The Honey Queen (25 page)

‘We don’t need empty spare rooms,’ Opal had told her. ‘This is your home, you’re always welcome back here.’ She’d told all her children the same thing when they left home.

Her bedroom was a pale grey, quite out of keeping with the rest of the house with its magnolias and creams. Meredith had been very specific about the colour she wanted it painted when she was fourteen.

It was the same sort of grey that her friend Clara’s room was painted – the difference being that Clara’s room was a big high-ceilinged room in a lovely old house two miles away with genuine antiques and a marvellous mahoghany bed that had been in her family for decades. It was a far cry from Meredith’s cramped room overlooking St Brigid’s Terrace with its cheap single bed.

Meredith had done her best, stapling flowery fabric on to an old headboard to lend a touch of glamour. It hadn’t been enough, though. It had still looked like a room in an ex-council house with clip frames hanging on the walls and a DIY wardrobe her father and brothers had put together one weekend with a certain amount of teasing and cursing as they tried to read the instructions. No matter what she did, Meredith’s bedroom would never be like Clara’s.

It was meeting Clara that had changed everything in the first place.

It all came about because she was in the wrong school.

Ned and Opal had worried about her when she’d been younger because she was such a quiet, shy child. Meredith could remember the whispered conversations between her parents about how they thought of sending her to St Loretta’s, a small fee-paying school several miles away from Redstone.

The boys would all go to the local, free secondary school but a plan was made to save up so that Meredith could go to Loretta’s.

‘I don’t want to go!’ Meredith had cried when she’d heard the plan. ‘I’ll be different, I won’t have gone to their private little junior school.’

‘You won’t be different, lovey. It will be a great chance for you, Meredith,’ her father had said. The local school would be a bit rough for a girl as sensitive as her but nobody wanted to say it out loud.

‘We can’t afford it,’ she’d said, her last attempt at escaping.

‘We can afford anything we need when it’s best for our children,’ said her father sternly. She’d been right about Loretta’s. Meredith hadn’t fitted in. Too shy to make friends easily, and too in awe of the posher girls who all knew each other because they’d been together in school since they were four, she was always on the outside looking in.

She hid her pain from her parents and they really believed that she loved it.

‘I told you that you’d fit in,’ Ned would say, delighted.

In truth, Meredith had no friends because she was too embarrassed to invite her wealthier classmates back to her ex-council-house home. Other girls didn’t see this as shyness, they saw only standoffishness.

So school became a kind of hell until the day she met Clara.

Meredith could remember exactly where she was the day Clara had first spoken to her. Sitting at the back of the school at the top of the steps leading down to the basketball courts. It was a sunny day in late September. Most of the girls had finished lunch and were either playing sports or lounging in the playground at the front of the school, which was a suntrap. Meredith didn’t mind sitting in the shade even though everyone else was obsessed with getting a tan. It didn’t bother her because her pale skin never went brown. It just went from lobster back to white again.

The new girl, Clara, sat down beside her.

‘Do you ever feel,’ Clara said in the very upper-class tones that had caused the girls in Meredith’s class to snigger at her, more out of envy than out of anything else, ‘that you just don’t fit in?’

Meredith had looked at Clara in fascination and saw the strain in her fine features.

‘And there’s no point fitting in or trying to, because you never will?’ Clara went on.

For all the teasing and bullying Clara had endured since she’d arrived at the school three weeks ago, it hadn’t appeared to have hurt her. She wasn’t crying. She was just stating the way things were in a matter-of-fact manner.

‘I’ve been here two years and I don’t feel as though I fit in either,’ Meredith said shyly.

‘Maybe we can hang out together,’ said Clara, beaming at her. ‘Show the rest of the world that their opinions don’t matter.’

Until that moment, Meredith had desperately longed to fit in. Suddenly,
not
fitting in seemed the most thrilling thing ever. If not fitting in meant being like Clara, then it suited her just fine.

From that moment on Meredith was Clara’s slave. Clara had rescued her from being on her own and Meredith had been on her own for what felt like all her life. Her brothers had each other, her mother had her father, but Meredith had always felt like the odd one out – and since the day she started at Loretta’s, Meredith had had no one. Her old best friend Grainne had made new friends at the secondary school and spent all her time with them. The other girls on St Brigid’s Terrace all thought Meredith was a snob because she went to a posh school. A posh school where everyone looked down on her and she hadn’t made a single friend. Until now. Gorgeous, glamorous Clara, who was teased by the other girls as much for her looks as for her accent, was saying they were alike.

