Secrets Between Sisters: The perfect heart-warming holiday read of 2018

Chapter One Several Years Later

‘You’re like Baa, baa, Black Sheep, Ma.’

‘Baa, baa, Black Sheep?’

‘You’ve got three bags full by the kitchen door.’ Finn was leaning against the doorjamb of Río’s bedroom, watching her curiously. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m decluttering.’ Río looked up at her son from where she was sitting on the floor, surrounded by junk. ‘It’s my New Year’s resolution. I heard someone on the radio this morning say that every time you buy something new, you should discard at least two items of your old stuff, and I haven’t thrown anything out since the cat died.’

‘The cat dying hardly counts as throwing something out.’

‘No, but throwing out her bed and her kitty toys did. So now I’m making up for the fact that I haven’t trashed anything for ages by dumping loads of things. Like this.’ Río tossed a theatre programme over her shoulder. ‘And this.’ A desk diary went flying. ‘And these. Go, go, go!’ A bunch of Christmas cards fluttered after the desk diary. ‘Decluttering’s proving to be surprisingly therapeutic. How’s your hangover?’

‘Not too bad.’

‘Last night was fun, wasn’t it?’

Río and Finn had rung in the New Year in O’Toole’s pub, where Río worked part time as a barmaid. But for once she hadn’t been pulling pints–she’d been singing and laughing and dancing into the small hours. She and Finn had swung home around three a.m., and then Skyped Finn’s dad and left a recording of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on his answering machine in LA.

‘Last night was a blast.’ Finn moved across to the pile of debris that Río had fecked into the middle of the floor, and pushed it about a bit with his bare foot. ‘Anything here I might want to keep?’

‘Nope.’

‘What about the bags in the kitchen?’

‘They’re full of crap too.’

In the kitchen Río had bagged–amongst numerous other useless objects–a torn peg bag, half a dozen broken corkscrews, a copy of a GI diet book (never read), a cracked wine cooler and a yoghurt maker still in its box.

Upstairs, she had decided to attack her bureau before attempting to cull her wardrobe. She suspected that if she opened the closet door, her clothes would start pleading with her not to discard them–especially those heart-stoppingly beautiful garments she’d earmarked for herself when she’d dealt in vintage clothing. The chiffon tea dresses, the cobwebby scarves, the silk peignoirs–all had their own stories to tell, and all had the power to bring her hurtling back to the past.

As did the photographs. They were mostly of Finn. Finn aged seven, in a rowing boat with his father, both squinting with identical green eyes against the sun; Finn at thirteen, climbing a mast, black hair a-tangle with wind and sea salt; Finn at fifteen, kitted up in scuba gear, poised to perform a backward roll from a dive boat; Finn on his twentieth birthday, smiling to camera with a pint of Guinness in his hand…

‘Ha! Get a load of Dad’s ponytail!’

‘What? Show me!’

‘I could blackmail him with this if he had any money. Look.’ From out of the bureau Finn handed Río a yellowed newspaper cutting. Underneath a headline that read ‘Flawed Hamlet Fails to Engage’ was a picture of Shane gazing moodily at a skull. ‘What year was this taken?’

Río frowned, thinking back. ‘It must have been’ eighty-seven, because I was pregnant with you during the run of that show. I remember climbing ladders to paint the backdrop, and trying desperately to hide my bump–I was scared they’d fire me for health and safety reasons if they found out. No wonder you’ve a head for heights’.

‘And depths. I was down at forty metres this morning.’

‘Finn! Don’t scare me!’

‘Pah! It’s a piece of piss, Ma. I could dive in my sleep now. I got gills.’ Finn started rummaging in the drawer again, and produced a carrier bag stuffed with mementoes. ‘Baby shoes!’ he said, pulling out a pair of teensy bootees. ‘Jeepers! Were my feet ever that small?’

‘Give me those!’ Río grabbed the bootees from him, and set them reverently aside in a box she’d labelled ‘Things to Keep’.

