Chapter 8
8
Eventually, the universe threw me a bone…
“Did I wake you?” Rachel sounded surprised. “It’s gone eleven.”
“Aaah. No, no, not at all,” I lied, unconvincingly. “Awake for ages.”
As I sat up, a slice of sharp March sunshine cut through the gap in the curtains, nearly blinding me.
“Sorry for ringing,” Rachel said. “But would you be interested in some PR work? Urgent.”
“Um, sure .” My mouth was dry. Hope, it’s a terrible thing. “What is it?” My parched lips made popping sounds.
“Tell you when I see you. You’ll get paid. And you’ll reconnect with a blast from the past. So get up, get dressed, Brigit and I are on our way.”
Still dazed, I sat on the edge of the bed, knocking a couple of books to the floor. Unsure of my next move, I could…brush my hair? Beg Margaret to bring me a latte?
I hung my head—then, aghast, thought, Are those my feet? Unrecognizably unkempt, their unvarnished state would have got me an angry-not-disappointed work warning a few short months ago.
A soft knock at the door announced Margaret. In her hand was a latte. For me.
“How did you know?” I was grateful but confused. I’d never had her down as a mind-reader: she was far too matter-of-fact. But now that she’d officially “menopaused,” perhaps witchy skills were sprouting in her, along with—and these are Margaret’s words, not mine—her “Elvis-in-Vegas style sideburns.”
“Rachel texted. Said you needed caffeine.” She moved into my bathroom, switching on the shower. “She told me to do this too. Get in. Wash your hair.”
Meekly, I obeyed. There was a relief in being given orders.
—
Margaret was waiting, plate of toast in her hand, when I came out, wrapped in a towel. “Rachel’s coming over?” she asked.
“And Brigit.”
“How’s Queenie?”
Brigit’s thirteen-year-old had been in and out of hospital thanks to a series of inexplicable falls.
“On the mend,” I said. “Finally. So Rachel said something about PR work, it must be for Brigit.”
Margaret’s smile was radiant. Nothing frightened her more than unemployment, even other people’s. “It must be to do with her feathery-strokery retreat!”
Oh, I hoped so.
Brigit, like Rachel and me, had once lived in New York. Manhattan had suited Brigit: shiny, hungry people, designer sample sales and impossible-to-access parties. Irish men were not for her—until she met Colm, a man in constant motion, talking fast, laughing often, keen to hear your opinion on movies, design, art, politics, telling you about what he’d seen or read or eaten.
Together they became that couple—cool but never try-hard. After watching a documentary about the rock-hewn churches in Lalibela, they went straight out to a travel agent (different times) and bought flights to Ethiopia. They were the first people I knew whose home featured taxidermy. By the time a squirrel riding a penny-farthing had become a commonplace living-room fixture, they’d long moved on.
The first big surprise was that Colm was originally from a farm in the wild beauty of Connemara, where the nearest town, Maumtully (population 1,271), was a four-kilometer drive on bad roads. The second big surprise was that he persuaded Brigit to live there.
Even then—by leaving city life behind, a decade before it really caught on—they were ahead of the curve.
To house themselves and their—eventual—four children, they designed and built a home of glass and local stone, so beautiful that, on departure, their many visitors were often in a pink-cheeked fury, threatening to burn their own shithole of a place to cinders.
Brigit, always enterprising, converted an old shed into a charming Airbnb; it won an award. Then she repurposed an unused barn into a light-filled studio which hosted yoga weekends and artists’ workshops. Its reputation spread so quickly that Brigit overhauled a second adjacent barn and linked the two. Next thing, one of the yoga bunnies wanted to get married there, so now the yoga/painting devotees were in frantic competition with the wedding hopefuls over availability.
Then the pandemic arrived. Six short weeks into it, both of Colm’s parents died. Colm inherited their adjoining farm, fifty scenic but otherwise useless acres. During the long, tedious hours of lockdown, he and Brigit began playing around with ideas for a high-end retreat, called Dolphin Cove.
