Summer at the Garden Cafe Read online

  Dedication

  For Roberta, with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Also by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  People who live in Finfarran say you can see four seasons of the year there in a single day. Then, in case you’d think they were being poetic, they point out that you’ll never know what you ought to wear, so you’d better be prepared for anything.

  The county town of Carrick to the east is the gateway to the Finfarran Peninsula, which stretches into the Atlantic from Ireland’s rugged west coast. It’s a place of fishing ports and villages, the little town of Lissbeg with its shops and school and businesses, high cliffs, a deep forest, isolated farms, and long, golden beaches. As the clouds whirl in from the ocean, they bring rain on the wind followed by rainbows. Cool, dew-spangled mornings can change to long days of burning turquoise skies and end in red-gold sunsets with a chill in the air that sends you home to hot whiskey and crackling fires. With fuel from the forest and turf from the bogs, Finfarran’s homes have never lacked comfort. Yet scattered along the peninsula are emigrants’ houses where the souls of the buildings have flickered out along with the fire on the hearth.

  The house that people still call Maggie’s place stands on a cliff in a rutted field with its back to a narrow lane. For years it stood empty, its blind windows facing the ocean and its slates shattered by storms. Self-seeded willow trees and yellow furze smothered the sloping field that ran down to the clifftop and the boundary walls were lost in curling briars. Inside the house, dead ashes lay on the hearthstone and crows’ feathers drifted from the chimney onto the stone floor. Outside, by the gable end, were the fallen walls of a stone shed that had once held a turf stack. At some time or another half the rubbish of the parish seemed to have ended up in Maggie’s field. Among the rusting washing machines and fridge freezers were broken bits of furniture, old bikes, and knackered lawnmowers. Each summer they disappeared among waving flowers and grasses and each winter they stood out starkly like the bones of starving beasts.

  So every year the house and the field looked more decrepit. Yet each autumn when seeds fell from the flowers and the grasses, the promise of renewed life entered the earth. And under the fallen stones at the gable end were hidden the seeds of a story, waiting in silence and darkness to emerge into the light.

  1

  Although Hanna had lived here for over a year, she still opened her eyes each morning to a rush of astonished delight. Now, stretching luxuriously in a shaft of sunlight, she looked around. Her room was just big enough to take her double bed, a chair, and a chest of drawers. She had painted the walls herself, using a soft shade of yellow to contrast with the rich gray color she’d chosen for the window frames. A ceiling-high, built-in cupboard, which was a paler shade of gray, served as a wardrobe, and the rails of the old brass bed had been painted in deep cream enamel.

  The front door of the house opened onto a narrow field that sloped down to a low stone wall, beyond which was a grassy ledge and a sheer drop to the churning Atlantic. The building stood alone surrounded by fields, so, eager to allow as much light as possible into the small rooms, Hanna had hung no curtains on the windows that faced the ocean.

  Beneath the duvet on this unhurried Sunday morning, her toes curled with pleasure as she watched dust motes in sunlight drift round the battered brass balls on the bedposts, which she’d polished to a golden sheen.

  It was late spring, when the weather on Ireland’s Atlantic coast veered between balmy days that brought green shoots, and days of howling, bitter gales that brought floods and freezing sleet.

  Yesterday Hanna had puttered between the fireside and the slate worktop by the cooker where she’d measured out buttermilk, flour, and soda in a green glass tumbler and kneaded and cut a batch of scones before sliding them into the oven. Then, with a scone piled with butter and jam in her hand and a book on her knee, she’d sat by the fire while the wind hurled rain against the window. But now sunshine beckoned her outdoors. Pushing back her duvet, which was patterned in yellows, greens, and grays like her spring garden, she reached for her kimono and made for the bathroom.

  Later, still wrapped in her kimono and with her feet pushed into Wellingtons, she carried a coffee and an apple down the field, climbed the stile, and settled herself on the wooden bench on the clifftop ledge beyond her boundary wall. The sun on her face was warm and the view stretched for miles from the edge of the cliff to the shimmering silver line where the sky met the ocean.

  Lazy mornings like this one belonged to Hanna’s weekends. The rest of her week began with the bleep of her alarm, a snatched breakfast, and a quick shower before the three-mile drive to work, and, though she loved her job in Lissbeg’s public library, she took huge delight in the hours she spent at home. What she cherished most was her sense of independence. After a painful divorce she’d spent several years living with her teenage daughter, Jazz, in her widowed mother’s retirement bungalow. It hadn’t been easy. By any standards Mary Casey was a difficult woman and, now that Jazz had flown the nest, Hanna’s pleasure in moving to her own home was augmented by the relief of averting what had seemed like an inevitable future cooped up with her bossy mother. Physical distance had made their relationship easier, but Mary could still be infuriating. Today she had summoned her daughter and granddaughter to a family lunch which Hanna would have been glad to get out of. Still, it would be great to see Jazz. And, opinionated and volatile though Mary might be, her Sunday roasts were delicious.

