Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘Pay good money for a gardener when I have Shay?’ said Antoinette, shocked. ‘You must think we all have money to throw away, Cassie.’

  No, Cassie reflected sourly, only marriages.

  ‘I’ll get him to phone you,’ she said shortly. ‘I think the girls are back. Bye.’ And she hung up.

  If Shay so much as set foot in his mother’s house this weekend, Cassie would find her own long-lost, rarely-used garden implements and stab him with them. And then she’d pack his bags for him, she thought grimly.

  The sports’ club party arrived home at one, hungry and grumpy.

  ‘We didn’t go to the Coffee Bean,’ grumbled Lily.

  ‘There was no parking,’ said Shay defensively.

  There never was parking, Cassie knew. It was the best coffee shop for miles, so you had to park a long way around the corner and schlep. But nobody minded. The Coffee Bean had cranberry and orange muffins and hot chocolate to die for …

  ‘We went to Freddie’s crappy coffee shop,’ said Beth scathingly.

  Freddie’s made the hot chocolate with water instead of milk and had rock-hard scones that people joked were sponsored by the local dentist, so good were they at dislodging fillings.

  ‘Dad met some of his friends and they talked for ages about football …’

  The litany went on. He’d missed Lily scoring a goal because he’d been talking to another father and hadn’t run between the two girls’ matches the way Cassie did, determined to give of her time fairly to both daughters.

  Under normal circumstances, Cassie would have told the girls not to be so hard on their poor dad, to apologise and remember who’d taken them to netball. Diffusing family rows was her speciality. She’d have privately told Shay that hormones were ruling the house and not to mind, that the girls did exactly the same thing to her all the time.

  But not today. Today she felt unhinged, attacked by memories and problems from every side.

  ‘Freddie’s is a dreadful coffee shop, Shay, and you know it,’ she snapped. The words were out of her mouth before her brain had fully kicked in. ‘Oh yes, and your mother rang. Her garden needs doing. I should point out that our garden needs doing too but I feel we’re rather low on the list. Again.’

  And with that, she swept into the kitchen, slammed the door and headed for the coffee maker. The calming herbal tea thing could go hang; she needed proper caffeine.

  Shay looked at the kitchen door and idly wondered if the wood was still vibrating from the slamming. Cassie had been saying the girls’ hormones had been a problem lately, not that he’d really noticed, but he wondered if his wife’s hormones were really the worrying ones. What was wrong with her? So they hadn’t gone to the coffee shop the kids wanted. What the hell? Nobody had taken him to coffee shops when he was a kid.

  And since when did Cassie worry about the garden? She was as hopeless at it as he was. They had grass, a deck and few scrubby shrubs along the garden walls. It wasn’t a bower like Pearl’s, but then Pearl lived with her secateurs in hand for deadheading and a bit of twine in her pocket to tie up trailing things. You were either born like that or you weren’t.

  Flowers and wine, Shay decided. That would sort things out. He’d phone his mother, get out of the house for the day, sort out Ma’s garden, let Cassie’s mood improve, and bring home gifts. That always worked. She had a bee in her bonnet about him going round to his mother’s but what else was he to do? He had a duty to his mother; surely Cassie understood? But then, he supposed, she hadn’t had a mother and Pearl was the most competent person on the planet, so beside her, his poor mother came up badly in the taking-care-of-herself stakes. Still, Cassie would get it. She never lost her temper for very long. It was one of the things he loved about her.

  Except she might lose her temper over the house-selling thing. Shay felt a twinge of discomfort. He still hadn’t broached that with her.

  He’d seen a place in the property pages that looked good – far too expensive, but the sort of thing they were theoretically looking for. If they couldn’t find a house that suited with the sort of flat in the garden, this property in the paper made him think they could sell his mother’s house, she could move into theirs, and they could buy somewhere and build on it with a bridging loan … It was a good plan.

  ‘Hope you approve, Dad,’ Shay said to his father, who he hoped was up above playing cards with his pals and watching the footie on some celestial big-screen telly.

