Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘When evening comes, all I have the energy for is sleep!’ Carla said crossly.

  Phoebe looked once more out the window at the square towards the pretty houses on the other side. ‘It’s so beautiful here,’ she said, trying to drag the conversation back to something less contentious.

  ‘Humph,’ said Mrs Costello, following her gaze. ‘Some foreigners moved in last year. Not that they’re noisy yet but you don’t know when it’ll start. Gloria O’Brien lives in that house. Her husband’s gone gaga, in a home. And that’s Pearl Keneally’s house over there. Always a crowd in there on a Thursday,’ she added grimly. ‘Playing poker, I hear.’

  ‘That sounds like fun,’ said Phoebe. She could remember many evenings at home with her father teaching her the card games he’d learned as a kid in County Clare: twenty-five; its more complex cousin, forty-fives; pontoon; and gin rummy. In the remote countryside where he’d been brought up, his mother had cycled off on her bike many a night to different houses, where they’d play for hours to win a goose or a duck.

  ‘There’s a washer and dryer in the utility room. Coin-operated,’ Mrs Costello continued, taking a look at Phoebe’s very plain outfit. ‘What did you say you were studying?’

  ‘Fashion.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know it,’ were Mrs Costello’s final words as she departed, with a last look at the bedsit as if she were leaving a room of valuable antiques and sets of Sevres china to a couple of bulls.

  Phoebe giggled to herself as the door shut loudly behind her and began to unpack. She wasn’t sure what she could do to make bedsit number four, painted a bilious green, look homely, but she’d try.

  Once she’d unpacked and laid her possessions out in the bedsit to make it feel more like her own place, Phoebe stared, as she had so many times before, at her wardrobe. In Wicklow, living in a farm in the hills, there had not been much call for high fashion. Even though Phoebe had lived and dreamed clothes since she was nine, had collected Vogue with her pocket money, and had fantasies about cutting exquisite garments and draping them straight on to model’s bodies, her own wardrobe was somehow less than fashionista. Tall, strong girls looked ridiculous in modern cream tulle with a felted bodice: the outfit Phoebe was sure had finally won her a place in the prestigious Larkin College of Art and Design.

  Phoebe had made the outfit for Lizette, a platinum-haired hairdresser from the village, and she’d modelled it for the photos. But Lizzy was small and slender-boned, while Phoebe had no slender bones anywhere and had been a star netball player all during school. Finding jeans to fit her long legs was a nightmare. The best thing she’d ever made for herself was a heavy wool coat, slightly eighteenth century in design with a long, sweeping tail to it, but since then she’d been too busy with school, the farm and her portfolio to make much else.

  She’d been trying to make a new wardrobe for herself since she’d heard she’d got the place in Larkin in June, but there was so rarely any time. The sheep needed to be taken care of, the hens and ducks needed to be fed and their houses cleaned out. Phoebe had her part-time job at The Anvil, the nearest pub where farmers went for their few pints, and where a complicated system of designated drivers had been set up to cope with the drink-driving laws. Not that everyone went along with it.

  Due to her height, Phoebe was considered a good woman for taking the keys off recalcitrant men who’d decided that imbibing six pints meant they were perfectly fine to drive the pick-up truck home that night.

  ‘You’ll thank me in the morning,’ Phoebe used to say, and earned herself a few extra quid in her pay packet and a smile from the owner, a small woman who could pull a great pint but was no good when it came to playing car-key tag with drunk customers.

  The job meant she had the money for her college fees, her books and her rent in Mrs Costello’s dream bedsit, but she’d have to get work in Dublin too or she’d never cope.

  No time like the present to start looking, Phoebe thought, mustering up her courage. She walked quietly downstairs and was sure she heard a door in Mrs Costello’s apartments open. At least there was no need for an alarm system, she told herself. Mrs Costello would have any burglar whacked over the head with a frying pan before he’d got so much as a leg over a window frame.

  She’ll grow on me, Mum, Phoebe thought to herself, deciding that dictating a letter to her mother would help her cope with the loneliness.

  All her life she’d been part of a family, with people and animals. Now she was alone and it was the one part of this giant adventure she was terrified of. No Mum, no Mary-Kate, no Ethan, no Prince, no beloved farm animals.

