Moving On

Frankie

Frankie

A SMELL OF PAINT LINGERED. SHE FLUNG OPEN windows as she moved through the rooms. The house felt familiar and different. She had to keep reminding herself that it belonged to her. Her very own home, her name added to the title deeds.

‘Can Grace and I have the new bedroom?’ Juliet asked.

Ellen looked at her in surprise. ‘You don’t have to share here, you can have a room each’ – but it turned out they liked sharing, and because Juliet rarely asked for anything, Ellen said yes. ‘Our own bathroom!’ Grace exclaimed, and Ellen thought it a small price to pay for harmony, and moved into Frances’ old room.

They spent the rest of the day unpacking, folding sweaters into drawers, hanging clothes, arranging shoes on racks and books on shelves, attaching posters – Westlife, Alicia Keys, Backstreet Boys – to the freshly painted walls with Blu Tack. When suitcases and boxes and rucksacks had been stowed in the attic, Ellen used the new oven to reheat the chicken casserole she’d brought from Dublin, and they had their first family meal in Galway.

‘Come soon again,’ she said to her father when he was leaving. ‘We’d love to have you stay anytime.’

‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he replied. He’d turned seventy-seven in March, and they’d found their way back to one another, and she knew she had Frances to thank for that.

‘You said we could get a kitten,’ Grace reminded her at bedtime.

‘We will,’ Ellen said, ‘but let’s get you and Juliet settled into your new schools first. You need to be happy there before we look for a kitten, because kittens won’t be comfortable in a house unless everyone is happy in it.’ She’d learnt a few coping strategies when dealing with her temperamental little daughter.

Two weeks later, both girls seeming content with their new schools, they went to the local cat sanctuary, where Grace picked out a round-bellied calico kitten that mewed loudly all the way home.

‘You need to think of a name,’ Ellen told the girls.

‘Frankie,’ Juliet said, ‘because of Frances, who gave us our house.’

Ellen waited for Grace to object, but instead she repeated ‘Frankie’, and the matter was settled. Maybe they’d already decided between them.

From day one the new arrival created havoc, clawing her way to the top of curtains, leaping onto kitchen chairs and from there to the table at every opportunity, leaving tiny but definite scratches on furniture legs, scattering litter far and wide every time she used the tray.

But from day one she was also Grace’s, choosing her lap over the others’ when she finally ran out of steam, sleeping at the end of her bed – a battle Ellen had fought and lost – and generally making no secret of her preference.

In the meantime, Ellen’s agent, Dorothy, was negotiating the terms of the publishing contract, and in October it finally arrived for Ellen’s signature. Publication date for the first book was set for June of the following year, the second two years later. The money offered sounded generous to Ellen, but she had no yardstick, no author friends to compare notes with. Payment would be doled out in stages, with the first cheque due on contract signing.

She flicked through the pages, seeing territories and rights and typescript , and other terms that meant little to her, but that presumably made perfect sense to Dorothy. She signed and returned it, and a week later was invited to meet her editor – who was, to her surprise, a man called Tony. She’d assumed a woman would handle what felt to her very much a woman’s book. ‘He’s good,’ Dorothy told her. ‘Your book will be in safe hands.’

Your book. The most thrilling words in the universe. Again she thought of Ben, and the possibility of his coming across the book somewhere.

Tony was in his sixties, and fond of bow ties. He told her these two facts in his deep rumbling voice within a minute of meeting her. He also told her he wanted to change the title of her book. ‘Are you attached to it?’ he asked, and Ellen said not particularly.

‘I’m thinking Mother and Daughter ,’ he said, giving a sweep of his arm, as if the title were there in front of him, in neon lights possibly. He looked like he might be fond of neon. ‘Your story is full of heart, full of emotion, and Mother and Daughter says that – and it’s simple and memorable, like all the best titles. Yours, forgive me, is a little dated, a little clunky.’

She forgave him. They were having lunch in a Michelin-starred restaurant in Dublin. It felt surreal, lunching with her editor. He told her, over roasted guinea fowl, that he’d been in the business for forty years, ‘since I was a callow youth’. He was given to pronouncements, accompanying them with a big smile that sent his face into a thousand happy creases.

