Moving On

by Roisin Meaney

Genres: Women's Fiction; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

The average person moves house eight times in their lifetime. But are you moving closer to your destiny or further away?

This is Ellen's story...

Release date: February 6, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 408

Sample

HER TEA HAS GONE COLD. SHE WONDERS HOW MANY cups she’s wasted over the years, made and then forgotten as she’s tapped the keys of her laptop or sat lost in thought, trying to puzzle her way through a roadblock in a plot while tea has cooled in a cup.

Today she’s not typing or sitting; she’s standing in the littlest bedroom that became her writing room after the girls moved out, and she’s preparing to pack up the contents of her bureau, a task she’s left till last. She found the bureau in a charity shop over twenty years ago, and its drawers and cubbyholes harbour many memories.

Packing again, moving house for what she hopes – no, she knows – will be the last time. Tomorrow she will leave the home she loved best, of all the places she’s lived, and today she’s lost in the past, and her tea cools.

She sets the cup back on the windowsill and makes a start. From one of the little nooks in the top of the bureau she takes a notebook, its cover dark green with a flowery print. She traces the inscription on the flyleaf, its ink faded with age. They were children, two children playing at love.

In the pocket inside the notebook’s back cover are letters written in different hands, all precious, all folded and stored there over the years. She unfolds them carefully and rereads them now, tears brimming as the words conjure long-ago emotions.

In the same pocket is a newspaper clipping of the Irish fiction bestseller list from almost twenty years ago, her first book sitting at number ten. Seeing it listed there prompts a stir of the old excitement. Its publication had been the beginning of something, when she’d thought herself too old for any more beginnings. So much still ahead, and she’d had no idea.

In a week she’ll be fifty-nine. At twenty she’d considered herself so grown-up. She shakes her head, smiling. How little the young know, and how wise they fancy themselves to be.

She returns the clipping and the letters to their pocket. She closes the notebook and places it into a waiting box. In the next nook is a cork, which she lifts out and sniffs. Keep the cork, she hears Alf saying, and she did keep it. Her first-ever champagne, popped open to mark a bittersweet day, years before any of the books. She adds it to the box.

In a small drawer she finds a page from a magazine that she meant to frame and never got around to. Her first-ever press ad, for a yogurt aimed at weaning babies. She remembers buying extra copies of the magazine, sending the page to Danny and Frances and Joan and her mother.

An hour or so later, as she’s closing the last box, her phone rings. She pulls it from her pocket and sees Juliet’s name.

‘Hello, darling.’

‘Mum – we’re just leaving now, see you soon.’

‘Wonderful. Drive carefully.’

‘I will. Any word from Grace?’

‘Not yet.’

Her last phone conversation with Grace had turned into a row. At twenty-seven, Ellen’s younger daughter could still be volatile – and when she told her mother that Tom wanted to take a year out to travel the world, Ellen made the mistake of saying that it sounded like a good idea.

‘A good idea? Really? It’s fine for Tom – he can take leave of absence. What am I supposed to do with my clinic, pack it up until we come back?’

Ellen should have backed off and left it at that, but she didn’t. ‘Maybe you could get someone to stand in.’

Another mistake. ‘Right – like vets are floating around just waiting for a job offer! Have you forgotten when I tried to find someone to go into partnership with when I was starting up? You haven’t a clue!’

And on she went, taking her frustration out on her mother, like so often before. Since then there’s been no response to any of Ellen’s voice messages – were they even listened to? Will Grace show up this evening?

After saying goodbye to Juliet, Ellen brings the boxes downstairs and stacks them with the others in the hall, and then she push-pulls the empty bureau out to the landing. A lot of the furniture has already been moved; the rest will be transported tomorrow. Now the house feels hollow when she walks through its rooms.

She enters the bedroom that used to be her aunt’s and looks down at the back garden. She remembers her first sight of it in 1981, and Frances on her knees, digging weeds out of the rockery. How strange it will be to see a different garden when she pulls apart other curtains every morning.

She’s just out of the shower when her phone rings again. She looks at the name and smiles.

‘Hey.’

‘Hey yourself. How are things?’

‘Great. I emptied the bureau.’

‘Finally. Don’t dream of trying to move it.’

‘I just pulled it out to the landing.’

