Between Sisters (37 page)

‘Well, I’m not sure I’m the best person for advice,’ sighed Cassie. ‘I made a bit of a mess of it myself.’

‘But what should I do?’ Coco said.

Cassie tried to think logically. She put her big sister head on.

‘If Red came in to see you, then he’s got something to say to you and perhaps he did want to see you on your own. He doesn’t know that Phoebe works there or who Fiona is. She was only small when he left. If I were you, I’d contact him and say you want to see him. Just for a coffee. Just to finish it all because you never did. You simply walked away and you didn’t sort it out. Just like I did,’ added Cassie with an unhappy laugh. ‘I didn’t finish it either. Maybe it’s another genetic thing.’

Coco grimaced. ‘We’re not doing too well on the romance front, are we?’ she said. ‘We’re good with business, though.’

‘You’re brilliant at everything,’ Cassie said loyally. ‘But I think until you – if you’ll pardon the expression – put this to bed, you’re never going to be able to forget about Red. He’s always going to be
the one
. No one is ever going to match up to him because you’re still thinking about him. So see him, tell him you’re getting on with your life, and you’d love to see him getting on with his life. Then Aunt Edie can stop telling Pearl about things in the paper she’s seen where he’s mentioned.’

‘She does that?’ said Coco.

‘Oh, all the time,’ said Cassie. ‘Drives Pearl nuts. Edie thinks she’s being helpful and she thinks if Red’s unattached you should run out and grab him right now.’

‘As if he wants me,’ said Coco.

Ruth Reynolds watched her brother bury his face in his hands as she said: ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘Yeah,’ Shay said in a sigh that was halfway between exhausted and I-might-hit-someone-in-a-moment. ‘You warned me, OK, you warned me.’

‘You’d just forgotten what Mum is like,’ Ruth went on.

‘I’m remembering now,’ said Shay.

They were sitting in the serene surroundings of a lovely medieval-themed hotel, close to their mother’s Clontarf home.

Miriam and their mother had gone to the bathroom, because they liked going together.

‘Us girls just need to touch up our lipstick,’ Antoinette had said happily. ‘Plus we can have a nosy around.’

The three grown-up children and their mother were in the hotel to see if everything was up to scratch, as Antoinette put it, to host her sixty-fifth birthday party dinner.

Shay thought the hotel was perfect and didn’t see the point of this at all, but since he had nowhere to go that evening, he’d got roped into this.

They’d had a meeting with the banquet person. ‘Although I don’t see why we’re meeting the banquet person,’ Shay had pointed out to Ruth as soon as their mother was out of earshot. ‘It’s only going to be a small group of us. You, me, Miriam, Liam and the kids, Dilys and Josette, Aunt Aggie and Uncle Phil. I mean, how many other people are coming? I thought it was a small dinner.’

‘You haven’t been working on the guest list?’ Ruth said, eyebrows raised in mock astonishment.

‘Don’t be a cow, Ruth. She’s driving me nuts,’ groaned Shay. ‘I think I must have fixed everything in the house. And we can’t have dinner at home, no. Every second night we have to go out. It’s like she’s showing me off in the area. I feel like a dog in Crufts. We go down to the pub, we have something there, then we walk home. You know the weather’s starting to get cold and it’s damn freezing, but we do the long loop home as if she wants to show me to all the neighbours.
Look at my son: he’s living here with me!
No mention of:
His wife threw him out.
’

‘Shay, I told you. Ma wants what she wants and she’s good at getting it. She doesn’t want to be lonely and she wants someone else to fix it. It’s called not taking responsibility for yourself,’ Ruth said. ‘And I’m sorry, but I’m having nothing to do with it. I’m busy. You screwed it up, you sort it out.’

‘Yeah, thanks a bunch, sis,’ said Shay.

‘Have you spoken to Cassie?’ Ruth asked more kindly.

