Between Sisters (38 page)

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. Horrible story, although I hear Jo’s doing OK, but imagine having a stroke at that age …’

Red was out of his leather office chair so fast that it fell to the ground, bashing off the window behind him.

‘What was that noise?’ said Dan curiously.

‘The sound of me being very happy,’ said Red triumphantly.

Coco was in the shop bright and early after dropping Fiona to school. She’d no plans to visit Jo in rehab today. She couldn’t go in every day and, to be honest, she was completely exhausted. She was on her own all day in the shop today, with not even Phoebe dropping in later to give her a hand, and there was so much to do. Phoebe and Alice were brilliant but only Coco could do the accounts and work out how well the business was doing.

Phoebe was trying to catch up with the college work she’d neglected since she’d started working for Coco. Plus she and Ian, a fabulous designer from Phoebe’s college who had come in and spent several happy hours examining how beautiful old garments were put together, were hatching some plot to help Phoebe’s mother make some money that didn’t involve farming.

‘Are you sure she’d like that?’ said Coco, wary of people interfering in other people’s lives.

‘My mother’s worked herself to the bone trying to run a sheep farm when she’s not made for it; not on her own, anyway,’ said Phoebe.

‘Phoebe’s mum is a size two, and not in a good way,’ put in Ian, who had been to the McLoughlins’ farm for a weekend and, apart from an unfortunate incident where one of the rams had run after him, he’d loved it: loved Phoebe’s mother, her brother and sister, the dog, and even Phoebe’s beloved chickens and ducks.

‘We’re trying to work out how she can keep the land, sell the sheep, and do something else,’ Phoebe said.

‘I have plans,’ said Ian mysteriously. ‘But I need to investigate small new industry grants, which is more complex than eighteenth-century dress codes. If only I’d stayed friends with that old boyfriend who did business studies.’

‘You had a boyfriend in business studies?’ demanded Phoebe.

Ian shrugged. ‘I was going through my “guys in suits” phase. I am so over it, though.’

Coco could have done with a guy in a suit or any sort of assistant to help her negotiate the labyrinthine system of getting Jo’s home fitted out for her return. The upshot was that a top-floor apartment with an unreliable lift was hardly perfect for a person with limited mobility. The shower in Jo’s ensuite was in the bathtub, which would have to be replaced with a freestanding shower with special handles, because of Jo’s uncooperative leg. The door needed to be replaced to cope with the wheelchair Jo used when she became tired, and the hall in the apartment was too small for the turning circle required for it.

The counters in the kitchen were also too high if Jo was in the wheelchair, but fine if she wasn’t, and all the variables and unknowns in the calculations meant it was impossible to discuss facilities and money with the insurance company, or the fabulous people in rehab, with any degree of certainty.

She fired up the laptop in the office and sat down. It was nine: she had an hour before the shop was due to open. She could get a good lot of work done in that time, but first, she thought, maybe a cup of good coffee …

‘How’s it going, Coco?’ said the guys at Coffee Magic when she went in asking for her usual short skinny cappuccino. ‘Are you going to be wild today and have chocolate on top?’

‘Oh, let’s live a little,’ said Coco with a grin. ‘Chocolate on top it is.’

‘How’s Jo?’ asked Tommy, the better looking of the two guys who ran the café and who was always ultra-friendly to Coco.

Phoebe and Alice insisted he fancied her, but Coco’s opinion of her own fanciability was so far in the doldrums that she insisted he was simply a nice man who tried to cheer up the area’s lonely old spinsters.

‘Ha! Spinsters!’ Alice said, giggling. ‘He doesn’t look at me the way he looks at you.’

‘You still have a hope,’ Coco would reply sternly. ‘Tommy saves that special look for people like me and my Great-Aunt Edie, though it’s a waste on Edie as she might slap him for insubordination!’

She chatted to Tommy, telling him how Jo was and that she’d be home soon, which made him cheer, and made Coco grin. He was sweet.

She was still grinning as she walked down the street back to Twentieth Century, thinking she was lucky to live and work in such a beautiful place with such friendly people all around.

And then she saw him.

He was standing outside the shop, leaning against the window, arms folded, staring off into the distance, looking in the opposite direction. She kept walking. What was Red O’Neill doing outside her shop? She’d open with that.

‘Hello Red, what are you doing here?’ she asked, trying to hide the shake in her voice.

