Chestnut Street (25 page)

After fifteen weeks Vinnie wrote.

He said that he had finally got her address and he knew now that he loved her and wondered had she thought of him at all?

Shona posted all the love letters she had written him in the Arizona sunsets, and then she said she must buy her ticket home.

She told Marty and Ella that she hoped she wasn’t letting them down, but it had worked for her, this wonderful opportunity. She had found peace of mind in this place and now the man she loved was calling her home.

They sighed and waited until she had left them with starry eyes before they called her mother and father with the bad news.

Shona went back to her little room to check for her wallet, or billfold as she now called it.

She smiled to herself, thinking about all the things she would have to tell Vinnie. He had never been to the United States. There had been some stupid problem about getting a visa, something silly from his past. She thought of Vinnie as she hunted for the money. And hunted and hunted.

It was an hour before she accepted the fact that her money was gone. She sat still for a long time. But she had to face it eventually.

And it was so unlikely that a thief would have come into her room and not approach the store itself.

But equally unlikely that Marty and Ella would creep in and steal back the wages they gave her.

Or those innocent twins or the shruggy, distant Nick, who hardly noticed her.

She saw their stricken faces when she told them. “Could you possibly have lost it on the bus the time you went on the tour?” Ella had so much hope in her voice.

But Shona knew she had not taken her money that day. She had not dared to risk spending any of it.

She looked around at them all. Nick’s eyes were brighter than usual. Most times he seemed miles away, but now he was very much involved. Too involved.

Shona was about to say that she was positive about not taking her money with her that day. But something made her change her words.

“Suppose I had—do you think they might have found any of it?”

“I hear they often find most of it,” Nick said.

Shona said she thought she could have left it on the bus.

She was rewarded by the relief in the two good, open faces of Marty and Ella.

Her heart was full of hate for the hurt that this child was going to cause them in the years ahead.

“Maybe Nick can drive me to the bus station to inquire?” Shona said through gritted teeth. He was silent in the car as they drove through the open countryside.

Shona let the silence lie there between them.

Then he spoke. “What’s it like, Ireland?”

“Green, small, full of lakes and rivers and roads that twist and turn. Mountains. Sea all round the edges.”

“Is life easy there?” he asked.

“Not particularly. No more than it is here.” Her voice was leaden.

He handed her an envelope.

“Most of it’s there,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Only thirty dollars gone. I used it to send for some software.”

She didn’t reply as she looked out the window of the car at the Arizona scenery that she would never see again.

Had she been right to postpone their discovery of their eldest son as a thief?

Had she just done it so that she could escape from this life and leave them without trailing clouds of unhappiness?

They didn’t speak at all on the way home.

Shona made up a story about the bus company. She left Arizona for Ireland and Vinnie in high good form.

Vinnie said they would get married. Now, as soon as possible. Then they could use all her money on a honeymoon. Shona wore a friend’s dress for her wedding. They had only a few people there.

She would not let her father pay for a big reception. The photographs of her wedding day would not gladden any heart. You wouldn’t need to be a psychologist to see the look of strain on everyone’s face except the bride and groom.

Shona’s face was pure rapture; Vinnie had his nice relaxed smile.

The years passed more or less the way Shona’s father and mother knew they would.

They wrote every year to Marty and Ella about the whole story. Vinnie had long unexplained absences. There were no children.

Sometimes they thought this was a blessing. At other times they thought that perhaps children might have settled Vinnie down, made him stay at home and face up to his responsibilities.

Perhaps if she had been a mother, Shona would have had more anger on their behalf. On her own she had none.

Marty and Ella wrote back.

They said that life was fairly unchanged for them. Nick had left home and he didn’t really stay in touch.

They knew little of what he was doing except that he worked in computers.

He wrote a dutiful letter now and then, but they didn’t understand his moves from one company to another.

At least he was solvent. And honest … or at least not in trouble with the law.

Wasn’t it hard that you did so much for children and loved them so deeply and they seemed so indifferent to you in return?

Nick had reached twenty-one and they hadn’t even known where to send him a card.

Shona’s parents wrote to say that they read in a small paragraph in a newspaper that Vinnie had been in gaol, but their own daughter, now a mature woman in her late twenties, told them nothing of it.

Always they invited each other to Ireland and Arizona but they knew they were settled in their ways and they would never make the journey.

Shona opened a guesthouse, and as the years went by, it won all kinds of awards.

Visitors passed its name on from one to another. It had been written up in the best magazines.

Vinnie came back from time to time.

He was always polite to the guests for the first few days, and then they began to bore him. Shona would have to urge him to take a little trip somewhere in order to get him out of the way so that she could keep earning a living.

It was costing more and more of her money.

First she had not been able to buy the new bed linens and towels she needed to keep the standards.

The following year, she had to abandon her plan to build on
the four extra bedrooms that had been her heart’s desire. There just wasn’t the money.