  She was so used to talking to the farm birds that perhaps talking to herself was the answer.

  The square is not quite a square, Mam – more a rectangle – but you wouldn’t believe the plants here. All sorts of things and a fig tree … I’m not sure if I’m allowed into the garden but oh, a man with a terrier has just gone in, so I must be.

  The man and the dog were both old and they did a slow perambulation of the tiny park, with the dog lifting his leg on a few bushes, before both shuffled off again.

  Phoebe smiled at the man, who smiled back, and she felt more human to have smiled at another person. Not everyone around here could be as standoffish and suspicious as Mrs Costello.

  But perhaps it wasn’t really her landlady’s fault, Phoebe tried to think charitably. Maybe poor Mrs Costello had been overrun by mad tenants who’d graffitied the house with spray paint, phoned Mars on the house telephone, and blocked all the toilets before scarpering without paying their rent? Who knew?

  Phoebe looked wistfully over at the pretty house with the cerulean blue windowsills and the riotous garden and wished they’d been looking for tenants and not Mrs Costello. She liked the look of the upstairs room, which faced the square and had the branches of a beech tree tapping lazily against it. But she was in Mrs Costello’s, and if Dad’s death had taught her anything, it was that there was no point in wishing for what wasn’t true.

  Think the best of people, Mam liked to say.

  I will, Mam.

  Twice a week after Mass, Antoinette and her girlfriends went for coffee.

  ‘No point going every day; it wouldn’t be special,’ Dilys said. Dilys was the oldest, the mammy of the group, and was celebrating because she was driving again since she’d had her second hip replaced.

  ‘I am the Six Million Dollar Woman,’ she liked to joke. ‘They have rebuilt me!’

  She still had the walker because the left hip wasn’t totally healed, plus she liked the walker because it got her to the front of the queue in sales.

  ‘Nobody can afford to go for coffee every day,’ said Josette, who was the youngest at fifty-nine, and was addicted to clothes shopping.

  Antoinette, who was sixty-four and felt every one of those years despite her determination to hold on to her looks, loved their coffee mornings.

  Sometimes they went to the coffee shop beside the church, and other times they went to the big shopping centre where Josette and Dilys could indulge in their fierce passion for shopping, albeit different types. Dilys was a bits-’n’-bobs shopper, ever searching for the best deal: the cheapest and yet most expensive-looking toilet roll holder; the new tights that kept you warm or cold, whichever your body needed; any number of tchotchkes that might cheer up her already wildly cheered-up house.

  ‘I hate those hoarder shows,’ she sometimes said mournfully. ‘They make me feel like I’m one step away from being buried alive by stuff. I have to stop buying things. I mean, imagine years from now and I’m stuck in the house without room to move, suffocated by cushions, nice floral storage boxes I never use or blasted china pigs.’

  She liked collecting pigs.

  ‘I think my mother started me off,’ she said, ‘but it could have been Nana Reilly. With the knitting, you know. Great knitter, she was. I have an old pig she knitted for me when
I was a child, so that could have been it. But now I see them and I have to have them. This feeling comes over me and it’s no use, my self-restraint goes out the window and I’m at the till in five seconds.’

  Dilys’ house, quiet now that the kids were grown and Bob had died, was a shrine to pigs in every form: embroidered tablecloths with piglet faces; china ornaments in every porcine design; pink, satin-edged hand towels with piglets embroidered on them; mugs that oinked when you picked them up.

  ‘I beg of you, don’t get me anything with a pig on it,’ she’d say at Christmas and her birthday. And then they’d be out for a day, would wander into a shop and Dilys would shriek at the sight of a pen with a plastic pig hanging off the end, or a handbag hook with a piglet painted on it.

  ‘It’s a bargain! I know I shouldn’t but …’

  Josette was more of a clothes bargain sort of woman. Show her a blouse with a button missing on the sale rail, and she was in heaven.

  ‘I’m sure I have a button like those in my button box!’ she’d say delightedly, and both Dilys and Antoinette wouldn’t dream of pointing out that anaemic peach wasn’t her colour and that they’d yet to see her wear the last blouse she’d bought that only needed a button to finish it off.

