Between Sisters (7 page)

Flat shoes were useful for big hotels, Cassie knew, as she parked as close as she could to the enormous Springfield Hotel.

The Springfield was like a giant E block set down in the middle of a field that had been landscaped to death and now had walks, little streams and bridges dotted all over the place. To get to any one place you had to walk miles, and guests at weddings had been known to spend hours wandering tipsily around in the wee small hours, wielding hotel keys and saying, ‘It’s over here, near this statue, I know it is!’ until rescued by the concierge staff.

Billed as a spa hotel, it was, in fact, a major conference and wedding hotel because it had four hundred rooms, three giant conference rooms and a ballroom you could play ice hockey in, if you so wished.

Leo Quirke, the new manager, kept Cassie waiting when she arrived at half two to discuss the problems for the conference starting on Thursday. She sat in the outer room of Leo’s office and thought how she’d never had to wait for his predecessor, who had gone on to run a department of a luxury hotel in Boca Raton and who was, no doubt, delirious to have washed his hands of the Springfield, which had been beset with so many teething problems the joke in the trade was that it needed its own dentist.

Too big, built too quickly, and with too many corners cut, there were always problems with the hotel. But Fiachra – Leo’s predecessor – had sorted them out. Leo seemed to be more of an
ah, sure, whatever
type of manager. The type who’d give you a shove on the shoulder to imply a matey we’re-all-in-this-together.

‘Cassie, sorry to keep you waiting.’ Leo, who was forty-something, bank managerial in a navy chalk-striped suit he was clearly no longer able to button, smiled urbanely and held out a hand. ‘You are looking lovely, if I may say so,’ he added, doing some eyebrow lifting.

Cassie gave him the
you may not say so
stare she’d perfected over many years in the events management business, shook his hand briefly and said crisply: ‘Can we go into your office and sort this out, Leo? I’m pressed for time.’

She walked in ahead of him, sat down at the desk and quickly spread her papers in front of her. Larousse had a watertight contract for the event and it was very specific on deal-breakers. Facilities not working were top of a long list that went over many issues.

Leo leapt into the fray. ‘Obviously we are doing all we can from this end,’ he said. He did the eyebrow thing again.

Was that flirting? Cassie had no idea. It was millions of years since anyone had flirted with her. She didn’t give out any signals, did she?

Right now she had a headache, her hair had dried strangely after that morning’s rain, so she’d had to pull it into a tight bun, and despite the application of Belinda’s make-up, she wasn’t sure how she looked. She knew how she
felt
, though: tired, headachey – probably the tautness of the darn bun – and worried about what she’d do if she had to pull a conference for a hundred and twenty-five people two days before it was due to go ahead.

Flirting? Did Leo have any idea how close to the edge she was?

The set-up crew were due into the hotel first thing on Thursday with the company’s logo boards, presenters and goodie bags, and Cassie herself was due there by twelve to go over the final checks for the meals, drinks and entertainment for Thursday and Friday night. The paraphernalia for the Saturday golfing match was being handled by Jason and his crew from Larousse, who specialised in sports events. Jason was a dab hand with golf events and had several professional players’ managers’ numbers on his personal mobile. Yet secretly he hated golf and only liked golfers for the glory of those shifting shoulder muscles when they hit a fabulous drive; but then nobody needed to know that.

‘You were a little unclear on the phone,’ Cassie began in her discussion with Leo. Saying you figured someone had been downright lying on the phone never started a conversation well. ‘What exactly is the problem with the spa, Leo, and what is being done to fix it?’

‘We’re doing everything,’ Leo said gravely. ‘You know how tricky spas can be … The hammam has a problem and there’s something wrong with the pool filters …’

The pool had been refitted at vast expense only last year, Cassie thought, instincts prickling.

‘Let’s take a look,’ said Cassie suddenly.

He hesitated.

‘I love the spa here,’ Cassie said, standing up and making for the door.

He had no choice but to follow her.

Whatever the question, flat shoes were the answer, she thought, as she walked down endless corridors with Leo scurrying to keep up, arriving finally at the spa.

