Chapter 24
‘Good morning, Patricia,’ Bronagh greeted her, perplexed as to what was going on as she quickly tip-tapped into the computer. It confirmed what she’d thought: their guest wasn’t due to check out until Friday morning. ‘Is everything alright?’
‘Yes, thank you, but I’ve decided to go home early.’
Bronagh was alarmed by Patricia’s obvious despondency. ‘Was everything alright with your room?’
‘Yes, it was very comfortable, thanks, but things haven’t worked out like I’d planned.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.’ It wasn’t Bronagh’s place to press for further details, as much as she’d have liked to.
She’d sensed there was something buried beneath those layers of jewel-like colours when Patricia had arrived.
Now she wouldn’t get the chance to find out what.
‘Would you like me to call you a taxi to the airport?’
Bronagh’s assumption that she was flying back to London, where she’d said she lived, caused Patricia’s stoic resolve to falter. Her eyes filled and her lip trembled as she let go of her suitcase and dipped her head.
When Bronagh saw her shoulders shaking, she sprang from her chair. ‘Oh dear.’ She stepped out from behind her desk and took charge, putting an arm around the sobbing woman. ‘I think a cup of tea is in order.’
Patricia allowed her to steer her through to the guest lounge and settle her on the sofa.
Bronagh popped the kettle on and, telling Patricia she’d be back in a tick, hurried through reception to the stairs leading to the dining room and kitchen below. ‘Freya,’ she called down them. ‘Would you mind the front desk for me for a few minutes?’
‘Coming.’
Then, pausing only to pick up the box of tissues she kept on her desk, she returned to the lounge, closing the door behind her. ‘Here we go.’ Bronagh set the tissues down on Patricia’s lap.
Red-eyed and snivelling, Patricia gave her nose a good blow and dabbed at her eyes. She was considerably more composed by the time Bronagh handed her a cup of tea.
‘I popped a sugar in there too. Sugar always helps, I find.’
She hovered, waiting to see whether Patricia wanted her to stay or not. Should she fetch her custard creams? No. She’d wait and see how the land lay. ‘You’ve no need to tell me what’s upset you, like. But I’m here to listen if you’d like to.’
O’Mara’s guest offered a watery smile of gratitude, and the cup rattled in its saucer as she set it aside. ‘I’m going home to Ranelagh this morning, not London, Bronagh, so I won’t be needing a taxi to the airport.’
Bronagh took that as her cue to sit and did so in the adjacent armchair.
‘I thought you mentioned London was home. Do you keep two homes?’ She and Lenny had been doing that this last while, she supposed.
It was a coincidence that the house she was going to view this afternoon was in Ranelagh too, but now was not the time to mention that.
Patricia made an indecipherable sound before saying, ‘I did, and no, I don’t.
I haven’t visited London in at least fifteen years.
I’m a fraud, Bronagh. I’m not a woman with an exciting career living in London.
I volunteer in a charity shop and look after my mam, who’s poorly, in Ranelagh.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Ranelagh.
It’s a grand place to live, but it’s not where I thought I’d wind up when I was young.
I love my mam too, and I’d not have anyone else looking after her. Don’t get me wrong.’
Bronagh didn’t understand. Was she unwell herself, she wondered?
She’d had a taste of that hidden sort of illness with Lenny’s sister Joan who, when they’d first met, had been living with the secret shame of being a hoarder.
It wasn’t Joan’s fault; she wasn’t well, and it had taught Bronagh that sickness wasn’t always of the body but could be of the mind too.
It needed to be treated with just as much kindness and care.
‘But why would you feel you needed to say you were those things, Patricia?’ she probed gently.
‘I don’t know.’ Patricia looked very small as she shrugged her shoulders, her lips trembling. ‘That’s not true either. I do. I know perfectly well. It’s just it sounds completely mad saying it out loud.’
‘I’m not in the business of judging people,’ Bronagh said softly. ‘And you know the saying: a problem shared is a problem halved. I’ve always believed that to be true.’
Patricia took a deep breath. ‘The only way I can explain it is this. I wanted to be that woman who arrived here yesterday with her ridiculously overpacked suitcase. I wanted to have the interesting job and life in London. Or I thought I did. I don’t know what got into me.
