Molly nodded, and when the barmaid returned with the steaming brew her face suddenly took on a look of comprehension.
‘Right so! You’re here with Vivvy. You’re the lost niece.’
‘Vivvy? Did you say Vivvy?’ Molly could only imagine her aunt’s horror at having her name so twisted and tortured.
‘Vivvy Connor — she’s your aunt, isn’t she? What a woman. I tell you, she had the whole place going last night,’ at which point the poor deluded woman started nodding at all points round the room as if to indicate the spots where Vivienne had swung naked from the chandeliers.
‘Are we talking about a tall, slim New Yorker with perfect red-gold hair and impeccable clothing?’ Molly asked, astonished.
‘Beautiful!’ the barmaid gushed, her eyes heavenward. ‘Beautiful.’
Molly sipped at the hot tea. Whatever the hell was happening in her world, she’d obviously be better off not trying to understand it.
‘And talk about a singing voice,’ the barmaid continued. ‘Angel! Angel. I’m Maureen, by the way, and you must be Molly.’ She leaned across the bar and held out her hand.
‘I’m sorry, Maureen, of course I’m Molly. It’s really nice to meet you, too. It’s just that I’m having a very bad day.’
‘Do you want me to ring Vivvy and tell her you’ve arrived? I’m sure you’ll want to be reunited with clean knickers. Take the coat off and give us a look at your wedding dress, will you?’
‘Is there anything Vivvy didn’t tell you about me?’ Molly asked, astounded, clutching her coat closer to her. The fire was roaring at the other end of the pub but Molly doubted she would ever feel warm again.
‘All I’m saying,’ Maureen was saying, ‘is that if Jack White showed his face in these parts, ruggedly handsome or not, he’d get a right old seeing to, Molly. We’re all behind you on that one.’ She leaned forward and tugged at Molly’s lapel until she got a glimpse of the beaded bodice before Molly reared back and out of her reach.
‘But I think I have to disagree with your woman on your wedding dress, there, Molly. I think it would have looked lovely on the day.’
With that she headed for the back-room door at the far end of the bar. ‘Now, I’ll just ring Nell at Skibregan House and tell her that you’re here and perhaps since it’s raining so hard she’ll get Jonty to run down and get you. Such a hoot — you and your rental cars!’
Molly sat at the bar feeling for the 99th time in the past however many days it had been as though someone else had inhabited her body and taken charge of her once successful and enjoyable life. And now, by the sounds of things, the same evil presence had engorged the glamorous and sophisticated form of her Aunt Vivienne. Had the whole place going? Singing like an angel?
‘Someone’s on their way to bring you up there now,’ Maureen reported on her return.
‘And where are they bringing me to exactly?’ Molly asked her politely.
‘Well, you’re staying in Nell and Jonty’s bed and breakfast just around the corner. Sort of up behind us on the hill. It’s the loveliest place, Molly, you’ll love it there. Beautiful views of the sea and gorgeous rooms. She’s done it up so well. I think Vivvy is in the four-poster room and you have the brass bed. It’ll be just the place for you to spend some time, you know, thinking things over a bit. Reflecting. And Vivvy and Nell get along like a house on fire. The duets!’
Maureen shook her head at the memory of it all and went about drying the pint glasses while she waited for Molly’s second pot of tea to brew.
‘Just what exactly do you mean by thinking things over and reflecting?’ Molly asked, trying to keep her voice casual.
‘Well, with the wedding going down the gurgler and you with no gallery any more and not even so much as a place to rest your weary head when you get home, there’s obviously a lot to consider.’
Molly was stunned. Not only because a perfect stranger knew so much about the sad and pathetic turnaround in her life but also because what she said was true. Molly had no husband. No boyfriend in fact. No-one who would touch her with a 40-foot barge pole if last night was anything to go by. She had sold her gallery at the behest of the man who had cheated on her. She had lived in his house. Currently, as of this exact minute, she had approximately nothing going for her. Nothing. Okay, almost nothing.
‘So has Viv found Tom Connor?’ she asked, clutching at the slightest chance that something good might have happened. ‘My uncle, Tom Connor?’
