After the Wedding: What happens after you say 'I do'?

Book 0: Roone

by Roisin Meaney

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Maeve Binchy fans will love THE IRISH NO. 1 BESTSELLER Roisin Meaney's warm storytelling and unforgettable characters. The residents of Roone are getting ready for a summer of love, secrets and drama.

After a bumpy start, Nell and James have finally said 'I do' and everything seems to be falling into place. Nell is getting comfortable in her new role as stepmother to James' sixteen-year-old son Andy, she's finally mending fences with her father and she's ready to look to the future.
Then Nell's ex-fiancé Tim - her husband James' brother - comes back to Roone, a place he's never liked, and she begins to feel uneasy. As the summer days roll by, and Tim seems in no hurry to return to his wife and daughter, Nell is finding it more and more difficult to enjoy her new beginning.
But when the little island of Roone is rocked by the disappearance of a young child, Nell realises that life can change in a single moment. Will happiness be restored before the autumn comes?

(P) 2020 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Release date: April 3, 2014

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 299

Sample

The grass darkens the pink of her sandals as she crosses the little patch of lawn between their pretend house and the path. Her toes get wet and slippery; she stoops to dry them with the front of her cardigan, and lingers to examine a furry black caterpillar as it pleats its way across the path in front of her.

‘Where are you going?’ she asks, but it doesn’t tell her because it can’t talk. She lays her finger on the ground before it and it clambers all the way over, tickling her with its little legs. She wishes she had some food for it. Mrs Carmody read them a story about a very hungry caterpillar that kept eating stuff. He had a red face, and one bit of him got ripped off by Brian, and Mrs Carmody had to put Sellotape on it.

She says goodbye to the caterpillar and walks on, past the house with the man who was sitting on his garden seat yesterday when she was going to the beach with Mammy. He wore giant blue shorts and no top and his tummy was pink and fat and he had a can of beer on it, like it was a table. When they passed him he said, Hello, ladies, and Mammy squeezed her hand too tight and made her walk faster. She’s glad he’s not there now.

All the curtains are closed in all the windows she sees. Everyone must still be asleep. She keeps walking until she gets to the last one. There’s a white ribbon tied on the silver car parked outside. Granddad put a white ribbon on his car when Auntie Nuala was getting married. She was a flower girl, she wore a pink dress and sparkly shoes that she was allowed to keep, but they’re too small for her now.

Mammy and Daddy got married too. Mammy told her she was there, but she doesn’t remember because she was just a baby. Mammy showed her a book with all photos of the wedding, and in the photos she’s got a white dress and a white hairband although she has hardly any hair, and Gary is small and has clothes like Daddy, even a tie. Ruairi isn’t in any photo: he was still in Heaven.

She runs a finger along the ribbon on the car. It feels slippery. She looks at the house and sees someone opening curtains. It’s a big boy in a blue T-shirt who looks out and waves at her. She waves back and then skips off in case she gets in trouble for touching the ribbon. She sings a song Mrs Carmody taught them about a butterfly, but she can’t remember all the words so she sings la la la.

She’s almost at the end of their road when she remembers Baba. She thinks she left him on a chair in the kitchen. She wants to go back and get him but Gary is there, and Gary is mean. He put all the Frosties from the box into his bowl so there were none left for her, and when she said she was going to tell Mammy he twisted her arm and made it hurt, so she ran out. Now he’ll be in big trouble because it’s his job to mind her when they get up before Mammy and Daddy.

She’ll go down to the beach and look at the sea. She won’t stay for a long time because she’s hungry and her toes are a bit cold and she misses Baba; she’ll just stay long enough to get Gary in trouble. She remembers the way to the beach from yesterday with Mammy. Daddy took the boys to see the lighthouse and Mammy said they’d have a ladies day instead, just the two of them. They had crisps and lemonade, and she had two paddles, even though the water was freezing, and she built a sandcastle and buried Mammy’s feet.

She reaches the big road. The beach is down a lane on the other side. She looks the two ways before crossing the road, just like Mammy told her.

A red car is coming. She stands still and watches it getting bigger.



