A Week in Winter(6)

She would have to move on.

This was very mysterious to those who read her letters home. Perhaps she had been unhinged by grief. After all, they had been so wrong about Walter Starr in life. Maybe they should respect him in death. Her friends now understood her need for solitude. She hoped that her family would do that also.

Orla and Brigid, who had been planning to come and visit the apartment in Seventh Avenue, were distraught.

Not only would there be no welcoming Uncle Walter coming to meet them at the airport, but there would be no holiday at all. Now there was no possibility of Aunty Chicky to take them on this Circle Line Tour round the island of Manhattan. She was moving on, apparently.

And anyway, their chances of being allowed to go to New York had disappeared. Could anything have been more unfortunately timed, they wondered.

They kept in touch and told her all the local news. The O’Haras had gone mad and were buying up property around Stoneybridge to develop holiday homes. Two of the old Miss Sheedys had been carried away by pneumonia in the winter. The old person’s friend, it was called; it ended life peacefully for those who couldn’t catch their breath.

Miss Queenie Sheedy was still there; strange, of course, and living in her own little world. Stone House was practically falling down around her. It was said that she seemed to have barely the money to pay her bills. Everyone had thought she would have to sell the big house on the cliff.

Chicky read all this as if it were news from another planet. Still, the following summer she booked her flight to Ireland. She brought more sombre clothes this time. Not official mourning, as her family might have liked, but less jaunty yellows and reds in her skirts and tops – more greys and dark blues. And the same sensible walking shoes.

She must have walked twenty kilometres a day along the beaches and the cliffs around Stoneybridge, into the woods and past the building sites where the O’Haras were busy with plans for Hispanic-style housing complete with black wrought iron and open sun terraces much more suitable for a warmer, milder climate than for the wild, windswept Atlantic coast around Stoneybridge.

During one of her walks she met Miss Queenie Sheedy, frail and lonely without her two sisters. They sympathised with each other on their loss.

‘Will you come back here, now that your life is ended over there, and your poor dear man has gone to Holy God?’ Miss Queenie asked.

‘I don’t think so, Miss Queenie. I wouldn’t fit in here any more. I’m too old to live with my parents.’

‘I understand, dear, everything turns out differently, doesn’t it? I always hoped that you would come and live in this house. That was my dream.’

And then it began.

The whole insane idea of her buying the big house on the cliff. Stone House, where she had played when she was a child in their wild gardens, and had looked up at from the sea when they went swimming, where her friend Nuala had worked for the lovely Sheedy sisters.

It could happen. Walter always said it was up to us what happened.

Mrs Cassidy had always said why not us just as much as anyone else?

Miss Queenie said it was the best idea since fried bread.

‘I wouldn’t be able to pay you the money that others might give you for the place,’ Chicky said.

‘What do I need money for at this stage?’ Miss Queenie had asked.

‘I have been too long away,’ Chicky said.

‘But you will come back, you love walking all around here, it gives you strength, and there’s so much light and the sky looks different every hour here. And you’ll be very lonely back in New York without that man who was so good to you for all those years – you don’t want to stay there with everything reminding you of him. Come home now, if you like, and I’ll move into the downstairs breakfast room. I’m not too good on the old stairs anyway.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Miss Queenie. It’s your house. I can’t take any of this in. And what would I do with a big house like this all on my own?’

‘You’d turn it into a hotel, wouldn’t you?’ To Miss Queenie, it was obvious. ‘Those O’Haras have been wanting to buy the place from me for years. They’d pull it down. I don’t want that. I’ll help you turn it into a hotel.’

‘A hotel? Really? Run a hotel?’

‘You’d make it special, a place for people like you.’

‘There’s no one like me, no one as odd and complicated.’

‘You’d be surprised, Chicky. There are lots of them. And I won’t be around here for long, anyway; I’m going to join my sisters in the churchyard soon, I’d say. So you should really have to decide to do it now, and then we can plan what we are going to do to make Stone House lovely again.’

Chicky was wordless.

‘You see, it would be very nice for me if you did come here before I go. I’d just love to be part of the planning,’ Queenie pleaded. And they sat down at the kitchen table in Stone House and talked about it seriously.

When Chicky got back to New York, Mrs Cassidy listened to the plans, nodding with approval.

‘You really think I can do it?’

‘I’ll miss you, but you know it’s going to be the making of you.’

‘Will you come to see me? Come to stay in my hotel?’

‘Yes, I’ll come for a week one winter. I like the Irish countryside in winter, not when it’s full of noise and show and people doing leprechaun duty.’