Between Sisters (6 page)

‘You don’t miss what you never had,’ she’d told her new girlfriends at college when they were on their second night out at the college bar and had moved on to sharing mother stories – the fabulous mother who was the kindest woman on the planet; the mother who behaved as though men were all raging sex maniacs and had sent her daughter to a convent lest one of the said maniacs got his paws on her; the mother who had a narcissistic streak and couldn’t hold a conversation for longer than two minutes without dragging it back to herself.

The other three had been silent for a beat when Coco Keneally mentioned that she’d never known her mother.

‘She left home when I was one. I don’t even remember her,’ Coco said lightly, because it was easier to tell this story in such a manner rather than imply it had hurt in any way.

‘But a
mother
… You need a mother,’ said Janet with great sadness – Janet who was the youngest of the four new students and had been explaining how she had the kindest mother
ever
.

Beers had been consumed and a level of honesty had been reached between the four women who’d been strangers until a month ago when they’d met on registration day for First Arts: four eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, anxious but hiding it, madly trying to appear cool.

Even then, Coco’s love of vintage clothing had been obvious: she’d worn Grammy’s felted wool swing skirt with the kick pleat at the back, a red fake leather trench coat, and a black beret over her long, insanely curly dark hair.

‘Coco,’ Janet went on, ‘how can you bear it?’

‘Lots of people don’t have mothers. I had my older sister, Cassie,’ said Coco simply. ‘I had Dad when he was alive, and Grammy. Between them they made it not matter that my mother had left.’

‘I’ve just realised: you won’t have a mum to help you buy your wedding dress!’ hiccupped Lorraine from the convent, where it appeared that, despite reports to the contrary, convent girls were not wild and were certainly not able to hold their drink. On her second beer, Lorraine was already well beyond the tipsy stage. ‘That’s so sad.’

‘Look on the bright side: your mother will never want to upstage your wedding,’ added Carla (narcissistic mum) cheerfully. ‘At my brother’s twenty-first birthday party, my mother wore a leather mini skirt, a crop top that showed off her belly bar, and flirted with all my brother’s friends.’

‘Midlife crisis?’ said Janet hopefully.

‘Ah no, just my mother,’ shrugged Carla, with a glitter in her eyes.

‘That’s so sad—’ began Janet, tears at the ready.

‘Thirty’s a nice age to get married,’ Coco said, wanting to cut off Janet before she really started to cry at the thought of mothers unlike her own fabulous one and
how had people coped?

‘Yeah, thirty,’ said Carla.

‘Twenty-seven,’ insisted Lorraine. ‘Still in your twenties; any older and you seem sad.’

An argument started on the wisdom/sadness of getting married in your thirties and Coco never got around to saying that she knew she’d have her sister and her grandmother by her side when it was her turn. And who needed a mother they couldn’t remember, anyway? Little kids didn’t remember that far back.

When she got married, she thought, allowing herself to imagine this event with all the talk of weddings, the pretty green in Delaney Gardens would be the venue. Cassie would plan it all like a military campaign: a hundred tea lights lit by 3 p.m., sir! Cassie could organise anything: her two tiny daughters, her husband, her job, even the newly purchased semi-detached house a mile from Delaney Gardens where the previous tenants had left it looking like a squat and had somehow removed all the grouting from the bathroom tiles.

A small marquee would fit in the patch of glorious green in Delaney Gardens between the gnarled crab apple trees, the bluebells and the huge old fig tree. Grammy would source food from all her cooking pals, so no fortune would have to be spent on four courses or sorbets or any of that nonsense.

Coco wanted the music of The Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller, with a hint of the seventies thrown in to get people up dancing.

‘You’ll need disco music,’ said Cassie, shocked, when Coco had explained how she and the girls from college had been talking about weddings. ‘You can’t get married without Abba, at least.’

And the sisters had giggled at the thought of this lovely imaginary event to plan, and had discussed how it was handy Coco was waiting for several years, because right now, Beth would be a very bad flower girl as she was going through a stomping phase in nursery school.

Had she really been that naïve? Coco thought now. Thinking thirty was the right age to get married – as if it were something you had the slightest control over.

Coco had grown more and more accustomed to the concept that life rippled along in its own way no matter what you did to intercept it, but she was still shocked by how powerless she was about it all.

She was thirty-one now, and her last serious relationship had been with Red, four years ago. Since then she’d had a couple of dates and then, for a whole year, nothing. Nada. Zip. Until last month and the disastrous blind date at a friend’s dinner party with a recently separated guy who’d muttered endlessly about his ex-wife and her new man, and then grabbed Coco as she tried to leave and slobbered drunkenly on her in a manner he clearly thought was kissing. Nice.

