Free The House On Willow Street by Cathy Kelly Page B

world is at it. Was a law brought in making marriage compulsory and nobody told me about it?”
    “Don’t be daft. You don’t want to get married, not really.”
    “I do.”
    “You don’t. Jack’s a prat. Geddit? Jack’s a prat. He’d make you miserable. What if the two of you had got married and he’d met Tawhnee afterward? What then, tell me?”
    “He’d still have run off with her,” Mara said, feeling like the voice of doom in her own Greek chorus. “Does loving a shallow man make me shallow too?”
    “No, simply a typical woman,” advised Cici, wise after several bottles of Miller. “You’ll feel better tomorrow and we’ll think of a plan to have fun, right?”
    “Right.”
    The taxi driver told her she was a sensible girl to be going home early.
    “The town’s full of mad young women running around in this cold with no coats on. Young girls today, I don’t understand them. Nice to see a sensible one like yourself.”
    In the backseat, Mara made assenting noises out of politeness. She wasn’t in the least bit sensible, she merely looked it and always had. Even at school, silliness was assumed to be an attribute of the tall, mascara’d minxes who wore their uniform skirts rolled up and had liaisons behind the bike shed. Everyone thought that small, quiet girls who did their homework had to be sensible, nice girls, even if they had wild red hair and a penchant for spending their pocket money on mad clothes.
    In the B&B, the landlady was astonished to see a wedding guest home before eleven.
    “I’m working very hard and I’m exhausted,” Mara said,because she didn’t want another person to tell her she was a rock of sense in a crazy world.
    Then she went to her room, locked the door and allowed the tears to fall. Sensible and dumped—what more could a woman ask for?

4

    O ctober ripped through Avalon with unprecedented storms that made the sea lash the rocks at the edge of the Valley of the Diamonds, the prettiest cove on Avalon Bay. From Danae’s house, she could see the frothing of rough waves crashing into the shore. The last of the visitors had left Avalon and it was back to its off-season population of six thousand souls.
    On Willow Street, another of the ancient willows had sheared from its roots overnight, like a piece of sculpture broken by a hurricane. Danae wished someone from the council would move it, put it out of its pain. She didn’t know why, but she felt these beautiful trees could feel pain like humans could. The magnolias in her garden appeared to have curled in on themselves, no bud ready to unfurl, and there was no scent of honey in the air at night from the honeysuckle, only the icy chill of winter approaching.
    Danae’s walks with Lady were shorter affairs, as neither of them could cope with being out for long in such wild winds. She wrapped a scarf around her mouth when she walked because it felt as if the wind was trying to steal her breath.
    “You don’t like it much either, do you, darling?” she said to Lady late one afternoon as they faced into the wind climbing the hill toward Avalon House. Above them, the FOR SALE sign swayed perilously in the wind, dirty and battered from hanging there so long.
    Lady’s favorite walk was over the stile into the woods that belonged to Avalon House, where she could cavort over fallen logs searching for rabbits and squirrels. A few months ago, the woods had been wild with the remains of sea aster and bell heathers, with the delicate purple heads of self-heal clustering here and there amid the leaves. But now, the flowers were gone and a wildness had taken over the place.
    Lady loped on, knowing the way to go, past a couple of sycamores twisted toward the ground from decades of high winds. To the right were the ruins of the old abbey, nothing now but half a gable wall of ancient brick. Small stones sticking up around its grassy meadows were crude gravestones dating back to the time when people left a simple marker at a burial