by Cathy Kelly
She had tasted squid ink risotto, asparagus wrapped in parma ham, gravadlax with rocket salad, lamb, boeuf en croute, sole off the bone. She had reserved rooms, discussed flowers, queried the possibility of having dahlias – and oh, how she hated dahlias – on the main table because Edward’s mother had grown them and this was about him, and he still smiled whenever he saw a dahlia.
And that little cow was going to ruin it all.
Anger was inappropriate in most of life: Bess had learned this the hard way. Anger was something one felt in private, when it could be stared down, made small and manageable. Clever women did not give in to anger in public or especially in the business arena where it would look as if they were ‘hysterical’.
Clever women did not rage against husbands because they were hopeless at buying Christmas gifts – they knew to buy it themselves, get the shop to wrap it and hand it to the husband in question, smiling.
That would have been Bess’s motto if her first husband had stayed around long enough or had had the money to buy anything and she had no time for women who thought otherwise.
A woman who wanted the perfect gift should buy it herself and not waste time wondering angrily why another human being didn’t understand her great need for it.
And yet the anger in this case overwhelmed all of her legendarily fierce self-control.
Bess swept the papers off her desk in a motion so uncharacteristic it would have startled her daughter.
Bess had done her very best and yet her stepdaughter, an idiotic blonde woman, apparently thought her father should sit shiva for ever over his dead wife.
If Jojo truly loved Edward, why didn’t she understand that he needed a woman in his life. Not just any woman: Bess.
What Bess wanted most of all was for Jojo to see that Edward loved Bess, that she was not second best, that she could exist alongside the memory of Lottie.
Elaine and Jojo were celebrating: a low-key little celebration involving cupcakes from the café, Earl Grey for Jojo and a skinny flatté for Elaine.
A customer who’d lost three stone, dejunked her closet, and resold some of her old gems, had come in to restock.
‘I never thought I’d fit into anything like this,’ Carol said, twirling happily in a short fitted cream dress that both Jojo and Elaine had done their best to prevent her taking into the dressing room.
It was a dress that required either a Pilates-hard body inside it or else two pairs of Spanx and no food for a week.
There were women in Silver Bay who could get away with it – but not Carol.
The shop owners had shared a complicit gaze. They could not let lovely Carol leave the premises in a dress she would either never wear again or else would wear once and then never wear again on the grounds that it showed off every single line of the body, including the elastic waistline of her tights. Clothes that made you feel bad had a strange, magical power: both Elaine and Jojo agreed. One look at yourself in a strangely ugly outfit could cast a spell and ruin your week, your day, the rest of your life.
As Elaine put it: ‘You could cure the worst illnesses on the planet and you’d spend time saying, “But I looked horrible in that dress on the news …” Yes, even the scientific, serious women feel it – we all feel it!’
Elaine gave Jojo the raised eyebrow look that implied: will you? Or will I?
Jojo took over.
‘It looks amazing, Carol,’ Jojo said, ‘so let’s put it on the “possible” rail. Cream does suit you and this’ – she produced a far more elegant dress – ‘could also work.’
An hour later, Carol left – without the unflattering dress – and with some beautiful items that would form what Elaine lovingly referred to as a capsule wardrobe.
‘Everything has to work with everything else,’ she said to all comers, which was why they had so many loyal customers.
Of course, nobody but fashion stylists could ever successfully work a capsule wardrobe, so they had to keep coming back wondering why this random top they’d bought on their holidays had looked lovely in Portugal or glorious in the half-price sales in town but hideous back home.
Jojo was licking cupcake crumbs off her fingers, thinking that she was definitely going to put on weight with this latest treatment cycle, when her mobile rang.
Her father.
Wiping her sticky fingers on a napkin, she took the call and went into the back room.
‘Hi, Dad.’
She knew what this was about.
‘Hello, Joanne, lovie,’ said her father. ‘Am I interrupting?’ He was the only one who ever occasionally called her Joanne, which was lovely and different, except it was what the hated Bess now called her too.
