The Ballroom Café Read Online Free Page A

to help out, she just might be able to hold off the bank. Spying Roberta lurking at her bedroom window, Ella hurried to the back stairs so that she would not have to hear her sister slap down another note. Already this morning she had made the hall table shake as she banged down two red notes in quick succession.

     
    Taking in strays now, are we? Our mother and father would be ashamed of you. R.

     
    Muriel Hearty says you are the laughing stock as far as Gorey, with your highfalutin ideas for a coffee house. R.

     
    Her head thumping with the silent fuming of her sister, Ella moved swiftly to her room and her dressing table. The crows were bickering in the high trees. Closing her eyes, she imagined it like she had done so many times, every detail just right: the buzz of conversation, the ping of china cups, the crunch of the gravel as people came and went to her café, the old house humming with life.
    Reaching into the silver jewellery box, she took out the green brooch. Shaped like a pansy flower but coloured inky black-green, her mother grumbled loudly it should have been purple, yellow or even all black. Bernie O’Callaghan wore it once with her dark coat, but it was never accorded another outing.
    ‘I like a flower to look like a flower,’ she said, clicking her teeth in annoyance that her husband should have wasted his money on something she could not like.
    Ella loved the Weiss pansy, the green stones glistening and the darker crystals shimmering, outlining perfectly the curved petals of the flower. The centre was black, except for one green crystal shaped like a teardrop.
    John O’Callaghan, when he entered into correspondence with the Weiss jewellers of New York City, also thought the idea of a pansy in varying green hues was both beautiful and different. Mr O’Callaghan ordered two brooches a year, from Weiss, New York. The family-run jewellers were happy to post the small parcel care of Rathsorney post office, so that Bernie O’Callaghan never fully realised the lengths to which her husband would go to show her he loved her.
    In all the years, Ella only wore the brooch once. Intent on keeping it for a special occasion, she lost her moment. The time came when the only significant event left in her life was the funeral of her husband. Just before his coffin was taken from the house, she pinned the brooch to the wide collar of her black swing coat. Those who saw Ella that day said she never looked so pale, stylish, heartbroken or so alone.
    Even after her parents died, there was a delivery from New York, as if the love of John O’Callaghan for his wife was indestructible. Ella still kept those brooches in the same small cardboard box they arrived in.
    Muriel Hearty had run up the avenue, her forehead furrowed; she was stuttering her words. ‘I got it in yesterday and I saw Mr O’Callaghan going down the street. Next thing I was distracted; I should have called out to him. I will never forgive myself.’
    Opening up the brown paper and separating the two folds of the lid to reveal the two brooches carefully wrapped in white tissue paper, Ella took out the topaz and orange rhinestone brooch. It would have perfectly matched her mother’s new burnt-orange coat, the one she had bought in Gorey and was saving for her birthday. The brooch, with a circle of smoky topaz and dull yellow stones was highlighted with deep orange rhinestones, which radiated, like shafts of sunlight, from a central topaz. Held to the light, the orange stones sparkled.
    It was the other brooch that Ella adored: a simple square of clear stones that, when trapped in the light, threw out the colours of the rainbow. It would have sat so perfectly on the floaty dress her mother had fashioned for the night of the choral recital.
    She had felt an anger rise in her, that Muriel Hearty had not stopped her infernal gossiping and run after her father.
    Ella had dispatched a postal order for the amount of the brooches and also wrote to Mr Weiss as