Legacy
Legacy
‘I’D LIKE TO LEARN TO DRIVE,’ SHE TOLD HER father, so he took her for an hour each weekday to an industrial estate, and he put her behind the wheel and told her what to do, and she ground the gears and flooded the engine and revved uselessly in neutral, and slowly began to learn the right way to do everything. Within a month, he said she was ready to apply for her test.
It took two attempts to pass it, and when she did, they hunted around until they found an eight-year-old Beetle without too many miles on the clock. Not blue like Frances’, but orange. Like a ladybird, she thought, and there and then it was named.
Towards the end of August, two official-looking envelopes arrived at her father’s house with her name typed on them. She steeled herself for more rejections, but was wrong on both counts. In the first, an agent called Dorothy O’Connell asked for the opening and closing chapters of her book, and a more detailed synopsis than she’d already sent.
The second letter was from a solicitor named Robert Fitzsimons who told her he was representing the late Frances O’Shaughnessy, and who asked that she contact him at her earliest opportunity in relation to a bequest. A personal visit would be preferable, he said, so she rang and made an appointment, and drove to Galway on her own, slowly and carefully, trying to remember everything she’d been taught. Ring me when you get there , her father had said, probably every bit as nervous as she was.
She parked in Frances’ driveway, her car occupying the ghost imprint of the blue Beetle. She walked into the city and found the office she needed, where she was told that her aunt had willed her the house.
‘She also left this for you,’ the solicitor said, handing Ellen an envelope. Inside was a letter dated two years previously.
My dear Ellen,
I’m assuming I’ll go before you, long before you, and hopefully I will. I want you to have the house, because it makes sense in my head for you to live in it with your girls, and my brothers certainly don’t need it. You always felt right in it when you were staying with me. You may decide, of course, that you’d rather someplace more modern, or if you’re still in Dublin, you might not want to move west. It’ll be yours to do with as you want, and I won’t be back to haunt you if you sell it.
Thank you for all you did for me. I know I wasn’t the easiest to live with, but I enjoyed our time together, even if I didn’t often show it. You reminded me of me a bit – I’m not sure whether you’ll take that as a compliment or not, but I mean that you have a good heart, as I hope I do too.
I’ll leave it at that before I get boring. I wish you a long and happy life. As I write this you’re going through your troubles but I feel better times are coming for you, and as you know I’m never wrong.
Your loving aunt,
Frances
Dear Frances.
She showed the letter to her father. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘What should I do?’
‘Whatever feels right,’ he replied. ‘You know you’re welcome to live here as long as you want, but you can work anywhere, and you might like having your own place – and you know Galway from your time there. It was very decent of Frances. Think about it. Don’t rush to a decision.’
She thought about it. Next year Juliet would be moving to secondary school, and Grace would be turning nine. It would mean another upheaval for her girls, but against that they’d have their own house, with their own rooms, in a city that Ellen had grown to love while she’d lived there, and their grandfather would only be a drive away.
She would move, she decided, next summer. She’d tell the girls soon; she’d ease them gently into the notion of relocating, so they’d have lots of time to get used to the idea. She’d enrol them in new schools in Galway, and have everything set in place for the move.
She would also extend the house, if allowed. A two-storey extension, with a bigger kitchen leading into a sunroom at ground level and an extra bedroom above, possibly ensuite. They’d need another bedroom for guests, and the sunroom would be a useful teen space in later years. They’d still have plenty of garden.
Frances’ garden belonged to her now. She could hardly believe it. In latter years it had fallen into neglect, but she would resurrect it. She would take great joy in bringing it back to its former glory.
Her father got an architect friend to draw up plans, and she applied to Galway County Council for planning permission. Hopefully, with a year at her disposal, the building would be done by the time they were moving in.
She told the girls, making it sound as appealing as she could. ‘A house of our own,’ she said, ‘and a lovely garden.’
Predictably, Grace objected. ‘I don’t want to move again’ – so Ellen had to resort to bribery.
‘We could get a kitten,’ she said. Grace had pretty much adopted the bakers’ cat from next door, sneaking it regularly into her grandfather’s house. ‘You and Juliet could name it’ – and that did the trick.