‘A celebration, we’re finished, though.’
‘Celebrating what?’
‘Oh, just a customer bought quite a few things and it’s been a good month for us—’ Jojo stopped. Her father’s version of a good month financially and hers were quite different. Since he’d married Bess, he’d been making noises about investing in the shop. ‘Helping you and Elaine to have an empire,’ he’d said gruffly.
Trying to bribe his new wife’s way into their lives, more like.
Dad had wanted to be involved in the shop six years ago but her mother had always been very firm about how the Brannigan kids would not be ruined by not understanding how to work for a living.
‘We’re not raising trust fund brats, Eddie,’ she’d always said. ‘Paul and Jojo are clever enough to earn their own livings.’
They’d always both had summer jobs: Jojo in clothes retail so she could learn the trade and Paul in a bar during college so he could buy the motorbike that made their mother pale when she saw it for the first time.
At least that nauseous stepmother could never accuse Jojo of hanging onto her father’s coat-tails for money.
‘Hugh well?’ said Dad.
‘Fine,’ said Jojo. Not that we’re talking because he hates me doing another cycle of infertility treatment.
‘And you, lovie?’
‘Happy as a clam,’ she said. A clam that feels as if it’s sinking too deeply into the ocean where the clam-eating monsters live.
‘OK.’
It was awkward silence time.
There had never been awkward silences in the Brannigan household before but now life was full of them.
Like the classic moment when Edward had told his daughter: ‘I am going to marry Bess, Jojo, and I want you to be happy for me.’ Cue biggest awkward silence on the planet.
‘The thing is,’ Edward went on stiffly, ‘this party for me, I want you and Hugh to come and Bess says you haven’t replied.’
Cari had edited a business book once that said you should wait a beat before replying to tricky things.
‘Don’t feel the need to fill the silence,’ Cari had explained the details.
Jojo was sure that her cousin was an expert in not filling in silences but Jojo wasn’t built that way.
Lottie had raced into all silences, smiling, chatting, putting her arm round people and drawing them into conversation if they were shy. Jojo had inherited it all: the talking to strangers on trains and handing out coins or take-away cups of tea to homeless people.
‘Dad, I don’t know why she’s having it in Lisowen, that’s all. You and Mum had your anniversary there – it’s …’
Jojo blindly searched for a word that didn’t have an expletive attached. ‘It’s hard to imagine us all there without Mum and you with someone else. OK?’
‘Pease, Jojo, for me? Please make an effort, come up to the house and talk to Bess. She’s doing it for me, you know.’
And because Jojo was emotional and because her father’s voice made her think of other times, she found herself agreeing to drop in to her old home that night. Tanglewood. Her old home, where she’d shared the loveliest and happiest of childhoods with Paul and Dad, all thanks to her darling mum, who made it a haven for them all.
On the way home from work, Edward phoned Bess.
‘Right,’ Bess said, unnerved. She’d just parked outside the house and looked at it as her stepdaughter would see it: changed utterly.
Jojo had not visited once since the renovations. She had accompanied Hugh, Paul, Lena and Heidi to a couple of meals with her father and Bess when Paul had been home from New York, and that was it, apart from the wedding.
In some ways, Bess would be perfectly happy if Jojo had no part in her or Edward’s life but she was his daughter and he loved her.
She wanted to say, ‘Jojo should grow up! Nothing in life is easy!’ She wanted to say so many things but none of them would be helpful. If she’d had a retinue of female friends to call, then life might have been easier, but she didn’t. The mothers she met when Amy was at school had not been her friends, scared as they were of her stealing their damn husbands, which was laughable. Bess had been trying to cope with single parenthood, not fend off bored married men.
At work, she’d had to be utterly professional, and besides, she’d nearly always been in a far higher position than most of the other female staff in all the companies for which she’d worked: a woman apart because, at that time, there were far fewer female CPAs, and she’d known she’d lower her power base if she went to lunch with the assistants and receptionists, even though she’d yearned for female company. No wonder women in business were seen as such tough cookies: they’d had to be to survive.
