Moving On

Success

Success

A WEEK BEFORE THE PUBLICATION OF HER FOURTH book, Dorothy told her the publishers had made an offer for two more. New translation offers came from Austria and Sweden and Norway.

In August, after sitting her Junior Cert, Grace packed up for France. Following some municipal to-ing and fro-ing on Leo and Henri’s parts, and a pedagogical assessment that Grace had afterwards pronounced to be dead easy, she’d been accepted into the same lycée that Henri and Louis had attended, located in the centre of Nantes.

Ellen and Grace flew to France the day before the new school year began, and Henri met them at the airport. Although Ellen hadn’t seen him since her first book launch, they were in regular written and phone contact, so he didn’t feel unfamiliar. He was still the same lovely Henri, welcoming Ellen warmly, telling Grace that Esme was waiting for her at home.

Ellen stayed one night with them. They’d transformed Marguerite’s house, overhauling the central heating, laying thick rugs on the old floors and adding heavy lined curtains to the windows, in addition to the shutters that they’d retained. The sweeping view that Ellen loved was the same: she stood at her bedroom window and remembered Marguerite, and the thorny road they’d trod together.

In the morning Henri drove them to the school, which was small and made of red brick, with big wooden doors through which teenagers were streaming. Ellen got out of the car and made to walk in with Grace, but her daughter said, ‘I can do this on my own, Mum,’ so Ellen contented herself with a quick hug and stood, eyes brimming, as her strong, brave, obstinate, beloved daughter walked away from her.

Look back , she begged silently. Look back before you go in – and reaching the top of the steps, Grace turned and gave her mother a cheerful wave, and Ellen forced a smile and waved back. And Henri, standing beside her, put an arm around her shoulder and squeezed. ‘We will look after her,’ he promised, and she thought You’d better .

Grace’s letters – her first letters to Ellen – were full of news and full of joy. By Halloween she’d found a boyfriend called Luc – no qualms about telling her mother – who was in her class, and who called her tigresse – ‘which means tigress in English, in case you don’t know!’

Tigress. Dear God. Ellen rang Leo. ‘Did you know she has a boyfriend?’

‘I did. I met him last time I was there.’

‘Thanks for telling me.’

‘Don’t worry: I told him he’d better not sully my daughter’s virtue, or I’d be forced to shoot him.’

‘Leo.’

‘Ellen, this is why I didn’t tell you. He’s fine, very mannerly, and she’s happy. They’re sensible – and Henri is keeping an eye out. He says she’s flying it at school. You really don’t need to worry about her.’

Grace came home for Christmas, her hair cut into a bob, her fringe short and blunt. She wore eyeliner, and she’d ditched her beloved Diesel jeans in favour of a tartan miniskirt. ‘Two euro in a charity shop,’ she told Ellen. She looked like a young woman, not the child Ellen had accompanied to France just four months earlier.

She spoke in rapid French on the phone with Luc. She washed up after meals without being asked, and took Ellen’s shopping list to the supermarket, and readily agreed to surrender her bedroom to Juliet and Rosie, arriving on Christmas Eve. Ellen wondered if Grace had been kidnapped and a changeling sent back to Ireland in her place.

‘Do you want me to tell Grace about you and Rosie?’ she asked Juliet when they arrived, and Juliet said Grace already knew, and Ellen realised that her daughters were no longer the children she still fancied them to be, and it saddened her that the day would come when they no longer needed her.

Her father joined them for Christmas, as he did for all their Christmases in Galway. At eighty-four he was tired. Ellen could see more small deteriorations, more little signs of ageing, every time they met. She was glad Juliet hadn’t moved into student accommodation in second year, glad that she’d opted to remain in the house with him so he’d have someone at night. Rosie stayed with them most weekend nights, which seemed to work too.

‘Would you consider coming to live here with me?’ Ellen asked him one evening. They were alone, the three young people having gone to the cinema. ‘I need company, with the girls moved out.’

‘What about Juliet? I couldn’t leave her on her own in Dublin.’

‘Of course you could: she’s very responsible. And she could always ask Rosie to move in, if you were OK with that.’

‘I’d be fine with that, but you don’t want me here. I’d only slow you down.’

‘How would you slow me down? I’d still write during the day, and you could do whatever you wanted, and I’d feel safer with someone else in the house at night. Think about it.’

‘I will,’ he promised – but nothing happened until the following summer, when Juliet was in Spain with Rosie and her parents, and he fell in his back garden and lay there for almost a full day, unable to get himself up, before a neighbour spotted him from her window. Miraculously he’d broken nothing, but he was cut and bruised and shaken, and kept in hospital overnight for observation and tests.

A few days later Ellen drove him and his luggage from Dublin to Galway. Juliet and Rosie remained in his house, continuing to live there after graduation, with Juliet picking up the occasional illustration job, and painting murals on shop windows and children’s bedroom walls, and Rosie working in an artist’s co-operative. They’d never have afforded rent in Dublin, scarcely one salary coming in between the two of them, so the house was a blessing.

Iris, Ultan and their twin girls were frequent visitors to Ireland, dividing their time between Dublin and Galway. Ellen loved seeing the little girls toddling around the garden with their grandfather, the three of them moving slowly among the shrubs and flowers that Ellen loved to tend whenever she got the chance and the weather obliged.

Grace thrived in France, during which time Luc was replaced by Jacques. At eighteen she graduated with exam results that were more than good enough for her to study veterinary medicine, which she’d decided was the career for her.

