Cathy Kelly - The Honey Queen

He loved her beautiful shop when she showed it to him and said he and his brothers would give a hand with the painting. Due to lack of funds, Peggy had been planning to do it all herself.

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said, instinctively, aching inside at how hurt he looked.

In moments of clarity, she wondered how the hell had she attracted this gorgeous, decent man? His family sounded wonderful. The townhouse where he lived with his two brothers was only half a mile away from the home where they’d grown up in St Brigid’s Terrace, just round the corner from Peggy’s cottage. He and his two brothers often went home to Mum for Sunday lunch, he told her. On odd occasions – well, once a week, actually, he said ruefully – their mum turned up at the bachelor house to tut about the state of the place and do his brothers’ washing.

‘I keep telling her not to, but she insists on doing it.’

‘You do yours?’ she asked, thinking how utterly lovely this all sounded.

‘As I keep telling Brian and Steve, if they’re old enough to vote, they’re old enough to know how to work the washing machine,’ David said.

He mentioned, too, that he had a sister, Meredith.

‘She lives in a pretty swanky apartment in Dublin,’ he said, ‘and runs an art gallery with someone else. None of us get to see her much.’

‘Oh.’ The words slipped out: ‘Do you not get on with her?’ Meredith seemed to be the one flaw in the Byrne family.

‘No, I get on with her fine,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘She’s changed, that’s all. I think she got caught up caring about the wrong sort of stuff. Money, labels – you know, that type of thing. I miss her, actually, but she’s moved on from us.’

Peggy detected a flash of something in his eyes: not rancour but sadness.

Though their own children had all flown the nest, his parents still had a teenager in the house: David’s cousin Freya. His face lit up when he talked about her.

‘Crazy like a fox,’ he said. ‘Knows everything. Fifteen going on thirty-seven. Myself and the lads keep an eye on her, because there’s no knowing what she might get up to next.’

‘Why does she live with your mum and dad?’ Peggy asked, not wanting to sound too much like a grand inquisitor but utterly fascinated all the same. Hearing about the family was like basking in the glow of their loving normality. Besides, asking questions was a great way of distracting people from asking about her, and the more she knew David, the more she didn’t want him to know her truth.

‘My dad’s youngest brother, Will, died in a car crash and his wife, my Aunt Gemma, had a nervous breakdown. I don’t know what the psychiatrists called it but that’s what happened,’ David said sadly. ‘She never recovered from his death. Not that anyone would recover from that,’ he added, ‘but afterwards, she literally ceased to function. She’d always been an anxious person but she simply went to pieces. Freya was their only child and after a while, when it became apparent that Gemma wasn’t functioning, Mum stepped in and said Freya couldn’t live like that any more. Gemma would forget to buy food, forget to cook dinner, forget to get Freya from school, that sort of thing. So Freya’s with Mum now and it’s brilliant. She keeps Mum young, Mum says. We all get a great kick out of her. Gemma’s doing much better now, too. She can’t work, though, but she sees Freya all the time, things are good there.’

Peggy loved hearing about his family. Apart from poor Aunt Gemma, they sounded nice and normal: the sort of family she’d love to have been a part of. That’s when she knew the fantasy was over and that she had to listen to the voice telling her she should end it. Normal wasn’t for her. She’d screw up normal. She was probably a lot more like Aunt Gemma than anyone else in David’s grounded family. Not that she was likely to forget to buy food or cook – Peggy was incredibly organized and seldom forgot anything – but she was far from normal.

‘Now you know all about me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you, about your family.’

Peggy had a well-rehearsed story about a small family who lived in a bungalow in a town in the centre of the country: a gentle mother who loved needlework and knitting, and a father who was a mechanic. He’d come from a farming background, while her mother had been born in Dublin’s city centre.

‘No brothers or sisters, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’d have loved to be part of a big family like yours. I’m jealous. I was such a tomboy when I was younger, climbing trees with the boys, having fights!’

Normally, people lapped up this story and laughed at the notion of Peggy getting into fights. It was a perfect distraction and nobody had ever questioned the truth of it. Until now.

David’s brow furrowed.

She looked at the face she wanted to touch, so she knew each contour and felt a yearning gap inside. It had to end and soon.

‘I can’t see you having fights,’ he said finally. ‘You’re too gentle. You’re joking, surely?’

Peggy summoned up a smile in the middle of her misery. ‘No, I was a tomboy, honestly.’

‘Apart from the knitting and sewing, then,’ David said, still looking as if he didn’t believe her.

‘Oh, yes, apart from that,’ Peggy agreed.

He was too clever, too able to see inside her, she thought. How had he got inside her head so quickly?

In bed that night, unable to sleep, she practised different ways of telling him it was over: ‘I’m too young, David, too young for the picket fence and the two-point-five children.’

Even in her head, the mental David had an answer to that argument: ‘How do you have two-point-five children? I’ve always wondered.’

She’d never left anyone properly before. She’d had dates and boyfriends over the years, but nothing serious, nothing that couldn’t be undone by packing up and moving on. She had no experience of how to handle this.

Two days later, she was so preoccupied trying to come up with a way to end it that she somehow found herself agreeing to go back to his house for dinner on their third date.

‘The lads are out for the evening – I almost had to bribe them. They want to see this woman I can’t stop talking about,’ he told her on the phone.

Peggy beamed at the thought of David talking about her.

‘And I cleaned the house and told them that, if they messed it up, I would destroy Brian’s electric guitar and put Steve’s precious football jersey, the one signed by the Irish team, into the wash.’

They both laughed.

‘You’d never do that,’ Peggy teased.

‘What, you don’t think I can be cruel and dangerous?’ he said, laughing.

‘No,’ she said quietly.

How easy it would be to let herself fall further in love with this man and spend a lifetime with him. It seemed there would be no arguing, no fights, none of that constant tension in the house. But what if he changed? That’s what men did, and you had to know how to deal with that. Peggy already knew that she couldn’t. She was better off on her own.

‘What happened there?’ he asked, picking up on the change in her voice. ‘You sounded so sad. Tell me, please.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I can’t.’

‘There’s a lot about you, Peggy Barry, that I don’t understand. Yet,’ he added.

‘Gosh no, I’m very boring,’ she said lightly. It was her standard response and she’d used it during their first dinner, but she knew he wanted to know more now and that her made-up family background wouldn’t keep him satisfied for long.

‘Hey, Ms Knitting Shop Owner and future entrepreneur of the year,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you’re boring for one moment, but if that’s the story we’re running with right now, then being allegedly boring hasn’t turned out too bad for you.’