My Mother's Secret (3 page)

Jenny and Pascal Sheehan had bought Aranbeg shortly after their second child, Davey, was born. It had been a run-down stone house set in an overgrown garden when they first saw it, but both of them had instantly fallen in love with it. Over the years Pascal – who was an excellent and exacting handyman – had renovated and improved it, turning it into a fine home with a large reception room, extended kitchen and four bedrooms. The initial purchase had been a big gamble with the proceeds of money they’d won on a prize bond. Both Jenny and Pascal had agreed that the sensible thing to do would be to pay off the mortgage they had on their Dublin home, but Pascal’s family had originally come from Wexford and he’d always hankered to have a place there too. There had been times when they regretted not having taken the more conservative option, but both of them loved decamping to Aranbeg every summer, even though Pascal could only join Jenny and the children at the weekends. They went there at other times of the year too; sometimes as a family, sometimes as a couple for a night alone, and from time to time Pascal went on his own to plaster a wall or sand the stairs or regrout tiles. Aranbeg became more than a holiday home for the Sheehans; it became a second home and the place where both Jenny and Pascal preferred to be. Pascal’s retirement gave them that opportunity.

Even though the children were grown up and hardly ever stayed there any more, Aranbeg was a family home to Pascal and Jenny in a way their house in Dublin never had been. They’d put more of themselves into the country house than they ever had in the city. The floors were polished hardwood, there were elegant drapes at the windows, and the decor was simple and understated but reflected Jenny’s artistic personality. Sketches of Roisin, Davey and Steffie done by Jenny herself adorned the walls and provided a clue to their growth into adulthood. Steffie’s own favourites were the ones her mother had done of each of them, aged about four, standing under one of the apple trees in Aranbeg’s garden. Roisin looked fierce and determined, a lock of dark hair falling over her forehead; Davey was sketched arms akimbo, wearing football gear that was way too big for him; and Steffie’s own drawing showed her leaning against the now much wider tree trunk, a faraway expression in her eyes. Steffie always thought that those sketches captured them exactly, and told you all there was to know about the Sheehan siblings.

She brushed past the sketches, carrying the cake (as gingerly as before) and then the party decorations from the car. She’d just poured herself a long glass of water when Roisin rang to see how things were coming along.

‘I only got here a few minutes ago,’ Steffie told her. ‘So nothing’s coming along yet.’

‘Did you get the cake?’

‘Of course. And I phoned the deli on the way down. They’re going to deliver the food shortly. How are Mum and Dad?’

‘Urgh!’ Roisin grunted. ‘It’s been really difficult to stop them from haring off to Aranbeg. If the weather wasn’t so tropical they’d have probably been happy to spend more time with the kids, but as it is I know they’re chomping at the bit to get away.’

‘Traffic was heavy enough,’ advised Steffie. ‘I thought I’d be here half an hour ago, so you’d better leave a little earlier than you planned.’

‘It’s always crap on sunny days,’ Roisin said. ‘I still think you should’ve driven down last night, such a waste not to have used the time to decorate and stuff when Mum and Dad were here. You could have—’

‘I was busy,’ Steffie interrupted her. ‘I had a meeting with a client.’

‘It hardly took up the whole evening, did it?’ said Roisin, who didn’t wait for a reply but changed the subject by asking her if she’d heard anything from Davey.

‘He texted to say that he was on the plane.’ Steffie decided not to argue with her sister. ‘I can’t wait to meet the girlfriend.’

‘She looks pretty stunning on Facebook all right,’ said Roisin. ‘Maybe she’s not as gorgeous in real life.’

‘Or maybe she’s better.’ Steffie laughed. She was never able to stay annoyed for long. ‘Can you believe it, though? Our Davey. With someone like her.’

‘He’s a thirty-seven-year-old man, for heaven’s sake.’ Roisin sounded impatient. ‘He should be married with kids by now.’

‘Well, I do agree that thirty-seven is old enough to settle down,’ agreed Steffie. ‘Obviously. It’s just that Davey … well, you know what he’s like.’

‘An eternal child,’ said Roisin. ‘I hope she has the patience for him.’

‘I guess we’ll have the chance to check it out.’

‘I didn’t arrange this party so you can run another one of Davey’s girlfriends out of town,’ Roisin said.

