Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘But,’ said Phoebe, feeling anxious and excited simultaneously, ‘does she want a lodger?’

  Everything was happening very quickly and she wasn’t sure if she’d fallen in with an incredibly kind lady or with somebody who was maybe a few marbles short of a set.

  ‘She doesn’t know she wants a lodger yet,’ said Pearl beadily, ‘but trust me, she does. It’s a four-bedroomed house with two bathrooms and a garden of white flowers in the back. Gloria’s an amazing cook, too. What are you studying in college?’

  ‘Fashion,’ said Phoebe, looking around to see if there were any other signs of madness. She had such a good feeling about Pearl but one had to be careful because who knew, after all?

  ‘Fashion,’ said Pearl thoughtfully. ‘Are you looking for part-time work, by any chance?’

  ‘Actually, that’s what I was doing this morning,’ said Phoebe, ‘dropping my details into the last few places. I’ve seen almost every shop, café and pub in Silver Bay and nobody has any space for part-timers except perhaps the pub, and I’ve done a lot of pub work before. I’m not overly keen on doing that anymore but it does pay the bills and you get tips.’

  Daisy had settled herself in a comfy dog bed and was looking longingly up at Phoebe and the shortbread biscuits with beseeching eyes that implied she hadn’t been fed in at least a month.

  ‘My granddaughter has a lovely shop around here and she’s been very busy lately because there’s been a sort of family illness, which means she’s not in the shop much. She has someone but …’ Pearl’s sniff implied what she thought about her granddaughter’s ‘someone’. ‘I wonder …’ Pearl seemed lost in thought. ‘I wonder,’ she said again. ‘Just let me work on it, all right? I’ll have a little chat with Gloria too. You need to meet her. How about this afternoon?’

  ‘I’m getting the bus home to Wicklow,’ said Phoebe apologetically.

  ‘Right,’ said Pearl, ‘when you get back we’ll set it up. No darling, I’m not deranged, I’m just … well …’ Pearl put her head to one side and smiled, and Phoebe could see how nobody could ever refuse Pearl anything. ‘I am either an organiser in the parish or a bit of a meddler, whichever way you want to look at it. But I see you, a lovely girl, who is living with terrible Rita – who never got over her husband leaving and who views the world through charcoal-tinted glasses – when you could be living with lovely Gloria who needs the company and would be so grateful. It’d be far more fun and you could, if I manage it, have a new part-time job into the bargain.’ Pearl beamed at Phoebe. ‘Leave it with me,’ she said.

  Cassie never stayed in bed at the weekend. She was an early bird, but this weekend she felt as if she could never get enough sleep. The anxiety she felt over the tragedy in Jo’s life had made her sleep badly all week.

  The other anxiety – the one she’d been trying to blot out – was the influx of feelings about her mother; feelings she was sure she’d sorted out years ago. Coco’s talk about the grenade of undealt-with issues had been slowly ticking in her mind all week.

  ‘So, my mother’s gone. So what?’ she’d told an old boyfriend who wondered about the unusual family set-up at the house in Delaney Gardens. It had been during her leather mini-skirt and dangerous years when she’d gone out in spite of all curfews set by her father: clubbing, drinking, pushing everything to the limit to see how else she could be punished. Because someone had punished her by taking away her mother – that had to be the only answer.

  Anyone who’d asked about her lack of a mother had been told: ‘She dumped us, preferred drinking and drugging to us,’ in brutal tones, as if Cassie didn’t really care either way.

  But she had and she still did. How, she thought now, with two beautiful daughters growing up with her, could any mother abandon their children and simply never come back?

  She’d felt those feelings most intensely when Beth had been born. As she held her baby, squalling with rage at having been taken from her cosy cocoon inside her mother’s womb, Cassie had felt love like no other and found that she now hated her own mother for abandoning her and Coco. A mother abandoning her children was the most unnatural act in the world. The most heinous.

  Being loved by that special person who took care of you from the start was the key to the most important development in humans. For that person to behave badly, to not love or to abuse the child, or to suddenly leave, could destroy the child left behind.

