I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  ‘I asked her not to say anything,’ she said. ‘She promised she wouldn’t.’ Did they need to keep it hidden though? Why should it be a secret, now that Laura knew?

  ‘How long,’ Laura asked, ‘are you intending to stay?’

  Again, no rancour in the words. No anything at all in the words. She might have been addressing a stranger, or the angry man downstairs.

  ‘I have a return ticket,’ Tilly said, ‘for the thirtieth. Next Wednesday.’ She wondered if she dared to reveal the rest. Not now, certainly not now.

  Laura nodded, her expression unchanged. ‘The electricity is out, it was cut off last night in the storm, so your shower won’t work, and you’ll have no hairdryer either. Feel free to run a bath if you want, in the main bathroom out on the corridor. There’s plenty of hot water – it heats from the kitchen stove. And I’ll send you up a torch for when it gets dark.’

  Exactly the information a paying guest would get. ‘Thank you,’ Tilly said, her hopes dimming with every word she heard.

  ‘I’ll call you for dinner around six. You’ll have to take us as you find us: we don’t stand on ceremony around here, even on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Tilly repeated, wishing she’d give some tiny indication that the notion of having a sister wasn’t so unwelcome.

  In the doorway Laura turned. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘you were probably hoping for a warmer reception, but you can’t just … arrive like this and announce that you’re my sister. You can’t do that to someone. It’s not fair. I’m going to let people think you’re another hotel guest, like the American man, at least until I have a chance to get my head around it myself, and we’ll just have to hope Colette keeps her promise and says nothing. OK?’

  Tilly nodded, unable to speak.

  And then she was alone, Laura shutting the door quietly behind her, leaving Tilly standing in the centre of the room on the verge of tears. That had gone just about as badly as it could, despite Colette’s assurances that everything would be fine.

  She should have broken the news in a letter, and waited for an invitation before coming to Roone. But she’d had no address for Laura, just her name, and the name of the island. She couldn’t have let her know; it wasn’t possible.

  She paced the wooden floor, trying to think. She hadn’t been turned away, but she hadn’t been made welcome either. She was to be introduced as another displaced hotel guest, her true identity hidden, like a shameful little secret. And unless that situation changed – and she had no reason to think it might – she would be waved off on the thirtieth, sent back to where she’d come from. It was like meeting her mother all over again, one big disappointment.

  What was she to do now? Should she stay and pretend to be someone she wasn’t? The prospect was awful – but with so little money, what choice did she have?

  Maybe Colette, who’d been so kind, so understanding, would give her a loan, if Tilly could bring herself to ask for it. She could find cheap accommodation – maybe go back to Bernard and Cormac’s pub, ask them if she could stay until her return date. Even without a loan she could do that: she was fairly sure they’d agree to her sending them money as soon as she got home.

  But she quickly dismissed this idea: the village was too close to Roone, literally within sight of the island. She needed to get further away, put more distance between her and a sister who’d prefer that she hadn’t come.

  She thought about Paddy and Breda in Dingle again. She could ask if they’d take her in until it was time for her to fly home. Yes, she’d phone them right now, leave the island tomorrow on the first ferry.

  She opened her bag and found the leaflet – an ad for a pizza restaurant in Dingle – that Paddy had scribbled his number on. She entered the digits into her phone, but when she tried to connect, no service showed up on her screen. Of course it did: the phones were down.

  She could get the ferry tomorrow anyway: she could leave the island and ring them from the mainland, or from Dingle itself. But what if the phones were down all over Kerry, or what if Paddy and Breda had indeed gone away for Christmas?

  Oh, it was such a mess. She put her head into her hands. She had to think, she had to think what to do.

  What about their father? He lived in Dublin: she could get his address from Laura, make her way there and look him up. But by the sound of it he wouldn’t want her either. Nobody, it would appear, wanted her.