Standing by the window, sixteen-year-old Andy Baker yawns and pushes a hand under his blue T-shirt to scratch absently at his stomach as he listens to the intermittent slosh of his father’s razor in the bathroom sink next door. If he put his ear to the wall he’d probably be able to make out the whispery rasp of the blade scraping its way along his father’s chin. Like paper the walls are in this house. He won’t be sorry to leave it.

He remembers the first time he set eyes on it, eleven years old and hunched heartbroken in his seat, barely looking up when Dad stopped the car and told him they’d arrived. Not interested in looking at a stupid house on a stupid island – who cared where they lived, when Mam wasn’t going to be there with them?

The scooped-out feeling she left inside him is still there. The loss of her still makes him sad, but it’s a blurrier-edged sadness now, like a softer echo of the sharp pain he felt right after she died. He wonders if it’ll ever completely go away, or if he’ll still feel something’s missing when he’s much older than Mam got to be, and his teeth live in a glass of water at night.

Nearly six years on, he can’t conjure up her voice in his head any more, can’t hear her calling up the stairs to him, telling him to hurry up or he’ll be late for school. But he recalls how she would stick out her bottom lip and blow her fringe from her eyes, and he remembers that she loved Turkish Delight, and that she baked a coconut cake with fluffy white icing for every one of his birthdays, until she was too sick to bake anything.

He remembers how embarrassed he used to get when she’d sit on his dad’s lap, and how she used to laugh at him for that, but not in a mean way. And when he smells the perfume she used to wear, even now, it summons such a lonesomeness in him that he has to fight the urge to cry.

He remembers things he wishes he didn’t, like how horrible it was when she was sick, when she wrapped her bald head in brightly coloured scarves and drew eyebrows on her forehead with a black pencil, and how she looked like a ghost of someone he didn’t recognise, with hollowed-out cheeks and eyes that had no light in them, eyes that seemed already dead. He remembers how bad her breath smelt near the end, as if the cancer – which he pictured as a lumpy brownish treacly gloop – was inching up through her, clogging all her pipes and tubes, pushing its stench ahead of it.

‘You’re my star,’ she’d whisper, drawing him close with the claw her hand had become, ‘my precious star,’ and he would breathe through his mouth and do his best not to pull away from her.

He watches a gull wheel high in the sky, which looks whiter than it was yesterday. Yesterday was one of those unexpectedly wonderful days that you find dropped into a bunch of ordinary ones. From early morning the sun shone out of a perfectly cloudless sky. People who’d come to spend the bank holiday weekend on Roone gathered towels and buckets and headed for the beach, wanting to grab the good weather, wanting to stretch out their winter-white bodies for the sun to pink up.

Andy and his dad had been busy packing, piling up boxes and cases in the hall and ferrying them to Nell’s. Late in the afternoon, when all they could do had been done, they’d washed the car and tied the ribbon on it, and afterwards they’d cooked a pizza and eaten it on the patio. The last supper, his dad said, catching a droop of melted cheese and folding it over his slice. Giving Andy half a glass of wine so they could toast the last supper.

He hears water gurgling from the sink. In a minute his dad will come out and it’ll be his turn to make himself ready for the day. He glances at the bed where he’s laid out the navy suit he got in Tralee three weeks ago. His first proper suit, bought for his dad’s second wedding.

His dad’s second wedding. Today Andy is becoming a stepson, and gaining a stepmother. He isn’t quite sure how all that stuff makes him feel.

‘Stepmothers get a bad press,’ Laura had told him about a week ago. ‘I was terrified of the ones in Snow White and Cinderella, and when my dad remarried – I was about your age, actually – I was all set to hate her, but she turned out to be impossible to hate. In fact, she ended up becoming my best pal.’

Andy’s met Laura’s stepmother. She came to Roone last autumn when Laura and Gavin were in the middle of turning Mr Thompson’s house into a B&B. When Andy was introduced to her he thought Laura must be pulling his leg. They looked about the same age: how could she be Laura’s stepmother? But nobody’s leg was being pulled – and anyone could see they liked one another a lot.