Instead of the familiar spa scent of essential oils, non-stop burning of candles and the inevitable hint of chlorine, she smelled paint. Bestowing a glittering and dangerous smile on her companion, Cassie pushed open the double doors to find that the Springfield spa and health club was being repainted.

‘Water leakage,’ tried Leo weakly.

‘Show me.’

‘Well, you know, all over the place …’

Cassie marched around, pushing into every changing room, checking the hammam – stone cold and it took
forever
to heat up – and the pool area.

Painters wandered around with cans of paint, and nobody looked to be in any sort of rush. There was a mañana atmosphere, helped along with the hotel’s jazzy Muzak. All they needed were a few cocktails and the whole thing might turn into a party at the drop of a baseball cap.

‘Is anything actually
not
working apart from it all being turned off so you can paint?’ Cassie asked Leo.

He took a deep breath and then said, ‘No.’

Cassie smothered the desire to stab him. Shay would undoubtedly be wildly busy at work and therefore not available to bail her out if she was arrested for the said stabbing. She put her game face on again.

‘Right. Get them all finished and out of here tonight, spend tomorrow eradicating the smell of paint, heating the pool and the hammam, and we have a deal. I’ll be here tomorrow first thing to check. Otherwise I will be cancelling and you’ll be getting a call from Loren Larousse about the financial implications of breaking a contract with us. Morally or legally correct or not, I can tell you that Loren will waste no time telling other event management people about this and it will not be good for the Springfield’s future conference bookings. You can phone me on the mobile to discuss in an hour.’ Cassie delivered the final blow. ‘I need to get back to the office to check out where else we can hold the conference. If we have to pay more for a higher quality hotel or for travelling down the country, we will – and trust me, I know that from past experience – Loren
will
take you to court for breach of contract.’

At that, Leo paled.

There were times, Cassie thought, when her boss’s tough reputation within the industry came in useful. In reality, court cases took forever and helped neither side professionally, but still, nobody who knew what Loren Larousse was really like wanted to cross her in business.

‘I’m sorry, it’s just that …’ began Leo, blustering.

Cassie felt momentarily sorry for him, but then thought of all the work involved if she had to even attempt to co-ordinate another hotel, undoubtedly not one in Dublin, and how she’d explain all of this to the conference people themselves. Loren would blame her for not literally camping down in the hotel because there was a new and untried manager around, and she would end up spending Thursday and Friday night stuck in the inevitable room beside the lift, overseeing everything personally in an attempt to make it all up to everyone.

At these thoughts, her feelings of sympathy withered and died.

‘Leo, we are in business. We don’t arrange conferences in hotels where the facilities get closed for redecoration on a whim. I have one hundred and twenty-five important guests coming on Thursday to stay with you for a convention booked six months ago, and you think it’s OK to repaint the spa while they’re here so they can’t use it?’

‘Well, you know …’

More bluster. What was wrong with saying, ‘Sorry, I screwed up’?

‘Leo, I will keep my boss from phoning up your chief executive and serving you as Thursday’s banquet main course if you can sort this out.
Capisce?
’

Then she turned on her heel and walked out.

It took twenty minutes to get out of the hotel and find her car, by which time it had started raining again and Cassie’s hair and clothes were wet through. Shivering, she sat in the car with the heater jacked up and thought of how nice it might be to text someone she loved. The girls were in school with their phones, hopefully turned to silent. Coco was always busy during shop opening hours and her speciality was returning texts three hours later by saying:

Sorry! Busy! Didn’t see phone!

And she and Shay rarely rang each other at work anymore. So she sent Coco a text instead:

Hi, honey. Come to lunch at the weekend? C xxxx

Four

Her grandmother really had been an amazing woman, Cassie thought as she unlocked the front door, weak with pure exhaustion, and Lily and Beth hurried into the house ahead of her. Grammy Pearl had raised two kids who weren’t even her own and Cassie wondered if she and Coco had been as annoyingly teenager-ish as her own daughters were.

