Page 45 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘What will you do?’ Constance said eventually.

‘I’ll stay, for as long as I can, I suppose.’ A tear raced down Ros’s cheek. She didn’t have to tell Constance how much the island or the little ranger’s cottage meant to her. Constance had known that from the very start. Leaving here would be like ripping off a limb or, worse, maybe her heart out. ‘Then, they’ve offered me a post on the mainland, but it’s in an office, coveringfor some woman going on maternity leave…’ She shrugged again.

‘Well that’s… I mean, if it was over in Ballycove, couldn’t you travel across, stay here on your days off, maybe…’ But of course, a maternity leave was for a matter of months and they both knew when winter came travel would be difficult, especially if you factored in the unreliable ferry times.

‘It wouldn’t be the same and anyway, there’s the cottage and…’

‘Stay here, at Ocean’s End. There’s plenty of space, well, that is if you didn’t mind the crows in the eaves.’ Constance tried to laugh to lighten things up. ‘Could you get a job here, on the island?’

‘Ah, Constance, we both know there are no jobs here on the island. And even if there were, sure, there’s nowhere to live. The cottage was my home, the first real home I’ve had in years.’

‘I know, I know, but I’m thinking about the hotel. Maybe if you asked them for a job, I mean, you know your way round a bar and they might let you have a room. It’s not as if they are inundated with people applying from the mainland, it’s all kids on their school holidays and…’

Of course, they both knew the hotel would pay a pittance and any room they had free was rented out to make as much as they could over the short season when trade was booming with summer visitors.

‘There’s no harm asking, I suppose…’ Ros smiled sadly and she sipped her tea, which was cold now.

‘Come on, I’ll make a fresh pot.’ Constance took the cup from her hand and rinsed it out. She stood inside the kitchen window, looking out across the sea and noticing a fishing boat bob up and down on the choppy waters in the distance. Her mind began to wander, back to a time long before she’d met Ros, maybe even before she’d come to live here in Ocean’s End. She thought of Dotty and long summer days and whispered things that hadmade her eyes grow wide. Suddenly, she remembered the things that friends do to keep each other close and, as she set the pot of tea on the table between them once more, she reached out to hold Ros’s hand. ‘We’ll think of something, I’m sure we’ll think of something. Between us, we’ll figure something out.’

30

Heather

By some miracle, Heather had slipped the card from the woman on the bookstall into the back of her wallet that day in London and only remembered it was there a few days after she arrived on the island. Heavens knew why, but instead of throwing it in the bin, she’d stuck it into the corner of the mirror on the dressing table in her bedroom at Ocean’s End. She laughed when she spotted it there, laughed out loud, because what were the chances? The morning had been spent in the long room that had once been Maggie Macken’s office. It was a magnificent room, faded now of course, but you couldn’t fail to notice the elegance beneath the smothering decay. It was a beautiful room, one wall lined floor to ceiling with glass-fronted bookcases. Thank God for the fact that the books were protected from the dust and mildew of the place, because although they showed visible signs of age, each of the books was still in good enough condition to take down and read and, yes, catalogue before she made a formal or maybe informal approach to someone in the publishing industry.

Constance had been dumbstruck. She’d repeated the idea to herself several times, whispering it as if the fairies might hear it on the breeze.My mother’s books? Republish?And then she’d spun around in a movement quicker than Heather had imagined her capable of.

‘But how would we do it? I mean, would anyone want to read them at this point, surely they are… well, they’re of an age,’ she said and her voice had trembled as much with fear as with any sort of optimistic trepidation.

They had the conversation, over and back, the notion of a writer who most people had forgotten, and of course, Heather knew only too well that this was true. It had been a surprise to her when booksellers had remembered the Macken books; more often than not younger shop assistants had no clue to whom she was referring when she’d searched in London. But that didn’t mean that readers wouldn’t enjoy them and, Heather argued, didn’t readers deserve the chance to experience them, too? She herself had found them to be a complete escape from her worries and misery when she’d sunk into them after her mother’s death. There was no reason why other readers would not feel the very same.

‘I can’t see the harm in trying, can you?’ She didn’t labour too much on the fact that some writers never truly went out of style. There were so many of those who sold perennially, albeit in specialist bookshops, but their legacy lived on in adaptations and special editions and all sorts of forms. Truthfully, once the excitement took hold of Heather it had kept her wakened for most of the previous night. She’d tossed and turned and flicked through her phone in the darkness, looking at other writers whose books still thrived through careful management of their estates. Why not the same for Maggie Macken? Why shouldn’t Constance reap some reward and maybe they could talk a publisher into enough to secure the house around her, at the very least.

