The Coast Road, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
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
Author’s Note
A Note from the Cover Designer
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Ardglas, County Donegal, March 1995
When the detective asked Izzy what had woken her that night she could not say exactly. She’d been sleeping badly all winter. It was not uncommon for her to wake three or four times in the night. It was also the first time in several weeks she’d shared a bed with her husband, but she did not mention that. At some point she’d needed the toilet. Crossing the landing, she’d stopped at the window and looked out across the bay. It had become her habit in recent months to pause there and try to locate the point where on a clear day the gable of the cottage was just visible. The sky was mottled with cloud, the first of the morning light seeping through. Black smoke hung over the headland.
‘And straight away, I knew something had happened,’ she said. ‘Even before I really knew, I knew – do you know what I mean?’
The two men stared back at her.
‘But how did you know, Izzy?’ Sergeant Farrelly asked her.
‘Well, when I saw the smoke I—’
‘No, Mrs Keaveney,’ the detective said. ‘How did a woman living two miles across the bay look out her window and see a bit of smoke and know the fire had been set intentionally?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s another story altogether.’
Chapter 1
October 1994
There had been two masses already that morning and the air was thick with incense. The church was packed and Izzy found herself squeezed between two bodies. Each time she went from kneeling to sitting to standing, she felt their shoulders press against hers. She pulled a balled-up tissue from her sleeve and wiped the sweat from her forehead. She thought of removing her woollen jumper but wasn’t sure if the top she had on underneath was decent, and besides, she’d never manage the manoeuvre without hitting the person next to her or exposing some part of her flesh. She didn’t think she could suffer an embarrassment like that this morning. Raising her head, she was confronted by the sight of Stasia Toomey’s broad back looming before her. Stasia stood stately and proud, tightly wrapped in a coat of royal-blue gabardine.
Kneeling again, Izzy caught the smell of sweat rising from her armpits. She bowed her head and closed her eyes.
And then the responses started. She took a long, slow breath.
‘Lord have mercy.’
Lord have mercy.
She had managed to drag herself out of bed for half-eleven mass. It was one thing to have been drinking, but to stay in bed with a hangover was to admit you had been drunk. She rarely drank to excess, so she wasn’t going to give James the satisfaction of using this against her. She’d slipped out of the spare room to make a cup of tea, saw the pictures lying scattered across the floor. The night before, when they’d returned from the local businesses’ dinner-dance, she’d insisted to James that she was sleeping downstairs in the spare room. She went careening down the hallway, knocking every picture frame off the wall. James had grabbed her arm and she’d planted an elbow in his ribs. He’d let out a roar, and of course, Niall and Orla had woken. And that was the image she couldn’t get out of her head – the two of them conjoined in horror, staring down at her from the landing.
She’d hurried back to bed with her cup of tea so as not to have to face any of them, but now as she knelt in the church, the collective responses to the prayers rising and falling in her empty stomach, she wished she’d eaten something.
‘Christ, have mercy.’
Christ, have mercy.
She tried to focus on Father Brian – the solid shape of him behind the altar. He was decked out in his Sunday finery, his vestments so clean and crisp and trimmed in shades of gold and silver, the stole embroidered with tight little bunches of grapes and ears of wheat. She reminded herself to say this to him next time he visited her: You were all decked out in your finery last Sunday, Brian. It suited you. The finest dress I’ve seen you in so far. Because she knew this was the part of the job he hated most, that it would forever be an embarrassment for him to present himself to people in this way. She thought of the wry smile he’d offer when she said this, the gentle putter of his laugh.
Oh Lord, it is your will that all shall be saved.
Someone near the front of the church rose. A tall woman with a mane of black hair stepped up and turned to face the lectern. Izzy felt a sharp little breath escape her. Colette Crowley, she thought – in all her glory. Such a fine-looking woman, it did you good just to rest your eyes upon her. The way she held her head so high. The length of her. The graceful tilt of her chin. And as she looked out at the congregation a smile played about her lips for a moment like there was something funny to her about all of this. Like she’d played a trick on them. Like she’d never really left at all. Izzy saw Stasia Toomey nudge her husband. A few people were overcome by fits of coughing. She cast an eye around to see if Shaun or Ann was present but couldn’t spot them anywhere.
And then Colette spoke in that beautiful, soft Dublin accent of hers – a reading from the prophet Isaiah – but Izzy was not listening to the words, just the sound of her voice. She was neither a coarse jackeen nor a pretentious south-sider – she was something else altogether and Izzy could have listened to her all day. And people stared up at her, like the vision she was, and when Izzy’s eyes drifted across the altar to where Father Brian was seated in his big marble chair, she saw the soft, sympathetic look he offered to Colette Crowley.
Give the Lord glory and power – that was the response Colette demanded of them, and Izzy thought that a bit bombastic: Hadn’t he power and glory enough?
