A Posy of Promises Read online

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You sound like Niamh; expecting fireworks with every kiss. This is real life, Finlay, not some romantic film. Sparks don’t happen after eight years of being together.’

  ‘Be honest, Ava, it wasn’t exactly fireworks at dawn at the beginning either. I thought you were reserved and shy, but try as I have, I haven’t been able to warm you up.’ He began eating his fried slices of chorizo covered in peppers and garlic. How could he eat when he was slowly strangling her heart?

  Ava impaled a chilli prawn with unnecessary force and wondered why she felt so tragically sad. Most of what Finlay had said was true, so why did she feel cheated and bereft?

  ‘I just think we should take a break and see other people. Life is too short to settle for second best and I don’t want to be your second best, Ava.’

  She couldn’t deny what he was saying was true. Perhaps there was something missing. But if you had never experienced it, how did you know? She had no relationship experience to compare notes. Maybe she did need to play the field a little. The truth was, the thought of being single and looking for love scared the bejaysus out of her. Finlay was used to going out with his mates and doing the club scene. Ava would prefer to curl up with a good crime novel and a big bar of Whole Nut, or to be sending funny cat pictures to her far-away friend, Joseph.

  She would waste away in Moonstone Street, the little terrace house she had shared with her gran, and cat Lulu, until Maggie had gone into the Sisters of Mercy nursing home, never to have a boyfriend again. To find love was to go out and actively look for it, and Ava hadn’t a clue when it came to playing those sorts of dating games. God, the thought of Tinder made her shudder. She didn’t flirt, didn’t know how to, and as for tarting herself up, it all seemed mildly absurd.

  The unexpected windfall of the house on Mount Pleasant Square had helped to soothe her bruised heart. Niamh’s enthusiasm for the house was infectious. Instead of worrying about the ins and outs of who bequeathed it to her, and trying to fret over the renovations, Niamh was just plain excited for her, and Ava decided that it was high time she felt the same, even if it was going against her natural disposition.

  She couldn’t help it, she was a worrier, but she had always been happy in her own skin. She never understood when her school friends pinched an inch of flesh and groaned because they could. She didn’t long to have blonde hair when she had mid-brown hair the same shade as nutmeg, and she never pined to be doing something she wasn’t.

  Life was just fine as it was. Comfortable, secure, sheltered even. She never went looking for excitement and it usually never came looking for her. Maybe that was part of the problem; she was just content to be.

  Listening to Niamh, Hazel, — her boss — and others chatter on about life and aspirations, Ava was often aware of how much they tried to look into the future. They were crystal ball gazers looking out for that next big thing in their lives. It was as if they expected something out there to be bigger and better and coming their way. Ava had always been happy just to be waking up in Moonstone Street with Maggie for company and the pleasure of working with beautiful flowers in a shop which kept her busy but not stressed, earning enough money to get by.

  She thought of Joseph, her old friend and former neighbour. While Ava and Niamh had attended the Catholic grammar school, Joseph went to the nearby Protestant one. His world was rugby and rowing, running with the fast girls from Malone Grammar, and even though they moved in different circles, they always remained close. Growing up, Ava and Joseph spent many hours playing Scrabble and Cluedo at their houses in Moonstone Street. But when Joseph went off to university in Liverpool to study software programming and design, and then landed a job in San Francisco, Ava remained at home. Even though his life seemed exciting, she always had the feeling that he had never really stopped wanting to return home. She was one of the lucky ones who knew the value of being happy with her lot.

  So, for Ava to find herself driving along the Malone Road, looking for the left turn into Mount Pleasant Square to view a house which had been predetermined, by someone she didn’t know, to belong to her, she was just a little bit on the queasy side. She didn’t do mysteries. Niamh on the other hand would have thrived in this circumstance. The sensation of nausea snaking its way around Ava’s belly would have been described by Niamh as butterflies, little flits of excitement in the pit of her stomach. But Ava wasn’t like Niamh, and rather than feel elation at the prospect of owning a home of substantial standing, Ava was quite honestly petrified. There was no point doing a Miss Marple and trying to work out the identity of the generous benefactor or the “Sugar Daddy” as Niamh insisted on calling him; if he or she wanted to be known to her then Ava was pretty sure she would have known by now.