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with the life I have.
’ The tea was growing cold and she paused to take a sip.
‘The thing is, more than anything growing up, I wanted to be a costume designer.’
‘I wanted to be an air hostess.’ Bronagh smiled. ‘That always seemed such a glamorous sort of job. All the girls at school wanted to be air hostesses, hairdressers or film stars. Why a costume designer?’
Patricia told Bronagh about her childhood trip to the theatre and the wonder it had inspired, along with her lifelong passion for sewing costumes and making her own clothes, even if her creations had been limited to fancy dress and outfits for her children.
‘It didn’t work out, though, and I suppose I wanted a glimpse of what I might have been like if it had. ’
‘Sure, life has a habit of doing that. You soon realise it has its own path for us to go down, and it’s not always the one we’d have chosen.’ Bronagh thought about her own past. ‘You know, we’ve something in common, you and I.’
‘Do we?’ Patricia clutched the wad of tissues, smudges of mascara beneath her eyes as she looked at Bronagh, her brows knitted together.
‘We both look after our mams. Mine’s been poorly on and off for most of my adult life.
I never moved out of our family home so I could be there when she'd go downhill. She needed me. There was a time, when I was young, I thought I’d marry a fella I was madly in love with.
Not that I regret him breaking things off now.
Not at all. It wasn’t meant to be because I’m going to be marrying the love of my life soon.
He took a long time to come along, but it was worth the wait.
Back then, though, when Kevin—that was the lad’s name—broke off our engagement, it was like my world shrank to working here and caring for Mam.
Like all the possibilities I’d seen for my future vanished along with him. ’
Patricia nodded slowly. ‘I made my own choices early on, but they didn’t feel like my choices.
My parents had my future mapped out. They didn’t see costume design as a sensible line of work and, back then, you listened to your mam and da.
I went along with them and became a secretary, eventually marrying the man I worked for.
Not that I’d change things either, although David left eventually and our children have their own lives now.
I might have branched out then, but Mam became ill.
With Da gone and me being an only child living on my own when she got really bad, it felt right to move her in with me.
’ Patricia’s sigh was weighty. ‘They’re no good, though, are they?
The could-haves, would-haves and should-haves. ’
‘No. They’d drive you mad right enough.’ Bronagh nodded. ‘What does your mam have?’
‘Late-onset lupus. It’s a disease that sees the body attack itself.’
‘An autoimmune chronic illness.’ Not a question, but a statement.
Patricia blinked in surprise at Bronagh’s perceptiveness.
‘My mam’s got ME and rheumatoid arthritis now too, but the ME left her with debilitating fatigue and very little energy. We fought a long battle to get that diagnosis and an explanation for why she was sick. Over the years, it’s brought a raft of associated illnesses with it too.’
A glimmer of understanding about what the other’s parent suffered passed between them.
‘I suppose you’re wondering how I wound up here at O’Mara’s?’
‘You don’t have to tell me another thing, Patricia. Not if you don’t want to.’
‘I’d like to, if you’ve time to listen.’
Bronagh thought about Freya minding the front desk. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t intrigued to hear the rest of their guest’s story, and sure Freya could manage, so she said, ‘I’ve all the time in the world.’
Patricia glanced around the guest lounge at O’Mara’s, thinking how strange it was that she should be opening up like this for the second time in such a short span.
There’d been plenty of opportunities to do so over the years, with the ladies she worked alongside at the charity shop always ready to lend an ear.
They’d become good friends. She had friends from when she was a young mam too, with whom she shared her daily trials and tribulations over regular coffee catch-ups, not to mention her mam—they’d always been close.
All would have listened. For whatever reason, though, it had taken an inquisitive little red fox and Bronagh, with whom she shared something unexpected in common, for her to dig deep.
She cleared her throat and, with her eyes trained on her clasped hands, began to speak.
‘Margaret, my mam, is in respite care for a week, and I decided to treat myself to trips to the theatre and meals out while she was being looked after elsewhere. But then I went one step further,’ Patricia confessed, beginning to unravel why she’d done what she’d done.
‘I’ve always loved the look of this guesthouse, right from when I was a young woman, so I booked myself in.
