son, Terence. Hugging was theoretically forbidden on the job for a variety of reasons but Mrs Mills always hugged the CC volunteers. She hugged Terence too, and her ginger tom, Liberace. Both Terence and Liberace got the best of everything and Mrs Mills herself wore clothes she’d owned for fifty years, clothes that were now too large for her shrinking frame.
She was looking for some money to take Terence to the Marian shrine at Lourdes, where she’d taken him every year since he was a small boy.
‘He gets some comfort from it, I know he does,’ Mrs Mills said, petting Terence’s huge knee with love. Terence was a gentle man but big. Rae wondered how his fragile and ageing mother dressed him every day, carefully putting on the adult diapers he needed. A public service nurse came in three times a week, but she was retiring soon and wouldn’t be replaced.
What would Mrs Mills do then? But she never complained, not about anything to do with her son.
‘I’ve got nearly all the money saved,’ Mrs Mills added proudly. ‘Just another seventy is all we need.’
‘We’ll talk about it at the committee next week,’ Rae promised.
She was afraid that there wasn’t enough money this year to help send Terence to Lourdes. The CC’s list of clients had grown exponentially in the past couple of years. People who’d once donated money at the charity’s church collections were now asking for money themselves.
‘I understand.’ Mrs Mills put a tiny, pale hand on Rae’s. ‘Lourdes is low down the list, Rae, I understand.’
She didn’t look sad or upset, Rae realised with surprise.
‘What happens will happen.’ Mrs Mills finally let go of Rae’s hands. ‘I’ve got some chutney for you,’ she added. ‘A friend of mine gave me a couple of pots at Christmas.’
She bustled off into her kitchen and left them sitting alone with Terence. He didn’t smile or say anything. Terence lived in his own world. Lack of oxygen at birth, Mrs Mills explained sadly. He might have been handsome in another world, Rae reflected with pity. A strong, handsome man who could look after his elderly mother in her later years. Except Terence would always remain a child, the cared-for instead of the carer. ‘It’s lovely chutney.’ Mrs Mills appeared carrying two jars with fabric-covered lids.
Rae and Dulcie had been given many things over the years. Rhubarb from someone’s back garden, many hand-made cards from children, sometimes a few roses wrapped in tinfoil. It was always the people who had the least who wanted to give the most.
Rae put her jar into the small rucksack she used for CC visits, then she and Dulcie took their leave.
‘Isn’t she sweet?’ Dulcie said as they trooped down the concrete stairs, trying not to smell the ever-present scent of urine.
‘Yes, she’s wonderful,’ agreed Rae. ‘I don’t know how she copes, to be honest. Perhaps it’s easier to let your mind float off; easier than dealing with the daily reality, that’s for sure.’
Rae was still sitting on the bed, thinking about Mrs Mills when Will’s voice broke into her daydream. ‘Hi, love, I’m home.’
‘Coming,’ Rae replied.
She’d give Will some of the chutney to try. He loved cheese after dinner. When they were first married, Rae had teased him that cheese and crackers were the ‘posh person’s dessert’.
‘Oh yes, I suppose you had trifle in tin bowls?’ Will would joke.
‘Trifle? We couldn’t afford trifle!’ she’d say.
They’d never had dessert in the Hennessey household. A lot of the time, they didn’t even have dinner. Few days passed when Rae didn’t close her eyes and say thanks for the life she lived now. She was so grateful for all she had, but that gratefulness was tinged with sorrow over the past. And the past never left her.
When my mam was dying, she only had one worry. That I’d look after my sister, Agnes. She never married and Mam knew that was hard on her, for all that Agnes used to say she had no use for men at all.
Except your father, Joe – she was fond of him. He was like a brother to her. But apart from Joe, Agnes liked to pretend she couldn’t care less what any man might think of her.
She had courted in her youth but the man she loved, Mikeen Clancy, had been killed in the War of Independence. He was twenty-five, as gentle a man as ever came out of County Galway, but gentleness doesn’t stop bullets. The light went out of Agnes after that. His mother and his family got to grieve, but there was no ring between Agnes and Mikeen. Only an understanding in their hearts. If you married a man, you were entitled to grieve when he died. Being hopeful of marriage didn’t count.
Agnes cried on her own at night. When they got Mikeen’s body back, nobody gave her a lock of his hair to keep.
It wasn’t easy, being a spinster in our parish. Years later, when we’d upped sticks and moved to America, it was all different. On the streets of Brooklyn, there were plenty of women without chick or child or man, and nobody pitied them. But in Kilmoney, a woman without a husband was in a different class altogether. A husband gave a woman standing in the community. With no husband, you might as well be a child.
In truth, there were few men as capable as my sister around. Nobody would run a house like Agnes, and she was so good to you, Eleanor, like a second mother. But I think she lost hope when Mikeen died, and no other man looked at her the same way when they saw her sadness.
She put a lot of her love into the garden. If she was down, she went out into the garden and pulled up a few weeds. When it came to vegetables, parsnips were her favourite. She liked to cook what we used to call green, white and gold – mashed parsnips and carrots with parsley on top. But her favourite dish was panroasted parsnips. A good housekeeper should always have a little bit of duck fat in her pantry and use that to coat the parsnips. Roast them until they’re crisp on the outside, speckled with black pepper.
‘Bia don lá dubh,’ as Agnes used to say. Food for a black day.
Connie O’Callaghan wasn’t sure at what point she’d become a professional single woman. But she was reasonably sure of precisely when other people had accepted her as such. It was around the time of her thirty-ninth birthday, nearly a year ago, when people had stopped telling her about this or that man they knew who was ‘gorgeous, just right for you’ and started inviting her to events without a plus one.
When she was in her early thirties, after she’d split up from her fiancé Keith, people did their best to fix her up with every single man within a fifty-mile radius.
She’d gone on dates with a few guys from the bank where her cousin worked, but nothing had come of it, apart from a greater understanding of what actuaries really did, courtesy of one man who had no other conversation.
There had been several dinner parties where she’d arrived and surveyed the men, wondering which one was the ‘fabulous man, simply fabulous’, and every time her guess had been wrong.
He had never been the one she liked the look of. Invariably he turned out to be the one she’d assumed lived with his mother, had a stamp collection and had never been on a date before.
Men were produced for her like rabbits out of a magician’s hat. But it hadn’t been love at first sight on either side.
Connie hadn’t just relied on blind dates in those early, post-Keith years. There was no staying at home with a DVD box set and a tub of ice cream, either. No, she’d been out there looking for love.
There had been scuba-diving weekends. Connie wondered whether she’d made a mistake, learning to dive in rugged Donegal