‘She won’t talk to me, although she sends me icy texts telling me what the girls are up to and when I can see them. I’ve seen them twice in the last ten days. Both times they cried for half the visit, and Mum was no help at all because she kept going on about how fabulous it was having me around and what a wonderful arrangement it was, as if I was never going home. The girls were devastated. I don’t know if Mum really doesn’t get how upsetting separation is for children, but the girls want their father back and she’s carrying on as if that’s never going to happen because I’m with her and that makes her really happy. So zip-a-dee-doo-dah, one sixty-four, nearly sixty-five-year-old woman is very happy and two teenagers are crying.’

He could see his mother and Miriam approaching, looking delighted with themselves. Antoinette was dressed as if going to a garden party in a floral dress quite at odds with the season, along with high, pale pink shoes and a little short-sleeved jacket that showed off her delicate wrists. She was wearing her pearls. She always wore her pearls when she was going somewhere where she wanted to impress people, Shay knew.

He wished his mother would stop trying to impress everyone. Cassie never did that. Cassie was just … Cassie. She was beautiful, he thought sadly. He remembered what it was like to wake up next to her in the morning and see her staring at him with those sleepy, dark eyes. And her smile: she had such an amazing smile. She’d lie there in bed, her hair all tousled on the pillow. He grinned to himself. She hated that hair, always said she could never do anything with it, but he loved it. Cassie’s hair was curly and a little bit wild, like her. For sure, sometimes he wished she’d dress in sexier clothes, more fitted things, and show off those gorgeous legs of hers, but that wasn’t what she liked. She wasn’t like Coco.

She’d had to be the tough one, the grown-up one, from a very early age. He understood that. That’s why she wore those clothes. She’d told him that once, years ago, when she was still Library Girl and he was Jock Boy. When they’d talked. All the talking had gone out of their marriage what with the conversations about groceries, taking out the bins, and paying the bills.

He wished she were here now. She’d know the right thing to say to his mother to make her feel that her day was special, instead of his desire to tell his mother that it was only a damn birthday and what was the big deal?

That was the craziest part of all this – Cassie had always got on wonderfully with his mother. It was like she was surprised he had a mother at all, as if mothers weren’t on her radar.

On their wedding day, Cassie had made such an effort to involve Antoinette.

‘I think the groom’s mother gets totally left out of things,’ she’d said before the actual wedding. ‘It’s like she’s an also-ran. And you know Pearl obviously is like my mum, but Pearl isn’t slightly precious about her side of things, so I want your mum to be involved, it’s important to her.’

She’d consulted his mother about all manner of things and his mother had been thrilled.

He thought of that now as he watched his mother happily working on the long list of people for her allegedly small birthday dinner, and she didn’t seem in the slightest bit put out that Cassie was not on the list.

He hadn’t said: ‘Don’t put Cassie on the list because it would be awkward’, but she simply hadn’t.

He’d seen the list, had watched her working on it, had endured many an evening while she discussed it as if it were some matter of vast national importance. And nowhere was there a mention of his wife or daughters.

Suddenly, Shay had the strangest feeling that Cassie had been right all along: that his mother wanted him and nobody else from his nuclear family.

She had focused on what she wanted and that meant her beloved son, nobody else. It was, he realised, monstrously selfish, and he’d stupidly gone along with it because he felt being a good son was his duty. As if duty was a black and white thing, instead of being many shades of grey.

Shay got to his feet. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I’m getting a killer of a headache, so I’ll go home. Girls, you’ll drop Mum back?’

Ruth looked up at him with a faint, knowing grin, while Marguerite and Miriam stared at him in astonishment.

‘Don’t you want to help us sort everything out?’ said his mother.

‘I’ve got some paracetamol in my handbag,’ offered Miriam, who was always prepared.

‘No, really, thanks, I’d just be in the way. This is more your sort of thing.’

And his mother smiled at the notion that there were things women were innately better at than men, lovely things like arranging parties – not dull things like changing light bulbs, the sort of things that Cassie did without blinking.

Cassie had never asked him to fix the washing machine; she’d have a go at it herself and if she couldn’t fix it, she’d just call the plumber.

His funny, strong, lovely wife, who had done her best to make their family perfect, even if perfection was entirely impossible. But she’d tried her best.

He missed her so much, but how could he tell her that now?

Shay stood outside the hotel and breathed in heavily.

‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’ said a voice, and he turned to see his mother coming up to him, tottering slightly on the high heels she’d insisted on wearing.

‘Nothing,’ he said flatly. ‘Nothing’s wrong, just thought I’d get some air, and you are better at that sort of thing than I am.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to come back, Shay? We’re trying to decide the menus. It may only be a small, select gathering but I want the food to be perfect.’

At that moment, Shay looked at his mother through different eyes. She wasn’t thinking about Cassie, Beth and Lily at all. She was thinking about her own party, her own friends and nothing else.

She wasn’t thinking about him either, he realised with a start. He was just another part of her life, like a chess piece to be moved around.

Not that she didn’t love him; of course she loved him.

But she loved herself more. She was the centre of her universe and he was a mere satellite.

If he didn’t get out now, he’d be with her forever, getting older and more bitter, with her giving him new jobs to do every day, because the jobs would be never-ending.

He could imagine it:
Shay, pet, can you go to the post office for me? Shay, I don’t feel like driving today. Will you bring me to meet the girls?

Things that his mother was well able to do would suddenly become things that he would have to do.

Pearl came into his mind at that moment. Strong, courageous, and still going strong at seventy-nine. Pearl had had to bring up two girls as her own daughters and she’d made a damn good job of it. He thought he’d ring Pearl or maybe Coco again, if Coco was still talking to him, to see how Cassie was.

‘Are you sure you won’t come in, sweetie?’

‘No,’ said Shay, and he stalked off away from her, taking out his mobile phone.

Coco sounded wary and strangely tired when she answered the phone.

‘Hello Shay,’ she said.

‘I know you think I’m a complete bastard, but I’m not, Coco,’ he said. ‘Please help me out here.’

‘Help you out, Shay?’ said Coco, sounding not at all like the sweet Coco he adored, but like a tougher woman altogether. ‘What were you
doing
making some plan with your mother to move everyone into a different house so your mother could move in? I’ve nothing against your mother, I think she’s lovely, but you’re not married to her: you’re married to Cassie.’

‘I know,’ muttered Shay.

‘I don’t think you do, you moron,’ snapped Coco, astonishing him. ‘Do you have any idea how abandoned Cassie felt when she was growing up? How abandoned I felt? And then you went and did it again, you just walked off, chose your mother over Cassie. No wonder she did what she did. Yes, I think she should have talked it over with you, but still Shay, come on, you were asking for it.’

‘I know, I know,’ he agreed miserably. ‘It was the stupidest thing ever, but Mum had this idea and I thought it was going to suit everyone and—’

‘Shay, I love you, but I’m up to my ears in my own ruined life,’ Coco cut in. ‘I don’t have time for meandering conversations. I’m in the shop, Fiona’s with Cassie, and I’ve only got a couple of hours to sort stuff out. I don’t have time for chit-chat. What precisely are you phoning me for?’

‘I’m trying to find out how Cassie is, how the girls are. I talk to them at night but Cassie refuses to speak to me.’

Coco was silent for a beat. ‘Well, refusing to speak to you and refusing to see you are two entirely different things,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come and see her?’

‘If she doesn’t answer my phone calls she’s hardly likely to want to see me,’ said Shay.

‘OK then,’ said Coco, sounding exasperated. ‘I guess nothing is going to change. You’re a great guy, Shay, a lovely brother-in-law, but please, cop on.’

She hung up and Shay sighed. Whatever was going on in Coco’s life, she didn’t sound too happy either.

In the shop, Coco glared at the phone.

Men,
she thought with fierce irritation.
Why did they make everything so darn complicated?

Twenty-Two

‘A medical?’ said Elsa to the voice on the phone.

‘Yes, a medical,’ said the girl from the TV company. ‘I know it sounds a bit odd, Dr de Marco, but with the new show and a whole host of new investors, everyone’s being really cautious.’

Elsa sat in the lovely wing chair in front of the fire in her pretty home and looked around at all the things she’d collected over the years: the pictures, the books, the treasures from travel abroad. She and Mari had gone to India once on the cheap, and while the memory of poor Mari’s appalling stomach problems had receded, Elsa would never forget that amazing trip because of the beautiful Indian ornaments that were dotted around her room.