She rang Leo to tell him. ‘It will be a good thing for the girls,’ she said, ‘to have our own place. It would mean you flying to Shannon or Knock airport instead of Dublin.’
She no longer loved him. She wasn’t entirely sure when this realisation had hit her: all she could say for certain was that she knew it to be true, and her overwhelming reaction was relief. It made it easier to be in his company.
He didn’t protest. He simply thanked her for letting him know, and asked her to pass on the new contact details after they’d made the move. He enquired about schools, and Ellen told him she’d already sorted them.
‘When they’re a little older,’ he said, ‘I’d like them to come and stay with me sometimes, during the holidays’ – and she had to say yes to this, although she still dreaded them meeting him and Claire together, and discovering that it was Claire who had taken him away from them.
Grace would no doubt attack Ellen for not telling them – Ellen was always her punchbag of choice – but Juliet would be hurt too that they hadn’t been told. It was so hard to know the right thing to do. She missed Frances, who would have known what the right thing was.
In the meantime, she sent the first chapters and synopsis of her book to Dorothy O’Connell. A month later, when she’d convinced herself that she’d never hear from the agent again, she received a reply by email.
Ellen,
I’d like to read the rest of your manuscript. Feel free to send it electronically at your convenience.
Best,
Dorothy
At her convenience. With difficulty she waited till the morning, and then emailed it off. She watched it loading slowly as an attachment, her two hundred and twenty precious pages, and imagined it landing in the agency, and Dorothy O’Connell printing it and reading it. She felt almost unbearably excited.
She told her father.
‘I can’t believe you wrote a book,’ he said. ‘That is some achievement, Ellen. All this time I thought you were writing ads. Best of luck with it.’
She emailed Danny with the news.
An agent reading your manuscript – how fantastic is that? My fingers are so tightly crossed I can’t eat my French toast, that’s how supportive I am. Keep me posted on EVERY development. Booker here we come.
In the days and weeks that followed she checked her inbox constantly, smothering disappointment when another day passed with no response from Dorothy. Finally, after six weeks, the message she’d been waiting for arrived. Things moved slowly, she was discovering, in the literary world.
Ellen,
Will you come to see me? I like your story and your voice, and I’d like to talk to you. Please ring my secretary to make an appointment.
Best,
Dorothy
She rang there and then, unable not to, and was given an appointment for the following Thursday, two days away. Two eternities away. To keep herself busy she mowed the lawn that didn’t need mowing, and cleaned the bathroom, and changed the sheets and pillowcases on every bed.
She washed the bed linen and hung it out to dry. She emptied the fridge and scrubbed it, and moved on to the oven, and vacuumed and mopped every floor in the house. She took in the laundry and ironed it, and after that she baked a chocolate cake, because she’d run out of things to do.
‘I love it,’ Dorothy O’Connell said. ‘It’s well structured and fresh in tone. It’s got plenty of emotion, which is always good, and you can certainly write. Women readers will identify with the subject – and it’s the kind of story that would translate easily to the screen.’
She was short, shorter than Ellen, and plump, and dressed in a pinstriped jacket and skirt, and her hair was cut tight to her scalp. ‘I’d be happy to represent you, if you’re agreeable.’
Represent her. Ellen was fairly sure that meant become her agent. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very agreeable. Thank you.’
‘Well done. I’ll have my secretary mail you my contract. Take a few days and let me know. If you’re still happy to be signed up, I’ll begin talking to editors. In the meantime, start thinking of a plot for your next – we’ll be chasing a two-book deal.’
A two-book deal. She walked all the way from Harcourt Street back to Rathfarnham, as euphoric as she’d been when Tim at Marketing Solutions had offered her a three-month trial. Once she signed along the dotted line – and she’d sign whatever arrived – she would have an agent. She would be a writer with an agent, and her agent would be talking to editors about her. So far, so good.
She thought about how happy Frances would have been at the news, how much faith she’d always had in Ellen. And Ben, whose suggestion it had been to write a book.
Maybe one day he would walk into a bookshop and see a book with her name on it, and recall what they’d had, and smile.