Heather spent a sleepless night, high on the excitement of a project that had ignited her imagination in a way she’d never dreamed possible. She could see that the whole legacy of Maggie Macken’s life’s work could be developed into something far, fargreater than the books she’d written. In her mind’s eye, she saw not just the special editions sitting on tables in Hatchards in London and The Strand in New York. Beyond that there was the potential for movie tie-ins, for serialisation and maybe, one day, for a writers’ retreat right here on Pin Hill Island. What a wonderful way to bring visitors to the island when everything else had shut down! Certainly, the hotel owners would be thankful of the business. God knew, but from what she’d seen, Ireland was teeming with creative writing teachers, why not make the most of it, if they could. It would mean not just that Constance would have enough money to make the house secure, but maybe to bring it back to its former glory too. Constance would finally have the satisfaction of knowing that she’d secured her mother’s memory for quite some time to come, which they both knew had always been important to Maggie Macken.

All of these things, racing around Heather’s brain, had chased her from her bed before five in the morning. The silence was bliss and she had walked into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea, which she drank in the garden, watching as the sun came up from across the bogs and scattered sparkling shards slowly across the water. A light wind played among the wildflowers in the garden and when she craned her neck to look along the island’s coast, she could see the trawlers making their way out to sea for the day.

Later, looking along the wall of books, Heather knew she’d need some sort of system. They needed a catalogue and then, once she had sat with Constance to agree a plan going forward, she would contact that bookseller she’d met in London. She placed the card in the centre of Maggie Macken’s desk. Emptying the desk of the mountain of discarded rubbishy paperwork that had amassed there over many years had been her first task. Now that it was clear and she’d found an unused notebook and pens, she sat looking around the room. It was elegant – more thanthat, it was inspiring. Heather smiled; she could see why Maggie Macken wrote so many books here, sitting at this desk. A little shiver of excitement reached up her spine at the idea of it.

She took the card in her hands again – Bea Hardiman. The woman on the bookstall had scrawled her name across the top of her son’s business card. The son, Gregg, worked as an agent for a company called Bookpress – she had looked them up. They were impressive, to the point of being intimidating, but Gregg was a junior agent and hopefully hungry to build up a list of his own. Some of the senior partners represented writers’ estates. Heather had never heard of most of them, but at least it meant they would be open to considering an estate like Maggie Macken’s, or maybe they’d point her in the direction of someone who might be interested.

Cataloguing the books didn’t take one day, it took four. And Heather worked tirelessly, hardly taking time to eat and only going for a walk to clear her head as night fell. Constance came into the office that first morning and offered to help, but Heather had already set up a system of sorts. She didn’t say it, but the only thing she needed help with was clearing out the rubbish that had built up in the office, taking down the cobwebs, cleaning the carpets of the build-up of years’ worth of dust.

A day or two later, she came across some shoeboxes, filled with letters that Maggie had kept tidied away in an alcove beneath the window ledge. When Heather opened them, she could see some were filled with fan mail, but some had more personal correspondence, things that related to not just her finances but also the little notes and cards that were a postscript to a life.

Folded in a drawer, Heather spotted a letter from the guards. It halted her in her tracks. It was a letter about her own grandfather – they were contacting Maggie in relation to any information she might have regarding his whereabouts. Norman Wren had never been found, remaining an open-ended question,and now Heather wondered if in that question was the answer to her mother’s emptiness.

Heather lifted up the boxes and carried them into the kitchen. She placed them on the kitchen table in front of Constance.

‘You still want to help?’ she asked, because it was one thing to go through Maggie Macken’s professional outpourings, but quite another to go raking through things that Constance might prefer to keep private.

‘Oh, my, I had forgotten that these were even in the house.’ Constance shook her head. ‘To tell the truth, after my mother died, I just closed up that room. I couldn’t face it.’ She smiled sadly, but then her eyes brightened as she lifted the lid on the first box. ‘Actually, now, I think I might enjoy a walk down memory lane,’ she said. ‘I’ll start it after lunch. Ros is in the garden, she’s tackling the ivy today.’ Constance rolled her eyes, because maybe she knew that without someone like Ros here all the time, the ivy would eventually choke everything in its path. ‘We’re having pizza for lunch, Ros picked up a huge one in the supermarket on her way over here this morning. We’ll eat outside, around one, I’ll give you a shout,’ she said then, carefully taking out the letters at the top of the first box.

*

The woman on the bookstall – Bea – remembered Heather well when she rang.

‘I can’t believe that I’m ringing you,’ she said once the woman stepped away from the sound of traffic. Heather had a feeling she had a cup of coffee steaming in her gloved hands.

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