Once in a Lifetime
Warm, captivating storytelling from the heart – treat yourself to come Cathy Kelly time with this No. 1 bestseller.Something happens that changes you forever…Ingrid Fitzgerald is flying high. A successful TV presenter, she's happily married with two wonderful children. But as they fly the nest, she's about to discover a secret that will shatter her world.Natalie Flynn is falling in love – but the secrecy surrounding her mother's past still troubles her. And Charlie Fallon loves her family and her job at Kenny's Department Store, but could now be the time to fight for her own happiness?The woman with the power to help them is free spirit Star Bluestone. Experience tells her that the important things in life must be treasured and the chance for real joy comes only once in a lifetime…
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Once in a Lifetime
Cathy Kelly
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009
Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2009
Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780007389346
Version: 2017-11-21
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For Dylan, Murray and John, with all my love
Table of Contents
Star Bluestone had talked to bees all her life. She talked to her flowers too, murmuring to the rare yellow poppies she’d nurtured from seeds gathered in the old Italianate garden thirty miles away across the Wicklow hills. She and the young Kiwi gardener there had such great chats, he walking her through the orchard and reaching up to cradle a baby apple bud the way another man might touch a woman.
He understood that people who loved the soil talked to their plants and to the bees whose careful industry made their flowers bloom. Even though he was only thirty to Star’s sixty years, he didn’t think she was an eccentric old lady. Rather, he was impressed by Star’s encyclopaedic knowledge of plant life. His earnest, handsome face became animated when they talked.
When she watched this kind boy, Star always remembered fondly that good gardeners make good lovers. Nobody capable of the tenderness required to separate delicate fronds of fern for replanting would ever be heavy-handed with another person’s body.
It had been a few years since Star had lain in a man’s arms. She’d had many lovers, but the one she would remember for the rest of her life, the one whose memory was imprinted upon her skin, hadn’t been a gardener. He’d been a poet, although that wasn’t how most people knew him. To the world, he was a conventional man, handsome, certainly, with beautiful manners and an important job waiting for him. To her, he was the man who sat with her under the stars and recited poetry as he traced his fingers along her face and talked about their future.
That had been over thirty-five years ago. Star talked to flowers and her beloved bees in their white hives back then too.
When she’d been growing up, her school friends hadn’t understood why Star did this, but they didn’t question it. After all, Star was different in most things. So was her mother. Their mothers didn’t grow herbs with such skill or know how to brew potions of feverfew and camomile to soothe menstrual cramps, nor did they stand gazing up at the Midsummer moon.
Eliza Bluestone did, and that it picked her out from all the other mothers in the small town of Ardagh was both a blessing and a curse to Star. The blessing was the knowledge her mother gave her. The curse was that knowing so much made her separate from all her friends.
Eliza mightn’t have told her daughter all the wisdom in her huge, midnight-dark eyes, but that knowledge somehow transferred itself to Star anyhow.
When she was a lithe young girl of twenty, and wanted to dance with her friends and flirt with young men, being wise was an impediment. She just knew that few people would be lucky enough to meet their soul mate in a pub ten miles from their home. Finding the right man to be her husband was going to be hard because the Bluestone family–which meant Star and her mother–were hardly conventional and it would take a strong man to love them. In the same way, she knew that her friends would not all have the joy and happiness they expected in their lives, because not everybody could. It was obvious. To imagine anything else was folly.
Though, Star, like her mother, couldn’t actually predict what would happen in the world, she had enough wisdom to understand the rules of the universe. While her friends threw themselves blindly into everything and were surprised when the man they’d met at the club hadn’t called, or shocked that other people could be bitchy, Star was never surprised by anything.