She hears his long sigh. ‘I can’t turn my back for an instant.’

‘I’m fifty-eight, not ninety-eight. I’ll have you know I’m still young enough to move furniture.’ But she’s laughing. Every day he makes her laugh.

‘Just don’t come crying to me when you slip a disc. You all set for this evening?’

‘Why? Is something happening?’

‘Very funny. You’re hilarious. When can we expect you?’

‘About half an hour.’

‘Love you,’ he says.

‘Love you more. See you soon.’

Her heart is too full for all the happiness. It spills over; it fills all the spaces in the hollow house. Tomorrow they are moving into the cottage closer to the sea that they came across six months ago and instantly, jointly, loved. They are going to live there for the rest of their lives, and they are going to be monumentally happy. Abundantly happy. Stupidly happy.

She dries her hair and pins it up with the big tortoiseshell slide Juliet had taken off and given her, one time Ellen admired it. She dusts powder on her face and adds lipstick, and gets into the black dress Juliet had insisted she splash out on. As she slides her feet into red shoes she hears Claire saying At least one pair of red shoes should feature in every woman’s wardrobe. Claire, who knew it all, or thought she did.

In the kitchen Ellen checks that she switched off the cooker before phoning a taxi. As she hangs up, her eye is caught by the cardboard box on the worktop. She looks at the books inside; twelve copies, all the same. She lifts one out and runs a hand over the cover. Her happiest book yet, every word flooded with love.

Ten minutes later, a car horn sounds outside. She pulls on her coat and leaves the house.

‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE ACTUALLY GOING,’ CLAIRE said.

‘Oh, I’m definitely going.’

All morning she’d felt fluttery with excitement, for once not able to eat breakfast. At the age of twenty, Ellen Sheehan was finally leaving home, making a start on a life that she knew would be filled with amazing adventures.

Her one tiny regret – well, maybe not that tiny – was that Claire wasn’t coming too. That had been the plan, for both of them to escape together, but that was before Claire’s only brother had skipped off to London to work on the building sites for the summer, leaving Claire trapped behind the counter of her family’s pub.

‘The minute Martin comes back you’ll follow me, right?’

‘I’ve told you I will. Can’t wait.’

Claire had turned twenty in February, five months before Ellen. They were grown-ups now, ready for the world and all it could throw at them. They rounded a bend and there was the bus station, causing Ellen’s stomach to flip again. Another few minutes and she’d be on her way – and this time tomorrow she’d have begun her new job, surrounded by books all day, meeting people who loved them as much as she did. Could things get any better?

At the station they found the Galway bus and stood at the open door. ‘Behave yourself,’ Claire said. ‘And obviously I’m joking.’

Claire never behaved herself if she could help it. She believed in having fun, particularly if it meant breaking rules. Ellen knew she’d never be half as brave – and so did Claire. She called Ellen her rock of sense, but Ellen didn’t want to be anyone’s rock of sense. She wanted to have fun too, without worrying about it.

Ellen’s mother didn’t think Claire was brave. That girl is a bad influence, she’d said more than once. I’m glad you’re getting away from her. She didn’t know that Claire was following on: Ellen had thought it best to say nothing about that.

‘Here,’ Claire said, fishing a long blue box from her pocket. ‘A little going-away present’ – and inside, Ellen found a silver pen.

‘Wow, I love it. Thanks a million.’

It crossed her mind that it might be stolen. Claire was an experienced shoplifter. The trick, she’d told Ellen, is to buy something small, and look them in the eye when you’re paying for it, and smile like mad and talk about the weather.

There had been a time, a horrible time, when Ellen had stolen from shops too, but it hadn’t lasted.

The bus was filling up. ‘Find a proper boyfriend,’ Claire said. ‘You’ll have plenty to choose from in Galway. Stop being so fussy.’

Claire wasn’t fussy. She’d lost her virginity at seventeen, in the back seat of her then boyfriend’s car, and she’d had plenty more sexual partners since then. It’s just physical, she’d say. It’s fun, and no big deal – and that was the problem, because Ellen wanted the big deal.

She wanted the drama, the deep passion of all the lovers she read about, the Cathys and the Heathcliffs, the Elizabeth Bennets and the Mr Darcys. She wanted someone who would die for her, someone who would kill for her. She wanted nothing less than a soulmate, and she was happy to wait for him.

