A cantankerous, elegant old woman sits in her beautiful Somerset house while her family secretly plots to evict her. In the garden is her one remaining racehorce, prematurely retired, and in London the man she probably should have married – who is still her dearest friend.
Onto this scene comes Maeve Delaney. Sole applicant for the job of companion to Lady Pamela, streetwise and outrageous, Maeve bursts into the old house like a firecracker. As open warfare settles into a wary truce between the two women, Maeve sets her heart on bringing the great racehorce, Irish Dancer, out of retirement and everything changes. Soon it is not only Irish Danceer but all of Sarah Challis's colorful characters that are turning for home.
A cantankerous, elegant old woman sits in her beautiful Somerset house while her family secretly plots to evict her. In the garden is her one remaining racehorce, prematurely retired, and in London the man she probably should have married – who is still her dearest friend.
Onto this scene comes Maeve Delaney. Sole applicant for the job of companion to Lady Pamela, streetwise and outrageous, Maeve bursts into the old house like a firecracker. As open warfare settles into a wary truce between the two women, Maeve sets her heart on bringing the great racehorce, Irish Dancer, out of retirement and everything changes. Soon it is not only Irish Danceer but all of Sarah Challis's colorful characters that are turning for home.
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Overview
A cantankerous, elegant old woman sits in her beautiful Somerset house while her family secretly plots to evict her. In the garden is her one remaining racehorce, prematurely retired, and in London the man she probably should have married – who is still her dearest friend.
Onto this scene comes Maeve Delaney. Sole applicant for the job of companion to Lady Pamela, streetwise and outrageous, Maeve bursts into the old house like a firecracker. As open warfare settles into a wary truce between the two women, Maeve sets her heart on bringing the great racehorce, Irish Dancer, out of retirement and everything changes. Soon it is not only Irish Danceer but all of Sarah Challis's colorful characters that are turning for home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466861381 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/31/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 410 KB |
About the Author
Sarah Challis was born in Buckinghamshire, England, but has lived in California and Scotland. She now lives in a small village in rural Dorset. Most of her working life has been spent teaching. She is married with four sons. Turning for Home is her second novel. She is also the author of Blackthorn Winter.
SARAH CHALLIS has lived in Scotland and California but is now happily settled in a Dorset village.
Read an Excerpt
Turning for Home
By Sarah Challis
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2001 Sarah ChallisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6138-1
CHAPTER 1
Maeve Delaney found herself twenty-six years old and with exactly thirty-five pounds to her name. She had counted her money carefully and was oddly pleased to find that with the few stray coins retrieved out of pockets and from the bottom of bags, she arrived at a neat round sum. It seemed a good omen. She had, at various points in her adult life, had less in the way of funds, and at other times considerably more. Now, as she walked through Regents Park on a bright September day, she knew that something would have to turn up. It usually did. The positive things about her present position were that she had a roof over her head, even if you could not call a squat in Bethnal Green a home; that Mohammed had found a job as a waiter in an Algerian restaurant, so he was all right for the moment and he would not let her starve; and that she had put a thousand miles between her and the last disastrous man in her life, a man who had promised her the earth and had turned out to be a liar and a cheat. Despite her dangerously reduced circumstances, Maeve walked with an optimistic spring in her step and an eye for the beauty of the morning. When she happened upon a bench in the sun, she would stop and sit and empty her mind and wait for a solution to come to her.
She could, of course, telephone her father in Belfast and he would send an air ticket home. This was the ultimate last resort. Since she had slammed out of her home at seventeen in a storm of angry words and teenage defiance, she had only once asked for his help and that was when she was so ill with some amoebic infection that the nuns who were caring for her in Mexico thought that she was going to die. He had wired money for her flight and bombarded the convent hospital with panic-struck enquiries. However, when she was well enough to fly home, weak, pale and spindly, it took only a few days for their relationship to whip up another storm like the one she had blown out on. The solid house shook, the windows rattled, and the newly hung, swagged and tasselled curtains stirred in the blast. Poor Bethany, the second and fairly recent Mrs Delaney and the architect of the new décor, cowered in fright. Not much older than Maeve, she was a lazy, gentle woman with doe-like, limpid eyes and a generous figure. Her very bulk seemed to smother her husband's rages like a blanket thrown on a fire. She stifled his vile temper with her passivity, absorbing his anger like blotting paper. Only when he had been particularly cruel did the fat tear slide down her cheeks and he would be overcome with remorse. How different was Maeve who rose up like a striking scorpion to sting, who matched her father in vicious temper and poisonous tongue. So it was and so it always had been. They even looked alike. Small, dark, pale-skinned, with a sort of vivid vitality in the turned-up nose and large, mobile mouth. Dangerous people. Clever, shifting, unpredictable. Maeve's father was a highly respected criminal lawyer. He might just as easily have been a brilliant crook.