‘Sorry,’ said her friend who’d set it up. ‘I thought he was over it. I shouldn’t have made Brandy Alexanders …’

‘No,’ said Coco, and she’d nearly said,
It’s me. I am catnip to the wrong men and the right men run from me.

Red had run from me, the man I wanted to marry,
was what she’d thought, but she never told people things like that.

Instead, she’d said, ‘He was drunk. Hardly your fault. You didn’t pour it down his throat. But no more blind dates and dinner parties, please? They make me feel hopeless and pitied. Trips to the cinema and things like that, lovely. But dinner parties with other couples just make it worse.’

In the years since Cassie and Coco had planned the perfect wedding, Cassie and Shay had long since renovated their house on the cheap and Coco’s nieces were now thirteen and fifteen. Beth had gone back into a stomping phase, Cassie pointed out miserably.

And still no need to set up any type of marquee in Delaney Gardens for Coco.

Was there something wrong with her? Was nobody in her family telling her the truth because they loved her? Would therapy help? No, cross that off the list, Coco thought gloomily. She couldn’t afford therapy. The electricity bill from the shop alone made her wince every two months. Who knew what professional therapists charged for their services?

No, perhaps she was simply one of those women who were destined to be alone.

Three

That afternoon, Pearl Keneally stood in her red and white themed kitchen with Ritchie Valens singing in the background and toyed with the idea of putting the salted peanuts out in her small, hot-pink and blue dishes from Ios, but then thought better of it.

Liam’s blood pressure was high enough: he didn’t need the salt. Plus Gloria was back in diet club for a winter wedding and would stab Pearl if she saw needless temptation. Pearl snagged a handful of peanuts for herself, then put them in the back of the treat cupboard. Daisy, an oyster pug who needed to be on a diet herself, sat at Pearl’s feet, smiling and watching with delight. For Daisy, her mistress’s weekly events meant treats.

Snacks and drinks was what they’d agreed when they set up the Thursday night club all those years ago. The group, who all lived in Delaney Gardens, had between them seen children grow up, grandchildren grow up, had experienced death, illness: you name it, they’d seen it. And still they came together once a week, rain, hail or shine. The rules hadn’t changed: no proper dinners or cheese squashed into shapes on crackers, or it would soon become a huge effort when all they wanted were a few card games and the company.

Now that over forty years had passed, people’s varying ill health meant the snacks had to be wildly healthy, not dangerous for anyone on anti-stroke medication and suitable for Annette, who was diabetic. Pearl found the low-cal, low-salt, low-taste nibbles and put them out with some trail mix, along with diabetic chocolate near the seat where Annette usually sat.

Some members of the club were gone to wherever it was people went. There were six of them now instead of the initial nine: Loretta and Dai were dead, Louis in the mysterious and painful land of dementia.

Annette’s husband, Dai, had had a heart attack when he was sixty and, years later, Annette insisted that she’d never have survived without her Thursday nights.

‘I couldn’t fall in love with anyone else,’ she said. ‘Dai was the love of my life. Thursday nights saved me. I had somewhere to go.’

Gloria’s husband, Louis, was in a nursing home with advanced dementia. He no longer recognised Gloria or any of his family, and sat whispering fearfully about ‘going home’, by which he meant his birth home.

Gloria had stayed away from the Thursday night club for a year when Louis had first gone into the nursing home.

‘The guilt kills me,’ she’d told Pearl the night Pearl had gone over to Gloria’s to beg her to come back to the poker club. ‘
I
should be taking care of him, not someone else, someone who doesn’t know what he likes!’

‘And what would you do if he got run over by a car when he escaped from the house again, looking for the way back to his mother’s house, Gloria? You’d feel twice as guilty then,’ Pearl had said, knowing she had to be cruel to be kind. ‘What Louis needs now is something you can’t physically give him. He needs people who are rested and expert, people who aren’t so worn out with emotion that they want to cry when he won’t eat and sob with exhaustion as they try to change his clothes. You can’t do that, Gloria.’

‘I know.’ Gloria sat with her face in her hands. ‘But I feel guilty.’

‘You will if you sit at home and brood. You need a few hours every week where you forget it all, where you can laugh and know nobody’s judging you and that we love you. We all miss Louis, he was a part of our lives too, but he wouldn’t want you killing yourself with pain because he has this bloody disease.’

‘He was a great poker player, wasn’t he?’ Gloria remembered proudly.

‘Better than the rest of us put together,’ Pearl agreed. ‘He loved the tradition of it all, the fun. I’m not just saying what I think you need to hear, Gloria,’ Pearl went on, ‘but I knew the real Louis. He was good and kind and loved you with all his heart. He would hate to see you in this much pain.’

