Gaby raised one eyebrow, thinking otherwise.
‘At least, I’m not any more.’ Kitty raised her chin haughtily.
‘She’s difficult to get to know, I realise that. The problem with Eva is that she is …’ Gaby paused for dramatic effect, which worked as Kitty hung on every word ‘… creative.’ She said it like it was a bad word. Then she lowered her voice so that nobody could hear the dirty secret to come. ‘She’s one of these types who thinks that their art speaks for themselves.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Honestly. I deal with this crap all the time with my writers. They think their work is their voice, they don’t understand that they have to give it one. They don’t realise that it’s people like me and you who help them sell their bloody art. Do you know how long it took me to get Eva to start that “Dedicated” blog? They think that stuff is in the way of whatever it is they think they’re channelling. Think about it, if James Joyce were alive today, don’t you think his tweets could make his stuff more accessible?’
Kitty really hoped nobody was listening to their conversation.
‘Anyway,’ she waved her hand dismissively, ‘Eva is an interesting person, she’s got a great heart, you just need to spend a lot of time with her to really open her up and when you see inside, well then, you’ll understand it all.’
‘You know something about her?’
‘I know more than most, which isn’t saying a lot, but I’ve seen in there once or twice. She went out with my brother for three years. He was an idiot but she was adorable. We’ve been close ever since. I vowed to help her out and I won’t let her down.’
Kitty had wanted to talk to Gaby about something that had nothing to do with Eva Wu at all, but while they were there and talking about her she was interested in new insights on the girl she couldn’t quite find a story on.
‘It would help if I could at least talk to her clients, hear how she’s helped them, learn what she’s done for them. She’s so secretive about it all.’
‘Not so much secretive as protective of her clients. She insists on discretion. She sees what she does as more than giving a gift and she’s right really. What she does is very special.’
Kitty shook her head, confused.
‘I know. It will all make sense when you’re in Cork.’
‘How did you know I was going to Cork?’
‘To the wedding? I just assumed.’
‘The wedding, on Friday.’ Kitty gasped. ‘Of course.’ With all the excitement of Birdie’s impending road trip she had forgotten about the wedding where Eva was due to present the Webb family with their gifts. ‘How does Eva usually travel?’ Kitty asked.
‘She drives, why?’
‘Ask her if she’d like to catch a bus with me on Thursday to Cork. There’s something I have to do there that I think she’ll like.’
‘Sure,’ Gaby said, looking over Kitty’s shoulder towards her next appointment arriving. ‘Here’s Jools Scott. The writer. Great on a page but can’t put two words together in person. If I manage to get him one interview I’ll be doing well,’ she said out of the side of her mouth, and then waved at him happily.
‘Before you move on, there’s something I have to ask you. I’m sure everyone asks you this but I wonder if you could do me a huge favour.’ Kitty got to the real reason she’d asked for the meeting. She placed Richie’s USB down on the table before her and fixed Gaby with her sweetest smile.
To Kitty’s great relief Gaby took care of the bill with her publisher’s credit card, her final bribe to Kitty to write a positive piece on Eva. Feeling that she owed Eva for letting her down twice, Kitty called Nigel at George Webb’s office.
‘Molloy Kelly Solicitors.’
‘It’s Kitty Logan. I’m outside your office. Eva Wu is incredibly protective of her clients and won’t tell me a thing. If you want the piece to be as favourable as possible then I need you to start talking.’
He was quiet, then: ‘Fine.’
Five minutes later he was outside with her in another of his dapper suits. When he saw her bike his lips curled at the edges. ‘How twee. Walk with me, Judy Bloom, I don’t want anybody to see me with you in those last season’s pumps.’
Kitty smiled and they walked to the famine memorial and leaned out overlooking the rather murky Liffey.
‘Let’s get straight to the point. I’m gay.’ He looked at Kitty but she wasn’t in the mood for smart comments. ‘I’m from a small parish in Donegal where everybody knows everybody’s business. As soon as I could talk I knew that I was gay and in my family that kind of thing is completely unacceptable. My father is a dairy farmer, like his father before him, like his father before him. I’m the only boy in the family and it was expected that I would go into the family business. It wasn’t a life that appealed to me. My parents are fanatically Catholic. Hell, for them, is a very real place. Sex before marriage would have my sisters kicked out of the house, if my parents ever knew the truth. They live in a world of religious rules and they do not break them. They can’t see beyond them; it’s all they’ve ever known. Homosexuality,’ he laughed bitterly, ‘you can imagine what they thought of that. If my father couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to be a dairy farmer for the rest of my life, he certainly wouldn’t understand the fact that I just happen to love men. When I told him I didn’t want to be involved in the family business he didn’t speak to me for almost a year. Imagine how he felt when I told him I was gay. But I’d no choice but to tell him. I’d met someone, he was a huge part of my life, it felt like I was living a lie not being able to talk about him or my life in Dublin, or not being able to bring him to family occasions. I finally told them and, well, my mother could deal with it as long as we never discussed it again and she prayed every day for me to be healed, but my father refused to be in the same house as me. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, he wouldn’t speak to me.’
