He bolted down towards the end of the village. There wasn’t really anywhere to go, not like their home in Dublin when he could have taken the bus into town, hung around the city streets for hours on end, before taking the last bus home. He’d been about fourteen the last time he’d done that and his mother had been livid. Deep down, he knew it was partly why they were here now. Maybe it had as much to do with her worries for him as it had with any concern for herself. Ballycove was the kind of place you couldn’t hide in. Not really. Oh, there was a beach that stretched for miles, but in the cool temperatures, it wasn’t the sort of place you wanted to spend hours on end. There was a coffee shop, a pub, the local church and a boat house where he’d seen some of the local youngsters hanging out. They were kids who had small boats or surfboards and Niall had zero interest in any kind of sport or anything else in this backward place.
6
Elizabeth
Elizabeth couldn’t decide if the lilies added a feeling of refinement to the hall or if it might look as if she’d forgotten to leave them up at Eric’s grave. She wanted to make a good impression and the flowers could swing it either way. The thing she had to ask herself: would the positive impression so far outweigh the negative one to be worth taking the risk? The answer, she decided, was no, so she moved them into the kitchen and set them on the draining board where she had no intention of bringing Lucy Nolan.
She would treat her as she’d treated every other colleague Eric had entertained in their home. She would show her around the surgery first and then they could sit and have tea and cake in the drawing room. Of course, she knew it was much too early for cake, but what else could she offer the woman? Sandwiches? Well, at least, that’s what Elizabeth thought they should do, but because she was Jo’s daughter, Lucy was not like Eric and a completely different species to Thea Gilchrist. Not all doctors, Elizabeth knew, were created equal.
Eric’s approach to being a GP was old-school. He was a rather conventional country doctor, a combination of tweeds, scuffed leather medical bag and gruff consideration. He turned up for a house call only if he had to; saw anyone who was well enough to show up, in his surgery. Over the last few years he dispensed decreasing amounts of sympathy and large numbers of antibiotics, muscle rubs and painkillers. He didn’t believe in anything that wasn’t scientific. The notion of sending people to a yoga class to deal with hypertension elicited a snort at best, and a loud guffaw when he’d read it aloud to Elizabeth from a supplement in the Times.
As small a village as Ballycove was, Elizabeth didn’t really know Lucy, apart from empty small talk if they met in Mr Singh’s supermarket on those rare weekends when she visited Ballycove over the last few years. Elizabeth thought about the way Jo described her daughter. She sounded like a very modern woman; cut of a different cloth to the type that had been available when Elizabeth was a girl. She could imagine Lucy Nolan being a Pilates devotee. That in itself was good enough to promote her in Elizabeth’s estimation. Ballycove needed a breath of fresh air and the surgery needed it more than anywhere else.
Still, for all that she liked the idea of Lucy, Elizabeth felt a ticklish, unfamiliar nervousness in the bottom of her stomach as she went about the drawing room, dusting where no dust had dared yet to land. It was early morning now and the sun streamed in through the surgery windows. It gave the feeling that there was some natural warmth about the place, although of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The reality was that the surgery was little more than a lean-to garage. It was in need of a serious overhaul, if not complete rebuilding. That wasn’t something Elizabeth had ever given much thought to before and she certainly wasn’t in the happy position of being able to afford to give it any deliberation now.
Her mind cast back once more to the bundle of documents that Eric had stored out of sight from her and it brought that increasingly familiar sense of panicky sweat across her shoulders.
Last night, at a late hour, when she should have been tucked up in bed, she had taken down the old calculator that normally hid at the back of the kitchen drawers. She totted up the lot, between the overdraft, the loans and the letter from a private firm who’d forwarded a tidy sum to her husband for his personal use. It came to a grand total of sixty-two thousand euro. Not a fortune; perhaps, if she sold the house, she could easily rent somewhere more modest and pay off the debts, but it would leave her with nothing at the end. She would be cast for her remaining years into a grotty council house if she was lucky, or if not, at the mercy of some harsh landlord who would kick her out as soon as a more lucrative renter turned up on the doorstep. She couldn’t let that happen.