Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [178]
Déjà vu, Tara thought, in astonishment. This is exactly the kind of conversation I used to have with Thomas. I must have been mad to put up with it. And for the first time ever she knew this to be true: she’d rather be lonely for the rest of her life than live like that again.
Katherine and Tara were home for ten days. Because flights from London to Ireland were so oversubscribed at Christmas time, they’d booked theirs the previous March. At the time Katherine had congratulated herself for her in-like-Flynn behaviour. Now she was bitterly sorry. The idea of being away from Joe for ten days was awful.
Fintan had stayed in London because he was having another blast of chemo. He’d insisted that Tara and Katherine go to Ireland. ‘I’ll be swamped with people,’ he complained. ‘Sandro, Milo and Liv are staying in London. Harry, Didier, Neville, Geoff, Will, Andrew, Claude, Geraint and Stephanie have insisted on coming over on Christmas Day. And JaneAnn and Ambrose are coming from Ireland.’
‘Yikes,’ Tara gurned. ‘JaneAnn and Liv! Has JaneAnn forgiven Liv for stealing Milo away from Knockavoy?’
‘Not really. But she’ll have to behave herself.’
‘Where’s Mam?’ Tara asked her father when they got home.
‘Here!’ Fidelma rushed in, beaming with delight. She was covered in feathers and wearing a ‘My neighbour went to London and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’ T-shirt. ‘I can’t stay,’ she explained. ‘I only came up to say hello. I’m up to me oxters plucking turkeys below in the shed. There’s so many feathers floating around the place I can nearly fly!
‘Oh, Lord, you’ve turned into a right skinnymalinks,’ she noticed. ‘Is that because of the boyfriend?’
Tara nodded, her face trembling violently with the onset of tears. But it was fine to cry. She was with her mother.
‘And because of poor Fintan, too, I’m sure.’ Fidelma felt like bursting into tears herself, but now wasn’t the time. ‘Put all your worry behind you,’ she assured Tara, taking her in her arms. ‘We’ll mind you. You won’t know yourself going back.’
Tara snuggled into the squashy warmth of her mother, exhaling with relief at the healing power of maternal love. She could stop soldiering because her mammy was going to carry the burden for a while. For the first time in a very long time she felt safe.
Tara had a lovely Christmas. Delighted to be home and delighted to see her three younger brothers, Michael, Gerard and Kieran, who prided themselves on still behaving like surly adolescents even though they were variously twenty-three, twenty-four and twenty-eight. Katherine, on the other hand, was counting the days until they returned to London. She spent hours and hours on the phone to Joe in Devon, both of them unable to ever hang up.
‘You go first.’
‘No, you go.’
‘No, you go.’
‘OK, we’ll count to three, then we’ll both hang up.’
‘OK.’
‘Right, one…’
‘… two…’
‘… three!’
‘Joe?’
‘Yes?’
‘You didn’t hang up.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. But neither did you.’
On Christmas morning, Agnes asked her, ‘Did he give you a Christmas present, this young man of yours?’
‘Yes, Granny,’ Katherine purred. ‘He gave me a star.’
‘What do you mean he gave you a star?’
‘He got a new star named after me. Somewhere up there,’ she tilted her head ceilingwards, ‘is a star called the Katherine Casey star. He said I was a star, do you see?’ she confided, shyly. ‘So having a star named after me seemed appropriate.’
‘In my day we were glad of a charm for our charm bracelet,’ Agnes muttered. Young Katherine was showing late but worrying signs of turning into another Delia.
Frank Butler and Agnes weren’t the only ones who’d noticed that Katherine had changed. ‘I don’t know what it is, but she’s gone very like her mother,’ they puzzled in the shops and pubs of Knockavoy.
‘Not that she’s wearing the oul’ tents or anything.’
‘No, indeed! She has some very handsome costumes. Look at her now!’
All the men gathered at the counter in Forman’s swivelled to look at Katherine, who was wearing a sleek black leather