Page 33 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘Oh, don’t worry so much about it, sure indeed who is looking at it anyway, except myself?’ Constance shrugged and Ros knew it had to bother her, but she was too proud to make a fuss.

‘Right, well, if you can live with it for another while.’ Ros grabbed the gardening gloves that had become her own these last few months. ‘I’m going to help Heather cut through some of that jungle,’ she added before making her way into the garden.

Heather was glad of the help. Ros knew, if there was one thing you could depend upon on the island, it was that the rain would fall again, and maybe a day scrubbing that stairs carpet might be better spent when the weather was not as decent as it was today.

With the two of them hacking through the weeds, it didn’t take long at all to clear a path to the faded old door that had long since cut off what Ros supposed was an even greater wilderness beyond. But regardless of what might be waiting for them on the other side, they pulled the door out eagerly and Ros held her breath as she peered into the tangle of growth beyond.

Sure enough, in the far corner, a squat building sat. Constance had called it the cottage, but even covered over by briars and nettles as high as the roof, it was obviously a miniature, single-storey version of Ocean’s End. There was the flat roof, the flaking white walls and windows that sat in frames as thin as knitting needles. Ros had seen bigger garden sheds. Fromthe doorway, the overgrown paths were somehow just about discernible beneath the flourish of weeds, but it was almost lunch time and, if Ros was hungry, she suspected Heather was famished. Her stomach had begun to rumble just before they pushed through.

‘I so want to see inside,’ Heather said, but then her stomach growled again. ‘Let’s have lunch and then we’ll clear a path over. It would be nice to have Constance with us when we look inside, don’t you think?’

‘We couldn’t do it any other way,’ Ros said and she meant it. Even if there wasn’t a lock on the door, which she assumed there probably wasn’t, opening up the little cottage again would be something Constance would want to be there for.

Ros arrived back at the house to find several texts and a missed call on her mobile.

‘Popular?’ Heather smiled and she handed her an icy cold glass of water.

‘Hmm,’ she said because the missed call was from Jonah and the texts were from Shane. She opened the first text.Hey, just wondering if you’ve heard from the interview panel?The second,It was really good seeing you.The third,Fancy dinner this week?

‘Everything all right?’ Constance asked.

‘Yeah, fine, I think I’ve been asked out on a date,’ Ros said and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. After all, there was no denying the chemistry she felt for Shane, you’d have to be made of marble not to fancy him, but bumping into him at the interview felt a bit… she wasn’t sure, but something had been off with him. She told Constance and Heather how she felt.

‘Well, you can always turn him down,’ Heather said.

‘But you like him?’ Constance asked.

‘Fancy him. A different thing altogether in my experience,’ Ros said wryly. It was true. She had yet to strike the right balancewith any man, find one that she likedandfancied, not as easy as you’d think, it turned out. Then again, she hadn’t exactly been looking all that hard.

‘Don’t judge him on just one thing,’ Heather said then and that was unexpected because Ros would never have taken Heather for a romantic soul, unless it was between the covers of a Maggie Macken novel.

‘Let’s eat. Jonah Ashe can definitely wait until we’ve finished eating our lunch.’

Lunch was already organised, of course, Constance had cut up what remained of a chicken cooked the previous evening for dinner. They ate it with fresh bread and dark red tomatoes. Constance slathered pickle across hers and licked her fingers as she finished up the last slice on her plate. Then, they sat outside the back door of Ocean’s End, watching the gulls dive and soar in the distance as they circled a fishing boat making its way back to the pier.

‘It’s so long since I stood in that little cottage,’ Constance said. ‘If I’m honest, I’ve hardly thought about it in twenty years. It was tiny back in the day, just a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms hardly big enough for single beds and a dressing table each.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘I remember my mother saying that it had been built originally as a house for the gardener who lived here, a single man, and then, of course, to make way for mother and daughter, they had to divide the original bedroom into two. When I think of it now, they were probably little more than cupboards really.’

‘I’m sure they were lovely,’ Heather said softly, and even Ros knew that sixty years ago, any child in Ireland who had a bedroom to themselves was an exception, rather than the rule.

‘Of course they ate here, in the kitchen, we all did, mostly. Your grandmother was a superb cook. It was just the four of us and weall ate together, there was no upstairs downstairs or any of that nonsense at Ocean’s End.’

‘I can’t imagine there would have been,’ Heather said softly, because of course the girls – Constance and Dotty– had been friends, equals, regardless of what their mothers earned or how famous Maggie Macken had become over the years.

From the west, a blanket of silver-grey clouds rolled in to cover the sun and Ros thought the reprieve from the warm rays was welcome. ‘We should get back to it. We could have it cleared out by the end of the day.’

‘Ah now, come on, you’re killing yourselves, the pair of you, I can’t let you keep on working like this, honestly, I feel as if I’m really taking advantage,’ Constance called after them as they returned to clearing back the path.

‘It won’t take much longer,’ Heather said and she was right. Hacking a narrow path to the little cottage was easy enough. They only needed to make it wide enough to walk along it in single file, but they widened it out as they went, so they could easily link Constance down to the end and be sure that she wouldn’t fall or trip or lose her balance.

By five o’clock they had reached the front door of the tiny house. It was every bit as tragic-looking as Ros had expected. The paint had not so much peeled away as expired, giving up its dying breaths even as Ros traced her fingers around the old knocker. The door was down to the bare wood with only a scrape of red paint here and there to point you towards some idea of what it might have looked like back in its heyday. The walls had been whitewashed too; the chalky lime, although grey and greened up with moss, cracked and fell off against Ros’s hand when she rubbed it over to get a sense of the place.

‘Let’s go back and get Constance to come down and look at it with us,’ said Heather.

‘Yes, let’s, and maybe…’ Ros gazed back up at the house again. It looked as if it had been abandoned for forty years. ‘We’ll need light, our phones are probably best, no point lighting candles or anything that might catch fire on a stray cobweb.’ Because she absolutely expected the place to be filled with thick and clingy cobwebs, and damp from ceiling to floor and even damper in the corners.

‘You can’t have cleared it back already?’ Constance said and she began to fill the kettle automatically when they came into the kitchen.

Ros nodded. ‘We have, it wasn’t as bad as you’d expect, but we thought you might like to see inside with us. We can open the door together.’

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