Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘I need someone who doesn’t lie to me …’

  ‘I only closed early a few times, and I was going to change the window displays …’

  Phoebe pushed the door open and took stock of the situation. ‘I’m Phoebe McLoughlin,’ she said to Coco. ‘Should I come back later?’

  Coco drew herself up to her full five foot one. ‘No,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Welcome, Phoebe. Come on in. Adriana, I’ll send your wages on, and I’ll be examining the till carefully and the stock for any discrepancies.’

  Adriana snorted. ‘I would never steal.’

  Coco held the front door open. ‘By taking wages and not working, you already have,’ she said sweetly. ‘But more fool me for not getting rid of you ages ago. I guess I’ll have to chalk this one down to experience.’

  Adriana marched past, Coco shut and locked the door, and then leaned against it.

  ‘I’ve never done that before,’ she said, thinking she might cry herself.

  Phoebe grinned. ‘First time for everything,’ she said. ‘Now, I’m not dressed for cleaning but I guess that’s what we’re doing today. I like your overalls. Any in my size?’

  Pearl was changing her duvet and struggling with it when the doorbell rang. Goody, she thought. It might be someone who could help. Daisy, who kept having to be stopped rolling in the bits of the duvet on the floor and escaping into the cavern of snowy white cover to play hide and seek, was of no assistance at all.

  ‘Coming,’ yelled Pearl as she went carefully down the stairs.

  She was beginning to see the allure of those stairlift yokes. It was so easy to slip, and while she wasn’t like Edie – terrified to put a foot under her in case she fell when she was on stairs – Pearl was getting more anxious about the thought of a fall. Falls were the bogeymen of old age, she knew. Hips and pelvises shattered like glass when you got older, and hospital stays merged into nursing home stays, and before people knew it, they were stuck there forever. She wanted to remain in her own lovely home with her things, and with darling Daisy to snuggle into her bed at night, and darling Peter around the corner. She wasn’t ready to let go of all that.

  Mind you, she reminded herself, look at poor Josephine and what she was going through, and her only thirty-one, the same age as Coco. Tragedy can strike at any age.

  And that dear Fiona, such a glorious little imp with the most gorgeous smile, and Coco said she’d been so upset when Josephine’s sister had been over from Australia.

  Pearl was thinking sadly on the unfairness of life as she opened her door, and was surprised and delighted to see her older great-granddaughter standing there in her school uniform, rucksack slung across one shoulder.

  ‘Beth, my love, come in!’

  ‘You sure I’m not interrupting?’ said Beth in a tremulous voice that wasn’t like hers at all.

  Pearl could recognise those signs as well as she could read the day’s weather from the morning sky. She’d raised three teenagers after all: her son and, later, his daughters too.

  ‘Come in, lovie,’ she said, and put an arm around Beth’s slender shoulders.

  She rarely saw Beth in her school uniform and it made her look younger than she normally tried to look. As per the school’s strict instructions, there was only a little make-up on those blue and amber eyes – eyes that looked suspiciously red today. Beth was tall like Shay and had the lean build Coco would have killed for at the same age. She was nearly sixteen now and her figure was womanly: slender hips but with the rise of her breasts visible under the deeply unflattering green school jumper. Her hair was tied up into a knot: now that was like her mother’s. Raven’s-wing dark and curly, suited to a Renaissance beauty in a corseted gown. Cassie’s hair was glorious but Cassie insisted in scraping it back and dressing in very businessy, androgynous clothes, and Pearl had never quite been able to understand that.

  Now with Beth, Pearl kept up the chatter, knowing that nothing was more off-putting to a teenager than bluntly being asked: ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Shall I make us tea? Down, Daisy,’ she added as Daisy bounced in her puggish fashion, desperate for love and attention. ‘How’s school, lovie? Still haunting you with that dreadful A-line skirt?’

  Beth finally laughed and her tense face softened. ‘Horrible, isn’t it? Who wears green, red and purple in a kilt?’