Nell is about the right age to be his stepmother. If Mam hadn’t died she’d be forty now, just five years older than Nell. And he and Nell have always got on – right from the start, when he didn’t want to talk to anyone on Roone, she knew how to leave him alone until he was ready. If he had to choose a stepmother he’d probably choose her. It’s just a bit weird to be getting one at all.

And another kind of weird thing is that Nell was engaged to his uncle Tim first, before they broke it off and she switched to Dad. And Uncle Tim will be at the wedding today, and so will his wife Katy, who was Nell’s penfriend for years. All a bit of a muddle.

He takes his new white shirt from the wardrobe and lays it on the bed next to the suit. He opens a drawer and takes out the skinny green tie he found in a Tralee charity shop, the same day he got the suit. He bought the tie for a laugh; it was only twenty cents, and he was going to show it to his dad and tell him he’d got it for the wedding, just to see the look on his face – but when Nell saw it she’d loved it, and begged him to wear it.

He’s looking forward to moving into Nell’s house. It’s bigger than this one – well, most houses are – and it’s closer to his favourite beach. And John Silver lives there too, of course, which is a big plus. For the first time in his life he’ll be living in a house with a dog. He and his dad looked after John Silver while Nell’s house was let out two years ago, but knowing you were going to have to give him back eventually was a bit of a bummer.

He hears the bathroom door opening. He goes out to the corridor and there’s his father, standing with a red towel around his waist, hair in a tumble.

‘All yours.’

There’s a bit of toilet paper stuck to one side of his chin. Andy grins at it.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘You got paper on your face,’ he replies, walking into the bathroom, which is full of steam and smells like he’s just walked into a forest.



In his bedroom James Baker pats himself dry. He’s been awake since just after five, lying open-eyed as the dawn slithered in through the window and picked out of the darkness the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, his wedding suit hanging in its grey nylon carrier on the back of the door.

His bedroom window was open, like it was all year round. He heard the first birds, and later a distant barking dog, and just before he got up the cheery clatter of a tractor in some field not too far away. Jim Barnes maybe, getting a good run at the day.

As he lay there waiting for eight o’clock to arrive he found himself thinking of Karen – inevitable, maybe, on this particular day. The first woman who’d walked up an aisle to him was bound to be called into being as he was about to stand at the top of another aisle to receive his second bride. He and Karen had had a dozen years together, which was a lot more than some people got – but surely this time round Fate would be more generous to him.

At half past six he pushed back the duvet, too full of nervous energy to stay where he was. He pulled on his painting jeans and T-shirt and tiptoed barefoot to the kitchen and made coffee. He took it out to the patio, where the easel Nell had given him for Christmas held his half-finished painting of Jupiter, the small yellow rowboat she’d inherited from her grandfather. He picked up a brush.

So much inspiration here on Roone, so much he wanted to capture on canvas, a small group of galleries around the country willing to display what he produced. Someone happy to buy one, every now and again. Money, or the lack of it, didn’t bother James – he earned enough from the day job in Fitz’s bar to support himself and Andy. He painted because he loved it.

At ten to eight he cleaned his brushes and stripped off his clothes in the bathroom and scrubbed himself shiny in the shower, thinking about the day ahead, about the years that were waiting to be lived with Nell and Andy, and maybe more children. He felt light-headed with happiness at the thought of it all. He rinsed shampoo from his hair and wrapped a towel around his waist and filled the sink.

As he scraped the last of the night’s stubble from his chin he fancied he heard a small child outside, singing in a high voice – something about a butterfly? – just before he cut himself.

He eases the scrap of toilet paper away now, swabs the tiny red mark underneath with antiseptic. They’ve hardly taken the straightforward route, he and Nell. Oh, he fell in love quickly enough: within a few months of their arrival on Roone he realised to his utter disbelief – still grieving for Karen, not looking for anyone to replace her – how important Nell was becoming to him. He held back, unsure of how she felt, afraid to trust being in love again – and while he was dithering, his brother came to Roone on holidays, and James in his innocence introduced him to Nell.

They became an item almost at once, with Tim making the journey from Dublin to the island every weekend to be with her. James stood miserably by as his younger brother wooed and won her. He heard with despair of their engagement, he witnessed Nell’s happiness as she prepared for her wedding day. He suffered the torment of imagining her and Tim together, once Tim had moved his weekend things from James’s house to Nell’s.

