Cecelia Ahern - One Hundred Names

‘It must have been very difficult.’

‘It was.’

He was silent.

‘He was like that for five years. We didn’t speak a word for five years. Well, I tried but … but then it was his sixtieth birthday and I suppose having that come up and me not being there didn’t feel right. I wanted to get him something, a gift that he would be able to look at in his own time to understand what I was trying to tell him. So I hired Eva.’

‘How did you hear about her?’

‘She’d helped out another friend of mine,’ he smiled. ‘But that’s another story for another day. She stayed with us in Donegal for a week, because that’s what she insists on doing. It was the most awkward time for her but she was fantastic, she fit right in.’

Kitty had noticed that was what Eva seemed to do best.

‘My mother was convinced that she was my girlfriend, that I’d been “healed”, and she couldn’t have made Eva feel any more welcome.’

‘What about your father?’

‘He managed to sleep in the house when I was there, which was progress, but he made sure to be gone at meal times and throughout the day. My sisters bought him a motorbike – it had been his lifetime ambition to have one – but I wanted him to have a present that meant something more to me, to him. I thought, there’s no way in the world this girl can find the gift that can do everything I want it to.’

‘And did she?’

To her surprise Nigel shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t everything I wanted. It was far more. She made a photo album. She found photographs of his grandfather and his father working the farm, photos of him and his father working the farm, and then photos of him and me from the day I was born to the day I left the house. Photos of us together on the farm, of him pushing me on the tyre swing that he’d made for me, photos I’d never seen before. Dad had had to cut down one of the oak trees on the land. He’d been devastated about it because it was one of the trees we’d all played on as children, that he and his father had played on. It was the one with the tyre swing. But because of the heavy snow that year, it had suffocated the roots and the tree couldn’t survive. Eva had taken the chopped wood from that tree and used it to form the back and cover of the photo album. On the front she’d carved his name and birthday message from me. She charged me sixty-five euro for the carpentry and forty euro for the printing of the photos and stationery. That was the cost of the gift.’

‘Did it work?’

‘Mother said she heard him crying while he was looking through it when she’d gone to bed. He didn’t say anything to me for weeks and then out of the blue one day he called me.’

‘What did he say?’

Nigel laughed. ‘He started telling me about a problem he was having on the farm. Something about one of the cows in heat. I was just so surprised to hear his voice on the end of the phone, I could barely take in what he was saying. There was no mention of the five years we hadn’t spoken, it was like he’d picked up where we’d left off.’

‘So Eva is incredibly thoughtful.’

‘She’s more than that. She understood how my father thought, what exactly it was that upset him or disappointed him, what would move him, what would shake his belief. She lived with us and asked us questions and listened to our stories and she came up with a solution. My father is a sensitive man, but he’s a closed man, he would never show or discuss emotions, yet she found a gift that touched his heart.’

Kitty thought about that. ‘Okay.’

‘You get it?’

‘I got it.’

‘Good. Now don’t disturb me at work again,’ he said cheekily, and left her alone on Custom House Quay.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Kitty got off the bus in Kinsealy, North County Dublin beside the garden centre early on Wednesday morning. In the fields beyond, families gathered to pick strawberries and behind that field Steve’s father’s allotment was in full swing as the summer weather attracted garden lovers to their patches. All of the land belonged to Steve’s father: the garden centre, the strawberry fields, the allotment, and to most people’s surprise and frustration, for over a decade he had managed to fight off planners from buying the land to develop houses. Those offers had stopped in recent years but he had turned down millions, happy to keep his businesses going. He was a farmer at heart, as tough as they came, and he wouldn’t know what to do with twenty million in his bank account. His days were best spent toiling the earth, finding new gadgets for gardening. And snapping at people.

‘Thought you’d be hiding under a rock,’ he said to Kitty as she walked into the clubhouse.

‘Thought you’d be the best man to see about the right rock.’

‘The biggest one you could find, I’d say,’ he eyed her warily.

‘I’m open to anything,’ she smiled back, which further annoyed him. ‘How’s everything going? Business good?’

He looked at her and then back down at the paperwork on his desk. ‘If you’re looking for Steve, he’s rotavating allotment fifty.’

‘Steve is rotavating?’ Kitty laughed. ‘What does he know about rotavating?’

‘A lot more than you know about journalism, that’s for sure,’ he barked back.

That put her in her place.

‘He has a girlfriend, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘Katja.’

‘I know.’

‘Nice girl.’

‘I know.’

‘Does well at work.’

‘I know. She takes pictures.’

‘She took that one.’ He eyed her warily again and Kitty’s eyes moved up to the beautiful landscape of Skellig Rock off the coast of County Kerry on a misty day. It had the desired effect: the sheer beauty of it, and knowing Katja had taken it, made her uncomfortable.

‘Which is number fifty?’

He waved his hand at a map on the wall and ignored her.

Kitty made her way through the fifty-metre square patches and smiled at families in their gardens. Some were busy at work, others were sitting out in deckchairs, drinking from tea flasks, children running around, soaking one another with watering cans. Each plot had a different scene, which reminded her of the blackboard of specials in Brick Alley Café: ‘Every table has a story to tell.’

She found Steve in the allotment, alone with a rotavator, noise so loud he couldn’t hear her call out to him. She stood at the fence and watched him, his face etched in concentration on the soil ahead of him. To her surprise his skin was visible. He’d lost the leather jacket and instead wore a T-shirt and jeans, thick work boots on his feet. He was entirely covered in mud and grass, stains that she couldn’t recognise, his hair even more of a tangled mess than usual as he’d worked outside all day. Finally he lifted his gaze from the soil and saw her.

She smiled and waved. He turned the machine off immediately.

‘Kitty,’ he said, surprised.

‘Thought I’d come down and surprise you.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘A few minutes. I was watching your concentration face.’ She frowned and pouted, the same way his lips went when they were studying in college or when she caught sight of him in exams.

He laughed.

‘Dad greet you at the door?’

‘The best welcome committee a girl could have.’

‘Sorry about that,’ he said, genuinely concerned.

‘Don’t worry, I’d rather that than manure on my front door any day.’

‘They’ve done more?’

‘Just that. It’s stopped since Sunday, actually,’ she said, realising. ‘Maybe they got into trouble. And speaking of trouble,’ she made her way round the fence and inside the allotment, ‘I came here to give you this.’ She opened her arms and threw them around Steve, wrapping him so tight and squeezing him. She could tell he was shocked, his body stiffened, not comfortable with human contact, but she didn’t care, she needed to thank him for what he had done for her. Finally his body relaxed and he surprised her by wrapping his arms around her waist. It felt oddly comfortable. She hadn’t expected him to react that way, she had expected him to push her away but appreciate the gesture anyway, but now she found them both in the allotment hugging tightly and she was suddenly self-conscious. She loosened her grip and he did too, but he didn’t pull away from her. Their faces were close when they looked at one another. His blue eyes bored into hers. She swallowed.