Before Loretta’s, Clara had attended a very expensive girls’ school on the other side of the city. But something had happened, something Clara never spoke about, and the family had relocated. Clara and her older brother had been sent to state schools and Clara’s parents had picked Loretta’s as a suitable replacement for Clara. It hadn’t gone well and Loretta’s girls had turned on Clara. She’d once had money, and had gone to a far more expensive school than theirs – even if the money was gone now, she was surely looking down on them. So they’d look down on her first. Clara had beautiful clothes. Been on glamorous holidays. How dare she come there with her posh voice and look down on everyone.

But Meredith knew – as the others would too, if they’d only taken the time to get to know her instead of being so hostile – Clara didn’t look down on anyone. She liked people whether they had money and had been on exotic foreign holidays or not. Those weren’t the standards by which she judged people, otherwise she wouldn’t have been Meredith’s friend, would she? Shy, quiet Meredith who was good at art but who came from St Brigid’s Terrace.

Clara didn’t give a fig where her new friend came from, but Meredith found that she cared very much where Clara came from. Clara’s new house was a gracious period property for all that it represented a decline in the family fortunes. Her father drove off to work every morning in a big shiny black car. Her mother wasn’t like other mothers Meredith had known. She wandered around the house, sometimes cutting flowers for indoors, looking perpetually elegant and glamorous with her short mop of blonde hair, her elegant blouses, her neat pedal-pusher trousers that revealed slender ankles in dainty pumps. The first time Meredith had been in Clara’s house, she’d peeped shyly at Mrs Hughes in fascination.

‘Would you girls prefer to go up to Clara’s room and talk, or sit in the garden? It’s such a lovely day,’ Mrs Hughes said. ‘Your aunt sent over some of her homemade elderflower cordial,’ she told Clara, who grinned. ‘It’s probably dreadful but we could give it a go. Do you want to stay for supper?’ Mrs Hughes enquired. ‘I could telephone your mother and speak to her if you like?’

‘No, it’s fine, Mrs Hughes, I won’t, thank you – maybe another time,’ stammered Meredith, thinking that in the Byrne household they had tea in the evening and her mother might faint if someone like Mrs Hughes phoned and inquired if Meredith would like to stay for supper. What
was
supper, Meredith wondered. Why was it so different from tea?

‘Clara, don’t forget your piano practice,’ her mother reminded her. ‘Just because you’re not taking lessons any more, darling, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep it up.’

It was like something out of a film, Meredith thought. She longed to be part of that world. Longed to have supper instead of tea. Longed to have a bedroom like Clara’s, carelessly decorated with old bits of family furniture. Not that Clara looked down on what Meredith had for a second.

‘Oh, I love your house!’ she said after Meredith had found the courage to invite her. ‘It’s fabulous, so beautiful and unique. I’d love to have three storeys. Our house is so boring.’

‘But your house is so big,’ Meredith said, astonished.

‘I know, but it’s dull. Our old house was nicer, more like your house, more character,’ she said but Meredith was sure she must be lying.

Clara’s father recovered from whatever financial setback had sent them to Redstone in the first place and after a couple of years, the family left. Clara and Meredith promised to keep in touch, but distance meant that the friendship petered out.

However, Meredith had learned an important lesson from Clara. She’d observed what it was that set her friend apart from everyone else in school: class, breeding,
knowing things
. Meredith, who had never felt that she belonged anywhere, had found something to believe in.

Lying on her bed in Redstone, Meredith stared around her at the grey bedroom walls and thought of her beautiful apartment in Elysium Gardens. If she knew Clara now, would Clara still want to be her friend? She doubted it.

Freya’s best friend Kaz wanted to come around to meet Meredith. Well, to look at Meredith.

‘She’s not some creature in a zoo,’ Freya pointed out as they ambled across the playing field.

‘Yeah, but I’ve never seen her before, remember. I only saw those pictures of your dad’s birthday where she looked like something out of
Hello!
magazine.’