And then Colette descended from the lectern, stepping carefully, minding the hem of her long skirt. A shuffling of bodies filled the silence that had fallen over the church. Izzy watched Stasia Toomey’s gaze track Colette all the way down the aisle, the hard set of her jaw easing only when Colette had knelt in her pew. But Father Brian did not move from where he was seated. He looked so still, so poised, his hands resting delicately on his knees like he was meditating over every word Colette had said. Izzy brought the tissue to her brow but there was nothing in her hand. She looked down and saw the tissue scattered across the hassock like snow.
* * *
He was purposely avoiding the main street of the town; this was what she’d thought to herself as they drove along the Coast Road the previous night. James was avoiding the main street, so they wouldn’t have to pass the shop. The papers had needed to be signed and returned to the agent that afternoon but James had arrived home late from work, unknotting his tie as he came through the door and complaining about how they’d never make it to the dinner on time. She’d left the contract on the kitchen table where, she knew, he’d seen it every time he passed. It had lain there for a week with only her signature filled in. And now they were taking the Coast Road to get around a conversation about how he had reneged on his side of the deal.
The road rose steeply and narrowed as they drew away from the town. It followed the coastline more closely – hills rose up on one side and tumbled down into the Atlantic on the other. The moon hanging low over the bay looked like someone had pared a sliver off it with a knife. She lifted her handbag from the footwell, snapped it open, took out a mint, and snapped the clasp shut again. She unwrapped the mint and popped it in her mouth, clacked it against her teeth. She turned on the radio, heard the beat of dance music, turned it off.
‘It must be great not to want things,’ she said, at last.
She watched his arms stiffen against the wheel. A muscle flickered in his cheek.
‘It must be great to be so satisfied with your life, to have all your needs met,’ she said. ‘I wish I could say the same.’
‘You know it wasn’t the right time,’ he said.
‘And when will the right time be?’
‘I don’t know . . . maybe it’s not the right property.’
‘It’s going for a song.’
‘Exactly. Why do you think that is?’
‘Because it’s been allowed to go derelict – a lick of paint and bit of money spent on it is all it needs.’
‘It failed when it was a gift shop, it failed when it was a bakery, it failed when it was a music shop—’
‘Well, it worked when it was a flower shop and I ran it.’
‘You never made that much money at it.’
‘I made enough and we were damn glad of it at the time.’
‘Look, it’s throwing good money after bad. Maybe if the price drops again, we can—’
‘Do
‘It doesn’t look good for an elected member of government to be going around buying up half the town.’
‘Half the town? Half the town? One shitty-assed shopfront on the main street and you call that half the town? I’m sick of having nothing just so that we don’t look too flash in front of your constituents.’ She folded her arms and turned her face to the window. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t work,’ she said. ‘People still think we have money.’
‘Which is not the case.’
‘And don’t I know it – you’ve made everyone else in this town rich except us.’ They rounded a corner and the waning moon swung back into view. ‘We can afford that property,’ she said. ‘You just don’t want me to have it.’
The car pulled up in front of the hotel.
‘Are you going to spoil another night?’ he asked.
She watched couples gliding up and down the steps of the Paradise Lodge. Brass railings and polished handles glinted beyond the glass-fronted doors of the hotel.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I won’t embarrass you.’
All through dinner she allowed Tom Heffernan to refill her wineglass and stare at her chest while she glowered across the table at James. She smoked one cigarette after another, the butts piling up in the ashtray in front of her. She’d worn a black satin culottes-suit with a low-cut top and a little bolero jacket she’d thrown off as soon as she sat down. Neat on her top half, and wide at the hip, she’d chosen the outfit to accentuate above and disguise below. James was usually quick to offer her compliments on her appearance but that evening he was barely fit to look her in the eye. And everyone so far at the event had admired the outfit, except her husband, who sat nursing the same whiskey he’d bought when he’d arrived. He had his hand over the mouth of the glass tumbler, rocking it back and forth in that uneasy way of his, as though he lived in dread of someone topping it up.
She’d pushed her loin of beef around the plate, and when the profiteroles arrived, she ignored them and withdrew another cigarette from her pack. While James gave his speech on the importance of business in the local community she looked up at the light fixture, a long cylinder dripping with strings of glass beads. As she stared at the lights shrouded in cigarette smoke, they melted into one and for minutes at a time she could distract herself from her husband’s voice. She listened to the applause and kept her arms folded on the table. There was a great deal of backslapping when James sat down again.
‘Fair play to you,’ Manus Sweeney said. ‘You’re damn right. It’s hard work that saves communities. You can’t be relying on government funding all the time.’
‘Well, Manus, I didn’t want to spell it out up there, but that’s just it. There are people nowadays who want everything for nothing and they’re not willing to work for it.’
