Chapter 13
Present
They’d been in school together, Blythe and Mae English.
Oh, they’d never been friends, Mae had always been one of those girls who scowled too much, sloped everywhere and slouched against walls outside of the main groups of girls that made up their year.
Blythe might have completely forgotten her, except for the fact that she’d left a year before Blythe, to have a baby.
Mae had married a man who was at least ten years older than her and never had a good word said about him, not even after he’d died of liver disease.
He left Mae with four kids and a mountain of money owed she had no way of paying back.
Blythe knew all of this, only because she’d been a lifelong member of the St Vincent de Paul charity on the island.
Mae was one of their most truly deserving cases while her kids were growing up.
So far as Blythe was concerned, Muffeen Mòr had not let her down, but Mae somehow always believed she was still owed.
Blythe was surprised when she stopped her to chat on her way to the post office.
‘Have you heard about these break-ins?’ Mae wasn’t a woman for small talk.
‘Break-ins? On Pin Hill?’ She checked that she’d heard the woman properly, after all, this was Pin Hill. Blythe couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a serious crime on the island.
‘It’s them bloody foreigners, I tell you, your sister is worse for encouraging them. Next thing you know, we’ll be overrun with them.’
‘I’m not sure I follow…’ Blythe said.
‘I told her, Blythe wouldn’t have them near the place, nor the old man, he’d have given them short shrift, I’m sure.’ Mae crossed her arms over her sizeable breasts and exhaled as if she’d just completed a particularly arduous task.
‘Rae has taken on new staff in the hotel, and they aren’t locals?’ Blythe was just about catching up, what with the vigorous head nods back towards the hotel, the dramatic eye rolls, and huffing and puffing. Mae had a habit of saying more between her words than with them.
‘You didn’t know?’ Mae laughed then, a cruel sound, because she loved having one up on other people. ‘Ah, well, probably she knew you wouldn’t stand for it, giving jobs to blow-ins instead of local hardworking lads.’
‘Ah…’ Blythe smiled. She’d had no idea. Business in the hotel must be better than she’d thought, if Rae could afford to take on a full-time employee. Still, she felt uneasy, she’d never been keen on outsiders. She didn’t trust them. Never had. ‘And you’re worried because…’
‘Are you not listening? Because of the break-ins. All over the village at this stage, four houses over the last week alone.’ Mae shook her head crossly, her anger was palpable.
‘Oh, it’s alright for the likes of you, out there, buried at the end of your fancy avenue, with security systems and all sorts probably, but the rest of us aren’t so lucky. ’
‘I wouldn’t wish a break-in on you for all the world, Mae, or anyone else for that matter,’ Blythe said, although, from the side-eyes Mae was giving her, she wasn’t sure that the same could be said in reverse.
‘And as for them taking over that cottage…’ Mae said, and Blythe had a feeling she was only warming up.
‘The new family?’
‘The Vals, that’s what they call themselves. Here we are and there aren’t enough houses for ourselves, and these strangers that haven’t any connection to the island at all are falling into the lap of luxury.’ Mae was still complaining.
‘Ah…’ Blythe said and of course, the whole country was up in arms because there simply weren’t enough houses to go around. The immigration crisis had only added to the problem. ‘The old McDaid cottage is hardly the lap of luxury…’
‘Hah, easy for you to say.’ Mae blew a long ribbon of cigarette smoke into the air. ‘But, compared to my little house, you should know it well, you called to it to poke your nose in often enough over the years…’
‘I never poked my nose in, I asked if I could help.’ Blythe was quick to correct her, because it was true. When Mae had four snotty kids, Blythe had arrived with food baskets and gifts that were meant to come from Santa Claus.
‘Anyway, I’m still there, only now I have two sons and one of their partners if you can believe it, and three grandchildren all bunking in with me. Can you imagine what that’s like in a three-bedroom house that you can’t swing a cat in at the best of times? How could any woman be sane, I ask you?’
‘That can’t be easy,’ Blythe said and she knew it was all she could afford to say, because Still Water House, after all her hard work, would probably be akin to Buckingham Palace to Mae’s eyes.
‘Don’t get me started,’ Mae said crossly and maybe, when Blythe thought about it, she could see why Mae always seemed to be so angry with life.
‘But there’s plenty of money to put people from the other side of the world into the best of accommodation, everything laid on probably too – food in their bellies and money in their pockets and my sons can’t even get a council flat on the mainland, never mind a house for my grandchildren. ’
‘You’re probably not the only one feeling like that,’ Blythe said, because of course, there were plenty of other people across the country in similar predicaments. Hadn’t she seen it often enough on the evening news?
‘Course I’m not. Plenty of people on the mainland are in the same boat, between these foreigners from God knows where and then all those crowds running away from war on the edge of Europe.
Sure, we’ll all be living in tents before we know it.
It’s time to put the foot down, let them know we’re not having it. ’
‘Well, I’ll call into the hotel and see what Rae has to say about it all.
’ Blythe smiled. The sun had come out and they had moved to the shade of a huge old sycamore.
Occasionally, warm light dappled through the canopy of leaves overhead and Blythe felt it trickle across her nose and eyelids.
She had closed her eyes, turned to face upwards.
‘And, it’s not just the houses that are the problem,’ Mae cut into her thoughts again.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the jobs. There’s no jobs for my boys in Muffeen Mòr. I mean, they’ve asked around, but no one wants to give them a job. But they’ll bend over backwards for these strangers.’
‘I’m quite sure that’s not the case,’ Blythe said.
‘Oh, are you now.’ Mae poked her in the side with a sharp elbow. ‘What do you call that then?’
‘Huh?’ Blythe managed, because for a moment, she couldn’t quite believe her eyes.
In front of the hotel, a young – quite obviously foreign – man was shining up the brasses on the front door.
Blythe felt that familiar feeling of terror rise in her.
She couldn’t help it. Even all these years later, it was there, just under her skin, that suspicion of strangers.
‘See what I mean? Your uppity sister won’t give my Jason a job, but she has one if some blow-in arrives knocking on her door.
’ With that, Mae threw down her still-lit cigarette butt on the ground, stubbed it angrily with her foot and marched away like a woman on a personal mission.
Blythe couldn’t blame her for being angry, it was a disgrace to think that Rae would give a job to an outsider over a local and she’d damn well let her know it, too.