  Thinking of his dad made him think of his sisters. He’d need to talk to them about the whole moving thing with their mother and how it would all work out. He’d talk to Cassie when she calmed down. Next week, for definite. When she wasn’t so hormonal.

  Ruth answered the phone on the second ring.

  ‘Waiting for someone?’ Shay teased his sister.

  ‘No, just beside it, working,’ said Ruth. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Just off to Ma’s to sort out the garden for her.’

  ‘Fabulous,’ said Ruth, sounding pleased. ‘She was onto me the other day saying it was a mess and what was she going to do. I said not to ask me. Hardly my strong point.’

  ‘I don’t know a weed from a flower,’ Shay said, ‘but she’ll just tell me what to do.’

  ‘How’s Cass and the kids?’ said Ruth, sounding as if she was still working, despite talking to her brother.

  ‘Fine.’

  Not that fine, said the tiny little voice in Shay‘s head. He knew he ought to get his sisters to share the burden, as Cassie so often said, but Ma rang and asked him, and he felt such guilt that she was lonely.

  ‘Listen, Ruth, can you spend more time with Ma these days? She’s going through a lonely patch right now and—’

  ‘She’s been going through a lonely patch since Dad died and that’s over four years ago,’ Ruth interrupted. ‘I have taken her to places, to exhibitions, to comedy shows, to the concert hall, to a fashion show once … She’s not interested. She wants everything the way it was before when she was belle of the ball, when we were kids and she was young, when Dad was alive, and that’s not happening anymore. I’m forty-one: I’m hardly the belle of any ball,’ Ruth said with a hint of bitterness. ‘So she can forget it at her age. She needs to make a new life for herself, do charity work, do something, and stop moping about the past—’

  ‘Ruth!’ interrupted Shay, but there was no stopping his sister now.

  ‘Shay, we can’t all have what we want. I wanted a husband but I didn’t get one, so I have to live with that. Ma doesn’t think normal rules apply to her. She thinks that if she wants it, she can have it because that’s what life was like when Dad was around. He indulged her and you know it.’

  ‘Yeah, but they had a good marriage—’

  ‘Fine, they did, but sadly Dad is gone now and while that’s horrible for all of us, especially her, death is part of life. She has to understand that and stop pretending you’re him. So you run after her all you want, but I won’t.’

  ‘You’re hard, Ruth,’ said Shay in dismay.

  ‘I live in the real world,’ said his sister grimly. ‘Ma wants what she wants and she doesn’t care who or what she goes through to get it, so watch out.’

  Shay didn’t feel up to phoning his younger sister after that, although Miriam would have a welcome for him because she was a million miles away from Ruth, who’d always been the toughest of the three Reynolds children. It was being the eldest, Ruth said when they teased her: being the one responsible for making sure the other two had their teeth brushed in the morning and had their shoelaces tied before school.

  Ma had looked lovely in the mornings, Shay could remember. She had a flowery dressing gown with pale pink ruffles around the neck, she’d have tied her hair up prettily and put on lipstick, and she’d stand at the door and wave at them as they walked down the street under Ruth’s strict guidance.

  Ruth
had only been two years older than he had, he realised now with a start. It was like relying on Beth to take care of Lily, but times were different then. There weren’t predators like there were now – no stranger danger. Kids walked to school with their brothers and sisters even though loads of mothers didn’t work; they cleaned and baked and took care of things. His mum had been brilliant at that. He owed it to her to take care of her.

  Cassie would get it. He knew she would.

  Thirteen

  Phoebe had phoned Tommy Joe about picking her up from the bus station.

  ‘No bother,’ he’d said, ‘seeing as it’s you. Have you got citified, Phoebe? Will you be looking at us like we’re all muck savages from now on?’

  Phoebe had laughed.

  ‘I shall always think of you as the debonair Tommy Joe who brings my luggage right up to the bus,’ she said cheerfully.

  ‘Go away out of that, Phoebe,’ he’d said, obviously pleased.

