Homecoming
The Sunday Times No. 1 paperback bestseller.. . . because it’s where the heart is.Four women. Four lives. One place they call home.Eleanor Levine left Ireland years ago with just a suitcase and her mother’s recipe book. And now, a lifetime later, she returns from New York for Dublin’s beautiful Golden Square full of hard-won wisdom. As she watches life unfold from her window, she is drawn into the lives of the women who live in the square…Beautiful actress Megan Bouchier had fame and success in her grasp – then she made the wrong kind of headlines. Now she needs a place to hide.Big-hearted teacher Connie O’Callaghan is approaching forty and has given up on love. Why does no man match the heroes in her romantic novels?Rae is a loyal friend and wife, dispensing tea and sympathy from Titania’s Tea Room – until a secret threatens everything she holds dear. . .Rae is a loyal friend and wife, dispensing tea and sympathy from Titania’s Tea Room – until a secret threatens everything she holds dear…
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Homecoming
Cathy Kelly
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010
FIRST EDITION
Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2010
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 © JULY 2010 ISBN: 9780007411016
Version: 2017-11-21
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To my husband, John, and to darling Murray and Dylan, with love
It didn’t take long for Eleanor Levine to unpack her things in the apartment in Golden Square. She’d brought just two suitcases on the flight from New York to Dublin. For a simple holiday, two suitcases would probably be too much luggage. But for the sort of trip Eleanor planned, she was travelling light.
When she’d arrived in the hotel in the centre of the city just two weeks before Christmas, the receptionist had just nodded politely when Eleanor said she might need the room for more than the three weeks she’d booked beforehand. Nothing shocked hotel receptionists, even elegant elderly ladies with limited luggage who arrived alone and appeared to have no due date to leave.
Equally, nobody looked askance at Eleanor when she gently turned down the invitation to book for the full Christmas lunch in the hotel’s restaurant and instead asked for an omelette and a glass of prosecco in her room. After a lifetime spent in New York, a city where doing your own thing and not apologising for it was almost mandatory, it was comforting to find the same behaviour had travelled across the Atlantic to the country of her birth. It wasn’t what she’d expected, truth to tell. But then, it was so long since she’d been home, she didn’t really know what to expect.
On the plane journey, still reeling from having left her warm, cosy apartment and her family behind her, Eleanor had thought about the Ireland she was about to see. She’d left over seventy years before in the steerage of a giant steamship, a serious eleven-year-old travelling to the New World with her mother and her aunt. Their belongings had fitted in a couple of cardboard suitcases, and her mother, Brigid, held the family’s meagre fortune in a purse round her neck.
Now here she was, returning with several platinum credit cards, a line of letters after her name and a lifetime of experience behind her.
Apart from Eleanor herself, only one thing had made both trips: her mother’s recipe book.
Now that she’d put her toiletries in the master bedroom’s en suite bathroom, and had unpacked her clothes and books, she took a white shoebox out of the second suitcase.
Her wedding shoes, white satin pumps from Christian Dior, had lived in the box for many years until she’d given them to her daughter, Naomi, for her prom night.
Now her grand-daughter Gillian borrowed them from time to time, wearing them with the full-skirted vintage dresses that had been all the rage during Mr Dior’s New Look in 1947. Like many modern teenagers, Gillian loved wearing vintage and often visited her grandmother proudly bearing something she’d paid fifty dollars for, and which was a replica of something Eleanor had thrown out twenty years previously. Fashion comes full circle, Eleanor thought, smiling.
Thousands of miles away from Gillian, Naomi and life in New York, Eleanor tenderly opened her box of treasures. None of them were treasures in any monetary sense. But as tokens from a life lived with great happiness, they were treasures indeed. There was a dyed black ostrich-feather mask from a Hallowe’en party, the silk ribbon still tied in a knot from the last time she’d worn it, half a century before. A single pressed rose was visible through the thin layer of tissue in which it lay. Ralf had given her the rose as a corsage one night at a ritzy white-tie affair at St Regis Hotel. Under the tissue, the dried-out petals were feather-light.
