Between Sisters (30 page)

Mari sniffed the air appreciatively as Elsa slipped into her seat after hugging her friend. ‘Guerlain’s Jicky,’ she said. ‘I do love that scent. Suits nobody as well as it suits you.’

‘The one thing I haven’t changed,’ Elsa said softly. The scent both cheered her and made her sad. It traced the lifeline of her womanhood, from the heady days of the 1970s when she first smelled its glorious scent and could barely afford it, to now, when it reminded her of the good times as well as the bad. It was spicy and woody, with lemon and lavender notes plus a hint of vanilla: scents she couldn’t live without.

‘Nothing wrong with a few changes,’ Mari said, smiling back.

Waiters materialised the way they always had for Mari, and after a certain amount of one waiter telling Mari she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen – ‘Please, tell me I have the chance, my beauty’ – they got to order.

‘I can’t help it!’ Mari protested when they were all gone and she could see Elsa grinning at her. ‘I don’t do anything.’

‘I know. Bees, honeypot.’

‘It’s torture. The effort I have to put in with some of the fathers. They see me alone in this tiny house, figure out it’s just me, because really only one person could fit, and they carry on as if I must be lonely, and suddenly it’s all “Shall we have wine, while Tinkerbell/Charles is practising?” And that’s with a child –
their child
– sitting at the piano, watching the whole thing!’

Mari was a piano teacher and taught long hours in her tiny Putney mews. She rented the house rather than owned, and bought clothes from charity shops so she could put money into the pension she’d neglected during her wild modelling years. Both she and Elsa agreed with the legendary Bette Davis that old age was not for sissies, and they were trying to catch up financially now.

‘For lessons with troublesome fathers, you could wear all black and pretend to be a grieving widow,’ suggested Elsa. ‘Or – and this is what I prefer – you could stare at them grimly, tell them how inappropriate they are being to suggest alcohol in such an environment, and ignore them for the rest of the lesson.’

Mari signed. ‘I know, but I need the work. I can’t alienate the clients, even if I want to tell them that women who live on their own are not dying for attention from any idiot who comes calling. I’ve had enough men to last me several lifetimes.’

Once their soft drinks had arrived, the two old friends talked in what was almost a verbal shorthand.

‘Danny?’ asked Mari.

‘Great form. He’s ready to do an Iron Man; has two per cent body fat, apparently. That’s what comes from being thirty-one.’

Both women grinned ruefully.

‘Clare?’ Elsa asked.

‘Still in denial,’ said Mari. ‘She thinks if she keeps begging, he’ll come back.’

‘I must phone her,’ Elsa said.

‘I went round yesterday. Made her have a shower and I cleaned the kitchen. She’s stuck in that place of where if
he’s
not coming to see her, then there’s no point in taking out the bins or even washing up. I hate to see her that way. Plus she’s not coming to meetings.’ Mari shook her beautiful head sadly and reached down to her handbag. ‘Blast,’ she said, sitting upright again. ‘I have to give up smoking. I don’t know how you did it.’

‘I wasn’t really an addicted smoker,’ Elsa said, shrugging. ‘I know, staggering given my history. Just didn’t have the smoking addict gene, clearly. Ten years on and off and I never got hooked. Who knew?’

‘Could there be a TV show in that?’ Mari asked mischievously. ‘Wildly addicted to some things and not to others?’

‘Brat,’ replied Elsa. ‘If we do, I’ll drag you in and get them to put you on nicotine patches as a test subject.’

Mari laughed. ‘Good luck with that.’

Their food arrived and they talked about the man Mari was tentatively seeing.

‘I told him straight out, when he asked me on the date,’ Mari said. ‘He took it very well. Said his sister’s been in Narcotics Anonymous for ten years, so there’s hope for us.’

For the first time that day, the beautiful face showed the real fragility behind Mari’s bright smile.

Elsa reached out and stroked her friend’s hand. ‘When do I get to meet him?’ she asked.

‘Soon. He picked me up after Sunday,’ Mari said. ‘By the way, you missed Sunday. You never miss the Sunday meeting. What’s up?’

Suddenly, Elsa’s vegetarian dolmades didn’t look so tempting.

‘I have a lump under my arm,’ she said flatly, looking down at her food. ‘I wasn’t sure at first. It could be anything. A cyst, you know. Not hormonal since the hysterectomy. Having the ovaries out puts paid to any hormonal action.’

‘But you went to the doctor?’

Elsa hesitated. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I know, it’s ludicrous. I tell people to face things and I’m not facing this, but I think it’s nothing.’