Because they’d never believed it would become a reality, their imaginations went nuclear, conjuring up a next-level escape. Accommodation, deftly integrated into the landscape, would be in glass and stone cottages, similar to their own home. Views would be stunning, the interiors intuitive and the prices high.
Food would be fresh and simple. (Or exotic and complicated. I wasn’t sure what their latest thinking was.) No gym or swimming pool because nature would provide: guests could immerse themselves in the bracing Atlantic and return ecstatic. Instead of a thirty-minute sprint on a treadmill, they and a wise guide would climb a local mountain, occasionally accompanied by hares, sheep, maybe even hailstones. Upon their return, they’d be wrapped in a khullu blanket, seated by the fire, given a hot whiskey and insist they’d never felt so joyous.
Massages and yoga were a given. Also on the menu were sound therapy, psychics-on-call, an adult-proportioned playground, “managed boredom,” digital detox and star-gazing, alongside more hardcore wellness stuff, such as rebirthing and Ayahuasca ceremonies.
Their tag line was Give us your body and we’ll give you back your soul . I wouldn’t have minded six months there myself.
Somehow—probably because they knew all kinds of people—their lockdown hobby came to the attention of venture capitalists. Next thing you knew, Dolphin Cove got green-lit, a ton of investment money showed up and construction began.
Margaret said, “It would be great if you got some work.”
“Doing what, though? They’re still about a year out from opening, I thought.”
“Eat your toast,” Margaret said as I got dressed. “And tell me how you are today.”
“I feel like a blank space,” I said. “I’m not the person I was but I’ve no clue who I’m going to be.”
“Ah, yeah.” Margaret nodded. “I used to feel the same.”
I perked up. “Tell me!” I so enjoyed our morbid little chats.
“For years I loved being a mother but when the kids became teenagers I realized they weren’t going to be mine for much longer. The truth is they never belonged to me, but I forgot. Then I felt…like the hole in the doughnut.”
“But you had Garv. And your job.”
“I loved Garv, I still do, but even now I wonder if we’ll be enough for each other when the kids leave? As for my job—I don’t hate it but…So it was up to me to find a new purpose. And I didn’t know where to start. All I knew was I didn’t want to start any of the mad stuff women over fifty do.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, you know. Going swimming in the sea in the nip with a hundred other menopausal women. That seems to be a thing. It’s not so much that my body has gone to hell. It’s the compulsory jolliness which would destroy me. Dancing around on the freezing sand, our nipples bouncing around our knees, yelling, ‘We’re old and saggy and we don’t care’! While some mortified nineteen-year-old lad from the local paper takes our photo.”
I could see her point.
“He’d make us run towards the sea so he could photo us from behind. A hundred old bums running towards the waves.” She shuddered. “Or having an affair? Anna, no. The thing I realized is that everyone has times when we’re forced to stop. To pause and take a look around, so we can see what we have, what we might want…It’s a good thing.”
“Were you always this wise?” (Walsh family shorthand had Margaret as “good with money” and “very practical.”)
“You know, I might have been,” she said. “But anytime I tried, everyone started yelling, ‘Shut up and tell us about savings accounts.’ Anyway! At the moment you’re an empty glass but in time you’ll fill up again. But make sure it’s with the right stuff because we only get one go. People spend their lives in the service of others or afraid to take what they want. I spent years putting my children first and I forgot all about me.”
“Honestly, Margaret, you’re blowing me away here. You’re really good at this!”
“Ah, I’m not.” She seemed delighted. “Rachel’s the enlightened one.”
“Not in the last few years. Too busy floating around on a cloud of Luke Costello-scented hormones. She’s impossible to get sense out of.”
“Helen?”
“ Enlightened? HAHAHAHAHA—”
“They’re here,” Holly called up the stairs. “Even Luke!”
“Don’t look,” Margaret yelled.
“I don’t know how not to!”
Luke Costello was dark and devastating, his jeans worn just that smidgeon too tight. His shady secret—that he was essentially a nice, uncomplicated man—dialed down some of his crotch power. Nevertheless, being around him, trying not to stare at his region, could drain the life from the strongest person.
Holly, a very innocent eighteen-year-old, found it tougher than most.