take one look at her child’s eyes shining naughtily in her tiny little face. ‘You always know what I’m doing – have you got X-ray vision?’
‘Yes,’ Frankie would say gravely, suppressing the urge to laugh. ‘All mothers have it. As soon as the baby is born, kapow! – we are given the gift. I can see through ceilings. So I know you have been upstairs doing something verrry naughty.’ She’d drag out the syllables in pretend menace.
Emer was a kind person too, but in Sydney she was far removed from the pain in Sorrento Villa and it was out of the question to let on that there was a problem. That would only have her rushing home to help Frankie cope.
So when Emer telephoned and asked: ‘Dad sounds down on the phone, is he all right?’ Frankie made herself smile into the receiver and slipped into her cheery, buoyant tone.
‘No, love, he’s just relaxing, taking time off from being a wage slave.’
‘Has he started work on the house yet?’ Emer said.
In the background, Frankie could hear happy voices and could almost sense the sunniness of Emer’s new world. Wishing some of that sunniness would beam out of the phone and light up the gloom in her world, she upped the cheeriness a notch:
‘Not yet. We’re still discussing things. You know your dad, he wants it to be perfect. Now, tell me all about you, darling. What’s the weather like? It’s chilly here, I can tell you …’
It was a struggle to come up with snippets of cheerful news from home, so her emails followed the same tactic of swiftly shifting the focus from life in Redstone to the latest goings on in Sydney and Japan. It was a little trickier in Alexei’s case, because he was hugely intuitive and much more liable to pick up on things. While Emer took after Frankie, drawing on a tough nugget of strength buried deep inside of her, managing to stay positive no matter what, Alexei was a worrier.
She pictured him now, with his wide Slavic cheekbones, grey eyes and the shock of blond hair, so different from everyone in the family. He might not have been born from her body, but he was very much the child of her heart. It had been a wrench, letting him go off on a gap year before college. The thought of her daughter travelling alone actually troubled her far less than the thought of her son venturing out into the world with three other boys for company. Emer had street smarts in abundance while Alexei was softer, much more vulnerable than his feisty sister, who’d signed up for a self-defence course months before she left.
‘Got to be able to look after myself, Mum,’ she’d said, showing off some of her techniques.
Alexei took after Seth: he was gentle, thoughtful and prone to staring into the distance when working out a problem, his mind drifting off to some higher plane just the way Seth’s did.
Seth. All her thoughts came back to Seth. If a person was supposed to get better at things over time, why didn’t that dictum hold true when it came to marriage? Perhaps, she thought, closing her personal email and opening up her business mailbox where fifty new messages had arrived overnight, a visit from Seth’s long-lost half-sister might succeed in lifting his spirits.
He’d been so thrilled when he got the email from Melbourne. Thrilled, with a tiny and utterly-to-be-expected element of shock.
‘I have a sister,’ he’d said in wonderment as Frankie leaned over his shoulder to read the email. As she carried on reading he’d sat staring at the email as if it was a thing of fantasy that might vanish at any moment. ‘I’d always wanted someone else when I was growing up, a brother or a sister. And I had one all along …’
Frankie hugged him, aware even then that she could support Seth over this, yet the words that would help him with the grinding pain of his redundancy escaped her. Her career as a human resources executive was built on a mastery of effective interpersonal skills, arbitration, mediation, appraisals, setting goals and accomplishing them … but when it came to Seth, instinct told her that there was nothing she could do for him. If he was going to crawl out of this misery, he would have to do it by himself. Without her help. And Frankie, who wanted to solve everyone’s problems, hated herself for that.
Chapter Two
Peggy Barry had spent a long time searching for the perfect place: a town far enough away from home for her to flourish – and yet near enough for Peggy to drive to her mother if she was needed. Her mother was the reason she hadn’t left the country altogether, but nobody, including Mrs Barry, had to know that. Peggy wanted to remain in Ireland in case one day her mother would accept the truth and phone her daughter. Until then, she travelled, searching.
Since she’d left home at the age of eighteen, an astonishing nine years ago, Peggy had lived in all of Ireland’s cities and many of its towns and still hadn’t found the perfect place.
She had almost resigned herself to the likelihood that it didn’t exist, that there was no town or village or suburb where she could feel as if she belonged.
‘What are you looking for exactly?’ the owner of the last bar she’d worked in had asked her.
Peggy had liked TJ, even though he wasn’t her type. Mind you, in the past year, nobody had been her type. Men and dreams of a future didn’t appear to work well together. Guys mistakenly thought that tall, leggy brunettes working in bars wanted quick flings and couldn’t possibly be serious about saving money for their own business or about waiting for the right guy to settle down with.
The bar – lucrative, loud, boasting a vibrant Galway crowd – had been quiet once the last stragglers had been sent home. TJ was cashing up and Peggy was cleaning. Her shift ended in half an hour and she yearned for the peace of her small flat two storeys above the dry cleaner’s, where there was no noise, nobody gazing drunkenly at her over the counter and telling her they were in love with her, and could they have two pints, a whiskey chaser and a couple of rum cocktails, please?
‘Sanctuary,’ said Peggy absent-mindedly in reply to TJ’s question as she went from table to table with her black plastic bag, bucket, spray and cloth. She’d already gathered up the ashtrays from the beer garden and put them to soak in a basin. The glass-washing machines were on, the empty beer bottles collected. The floor, sticky with alcohol and dirt, was somebody else’s problem in the morning.
‘Saying “sanctuary” makes you sound like a nun,’ remarked TJ.
‘OK, peace, then,’ Peggy said in exasperation.
‘If you want peace, you need one of those villages in the middle of nowhere,’ TJ said, reaching for another piece of nicotine gum. ‘Sort of place where you get one pub, ten houses and a lot of old farmers standing at their gates staring at you when you drive by.’
‘That’s not at all what I want.’ Peggy moved on to the next table. Somebody’s door key was stuck there in a glue of crisps and the sticky residue of spilt alcohol. Peggy scrubbed it free and went back to the bar, where she put it in the lost property tin. ‘TJ, you can’t run a business in a village in the middle of nowhere and I want my own business. I told you already. A knitting and craft shop.’
‘I know, you told me: knitting,’ TJ repeated, shaking his head. ‘You just don’t look the knitting type.’
Peggy laughed. She seldom told people about her plans for fear they’d laugh at her fierce determination and tell her she was mad, and why didn’t she blow her savings on a trip to Key West/Ibiza/Amsterdam with them? But
