Read Online OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found by Gretta Mulrooney - Free Book Online

impregnated with the same sharp scents and she imagines that Nanna must have rubbed them into her limbs before sleeping.
    Carefully, she wipes off the books in the back bedroom and examines the yellowing pages. On each flyleaf are the initials O.F. The copy of Bleak House has a flattened Sweet Afton cigarette pack as a bookmark. Her grandmother had never liked cigarettes, or the devil’s weed, as she’d called them. That was why Liv’s mother had always smoked standing at the open door, or out in the glen.
    It’s a long time since she’s done so much hard physical work; she and Douglas have a cleaner who visits once a week and sees to all the chores, including the ironing. She is grimy, aching, and happy. She lights a fire, cranks the big cast-iron pot from the back to the middle of the hearth and fills it with water, placing the tin bath ready in the centre of the kitchen. While she waits for the water to heat, she pours a glass of wine from the bottle she’s kept chilling in the well. It’s delicious, all the more so, she thinks, for being well earned. She relishes the taste, the relief of being able to open a bottle without having to worry that it will be an overwhelming lure, without having to hide it at the back of a cupboard or behind a bookcase.
    Her father cleared most of Nanna’s personal papers after her funeral. In the dresser drawer Liv has found a small photo album. She sits by the fire with her wine and turns the pages, looking at black and white images of people she doesn’t know. There are various groups, the women in dark clothes, the men in suits. A nun is at the front of some of the groups, waving at the camera cheekily.
    There is one photo of Liv and her grandmother holding hands, taken by the well; Liv aged about five in a ruched summer dress, Nanna garbed in her usual black, a tall woman with a full bosom, straight shoulders and capable hands. Around her grandmother’s head is one of the scarves she always wore, wrapped bandanastyle, framing her high forehead. Every Christmas, Liv’s father would buy one in Debenhams on the high street and post it in a padded envelope. It was always the same style, silk and in her preferred colours of blue or cream with a rose print. The bandana lent her an exotic air of a hippy or woman from the east who had wandered into the glen. Liv couldn’t recall ever seeing her without it, even at bedtime. She is sure that her grandmother slept in it. She holds the photo closer, scrutinising it. Both she and her grandmother look solemn, squinting in the sunlight. She has only distant, fleeting memories of the visits; hot potatoes bursting on a plate, milk cans wedged in the well, a sudden shudder of fear as a bull’s head loomed through a hedge, steam coiling from fresh cowpats, collecting eggs still warm from the hens for breakfast, her grandmother singing as she fed Susannah and chanting a rhyme as she helped Liv undress at night in front of the fire.
     
    Dan, Dan, the dirty old man, washed his face in a frying pan,
    Combed his hair with the leg of a chair
    And threw his britches up in the air!
     
    Her grandmother’s hands were rough from work, but warm, and when Liv was washed and in her nightdress, Nanna would hold her face and plant a kiss in the middle of her forehead, saying, ‘Now, Alannah, it’s time to sleep the sleep of the just.’ She touches her grandmother’s face with her finger. I hardly knew you, she thinks, I was always too busy to come and see you and yet you left me your house, this refuge.
    When the water is bubbling she transfers it by saucepan to the bath, a laborious process that takes a good ten minutes, topping it up with cold. No wonder she’d never seen her grandmother bathing. She lies in the tub with the pink radio on a chair beside her, listening to an Irish station. There is a discussion about the phenomenon of returning emigrants coming back to a country they’d left a long time ago. ‘It’s history revolving,’ a Professor