The Kinsella Sisters (2 page)

‘I’m Río,’ said Río. ‘And this is my son, Finn.’

Felicity Bolger looked at Finn with ill-concealed distaste, then turned back to Isabella.

‘Can we get a donkey, Mummy?’ breezed Isabella, fastening her sandals. ‘We could keep it down here and Finn could look after it for me when we’re in town. Finn says donkey races are great craic. He says he could organise them and we could charge people money to come and watch and take bets on which donkey’s going to win. I had a go on Dorcas, and even though I fell off, Finn says I have quite a good seat and—’

‘Oh, do stop your chattering, Isabella, and concentrate on what you’re doing,’ snapped Felicity. ‘We’re going to be late for this reception.’

Isabella gave her mother a mutinous look. ‘I don’t want to go to a stupid reception,’ she said. ‘I’d rather stay here and ride Dorcas.’

There was an ominous silence. Then James cleared his throat, Adair whistled a bar of some random tune, and Felicity drew in a small, shuddery sigh.

‘All right, then!’ she said in a tremulous voice. ‘Stay here and ride Dorcas, if that’s what you want. I can’t bring you to the reception, anyway, looking the way you do. You can travel back with Daddy in James’s Jeep. I’m going on by myself. Give me the keys to the Merc, please, Adair.’

‘Felicity—’

‘Give me the
keys.
’

Reaching into the pocket of his Barbour, Adair drew out a set of car keys and handed them over.

Then, with a barely audible: ‘Thank you. Have fun …’ Felicity flicked back her frosted hair and fled without another word.

Another silence fell, and then Adair Bolger said, ‘Go after her, darling.’

‘But, Daddy—’

‘Go on. I’ll join you in an hour.’

‘But—’

‘Please
, sweet-cheeks. This reception means a lot to Mummy. It’ll be her first big social event in Coolnamara.’

Isabella gazed after her mother, who was stumbling along the shore, looking wretched and unloved. Then she looked back at Finn, who had resumed his scrutiny of the rock pool.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said. She quickly finished fastening her sandals, then jumped off the slipway. ‘Mummy, Mummy!’ she called. ‘Hang on! I’m coming!’

Felicity paused, drooped, then made a helpless gesture with her hands. ‘But your clothes…’

‘She can change in the hotel,’ replied Adair, quickly. ‘Run, Isabella.’

Isabella ran. Halfway up the beach, she turned, and waved at Finn. ‘Next time I see her, she could be ready for racing!’ she called, before continuing on after her mother. ‘Mummy – wait up! Finn’s going to allow me to ride Pinkie when she’s old enough. Maybe I could get jodhpurs and proper riding boots? And a hard hat.’

‘Don’t be stupid, Isabella. You’re talking about riding a donkey, not a thoroughbred pony’

‘But it could be fun! Remember that film where…’

Isabella’s voice grew reedier and reedier, and then mother and daughter disappeared along the path that led to Coral Cottage.

‘I think you said your name was Río?’ enquired lames, turning to Río with a polite smile. ‘Río… um …?’

Río knew the architect was fishing for her surname, but she was damned if she’d volunteer it. ‘It’s short for Ríonach,’ she told him.

‘That’s an unusual name.’

‘It’s Irish; it means “queenly”.’

‘How fascinating. Well, nice to meet you, Río,’ said James.

‘Likewise,’ said Adair. Now that Río saw him up close, he didn’t look like a male model at all, she realised. There was something about him that was a bit rough around the edges, despite the country gent casuals. ‘Do you live locally?’ he asked her politely.

‘Yes,’ said Río. ‘I’ve lived in Lissamore all my life.’

‘In the village? Or – um…?’

‘In the village. But here is my favourite place. It’s so unspoiled. Did you know that it’s a designated area of outstanding natural beauty?’

Adair and James exchanged neutral looks. ‘Is that so?’ said Adair.

‘You mean you weren’t aware of that when you made the decision to bulldoze Coral Cottage and build your Legoland mansion?’ Río gave him a disingenuous smile. ‘That’s a shame. You might want to take things a bit more slowly, Mr Bolger. People in the country don’t like it when things happen too fast.’

‘I’d hardly describe the planning procedure as “fast”,’ said James, with a supercilious smirk. ‘Each application is subject to rigorous examination by the relevant department and—’

‘Don’t patronise me, and don’t push your luck,’ returned Río. ‘You might just about squeeze permission to stable a donkey here. But I’ve never heard of planning permission being granted for a yoga pavilion in Lissamore. And as for mooring a pleasure craft…’ Raising her chin, she gave them a challenging look. ‘Let’s just say you could find yourselves with a fight on your hands.
Slán
, lads.’

With a toss of her head, Río strode away from them, back in the direction she’d come. The climb up the cliff path was a stiff one, and by the time she got to the top she was breathless with exertion and anger. Looking down, she saw that the beach was deserted now but for Finn, poised above his rock pool. Fishing in her backpack for her phone, she dragged a couple of deep
breaths into her lungs before jabbing the keypad. What she was about to do was going to take some nerve. She was going to phone her sister.

Río had read some aphorism somewhere, about sisters being bonded by childhood memories and grown-up dreams. She and her sister, Dervla, shared plenty of childhood memories, but she hadn’t a clue what Dervla’s grown-up dreams might be. The Kinsella sisters hadn’t spoken in any meaningful way for over a decade, and the reason for this was quite simple. They had learned to loathe one other.

‘Dervla?’ said Río, when the number picked up. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that Coral Cottage was on the market?’

‘Because it never was on the market,’ came the cool response. ‘It was sold privately’

‘Did you handle the sale?’

‘I may have had something to do with it, yes.’

‘How could you, Dervla? You
know
it’s always had my name on it.’

‘Oh, Río – give me a break! It never had your name on it. It never
will
have your name on it. I thought you’d given up on
that
dream years ago. Oh, excuse me one moment, will you? I have a call coming in.’

‘On-hold’ music jangled down the line, and Río repressed an urge to fling the bogging phone off the cliff. Then she took another deep breath, bit down hard on her bottom lip, and decided instead to use this ‘Greensleeves’ interlude to count to ten, the way she’d learned to do any time she had dealings with Dervla.

As she counted, she compared herself to stout Cortez in the poem, except she was viewing the Atlantic, not the Pacific, and this view was her birthright. To the west, the bay gleamed lapis lazuli, its islets blazing emerald in the low-slung sun. Below her, a low, fluting call and the glissando of wings announced the arrival of curlews on the foreshore. An early season Cabbage
White fluttered past – insubstantial as tissue paper – and a honeybee buzzed over the bright cotton of her skirt, thinking, perhaps, that Río might be a flower. And then, beyond the headland, came the riotous, discordant guffaw of the donkey.

‘Is that a friend of yours I hear?’

Dervla was back on the line, and because Río had only got as far as seven, her voice shook with rage when she spoke again.

‘You, Dervla Cecilia Kinsella, are a conniving bitch. I will
never
forgive you for this.’

‘I’m quaking in my Manolos, darling. Incidentally, what sartorial statement is
your
footwear making today? Are you sporting espadrilles? Or Birkenstocks? Or are you wandering lonely as a cloud, barefoot along the beach in Lissamore with sea pinks in your hair and—’

This time, Río did obey the inner voice that had urged her to hurl her phone off the cliff. She followed its trajectory as it sailed through the air, bounced off a boulder and fell with a splash into the sea.

Shit, shit,
shit!
she thought. That impulse, that fit of pique, that little act of what my sister would describe as
lunacy
, just cost me the best part of sixty bogging punts…

‘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:

‘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—’