  ‘There’s probably an outraged Scottish clan somewhere who want their tartan back and don’t want irate schoolgirls turning the hems up so they look like belts when they get into sixth year,’ Pearl said, her cheerful tone hiding her worry.

  Coco hadn’t tried the skirt-as-belt look for all her ability with clothes: too self-conscious about her figure. But Cassie had turned her kilt up to mini-skirt proportions when she was in her Doc Marten’s phase, much to Edie’s chagrin.

  ‘I don’t know where to look!’ Edie had said the first time she’d seen this apparition.

  ‘Close your eyes and breathe deeply then,’ Pearl had advised.

  Pearl decided she wouldn’t mention all of this right now and pretended to be deeply interested in taking out the contents of the biscuit cupboard. ‘I have shortbread, but they are a couple of days old—’

  ‘Oh Pearl …’ And then the tears came, as Pearl had known they would.

  Pearl wrapped Beth up in her arms. She wished she could hug the pain away but she couldn’t, never could. Life had pain in it and people had to go through the pain. She could only listen and offer support.

  ‘Sit down with me and Daisy,’ she said, steering them all to the couch.

  At first Beth couldn’t talk; she simply held on to Pearl and sobbed into her white cotton cardigan.

  ‘Let it all out, my love,’ crooned Pearl, stroking Beth’s hair.

  On the other side of Beth, Daisy sat on the couch in a state of agitation: one of her people was upset and she wasn’t able to do her face-licking to fix it. Daisy was a prodigious face-licker and she knew it helped when there was crying. Upset herself, she began to make anxious little whimpers until Beth stopped and pulled the dog on to her lap and held her close, as if Daisy was a cuddly toy and Beth was a small child.

  The magical healing power of animals, thought Pearl.

  When Marguerite had left, Pearl’s two black pugs, Basil and Sybil, had understood better than any of the humans that heartbroken little Cassie needed small, warm, furry bodies to cuddle at night. Cassie had cried herself to sleep every night until the dogs were left to sleep in her room.

  No dog could replace a mother, but they’d given her the unconditional love she needed.

  ‘It’s Mum and Dad,’ Beth finally blurted out. ‘They barely spoke to each other all weekend and it’s been like that for ages now. Dad’s always out, Mum’s upset … Oh Pearl, I think they’re going to get a divorce.’

  Sixteen

  Antoinette found the house in the newspaper property section in the library. A person couldn’t possibly buy all of the papers, so she’d taken to going into the library to peruse the various supplements and use the internet, which a nice young man had shown her how to do, and today, bingo! There it was: an old red-brick not far from where Shay and Cassie lived now, with a modern glass extension at the back and a beautiful guest cottage tucked away behind it.

  The garden looked pretty, although there was lots of gravel and low plants, which Antoinette hated. She’d have to get rid of that. There was a separate entrance for the cottage too, which meant she’d have her privacy, and two bedrooms – imagine that, two! – plus a small kitchen and a spacious living room. Obviously lot of the pieces of furniture from Oakleigh Avenue wouldn’t fit in such a neat little house, but she could sell them. Buy new things. She could have a foldaway table and set it up for dinner parties. Shay could help her source the perfect one. With that old Lismore lace tablecloth she and Arthur had been given on their wedding day, she could prettify it with her Belleek chin
a and have the girls around for dinners. Best of all, Shay would be on her doorstep, there for when she felt low or needed to see a friendly face. Cassie and the girls too.

  Cassie sounded glum these days on the phone. Possibly the change of life, Antoinette thought, although she was a bit young for it. Still, who knew? It hit different people at the oddest times. And so many women lost their looks at that point. All the hormones abandoned them and they lost interest in men, sex and even themselves.

  Not that this had ever happened to Antoinette.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ her closest family friend, an aunt, had said meaningfully when Antoinette had reached that age. And Antoinette had. But looking after herself hadn’t been enough. She’d entered a third age: an age where she felt her wisdom should be valued and it wasn’t, not at all.

