The Honey Queen

Coping with anything had turned out to mean a husband who sloped around in sweatpants and could barely summon up the energy to walk to the crossroads for a daily newspaper. He’d lost his zest for life when he’d lost his job. All the great plans for the house now lay untouched under a mound of bills at one end of the kitchen table.

Redundancy had settled over their house like a heavy grey storm cloud.

Frankie, who had been responsible for setting up counselling sessions for Dutton employees following a series of redundancies at the company, now saw the problem from the other side of the table. Her husband was in despair.

Work doesn’t define women in the way it defines men, she remembered telling her team in the HR department at the time. Men find it hard to cope with being out of work.

Platitudes delivered straight from the most basic HR psychology books.

Those words were certainly mocking her now as she lay beside this shadow of the man who had been her husband, waiting for sleep to claim her. Sleep didn’t come.

It was the Sleep Theorem, she told herself. The number of hours you lost sleepless in bed was always in reverse proportion to the amount of work you had to do the following day. Eventually, she drifted into an uneasy doze filled with nightmares involving Emer and Alexei in danger, when she couldn’t run fast enough to save them. And darling Seth, once her mainstay in life, was watching it all and seemed paralysed into indecision.

At six the alarm went off. She woke exhausted and decided that, at that precise moment, the word for the day was shattered. While Seth carried on sleeping, she showered, dressed and had some muesli for breakfast before heading into work.

As she pulled into the underground car park of Dutton Insurance at seven twenty-five on that clear but cold February morning, Frankie felt a low drag of anxiety in the depths of her belly. Steeling herself for the day ahead, she grabbed her briefcase, got out of the car and strode towards the lifts.

The doors closed behind her with a satisfying swish. The inevitable muzak drifted into her head. She hated that music. The lifts from the car park were workmanlike and industrial. Important visitors to Dutton Insurance parked in a designated section of the car park and made their entrance through much more glamorous lifts. She pushed the button for the lobby, the lift shuddered and brought her up. She used to make it her business to run up the stairs at least once every day but these days she was too tired.

‘Morning, Mrs Green,’ said the fresh-faced security guard as she slid her recognition card into the slot on the barrier.

‘Morning, Lucas,’ said Frankie cheerily, suppressing the thought that he looked even younger than Alexei, standing there in his uniform as if ready to defend Dutton Insurance from invaders. The policemen were looking younger too. Was she finally at that age at which all the old clichés start becoming true? She headed across the Italian marble floor to the gleaming brass-fronted lifts that were the public face of the business.

These lifts were mirrored on the inside and Frankie could see herself from every angle.

As a girl, she had grown up confident in herself, confident in her tall, athletic body and never embarrassed about budding breasts or menstruation. In fact her only worry had been that her mother might run around brandishing a packet of tampons and screaming You’re a woman now! at the top of her voice when Frankie had finally had her first period.

Frankie had never dieted like the girls in her class at school, hadn’t denied herself food, had loved her body for the things it could do, the sports it could play. She was captain of the netball team and a fabulous long distance runner with those long, lean legs. In her teenage bedroom, she’d had a small haul of medals and trophies from track and field events.

For most of her life, her body had done whatever she asked of it and it never occurred to her to worry about curves here and there, or fine lines around her eyes.

Until now.

As she stood on her own in the lift, harsh lights accentuating every flaw, it struck her that the woman in the charcoal skirt-suit, the subtle pearl earrings, and the long, dark hair tied up neatly into a knot, looked old.

Frankie closed her eyes and waited for the lift to arrive at her floor, then marched out without another glance at herself. In her office, she switched on her computer and keyed in her password.

The instant messaging icon flashed that a message was waiting. It was from Anita, Frankie’s closest friend within the company, a mother of two who was second in command in the legal department. She clicked on it.

You in yet? Have gossip – not nice gossip.

Where are you? typed Frankie.

About to go to canteen. Need coffee. War when I left the house. Julie knows it’s my early day but she still hadn’t turned up when I was leaving, Clarice was on the kitchen floor screaming, Peaches was throwing baby porridge around and Ivan was glaring at me, as if it was my fault. I only got out by the skin of my teeth.

You should fire her if she’s late again. I told you about giving her written warnings.

It would be simpler to fire Ivan. Husbands are easier to come by than good nannies. See you in five?

Frankie grinned and set off for the canteen, walking at speed through the vast open-plan beige kingdom that was Dutton Insurance. She certainly didn’t believe that a husband was easier to come by than a nanny. Besides, Ivan was actually a sweetie. Francesca knew it was useless to point out yet again that Julie was invariably late, barely listened to half of what Anita said and was paid as much as the head of the UN Peacekeeping Force. Last time she had said this, Anita’s voice had veered into near hysteria as she protested that Julie was the one person in the world capable of managing her two children: ‘She’s been with us since Clarice was a baby and she’s the only person Peaches will settle with. Even Ivan’s mother can’t make Peaches go to sleep – and she had eight kids.’

