Between Sisters (17 page)

‘Oh, I love them,’ Phoebe said simply. ‘I was reared on a farm and I miss the animals so much. But I’m up here for college and I need a job and—’

‘And you thought this would be the right place for you.’ The girl smiled. ‘Sorry, Dad has enough trouble keeping the place going and that’s paying all of us buttons, to be honest. But we’ll keep your name on file. Phoebe, wasn’t it?’

Phoebe nodded. ‘Thanks a million,’ she said, as she headed for the door.

Twelve

Red O’Neill walked through the airport, ignoring the stares of a few of the savvy business people who’d been on his flight.

What’s
he
doing on a commercial flight?
he imagined them thinking.

‘You don’t make money by flying private,’ he wanted to tell the rubberneckers. He’d hated all that ‘wheels up’ and ‘I have the Gulfstream this weekend and was thinking of flying to Hawaii’ rubbish. It annoyed the hell out of him. If it was easier to fly commercial, he did it.

Anything else was all ego; nothing to do with business at all. Red had never bought into such vanity, which was one of the reasons why his venture capital business had done so well in the past few years. So well, in fact, that the
Financial Times
had featured an interview with him three weeks ago. An interview that would have once had him clapping his hands with glee. The
Financial Times
was
the
paper for men in his line of work. Them wanting to interview you was like saying:
You’ve arrived. You’re an international businessman of note, not just some young fella from Dublin
.

Less of the young,
he thought ruefully. He was nearly forty and there had only been one question with the
FT
interviewer that had left him slightly stumped.

‘What’s next?’ the reporter had asked. ‘What does Red O’Neill really want now?’

Red had a great reputation in the business for thinking on his feet: it was how he got out of the San Diego deal just in time, just before everyone else had lost their shirts. But he couldn’t think on his feet for this question.

It would have sounded completely ridiculous to say that after working his butt off for so long, he now wanted to actually have a life – and to somehow get over a woman he’d broken up with four years previously. That would have made him sound gauche and foolish, things Red never wanted to appear.

So he’d smiled his enigmatic smile, which normally worked very well – on women.

Sadly, this was a male journalist, so the enigmatic smile on the large, well-sculpted face with the brooding eyes – a smile that turned women’s heads, and not just because he was wealthy – didn’t have quite the same effect.

‘To be even more successful next year,’ he’d said lightly, hoping he appeared neither bigheaded nor stupid.

It was so difficult figuring out the right thing to say without sounding like a moron. He hated reading interviews with himself in newspapers because no matter how he meant to sound, it so often came out differently.

There was only one person who’d ever told him the truth about stuff like that, told him how he appeared in interviews, and she was the one who’d left him. It was why he almost never did business in Ireland. He didn’t want to bump into her; he didn’t want to even be in the same city as her.

It wasn’t that the great Red O’Neill hated failure and that Dublin had been the scene of that great failure. It was that he still felt the hurt.

He hadn’t told his mother he was coming today. Myra O’Neill would have rolled out the red carpet, delighted to see the return of the prodigal son, but Red always felt that big family reunions were for his brothers, the two O’Neill brothers who’d done it all properly. Who’d got married, who’d had children and reared them within a few streets of where they’d all been brought up in Silver Bay – not far from Delaney Gardens, but the less he thought about that, the better.

Red was high on every ‘most eligible bachelor’ list in Ireland since the year dot, and now, since the
FT
piece, possibly wait-listed for some other eligible bachelor lists around the world. Yet he wanted what his brothers had.

He’d sound like some 1950s housewife if he said it, but he genuinely wanted the whole enchilada: wife, kids, weekends where he didn’t think about the office but just enjoyed the sheer pleasure of being with his wife and children. The same way his brothers did with their families. The way he’d been brought up.

He didn’t want seven houses in different places; he wanted a beautiful house in his home city where he was close to his family, because Google and Facebook had shown that you could run any multi-national from Ireland.