  It hurt her the way people didn’t notice her as much as they used to. Nobody said, ‘Antoinette, lovely hair, such a pretty smile.’ Those sort of compliments had boosted her all her life but then, with Arthur gone, she didn’t see his old friends anymore and there were no more compliments around the golf club, no more men saying nice things and making her smile.

  Not that Antoinette had ever any intention of so much as putting a foot wrong with Arthur’s friends. She was a lady, not that sort of girl at all. But compliments cheered one up so. She missed all that desperately. The company of women just wasn’t the same.

  She slid her gaze back to the newspaper photo of the red-bricked house with the guest cottage. There was an ensuite in the master bedroom but an ugly family bathroom. Obviously the house revamp had got as far as the extension downstairs and perhaps the money had run out. The cottage might have been a separate rented-out property because it looked different from the main house. Still, Beth and Lily could live with an ugly bathroom.

  Antoinette gathered up her handbag and jacket, and then left the library. She had phone calls to make. If she couldn’t get Shay at work, she’d leave a message for him at home.

  Belinda and Cassie met at the lifts that evening.

  ‘Remind me never to drink at lunchtime again,’ whispered Cassie. ‘I nearly fell asleep this afternoon.’

  ‘I ignored those two martinis,’ Belinda whispered back, ‘but that’s it, honey. We’re not in an episode of Mad Men. Drinking on the job is the number-one firing offence with Loren, and you know it. ‘

  ‘I won’t, I won’t, I promise. Stress-cubed, that’s all.’

  When she heard her phone ringing with Beth’s personal ringtone, she answered quickly.

  ‘Hello Beth, all OK?’ It was her constant answer to her daughters, as if all calls had to be emergencies.

  Beth teased her about it, so did Lily now that she, too, had a phone.

  ‘Mum, we’re fine!’ they’d say, laughing at her. ‘The phone is not an instrument of doom!’

  But then their mother had never left when they were seven. They didn’t understand that bad things could happen.

  This time, however, Beth’s voice was so frantic on the phone that at first Cassie thought there had been an accident.

  Be calm for Beth’s sake, she thought, every mothering instinct she had kicking in, even though she wanted to screech ‘What’s happened?!’ at the top of her voice.

  ‘You never told me you and Dad were splitting up! Granny’s found a house for her and Dad, they have it all organised, but what about us, Mum? When were you going to tell us? Pearl said it would be OK when I was imagining you getting a divorce, because I was with her earlier and she said all married people fight. But then I got home and heard the message, and now I know it all. When were you going to tell Lily and me? Tell me that?’

  Stepping into the silent boardroom for privacy, it took Cassie five minutes to get the whole story out of Beth.

  First, Beth had gone to Pearl’s instead of staying in the afterschool programme to do her homework, and Pearl had calmed her down about the possibility of Cassie and Shay getting divorced.

  ‘How could you think that?’ asked Cassie with a lump in her throat, feeling entirely to blame because she knew full well how Beth could think such a thing.

  ‘Mum, I’m not seven, so stop treating me like I am. It’s been Screamsville all weekend with you two either shouting or ignoring each other, so I knew there was something wrong but I didn’t know what!’

  The next part of the mystery was simple: when Beth got home from Pearl’s, there was a message on the answerphone from Granny Reynolds.

  ‘She says she’s got a house for her and Dad to move into together, and nobody told me or Lily, and I don’t know why you think you can do that,’ shrieked Beth down the phone. ‘How could you not tell us you’re breaking up?’

  ‘You sure you’ve got that right, honey?’ said Cassie, confused.

  ‘Listen,’ said Beth, and pressed play on the answering machine.

  Once she’d heard it, everything made sense to Cassie.

  Yeah, thought Cassie grimly. How could you not tell us, Shay?

  ‘Nobody’s going anywhere,’ she assured her daughter. ‘There are no plans to move, no plans for Antoinette to move in with Dad. It’s a mix-up.’

  She was damned if she was going to call Antoinette ‘Granny’ anymore. Antoinette had long since crossed the barriers from ‘granny’ to ‘meddling cow’. How dare she leave such a message on their answering machine? How dare she ring up and talk to Shay as if none of the rest of them were there, as if none of the rest of them mattered? No, Antoinette had gone too far this time and, if he was in on it, so had Shay.