Maeve's mother could never be called upon to bail her out. Juanita Delaney now lived in the south of France, her exotic, half-Spanish looks on the point of collapsing into dereliction. Over made-up, tottering about on high heels, smoking and drinking too much, her desiccated cleavage always on display, her once famous legs now thin as a chicken's, she terrified Maeve, who preferred to remember her as the dark beauty whom all the other girls at school had wondered at. Their own fat, powdered, pink and white mothers in their ugly stiff clothes had pushed forward like a herd of curious, nudging cows as Juanita swept into Speech Day in an outrageous hat, or drew up in an open car with a tanned, minor actor at the wheel. Maeve loved showing her off but secretly yearned for something more normal, more naturally maternal.
Her parents' unlikely marriage foundered when Maeve was twelve. Her mother dealt the final blow when she ran off with an excitable French film producer. Maeve had by this time already been despatched to boarding school, first in Ireland and then to a smart Catholic school near Windsor. Maeve had seen her mother only a few times since. Each time she had found her more alarming. The drink, the succession of ever less attractive and more hopeless men, the desperate attempts to hold on to youth and glamour, even as a child Maeve saw her decline clearly and painfully. The fact that her mother was at heart a deeply selfish woman who had dedicated her life to preserving herself as a woman men desired, and that little else mattered to her, did not escape the knowing child.
Maeve walked briskly. Most of her actions were rapid. No dawdler, she. From the age of seventeen she had been on her own, making her own decisions. That way she knew if things fucked up it was her own fault. She liked that. Being free of people's influence. Her parents could do as they liked. It didn't matter to her. Let her father marry a single-brain- celled beauty therapist. Let her mother become a hideous old soak. They led their lives, she led hers.
Thirty-five pounds. She would have to get a job. She thought of the five hundred odd quid owed her by Carlos. She had pushed off and left him without collecting her back pay. The six months she had spent cooking on his charter yacht in the Med had begun like a dream in April and veered off into a nightmare in August. The partnership he had promised had ended in drunkenness and abuse. The gentle lover of the spring turned into a possessive demon. She had nothing to show for it except the remains of a tan and fading purple bruises.
Maeve, however, was not one to brood on past misfortune. Having voluntarily curtailed her own formal education, she was a great exponent of learning on the road, graduating from the university of hard knocks. Carlos could be written off as an experience. She wouldn't get caught like that again.
This morning she was on her way across the park to her friend Sophie's flat in St John's Wood, to cadge a bath. Good old Sophers was generous with her bath essence and had thick fluffy towels. Of course, they would be the best quality. They had been on her carefully chosen wedding list. Maeve thought of deep, steaming water with anticipation. She would baby-sit for Sophie's two-year-old twins, Freddy and Flora, in return. This was a good and fair arrangement appreciated by both parties. Maeve was not in the habit of feeling sorry for people as a rule. The fact that Sophie had been abandoned by her husband, Fergus, did not arouse much sympathy. If you marry a wanker and then have his babies, you get what you deserve, but all the same, poor old Sophers had had a tough time. She was too bloody nice, that was her trouble.
In the distance Maeve could see an empty bench, under the trees but bathed in sunlight. That was where she would stop and have her think.