‘Well, you’d have to talk to her about that, Molly. I think there was a call last night from your man at the agency in Dublin but I’m not sure what the news was. No doubt Gerry O’Reilly will be taking care of it from this end. Whatever the news, your aunt wasn’t exactly crying in her beer when she got off the phone, though. That woman can dance!’
Of course, there’s a chance it is not my Viv she is talking about, thought Molly. It could be a whole other singing, dancing, beautiful Viv full of fun and laughter.
‘So you don’t know a Tom Connor yourself, then?’ she asked Maureen.
‘Me? No, but then I’m not originally from around here so I probably wouldn’t know him. I’m from Dublin, you know, where you broke your arm.’
‘So I hope it’s not a rude question but why would anyone want to come to Ballymahoe from Dublin?’ asked Molly, truly interested.
A red flush poked up out of the top of Maureen’s shirt and crept up her face.
‘And what exactly is wrong with Ballymahoe?’ she asked crisply. ‘Of course, with you having been here for — what is it?’ She looked at her watch. ‘Nearly 10 minutes now I can understand that you must know every single thing there is to know about Ballymahoe but what an expert like yourself probably doesn’t realise is that—’
‘Hold on just a bloody minute, Maureen,’ Molly said, standing and holding up her hand in a halting measure.
‘There you go, you see — your aunt told us you were difficult but I never for a moment—’
‘I said hold on!’ Molly said very loudly, very clearly, very angrily. ‘I come in here perfectly innocently and have to listen to you — a perfect stranger — regurgitate private details of my life and then you have the cheek to get uppity because I ask you one single simple question about why you would live in a tiny little West Cork shithole rather than a city full of people? What is the matter with you?’
Maureen looked as though she were about to cry.
‘Don’t you even know, Molly Brown,’ she wobbled, ‘there’s no such thing as a perfect stranger in Ireland. Only friends you haven’t met yet.’
At that moment the door opened and Vivienne came in, wearing jeans and a Gucci belt and loafers with a beautiful mauve cashmere polo neck tucked into her tiny waist.
‘Oh, Vivvy!’ cried Maureen, rushing from behind the bar to embrace her. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. You’re right,’ she whispered, sotto voce. ‘Dreadful! Hard to handle! Rude!’
Molly looked at Vivienne — or whoever it was that was pretending to be Vivienne. She certainly had the same face and hair and body for that matter but the clothes belonged to someone else.
‘Who are you?’ she asked the woman posing as her aunt. ‘Who are you and what have you done with the real Vivienne Connor?’
Vivienne sidled up to her niece and slipped a comforting arm around her shoulders.
‘Molly, I can imagine how you must be feeling right now. Why don’t you come with me?’
Molly looked at her suspiciously. ‘Where are you taking me? Back to your spaceship, I suppose,’ she said, shrugging off her aunt’s arm. ‘Well, I watch The X-Files too, you know, so bugger off.’
‘What on earth are you on about?’
‘You’re not implanting one of those little chips into the back of my neck, if that’s what you’re thinking. Not that anybody would ever find it if you did,’ and, just for a change, Molly started to cry.
Vivienne put her arm back around the shaking shoulders of her bewildered niece.
‘I thin
k you might be very tired,’ she said softly into Molly’s ear. ‘I think you might be very tired and in need of a deep, long, bubbly bath and a lie-down in a big, squashy bed piled high with feather duvets.’
Molly looked at alien-aunt, her tears overflowing, and nodded her head. So what if she was an abductor? The bed sure sounded nice.
‘Come on, then,’ Viv said, plucking Molly from her bar stool and putting her on her feet.
‘I know just the place for you and it has a beautiful view and a roaring fire and is attached firmly to the ground, you know, not flying anywhere.’
She shepherded Molly out the door, with much muted winking and nodding at Maureen, and gently lowered her mournful niece into the passenger seat of a beautiful new Daimler before jumping in the driver’s side and heading around the corner.
‘Hah!’ Molly said. ‘See! The old Viv couldn’t drive.’
‘Actually, Jonty gave me a lesson this afternoon,’ said Viv, putting her foot gently on the gas and driving them around the corner and about 500 metres up the road.
