Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘What’ll I say is wrong if Loren asks where you are?’ said Belinda when Cassie phoned in to say she was taking the day off.

  ‘Say it’s stress,’ said Cassie, who really didn’t care anymore.

  ‘Oh honey,’ said Belinda sadly, ‘I’m so sorry. I wish there was something I could do. Shall I come over this evening after work and bring a bottle of wine?’

  Cassie thought of all the wine she was already getting through on a secret basis. She preferred drinking on her own. You could drink more quickly that way, get into that nice state of forgetting how wrong everything was, how strange the house felt, how upset the girls were and how she was filled with a sense of doom because something very precious was now gone.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thanks Belinda, but no, I’m fine. Really, I’ll be OK tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll handle Loren,’ said Belinda.

  ‘Thanks for that,’ said Cassie, ‘but actually, I’m OK if Loren does ring. I’ve almost never taken time off before in all the years I’ve worked for the old cow.’

  ‘Unkind to cows,’ Belinda said. The friends laughed.

  So Cassie was home when Coco phoned.

  She was sitting listlessly on the kitchen couch still dressed in her pyjamas, watching something on TV, a repeat of a comedy show she used to watch twenty years ago, when her mobile rang. She looked at it briefly, determined not to answer unless it was either of the girls or their school, but it was Coco. She could talk to Coco no matter what.

  ‘Cass,’ said Coco, and her voice was urgent, excited. ‘You won’t believe this but there was a phone call to the shop and I wasn’t there. Alice took it. A woman rang from London, posh voice apparently, and she says she’s a friend of our mother’s and she wants to talk to us.’

  Cassie almost dropped the phone but somehow she managed to hold on to it. ‘What? Our mother?’

  ‘Yes, I wanted to ring her immediately but I wanted to do it with you. We’ve got to, haven’t we?’

  ‘Should we talk to Pearl first?’ said Cassie, her head whirling with all the implications of this.

  ‘No,’ said her sister, ‘let’s do it together. I’ll come round to you.’

  Cassie had barely managed to wash her face, comb her hair and throw on an old tracksuit before her sister came around.

  ‘You must have driven like a maniac,’ she said as she opened the door.

  ‘Yes,’ said Coco. ‘I’m so excited. Aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cassie. ‘All these years and now she wants to get in touch with us? What did Alice say – this woman wants to get in touch with us or our mother wants to get in touch with us and is using this woman to do it?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m not sure,’ said Coco impatiently. ‘Let’s just ring.’ She turned her phone to speaker and dialled the number.

  ‘Hello,’ said a voice, and Cassie and Coco looked at each other. It was indeed a posh voice. Elegant, received pronunciation vowel sounds.

  ‘Hello, this is Coco Keneally, and my sister Cassie is here with me,’ said Coco hesitantly. ‘You rang my shop earlier today looking for me about my mother. I don’t know what to say,’ she said.

  ‘You’re both there?’ said the woman, sounding just as shocked as they were.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cassie, ‘we’re both here. We’ve been here for a long time – thirty years, in fact – and this is the first time our mother has seen fit to contact us.’

  She couldn’t help herself, it was coming out now: the anger, the bitterness, the betrayal.

  ‘I see,’ said the woman. ‘My name is Mari Barrington and, as it happens, your mother tried to get in touch many times. She’s one of my dearest friends and has been for twenty years. She’s gone into hospital for surgery for cancer and I’m her next of kin. I’ve known about you all the time I’ve known her, and I’ve known that not being able to see you was one of the most painful things in her life, but your father wouldn’t let her. So you see, she has tried to get in touch. If you don’t want to see her, that’s fine.’

  The world seemed to tilt.

  ‘No,’ said Cassie weakly. ‘No, that’s not what we’re saying at all. She never got in touch with us. Honestly. She … she just disappeared.’

  Mari doodled on the pad on her desk with the fountain pen she’d used at school. Funny how one held on to old things.

  Of course, she thought. Elsa’s husband’s bitterness had ruled the roost.

