Barefoot Over Stones Read online

  ‘You keep treating the sick people of Caharoe and I will make sure they don’t vomit at the sight of the house. Is that not a fair deal, Dr Shepherd?’

  ‘Deal.’ Richard grinned before pulling her beneath the quilts again.

  Hugh Lalor, the solicitor who lived in one of the other corner houses of the square, had recommended a builder to Richard when he had first bought the house. Richard had transcribed the details diligently, meaning to do something some day, before filing the information with all the legal papers regarding the sale. Cathy soon unearthed them and so began her transformation of the ‘barn’, as she had taken to calling Richard’s house. She approached Lovett’s Hotel across the square and asked if Richard’s surgery could move there temporarily while its permanent home was being refurbished. Tadhg Lovett was delighted by the prospect. His lounge, ordinarily empty during the day, would become a flurry of tea-drinking and ham-sandwich-eating and his handful of hotel rooms, usually only inhabited by the odd returning emigrant, would have a purpose.

  ‘Business is business wherever it comes from,’ he said, shaking Cathy’s hand to seal the deal. ‘And tell me now, miss, are you the doctor’s housekeeper or secretary? It’s just that I have a bad knee that I have been meaning to get checked.’

  Cathy imbued her smile with a friendship she was finding hard to muster. ‘I am Richard’s fiancée, Mr Lovett, and I am sure he would be happy to look at your knee if you can make it across to us. Otherwise he does house calls, whatever best suits the patient’s needs.’

  ‘Ah, sure I’ll wait until he moves over here for the few weeks. He can have a look at my knee in passing, in between jobs. I should get a discount really, seeing as he will be my lodger.’

  ‘Richard won’t see you suffer with your knee, Mr Lovett.’ Cathy took herself back to the barn before she said something smart. Caharoe was a small place and it was better to keep on the right side of everyone. God, this doctor’s wife thing was shaping up to be great fun altogether.

  Tadhg watched her tall, sweeping figure cross the street. ‘Fiancée, if you don’t mind. Did you ever hear the like of it?’ he said to no one in particular, but he was already plotting the sliced-pan order for the sandwiches required for the makeshift surgery and its hungry patients.

  The builders took down the partition walls that a previous owner had erected, restoring the original proportions of the house. When all the months of structural work had been completed Cathy took to the decorating with feverish intent. She and her younger brother Donal came most evenings that summer to paint, sand and varnish every surface. Richard supplied the money for the restoration work and brought roughly made picnics to the workers. He was totally useless but he sat keeping them company. If a song he loved came on the battered paint-stained radio he would release Cathy from her vice-like grip on the paintbrush and waltz her around the room. Donal would turn scarlet and look away embarrassed, painting even faster while his sister and Richard danced. When exhaustion overtook them they would sit on a bare floor sipping bottled beer and eating egg sandwiches followed by slices of jam sponge or cream rolls from the bakery on Earl Street.

  It took all of that summer to get the house and surgery completed but Cathy enjoyed every minute of it. Tadhg Lovett sold a mountain of sandwiches and had his knee fixed into the bargain. Cathy barely had time to get ready for their wedding, which was set for 29 September, Michaelmas Day. She chose a simple shift dress to the knee in the softest shade of ivory. She wore no veil and her long dark hair hung loose around her shoulders. She carried a clutch of fiery orange-blossomed crocosmia picked for her by her mother. Not for the first time Richard stood captivated by Cathy’s radiance. That day he was sure he was the luckiest man alive.

  As a wedding present for them both, Cathy got a brass nameplate made for their barn. She read it now twenty years later surrounded as it was by the climbing bark of mature wisteria and clematis.

  Michaelmas House

  Caharoe

  Dr Richard Shepherd

  General Practitioner

  First Richard, this house and then Alison had been the focus of her life.

  She stood hesitating before she put her key in the front door. Her heart was breaking with loneliness for Alison and tears welled in her eyes. Richard was across at Lovett’s knocking back whiskey as he always was on a Sunday night. When exactly had it happened? When had her life shrunk to such a small, predictable package of care and duty? As she turned the key on an empty Michaelmas House Cathy Shepherd decided to go easy on herself. She was lonely, that’s all, and it was best not to dwell on things that could not easily be changed.

