Between Sisters

by Cathy Kelly

  Fiona raised her eyes to heaven. ‘Some people just don’t know how to handle dogs,’ she said, sounding so much like her mother that everyone laughed. She marched out of the room, calling: ‘Lily, dog duty.’

  ‘My headdress isn’t fixed,’ complained Lily.

  ‘Come on,’ said Fiona impatiently. ‘I can do it later. I am very good with headdresses.’

  Downstairs, Shay had opened two bottles of wine and was simultaneously trying to stop four dogs from entirely wrecking Pearl and Peter’s beautifully organised house. Peter was outside overseeing some final flower deliveries.

  ‘Girls, can you please get the dogs off the cushions?’ he said.

  ‘Doggies,’ said Fiona in her best stentorian dog-training voice, ‘kitchen, now. Treats!’

  Daisy, Apricot, and Cassie and Shay’s two rescue spaniels, King and Charlie, followed her excitedly. Treats was a word they knew well. And Fiona was very good at giving treats.

  ‘It’s all in the way you say it,’ she explained to Lily, raiding the cupboard where the doggie treats were hidden.

  Fiona loved spending time with Lily. Lily was one of the few people who let Fiona boss her around – well, apart from Coco, who was putty in Fiona’s little hands. Red, whom Fiona adored entirely, liked to tease her by saying she’d have to stop bossing Coco around once they were married.

  Fiona loved that. ‘As if!’ she’d say, sounding like a teenager.

  Her mother was back to not letting anyone boss her around. Now that her leg was not wobbly anymore, Jo was determined to be in charge of her life, so Fiona was stuck with telling the dogs and her beloved Apricot what to do, as well as twisting Coco around her little finger.

  Jo was still getting her hair done in the dining room and the noise of the hairdryer could be heard blasting alongside loud conversation from Ian and the make-up artist.

  ‘You really could go into business with those headpieces,’ the make-up artist was saying. ‘I love your work. They’re perfect for weddings: so easy to fit on and work flowers through them. Genius.’

  ‘Nah, I’m still in college,’ said Ian. ‘I want to learn it all and then decide what I want to do. Headpieces are just a hobby at the mo.’

  ‘But you could make a fortune,’ the make-up artist went on.

  Ian shot her a withering gaze. ‘I am so not into avarice,’ he said dismissively. ‘There’s more to life than money.’

  In the O’Neill house on Longford Terrace, Myra was back from the hairdressers and was watching as one of her daughter-in-laws applied a faintly shimmering pale lilac eyeshadow to her eyelids.

  ‘Is this my colour?’ she said anxiously, one eye half-open as she peered at herself in the mirror. ‘I don’t normally wear anything shimmery. I don’t want to be looking like mutton dressed up as lamb.’

  ‘Myra, will you relax? It’s already looking lovely. I’m good at this,’ protested Alix, who had several years of beauty college behind her before settling down to have her two children.

  ‘I want to look perfect. You know they’re having a make-up artist at the house and everything,’ added Myra, still not convinced.

  ‘You could have gone over,’ Alix reminded her. ‘Coco offered and Red said he’d hire one here.’

  ‘I don’t hold with that sort of thing,’ said Myra, who knew she’d feel anxious until the priest had said ‘amen’, the register was signed and it was all over.

  ‘Besides, you’re not doing badly, Alix, just not so much purple-ness,’ she added.

  ‘Fine,’ said Alix resignedly, who knew there was no point mentioning her trophy for make-up application in college.

  Upstairs, in the bedroom he’d shared with Dan and Mike for so many years, Red was thinking that he was glad he’d chosen to leave for his wedding from his own family home. He could have had his pick of any of Dublin’s swankiest hotels, but somehow it seemed right to be leaving Longford Terrace to marry Coco, when she was getting ready in Delaney Gardens, just around the corner. He knew she was probably already wearing the spectacular dress she’d been giving him endless hints about.

  ‘It has to be a surprise,’ she’d say mysteriously, any time he tried to get more information.