And she would meet him in Galway. She was convinced of it.

For one thing, she was bound to encounter lots of readers in the bookshop: right from the start, they’d have that in common. Plus, if she could lose ten pounds by Christmas, and stop biting her nails, and let her hair grow, she’d feel so much better about her appearance, and that confidence would definitely attract more attention.

Yes, she was hopeful. Very hopeful.

‘Are you getting on?’ the bus driver called.

‘Just a sec.’ Claire flung the rucksack into the luggage compartment and threw her arms around Ellen. ‘Phone me,’ she ordered. ‘I want all the news. If your aunt doesn’t allow you to use her phone, wait till she goes out.’

At the mention of her aunt, Ellen’s excitement dimmed. Moving in with her mother’s older sister, a relative she hardly knew, wasn’t the start she’d have chosen for her new life, but it would only be for a short while, until she and Claire found a flat together.

‘See you soon,’ she said. ‘Tell Martin he has to come home.’

‘I will. Have a ball. Go wild. Now get on before they leave without you.’

Ellen hitched her small bag higher on her shoulder and boarded. From her window seat she waved at Claire until the bus pulled out of the station. Watching familiar streets as they flashed past, she wondered if she would ever live in the town again – and this thought stirred a memory of another uprooting when she was eight, the family leaving their old town when her father had been offered a better job here. It must have been momentous at the time for her and Joan, but they’d been young enough to adjust and make new friends.

And then, eight years after that—

No. She would not think about it, not today. She switched her thoughts to the man who was going to be her new boss, and whom she had yet to meet.

Ben McCarthy, he’d said at the start of their phone call two weeks earlier. Manager of Piles of Books. Coming back to you about the job you applied for.

Oh . . . yes. She hadn’t expected to hear so quickly – hadn’t she only posted her letter two days ago?

What’s your favourite book?

The question had caught her off-guard, but was an easy one to answer. Lolita.

Ah, the great Nabokov. Could you live without reading?

Another unexpected question – but again, one she hadn’t had to think about. I couldn’t go a day without reading.

The right answer, he’d said, sounding pleased. Which dead author do you wish you’d met?

She’d almost laughed. This was crazy. Dickens.

And what are you reading now?

Housekeeping.

Marilynne Robinson?

Yes.

Like it?

Yes, I’m really enjoying it.

A brief pause had followed, and then: You’ll do.

Pardon?

Six pounds an hour, half nine to half five, Monday to Saturday, with one flexible day off in the week. How does that sound?

She’d hardly believed it. Was he actually offering her a job based on a conversation lasting less than a minute, and involving no more than a few bookish questions? He hadn’t asked anything about the typing pool, wasn’t even looking for a reference.

Is that a yes? Are you thinking about it?

Yes, she’d said hastily. Yes, please. Thank you. She’d already forgotten the terms and conditions he’d rattled off, but she hadn’t cared.

Great. How soon can you start?

She’d thought fast. I need to give two weeks’ notice where I am.

Two weeks. That brings us up to . . . Friday, September fourth. So let’s say you start here on Monday seventh.

OK.

Good, all settled.

Um . . . is there anything else I need to know?

Yes. Wear comfortable shoes – you’ll be on your feet a lot. Be here at half nine sharp, or I’ll have to fire you.

She’d waited for a laugh, but none had come. Thank you, she’d replied, but he’d already hung up.

Half nine sharp, in comfortable shoes. No mention of a dress code, or what her duties would be. No information about the shop or who else worked there. It had certainly been an odd interview, but it had ended with an offer of work, and it had enabled her to hand in her notice at a job she’d hated, and now she was on her way.

She wondered what he’d be like face to face. Hopefully he’d be a bit less . . . unpredictable. Some people just didn’t suit the phone.

On the other hand, what was wrong with unpredictable? Might make life more interesting, working with someone who didn’t do the expected thing. From now on she must be open to every possibility, willing to embrace the unknown, the unexpected. Willing to be brave.

She rummaged in her bag until she found her book, and the apple she’d snatched from the fruit bowl on her way out of the kitchen. She began to read, and the world outside the bus window fell away.

