The House on Willow Street
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‘I know what you’ve come to talk about,’ Tess said. ‘I understand. I mean, it’s difficult, obviously it’s going to be difficult, but other people have been through worse. We’ll manage somehow.’
Kevin looked up at her, incomprehension in his eyes. ‘You know?’ he said.
‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I guessed: the finances. We have to do something, don’t we? I really think I’m going to have to close the shop and get a job somewhere else.’
‘Oh Lord.’ He went quite pale, which was no mean feat because Kevin’s face was always weathered from being outdoors. ‘That wasn’t what I came here to say,’ he said.
‘Go on, then.’ Tess took another biscuit. He’d got them from the deli. A local lady named Madeleine made them and she really was the most marvellous person at baking. Her Christmas cakes were much in demand; the last couple of years she’d baked one for Kevin and Tess, wonderfully decorated with sugarcraft Santas, reindeers and penguins – all manner of Christmas things that Kitty and even Zach adored.
‘It’s not about money,’ Kevin said. He took a huge breath. ‘I’ve met someone else.’
‘What?’ Tess stared at him in utter bewilderment.
‘I didn’t mean it to happen this way,’ he said, ‘it just did. I don’t want to hurt you, Tess, or the children, but the fact that we separated and the fact that I met someone means that separating was the right thing to do.’
Her language skills finally came back to Tess. ‘What do you mean, “the right thing to do”?’ she said. ‘We separated to see if we wanted to be together …’ she could barely get the words out, ‘… not to go looking for other people.’
‘I wasn’t looking,’ he said. ‘It just happened.’
‘Nothing just happens,’ hissed Tess.
‘Well, this did.’ He ran his hands through his hair. It was always spiky. No hair product would ever make it flatten down and it grew like crazy. Once a month he went to the barber and got a short back and sides: three weeks later, it was wild as a bush again.
‘Who is she, this someone you met?’ Tess said. She pushed her tea and biscuits away from her. She didn’t want any form of comfort as she took in this horrendous turn of events.
‘Her name is Claire. Her parents moved to Avalon about a year ago. She’s lovely. She’s an illustrator – you’d really like her.’
‘Oh God, I can’t believe you said that!’ Tess said. ‘I’d really like her? Why? Is she like me? Does she have kids? Is she married? Divorced? What? Tell me.’
‘She’s a bit younger, actually,’ Kevin said. ‘And no, she doesn’t have children – although she’d love to. One day.’
And that’s when Tess thought she was really going to lose it. ‘A bit younger?’ she asked, enunciating every word carefully. ‘Exactly how much younger?’
Kevin moistened his lips. ‘She’s twenty-nine,’ he said.
‘Oh my God, twenty-nine!’ Tess got up and began to pace. ‘She’s twenty-nine. She’s Claire. She’s an illustrator. Don’t tell me: she’s got long blonde hair and wears cool skinny jeans and goes to rock festivals?’
‘Well …’ began Kevin.
‘She is, isn’t she? Why? Why did this happen?’ Tess said.
‘I did some work in her mother’s house and I met her. And as to why it happened …’ He held his hands out in supplication. ‘I don’t know why. All I know is that I met her, we had an instant connection and we went out. We’ve been out three times now – not here though. We’ve never been out together in Avalon. I didn’t want people to talk,’ he added, his tone pleading. ‘You know what this town is like. We went into Arklow, but people are going to see us together soon and I wanted you to know.’
‘And it’s serious?’
Kevin couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s serious.’
‘Do you know, I thought you were coming up here to tell me that you were having even more financial problems than we had been already and … oh …’ Tess shook her head. ‘I didn’t know what you were going to say, but not that. That wasn’t on the list.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The thing is, how do we tell the children?’
‘What do you mean, we tell the children?’ she demanded.
‘Well, we have to.’
‘We don’t have to,’ said Tess grimly, ‘you have to. And do you know what, Kevin, right now I think you’d better go. Just go. Get out of here.’
He got up and crossed the room, turning back at the door to say, ‘I’m really sorry, Tess. I never meant for it to turn out this way …’
‘Just go,’ she said wearily.
