Chapter 16 #2
‘I’m looking forward to seeing her too. It’s strange, but I hadn’t thought about this place in years and then with my mother…
’ Heather said and she wondered if perhaps she should have made it her business to visit the old woman before this.
Until that moment, the notion had never entered her head; after all, Constance had been her mother’s friend – until she wasn’t any more.
With Dotty, even reaching out to her could be enough to cause a rift that could go on for months between them.
‘These last few days, I’ve felt as if Ocean’s End is drawing me back.
’ And she glanced back towards the largest of her cases, the one she’d packed her mother’s ashes in.
Perhaps she’d needed to get out of London more than she realised.
This journey felt as if it was inching her heart open wider with every mile she travelled.
‘I’m really looking forward to seeing her too,’ she said again and she smiled because she really was.
‘I worshipped her when I was a kid, she was such a force of kindness.’
‘Join the club,’ Finbar said. ‘Every kid on the island adored Constance, for all the years she taught at the local school, you won’t hear one bad word about her.’
‘She’s, ahem…’ Ros bit her lip, perhaps trying to pick out the right words.
‘Not as young as I remember her?’
‘Well, yes, probably and the house – Ocean’s End – it’s…’
‘I adored it as a child. It was so different to where we lived in London.’ It wasn’t just the house; it was Constance more than anything. It was having bedtime stories and hot chocolate in the little tent they’d made in the garden from old sheets hung across a broken fence.
‘If it’s a while since you’ve visited, it’s probably not quite what you remember,’ Finbar said softly. He’d turned off the engine, waiting while a farmer herded what felt like an unending line of sheep before them from a field on one side of the road to a similar field on the other side.
‘Constance showed me a photograph of you both when you were last here, the house was in the background and, well…’ Ros wavered.
Heather assumed she was trying to pick her words tactfully.
‘She’s on her own, you see, there’s no-one to help with the upkeep.
A place like that takes quite an amount of maintenance to keep it standing.
I don’t suppose that there’s the money to do much either so the house has fallen into… ’
‘Disrepair?’ Heather smiled. It was kind of Ros to prepare her for the worst, but she knew that too much time had passed for things to be as she remembered them.
Hadn’t she had the biggest reminder of that with her own mother passing away and having just had to empty out their little house in London?
‘Well, that’s a kind way of putting it, but I suppose, if I tell you that there was a crow’s nest being built in one of the bedrooms upstairs at one point, it might give you a better idea of what to expect.’
‘Oh, poor Constance,’ Heather said and she immediately felt guilty.
It was one thing to have accepted that there was little she could offer her own mother beyond the practicalities of keeping the roof over her head and some sort of comfort around her, but she knew, in her heart, all Constance would have asked for was an occasional phone call and she would have offered a listening ear and so much more in return.
‘I should have kept in touch,’ she said quietly now.
‘I think she would have liked that, but it’s never too late to start,’ Ros said.
‘Okay, we’re off again.’ Finbar pushed the gear stick forward and turned over the engine. They barrelled along the road and soon he flicked on the indicator and the jeep turned down into the familiar avenue leading up to Ocean’s End.
Heather watched as the house peeked over the land, revealing itself inch by inch as the jeep rumbled closer.
The chimney stacks, when they were visible, looked somehow more shrunken than they had before.
Heather remembered them as huge gleaming white beacons against blue skies.
Today they were little more than ashy squats, the blackest one puffing smoke towards a gloomy sky.
The house, as it emerged from the overrun garden, had not so much lost its lustre as fallen into the sort of shabby neglect that made you suspect it had been abandoned years ago.
‘Come on, she’ll have the kettle boiled a thousand times over waiting for us.’ Ros giggled as she flung open the doors and reached in to take out Heather’s bags.
‘Oh, Constance.’ It was all Heather could manage.
She was still sitting in the front of the jeep, hardly able to pull herself onto the path, so broken was her heart at seeing what the place had fallen into.
She waited for all of a minute until the front door pushed open and the familiar shape of Constance Macken emerged from the darkness beyond.
‘You’re here.’ The old woman stood a moment, smiling towards the jeep.
‘Constance.’ It was hardly a word, but when Heather breathed it, it felt as if every fibre in her being somehow relaxed. ‘Constance.’
She flung open the door of the jeep and leapt from it, onto the overgrown gravel path, racing towards the woman who had meant so much to her when she was young.
‘It’s been too long. I’m so sorry, I should have called or written or something…’ And then, tears were moistening her eyes as she buried her head in Constance’s shoulder and neck and she was overcome with a feeling of love and belonging such as she’d never really felt before.
‘Don’t be silly, I’m just glad you’re here now. Come on in, pet.’ All the while, with her soothing voice, it felt as if Constance was comforting Heather, with pats on her back and the very essence of lily of the valley coming from her clothes and even her hair.
‘I never thought, I never realised…’ What?
Heather knew what, she knew exactly what – she had missed this place, even though it had only been the stem of a memory, from the very root of her childhood, she had missed this place, as others miss a loved one.
‘I’m so glad to be back here, Constance, so glad.
’ And she knew, it didn’t matter if the whole house fell down around them, she was just glad to be here.
‘Don’t be fretting now, I have tea in the pot and sure, doesn’t that always make things better,’ Constance said in that lovely soft accent and Heather felt herself carried along between her bags and her baggage and Ros and Finbar and of course Constance into the welcoming embrace of Ocean’s End.