‘Are you still there?’ said the voice again.

‘Yes, I’m here,’ said Elsa.

She hadn’t spoken to her agent. Hadn’t said, ‘No, I can’t do that family reunited show because it will break my heart.’

‘Give me the details of who I have to talk to,’ she said crisply, professional as ever.

No point in breaking the news to this poor girl. She’d make the phone call to her agent tomorrow and be ready to face the onslaught of Stanley and Luigi wondering why she couldn’t take this incredible televisual break.

When she finally hung up the phone, she sank against the back of her chair and breathed in and out very deeply.
This too will pass
. She reached under her arm, past the cardigan she wore because it was getting colder, and felt the lump. It hadn’t gone away. Still there, obviously not any sort of infection, and given that she’d had a radical hysterectomy ten years before, it certainly couldn’t be hormones. Elsa knew she wasn’t going to do any TV show medical, but perhaps this was a message from above telling her she needed one anyway. She picked up her phone, dialled her GP and made an appointment.

Elsa knew that Dr Patel was an incredibly busy GP because there was a room full of patients waiting to see her and her partner, but never in all the years Elsa had been going to see her had she felt in any way rushed.

‘Come in, doctor,’ said Dr Patel, a little wicked smile on her beautiful face.

‘Thank you, doctor,’ said Elsa, continuing the joke.

They’d had a very good relationship over the years, with Elsa not needing to visit the doctor much in the last ten years after that dreadful two-year period when fibroids had made her life a misery.

‘So, what can I do for you?’ said Dr Patel, looking up at her patient.

‘I’m embarrassed to say it,’ Elsa began, ‘but I found a lump in my breast a little while ago and I couldn’t bring myself to come in and see you.’

‘As if it would go away if you left it alone?’ Dr Patel said, having changed rapidly from smiling to non-smiling. ‘Elsa, how could you do this?’

Elsa shrugged. ‘Stupid, I know.’

‘How long have you had it exactly?’ the doctor said.

‘A month,’ said Elsa reluctantly. ‘I of all people know you can’t put your head in the sand but I … I somehow did.
Physician heal thyself.
’

‘OK,’ said Dr Patel, smiling once again, but this time it was her let’s-reassure-the-patient smile. ‘Let’s examine you.’

Stripped to the waist, Elsa lay on the couch, one arm raised, while the GP carefully palpated her breast. She checked the lump very carefully.

Is she spending an awfully long time examining it?
Elsa wondered.

Then the doctor examined the other side, checking under her arms too.

‘Right, put your clothes back on, thank you,’ Dr Patel said in a cool, impersonal voice that Elsa knew spelled trouble.

She dressed as Dr Patel washed her hands, then came out from behind the screen and sat in the chair while the doctor finished typing a note on her computer.

‘I can’t say for sure,’ Dr Patel said, ‘but I feel that lump is a little iffy, Elsa.’

Elsa froze.

‘I want you to go to the one-stop breast clinic as soon as you can. They should have the results on the same day and they can take it from there.’

‘What do you mean, they can take it from there?’ asked Elsa.

‘Just if there is anything that needs to be taken care of, they can take care of it,’ Dr Patel said. ‘You can’t leave these things too long, Elsa.’ And then she stopped, as if she knew she shouldn’t say this. ‘As we all know, a large percentage of lumps are perfectly benign – cysts, other things – so don’t worry, just … We’ll get you in to see the people at the clinic and we’ll see what happens, OK? I’m sorry, Elsa.’

Elsa took the letter and shook her head. ‘Hardly your fault, doctor,’ she said, a smile nailed to her face.

If Elsa and Mari didn’t have work, they often met up on Wednesdays at one with a group for coffee. But when she went to their usual place, Mari found no sign of her friend with their gang. She tried to ring Elsa when everyone was having coffee and got her voicemail. Mari left a message.

‘Hi Elsa, hope you’re OK. Missed you today. Tell me what you’re up to, sweetie. Hope you haven’t got that terrible sore throat. There’s a dreadful one going around. Half the place is down with it. I’ve had two cancellations for lessons tonight. Yippee for me! Talk later. Love you. Bye.’