  ‘I think your father may have had a hand in stopping you from ever finding out,’ she said now. ‘Your mother wanted to see you both, she tried to come back to you, tried to be your mother again, but your father wouldn’t allow it. He said you were all happy, that you’d said you didn’t need her or want her anymore. She wrote letters, lots of them. He sent some back, but not all of them.’

  Cassie clutched her stomach as a sharp pain hit her. She didn’t know what it was: grief, pain, the sense of so much lost time?

  ‘No,’ she said, almost a moan.

  ‘And she’s sick now?’ said Coco.

  ‘She’s gone into hospital this morning,’ said Mari, her voice softening slightly. ‘She’s so private, your mother, she didn’t even tell me she was going in for the surgery. She has cancer and she never told any of us.’

  ‘Cancer,’ Coco echoed sadly.

  ‘You said she never told “any of you”,’ said Cassie. ‘Did she get married again or have a family?’

  She didn’t know why but that would have been the most painful of all – to discover that Marguerite had started again with new children, having left them behind. It was ridiculous, childish …

  ‘No,’ said Mari, ‘she only had one family and you were it. But she has another family with her friends who love her dearly, and I couldn’t let this time pass without getting in touch with you. She might absolutely murder me for this breach of confidence, but I just thought I’d give it one last try.’

  ‘One last try?’ breathed Coco. ‘You see, we’ve honestly never heard from her all our lives,’ she said slowly. ‘Our father never told us that our mother had got in touch, never said she’d written. He just said she’d gone and had never come back.’

  ‘How very painful that must have been for you,’ said the elegant voice on the other end of the phone. ‘People do the strangest things when they’re angry and in pain. She always said she hurt him so much. I can’t tell you how sad all this makes me. You’ve found her now. If you want to see her …’

  Coco and Cassie stared at each other.

  ‘Yes,’ they said as one.

  The skies darkened and it started to rain heavily just as Pearl was taking a load out of her washing machine. Daisy shivered under the kitchen table.

  ‘Yes, it does look like thunder, sweetie,’ said Pearl, looking up at the sky.

  Daisy hated thunder and took to her doggy bed whenever it arrived.

  ‘It didn’t say anything about this on the radio this morning, though,’ said Pearl thoughtfully. There was a superstitious part of her that said unexpected bad weather meant something. Her mother used to believe that and had a host of old sayings about everything from weather to dropping cutlery on the floor.

  Burning the bread meant visitors; a dropped knife meant a gentleman caller; and thunder … thunder never meant anything good.

  When the doorbell rang, it made both Pearl and Daisy jump with the loudness.

  ‘Goodness, who’s out in this weather?’ said Pearl, slowly making her way to the front door. But it was already being opened.

  ‘Grammy, it’s us,’ called Coco. ‘I just buzzed the bell so you wouldn’t get a fright.’

  Why would the girls be coming to see her during the day? There was something wrong, Pearl knew: the thunder was never wrong.

  She knew for sure when she saw their faces.

  Sometimes she felt her
age and she felt it now, felt the rush of seventy-nine years overwhelm her. Coco looked excited, while Cassie … Cassie looked white and shocked.

  Coco blurted it all out.

  ‘Mum isn’t dead, Grammy. A woman rang my shop from London, says Mum is alive, sober and is going into hospital for cancer surgery. The woman said Mum wrote many, many times but Dad wouldn’t let us see her, told her we had our own lives and to leave us alone. You see? She didn’t just abandon us!’

  Pearl had to sit down. She felt her heart race and a pain in her chest, and she wondered if this was what it was like to feel your mortality come to greet you.

  ‘Pearl, it’s all right,’ said Cassie, rushing to kneel at her grandmother’s side. ‘We don’t blame you.’

  ‘No,’ said Coco tearfully, ‘we don’t. We just want to understand, that’s all.’

  ‘Can you get me my blood pressure tablets?’ Pearl said quietly. ‘And I’ll tell you everything.’

