Cathy Kelly - Homecoming

Like Ralf’s letters and Naomi’s innocent little notes in their awkward writing, the recipe book was a source of huge comfort, a talisman to be held close to her chest when her heart was breaking. It had comforted Eleanor all her life and it comforted her now.

Nobody glancing at the battered recipe book would guess at the wisdom inside it. People, especially people today, thought that wisdom had to come from experts with letters after their names. Eleanor herself had plenty of those – the hoops psychoanalysts had to jump through meant half an alphabet could go after Eleanor Levine’s name.

But two things had taught Eleanor that people with little academic history often knew more than the most scholarly person.

One was her mother, Brigid.

The other was her own vast experience of life.

Eleanor was now eighty-three and she’d lived those eighty-three years with gusto.

Brigid had taught her to do that. And so much more.

Eleanor had been schooled at some of the finest universities in the United States, while her mother had scraped merely a few years of education in a tiny Connemara village school where each of the children had to bring a sod of turf every day to keep the fire alight. Yet Brigid had been born with all the wisdom of the earth in her bones and a kindness in her heart that meant she saw the world with a forgiving eye.

During her years working as a psychoanalyst in New York, Eleanor had discovered that bitterness ate away at people’s insides just as effectively as any disease.

People spent years in therapy simply to learn what Brigid O’Neill had known instinctively.

The recipe book was where she’d written all of this wisdom down for her daughter.

At some point, the recipes and the little notes she’d written in the margins had taken on a life of their own.

Brigid’s recipe book had never really been a simple book of how to cook. It was a book on how to live life, full of the knowledge of a gentle countrywoman who’d lived off the land and had to use her commonsense and an innate Celtic intuition to survive.

Eleanor had often wondered if her mother had more spiritual awareness than normal people. Some sort of instinct that the modern world had lost and was always trying to regain. For certain, her recipe book contained a hint of magic. Perhaps it was just the magic of food and life.

And really, food and life were so intertwined, Eleanor thought.

Her mother’s life had been lived with the kitchen stove always nearby. Feeding people and nurturing them was a gift in itself. The old religions that made a point of the power of the feast had understood that. Food was about hope, rebirth, community, family and a nourishment that went beyond the purely physical.

Like the mashed potato with the puddle of melting butter in the middle and spring onions chopped in that you ate when you were feeling blue. Or the chicken soup made when there was nothing to eat but leftovers, but which when mixed together with skill and love and a hint of garlic became a melting broth that would warm your heart.

Or the taste of fresh berries on juice-stained lips in bed with the man you loved.

Eleanor thought of a man she’d shared a warm bed and strawberries with once upon a time.

Even sixty years later, she could still remember the sheen of his skin and the way her fingers had played upon the muscles of his shoulders as they lay together in a cocoon of love.

It wasn’t something she could share with anyone now. People tended to be scandalised if an octogenarian mentioned sex. Ridiculous, really. A bit like being shocked at the notion that a vintage Ford from the 1930s had ever driven on the roads. She smiled.

She’d told Ralf about that man, her first lover, when they were first courting.

‘I don’t want secrets between us,’ she’d said.

And Ralf had understood. Because he knew that the lovemaking he and Eleanor shared far exceeded anything she’d enjoyed with the man with the strawberries.

Ralf had loved cheese, little bits of French brie dripping off a cracker on to the plate, as they lay in their scrumpled bed and talked after making love.

She’d introduced him to Turkish apple tea, which somehow went with the cheese. He’d showed her how to make kneidlach, the little kosher dough balls he’d loved as a child. Some of their happiest moments – and there had been many, many happy moments – had been spent enjoying meals.

Food made it all better.

She’d loved it when they would wander out for dinner in one of the neighbourhood restaurants, then sit talking for hours after they’d finished eating. With a professional eye, Eleanor watched couples who were long married and had nothing to say to each other and felt sorry for them with their uncomfortably silent meals. She and Ralf never had that problem: they never stopped talking. Being interested in the person you were married to was one of life’s great gifts.

Eleanor heard the clock at St Malachy’s on the other side of the square ringing noon. It was a sound she’d always associate with her childhood. The family home in the tiny west coast village of Kilmoney had been two miles from the local church, and when the Angelus bell rang at midday and six in the evening, everyone stopped what they were doing to pray.

In Golden Square, only a few people would do that.

From her vantage point, Eleanor could see a lot of Golden Square. She hadn’t chosen the apartment because of the locale, but now that she was here, she loved it. There were few of these old garden squares left in Dublin city, the letting agent had told her, and even in the property slump houses here still sold pretty quickly. The garden itself was boxed in by old iron railings with curlicued tops. At each end was a pair of black-and-gold gates with an elegant design of climbing vine leaves. Eleanor had seen something like them in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and she was sure they were valuable. They stood sentinel over the flowers, the benches and the children’s playground inside.

Despite the modern shops and businesses on one corner of the square, there was something olde worlde about the redbrick houses and the Georgian villas. Most were divided into flats now, but they still looked as though a kitchen maid in long skirts might run up the steps each morning at dawn to set the fires.

Eleanor had arrived there by accident, but she found she liked Golden Square a lot. And there were, she believed, no accidents in life. Things happened for a reason.

She’d moved in two days after Christmas, even though the young letting agent had implied that she must be mad to want to move in during the holiday.

‘This is what suits me,’ Eleanor had said, using the calm psychoanalyst’s voice that had worked for so many years with her patients.

Suitably chastened, the letting agent had driven her to the apartment from the hotel where she’d spent Christmas. Though he was careful not to say so aloud, he wondered why anyone would want to spend Christmas or even New Year away from their families. Perhaps she didn’t have a family, he decided, and at that moment, vowed to be nicer to his own mother because one day she’d be an old, white-haired lady – though perhaps not one as fiercely determined or as straight-backed as this one. So he went along with Mrs Levine’s plans, betrayed no surprise when she explained she was Irish by birth despite her American accent, and concluded she must be a little mad, as well as being rich. She clearly had plenty of money to have stayed in a five-star hotel over Christmas, and she hadn’t quibbled over the rent for the Taylors’ apartment on Golden Square.

It was, she’d said, when he’d taken her to view it on Christmas Eve, exactly what she was looking for: somewhere central, without stairs in the home itself, although she was able to manage the ten steps up from the path to the front door of the gracious old villa-style house. She’d wanted somewhere elegant and well-furnished and the Taylors’, with its lovely paintings and its old-fashioned furniture, was certainly that.