Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘I know,’ said Pearl as she sat down.

  She didn’t want to make the inevitable cup of tea to try and make everything better. She was fed up of making tea as a distraction from real life.

  ‘What do you think pushed her over the edge?’ Pearl asked anxiously. ‘I’ve talked to her on the phone but I think she’s avoiding me. She cries all the time when I phone, or else she’s angry and says: “It’s Shay’s bloody fault”. As for Antoinette … Oh Coco, I don’t know what to do. I mean, Antoinette was behaving in a silly manner, but for Cassie to throw Shay out …’

  Coco played with the sugar bowl on the table, twisting the silver spoon around and around in the grains of sugar.

  ‘Should we go round together?’ Pearl said. ‘Do you think that would help? Tell her it’s crazy to break up her family for this?’

  Coco thought about it. ‘I honestly don’t think that’s going to work. It’s like …’ She felt that she was betraying Cassie by even saying this, but Pearl might know what to do. ‘It’s like she’s become a little crazy ever since the night Jo had her stroke.’

  ‘And you think that’s it?’ said Pearl, confused. ‘Jo having a stroke?’

  ‘No,’ said Coco. ‘That’s not it precisely. It was the conversation we had afterwards when I came home from the hospital. We started talking about our mother and what it had been like. I was talking about how I didn’t remember her, and Cassie said she did and how she’d always tried to protect me because she didn’t want me to be scared, but that she was always afraid that people left …’

  Pearl breathed in heavily. ‘Oh, poor Cassie,’ she said, her hands beginning to shake. ‘That’s … that’s so sad. I had no idea. I thought it was just something with her and Shay and Antoinette. She tries so hard to make everything perfect …’

  ‘I think she tries to make everything perfect because she still wants the perfect family,’ Coco said. ‘That doesn’t mean that you and Dad didn’t give us the perfect family, but there’s some part of Cassie that wants the mum and the dad thing, and she’s determined to give the girls that. Antoinette messed it up and made Cassie think that Shay could leave. That’s what she’s afraid of: that people leave. And I don’t know what to say to her about that because, well …’ Coco shrugged. ‘Look at us. Our mother did leave so there’s no happy answer to that.’

  ‘Cooeee,’ said a voice from around the side of the house.

  ‘Oh heavens, no,’ said Pearl, closing her eyes wearily. ‘Not now.’

  ‘Anybody home?’ came the voice again.

  There was a barrage of small puppy and larger puppy barking, and suddenly Edie was at the back door, resplendent in a beige suit with a little fur collar and a hat more suited to Ascot than a cool autumn day.

  ‘I just popped round for a minute and when nobody answered the front door, I thought I’d come round the back. Hello Coco, you’re looking very well, I must say. Red suits you, you should wear it more often, but I do think something modern, maybe.’

  Edie’s basilisk gaze took in Coco’s bombshell dress: a glamorous creation that wasn’t vintage but looked somehow exquisitely forties and showed off her bosom and tiny waist to great effect.

  ‘Nothing short or ugly like young girls are wearing these days, but perhaps not anything as tight as that either, because I did love the style of the clothes from the forties and fifties, Coco, but they are gone, after all.’

  Despite everything, Coco giggled. Edie had that effect on her.

  Pearl got to her feet and laid a hand on Coco’s. ‘We’ll talk about this later,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You and Fiona might as well get out of here because we won’t be able to talk with Edie here.’

  Once Fiona, Coco and Apricot had gone, Edie sat down at the table like a duchess and watched her older sister make tea. It had always been the same: Edie had somehow managed to behave as if she was the aristocracy while everyone else in the family was there to serve her.

  Sometimes Pearl knew exactly why Harry had cheated. It was very hard to live up to her sister’s exacting standards, and one always felt that one was somehow not matching up.

  ‘Coco looked very well,’ said Edie, rubbing a bit of fluff off her beige skirt.

  Daisy did not sit at her feet. Daisy was a clever dog and knew that Edie had no time for small, velvety animals with big eyes. Instead, Daisy sat, slightly scared, behind her mistress’s chair, her eyes bigger than ever.