‘It must have been very difficult.’
‘It was.’
He was silent.
‘He was like that for five years. We didn’t speak a word for five years. Well, I tried but … but then it was his sixtieth birthday and I suppose having that come up and me not being there didn’t feel right. I wanted to get him something, a gift that he would be able to look at in his own time to understand what I was trying to tell him. So I hired Eva.’
‘How did you hear about her?’
‘She’d helped out another friend of mine,’ he smiled. ‘But that’s another story for another day. She stayed with us in Donegal for a week, because that’s what she insists on doing. It was the most awkward time for her but she was fantastic, she fit right in.’
Kitty had noticed that was what Eva seemed to do best.
‘My mother was convinced that she was my girlfriend, that I’d been “healed”, and she couldn’t have made Eva feel any more welcome.’
‘What about your father?’
‘He managed to sleep in the house when I was there, which was progress, but he made sure to be gone at meal times and throughout the day. My sisters bought him a motorbike – it had been his lifetime ambition to have one – but I wanted him to have a present that meant something more to me, to him. I thought, there’s no way in the world this girl can find the gift that can do everything I want it to.’
‘And did she?’
To her surprise Nigel shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t everything I wanted. It was far more. She made a photo album. She found photographs of his grandfather and his father working the farm, photos of him and his father working the farm, and then photos of him and me from the day I was born to the day I left the house. Photos of us together on the farm, of him pushing me on the tyre swing that he’d made for me, photos I’d never seen before. Dad had had to cut down one of the oak trees on the land. He’d been devastated about it because it was one of the trees we’d all played on as children, that he and his father had played on. It was the one with the tyre swing. But because of the heavy snow that year, it had suffocated the roots and the tree couldn’
t survive. Eva had taken the chopped wood from that tree and used it to form the back and cover of the photo album. On the front she’d carved his name and birthday message from me. She charged me sixty-five euro for the carpentry and forty euro for the printing of the photos and stationery. That was the cost of the gift.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Mother said she heard him crying while he was looking through it when she’d gone to bed. He didn’t say anything to me for weeks and then out of the blue one day he called me.’
‘What did he say?’
Nigel laughed. ‘He started telling me about a problem he was having on the farm. Something about one of the cows in heat. I was just so surprised to hear his voice on the end of the phone, I could barely take in what he was saying. There was no mention of the five years we hadn’t spoken, it was like he’d picked up where we’d left off.’
‘So Eva is incredibly thoughtful.’
‘She’s more than that. She understood how my father thought, what exactly it was that upset him or disappointed him, what would move him, what would shake his belief. She lived with us and asked us questions and listened to our stories and she came up with a solution. My father is a sensitive man, but he’s a closed man, he would never show or discuss emotions, yet she found a gift that touched his heart.’
Kitty thought about that. ‘Okay.’
‘You get it?’
‘I got it.’
‘Good. Now don’t disturb me at work again,’ he said cheekily, and left her alone on Custom House Quay.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Kitty got off the bus in Kinsealy, North County Dublin beside the garden centre early on Wednesday morning. In the fields beyond, families gathered to pick strawberries and behind that field Steve’s father’s allotment was in full swing as the summer weather attracted garden lovers to their patches. All of the land belonged to Steve’s father: the garden centre, the strawberry fields, the allotment, and to most people’s surprise and frustration, for over a decade he had managed to fight off planners from buying the land to develop houses. Those offers had stopped in recent years but he had turned down millions, happy to keep his businesses going. He was a farmer at heart, as tough as they came, and he wouldn’t know what to do with twenty million in his bank account. His days were best spent toiling the earth, finding new gadgets for gardening. And snapping at people.
‘Thought you’d be hiding under a rock,’ he said to Kitty as she walked into the clubhouse.
‘Thought you’d be the best man to see about the right rock.’
‘The biggest one you could find, I’d say,’ he eyed her warily.
‘I’m open to anything,’ she smiled back, which further annoyed him. ‘How’s everything going? Business good?’
He looked at her and then back down at the paperwork on his desk. ‘If you’re looking for Steve, he’s rotavating allotment fifty.’
‘Steve is rotavating?’ Kitty laughed. ‘What does he know about rotavating?’
‘A lot more than you know about journalism, that’s for sure,’ he barked back.
That put her in her place.
‘He has a girlfriend, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Katja.’
‘I know.’
‘Nice girl.’
‘I know.’
‘Does well at work.’
‘I know. She takes pictures.’
‘She took that one.’ He eyed her warily again and Kitty’s eyes moved up to the beautiful landscape of Skellig Rock off the coast of County Kerry on a misty day. It had the desired effect: the sheer beauty of it, and knowing Katja had taken it, made her uncomfortable.
‘Which is number fifty?’
He waved his hand at a map on the wall and ignored her.
Kitty made her way through the fifty-metre square patches and smiled at families in their gardens. Some were busy at work, others were sitting out in deckchairs, drinking from tea flasks, children running around, soaking one another with watering cans. Each plot had a different scene, which reminded her of the blackboard of specials in Brick Alley Café: ‘Every table has a story to tell.’
