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Nola wondered if it wasn’t a strain of lunacy. The dream of opening a drama school when she had less than two months before the instructions in her father’s will had been adhered to. And what did she know about running her own business? And yet, here she was again, sitting in the middle of the dusty stage in the community hall, a slight chill in the air and musty aroma enveloping her in the darkness.
She had ducked in with a fold of raffle tickets one of her colleagues had left in the staff room that were meant to be dropped off for tonight’s bingo session. But it was only an excuse.
‘JulietorLady Macbeth?’ Aiden’s voice came from the back of the hall.
‘I’m too old to play Juliet,’ she said, and the truth was, she was too lightweight to ever be considered for Lady Macbeth.
‘Shame, you would have made a fabulous tragic heroine.’ He was pulling out stacks of chairs. ‘Well, are you going to supervise or lend a hand?’ He laughed at her.
‘But I…’ There was no point telling him that she’d only popped in for a moment – she’d been there almost an hour already when she checked her watch. ‘Sure.’
‘We’re trying to get a rota going, you know, to keep this place in shape. Old Jack Coveney died last year and since then…’
‘God, I remember him from when I was a kid coming here for Irish dancing classes. He must have been ancient by the time he passed away.’
‘He probably was, but he turned up here every single day to ready the hall for whatever was going on.’ Aiden rolled out stacks of chairs in a neat line and Nola started to lay them out. ‘He was doing it for thirty years. After his wife died, he said it kept him out of the pub.’
‘So now, everyone just pitches in?’ Nola changed the subject quickly.
‘Something like that. A few of us came together, decided to take it on – everyone has their own day and we swap about if it doesn’t suit.’ He stood for a moment, counting up the stacks of chairs. ‘What about you?’
‘Me? Oh, I won’t be here long enough to get my name on a rota.’
‘Of course, but I just thought, when I saw you there, you seemed to be…’ He stopped. He’d clearly learned the hard way what happened if he said the wrong thing around her. ‘You were lost in… something?’
‘Daydreaming?’
‘Was it? It looked almost tragic.’
‘Ophelia or Desdemona tragic?’
‘I’m not sure.’ He started to unstack chairs from the back and for a while they wordlessly went about the work of setting the place out, the clanking of metal on the maple wood boards filling up the echoing hall with crashing bellows. He worked fast, taking stacks of chairs and emptying them across each line as if they were little more than teacups being set out for a quick snack. Nola moved as quickly as she could but there was no making up ground once Aiden started.
‘Is that it?’ she asked when they finally met each other after she’d laid out less than a quarter of the hall.
‘I don’t know, is it?’ he asked, a little too close to her for comfort. She stepped back deliberately. ‘Even though you’re only here for a short time, it’s okay to make connections.’
‘I’m going back to London soon, Aiden. I have a job at the school and commitments at home and I’m helping out with the Ballycove fete.’ The fact was, she had more connections here than she’d left behind in London.
‘You see, I think there’s more to you being here today than just coincidence.’
‘Well, it wasn’t to see you, if that’s what you’re hinting at.’ The very nerve of him.
‘No, of course not.’ He too took a step back and then walked away from her, towards the end of the hall. ‘You miss this, don’t you?’ He nodded towards the stage behind him.
‘I…’ She sighed. There was no harm telling him what had been rattling about her brain for the last few days. ‘Okay, so I had this crazy idea that maybe I could open my own drama club and…’ She waved her hand to let him know that her thoughts had rambled off into something silly.
‘So?’
‘Well, of course I can’t open a drama school.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because…’ She stopped and took a long theatrical breath before exhaling softly, feeling that overwhelming sense of failure she had felt for the last few years – that everything she touched was bound to turn to failure. ‘Because I don’t know the first thing about running a drama school for one thing and…’
‘What’s that got to do with anything? I didn’t know a thing about farming, other than the little day-to-day jobs I did to help out around the place when I was a kid at school, but I knew when I came back here that this was where I was meant to be. I made my own blueprint and it’s worked out okay.’ His gaze was unnerving, as if there would be no fudging or excuses that he would believe.