  ‘I still wish you’d tell her to wear ordinary clothes, Pearl,’ Edie went on. ‘She’ll never catch and keep the right sort of man in anything that shows off her chest. Well, she’ll catch a man, but …’ Edie paused for effect. ‘I suppose I did tell you that Red O’Neill was back in town recently? He’s quite a catch, you know. Plenty of money, apparently. I’m not sure what it is he does but he’s been in the social columns—’

  ‘You mean in the gossip pages?’ interrupted Pearl acidly.

  ‘You say tomayto, I say tomaato,’ said Edie. ‘Anyway, he’s back, he’s still not married, and I don’t see why she shouldn’t make a play for him again.’

  ‘Oh Edie,’ said Pearl in exasperation. ‘Coco split up with Red over four years ago, and she’s hardly likely to make a play for him now, as you so indelicately put it. She’s getting on with her life.’

  ‘No she’s not,’ Edie insisted. ‘She’s looking after someone else’s child and her life is on hold. I never hear of her going out on dates, and even if she did, who is going to look at a woman who wears outfits from the forties and fifties? For goodness’ sake, she’s a beautiful girl. She should be wearing elegant, modern clothes. Maybe something long and flowing with little court shoes and—’

  ‘Edie,’ interrupted Pearl sweetly, ‘I hate to tell you, but those aren’t modern clothes. Those are old-fashioned clothes, but they’re simply the old-fashioned clothes that you approve of. Coco likes wearing old-fashioned clothes that she approves of: the sort of things she sells in her shop.’

  Seeing as she was getting nowhere, Edie changed the subject. ‘How’s Cassie?’ she said. ‘I hear she threw the husband out. Girls today – they haven’t a notion how to handle men.’

  Pearl’s lips tightened as she poured the tea. ‘Shay and Cassie are having some problems. I wouldn’t say she threw her husband out; I’d say that they are living separately while they work it out.’ She closed her eyes momentarily and said a prayer that she wouldn’t burn in hell for such a blatant lie.

  Cassie had indeed thrown Shay out, and even though Pearl had been around twice and had phoned most days to talk to her about it, Cassie refused to talk about the idea of Shay coming home, beyond saying: ‘There’s no coming back from what he did, Pearl. No coming back at all.’ All of which was followed by bursting into tears.

  Pearl would then hang up and feel like bursting into tears herself.

  ‘I hope you aren’t spreading stories about our family business, Edie,’ Pearl said, slightly cross now.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course I’m not. It’s just people ask and I need to have some story made up to tell them. I could say he’s gone off somewhere for work. His mother lives on the other side of the city, after all, so I’d get away with that. Stupid woman, always trying to look younger than she is. I don’t know why people don’t give in to growing old gracefully.’

  ‘So says the woman who dyes her hair,’ Pearl added with a hint of rancour.

  Edie got to her feet in a stately manner. ‘There’s no pleasing you today, is there, madam? I don’t know what upset you but I’m going to go,’ she said. ‘I know when I’m not wanted.’ And she sailed out to the front door, closing it with an almighty slam.

  Pearl reached down, picked Daisy up and put her on her lap. ‘For a woman who says she’s quite frail, Edie can certainly slam a door,’ she told her dog. ‘Come on – let’s go to Peter’s. I need to talk to someone who’ll listen to me.’

>   ‘So what am I going to do?’ said Pearl.

  She was sitting in a deep, comfortable armchair in Peter’s house and as she looked around, she wondered why they hadn’t held the Thursday night poker club in other people’s houses over the years. Somehow they’d all got into the habit of having it in hers, and yet Peter’s house was so beautiful, the walls full of paintings done by his late wife, Loretta, who was a talented botanic artist, and everywhere else decorated with things from his travels over the years when he and Loretta used to go on cruises to exotic lands.

