‘Will you at least mention the fundraiser to the consultant the next time he does his rounds? Let him know the lunacy you’re planning…’ Lucy had a feeling she might as well have been talking to the pots and pans.
‘I will, if it’ll make you happy,’ Jo agreed in the end, but still Lucy had a feeling that if her mother had to be carried down that beach, she had every intention of showing up on the day. God knows, near enough everyone who visited the treatment ward had been signed up for a ten-or twenty-euro sponsorship donation. ‘I can’t let my fans down,’ she’d said laughing then.
‘They need never know. I’m happy to go into the water for your share as well as my own,’ Lucy said.
‘Oh dear and you’d let me miss out on all that fun. I don’t think so. I’m really looking forward to it. Even old Mrs Wills is going and she must be ninety if she’s a day.’
‘Holy crap,’ Niall snorted from behind his phone. ‘What’s she thinking? The sight of her in the buff will be enough to frighten every fish from the bay.’ Jo winked at Lucy. They still laughed because Niall pretended he didn’t hear what they were saying mostly.
‘I suppose we’ll just have to hope for a heat wave,’ Lucy said and bit down on her words as she was saying them, because really, there was no surer way to predict snow in August than pray for sunny weather in the west of Ireland.
*
Perhaps it was because the fog was so very heavy the following week that on Wednesday morning Lucy never noticed the For Sale sign in the garden next door to their house. The Murphy house had been owned by the same family probably since it was built. It had been empty since old John Murphy had finally agreed to move in with his daughter who lived in one of the estates on the way into the village. It was for the best, although when he’d told Jo, they’d all been sad to see him go and no-one had thought for a moment that the family would actually put the property up for sale. After all, John was hardly an old man. A recent fall had left him in plaster, but really, they’d expected him to return as soon as he was mobile again.
By lunchtime, news of the sign’s arrival had made its way into the surgery. Elizabeth sat a little nervously at her kitchen table while Lucy tucked into lunch. Alice was still on her rounds and finishing early for a parent-teacher meeting. When Elizabeth broached the subject, her voice was a notch higher and it struck a nervous pitch in the otherwise quiet kitchen.
‘One of the old dears mentioned this morning that Murphy’s cottage has come up for sale.’
‘Well, that’s unexpected, but perhaps it’s the sign you’ve been waiting for?’ Lucy smiled at her, but she could see the tell-tale quavers of apprehension in Elizabeth’s eyes.
‘Yes, perhaps.’ She shrugged her shoulders, in a rather French way, and settled her eyes on something that was probably nothing at all, midway down the long tangle of garden outside. ‘It seems like I’m not the only one thinking of putting down new roots,’ she said gently.
‘Oh?’ Lucy folded away the magazine she’d planned to flick through to take her mind off Jo – she wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince that it might work. ‘Who else is on the move?’
‘Dan.’
‘Dan, the writer?’ Lucy asked and she knew she sounded like an echo, but it felt like a bolt from the blue. Where would Dan go? But then, maybe she already knew the answer to that? Back to London.
‘Yes, believe it or not—’ a small smile escaped Elizabeth’s lips and she leant in a little closer to Lucy ‘—between ourselves, I think he might be interested in buying this place.’
‘What?’ Lucy wasn’t sure if she heard right, but then she gathered herself up, because this was good news, wasn’t it?
‘You look surprised,’ Elizabeth said softly. ‘Nothing is set in stone, not if you were thinking of…’
‘No, no, nothing like that. I haven’t really given it any thought at all since… not really.’ She didn’t need to add, the top-most consideration on her mind these days was Jo and they were busy enough with the fundraiser to keep much more from her thoughts. ‘I suppose, I just wouldn’t have thought he’d hang around.’
‘Not enough excitement for him after the bright lights of London?’
‘Something like that,’ she said, but then, when she thought about it now, this place suited him. There was an earthiness about Dan that Lucy couldn’t imagine in London. ‘So, he’d buy the lot?’