The Honey Queen (35 page)

‘No, no,’ Frankie said, suddenly taking the easy way out. She didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Maybe it
was
over. She couldn’t cope with that knowledge right now.

‘I’m tired,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll go to bed.’

‘I might stay up to see the end of the match,’ said Seth.

‘Fine.’

Frankie climbed the stairs wearily to bed, feeling she might cry her heart out. But she wasn’t going to let herself start. Not now.

T
he night before the wedding, Opal considered all the wonderful people and things in her life and thought how blessed she was.

There was Ned, and she loved him as much as she had on their wedding day, even though his mother would have liked him to marry Concepta, who had a farm to inherit from her uncle when she was older. Land meant money and some security in those days.

‘What’s your philosophy, Opal?’ Freya asked dreamily, sitting at the table, stirring her hot chocolate. Freya hadn’t a yen for sweets but when it came to hot chocolate, she was addicted.

‘Philosophy?’ said Opal, startled.

Freya was a great one for questions out of the blue, questions you had to think about. The lads hadn’t been like that and although Opal suspected Meredith was, she’d never
asked
the questions but kept them inside her head. Opal had tried to gently lever them out, like she’d once seen someone open an oyster shell on a television cooking show, but Meredith hadn’t been that type of kid. She kept her feelings locked in her heart and Opal had never been allowed close, a thought that still made her sad. But Freya – now there was a girl who could release her thoughts into the air like butterflies …

‘Bobbi’s philosophy is to be a warrior woman on the outside – but she’s melted caramel on the inside. Like when there’s a dark chocolate coating that’s a bit bitter and then you bite into it, and it’s all melting and soft. Don’t you agree?’

Freya stared up at her aunt with those big Bambi eyes.

‘And David’s like an oak or something, a tree that looks strong but can be hurt too. I wish I knew what was eating away at him, but he won’t talk. Now, you, Opal, I think your philosophy is to shine golden light on us all and make us better people. Lillie’s the same.’

‘Lillie?’

‘The Australian woman I meet in Redstone sometimes. She talks to Seanie and Ronnie at the bus stop too. Most people don’t,’ Freya said. ‘Which is mad, because they’re very wise.’

Opal stared back, thinking. ‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘They are wise. And you’re right about Bobbi, she is soft despite everything that louser of a husband put her through. And David … I wish I knew who’d hurt him. How could anyone hurt him?’ She sighed sadly. ‘Having children is heartbreaking, love, that’s all I’ll say. You never stop worrying about them.’

She paused and looked at Freya. ‘Did you do this kind of thing with your mother?’ she asked curiously.

Gemma was a mystery to Opal. For a mother to be so unmotherly was almost unnatural in Opal’s eyes. And yet everyone’s path was different and poor Gemma had her own pain. It wasn’t for Opal to criticize her. And Gemma not being able to care for her daughter had meant that Freya had come like a blessing to live in their home.

‘Mum doesn’t care for this game,’ Freya said simply.

There was no recrimination in her voice: plain fact instead.

‘She begins to fret about what people think about her and then she gets upset … Dad and I were forever trying to make her see that it didn’t matter what other people thought. What she thought mattered. But she’s fragile; she can’t take pain, even imagined pain from someone else looking at her in the street. What other people think are their ideas floating around in their head. It’s bad to colour them with what’s in your head.’

Opal stared at her niece, a fifteen-year-old girl on the outside and the Dalai Lama on the inside.

‘Freya, has anyone ever told you that you’re very deep and wise?’ she said proudly, reaching over to stroke Freya’s face.

Freya grinned and the dimple on her left cheek sprang into action. ‘Only you, Opal. Only you.’

Meredith woke early on her brother’s wedding day. Early enough to register the presence of the sun sneaking in through a slit in her bedroom curtains. Briefly, she wondered where she was. This still happened, even though she’d been living with her parents for almost a month now. St Brigid’s Terrace was home and yet it wasn’t home. Despite everything, the apartment in Elysium Gardens had felt like home to her for five years and she missed the airy spaciousness of it, her aloneness. Back here in the bedroom where she’d grown up, she felt again like a confused teenager, trying to find her way out into the world.

