October 1994

There had been two masses already that morning and the air was thick with incense. The church was packed and Izzy found herself squeezed between two bodies. Each time she went from kneeling to sitting to standing, she felt their shoulders press against hers. She pulled a balled-up tissue from her sleeve and wiped the sweat from her forehead. She thought of removing her woollen jumper but wasn’t sure if the top she had on underneath was decent, and besides, she’d never manage the manoeuvre without hitting the person next to her or exposing some part of her flesh. She didn’t think she could suffer an embarrassment like that this morning. Raising her head, she was confronted by the sight of Stasia Toomey’s broad back looming before her. Stasia stood stately and proud, tightly wrapped in a coat of royal-blue gabardine.

Kneeling again, Izzy caught the smell of sweat rising from her armpits. She bowed her head and closed her eyes.

And then the responses started. She took a long, slow breath.

‘Lord have mercy.’

Lord have mercy.

She had managed to drag herself out of bed for half-eleven mass. It was one thing to have been drinking, but to stay in bed with a hangover was to admit you had been drunk. She rarely drank to excess, so she wasn’t going to give James the satisfaction of using this against her. She’d slipped out of the spare room to make a cup of tea, saw the pictures lying scattered across the floor. The night before, when they’d returned from the local businesses’ dinner-dance, she’d insisted to James that she was sleeping downstairs in the spare room. She went careening down the hallway, knocking every picture frame off the wall. James had grabbed her arm and she’d planted an elbow in his ribs. He’d let out a roar, and of course, Niall and Orla had woken. And that was the image she couldn’t get out of her head – the two of them conjoined in horror, staring down at her from the landing.

She’d hurried back to bed with her cup of tea so as not to have to face any of them, but now as she knelt in the church, the collective responses to the prayers rising and falling in her empty stomach, she wished she’d eaten something.

‘Christ, have mercy.’

Christ, have mercy.

She tried to focus on Father Brian – the solid shape of him behind the altar. He was decked out in his Sunday finery, his vestments so clean and crisp and trimmed in shades of gold and silver, the stole embroidered with tight little bunches of grapes and ears of wheat. She reminded herself to say this to him next time he visited her: You were all decked out in your finery last Sunday, Brian. It suited you. The finest dress I’ve seen you in so far. Because she knew this was the part of the job he hated most, that it would forever be an embarrassment for him to present himself to people in this way. She thought of the wry smile he’d offer when she said this, the gentle putter of his laugh.

Oh Lord, it is your will that all shall be saved.

Someone near the front of the church rose. A tall woman with a mane of black hair stepped up and turned to face the lectern. Izzy felt a sharp little breath escape her. Colette Crowley, she thought – in all her glory. Such a fine-looking woman, it did you good just to rest your eyes upon her. The way she held her head so high. The length of her. The graceful tilt of her chin. And as she looked out at the congregation a smile played about her lips for a moment like there was something funny to her about all of this. Like she’d played a trick on them. Like she’d never really left at all. Izzy saw Stasia Toomey nudge her husband. A few people were overcome by fits of coughing. She cast an eye around to see if Shaun or Ann was present but couldn’t spot them anywhere.

And then Colette spoke in that beautiful, soft Dublin accent of hers – a reading from the prophet Isaiah – but Izzy was not listening to the words, just the sound of her voice. She was neither a coarse jackeen nor a pretentious south-sider – she was something else altogether and Izzy could have listened to her all day. And people stared up at her, like the vision she was, and when Izzy’s eyes drifted across the altar to where Father Brian was seated in his big marble chair, she saw the soft, sympathetic look he offered to Colette Crowley.

Give the Lord glory and power – that was the response Colette demanded of them, and Izzy thought that a bit bombastic: Hadn’t he power and glory enough?

And then Colette descended from the lectern, stepping carefully, minding the hem of her long skirt. A shuffling of bodies filled the silence that had fallen over the church. Izzy watched Stasia Toomey’s gaze track Colette all the way down the aisle, the hard set of her jaw easing only when Colette had knelt in her pew. But Father Brian did not move from where he was seated. He looked so still, so poised, his hands resting delicately on his knees like he was meditating over every word Colette had said. Izzy brought the tissue to her brow but there was nothing in her hand. She looked down and saw the tissue scattered across the hassock like snow.

*  *  *

He was purposely avoiding the main street of the town; this was what she’d thought to herself as they drove along the Coast Road the previous night. James was avoiding the main street, so they wouldn’t have to pass the shop. The papers had needed to be signed and returned to the agent that afternoon but James had arrived home late from work, unknotting his tie as he came through the door and complaining about how they’d never make it to the dinner on time. She’d left the contract on the kitchen table where, she knew, he’d seen it every time he passed. It had lain there for a week with only her signature filled in. And now they were taking the Coast Road to get around a conversation about how he had reneged on his side of the deal.