  Her mother had done that.

  As her daughters grew, Cassie had learned to bury her feelings about her real mother. She was too busy trying to do everything right to worry about herself, but now, partly because of how little Fiona was coping with her ill mother, and definitely due to Shay endlessly choosing his mother over her, it had all come rushing back.

  The fear of abandonment was irrational, she knew, but it was there all the same: fear of abandonment and of the grenade going off.

  Come that Saturday morning, her body had responded by being overcome with aches. Even her head ached, and she wasn’t a woman for headaches. She had a million household chores to do after she’d taken the girls to their netball matches, but still she wanted nothing more than to lie in bed and try to doze.

  Shay, seeing how tired she looked, said he’d take over. Would she like tea or to try to sleep again?

  ‘You never have a rest,’ he added kindly, and Cassie wanted to cry with relief at the gesture.

  Kindness, she thought gratefully: that was the secret to marriage, the one they never mentioned in magazines – having someone say they’d bring you tea and let you stay in bed when you thought your whole body might collapse if you had to haul it out of bed again.

  There was much bad-humoured moaning in the house. Nobody liked Saturday morning sports fixtures.

  ‘It’s torture,’ said Lily, her oft-repeated theme.

  ‘Hush, your mother’s trying to have a rest,’ hissed Shay.

  There was silence for a beat.

  ‘Mum’s not taking us?’ said Beth, shocked.

  ‘No. Now brush your teeth, and not ten seconds of vaguely rubbing the brush near them – the whole two minutes,’ their father went on.

  Cassie burrowed under the covers to block out the noise. This was the reason why she didn’t stay in bed often. Shay turned into an army general when he was in charge in the mornings and a row was inevitable. His favoured military approach at leaving the house antagonised the girls used to Cassie’s more laid-back and fun morning routine.

  She tickled them in the morning sometimes, put on loud music, dropped long-forgotten fluffy teddies on top of them – anything to make them laugh at the notion of getting up. One laugh in the morning was strangely worth two more at any other time of the day.

  Even under her duvet, she could hear the row brewing.

  ‘I do wash my teeth!’

  She burrowed deeper.

  ‘Mum! Dad’s been mean to me. He said I don’t brush my teeth properly and I do!’ wailed Lily, arriving at the bedroom door.

  Cassie knew this to be recently true because Lily was beginning to find boys attractive and knew that stinky breath was not desirable in girlfriends because Beth had told her. Not that Cassie had mentioned this information to Shay, who would have trouble learning that his thirteen-year-old daughter had even the slightest interest in boys, never mind knowing that fresh breath was an important part of this dating ritual. He’d probably have a seizure at the notion that Beth knew this too. It appeared that all the books were right: fathers did have huge problems adjusting to their daughters growing up and becoming interested in the opposite sex.

  ‘Honey, tell him I know you brush them properly,’ Cassie murmured. She reached a hand out from under the covers for a hug.

  Lily sat heavily on the bed. ‘I wish you were taking us. He won’t take us for hot chocolate afterwards. Can you make him take us to the café?’

  Was this what it w
as like being a judge – always having to be the higher authority?

  There was no getting away from it – she’d have to get up and referee. Cassie hauled herself from her duvet nest. On the landing, another argument was going on about how Beth’s netball skirt and shorts combination – a garment known as a ‘skort’ – had grown scandalously short when compared to Beth’s ever-growing long legs.

  ‘She can’t go out like that!’ Shay said, glaring at Cassie as if their elder daughter’s growth spurt was entirely her fault.

  ‘I know it’s short but I haven’t had a chance to get back to the uniform shop yet to get the next size up,’ Cassie said tiredly. She’d done all the back-to-school uniform shopping, not Shay. She wanted to add that they were lucky there was food in the fridge, that anyone had homework done any night, or that without her, nobody would have had cooked dinner for the whole week. She wanted to add that Shay still hadn’t managed to speak to Coco once about the whole Jo tragedy and ask how she was coping, but she held her breath.