He wanted it all. Both his parents’ marriage and his brothers’ marriages had shown him how family life could be, and he wanted that. But big, successful businessmen weren’t supposed to think in such a way. They were supposed to be superglued to their four phones, screaming at harried assistants, and wearing headsets to murmur their secret deals as they marched around galleries with their art collectors picking out investment/kudos-gaining paintings for their kudos-gaining big houses in the right spots in the right countries around the world. They were supposed to want super-thin, Pilates-honed wives who had Birkin handbags in every colour and every animal skin to hang off skinny arms, with an array of shoes that needed their own closet. These men wanted entrée to Davos, not tickets to kid movies with their small children.

But Red – who’d met plenty of Birkin wives, eyes anxiously swivelling as they watched their mega-rich husbands in case someone younger or prettier came along – didn’t want that life. He wanted the cinema tickets to
Despicable Me 3
. He wanted a short, curvy woman who’d never tried Pilates in her life and who would probably only see a Birkin bag if such an unlikely gem passed through her vintage shop.

Nobody knew this of course. They all thought Red was the ultimate alpha male, when in fact he was an alpha-beta, which was a new type of man, apparently, explained to him by an old pal’s wife.

Michael and Barbara Doorly had been friends of his forever, and Barbara, who was a journalist, said the metrosexual was old hat and the alpha-beta – ‘still macho but also caring and wants a family’ – was where it was at.

‘This is the sort of man who wants to understand his woman, wants to be with her, wants to nurture her and take care of her and take care of their children,’ explained Barbara, who was writing a feature about it.

Michael, who’d got a better fix on Red than any journalist ever would, had looked his friend in the eye and said: ‘I think you’re right, Babs. Our boy is an alpha-beta. That’s where all those high-flying girlfriends have been going wrong.’

Red had pretend-punched Michael, who’d pretend-punched him back.

‘The furniture, guys,’ said Barbara, who was used to this sort of male bonding and had a broken vase to prove it.

‘Mr O’Neill?’ A driver stood in front of him now, wearing a dark suit, dangling keys in his hand.

‘Hello,’ said Red politely. He was always polite. Maybe he wasn’t so alpha-beta after all. ‘You know where I’m staying?’

The driver said: ‘Of course, sir.’

‘We’ll drop by my mother’s first. Twenty-one Longford Terrace, Silver Bay.’

‘Whatever you want, sir.’

The driver tried to take Red’s carry-on bag but Red refused. ‘I’ll take it myself,’ he said.

No point going to the gym and doing a 90 kilo push press if you couldn’t carry your own damn case to the car. They climbed into the car, which was parked in the special VIP drivers’ parking area close to the airport. No more parking miles away like the plebs did, the way he and Coco had done for that amazing holiday in Greece once. He sat in the back seat and closed his eyes. Just because he was in the same country as her, he would not think about her. She was the past.

He’d gone out with plenty of women after Coco: fabulous, amazing women. City women, fit, gym-going, smart, clever girls that any man would have been delighted to be seen with. But there was always something wrong, something that ended the relationship abruptly.

‘You’re just not with me – mentally, I mean. You’re here but your head is a thousand miles away,’ complained Lara, a brunette lawyer who had a fleet of men after her.

‘I don’t think you’re a player but are you ever going to settle down?’ demanded Karen, a no-nonsense girl from New Zealand who didn’t believe in hanging around waiting for the man to ask the serious questions.

If Karen was going to be with a man, she wanted to know if there was a future in it. And Red had had to admit that there was no future in it. He didn’t know
why
. He wished he did.

‘I’m sorry,’ he’d said, and it had been very hard not to say, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ – a statement which might have got him a knee somewhere painful.

Michael, who appeared to know everything about women thanks to Barbara, said that the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ thing had come to be a handy way for guys to dump women by pretending they were saying sorry, when in fact, it really meant: ‘It
is
you but I can’t handle the argument if I say so.’

‘How do you know all this stuff?’ Red asked Michael, bewildered.

‘Barbara. She writes an article a week on men and how weird we are. She knows more about us than we do.’

‘Isn’t that hard to live with?’ said Red.

‘Nah. I love her so I just roll with it. It’s the secret to marital happiness,’ Michael added with a grin. ‘Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?’ The grin widened. ‘I like being happy.’

