Once in a Lifetime. Cathy Kelly

      Once in a Lifetime

      Cathy Kelly

      

       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

      www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

      Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2009

      

      Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

      The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      

      Ebook Edition © February 2012 ISBN: 9780007389346

      Version: 2017-11-21

      

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

       For Dylan, Murray and John, with all my love

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

Copyright

       Dedication

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

       6

       7

       8

       9

       10

       11

       12

       13

       14

       15

       16

       17

       18

       19

       20

       Epilogue

       Excerpt from The House on Willow Street

       Prologue

       Chapter One

       Back Ads

       About the Author

       By the same author:

       About the Publisher

       Prologue

      Star Bluestone had talked to bees all her life. She talked to her flowers too, murmuring to the rare yellow poppies she’d nurtured from seeds gathered in the old Italianate garden thirty miles away across the Wicklow hills. She and the young Kiwi gardener there had such great chats, he walking her through the orchard and reaching up to cradle a baby apple bud the way another man might touch a woman.

      He understood that people who loved the soil talked to their plants and to the bees whose careful industry made their flowers bloom. Even though he was only thirty to Star’s sixty years, he didn’t think she was an eccentric old lady. Rather, he was impressed by Star’s encyclopaedic knowledge of plant life. His earnest, handsome face became animated when they talked.

      When she watched this kind boy, Star always remembered fondly that good gardeners make good lovers. Nobody capable of the tenderness required to separate delicate fronds of fern for replanting would ever be heavy-handed with another person’s body.

      It had been a few years since Star had lain in a man’s arms. She’d had many lovers, but the one she would remember for the rest of her life, the one whose memory was imprinted upon her skin, hadn’t been a gardener. He’d been a poet, although that wasn’t how most people knew him. To the world, he was a conventional man, handsome, certainly, with beautiful manners and an important job waiting