  ‘If it’s a surprise, stop giving me hints,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Oh, I so want to share it with you,’ she’d sighed in exasperation.

  ‘Crazy woman!’ Red had said and pulled her close. ‘How did I manage without you to drive me mad for four years?’

  ‘I can drive you mad for a long time to come now,’ said Coco, nestling against him.

  Red allowed himself to think briefly of when he’d get to take off the glorious, much-hinted-at dress that night and smiled to himself. There had been a mention from Phoebe of stockings. The thought of Coco’s curves in stockings was enough to make him want to cancel the whole party afterwards and drag her off to a hotel like a caveman.

  ‘Hey, lover man,’ said his brother Dan, popping his head round the door. ‘Can I run through the best man’s speech with you? I don’t want to put my foot in it anywhere ’cos I know you will kill me, so can we talk? Might wipe that sappy smile off your face!’

  Cassie looked out the window to Delaney Gardens where the garden had a small marquee with bunting, balloons and flowers strewn all over the place. Coco, who’d worked very hard, had wanted fairy lights attached on to everything that didn’t move.

  Please let it not rain, she begged frantically the night before.

  ‘Those lights aren’t suitable for outdoors, you know,’ said Cassie, stalwart of many, many functions in the open air.

  ‘None of them?’ wailed Coco. ‘Oops. Pray harder for no rain. You see, I wanted to do it myself and didn’t want you to have to work at my wedding. It’s hard enough with your new business without having to do all of this yourself too.’

  ‘I’m not on my own,’ Cassie reminded her. ‘I’ve got Belinda and Kenny working with me.’ She smiled. ‘It’s so nice not being shouted at in the morning anymore.’

  ‘Red says he’ll put all his Irish business your way,’ promised Coco. ‘The Keneally sisters stick together.’

  ‘I think learning that you’re marrying Red is what made Loren back off with her wild threats to sue us,’ Cassie said. ‘Plus the round-robin email where everyone who left said she’d bullied us all the time and if she decided to sue, we’d counter-sue for constructive dismissal. That doesn’t look good on any events company’s CV.

  ‘Tell me,’ Cassie went on, ‘did you sort out the seating plan so that you know where to put Aunt Edie so she can do minimum damage?’

  ‘Red says he has a sweet, churchgoing widowed uncle on his father’s side. He was captain of his golf club, so he’ll do nicely. I’m putting her beside him.’

  ‘But she might get angry because she’s not close enough to the action,’ Cassie pointed out.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry – she couldn’t get any closer to the top table unless she was sitting on the cake,’ said Coco. ‘I don’t want her shrieking at me for the next twenty years.’

  Coco suddenly saw that the bathroom was free and raced into it. Taking out her mobile, she rang Red.

  ‘Hi darling,’ she said.

  ‘Hi beautiful,’ replied Red. ‘I was thinking about you wearing stockings … Are you?’

  ‘I might be,’ said Coco saucily. ‘But we are going to a church, remember. No groping.’

  ‘Right, no groping,’ repeated Red. ‘None at all?’

  ‘Perhaps in the car on the way back here,’ said Coco, relenting. ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you,’ said Red.

  In her perfect eau-de-Nil house, Edie dithered over which diamond brooch to wear. She hated dithering; it annoyed her so much in other people and she couldn’t bear such behaviour in herself either. But the right impression was important today. She wanted the O’Neills to know they
were marrying into a substantial family. Just because Pearl had never had two ha’pennies to rub together, and her verandah was still made out of those old packing cases that got painted blue every summer, didn’t mean that the other branch of the family hadn’t done well.

  Edie was determined to wear her little mink jacket to demonstrate this. She’d thought of wearing a lemon short-sleeved sheath dress, but then decided her lower arms might look crêpey and decided there was nothing worse than a lady of her vintage showing off crêpey arms. It had to be long sleeves, she decided, even though it was a fabulous day for May and the weather forecast was for a marvellously sunny day.

