Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘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 th
em 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.

  Flat shoes were useful for big hotels, Cassie knew, as she parked as close as she could to the enormous Springfield Hotel.

  The Springfield was like a giant E block set down in the middle of a field that had been landscaped to death and now had walks, little streams and bridges dotted all over the place. To get to any one place you had to walk miles, and guests at weddings had been known to spend hours wandering tipsily around in the wee small hours, wielding hotel keys and saying, ‘It’s over here, near this statue, I know it is!’ until rescued by the concierge staff.

  Billed as a spa hotel, it was, in fact, a major conference and wedding hotel because it had four hundred rooms, three giant conference rooms and a ballroom you could play ice hockey in, if you so wished.

  Leo Quirke, the new manager, kept Cassie waiting when she arrived at half two to discuss the problems for the conference starting on Thursday. She sat in the outer room of Leo’s office and thought how she’d never had to wait for his predecessor, who had gone on to run a department of a luxury hotel in Boca Raton and who was, no doubt, delirious to have washed his hands of the Springfield, which had been beset with so many teething problems the joke in the trade was that it needed its own dentist.

  Too big, built too quickly, and with too many corners cut, there were always problems with the hotel. But Fiachra – Leo’s predecessor – had sorted them out. Leo seemed to be more of an ah, sure, whatever type of manager. The type who’d give you a shove on the shoulder to imply a matey we’re-all-in-this-together.

  ‘Cassie, sorry to keep you waiting.’ Leo, who was forty-something, bank managerial in a navy chalk-striped suit he was clearly no longer able to button, smiled urbanely and held out a hand. ‘You are looking lovely, if I may say so,’ he added, doing some eyebrow lifting.

  Cassie gave him the you may not say so stare she’d perfected over many years in the events management business, shook his hand briefly and said crisply: ‘Can we go into your office and sort this out, Leo? I’m pressed for time.’

  She walked in ahead of him, sat down at the desk and quickly spread her papers in front of her. Larousse had a watertight contract for the event and it was very specific on deal-breakers. Facilities not working were top of a long list that went over many issues.

  Leo leapt into the fray. ‘Obviously we are doing all we can from this end,’ he said. He did the eyebrow thing again.

  Was that flirting? Cassie had no idea. It was millions of years since anyone had flirted with her. She didn’t give out any signals, did she?

  Right now she had a headache, her hair had dried strangely after that morning’s rain, so she’d had to pull it into a tight bun, and despite the application of Belinda’s make-up, she wasn’t sure how she looked. She knew how she felt, though: tired, headachey – probably the tautness of the darn bun – and worried about what she’d do if she had to pull a conference for a hundred and twenty-five people two days before it was due to go ahead.

  Flirting? Did Leo have any idea how close to the edge she was?

  The set-up crew were due into the hotel first thing on Thursday with the company’s logo boards, presenters and goodie bags, and Cassie herself was due there by twelve to go over the final checks for the meals, drinks and entertainment for Thursday and Friday night. The paraphernalia for the Saturday golfing match was being handled by Jason and his crew from Larousse, who specialised in sports events. Jason was a dab hand with golf events and had several professional players’ managers’ numbers on his personal mobile. Yet secretly he hated golf and only liked golfers for the glory of those shifting shoulder muscles when they hit a fabulous drive; but then nobody needed to know that.

  ‘You were a little unclear on the phone,’ Cassie began in her discussion with Leo. Saying you figured someone had been downright lying on the phone never started a conversation well. ‘What exactly is the problem with the spa, Leo, and what is being done to fix it?’

  ‘We’re doing everything,’ Leo said gravely. ‘You know how tricky spas can be … The hammam has a problem and there’s something wrong with the pool filters …’

  The pool had been refitted at vast expense only last year, Cassie thought, instincts prickling.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ said Cassie suddenly.

  He hesitated.

  ‘I love the spa here,’ Cassie said, standing up and making for the door.

  He had no choice but to follow her.

  Whatever the question, flat shoes were the answer, she thought, as she walked down endless corridors with Leo scurrying to keep up, arriving finally at the spa.

  Instead of the familiar spa scent of essential oils, non-stop burning of candles and the inevitable hint of chlorine, she smelled paint. Bestowing a glittering and dangerous smile on her companion, Cassie pushed open the double doors to find that the Springfield spa and health club was being repainted.