THERE WAS NOBODY TO MEET HER IN GALWAY. HER mother had said Frances would collect her, but her aunt was nowhere to be seen. Ellen hadn’t set eyes on her since Granddad’s funeral six or seven years ago, and only intermittently before that. She thought she’d recognise her, just about, but there was no sign of anyone who looked remotely like her.

After hanging around for fifteen minutes she found the address she’d tucked into her jeans pocket, just in case, and showed it to a ticket clerk, a tired-looking woman with colourless hair and holes in her ears but no earrings. She glanced at the address and shook her head.

‘Ask Paddy,’ she said, indicating a stocky uniformed man by the door. He took glasses from his pocket and peered at the paper. ‘That’s right across the city,’ he told Ellen. ‘Too far to walk with luggage. You can pick up a bus at Eyre Square: show the address to the driver.’

Forty minutes later she stood outside her aunt’s house. Number 9 was a semi-detached in a row of identical others, or nearly identical. Different colours on the doors, windows curtained or left bare, but basically the same house repeated, two-storey with red brick below, pebbledash above. Twenty or so houses in total, the end ones curving in towards each other to form a cul-de-sac.

A few skinny boys kicked a ball about on the road, ignoring Ellen. Two women stood talking over a low straggling hedge a few doors up from number 9, one with arms folded, the other dragging on a cigarette. They’d broken off their conversation to stare at Ellen as she’d trudged past, and now she could sense them behind her, still watching.

She studied the house. They’d come back here after her grandfather’s funeral, but she didn’t remember it. Its front door and window frames were dark green. Two metal gates, a narrow cement path leading from the smaller one to the front door, a rectangle of neatly mown lawn to one side of it, gravel to the other. A blue Volkswagen Beetle was parked on the gravel, its body scratched and dented in several places, some of the dents rusting.

She pushed open the gate and walked up the path to the front door. There was no doorbell or knocker so she rattled the brass letter-box. Up close, the green paint was flaking.

No response. She tried again, and still nobody came. She took the address from her pocket – yes, number 9, and the road’s name displayed on the first garden wall she’d passed. It was the right house, but nobody appeared to be home.

Or had her aunt changed her mind, decided not to put Ellen up after all? Was she inside right now, waiting quietly until her niece went away? But where could she go? She knew nobody else in the city, not a soul. She stifled a flutter of alarm. She set her rucksack on the doorstep and crossed to the side passage. She saw a metal dustbin, a big black bicycle attached by a chain to a drainpipe, and a huddle of coal bags.

She stood uncertainly, biting a nail until she remembered she was trying to stop, and whipped it from her mouth. She didn’t want to go around to the back in case her aunt was hiding from her there, but what choice did she have? She took a deep breath and walked down the passage and rounded the corner.

And stopped dead.

The garden was magnificent. Filled with colour, even this late in the year, a riotous mix of flowerbeds and rockeries and shrubs, with a crazy-paving path taking a winding course through it. A shed on one side, its door ajar, was completely covered in some vigorous climbing plant.

A strip of concrete ran along behind the house, three-foot wide or so. It held a wooden seat, silvered with age, on which a pair of fur-trimmed slippers sat. Birds darted at a feeder suspended from an overhanging branch of a neighbouring tree.

It was a haven, rich in fluttering and buzzing, and heady with scent. In such a busy space it took her a minute to spot the figure in a wide-brimmed sunhat kneeling by one of the rockeries, her back to Ellen. The ridged soles of wellingtons showed beneath a substantial backside. Brown corduroy trousers, a checked shirt tucked in. Ellen heard the small clank of metal against rock.

‘Aunt Frances?’

The head swung around to reveal a face, weatherbeaten and beakish. ‘Yes?’ The word barked out, and accompanied by an expression of deep suspicion.

‘I’m . . . Ellen. I’m . . . coming to stay with you.’

The suspicion was replaced by outrage. ‘Today? You were to come tomorrow! Your mother clearly said Monday!’

‘Oh . . . I’m sorry. There must have been a mix-up. My job is starting tomorrow.’

The frown didn’t budge. ‘How did you get from the station?’

‘I . . . took a bus.’

