The Girl on the Cliff (26 page)

‘Yes. Which means you and Shane do too.’ Katheen’s eyes twinkled. ‘There now, not such an Irish peasant as you thought yourself, Grania! Not that you’d ever have noticed it in Sophia. My mammy was just like her mother, Mary: kind, home-loving, not an air or grace upon her. Not like that adopted sister of hers, that Anna.’

Grania read the timbre in Kathleen’s voice and watched her face darken.

‘Did you know her?’ Grania asked in surprise. ‘I thought she and Mary were estranged?’

Kathleen sat down heavily at the table. ‘Well, Grania, pet, there’s more to this tale yet. Haven’t you put two and two together?’

‘No.’ Grania shook her head. ‘Should I have done?’

‘Being up at Dunworley House, I thought you might. There’s enough clues around the old place. Well now, the –’

At that moment, Aurora entered through the back door, one of the newborn collie pups cradled in her arms. ‘Oh, Grania! Mrs Ryan!’ Aurora’s eyes were shining with happiness as she looked down at the pup. ‘She is adorable! And Shane says I can be the one to name her! I thought Lily, after my mother. What do you think?’

Grania saw the expression on her mother’s face, but ignored it. ‘I think that would be perfect.’

‘Good.’ Aurora planted a kiss on the top of the newly
christened pup’s head. ‘There wouldn’t be a chance, I mean a possibility that …’

‘We’d have to ask your father first, Aurora.’ Grania read her mind. ‘Besides, Lily’s not ready to be taken from her mother just yet.’

‘But can I come down and see her every day?’ Aurora begged. ‘Can I, Mrs Ryan?’

‘I …’

Grania could see her mother grudgingly softening in the face of such an engaging and excited little girl.

‘Well now, I don’t see why not.’

‘Thank you!’ Aurora walked up to her and planted a kiss on Kathleen’s cheek. She sighed with pleasure. ‘I love it here at your house. It feels like a proper …’ Aurora searched for the word, ‘home.’

‘Thank you, so, Aurora.’ Kathleen’s last shred of reserve crumbled. ‘And what will you two be doing for your tea tonight, then?’

‘We hadn’t really got that far, had we, Aurora?’ said Grania.

‘Then why don’t you both stay here and have it with us?’

‘Yippee! That means I can stay longer with Lily. I’m going back to see Shane now. He said he’d take me into the milking shed.’

Grania and Kathleen watched Aurora as she returned outside.

‘Despite how you feel about the Lisles, you have to admit that Aurora is a lovely little girl,’ Grania ventured carefully.

‘You’re right.’ Kathleen banged the table and stood up,
heading for the pile of potatoes waiting to be peeled. ‘It’s nothing to do with her, poor little pet. How are her nightmares?’ she asked Grania as she took a knife from the drawer and began peeling.

‘She seems better. No more night wanderings at least. Mam –’ Grania wanted to lead the conversation back – ‘when you asked me if I had put two and two together before Aurora came in, I –’

It was her father’s turn to interrupt. ‘Make me a brew, Kathleen, I’ve a raging thirst on me,’ John said as he strode into the kitchen.

‘You be going upstairs for a shower while I do it.’ Kathleen wrinkled her nose. ‘You smell of cow and you know I can’t stand it.’

‘I will, so,’ John said as he planted a kiss on Kathleen’s head to annoy her. ‘And I’ll be back down smelling of roses for that tea.’

That evening, Grania did not get another chance to talk to her mother further about the past, but instead enjoyed the sight of Aurora sitting at the table with the Ryans and questioning them eagerly on all aspects of living on a farm.

‘I think I’d like to be a farmer if I can’t be a ballerina,’ she commented to Grania as they walked up the cliff path on their way to the house. ‘I love animals.’

‘Have you ever had a pet of your own?’

‘No. Mummy didn’t like animals. She said they smelt.’

‘Well, I suppose they do a bit,’ agreed Grania.

‘But humans do too,’ Aurora said equably as they arrived in the darkened kitchen and Grania put the lights on.

‘Right, madam. Straight upstairs for you. It’s late.’

Once Aurora was settled for the night, Grania – still thinking about Mary, her great-grandmother, and what a remarkable woman she had sounded – prowled around the house, unable to settle. Still unaware of what the connection to the Lisles was, and what, in her mother’s words, she had not yet put together, there was something that was pricking at the back of her consciousness. Some fact she could not place, which would tie the strands together. It was not in the drawing room, or the library, or Alexander’s study … Grania opened the door to the dining room, remembering the one night she’d spent having dinner with Alexander in it.