When she got there she sat down and drew up her knees like a little fishing gnome perched on a toadstool. Her problems were obvious. No money. No job. Nowhere to live. The job must come first and she would have to stay in the squat for as long as possible while she saved up to get somewhere else to live. She could easily get waitress work but it was so badly paid. The same applied to cleaning jobs. She spoke French, Spanish and Greek fairly fluently and she might try and get a job as a tour guide. She wasn't that keen on staying in London though. It was expensive and dirty and she felt out of touch with her own age group who seemed to spend hours in pubs and clubs and shopping for clothes. Ah, that was another problem. Her clothes consisted of little else than what she had been able to grab when she did a runner off the yacht. She had one pair of beaten-up trainers and two pairs of tatty trousers, T-shirts and a sweater. The black leather jacket she was wearing belonged to Mohammed. She couldn't buy much with thirty-five pounds. Not when she had to live on it as well. She didn't want to borrow from Mohammed who was so anxious to start sending money home to his enormous family in Egypt. Perhaps Sophie could lend her something to wear to go job-hunting? But Sophie was tall, nearly six foot. You could fit two of Maeve into most of her garments. Shit.
A well-dressed elderly man walked slowly past, with two Sainsbury's bags full of groceries. Maeve eyed them hungrily. She could see a packet of croissants on the top. Under his arm he carried a newspaper. He smiled kindly at the odd little elfin figure. Another drop-out, he thought. London seemed full of them, these strange young people with their closed, dead- looking faces and their grubby sleeping bags and dogs on strings. Even in the Blitz, which he remembered vividly, there had never been such abject misery. As he turned off the main path to walk towards his home in Primrose Hill, the newspaper slipped under his arm and the magazine folded inside it slid out and fell to the path. Rather deaf, he did not hear it drop and walked slowly on with his week's worth of reading material lying on the gravel. By the time Maeve came across it five minutes later, the old man was well away, disappeared across the busy main road towards his home. Maeve picked up the slim magazine which she had never read but had seen on newsstands. In fact, her father had once been asked to contribute a contentious article about the Northern Ireland peace process, and had been thrilled by the number of outraged letters he had got in response. Something interesting to read landing at her feet was a piece of luck for Maeve and a change from the tabloids people discarded on Tubes and buses.
She flicked through the magazine as she walked and the very first thing she read was: 'Carer/companion urgently sought for elderly, disabled lady living in own home in Somerset. Other help kept. Comfortable accommodation and excellent salary offered to the right person. Highest references essential. Some light cooking desirable. Car driver preferred.'
God, thought Maeve, I've found myself a job.
Sophie, however, didn't think so.
'Maeve, you're barmy. Nuts. It's a total waste of time. What kind of companion would you, of all people, be to a dribbling old crone? You're notoriously impatient. You'd hate it – you couldn't be stuck in the country in a creaky old mausoleum. Anyway, look at you – you look off the street. Completely dodgy. No one's going to let you near their granny.'
'Hey, Sophers!' Maeve protested. 'You know I've got a nicer side. I love your brats, don't I?' and she tugged Flora onto her knee. 'You don't mind leaving them with me, do you? You don't worry I'll lock them in a cupboard while you're out. I quite like old people.'
'You don't know any!' retorted Sophie.
Maeve considered. This was true, so she ignored it.
'I clean up OK – if I can get hold of some suitable clothes. References are no problem. You can write me one. Mohammed can write me another. God, I wonder if he can write? He can say he's a sheikh or something and I've looked after his Sultana mother. I'll write one myself.'
Sophie was horrified. 'My God! You'll go to prison!'
'Don't be silly. After all, I haven't really got anything to hide. I haven't got a criminal record. I don't steal. I'm not a pyromaniac. On those grounds alone I sound ideal. Come on, Sophers. Don't you see how it would be just right for me at the moment? I could save everything I earned, have board and lodging while I get revved up to do something else.'
Sophie looked doubtful. She loved Maeve who had shared a cubicle with her in the first miserable weeks at boarding school. She'd been a rock when Fergus had buggered off and left her when the twins were four months old. She had given practical help, taking the babies off her hands, cleaning the flat, which was worth much more than sympathy which just made her cry. But she had deep reservations about this current scheme. With a struggle Sophie tried to be more open-minded. She, who had only ever wanted a grand, white wedding and a big family of happy children, and a devoted husband, and an Aga and all that went with it, now found herself in a basement flat as a single parent. She had been forced to accept a life which she had never chosen and of which she basically disapproved. She believed in marriage and had meant every single one of the promises she had made at the altar. But it hadn't counted for anything. So why did it matter if Maeve was dishonest? The world seemed to reward shits. She had heard Fergus was seeing a blonde banker, while she was humping the bloody double pushchair up the steps of her basement flat, and collapsing exhausted in front of mindless television programmes every evening. No, she'd support Maeve.