  Throughout the week a small part of her hoped Alison would change her mind and come home for the weekend. She was not ready to think of her stint in Dublin as anything other than a temporary arrangement. Alison phoned on the usual days and her form was very good. Cathy managed not to ask her to change her mind. ‘It will be good for her, help her to find her feet,’ she told a very dubious Richard. If she said it often enough she might just convince them both, she hoped.

  Cathy held it together until the following Saturday, comforted by the routine at the surgery. All the regulars, of whom the practice had scores, dragging in their dead legs and arthritic joints on a weekly basis, enquired after Alison. How was she doing in Dublin? Was she living far from the college? Cathy found herself delivering confident assertions that Alison was doing just fine. She had moved in with a lovely girl, Ciara, from Tipperary, and was doing well at her course. All true, she reminded herself if her certainty wavered even for a moment.

  She and Richard shared a bottle of red wine on the Friday night and when he admitted that he too was missing Alison that made Cathy feel less pathetic.

  ‘Maybe we could visit her in Dublin some weekend, see the den of vice and squalor she has landed herself in?’

  ‘Ah, show a bit of faith, Richard! I’m sure Alison found a grand flat and to be honest I wasn’t as keen as you were on Bea Duggan. She seemed terribly sour.’

  ‘You see, Cathy, that’s exactly what I liked about her. She looked stubborn, looked like she wouldn’t tolerate any late hours or bad company. Sour can be a good trait in a landlady.’

  ‘God, you can sound like a right old misery guts when you want to.’

  ‘I’m entitled to be miserable when I have had Tadhg Lovett’s septic toe presented to me on three separate occasions this week, only one of which happened in the privacy of my surgery. Honestly, I am dreading the moment and the hour when he discovers a boil on his backside, because I won’t be able to get a drink in this town without offering to lance it first.’

  Cathy collapsed in fits of laughter at the unbearable mental image and felt light-hearted for the first time in days. It could be the wine gone to her head but she didn’t really care. Midnight came and went while they chatted and cuddled together in front of the open fire, still alive with the vivid colours of the shrinking turf.

  Saturday was shaping up well enough too. She had planned to see an art exhibition in the Jenkin Gallery in Cork with Rena Lalor. Cathy knew in her heart that Rena would humour her with about ten minutes at the gallery before her insatiable thirst for the city boutiques and department stores would overcome her and have to be quenched by an empowering excursion down Patrick Street. And so it was. Rena smooched with the gallery owner while gasping in a seemingly new-found appreciation of the artist’s vision. She was particularly taken by the red planet at the bottom of a painting of warring lovers. It was, she thought (aloud, naturally), symbolic of their love transcending this world. Neither Cathy nor the gallery owner pointed out to her that it was just a sticker marking the painting sold. Cathy didn’t because she couldn’t bear to burst her friend’s exuberance and the gallery owner refrained because he was already mentally lodging the cheque from what he expected was a certain sale. When Rena found out that her warring lovers were sold she picked out another close to it which Cathy was sure she had not even given a second glance. With the painting bo
ught and promptly forgotten Rena was ready to move on to her sartorial prey.

  Being in Rena’s company was like being in a tidal wave of consumerism. She always needed an outfit for a forthcoming occasion. She and Hugh were on a continual round of race meetings, charity socials and fund-raising dinner dances. The Lalor legal practice was thriving and was drawing clients from all over the southwest. ‘You have to entertain the clients,’ was Hugh’s mantra after one or two swiftly downed tumblers of the doctor’s whiskey. ‘They expect it and they expect to see my Rena in a new rig-out.’ He would stare at Rena in between gulps and his gaze consisted of one part devotion to several parts lechery. Cathy could just about tolerate Hugh Lalor when he was sober but his drink-fuelled playboy act threatened to make her stomach turn. Richard would often give her a good-humoured wink as if to implore that she turn a blind eye to Hugh’s antics. She knew Richard was very fond of him and for her husband’s and Rena’s sake she usually held her tongue. She knew her friend relied on shopping to fill lonely hours when her husband and son had no time to talk, so busy were they with professional lives that required her inclusion only on an intermittent basis. Shopping for the social calendar had become her salvation and consequently her chief topic of conversation. Last year’s dress for the Galway Races could do Tralee Races at a push but it could never go back to Galway and would not have been stylish enough for Punchestown or Fairyhouse in the first place. There was an etiquette involved in dressing for these outings and through these shopping trips Cathy was getting a master class, even though she was not remotely interested in ever going to such places.

