Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  The rest of their part of the fifth floor was a warren of tiny offices and cubicles where the work actually went on.

  Cassie, as a senior organiser, had her own office close to the huge meeting room which Cassie’s friend Belinda called ‘the place where ideas went to die’.

  Loren Larousse – which had to be a made-up name for a girl from Dublin, but nobody had ever managed to get their eyes on her passport as ultimate proof – had set up Larousse Events twenty years ago and viewed the company not so much as her baby but as her own private fiefdom.

  In the media, she was much vaunted as a female entrepreneur who loved to hire women. In private and within the tight-knit industry, she was an equal opportunities employer: capable of being a complete bitch to both men and women.

  Whenever she sat at a meeting in the huge boardroom with its vast ceiling-to-floor windows, Cassie dreamed of pushing Loren out.

  ‘We all think you’re a witch, so let’s see if you can fly!’ she’d say gleefully.

  But that was bolshie Cassie speaking, the nineteen-year-old girl who’d been full of who’s-going-to-make-me attitude. Modern Cassie, who was tying herself in knots to be the perfect mother, perfect wife and perfect career woman, would never say such a thing.

  It was now 8.15 and the Larousse Events staff were just getting in, hanging up coats, checking how many zillion emails had uploaded in the night, hoping for a few penile enlargement ones or lonely girls with unlikely names who wanted to be their best friends because they could happily be deleted.

  Cassie’s head ached as she thought of the day ahead. Her workload today included the final stages of setting up a conference in a large hotel west of the city, where it transpired the spa was going to be out of order during the three-day conference the following week.

  ‘They’ll be too busy to be in the spa,’ blustered the hotel’s manager the day before, a new hire who made Cassie long for his predecessor, who’d made everything run smoothly.

  ‘Theoretically they might be too tired to use the mini-bar, but it will be stocked in every room, won’t it?’ Cassie had replied. ‘We need this sorted out or we’ll have to discuss pulling the conference,’ she added.

  That was utterly last resort stuff. Everywhere would be booked. The company needed a big hotel and really big conference hotels in Dublin were short on the ground.

  She was thinking how she’d call him first thing to see if he’d come up with a solution, and knew she’d have to drive out there to talk in person, when she spotted Belinda, her closest work colleague and possibly second-best friend on the planet, walking back from the ladies’ room, handbag in hand.

  Belinda was ying to Cassie’s yang – a tall, cool blonde, keen on silk T-shirts, sharp skirts and Vogue-editor heels, as well as done-every-month highlights and blood-red manicures. Cassie was petite, had dark curly hair like her sister Coco, and taming it into work mode was easier when she could corral it back into a loose knot without actually doing much in the way of brushing it. Brushing caused lethal 220-volts frizz.

  While Coco was the sister who wore vintage and lived in fifties cinched-in dresses, Cassie’s wardrobe veered towards the androgynous, with loose modern jackets and trousers. Never skirts. Never heels. Heels were girlie and Cassie was not. Being her sister’s protector from the age of seven meant Cassie had been the ultimate tomboy and she still was, she sometimes thought.

  Instead, Coco was the girlie one with the bow-shaped lips and dimple on one side. Cassie had a strong chin, deep-set grave eyes and a serious problem with freckles: cute on kids, but not so cute on late-thirty-something career women.

  Sometimes she wondered if she’d got those freckles from her mother because nobody else in the family had them except Beth, but because there were almost no photos of Marguerite, she’d never know. Her memories of her mother had faded to that memory of perfume in the car, something spicy she’d never been able to identify because it wasn’t there fully in her consciousness, just hidden beneath the surface.

  When she closed her eyes, though, Cassie was sure she could smell it: something exotic, reminding her of a Moroccan souk with spices, heady oud and vanilla.

  ‘What do you think?’ Belinda asked in a murmur as they fell into step beside each other. ‘It’s a new foundation,’ she continued, gesturing to her perfect skin. ‘Said to last forever and make me young and dewy. Or something along those lines. I don’t know why I believe that crap, actually, but they sucker me in every time. Advertising works.’