  As the bus neared the village, Phoebe felt the excitement heighten. She was going home and she could hardly wait.

  But once she’d hauled her stuff off the bus, there was no sign of Tommy Joe’s bright red head of hair above the crowd. He was so reliable, he’d never forget. Something must have happened to him …

  ‘Surprise!’ roared Mary-Kate and Ethan, jumping out from behind a sign. Their mother followed, beaming.

  ‘We couldn’t resist,’ said Mum, as all three of them tried to hug Phoebe at the same time. ‘I squared it with Tommy Joe; he knows he’s getting his fare to bring you back.’

  ‘You have no idea how good it is to see you all,’ said Phoebe, breathing in the scent of her beloved family: the deodorant Ethan was using by the bucketload, Mary-Kate’s modern floral Body Shop scent, and the lavender smell that seemed to emanate from her mother’s very pores from evenings spent sewing it into embroidered little bags for sale in the craft shops in Wicklow town.

  They all chattered nineteen to the dozen as Mum drove Doris, the family’s big old jeep, up the village and into the hills where the McLoughlin farm lay.

  ‘Sabrina from his class fancies Ethan,’ said Mary-Kate, earning herself a thump from her younger brother. ‘Well, she does!’

  ‘Mary-Kate wants to get her belly button pierced …’ began Ethan, before getting an even harder thump.

  ‘You promised! He overheard me and Jen talking, and it was only an idea anyway,’ said Mary-Kate mutinously.

  ‘Everyone’s fine,’ said their mother serenely, concentrating on the road, which got quite potholed up their way as they were high in the Wicklow Hills. When there was a dusting of frost in Dublin, Wicklow got snowfalls that slowly and inescapably ripped its way through the roads and made potholes from hell.

  Phoebe listened to talk of school, friends and how well the hens and ducks were, and gazed out of the jeep’s grimy windows at the fifty-five acres her father’s family had farmed for at least a century. It was rocky, hilly land and nothing but hardy Wicklow Cheviot sheep could be reared there.

  The family owned sixty ewes with two breeding rams, and the work was endless. When the sheep were grazing out on the common ground in the good weather, farmers needed to get their hay ready, fertilise the grass for when the sheep were back on it, repair fences, gates and walls, get ready for the sheep dipping and, later, the sheep shearing. There were vet bills from scanning the sheep when they were pregnant and constantly taking care of sick animals. The shearers needed to be paid, as did the men with the heavy machinery for cutting and baling the hay for winter feed. When the sheep gave birth after Easter, the farmer would be up morning, noon and night in the shed for lambing, hand-rearing any whose mothers had died. In October, those same adorable lambs were big enough to go off to market to be sold – something Kate McLoughlin had always found hard, despite the fact that she was a farmer’s wife and that was where the family income came from.

  Other local farmers, a kind and tight-knit bunch, had helped so much when her husband had his accident, but at the end, coming in and out of the consciousness of the drugs, he’d been aware enough to know that Kate wouldn’t be able to manage the farm on her own.

  ‘Get your mother to sell up, Phoebs,’ he’d told Phoebe, his big strong voice gone to a whisper.

  ‘Dad, you’ll be back in no time,’ began Phoebe, holding back the tears.

  ‘I won’t, my darling girl. I won’t. Please make her sell.’

  ‘But you love the land, Dad,’ Phoebe had said, tears coming now.

  ‘I love the land but the land isn’t what’s important, my darling: people are. You mother will kill herself farming it out of loyalty to me. She’s not made for this life. None of you are. It’s backbreaking and we could do it when I was there, but not now I’m going. You must sell.’

  ‘You’re not going,’ sobbed Phoebe, and her father had looked at her with great sadness, too worn out after his speech to say more, but telling her that he was going.

  He’d died that night. When the funeral was over, and the McLoughlins, white-faced with grief, had gone back home, Phoebe finally repeated this conversation to her mother, who’d instantly lost her temper – an unusual occurrence.

  ‘I’m not selling the land your father loved so much!’ she’d said furiously, then burst into tears. ‘It’s all we’ve got left of him.’