  Until the paperwork had been finalised, she couldn’t claim possession, but once Amanda has sorted out the legalities, Ava had been finally allowed to take official ownership. She had called into Amanda’s office at lunchtime to pick up the keys, sick with anticipation. The keys had sat all afternoon in her bag, tormenting her with curiosity. She had been busy at work, so she had been able to cope most of the day, but come five o’clock she was out of Blooming Dales as fast as she could run.

  Ava pulled up outside the house and allowed herself a moment to take in the scene. The square was a large stretch of well-maintained lawn edged with copper beech trees around which the houses had been built. The area had a hushed atmosphere that only serious money could buy. Ava was sure her neighbours would be high-end professionals: doctors, barristers and company directors — all with wealth and a certain sense of privilege.

  What was she doing in possession of such a house? It seemed mildly ludicrous that she should have come into ownership of a home which was probably worth more than she could ever make in a lifetime as a shop assistant in a florist.

  Still, someone wanted her to have it and she was more than intrigued as to why. Everyone had come under scrutiny – Mr Harris, a regular customer to Blooming Dales, and his kindly attachment to Ava was suddenly questioned. Had he died and left the house to her? Or the original owners of the florists, Esther and Harold? They were wealthy; had they, out of some sense of loyalty, left it to her? She even looked at the postman strangely to see if he knew some dark secret about her parentage which could explain it all.

  Locking up her car she couldn’t shake a sense of déjà vu. She had thought of practically nothing else but this house and Finlay for the past two weeks, so it was probably no more than her mind playing tricks on her. She had envisaged this moment, tried to imagine what the house would look like inside and now, here she was, about to put form, shape and colour to her imaginings.

  The tall, iron, rusty gates of number ninety-seven were padlocked but Ava held the keys. They felt weighty and potent in her pocket. She fumbled with the bundle to identify the corresponding key for the lock on the gates. It clicked in and she partly lifted and pushed the heavy gates back into the overgrown drive, while simultaneously shoving a branch of berberis red leaf hedge out of her face, and made her way up the drive — feeling trepidation course through her veins.

  What if the house was overrun with mice, or worse, rats? It was bound to be damp and crawling with spiders never mind the thought of ghosts lurking around corners. Her heart thundered out a rhythm like the clatter of wild horses.

  She wished she had told Finlay about the house before the break up. She could have asked for his company, but something made her want to keep the house all to herself. Just until she got her head around the enormity of it. Besides, she hadn’t wanted Finlay getting any ideas about settling down and proposing now that she was the owner of such a grand family home. Not that he would be after her for her inheritance; it was just that seeing such a home would make anyone think of settling down and breeding a nest of children to fill the many vacant rooms. Still, look where that line of thinking had got her. The joke was most definitely on her.

  For the past few nights, she had tossed and turned in bed, one-minute
feeling bereft that she no longer had Finlay in her life, and the next mulling over what the house would look like. As she lay in her single bed in Moonstone Street, staring at the twee pink and sage green floral wallpaper Maggie had chosen many years earlier, she was glad to have the distraction of number ninety-seven to stop her obsessing over Finlay. Having the house to think about, and visualising its layout, had stopped her falling into a self-pitying crying session.

  She had managed to hold off telling Joseph. He’d be delighted about her house news, but she felt pathetic to be reporting her relationship status. Joseph, like Niamh, had made something of his life. While Ava was letting hers pass her by, he had headed off to university and ended up in Silicon Valley, in a job she couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

  Standing on the front driveway surveying the scale of the house and the grounds, she felt like a little girl gazing into her future, imagining what might be. Strangely enough, she felt as though she had stepped into a dream. Reading and rereading the estate agent’s descriptions had given her a sense of the layout and the features in each of the rooms, but it wasn’t enough to read the descriptions. She wanted to see the proportions of the rooms, to feel the sunlight stream through the windows onto her face, to listen to the sounds of the birds in the overgrown gardens, and to sense what the house could mean to her.