  Cassie smiled.

  At forty-one, Belinda was three years older than Cassie, but had one older son who was unlikely to have woken her in the night since he was away at college. She actually did look pretty dewy but that was down to facials, IPL lasers and a new thing called jet flushing that cost as much as a week’s food shop, and apparently you needed six in a row to get any result at all. Cassie knew she would never be getting flushed unless her numbers on the lottery came up.

  ‘You look fabulous,’ she told her friend truthfully. ‘Are you still using that magic concealer pen to get rid of under-eye circles?’

  ‘Yup. Fakes eight hours’ sleep.’ Belinda was single and liked her own space, but not all the time. Gentlemen callers were welcome as long as they knew when to go home. Men messed up the towels.

  Cassie used to wonder if Belinda was lonely. But then she realised that these days, she was sometimes lonely, and she was married with kids. Maybe those date-night people were onto something.

  ‘Can I borrow the magic concealer pen?’ Cassie asked.

  ‘Lily had a nightmare?’

  ‘Yes. Can’t you tell? I’m trying to eradicate it with caffeination before Loren sees me and rips me in two for appearing in the office looking less than perfect.’

  ‘Yeah, well, we can’t all have a professional blow-dry every morning and get dressed from a wardrobe set up by a personal shopper,’ Belinda replied.

  She briefly gazed at her friend’s pale face, the bruised smudges beneath her brown eyes and the wet hair. With amazing sleight of hand, Belinda took Cassie’s coat and laptop bag, handed over her own handbag, and muttered: ‘Go. Let the under-eye thing do its magic. Use the highlighter/sculptor thing too. Charlotte Tilbury. Ludicrous price but worth it. Does actually make you look like you’ve been on holiday and have cheekbones like a supermodel. We should have gone into the beauty products business years ago, honey. That’s where the money is today. Then we wouldn’t have to be prostituting ourselves working for the Wicked Witch of the West.’

  ‘Isn’t it the Witch of East?’ said Cassie.

  ‘She was the good one, wasn’t she? Nah, West. Loren had all the good sucked out of her on her last liposuction procedure.’

  Cassie had her first laugh of the day and, juggling her coffee and Belinda’s handbag, headed for the loo.

  The ladies was large and full of chatter as women from the various companies on the floor talked while they brushed their hair and slicked on lipstick. Usually a hotbed of rumours, the current one was about the US event company, Prestige, taking over Larousse Events.

  Cassie still hadn’t found out if it was true or not but that didn’t stop the gossip. From what she could ascertain, Prestige was a much leaner affair than their own company. Friendly takeovers were just like hostile ones but with more smiles: many people would still lose their jobs. The thought sent a little shiver through Cassie. More change, and she hated change. She hoped that rumour was just a rumour.

  She went to work with Belinda’s magic products, dried her hair with some paper towels and listened.

  The other gossip was that Denise, from the small accountancy firm on their floor, had left her husband after an affair with one of the personal trainer guys in the gym on floor ten. As Cassie applied Belinda’s brilliant concealing pen to the dark shadows under her eyes, she heard how Denise had been sick of her workaholic husband and how he had no tim
e for her.

  ‘Nothing in the bedroom department,’ the girl with all the news informed her avid listeners.

  ‘Do you think yer woman with the Rolling Stones fella was right about how to keep a man?’ someone said. ‘Cook in the kitchen and hooker in the bedroom?’

  Everyone was silent as they thought about this. At least half of the women on the fifth floor had kids and really needed a wife to keep the show on the road. Bedroom antics were way down the list.

  ‘I wouldn’t be into yer man from the Stones,’ said Gladys, senior supervisor from the insurance company, as if Mick Jagger was waiting outside for her command to have him washed and sent to her tent. ‘The mouth on him.’ She shuddered. ‘Now, that nice Michael Bublé, if he was around … Well, you wouldn’t kick him out of bed for getting crumbs on the sheets, would you?’

  Everyone laughed, breaking the tension.