‘If you think it’s nothing, why did you miss Sunday?’ demanded Mari.

‘I was tired,’ fibbed Elsa. ‘Besides, nine out of ten …’

‘Yes, nine out of ten lumps are harmless,’ repeated Mari, ‘but you have to get it seen to. And with your history …’

They were both silent, thinking back. Mari gave up all pretence of eating and made Elsa sit beside her on the banquette.

‘You want a drink?’ asked the owner, appearing and seeing that comfort was called for.

Both women managed a wry laugh. ‘No,’ they said in unison.

‘Actually, perhaps English breakfast tea,’ amended Mari, ‘with milk and sugar. She’s Irish; she needs it.’

‘Irish need whiskey!’ said the owner cheerfully. ‘I have no whiskey but I get you best brandy, free on the house—’

‘No, thank you.’ Mari was firm. She had finished her cranberry juice and couldn’t face another, no matter how good it was for her urinary tract. ‘Tea would be lovely.’

She turned to her friend. ‘You haven’t even been to the doctor yet. I have the oddest feeling you’ve already diagnosed yourself as being ill. Elsa, remember: we’re in this just for today. Tomorrow hasn’t happened yet.’

‘I know. I know it all. It’s been over twenty years, Mari.’

Elsa held up her wrist with the tiny tattoo of the circle with a slightly unusual triangle in it. Tattooed in a type of sepia ink, the tattoo was barely noticeable, and on television Elsa covered it with make-up. She could cover it with bracelets too, but with her special friends, those who understood, she kept it on show.

It was the sign of Alcoholics Anonymous, where she and Mari had met many years before, and where they’d done their best to beat the damn disease by going to meetings, staying in touch with their friends, and trying to forgive themselves for the past. Drugs had been a harder problem for Mari, but the age range of so many of the people in NA was so young that she stayed with the AA set. She had nineteen years of being clean and sober – a little less than her dear friend.

‘I know what’s wrong with you,’ said Mari decisively. ‘You’ve got this lump, hypochondria has set in, and you keep thinking of the past and that you’re being punished, which is rubbish, Elsa. Why don’t you do something about it? By that, I mean contact them again.’

Elsa shook her head. ‘No, not now. I can’t wreck their lives just because I’m feeling fragile. They’ve chosen not to be in my life. Just as I chose to drink.’

Mari hugged her close. ‘I don’t know if any of us ever chose alcoholism, love,’ she said. ‘Who – if they knew what it meant, what they’d have to sacrifice – would choose it? I like to think it chose us, and somehow we got away. Scarred but still free.’

That evening, Elsa couldn’t settle in her home, no matter that a lovely breeze blew from Wimbledon Common into her tiny garden, where she had a little Zen oasis set at the very end with a tiny water feature and an exquisite Bonsai tree she cared for diligently. She liked to sit and pray here in the early morning; not the prayers of her youth but different, spiritual prayers where she thought of all the people she loved and prayed for them to have strength and courage that day.

As a longtime member of AA, Elsa sponsored several newer members, which meant they phoned her for advice and help, and talked to her when they felt they couldn’t possibly cope with not picking up a glass at that exact moment because the pull was too hard, the pain too bad not to want to numb it.

Not everyone made it. Many people went back off into the world of drinking and there was nothing she could do about it. She had no magic trick to make them stay. It had to be their own choice. Nobody could stop the addict from picking up the glass.

Elsa loved her little house, bought with the proceeds of her TV career. It was painted in buttercup yellows and soft ochres, lit with gentle golden lamps, a haven of calm, full of books, photos of places she and Mari had been, artefacts brought back from her travels around the world. Missing on the walls were photos of her darling girls, but she kept them hidden in her study and could only bear to look at them sometimes.

If only she had been allowed to see them again, she’d have told them how much she loved them, explained that she’d been in the grip of addiction, and begged them for another chance. But Cassie and Coco hadn’t wanted to give her another chance and she had to respect that.

She knew so many women who’d raised children as they battled alcoholism and had relationships damaged beyond repair. How often had she sat with women who would never have relationships with their children because their drinking had destroyed their whole family.

‘You’re lucky – they don’t hate you!’ one recently sober mother had shrieked at Elsa once, when her family had thrown her out of the family home and her grown-up daughter refused to let her even see her grandson.

Elsa had said nothing. Her daughters must have hated her to have never wanted her in their lives again, even when she’d turned her life around and apologised for the pain she’d put them through.

Maybe her daughters and her husband had been right, and their lives were better without her after all. Perhaps that was her punishment. Perhaps this worrying lump under her arm was more punishment, and it was right that she take it without complaint.