‘Blimey, eight kids,’ said Frankie. She’d have loved more children herself, but not that many.

Anita was in the empty canteen pushing a tiny dark-red pellet into the trendy Nespresso machine that the Chief Financial Officer had installed on all the floors of the company two years before, when they’d achieved record profits, despite the state of the economy.

In ten minutes, the canteen – which served the executive floor – would be buzzing with people in early for the monthly status meeting, attended by representatives from all the divisions. It was a largely for-show meeting because all the real business was done behind locked doors, but the CEO was keen on making everybody feel a part of the team.

‘Have you heard anything?’ Anita said, as she waited for Frankie to get her coffee.

‘Heard what?’ Frankie said slowly, again feeling that low drag in the pit of her stomach.

It was obvious from Anita’s face that, whatever she’d heard, it wasn’t good news.

‘Heard that we’re in trouble, that there’s a takeover on the cards.’

‘Oh.’ Frankie reached for the nearest chair and sat into it. ‘Where did you hear it?’

‘Oh, the usual labyrinthine methods whereby gossip gets around. Someone in the executive dining room was overheard by one of the chefs who told his girlfriend on the third floor. I heard about it last night, haven’t been able to sleep. I mean, if we’re taken over by another company, loads of us are going to lose our jobs. What’ll I do? The mortgage is huge and we can only just manage it with both our salaries.’

She looked so distraught that Frankie, who had spent her working life mentoring colleagues, ignored her own shock and pain to comfort Anita.

‘Now listen here,’ she said, ‘it’s just a rumour. Companies thrive on that sort of stuff. Besides, whatever happens you can get through it. We can get through it. We’re made of stronger stuff. We’ve gone through childbirth! You had a ten-pound baby, Anita. There’s nothing you cannot cope with.’

The comment had the desired effect. Anita gave a snort of laughter.

‘Yeah, I guess,’ she said, shaking her head ruefully.

Baby Peaches had been a positive Goliath, taking after her tall, broad father rather than her petite five-foot-two mother.

‘I know there’s no medal for childbirth, but there should be,’ Frankie went on. ‘A ten-pound baby – you should get gold for that. No, platinum.’

They talked a while longer and then Frankie looked at her watch.

‘Time to move,’ she said, finishing her coffee. ‘Once more unto the breach and all that.’

She hurried back to her office, rumours of a takeover now adding to the turmoil in her mind. Stay focused, she told herself. Panicking never got anyone anywhere.

With the office still empty she decided to grab the chance for a speedy morning email to Emer and Alexei.

Beautiful Emer, currently in Sydney but thinking of moving to the US for a few months, was waitressing by day and putting years of piano lessons to good use by playing in the restaurant of a boutique hotel by night.

It’s incredible here, Mum, you’ve got to come out before I leave, she’d emailed only last week. I love it. The sun, the people. You’d love it too.

If Frankie, who had read many CVs in her time, had to come up with one word to sum up her daughter, that word would be light: the shining light that flowed out of her like the sun. Emer was vivid and sparkling and prone to mischief. Frankie had been the same as a child.

‘How come you always know, Mum?’ Emer would demand crossly when Frankie would 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 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 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 whenever she did mention her life plan, it was astonishing how often people told her that she didn’t look ‘the knitting type’.

What was the knitting type? A woman with her hair in a bun held up with knitting needles, wearing a long, multi-coloured knitted coat that trailed along behind her on the floor?

‘I want to run my own business, TJ,’ she said, ‘and knitting’s what I’m good at, what I love. I’ve been knitting since I was small: my mother used to knit Aran for the tourist shops years ago. She taught me everything. I know there’s a market for shops like that. That’s what I’m looking for – somewhere to start off.’

‘You told me, but I’m not sure I believe you.’ TJ’s eyes narrowed. ‘What exactly are you running away from, babe? You should stay here. You’re happy, we appreciate you.’

What got a woman like Peggy trailing all over the place looking for peace? A man, he’d bet tonight’s takings on it. When women moved all the time the way Peggy did, a man was usually behind it all.

Women like Peggy, tall and rangy with those steady dark eyes half-obscured by curls of conker-brown fringe and a hint of vulnerability that she did her best to hide, were always running from men. Not that she couldn’t be tough when she was dealing with angry drunks pulling at her clothes and making suggestions. But she was soft inside, despite the outer tough-chick exterior and the black leather biker jacket and boots. Too soft. He wondered what had happened to her.