  But Cassie didn’t laugh. Instead, she thought of how long it was since she and Shay had made love. True, she was perpetually too tired for sex. Arguing with the girls gave her tension headaches too, but it was months now and Shay hadn’t made a single move to make love to her. She tried to remember the dates but couldn’t, yet she realised that it was a long time since Shay had reached out in the bed towards the wall of her back, stroking, telling her he wanted her.

  She put down the magic concealer pen, no longer really caring about how she looked. Was her husband going off her? Had he gone off her? The ripple of anxiety over abandonment she’d never truly been able to shake began to hit earthquake status.

  ‘Cassie.’ A voice interrupted this terrible thought. ‘Do you have a moment?’

  It was Karen, a junior in Cassie’s department: a sweet girl in her twenties who was going out with the boyfriend from hell.

  Desperate to talk, Karen just blurted it out: ‘I told him what I was thinking and he walked out. Just walked out, Cassie. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I thought we’d talk about our relationship but he didn’t. He got his stuff, said I was too high-maintenance with my talk about our plans for the future, and then he went. My brother’s wedding is next weekend and we were going together, but now I’ll be there on my own.’ Karen’s crying sounding like howling. ‘Cassie, what do I do?’

  Cassie managed to put an arm around Karen and let her howl.

  As ever, it was a supreme irony that Karen had come to her for help. People had been coming to Cassie for help and support all her life. People told her things. She didn’t know why.

  ‘You have an open face; we have open faces,’ Coco had said years before. ‘We look like we can keep secrets and that we don’t judge.’

  Coco had been born looking as if she was interested in everyone, with sparkling brown eyes that could turn almost black with emotion and feeling, and made the person talking to her feel as if nobody else on the planet existed but them and their problems. She exuded warmth, caring and kindness. And she didn’t mind.

  Cassie had been born looking as if she was the woman who could sort out every problem, starting with the Middle East. And she did mind.

  Tell me and I will fix it was the unspoken message on her face, and although Cassie had spent hours looking at herself in the mirror trying to figure out why people felt this about her, she was at a loss. She only saw a woman with dark eyes, winged brows, those darn freckles and a too-wide mouth that possibly smiled too much because smiling was safer, she’d learned over the years. Smiling stopped people asking ‘are you all right?’

  Since she’d been seven, though, she’d understood pain. Was that the secret? Did people see pain in her eyes and think she’ll understand?

  Either way, Cassie fervently wished she hadn’t been born with this look on her face. She knew the secrets of half the people in her office, many of the mothers in the girls’ school and, when Coco was busy, her friends turned to Cassie for advice. It was exhausting.

  Grammy Pearl had the same gift. People loved to talk to Grammy and total strangers flung themselves at her at parties, telling her their life stories while searching for tissues in their pockets or handbags.

  Weird how genetics worked. They’d got this unasked-for gift from Pearl.

  It could hardly have come from Marguerite.

  Still, Cassie summoned up the strength she’d been summoning up since she was seven, closed off her own problems deep inside her, and began to calm Karen down.

  She might text Coco later and see if she could come round for supper that evening. Coco always cheered her up. And Coco never, ever let her down.

  Two

  Coco Keneally liked to think that her vintage shop, The Twentieth Century Boutique, was a bit of a mysterious jewel: bijou-looking on the outside, a slightly shabby Tardis on the inside because it hadn’t been painted in a few years, and yet filled with sparkle. Set on the main shopping street in Silver Bay, a once down-at-heel but now up-and-coming part of Dublin Bay’s outer reaches, it stood out among a trail of shops that included two competing hairdressing salons, a small jewellers there since the year dot, a convenience store and a new coffee shop that had made the local pubs up their game in terms of morning coffee and cakes. There was a sprawling pet shop, a small strange establishment that never seemed to be open but had clocks, toasters, screwdrivers and the odd power tool in the dusty window, and a glamorous chemist where a quick trip for tissues could result in a haul of nail varnish, things for removing hard skin from feet and an essential oil known to cure all ailments if rubbed on every day.