  She stopped pacing: this was getting her nowhere. She crossed to the window and looked out, and saw a line of raggedy hills patched in purples and blues, and below them a scatter of houses and ramshackle russet barns spaced between fields in rough rectangles of brown and green and yellow, some of them dotted with cattle or sheep.

  Closer to home she saw the top section of the field that lay to the side of the house. There was a wire enclosure there, twenty or thirty feet across, in the centre of which sat a little wooden hut that was painted white with a green door that appeared to be split horizontally in two. Several hens with different colouring – reddish brown, cream, black, speckled combinations – were wandering about within the enclosure, pecking at the earth.

  And then Tilly spotted a man standing in the enclosure, close to the little hut. Elderly, on the plump side – portly, she’d call him – with ovals of pink in his cheeks. He wore a jacket of heathery tweed and neat grey trousers. His black shoes were polished and a flat grey cap sat on his head. He wasn’t doing anything much but standing there, hands behind his back, observing the hens.

  And just as she was about to turn away, the man raised his head slowly and looked directly at her. He brought his right arm around to lift his cap an inch or so off his head, and he gave a little bow and smiled. There was a delightful quaintness about him, and a gentle quality to his smile that brought an answering one to Tilly’s face. There was a world of comfort in that smile. She raised a hand and waved, and he acknowledged it with a second little bow.

  He moved off then, leaving the enclosure through a metal gate, closing it carefully behind him, walking out of her line of vision. She wondered who he was. An elderly relative maybe, or a neighbour pottering about, waiting to be called home for his Christmas dinner.

  As she turned away, her gaze fell on the birth cert she’d copied in the town library. She lifted it and read the words she knew by heart before returning it to its envelope and replacing it in the suitcase. She rummaged among the clothes until she found the present she’d brought for her sister. She wondered what to do with it now. She couldn’t hand it over: it would look like she was trying to make Laura feel guilty if she presented it to her just before she left. Maybe she should give it to Colette instead, or Breda, if they met again.

  She yawned, overcome with another wave of weariness. She closed her case and slipped off her jacket and shoes, and slid Colette’s scarf from around her neck. She finished making the bed, taking the pillows from the floor where the girls had left them.

  She got in, fully clothed, and burrowed under the duvet, whose white cover was splashed with giant yellow and orange and red daisies. The sheets felt cool where her skin touched them, but the room was warm. She closed her eyes. She’d get through the rest of today, and tomorrow she’d find somewhere to go.

  It was Christmas Day. She kept forgetting.

  She slept.

  Her sister.

  She laid the sleeping Poppy in her cot. She went downstairs and basted the turkey and made ham sandwiches and coffee and brought them out to the party of eight men now assembled there who had cleared the tree and were beginning to tackle the mound of shed debris underneath.

  She had a sister.

  She made more coffee and took it into the sitting room, where she found Gladys dozing by the fire and no sign of Mr Kablinski. She basted the turkey and gave the children bags of popcorn and cream crackers topped with peanut butter to keep them happy until dinnertime.

  Her sister was here. She was upstairs.

  She peeled potatoes and scrubbed carrots and cut crosse
s into Brussels sprouts. She basted the turkey and set the ham to boil and put Betty Buckley’s plum pudding on to steam. She made brandy butter and got Poppy up again and sat her in the playpen with Rabbity. She basted the turkey and took the Christmas cake from its shelf in the scullery and placed it on one of the bone-china dinner plates that Gladys had given them for their wedding, and sat it on the dresser.

  And all the while, as she worked her way through the afternoon, as she picked up fallen toys and discarded socks and splayed picture books, as she washed small hands and wiped runny noses and changed nappies and scolded and cajoled and praised, as she swept the floor and located the red tablecloth at the back of the airing cupboard, as the kitchen filled with the tantalising aroma of roasting meat, as she lit candles in the fading light and placed them safely out of reach, all the while the revelation of her sister – she had a sister – was the only thing she could think about.