And then it was all called off – Nell called it off – and James didn’t dare hope that his chance might have come. He waited for a reconciliation, convincing himself it was inevitable, so afraid was he of playing his hand and being rejected. But there was no reconciliation. Tim didn’t reappear on Roone, no attempt was made to resurrect the relationship, and James saw little evidence that Nell was pining for his brother. She was sad, undoubtedly, that her plans with Tim had come to nothing, but as far as he could see, not heartbroken.

Her friendship with James seemed as strong as ever; indeed, there were times when he imagined he detected something more, a new softness in her glances, a tenderness in her voice – but as the weeks turned into months, he struggled to find the courage to tell her how he felt. And in the end, it was Nell who did the telling.

‘He was the wrong brother,’ she murmured, one unforgettable afternoon as they tramped across the damp sand near the water’s edge of Roone’s longest beach. Both of them scarved and overcoated, their boots sucked into the sand with every step. It was November, three months after her broken engagement. It was freezing, dusk was already falling at four o’clock, and nobody else had been foolish enough to go near the beach.

‘I knew that day you came to see me in the hospital,’ she went on, ‘the day after my house went on fire. You brought marshmallows, remember? You pulled the bag out of your pocket and put them into my hand, and I realised then that I’d picked the wrong brother.’

And right after saying it she’d stopped walking and turned to look at him, searching his face for his reaction.

‘I’m not making a fool of myself here, am I?’ she asked – and he kissed the tip of her frozen pink nose, and he enfolded all the layers of her in his arms and tried to contain his overflowing heart. And as they stood entwined, he whispered at last the words of love that had stayed so long unspoken.

Telling Tim wasn’t something he relished. He decided to wait until they were face to face, which didn’t happen until Christmas. James and Andy had travelled to Dublin to spend the few days as they always did with Andy’s grandmother, and Tim arrived at noon on Christmas Day to join them for the festivities.

James’s news didn’t appear to come as a surprise. He chewed his lip as he digested it.

‘Always knew you had a soft spot for her. Used to think she had one for you sometimes.’

‘She didn’t,’ James replied, ‘not until after you split up.’ She picked the wrong brother first, which took a bit of the sting out of James coming second.

‘You did for her though, didn’t you?’

‘I did.’ Nothing to be gained now with lies, and his conscience was clear: he’d never tried to change her mind, much as he’d wanted to.

The afternoon was crisp, the sky full of unshed snow. The brothers sat in the little gazebo at the back of the house they’d grown up in, waiting to be summoned to the dinner Andy and his grandmother were preparing.

Tim stretched out his legs, crossed one ankle over the other, straightened the crease in his grey trousers. ‘You must have been happy when we split.’ The words said without rancour; he might have been remarking on the long-range weather forecast. But James, who’d grown up with him, heard the steel at the edge.

He regarded his brother’s shoes, which had probably cost more than James’s entire range of footwear. ‘I wasn’t happy. I thought you’d probably get back together.’

‘But when we didn’t, you saw your chance and jumped at it.’

James made no response, knowing that whatever he said would be wrong now. Tim’s resentment was to be expected: he would have to ride it out, and hope that time would wear it down. They sat side by side on the wrought-iron bench, the smell of roasting turkey drifting out from the house, Chris Rea driving home for Christmas on somebody’s radio.

‘As it happens,’ Tim said, uncrossing and recrossing his legs, ‘I’ve met someone myself.’

James looked at him. ‘You have?’

‘From Donegal. Early days.’

And before James could ask any more, Andy had appeared to call them in, and that was the end of that, until a letter to Nell in February revealed that the Donegal someone was her long-term penfriend Katy. And a few months later, while they were all still getting used to the notion of Tim being with someone who wasn’t Nell, he and Katy went on holidays to Italy and came home married, just like that.

And in September Katy announced that she was pregnant, a week after James had got down on one knee in Nell’s hair salon – empty of customers at the time – and asked her to marry him.

And today it’s going to happen: today he and Nell will become husband and wife. They’re not having anything like the big splash-out wedding Nell and Tim were going to have. And they’re not getting married on Roone, as they had planned to do last December.