‘And here’s more newspaper stuff about Dad. Hey! Listen to this. “Shane Byrne glowers sexily as Macheath, but he should not also be required to sing.” Was Dad a really crap actor, Ma?’

Río laughed. ‘No, he wasn’t. He just never got the breaks he deserved. Good-looking actors can be at a real disadvantage. Casting directors tend to want to bed them rather than hire them.’

Finn gave her a cautious look. ‘Ahem. Casting directors are mostly women, yeah?’

‘Yip.’

‘Thank Jaysus for that. You want to keep this?’

Río shook her head, and Finn screwed the newspaper cutting into a ball and batted it across the room. Next out of the carrier bag was a photograph mounted on pretty, marbled card.

‘Well, hello!’ said Finn. ‘Who are these foxy ladeez? Don’t tell me it’s you and Dervla, Ma? Take a look!’

Río looked–and looking took her straight back to the spring of 1987, the year her mother had died. The picture showed a seventeen-year-old Río walking hand in hand with her sister through the garden of their childhood home. Both girls were wearing silk kimonos–one patterned with birds of paradise, the other with cherry blossom–and both were barefoot. Yellow-faced monkey flowers and blushing meadowsweet stippled the banks of the pond in which a lamenting willow trailed her arms, and a pair of lazy koi drifted. You could practically smell the damp earth.

Río remembered that Shane had taken the photograph–from the sitting-room window, to gauge from the angle. And sure enough, when she turned the print over, there on the back were some lines he had adapted from a Yeats poem, written in his scrawly black script:

The light of morning, Lissamore,

Sash windows, open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one I adore.

‘You were beautiful, all right,’ observed Finn. ‘Both of you. Jaysus, if I’d been Dad, I’d have been hard-pressed to choose between the pair of you.’

Río looked up from the photograph. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked uncertainly.

‘Well, he’d obviously already made his choice, hadn’t he? You were the adored one. Otherwise I would never have happened.’

‘Oh. Yes.’ Río’s eyes dropped back to the image on the photograph, of the two girls wandering through an Impressionist garden, waiting in anguish for their mother to die. She remembered how her older sister’s hand had felt in hers, the reassuring coolness of her palm, the comforting pressure of her fingers. They’d held hands again at the funeral the following week, and slept together in their mother’s bed afterwards, with their arms wrapped around one another. But just months later, Dervla had turned on her heel and stalked out of Río’s life.

Río looked at the photograph for a long time, and then she reached for an envelope and slid it inside.

‘What went wrong between you and Dervla, Ma?’ asked Finn.

Río affected a careless attitude. ‘Sisters fall out. It happens all the time.’

‘But you must have been close once. You can tell by that photograph.’

‘Dervla and I were all each other had for a couple of years. On the day that picture was taken, my father was most likely slumped over the desk in his study with a whiskey bottle beside him, while Mama lay dying in the bedroom above.’

‘What about friends? Had you no one to help you?’

‘Young people are no good at handling death, Finn. It embarrasses them. Most of our friends tended to steer clear. Apart from Shane.’

‘Good for Dad.’

‘He was a rock, all right.’ Río set the envelope aside in the ‘Things to Keep’ box, then looked back up at Finn, who was unfolding another press cutting.

‘Hey–here’s a pic of you in the paper,’ he remarked. ‘I remember that dress from when I was about ten.’

‘You were nearer thirteen,’ Río remarked, peering over his shoulder. ‘That was taken in my activist days, when I kicked up a stink about Bully Boy Bolger pulling down Coral Cottage.’

‘I thought Coral Cottage had fallen down years before?’

‘It was derelict, but not a ruin. And it was slap-bang in an area of outstanding natural beauty. It should have been resurrected, not built over. It still makes me mad when I think about that barnacle of Bolger’s getting planning permission.’

‘How did he wangle it?’

