Chapter 1 #5
Will had benefited from the O’Neills’ Greek qualities – their fierce, unswerving loyalty to family and friends, their boundless hospitality – but, much as he adored them, he understood why someone might find them overwhelming.
Clannish, talented, decadent and hospitable to a fault, they were not for the faint-hearted.
The worst sins as far as the O’Neills were concerned were being boring and crimes against hospitality.
Will got the impression that Kate’s boyfriend had been found guilty of both.
‘I suppose Mum would make a pretty scary enemy,’ Lorcan admitted. ‘Not to mention Rachel. I hate to think what would have happened to us if Tom had done a runner.’
‘Rachel doesn’t take any prisoners.’
‘Speaking of which, I’ll go and chivvy Tom along. See you downstairs in a mo.’ Lorcan went to the door, but paused. ‘You really think we’re Greek?’
‘In a good way,’ Will reassured him.
In a very good way, Will thought, as he finished knotting his tie.
The O’Neills had saved his life and stopped him becoming a hopeless drifter.
There had always been money in his own family, so there had never been any pressure on him to achieve academically or to work hard.
That he had done both was as a result of his connection with the O’Neills and, most of all, his friendship with Lorcan.
They had been best friends at school, and when Lorcan had gone on to university, Will had followed him because he would have followed him anywhere.
Once there, he had discovered a capacity for hard work and self-discipline that surprised no one more than himself.
His childhood had been at once deprived and privileged, arbitrarily indulged and neglected by his wealthy, talented parents.
His mother, Helen Kilgannon, a beautiful but mentally unstable artist, was an Irish aristocrat and heiress to a large fortune.
His father was a brilliant, acclaimed (and recently knighted) playwright, as well as a notorious hell-raiser and womaniser.
Helen had supported the young Philip Sargent in the early days of their marriage before he had made a name for himself as a playwright.
By the time Will came along, Philip had won a BAFTA and was beginning to earning serious money in his own right.
Will seemed to have everything. Then, when he was fifteen, his world fell apart.
His father left his mother for the glamorous star of his latest West End play.
The betrayal shattered his mother’s fragile sanity and she sank into a deep depression, broken only by episodes of mania that were even more difficult to cope with.
During one such phase she uprooted herself with Will and moved back to Ireland to start a new life among her ‘own people’.
At first, Will bitterly resented the upheaval, constantly mocked for his ‘posh’ accent and resented for having been born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth.
Things had improved considerably when he became friends with Lorcan, who was hugely popular.
Through him, Will gained access to a wide circle of friends and acquired a surrogate family.
But his home life had continued to deteriorate.
His mother sank deeper and deeper into depression, and Will felt helpless in the face of her despair.
One Sunday morning, after they had been living in Ireland for a year, Will found her dead in her bed: she had swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills.
His father had flown over for the funeral (thankfully without his new wife), and Will, wild with grief, had cold-shouldered him throughout, determined to let him know that he held him responsible for his mother’s death.
His father had insisted that he move back to England with him to finish his schooling.
Will had agreed, reluctantly, dreading leaving the one place he’d been happy but secretly pleased that his father wanted him, and that he hadn’t been abandoned by both his parents.
In fact, part of him longed to be with his clever, witty father.
Moreover, he was looking forward to being a thorn in the side of the woman who had wrecked his mother’s life.
When he got to England, though, his father promptly packed him off to boarding school.
His new wife had had a baby and the last thing she wanted was a sulky, resentful teenager around the house.
Besides, Philip was a firm exponent of the public-school system, having been through it himself, and this was one of the finest schools in the country.
He had never approved of the move to Ireland or of Helen’s ridiculous obsession with keeping Will at home with her.
Now that he was overseeing Will’s education, he would see that it was done properly.
So Will was dispatched to boarding school, while his father devoted his attention to his new family.
It was the last straw for Will. If he was going to be alone in the world, he decided, he might as well be alone in a place where he was happy.