  Tipping out the dregs of her coffee, Hanna reminded herself that she had several hours to enjoy in her own garden before driving to her mother’s bungalow. As she wandered back up the field toward the house, she wondered if she ought to clean its windows. The wind from the ocean had crusted them with salt, making them as opaque as the windows of greased paper sh
e’d read about in a book about the American frontier.

  The simplicity of her house delighted her and she’d wanted to retain its integrity when restoring it but, having been born and raised in the locality, she’d opted without hesitation for triple glazing. This was no holiday home to be enjoyed in high summer and locked up and left empty when winter roared in from the north and the east. Like every other house of its kind on the Finfarran Peninsula, it had been built for a family who farmed the fields, burned turf on the open hearth, and, in many cases, ended their days by the fireside crippled with rheumatism. Hanna knew that if her father’s Aunt Maggie, from whom she’d inherited the house, had had the chance of installing triple glazing, she’d have grabbed it with both knotted hands. So, even though integrity had mattered and money had been a major consideration, Hanna had cut no corners herself when it came to practicality—a tiny extension at the back of the house contained a well-heated bathroom and utility room; her oven was electric and her stove-top was gas, in case of power cuts; and her glazing came with a proper guarantee.

  She smiled as she remembered the frontier log cabins she’d read about. The window lights had often been made from marriage certificates: the precious documents, frequently the only suitable piece of material that a frontier couple owned, were carefully greased or waxed and installed by the man of the house when building a home for his family. There was no man in Hanna’s story now, and, approaching the house through the rutted field, she could honestly say that she felt no lack of one. She was Hanna Casey again, not Mrs. Malcolm Turner. Her marriage was behind her and her future was ahead and, whatever the future might bring her, right now she was reveling in solitude.

  Her great-aunt Maggie had left her the house and the clifftop field more than forty years ago and, when she’d first heard of the bequest as a twelve-year-old, she’d been baffled. “But why?” she’d asked. “What would I want it for?” Her father had shrugged and smiled at her. “Life is long, pet. You’d never know what might happen.”

  Time had proved him right and, having forgotten about her tumbledown inheritance for most of her adult life, Hanna had come to thank her stars for it. It was all she possessed that was unencumbered by the grief and anger of her divorce and, in the process of restoration, it had become both a sanctuary and a solace.

  Maggie Casey, who had lived well into her eighties, was a termagant. Like most of her generation she had spent time in England, but Hanna remembered her here in the house as a pinched, bad-tempered old woman always shooing hens out the door and bewailing the price of paraffin. By the end of her life, having alienated most of her neighbors, she depended heavily on her nephew—Hanna’s dad, Tom—for help and company. But the claim on Tom’s time and attention had infuriated Hanna’s mother, Mary. To begin with, having no option, she’d put up with it. Then, as soon as Hanna was old enough, she took to sending her round to Maggie’s to give her a hand: Wasn’t it good for a young one to make herself useful, she said, and wasn’t there plenty of work at home for Tom to be getting on with? Torn between two demanding women, Tom had acquiesced, presumably deciding that that would be best for everyone. As a child Hanna was unaware of those interwoven threads of adult resentment, dependence, pity, and acceptance. But what she did know was that her own relationship with her gentle, loving father stirred up deep wells of jealousy in her mother, who adored him. And, as a result, she had been glad of any escape from the cramped rooms where she had grown up, over the family’s post office.

  For the last few years of Maggie’s life it was Hanna who did her chores and kept her company. The old woman’s conversation consisted largely of curt commands to wash the teacups and bitter complaints about the nosiness of her neighbors, the incursions of her hens, and the cost of lamp oil. All the same, she and Hanna got on well together. Maggie accepted no diktats but her own, which were always arbitrary. She had a love of the little new potatoes she called poreens so, although grown-ups usually disapproved of lifting spuds while they still had some growth in them, Hanna was sent out each year to tease the smallest potatoes from the sides of the ridges, leaving the rest to mature for a few weeks longer. She’d wash them in running water before Maggie shook them into the black pot that hung from the iron crane over the turf fire. Later they’d eat them straight off the kitchen table, dipping each mouthful first in salt and then in a bowl of buttermilk.

  Part of the pleasure of those meals lay in the shared knowledge that Mary would disapprove of them. According to Maggie, God made spuds to be eaten in the hand. According to Mary, He knew all about germs and bacteria, which was why He also made cutlery. The same opposing rules applied to laundry, which Mary washed with the latest biological detergent and Maggie scrubbed with yellow soap. And to leftovers, which Mary sealed up in plastic bags and Maggie shared with the cat. Enchanted by the pleasures of food dug straight from the earth and sun-warmed sheets dried in the salty wind, Hanna had learned to keep house according to Maggie’s rules in Maggie’s place, and to keep quiet about it at home. And now, over forty years later, more than twenty of which she had spent living in London, the house and the field were once again Hanna’s fortress against her mother. Though she still couldn’t think why her great-aunt Maggie had left them to her.

