It's That Time of Year

by Roisin Meaney

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

It's the weekend before Christmas. Julia, Eddie and Steph are making separate journeys to Ireland to attend the wedding of their beloved Annie, the woman who fostered each of them in their childhoods and to spend the weekend in the house that gave them all shelter when they needed it most. All three are now adults -- Julia, a world famous singer living in luxury in Paris; Eddie, a chef in London; and Steph who spends her days on a remote Greek island, running a writers' retreat with her older lover -- but as the wedding celebrations get underway, certain truths come to light which show that past hurts have yet to heal. As Annie says 'I do', the three make some discoveries about themselves -- but will the guests of the wedding party get their happy-ever-after in time for Christmas day? It's that Time of Year is the spellbinding, warm-hearted new novel from one of Ireland's best-loved writers.

Release date: October 8, 2020

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 259

Sample

THE FLANNERYS HAVE FORGOTTEN TO TURN OFF THE lights on their holly bush again. Off and on they flash, throwing tiny soft bursts of blue and red and green into the night. The tail end of the night really, already a faint lightening in the sky, smudges of grey breaking up the darkness when Annie looks east towards the school and the church and the chipper. The school closing today for the holidays, traffic on the road last evening, parents and children travelling to and from the annual Christmas concert.

All the concerts she has attended over the years, never a year without at least one of her children involved. Helping out with preparations beforehand in noisy classrooms, attaching cardboard wings to white dresses, clipping tinsel halos to shining hair, drawing ripped seams together with safety-pins, bending to tie laces, to wipe noses, to reassure anxious little performers with a hug and tell them they were going to be wonderful.

Her heart in her mouth as she watched them onstage in case of a stumble, or lines forgotten. Stepping into the aisle to take a photo that invariably came out blurry: thank God for Cora, who was a far better photographer. Clapping till her hands were sore when mishaps were avoided, and when they weren’t.

She flicks through them in her head, all her children. All the precious, unlucky, sad, mixed-up, lonely little creatures who were never really hers, just loaned to her for a while. All the tears she dried, the tantrums and rages she tried to quell, the sorrows she did her best to mend, to melt away with toys and treats and singsongs, and happy bedtime stories.

Finished now, no more children. Packed it in two years ago, when her body ran out of the energy it needed to cope with a house full of young children. These days she drives the meals-on-wheels van around the neighbourhood each weekday lunchtime, and helps with events in the community hall, and does the readings in church every fourth Sunday, and gives the garden the attention it was craving. These days she takes Keith Burke’s little dog for a walk when Keith’s hip is at him, and brings Ruthie, who is about to become her stepdaughter, to the cinema in Ennis every Thursday afternoon. These days she gets through more books, and takes long, lazy baths, and lies in bed an extra hour in the mornings.

Most mornings.

She stands in the lee of the porch, shoulders hunched, hands deep in the pockets of her winter coat, breath turning white as it meets the frosty air. Nothing beneath the coat except her nightdress, not nearly enough protection against this early-morning chill but she woke abruptly, going from sleep to full awareness in the space between one heartbeat and another, and something nudged her down the stairs and outside.

She turns her gaze to the sign that Joe Dineen erected six weeks ago, its wooden post attached to the gate pillar with plastic ties, and she feels the same belt of dismay that the sight of it always prompts. She can’t make out the lettering in the faint light, but she doesn’t need to read it. For Sale, it says, and Joe’s number underneath. For Sale. Come and buy my home, come and pay for my refuge, my sanctuary, with euros and cents. It won’t be the same without you in it, people tell her, and it won’t, it won’t. The loss of it, even before it’s happened, causes her to weep inside. How can she possibly let it go, even as she knows the impossibility of keeping it?

She tilts her face to the sky. She turns it this way and that to take in the sweep of dimming stars. The threatened snow has yet to make an appearance, the days dry and bright and cold as the year moves to a close. Perfect December weather really: no icy roads to torment the traveller, no stormy gusts to rip tiles from roofs and push trees sideways, no sleety showers to make even the shortest of walks a challenge. So far so good.

Her feet in their slippers tingle with cold. She shifts her weight to wriggle her toes, and turns her attention to the astonishing fact that today is the last day of her fifties. How did that happen? How has she become a woman with almost sixty years of life lived? In the mirror she sees the lines in her face and the pockets of skin beneath her eyes and the multiple white strands laced through her mud-brown hair that tell her it must be true, but inside, in her heart and in her soul, it seems the greatest of travesties, a miscalculation of epic proportions. She’s never that age – she’s nowhere near it.

Oh, she knows it’s not old. In these days of extended life, sixty is middle-aged, maybe nudging towards elderly, but nowhere near old. We’re in our prime, Matt tells her, his sixty-second birthday in another few weeks, and she laughs and agrees with him – and yet, and yet, the thought of sixty, the idea of it, makes her want to run and hide from it.