‘She doesn’t look like something out of
Hello!
magazine now,’ Freya said with feeling. ‘I wish I could get to the bottom of it. Opal’s probably going to talk to her, but Opal is so easily hurt. I wish I was there. I’d ask her straight out. “What the heck is going on? Why are you here and why do you have to go off and meet your criminal lawyer in the middle of the morning?”’

‘You don’t suppose it’s drugs, do you?’ said Kaz.

‘You never know,’ Freya said. ‘I don’t think she’s the type. I mean, if she was on something she’d probably be more laid back. I’m telling you, Kaz, she’s wound so tightly, she’s like a coiled spring.’

‘Wow, coiled spring, huh?’ said Kaz, thinking this over. ‘Will we bunk off lessons, go and have a coffee and fag break?’

‘No, I’m giving up the fags,’ Freya said. ‘Opal caught a whiff off me the other night and she got so upset. I cannot tell you how upset she was. And I hate to upset her or let her down. Besides, she’s right: smoking kills. We all know it.’

‘Getting in a car can kill. Having a drink can kill. Getting on an airplane can kill,’ Kaz grumbled, ‘but they don’t all have pictures of corpses and a skull and crossbones on the side of every car, do they? Why is it us poor smokers who take the rap?’

‘Yeah, well, I don’t really need them,’ Freya said. ‘Plus I can’t afford them.’

‘You could,’ said Kaz, ‘if you keep doing people’s art and maths homework, you could have a very good habit going there.’

‘I don’t need a very good habit going there,’ said Freya.

‘Is that why you don’t drink?’ Kaz asked.

‘I do drink,’ said Freya, ‘just not much. Listen, if you had spent much time with my mother and watched her “coping” with life on a Saturday night thanks to a litre bottle of wine, then you wouldn’t be so keen on booze. I don’t want to turn out like her.’

They were both silent for a while. Freya rarely spoke about her mother.

Freya was so low-key about it all that Kaz tended to forget her mother was a bit of a madzer. She patted her friend’s arm awkwardly.

‘Your mother will come round in the end. She’ll be fine, I bet ya.’

‘No,’ said Freya, ‘she won’t. But I’m doing OK. I’ve got Opal and Ned to look after.’

‘I thought they were supposed to be looking after you,’ said Kaz.

‘You know me,’ Freya pointed out, ‘I like to do the looking after, which is why there is a problem with this whole Meredith coming home thing. The boys, Steve, David and Brian, they’re great, they love their parents. They’re typical guys apart from the fact that only David has the vaguest clue how to work the washing machine so poor Opal still does the other pair’s washing no matter how much I tell her she shouldn’t. But they’re normal, wonderful – not that I tell them that, obviously. They appreciate Ned and Opal. But Meredith, I don’t think she appreciates anything.
That’s
what’s wrong with her. I’ve never been able to figure out what her problem was, but that’s it. And now she turns up on the doorstep looking all miserable and sobbing but not able to tell anyone what’s wrong.’

‘And she doesn’t look all glossy and fabulous any more?’ asked Kaz excitedly.

‘No,’ said Freya. ‘She looks pretty wrecked – dragged through a bush backwards sort of stuff.’

‘Please can I come home with you?’

‘No, you can’t. It’ll only make it worse. She’s like one of those feral kittens. You can’t introduce too many people to it at once or else it’ll go and hide. You can come home with me tomorrow and see her. I’ll have figured her out by tomorrow.’

‘’Kay,’ said Kaz despondently. ‘Phone me if there are any developments. I live a boring life you know.’

‘I’ll send out bulletins every hour, OK?’

S
eth was taking things so slowly that Lillie wondered how she’d ever energize him enough to do anything with the house.

Lillie felt she’d been taking things slowly for what seemed like a lifetime. She’d been at Sorrento Villa over a week before she managed to persuade him to venture upstairs and show her around the rest of the house.

‘I’m almost ashamed to let you see it, Lillie.’

He looked forlorn, almost like one of her own children rather than her brother, Lillie thought. His facial expression said ‘it’s my fault it’s a mess and I’m full of shame at that fact’.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she’d announced cheerfully, using the voice she’d used on her sons when they were little and needed encouragement. ‘I know how it is with old houses: they need a lot of work and a lot of money. If you don’t have the funds, it can be a struggle to get started.’