  Don’t sweat the small stuff. Keep the big stuff firmly at the back of your mind.

  ‘It’s not acceptable, Cassie,’ said Shay fiercely, unable to move off what he clearly viewed as a scandalous outfit for their daughter to be wearing to a sporting event. ‘People will be able to see … well, her underwear! It’s indecent! You can’t let her out like that, Cassie.’ It was the ‘you’ that did it, as if only Cassie had any responsibility for things in their house, while Shay was only responsible for things relating to his beloved mother’s home.

  Cassie lost her battle with not sweating the small stuff.

  ‘You go to the uniform shop then,’ she said, surprising them all with her roar. ‘You can do the grocery shopping and make the dinner. And every Saturday we have hot chocolate in the Coffee Bean, which you wouldn’t know as you almost never take the girls to sports, but this week you can take them in there!’

  With that, she turned on her heel, marched back into their bedroom and slammed the door.

  Outside, there was silence.

  Beth went into her room, bent over beside the mirror and twisted around to see if she could catch a glimpse of her knickers. Not a sign of them and she was wearing the pink cotton ones with the lace at the top, the ones she liked best because she thought they were really pretty and not at all kid-like, because Mum was obsessed with them wearing age-appropriate clothes.

  ‘You can’t see my knickers, Dad!’ she roared triumphantly.

  On Saturday morning, Antoinette thought she might phone Shay and get him to come round for a few hours in the afternoon. It was a sunny day, still warm for September. The branches of most of the shrubs in the garden needed to be cut back for winter and he was great with the secateurs. Her old hands weren’t up to it anymore.

  ‘I cut all my garden stuff up,’ her friend Dilys liked to say. ‘This gizmo I got in the garden shop can cut anything, whether you’re strong or not. The fella that sold it to me said it was the perfect thing for the more mature lady. I think he was flirting with me …’

  Josette rolled her eyes. ‘You think everyone is flirting with you, hussy,’ she said.

  ‘Keeps me happy!’ said Dilys, winking bawdily. ‘There’s many a fine tune played on an old fiddle.’

  ‘My hands aren’t up to it,’ Antoinette pointed out, with a look at the fingers she manicured herself every week. ‘The last time I did it, I had pains for ages.’

  ‘I have pains for an hour after I get out of bed,’ said Dilys, ‘but I still do it. Lord, Antoinette, don’t get old before your time.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with age,’ Antoinette said, wondering why she’d bothered even mentioning the pains in her hands.

  Dilys was very annoying these days, pushing Antoinette all the time and implying that she was relying on Shay too much. Dilys was really taking the whole ‘anything a man can do, I can do better’ thing too far. Dilys would hurt herself one day with her determination to do it all herself, despite the two new hips. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have adult children to help. But then not everyone had a son like Shay.

  The row over short uniforms and teeth-brushing meant Cassie had as much chance of launching herself up to the International Space Station as she had of going back to sleep, so she made herself some tea and toast, then went back to bed and flicked through a magazine. Her concentration wasn’t even up to a book, which was a good indicator of her tiredness. Work was exhausting. Loren, her boss, had taken on four huge jobs and hadn’t added any temporary staff to help them all out.

  ‘Conference tourism is good for all of us!’ Loren had said in a rallying speech the day before as she’d hurried out the door in head-to-toe designer gear to go to a posh lunch in the Merrion Hotel – an activity she described as ‘networking’ and on which she claimed oodles of tax back as a business expense.

  ‘Better for some of us than for others,’ sighed Belinda, clutching her office laptop she was taking home to work on all weekend.

  Cassie had decided to ask Coco and Fiona if they wanted to come to an early Saturday dinner.

  ‘Stay over, perhaps?’

  ‘I’d love to but Attracta’s flying in from Sydney on Saturday and she’s staying with us. Xavier’s coming on Sunday. He’s very laid-back about the whole thing, saying it’s just a quick trip. They’re a weird family …’

  Cassie thought about it. ‘They had a weird upbringing, Coco,’ she said.

