‘Make sure no one falls off the cliff,’ said Bertie. ‘My heart’s in my mouth every time I see one of our guests near the edge.’
There was a sound of a car pulling into the gravel driveway. Grace looked out through the small window. ‘It’s the bride! She’s arrived!’ She gathered up her kaftan like a Jane Austen heroine on her way to a ball and ran outside, Rosie behind her.
In one of the parking spaces on the gravel drive, two women were extricating themselves from a car which was so piled high with suitcases, boxes and clothes carriers that it was difficult to see how they had managed to fit inside in the first place.
Grace was hugging them both. ‘Oh, you’re so welcome to Cliff Top,’ she was saying. ‘The weather is behaving itself, isn’t it? Splitting the rocks, almost too hot.’ She smiled. ‘Niamh, this is Rosie O’Malley, Cliff Top’s owner and managers. Rosie, Niamh our bride.’
Niamh flung her arms around Rosie. ‘Oh, thank you for having us,’ she said. ‘We know we’re your first wedding and so we’re so grateful. When Seán proposed here, we were so thrilled when Grace said Cliff Top could host our wedding. She said that the big boss was called Rosie and she absolutely adored weddings.’
Rosie was about to ask who the big boss was and then she realised Grace meant her. Big boss sounded more like someone who ordered horses’ heads to be left in enemies’ beds or smoked cigars and Rosie had never done either. Nor did she particularly like weddings. ‘They’re my favourite things,’ she said, looking at Grace who studiously avoided her gaze. ‘And you’re both so welcome to the hotel.’
‘I’m Kate, bridesmaid-in-chief,’ said the other woman, dragging her case over the gravel. She had golden hair which actually tumbled, there was no other word for it, and the kind of teeth that looked chiselled, all perfect and white.
‘Bridesmaid-in-chief?’ said Grace. ‘That sounds impressive.’
Niamh laughed. ‘Kate is the perfect embodiment of someone with a type-A personality. Even when she’s a bridesmaid. She’s one of those annoying people who excel at everything.’
Kate was smiling. ‘But I’m not the one getting married.’
‘Same,’ said Grace. ‘I don’t excel at relationships either.’
‘I’m not saying I don’t excel at them,’ said Kate, quickly. ‘I haven’t yet found a man who deserves me.’
Grace smiled. ‘Why don’t we go and have a cup of tea or perhaps something cooler? We have some home-made raspberry cordial?’ Grace led the two women into the hotel.
Kate and Niamh were full of excitement, giddy with happiness and anticipation and, as Rosie walked behind them, a strange feeling hung over her, as though life was happening to other people and never to her. Sometimes, she had a fantasy of buying a camper van and driving off into the sunset, a dog on the seat beside her, making for the Rosslare ferry and straight to France. Freedom, the whiff of adventure in the air. Oh, she was being silly. Who wouldn’t want to run a lovely hotel like this?
‘Will the groom be here soon?’ asked Grace.
‘Oh yes,’ said Niamh. ‘He texted about an hour ago to say they were heading out of the airport. They won’t be long now.’
Bertie was already coming towards Niamh and Kate with a tray with a jug of iced water and sprigs of mint, a pot of tea, one of coffee and some of François’ shortbread and a bowl of fresh strawberries, dusted with sugar and a dish of cold whipped cream.
‘Ladies, a hundred thousand welcomes to you both,’ Bertie was saying. ‘Oh, isn’t this marvellous? I remember when I was manager of the Shelbourne Hotel and Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco came to stay on their honeymoon. We had such fun looking after them. And we’ll do the same with you. They were at some big banquet at Áras an Uachtaráin, with our president and all that, and they returned to the hotel and Rainier went to bed but Grace joined just the staff all in the kitchen, away from the guests, for a little party. She had some great Hollywood gossip, I can tell you.’
Bertie was great for the old blarney, thought Rosie. She never knew which of his stories were true and which were richly embroidered to add to his charm. Perhaps this wedding would pass without any issues after all. She just needed to get through the next four days.