Her aunt tutted, looking even more put out. ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’

Ellen felt under attack. Everything sounded like an accusation, when she had done nothing wrong. ‘Sorry – I didn’t have your number, just your address.’

More tutting. ‘Your mother has my number – why didn’t she give it to you?’

‘. . . I don’t know.’ Because you were supposed to pick me up, she shouted in her head.

‘Where’s your luggage? You must have luggage!’

‘I left it by the front door.’

‘Well, go and get it, for goodness’ sake!’

Ellen scuttled away. At least it looked like she had a roof over her head – but how on earth was she to get on with this snapping creature? Would she have to spend all her time out of the house, just to avoid her? Thank God it wasn’t going to be for long.

When she returned, her aunt was heaving herself laboriously to her feet. ‘Can I help?’ Ellen asked, stepping forward – but she was flapped away impatiently: ‘I can manage!’

Once upright, her aunt walked in a swaying, waddling way to the garden seat and lowered herself onto it, pulling off the hat to reveal yellow hair that sprang from her head in peculiar little tufts – had it always been that colour? ‘I have arthritis in the hips,’ she pronounced, somehow making that sound like Ellen’s fault too. ‘I refuse to let it stop me doing what I want.’

She was short, with pouched watery blue eyes, and a pointed nose that looked like it had strayed there from a larger face, and a small pale mouth. Apart from a broad midsection, her figure was neat.

She didn’t resemble Ellen’s mother in the least. Not one common feature could Ellen see, except for a shared eye colour, although her aunt’s were a paler blue. They even dressed differently; Ellen had never once seen her mother in trousers.

There was twelve years between them, which would make Frances sixty-eight now. There were two brothers younger than the girls who’d emigrated to Australia years earlier and never returned home.

Her aunt shucked off her wellingtons and wriggled a foot into one of the waiting slippers. A smudge of earth sat on her left cheek. ‘When did you eat?’ she asked.

Ellen thought of the apple on the bus. ‘Er, I had lunch.’

‘What time?’

‘. . . Around two o’clock.’

‘Dinner is at half six. You’ll have to wait till then.’

‘I can go out and eat if you like. Seeing as how you weren’t expecting me, I mean.’ She was starving, and half six was ages away. She could get fish and chips somewhere.

Her aunt pushed on the second slipper. ‘No need for that. I roast a full chicken on Sundays so I have leftovers for other dishes. There’ll be plenty for you.’ She threw Ellen another sharp look. ‘I hope you’re not a fussy eater. I can’t abide fussy eaters.’

‘No.’ Not that she’d dare admit it if she was.

‘You can empty those weeds into the bin at the end of the garden,’ her aunt said, pointing to a blue basin by the rockery, ‘and then put the things back into the shed, and follow me in.’ Without waiting for a response she levered herself off the seat and disappeared into the house, wellingtons standing where she’d left them.

The kitchen was small and painted apple green. A chipped white sink under the window, a cooker in a corner, a tall slim cupboard, a square table against a wall with a single chair tucked under it. A yellow Formica counter ran along the opposite wall, a fridge and a twin-tub washing machine beneath, along with open shelving on which crockery and pots and pans were stacked.

The table was draped in dark blue oilcloth. A newspaper was folded open at a crossword. A calendar with a picture of a mountain hung crookedly from a nail, still showing August.

Her aunt was chopping an onion at an alarming rate. A frying pan waited on the cooker, a wedge of yellow fat pooling on it. ‘You might as well go up and unpack,’ she told Ellen. ‘Your room is next to the bathroom.’

Ellen hauled the rucksack up a narrow staircase with a brown strip of carpet running along its centre. She stood on the landing and located the bathroom, and opened the door beside it.

The walls were papered in grey, with twining green vines and purple grapes. One strip of paper had peeled away from the top and dangled above the window. There was a single bed with no headboard, a small heap of blankets and a flat pillow sitting on the bare mattress. A large wardrobe, ludicrously big for the room, was crammed between the foot of the bed and the window. A kitchen chair, the partner of the one downstairs, was the only other furniture. The floor was wooden, with a thin blue mat by the bed.