‘For the love of God!’ Steffie cried. ‘I never ran anyone out of town. All I did was mention that I’d seen Emily Mahon with Laurence Gibson. I never for a second suspected she was actually two-timing Davey with him.’

‘Scarred him for life,’ said Roisin. ‘That’s why he’s commitment-phobic now.’

‘It was
years
ago,’ protested Steffie.

‘Hmm. And how about you? Have you got a date for today?’

Roisin’s words were more of a challenge than a question but Steffie kept her voice light as she replied that Steve might show up but she wasn’t sure. ‘Steve. Steve. Is he a new guy?’ asked Roisin.

‘Not exactly new. I’ve known him a while.’

‘And you practically have the same name! Steve ’n’ Steffie – how cute. And how promising.’

Steffie knew it was a lot less promising than Roisin thought. Steve was a programmer with one of her client companies and she’d met him a few months earlier. He was laid-back to the point of being practically horizontal, they had fun together and he was good in bed. Not that her sole criterion for a boyfriend should be his expertise between the sheets, she would tell herself, but when he was notoriously bad at punctuality and calling her, it was nice to have those deficiencies offset in other ways.

‘At the moment we’re taking it easy,’ she said. ‘No strings.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ exclaimed Roisin. ‘At this point in your life you need to be making decisions about men. Not having no-strings friends-with-benefits relationships. There are times I think I’m the one person in this family who’s done the grown-up thing. Honest to God, you and Davey are like kids the way you carry on.’

‘I wasn’t aware that getting married was the only measure of adulthood,’ retorted Steffie, stung by the friends-with-benefits accusation, which was a tad too close to the truth for her liking.

‘At the moment I’m bearing all the filial responsibilities,’ Roisin said. ‘I’m the one who’s provided Mum and Dad with grandchildren … I could do with you and Davey taking up the slack. Thing is, if he stays in Denmark with Camilla, Mum and Dad won’t get to see them that often either and all the pressure stays on me.’

‘So you want me to marry Steve and get pregnant to help you out?’ Steffie could imagine what his reaction to that would be.

‘Yes,’ said Roisin.

‘If and when I decide to marry someone to provide our parents with extra grandchildren, I’ll let you know,’ Steffie said drily.

‘You can’t be the baby for ever,’ Roisin said. ‘You’re twenty-seven and you run your own business, as you keep pointing out. That makes you a grown-up.’

‘Running my own business doesn’t leave me a lot of time for getting married,’ said Steffie.

‘Of course it does. You have to prioritise, like me with putting my family first and taking contracts if and when they suit me.’

‘Been there and done that,’ Steffie reminded her. ‘I’ve had enough of contracts and sharing jobs and working for other people to last me a lifetime. Butterfly Creative might be small and it might not make me a millionaire, but at least I’m managing to hold it all together. I want to enjoy that for a while.’ Although enjoy wasn’t really the right word when you were barely keeping your head above water, she thought. Still, it was challenging. And maybe one day it would all come spectacularly right.

‘Hmm.’ Roisin wasn’t convinced.

‘Anyway, I’m not thinking about marriage now,’ said Steffie. ‘I’ve plenty of time for that.’

‘I wanted to marry Paul the moment I met him,’ Roisin told her.

‘Things were different back then,’ said Steffie. ‘Lives were less complicated.’

‘Back then. Less complicated. You cheeky thing!’ Roisin sounded affronted. ‘It wasn’t the dark ages, you know.’

‘It was the nineties,’ Steffie told her. ‘There was nothing else to do except get married and have babies.’

‘You’re lucky we’re not in the same room right now or I’d deck you,’ said Roisin.

‘Ah, I’m only teasing you, Ro,’ Steffie said. ‘You struck gold with Paul and you have a lovely family. I envy you.’

‘You do?’ asked Roisin.

‘Absolutely,’ Steffie replied, although the idea of being married with three children was overwhelming. ‘I’ve got to go. I think I hear the food arriving.’

‘Thank God for that,’ said her sister. ‘I’ll see you later.’

‘Right.’

Steffie hung up. She hadn’t heard the sound of anyone arriving, but as she walked through the house to her car, she realised that she’d inadvertently told the truth. A blue van with Patty’s Pantry on the side had just driven up outside.