  She didn’t doubt that the girl’s story was true. Everything tallied. The times matched, and the description of the meeting with Diane – highly strung, hadn’t she’d said, vulnerable? Laura could identify with that, oh yes, that sounded about right. And the mention of Trudi: where on earth would she have heard about Diane’s voice coach, if not from Diane herself?

  And the eyes, of course. She had Luke Potter’s blue-green eyes, and his height, which had passed Laura by. But it was the eyes that clinched it.

  For seventeen years her sister had existed, and Laura had been completely oblivious to the fact. What kind of mother didn’t tell her firstborn child that she’d had another? What kind of selfish monster didn’t let her daughter know that she had a sister?

  Laura thought back, dredging up memories of times she normally preferred to forget. The years before her mother’s departure, the rows, the slamming doors, the sobbing that Laura had tried not to hear as she pretended to do her homework in her room. The silent mealtimes afterwards, her father glowering, her mother red-eyed as she drank herbal tea and ignored the food.

  How had they lasted so long, the two of them? What had kept them together for over thirteen years, while they’d been busily ripping one another apart on a regular basis? Was it love that had held them in place? Could love really have been that warped, that devoid of happiness?

  Whatever it was it ran out, a few months after Diane began working with a new voice coach. Trudi, Laura was told, from Australia – and she shook hands with the woman whose cheekbones were high and sharp, whose many bracelets rattled when she moved, whose dark hair was swept into a stiff tower on her head. Trudi, who smelt of baby powder, and who called Laura’s mother Di – the only person Laura had ever heard addressing her in this way.

  Trudi became a frequent caller, spending hours closeted with Diane in the room off the kitchen, the scales and exercises and arias drifting out and filling the house as Luke painted in his big purpose-built studio at the bottom of the garden, safely out of earshot.

  And then one day Diane left, a few weeks before almost twelve-year-old Laura finished primary school. She simply packed a bag and walked out without a word to anyone, leaving only a brief note on Laura’s pillow for her to find when she got home from school.

  I’ve gone away with Trudi, I felt I had no choice. I deeply regret leaving you, but you will be better off without two parents who cannot live together. I hope you will be happy with your father, and I will see you when I feel able.

  Three stilted sentences, the only evidence of real emotion to be seen in the splotched mess that had been made of the word hope when a drop of liquid, presumably a tear, had fallen onto it. No mention of where she was going, no contact information at all.

  Life was easier without her; there was no denying it. With nobody screaming or throwing bits of crockery about, no doors being slammed, the house was an infinitely more peaceful place. It was lonelier too for a while, of course, and disconcerting to become suddenly motherless, but before a week was out Luke had engaged the services of a live-in housekeeper, who took care of the practicalities, and he enrolled Laura in a boarding school at the end of the summer that she immediately took to, and life moved on.

  Months passed, years passed. No letter arrived for Laura, no phone call. It was as if her mother had simply walked out and left the world behind. Laura assumed her father hadn’t heard from her either, but she was wrong.

  Your mother and I have legally separated, he told her, completely out of the blue, one time she was home for the holidays. It was a year or so after Diane’s departure, and the first time he’d mentioned her.

  Where is she? Laura asked.

  Australia.

  She wanted to ask more, so much more she wanted to know, but his expression forbade it. What did it matter anyway, when her mother clearly didn’t care about her any more? She determined to put it to the back of her mind – and largely she succeeded, thanks to the cheerful bustle of boarding-school life. Every hour of the day filled with classes and sports and study and meals, and nightly whispered chats after lights out. She could get on without her mother; she could manage fine.

  And then, three years after Diane’s departure, Laura was called out of class and told she had a visitor – and there, in the smaller of the family rooms, sat her mother. Thinner, paler, altogether more subdued than Laura remembered.

  They embraced, mother and daughter. It seemed like the thing to do. They spent barely ten minutes together, during which time they managed not to mention Luke once. Diane asked Laura how she was doing, and Laura told her about school, and her friends, and the schools’ basketball league they were involved in, the semi-finals of which were coming up at the weekend, and the trip to France she was taking with a friend’s family during the summer holidays.