She was so disappointed, and it almost began to show in her normally sunny face. She couldn’t understand it, she said to the bank manager, who was a kind and reasonable man.

“It’s your outgoings,” he had said sadly. “Maybe if you took fewer holidays.”

Shona had been on no holiday since her honeymoon. She bit her lip and put on the brave smile that had been her trademark.

By 1994 the kind bank manager said this was it. The guesthouse could no longer continue. Glumly Shona read the figures.

“It’s the outgoings,” the manager said again.

“Yes,” said Shona, her heart like ice.

She was thirty-six, and had loved a man who had taken everything and given nothing. Until he had taken her guesthouse, she had forgiven him. But now she would have no home, no life, no people coming through. What a waste of a life.

“I have a buyer,” the bank manager was saying. He hated having to do this. Shona knew she made it easy for him.

“Ask the buyer to come and see me,” she said in a voice without light or shade.

“He’ll be in Ireland next week.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it.” Her smile was so brave the bank manager wanted to cry.

Nobody had ever told him it would be like this. The buyer came next week. He drove up to the guesthouse. She knew it was the buyer, not a guest.

He was young, early thirties, Shona had expected a man of retirement age.

She came out to the door to meet him. There would be no whining—if the man could buy, she could sell.

It was Nick.

Nick, thirty-one years old.

Same blond hair, same slightly hunched, restless way of standing. As if he might run away.

But this time his eyes met hers.

It was a glance between friends, not the look of someone she hadn’t seen for fourteen years, someone who had stolen her money and given it back, apart from thirty dollars.

“Why?” she asked.

“No point in sending you back thirty dollars … I always knew that.”

“I didn’t,” she said with spirit. “There were days when I could have done with that thirty dollars.”

“To buy another necktie for that man … of yours.”

“He’s not my man anymore.”

“How often have you said that?” He seemed to care about the answer.

“Never … as it happens.”

He smiled at her and laid some papers down on the table.

“You’re buying my little guesthouse?” She was not able to take it in.

“I’m buying it, for you. You saved my life once; I’m saving yours.”

“You can’t do that—the amounts aren’t exactly similar.”

“No, but the circumstances are. I would have gone under without you, maybe you might without me. I kept an eye on you. I waited.”

“Why?”

“You were my first love.” He spoke simply, without guile.

“There must have been many since then,” Shona said.

“No … as it happens,” he mimicked the phrase she had used earlier.

“You couldn’t have loved me—I was years older than you then.”

“You still are, Shona, but I sort of caught up.” His smile was very charming.

She caught her breath.

“What do we do now?”

“I return your investment. You invested … accidentally, I admit … in some of my first software. Now I’m a computer millionaire, whiz kid, whatever …”

“There’s no need …”

“There’s every need, and only one string attached—it goes in your name, not in his.”

“I tell you he’s gone,” she said.

“That’s very good news,” said Nick, who was sitting down with the air of a man who might be going to take very early retirement indeed.

Molly wanted a room for three nights a week. This way she could work in the big financial center for four full days from Tuesday to Friday and then get a late train back to the peaceful place where she was just managing to get her life back together.

She had no idea how appallingly expensive it was to rent a room these days. How did people manage? And how had she not known? All those years living with Hugh in their big comfortable home must have made her completely unaware of how the rest of the world existed.

But the big house was sold and the money divided, and Molly had bought a country cottage, to everyone’s amazement. All she needed now was somewhere to stay for less than half the week—it didn’t matter how simple—and yet she was unable to find anything at all suitable. Friends had offered her a bed, but Molly valued friendships. She didn’t want to perch in their houses; she wanted her own place. Surely, somewhere in a city this size, there must be a plain, ordinary room with a bed and a chair and an electric kettle. She would install a clothes rail and a small television set. She was happy to share a bathroom. She didn’t need to live in any great style.

Molly’s job in the financial center was a demanding one, with long hours. There would be little time for entertaining. She would be happy to go back to a room at the end of a long day and sleep. Sleep was becoming increasingly important to her these days.

Otherwise she would think about Hugh, playing it all over in her mind, what had happened here and there and how it could all have been prevented. Round and round in her head these thoughts would go, leaving Molly exhausted and confused as ever. Over the months she had discovered that the solution to all that useless speculation was hard work and sleep.

It was ludicrous spending so much of the money that she earned on a small hotel room. She would try yet again, go to yet another accommodation agency and explain her very simple needs.

The woman behind the desk was sympathetic but doubtful. People really didn’t want strangers coming into their homes. Now, if she were to consider sharing with others, there were very nice properties on the market.

“But I don’t want to share with young people,” Molly pleaded. “I’m forty-one years of age—I can’t sit and listen to their music and have their friends coming in at all hours of the night. I just want a place of my own in someone’s home where I will be no trouble. Is it such a terrible crime?”