‘Brown envelopes stuffed with cash, presumably. That kind of carry-on was rampant in those days.’ Río took the cutting from Finn, scanned it, then sat back on her heels and tossed it onto the pile, where it joined the jetsam of her past. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t mind so much if anybody actually lived there. But apart from this Christmas, the Bolgers haven’t been near the joint for yonks. Imagine spending all that money on building a holiday home with all mod cons, and mooring for a boat, and a fecking yoga pavilion, that you never even bother to visit!’

‘Maybe they bugger off to Martinique and the Seychelles and places like that instead. I wouldn’t blame them, given this climate.’

‘I wonder what it’s like to have that kind of dosh. Lucky Mrs Bolger will get a tasty settlement when her divorce comes through.’

‘They’re getting divorced?’

‘That’s what the dogs on the street are saying.’

Shaking back her hair, Río stretched, got to her feet, and wandered to the window. On the street below, there were indeed dogs–quite a few of them. Her neighbour’s Yorkshire terrier was sitting on the harbour wall chatting to the postmistress’s Airedale, and Seamus Moynihan’s lurcher was looking out to sea, waiting for his master’s trawler to arrive back with the lobster pots. The bichon frise that belonged to Fleur of Fleurissima was posing prettily in the doorway of the shop, waiting for one of the local curs to pluck up the courage to ask her for a date.

Fleurissima was the village’s sole boutique. Río’s friend Fleur specialised in non-mainstream designers sourced from all over Europe: her beautiful shop was a mecca for those with some wealth and a lot of taste, who were seeking unusual and elegant one-offs. It opened for just nine months of the year, because it didn’t make financial sense to stay open after October. In wintertime there were no well-heeled visitors around to snap up her exquisite garments, so Fleur opened the shop only in the run-up to Christmas, but she always took New Year off to fly to some exotic location with her latest lover. This year, she planned to celebrate New Year’s Day by swimming in the Blue Lagoon in Jamaica.

Río had helped run the shop once upon a time; now she just dressed the window. In the old days, she and Fleur had acquired their stock from the house auctions that were held every few weeks in estates and big houses all over Ireland. They’d pull up in Río’s ancient, battered Renault, and drive away with cardboard boxes crammed with silk and satin and velvet and chenille, some bearing labels with legendary names: Ossie Clark, Yves Saint Laurent, Mary Quant. It broke their hearts to sell their spoils–in fact, sometimes they ‘borrowed’ the frocks themselves before they sold them–but that had been how they made their living in the days before Lissamore had become a playground for plutocrats.

Lissamore was one of the prettiest, most picture-postcard-perfect villages in the whole of the west of Ireland: there was even a sign to say so, a quarter of a mile down the road from Río’s house. It read: ‘You are now entering Lissamore–possibly the most picturesque village in Ireland.’

Since the sign had gone up a couple of years earlier, Río had been tempted to deface it by crossing out the word ‘possibly’. Opposite her front door, fishing boats bobbed cheerfully in a photogenic harbour against a backdrop of purple mountains. Islands shimmered in the bay beyond, rimmed with golden beaches–the kind of beaches that would be bound to win awards if only Condé Nast copped on to them. On the outskirts of the village, leafy boreens wound their way here and there, mostly leading to random beauty spots. Boats and boreens, mountains and islands–all could have been designed by a deity in a benevolent mood, or by the Irish Tourist Board.

Río’s house was on the main street, one of a nineteenth-century terrace of two-storey cottages. It was the kind of house that epitomised the estate agent cliché ‘oozing with character’, the kind of house that tourists chose to pose in front of for photos. There were, however, two major drawbacks to the property as far as Río was concerned. She didn’t actually own it, and it didn’t have a garden.

All her life Río had dreamed of tending a garden by the sea. When her mother had lain dying, she had sat by her bedside and told her stories about how one day she, Río, would own Coral Cottage, where she and Mama had used to go to fetch freshly laid eggs. She promised to plant there all the flowers her mother had grown in the garden of their family home, and build a bower for Mama to rest in on warm summer days, and a tree house for her future grandchildren to play in, and a picnic table, for when they felt like entertaining. And she’d promised her mother that when she died–and oh! she could have years ahead of her still! Mama could outlive Río!–her ashes would be scattered on the promontory by Coral Cottage, which overlooked the Atlantic. This last promise Río had kept; but of course the bower and the tree house and the picnic table had never been built. Instead there was an ostentatious yoga pavilion in the garden of what had once been Coral Cottage, and which was now known locally as Coral Mansion.

