Between Sisters (9 page)

‘It’s all right,’ Pearl said. ‘I don’t mind after all these years. As long as you make the tea afterwards.’

‘Don’t I always?’

Peter turned to her and grinned, his long silver beard glittering in the candlelight.

He’d been marvellous-looking and charismatic in his youth and those looks had transformed into elegance and handsomeness all mixed in with an air of great wisdom as he’d aged.

‘Uncle Peter was a real stunner,’ Coco had said once, looking at old photos of Delaney Gardens from forty years ago when they held picnics on the lawn at midsummer and the Fourth of July, in honour of Peter’s American wife, Loretta.

Still is,
Pearl had thought to herself. She’d never told her granddaughters about her and Peter. Not that she was ashamed of it. They’d never so much as exchanged an illicit glance when Loretta was alive, had never for a moment thought of each other that way, but they were people with needs and had both ended up alone. One poker night Peter had stayed to help clean up and had stayed longer than he’d meant to.

It had been years since Pearl had felt a man’s hands on her naked body: Jim’s father, Bernie, was long dead, and raising the two girls kept her too busy to think of finding love again. She’d been in her sixties when Peter had come into her life and they’d had to be careful because of Coco and Cassie. It was easier now she lived alone, and yet her and Peter’s love had been clandestine for so long, they’d thought:
why change it?
They brought each other joy and comfort.

Peter had no children. Loretta had suffered from some malady inexplicable in the early sixties, and she’d had three late miscarriages until, despite the exhortations from blithe male doctors to ‘Keep trying, pet’, they’d given up. There had been no groups for people denied parenthood then and Loretta had never recovered from the loss of those three tiny babies.

Nobody had ever agreed with Peter that the heart attack that had killed his wife in her early fifties was the result of her poor, broken heart. Except for Pearl.

Slowly, years after they were both on their own, their friendship had turned to love. Love and kindness: the best combination of all, Pearl always reminded herself, feeling so lucky.

‘I feel sorry for poor Father Alex,’ Peter said, cigarette extinguished as he settled himself back into the bed, moving carefully because of his dodgy hip. He spooned his long body around Pearl’s smaller, softer one, and stroked her shoulder gently. ‘He’ll never have this.’

‘I know,’ said Pearl. ‘Crazy. We need all the love we can get.’

Inevitably, her thoughts ran to her granddaughters. Coco had nobody to love in her life. And as for Cassie – Pearl could see that all was not well with that marriage. Yet it wasn’t her place to interfere. She’d probably interfered enough long ago.

‘Will you stay the night?’ she asked Peter.

He didn’t stay often. There were plenty of people up early in Delaney Gardens and not all of them understood the meaning of the word ‘discretion’.

Peter held her to him. He’d catch the moon for Pearl.

‘Of course,’ he murmured.

Six

The second-to-last Sunday in September was Pearl’s seventy-ninth birthday and an outdoor party in Delaney Square was planned, so when Cassie woke at half past six that morning to see the sun peeking in through a gap in the floral curtains in her and Shay’s bedroom, she was delighted.

Pearl loved the sun and Cassie had so many memories of her grandmother sitting in her tiny garden soaking up the rays, knitting up a sweater or peeling apples for fruit pies – never just sitting doing nothing.

Beside her in the bed, Shay lay deeply asleep, one big hand flung out towards her as if reaching for her in a dream. It had been hot the previous night and he’d worn only boxers to bed, so his large, strong body was naked from the waist up, stretched out like a man from an underwear advert.

She’d fallen in love with that body first, she used to tease him. He’d been in the college football team, a ‘jock’, Cassie’s friends had said dreamily, but he’d been smart too: an engineering student determined to do a PhD when he was finished his degree.

Cassie was studying business and their paths wouldn’t have crossed except that Cassie and some friends had gone along to an after-game party and she had found herself being chatted up by the type of tall, muscular guy she’d never normally look at. He was freckled and fair-haired, a strawberry blond with hints of sun-kissed blond streaks. She knew without asking anyone that he’d have a stream of female fans after him.