'OK, pal. I'm with you. I'll be good at this type of thing. I mean, it could be my parents advertising for a keeper for my granny, couldn't it? I know what they'd expect. Let's write the reference first. Shall we say you were my kids' nanny? And listen. There's a charity shop round the corner stuffed with the sort of dreary clothes you'll need. I cannot wait to see you in a pleated, navy polyester skirt ... but they're fashionable again, aren't they?'
Maeve half got up to hug her, still holding Flora on her knee.
'You're a star, mate,' she said. 'What a blast!'
While Maeve was in the bath they composed the reference Sophie was going to write. Maeve was inclined to get carried away and made herself sound like Mother Theresa, but Sophie toned it down and they were pleased with the final result. Sophie had some of her parents' grand, embossed notepaper in the bottom of a suitcase – 'I wrote my wedding present thank yous on it,' she said, wistfully – and they decided to use that.
Flora and Freddy toddled between them, fascinated by tiny Maeve in her bubble mountain. She scooped little mounds of foam and put them on their heads which made them roar with laughter until Flora biffed Freddy and he cracked his head on the side of the bath and the whole thing ended in screams. Maeve restored smiles in a second by submerging herself entirely under the surface of the water and then reappearing very slowly. The twins shrieked with delight, their fat little faces still shiny and wet with tears.
Maeve got out of the bath and skipped round the flat naked which made them roar all over again.
'Put some clothes on,' said Sophie. 'The whole street can see you.'
'They're welcome!' said Maeve. 'A penny a peep is considered quite cheap!'
When she did get dressed she had no option but to put her old clothes back on. Even Sophie's T-shirts looked like mini dresses on her tiny frame.
'When we've had a sandwich we'll go to Oxfam,' said Sophie. 'How much can you spend?'
'About a tenner,' said Maeve. 'I've only got thirty-five quid in the whole world. When we get back may I use your telephone to ring this number on the ad, and may I use this address? I can't tell the Snodgrasses that I live in a squat. I'll tell them that I live with a girlfriend and then should they ring for any reason, you can say I'm out and take a message.'
They ate a messy lunch, with the twins chucking Marmite sandwiches about and throwing carrot sticks on the floor.
'They're tired,' said Sophie. 'They'll sleep the moment they're in the buggy.' Then there was all the wiping down and changing nappies and pushing awkward little arms and legs into outdoor clothes.
'I don't know how you can stand this,' said Maeve. 'I'd just keep them naked and run a hose over them.'
'You wait. This old dear is probably incontinent. You'll be changing nappies soon.'
'Christ!' said Maeve. 'That's a thought. Wait a minute though. "Other help kept." That means there'll be a nurse or something, doesn't it? That will be her job.'
'Don't be too sure,' warned Sophie. 'I don't think they'd want a companion if there was a nurse.'
'Oh well,' said Maeve. 'I'll have to face that one when it comes. Get a move on, twinnies. We're going out. Sophie, how do you lug this great chariot up these steps ten times a day? It's like being a pit pony.'
'I just have to,' said Sophie as they hauled the double pushchair up to the pavement, each with a twin under an arm. 'There's no one to help me. I did complain about it to Fergus and he said if I wanted the garden at the back, which of course I do, I'd have to put up with it.'
'What's he putting up with, I'd like to know. Except of course the huge disadvantage of being Fergus. But he must be used to that by now ... like a birth defect.'
Sophie laughed. She plonked the twins in their seats and harnessed them in. Maeve took the handles and ran off down the road pushing the squealing babies. 'Come on, Soph! I'm going to try a wheelie!'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Turning for Home by Sarah Challis. Copyright © 2001 Sarah Challis. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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