She wrapped a mohair throw around her shoulders, took her Earl Grey into the garden and listened to the sounds of the city around her. She loved London: loved the buzz of the city and the fact that it was here she’d finally found peace.

She’d been drunk here too – drunker and wilder than she’d ever been at home in Silver Bay, when she’d still been Marguerite with two beloved daughters to take care of.

Having them taken away had sent her on a spiral of destruction from which she didn’t think she’d ever have recovered had it not been for the outreach programme that had found her living in a squat, malnourished and yet facially bloated, her broken nose and many bruises on her body the living document to her life in the darkness of addiction.

The people who looked up to her as a television guru would never have recognised that Marguerite Keneally, née Donnelly, in the calm, elegant Dr Elsa they knew now. The mental health charities Elsa had tried to help, raising funds for people with schizophrenia and bi-polar disease to bring these illnesses out of the cold and into the understanding of more people, would never know that she understood all too well what they meant.

Eighteen

THE PAST

Marguerite Donnelly’s best friend, Eithne, felt that music had power. Jim Morrison, from The Doors, was her absolute hero.

‘He makes me want to scream and cry, and rip off my clothes, and …’ Eithne ran out of words for Jim Morrison. She had a poster of him inside her wardrobe door.

Her mother, Betty, who had two sisters – both nuns – would have needed to be resuscitated if she’d seen Jim’s brazen bare chest with his nipples showing. Eithne did all her own ironing now in case her mother ever put anything away in the wardrobe, her precious Jim poster got ripped down, and she was never allowed out of the house and into the record shop ever again.

‘I’d die if I couldn’t buy albums,’ Eithne said, and everyone believed her. ‘Vinyl is my life.’

Marguerite loved music. She loved the way it could take you away somewhere lovely where you were adored, intoxicating, clever, special. But music’s power was limited. Music couldn’t take away the most powerful thing of all: fear.

Fear had the most power of all.

Fear wasn’t the strange men on drugs they were all warned to beware of these days.

‘Drugs are the evil stalking the land!’ the headmistress often thundered during assembly. Sister Phillip read the papers and heard about strange cigarettes and how they were leading young girls astray. Astray meant sin and pregnancy.

Marguerite had no fear of funny cigarettes. Fear wasn’t walking near the graveyard on the way down to Marguerite’s house, a graveyard where young fellas sometimes hid and leapt out at night just for the lark of it. Fear was in her home, in her heart. And fear had such power.

From the outside, the Donnellys were more or less a normal family. Two kids, Rafe and Marguerite, the inevitable sheepdog lying at the gate chasing after cars, at the lower scale of the Newcastle Bridge community – not poor but without a ha’penny to spare either.

Tony Donnelly had a job driving trucks for the quarry, and if he spent a bit of time in the pub, well, nobody begrudged a man a few pints when his work was done. He was the silent type even with a drink on him.

Veronica Donnelly was an odd woman, no doubt about it. Kept herself to herself. Didn’t go to Tupperware parties or join in the keep-fit classes in the parish hall.

Eithne’s mother Betty did her best, when the two girls became friends in the convent, to make friends with Veronica. The best way to keep an eye on girls was to know the other family, make sure that when one said they were off to the library, that they were really off to the library.

But Veronica wouldn’t go along with it.

‘“They can look after themselves,” that’s what she said,’ Betty recounted to her husband. ‘They’re fifteen now. Eithne needs to have an eye kept on her and I’ve barely set foot in that house of the Donnellys’ over all the years the girls have been friends. Kept me standing on the step again this time. Wouldn’t let me past the door. What is she hiding in there?’

Fear was what Veronica Donnelly was hiding.

Marguerite could have told people that, but by the time she realised that her family wasn’t normal – that her mother wasn’t normal – who could she tell?

‘She takes out the strangest books,’ commented one librarian to the other as Marguerite walked out.

‘Who?’

‘That Donnelly girl. Ones about war, death and the Holocaust. She has Emily Dickinson out permanently, and she now has one about the Second World War ghetto in Warsaw,
Mila 18
, by that Uris fellow. I said, “I don’t know why you don’t read nice books instead of all those sad, depressing ones,” but she looked at me like I was gone in the head.’

‘They should be eighteen to read the adult books,’ said the other librarian, sniffing. ‘I’ve said so but does anyone listen to me? No.’

