasn’t working out like that. Matt appeared to be taking her stoic silence for a thoughtfulness, as if she was busy mentally working out what the family would need to take. Why didn’t he see that she was upset? How could he be so blind?
The clock on the dashboard said it was six fifteen when Hope pulled up outside Your Little Treasures, not caring that she was double parked. Head down against the rain, she ran up the path to the glossy pillar box red door.
Marta was standing sentry in the small hallway, looking less Rottweiler-like than usual on account of her upswept hairstyle and a very un-Marta-like lacy dress. She was obviously going out for the evening.
‘You’re late,’ she snapped as Hope reached her.
The build-up of misery over the past few days came to a triumphant head in Hope’s mind. ‘So sue me,’ she snapped back with unheard of venom.
Marta took a step back at this unprecedented attack from the meek and mild Mrs Parker.
‘As long as it’s just this once,’ she muttered, giving Hope a wide berth.
Matt couldn’t remember when he’d felt this fired up over anything. Not the local television ads they’d won off a top London ad agency, not the excitement he’d felt when Hope had first become pregnant. Nothing had ever given him the buzz that this new adventure was giving him.
He arrived home with a bouquet of flowers for Hope and a bottle of rosé wine. She loved rosé. She was a bit unsure about the whole trip, but that was just Hope. Dear Hope, he loved her despite her nervousness about things and her fear of the unknown. She’d love Kerry when she got there.
Matt remembered when he was nine, and his parents, to whom he’d been an unexpected interruption in their marriage and careers, had shipped him off to Uncle Gearóid’s. At first, he’d hated the idea of leaving his home to travel to Ireland, but after that first summer, he’d wanted to go every year.
There was something magical about Redlion. Maybe it was the fact that Gearóid didn’t believe in rules so there was none of that palaver about being in by a certain time or eating three meals a day, but Matt had loved it.
Meals were whenever Gearóid took it upon himself to open a tin of beans and nobody batted an eyelid when the nine-year-old Matt was brought into the local pub (shop at the front and small snug at the back) to have his first taste of porter. They’d gone on fishing expeditions, on wild adventures to the Beara Peninsula, where Gearóid had practically gone into a coma after a drinking session with a fellow writer in a small hillside dwelling that Matt’s mother would have disapproved of no end. Matt had grown up with a mistily romantic memory of sitting on cracked leather stools in the dim, stained snug, listening to farmers talking of their herds and the trials of bovine mastitis, while Gearóid and his cronies rambled on about novels and poems, their plans for being the next Yeats, and how they’d got a consignment of good quality poteen and maybe after the next round they’d take a ramble back to Curlew Cottage for a wee dram.
Gearóid, with his wild woolly hair, long beard and fondness for brown corduroy suits he got directly from Dublin, had been an idol to his nephew. He lived outside the system, he told Matt proudly, which was why he’d left his home in Surrey to travel to Kerry and become a writer. Taking the Irish version of his real name had been part of the fun. The one-time Gerry had become Gearóid, more Irish than the Irish, a man who could sing old Irish songs for hours on end and knew the location of every stone circle in Munster. Gearóid supplemented his income by giving tours to the hordes of tourists who came to Kerry searching for their roots, but, as he got older, his fondness for the jar meant he was quite likely to turn on them and tell them they were all a pack of feckers and should feck off back wherever they came from.
To his shame, Matt hadn’t visited for over four years and he’d felt terrible about the fact that when Gearóid had died, he’d been in the middle of a vital campaign and hadn’t been able to make it to Redlion for the funeral. He’d make it up to Gearóid, he promised, by becoming a writer. Turning his back on Bath and his career, albeit only for a year, was his tribute to his maverick uncle.
Virginia Connell stood in the garage of her new home in Redlion, looked at Bill’s golf clubs and smiled wistfully. She’d hated those bloody things all their married life. Well, maybe not hated but certainly felt irritated by them. Every weekend, come rain or shine, Bill had played golf. A brilliant man, he never managed to remember anniversaries, parties and dates she’d put in his diary months before, but thanks to some male instinct, he never forgot an arrangement to play golf.
They’d never really argued about it. Virginia had been very self-sufficient; you had to be when you had three small children and a husband who worked away from home a lot, she always said briskly. When Bill forgot a date she’d made with him, she’d wag a reproving finger and tell him she’d reschedule when he had an opening in his diary. He’d grin, kiss her and promise they’d go somewhere really exciting, which they never did, naturally. Steak and chips in the local had been a treat. Virginia hadn’t minded. She loved Bill and he loved her in return. That was all there was to it. What did posh dinner dates matter when there was much more to life? She much preferred their quiet evenings in the local dunking chips into garlic mayonnaise to those high-powered affairs where Bill’s business partners insisted on bringing the entire company, plus wives, out to four-star restaurants. Virginia hated those nights where the conversation was brittle, every subject was a potential minefield and where the only fun was watching which of Bill’s partners could pretend to know most about wine.
The food was just as good in the pub and when she and Bill were alone together, they could relax and be themselves.
Over the years, Bill did his best to get her to learn golf. She laughed and said he was only suggesting it so they’d see each other in the golf club instead of blearily in the kitchen in the morning over coffee.
Virginia gently pulled the suede cover from his driver, stroking the polished club head and remembering how delighted he’d been when he bought it.
‘This is space age technology,’ he’d said gravely that glorious Saturday morning in April more than eighteen months ago, before going on to explain how he’d had a nine degree driver before but this one was eleven and a half.
‘And that’s better?’ Virginia had teased as she made them both tea.
‘It’s about the degree of loft…’ Bill had begun to explain before he noticed her grinning. ‘What am I explaining it to you for, you philistine,’ he laughed. ‘Some wives take an interest in their husband’s game.’
‘Yes, and some husbands get home occasionally,’ she retorted. ‘I’m thinking of having an affair if you don’t get home tonight before eight. Would you mind?’
Bill pretended to consider this, angling his grey head to one side and screwing up his brown eyes. ‘Could you have an affair with the golf pro?’ he suggested. ‘Then I might get preferential rates on lessons.’
‘No problem, darling,’ Virginia