what with internet shopping. She ordered online and a nice young man from the supermarket delivered it and carried everything into the house for her. When he saw there was no one to help her put it away, he’d asked her where it all went and laid everything on the correct counter, so she wouldn’t have to bend down to lift the bags.
That day, after he’d gone, Eleanor had nearly wept. It was the kindness that got to her. Rudeness, she could handle, but any kindness breached her defences and she felt as if she might sob on a total stranger’s shoulder.
Next door to her building, she could just see the steps down to a basement flat where a big bear of a man lived with his daughter. Eleanor occasionally saw him taking the little girl – a tall, skinny child with red curly hair – to school. He seemed happy when he was with her, but when he was alone he looked different: deeply sad and unreachable.
Eleanor felt an overwhelming urge to find out what was wrong and help.
Ralf, her darling husband, used to gently chide her for trying to fix the world:
‘It’s not your job to make them all better.’
Eleanor remembered the early days of psychotherapy in college and the desire to improve the lives of everyone she met.
People weren’t just people to her, they were potential cases of obsessive compulsive disorder, Electra complex, or separation anxiety.
Everyone in her class had thought like her.
They’d had to stop going to the main campus cafeteria for a whole month because they’d all become fixated on one of the waitresses who, in their eyes, was suffering from a psychosomatic wasting disorder and they wanted to help.
Eventually, someone confessed to Professor Wolfe, their tutor, and wondered what should they do?
Professor Wolfe hadn’t taken this the way they’d hoped.
‘Why do you think you can help this waitress?’ he asked, head to one side, fabulously detached. ‘What makes you want to help her? Has she asked to be helped?’
‘I bet if you asked him the way to his office, he’d put his head on one side and say “Why do you need to know?”’ grumbled one of Eleanor’s classmates.
‘He’s right, though,’ Eleanor had sighed. Psychotherapeutic help wasn’t a bandage you put on a cut. It was a tool for life and it couldn’t be applied unless the person wanted it applied. All the psychoanalyst could do was gently help the patient find their own particular tools; it was up to the patient to use them.
‘Everyone can’t be mad,’ said Susannah, her roommate in college, who’d studied molecular biology and had heard many of the late-night ‘who do we think suffers from X or Y?’ conversations. Susannah saw life in absolutes. She was a postdoctorate student working on cancer research and there was no room for emotion. Things worked or they didn’t. The mice died and you moved on.
‘Mad is not an expression we tend to use in psychoanalysis,’ Eleanor had said, laughing.
‘You could have fooled me,’ Susannah said.
There was a birthday card in Eleanor’s treasure box signed Susannah, Mrs Tab Hunter. Susannah had been obsessed by the fifties movie star, but you couldn’t call her mad.
Eleanor wondered where Susannah was now. They’d lost touch around about the time Eleanor and Ralf got married. Susannah went off to live in Switzerland to work at a university there. Eleanor pictured her: still tall, eccentric and in love with people she saw only on cinema screens.
A gust of wind made the branch of the rowan tree outside the window bang against Eleanor’s window. The tiny scarlet berries on the holly bushes beneath it were all gone now. Sometimes a lone robin sat on the tree and look quizzically at Eleanor, as if asking for food.
Eleanor smiled sympathetically at him but she wasn’t able any more to hang seed balls outside. That took dexterity and suppleness, things she no longer had.
There were many things she no longer had. Her beloved Ralf being the most important. No one needed her now. Her family back in New York loved her, but they had their own lives. Naomi and her devoted husband, Marcus, were busy with their furniture import business. Filan’s Furniture was much in demand and, despite the credit crunch, they were expanding.
Gillian, Eleanor’s adored grand-daughter, had settled into her second year at UCLA and had thrown herself madly into her new life there.
They would manage without her. She was too broken, too wild with grief to be a proper mother or grandmother any more. Worse, in her present grieving state, she might be a burden.
It was an odd feeling. All her life, Eleanor had worked and strived, both for her family and in her professional life. She solved problems, she didn’t create them.
In an instant of loss, all that had changed. She had changed.
Which was why she’d turned her back on New York and returned to Ireland. Here she might find the answer, find out what she had to do. She hoped so with all her heart.
Being able to boil an egg means you’ll never go hungry. Duck eggs make the most wonderful breakfasts. When you crack open the fragile shell and peer into that golden yolk, the colour and consistency of honey, and breathe in the scent of the land, your heart sings.
The problem is the ducks. We always had a couple in the yard, Muscovy ducks, with black and white feathers and red bills, and Lord, those birds could fight. They were like a warring family. In the end, I kept them in separate pens in the coop. It was the only way.
Some people are like that too, by the way. No matter what you do, they’ll fight. That’s their business, love. You can’t stop them fighting. Might as well let them at it, but don’t get involved.
You might wonder why I’m telling you this, Eleanor, but you see, I don’t want you to grow up without learning all these things, the way I did. It wasn’t my mother’s fault, mind. It was mine. I was a sickly child, although you wouldn’t think it to look at me now. As I sit at the table with my writing paper, I’m a few months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday and I’ve never felt better. But as a little one, I spent a lot of time in bed with fevers and coughs. My mother dosed me with a drink made of carragheen moss and lemon juice. A weak chest, was what the doctor said, although we didn’t go in much for doctoring. They were hard years, then, at the start of the century and there wasn’t money for doctors for the likes of us.
My mother once took me to visit an old man who lived way over the other side of one of the islands, to a house on the edge of the cliff, because he had the curefor a bad chest. Someone said his cure was mare’s milk and some herbs and a bit of the mare’s tail – it had to be a white mare, mind you – but whatever, it didn’t work on me.
The long and the short of it is that I didn’t learn how to cook alongside my mother. Most girls learned from watching their mother at the fire. I was wrapped up in the bed in the back room with only a few books for company. Agnes brought home books from Mrs Fitzmaurice’s house, and I read them all: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tom Jones, even.
And then one day I just grew out of the bad chest. My mother wanted me to go to school because I’d been there so rarely. Again, I had my head in the books and never so much as peeled an onion. Then Mam became ill and suddenly I was the woman of the house. Agnes was gone all week and back on Sundays, the lads were out working on the land, and the only person left to cook and clean was the one person who didn’t know how to do any of it.
But I learned, Eleanor, I learned. The hard way, I might add.
That’s what I want to tell you. About the joy of cooking and feeding the people you love. About the skill