One stormy November day he walked out of his school gates and kept going, not stopping until he turned up on the O’Neills’ doorstep two days later.
It was part of O’Neill family legend that they had answered the door one night to find Will standing there in his school uniform, soaked to the skin and shaking like a puppy.
He had run out of money and had had to walk all the way from Dun Laoghaire.
When he had left, Will hadn’t thought beyond getting away from school and going to see Lorcan.
He was appalled, as realisation dawned, that by turning up on their doorstep he had made himself the O’Neills’ problem.
The last thing he wanted was to be a burden to his friends.
However, to his enormous relief, it soon became obvious that the O’Neills didn’t see it like that.
As he had dripped onto their kitchen floor, the whole family had rallied around to boss, cajole and fuss over him.
‘You should have rung – we’d have picked you up,’ Grace had said as she rubbed his hair with a towel.
‘I didn’t have any money left for the phone,’ Will replied, meekly succumbing to her ministrations.
He was mentally and physically exhausted, but, as the O’Neill family machine swung into action around him, he felt all the uncertainty of the past two days seep away and began to relax.
He felt safe and secure in a way he had never experienced before.
His parents had been so haphazard and chaotic that he had had to fend for himself most of the time, and since his father had left he had had to look after his mother too.
It was a relief to let someone else take over.
Under cover of the towel, Will grinned, enjoying the novel experience of being mollycoddled.
Lorcan brought him up to his bedroom and provided him with dry clothes.
When he returned to the kitchen, Kate fed him soup and bread, followed by chocolate cake and copious amounts of hot, sweet tea – she had decided he was in shock.
Conor, the eldest, cleared out the spare room, and Rachel made up the bed for him.
Jack just kept patting him on the shoulder and telling him everything would be all right, while Grace tried to get information out of him.
‘I’m not going back,’ was all Will would say. He tried to sound tough, but everyone could see he was on the verge of tears.
‘Ah, come on, son, everything’ll be all right,’ Jack said gruffly. ‘How about a drop of whiskey in that tea?’
Jack’s gruff kindness was the final straw, and Will broke down. He covered his face with his fists, but a fat tear sploshed into his soup.
Grace had finally coaxed his father’s phone number out of him.
‘I’m not going back,’ Will warned her as she dialled.
‘Of course not,’ Grace soothed him. ‘We’re not going to make you.’ She had an Irish mother’s horror of public schools.
It was Grace’s finest hour. She went into maternal overdrive and spent more than an hour on the phone to Philip Sargent, cajoling him into letting Will stay in Ireland.
It wasn’t easy. Philip had begun by insisting that Will return to England and finish his schooling.
There was the matter of money too. Will stood to inherit a fortune from his mother, but not until he reached the age of twenty-one.
Until then, Philip insisted, he was Will’s guardian, and he would not support him if he stayed in Ireland.
‘Tell him I’ll get a job,’ Will said stonily when this was relayed to him. ‘I don’t need to finish school.’
‘He’s only sixteen,’ Philip argued. ‘He can’t live on his own and do as he likes.’
‘He wouldn’t have to live on his own,’ Grace told Philip. ‘He can stay with us and go to school with Lorcan like before. It’s no bother. We’re all terribly fond of Will and we’d love to have him here.’
‘He can’t just wander off and move in with another family, like a bloody cat!’ Philip fumed.
‘I’m very fond of cats,’ Grace said defensively.
‘Look, put him on.’ Philip sighed.
Finally Will was persuaded to speak to his father. He was cold and unyielding. He wasn’t going back. If he was sent back he would run away again.
Finally, after a good deal of wrangling, Philip had to admit defeat. Faced with the choice of Will staying in Ireland with his friends and finishing school or getting some menial job while he waited to become a hopeless dilettante, he opted for the lesser of two evils.
But Will had never forgiven his father and that night in the O’Neills’ kitchen was the last time he had spoken to him.