Today they’ll make their vows in a little church on the side of a hill that overlooks the Atlantic in County Clare, about three hours’ drive from Roone. The wedding party, all ten of them, will make their way there in three cars, and will fit around a single table in the Ennistymon restaurant where a meal has been booked for after the ceremony.

He begins to dress. The day will be bittersweet, and there is nothing he can do about that. Nell will do her best to hide her grief, and he will try to make it easy for her. The wedding is happening because they both want it to, but December’s tragedy will soak into every minute of it.

He slips on his shirt, still creased from its packaging, and does up the buttons. Andy is going to wear the hideous green tie he bought as a joke, because for some unknown reason Nell had taken a fancy to it and asked him to wear it. Any worries James might have had about his son accepting Nell as a stepmother had melted away when he heard that.

He’s getting married. He and Nell are getting married. Again he feels a flip of happiness as his mouth curves into a smile. Still half dressed, he takes his phone from the bedside locker and places a call.

Laura answers on the second ring. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing is wrong. I just wanted to touch base with someone, and I’m not allowed to call the bride.’

‘Getting jittery?’

He grins. ‘Not a bit. Happy as Larry.’

‘Good. Now I have to fly – I’m in the middle of three breakfasts, and Ben has just spilt the milk. Touch base with Hugh if you need someone to talk to. See you in Clare – don’t be late.’

She hangs up before he can reply. Living on Roone for less than a year, and already she’s become as much a part of the island as James and Andy. Nell’s next-door neighbour – theirs too after today. Walter’s old house turned into a bed and breakfast; the scattiest on the island, he’s sure.

‘Can’t cook to save my life,’ Laura admits to anyone who enquires, but so disarmingly that people forgive her anything. James wouldn’t be surprised to hear she had the guests making their own full Irish, and feeling they’d been specially chosen to do it.

He throws his phone onto the bed and finishes dressing.



Once upon a time Nell Mulcahy fell in love with James Baker.

They’re made for one another, everyone says it. Much more suited than Nell and Tim ever were, it’s obvious now. He’d never have settled on Roone, that fellow. Never tried to get to know anyone, back to Dublin in his fancy car every Sunday night. Just as well it didn’t work out with him and Nell.

Funny that she moved from one brother to the other, though, wasn’t it? Funny that she didn’t go for James in the first place, seeing as how they were friends ever before she met Tim. Everyone already matching the two of them up, then along comes Tim and sweeps her off her feet. And now look at her, settling on James after all. Better, though. Much better.

They don’t say all that to Nell’s face, of course. They say it to Laura’s face – or rather, Maisie Kiely did, about a month ago.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she said, holding out her sherry glass for Laura to refill, ‘we all think the world of Nell, we’d love to see her settled down. But there’s been so much upset, hasn’t there? Her father leaving out of the blue like that, whatever was wrong with him, and then the whole business with Tim, and right after that her lovely little house burning down. And when she was all set to marry James, everything cancelled again with what happened to poor Moira, God love her. You’d wonder will things ever go right for her.’

‘They didn’t cancel. They’re still getting married.’

Maisie looked offended. ‘But not on Roone. Not here, where all her friends are. They’re going to Clare, and only having their families there. What kind of a wedding is that going to be?’

Laura thought it best not to mention that she’d been invited, the only non-family guest. ‘The main thing is they’ll be married – and they can always have a bit of a party here later on.’

‘They can, I suppose.’ Maisie pursed her lips and sipped her sherry. ‘And what about yourself?’ She searched the sitting room and found Gavin going from group to group with a bottle of red wine in one hand and a teapot in the other. ‘Has he any notion of making an honest woman of you?’

‘Any day now,’ Laura told her. No need to mention that she’d already turned poor Gav down twice: Maisie would have it around the island before teatime.

It was just before Easter. It was the official opening of Walter’s Place, which was what Laura and Gavin had decided to call the B&B, seeing as how everyone still referred to the house as precisely that, even though poor Walter would have been gone two years in July, and Laura and Gavin had moved in last August. It would probably be known as Walter’s place long after she and Gav – and possibly the twins – were pushing up daisies in Roone’s quaint little graveyard, or wherever they all ended up.