And there, hanging over the fireplace, was the answer. When she’d sat here before, she’d barely glanced at it, but it had obviously stuck in her memory. An oil painting of a ballerina in a white tutu, swansdown gracing her dark head. Her arms crossed over her legs, her face invisible as it rested on her knees. At the bottom of the painting, the words read:
ANNA LANGDON AS ‘
THE DYING SWAN
’
.

‘Anna Langdon …’ Grania said the name out loud. This was the connection she had missed. The reason her mother had mentioned that Aurora had inherited her talent from her grandmother.

Grania climbed the stairs an hour later, unable to confirm her theory as the face of the dancer in the painting was hidden. But if it was the same as the dark-eyed woman in the black-and-white photographs strewn around the house, Grania knew she’d made the connection.

At breakfast the next morning, Grania asked casually, ‘Aurora, did you ever meet your grandmother?’

Aurora shook her head. ‘Mummy said she died before I was born. Granny was quite old when she had Mummy, you see.’

‘Can you remember her name?’

‘Of course I can!’ Aurora was insulted at the question. ‘Her name was Anna, and once upon a time she was a ballerina. Just like I’m going to be.’

Back at the farmhouse that afternoon, with Aurora happily up on the hills counting sheep with Shane, Grania tackled her mother again.

‘So, Mam, how did it happen that Anna Langdon and Lawrence Lisle’s younger brother, Sebastian, met and got married? I’m right, aren’t I? Anna Langdon, famous ballerina, became Anna Lisle? Lily’s mother and Aurora’s grandmother?’

‘Yes,’ Kathleen nodded. ‘She did so. You can’t really ask me the ins and outs, Grania, because I was no more than a babe when they married. Even though I met her, I can only guess at what happened before that. And there was no love lost between my mother and her sister, so my mammy hardly spoke of it.’

‘But why did Anna follow her mother and sister to Ireland? When she’d obviously become so famous?’

‘Well now, you have to remember that Anna was in her late thirties when she came home to Ireland to roost. And all ballerinas and beauties have a shelf life, don’t they so?’ Kathleen added pragmatically.

‘Do you remember her at all, Mam?’

‘Oh, I remember her.’ Kathleen’s busy hands paused on the pastry she was rolling. ‘For a child like me, brought up
in this small place, Aunt Anna seemed like a movie star. The first time I met her, she was dressed in a coat of real fur. When she hugged me, I remember the softness against my face … and then she took it off, to sit down and have a brew in our front room. She had the tiniest figure on her I’d ever seen. And heels that seemed the height of mountains to me. And then she lit a black cigarette.’ Kathleen sighed. ‘How could I ever forget her?’

‘So, she was beautiful?’

‘She was … a presence … a force of nature. And it’s hardly surprising that the first time old Sebastian Lisle set eyes on her, he fell passionately in love with her.’

‘How old was he?’

‘He would have been sixty or so. A widower, who had married late to begin with. Adele, his first wife, was thirty years younger than him. She died giving birth to … 
that boy
.’

‘Sebastian had a son already?’

‘Yes,’ Kathleen shuddered. ‘His name was Gerald.’

‘So Anna and Sebastian Lisle married?’

‘They did so.’

‘What was Anna wanting with an old man after the life she’d led, Mam?’ pondered Grania.

‘Who knows? Money, maybe. My mam always said Anna was a terrible spendthrift, enjoying the life of luxury. As for Himself, he must have thought all his Christmases had arrived at once in the shape of Anna. They married within three months of their first glance of each other.’

‘The brother of Anna’s guardian, Lawrence …’ mused Grania. ‘Did Sebastian know who Anna was?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Kathleen continued, ‘they both thought it a huge joke that Anna had been presumed dead for all these years.’

‘But what about Mary? Didn’t the fact that Anna came to Ireland cause a problem for her?’

‘Well now, when Anna turned up in Ireland at Mary’s house, then met Sebastian a while later, Mary knew she had to be telling her what she’d done to protect her when she was younger,’ said Kathleen. ‘’Twas for all the right reasons she did it – who knows what would have become of Anna if Mary hadn’t intervened? Anna knew that without Mary telling Lawrence Lisle she was dead and taking her in, she’d not have had the chance to pursue her ballet career.’