  The garden was an abundance of colour and fat willowy blooms with nature taking advantage to flourish in the absence of restraint. Tall violet foxgloves and orange great reedmace flanked the path with dandelions underfoot and hawthorn bursting through at every opportunity.

  The front door was painted a dark green, but the paint was splitting and peeling. The brass knocker and the ninety-seven brass plaques were tarnished and mottled. Ivy crawled up the sides of the doorway like creepers in a horror movie, as if protecting the house from intruders. A collection of cracked and tawdry terracotta pots were clustered around the three wide steps leading up to the door, but whatever they had held had shrivelled and died long since, giving way to a collection of dandelions, weeds and moss.

  Ava walked up the stone steps. This was a momentous occasion. The fear and the anxiety she had felt melted away, and suddenly she experienced all the excitement and trepidation of a new bride being carried over the threshold, except she had no groom to do the carrying. But there was a sense of starting out, that this was the beginning of something. An image of James Stewart and Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life popped into her head. She could remember the scene of their old falling down house, and how their faces, lit by the moon, had glowed with excitement at what their future could hold while they sang, By the Light of the Silvery Moon.

  Ava almost laughed at herself for her romantic notions. She was the most unromantic and least sentimental person really, but this house had caught her imagination and made her tingle with goosebumps.

  It was a wide doorway, its proportions in keeping with the size of the house. Ava worked her way through the keys until she found the one most likely to fit the front door. She held out her hand with the key poised in the keyhole, slightly shaking at the thought of what lay behind the big green door. She was all a flutter with a nervous energy, which made her feel like running and jumping just for the sake of it like a five-year-old on Smarties. Opening the door and knowing she was about to see the interior at last was like unwrapping the best present ever, and Ava hardly ever received presents which she hadn’t chosen in advance.

  At last, she stood in the oak panelled hallway and surveyed the scene. It was a grand entrance with parquet flooring, dulled by dust and time, with a wide staircase leading to a tall, narrow, stained-glass window on the first-floor landing. The light streamed in through the coloured glass creating a kaleidoscope on the threadbare, moth-eaten, carpeted stairs. Dust motes danced in the light like microscopic fairies while the whole house seemed to sigh in response to having a long-waited-for visitor. Four panelled doors, all closed, led off from the hallway.

  Ava decided to go to the right first and turned the Bakelite handle of the first door. She walked through and found a large, square-shaped living room, dominated by a tall, ugly fireplace of brown and grey marble. Picture rails lined the walls leading to a large deep bay window that looked out over the front gardens. A set of French doors led to the side of the house. Branches of a lilac tree in full vibrant bloom pushed against the French doors as if nosing in to see who was wandering around the old, long-neglected house.

  Ava sighed. It was a beautiful room that even dirt, dust and cobwebs couldn’t disguise. The high ceiling and the proportions of the space created a welcoming area, which even though it was so large and empty of furniture, still seemed cosy and inviting.

  She moved on through to a connecting door and found herself in what was probably a dining room or breakfast room. It too had French doors, rusty, with dark green mildew lurking in the corners of the metal frames. The doors looked out onto a small crazy-paved courtyard with emerald green velvety moss growing in between the cracks.

  The kitchen was to the back of the house and consisted of an assortment of mustard colour Formica cupboards set off with turquoise tiles on the walls which screamed circa 1970s. A creamy buttermilk-coloured painted Welsh dresser took up one wall and an alcove of shelves nestled in the corner with enough room for a table and chairs and even a small sofa.

  Ava tried the back door and heard something scurry away under the partially rotted wooden frame. Urgh, she hated mice. She would be glad to have Lulu. She smiled as she was already picturing herself curled up with a book in the corner of the kitchen with her pretty, arrogant cat at her feet.