‘Haven’t seen you at one of these crazy nights before, have I?’ he said, a bruise developing nicely over one eye, remnant of the tough game. He was good-looking, no doubt about it, and knew it, Cassie decided. Guys who knew they were cute should come with health warnings.

‘I like to stay in the library and talk to the geeky guys,’ she’d replied with mock innocence. She might be wearing a pretty conservative student outfit of jeans and a white shirt, but once she’d been a wilder kid, the girl who liked her old studded leather jacket, and she’d had plenty of practice verbal fencing with equally wild boys.

Shay had leaned against the wall, and those eyes, blue with the same amber striation their daughter Beth had inherited, were almost hypnotic. He seemed to see through her with those eyes. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said. ‘You look all buttoned up on the outside, but inside …’

Cassie had felt a strange leap of inner excitement that neither the nerdy guys nor the wild ones had incited in her. Maybe he wasn’t a dumb jock after all. Maybe he was smart.

‘Inside you’re something else. Want a drink, Library Girl?’

‘Something soft, a lemonade or juice, Jock Boy,’ she teased back. ‘Us Library Girls don’t want men taking advantage of us.’

‘Damn,’ he’d said. ‘You just foiled my evil plan.’

Cassie stood on her tiptoes so she was closer to his ear. He was tall, she wasn’t, and she lowered her voice to a breathy sexiness: ‘We could always … talk.’

And they had. All evening. They’d eventually left the craziness of the party to find somewhere they could share a few slices of pizza and keep talking without being interrupted by someone turning the music up to eardrum-popping levels. After that, they’d been inseparable, and even though Shay had still called her Library Girl, by then he knew Library Girls were anything but boring.

It was a long time since he’d called her that, Cassie reflected. Years?

Having children had been such a wonderful step for them, yet grown-up life, work, and now having his mother permanently on the phone had turned the glorious romance between two students into something else entirely: a relationship held together by different strands, with what felt like all of the original attraction lost somewhere along the way.

Jock Boy had turned into a serious man with weighty work issues in the engineering company where he worked, and as for Library Girl: she seemed like a creature from aeons ago, a figment of Cassie’s imagination.

Shay stirred in his sleep, and briefly Cassie allowed herself to think of how once she’d have woken him up so they could take advantage of this quiet time to make love. She might have wriggled back under the covers and arched herself against him, rubbed her body against his muscular one. He cycled and ran, still keen on keeping in shape, and he still loved the feel of her body. Or at least he used to, she thought with a pang.

The great chasm of loneliness ached in her chest. She felt so unloved.

Why couldn’t Shay understand he was pushing her away by giving all his attention to his mother?

She’d never explained her fear of abandonment but she was sure he understood. She was terrified of being left …

Suddenly, the thought became too frightening and a shiver of fear ran through her.

He could leave her.

Men left, the way mothers left.

Her heart palpitating, she thought of how much she loved Shay. They had two daughters together. Wasn’t that enough?

They’d get through this because only dreadful mothers broke their families up. Mothers who didn’t care who they hurt. Mothers who walked out and never came back.

Imagine a father who’d do the same if he was pushed too hard … No, they’d make it work. They had to.

Her chest tight with both remembered and current pain, Cassie slipped from the bed and quietly went downstairs to make a morning cup of calming herbal tea to bring back to bed.

It was rare to feel so alone in their house. There was always noise, her family pootling around, someone on the phone, the radio blasting loud modern music she never recognised anymore. But this morning she was blissfully alone and she walked in her bare feet along the wooden floors into the peppermint-green kitchen, where Fluffikins lay on the windowsill, luxuriating in the morning sun.