The road rose steeply and narrowed as they drew away from the town. It followed the coastline more closely – hills rose up on one side and tumbled down into the Atlantic on the other. The moon hanging low over the bay looked like someone had pared a sliver off it with a knife. She lifted her handbag from the footwell, snapped it open, took out a mint, and snapped the clasp shut again. She unwrapped the mint and popped it in her mouth, clacked it against her teeth. She turned on the radio, heard the beat of dance music, turned it off.

‘It must be great not to want things,’ she said, at last.

She watched his arms stiffen against the wheel. A muscle flickered in his cheek.

‘It must be great to be so satisfied with your life, to have all your needs met,’ she said. ‘I wish I could say the same.’

‘You know it wasn’t the right time,’ he said.

‘And when will the right time be?’

‘I don’t know . . . maybe it’s not the right property.’

‘It’s going for a song.’

‘Exactly. Why do you think that is?’

‘Because it’s been allowed to go derelict – a lick of paint and bit of money spent on it is all it needs.’

‘It failed when it was a gift shop, it failed when it was a bakery, it failed when it was a music shop—’

‘Well, it worked when it was a flower shop and I ran it.’

‘You never made that much money at it.’

‘I made enough and we were damn glad of it at the time.’

‘Look, it’s throwing good money after bad. Maybe if the price drops again, we can—’

‘Don’t!’ she shouted. ‘You never had any intention of buying that property. You just thought you could placate me with it, dangling it in front of me.’

‘It doesn’t look good for an elected member of government to be going around buying up half the town.’

‘Half the town? Half the town? One shitty-assed shopfront on the main street and you call that half the town? I’m sick of having nothing just so that we don’t look too flash in front of your constituents.’ She folded her arms and turned her face to the window. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t work,’ she said. ‘People still think we have money.’

‘Which is not the case.’

‘And don’t I know it – you’ve made everyone else in this town rich except us.’ They rounded a corner and the waning moon swung back into view. ‘We can afford that property,’ she said. ‘You just don’t want me to have it.’

The car pulled up in front of the hotel.

‘Are you going to spoil another night?’ he asked.

She watched couples gliding up and down the steps of the Paradise Lodge. Brass railings and polished handles glinted beyond the glass-fronted doors of the hotel.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I won’t embarrass you.’

All through dinner she allowed Tom Heffernan to refill her wineglass and stare at her chest while she glowered across the table at James. She smoked one cigarette after another, the butts piling up in the ashtray in front of her. She’d worn a black satin culottes-suit with a low-cut top and a little bolero jacket she’d thrown off as soon as she sat down. Neat on her top half, and wide at the hip, she’d chosen the outfit to accentuate above and disguise below. James was usually quick to offer her compliments on her appearance but that evening he was barely fit to look her in the eye. And everyone so far at the event had admired the outfit, except her husband, who sat nursing the same whiskey he’d bought when he’d arrived. He had his hand over the mouth of the glass tumbler, rocking it back and forth in that uneasy way of his, as though he lived in dread of someone topping it up.

She’d pushed her loin of beef around the plate, and when the profiteroles arrived, she ignored them and withdrew another cigarette from her pack. While James gave his speech on the importance of business in the local community she looked up at the light fixture, a long cylinder dripping with strings of glass beads. As she stared at the lights shrouded in cigarette smoke, they melted into one and for minutes at a time she could distract herself from her husband’s voice. She listened to the applause and kept her arms folded on the table. There was a great deal of backslapping when James sat down again.

‘Fair play to you,’ Manus Sweeney said. ‘You’re damn right. It’s hard work that saves communities. You can’t be relying on government funding all the time.’

‘Well, Manus, I didn’t want to spell it out up there, but that’s just it. There are people nowadays who want everything for nothing and they’re not willing to work for it.’

There was a lot of nodding and agreement to that and Izzy turned her face away. Seated at the table opposite were Shaun Crowley and Ann Diver. Ann was the only woman and the men were mostly bachelors who had no one to bring to an event like this. Shaun was leaning a conspiratorial ear to the man next to him, and to his right sat Ann, looking like she’d been squeezed onto the end at the last minute. She wore oversized silver earrings, ornate things that dangled almost to her shoulders, and as if she regretted the decision now, she gripped one earlobe, hiding the earring. A waitress at the Harbour View Hotel for years, she was probably more used to serving at these events than attending them, and Izzy told herself to go and chat with her before the night was over. Poor Ann was unlikely to get much in the way of conversation out of Shaun, who was not in the habit of small talk. He was polite enough if you tried to engage him, but he always looked bored out of his mind at these things, sitting there in his shirtsleeves like it would have been too much bother for him to have worn a jacket and tie like every other man.

‘God, he’s an eccentric, that fella, isn’t he?’ Teresa Heffernan whispered to her. ‘All the money he has, you’d think he’d make a bit of an effort, iron his shirt at least.’

Izzy considered this. ‘Well, he has Ann to do it for him now,’ she said.

‘Yeah, but she’s back on the scene.’