Gloria let the tears flow. ‘I am so lonely, Pearl.’ She almost breathed the words out, she spoke so slowly. ‘We had fifty years and now it’s all over, gone. How can it be gone when he’s still actually here? It would feel like cheating on him to have fun when he isn’t.’

‘If
you
were in the home, if places were reversed, what would you want for Louis? Endless pain and guilt, or a life with friends who helped you?’ Pearl delivered the final bit of her argument.

That was a year ago, and Louis was going steadily downhill, getting thinner and having more and more chest infections he couldn’t shake, but Gloria was somehow coping. Joining the diet club was a huge step, Pearl knew. The Gloria of a year ago was so numb that she didn’t care if she was five stone or fifty.

Ritchie Valens was singing ‘Bluebirds Over the Mountains’. Whisking around the living room with Daisy panting at her heels, Pearl admired her house and thought how pretty it all looked now: one person – her younger sister, Edie, who’d been born with a bitter taste in her mouth – had said it was ludicrous having a Mediterranean-themed house in a northern European city, but Pearl pointed out that when there wasn’t always enough sun outside, you had to generate it
somewhere
. Plus, the house was very near the sea after all. The sea wall of Silver Bay was only half a mile away, so a maritime theme worked. And people needed vitamin D.

Her walls were primrose yellow, her couch was a faded turquoise with rainbow crochet cushions, she had a heated fish tank for a sense of the ocean, a jungle of stretching, gleaming cacti plants on the low windowsill, and the pictures on the walls were of Santorini, Thessaloniki and Crete.

All the people whom Pearl loved, loved her home. Coco, Cassie, Shay, Lily and Beth adored it. The Thursday night club loved it. Edie could go hang, with her beige carpet, beige velvet couch and OCD-inspired overuse of hand sanitiser.

‘Pearl, it’s like being on holidays,’ Lily liked to say, lying on the couch and looking up at the Greek pictures.

When she was little, Beth hadn’t been able to say Great-Grammy but had liked saying ‘Grammy Pearl’ in her breathy, little girl’s voice, and so Grammy Pearl it had remained for both of Pearl’s great-granddaughters.

‘I think I’m on holidays when I’m in this room too, Lily,’ Pearl would reply happily.

Pearl had always loved Greece and for years now, sturdy, white-haired but nut brown from a summer spent outside in her tiny garden coaxing tomatoes and baby strawberries to grow, she’d chosen to wear gleaming whites and Grecian blues, and had her toenails painted coral by Coco who lived just up the street – ten minutes at Coco’s fast pace.

The nice new young doctor in the local practice had said it was incredible that Pearl was up to so much gardening, had only had a hint of arthritis and was a supple as she was at her age.

‘Not many seventy-eight-year-olds have your energy or stamina,’ he’d said. ‘You have great genes, Mrs Keneally. Or is there another secret to it?’

‘I raised my granddaughters,’ Pearl said simply. ‘I couldn’t be old because they needed a mother; theirs was gone. Love is a powerful thing.’

Automatically she turned to the photos of the girls on the old upright piano. Cassie on her wedding day, radiant in a brand-new dress, despite Coco’s attempts to get her into something old and romantic.

Pearl’s son, Jimmy, had been alive then and he stood tall and proud in the photos, but with that hint of sadness around his eyes. That had never gone. Pearl loved Jimmy with all her heart but she’d never been able to help him recover from his wife’s departure. You
could
die of a broken heart, Pearl thought, even if it was a slow death.

She’d done her best when Marguerite had left them all those years ago. She’d insisted that Jimmy and the girls move in with her to the small narrow house in Delaney Gardens and had been a mother to all three of them: devastated Jimmy, Cassie, who was seven and had coped with a combination of bewilderment and, later, of acting out, and little Coco, just one and the most adaptable of the three.

Despite it all – dire warnings from Edie, sympathetic glances from neighbours, concern from Cassie’s schoolteachers during her particularly difficult teenage years – they’d managed.

‘You’ll go straight to heaven for all you’ve done,’ Edie used to sniff when it turned out that Cassie
wasn’t
planning a life smoking dope and living in a squat as she’d grimly foreseen when Cassie was seventeen and had a wardrobe entirely made up of tight jeans, T-shirts with rude slogans on them, a studded leather jacket and Doc Marten boots.

‘I’m not planning on going anywhere anytime soon, Edie,’ Pearl said in exasperation. ‘Stop shuffling me off this mortal coil.’

Yet Edie’s words left unease in Pearl. She wasn’t a saint – far from it. She’d played her part in their family drama in more ways than raising the girls Marguerite had left behind.

Over three decades since her daughter-in-law had left and Pearl still felt the raising wasn’t finished. That, she could have told the young GP, kept her alive to be a mother to them.