  Today, looking at the land and the sheep spread out on it, Phoebe – recently used to the pretty gardens of Silver Bay – realised how harsh a landscape it was up here. You got used to the land when you came home to it everyday, but now she could see it.

  The Wicklow Hills weren’t plump with grass like some parts of Ireland, where lush fields reared fat livestock. Here it was untamed and beautiful, but the height above sea level and the wildness of the countryside meant vicious winds, lashing rain, and a landscape that fought with you even as you battled to save fences, mend walls and breed sheep.

  When Phoebe had been there to help, her mother had been worn down with it all. Now Phoebe wasn’t there and the job somehow seemed impossible.

  At night, to makes ends meet, Mum managed – if she wasn’t too tired – to indulge in her first love – sewing – yet even that was to make money. She harvested lavender from her kitchen garden and sewed the dried lavender heads into little linen bags that she’d dyed pale pink with beetroot dye, tied with heliotrope velvet ribbons and sold to some local shops. It was all natural, all handmade, and it was what Kate McLoughlin had really wanted to do when her children were old enough. She’d had a business plan in place, enough ideas in her creative head for ten people, and a light in her eyes at being able to make money for them all. But that was before her husband had died and all their lives had changed.

  Every animal in the place appeared when they drove up to the old homestead. Phoebe got out, picking up her beloved chicken, Donna, and crooning nonsense to her. A troupe of wildly clacking ducks emerged too.

  ‘Giorgio,’ said Phoebe, delighted with her welcome, and ran into the shed to get some feed to give the ducks as reward.

  Prince danced around her, muddy paws up to her ribs, barking until he was hoarse.

  ‘See how much we’ve all missed you,’ said Ethan, holding on to his sister in a way he’d never have admitted to in school, because hugging family members was so uncool.

  After the time spent this morning in Pearl Keneally’s beautifully painted little house, Phoebe was startled at how run-down the homestead actually was. Nobody on Delaney Gardens had much money. Pearl was an old lady with a verandah, she’d proudly told Phoebe, which had been made of old packing cases by her husband many years ago. Nothing in her house was new and yet it was all beautifully maintained and painted well. By contrast, the old McLoughlin place that Phoebe adored was shabby and hadn’t seen a lick of paint in years. There were cobwebs in the corners, because who had time to get up there with a duster and clear them away?

  Phoe
be was both ashamed of herself for noticing this and angry that circumstances meant her family had to live in a home that could have been beautiful if only for time or money.

  Mum was making tea, Ethan was telling some convoluted story about a hurling match in school, and Mary-Kate was showing how she’d been transforming some of her clothes with the skills Phoebe had shown her.

  ‘I took apart a necklace and sewed it on the collar of this sweater, see?’ said Mary-Kate proudly.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ said Phoebe, but she was only half-listening to any of it. Instead she was seeing the peeling wallpaper her mother had tried to glue down, and how the tiles on the floor were chipped and cracked because they’d been ancient before Dad had died, and after that nothing got done anymore.

  She had time, too, to really look at her darling mother and see, with the fresh eyes of someone who’d been away a few weeks, that her mother was no longer the beautiful, fresh-faced woman she had in her mind’s eye but was thin, far too thin, and her hair was limp from no time to wash it.

  But when would her mother have a moment to herself anymore? Never, was the answer.

  Kate McLoughlin’s clothes were threadbare, her jeans had been patched many times, and they were now held up on the tightest notch of her belt. There were lines on her face etched in as though Rembrandt had wanted to paint a servant woman with exhaustion written all over her.

  Keeping this farm alive was killing her mother, and it had taken Phoebe going to Dublin to college to realise it.

  Phoebe did all she could on Saturday: cleaned out every bird shed until it gleamed, walked the land with her mother, and helped repair fences and clear ditches.

  ‘You’re down here to relax,’ said her mother as Phoebe threw herself into the work like a woman possessed, but Phoebe could see she was grateful for the help.