  ‘Water leakage,’ tried Leo weakly.

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘Well, you know, all over the place …’

  Cassie marched around, pushing into every changing room, checking the hammam – stone cold and it took forever to heat up – and the pool area.

  Painters wandered around with cans of paint, and nobody looked to be in any sort of rush. There was a mañana atmosphere, helped along with the hotel’s jazzy Muzak. All they needed were a few cocktails and the whole thing might turn into a party at the drop of a baseball cap.

  ‘Is anything actually not working apart from it all being turned off so you can paint?’ Cassie asked Leo.

  He took a deep breath and then said, ‘No.’

  Cassie smothered the desire to stab him. Shay would undoubtedly be wildly busy at work and therefore not available to bail her out if she was arrested for the said stabbing. She put her game face on again.

  ‘Right. Get them all finished and out of here tonight, spend tomorrow eradicating the smell of paint, heating the pool and the hammam, and we have a deal. I’ll be here tomorrow first thing to check. Otherwise I will be cancelling and you’ll be getting a call from Loren Larousse about the financial implications of breaking a contract with us. Morally or legally correct or not, I can tell you that Loren will waste no time telling other event management people about this and it will not be good for the Springfield’s future conference bookings. You can phone me on the mobile to discuss in an hour.’ Cassie delivered the final blow. ‘I need to get back to the office to check out where else we can hold the conference. If we have to pay more for a higher quality hotel or for travelling down the country, we will – and trust me, I know that from past experience – Loren will take you to court for breach of contract.’

  At that, Leo paled.

  There were times, Cassie thought, when her boss’s tough reputation within the industry came in useful. In reality, court cases took forever and helped neither side professionally, but still, nobody who knew what Loren Larousse was really like wanted to cross her in business.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that …’ began Leo, blustering.

  Cassie felt momentarily sorry for him, but then thought of all the work involved if she had to even attempt to co-ordinate another hotel, undoubtedly not one in Dublin, and how she’d explain all of this to the conference people themselves. Loren would blame her for not literally camping down in the hotel because there was a new and untried manager around, and she would end up spending Thursday and Friday night stuck in the inevitable room beside the lift, overseeing everything personally in an attempt to make it all up to everyone.

  At these thoughts, her feelings of sympathy withered and died.

  ‘Leo, we are in business. We don’t arrange conferences in hotels where the faciliti
es get closed for redecoration on a whim. I have one hundred and twenty-five important guests coming on Thursday to stay with you for a convention booked six months ago, and you think it’s OK to repaint the spa while they’re here so they can’t use it?’

  ‘Well, you know …’

  More bluster. What was wrong with saying, ‘Sorry, I screwed up’?

  ‘Leo, I will keep my boss from phoning up your chief executive and serving you as Thursday’s banquet main course if you can sort this out. Capisce?’

  Then she turned on her heel and walked out.

  It took twenty minutes to get out of the hotel and find her car, by which time it had started raining again and Cassie’s hair and clothes were wet through. Shivering, she sat in the car with the heater jacked up and thought of how nice it might be to text someone she loved. The girls were in school with their phones, hopefully turned to silent. Coco was always busy during shop opening hours and her speciality was returning texts three hours later by saying:

  Sorry! Busy! Didn’t see phone!

  And she and Shay rarely rang each other at work anymore. So she sent Coco a text instead:

  Hi, honey. Come to lunch at the weekend? C xxxx

  Four

  Her grandmother really had been an amazing woman, Cassie thought as she unlocked the front door, weak with pure exhaustion, and Lily and Beth hurried into the house ahead of her. Grammy Pearl had raised two kids who weren’t even her own and Cassie wondered if she and Coco had been as annoyingly teenager-ish as her own daughters were.

  From the moment she’d picked them up from school, there had been squabbling, a heated debate over why they had less pocket money than anyone else in their year (Beth), and a mutinous murmur over how her phone was totally crappy and why didn’t she have a really cool phone like everyone else (Lily).

  Inside their painstakingly renovated house, the girls dumped their rucksacks full of books and their coats on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, shrugging off the detritus of school. Nobody moved to help their mother with the shopping she’d raced around the supermarket to purchase before she’d collected them.