Molly stopped snivelling when Viv turned up a long driveway and pulled up outside a stone cottage surrounded by a hedge of what looked like native New Zealand cabbage trees. It was beautiful. They were parked out the back but perched, as Maureen said, up the hill behind the pub, the two-storey house with dormer windows and pitched roof looked out over the bay and endless expanse of cold green hills opposite.
‘It’s lovely,’ Molly sniffed as Viv opened her door and pulled her to her feet. ‘It’s really lovely.’
‘Wait until you get a load of your boudoir, Missy,’ Viv said as the door to the house opened and a warm-faced woman in a long black-watch tartan skirt and navy blue sweater greeted them.
‘Molly, dear, so glad to see you. We’ve been worried! Ah, look at the state of you. Will I run you a bath? Vivvy, shall I sit her in front of the fire in the drawing room while I run her a bath, will I? Come this way, dear. You must be frozen. A cup of tea and some scones?’
Molly felt like being coddled. From this woman she liked it. She liked it a lot.
‘I’m Nell,’ she said, shooing Molly from the cold reception hall into a drawing room full of over-stuffed chairs and couches, an eclectic mixture of antique furniture and a baby grand piano groaning with pot plants sitting on an ancient shawl.
‘The scones sound nice,’ Molly managed to spit out before finding herself propelled towards the armchair closest to the fire and plonked into it.
Viv sat opposite her and nodded at Nell, who disappeared out the drawing-room door in what Molly supposed was the direction of the kitchen.
‘So,’ said Viv, in a not-so-coddling tone, ‘are you going to tell me what the hell happened yesterday?’ So much for the nice cosy world Nell had gone to so much trouble to establish.
Molly was not in the mood for the third degree and was not having a bar of it.
‘Are you going to tell me what the hell happened yesterday?’ she answered back. ‘According to Maureen you were dancing on the table with your knickers on your head while the entire population of Bally-wherever-the-hell-we-are was standing around clapping.’
Viv looked at her coldly, no trace of the kindly, soft-spoken alien-aunt of moments before.
‘Well, whatever I was doing, I was doing it where I was supposed to be doing it. You, on the other hand, go gallivanting off at a bus stop in search of something sweet and sticky and turn up nearly 24 hours later looking like, like, like this. I don’t know what has gotten into you, Molly.’
‘God, Vivienne, could you not just give me one tiny little break? Just this once? Do you think I missed the bus on purpose? Do you think I spent the night in hell just to get back at you? Why would I do that? I’m just having a bad day, a bad life. It’s nothing to do with you. Can’t you just leave me alone to get on with it?’
Viv opened her mouth to speak just as the door burst wide and Nell’s flushed happy face appeared, her arms bearing a tray laden with teapot, cups, warm scones, butter, jam and cream.
‘There you are, now!’ She put the tray down on the table beside Molly’s chair. ‘Your aunt will be lucky to fit anything in after all that egg and bacon she had for breakfast but there’s plenty here for two if she can manage it. Now I’ll leave you alone. Molly, dear. I’m just getting the water hot enough to run your bath. Can you wait another half hour? I’ll bring more scones.’
‘Thanks, Nell,’ Molly said, wishing with all her heart she could sit on Nell’s knee and rest her head on that blue woolly shoulder. If she survived another half hour alone in a room with her aunt a bath would be more than welcome.
Viv waited until Nell had bustled out before picking up where she had left off.
‘All I’m saying, Molly, is that just because you’ve been dumped on does not give you carte blanche to waive responsibility for the rest of your life. What if you had been killed or abducted yesterday? How would I explain that to your mother? Did you ever stop to think about that?’
Molly was at a loss, almost. ‘So that’s what this is all about, Viv? What you would say to my mother if I was abducted or killed. Well, I wouldn’t expect you to know anything about mothers and daughters but I can tell you now that if I was crushed by a steamroller and you had to ring Mum and tell her, how you explained it would not be foremost on her mind. I’d be dead, after all. The death of her daughter would probably take precedence over the grammar of her sister.’
An unreadable look swept across Viv’s face, ending in a set jaw and small eyes.