  Diane didn’t offer much information, didn’t really say anything about the years since they’d met, apart from telling Laura that she was living in Australia now, that she’d gone there with her friend Trudi, and that she wouldn’t be moving back home anytime soon.

  Laura didn’t say she already knew about Australia. She accepted the gifts her mother had brought – hair ornaments, a brooch, a pen – and told her she’d better get back to class.

  I’ll write, her mother promised, and Laura shrugged and said OK, and that night she avoided the other girls and wept under the bedclothes for a mother who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, love her, and a father who had shipped her off to boarding school rather than have to look after her himself, and who never turned up on family days.

  By then Tilly had been born. Tilly had been two and a half or thereabouts when her mother had come back to visit Laura. The thought butted into her reminiscences, bringing her up short. Her mother had had a second child, and neither Laura nor her father had had the slightest inkling. And, by all accounts, he still didn’t know he’d fathered two children with her.

  Three weeks after the encounter, a letter arrived at the school with an Australian stamp, the first of several over the ensuing months. They were generally sad little affairs, filled with trivia that told Laura nothing of any worth. A neighbour’s cat had kittens, all white except for one that has a grey and black tail … A convenience store at the end of our block burned down, the police think it might have been deliberate … A little boy went missing in the neighbourhood; he turned up safe and well hours later on the other side of town … We watched a film set in Ireland on television, Meryl Streep was in it … Very hot this past week, hard to get to sleep … and so on.

  A return address had been written in the top corner of the first envelope, and Laura dutifully wrote back with whatever happenings she could summon. After some months they both ran out of steam, and all Laura got from then on was a card at Christmas that never included her father in its greeting, and all she sent was one in return.

  When she left school Laura signed up for a childcare course, and her father provided her with an allowance that enabled her to move out of home and into a flat that was shared with two others. They met rarely after this, their lives moving on different
tracks. Laura would occasionally call by the house, where she’d drink coffee and they’d make small talk. Luke never got in touch with her: she knew their connection, such as it was, would be lost completely if she stopped calling in.

  And six months into her childcare course, out of the blue one day her phone rang and it was her father. I’m getting married, he told her.

  She was completely stunned. She had no idea he was even seeing someone. But then, how would she? They were practically strangers to one another.

  Aren’t you still married to my mother? she asked.

  No, he replied shortly. We’re divorced.

  Another bombshell. Her parents had divorced, and nobody had thought to let her know. She felt a surge of real, cold anger towards him. He was her father, for Christ’s sake. She was his daughter, not some casual acquaintance who dropped in for coffee now and again. She bit back her resentment, tried to tell herself it didn’t matter.

  Two months later, while she was still smarting from his casual indifference, she acquired a stepmother just ten years her senior. She sat stiffly in the register office; she congratulated them politely. She left the ensuing cocktail party, full of people she knew only slightly and had no interest in, as soon as she could.

  And not long after that she met Aaron, and fell immediately and thoroughly in love with him.

  She married him a week before her nineteenth birthday, much against her father’s wishes. Looking back, she could hardly blame him. Aaron was an unemployed bricklayer living in a council flat; Laura was the daughter of a highly successful artist. But she was deeply in love for the first time in her life, and she was loved in return, she was certain of that. They were made for one another, she and Aaron. They would have lots of babies, and grow old and crotchety together.

  Happiness made her generous, made her want to share it. I’m getting married, she wrote to her mother. I’d love it if you could come. They weren’t planning a big wedding. A scatter of Aaron’s family, a few friends from either side, an aunt of Laura’s – her father’s sole sibling, who lived in Galway and whom she rarely met – and a couple of cousins, her aunt’s children. Luke and his new wife were also attending. Laura had hoped they’d turn down the invitation, which she’d felt obliged to send, but they hadn’t.