‘And Mary forgave her daughter for not contacting her for all those years?’

‘Well, after what they’d been through together in London, there was a bond there. And you’ve already heard how Mary loved Anna as her own. She’d have forgiven her anything. My mammy, Sophia, was the one who took it hardest. She referred to Anna as “the prodigal daughter”.’

‘Perhaps she was jealous of their bond,’ said Grania.

‘To be sure, that was in there somewhere, yes. But at least they were reconciled before Mary died. And after what she’d done to help Anna in the early days, my grandmother deserved that, so she did. And I can tell you, Grania, that fresh flowers appeared without fail on Mary’s grave up at Dunworley church every week, and only stopped the very day after Anna herself died. ’Twas her way of saying sorry and that she loved the woman she’d always called “Mother”.’

The thought of this gesture brought a sudden, unbidden lump to Grania’s throat and warmed her a little towards Anna.

‘Sebastian decided not to take action against Mary for stealing Anna away from his brother all those years ago?’ she asked.

‘Whatever Anna told him about the situation was enough. And besides, Lawrence Lisle was long dead and the past was the past. As far as Sebastian was concerned, Mary had cared for the love of his life and that was all that mattered. I swear, Grania, I’ve never seen a man so blinded by love for a woman.’

Grania struggled to take it all in. ‘Then Lily was born?’

‘Yes, Lily was born. God save us all,’ Kathleen muttered.

‘And the three of them lived up at Dunworley House happily ever after?’

‘Hardly,’ Kathleen snorted. ‘Do you really think Anna Langdon was going to be content to play mammy to a baby and a three-year-old stepson, shut away in a crumbling house on the edge of the world?’ Kathleen shook her head. ‘No. A nursemaid was engaged for the baby, and Aunt Anna took off a few months later. She’d say she had to go for one of her ballet performances, and disappear for weeks. My mammy was sure there were other men she saw, too.’

‘So Lily grew up virtually motherless, and Sebastian Lisle a lonely cuckold?’

‘That’s about the size of it, yes. And you’ve never seen a man more miserable than Sebastian. He used to come down to see us here with Lily. He’d sit at the table, and ask
my mother if she’d heard from her sister. I was only five at the time, but I still remember his face … ’twas a picture of despair. It was as if he was enchanted by her, the poor, deluded old man. And when Aunt Anna turned up from wherever she’d been – sometimes after months away – he’d always be after forgiving her.’

‘And what about Lily? What kind of life must she have had – an ageing father and an absent mother?’

Kathleen’s face closed suddenly. ‘Enough of this talk now! I don’t want to discuss it any more. What about you, Grania? What about your future?’ she retaliated. ‘Aurora’s father will be home here soon enough and you’ll not be needed there when he comes back.’

‘Like you don’t want to discuss the past, I’m not that keen on discussing the future.’ Grania stood up as mother and daughter reached deadlock in the conversation. ‘I’ll be off up to my room to collect a couple of bits and pieces to take up to Dunworley House before Aurora comes back with Shane.’

‘As you want,’ said Kathleen to Grania’s disappearing figure. She sighed, feeling drained by thoughts of the past, and knowing that the telling of the story wasn’t yet over. But she’d told enough for now, and besides … she didn’t feel strong enough to talk of the rest. And maybe she never would.

‘Ah now, darlin’.’ John entered the kitchen and put his arms around her. ‘Where’s that brew?’

I feel I must intervene here … things were going well until I realised that if I was reading this, I would be utterly confused. It is complicated. So, for your comfort, I shall resort to a family tree.

Well! That took me longer to work out than writing the three chapters before it. I hope it helps explain things.

I’m worried you may feel it’s all too coincidental. But actually, it isn’t at all. We – the Ryans and the Lisles – lived in a tiny, isolated community on the edge of the world. We’ve been neighbours for hundreds of years, so I don’t think it’s surprising our lives and our subsequent histories became entwined.

I admit to finding the compiling of the tree difficult. I know that, soon, I too will have the second date entered and become part of the past, not the present. It also struck me that we humans live as though we are immortal, taking decisions as though we will live forever, with no acceptance of the inevitable, which comes to us all. Of course, it is the only way we can survive.

I feel it’s time to move away from Ireland and the past now, and look to the future, to America. The land of hope, where dreams can come true, where anything is possible.

Reader, this is my kind of country!