After he’d gone, she sat with Kitty through twenty minutes of something on the Disney Channel, although Tess would never have any memory of what it was: she was in shock. Instead, she held Kitty’s hand and tried not to cry. She wouldn’t let it all out in front of her daughter, she couldn’t. This would devastate the children. Zach had hated it when his father had moved out, and even though Kitty had coped in her own childlike way by asking for a kitten, she was like all young kids and hated change.
Tess had worked hard to make the separation appear perfectly normal by saying things like: ‘Grown-ups sometimes live apart for a bit and then it all works out again.’ How could she explain this? Nothing would explain this. Her family had broken into two pieces – and it was all her own fault.
At two a.m., when she had finally given up on sleep, she rang her sister in Massachusetts.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Tess whispered, not wanting to wake the children. ‘What’s gone wrong? We tried counselling. All the magazines and books say that when people love each other, counselling fixes it. When that didn’t work, I read that separation can shock you back into realizing what you might lose. You know: it’s make-or-break time. Kevin didn’t want to try that, it was me who said let’s give it a go, separation could work.’
‘That’s bull and you know it,’ said Suki, who was an expert markswoman in shooting straight. ‘Listen to me, Tess. I may have screwed up more relationships than you’ve had hot dinners, and I made a mess out of my only marriage, but I get the two facts that have been eluding you for the past few months: separation never leads to anything but break-up and people change. When you met Kevin, you were vulnerable.’
They were both silent and the gulf of the Atlantic Ocean felt huge. The two of them were the only ones who really knew just how vulnerable Tess had been back then. Vulnerable almost wasn’t the word. Tess had felt so horrendously alone. Her sister was in America, her father was dead, Cashel had gone and there was nobody else in her life.
‘You needed to be rescued. Now, you’re a grown-up. If any rescuing needs to be done, you do it yourself. So you’ve changed. When Kevin met you, he loved being the strong silent type who could take care of you. But you don’t need him the same way any more. That’s probably why he’s fallen for this Claire girl. She thinks he’s the strong man who’s going to take care of her, and he loves that.
‘And what those magazines and books of yours didn’t tell you,’ Suki added in a dictatorial voice, and Tess could imagine her sister saying this in a lecture on the differences between the sexes, ‘is that men are far less likely than women to stay alone after a break-up. I can’t recall the precise statistic off-hand, but a high percentage of widowers remarry within a year of their wife’s death. The same isn’t true of widows. Men don’t like being on their own, honey, and you sent him off into the wide, blue yonder on his lonesome.’
‘He was living in the granny flat behind his mother’s house,’ Tess hissed, ‘in the same town as me and the kids. He said he couldn’t wait for the separation period to be over because the minute we were apart, he knew we ought to be back together!’
‘What about you?’ Suki asked.
She’d always known the right and hardest question to ask, even when they’d been kids.
‘I was changing my mind,’ Tess admitted slowly. ‘It’s been lonely.’
‘I know what that’s like,’ Suki said quietly on the other end of the phone, so quietly that Tess only thought she’d heard it. Any other time, she’d have dived in and asked Suki what was wrong, being the good sister, trying to help Suki sort out another tangled romance in her hectic dating life. But tonight she wanted it to be about her. Tonight, Tess needed Suki to put that fabulous brain to use and help her sort this mess out in her head.
‘I was used to being married, Suki. Used to waking up with Kevin, used to the stuff he did. Now, I have to do everything – the grocery shopping, the cooking, sort out all the school stuff, work out all the bills. And Kevin gets to play couple-in-love with his child girlfriend. Whom I’m going to really like, apparently.’
Tess exhaled and lay back on her pillows miserably. ‘I still can’t believe he said that.’
‘Honey, I wish I could help you but—’
‘Yeah, but you’re three thousand miles away and you’re broke too. I get it,’ Tess said sadly. ‘We should offer our services to some marriage counselling clinic. They could use us on their posters: Meet the Power Sisters, whatever you do, don’t do what they did – that way you’ll be happy.’