Meredith shoved back the duvet quickly. She was fed up thinking about her teenage self. Teenage stupidity had been responsible for so much. It had made her search for a far-flung dream she’d had no hope of ever achieving – or perhaps she
had
had a hope of achieving it, except she’d believed in the wrong people. Sally-Anne and Keith were definitely the wrong people and she’d been too blind to see it. She’d been taken in by money, glamour, the fact that they knew the
right
people. But the right people had turned out to be the wrong people.

It was still only half past seven and Brian was getting married at one o’clock. It was the Saturday before Easter, and Meredith thought it was a ludicrous time for a wedding. But Brian had explained that he and Liz were taking advantage of the school holiday to fly off for a week’s honeymoon in Ibiza. Lucky them, Meredith thought. She wished she could escape to Ibiza.

Before a wedding where she’d take a day off in her old life, Meredith would just be waking up, stretching luxuriously in her king-size bed with the Frette sheets. Not that the king-size bed with the Frette sheets had done her much good. She’d been too uptight to have anyone else in them. And now the thought of paying thousands of euros for bedclothes struck her as ludicrous. Her mother would be horrified at the thought of such waste. Meredith could imagine her voice in her head.

‘Thousands of euros for sheets?’ Her mother would stare at her uncomprehendingly.

In Mum’s world, sheets were things you prized more when they were so worn they became soft to the touch. Her mother’s mother, Granny Cordy, had come up from the country to live in inner-city Cork and she was forever telling her children that when she was a girl they’d lain on sheets made out of flour bags, three to a bed. ‘Well, Granny Cordelia,’ Meredith whispered. ‘If you’re looking down now, you’re probably shocked – and you’d be right to be shocked. I spent more on my sheets than you spent on a year of groceries. More fool me, as you’d have said yourself. But I’ve learned my lesson, Granny Cordelia. I’ve learned my lesson.’

Still in the camisole top and shorts she’d worn to bed, Meredith went down to the kitchen to get herself some coffee. It was already abuzz. Despite the fact that he should, theoretically, have been lying in bed with the hangover from hell after his stag night, Brian was sitting at the kitchen table with his phone pressed to one ear and a set of table plans in front of him.

‘Oh God, Liz,’ he groaned. ‘I can’t work this out. There is no answer to this problem. Your aunt Phil will just have to sit at table thirteen and like it. There’s nowhere else to put her.’

Meredith tuned out. She felt spectacularly uninvolved in the wedding but also guilty for feeling that way. Brian was the first of the family to get married, but that sort of irked her too. She was the oldest. She was the only girl and by rights she should have legions of boyfriends running after her now. These days the only legions running after her were tabloid journalists wanting the latest on the Sally-Anne and Keith Alexander story.

Where have they gone with the money? How can you claim you knew absolutely nothing? How much money did you lose? Is it true that you smuggled a valuable picture out of the country on the day the gallery’s assets were frozen?
Meredith shuddered. Things had died down a little in the past week. Some new scandal had hit the papers and interest in the glamorous Alexanders and their wealthy investors had waned. Meredith felt she was able to turn her mobile phone on again. The blissful relief of no longer being the one pursued was like the relief of having a tooth filled at the dentist after a week of nerve pain.

The back door was open and she looked outside. Her mother and Freya were sitting on the kitchen step into the garden, sunning themselves in the early morning sun and drinking tea out of big mugs.

‘Meredith, love,’ said her mother warmly. ‘Come and join us. Freya and I are taking a bit of a rest before the madness begins.’

‘There’s tea in the pot,’ said Freya kindly.

Meredith instantly felt her hackles rise. She didn’t know why, but her cousin annoyed her. There was Freya, sitting companionably with her mother as if
she
were Opal’s daughter. It didn’t matter to Meredith that she hadn’t been about for years, that Freya was the one who’d helped Opal get her hair highlighted and had gone with her to the doctor when her knees were bad. No, Meredith felt the full wave of resentment wash over her as she looked down at the pair sitting cosily together. She wanted to burst into tears like a child.

‘I think I’ll have coffee, actually,’ she snapped before turning and going back inside.

Freya and Opal looked at each other and Freya could see the glitter of tears in her aunt’s eyes. She put her arm around Opal’s shoulders.

‘There now, Opal,’ she murmured kindly. Rather than say what she really thought and risk hurting her aunt, she had to improvise. ‘I expect it’s hard for Meredith on her brother’s wedding day. You know how it is with us girls, we love to think of getting married and it’s a bit tough when it’s not your own wedding. And after all Meredith’s been through too. When things are bad and there’s no sign of a romance for you on the horizon, it can be terribly upsetting. It’s obviously getting poor Meredith down.’