  The back door opened up onto a utility area where a broom and an old rusty mangle stood looking forlorn. She moved on through the back door to see the gardens. They were a wild, overgrown jungle of lupins, climbing roses, a huge gooseberry bush, heavy with fruit, tall purple-headed chives and a mass of lavender. The lawn had become a patchwork of dandelions and clover while the remaining grass was windswept and overgrown. A paved path snaked through the growth but was largely disguised by moss and the tangled branches of some unidentifiable shrub which had rejoiced in the lack of regular pruning. The garden was edged by three tall trees, one an apple tree, the other which looked like a plum, and a grand sycamore. Overgrown hedging stood behind the trees creating complete privacy.

  Ava made her way back into the house. She still had two downstairs rooms to explore never mind the upstairs. Although the house had been clearly empty for a long time, it didn’t smell of damp. Instead, Ava thought she could smell lavender as she climbed the stairs. A faint smell of lavender mixed with dust and old newspapers.

  Each stair creaked and groaned under her weight, making her feel certain that if she were to be lying in bed, no one could ever tiptoe up to the bedrooms without her hearing them. She stopped at the first-floor landing beneath the grimy stained-glass window and looked down onto the hallway. It was a gorgeous house, very grand yet homely and would obviously make a fabulous family home.

  Maybe Ava was crazy to consider living in it. What would she do knocking around in such a big house all on her own? It wasn’t as if she had Maggie to share it with and Finlay had made his feelings clear. He had almost certainly moved on. Maybe Ava was destined to become an old spinster living with Lulu, the cat, in the big house. The local kids would play “Belfast” — ring her door bell and run — fearful of the nasty old lady who lived all alone with her cat for company.

  The rational response would have been to sell it. Even though the housing market had crashed in Northern Ireland following a period of crazed buying and selling in response to the new state of peace, Ava was sure such a house in a much sought-after location would sell. Perhaps for not as good a price as she would have got a couple of years earlier but realistically she could probably get half a million easily, even in such a bad state of repair.

  But what would she do with so much money? The thought of travelling may have appealed to her when she was younger, but she c
ouldn’t bear the thought of leaving Maggie. And starting up her own business didn’t really make sense. What would be the point, just to earn more money to buy another house somewhere else?

  Her mind was racing with ideas and she wished yet again that she had Finlay to share it with. Still, at least Niamh would be delighted for her and the two of them could spend hours discussing layouts and drooling over interior design magazines. Hazel would be a great help too and would definitely have an opinion on every Farrow and Ball paint sample. Ava couldn’t just move in overnight. There was still a lot to consider, not least the work which would need doing.

  It was surreal to think that she owned it. Ava Connors, who had never imagined living in such a house, could simply pack a suitcase, a few clothes, books and stuff, and she could be good to go. She had no real reason to stay in Moonstone Street beyond a sense of loyalty to Maggie and a fear of uprooting Lulu. The biggest problem preventing her from making the leap was that from the outside, the house, appeared to be in a sad state of repair. ‘Wreck and ruin’ was the expression Maggie would have used. Without having a builder’s discerning eye, Ava couldn’t really assess the full picture, but it was unlikely to be habitable without a lot of hard graft and a fair poke of money. The hard graft wouldn’t be a problem, Ava would happily throw on a headscarf and a pinny to strip wallpaper and sand down floors, but she had a sneaky suspicion the house would be in need of a more substantial makeover, requiring expertise and cash — neither of which she could claim to have. Where she would manage to find the necessary spondulicks to do the house up was another problem she had avoided thinking too deeply about.

  She was frustrated that she couldn’t talk to Maggie about it. She longed to settle down at their kitchen table with Nambarrie tea leaves stewing in the brown teapot and a plate of ginger snap biscuits at the ready to be dunked into their mugs while they mulled over the whole episode. Part of her felt that it would have been unfair to tell Maggie about it. Anything out of the ordinary upset her and it would be a sure sign that Ava was considering life beyond Moonstone Street.