Once a tiny and indeed fluffy white kitten, Fluffikins had been named by Beth when she was nine and had since grown into a giant, grumpy moggy who should, by rights, have been named Lord Albert the Fifty-Sixth or something equally grand from the stately way he progressed around the house, barely deigning to sit on anyone’s lap.

Fluffikins gave Cassie a cool stare and then closed his eyes again.

‘Morning, your lordship,’ Cassie said, but was ignored.

Animals were so simple – what you saw was what you got. There was no subtle subtext. She liked that, although sometimes, when she read about how animals could lower your blood pressure, she wished Fluffikins wasn’t quite so lordly and would occasionally snuggle up to one of them. The person he liked most was Shay, who didn’t like cats. Knowing Fluffikins, this made sense.

‘Can’t we get a dog?’ Shay liked to say plaintively when Fluffikins had settled on his master’s lap, calmly grooming and shedding white fur all over Shay’s sweater.

‘We could get a pug, like Pearl’s Daisy! I love Daisy,’ said Lily joyfully.

‘But who’d walk the pug and take care of it during the day?’ Cassie felt like the voice of doom but someone had to be reasonable around here. Her every nerve was already stretched, although she’d always loved dogs and had adored her Grammy’s velvety-soft little dogs with their huge, happy eyes. Those dogs had helped her through so much. She could remember sitting with Basil and Sybil when her mother left, their shiny black fur pressed against her body as if they could comfort her with pure squishing …

‘You’re up early.’

She jumped, shocked, as two strong arms encircled her as she stood in the kitchen.

‘I thought you were asleep,’ she said, leaning back into her husband instinctively. He’d brushed his teeth before coming downstairs, she realised, and he nuzzled into her neck and shoulders from behind, planting delicate kisses on her skin.

Her body had missed his and she leaned further into him, reaching to grab his forearms and tangle her fingers with his. And then he’d turned her and Cassie was touching his fair head, pulling it down to hers.

It wasn’t only women who needed sex to make them think they were loved, she thought briefly as they kissed, and she felt the tension drain away from her body. They could talk about his mother another time
. This
was something only they could share; this love could make their marriage strong so there would be no question of anyone leaving.

Edie planned to wear her good cream waffle-print dress, along with the diamond pin that Harry had given her on their twenty-fifth anniversary, to Pearl’s birthday party. Harry might not have been the most faithful of men – not that she’d tell anyone that, especially not her sister – but he’d had wonderful taste in jewellery.

One of Edie’s friends had told her over lunch that she should leave him that time in the early seventies when he’d taken up with the shop girl from the department store. The shop girl wasn’t like the others: she was scheming, Edie’s friend said. Scheming enough to see herself installed in Edie’s house, and to heck with what people said.

‘Why would I leave him?’ Edie had replied, splendid in her favourite lunch outfit, an apple-green Jackie Kennedy-style suit – Jackie had such
style
– nicely accessorised with her Harry Winston bracelet, product of a holiday where Harry had done a lot of guilt-purchasing.

‘What about your dignity, Edie?’ the friend had cried.

‘My dignity won’t give him permission to live with a little floozy, spending our money and leaving me to wilt at home,’ Edie had snapped back. ‘Women on their own don’t get asked out to the races or parties; they don’t get diamond pins; they don’t go on holidays unless they can hitch up with some widows or spinsters or other deserted women. There’s no life for you if you don’t have a man. No, I’m staying married, thank you very much. Harry will get over this; he always does.’

He had, eventually. Edie had a floor-length sable in her wardrobe from that one. Not that she went out of the house in it much. Pearl said she’d be mugged if she wore it.

‘Robbers will take one look at you, know you’ve a few bob in your handbag, Edie, and you’ll be lying on the ground in a flash, handbag gone, wrist broken, probably, and scared out of your mind. For goodness’ sake, don’t borrow trouble.’

