got up from the table quickly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I think the jet-lag is getting to me. I’m going to go to bed.’
‘Of course.’ Anneliese got up and gave her another hug.
Izzie sank into her aunt’s arms and bit back the desire to burst into tears.
‘I’ll phone you later,’ Anneliese whispered, for her ears only.
‘I’d like that,’ Izzie said.
Izzie woke up to light filtering in through floral curtains. She’d been having the most amazing dream and she wanted to tell Joe. They’d been on a holiday somewhere sunny, maybe Mexico, and she could feel the heat burnishing her skin. Then there was a ride in a teeny plane and now they were back in their lovely home, a light-filled loft apartment. She felt utter contentment fill her and she rolled over in the bed to touch Joe. Just then, she came fully awake. There was no Joe in the bed beside her. She’d never slept with him, she realised suddenly. It had all been a dream. Their sleeping together was relegated to small naps after those times they’d made love: correction – after they’d had sex.
They would never live in an airy loft apartment in New York together; he’d probably hate it. She wasn’t sure what he liked in apartments or houses. She’d never seen anywhere he’d ever lived. Instead, she was alone in her childhood bed in Tamarin, with the pale wallpaper she’d picked herself when she was eighteen and the apple tree banging in the wind against the window. Joe would never see this, he would never know about her childhood, he’d never come here, he’d probably never get to meet Gran.
Izzie, you are a moron, she said out loud.
She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, threw back the covers and got up. No looking back: it was time to look forwards. It was after eleven. She’d slept for fifteen hours and she was hungry and thirsty.
Still in her T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, she went downstairs. There was no sign of Dad, but there was coffee in the pot and a note left on the counter beside the coffee.
‘Izzie, there’s food in the fridge. Hope the coffee’s drinkable when you get up. I’m on my mobile phone and I’m going to drop into the hospital later. Call me if you need a lift, otherwise, I’ll be back at one.’
Izzie drank her coffee, ate two rounds of Irish soda bread toasted and smothered with bitter marmalade, then showered and checked her messages on her BlackBerry. There was one from Carla, wishing her well, hoping that everything was OK, a couple more from people at work, another from Andy, who lived two apartments below her, saying he’d called and did she want to go to the movies with him and some friends?
She’d have to ring him later and tell him she was in Ireland. There was one from Stefan, about the SupaGirl! competition. More work, she’d pass that on to Carla. Nothing from Joe. Not that he’d ever emailed her before – he was far too clever to want electronic evidence of their fling, she thought acidly. But he had her email address, he could have mailed if he’d been that desperate to get in touch with her.
It seemed that when the going got tough, the tough found themselves other sex playmates. Thanks a lot, Joe, delighted to find out that you could last the distance.
Leaving a note for her dad on the counter – Gone to the hospital, probably see you there. In case I don’t, I’ll be back this afternoon – she stepped out the door and set off. She’d forgotten how small Tamarin was. One of the joys of Manhattan was that it was such a compact city compared to places like LA, but Tamarin was so wonderfully small, and she’d forgotten that. It was possible to walk from one side to the other in half an hour, and in the process one would probably have to stop ten times to talk to acquaintances.
As she walked, Izzie found herself wondering what it would be like to live in Tamarin again. Maybe that was the answer: get away from New York and all the toxic men she met, live somewhere simpler, where she belonged. But then New York was the perfect place to live if you didn’t feel you belonged anywhere else. Everyone belonged in New York.
Gran had never pushed her to come home. She wasn’t the sort of person who laid guilt trips on people. Not once, in all the years that Izzie had lived away, had her grandmother complained about Izzie not phoning, writing, visiting or moving home.
Walking through the town where her grandmother had lived most of her life, Izzie wished they’d talked about it.
Why was it that when someone was ill, you thought about all the things you hadn’t said? Up until now, Izzie was pretty sure she’d said everything, and yet there were some gaps in the conversation, gaps she wished she could fill.
‘Gran, I’m sorry I haven’t got married and had kids. I know you’d love to have great-grandchildren, and you’re so good with children. You were so good with me. But it just hasn’t happened.’
What else would she say?
‘How do you find love, Gran? You loved Granddad so much. But how do you know when you’ve got that and how do you get it? Was it easier when you were young? Did you get married more quickly? Is it because we date people and have sex and go off them and don’t have to marry them, is that the difference?’
Izzie thought she’d read somewhere that relationships where people lived together for years before they got married were more likely to end in divorce, than the reverse. It didn’t make sense.
Knowing the person by living with them seemed preferable, but Gran could hardly have lived with Granddad Robby before they’d got married. The net curtains in Tamarin would have been twitched off the windows in outrage if that had happened fifty-odd years ago. Yet they’d stayed together, even though going from singledom into marriage must have been a big leap at a time when women were virgins before marriage and the marital bed was a place shrouded in mystery.
Did people stay together years ago because it was preferable to splitting up?
Izzie had reached Harbour Square and she sighed with pleasure at the beauty of it. This really was the heart of Tamarin, had been for centuries when the local market was held here, where the salty-fresh smell of fish mingled with the heat of farm animals penned up to be sold. Now, there was no straw underfoot and the only creatures were the local dogs that congregated outside Dorota’s café with their owners, but the sense of timeliness continued. The squat palm trees reminded Izzie that once ships had sailed into the harbour from exotic climes. The wide boulevard style of Harbour Square was a legacy of the nineteenth-century Mayor Emmanuel Kavanagh who’d come from Argentina on a ship, stayed to marry a local girl, and planned the elegant expanse of the square to rival the airy open spaces of his beloved Buenos Aires.
Seagulls wheeled around in the sky, calling to each other as they considered where to sit and watch the fishing boats unload their catches.
It was a busy scene but never frantic. Tamarin had a calming effect on people: as if the very bricks of the town murmured a message that there was enough time in the day for everything, and if there wasn’t, whatever was left could wait till morning.
When she had a moment, Izzie decided, she’d come back and sit in Dorota’s and watch the town unfold around her, the way she used to when she was at school and would sit there with her friends gossiping and pretending they didn’t see the boys from school doing the same thing. For now, she only had time to buy a takeaway coffee of Dorota’s strong Colombian blend. Gran loved that coffee and Izzie decided that if she sat at her grandmother’s bed, the scent could drift over her. If Izzie’s