  ‘Ours wasn’t cookie cutter either, Cass,’ said Coco lightly. ‘No mother, Dad permanently sad about her leaving … Only Pearl was normal. Well, and us …’

  ‘You’ve never been normal!’ teased Cassie, not wanting to talk about their own lives. The conversation during the week had been hard enough. That was the trick: if she didn’t think about the past, it didn’t exist. ‘And we had love, don’t forget that.’

  ‘Yeah, love,’ said Coco gratefully.

  ‘That’s what you’ve got for Fiona, and don’t forget it. You’re not her mum but you love her. That can work, even if it’s just till Jo gets better.’

  ‘I guess. I’m just so terrified of doing it all wrong,’ said Coco.

  Her sister laughed loudly. ‘That’s the main theme of motherhood,’ she said. ‘Welcome to the club!’

  ‘We had the big talk,’ Coco went on. ‘I told her I would never let her down and she hugged me all evening, sitting on me like a baby monkey. She’s never done that before.’

  ‘She was scared,’ Cassie said, ‘and you helped her with that. You’re doing amazingly, darling.’

  Cassie had finally dragged herself out of bed and was about to start on vacuuming the house when the phone rang. It was just about the time the netball matches should be over, so Cassie thought it might be one of the girls with news of netball matches lost dismally or won triumphantly. Or even an update on the current row with their father.

  Instead, it was her mother-in-law.

  ‘Oh Cassie, how are you, pet?’ said Antoinette. Then, without waiting for an answer, she sailed on. ‘I was looking for Shay. Is he around? I need him to do something for me.’

  Shay had been at his mother’s twice this week and the previous week. He’d been there the night Jo had been rushed to hospital – the night when she’d needed him.

  Cassie felt a surge of anger rise from somewhere inside her. That night she’d really needed her husband and he hadn’t been there – it still rankled.

  The words abandonment and choice rippled through her head. Antoinette was making Shay choose.

  ‘He’s taking the girls to netball, Antoinette,’ she said coolly.

  ‘Oh, right. I thought that was your thing, the netball and all that,’ said her mother-in-law.

  Cassie realised that her plan for not sweating the small stuff wasn’t going too well that morning.

  ‘He loves to do things with the family,’ she said, knowing ther
e was a hint of bitchiness in her voice but unable to contain it. ‘The girls love having hot chocolate with him after a game,’ she added, thinking that a great divine foot might come out of the sky and stomp on her for such a barefaced lie.

  ‘Isn’t that lovely?’ said Antoinette in such nice tones that Cassie felt guilty immediately.

  Poor Antoinette lived on her own and she was just phoning up for a chat, that was all …

  ‘Can you get Shay to phone me, then, pet?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You see, I need my garden sorted out. I know he’s a dab hand with the old shrubs, even if he doesn’t have a clue what’s a shrub and what’s a weed, but if he comes soon, he could tidy it all up for me today,’ Antoinette went on.

  Cassie thought of the wilderness of their own back garden, which was an unattractive combination of semi-wild and semi-barren due to places where plants had either gone feral or died altogether. Only the patio, with pots delivered from Pearl, was decent. Shay hadn’t been near it all summer, too busy at his mother’s beck and call, and Cassie hadn’t inherited her grandmother’s gardening gene.

  ‘I don’t know if you know how lucky you are with Shay, you know.’ Antoinette was still talking. ‘Not many husbands are so good around the place, but Shay, Lord, that man can fix anything. He takes after his father, of course. Our garden was the pride of the road once. Not anymore, sadly, but Shay will fix it all up—’

  ‘Have you thought of getting a gardener in to do some work in it?’ Cassie interrupted suddenly, unable to take any more.

  Her mother-in-law wasn’t poor and despite the state of their own finances, Cassie would have contributed something to the gardener from her own pay packet if she thought it would get Shay away from Antoinette’s clutches. Better still, Miriam and Ruth could cough up to help their mother.