She was glad her coffee was in a takeaway cup with a lid so her shaking hand wouldn’t spill it.

‘I’m doing what I should have done a long time ago,’ he said, and she felt herself melt at the sound of his voice. Oh, she missed that voice.

‘Can I come in?’

‘What do you want?’ she asked, trying to sound like a determined businesswoman and not some pushover. What was he really here for?

‘I wanted to talk to you, Coco.’

‘OK,’ she squeaked. ‘Here, hold this.’

She handed him her coffee with shaking hands and fumbled for her keys. Somehow she managed to open the shop door and walk in.

‘Put it on the counter there,’ she said as she locked the door behind him. ‘So, what is it you want?’ Swiftly she went behind the counter; she needed something between the two of them.

‘To talk. To discuss what really happened four years ago.’

‘You know what happened four years ago,’ said Coco, brave now behind her counter.

‘No, I want to talk about what really happened four years ago and not what you
think
happened.’

Coco’s eyes flashed. ‘I know exactly what happened,’ she said, and took a sip of coffee to steady her nerves.

Up close he was still as disturbing as ever. Everyone was taller than her but he seemed so much taller, a giant of a man, and charisma came off him in waves. That suit was made to measure, she noted, and his aftershave was something she’d never smelled before, something that reminded her of holidays in Italy, and lemons, and juniper and … Oh damn him for coming here and upsetting her. She’d been bad enough the last time he’d come.

‘If you want to talk, why did you march out of here the other day without saying a word?’ she demanded, eyes still flashing.

He loved her when she looked like that, Red thought: all hot-tempered and angry. Everyone thought Coco was sweet and mild-mannered, but he knew another side to her – the wild, passionate side.

‘A mistake,’ he said and grinned, a grin that could fell lesser women. ‘I jumped to conclusions and assumed the little girl with you belonged to whoever you were going out with. You seemed so close; it made sense in some dumb way.’

Coco blinked. ‘She’s Jo’s daughter, Fiona. Jo’s ill.’

‘I know and I’m sorry, but the way Fiona looked at you …’

‘I know. I look at her the same way,’ Coco said, and for a moment all hostilities were suspended. Her blind fury left her and she looked at Red wearily. ‘Say what you need to say and get out, OK? There is so much going on in my life, Red, I don’t have time for rehashing the past.’

‘I am so sorry about Jo,’ he said. ‘I had no idea that day when I came in. How’s it been?’

‘Horrible.’ Unbidden, Coco felt the tears well up. She never cried about Jo now. She was beyond all that. Her efforts went into taking care of her beloved Fiona and of figuring out a way for Jo and Fiona to be happy and safe together. She tried not to think about not having Fiona with her all the time, because she would have to return to her mother, and that thought nearly broke her …

Red’s strong fingers reached out to grab her hand and wouldn’t let go. ‘You poor darling. I’m here now, if you want me.’

Startled, Coco tried to pull her hand away but he wouldn’t let her, and somehow it felt nice to be holding his hand, as if merely touching him meant some of her fear and anxiety were dissipating. He was taking the pain away and giving her comfort and strength back.

He looked her straight in the eye. ‘I love you. I think I’ve never stopped loving you. But I was so angry when you wouldn’t believe me that there was nothing between me and that girl. I’d met her fifteen minutes before and it was purely a favour for Teddy Mitchell, who has had the good sense to keep away from me ever since. She was looking for work and she thought nobody took her seriously because of how she looked.’

‘That’s it?’ said Coco grimly, remembering exactly how the girl had looked.

‘That’s it. I love you and this is our last chance saloon. I am laying my heart out on the table for you, Coco, because I can’t think of anyone but you. I don’t want anyone but you. I told you the truth then and I’m telling you the truth now. I meet people all the time but I don’t love them, and I don’t and never wanted to cheat on you with anyone. I need you to understand that. I needed you to believe me, Coco. That’s why I left.’ Red hitched a hip on the counter, still holding her hand tightly. ‘If you don’t trust me, we don’t have anything.’

Coco’s mind whirled.

‘Who do you trust absolutely, Coco?’

‘Cassie and Pearl. Jo and Fiona,’ she added, smiling.

‘But not me.’

‘I did trust you!’ she whispered.