  Loretta had loved Egyptian pictures on papyrus, and they vied for space with her exquisite watercolours and funny prints of New Orleans chefs in patisseries making beignets and other delicacies. Pearl had never spent a lot of time in Peter’s house. It was as if there was some old-fashioned idea in her head that a lady never went to a gentleman’s house, and there’d be less talk if a gentleman visited a lady.

  What poppycock that had all been, she thought now. Who really cared if they saw her crossing the garden to visit Peter in his house?

  Peter hadn’t offered to make tea. Instead, recognising the stress on Pearl’s face, he’d opened a bottle of good French white wine, and put it on the table in front of them.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  It was one of the many things she liked about him, the way he wanted all the information before he made any pronouncements on any subject; entirely different from her sister, who decided her opinion long before she had any of the facts.

  Pearl explained how Coco had come to visit and how she’d put down Cassie’s total misery and anxiety to the night they’d talked about their mother leaving.

  ‘I knew that’s what it was but I kept hoping I was wrong, so when Coco made it obvious that Cassie’s abandonment issues are at the heart of it, I wanted to cry,’ Pearl said to Peter. ‘I wanted to say: “It’s all my fault, Coco. All my fault.” I thought I was doing the right thing and, over the years, I’ve realised I didn’t do the right thing at all; it just seemed like the right thing at the time. But when you don’t tell the truth at the start, when do you tell it later?’

  Peter knew the story: she’d told him before and she trusted his judgement.

  ‘I think at the time it didn’t look as if you had any other option,’ he said gently. ‘You were trying to protect those two girls, Pearl, and you did. You raised them, looked after them, loved them. You gave them everything you could—’

  ‘Except a mother,’ Pearl interrupted. ‘I helped take their mother away from them and she never came back.’

  ‘Jim was involved too,’ said Peter. ‘And he was the girls’ father, after all. He knew what could happen. He’d seen what had happened with Marguerite and the car crash. He knew it was just a matter of time before there was a really serious accident. You did what you thought was right at the time, Pearl. Marguerite needed rehab and you had to use tough love to make her get it.’

  ‘But I don’t know if she ever did get to rehab – she just disappeared. I can’t get that thought out of my head, Peter. She was a lovely woman and she was damaged, I see that now. I should have tried harder to keep her here and help her.’ Pearl buried her face in her hands. ‘I wish I could turn the clock back and make things different. We thought we were doing the right thing but we were so harsh, so tough, and now look: two wonderful women both terrified of being abandoned. That’s why Coco and Red split up, you know. She was sure he was leaving her for someone else, so she pushed him away, and that’s what Cassie’s doing now. She’s pushing Shay away before he can leave her, before he can choose his mother over her. Now where do you think they learned that lesson?’

  Twenty-One

  Having children as a single mother: it was the sort of huge subject she once would have talked about with Jo or Cassie, Coco thought as she went around tidying up the apartment. Fiona was asleep in bed, snuggled up happily with the nightlight on in her room and all her precious teddies clustered around her. Apricot was asleep in a furry dog bed on the floor, also surrounded by teddies. Coco had explained that if Apricot fell out of the bed in the night, she could seriously hurt herself, so she lay in her bed on the floor beside Fiona’s, snoring gently.

  The spare room was totally Fiona’s now. Coco couldn’t see it any other way but with a child in it. It was amazing how difficult it was looking after a child on your own, and yet how incredibly rewarding. She went around picking up pencils, dolls’ clothes, bits of paper, all the stuff that seemed to fall and drop on to the floor. There were tiny Barbie shoes in the fluffy rug under the coffee table, half-chewed by Apricot, a couple of kids’ CD cases open with their discs missing, stuff everywhere – stuff that was a sign that this apartment was fully lived in. Coco loved it. She loved taking care of Fiona and the sense of sheer joy it gave her.

  Fiona had stayed over before, a couple of times but not often, except then Coco had felt that they were both on their best behaviour, because even though she was Fiona’s godmother, Coco wasn’t a mum; she didn’t understand how things were done, but now she did. Now she realised that you had arguments over cereal in the morning and teeth-brushing, and were able to say things like: ‘Oh, stop complaining, you little monkey,’ or tickle Fiona to ease things along when she tried to brush Fiona’s hair with a special brush to remove tangles.

