Maeve Binchy - Tara Road

'You'd never think we lived in a Republic with all this chat about princesses,' Ria would tease him.

'You know what I mean, it's all like a fairy tale,' Danny would say.

And in so many ways it was.

There was enough business coming in. It meant plenty of hard work but Danny was able for that. Barney was being a little more discreet about his involvement with him.

Ria was wonderful with little Annie. She even put her into the car regularly and drove her down to see her grandparents in the country. Danny's parents seemed very touched by that. His mother knitted the baby silly hats and his father carved her little toys. There had been no knitted hats and carved toys when Danny and his brothers were growing up.

He had a truly beautiful daughter, a house that someone of his education and chances could only have dreamed about. He had a wife who was loving and good to him.

Life had been very good to Danny Lynch.

Ria had never forgotten that Danny was not at her side when the baby was born, but she had heard the story of how Barney McCarthy's life and reputation had been saved. There was no way Danny could have known that the baby would come so early. Ria had very mixed feelings about the way Barney was being protected in his double life. She hated being a party to deceiving the kindly Mona McCarthy.

But all this took very much the back seat compared to her love for the new baby. Ann Hilary Lynch weighed seven pounds one ounce at birth and was adorable. She looked up trustingly at Ria with her huge eyes. She smiled at everyone and they passed her around from one to another, a sea of delighted faces, all of them thinking that they were special to the baby.

And all Ria's fears and worries that she had blurted out to her sister Hilary seemed to have been groundless. She was able to manage her baby, and Danny loved her more and more as time went on. He was a doting father and her heart was full as she saw him take his little daughter by the hand through the big wild garden which they had never tamed. There were too many other things to do and so little time.

She grew up a sunny child in a happy home, her blonde straight hair like her father's falling into her eyes.

There had never been proper pictures of Ria as she grew up. Often she had wished she had snapshots of herself as a toddler, as a ten-year-old, as a teenager. But apart from the occasional picture of a first communion, confirmation and a visit to the zoo her mother had not kept any real record. It would be different for Annie. Everything would be there, from the hospital to her triumphant arrival in Tara Road, her first Christmas at home… all the way along the line.

And Ria took pictures of the house too. So that they would all remember the changes, so that Annie would not grow up thinking things had always been luxurious. Ria wanted her to see how she and the house had in a way grown together.

The day before the carpet arrived, and then the day it was in place; the day they finally got the Japanese vase Danny had always known would be right; the huge velvet curtains which Danny had spotted at the windows of a house which was being sold at an executor's sale. They measured them and found they fitted exactly. Danny knew they'd go for nothing, it was always the same when distant relatives were selling up. They just wanted the place cleared quickly; there were massive bargains to be had.

Ria sometimes felt a little guilty about it, but Danny said that was nonsense. Things were only valuable to those who wanted them.

Most of their life was lived in the big warm kitchen downstairs, but Danny and Ria spent some time every day in the drawing room, the room they had created from their dreams. They delighted in finding further little treasures for it. When Danny got a raise in salary they went out and bought something else. The old candlesticks that were transformed into lamps, more glass, a French clock.

There was no sense that this room was kept to impress people. It was not a parlour as Hilary had so scornfully dismissed it. The heavy framed portraits that they bought for the walls were other people's ancestors not their own. But there was no pretence, they were just big pictures of people who had been forgotten by their own. Now they came to rest on Danny and Ria's walls.

Ria did not go back to work. There were so many reasons why it made more sense to be at home. There was always a need to drive someone somewhere, or pick them up. She did one day a week in a charity shop and another morning in the hospital helping to entertain the children who had come with their mothers because there was nobody else to mind them.

Danny's office wasn't far away. Sometimes he liked to come home to lunch, or even to have a cup of coffee and relax. Barney McCarthy came to see him there too. For some reason the two of them didn't meet in hotels as much as they used to. She knew the kind of food he liked to eat nowadays and always gave him a healthy salad and some poached chicken breast.

Ria would leave the men to talk.

Barney McCarthy often said admiringly in her presence, 'You were very lucky in the wife you got, Danny. I hope you appreciate her.'

Danny always said he did, and as the years went by Ria Lynch knew this was true. Not only did her handsome Danny love her; as the years went by he loved her more than ever.

CHAPTER TWO

Rosemary's mother said that Ria Lynch was as sharp a little madam as you'd meet in a day's walk. 'I don't know why you say that,' Rosemary said. But she knew very well what caused her mother's irritation. Ria was married, well married too. This is what Mrs. Ryan wanted for her daughter and she transferred her disappointment to attacking Ria Lynch.

'Well, she came from nothing, from nowhere, a corporation estate. And look at her now, mixing with Barney McCarthy and the wife and living in a big house on Tara Road.' Mrs. Ryan sniffed with disapproval.

'Honestly, you'd find fault with anyone, Mother.' Since she was a toddler Rosemary had been told to say Mother not Mam like other girls did. They were people with class, she had been led to believe.

But as she grew up Rosemary realised that there really wasn't much sign of classiness in their lives. It was much more in her mother's mind and dreams, memories of a grander lifestyle when she was young and resentment that her husband had never lived up to her hopes.

Rosemary's father was a salesman who spent more and more time away from a home where he never felt welcome. His two daughters grew up hardly knowing him except through the severe thin-lipped disappointment of their mother who managed to make sure they realised that he had let them all down.

Mrs. Ryan had great hopes for her two elegant daughters, and believed that they would marry well and restore her to some kind of position in Dublin society. She was bitterly disappointed when Rosemary's sister, Eileen, announced that she was going to live with a woman from work called Stephanie, and that they were lovers. They were lesbians and there would be no secrecy or glossing anything over. This was the 1980s and not the Dark Ages. Mrs. Ryan cried for weeks over it and agonised as to where she had gone wrong. Her eldest daughter was having unnatural sex with a woman. And Rosemary was showing no sign at all of landing the kind of husband who might change everyone's fortunes.

No wonder she resented the good luck of Ria, a successful husband, a house in a part of Dublin that was becoming increasingly elegant, and an entry to the best homes in the city because of the patronage of the McCarthys.

Rosemary had moved into a small flat as soon as she could afford to. Life at home was no fun at all but Rosemary visited her mother every week for a lecture and a harangue about her failure to deliver the goods.

'I'm sure you're sleeping with men,' Mrs. Ryan would say. 'A mother knows these things. It's such a foolish way to go on, letting yourself be cheap and easily available. Why should anyone want to marry you if they can get it for free?'