‘There’s one thing you never mentioned,’ Suki went on as if she hadn’t been interrupted. ‘Love. You haven’t talked about love, Tess. You miss Kevin and all that, but is your heart broken because he’s not there, or is it broken because there’s no one to share the chores and no one in your bed at night? Only you can answer that. If you decide that you do love him, then you have to fight the child girlfriend for him.’
For the first time that evening, Tess laughed. It was hysterical laughter, and once she started, she found she couldn’t stop. She tried to muffle her laughter in the pillows.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, coming up for air. ‘I had a vision of me and this lovely twenty-nine-year-old in hand-to-hand combat in the main square. Me whacking her through the pub window, bare-knuckled.’
‘Tell me when that bout’s scheduled,’ Suki said drily, ‘and I’ll book the first flight home.’
Chapter Five
Coffee was Suki’s drug of choice these days. A silky Colombian macchiato with a hint of soya foam from the small coffee shop down the block. She’d pick up a cup to go and then take it out to the porch at the back of the house. Once a fine, albeit small, clapboard house owned by a local potter, it was prettily decorated and had several storm lanterns hanging from the porch roof. There was also an old peeling swing seat with a cushion that probably pre-dated the last ten political administrations, but it was the perfect place to sit in with her coffee and smoke the first of her ten cigarettes of the day.
The radio had forecast a fierce nor’wester that morning, and in the jungle of a backyard, the skinny trees shivered in the wind. Gardening was not Suki’s strong point.
Compared to the old cottage she’d got in the divorce settlement from Kyle, the view was nothing to speak of. There, she’d looked out over the fine sand of the beach, watching as the waves rolled over driftwood. She used to collect interesting pieces of driftwood; they complemented the pale blue of the cottage walls and blended nicely with the various bits of nautical paraphernalia Kyle’s mother’s decorator had added to the cottage when they’d first moved in.
In this house, with its wallpapered walls and mustardy cream paintwork, the driftwood looked dirty. It was all a matter of setting.
Another difference was the skyline: no Richardson had lived within hailing distance of the neighbours for decades. Neighbours were what poor people had. The rich could afford glorious isolation, and their cottage had been suitably solitary, the only one on the beach.
Here, on the edge of a small estate in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she had another line of houses behind hers. Rather than look at them, she stared up into the sky as she blew smoke out and sipped her coffee. It was a good time of the day for thinking.
Today, she needed to get groceries, pay some bills online and progress a little further with the book.
It wasn’t moving.
‘Do you write all the words?’ a woman had said to her at a cocktail party once. This had been back in the days when Suki had felt loved by the world, so she had merely smiled kindly and said, ‘Yes, I write all the words.’
Today, she’d have been less kind: ‘No, the Word Fairy comes in the night and does them. I just read them through in the morning to make sure she’s written enough. By the way, you need to go back to your village, ’cos they’re an idiot short.’
The Word Fairy wasn’t working at all these days.
Growing up in Ireland, she’d never been a morning person except in the summer holidays, when shafts of morning sun would slant in through the holes in the curtains in her bedroom. Sometimes, Suki would get a cup of tea from the kitchen – summer was the only time Avalon House wasn’t arctic – and then climb up the back stairs to the third floor, where a window led out on to the ersatz Norman battlements. Nobody but she and Tess ever went up there. Suki used to scatter her cigarette butts everywhere, until Tess brought up an empty baked bean can and it became the ashtray, occasionally emptied when it was overflowing. They had dragged two old cushions up to the window and on nice days, she and Tess could sit in comfort, hidden from the world, and gaze down from their lofty position at the top of Willow Street. They could see the comings and goings of Avalon, could see the line of caravans in Cabana-Land and the rocky spur to the right where children loved to explore in the daytime and where young lovers liked to make out at night.
Suki liked being near the sea. There was a claustrophobia in being land-locked. Sea and trees, they were her lodestones.
The beach at Avalon was so beautiful, the curve of the sand on one side, tailing off to a tiny cove covered with smooth rocks that shimmered in the sun. Valley of the Diamonds, it was called.
Once, a boy had taken Suki there. She hadn’t let him go all the way, whatever he told his friends. Suki Power was lots of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
Cigarette finished now, she made her way wearily upstairs to her office.