Why not? I thought. But then, when I came to pack, it snowballed.
You see, I had all these clothes I’d sewn over the years that never got an outing because they were far too bold and impractical for how I spend my days.
I was like a woman possessed because, before I knew what I was doing, I’d made up my mind.
I’d pretend to be the character I’d made all those clothes for and whom I’d carried inside me for years.
I wanted to know what it was like to walk in that woman’s shoes.
’ She flashed Bronagh a small, rueful smile.
‘Uncomfortable, as it happens. I’ve a corn starting thanks to the boots I wore yesterday. They pinched something terrible.’
Bronagh felt like saying, snap, as she felt her skirt tugging tight around her middle. It was a high price women paid to look the part. She wanted to press Patricia on her talent for dressmaking but decided to let her finish first.
‘I realised something last night, though, and everything suddenly made sense. I was scared of failing at costume design, so I never even tried. It was far easier to blame everybody else for not following my dreams than to take a good, hard look at myself.’
‘Do you not think dreams can shift and change, though?’
Patricia raised her gaze quizzically to meet Bronagh’s. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean we set ourselves these lofty goals in our youth and, when we don’t reach them, we feel like we’ve failed.
But maybe, if we look a little closer, we’ll find that’s not who we were ever supposed to be in the first place and that the goalposts shifted a long time ago.
We don’t stay the same, after all. Who I was in my twenties is not who I am now, and what I wanted then isn’t what I want now. ’
‘I never thought about it like that before.’
‘Well, now you have, I can’t see a single reason why Patricia from Ranelagh can’t stay here until Friday like she’d planned and enjoy her meals out and trips to the theatre.
Can you? Because she seems every bit as interesting a woman as the one who arrived yesterday.
And why shouldn’t she dress however she pleases. ’
Patricia was silent for a moment before venturing a tentative, ‘No.’
‘And I thought you looked grand in yesterday’s get-up myself.’
‘Did you?’
‘Oh yes. In fact, I was planning on asking you where you got that gorgeous coat. You said you made your outfit yourself, but surely not that too?’
‘I did, as it happens.’ Patricia sat up a little straighter.
Bronagh listened as their guest spoke about her passion for repurposing the old into something new since she’d begun volunteering at the charity shop.
By unpicking and starting again, or simply adding a flourish here and there, she gave the old and tired a revamp.
An idea was beginning to bubble and, when the other woman had finished, she spoke animatedly.
‘You could have a grand little cottage industry if you set your mind to it, Patricia.’
‘Sell what I make from home, you mean?’
‘Sure, and why not? I’d love a coat like yours any day over the ones in the shops that every Joe Bloggs is wearing.
A one-off design, like, because we don’t all want to blend into the crowd, but not all of us have the budget for designer clothes either.
If you’re repurposing unwanted clothes, surely you wouldn’t have the outlay of purchasing fabrics?
So there’s your market right there—one-off, affordable pieces for women who aren’t afraid to be seen.
Could you not do that while still being around for your mam? ’
‘I suppose I could.’ Patricia’s expression was eager as she waited to hear more, the tears forgotten.
‘C’mere to me now, Patricia.’ Bronagh leaned forward, getting excited by the idea herself.
‘Would you leave a few things with me to show a friend of mine I’m meeting today?
Maureen’s got a grand head for business.
She ran this place for years and she’s tried her hand at a few other ventures. You might have heard of the Mo-Pant?’
‘No.’
‘Well, they were a legging trouser yoke Maureen got behind and made a big success of. If she thinks we’re on to something, she’ll tell you how to go about it all.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Patricia sat back in her seat, flustered now as she began clasping and unclasping her hands.
‘Listen, from where I’m sitting, the only difference between yourself and the London Patricia is a belief in your own abilities. Don’t let that keep holding you back.’
‘You’re right.’ Patricia seemed galvanised and suddenly stood up. ‘I’ll go and pick out a few things right now.’
‘Grand. Although I do have one concern.’
Patricia looked at her warily.
‘How are we going to get that suitcase of yours back up the stairs?’
The two women were still laughing as Bronagh shooed Freya out of the way and fetched the custard creams while Patricia opened her case to pluck out some items to showcase.