Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy

Author:Maeve Binchy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307455239
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2010-03-09T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Talking to Mercedes

Part 1 – Helen

Ah, there you are, Mercedes. I was having a little sleep there. I dreamed I was back in Rossmore, walking down the crowded main street. I often dream that. But you wouldn’t know where it is, it’s over in Ireland across the sea from here. Ireland is only fifty minutes on a plane from London. You should go there sometime. You’d like it there, you’re religious and it’s very Catholic.

Well, it was anyway.

I’ve always liked you, Mercedes, much better than the day nurses – you have more time for people, you’ll make a cup of tea. You listen. They don’t listen, it’s sit up and wake up and get up and cheer up. You never say that.

You have a nice cool hand, you smell of lavender, not of some disinfectant. You are interested.

You say your name is Mercedes and that you would like to marry a doctor. You would like to send your mother more money. But it took me weeks to find even that out about you, Mercedes, because you only want to talk about me and how I feel.

I wish you would call me Helen rather than Madam. Please don’t call me Mrs Harris. You are so friendly, so interested in my family who come to visit. My tall, handsome husband James, my gracious mother-in-law Natasha, my wonderful, beautiful daughter Grace.

You ask me all kinds of questions about them and I tell you, it’s a pleasure to tell you things. You smile so much. And you aren’t curious and don’t act like the police, always asking questions. That’s what David seems like to me. You know David, he is Grace’s boyfriend. I think you sense that about him, you often move him gently on when he is here. You know that he distresses me.

But you I could talk to for ever.

You love the story about the night I met handsome James Harris twenty-seven years ago when I borrowed my flatmate’s dress to go to a party. He said that it was the same colour as my eyes and that I must be very artistic. In fact it was the only dress between the three of us that was smart enough for me to wear.

I told you the truth about that, and about how fearful I was about meeting his mother Natasha for the first time. Their home was so big and impressive, her questions so probing. I had never eaten oysters before – it was such a shock to me. And I told you the truth about a lot of things, about how kind they always were to me in the orphanage where I grew up and how they insisted on making my wedding cake. Natasha had objected at first because she thought it would be amateurish but even she was pleasantly surprised.

I went back to see them often at the orphanage. They told me I was the only child in the home who didn’t ask about my parents. The others were

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