  The shopping today was proving a welcome distraction when she would normally have spent the day with Alison while Richard was at the golf club. She was standing in the middle of the Winthrop boutique waiting for Rena to release a flurry of shop assistants from active service when a midnight-blue-coloured silk skirt caught her eye. It was ages since she had bought anything for herself. She had lots of clothes, expensive and well-tailored items that suited her job as the practice manager and the doctor’s wife but something about the frivolity of buying something gorgeous because she loved the look of it appealed to her. It was a size ten. It should fit, but she invaded Rena’s kingdom in the dressing rooms just to make sure. It fitted beautifully, showing off her slender waist.

  ‘My God, that is fabulous on you,’ shrieked Rena when she spotted Cathy twirling happily, almost decadently, in front of the mirror. Rena was taken aback. Cathy has the figure, she thought to herself a bit sourly, but she wouldn’t allow jealousy to fester. Everyone deserves to look well, she lectured herself silently while deciding to take the blouse she was trying on in all three colours. (‘It’s well cut,’ she would find herself telling the shop girls as if she was selling the merchandise herself.)

  ‘You have to buy it, Cathy, you just have to,’ Rena went on. ‘It’s calling for a touch of flamboyance though, if you don’t mind me saying so. A nice blazer and a hat maybe. The right match would set it off to a T.’

  They emerged from the changing room. Cathy carried the blue skirt and three girls struggled under Rena’s assorted purchases.

  ‘You know what, Rena, I will buy it but I don’t need a hat. Remember we don’t move in the same social circle as you and Hugh. The odd GP conference is the stellar point of our social calendar and hats don’t really get a look in there.’

  ‘Well, it’s not for the want of asking you. I am sick, sore and sorry of trying to drag you both along to the races or the charity balls. We would always find you a spot at our table. You would enjoy it, you know, if you just gave it a chance.’

  ‘Ah, you never know, maybe we will,’ Cathy said good-humouredly, but she was quite sure that hell would freeze and possibly thaw again first.

  It wasn’t until the bell for seven o’clock mass was ringing that Cathy pulled her car into the driveway of Michaelmas House. Rena had left most of her bags in Cathy’s car. It helped Rena to bring home her shopping piecemeal because that way she would not have to acknowledge the sight of the complete haul. The guilt of that had often outweighed the retail therapy itself. She would collect them during the week when Hugh was tucked away in his office at the back of the house. It wasn’t that he minded her spending, she had to admit. If it bothered him he never said as much. It was more that sometimes her capacity for spending money shocked even herself. The painting had been an extravagance. She would look out for the next bank statement and bin it. Maybe she would even give the painting to Cathy. Cathy loved that arty-farty racket. Well, she’d only bought it because she was in Cathy’s company, hadn’t she? It was her fault really. That conclusion comforted her somewhat. She wasn’t sure that nude ladies had a place in the home of a prominent solicitor. What in the name of God had she been thinking of?

  There was always a flurry of traffic around Caharoe in the run-up to mass and then a slow drift afterwards as the street emptied into the pubs. The lights of Lovett’s Hotel were reflected in the low-lit windows of Michaelmas. Soon the languorous hum of conversation and laughter would grow steadily louder and Cathy and Richard would hear it as they prepared and ate dinner. He would tell her anything he had heard at the golf club, snippets of local gossip that Hugh Lalor never seemed to be without. She would fill him in on the art exhibition that she had seen and all of the exploits with Rena. They would talk lightly of Alison, trying to be positive, trying not to be lonely.