Marguerite loved her sad books. They made her feel less alone knowing that crazy, bad and horrific things could happen to ordinary people living ordinary lives. That she might not be imagining it. That she could be living in a small town in the middle of Ireland with a woman who walked a tightrope between sanity and insanity. That she could live in constant fear, fear that made her startle if she heard a loud noise. Fear that made Rafe determined to get out of there as soon as he had his final exams.

Not that they could tell anyone. Mental illness was something you could never speak about. People being ‘not right in the head’ was almost the worst thing you could say about a person. Mother’s
not-rightness
was controlled by drugs, but she didn’t like them because they made her tired and sleepy, and then she might not take them, and then … Chaos would reign. She’d scream, want to fight, go after Rafe and Marguerite with kitchen implements, accuse them of trying to poison her.

‘Your mother will be fine,’ Da would say when Mother had gone to bed after a bad incident. He’d clean up the broken glass – they barely had any glasses left in the house, and if it hadn’t been for the marmalade coming in glass pots you could then use as glasses, they’d have had none at all – and sweep up the shattered plates. Some might have blood on them. Mother had cut her hands on the shards and shrieked: ‘Look at this, look at me! I’m bleeding to death.’

It might take an hour, but eventually she’d allow Da to clean the cut and bandage her up. Da went to Clonmel to buy bandages and antiseptic. He couldn’t buy as much as they needed in Byrne’s Chemist & Animal Foodstuffs in their tiny village. Mr Byrne would start to wonder. The doctor might be told. The doctor who’d been told that all was well, that Veronica Donnelly was happy on her drugs and she was taking them. No, that could never happen.

‘They’d put your mother in a hospital if they knew,’ Da would say.

The hospital was what they were all supposed to be scared of. Mother had been there twice before, and she’d been tied in a chair, drugs pumped into her, God knew what else, Da said. Inhumane was what it was. She needed love and care, that was all.

Marguerite wasn’t scared of the hospital. She wanted her mother taken away. But it wasn’t her choice. It would be inhumane, she tried to tell herself.

So instead Marguerite slept with her door locked, the old plastic suitcase up against it and the kitchen paring knife under her pillow. She leapt a foot if she heard a loud bang, and her body was set permanently to alert, adrenaline racing through her like the horses her father had once followed on the racetrack, only he never got to go there anymore.

‘Your mother needs me,’ he’d say.

But what about us?
Marguerite wanted to say.
We need you too.

Schizophrenia, a word almost never uttered in their house, had taken both parents away from her, and harder still was the fact that they must be secret about it all. Nobody must ever know.

Why,
wondered Marguerite?
Why can we speak about a person with a heart attack and not talk about a person with the attack going on endlessly in their head?

The crowd of teenagers all watched their classmate behind the bar. He’d be murdered if his father found out, they knew. Murdered for letting a gang of sixteen-year-olds into the family pub after hours; murdered for having a lock-in when it was illegal to open after closing time.

But this was an adventure, this was Paudie’s sixteenth birthday, this was special.

Paudie had worked in the bar unofficially since he’d been small and could fill a glass with spirits from the optics as fast as any adult barman.

‘Paddy and coke,’ ordered someone.

‘Pint of Guinness,’ said another.

One by one they ordered until it came to Marguerite. Marguerite was shy and had never fitted in.

‘Wouldn’t say boo to a goose,’ Paudie’s pal said of her.

But she didn’t look shy. She could smile at people, and she’d smiled at Paudie before because he was kind, didn’t treat her like a weirdo because she didn’t go to discos or parties like everyone else in their class. Her only pal was Eithne, who was wild over The Doors and had gone into mourning over Jim Morrison’s death.

‘Summer was over, life was over,’ according to Eithne, a view not shared by The Lake Cottage B&B where Eithne had a summer job chambermaiding and where she constantly stopped work to look moodily out of the window and think of poor Jim in his cold bed in Père Lachaise.

Marguerite kept herself to herself, but tonight she’d come with them to Paudie’s birthday. He’d asked her when he met her down the town.

‘Yeah, I’ll come out, why not?’ she’d said, with a broad smile he so rarely saw in school.

Now she looked at him and he felt as if he might drown in those brown eyes. They were the colour of beech trees, of the rich dark furniture in the church, polished and mysterious, gleaming with some hidden mystery. The summer sun had given her skin a light colour and she had freckles all over her nose. Her hair was long and rippling, and he wondered what it would feel like to touch it.

‘I don’t know, Paudie, what would I like?’ she asked now, replying to his question about what drink she wanted.

Paudie knew that with Marguerite, it wasn’t a clever answer aimed at sounding smart or cool; it was unsure, like her.