‘I’d like to go to college in London,’ she told Ellen. ‘I could live with Dad and save on accommodation.’

‘As long as he’s happy to have you,’ Ellen replied, already knowing Leo wouldn’t object. He and Grace had always been close, their bond weathering their separations.

She wondered if Leo had met anyone after Claire. If he had, he was being discreet about it. She hadn’t seen him since both girls had moved out of home, but every so often he phoned her or she phoned him, just to keep in touch, and it was pleasant to hear his voice.

She’d always loved his voice.

She continued to write, one novel following another, the only interruption the occasional job coming in from Lucinda, Ellen having tapered off the rest of her freelance work. As long as Creative Ways needed her, she would make time for them. Every day after breakfast she would switch on her laptop and spend the morning putting words onto the screen while her father went for a gentle walk around the block or read the newspaper in the sunroom, or just sat and dreamed, the way old people did.

In the afternoons she’d meet friends or go shopping or potter in the garden, or curl up with a book until it was time to prepare dinner. Occasionally she was invited out on a date, and sometimes she accepted, and other times she found excuses.

In 2011 she turned fifty. Both girls came to Galway for the occasion, and she took them and her father out to an early bird dinner in a newly opened French restaurant, just so Grace could show off her fluency with the waiters.

Later that evening Joan phoned her to wish her a happy birthday. The sisters didn’t see a lot of each other, Joan busy with work and children, Ellen with her writing commitments, but they kept in touch by phone.

‘How’s everything?’ Joan asked. ‘How’s everyone?’ And Ellen filled her in, and then heard about Seamus’ promotion to area manager – ‘finally!’ – and twenty-four-year-old Ivan’s romance with a work colleague that looked like it might last.

‘Any love life yourself?’ Joan asked, and Ellen told her that she hadn’t time for a love life, and didn’t add that she continued to miss it. Maybe she’d already had her quota of men she might have grown old with; maybe Ben, Danny and Leo had been her three possibilities.

Happy 50th , Danny’s card said. Happy to report I’m still 49 . He enclosed a fifty dollar bill – a dollar for every year – and for his fiftieth a week later she sent him a dozen lottery scratchcards, and he returned one that had a €5 win. Buy yourself a new hat , he told her, and she put a colander on her head and emailed him a photo. A steal at €4.99 , she wrote.

Two years later, twenty-five-year-old Juliet was commissioned to illustrate a new children’s book series, which took months of work but which paid handsomely. ‘I feel rich,’ she told Ellen. ‘I’m going to splash out on a new hairdryer,’ and Ellen thought how little it took to make her happy.

For Grace’s twenty-first in August of the same year she asked Ellen to come to London. For the first time she hadn’t come home for the summer holidays, and Ellen knew why.

‘It’s time you met Tom,’ Grace said. The Tom she’d started seeing shortly before the previous Christmas, the Tom who had littered her communications to her mother ever since. Ellen knew he must be important. ‘Dad says he’ll take us all out to dinner. Juliet and Rosie are coming, and Iris and Ultan – and how about Granddad?’

‘I don’t think he’d be able for the flight, love, but I’ll say it to him.’

‘You go,’ her father said. ‘I’ll be fine here.’

Eighty-nine now, and soldiering on. Getting himself out of bed in the mornings, dressing in the soft tracksuit bottoms Ellen had got for him, his arthritic fingers no longer able for zips or buttons. Negotiating carefully the stairs he insisted he was still able for.

Ellen called to the house next door. ‘I’ll be away on Friday night,’ she said to Kay, a widow in her sixties, an empty-nester like Ellen. ‘I’ll leave a cold dinner for him, but could you think of an excuse to call around on Saturday morning?’

‘I could, of course,’ Kay promised. ‘And I might just find myself in possession of a hot apple tart on Friday night to share.’

‘Thanks Kay.’

They’d had keys to one another’s houses since the time Ellen had locked herself out and borrowed Kay’s extendable ladder to get in through her open bedroom window.

Leo looked good, and younger than his sixty-two years. Navy suit, white shirt, hair cut tight to his head, the dark sprinkled now with grey, a neatly trimmed beard a new addition. ‘A bit too busy,’ he said, when Ellen asked how work was going. ‘Looking at retirement next year.’

‘And then what?’

He gave her the smile that in the old days would have made her want to touch him. ‘Thinking about France.’

‘Moving there?’

‘Maybe.’ He nodded in the direction of Tom. ‘Looks like our baby has made her choice.’

Ellen regarded the fair young man seated next to Grace. ‘Early days,’ she said. ‘At her age, I didn’t know who I wanted.’ Or rather she had, but he’d gone off to see the world and left her behind.

‘At forty-five, I didn’t know who I wanted,’ Leo said, too low for anyone else to hear.

She looked at him. They were seated together at the end of the table. Forty-five. The age he’d been when he’d told her about the affair with Claire. The age he’d been when she’d left him for the second and final time.

‘I thought I did, but I was wrong,’ he went on. ‘I had what I wanted, but I couldn’t see it. I was a fool.’

She couldn’t argue with that. It should have made her happy to hear it, but it didn’t. ‘History,’ she said. ‘Water under the bridge’ – and back came the waiter with dessert menus, and the topic was dropped.

What might have been, she thought. The saddest phrase in the world. She would have been happy with him. They could have grown old together.