4
PATRICK
Seán looked the same as ever. That big smile and blue eyes, his hair cut short and that spiky bit which never lay down flat. He’d filled out a good bit, with the kind of arms and chest that were the result of a gym habit, but the two brothers had always been strong. Growing up on a dairy farm in East Cork does that to a fella because you’re not spending your childhood playing computer games in a darkened room – much as they wished they were at the time. Instead, you’re out in the cold and the damp lifting the kind of things that city boys and girls wouldn’t imagine could be lifted. Bales of hay, sacks of feed, pitchforks, shovels, hauling broken gates, loading cattle onto the trailer on Mart day. It never stopped. They were bred for early mornings and hard graft, and it never left you, that feeling that you have to be up and at it, and you couldn’t rest at night unless you were bone-tired with a good day’s work behind you.
It was the cows themselves that made it all worthwhile, sensing you from a mile away, however softly your boots sink into the mud or however quietly you walk along the lane, they begin to rustle and low. And it’s not because they know you are there to feed them, it’s because they trust you. And like you. It was ridiculous now to realise how much Patrick needed those cows and their affection, the way they would press against him, their soft noses, the ears which would flick when they saw him, those intelligent brown eyes, their hot nostrilly breath on his hand. Had anyone asked him at the time, he would say he hated the milking parlour and couldn’t wait to get away from the thing. But he could still transport himself back there, that slow rhythm to life, the cold dawns, the sun beginning to rise over the hill, the walk down the lane to the sheds, the sound of the cows as they knew he and Seán were close by. He could still name every single one of those girls and tell you about them.
The cows were just part of the family. As they attached the milking machine, he and Seán would stroke the cows, talking gently, asking how they were that day and how did they sleep. Their father had no such sentimental feelings for them and barely grunted at them, as truculent with them as he was with the boys and their mother. The farm had belonged to the Fitzgeralds, his mother’s family, and passed down to her, their father probably seeing a good thing, but his heart was never in the farm or the way of life. When the boys left home, he milked the cows and maintained a cursory control over it, mainly to still be in receipt of various EU payments and schemes. Crucially, he never divorced his wife, the boys’ mother, and so never completely lost the farm. When she died, he was still legally entitled to it and retook possession, leasing the land and the house to their neighbours while maintaining a small herd.
Now, all these years later, Seán had his eyes on the road, heading away from the airport, making for the hotel. His little brother, soon to be a married man. Hard to believe.
‘Do you ever think of the dairy?’ Patrick asked him.
Seán laughed. ‘There’s not a day I don’t think about it. Every time I walk into my office, sit down at the desk, breathe in a noseful of that stale air, people’s tuna sandwiches, last night’s leftovers slowly turning in the shared microwave, and we can’t open the windows because of the air conditioning. And there’s no craic to be had, everyone staring at screens and all that and I wish every single day that I was back with those girls in the shed…’ He smiled across at his older brother. ‘You the same?’
‘Now and then,’ said Patrick. In Boston, some mornings, before he’d opened his eyes, he’d think for a moment that he was in his old childhood bedroom, the sound of his mother downstairs getting the day on, knowing he had to get up and start the milking and he was almost always disappointed that he was in bed in Boston and that his mother wasn’t downstairs making breakfast. There is nothing that makes you feel safer than your mother close at hand, hearing her move around the house. She’d call up to them. ‘Paddy? Seán? Time to get up!’ And they’d emerge, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen and eat the porridge she’d made, the stove beginning to warm the house and the sound of the news on the old radio, their mother listening with half an ear to that and the other to Seán talk on about a match at school.
Dark winter mornings took on a different hue once you were in the sheds with the cows, the sense that you were doing good work. Being with animals was like that, though, wasn’t it? Intelligent, sentient, sensitive beings who knew when you were in a bad mood and literally nudged you out of it, or on bright spring days when you let them out into the field and some would break into a kind of skip and you could only laugh from the sheer joy that you shared the planet with these wonderful creatures. And it was the rhythm of the day, up and out and down to the sheds, and then the evenings again, checking in on them. You’d know by a turn of their head that something was up. It attuned you, taught you perception skills you didn’t know you had. Who knew that growing up on a dairy farm would prepare you for life in business? But it had. Patrick had skills that he knew came directly from the farm, the ability to soothe and smooth, the hypersensitivity when it came to assessing someone’s mood, having a place in your mind to retreat to. One stressful day and he could transport himself back there, still feel the rough straw, the velvet noses, the soft ears, the sounds they made, the smell of clean straw and clean manure. It never left. And then he opened his eyes and it was a lifetime later and he was a grown man and he was in Boston, a thousand light years away from the farm.
‘We were lucky to have it,’ he said now to Seán.