Then again, this milestone birthday is also going to herald a new beginning for her, and for Matt. Tomorrow they start on their journey together, years later than most but with as much anticipation and love, she’s sure, as any couple heading for the altar. They may have taken longer to get there, but maybe the delay makes their destination all the sweeter.

She shivers. She draws the heavy coat more tightly around her without taking her hands from her pockets. She should go in, find the redness in last night’s ashes in the stove and coax it with firelighter and kindling to a fresh flame. Boil the kettle, make sourdough toast, begin the day as she always does. But still she lingers, reluctant to leave this quiet space, this time of waiting and wondering, this time of not-doing.

She thinks of the three people, strangers to one another, who will embark on their separate journeys sometime today. Making their way back to her, covering the miles that separate them. I know it’s really near Christmas, but I’d so love if you could be here, she’d written to each of them. I’ll have a bed made up for you. Stay for the weekend, or as long as you want. Stay for Christmas if you can!

She hadn’t been hopeful that any of them would make it, hadn’t been sure that they could leave work commitments or partners or whatever on such short notice, or that they’d even want to travel at this time of year. She’d braced herself against the possibility that none of them would be able to come – but they are able, and they’re coming, all three. Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Julia wrote, and Delighted, great news, Eddie wrote, and See you then, looking forward, Steph wrote.

It wasn’t difficult to settle on the three she chose, with maybe a hundred – no, well over that – to pick from. First, because these three had left the deepest imprints, these three she finds tiptoeing into her thoughts more than any of the others. And second, because some feeling, some impulse, whispered to her that each of them needs her in some way, each of them is bringing a hurt for her to mend, just like she used to.

The tip of her nose stings with every frosty inhalation. She can’t feel her toes anymore. Come on, move. She takes her hands from her pockets and pushes the front door open. She enters the house as the morning edges in and the night recedes, and the lights on the holly bush flash on and off and on again.





THREE TIMES THEY CIRCLED THE BLOCK BEFORE locating the turn they were seeking. ‘Honestly,’ her mother said, ‘you’d think there’d be a sign.’

‘There it is,’ Annie said. ‘See? On the side of that corner house.’

Her mother tipped her head to look through Annie’s window. ‘There’s no sign there.’

‘It’s under the ivy. The end is sticking out.’

‘Oh, for goodness sake – how is anyone supposed to see that?’

Only the final ry of the street name was visible, which wasn’t much help if you were new to Limerick and trying to locate the house that was to be your home for the foreseeable future.

‘What number is it?’ Her mother was peering now over the steering wheel at the red-brick terraced houses as they crawled past. ‘Half of them don’t even have numbers.’

‘Fourteen – watch out for that bin. Look, there’s twelve. It must be nearby.’

Number fourteen was right next door to twelve, the odds on one side of the narrow road, the evens on the other. Her mother cut the engine and eyed the house doubtfully. ‘It’s nothing much to look at.’

It wasn’t. Its coat of mustard yellow paint was coming off in patches, the scrap of lawn in front of it overgrown and filled with thistles. The railing and gate that cordoned it off from the road were stained with rust. Two bins, one blue, one green, were positioned directly outside the only downstairs window, in which a dingy net curtain hung.

Annie saw it all, and didn’t care. She’d secured her place in college and was leaving home for the first time, on the way to realising her dream of becoming a teacher. She couldn’t wait for this part of her life to begin, and she didn’t give a damn what kind of a roof was over her head. She’d happily have taken possession of a garden shed, or a tent on someone’s back lawn. You won’t look at us when you’re a posh college girl, Matt McCarthy had said when she told him she’d been accepted for teaching. He’d have a good laugh now if he saw where she was proposing to live. Nothing remotely posh about it.

‘You don’t have to come in,’ she said – but her mother was already getting out of the car, so together they hauled Annie’s cases from the boot and made their way up the cracked concrete of the short path, her mother tut-tutting at a giant thistle that sprang up from the edge of the lawn. Weeds never lasted long in their garden at home.

Annie pressed the doorbell. They waited without speaking. Someone nearby was listening to Freddie Mercury singing about Moët et Chandon; again she was reminded of Matt, who was a big Queen fan.

Even this late in the afternoon it was hot, their third sunny day in a row. She peeled her shirt away from her back and tucked her hair behind an ear, and wished for a glass of ice-cold water.

‘This is ridiculous. Are you sure you weren’t to call to the college for the key?’

‘I’m sure. I was told my housemate would be here.’

‘Well, if she is, she must be deaf. Press it again.’