There was a lot of nodding and agreement to that and Izzy turned her face away. Seated at the table opposite were Shaun Crowley and Ann Diver. Ann was the only woman and the men were mostly bachelors who had no one to bring to an event like this. Shaun was leaning a conspiratorial ear to the man next to him, and to his right sat Ann, looking like she’d been squeezed onto the end at the last minute. She wore oversized silver earrings, ornate things that dangled almost to her shoulders, and as if she regretted the decision now, she gripped one earlobe, hiding the earring. A waitress at the Harbour View Hotel for years, she was probably more used to serving at these events than attending them, and Izzy told herself to go and chat with her before the night was over. Poor Ann was unlikely to get much in the way of conversation out of Shaun, who was not in the habit of small talk. He was polite enough if you tried to engage him, but he always looked bored out of his mind at these things, sitting there in his shirtsleeves like it would have been too much bother for him to have worn a jacket and tie like every other man.
‘God, he’s an eccentric, that fella, isn’t he?’ Teresa Heffernan whispered to her. ‘All the money he has, you’d think he’d make a bit of an effort, iron his shirt at least.’
Izzy considered this. ‘Well, he has Ann to do it for him now,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but she’s back on the scene.’
‘Who?’
‘Colette.’
‘Is she, indeed.’ Izzy took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Well, she’s never ironed a shirt in her life. Poets don’t iron shirts.’
‘Apparently she showed up at the front desk of the factory today, brazen as anything, and asked to speak to Shaun. She was all of two minutes in his office, and when she come out again, she wasn’t looking too happy.’
‘Maybe she got wind of his new woman.’ And Izzy had struggled to get her head around this recent news, that Ann and Shaun were an item – quiet, homely Ann, who’d been a widow most of her life. Ann and Shaun were closer in age, which made a kind of sense, but otherwise she was as different from Colette as it was possible to be.
‘Word is he won’t let Colette see the kids,’ Teresa said.
‘Ah, now,’ Izzy said. ‘That seems a bit much. Imagine if someone wouldn’t let you see your children?’
Teresa settled back into her chair and tapped the head of ash off her cigarette. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘doesn’t he have his reasons.’
Izzy was about to argue this point when she was distracted by James jabbing his finger onto the surface of the table.
‘My parents were never given a single thing,’ he said. ‘They had to work for every penny.’
‘And were your parents from the town?’ Manus Sweeney asked.
‘They were not,’ Izzy said. ‘They were from some boreen up north of the county. They were probably third cousins.’
There was a silence.
‘Second cousins,’ James said, and everybody laughed, but Izzy recognised the cold glimmer that had entered his eyes.
‘Testing, testing, one two,’ someone said into a microphone. A bass guitar thrummed. There was a clash of cymbals.
‘And I don’t know how you can say that your parents were given nothing,’ Izzy said. ‘Didn’t the council give them the house you grew up in?’
James looked away from her. ‘Well, that’s just it,’ he said. ‘Back then you were given what you were given and you had to just get on with it.’
‘Jesus Christ, when’s the music going to start,’ Izzy said under her breath.
‘People led simple, ordinary lives,’ James went on, ‘and those are the people who I want to help, the people who are willing to go out and work and help themselves.’
She looked at her husband – simple and ordinary. She thought about getting the wine bottle and going to the end of the table and bringing it down over his simple, ordinary head.
A sound tore through the speakers so loud that the room gave a collective swoon.
‘Sorry about that, folks,’ said the man on the stage. ‘But sure, that woke yous up!’ He gave a cackle and the band launched into the opening bars of ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’.
‘Oh, I love this one,’ Izzy said. ‘Come on, who’ll dance with me? Tom.’ She grabbed him by the arm and stood up and her chair fell backwards onto the floor. Tom rose and she felt his hand on the small of her back and hoped to God James was watching.
* * *
Father Brian was back at the pulpit to deliver the gospel, and afterwards told them he’d not prepared a sermon because he’d been down the country attending a funeral, which she knew to be a lie because he’d spent all afternoon on Thursday in her kitchen, smoking and drinking tea, and had mentioned nothing about a funeral. Still, she was relieved the sermon was to be left out. It happened only a handful of times a year, and given her current condition it was a stroke of luck. It would shave a good ten minutes off proceedings. But then the responses began again, the lurching cadence of them, and she knew she wasn’t going to make it to the end.
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.
Oh, the sweat was dripping down her back.
Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.
And the taste of bile snaking up her throat.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the person next to her, and pushed her way past the seated congregants without lifting her head or looking one of them in the eye. She scurried down the side aisle, her eyes fixed on the floor. Near the church door she jostled her way through the men who, either too late or too drunk to be seen going into the church, had gathered in the porch. A speaker hung above the door echoing what the priest was saying at the altar. She rushed towards the church gates with Father Brian’s voice calling after her.
