Forty-eight years earlier…
Sometimes Tess wondered at the blackness of this city as she stared at her reflection in the kitchen window before her. The patch of land outside, that might have been a grand garden once, only paraded the darkness further. Across the city, people picked their way home quickly, the promise of a turf fire and the six o’clock news perhaps enough to salve the inconvenience of the cold December evening.
Tess managed not to cry, instead she bottled it all up. She never spoke of Douglas or how her heart was breaking; how could she say that he had cast her aside because she was not quite good enough. She couldn’t admit that to Nancy, it would make the rejection even worse. She hoped that if she left it just a little longer, he would relent and she would claim the happiness she had first assumed was hers. The letter sat uncomfortably on the kitchen table. Aunt Beatrice had taken a ‘turn’, her mother said. They hadn’t worried, over the years it had become an annual event – Tess could hardly remember a December when she hadn’t. Beatrice had led a band of women in the 1916 rising. She had played her part in the war of independence and later in the great emergency – Ireland’s response to the Second World War. Her father said it was a relief she’d missed out on Cromwell – if, in his dry opinion, only just. Her mother played out all those conversations between the faded blue words in her letter and Tess knew that Beatrice was too tired for another battle.
Their final goodbye was so much less than Tess hoped it might be. Beatrice was unrecognisably shrunken and grey, an incongruous doll-like figurine splayed across starched pillows in the county home. How could she have aged so much in a matter of months? She wanted to believe there was the quiver of a smile upon her lips as Tess spoke of the new life carving out before her. Later, when they sat alone, she told her about Douglas Buckley and how she loved him, and Beatrice had smiled, just a fraction, but enough for Tess to know she heard.
She passed away an hour later and Tess allowed the paraphernalia of death to wash over her. They were shunted from the ward, the priest and doctors, nurses and other patients became a blur of words spent only to fill the awkwardness of loss. There was a pattern, a long-worn path of what people said and did at times like this. Even if her parents were unaccustomed to it, they seemed happy to track along and accept the handshakes and nods that were shorthand for words rhymed off in funeral homes and beneath graveside orations.
‘She would want one of you to live there,’ her mother said quietly as they made their journey home. They sat, all three, in the back of her father’s car – and it struck Tess as odd that her mother chose to leave the seat in front free – their father captaining this sad journey alone.
‘I would love to live in Ballycove,’ Nancy said the words uncertainly. Tess knew Ballycove was where Nancy had always belonged. Nancy was hardly making a huge sacrifice, even if their mother counted it as such. She squeezed Nancy’s hand, a muted message, unpicked by love and fear. Although they sat next to each other, Tess could not meet her eyes, instead she felt her sister’s glance as it bounced nervously about the car – perhaps she had an inkling then that Nancy was about to bring her hopes crashing down upon her.
‘Well, we’ve always known that, Nancy.’ Her father’s voice, pragmatic, reasonable from the front.
‘She wanted me to have it,’ Tess wasn’t sure if she whispered the words, but her mother tutted beside her, so she supposed she’d said something, even if it wasn’t fully heard. Not that she’d ever said she’d live there, in that wild and often lonely spot staring out into the sea – but Beatrice had wanted her there. It was funny, but suddenly, she could imagine Douglas wanting to live there. It made the cottage seem more important, in those few moments; it might be pivotal to her future.
‘I think Douglas would love it,’ Nancy murmured, her eyes glued to the fleeting countryside that glided slowly past the condensation-shot window. It seemed to be such an odd thing to say, but it wasn’t really, because they often shared thoughts and sentences with each other, as though they were reading the other’s mind without even realising it.
Suddenly, all those dreams of music and Covent Garden and Carnegie Hall seemed to mist before Tess’s eyes and she saw within them the emptiness stretched out before her, without Douglas. These last few weeks, the row with Douglas and the way Nancy seemed to be drifting from her, it all blunted her resolve. Unexpectedly, her heart was no longer in those dreams that she had once cherished. Perhaps she was just in shock – she’d loved Aunt Beatrice, maybe more than she loved her own mother? Beatrice wanted all those things for her, but she wanted more. Beatrice had a young man, once. A boy called Denny Larkin, who travelled to London in the war and soon found himself fighting for a king that not too long before he’d railed against. Beatrice never met another. Sometimes, Tess thought that if she had, if she’d married like the other girls in the village, perhaps the little cottage wouldn’t have its faded sense of loss.
She looked far out to sea and felt the last vestiges of her aunt surround her in that place that was forever hers. She would return to Dublin, then things would seem better. If Nancy lived here – Tess could be happy for her, she might have some young man already. In these dark December days, everything just seemed so set. When spring bounced in and days were warm and bright – what could be nicer than a wedding? Yes, the more Tess thought about it, she had a sense that Nancy had met a young man and before they knew it, she’d be announcing her wedding.
She could imagine, living in Dublin, continuing with her studies and coming out to visit Nancy in Ballycove. She would get on with life. Douglas would work things out with her and they would be happy too. She would be glad then that she hadn’t told Nancy about this falling-out with Douglas, it would be water under the bridge and some day they would both forget it had ever come to this. She would make a good life for herself. She would graduate and the world would be hers to make of it what she would. She clung to the idea, that one day soon, they would both find their happy ever after, knowing that everything was going to turn out well. It became almost a mantra, at night, Tess found she would wake, her teeth grinding to the words – one day soon.