  ‘Wear what you feel like,’ Pearl had said in exasperation when they’d had this discussion. ‘Nobody’s looking at your arms to see if they’re wrinkly or not, and if they are, do you really care for the opinion of those sort of people? As I said, wear what you want. You’re beautiful.’

  A lifetime of being thought of as Pearl Keneally’s sharp, harsher and much less pretty younger sister reared up in Edie’s mind like a wild horse. Nobody had ever said she was beautiful, not even Harry.

  ‘No, you’re the beautiful one, everyone always said so,’ said Edie, stung. ‘Even Harry never said I was beautiful, so don’t make fun of me.’

  Pearl looked at her sadly. ‘Harry was a good man but he had a roving eye, and there was nothing you could have done about that, Edie. Even if you’d been Rita Hayworth, he’d have been off. You were always so beautiful and elegant, so perfectly turned out. You made him, you made that business flourish, and he loved you. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have come back.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Edie, too upset to realise that Pearl had known about Harry’s peccadilloes after all.

  ‘He loved you and so do I. Plus, I think you’re beautiful,’ said Pearl simply. ‘You’re my sister; I’ll always love you. Stop worrying about if you’re showing too much wrinkly arm and wear what you want to Coco’s wedding. She’d want you to be happy. I want you to be happy. I’m sure that Harry, sitting up there chatting up angels, wants you to be happy too, so if you happen to catch some dashing gent’s eye, you’ll do it in your lemon yellow faster than in that dull beige dress that’d make anyone look like they’d been embalmed.’

  Edie couldn’t help herself: laughter burst out of her. ‘Pearl, you’re dreadfully irreligious, you do know that?’

  ‘And you can be terribly po-faced, Edie, but I love you all the same.’

  Phoebe and Ian took a moment from fixing headdresses on to people to sit out in the sun on the front step and breathe.

  ‘We must have been mad to go into fashion,’ Ian said, face still triumphant from how wonderful everyone looked in his amazing headpieces.

  ‘Mad,’ agreed Phoebe, smiling at how proud he looked. He was such a darling. So talented, and not just at fashion either. Right at this moment, his mother – handsewer extraordinaire – was in the McLoughlins’ house with Phoebe’s mother discussing the whole McLoughlin organic hand-dyed and handmade craft range.

  ‘It can’t be like any old craft range,’ Ian had said when he explained the idea to Phoebe. ‘Not just lavender sachets, etcetera. No, you need a USP.’

  ‘Is that like a UFO?’ teased Phoebe.

  ‘We can’t have her involved in the business,’ Red had said, amused.

  ‘No bullying,’ Coco had intervened.

  ‘I am not bullying. I am giving them the benefit of my business acumen,’ Red said.

  ‘And seed money!’ said Phoebe in a loud whisper. ‘He can say what he likes.’

  Ian and Phoebe had designed the range: hand-dyed linen bags for laundry and travel, herbal sachets, and all quirkily embroidered with words like ‘lingerie’ or ‘knickers’, depending on the market. Red and Ian, who was proving to have a fabulous business brain, were already thinking along the lines of luxury bed throws and cushion covers, and three potential premises in an industrial estate in Bray were currently being looked at.

  The McLoughlin farm’s sheep had been sold, although the hens and the ducks remained.

  ‘They’re pets,’ Kate had told her daughter. ‘Besides, Prince needs something to herd or he’ll go mad.’

  Ethan and Mary-Kate were astonished to hear that their mother would be earning money, and had already asked if they could buy paint and do up the inside of the house.

  ‘A salary for definite,’ Red had said gruffly, before mentioning the sort of money that made Kate and her children gasp.

  ‘You are a kind man,’ Coco had said, kissing him.

  ‘How long has it taken for you to figure that out?’ demanded Red.

  ‘It will work out, won’t it?’ Phoebe asked Ian now.

  Ian gave her his I am a genius stare and then laughed. ‘Course it will, you daft maggot. How can it not with us behind it.’

  They had to leave for the church in half an hour. The house was chaotic with laughter and joy, so Elsa – who wasn’t used to so many people around her all the time, unless she was in a television studio – went into the back garden for a moment’s peace.