‘Don’t deliberately misunderstand me, young lady. All I’m trying to do here is kick-start your existence again. You cannot let one tiny little hiccup like Jack White end your life. If you’re going to lose your mind over him, then you’re not the woman I thought you were.’
Molly seethed with rage. Seething was the only word for it. If anything, she over-seethed. Angrily plopping jam and cream onto a crusty scone, she turned her excess seethe supplies on her aunt.
‘You don’t know anything about me, Vivienne Connor. You don’t know the woman I am. You’re just my mother’s sister and if she had another one, I bet you wouldn’t even be her favourite. Don’t you dare sit there in your perfect hair with your faaabulous life and your New York magazine and your mauve pashmina and tell me how to run my life. You don’t know anything about it! About me. About Mum, even. Why are you even here? What are you looking for? What if your brother Tom turns out to be a disappointment, Vivienne — had you thought of that? How will you cope? A hopeless alcoholic with one leg and no hair might not fit into your life plan just like a spinster niece with a broken arm doesn’t.’
Molly’s over-burdened scone sat perilously on the arm of her chair, uneaten. Her aunt sat straight up, her hands pressed between her knees, her lips white, her chest heaving.
Speaking in a low voice, she stared at the scone. ‘Don’t you presume to know anything about me,’ she said. ‘It may seem to you as though I have everything, Molly, but that is not the case. There are things that you don’t know, that your mother doesn’t know—’
‘What? You broke a nail and the manicurist couldn’t fit you in for a whole day?’ Molly interrupted rudely, picking up the scone and taking a huge bite out of it.
‘Don’t you dare speak to me like that,’ Vivienne said in cold italics and, to Molly’s horror, tears sprang from her aunt’s eyes.
‘I might not be the perfect sister, I may not be the perfect aunt but I know about the meaning of family, Molly, only because I have never had one and I would give all the New York magazines and mauve pashminas in the world to change that. I had a chance once a long time ago and I blew it. You ask me why I’m here as though I would be the last person alive to go looking for anyone and I can’t tell you how much that hurts but I am here to find my brother because,’ she faltered, her face squirming with the effort of containing her emotion, ‘because,’ she said looking Molly smack dab in her jam-smeared face, ‘because I can’t find my daughter.’
Molly dropped her scone in slow motion to the table beside her and stared at her aunt with her jaw hanging wide open.
‘You have a daughter?’
Vivienne had pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and was dabbing at her eyes, her composure regained but for a blue vein pulsing in her temple and the rapid rise and fall of her chest.
‘Vivienne — you have a daughter?’ Molly repeated.
Viv looked at her niece, then into the fireplace and started to speak. ‘I was living with Marco, my first husband. We didn’t have a whole lot of money because I was a junior editor on Me magazine which was like a poor cousin to Cosmo sort of thing and Marco was just starting to shoot the fashion for it, his first big break, really. Anyway, the editor really liked what he did and next thing he was doing all the big fashion shoots for all the company’s magazines. I was so in love! God, he was beautiful. Beautiful dark skin and a smile that just radiated charm. To cut a long story short, one day Marco rang me from Paris to say he wasn’t coming back to New York, that he had met someone else. And that was it. There didn’t seem to be any options for me at the time, but now of course I think why didn’t I get on the next plane and bring him home? How could he think of me with the legs of some 17-year-old model wrapped around his ears? I didn’t, though. I didn’t do anything because I had been waiting for him to get home to tell him I was pregnant with our child.’
Vivienne stopped as tears filled her eyes again, then she regained control and continued.
‘I had just turned 21 so your mother had just turned 20. I didn’t really know her that well and she was so far away, I didn’t feel as though I could talk to her and I felt kind of embarrassed. A 21 year old, pregnant and abandoned in New York? Who needs it? Luckily I didn’t show until I was about seven months and even then it was pretty easy to hide. I was hardly eating anything and working a second job proofreading advertising copy to pay the rent and have some money for when the baby arrived. I don’t know how I thought I would manage. My neighbour, Mrs Bacinkas, looked after her grandchildren during the day and I guess I thought she would be able to look after my baby while I was at work.’