  Antoinette didn’t shop much on those days out. She liked younger boutiques than her two friends, whereas they seemed content to settle into what Antoinette called old-ladyness with acrylic cardigans and flat, lumpy shoes that she couldn’t have borne to wear. She might feel old sometimes – certainly she did since Arthur died – but she didn’t want to look old. Old wasn’t beautiful, old wasn’t pretty, and Antoinette had always been pretty.

  She often wanted to say, to Josette in particular, ‘Stop with the flat shoes!’ But she said nothing.

  Instead, she got her hair highlighted at a salon filled with young, trendy girls and boys who had asymmetric cuts, odd earrings and fluffed up her hair with expensive product, saying things like: ‘This is young and trendy, Antoinette, and very modern.’

  Antoinette wore slim jeans, watched her weight and saw no need to look old, no matter that she had to use a special jar-opener thing in the kitchen because of how stiff her hands got. She had nicer clothes than her daughter-in-law, she thought with some pride. Really, Cassie hadn’t a clue. If Cassie wasn’t so pretty – and she was, Antoinette knew, with a hint of the jealously she was ashamed of – she’d look like a man with those boring suit jackets and trousers she always wore.

  Cassie was one of those capable women: the sort who could change a plug as easily as wash the car. Men hated that in a woman, Antoinette felt. Arthur had loved her femininity and the fact that she’d needed him so much.

  This reliance on each other had formed the bedrock of their marriage: Arthur Reynolds had a beautiful, ladylike wife who wouldn’t put a pearly-polished fingernail on a screwdriver if you paid her to; and Antoinette had a big, strong husband who treated her like a princess and brought her flowers home every Friday night. Glorious red tulips for true love; richly scented blue hyacinths for constancy; and flowering jasmine for sweet love.

  ‘Did you get the washing machine sorted?’ Dilys asked her as they stopped for the inevitable second cup of tea and cakes – chocolate rice cakes for Antoinette, who was careful with carbs.

  ‘Shay came round to sort it out,’ said Antoinette. ‘Had it fixed in no time.’

  She was busy pouring her tea and didn’t see the searching look that passed between her two friends.

  ‘Shay? When was that?’ asked Josette conversationally.

  ‘After work. I phoned and he dropped on his way home.’

  ‘Not easy to drop into this side of the city when you live and work on the other side,’ Josette went on.

  ‘I don’t know anything about washing machines,’ Antoinette said airily. ‘That’s a man thing, isn’t it? Besides, that’s something I have to talk to you about,’ she added happily. ‘It’s a plan Shay has for me to move over with them. You know, sell my place so he and Cassie can buy a bigger house and I can have my own place attached. Not a granny flat, though – definitely not.’ She laughed as if that notion was entirely ridiculous. Antoinette Reynolds was not a granny sort of person, even though she had three grandchildren. ‘But close to Shay so I have someone to do all those difficult things.’ She beamed at her friends. ‘Solves lots of problems in one fell swoop, except how I’m going to get to see you pair all the time. I wouldn’t be up to driving over here …’

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Josette, who had an old Mini and drove it like she was about to go on to the grand prix track at Monaco, waving merrily at anyone she cut across and blowing kisses if anyone honked their horn at her.

  ‘It’s a long way,’ said Antoinette.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ Josette said, vexed. ‘You drive a Micra, Antoinette – it’s not as if you’ll be manhandling a ten-tonne truck over the East-Link bridge. And besides –’ Josette was warming to her theme now – ‘you have your life here in Clontarf. What do you want to be ending all that for to live with Shay and Cassie? Who came up with that notion?’

  ‘I did,’ admitted Antoinette. ‘It makes perfect sense.’

  ‘Ah now, Antoinette,’ said Dilys, ‘would you have liked your mother or your mother-in-law moving in with you when you were married?’

  ‘My mother never had a chance,’ Antoinette said, stung. ‘Poor woman died in her fifties. I’m only seven years older than her, you know. I have to take care of myself. A woman needs her family around her.’