  Coco had been running her shop for five years and the premises covered two shop fronts and a large upstairs, where the more expensively labelled clothes and accessories were: the rare and valuable Diors, Chanels, original Halstons, the tiny YSL Le Smoking nobody could fit into but which Coco found herself loath to sell via the internet on the grounds that, one day, the right person would come into the shop and Coco would know it.

  She couldn’t get so much as a leg into the suit – not without major amputation of a limb. Le Smoking suits had been made with svelte, tiny-boned women in mind and Coco was more of a pocket-sized Gina Lollobrigida: big hips, a DD bra to keep her breasts firmly in place, and the ability to put on weight by so much as looking at a bar of chocolate. So she went for a fifties look herself – sleek dark eyebrows à la Elizabeth Taylor, dark eyes emphasised with a cat flick, ruby red lipstick that suited her full mouth with its finely arched upper lip – and idly waited for the day when a woman walked into her store to befit the exquisite YSL suit.

  Vintage store was perhaps the wrong description for the place, Coco often thought. It was a treasure trove of the past, mysteries bound up in clothes, handbags and costume jewellery, memories of other lives.

  Coco loved the past. ‘Who knew what sort of life this nightgown has seen?’ she might say, holding up a crêpe de Chine garment when she was in Grammy Pearl’s house around the corner going through a cache of clothes, searching for special pieces.

  If Great-Aunt Edie, Grammy’s younger sister, was visiting at the same time, she’d sniff disparagingly and say something about how she couldn’t understand people buying second-hand clothes.

  ‘If faded old nighties from the thirties are vintage, then I’m from the moon,’ Edie would add. ‘Vintage is just other people’s old stuff, smelly and stained …’

  Edie disapproved of people working in shops that sold other people’s old clothes. She’d wanted Coco to go to college to study law or something … well, suitable.

  ‘I’m the oldest vintage here, Edie, and calm down,’ Pearl would say warningly. Nobody was allowed to criticise Coco or Cassie when Pearl was around. ‘Play nice or no cakes with the tea. I’ve got almond Danishes.’

  Grammy Pearl had encouraged Coco every step of the way with her shop but, strangely, she didn’t seem as keen on the past history of garments in the way Coco was. Grammy Pearl didn’t even like talking about the past. She was more of a looking
-forward person; astonishing for someone of seventy-eight, Coco thought.

  But then, helping to raise your granddaughters kept a person young, as Grammy Pearl often said. She looked quite like Great-Aunt Edie in many respects: same strong chin, good bones, high forehead. But where Edie was all angles and wrinkles around her mouth from pursing it up in near-constant disapproval, Pearl’s face had the softness of the finest silk, Coco thought. Edie dyed her hair a rich and unlikely shade of brown, while Pearl’s was white as snow and clustered around her face the way it did in photos going way back. Pearl’s eyes gleamed with fun and enthusiasm, and she used face powder, lipstick and a hint of mascara every day.

  Pearl was proud of everything Coco did, even if she didn’t wear vintage herself. But Coco loved to watch the expressions on her grandmother’s face on those times she visited the shop, fingering everything from recent, pre-loved things to garments that had last graced skin when the Second World War was raging through Europe.

  The stocking pile was top of Coco’s agenda when she opened up that September morning. Silk stockings from that era didn’t last in any meaningful way but there were places where you could order honey silk stockings with the all-important seam up the back.

  A lollipop-pink-haired fashion stylist on a mission had ransacked the stocking display the previous evening and after Coco had run an eye over her empire, she did some quick spritzing of some of the new stock to make sure it all smelled OK, then took the lock off the door to proclaim that they were open, and settled down to reorganise her stockings.

  Normally she went online first thing, to Facebook and her blog, to pin up photos of her latest finds, but she needed Adriana doing front of house when she was in the back office on her laptop, and Adriana was late.

  The internet was what made The Twentieth Century Boutique a success. Neither the suburban village that was Silver Bay, nor the city of Dublin itself, were big enough markets for a shop like Coco’s with its wildly diverse and often high-end stock, but with one click of a mouse, a buyer in Melbourne, Memphis or Mysore could pick up an alligator handbag, an original Biba coat or a highly sought-after Rifat Özbek bone-decorated jacket.