  She began to feel nauseous but she had to tell her girls the truth. Perhaps her heart could give way now and she’d never get to tell them the truth, of how she’d always felt she’d made a mistake by not keeping their poor mother closer.

  She took the tablet and sat quietly, holding her mobile phone close in case she had to dial a number. If the ambulance came, she wanted Peter with her.

  With Daisy on her lap, she told the whole story: how she’d been so fond of Marguerite but how she’d worried because Marguerite seemed so fragile, and of how the drinking had increased until the accident.

  ‘At the time, I didn’t think your father had any other option,’ Pearl said sorrowfully, ‘but in my heart, I knew there were better ways of helping people like your mother. I felt so guilty that we’d just sent her off without any help or love, and it always broke my heart that we never heard from her again. I couldn’t understand that. She loved you both so much. I just—’

  She started to cry and they both looked at her in horror. Grammy never cried.

  ‘I just can’t believe Jim wouldn’t let her come back to see you at least. That was wrong, so wrong. I never knew.’ She looked at her beloved granddaughters. ‘He was wrong to do that. I couldn’t bear to tell you about her because she’d never come back. I thought it would break your heart to know that, but it seems your hearts were broken anyway.’

  ‘Mari said when she tried to come back, Dad said none of us wanted her.’

  At this, Pearl crossed herself. ‘Bless his poor soul,’ she said. ‘I knew his heart was broken but that was wrong, so very wrong. Why didn’t he tell us? We both knew you needed a mother.’

  ‘We can’t blame him, Grammy,’ said Cassie. ‘His heart was broken too.’

  ‘But the letters – why didn’t I ever see them, why didn’t I notice?’ said Pearl in anguish. ‘It’s my fault. I swear on my life, girls, I never saw a letter from your mother!’

  ‘Hush, Grammy, it’s OK.’ Coco shot a worried look at her sister and tried to mouth the word ‘doctor’, but Cassie seemed lost in thought.

  ‘The other house, Grammy,’ Cassie said. ‘Marguerite would have sent letters to our old home, her old home.’ They’d moved into their grandmother’s lock, stock and barrel and their father had rented out their old house to keep the mortgage paid. ‘That must have been where she sent the letters.’

  The house was long since gone, old and needing much work, it had been sold. Marguerite sending the letters there made total sense.

  ‘You couldn’t have seen the letters, Grammy. I know you’d never lie to us like that,’ Cassie said.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ sobbed Pearl, and a heartbroken Daisy sat beside her mistress and began to howl at all the pain in the room. ‘But I should have known, I should have fought for her. I let her down, I let both of you down.’

  Shay had been given instructions to polish both his car and his mother’s. Both might be required that night for the great party. He’d had to take the day off work because there were so many flowers to be transported – guests needed to see how many bouquets Antoinette had received – and an elderly aunt, whom he knew his mother had absolutely no time for whatsoever, had to be picked up from the train station and delivered to the house.

  ‘Your car is bigger and looks better going up to the hotel,’ said Antoinette thoughtfully. ‘Now, you can collect Dilys and Josette first and bring them here, and then they can come up with Ruth, because her car is lovely. I like a BMW, don’t you? We don’t want the hotel people thinking we’re riff-raff.’

  Shay looked at his mother. ‘Seriously?’ he said. ‘You’re worried about what the hotel staff think when we drive up?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Antoinette.

  Shay bit his lip and he thought of other birthdays. ‘Mum, do you know what I got you last year for your birthday?’

  ‘Yes.’ She beamed at him. ‘That voucher for a Clarins facial and a lovely face serum to go with it.’

  ‘Do you know who came up with that idea and who actually went to the shops and bought it all?’ Shay went on.

  Antoinette’s beam faltered.

  ‘Cassie did. Like she buys everything for everyone. Like she makes sure you have the loveliest Christmas present each year, and she remembers that you like Rive Gauche and gets it for you. Like she knows you love Lindt chocolates and only buys them for you at Easter. The bunnies allegedly come from the girls but it’s actually Cassie who goes out and buys you Lindt Easter bunnies.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’ said Antoinette, looking annoyed at this point.