He told her that her book was wonderful. A triumph, he declared, that needed only a few minor adjustments to be completely perfect. He predicted a film deal, and suggested that her second book would follow the fortunes of mother and daughter as their children grew up. ‘Readers adore sequels,’ he pronounced, smiling hugely over a bowl of sticky toffee pudding that he told her, with further glee, his doctor had strictly forbidden. By the end of the lunch, she fancied herself a little in love with him.

Over the months that followed, she revised her opinion. He had been sent to torment her, returning each version of her edits with a note that started by praising her latest submission, and continuing with just a few more tweaks . . . It took until the end of February for him to declare himself satisfied. ‘Onwards!’ he pronounced. ‘To copy-editing, which I feel sure will be plain sailing.’

Ellen’s heart sank. More editing – but the copy-edits proved far less traumatic than Tony’s, requiring her only to check the practical adjustments that had been made – correction of dates, elimination of commas, substitution of repeated words and the like.

By the end of March, Mother and Daughter was ready. ‘Ready for proofreading,’ Tony told her. ‘The final furlong. Nearly there now, won’t feel it till we’re done and dusted,’ so Ellen awaited the manuscript’s return yet again – the manuscript she now despised – and when it showed up she trudged wearily through it, telling herself it was really, definitely, the last time.

‘The cover!’ Tony announced, a week or so later. ‘Don’t you love it? Isn’t it perfect? So eye-catching on the shelves – it will jump out at readers!’

Was it perfect? Did it jump out at her? She liked it well enough, a line drawing of a woman leaning over a cradle – and of course the sight of her name beneath the title was wonderful – but it might not have been the cover she’d have chosen. She decided to trust Tony’s judgement – and Dorothy’s, who liked it too.

A photographer was summoned to Ellen’s house, and she was photographed in the sunroom and in the garden, and seated at the little writing bureau. ‘Just look natural,’ the photographer said. ‘Pretend I’m not here,’ and she grimaced her way through the ordeal and cringed at the results, but Tony was pleased, or claimed he was. ‘You look very lovely,’ he pronounced, and she forgave him the months of torture in return for the lie.

In June he organised a launch in a Galway bookshop, timed for a week after the official publication date, and posted Ellen a bundle of invitations to distribute. She sent them to everyone she could think of, including Henri and Louis in France, and Iris in London – and after some deliberation, Leo. She didn’t think the overseas invitees would come, but she thought they’d like to be asked.

They came. Everyone she invited turned up, and lots of people she didn’t know appeared too, in response to the poster the bookshop had displayed in the window. ‘People love a book launch,’ Tony told her on the night, resplendent in a spotted dicky bow and three-piece suit.

He gave a short, hilarious speech, littered with pronouncements and dramatic gesturing, and Ellen gave an equally short and far more nervous speech – basically thanking everyone she could think of, particularly Tony, and her agent Dorothy, also in attendance.

Everyone gave her gifts. Champagne and chocolates from Tony, a framed print of the cover from Dorothy, a gold locket from Henri and Louis into which she put photos of the girls. Her father gave her a silver bookmark on which he’d had inscribed To Ellen love Dad and the publication date.

Leo, keeping a low profile, gave her an old hardback copy of Great Expectations , her favourite Dickens. From America Danny sent more peanut butter cups, and a little rubber duck holding an open book. Wish I was there , he wrote. With you in spirit, as always xx. She’d mailed him and Bobbi one of her advance copies, and everyone they knew in California had read it, and allegedly loved it.

A week after publication, Mother and Daughter went to number ten in the Irish bestseller list, prompting another bottle of champagne from Tony and a beautiful bouquet from Dorothy. The following week it had dropped to number twenty, never to climb again, but one week in the top ten was enough, more than enough. Ellen clipped the list from the newspaper and slipped it into the pocket in Ben’s notebook.

I wrote my book , she told him in her head. I did it. I kept my side of the pact.

Waking up a couple of weeks later on the morning of her forty-first birthday, she made a mental list of things to be thankful for.

Two healthy daughters.

A mortgage-free house of their own, where she felt completely at home.

A book that had made the charts.

An agent and editor she liked and respected.

Financial security.

Equilibrium in her dealings with Leo.

Her father back in her life, and a new sister she’d grown to love.

Danny always there, removed geographically but in her corner at all times, and her truest friend.

Such a lot. So many blessings.