Cathy Kelly - The House on Willow Street

Like Danae, Belle was in her early fifties. She had been married twice and was long beyond girlish delight over bridal arrangements. It was a wonder the hotel did such good business in wedding receptions, because Belle viewed all matrimony as a risky venture destined for failure. The only issue, Belle said, was when it would fail.

‘The Witches of Eastwick were talking about you in the hotel coffee shop this morning,’ she told her friend. ‘They reckon you’re hiding more than pre-paid envelopes behind that glass barrier.’

‘Nobody’s interested in me,’ said Danae cheerily. ‘You’ve a great imagination, Belle. It’s probably you they were talking about, Madam Entrepreneur.’

Danae’s day was busy, it being a normal September morning in Avalon’s post office.

Raphael, who ran the Avalon Deli, told Danae he was worried about his wife, Marie-France, because she had an awful cough and refused to go to the doctor.

‘“I do not need a doctor, I am not sick,”’ she keeps saying,’ he reported tiredly.

Danae carefully weighed the package going to the Pontis’ only son, who was living in Paris.

If she was the sort of person who gave advice, she might suggest that Raphael mention his mother’s cough to their son. Marie-France would abseil down the side of the house on a spider’s thread if her son asked her to. A few words in that direction would do more good than constantly telling Marie-France to go to the doctor – something that might be construed as nagging instead of love and worry.

But Danae didn’t give advice, didn’t push her nose in where it didn’t belong.

Father Liam came in and told her the parish was going broke because people weren’t attending Mass and putting their few coins in the basket any more.

‘They’re deserting the church when they need us now more than ever,’ he said, wild-eyed.

Danae sensed that Father Liam was tired of work, tired of everyone expecting him to understand their woes when he had woes of his own. In a normal job, Father Liam would be long retired so he could take his blood pressure daily and keep away from stress.

Worse, said Father Liam, the new curate, Father Olumbuko, who was strong and full of beans, wasn’t even Irish.

‘He’s from Nigeria!’ shrieked Father Liam, as if this explained everything. ‘He doesn’t know how we do things round here.’

Danae reckoned it would do Avalon no harm to learn how things were done in Nigeria but kept this thought to herself.

Danae nipped into the back to put the kettle on and, from there, heard the buzzer that signalled a person opening the post office door.

‘No rush, Danae,’ said a clear, friendly voice.

It was Tess Power. Tess ran the local antique shop, Something Old, a tempting establishment that Danae had trained herself not to enter lest she was overwhelmed with the desire to buy something ludicrous that she hadn’t known she wanted until she saw it in Tess’s beautiful shop. For it was beautiful: like a miniature version of an exquisite mansion, with brocade chairs, rosewood dressing tables, silver knick-knacks and antique velvet cloaks artfully used to display jewellery.

People were known to have gone into Something Old to buy a small birthday gift and come out hours later, having just had to have a diamanté brooch in the shape of a flamingo, a set of bone-handled teaspoons and a creaky chair for beside the telephone.

‘Tess Power could sell ice to the Eskimos,’ was Belle’s estimation of her.

It was from Belle that Danae had discovered that Tess was one of the Powers who’d once owned Avalon House, the huge and now deserted mansion overlooking the town that had been founded by their ancestors, the de Paors, back in feudal times.

The family had run out of money a long time ago, and the house had been sold shortly before Tess’s father died. There was a sister, too.

‘Wild,’ was Belle’s one-word summation of Suki Power.

Suki had run off and married into a famous American political dynasty, the Richardsons.

‘Quite like the Kennedys,’ said Belle, ‘but better-looking.’

After spending three years smiling like the ideal politician’s wife, Suki had divorced her husband and gone on to write a bestseller about feminism.

To Danae, student of humankind, she sounded interesting, perhaps even as interesting as Tess, who was quietly beautiful and seemed to hide her beauty for some unfathomable reason.

‘Hello, Tess, how are you?’ asked Danae, emerging from the back room with her tea.

‘Fine, thank you.’ said Tess. She was standing by the noticeboard, clad in an elderly grey wool sweater and old but pressed jeans. Danae had only ever seen her wear variations on this theme.

Tess had to be early forties, given that she had a teenage son, but she somehow looked younger, despite not wearing even a hint of make-up on her lovely, fine-boned face. Her fair hair was cut short and curled haphazardly, as if the most maintenance it ever got was a hand run through it in exasperation in the morning. Despite all that, hers was a face observant people looked at twice, admiring the fine planes of her cheekbones and the elegant swan-like neck highlighted by the short hair clustered around her skull.

‘I wanted to ask if I could stick a notice about my shop on your board, that’s all.’

‘Of course,’ said Danae with a smile.

Normally, she liked to check notices to ensure there was nothing that might shock the more delicate members of the community, but she was pretty sure that anything Tess would stick on the board would be exemplary. The vetting system had been in place since some joker had stuck up a card looking for ladies to join Avalon’s first burlesque dance club:

Experienced bosom-tassel twirlers required!

Most of the ladies of Avalon had all roared with laughter, although poor Father Liam allegedly needed a squirt of his inhaler when he heard.

‘How’s business?’ Danae asked.

Tess grimaced. ‘Not good. That’s why I’ve typed up the notices. I’m sticking them all over the place and heading into Arklow later to put some up there too. It’s to remind people that the antique shop is here, to encourage them to bring things in or else to come in and shop. The summer season used to be enough to keep me going, but not any more.’ She looked Danae in the eye.

Danae kept a professional smile on her face. Although she didn’t know her well, she sensed that Tess was not the sort of person who’d want sympathy or false assurances that everything would turn out fine in the end, or that the antique shop would stay open when other businesses were going under because of the recession.

Instead, she said: ‘Chin up, that’s all we can do.’

‘That’s my motto exactly,’ Tess said, breaking into a smile.

Her large grey eyes sparkled, the full lips curved up and, for a moment, Danae was reminded of a famous oil portrait of an aristocratic eighteenth-century beauty, with fair curls like Tess’s clustered round a lovely, lively face. Someone who looked like Tess Power ought to have plenty of men interested in her, yet the most recent local gossip had it that her husband had left her and their two children.

Still, appearances could be deceptive. Danae Rahill knew that better than most.

When she’d shut the post office for the day, Danae headed home. She loved her adopted town. It was very different from the city where she’d grown up. After her father died, she and her mother had lived in a cramped three-room flat on the fourth floor of an old tenement building. They’d shared the bathroom with everyone else on that floor. Poverty had been the uniting factor in the tenements. People put washing and bags of coal on their balconies instead of window boxes.