  ‘That means that the person who thinks so much of you in my home is now alone. You have never appreciated what she has done for you and neither, it seems, have I. And it means that you apparently don’t care a damn about her because not once have you asked about Cassie, or worried about us getting back together, or indeed thought of inviting her or the girls to your party.’

  ‘Well, I have been busy …’ blustered his mother.

  ‘And I’ve been stupid,’ said Shay. ‘I can’t believe I have wasted so much time on a birthday party. I’m leaving.’

  ‘But tonight, what about tonight, it’s my sixty-fifth birthday party?’ wailed Antoinette.

  ‘You’re going to have to cope on your own,’ said Shay. And then he went upstairs to pack.

  Cassie wasn’t in work. He knew because he planned to go there first but had rung Belinda to check. She wasn’t at home, either. Panicking now, his final port of call was Coco.

  ‘Oh Shay, she’s here, at Pearl’s, and—’

  ‘Perfect, keep her there,’ said Shay, not wanting to hear another word, and hung up.

  How could he have been so foolish? Cassie had been right all along.

  At Pearl’s, Shay rang the doorbell and Coco answered the door.

  ‘We’ve found our mother,’ she said joyfully.

  ‘Right,’ said Shay, who really didn’t give a damn either way. ‘Where’s Cassie?’

  ‘In there with Pearl …’

  Pearl was lying on her couch with Daisy attentive beside her.

  ‘I should call the doctor, Pearl,’ said Cassie. ‘You’ve had a shock. You need your blood pressure taken. I don’t know why you don’t have one of those blood pressure things.’

  ‘Does Peter have one?’ asked Shay, shocking Cassie as he arrived.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pearl weakly.

  Shay kissed Pearl lightly on the cheek, patted Daisy, and then took his wife into his arms.

  ‘I am so, so sorry, my darling,’ he said. ‘I love you and I’m never going anywhere again.’ He kissed her and Cassie kissed him back. ‘Except to run over to Peter’s and ask to borrow his blood-pressure machine.’

  ‘What?’ said Cassie, but he was already gone again.

  ‘Thunder,’ said Pearl, managing to smile through her tears. ‘Always means something.’

  Peter arr
ived with a portable blood-pressure machine and a worried look on his face. He took Cassie’s place by Pearl’s side.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you’re going to be fine.’ He quickly took Pearl’s blood pressure. ‘One eighty over one ten,’ he said. ‘Hospital for you, my love.’

  My love? Cassie mouthed the words at her husband, who grinned and grabbed her hand.

  ‘Love is not only for the young,’ he whispered.

  The hospital kept Pearl in for observation but seemed impressed by her general good health.

  ‘You’re her husband?’ the doctor said to Peter, who replied: ‘No, fiancé.’

  ‘We’ll keep her in overnight, hooked up, but she should be fine to come home in the morning. It’s more precautionary.’

  ‘Fiancé?’ whispered Cassie to Pearl when the doctor was gone.

  Pearl smiled and held tightly on to Peter’s hand. She couldn’t speak anymore. But her family knew she’d never lie to them about something so important. She would never have done what Jim had done. Never. And yet he was her darling son and she could understand his pain.

  Still, there would be no more secrets from now on.

  ‘Yes, fiancé,’ she finally said, looking tremulously up at her granddaughter. ‘No more secrets,’ she said.

  Twenty-Five

  LONDON

  Sitting in the small London hotel, where Mari appeared to know the manager who’d sat them in a tiny private room upstairs, Coco didn’t know who was more nervous: her sister or Mari, who looked utterly stunning and dressed with such exquisite flair that Coco wanted to inquire as to the vintage of every one of her pieces of clothing. She knew that this was hardly the time or the place, but she kept staring at Mari. She looked familiar, so beautiful, like a model from an Ossie Clarke spread in Vogue.

  ‘It’s like an intervention in reverse,’ Mari said nervously as they waited for Elsa and her friend, Anastasia, to appear.