Annie obeyed, and when there was still no response she rattled the letterbox flap, which didn’t produce much in the way of noise. There being no knocker, she gave a tentative thump to the door with the side of her fist, then a harder one – and the music cut off abruptly. Another few seconds passed, during which her mother sighed and shifted her weight, and looked at her watch. Finally, they heard the soft pat of approaching steps, and the door was opened.

‘Hello! Sorry, I was out the back. I hope you weren’t waiting long.’

Light brown curly hair, a wide gap-toothed grin. A grey, well-worn Fleetwood Mac T-shirt. Tiny denim shorts that Annie prayed her mother wasn’t frowning at. No shoes.

‘Were you ringing the bell? I think it’s broken.’ The girl stepped forward and pressed it, frowning. ‘Yup, stone dead. Anyway,’ the smile returning, ‘I’m Cora.’

‘I’m Annie, and this is my mother.’

Hands were shaken. They were ushered into the tiny hall and given a tour of downstairs, which consisted of a poky sitting room that led to an even smaller kitchen at the rear of the house, and a tiny bathroom at the foot of the stairs, with a shower stall instead of a bath. ‘This is it, I’m afraid,’ Cora said. ‘Just the bedrooms upstairs.’

The furniture was cheap and drab throughout, the carpet in the hall and sitting room threadbare. One of the kitchen cabinets was missing a door. The bathroom sink was chipped, the plastic toilet seat cracked. It was all a little sad and in need of attention – but there was what looked like a working fireplace in the sitting room, and the kitchen led to a surprisingly sizeable paved courtyard that was splashed with September sun.

A shiny pink bedspread was thrown onto its paving stones. Two pillows sat on it, along with a splayed book, and a tape recorder with a tumble of cassettes, and a tube of sun cream. A half-pint glass filled with orange peel stood by the wall. The place smelt of coconut.

‘I stole your pillow,’ Cora told Annie. ‘I promise I’ll give it back before bedtime.’

They’d been placed together, after Annie had added her name to a list of new students looking for accommodation. House with two others, she’d written in the column that asked for her preferred option. Three seemed like a good number: any more might be too many, any fewer and you ran the risk of being stuck with someone you’d have to spend the year trying to avoid.

But preferences weren’t guaranteed. A week or so ago she’d received a letter telling her she’d been placed in a two-bed house with one other female, and since then she’d been praying that the female would turn out normal, and easy to get along with. So far, things looked hopeful.

Cora bent to pick up the glass. ‘Tea for anyone?’ she enquired.

‘Not me,’ Annie’s mother replied. ‘I need to get back home. Can you show us Annie’s room, so we can drop off her cases?’ Wanting to see it, of course. Wanting, probably, to check the mattress, to scour the walls for signs of damp.

‘Well, I’ve thrown my stuff into the room on the left of the stairs, but I don’t mind which one I have. As far as I can see, there’s not much between them.’

The stairs were narrow and steep, and uncarpeted. The bedroom to the right smelt a little musty. It ran the length of the house, with a window to front and rear, and it held a single bed, a small wardrobe, a dressing table with two drawers, and a wooden chair. No pictures on the walls, which were covered in pale blue paper scattered with tiny cream triangles.

While her mother was unpacking sheets, Annie peeped into the other room, and found it, as Cora had said, to be pretty much identical in size and layout, and smell. An enormous case, almost twice the size of Annie’s two, lay open on the bed, something red and frilly spilling from it. A rag doll with yellow plaits and a freckled face sat on the rear windowsill and beamed into the room. Jeans lay crumpled on the floor, a tower of paperback books on the dressing table.

The mattress on Annie’s bed looked new, thankfully. Annie’s mother pronounced it too soft, but otherwise acceptable. They made the bed with the clean sheets Annie had taken from the hot press that morning; she felt a surprising lump in her throat as they tucked in corners and settled blankets and eiderdown on top. It was really happening. She was really leaving home.

‘You’ll have to wait until you get your pillow back to put this on,’ her mother said, dropping the pillowcase onto the bed. ‘I hope she won’t make a habit of that kind of thing. Make sure you don’t let her walk all over you. And give a good scrub to that bathroom when you get a chance – God only knows when it was cleaned last.’

Annie was terrified her new housemate would overhear – but just then Queen started up again in the courtyard. She struggled with the catch in the back window until it released, and attempted without success to prise open the window – stuck fast, she guessed, with layers of paint. She’d have to find a way to free it. The front window opened more easily so she lowered the top half all the way, letting the warm air pour in.

Her mother pottered about for another few minutes, opening drawers, bemoaning the lack of hangers in the wardrobe, frowning at the flimsiness of the curtains, reminding Annie that they’d be expecting her home on Friday: ‘I’m doing roast chicken, so don’t be late. Let Ivan know what time to pick you up at the station.’

