Page 32 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘My mother brought me for a holiday. We stayed in the hotel. It was going to be just a holiday. Of course, while we were here, she heard that Ocean’s End was up for sale. Your grandfather took off, a few weeks before we were due to leave the house in Galway. That was another huge shock to everyone, poor Sylvie just being abandoned like that with a daughter and no way of making ends meet. So, when we were to pack up our lives my mother convinced Sylvie to come with us and the rest, as they say, is history. She offered her a job, keeping house and a small cottage in the garden for both of them. It must have seemed like the perfect solution.’

‘And my grandmother?’

‘She probably found it different at first, but she was happy here, certainly, there was never any mention of going back. We were all as pleased as each other to get out of Galway, I think. At the time, a husband just doing a moonlight flit, well you can imagine, lots of tongues wagging about her at every turn and I’m not sure Sylvie could even afford to go on living there. She’d never really had a job, so the offer of staying here was probably the answer to all her problems.’

‘My mother told me that her parents divorced,’ Heather said.

‘Oh, did she indeed?’ Constance smiled sweetly but she looked as if she could have bitten her tongue off. She made a littlenoise; probably best to change the subject. ‘Actually, the more I think about it, I think your grandmother loved it here. Do you remember the cottage in the kitchen garden?’

‘Why, yes, I had completely forgotten about that…’ Heather said then. How could she have forgotten that? Her mother bringing her along, showing her the window that had once been her bedroom, Heather standing on her tippy-toes to try and make out anything buried in the darkness within.

‘You’d hardly notice it now. It’s completely grown over, of course.’ Constance looked down towards the end of the garden. Ros had cleared a path so you could walk all the way to the border fence. On either side, she’d cut back as many of the high brambles as she needed so there was a view of the sea beyond. To the left, there was the remains of the walled-in garden, smothered beneath a thicket of weeds and brambles.

‘Of course, it was through the kitchen garden. I must go and take a look at it, one of the days when I’m here,’ Heather said softly and maybe that was the moment. As the sun dipped lower in the sky, a little part of her thought that life would be wonderful if she never had to leave this spot.

*

She’d been here just over a week when the parish priest came across to perform a ceremony to bury her mother. It didn’t feel like a week, it felt somehow as if she’d been here her whole life. She and Constance had slipped into an easy routine that pulled her back to a time she’d long forgotten. Back then, when she came to visit with her mother, she had dearly loved Constance. They’d always just clicked, of course, she could see it now, Constance took an interest in people. Young or old, it didn’t matter, she just loved to spend time and she listened,really listened to people. Heather could see it with Ros and with Finbar. It was obvious they both adored her. She even managed to weave her magic over the parish priest, who almost missed the boat ride back to the mainland, so intent was he on chatting to Constance when they sat drinking glasses of Guinness after the funeral lunch that had only been attended by the three of them with Finbar and Father Rory.

‘It was a beautiful ceremony, probably the nicest funeral I’ve ever attended,’ Heather said and it was true. ‘Thanks, Constance, and you too, Ros.’

‘There’s no need to be thanking me at all,’ Constance said in that plain way she had of speaking. ‘It should be the other way round, if right was right.’

‘You should be thanking me?’ Heather didn’t understand.

‘For bringing Dotty home to me, of course,’ Constance said softly.

‘And I was just glad to be here for you,’ Ros said, sipping her Guinness. She still hadn’t finished her first glass and Heather thought she’d never met a young woman like her. ‘The readings were beautiful.’ Ros had been quiet the whole time, as if the funeral had brought back memories of some sad time in her short life and she couldn’t quite shake off the melancholy of that time before.

Strangely, Heather realised that her mother’s funeral had not been a sad one for her. Rather, it felt as if Dotty was in some way coming home, which was strange because Constance was quite emphatic that when they were young girls, Dotty couldn’t get off the island quickly enough. Now, all Heather wanted was to hear stories of what her mother’s life had been like on the island all those years ago because, somehow, the woman Constance remembered seemed to be a much nicer person than the woman Heather had known.

Finbar lent his jeep to Heather while he ferried Father Rory back to the mainland. That way she could drive Constance home, and he told her to hold onto it until he called her, he wouldn’t need it for a day or two at least. Heather was slightly taken aback. In her whole life in London, no-one had ever just handed over their car keys just like that.

‘You seem to keep forgetting, you’re not in London any more, Heather,’ Constance said gently and Ros only smiled and nodded. Maybe it was some part of the reason why Ros wanted to stay on the island so badly.

‘Keep reminding me, I’m very happy to be here with you both,’ Heather said softly, because she couldn’t imagine feeling this sense of ease if she’d just buried her mother in some dreary London cemetery.

As the sunny day sank into an overcast grey evening, Constance confided to Heather she’d prayed for dry weather. There was some local old wives’ tale about it being unlucky to have rain hit a coffin before it went into the ground.

‘It can rain all it wants now,’ she said after the final shovelful of clay had been patted into place on her mother’s grave. Watching that had probably been the hardest part for Heather, but it was the way things were done here and she just had to accept it was what her mother would have wanted. So they’d stood silently by the graveside while two local men went about tucking her mother into the earth as if making up a hotel bed for her, with the utmost care and efficiency.

Yes, island life was completely different to anything she had ever experienced in London and Heather thought that none of that was a bad thing at all.

22

Ros

‘You’re doing far too much.’ Constance worried about her and, while this made Ros feel a bit guilty, she had to admit she actually loved it, too. It had been a long time since anyone had cared enough about her to worry that she was eating enough, or that she was warm enough or that she was working too hard.

‘I like to be busy and I’m hardly breaking my back. I mean, Heather is doing every bit as much as I am.’ And that was the truth. It was Heather who had cleared a path through the long grass to the door that had sealed the kitchen garden off for years, probably.

‘I’m just working out of curiosity; I remember only a shadow of what it was years ago…’ Heather smiled.

‘The garden?’ Ros asked as she leaned on the spade she was using to hack away at the briars.

‘No, silly, I’m sure that’s well gone. I’m interested in looking at the cottage,’ Heather said and Ros hated to admit she hadn’t even known there was a cottage tucked away inside the garden walls. But then, the walls were high, probably to keep the winds at bay, otherwise even the hardiest of plants would struggle here. The whole place was not only overgrown but sealed off too, with a door at either side fastened by ivy as much as any lock.

Once Heather had explained that the cottage had been where her mother had grown up, Ros was intrigued. She had come along today with every intention of washing some of the greyout of the faded creamy carpet on the stairs. ‘It was white, once,’ Constance corrected her. She wasn’t even sad that it had slipped from pristine white so completely. Ros had gasped when she’d seen photographs of the house from its heyday. The comparison between then and now made its current condition even more pitiful. The whole place sagged with a sort of tragic melancholy. It was as though it had long ago accepted the fact that its time was marked on some wall and it was just slowly marching towards the inevitable, but Ros couldn’t bear it, she couldn’t let neglect and reduced circumstances win out.

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