There was nothing else. No locker, no reading lamp, no mirror, no dressing table or chest of drawers. The ceiling bulb had no shade; the window was uncurtained. Ellen lifted the bedclothes and found a tan stain in the centre of the mattress. She opened the wardrobe – the door stuck until she tugged sharply – and a musty smell rushed out. Three wire hangers hung from a rail, a single black sock dangling from one of them.

She sat on the edge of the bed and thought of the bedroom she’d been so delighted to leave, with its bookshelves and matching wardrobe and dressing table, and its armchair and frilled bed linen. This one was definitely a step down, but it would have to do until Claire came.

The bathroom next door wasn’t much better. A large cast-iron bath had a damp towel slung over the side and a short rubber hose attached to its taps. Two pairs of enormous grey knickers hung from a makeshift clothesline above the bath. A bar of cracked soap sat in a small puddle by the sink taps. A faint but definite smell of urine hung in the room. Ellen did what she had to do and hurried out, shaking her hands dry.

Back in the little bedroom she propped her toilet bag on the windowsill and stacked her books beside it. She dropped her rucksack on the floor by the wardrobe – did she dare to ask for more hangers?

She turned her attention to the bed. She threw off the bedding and heaved at the mattress until she managed to turn it over. No stain on this side, at least. She went out to the landing and located the hot press and rummaged among a jumble of linens until she found single sheets and a pillowcase. The blankets were threadbare: just as well she’d be moved out long before winter.

But in the meantime she had to eat – and a savoury smell was drifting up the stairs now and making her mouth water. She made the bed and lay on it and read until her watch said twenty-five past six, and then she ran a comb through her hair and went downstairs.

‘I was just going to call you,’ her aunt said, carving chicken. ‘Fill that jug with water and take out the butter.’

The table had been set with mismatched crockery, and another chair had joined the first. Ellen did as she was told while her aunt lifted plates from the rack above the cooker with a tea towel. ‘I assume you can cook,’ she said.

Ellen’s heart sank. Another reason for a scolding. ‘I’ve never really had the chance. I mean, Mam does the cooking.’ She could hear how pathetic it sounded. Twenty years old, and her mother still making her dinner.

Her aunt regarded her grimly. ‘Every girl should know how to cook. I’ll teach you while you’re here,’ and Ellen’s gloom deepened, imagining orders being rapped out while she scurried about, scalding herself and burning everything else from sheer nervousness.

But her aunt knew how to cook, no denying it. The chicken was wonderfully tender and succulent, its stuffing flavoured with something tantalising Ellen couldn’t identify. Cauliflower was cloaked in a rich cheese sauce; potatoes were golden and crunchy outside, fluffy within. At least she’d eat well while she was here – although losing weight might be difficult until she and Claire had their own place.

‘It’s delicious,’ she said.

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ her aunt responded, but without the sharpness that had accompanied every other remark. Ellen gave up and ate hungrily, wondering if she dared ask for a lamp for her room.

‘More chicken?’ her aunt asked eventually. ‘Another potato? More carrots?’ and to every enquiry Ellen said yes please.

She waited until they’d both finished eating before venturing her request. ‘Aunt Frances, I wonder if – would there be a lamp anywhere I could take for my room?’

Her aunt stared at her. ‘A lamp? There’s one on the locker. Didn’t you see it?’

What locker? Could her aunt’s mind have started wandering? She’d already got Ellen’s arrival day wrong, and now she seemed to be imagining bedroom furniture where none existed. ‘I didn’t see a locker, just the bed, and a big wardrobe, and a chair.’

‘Oh, for goodness sake – that’s the wrong room!’

It was Ellen’s turn to stare. ‘You said beside the bathroom.’

‘The other side! I meant the other side!’

Ellen felt a sudden flare of anger. ‘Well, I wasn’t to know that,’ she said, as forcefully as she dared. ‘I’m not a mind-reader.’

Dead silence followed. She’d overstepped. She decided she had nothing more to lose. ‘Aunt Frances, I’m sorry. I’m grateful for your offer to keep me, but since I arrived I’ve been feeling that maybe you don’t really want me here, so I can tell you that it won’t be for long. A friend is moving to Galway soon, in the next few weeks, and we’re going to find a flat together. If it’s OK, I’ll stay here until then, but I’ll try to keep out of your way as much as I can.’

More silence followed. They regarded each other across the small table, and then her aunt gav. . .