your hands.’
It had never been like that. But she had understood that Anneliese sometimes needed the space to recover, so she could get her life back on track again. Lily had been such a part of Anneliese’s life ever since she had first come to Tamarin, thirty-seven years ago, and now Lily needed her.
Brendan’s mobile phone was turned off, but she left a message anyway. ‘It’s Anneliese here, I’ve just heard about Lily, I’m on my way to the hospital. I’ll run by her house first and pick up some things for her.’
Anneliese grabbed a few things for herself first. Coins for the phone in the hospital, the plug for her mobile phone charger, a few of her tranquillity teabags, a big jumper and socks in case she had to stay overnight, her knitting and the spare keys Lily had given her years before for emergencies. Then she locked up, put her overnight bag in the car and drove off. In the distance she could still see the people standing on the high dunes, looking down into Tamarin Bay, and she thought of the whale circling aimlessly in the water, not knowing where she was or how to get out. Even with all the people watching her and all the ocean life teeming in the Atlantic out beyond Tamarin Bay, Anneliese knew the whale felt lost and alone in the world.
It had only been a week since Anneliese had last visited Lily’s house. So much had happened in that week. Edward had left her and now Lily herself lay in hospital. Anneliese felt the guilt again, guilt that she hadn’t gone out and talked to Lily about her and Edward splitting up. She just hadn’t been able to face it, to face the pain and pity in Lily’s beautiful old face.
‘Oh love, I’m so sorry for you. Is there anything I can do?’
Anneliese had known all the things Lily would say, and she was afraid that they wouldn’t be any comfort to her, so she’d told Lily nothing. Now, her stupidity and fear meant that she mightn’t ever be able to say any of it. Lily was nearly ninety. At her age, a person who’d had a stroke might never recover. And all the pain Anneliese had inside her might remain bottled up there for ever.
As she drove, she let the tears flow, unchecked, down her cheeks. It wasn’t like the tears she felt with the panic attacks or the depression; those tears she tried to stifle, as if she could physically push them back into her body and stop the pain from escaping. But these tears for Lily were cleansing, they were a tribute.
Anneliese and Edward had always loved the road out to Rathnaree, which headed west of Tamarin along the top of the hill from where you could see the swathe of both Tamarin and Milsean Bays. Then the road dipped into woods and fields and parkland, bordered by huge hedges that stretched long tendrils out on to the road, making the road itself very narrow and forcing cars into the hedges in order to pass each other.
Lily’s house was the family home she had grown up in, a former forge that had once been a part of the huge Rathnaree estate. The Old Forge was no longer owned by the Lochraven family. They’d sold a lot of the land off years ago and now the house and the four acres of land it sat on belonged to Lily. That mattered a lot to her, she’d told Anneliese once.
‘I don’t think I’d be happy here if it was still part the Lochraven estate,’ she’d said. ‘I know it’s crazy. I’m old enough for it not to bother me, but there’s peace in the fact that it’s mine now, nobody else’s. There’s nothing like owning your own little bit of God’s green earth.
‘My mother, Lord rest her, would turn in her grave to hear me saying that. But I like the fact that it’s my own land and my own house. It gives me immense joy, actually, to own it.’
‘Why did the Lochraven family never give the house to your family?’ Anneliese asked. It didn’t quite make sense to her, that these incredibly wealthy people would never gift the homes to the loyal workers who had served them for years.
Lily had laughed loudly at that.
‘Oh, Anneliese, the number of times I wondered about that. I finally came to the conclusion that those sort of people don’t gift anything, that’s how they stay rich. They hold on to it and we’re just the peasants who do their bidding, working our fingers to the bone and getting nothing but a pittance in return. Well, I used to think that. Long ago. But I know a bit better now.’
There was something final about those last words, as if she didn’t want to be drawn on the subject of how she’d learned those lessons, but Anneliese had to know more. Thirty-seven years ago, Anneliese would ask anyone anything. She ploughed on.
‘Both your parents worked for them, didn’t they?’ she said.
‘My mother was the housekeeper from 1930 to 1951,’ said Lily. ‘Until she died, actually.’
‘She must have seen some amazing things, working in that big house,’ Anneliese added.
‘Oh, she saw lots of things, all right,’ Lily said. ‘She saw everything. That was how I learned my first French. Lady Irene used to say things like, “Ne pas devant les domestiques.” Not in front of the servants. I worked as a maid there for a while and I got used to hearing that. Lady Irene never seemed to realise that eventually some of us might learn French and know what she was saying. Lord, but my mother used to go mad if I’d give out about them,’ Lily added. ‘First, she’d be scared someone would overhear. Then she’d say: “Where’s your gratitude?”
‘I had no problem with gratitude. It was just that gratitude was a one-way street. My mother and my father worked hard up at Rathnaree and they just accepted that they’d never receive any gratitude for it. They got exactly what they were due, nothing more. The Lochravens liked to say their servants were part of the family, but they weren’t treated like that. They were just words, and words mean nothing. Oh, don’t mind me, Anneliese,’ she said. ‘I used to think if you were rich and from the gentry, you had it all. I know better now. Life hurts them the same way as it hurts us all.’
Anneliese thought of that now, as she turned off the road, up a narrow, hedge-lined lane to Lily’s cottage. It was such an enigmatic thing to say, but there had been a sense that Lily had a lot more to say if she were asked.
Anneliese wished she’d asked now. A person didn’t get to Lily’s age without learning a lot of life’s wisdom and, right now, Anneliese could have done with some wisdom. After losing her only child, Anneliese had never known how Lily didn’t curl up into a ball of bitterness and die.
It had been a long time since Lily’s home had been a forge but the name stuck: the Old Forge. Her father had been a blacksmith, the last in a long line of blacksmiths, who had come to work for the Lochravens. In his time, it had been a working forge, complete with picturesque horseshoe-shaped door and the tang of hot metal in the air. Eventually though, the forge itself had shifted to Rathnaree with its huge stables. Over the years, the original forge had been absorbed into the family home, until it was hard to tell where the forge ended and the house began.
There was a herb-filled front garden, because Lily loved herbs, and a fine big vegetable garden at the back that she no longer had the energy to dig or sow. When Lily’s husband, Robby, had been alive, the couple had kept cows and hens and Lily had become proficient at selling free-range eggs, making her own butter, doing anything to get by in the lean years when Robby hadn’t been able to find much work as a carpenter.
He was long dead, at least twenty years, Anneliese thought, remembering Lily on that bleak day in St Canice’s, when winter rain had lashed against the church’s stained-glass windows and Lily’s face looked as if it had been carved from the same wood as her husband’s coffin as she stood and stared at it.
All I’ve done is lost a husband,
