A Keeper, by Graham Norton.
Elizabeth Keane, divorced, fortyish and pretty much
dissatisfied with her current life, returns from New York to the little Irish
village of Buncarragh. Her mother has
died and Elizabeth is there to settle her mother’s estate and decide what to do
with the property; she is an only child
and everything should be fairly straightforward – except for her mother’s
brother and his family. There was talk
for years that Elizabeth’s uncle should have also inherited the house (as well
as the family business) so Elizabeth is not looking forward to being ‘welcomed’
into the bosom of the family again;
after all, family friction was one of the reasons she left home in the
first place, as well as her mother’s awful neediness.
And
the rumours. The rumours that
Elizabeth’s mother Patricia, a spinster who’d missed the boat with a husband on
it because she had to look after her ailing mum, all of a sudden disappeared
for months after her mother died, then came back with a baby and the
announcement that she had married a lovely man who lived near Cork, but sadly
he died, so it would be just Patricia and baby Elizabeth now. Well.
Who would believe all that balderdash?
No, that uppity Patricia had got herself in the family way and come back
with a baby and no husband: Elizabeth
was regarded as the village bastard and had to wear the shame of it until she
was able to escape to university. Well,
she hasn’t made the ideal life for herself in New York – far from it, but it
beats Buncarragh by a mile: as soon as
she has sold mum’s house she’ll leave, never to return.
And
there things would have remained until Elizabeth finds a collection of letters
in her mother’s wardrobe, a trove of historical information so intriguing that
Elizabeth decides to play detective and travel to its source, for it is obvious
that these letters are from the father she never knew, the father who had died. Well, his letters were so lovely that
Elizabeth’s sore heart quickens: if she
searches out his home, could there not be other members of the family still
surviving? Could she have a history
after all?
Mr
Norton tells his protagonists’ story in flashbacks: Patricia is Then and Elizabeth is Now, and
both women tread a rough road; in fact
it is hard to know who suffers more:
Patricia for all the sacrifices she made and the lies she was forced to
tell, or Elizabeth, innocent recipient of a family history she never dreamt of. Mr Norton’s prose gets a bit purple at times
but he can still weave a tale that nails us to the spot. FOUR STARS.
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