The House on Willow Street. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ the past two months he’d hauled the bins to the gate on Thursday night for the Friday-morning collection, trying to fill Kevin’s shoes. Every time he did it, Tess battled the twin emotions of pride and sadness.

      Huge pride at him behaving like the man of the house, and sadness that it was necessary.

      From the hallway below, Silkie yelped, eager for her next trip out – she knew her daily itinerary as well as Tess did.

      Tess grabbed Zach’s laundry basket and went slowly downstairs. Silkie was standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking forlorn.

      ‘I’ll put the washing on and we’ll go.’

      Tess walked to work every day, come rain or shine. She and Silkie would set out from the house on Rathmore Terrace, through the garden Tess was always planning to spend many hours on but never did, and out the white wooden gate.

      Instantly, Silkie would pull on the extendable lead, sticking her nose into the gatepost in case some passing dog had marked it.

      ‘Come on,’ Tess said most mornings. ‘No loitering.’

      Every second house was home to one of Silkie’s friends, so there were delighted squeaks at the house of Horace, a Great Dane who lumbered over to greet her and then lumbered back to the porch to rest his giant bones; a bit of rough-housing with Rusty, a shiny black collie who loved games and had to be told not to follow them; a few tender doggy kisses with Bernie and Ben, twin cockapoos who could rip any neighbourhood dustbin apart in minutes and caused chaos when they were in their owners’ holiday home.

      By the time she and Tess had come to the end of their street and turned down the hill on to the lane that led to Main, Silkie would be panting with happy dogginess.

      Their next stop was St Ethelred’s, the oldest Presbyterian church in the country, where tour buses paused for tourists to take pictures of the twelfth-century building, the moss-flecked tombs and small crooked headstones. The graveyard was watched over by three towering oaks that were at least, according to the local tree man, two hundred years old. At this hour of the morning, the great wooden door under the arched porch was locked. The rector would be along at ten to open up, with Mrs Farquarhar-White following him in to bustle around and polish things.

      On warm, sunny mornings, Tess would take the time to stroll into the grounds with Silkie, drinking in the serenity that inhabited this sacred space. Today, however, a breeze that felt as if it had come straight from Siberia ruffled Tess’s short fair hair as she stood at the church gate, so instead of going in she waited for Silkie to snuffle amongst the dog roses for any rabbits who’d dared to visit, then the two of them set off down the lane again.

      Cars passed her by, some of the drivers waving or smiling hello, others too caught up in their morning routine to do anything.

      Tess was happiest when the tourist season began to wind down and locals got their town back. With the school holiday over, the caravan parks had mostly emptied out and Avalon was beginning to fall back into the relaxed and gentle routine that would continue through autumn and into winter.

      Not that she objected to the summer visitors – they kept the town going, and provided a bit of excitement for local teenagers. Cabana-Land – which used to be called The Park when she was young – had always had a reputation as party central. She remembered how, back in the early eighties, she’d longed to stay out late at The Park like her elder sister. Suki never paid any attention to the curfew imposed by their father. On summer nights she would shimmy down the drainpipe wearing her spray-on stone-washed jeans, with her sandals in her hand, hissing, ‘Don’t tell him or I’ll kill you!’ at a worried Tess as she peered down at her from their bedroom window.

      There was a seven-year age gap between the two sisters and in those days, Suki and Tess had been complete opposites. Suki hated homework, was breezily unconcerned when she got into trouble at school, and by the time she reached her teens she had mastered the art of swaying her hips so that men couldn’t take their eyes off her as she walked through Avalon. She was taller than Tess, with the same blonde hair and the widow’s peak, inherited from their long-dead mother, and full lips that she made use of with a carefully practised pout.

      Tess, on the other hand, was never late with her homework, fretted over whether she’d get top marks on her history test, and was never in trouble either at home or school. She was the pale version of her sister, chiaroscuro in action, with strawberry blonde hair, and a fragility that made her perfect for ballet classes – if only they could have afforded them.

      The biggest difference between the sisters was that Tess loved living in Avalon, while Suki couldn’t wait to escape. She longed to live somewhere exotic, having failed to realize what Tess had grasped even as a child: that for the visitors who came from far-flung places, Avalon was exotic. City dwellers were charmed by the crooked main street with its scattering of gift and coffee shops and a single butcher’s. People from other countries thought that the high cross in the central town square with its working water pump and stone horse trough was adorable. They beamed with delight when grizzled old farmers like Joe McCreddin stomped out of the post office in his farming clothes and threadbare cloth cap with his trousers held up with baler twine, as if he’d been sent from central casting just for their amusement.

      And they all loved Something Old, the antique and curio shop Tess had run for seventeen years.

      Tess knew that her business had survived this long because she understood her clientele. She knew the pain of selling treasured heirlooms because money was in short supply.

      ‘My family owned a big old house which was once full of the most glorious antiques,’ she’d say, ‘and we never had a ha’penny. By the time I was ten, my father had sold just about everything of value, including old books, furniture and silver dating back two hundred years.’

      Zach helped too. Tess took him along on all her calls to buy antiques, right from when he was a baby, strapped in his car seat, big round eyes staring out of a chubby face. People liked having a baby arrive: it made the painful process of parting with heirlooms a little easier to bear.

      She and Zach would be invited in for tea, cake would be produced, then stiff old gentlemen would unstiffen and reveal how they hated having to sell the sideboard or the vase their great-granddad had brought back from India, but there was no other option.

      Her success also owed much to her innate kindness and sense of fairness.

      ‘You’ll never make a fortune selling a Ming vase on after buying it for twenty quid,’ said one lady, who was delighted to find that her set of old china was actually a full and unchipped early Wedgwood, worth at least five times what she’d thought.

      ‘Money earned in that way doesn’t bring you luck or happiness,’ said Tess. She simply wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night if she’d conned anybody out of a precious piece.

      As always, Tess felt a glow of pride in her town as she turned on to Main. Few of the visitors who stopped to admire the quaint shopfronts and exteriors were aware of the transformation that had taken place in the town ten years earlier, and the effort that had been put in by local businesses in order to achieve it. They had been forced to up their game by the construction of a bypass that stopped cars passing through the town on their way to Wexford. Belle, who at that time was the lady mayor as well as the owner of the Avalon Hotel and Spa, had started the ball rolling by calling a town meeting.

      ‘The caravan parks and the beach aren’t enough,’ she warned. ‘We need to revamp this town, brand it, put it on the map or we’ll all go out of business.’

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