‘I’m not running,’ Peggy said, straightening up from the final table and facing him squarely. ‘I’m looking. There’s a difference. I’ll know when I find it.’

‘Yeah.’ He waved one hand wearily. The soft women who’d been hurt by men all said that.

‘It’s not what you think,’ Peggy insisted. ‘I’m looking for a different kind of life.’

But as she walked home that night, hand wrapped around a personal alarm in one pocket of her leather jacket, she admitted to herself that TJ was sort of right – only she would never tell him that. He thought she was running away from a man, and in a way she was. Except it wasn’t the ex-lover TJ undoubtedly imagined. She was running away from something very different.

On a beautiful February day, shortly after leaving the bar in Galway, an Internet property trawl led Peggy to Redstone, a suburb of Cork that somehow retained a sense of being a town.

On the computer screen, the premises near Redstone Junction had it all: a pretty, Art Deco façade, a big catchment area and lots of other shops and cafés nearby to bring in passing trade.

Now, as she drove her rattling old Volkswagen Beetle slowly through the crossroads, she felt a sense of peace envelop her. This might, just might, be the place she’d been looking for.

It helped that it was such a lovely day, the low-angled winter sun burnishing everything with warm light, but she sensed that she’d have liked the place even if it had been bucketing down with rain. There were trees planted on the footpaths, stately sycamores and elegant beeches with a few acid-green buds emerging, giving a sense of the country town Redstone had been before it merged with the city. The façade of one entire block was still dedicated to Morton’s Grain Storage, pale brick with classic 1930s lettering chiselled into the brickwork itself, although the grain storage was long gone and the ground floor had been converted to a row of shops that included a pharmacy, a chi-chi delicatessen-cum-café and a clothes shop. Peggy parked the car and walked back through the little junction, loving the black wrought-iron street lights with their curlicues where the lamps hung. It was impossible to tell whether they’d been installed a hundred and fifty years ago or were a more recent addition.

She loved the trees and the flowers planted diligently around them, probably by a team of local people involved in the Tidy Towns competition, she thought. They’d obviously chosen a host of bulbs, for now buttery yellow early crocuses and pale narcissi were sweetly blooming in wooden troughs at the base of each tree along both arms of the crossroads.

Nobody had ripped up the flowers or stubbed cigarettes out in the earth. The people here obviously admired how they brightened up the street.

Even before she’d looked over the premises for rent – a former off-licence, which had unaccountably gone out of business – she’d felt a kind of peace in Redstone.

The vacant property was a double-fronted shop with two large rooms out the back and a flat upstairs, should she wish to rent that too, the estate agent added hopefully.

The downstairs would need only cosmetic work, but the upstairs needed a wrecking ball, Peggy thought privately. The fittings were old and hazardous. Besides, living over the shop was a mistake, she knew that after working as a waitress in a Dublin bistro and living upstairs.

‘Downstairs is enough for me,’ Peggy said. ‘I don’t have a deathwish.’

The agent sighed. ‘Ah well, plenty of people are looking for bijou doer-uppers,’ he said over-confidently.

‘As long as the floor’s safe and they don’t come crashing down to my place when they’re using the sander,’ Peggy replied. ‘The landlord’s responsible.’

The agent laughed.

Peggy eyeballed him. What was it about a woman in tight jeans and a leather jacket that made people think you were both ignorant of the law and a pushover?

‘I mean it,’ she said.

The deal to rent the shop was signed five days later.

She found a small cottage for rent at the end of St Brigid’s Avenue, on a 1950s estate of former council houses, about a mile away from the shop. The house wasn’t overly beautiful with its genuine fifties decor, but it was all she could afford.

Peggy celebrated her new life with a quarter-bottle of champagne and a takeaway pizza in front of the cheap television-cum-DVD player she’d bought years ago. She slotted Sleepless in Seattle, her favourite film of all time, into the player, sipped her champagne and toasted herself.

‘To Peggy’s Busy Bee Knitting and Stitching Shop,’ she said, happily raising her glass before biting into the pizza. She’d achieved her dream and her life would be different from now on. The past was just that: the past. Then she settled down to watch Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks nearly but not quite miss each other, and she cried, as she always did.

The process of renovating the shop had to be accomplished as quickly as possible so she could begin trading. Peggy knew exactly what she wanted and loved the hard work of rolling up her sleeves and getting into it – discussing the finish of the shelving with Gunther, the carpenter and shopfitter, and working with a sign-maker to get precisely the signage she had in mind.

‘You certainly know what you want,’ the sign designer said. ‘So many people dither for ages over different styles.’