‘Except when it counted,’ he replied. ‘You were ready to believe on absolutely no evidence that I would cheat on you weeks before our wedding. How could you marry me if you thought I’d leave?’

‘Because people leave!’ Coco shouted now.

Dislodging several displays and an art deco box full of jewellery, Red climbed over the counter and put his arms around Coco.

She almost moaned at the feeling of his holding her again. It felt so familiar and yet so long gone. It felt like … like
home
.

He loved the feeling of her in his arms again. She was wearing – what was she wearing? Something silly and furry? No, mohair – a form-fitting mohair sweater that clung to her, and it was dropping little cream hairs all over his suit.

‘I love your crazy clothes, Coco Keneally. I love everything about you.’ He slid to his knees, still holding on to her hands. ‘I swear to you that I never cheated on you, Coco, and I will never leave you again. I am here for you and will always be here for you. I apologise for running away, for not fighting for you. Can you believe that?’

Somehow Coco’s head was on Red’s shoulder and then he was kissing her, and she felt that heart-soar she hadn’t felt for four years.

‘Oh Coco, say we can try again, please? I know it’s been four years, I know you’ve changed and I have too but I can’t seem to live without you, no matter how I try.’

Coco put both small hands around his large skull and looked deeply into his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘You won’t …?’ Red felt his heart sink. The pain, he couldn’t cope with the pain.

‘I will,’ she replied. ‘I’m saying sorry I didn’t trust you all those years ago. I …’ She didn’t know how to say it. ‘It was hard for me to trust but I trusted you totally, and yet when I saw her, I felt as if you’d have to leave me for her. People leave.’

‘They do if you send them away,’ Red murmured. ‘I should never have gone. I wasted four years when I could have been with you. I will never leave, and you can always trust me, darling.’

Coco ran this idea around in her head. It was the truth. She’d known that, known almost from the moment she’d walked away from him that she’d made a terrible mistake. But she’d been too scared of turning back in case he’d gone, in case it was a one-off offer.

It was like having a burden lifted from inside her heart, and Coco leaned her head on his shoulder.

‘I do trust you, Red,’ she said, breathing in the smell of him. ‘But it’s been four years. How can we just start again—’

She didn’t get any further.

His hands gently took her face and he kissed her softly, lips just touching, as if she was something precious that might break if he was in any way rough.

‘We take it day by day,’ he murmured.

‘But you’ve had other girlfriends,’ said Coco suddenly.

‘And you’ve had boyfriends …?’ he asked.

‘A few,’ she admitted, thinking now was not the time to discuss her appalling dating history.

‘So we forget that. We move on.’

Someone knocked on the door of the shop. ‘Are you open yet?’ said a voice.

‘Not today,’ shouted Red, and went back to kissing Coco.

‘I still have the ring,’ he said finally, lips against her forehead, her body soft against his.

‘I threw it on the street.’

‘I picked it up.’

‘You were going to give it to someone else?’ she teased, amazed that she could joke about it.

‘No, I’m a one-woman sort of man, it seems.’

‘It seems?’

‘Yeah, it seems. And you’re it.’

Coco moved so she could see his face and trace its contours. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘because I’m definitely a one-man woman.’

Twenty-Three

LONDON

Elsa sealed both the letters and wrote the girls’ names on the front.

Cassiopeia and Coraline.

She wondered, as she always did, what they looked like now? If Cassie was still that grave little girl with her mother’s hair and how Coco looked because she’d been just a baby when Elsa had left.

She was Elsa now, not Marguerite anymore, because being Marguerite had always brought pain – apart from the sheer joy of her two daughters – and changing her name to Elsa so she could start a new life had signalled the beginning of the first time in her life that she’d known true peace.

Her life as Elsa meant peace from the fear of her mother, and peace from the fear of trying to numb the pain with alcohol. The only sadness was that in giving up the name Marguerite, she was saying goodbye to the woman who’d given birth to two beautiful daughters.

She kissed each letter softly.

Who knew if they’d ever receive them, or even want to receive them, but she wanted to write to them all the same. It was giving her some sort of release, some sort of peace. She hated the word
closure
. It wasn’t a word she used as psychoanalyst. Closure implied that everything could be tied up neatly and put away in a box, and she didn’t believe life was like that.

Life was about understanding the realities and living with them. Understanding what could be changed and what couldn’t. Coping and making peace with who you were and what life had thrown at you.