  She sat down on a bench that looked hand-carved and wondered if it had been there all those years before. She thought it might have been. She might have sat on this very bench with Cassie and hugged her as a little girl, with Pearl’s old roses nodding their heads peacefully in the sun beside them.

  She still felt nervy about returning home. No matter how much they all wanted it to work, she’d been gone a long time and her daughters had been through so much since – plenty of it because of her absence.

  ‘Pearl said you were out here.’

  It was Cassie, looking elegant and beautiful with her hair piled on top of her head with tendrils snaking down around her cheekbones. Her gown was the sort of thing Cassie never normally wore. It was fitted close to the body and Cassie had been quite shocked to see how slim and feminine it made her look.

  ‘You look lovely,’ said Elsa to her older daughter.

  There was the most work to do with Cassie, she realised. Coco was so full of joy about getting married, but Cassie had endured more pain, Elsa knew.

  It was Cassie who’d been the grown-up when Coco was small, Cassie who’d taken care of her sister and protected her from all harm. Elsa could see it in their relationship: the way Coco turned to Cassie all the time, showing her things, smiling and asking questions.

  Coco had really had two stand-in mothers: Pearl and Cassie, while Cassie had only had one and the memory of another one who’d abruptly left her.

  Cassie sat down beside Elsa on the bench.

  ‘Do you hate me?’ asked Elsa. ‘I could understand if you do. It’s all right to hate me. What we feel deeply inside isn’t always what we think we ought to feel, but you have to honour your feelings. There are no good or bad ones, just what we experience.’

  Unexpectedly, Cassie laughed. ‘I’m glad I know where my desire to fix people and my over-analytical brain comes from,’ she said.

  Surprised, Elsa smiled. ‘I want you to feel what you need to feel …’ she began again.

  ‘Elsa, I have been overanalysing my feelings about you for my whole life,’ she said. ‘Everything that happened in my life, I wondered if it happened because I didn’t have a mother or a conventional upbringing. I have my husband back, my family back and my mother back. Right now, I have had enough of analysing.’ She turned to face Elsa, which was difficult on the tiny bench. ‘And I believe that you can’t analyse me because I am your daughter.’

  ‘Not professionally,’ agreed Elsa, beginning to smile, ‘but I can’t help myself.’

  ‘Let’s make a deal.’ Cassie took Elsa’s hand in hers. ‘Let’s put off the analysis till after the wedding – but if we see someone with a particularly weird hat or an odd tic we need to discuss, we can analyse the heck out of them. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ said Elsa, smiling.


  ‘Now, I have to round up the troops and get everyone ready. Are you OK out here?’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Elsa, and she was.

  When Cassie had gone inside, Elsa looked at the house with its cheerily painted walls and the south-of-France blue verandah hung with tea lamps and flowers, and let the pain go. It had been such a long journey but she was here now and she could be happy. She’d battled to be here and she deserved it.

  There might be tough times ahead but she would be thankful for her beautiful daughters and her family and try to get through it. It was all any of them could do.

  Then she raised her face to the sun and let the heat bathe her skin.

  Today was all they had; tomorrow they would cope with when it came.

  Acknowledgements

  I love reading other people’s acknowledgements. You see names you recognise because publishing is such a lovely business and people move around, so you might know someone; and you see that other writers dribble hysterical thanks to that person who found a vital notebook on the bus and can be thrilled that it’s not just you who loses stuff.

  My dedications go a bit mad, but I don’t care: I love thanking all the lovely people who had a part in a book or in my life when I was writing the book. Writing is part of living, so you don’t have to have a plot idea to assist (I am dreadful at keeping the plot to myself when I am writing, so nobody really gets a chance to have a plot idea), but you might have dragged me off for a skinny cappuccino and a chat when my head was bursting with book, and that is a gift beyond rubies.

  First, thanks to my readers, without whom I’d still be writing on that second-hand kitchen table with nobody reading a word. Please keep talking to me: I love your emails and messages. It’s talking to friends. I love it when we meet on tours and I recognise people.