Elsa listened to the message the next day as she sat among the queues in the one-stop breast clinic in the hospital. There were so many women there and it seemed to be a first come, first served scenario, even though she’d been given an actual appointment. She’d brought some work with her: professional magazines she liked getting and the most recent report on new therapies for post traumatic stress disorder. She might not have a TV career anymore, but she had a private practice to keep going. However, Elsa couldn’t concentrate on work. Instead she looked around at the women waiting with her: young, old, middle-aged, many of them with partners or daughters or sisters or friends, people looking anxious no matter how hard they were trying to hide it.

Elsa didn’t feel nervous because she knew what this was: karma, the great reckoning. She’d never been able to make amends to the people she’d hurt and the end result was now here.

Despite her fear, there was a rightness about it all: we must pay for the pain we put others through.

When she was finally seen, she had a mammogram first and then the nurse brought her in to discuss the results.

‘Yes,’ the nurse said, ‘there’s a definite lump there. We need to do further tests. You had a hysterectomy and your ovaries out at fifty?’ she said, rereading the notes.

‘You think it’s cancer?’ blurted out Elsa.

The nurse looked at her seriously. ‘There’s a possibility,’ she said reluctantly, ‘but let’s not jump to any conclusions. Now, we’re going to do a needle biopsy here, so I’ll stay with you while that’s being done. It’s very simple. A small specimen will be taken from the lump. We’ll give you a local anaesthetic first, obviously.’

Seeing Elsa’s white face, she added: ‘It’s early days and the mammogram didn’t appear to show anything in your lymph nodes, which is excellent.’

Elsa felt pain when the needle went in for the biopsy. The needle itself looked big enough to tranquilise a horse. All she could think of was cancer. This could be cancer and that was OK. She deserved this. She had brought it upon herself. It was her fault for everything she’d done in the past.

‘Are you all right there, pet?’ said the nurse, holding her hand comfortingly as the doctor took the biopsy. Elsa refocused her eyes and stared at the woman who was being so kind to her, so helpful and determined to put her at ease and yet let her know what was happening.

‘I’m fine,’ lied Elsa. ‘Fine.’

She was due back in five days to get the results. ‘Don’t worry too much,’ said the nurse. ‘You can’t do anything until we know the facts, OK? Remember: be positive.’

Elsa walked out of the breast clinic and all she could think of was that she’d known this day would come after all. You had to pay for your mistakes. And she wanted to pay.

Father Alex Wiersbowski turned up at Pearl’s house just as she was absentmindedly organising the place for the Thursday night poker club.

‘Come in, Father,’ she said, and stood back to let him enter.

Father Alex loved Pearl’s house. It reminded him of holidays before he’d joined the priesthood, a different time and a different life when his father still had hopes of him getting married and settling down.

‘You’ll be the last one to carry on the family name,’ his father had said.

Alex felt so guilty about that now. He knew that many families were so proud to have a priest in the family, and yet for his small Polish family there had been a sense that he was giving up something by giving his life to God.

‘Mrs Keneally, your house is so pretty,’ he said, as he always said. He’d come to talk about the charity fair but Pearl seemed to be miles away, which was so unlike her.

Daisy wriggled against him delightedly. She liked this man in his dark clothes. He never seemed to mind if she got fur all over him the way some people did, and if he was given cake, he always gave her a bit. All in all, he was the perfect sort of visitor.

‘Could we perhaps have a cup of tea?’ said Father Alex, who was used to visiting elderly parishioners who worried they were taking up too much of his time. ‘I can make it,’ he added, again used to elderly parishioners who were not so steady on their feet.

‘Nonsense, I’ll do it,’ said Pearl, and together they marched into the kitchen.

As Pearl rattled around in the cupboards, Father Alex noticed she seemed to be worryingly distracted. It was as if she couldn’t look him in the eye, and normally Pearl was one of those wonderful women who looked a person straight in the face, eyeball to eyeball, smiling, engaging.