‘Right,’ she murmured to herself as she opened the front door. ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’

Chapter 3

As always, Roisin felt slightly exasperated after talking to her younger sister. Steffie, despite her pretence at being a businesswoman, didn’t live in the real world. She was merely playing at having a company, trying to make herself feel important after making herself virtually unemployable by refusing to work on that jewellery campaign. Roisin was quite sure that whenever a prospective employer checked Steffie out, he or she would hear about the incident and decide that she was too much trouble. Roisin had tried to point that out to her but Steffie refused to listen. She’d had it too easy, that was the problem. Being the unexpected arrival, ten years after Davey, she’d been utterly indulged by their parents, who’d adopted a far more relaxed approach to her upbringing than they ever had to their two older children. Roisin knew that she and Davey had paved the way for Steffie and made things easier for her, but Steffie never acknowledged that. Nor did she give Roisin credit for having looked after her when she was younger. She simply didn’t remember all the times Roisin had pushed her around the housing estate in her pram, or fed her or played with her when she would much rather have been doing something else. Steffie wasn’t one bit grateful, that was the problem.

Roisin sighed as she went into the kitchen and looked out the back window into the garden. Her mother was sitting on the canopied swing chair that Roisin and Paul had bought at the beginning of the summer and which was coming into its own in the heatwave. Jenny was reading the newspaper while Daisy, Roisin’s thirteen-year-old daughter, sat on the grass nearby, carefully varnishing her nails. Roisin was normally fairly strict about allowing her elder daughter to wear any kind of make-up, even though Daisy insisted that she had to experiment with different looks if she was going to fulfil her dream of becoming a top model. Roisin occasionally worried that her daughter might actually achieve this insane desire, because Daisy, like Steffie, was tall and coltish and very slender. She had a beguiling quality in photographs, in which her heart-shaped face and wide sea-blue eyes managed to appear both innocent and knowing at the same time. Fortunately, from Roisin’s point of view, there were thousands of gorgeous, quirky-looking girls wanting to be models, so the chances of Daisy being plucked from a sea of hopefuls was, she reassured herself, fairly slim. And with a little luck Daisy would eventually change her mind and get a proper job. Nevertheless, Roisin was careful never to make disparaging remarks to her about having to starve yourself to death to maintain your teenage figure in your twenties in order to stay at the top of the modelling industry. The last thing she wanted was for Daisy to suddenly start having negative body issues and haunting anorexia sites. So she said nothing, hoped for the best and only allowed her worries to surface in the middle of the night.

It was funny how your worries about your children changed with every passing year, she thought. When they were small and she was working outside the home her concerns were all about decent childcare. Later, the main anxiety she had about Daisy was making sure that she had friends. Her daughter had been so dreamy and disconnected from the world around her that Roisin feared she’d always be an outsider. But her childish dreaminess had vanished almost overnight, and these days she was about as popular as it was possible for a girl to be. Which was an extra worry too. Being super-popular was nearly as bad as being the outcast. As far as her other children, nine-year-old Poppy and six-year-old Dougie, were concerned, right now it was all about keeping them happy and ensuring that they weren’t fighting with each other or with their friends. And in Dougie’s case it was important that he got picked for the under-seven football team too.

That was where he was today, along with his dad and grandfather, at a friendly against an opposing team from a neighbouring estate. Roisin had no compunction about using moral blackmail to persuade her father that Dougie’s day would be made by him turning up at the game. Pascal had been a keen footballer when he was younger and Dougie looked up to him as the fount of all footballing wisdom. Poppy was equally mad about sport and equally keen to offer advice from the sideline, so it made sense to send them all off together.

So many people to look after, thought Roisin. So many things to juggle. And that was something that Steffie, who had it easy with only herself to think about, would never understand. Left to her own devices, she wouldn’t even have remembered Jenny and Pascal’s wedding anniversary, and even if she had, she wouldn’t have done anything about it. She definitely wouldn’t have bothered to organise the kind of party their parents deserved. Roisin had heard the hesitation in her sister’s voice when she’d called and asked her to be involved in a little of the planning. She’d known that Steffie wasn’t all that keen. But she’d shamed her into being part of it, and later today, when Jenny and Pascal were suitably surprised and pleased, Roisin would bet her bottom dollar that Steffie would happily accept any plaudits that came her way without admitting that nothing would have happened if it wasn’t for Roisin.