‘Ma? What are you daydreaming about?’ Finn’s voice brought Río back to the here and now, and she turned to him and smiled.

‘I was thinking about Coral Cottage, and the way it used to be. It was the loveliest place, Finn. My mother used to take me and Dervla to buy eggs from the old woman who lived there when we were small. There was always a smell of baking in the kitchen, and there were geraniums in pots on all the windowsills, and there would be a turf fire lighting and a cat on the hearth and hens in the henhouse, and I always used to dream that one day I might own a place like that and live the good life.’

Finn gave his mother a ‘get real’ look. ‘Come on, Ma! Who lives like that any more? Even you’d be lost without broadband and Skype.’

‘I was always a romantic, I guess. And the fact that you were conceived there made me—’

‘What! I was conceived in a derelict cottage?’

‘No. You were conceived under an apple tree in the orchard. I remember there was a full moon that night and—’

‘Ew, Ma! Too much information!’

‘Sorry I’ll shut up.’ Río returned to her bureau, absently leafed through an old notebook, then lobbed it onto the rubbish heap. Kneeling down and reaching randomly for something else to trash she said: ‘You should do this, Finn, in your room. Declutter your life. Isn’t it about time you got rid of a load of your old computer games?’

‘Funny you should say that. I was just thinking it was about time for me to do a blitz. I’ve been doing some thinking, Ma, and—’

‘Oh, look! One of your old school reports. Listen to this: “Finn is a popular and outgoing boy. However, he tends to concentrate overly on the physical aspect of his education. This is, unfortunately, to the detriment of his academic work, at which he could be very successful if he applied himself more rigorously.” I used to get that sort of thing in my school reports too. “Could do better. Must try harder.’”

‘Ma?’ Getting to his feet, Finn swept his hair back from his face, and the gesture reminded Río–as it always did–of his father.

‘Mm-hm?’

‘Carl’s decided he’s going to do the round-the-world thing this year.’

‘Good for Carl. When’s he going?’

‘In about three weeks.’

‘And he’s going for a whole year?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’ll miss him. What do you fancy for dinner this evening, by the way? Or maybe we should forget about cooking and head down to O’Toole’s for chowder? My treat.’

‘I hadn’t really thought about it. You see, Ma, the thing is that Carl’s asked me to go with him.’

Río paused in her perusal of a mail-order catalogue. ‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. And I’ve really been thinking about it. It would be a really amazing experience, wouldn’t it?’

‘Yes. It would.’

‘He’s–um–planning on hitting Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, South America…’

‘That’s going to cost a lot of money.’ Río turned a page automatically. A garden gnome that was great value at only €22.99 winked up at her with unseemly cheerfulness. How could it wink at her when her world was about to cave in?

‘Well, yeah. But there are ways of doing it on the cheap. You can get a ticket with a certain amount of stops on it, and it works out pretty good, depending on how many stops you take. It actually costs less than you might think. And I’ve been saving.’

Río wrenched her attention away from the gnome and forced herself to meet her son’s eyes. ‘You were saving up to go to college, Finn. I thought that’s what we agreed.’

‘I’m sorry, Ma. But I don’t want to study Marine Biology. I want to dive.’

‘But a degree in Marine Biology can help you as a diver. It can—’

‘Ma–I’m not an academic. I’m a hands-on kind of guy. I don’t want to pootle about underwater collecting specimens for analysis. I want to dive deep, I want to dive hard, I want to experience—’

‘You sound like some stupid slogan on one of your dive T-shirts.’

There was a silence, and then Finn said, ‘Shit, Ma. Are we going to fall out over this?’