She found Steve in the allotment, alone with a rotavator, noise so loud he couldn’t hear her call out to him. She stood at the fence and watched him, his face etched in concentration on the soil ahead of him. To her surprise his skin was visible. He’d lost the leather jacket and instead wore a T-shirt and jeans, thick work boots on his feet. He was entirely covered in mud and grass, stains that she couldn’t recognise, his hair even more of a tangled mess than usual as he’d worked outside all day. Finally he lifted his gaze from the soil and saw her.
She smiled and waved. He turned the machine off immediately.
‘Kitty,’ he said, surprised.
‘Thought I’d come down and surprise you.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘A few minutes. I was watching your concentration face.’ She frowned and pouted, the same way his lips went when they were studying in college or when she caught sight of him in exams.
He laughed.
‘Dad greet you at the door?’
‘The best welcome committee a girl could have.’
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, genuinely concerned.
‘Don’t worry, I’d rather that than manure on my front door any day.’
‘They’ve done more?’
‘Just that. It’s stopped since Sunday, actually,’ she said, realising. ‘Maybe they got into trouble. And speaking of trouble,’ she made her way round the fence and inside the allotment, ‘I came here to give you this.’ She opened her arms and threw them around Steve, wrapping him so tight and squeezing him. She could tell he was shocked, his body stiffened, not comfortable with human contact, but she didn’t care, she needed to thank him for what he had done for her. Finally his body relaxed and he surprised her by wrapping his arms around her waist. It felt oddly comfortable. She hadn’t expected him to react that way, she had expected him to push her away but appreciate the gesture anyway, but now she found them both in the allotment hugging tightly and she was suddenly self-conscious. She loosened her grip and he did too, but he didn’t pull away from her. Their faces were close when they looked at one another. His blue eyes bored into hers. She swallowed.
‘That was supposed to be a thank you,’ she said quietly.
He frowned. ‘Thank you for what?’
‘For cleaning spray paint off my apartment door, for cleaning dog shit off the steps, for giving me your bed, but most of all for making Richie’s face look like a rotten tomato.’
‘Oh. Right.’ He let go suddenly and took a few steps back – a lot of steps back – and then separated them entirely by standing behind the machine. Back to his usual self. ‘So you found out about that.’
‘He came to my flat to get his jacket. He thought you were my boyfriend and that you’d caught me out. He was thrilled.’
Steve’s face hardened. ‘That fucker. I swear I could hit him again.’
Kitty was surprised by his reaction. Steve wasn’t that kind of guy. He was never aggressive. He wasn’t soft but his first method of defence was to get out of a situation because he was never that bothered by anyone, not to pounce.
‘Well … you did it once and I appreciate that.’
‘Twice, actually,’ he smiled. ‘Almost broke my fist too.’ He lifted his hand and that’s when Kitty saw the swollen bruising on his knuckles.
‘Oh, Steve, I’m so sorry.’ She went towards him to touch it but, true to character, he pulled it away.
‘It’s fine. No big deal.’
‘I thought you weren’t speaking to me.’
He looked confused.
‘Just the way you hung up the phone the other day, I thought you were angry at me. About the story in the Sunday paper. About messing up again.’
‘No, no, Kitty, no,’ he said gently. ‘No way. I was so angry. At him. Why would I be angry at you?’
She s
hrugged and looked around, suddenly feeling so vulnerable in his company, so eager to please, so … no! She couldn’t be feeling like this with Steve?
‘So how are you, how’s the story going?’
‘I am loving it,’ Kitty said, pushing her feelings to one side and responding ecstatically.
He laughed.
‘I have met the most amazing people and I can’t wait to tell you all about them.’
‘Sounds good,’ he smiled. ‘It sounds like you’re back to your best.’
‘Does it?’ she said, genuinely touched.
‘Yeah. Back to all the stuff you used to bore me with before. It’s good to see you so …’ he looked at her ‘… happy.’
Happy. She thought about it. Yes, she was happy. Despite all the crap going on in her life, she was actually happy.
‘Do you want to go for something to eat or drink, or …?’
‘I’d love to but I have to get to Kildare, to the butterfly woman. I really need to learn more about her. She is so fascinating, like a creature from a Tolkien novel or something. And then I have a job interview,’ she winced.
‘Where?’
‘Ashford night school for their media studies course. Though I’m half-thinking of cancelling.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ he warned. ‘You’ll knock them dead.’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
‘Kitty,’ he fixed her firmly with his blue-eyed gaze, ‘you’ll be wonderful.’
She was genuinely moved by that and felt ridiculous as tears sprung to her eyes. She hadn’t received any praise lately, particularly not from Steve, and she hadn’t realised how much she desired his praise. She looked down at her feet in the soil and cleared her throat. ‘So I’m going on a trip tomorrow and I was wondering if I could use the assistance of your girlfriend.’ The words felt like chalk in her mouth but she was trying, she hoped that he could see she was trying.