At seventy-eight, she knew in her heart that she ought to be able to enjoy her card-playing nights in peace, but she wasn’t. Her girls weren’t settled, for all that they looked perfectly happy from the outside.

There was Coco, who, despite all her early romance, had no man in her life. Lots of first and second dates but nothing more. Once a man got close, Coco shoved him off the way she discarded tatty fake designer stuff for her shop. Red – Pearl usually hated men who were known by nicknames and not their given names, but Red was different – was gone now and Pearl had been so sure that Coco would go through with it this time: marriage, babies, settling down. But no.

Red and Coco had broken up four years before and since then Coco had thrown herself even more into her vintage clothes shop. Work was all well and good but it didn’t keep you warm at night, did it?

While Cassie … Pearl sighed.

Cassie was good on paper. It
looked
as if Cassie had it all: those two lovely girls, a good husband, a job, and yet Pearl could see something not quite right these days. It was more than the nightmare of the teenage years. Pearl suspected it was something to do with Shay, but Cassie hadn’t confided in her.

Despite how close they’d once been, there was a firm boundary around Cassie since she’d grown up – as if all those years of wishing her mother would come home had hardened something inside her, and made her feel that a castle wall to protect her was the safest way to cope with life.

Pearl could see how her granddaughter tried so hard to be the perfect mother to her two daughters. Indeed, how she tried so hard to be perfect at everything: perfect mother, perfect wife, perfect employee. Even perfect baker. Most Sundays Cassie spent at least three hours in the kitchen making dinners and cakes for the week. It was what she thought a good mother would do. And Cassie was, without knowing it, desperately trying to be the good mother she’d been denied.

Pearl, who’d been just fifty when Marguerite had left, was no baker. Pearl had done her best to fill in all the motherhood gaps but she still wasn’t the real thing.

Never would be.

And now Cassie was desperately trying to recreate something she’d never quite had as a child and Pearl wasn’t sure if her granddaughter was even aware she was doing it.

‘Guilt keeps me alive,’ Pearl would have liked to have said to that young doctor if she was speaking frankly. ‘Guilt at what I did do, what I didn’t do, and how it’s too late to change it all. Guilt at how I shouldn’t have let Marguerite leave, guilt at how I should have helped her more when she was here, guilt at thinking that one day she would come back.’

At night when she couldn’t sleep, Pearl sometimes sat in the window of the small house on Delaney Gardens, a house that had once squeezed two girls, their father and grandmother into it, and she stared unseeing over the garden and its huge fig tree. It wasn’t really what anyone interested in planning would have called a square. More a patch of square grass around which the houses were ranged on three sides: once state-owned houses that most people now owned. Built in the thirties as part of a social housing project, they were sturdy and compact with long back gardens, perfect for vegetable growing, which was how people fed themselves in those days.

In the centre of the actual Delaney garden was the old fig tree, bigger than the one Pearl had in her back garden. This one was a gnarled, twisted old beauty that had withstood many lovers’ initials scraped into it, small folk climbing its branches, and harsh storms that rattled windows long before double-glazing was invented.

The tree was allegedly a relative of the famous Australian Moreton Bay Fig, and now roots from the branches grew down into the ground, creating a safe enclosure of roots around the centre of its massive trunk. To small children, it was like a kindly grandparent leaning down to hug them.

‘Isn’t it a fabulous specimen?’ strangers always said in fascination. ‘I’ve never seen a fig tree like that before.’

‘And it grows fruit?’ others would ask.

Fruit galore. Fruit for jams, chutneys, desserts, and when Pearl had been young and had lived in Delaney Gardens with her husband, Bernard, fruit dripping down their chins as they sat on their threadbare, third-hand old seats in front of the fire, laughing and planning for their future.

‘It never turns out the way we plan, Bernie,’ she said to him. He was now long gone, his kind smile and ever-present pipe smoke drifting around somewhere else. She hoped he was on a divine cloud somewhere looking down, but not seeing the mess she’d made.

No, Pearl told herself, even if her sister had been planning Pearl’s funeral since Pearl had hit seventy-five, there would be no going anywhere, no letting go of the reins of the family until she’d sorted it all out.

She had so many regrets, and now she thought it was time to do something about them all. Too many lives had been hurt and she’d been a part of it. The family circle needed to be complete. Pearl had thought that keeping quiet would help her beloved girls, but missing someone hadn’t helped her, had it?

And if she told them the truth, she’d have to tell them the whole truth. And they might look at her with loathing if she did that. Cassie was always saying Pearl was an amazing woman. If the truth came out, about what she
hadn’t
done for their poor mother, Cassie certainly wouldn’t believe that anymore.