  ‘Quick, Dilys, phone the undertaker,’ teased Josette. ‘If you’re about to drop dead, what about poor Dilys here, with her dodgy arteries and her metal hips that set off airport scanners at fifty paces? You don’t see her desperate to move in with her family to look after her, do you?’

  ‘Heaven forbid! I’d kill my Lorraine if we had to live together,’ admitted Dilys, speaking of her eldest daughter. ‘But even if she was a saint, I wouldn’t move in with her. Roots and wings, girls: that’s what we give our children. Not us turning up with incontinence pads and all our misery. Besides, you’re only sixty-four, Antoinette. When I was your age, I was still going to the Argentine tango nights. I’d be going now if it wasn’t for my second hip not being totally healed yet. Hard for Vincenzo to twirl me on one leg, under the circumstances.’

  ‘I’m not you, Dilys,’ Antoinette said stiffly. She’d never been a dancer: the one ladylike thing she’d never quite mastered. ‘I’m hardly moving in with incontinence pads. It’s just that I need family close to me. I need Shay.’

  They all sat in silence, the noise of the café going on around them.

  In the end, Dilys signalled to Josette that she, through virtue of age, would be the one to say it.

  ‘Is this great plan fair to Shay, or Cassie, or your grandkids?’ asked Dilys. ‘Antoinette, you’re the youngest of us in so many ways – the clothes, how you look after yourself, even those blasted rice cakes.’ She gestured to the plate with its remains of dark chocolate and a few scraps that resembled polystyrene, as far as Dilys could tell. ‘You’re the last one to be behaving like you’re the dowager and need taking care of …’

  ‘What’s wrong with wanting to have my son be around for me?’ demanded Antoinette, going red under her layers of Estée Lauder. ‘I brought him up and, now his father’s dead, I am due something!’

  ‘Listen, love, the day we say our kids owe us something, we’re in trouble,’ Dilys replied. ‘You had your life and they have theirs. Don’t forget that. You could simply move closer to the girls. They’re both only down the road, so you’d be close to us too. What do they have to say about this plan?’

  At this mention of Ruth and Miriam, Antoinette’s face tautened.

  Ruth was spectacularly annoying when Antoinette phoned about problems in the house.

  ‘Get a man in to fix it,’ was always her answer. The subtext being
: Don’t bother me with this rubbish, Ma.

  Miriam was so tied up with her son and husband, some school rota she was involved in for study carpooling and a charity sports thing she’d started organising, you’d swear she was running a giant social media corporation. She never had time to listen. That was what was lovely about Shay – he made time to listen.

  ‘I haven’t told them. I’m going to go,’ she added, rattling her cup loudly back on to the saucer. ‘I’m hurt you don’t understand but I don’t need your approval for how I live my life. I need my family.’

  ‘Were we too hard on her, do you think?’ Josette asked anxiously when Antoinette was gone.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dilys drank her tea, looking every inch her seventy-five years. ‘But Antoinette’s finding it hard to find her place in the world since Arthur died. Antoinette needs to be loved. I don’t know why she doesn’t join a dating agency: she needs another man and not to be the dowager around poor Shay’s house. It’s not fair on him or his family either.’

  ‘Cassie and Antoinette get on, though, don’t they? It’s not like they dislike each other, is it?’ asked Josette.

  Dilys shot a knowing glance at her friend. ‘It’s one thing to get on well with your mother-in-law, Josette; it’s another thing entirely to live with her every day. Maybe they’ll have room for us all and we’ll start a commune. You know, find a nice man to share between us, have a different person to cook dinner every night, grow wacky baccy in the back garden beside the parsley, have a hot tub put in, that type of carry on.’

  The two women giggled until Dilys said she had to stop or she’d wet herself laughing.

  ‘Would you have let your mother-in-law move in, Josie?’ she asked.

  ‘Lord,’ she said, looking upwards and making a quick sign of the cross, ‘I’m sorry.’ She turned to her friend. ‘That woman was the nearest thing to a living devil as you’d find on this earth. Always on at me about having something wrong with my inner workings because I couldn’t give her grandchildren. Not that we didn’t try. She had the whole family terrified of her. If she came to live with us, I’d have been out the back door with my suitcase and over the garden wall.’