‘We’re bowing to the inevitable,’ Laura said to Nell, who agreed that they might as well.

Poor Nell, so shaken by her mother’s death, so quiet and sad for weeks afterwards, her wedding plans with James put on hold until she could find the will to move forward with them. The second time something had happened to mess with her dream of walking down the aisle.

And poor Moira, who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Crossing a street in Tralee just before Christmas, mown down by a car that had skidded on black ice and rammed straight into her. Gone to Tralee to choose a birthday present for Nell, not realising as she went across on the ferry that morning that she was travelling to her death.

But that’s in the past, and they all have to look to the future now. Laura spoons scrambled eggs onto toast and remembers the night she did her level best to seduce the man who is marrying Nell today, when she and the boys had rented Nell’s house for a fortnight, two summers ago.

Stripping off for him in Nell’s sitting room while the twins were asleep, dying for the feel of a man’s hands on her body, and widowed James Baker with his tragic blue eyes had seemed the ideal candidate for the job.

His heart hadn’t been in it. She’d known that, and had been willing to overlook it. She wasn’t asking him to put a ring on her finger, just to make her happy for an hour. But then Seamus had woken up, and by the time Laura had quietened him and come back to the sitting room, James had thought better of the whole thing, had buttoned himself up again and was ready to go home.

Just as well, seeing how things had worked out with him and Nell. Bit awkward now maybe, if he and Laura had had a fling. And she’d ended up meeting Gav anyway, as soon as she and the boys had gone back to Dublin.

She fishes a poached egg out of its saucepan and plops it onto a plate as the kettle comes to the boil and clicks off. ‘Ben, elbows down,’ she says, pouring water into the waiting teapot, lifting the egg again to slide a slice of toast beneath it.

‘How can you see?’

‘Mammy eyes,’ she tells him, ‘in the back of my head.’

No pair of Mammy eyes needed to know his elbows are on the table. Ten times a meal she has to remind him, and Seamus not once. They never cease to amaze her, these two miracles of hers.

She delivers the breakfasts – mushrooms forgotten on the full Irish, third time this week, but her offer to provide them is brushed aside, thanks be to God: barely enough time as it is to get herself ready for the wedding. She checks her watch on the way back to the kitchen. Gav due home from his rounds any minute, three-quarters of an hour tops before Hugh and Imelda arrive to pick her up.

‘Schoolbags,’ she says, elbowing open the door, hands full with cereal bowls and juice glasses. ‘Seamus, did you feed the hens?’

‘It’s Ben’s turn.’

‘Is not. I did it the last day.’

And while she’s sorting that out Gav arrives, and she hands over to him and heads upstairs, praying for no interruptions. Amazing how indispensable she becomes the minute she disappears.

In the bedroom she pulls her T-shirt over her head and steps out of her size-eighteen skirt. She takes the bright pink dress from the wardrobe and holds it up before the mirror. Is the colour a bit daring, considering her current shape? Will she look like a giant ball of candy floss?

Probably, but at this stage she has no choice. She steps into the dress and eases it up over her bump. She’s not looking forward to the journey in the back of Imelda’s car – for the past few months she’s been useless in any kind of vehicle – but she’s impatient to see the church again, to sit within its thick walls and feel its serenity.

The church had been her idea. She’d told Nell about it back in March.

‘It’s on the coast road between Liscannor and Doolin, halfway up a little hill. Aaron and I found it when we spent a week driving around Clare, the summer before the boys were born. We didn’t expect it to be open but it was. It was deserted except for a little black kitten fast asleep on a pew near the door. We sat there for about twenty minutes.’

Nell flicked a pebble from the stone wall. They stood on either side of it, huddled into jackets. ‘What was it like?’

‘Well, it wasn’t in the least bit fancy. No padding on the kneelers, plain whitewashed walls, very few statues. I remember the sun coming out from behind a cloud and lighting up the stained glass in the windows. The colours were so vivid, they splashed onto the altar and the walls. I could smell flowers, even though there weren’t any that I could see. And we could hear the sea quite clearly, although it was some distance away. There was something incredibly pe. . .