‘I will.’

This would be as much a change for her mother, Annie realised, as for Annie herself. The first of her two children to leave home, Ivan at twenty-three showing no sign of wanting to move out, happy to commute to his civil service job in Ennis in the old car he’d bought a year earlier. Annie was the one on the move – and who knew if she’d ever live at home again? The thought was at once exhilarating and terrifying.

Downstairs they found Cora sprawled on her bedspread in the courtyard. She waved a cheery goodbye to Annie’s mother. ‘See you soon,’ she added, which Annie thought was unlikely, unless her mother was planning to return with a bucket of cleaning solutions and a mop.

They hugged at the car. ‘I’ll ring tomorrow sometime,’ Annie promised. No sign of a phone in the house, but there was bound to be a payphone somewhere nearby, or in the college.

She stood on the path until the car disappeared, then made her way back into the house to find Cora in the kitchen, in the act of taking a tall brown bottle from the fridge.

‘I figured I should wait till she left before I produced this – wouldn’t want her to think you were sharing a house with a wino. Grab two glasses – I think I saw some in that corner press, or the one next to it. Isn’t this house dire? We’ll have to fix it up a bit, or we won’t be able to bring anyone back. I’d say your mother was scandalised, was she?’

‘Well …’

‘Mine would have hit the roof if she’d seen it but she had to work, thank goodness – she’s a teacher – so my brother brought me, and he wouldn’t notice if the place was on fire. Are you any good with plants? I thought a few pots in the yard might be nice, but I haven’t a clue – and maybe we could rig up some lights there too. I was thinking we could eat outside on a fine evening – better than in this horrible kitchen.’

She talked on, yanking the cork from the bottle and filling two glasses, spilling crackers onto a plate, cutting slices from a block of Cheddar. Annie had never tasted wine, or any alcohol apart from a small glass of sherry her father had poured for her the previous Christmas. She took a cautious sip, and found that it tasted slightly less sweet than the sherry, and was very cold.

‘Isn’t it awful? I hate Liebfraumilch, but it was all I could get for under a tenner at the off-licence.’

‘No, it’s fine …’

‘We can stock up on decent stuff when we do a shop in Quinnsworth.’ She moved out to the courtyard, Annie following. ‘We should probably start a kitty. We need loo rolls anyway – there’s only one there, and it’s a real cheapie. Where are you from, by the way?’

Annie named her village. ‘It’s in Clare, ten miles outside Ennis.’

‘I’ve heard of it. I’m from Galway – well, between it and Salthill. Not a million miles from Clare.’

They arranged themselves on the bedspread. ‘I asked the landlord for a toilet brush and a new shower curtain, and a door for that cabinet. Have you checked out the state of the couch under that blanket?’

‘No.’ Annie wasn’t inclined to check out the couch. ‘What’s he like? The landlord.’

Cora made a face. ‘Youngish … well, early thirties, I’d say. No wedding ring, but I’m not surprised – the smell of BO from him would knock you out. He lives in County Limerick, I forget where, so I’d say we’ll only see him when he’s collecting the rent. He says no parties, which is a bit rich – I mean, is he afraid we’ll do damage to his lovely house? When’s your birthday?’

Annie could hardly keep up. ‘Er, not till December.’

‘OK, mine’s next month, so that’ll be our first party. We’ll have a bit of time to check out the college crowd, see who’s worth inviting. And we can always ask the neighbours too, so they can’t complain.’ She reached for the sun-cream tube and squeezed some of its contents into her palm. ‘You want some?’

‘Thanks.’ Annie pulled her skirt up past her knees and applied the cream to her skin, inhaling its coconut scent. She wouldn’t dare wear shorts like Cora’s – she’d feel far too self-conscious with so much skin on show. The two pairs she’d left at home were longer and baggier, and were worn only in the back garden on the hottest of days.

Cora raised her glass. ‘Cheers, Annie. Here’s to a good year. Tell me if I’m talking too much – everyone says I can’t shut up. And if I ever do something that annoys you, you have to tell me instead of suffering in silence. Deal?’

‘Deal, as long as you promise to do the same.’

‘Oh, you needn’t worry – I will.’

The house was awful. No way would Annie’s clothes fit into that wardrobe: she’d have to leave half of them in her case, even with the dressing-table drawers. If she needed the toilet in the middle of the night, which she always did, she’d have to negotiate those narrow stairs half asleep.

But it was ten minutes’ walk from the college, and lights and a few plants would be lovely in the courtyard, and their first party was already being planned. And she was free to live as she chose here, and already her new housemate felt like a friend.

Cora ejected the Queen cassette and riffled through the others. ‘Supertramp or Janis Ian?’

‘Jan. . .