  Cassie had rapidly worked out what Antoinette was thinking. It made sense. She had said something about a ‘granny flat’ on the message and Cassie quickly figured out that Antoinette saw herself installed in a cosy apartment in Cassie and Shay’s back garden. A new back garden with a new house – one Antoinette was happily picking out from the property supplements.

  It would be the ideal solution to all her problems: she’d have Shay on tap all the time. They could all be one big happy family …

  Somewhere in the back of Cassie’s mind, the sensible part of it, she knew she should think about all of this before acting. But she felt a little unhinged, whether from the stress of the past few weeks or from the martinis she’d had at lunch, and the sensible part of her was not operating.

  She was going to sort this out once and for all.

  Cassie knew it was unreasonable to phone her mother-in-law first – like a cheated-upon wife phoning her husband’s girlfriend before confronting him – but she wanted to get the story straight from Antoinette before she talked to Shay.

  It took a few rings before Antoinette answered.

  She was probably looking through the property pages, working out how much she could get for her own house, Cassie thought angrily.

  When her mother-in-law finally answered, it was with her normal, slightly wavery tones. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Antoinette, it’s Cassie here,’ she said, surprised at how fierce she sounded. She hadn’t planned to sound like an avenging warrior queen, but she couldn’t help it. She was so angry. Lunchtime martinis and hurt were a very potent mix.

  ‘You left a message on our answering machine at home, something for Shay about a property you think we’d all like. Of course, that’s the family answering machine, Antoinette, so Beth heard it and she’s very upset. What’s more,’ Cassie emphasised, ‘I’m very angry. I know absolutely nothing about any plan to sell our house or for you to move in with us. Now, if this is some notion you’ve come up with yourself, I think it would be nice to share this notion with Shay. Or,’ she added, this time her voice dangerously low, ‘if this is something you have cooked up with Shay, then I am so angry, I can’t begin to tell you.’

  For a moment there was silence at the other end of the phone.

  ‘Well …’ began Antoinette, clearly taken aback by this type of anger from her daughte
r-in-law. Cassie had never been anything but polite to her. And Antoinette didn’t like angry people. It was upsetting.

  ‘It seemed like such a good idea,’ she muttered, ‘and we’d all have more space. I mean, well, you would. You and Shay could buy a house nearer Pearl and, and …’ Her voice tailed off.

  ‘And you’d have Shay at your beck and call all the time,’ said Cassie silkily.

  ‘I’m getting older,’ said Antoinette, playing what she considered her trump card.

  ‘I don’t think age has anything to do with this, Antoinette.’ Cassie paused. She hated having had to admit to her mother-in-law that she’d known nothing about this plan, but she needed to know who had come up with it. ‘Tell me, whose idea was this? Was it your idea, or did you and Shay cook it up together?’

  ‘Shay’s so thoughtful and he thinks about me all the time,’ said Antoinette defensively. After all, Shay had been her son before he was Cassie’s husband. ‘He knows I’m lonely here and that I need someone around to do things.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your two daughters?’ demanded Cassie. ‘Ruth and Miriam live much nearer to you than us, and you never, ever ask them to help.’

  ‘Oh, they’re busy with their own lives,’ Antoinette went on, as if this was all perfectly obvious.

  ‘And we’re not busy with our own lives?’ Cassie sounded dangerous now, and anyone who knew her really well would probably hang up. But Antoinette didn’t seem to realise that the danger point had been reached and an explosion was imminent.

  ‘Cassie, I know we should have talked it over with you. I thought perhaps Shay had, but it doesn’t sound as if he has. But don’t panic. I think it’s such a good idea and it would make things easier for me and—’

  Cassie interrupted her. ‘Easier for you? Why should I do something that’s easier for you, Antoinette? You have your life and I have mine. You do not impinge on my life without it being something that myself and my husband discuss. And you seem to forget that he is my husband.’