So Bess had cut herself off and now here she was: couldn’t get her daughter to come up and have dinner with her, and with no women friends to talk to.
She went into the house and found her husband’s old address book, found Nora Brannigan’s number and dialled it before she chickened out.
Nora’s soft warm voice came on the line.
‘Nora, it’s Bess here, Bess Brannigan.’
Cool, calm and collected Nora took a breath.
‘Bess,’ she said finally, ‘lovely to talk to you. We got the invitations,’ she went on, as if it was obvious that this was what Bess was phoning about.
‘You’re coming?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world. It’s not going to be too dressy, is it?’ Nora asked. ‘I’m not much of a woman for dressing up.’
‘Wear what you want,’ said Bess, smiling. She really liked this woman. Nora had the courage of her convictions in the most fabulous way. You couldn’t help but admire her. ‘Nora, perhaps we could have coffee or lunch during the week?’ she went on. ‘I … I wanted to talk to you about something.’
With the calm of an agent handler in Moscow discussing a wild change of plans with a double agent, Nora took it all in her stride.
‘Of course, Bess. What day suits?’
‘How about now?’ Bess wanted to say, but controlled herself. ‘Friday?’
‘Friday it is.’
‘I could come to Silver Bay – there’s that nice café near you, isn’t there, the one with the coffee buns?’ Bess said because she’d met Amy there once. Odd that Amy lived so near to Nora, in that quirky square with the beautiful old trees and the pretty houses.
‘The Death By Coffee ones with the hard coffee icing and a health warning with them? They’re fabulous but they go straight onto my hips,’ sighed Nora. ‘See you there at one.’
Jojo parked the car in the driveway of Tanglewood, noticing with pain that her mother’s crappy old Mini had gone. Mum had loved that car. Its suspension had been a thing of distant memory and too many encounters with shopping centre car park pillars meant it had been dented so many times it almost resembled a piece of modern art. Squash it a smidge more and it could have stood as an outdoor installation for a Manhattan gallery with a card under it: ‘Battered, bashed, still working: a symbol of modern life.’
‘Why doesn’t your mum have a swanky car?’ her younger cousin, Trina had asked once idly. Jojo knew that if Trina had access to any sum of money at all, she’d spend it at once on designer clothes, partying and on renting a fabulous apartment. She would spend like a lottery winner until it all ran out and be ripe for one of those TV shows on ex-lottery-millionaires who had spent wildly and wanted to speak out about how it had all gone wrong and they were looking for a cleaning job and had had to give up the fags.
But wanting a swanky car was merely Trina repeating what she’d learned as a kid. It was like listening to Aunt Helen speaking. Helen would have had a brand new Range Rover or a Bentley blocking the drive if she’d been married to the rich one of the three Brannigan brothers. Not one car: no, two. Two Bentleys.
‘Mum doesn’t care about things like cars,’ Jojo had explained.
She hadn’t entirely understood this herself when she was fourteen and her mother would roll up at school to collect her on wet afternoons.
Then, Jojo had been in the throes of teenage hormones and was embarrassed by the Mini’s decreptitude.
‘Ugh, I hate this crappy old car,’ she’d say sulkily, flinging herself into the front seat and shoving Noodle, a grey half-poodle, half-many other things into the back. Noodle had existed in the years before clever dog breeding had created no shedding Labradoodles.
Thanks to Noodle’s wildly mixed-up parentage, she shed hair like a four-week-old Christmas tree shed pine needles. The car was covered in it, the back of Jojo’s navy school uniform was instantly covered in hair as soon as she’d sat down and with Noodle half on her, deliriously trying to wash her face, the front of Jojo’s uniform would soon be covered in grey dog hair too.
‘You love it, really,’ Mum would say, smiling. ‘Keeps you in touch with the real world.’
