Cathy Kelly - Homecoming

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2010

FIRST EDITION

Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2010

Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007240449

Ebook Edition © JULY 2010 ISBN: 9780007411016

Version: 2019-01-04

To my husband, John, and to darling Murray and Dylan, with love

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 New Year

2 Eggs

3 Bread

4 Vegetables

5 Potatoes

6 Mushrooms

7 Imbolg, festival of light

8 Soup

9 Roasts

10 Feasts

11 Fish

12 Other feasts

13 Spring Equinox

14 Irish Moss

15 Holy Days

16 The Queen of Sheba

17 Food for the Turfcutters

18 The Dairy

19 The Wake

20 Oats

21 Herbs

22 The Homestead

23 Family reunions

24 Weddings

25 Beltane

Epilogue

Excerpt from The House on Willow Street

Prologue

Chapter One

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It didn’t take long for Eleanor Levine to unpack her things in the apartment in Golden Square. She’d brought just two suitcases on the flight from New York to Dublin. For a simple holiday, two suitcases would probably be too much luggage. But for the sort of trip Eleanor planned, she was travelling light.

When she’d arrived in the hotel in the centre of the city just two weeks before Christmas, the receptionist had just nodded politely when Eleanor said she might need the room for more than the three weeks she’d booked beforehand. Nothing shocked hotel receptionists, even elegant elderly ladies with limited luggage who arrived alone and appeared to have no due date to leave.

Equally, nobody looked askance at Eleanor when she gently turned down the invitation to book for the full Christmas lunch in the hotel’s restaurant and instead asked for an omelette and a glass of prosecco in her room. After a lifetime spent in New York, a city where doing your own thing and not apologising for it was almost mandatory, it was comforting to find the same behaviour had travelled across the Atlantic to the country of her birth. It wasn’t what she’d expected, truth to tell. But then, it was so long since she’d been home, she didn’t really know what to expect.

On the plane journey, still reeling from having left her warm, cosy apartment and her family behind her, Eleanor had thought about the Ireland she was about to see. She’d left over seventy years before in the steerage of a giant steamship, a serious eleven-year-old travelling to the New World with her mother and her aunt. Their belongings had fitted in a couple of cardboard suitcases, and her mother, Brigid, held the family’s meagre fortune in a purse round her neck.

Now here she was, returning with several platinum credit cards, a line of letters after her name and a lifetime of experience behind her.

Apart from Eleanor herself, only one thing had made both trips: her mother’s recipe book.

Now that she’d put her toiletries in the master bedroom’s en suite bathroom, and had unpacked her clothes and books, she took a white shoebox out of the second suitcase.

Her wedding shoes, white satin pumps from Christian Dior, had lived in the box for many years until she’d given them to her daughter, Naomi, for her prom night.

Now her grand-daughter Gillian borrowed them from time to time, wearing them with the full-skirted vintage dresses that had been all the rage during Mr Dior’s New Look in 1947. Like many modern teenagers, Gillian loved wearing vintage and often visited her grandmother proudly bearing something she’d paid fifty dollars for, and which was a replica of something Eleanor had thrown out twenty years previously. Fashion comes full circle, Eleanor thought, smiling.

Thousands of miles away from Gillian, Naomi and life in New York, Eleanor tenderly opened her box of treasures. None of them were treasures in any monetary sense. But as tokens from a life lived with great happiness, they were treasures indeed. There was a dyed black ostrich-feather mask from a Hallowe’en party, the silk ribbon still tied in a knot from the last time she’d worn it, half a century before. A single pressed rose was visible through the thin layer of tissue in which it lay. Ralf had given her the rose as a corsage one night at a ritzy white-tie affair at St Regis Hotel. Under the tissue, the dried-out petals were feather-light.

There was the shell-like gold compact she’d been so proud of when she was twenty-five, the gold paint tarnished now and the pinky powder nothing but a dusty remnant on the inside rim. There was red lipstick in its black-and-gold case. Manhattan Red. It had been all the rage in 1944, a colour to brighten lips and hearts.

There were love letters, too, from her beloved Ralf, some with humble elastic bands around them; others, bound with ribbon. He’d loved writing letters and cards. There was permanence in the written word, he’d believed. One was the letter he’d penned when their daughter, Naomi, was born, an incredible forty-five years ago.

‘I will love you and our daughter forever,’ he’d concluded. She knew it by heart. Eleanor’s fingers brushed the filmy folded paper but she didn’t open it. She couldn’t bear to see the words written in Ralf’s neat, precise hand. Perhaps she’d be too sad ever to read his letters again.

There were drawings and cards from her daughter, Naomi, so infinitely precious with their big, childish writing. Though it seemed so long ago since Naomi had written them, they still made Eleanor’s heart sing. Naomi had been such a beautiful-hearted child and she’d grown up into an equally wonderful adult.

The third important thing in her treasure box was another collection of writings: her mother’s recipe book. Originally, it had been covered with simple brown card but decades ago Eleanor had glued shiny Christmas wrapping paper on to the cover and now faded golden stars twinkled alongside burnished red and green holly sprigs.

The extra pages, added over the years, made the book bulky, and a lavender wool crocheted rope kept the whole thing tied together. It was all handwritten in her mother’s sloping italics, sometimes in pencil which had faded with age, sometimes in the deep blue ink her mother had favoured.