  Reaching the top of the rutted field she decided to forget about windows and think instead about gardening. She had plans to use the land near the edge of the cliff for vegetables, and to make an herb-and-flower garden close to the house. Last year she’d cleared the garden plot, rooting out furze and briars, pruning the willow trees at the south gable end, and marking out beds. At the edge of the plot, close to the house, was a pile of fallen field stones, once part of an old shed wall. Rather than remove them, she had decided to turn them into a rock garden into which she would sink tubs for herbs like marjoram and wild garlic that grow wildly if unconfined. It was going to be a hard slog, but Hanna reckoned the result would be worth it. Throwing on a pair of jeans and a paint-stained fleece, she fetched her thick gardening gloves and set about shifting stones.

  An hour or so later, having paused for another coffee, she stood back and considered her work. In piling the stones into heaps of different sizes, she had exposed a couple of slabs set at right angles to each other, presumably the foundations of a corner of the vanished shed. Thinking that their flat surfaces might be useful elsewhere, she went to see if they were too heavy to lift. Then, as she squatted down to look at them, she realized that a gray object which she’d thought was a stone was actually an old tin box. It was set in the angle between the slabs, half buried in earth and dented by falling stones. Fascinated, Hanna fetched a spade and managed to lever it out.

  As the spade released it from the earth, something solid moved inside it. Picking up the box in her gloved hands, she looked at it. It was an oblong biscuit tin with traces of a colored design still clinging to its tarnished surface. The rim where the lid met the base was thickly caked in earth. Carrying it to the doorstep, Hanna went and found a kitchen knife. Ten minutes later, sitting on the step with earth and chips of paint scattered round her, she eased the lid from the tin with her hands. Inside, wrapped in an old waxed sliced-bread wrapper, was a penny copybook bound in a thick cardboard cover. Handwritten on it in ink was Maggie Casey’s name.

  2

  High under the eaves in The Old Forge Guesthouse, Jazz scowled at herself in her bedroom mirror. She dabbed blush on her cheekbones and scrubbed it off again angrily. Then, shaking her hair out of its ponytail, she decided to trust to luck. Whatever she did, Mum and Nan were sure to say she was looking peaky, and there was no time to sit here trying to assume camouflage. Lunch in Nan’s bungalow, always called “dinner,” was served promptly at one, and God help you if you weren’t there ready for it. Twenty minutes in the oven to the pound, plus twenty more, was Mary’s rule; then twenty minutes while the meat rested on the worktop and the greens were strained and the spuds set on the table. She organized her Sunday mornings precisely and expected her guests to do the same. That w
as one of the many things about Nan that drove Mum crazy, though Jazz herself didn’t mind it. There was something very dependable about Mary Casey’s rules and expectations, even if she did peer and poke at you, and despite her massive sulks. Grabbing a sweater from the bed, Jazz ran down the stairs and went round to the kitchen.

  The old forge and its adjoining house belonged to Gunther Winterhalder, a young German, and his Irish wife. There were four en suite guest rooms in the house, where the Winterhalders also had their living accommodations, and the forge had become an open-plan space where meals were served on long wooden tables and guests could relax by a fire. Gunther was the cook, Susan did the housekeeping, and together they grew vegetables, kept goats, and made cheese that they sold to local shops. It had been a struggle to begin with but now business was improving, which was why Jazz had been taken on to help with this season’s guests.

  It was less of a choice on her part and more the fallout from a stupid car crash she’d had last year. Before the accident she’d been a cabin crew member with a budget airline. It was her first job and had brought her the freedom to travel the world and a buzzy, exciting life in a flat-share in France. But, after her accident and surgery to remove a ruptured spleen, she’d found herself grounded; constant travel would require constant vaccinations to support her impaired immune system, so, although she’d made what the doctor called “a great recovery,” she’d also been told that she’d have to change her job.

  From her dad’s point of view, serving drinks on cheap flights to Malaga hadn’t been suitable work for her anyway, so, for him, Jazz thought darkly, the crash had produced the perfect result. As soon as she’d got well, he’d started making noises about her returning to London, where she’d spent most of her childhood, and going up to Oxford to take a degree. She’s always had an entrepreneurial flair for marketing, he’d said, obviously seeing her as a future mega-tycoon. But without consulting anyone, she’d gone off by herself and taken a job in the guesthouse. She liked Susan and Gunther, who treated her more like family than an employee. The work was easy and she loved the old forge, which was beautifully positioned between an oak forest and the cliffs. And her decision had really annoyed Dad, which provided a savage satisfaction.