Secrets in the Snow - Emma Heatherington Page 0,36
she was desperately seeking someone she could trust to run the shop while she took time out, and the rest was history. Mabel always had that sixth sense to know when two people would work well together, and she was bang on the money with Camille and me.
I hadn’t looked back since.
Aidan pulls out a very cool pair of green velvet flared corduroys next, and it’s his turn now to share a memory of Mabel in her finest hour.
‘My uncle Peter was so madly in love with her,’ Aidan tells me, his face full of awe and admiration. ‘It was sickening to the outside world because let’s face it, a love like that comes only once or comes never at all for most of us mere mortals, but they had a deep, deep chemistry that could be felt in the air. They clicked, you know. They just clicked. It was pretty magical to be around.’
I imagine a younger Mabel in the corduroy flares, her bouncy blonde curls like she had in her photo albums, and Peter’s handsome stature watching her as if she were the only woman in the world. She was the only woman in the world for him.
‘Ironically, Peter used to warn me off marriage every time I spoke to him on the phone,’ Aidan says, his turn now to fall into a frown. ‘When I told him I was getting married to Rachel, he asked me so many questions, telling me of the pressures nowadays on young people and how we plunge into things without thinking. I thought it was because he didn’t believe in marriage, but it was in fact the opposite. He believed in it so much that he didn’t want me doing it for the wrong reasons. Disposable vows, he called it. Divorce on tap. He warned me not to get married if I was going to throw it down the drain a few years later. Anyway. That was Peter!’
And then he stops. And he looks away.
I can tell by Aidan’s tone of voice and how he stopped that he has already said more than he intended to. I want to prod a bit, to ask him more, but he looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
‘If only we all had even a little bit of magic in marriage like Peter and Mabel had,’ I say, trying to lighten the mood now by holding up a quite hideous luminous floral jumper that was definitely for a separate pile of clothing we’d decided would go elsewhere.
‘I do believe in that magic,’ says Aidan, a faraway glaze in his eyes now. Then he looks right at me. ‘I believe what he said now more than ever. I think we can all have what Peter and Mabel had, if we’re lucky enough to find or marry the right person.’
‘And have you found the right person?’ I ask him, wondering about his relationship with Rachel, his wife of I’m guessing, about six or seven years now. He stops and thinks and then shrugs it off.
‘I don’t think I have,’ he says sadly now. ‘But like you, I’d rather just talk about Mabel.’
13.
I try not to let my jaw drop at Aidan’s honesty about his marriage and we go on to share so many stories as we sift through Mabel’s collection of pussy-bow blouses, pleated skirts, and chunky knitted cardigans, with Aidan telling me of how he was so mesmerized by Mabel’s accent when he was a young child, and of his uncle Peter’s stories of New York that gave him a longing to try out a life in America.
He tells me how Peter and Mabel were treated like movie stars when they’d come to visit his grandparents in the little house on Teapot Row, and how the excitement that led up to their homecoming was second to none.
‘My grandfather would start rearranging furniture and polishing every surface so that the smell of the house was like something from an ad for Mr Sheen,’ he says with a spark of nostalgia, ‘and as for my gran, she put all her energy into fixing up the spare room, making it cosy and shopping for a list of food and drink only found in Ireland in the hope that it would make Peter want to bring his new American wife home for good sooner rather than later. Everyone was in awe of Mabel, but my grandmother just wanted her son to come home.’