‘Gin and orange,’ said Paudie decisively. ‘It’s sweet and hides the taste of the gin.’

He was sweet on Marguerite, so a sweet drink made sense. He poured her a triple shot in a big glass. Lord knew how long they’d have in the bar before they’d have to get out. Might as well treat her well now that she’d come out. All these years he’d been admiring her and finally she was with the gang. His girl for the night, he hoped.

Marguerite took a sip and, apart from the underlying bitterness, thought it wasn’t too bad. Plus all the rest of them were happy to be in the bar drinking illegally. She found she liked that wave of good-humouredness; being around happiness was infectious. She sipped some more. It was strong, she thought, but it was warming. She felt happy too.

Peanuts were produced and she had some. A joke was told and Marguerite giggled. This morning she’d been in bed reading about people dying and understanding that pain; tonight she was laughing at a joke, eating peanuts, feeling a pleasurable warm feeling in her belly.

Someone had found the radio the bar staff used to listen to big football and hurling matches and was trying to tune in Radio Caroline.

‘Turn it down!’ said Paudie, anxious. ‘It’s two in the morning. If my da hears, he’ll skin us all alive.’

He was banking on his parents being so exhausted that they wouldn’t hear eleven teenagers sneaking around the bar, serving themselves shots. If it weren’t for the beer in his system, he might regret all of this, but he’d had two pints now and was feeling mellow.

On a stool in front of him sat Marguerite, smiling now, those amazing eyes a little blurry. She mustn’t be used to drinking, he thought, but then how come she wasn’t? Her father liked the pub, but he wasn’t a heavy drinker.

Paudie’s mother had an opinion about Marguerite’s mother; his mother had an opinion about everyone.

‘Strange, that’s what she is. I can see it in her eyes. There’s something wild there. Probably in the kids, too. Paudie, you stay away from that girl. There’s trouble there, I can see it.’

That girl was staring up at the bottles behind the bar. She’d rarely been in a bar, and had never had a drink before. There was no alcohol in their house ever, except when Mother bought it and things went downhill.

‘Did you not take it off her?’ Da would yell when he came home. ‘She won’t take her medication if she drinks.’

Sitting in Paudie’s father’s pub, a thought came to Marguerite: she wasn’t her mother’s keeper. It wasn’t up to her to keep drink away from her mother or to make her mother take the pills. None of that was her job.

She felt a strange confidence with the warmth of the alcohol inside her. She didn’t feel shy the way she felt so much of the time, no need to keep her head down and hide her face behind the curtain of her hair. Suddenly she belonged.

‘Paudie,’ she said in a louder voice, ‘I’d like another of those orange yokes.’

Paudie grinned.

Marguerite found magic in a bottle. Any bottle. She learned to drink quickly, running to blackout every time she drank and ending up in the most crazy of situations.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ Eithne had yelled at her one night at a dance when she discovered Marguerite in a corner with two men entwined around her. ‘You’re disgusting!’

‘Yes, I’m disgusting,’ Marguerite agreed sadly, and leaned her head on one of the men, who was kissing her neck.

She left school with her final exams and got out of her home town at speed.

‘I won’t go back there,’ she told Rafe, who’d already gone to Dublin with a view to heading further afield.

‘Me neither,’ he said, taking a deep drag of his cigarette. He hugged her, which was unusual in itself because their family was not given to shows of affection. ‘Take care of yourself, sis. Watch the demons.’

‘What demons?’ she asked playfully, head to one side. She’d already had several gins before meeting him, knowing this was a goodbye, wanting to numb the pain.

‘The ones that make you want to block it all out,’ he said slowly. ‘We come from the same wound, Marguerite, and that makes us dangerous. To ourselves, and to other people. Take care.’

The city was the perfect place to hide. Nobody knew who she was or that she’d once been an A-grade student in her home town school. Nobody knew she had a firm moral code or that she only meant to have one glass of wine. Nobody knew that once she started, she couldn’t stop.

She met Jim at a party for college students, one she’d crashed with her friend, Niamh. Niamh had the hardness that Marguerite tried to adopt. With Marguerite, it was a veneer, sliver-thin.

When she met Jim that night – tall, with those striking Spanish-Irish good looks and a gentle charm – Marguerite felt as if she had found the man who could save her.

That night she’d drunk very little, enchanted by this lovely young man who talked to her about his hopes and dreams, and somehow extracted Marguerite’s long-forgotten hopes and dreams from her.

They’d sat on the top step of the stairs while the party raged around them, talking about places they’d like to see, what they’d like to be.