‘I got an E in my maths homework today and Miss Harrison read me the riot act. That’s enough real world for me,’ Jojo muttered. ‘Dad will go mental.’
‘Never mind your father,’ Lottie said cheerfully. ‘Not everyone is a maths head. We’ll get it into his skull one of these days that you aren’t going to college to study engineering. Now, I know you’ve probably got enough homework to keep you going for ten years but will we stop in Santina’s for a quick coffee? We can sit outside under an umbrella, have Noodle with us and share a piece of cake?’
Much later, at college with people from all over the country and all different backgrounds, Jojo finally understood how marvellous it was her mother didn’t care about stuff. She’d found that too many people measured themselves and others by what they owned rather than by who they were.
Jojo’s mum didn’t need to show off her family’s wealth to anyone. Family, love and kindness meant all to her. When she said she wanted her children to be happy, it wasn’t a platitude: she meant it.
Be the happiest roadsweeper in the world rather than the most miserable brain surgeon was her motto.
The car was gone. So too was the statue of the Venus de Milo that Lottie had bought for half nothing and had set about carefully ‘ageing’ by painting it with yogurt one summer.
‘I read that yogurt helps mould grow on stone so it looks older,’ she’d said, painting earnestly, in her gardening clothes with her blonde hair tied up with what might or might not have been an old duster. She’d proudly placed the statue in a prominent place on the right-hand side of the drive where they could all view its beauty.
Sadly, Venus had merely looked as if she’d been badly white-washed for about three months until one day Dad had run back into the house shouting, ‘Girls! Paul! Come quick. Venus has been transformed! The Louvre restorers or else helpful elves have come overnight!’
Laughing, delighted, they’d run outside to the drive to see that the white-washed look had been miraculously replaced with a genuinely old mossy effect on the stone, making the bargain basement statue look like a priceless antique unearthed from a lost Mediterranean garden.
Mum had cried. ‘I’m going to yogurt everything!’ she said, wiping her eyes.
‘Stay out of my room,’ Paul had joked.
‘Yours is already a shrine to penici
llin,’ his mother joked back. Paul liked to take mugs of tea upstairs to drink while studying, and didn’t bring them back down. Quarter-full mugs, ripe with green and white mould which bloomed out of all his vessels when they were gathered up.
Paul should have been here with her, Jojo thought miserably, getting out of her own car and looking around at the garden of Tanglewood to see what else had changed. Set on a hill overlooking the Irish Sea, the house was one level and had always had a hint of 1970s bungalow about it. All that had changed.
In the months since Jojo had been to her old home, Tanglewood had been entirely transformed. The 1970s vibe was gone. In its place was a modernist architect’s vision of how a single-storey old house might look when the entire front wall had been replaced by a sheet of plate glass revealing the sort of millennial house where something as bourgeois as curtains weren’t allowed.
The porch was now a little glacier to the left and without stepping foot inside, Jojo could see everything. A dormer upstairs had been added, with stairs that curved, and the wall where the family’s TV used to sit now appeared to be a blank concrete space with a piece of huge modern art, less Kandinsky and more the work of Coco the Clown, Jojo thought viciously, assuming her new stepmother had bought it.
‘Jojo! I’m so glad you’re here!’
Her father, a great bear of a man, enveloped her in a hug. Jojo hadn’t even heard him emerge from the house and he smelled like his old self, even with that familiar cologne he always wore. Something from the Burren Perfumery that her mother had always bought him. Heathery with a hint of lemon, and sea spray and something that was from the barks and lichens of the Burren, apparently. His hair was silver and he wore the same clothes he always wore after work: tonight, a soft grey sweater, a check shirt peeking out from the top and faded charcoal corduroys from about a million years ago.
‘Dad.’
She allowed herself to sink against him, wishing – wishing it was years ago, that her mother wasn’t gone, that she wasn’t trying to do the most difficult thing of her life without her beloved mother by her side.