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’ Río chewed her lip, hating herself. ‘I don’t mean to rain on your parade, Finn–really I don’t–it’s just that you’ve taken me a bit by surprise, that’s all’

Finn shuffled his feet. ‘You probably think that I haven’t put very much thought into this, Ma, but I have. It’s not like it’s going to be a holiday. We’ll pick up work as we go, me and Carl. There’s always work for Irish in bars, and we can help out in the scuba resorts we visit. And if I pick up enough work, I might be able to afford further training. Maybe even get my instructor-ship certification at last.’

‘Your big dream.’

‘My big dream.’

Río closed the mail-order catalogue and added it to the heap of junk. ‘Then go for it, Finn.’

‘You mean it?’

‘Yes, I do.’ She gave a rueful smile. ‘If we were in a movie now I’d say something meaningful like: “Follow your dream, son. That’s the only thing that matters in life.” Blah, blah, blah…’

‘But we’re not in a movie, Ma. I want to know what you really think.’

‘It doesn’t matter what I really think.’

‘Yes, it does.’

‘OK. Here goes,’ she said, taking a deep breath. ‘This is what I think. I love you more than my own life, Finn. You are the best thing that ever happened to me. And because I was responsible for bringing you into the world, I am responsible for your happiness. At the very least I owe you that—’

‘But, Ma, I owe you too. I owe—’

‘No, no. Listen to me. I owe it to you to be happy because there is no point–no point at all–in bringing into this world a human being who is going to end up a miserable son-of-a-bitch who resents his mother for standing in the way of what he really wants to do and turns into a–a big seething ball of bitter and twistedness. Oh God, how crap am I at this sort of thing! Let me try again.’ Folding her hands on her lap, Río looked down, waiting for the right words to come. ‘I didn’t make you so that you could care for me in my old age, Finn,’ she resumed, ‘or because I wanted to mould someone in my image. I couldn’t have done that even if I’d wanted to, because you were always your own man, even as a toddler. And now that you’re grown, it’s time for me to start letting go. Oh!’ Río stood up briskly. ‘I’m sounding like a character in one of your dad’s schmaltzier pilots. This is where I should get out your baby pictures and gaze at them tearfully.’

‘Here.’ Finn held out his baby bootees. ‘Gaze at these, instead.’

Río laughed, even though she actually did feel very choked up.

‘You’ve always been able to make me laugh, you brat.’

‘Maybe I’ve missed my vocation. Maybe I should do stand-up.’

‘No. Being a stand-up is more dangerous than being a scuba-diver.’

Mother and son shared a smile; then Finn gave Río one of those self-conscious hugs that twenty-year-olds give their parents, patting her shoulder and depositing a clumsy kiss on her cheek before disengaging.

‘Thanks, Ma,’ he said.

And then the phone went.

‘Get that, will you, Finn?’ said Río, reaching for a packet of tissues. She wasn’t going to cry. She just needed to blow her nose. She had nothing to cry about. She had reared a beautiful, confident, gregarious son, and she had done it all by herself. She had nothing to cry about.

Finn picked up. ‘Hi, Dervla,’ he said. ‘Yeah. I’ll put you on to her.’

‘Dervla?’ mouthed Río, giving Finn a sceptical look. ‘Dervla?’

He nodded, and Río wondered, as she took the handset from him, if this was one of Finn’s jokes. What had started as a fissure, just after their mother’s death, had developed into a rift between the sisters as wide and unbridgeable as the Grand Canyon. Dervla rarely phoned, and if they happened to meet on the street they would cross to the other side to avoid each other–to the private amusement of the rest of the village. For two decades Río’s sister’s preferred method of communication had been via terse reminders sent in the post or dropped through the letterbox. These billets-doux bore such legends as: ‘When was the last time you cleaned Dad’s kitchen?’ (A major chore.) Or: ‘Your turn to organise a chimney sweep for that fire hazard of a house.’ Or: ‘Please defrost Dad’s fridge. I did it last time.’ Since the advent of text messaging, the reminders had become terser still. ‘Lite bulbs need replacing.’ Or: ‘Washing machine broken.’