Cathy Kelly - Homecoming

A gust of wind made the branch of the rowan tree outside the window bang against Eleanor’s window. The tiny scarlet berries on the holly bushes beneath it were all gone now. Sometimes a lone robin sat on the tree and look quizzically at Eleanor, as if asking for food.

Eleanor smiled sympathetically at him but she wasn’t able any more to hang seed balls outside. That took dexterity and suppleness, things she no longer had.

There were many things she no longer had. Her beloved Ralf being the most important. No one needed her now. Her family back in New York loved her, but they had their own lives. Naomi and her devoted husband, Marcus, were busy with their furniture import business. Filan’s Furniture was much in demand and, despite the credit crunch, they were expanding.

Gillian, Eleanor’s adored grand-daughter, had settled into her second year at UCLA and had thrown herself madly into her new life there.

They would manage without her. She was too broken, too wild with grief to be a proper mother or grandmother any more. Worse, in her present grieving state, she might be a burden.

It was an odd feeling. All her life, Eleanor had worked and strived, both for her family and in her professional life. She solved problems, she didn’t create them.

In an instant of loss, all that had changed. She had changed.

Which was why she’d turned her back on New York and returned to Ireland. Here she might find the answer, find out what she had to do. She hoped so with all her heart.

Being able to boil an egg means you’ll never go hungry. Duck eggs make the most wonderful breakfasts. When you crack open the fragile shell and peer into that golden yolk, the colour and consistency of honey, and breathe in the scent of the land, your heart sings.

The problem is the ducks. We always had a couple in the yard, Muscovy ducks, with black and white feathers and red bills, and Lord, those birds could fight. They were like a warring family. In the end, I kept them in separate pens in the coop. It was the only way.

Some people are like that too, by the way. No matter what you do, they’ll fight. That’s their business, love. You can’t stop them fighting. Might as well let them at it, but don’t get involved.

You might wonder why I’m telling you this, Eleanor, but you see, I don’t want you to grow up without learning all these things, the way I did. It wasn’t my mother’s fault, mind. It was mine. I was a sickly child, although you wouldn’t think it to look at me now. As I sit at the table with my writing paper, I’m a few months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday and I’ve never felt better. But as a little one, I spent a lot of time in bed with fevers and coughs. My mother dosed me with a drink made of carragheen moss and lemon juice. A weak chest, was what the doctor said, although we didn’t go in much for doctoring. They were hard years, then, at the start of the century and there wasn’t money for doctors for the likes of us.

My mother once took me to visit an old man who lived way over the other side of one of the islands, to a house on the edge of the cliff, because he had the curefor a bad chest. Someone said his cure was mare’s milk and some herbs and a bit of the mare’s tail – it had to be a white mare, mind you – but whatever, it didn’t work on me.

The long and the short of it is that I didn’t learn how to cook alongside my mother. Most girls learned from watching their mother at the fire. I was wrapped up in the bed in the back room with only a few books for company. Agnes brought home books from Mrs Fitzmaurice’s house, and I read them all: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tom Jones, even.

And then one day I just grew out of the bad chest. My mother wanted me to go to school because I’d been there so rarely. Again, I had my head in the books and never so much as peeled an onion. Then Mam became ill and suddenly I was the woman of the house. Agnes was gone all week and back on Sundays, the lads were out working on the land, and the only person left to cook and clean was the one person who didn’t know how to do any of it.

But I learned, Eleanor, I learned. The hard way, I might add.

That’s what I want to tell you. About the joy of cooking and feeding the people you love. About the skill of making dinner for ten from a few scraps. There’s magic in cooking. It’s like prayer, you know. All those heads bent, hearts joined together. That’s why it works. It’s because of people coming together. Cooking’s the same.

The man in seat 3C sneaked a look at the young woman sitting beside him on the Heathrow to Dublin plane. She was small, fine-boned and wearing one of those funny scarves wound around her head, the way old ladies used to wear turbans years ago. He couldn’t understand it himself. Why would a pretty girl do that to herself, like she wanted to look ridiculous? A bit of blonde hair had escaped the scarf: it was old-style blonde, platinum, actually. Otherwise, she was very un-done-up, as his wife might say. No make-up, wearing jeans, a grey marl sweatshirt and trendy rectangular glasses. Yet despite all that, there was something special about her. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

‘Are you eating with us today?’ asked an airline steward. The male passenger looked up.

The steward was definitely talking to him but his eyes were on the woman in the window seat, consuming her, as if he hadn’t had a good look yet and wanted his fill.

‘Er, yes,’ said the passenger. He liked airline food, couldn’t understand why other people didn’t. Food was food. ‘What is it?’

‘Choice of beef stew or chicken with pasta,’ said the steward, deftly putting a tray down on the man’s fold-out table.

‘Beef,’ said Liam, thinking he might as well eat a proper meal as it would be at least nine before he got home.

‘Anything to drink?’ the steward murmured as he set a small tinfoil-covered package on the tray.

‘Red wine.’ Liam unveiled his dinner with anticipation. It was pasta.

‘Sorry,’ he said to the steward, ‘I wanted beef.’

But the steward had already put a small bottle of red wine on his tray and his gaze was now fixed on the girl in 3A.

‘I wanted beef?’ said Liam plaintively, but it was no good. The caravan had moved on.

Megan knew the cabin crew had worked out who she was, even though she always flew under her real name, which was Megan Flynn, and not Megan Bouchier, the name the world knew her by. Bouchier was her paternal grandmother’s family name, and all those years ago at stage school she’d seen the sense of dropping the prosaic Flynn in favour of the more memorable Bouchier.

She’d hoped the Flynn would give her some protection now, along with the blue silk scarf hiding her trademark platinum curls and the little Prada glasses with clear lenses, but it hadn’t worked.

When you’d spent the best part of six years appearing on television and cinema screens, and in magazines and newspapers, your face burned on to people’s minds the way the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list never seemed to do. Murderers and master criminals might go unrecognised, but land a starring role in a series of mediocre television shows and one standout British movie, and your face suddenly became as recognisable as the queen’s.

The dinner trolley was locked beside her row and at least three members of the crew were looking at her while pretending not to look at her, which was a difficult trick to pull off. Airline staff were good at that: charmingly treating world-famous people with polite nonchalance.

Today’s crew were reacting to her differently, though. Perhaps it was because she was no longer the adored young actress who’d been listed in Empire magazine as one of the ‘ten most promising actors of the year’ not that long ago. Instead she was the marriage-breaker pictured on the pages of every redtop in London alongside a photo of another actress, an older woman whose husband Megan was accused of stealing.