The office was really a glorified cupboard. Two years ago when she bought the house, the realtor had enthusiastically described it as ‘the nursery’. Suki had shot him an angry look at this description. Did he seriously think she was looking for a place to settle down and raise a family at her age? But the realtor was, she realized, a self-absorbed young man who was operating on auto-pilot, trotting out the same spiel whatever the house, whoever the client:
… through here the kitchen/diner, and look, an original wood-burning stove! And upstairs, conveniently placed next door to the master bedroom, a nursery!
She no longer walked into the tiny room and thought of it wistfully as the nursery. Even though she railed against older mothers, there was still a tiny place inside her that mourned her own childlessness.
But she was beyond that ever becoming a reality. These days, the ‘nursery’ was more of an office-cum-torture chamber. The place where she went to suffer and stare at a blank screen, wondering how to fill the endless pages that stood between her and the next tranche of the advance from her publisher – money she needed so desperately.
When she emerged from the wasteland that had been her life on the road with Jethro, Suki had been broke. Not a penny remained of the divorce settlement from Kyle Junior; it had either gone up their noses or on her back, indulging a penchant for ridiculously expensive clothes, jewellery, cosmetic treatments to make her look younger. The pretty Maine cottage she’d been given as part of her alimony had been sold to pay the debts she’d run up, splashing money around, settling bar bills with bravado to show that she was a famous feminist writer and not just another groupie hanging around with TradeWind. Except that’s exactly what she was – another groupie.
What shamed her most was that she hadn’t come to her senses and walked out. She’d hung on until Jethro had tired of her and tried to pass her along to someone else.
The thought of that night still made her feel sick. The following morning, she’d packed her bags and gone.
Out of the ravages of all that, she’d tried to rebuild her life. One of the few old contacts prepared to return her calls was her agent, Melissa, who somehow landed her a two-book publishing deal.
The advance was about a quarter of what she’d got on her last contract, and that was for one book.
‘You’re lucky to be getting this much,’ Melissa had said with customary frankness. ‘I suspect they’ve agreed to publish your feminist politik book on the basis that, come the day you write the bestselling “I married into the Richardson clan, then toured with Jethro and TradeWind and came out the other side”, they’ll make their money back and then some.’
‘I’ll never write that story,’ said Suki quietly, thinking that she wasn’t entirely sure she had come out the other side of either of those periods in her life.
‘Never won’t pay the bills, honey,’ Melissa pointed out. ‘Keep it in the back of your mind. We can talk about it when you come to New York for our meeting with the publishers.’
Suki had no intention of devoting any part of her mind to that particular project. But in the meantime, another book had forced its way to the forefront of Suki’s mind: Redmond Suarez’s book on the Richardsons. If he lived up to his reputation and succeeded in digging out all her secrets, Suki knew she’d fall apart completely.
It was late afternoon when Suki finally admitted defeat, having deleted just about everything she’d written that day. She went down to the kitchen and found Mick, still wearing the T-shirt he’d slept in, the one with his band’s logo on the front. His eyes were heavy with sleep, as though he’d not long got up. Mick was muscular, tall and admiring – just Suki’s type. He was also, she had begun to suspect, more than a little hung up on her relationship with Jethro and TradeWind. She wondered if she was a trophy girlfriend for him: ‘I’m dating Jethro’s ex.’
Maybe not. But he was becoming quite proprietorial. Last night, when she’d told him she was flying to New York to meet with her agent and publisher, he’d immediately started dropping hints that he wanted to come with her.
It seemed he hadn’t given up, because his first words were: ‘We need a little vacation, babe.’
He was sitting at her pine kitchen table, studying Mr Chan’s Takeout Menu as if there was a possibility he would deviate slightly from what he always had, which was chicken chow mein and peanut noodles. Suki teased him about it all the time, but today she found his careful perusal of the menu irritating.
Neither of them had money for a ‘little vacation’. Any more than they had the money for takeout every damn night of the week. Mick couldn’t cook anything except barbecue, which he thought should be added into the Constitution as an amendment: ‘Every man should have the right to grill in his own backyard and down a few cold ones at the same time,’ he liked to say.