‘Do you think so?’ Opal gazed at Freya hopefully. ‘I could understand if she felt that way, Freya. I was just afraid,’ she added with great effort, ‘that she was jealous of you and me.’ She hated saying it, but she’d begun to wonder. After all, Freya fitted into the household so much better than poor Meredith ever had. Oh, that was an awful thing to think.

Freya watched Opal shrewdly, with a pretty good sense of what was going on in her mind. There were times when she could cheerfully kill Meredith. If she ruined this day for Opal, Freya would not be responsible for her actions.

‘Gosh no, Opal,’ Freya said gently. ‘I’m sure it’s just single-person-at-the-wedding misery. Today’s going to be hard for her. And Brian is her baby brother. It’s difficult seeing him go off to Liz.’

‘Yes, of course,’ agreed Opal, delighted to be given this new explanation to cling to. She really was a terrible woman for imagining things. Of course Freya was right: Meredith must be upset about her little brother getting married because he was the first of them to really go. And even though Meredith had gone for a while, she’d come back, hadn’t she?

Lillie popped into Bobbi’s on Saturday morning with some roses for the reception counter. Even at ten past nine, the salon was buzzing, with every seat full, and two women waiting patiently on the chocolate-brown sofas, flicking through glossy magazines.

‘Mrs O’Brien is so thrilled with her new “do” that she begged me to bring you these,’ said Lillie. ‘They’re from her garden.’

Bobbi took the tinfoil-wrapped lemon-yellow narcissi and breathed in their heady scent.

‘Isn’t she an absolute pet?’ Bobbi said to Lillie, as pleased as if she’d been given a huge, shop-bought bouquet. ‘And so are you, for dropping in on her all the time.’

‘She’s lonely,’ said Lillie, ‘and she’s great fun to talk to. I enjoy visiting her and she has nobody else. Let’s hope someone does it for us when we’re ninety.’

Bobbi grinned. ‘I’ll probably be in one of those maximum-security nursing homes where strapping twenty-year-old nurses who think they’ll never be old talk to me in baby talk and assume I’m delusional when I tell them that I was once their age with a string of admirers.’

Lillie shuddered. ‘Sounds dreadful.’

‘I look at the young girls working here and I know they think I’m past it,’ Bobbi pointed out. ‘They can’t imagine you and I romping with a man, and we’re hardly ninety yet.’

Lillie roared with laughter. ‘I’m not in the market for romps, right now. I’d prefer a night in with a fire in the grate and something good on the telly.’

‘You can’t still be feeling the cold after Australia?’

‘It’s the house,’ Lillie revealed, shivering from memory. ‘It might be called Sorrento Villa, but that’s wishful thinking. Siberian Villa might be more apt. The basement is cold, no doubt about it. The upstairs rooms aren’t so bad, but downstairs needs some extra insulation or a damp course or something done, anyway.’

‘How’s Seth getting on with it all?’

‘Oh, we’ve made a start on the garden. I think he’s quite enjoying it.’

Bobbi had met Seth a few times with Lillie on their morning trips out for coffee and had quickly sized him up: a sweet, gentle man, and clever with it. He was also handsome too, she thought, not without a hint of envy for the unknown Frankie. Bobbi hadn’t been able to get much information from the ever-loyal Lillie about what had got Seth looking like a puppy who’d been thrown out of the house, but reading between the lines, Bobbi had worked it out.

One income, a new house that needed pots of money piled into it and a man who couldn’t work a screwdriver would drive a saner woman than she into a fit of rage.

She really had to get a look at this Frankie to continue the analysis. Bobbi loved watching other people and finding out what made them tick. A hair and beauty salon was the perfect calling for her in that so many people treated their hairdresser as a mother confessor once they were in the chair.

‘It’s like the mirror frees them to talk to you,’ she’d explained to Opal years ago. ‘They’re not looking you in the eye. Plus, you’re gently touching their head, and that makes the quietest of people blab. That’s why women love beauty and hair salons. They might have to pay for it, but for a couple of hours, they have someone being kind to them, making coffee, giving them magazines and generally treating them as if they mattered.’