Not at all like her sister Edie. He wondered, with a shudder, if Edie was there.

‘Your sister is around, no?’ he asked, as if Edie might leap out of a cupboard and rail against him for some church crime. Edie complained if the heating hadn’t been on long enough for early morning Mass, which made Father Alex, juggling a tiny budget, open and close his mouth like a goldfish. What did you say to a woman like that?

‘No,’ said Pearl, ‘she’s not. I’m getting ready for the poker club. Do you disapprove?’ she asked. ‘It is gambling, after all, and I don’t think the church is very keen on gambling.’

Normally Pearl would have said such a thing with a laugh in her voice, but she sounded so flat that Alex realised something was really wrong.

‘Please, Pearl – if I may call you Pearl – sit down. You seem a little upset, perhaps? I can make the tea if you tell me where everything is.’

Astonishingly, she did as he said. Pearl sat and pulled Daisy on to her lap, holding the little dog as if she was a talisman against misery. Father Alex thought he’d love a dog too but there was no way he could have one in the house what with Father McGinty being so erratic. He left all the doors open and would be sure to let any small animal out on to the road, where it would be killed.

Then there was the basic fact that priests got moved on every few years and there were many places where you couldn’t have a dog. What would he do then?

‘That cupboard over there, the teabags are in a steel canister,’ said Pearl.

In a few moments, he’d made a pot of tea for two and sat it down in front of them. He was too shy to wonder where Pearl kept her beautiful, home-baked biscuits.

Sometimes it felt odd to be a young man whose job was to counsel people far older and wiser. But Pearl appeared to be looking for something from him, so Father Alex sat and waited. Waiting was the key. If you waited long enough, people told you what was really on their minds.

‘Father, I did something a long time ago and I’m very ashamed of it,’ Pearl said.

Alex, who had heard many confessions before, was not surprised. All people had secrets, and sometimes things that people thought were absolutely dreadful were not so dreadful after all once they were taken out of the dark caverns of the mind and held under an open microscope in clear light.

‘Would you like to talk to me?’ he said. ‘I can hear your confession or we may just talk if that suits you better?’

‘No, I don’t want confession,’ said Pearl. ‘I don’t know if you can get absolution for this.’ She looked up at him and he was shocked to see such anguish in her eyes. ‘I made a mistake a very long time ago and it’s coming back to haunt me now. Not simply to haunt me, either, but to hurt two people I love very, very much. I just don’t know what to do.’

Father Alex sat and waited some more. He’d need a little more to work on but it seemed as if Pearl was finished. He began to think of the correct homily, one about how asking for forgiveness was key, when Pearl interrupted him.

‘I may come and talk to you one day,’ she said, ‘but perhaps not now, not when the gang are walking across the gardens, ready to bet everything they’ve got on a few hands of poker.’ And it was as if she’d removed the horrible thoughts from her brain and put back on a mask of calm.

‘I could go to the door and tell them to come later?’ he suggested.

‘No.’ Pearl put a warm hand on his. ‘You are a sweet young man, but no, that’s fine. I need to deal with this. Talking and crying about it won’t make it any better, will it?’

Father Alex found himself out in the street, wishing he had more tools to help people who were hurting.

‘So, how did it go?’ Dan was on the phone.

‘How did what go?’ said Red irritably to his brother. He was in his London office and was having a bad day. All his days were bad lately. He couldn’t think why. Maybe he needed a holiday.

‘With Coco,’ said Dan, who could do irritable just as well as his big brother.

‘She’s got a kid,’ muttered Red. ‘Or, to be more precise, she’s obviously seeing some guy who has a kid, so all those “she’s not seeing anyone” rumours were entirely wrong. I didn’t see any guy but it couldn’t have been her child, so what else, right?’

It still hurt. So much. Ridiculous to think he’d been holding a candle for her for so long only to have it snuffed out by a child.
They
could have had children by now: a couple of small ones whose faces would light up when they saw him.

‘Newsflash, bozo,’ said Dan. ‘That’s Josephine Kinsella’s little girl. Jo’s sick, had a stroke, they say, and Coco’s taking care of her daughter.’