In Red’s darker moments, he wondered if happiness simply eluded some people. Perhaps he simply wasn’t meant to be happily married like his two younger brothers, Mike and Dan, who had loving wives, small children and their mother’s adoration. The way to Myra O’Neill’s heart was not to be a successful businessman who got write-ups in the
Financial Times
, but to get married and present her with grandchildren to boast about endlessly at bingo and book club.

Or maybe he was just picky, as a couple of his friends had said.

‘Are you waiting for a supermodel? Someone from the Victoria’s Secret line-up? Is that it?’ Sandy, an old pal from the US college where he’d done his MBA, had asked this question when they were having a night out in London, eating the special blackened fish at Nobu before heading on to a few clubs, whereupon they decided they were far too old for this type of carry-on and went back to Red’s apartment with its giant windows overlooking the Thames to drink a few beers and talk.

‘Of course I’m not waiting for a Victoria’s Secret model,’ said Red irritably.

A vision of an entirely different sort of woman had come into his head – a woman who was very much the opposite of a leggy Victoria’s Secret angel. A woman who was short, curved and would never walk any runway with wings attached to her. Coco Keneally.

‘I saw her, that Coco, at the supermarket and, do you know what, I nearly went over and gave her a piece of my mind,’ his mother had told him on the phone only the previous month.

Although his mother gave him a hard time about not being married yet, she was his most fearless defender. Far more fearless than Edwards, O’Brien and Edelstein, his lawyers – so tough that the mere arrival of a missive bearing their stationery caused even the most ruthless business people to blanch.

If Red had allowed it, his mother would have gone round to Coco’s house and thrown eggs at the windows or paraded outside her vintage shop with placards saying:
This woman ruined my son’s life.

It was a mistake to mess with any of Myra O’Neill’s sons. They might be grown men but they were still her babies and she would never, ever forgive Coco Keneally.

Red himself hadn’t seen Coco since that horrible day four years ago and he sincerely hoped he wouldn’t see her now. That was the problem with coming back to Dublin: there was always the fear that he’d bump into her somewhere.

Yes, the big, strong Red O’Neill was scared of the thought of seeing his former fiancée. He still had the ring he’d bought her, although he’d never told anyone that. He’d picked it up from the street where Coco had thrown it. He kept it in the safe in the London apartment and sometimes, when he was feeling lonely, he took it out and thought that even then he could have afforded something more expensive, but that Coco, being Coco, had wanted something delicate, old and not ridiculously pricey.

He’d never meet her in Dublin, he told himself as the car flew through the Dublin streets. Nowadays, unless he was in the pub with his brothers and his father, he went to such different sorts of places from the sorts of places they’d frequented when they were a couple, before he’d made it really big. Cheap places, interesting places – no troupe of waiters standing behind all the chairs and lifting silver domes from their dinner plates in a choreographed manoeuver, that was for sure.

And yet sometimes, when he was sitting sleepily on a red-eye somewhere, a bit low, the way flying around the world often made him feel, he thought it might be nice to bump into Coco just one more time. As a sort of test, to see if she still held the same power over him. Because if she didn’t, then he’d be free.

The big black Mercedes looked faintly ridiculous outside Longford Terrace, so Red sent it away.

‘Thanks, sir,’ said the driver gratefully. Both he and Red knew that large, expensive, brand-new Mercedes were not normally seen outside Longford Terrace, and there was a definite possibility that, despite the presence of the driver sitting in the car, the hubcaps might mysteriously vanish.

‘I’ll call you later,’ Red had said.

He’d offered to buy his parents a big house in a posher area of the city when he first made money, but they’d refused.

‘This is our home, son,’ his father had said, and Red understood that. Still, he had to ask.

He went into the house, where his mother was busy cooking up a storm after his phone call on the way from the airport.

‘I wish you’d phoned and said you were coming over before you actually arrived in the country,’ said Myra O’Neill, with a faint hint of irritability in her voice.

Red grinned. He knew she wasn’t in the slightest bit irritable, knew she was overjoyed he was there at all. As soon as he’d rung to say he was in Dublin, he was pretty sure she was on the phone straight after to tell his two brothers, setting up a family dinner to beat all family dinners because there was nothing Myra liked more than a big O’Neill get-together.

‘Great to see you, son,’ his father said with a thump on the back.