  After the ritual dash to the television for the headlines Richard would say, ‘I will knock across to Lovett’s for one.’ Some drink, Cathy often thought, as he was rarely home before midnight. Tonight, she had decided, would be different.

  ‘Wait for me, I’ll come too,’ Cathy announced. Richard looked a bit stunned but a little bit delighted too, she thought. Mostly stunned though, it had to be said.

  Alison rang at ten when she got home from an early showing at the Savoy. The phone rang out as she pictured the hall table at Michaelmas and the carpeted steps of the stairs where her mother sat when she settled in for a long conversation with Rena or one of her sisters. The table lamp, always lit from nightfall, would cast her in a soft and flattering light. Her shoes would be kicked off and her long legs would be curled under the folds of her skirt. As the phone rang Alison thought that she must persuade her mother to buy some new clothes for herself. Maybe she would come shopping to Dublin some Saturday when Dad was playing golf? She would suggest it if her mother ever answered the blasted phone. When Cathy didn’t pick up Alison had nobody to tell that she had just seen possibly the worst film ever made.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The kitty would never stretch to the amount of HobNobs that Leda Clancy was putting away on a daily basis. Alison thought she’d have been able to handle it if the constant mugs of tea and biscuits improved her appearance or her mood in the slightest bit. But no. Leda still looked like the perished kitten that had lurked on Jean McDermott’s landing the previous Sunday night.

  Alison had nipped down to the corner shop at the end of their road for supplies at around nine o’clock when she expected Ciara to be home. She had planned that they would catch up over mugs of tea and biscuits. Ciara would have hated Ghost, the film that Alison had gone to see the evening before. She would have judged it way too soppy and not worthy of her money or her time. When Alison had admitted that Dirty Dancing was her favourite film of all time Ciara had started to gag so she knew she was in for a slagging but she was relishing the thought of her friend’s company. She had really missed her.

  Ciara was dragging her bags up the stairs when Alison arrived back from the shop.

  ‘Hi there, welcome back. It was quiet without you.’

  ‘It is good to be back, I can tell you that. Such crap that I have had to listen to over the past few days.’

  ‘Is everything all right at home? Is Leda OK?’

  ‘Nothing is right at home, Alison. In fact we would get the bloody Oscar for nothing ever being right. Maybe there is a grant from Europe for being the biggest
fuck-up of a family ever to exist. Free therapy maybe for the rest of our natural lives. As for my darling sister Leda, well, you can ask her yourself.’ She nodded upwards to where Leda stood on the landing. She was much taller than her sister but they shared the same slender silhouette. Her big blue eyes seemed bloodshot from tears or lack of sleep or both. Long, dark, wavy hair framed a heart-shaped face. She looked as if she was there against her will but there was no denying her incredible beauty, even if she seemed to do her best to conceal it with a surly expression.

  ‘Hi, Leda,’ Alison chirped, making a real effort to be friendly. ‘Go on in to the kitchen there and stick on the kettle.’ Leda didn’t move.

  ‘Move it, Leda!’ Ciara said with vehemence and Leda disappeared into the kitchen at her sister’s sudden command. Alison dropped the groceries in the hallway to give Ciara a hand with the heaviest of the bags.

  ‘Ciara, have you lifted the contents of your folks’ place or what? This bag weighs a bloody ton.’

  ‘I’ll tell you all in a minute. I just don’t want Jean McDermott to spot me bringing in Leda or her stuff.’ She nodded at their landlady’s door but they need not have worried about being caught. Jean had bought the Sunday newspapers, chiefly to camouflage a litre bottle of gin that she had also purchased and since consumed. She had passed out at about teatime, her spittle pooling a lonesome dribble on the Times review pages. Going on previous form, she was unlikely to wake before the oil-thirsty brakes of morning buses began their relentless chorus outside her door.

  Leda ate the first packet of biscuits from where she had perched them on her lap. Mindlessly, laconically, she munched away, unwilling or unable to make the slightest effort at conversation. She was barely conscious, it seemed, but incredibly hungry for all that.