  Before, she wouldn’t have known how to do those things, would have been afraid to say the wrong thing in case she upset Fiona, but now their relationship was so much stronger, pliable, able to withstand the give and take of two human beings living together – even if one of them was nine years old going on for twenty-three.

  All of which had brought Coco to her current state: of thinking about how she could have her own baby – and with neither her closest confidants around with whom to discuss it.

  Cassie was living in a devastated wasteland of misery over Shay having gone.

  ‘You told him to go,’ Coco had reminded her, because it was her job as her sister to make Cassie see the truth. She’d even told Shay he needed to come and see his wife, but he hadn’t done that either. Idiot.

  And there was no point in talking to Jo. Jo was coming out of the black hole that was her stroke and was still emotionally fragile. She wasn’t able to cope with other people’s problems, so Coco was researching seriously on the internet herself how single women could have babies. There were so many choices: sperm banks, friends, or – more controversially – friends who didn’t know what she wanted them for.

  She hated the idea of her baby’s father being a man she’d used purely as a donor and not told. But there was no point waiting anymore for Prince Charming to come along either. She’d had that before and he’d betrayed her.

  The little niggle in her heart that said: maybe you didn’t give him a proper chance? was pushed firmly to the side.

  If he’d really been the one, he’d have come back, wouldn’t he?

  Dan O’Neill met his brother for a pint in the bar in the Merrion and started the conversation by saying: ‘What’s up, bro?’

  ‘Does anything have to be up?’ said Red testily.

  ‘It does if you clandestinely slip into the country, ask to meet me and Mike, and tell us to say nothing to the parents. Ma will disembowel you, by the way, if she discovers you have been in Dublin and haven’t called in. I don’t care how many millions you have in the bank – you’re toast.’

  ‘I told him that,’ said Mike, coming back from the lavish bathrooms. ‘I love this place,’ he said. ‘There’s art everywhere – even on your way to the loo.’

  ‘You know, money has changed me – I can’t go unless I’ve passed an expensive, highly insured painting on the way,’ deadpanned Red.

  ‘You won’t be able to stop going once Ma has ripped out your intestines,’ Dan laughed.

  The two Dublin-based brothers roared until they thought they might throw up.

  ‘I’ll drop in,
all right?’ said Red.

  ‘And you never met us,’ Mike warned. ‘Or we’ll be killed too.’

  ‘So, what is up?’ Dan asked.

  Red cradled the pint he didn’t really want and looked at the two men he was closest to in the world: men who’d fallen in love and had managed to stay in love, get married, and even have children. It all seemed like a miracle to Red now.

  ‘I want your honest opinion here: did I screw things up with Coco? Should I have stayed around, tried harder?’

  Mike and Dan sat back in their chairs.

  ‘Now he asks us,’ said Dan. ‘Four years later.’

  ‘I told you at the time: women can be tricky,’ Mike pointed out. ‘But would you listen? No. You knew it all.’

  ‘Cut the sermon,’ begged Red. ‘Just tell me if I screwed up because I’m going crazy here. I don’t think I’m over her—’

  ‘Knew it!’ said the brothers in unison, high-fiving each other.

  ‘If it’s any help,’ said Mike, ‘Dolly’s cousin, Trixie, is a stylist and she’s in and out of Coco’s shop all the time, and apparently Coco is never with anyone. No man in her life. Trixie tried to set her up with some bloke last year but Coco said there was no point, she was hopeless with men.’

  ‘Really?’ breathed Red.

  ‘Yeah, really,’ said Mike. ‘So Dolly comes home and tells me, and I wanted to tell you but you were seeing that Latvian model at the time.’

  ‘We weren’t going out, I just met her at a fundraising dinner!’ said Red, irate. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because Dolly said after the way you’d treated Coco, you didn’t deserve her. And I said what had she heard about the whole thing, and she said you’d two-timed Coco—’