Pearl, unconventional and all as she was, had never been stupid. She had a point. The young pups today who mugged elderly people – well, locking up wasn’t good enough for them. Hard labour or even a go on that island surrounded by mangrove trees – what was it called? – Devil’s Island. Yes, that was the ticket. None of this namby-pamby letting them out on bail to rob another poor person. If Edie was in charge of the criminal justice system, it would all be very different.

She adjusted the diamond pin on her dress. Her diamond drop earrings were too long to go with the pin: one had to be tasteful. The cluster ones would be fine today. Plus somebody had to be properly dressed for this shindig. Pearl wouldn’t be. She wore those flowy cotton things, had her toenails painted deranged colours, and went around in strange sandals.

‘They’re Birkenstocks,’ Pearl had informed her. ‘You’d love them. So comfortable.’

‘Style is not about comfort,’ Edie had informed her in return, determined never to give up her beloved patent shoes with the low but elegant heels. She’d die before she wore anything flat and comfortable.

Of course, she was the only one with standards. Cassie would undoubtedly arrive wearing trousers and a long tunic-style thing over them; while Coco – Edie had a soft spot for Coco – would wear something old and although she’d look marvellous, as Edie kept explaining to her, men were wary of eccentric women and wearing old clothes was certainly eccentric. What that girl needed to do was get a husband and stop with all this career business. She’d had that Red O’Neill on the hook and somehow it had all gone wrong, and now look at him: always in the papers talking about that big business of his.

It wasn’t that Coco wasn’t pretty enough – she was. Took after her mother, actually, with that dark hair, the mischievous dark eyes and the wide, animated mouth. Cassie’s daughters looked quite like her too, except for the eyes: Lily and Beth both had Shay’s eyes. Not that Edie could ever say such a thing about the girls looking like Marguerite. Pearl had banned her from so much as mentioning their mother.

Coco had sex appeal too, or SA as they used to call it in Edie’s day. Not that she seemed aware of it, goodness, no. It was Pearl’s fault, Edie felt. Marguerite, for all her faults, had been sexy too and would have shown her daughters what to do with it, how to use it to get a husband. Cassie, who’d been sexy once, had managed to get the husband but Edie was sure she’d lose him. Cassie wasn’t the practical type who’d be able to let Shay go off on the odd romp, and if she didn’t buck up and start dressing nicely, she’d lose him to some young one for sure. Edie had seen it happen before.

Plenty of women thought their marriage was safe, but men had needs. Edie knew all about men and their needs, she thought darkly as she fingered her diamonds.

Pearl and Daisy were putting the last-minute touches to the flowers. Pearl had always favoured unusual vases, and today she’d found her old, cracked crimson and white Japanese teacups at the back of a cupboard, and was arranging some of the wildflowers Coco had brought from the florist.

Daisy, who liked to be in on the action, sat on the arm of the couch snuffling the flowers with her little black nose while Pearl sat at the dining room table, snipped stem lengths and tied teeny bouquets with string so they wouldn’t fall apart once placed in the cups.

‘Grammy,’ said Coco, coming in with a platter of cakes covered with kitchen paper towels. ‘You’re supposed to be upstairs beautifying yourself. I said I’d do that—’

‘I can do flowers,’ interrupted Fiona, following on Coco’s heels, carefully carrying a much smaller plate. She was dressed for the party in embroidered jeans, a pretty broderie anglaise top and a kaleidoscope of her home-made loom bracelets. Jo had put her daughter’s hair up in a high ponytail, while Coco had supplied a flowery clip from the 1960s.

‘Ms Doherty said I made the May altar look very pretty in school when it was my week to do it. Coco, I think we need more sparkles on the fairy cakes. They’re not sparkly enough. Look.’

Fiona pulled the kitchen towel off her plate, which contained cakes decorated with sparkles, icing dust and multi-coloured sprinkles to within an inch of their lives. Fiona had even added some of the tiny hard silver balls, which looked glorious but nearly always made Pearl fear for her dentures when she mistakenly bit into them.