He rented a ground-floor apartment in an old house two blocks away and he didn’t have a proper outdoor grill, just a makeshift one that ruined at least half the food. His friend, Renaud, band drummer by night and tax accountant by day, had a propane grill, and a decent backyard to go with it.
Mick and Steve, the bass guitarist, liked to bitch about Renaud, saying he wasn’t a real rocker because he had a ‘civilian’ job. They were true musicians: they didn’t do day jobs.
Suki was expected to agree with this assessment, but the more the bills came and the more it seemed as if Mick was living off her ninety per cent of the time and contributing nothing, the more she envied Renaud’s wife, Odette, who had the money for facials, a personal trainer and perfect nails.
A month ago, Mick had moved a lot of his stuff into her house. Now he was subletting his apartment.
Suki knew that if they stayed together, she’d have to be the one who earned the money. Which was about as modern feminist as it got.
She also knew that she’d never be able to mention the fact that she was the breadwinner, any more than she could tell Mick that his band was going nowhere.
Instead, she was expected to attend any gig they managed to get and stand at the side of the stage clapping and whooping over-enthusiastically. Anything less would upset Mick.
‘I don’t think you liked the show,’ he’d said once, early on, when Suki and Odette had been talking near the bar instead of frantically leading the applause.
‘I loved it,’ said Suki automatically, because that was what you did with performers. Only promoters and managers got to tell the truth, Jethro once told her. He’d been remarkably knowledgeable and clear-sighted about the industry, for all his drug-absorption.
‘Honey,’ she told Mick now, ‘New York is business. You know the cost of hotels there. I’m going to fly in and out the same day. Let’s have our vacation another time.’
He picked up her cell phone to call the takeaway.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘You want boiled or fried rice?’
Manhattan had once been Suki’s favourite place in the world. The glitter, the hum of excitement, the sense that anything was possible. She’d arrived the summer she was nineteen and she couldn’t wait to get her first waitressing job, didn’t care that she had to share a barely furnished house with eight other Irish college students in the Bronx. She was there – in the city that never slept. And she, Suki Power, was going to conquer it.
She’d been back to Manhattan many times during the years when Women and Their Wars was on the bestseller lists, and while she was with Jethro. Sometimes, they stayed in Jethro’s vast apartment on Park Avenue, but more often they flitted from hotel to hotel. Jethro was addicted to hotel living. He didn’t know how to boil a kettle and, if he thought about it at all, probably assumed the sheets were thrown in the garbage after being taken off his bed every day. He’d lived a normal life once, but that was a long time ago. He’d been a star so many years that he couldn’t or wouldn’t remember it.
Today, as the forever altered skyline came into view from the airplane window, she knew that another love affair was over. New York had moved on without her. Younger people with clear, unbroken hearts now stalked the glittering city. Strangely, this made her feel older than any line on her face did.
Her appointment with the publisher was at two and she was meeting her agent, Melissa, for lunch beforehand.
‘I’ll order something for us in my office, Suki. I’ve got a West Coast conference call at twelve. We won’t have time to go out,’ Melissa informed her when it was all being set up.
Suki knew what that meant: the Suki Richardson account made so little money, taking her out to lunch was no longer financially viable.
The old Suki would have raged about being treated badly.
The new Suki said ‘fine’.
She had a long way to go to become the goliath she’d once been, if she could ever get back there.
When the adrenalin was flowing, Suki felt a match for anybody: when she’d been on television all the time, when boys in Avalon had lusted after her, when she was Kyle Richardson’s wife, when she was with Jethro … But for herself, in herself, she didn’t know the last time she’d felt truly confident. That scared her like nothing else. If she could no longer fight, what would become of her?
The offices of Carr and Lowenstein had once occupied half of a suitably grand brownstone, but when they’d joined forces with a theatrical agency, they’d all moved into a glass tower. Suki spent the time in the elevator on the way to the forty-fifth floor fighting vertigo, a feeling which worsened when she stepped into the sheeny lobby, which was all reflective surfaces, to emphasize how high up they were. The reception had just-big-enough olive trees in planters in every corner and the silvery-green walls were massed with photos of the agency’s most famous and highest-earning clients.