Free The Death of Love by Bartholomew Gill Page A

baby?
    She snapped her head to the other side and saw another large, but empty, unmade bed, a tasteful early-nineteenth-century chiffonier reproduction, and a stuffed oval-back love seat on a royal-blue carpet. Raising a hand to her eyes, she again tried to look out the two windows, which seemed to fill the wall of the room that had eighteen-foot ceilings.
    There she saw sparkling green islands in a running jade sea. Closer was the corner of a terrace with white cast-iron furniture and a white iron rail. To one side was a boxwood maze patterning & lawn that swept down to a beach where the water was just the turquoise color of her eyes.
    Parknasilla.
    Noreen fell back into the pillows. Her hand reached out and lifted the receiver from the telephone. When a voice came on, she ordered scones and butter. “And scalded coffee with scalded milk. I don’t know if you still do that, butthere was a time—” A small voice on the other end assured her that she could have her wish. “And I wonder, have you seen my husband. I’m Noreen—”
    “Oh, yes. I can see him presently. He’s with the other babies in the sun room, reading the papers.”
    Noreen stifled a laugh and thanked the woman.
    “You’re welcome, Miss Frenche.”
    The woman began phrasing her correction, but Noreen said there was no need. After all those years—how many? Five, seven? No, longer. It had been nine full years since she had last been here, and somebody on the staff had remembered that she—or perhaps rather all of the Frenches—ordered scalded coffee with scalded milk. She would have to tell her mother and father. It was the sort of thing they appreciated, and provided the illusion that, in spite of being a tiny minority in an often exasperating country, they still belonged to the right things, some of which endured.
    And yet, ringing off, she felt glum. Here she was in one of Ireland’s premier resorts, which her parents had visited for whole weeks at a time but she herself could afford only on a government freebie. Barring some windfall, Maddie would never get to know the little bridges and lovely shadowed walks through the groves of island willows, the small, hilly, difficult golf course, the great green bay that she could now see in front of the hotel.
    Times had changed, and whereas she and McGarr enjoyed a combined income that on paper would have classed them as wealthy, no, rich —twenty or thirty years ago, they in reality had been caught in a kind of financial vise. Taxes on everything—income, property, gasoline, the V.A.T.—just seemed to go up and up, while inflation made what little money they had to spend worth less and less. At the same time property values had plummeted in the nine years since they had bought their house, which meant that they had lost money on their only real investment.
    Well, maybe somebody or something would bail the country out, she thought, but in the meantime she would enjoy the place while she was here. Noreen was about to palm a pillow over her eyes, when she heard some rustling and looked out through the sitting room to see a large buffenvelope being eased under the door. On it was an official seal and stamp, and her languor was immediately dispelled. Paddy Power had died, her husband had been called in, and the envelope might tell her why.
    A thin, quick woman, she hopped from the bed, and was soon back under the covers with the seal broken, the envelope open, and what proved to be Power’s autopsy in her hands. Tears came to her eyes, which she had to blot with the sheet, before she read, “Padraic Benedict Power, Age 58, Final Diagnosis.” A summation on the title page said Power had died of ventricular fibrillation brought on by acute digitalis poisoning. It then listed the effects of the fibrillation on his heart and body, along with signs of aging that were also discovered during the postmortem: a hernia, some arteriosclerosis of the coronary arteries, scarring in his kidneys, liver, and