Had
she
done that? Elsa didn’t know. But what she did know was that she’d never been able to make amends to her two daughters and she’d felt the pain of their absence every day since she’d left.

Jim had never wanted her back. No matter how many letters she’d written, he’d either ignored her or sent solicitors letters to her telling her to stay away.

We don’t want you. Not just me but my girls either. You destroyed us. You destroyed me.

It had been a long, long time since she’d tried to contact him. She’d given him her new name and address, tried to show him how she’d changed, how many years she was sober, and she’d begged –
begged
– to have the chance to see her daughters.

I will never let you see them because they don’t want to see you,
he had written, and she’d felt the guilt anew that she was responsible for turning that once-charming man into such a bitter, angry person.

When she’d been in the rehab place, two long and horrible years after she’d left home, there’d been nobody there for her family day, so she’d had to sit there while other people’s family members came in and told them how it really was. There’d been so many tears that day, people breaking down and sobbing, people storming out and saying they were never coming back. Addiction destroyed families.

Elsa had never had the chance to make amends to Jim, her daughters, to Pearl, to tell them how incredibly sorry she was for what she’d put them through.

She thought of Cassie’s little face the day she’d crashed the car, how Cassie had looked at her, those big dark eyes still full of belief in her mother even though Marguerite had ploughed into another car at the bottom of the hill. That was the day it had all changed, the day when it was no longer possible to hide everything. Elsa had never been able to make it up to her beautiful children, and no matter how hard she tried to work both her own analytical training and her twelve-step programme, that failure had haunted her.

Today, whatever she learned, it would be what she deserved.

The consultant and another nurse met her in the unit. The consultant sat calmly and delivered the news.

‘There’s good news and bad news,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there is cancer present in your breast but the good news is that it’s small, it seems to be in the early stages and the prognosis is good. I’m suggesting a lumpectomy so we can remove the cancerous tissue and some healthy tissue as well, and then six months of chemotherapy. First we’d like to do a PET scan to make sure the rest of your body is clear of cancer.’

He said it so matter-of-factly, even though his face was kind.
He must deliver bad news all the time,
Elsa thought blankly.

The nurse squeezed her hand. ‘It’s all right, pet,’ she said gently. ‘You don’t have to lose your hair, you know. There’s so many new treatments where people don’t lose their hair and you don’t need that awful cold cap anymore.’

‘No,’ agreed the consultant, who was totally bald, ‘no need for hair loss these days with some of the newer drugs.’

She didn’t care if she lost her hair. She wanted to lose her hair. She wanted her whole face and body to be ravaged to make up for the crimes she’d committed. To make up for what she’d done to those beautiful children and to her husband.

She kept zoning out as the consultant discussed prognosis for her type of cancer.

‘It’s not an aggressive cancer even though it is hormone positive,’ he was saying. ‘Your radical hysterectomy has helped there.’

Elsa barely heard him.

‘And of course there is always the chance of recurrence, but we’ll take it one step at a time. Now, we’ll try and fit you in for the lumpectomy as quickly as we can.’

She wanted to die. She wanted to be punished for everything she’d done. Something was going to go wrong with this surgery. Something was going to finish her off, because what else did she deserve? She was a mother who’d left her children. What worse crime could there be?

Elsa had got sober in Solstice House, a rehab facility for addicts who’d been living on the streets like she had. It was, she thought later, an incredible and magical place where people were taught to look at the past but be able to move on.

‘One day,’ said one of the counsellors in the unit, ‘you’ll look back at yourself and you will feel pity for the person you hate so much now.’

‘I doubt that very much,’ growled Elsa. ‘I’ll never feel sorry for her. I’ll never like her. I hate her. I hate me because of what I did.’

The woman had put her hands on Elsa’s and said, ‘No, I promise you, you will.’

‘How do you know?’ said Elsa rudely.

Sometimes she couldn’t stop the anger that came out of her, the anger that came from nowhere. It had been the same when she’d been drinking, the fights she’d got into. She reached up and touched her nose, still misshapen after being broken in a bar brawl that she’d started.

How could she ever
like
that person?

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said dismissively to the woman, who looked so settled and happy and middle-aged in her flowery skirt with her pretty blouse and her comfortable boots. She had a polished leather handbag, no doubt jammed with pictures of children and grandchildren and a perfect life that had never featured drink or drugs in it. How could she understand what Elsa, or any of the other alkies or junkies, were really going through?

‘I know because I was like you; I
am
like you,’ said the woman.

‘How?’ sneered Elsa.

‘I’m an addict, an addict in recovery. Drink was my weapon of choice, the accelerant I added to the fire. And towards the end, I didn’t need very much accelerant.’ The woman looked off into the distance. ‘It’s funny, that,’ she said. ‘For a very long time you can drink everyone under the table and then you reach a point that you almost can’t drink at all. Alcohol makes you want to throw up and yet your system craves it. Every part of you craves it. I craved drugs too, but not in the same way. It was alcohol for me. And I hated myself. My husband had taken the children away from me. I was living on my own in a disgusting bedsit.’

Elsa stared at her in confusion.

She’d
been living in a squat surrounded by other alkies and a couple of junkies, who were really quite harmless as long as they got their fixes. She thought she was going to die there and she wouldn’t have minded, really, until she’d somehow managed to pull herself out and find Solstice House after one person had left a flyer for it in the doorway.

‘I never thought my life was going to get any better and I never thought I could possibly like myself,’ said the woman, ‘but one day something happened and I still don’t know what it was. I suddenly realised that I didn’t have to be like this every day. That I could stop and I could stay stopped. That it wasn’t the second or the third or fourth drink that sent me off the rails – it was the first one. It was the first drag of the roll-up. It was the first drink. As long as I didn’t take them, I was fine. For that day alone, things would work out.’

Elsa stared at her with astonishment and grudging respect. ‘And how did you do that?’

‘I promised myself that I wouldn’t drink or drug for one day. Just one day. Tomorrow was a different story, but for one day I wouldn’t drink or drug, and I’d admit I was powerless over both those substances. You’ve got to do that. You can’t think you can control it, that you can be in charge of taking just one drink or just one drug, because you can’t. No drink, no drugs. End of. And I had to face me, which is the hardest bit.’ She stared deeply into Elsa’s eyes. ‘That’s why we’re here. So you can face all the inner stuff that you’ve been burying for all these years, smothering it with drink and drugs and self-hate. You’ll come out the other side and maybe one day you’ll be sitting in my place, helping another woman. You can choose. We’re here to help.’

Elsa thought of all her years of being clean and sober as she waited for the taxi to take her to the hospital. Twenty years. She’d never collected her twenty-year chip from AA, the symbol of her two decades of sobriety, but she’d gone out to dinner with some of her friends and they’d celebrated – celebrated that, along with someone else’s new grandchild, someone’s engagement: all the markers of life.

Celebrating the fact that they had been clean and sober was the thing that held it all together.

But right now Elsa didn’t feel like a proper member of her group of sober friends. She felt as if she deserved to suffer still. The people she was friends with, they’d all made amends with the people they’d hurt in the past, they’d made it up to families and friends, to children and husbands.

She’d made it up to nobody.

She thought of all those letters she’d written to Jim that he’d returned with the short sharp terse replies saying:
We do not want you in our lives. The girls do not want you. Don’t contact us again.

She still kept those letters. She sent him more and more letters but he’d stopped even replying or sending hers back.

She sent cards on their birthdays until Coco was fifteen and Cassie was twenty-one, and finally she stopped. They had different lives now, they were grown-up. Cassie might be married with children, and why would they change their minds and suddenly want to see the mother who’d walked out on them when they were so little?

Still, today she’d written the letters to them to be opened if something went wrong, because she felt so deeply that something was going to go wrong this morning.

The doorbell rang. It was the taxi driver. Taking in Elsa’s white face and small bag, and the fact that she was going to the hospital, he reached forward and said, ‘I’ll take that for you, love.’

She sat in the back of the black cab and sent a long text to Mari.

Mari, sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want anyone coming into the hospital with me. Having a lumpectomy today. It is cancer and I’ve got to have chemo. I’m texting because I’ve given them your number as my next of kin. I have such a bad feeling about all of this. Like it’s my time. If anything goes wrong, will you take the letters I’ve written to my daughters and post them? They’re on my desk. I’ve tried to stay out of their lives but it’s impossible and I can’t do that anymore. I know they don’t want me but I needed to tell them I love them and I’m sorry.

I love you too and thank you for all our years of friendship. You, Anastasia and our friends, you have been my family. Thank you.

Love, Elsa