From the moment she’d picked them up from school, there had been squabbling, a heated debate over why they had less pocket money than anyone else in their year (Beth), and a mutinous murmur over how her phone was totally crappy and why didn’t she have a really cool phone like everyone else (Lily).

Inside their painstakingly renovated house, the girls dumped their rucksacks full of books and their coats on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, shrugging off the detritus of school. Nobody moved to help their mother with the shopping she’d raced around the supermarket to purchase before she’d collected them.

Eighteen months ago they’d been mother’s little helpers; now they were hormones on legs – happy one minute, gloomy the next, worrying about how they’d ever be rich and famous singers after that.

‘I need a bath before I finish my homework,’ announced Beth, who was tall like her father but with her mother’s dark and unmanageable curly hair. ‘I got a whack of the ball in netball today. There’s already a bruise. Honestly, Mum, do I have to do it? I’m never going to be any good at it …’ And then she was gone up the stairs, trailing her school tie and shoes after her, coat still on the floor.

Beth was mercurial, definitely like Shay, but she could be funny and sparkly when she felt like it.

Cassie looked at the coats on the floor, which would miraculously move themselves via Mother Power, which was a well-known family phenomenon. Like the laundry fairy and the answer to the ‘where are my trainers/black jeans/pink long-sleeved T-shirt?’ question. Mother Power could do it all and knew where every lost item was.

Breathe
, Cassie told herself as she shouldered her way through the door with the shopping.
Breathe
. Think of that mindfulness book she had on the floor by the bed and occasionally actually read.
Be in the now, feel your feet touching the earth, rooting you
…’

‘Mum, there’s a message on the phone. I listened and it’s Gran,’ roared Lily from the kitchen.

The very notion of calm breathing and being rooted in the earth vanished to be replaced by the wild irritation she was accustomed to.

It could not be good for the body, this irritation.

In the kitchen. Lily’s skinny body was half in the fridge. Her appetite was mythic. Nobody could believe that somebody so small could consume so much and be so endlessly hungry. She could eat a trencherman’s dinner, and half an hour after, amble over to the cupboard, pull out the cereal and start gulping handfuls from the box. Where precisely it all went, Cassie didn’t know.

Lily was slender and short, like her mother, but Cassie’s slenderness came from watching what she ate and occasionally, just occasionally, going for a walk with Coco where they talked about most things. Not everything, but most things.

Lily appeared to do as little exercise as possible, despite the school system, and just ate.

‘Fast metabolism?’ Shay would say absently, when queried about this. ‘Great for sports, though. She likes tennis. Should she have tennis coaching?’

‘Who,’ Cassie wanted to screech, ‘would drive her to this extra tennis coaching? Not you, because you are never here anymore!’

But she couldn’t say that because it was the unsayable. She would not count how many times he’d been at his mother’s lately. She would not.

Breathe.

She put the bags on the counter still messy with the morning’s breakfast dishes and pressed the answerphone button as she watched her younger daughter plundering the fridge.

The frail-sounding voice of Antoinette, her mother-in-law, whispered through the kitchen.

‘Shay, pet, the hot water’s not working. I don’t know what to do and you know I’m scared of messing with the controls. Your father always did it. Could you come round?’

If Lily hadn’t been there, Cassie might have sworn out loud, something long and filthy that would necessitate serious paper money in the swear jar, but as it was, she consoled herself with a silent curse. Somewhere deep inside, it made her feel marginally better.

Then she opened the fridge and took out the half-full bottle of white wine chilling inside. She banished the thought that she’d only opened it the night before and that Shay hadn’t drunk any because he didn’t believe in drinking mid-week. She needed this, needed something to help cool and calm her down. What harm was there in a glass of wine?

Shay’s mother, Antoinette, had always said she wasn’t good with the phone and could never remember which one to ring, so she had a system of leaving messages all over the place. She’d have left one on Shay’s phone and probably in his office too.
Just in case.
By now, Shay and the entire northern hemisphere would know he was needed in his mother’s house and he would have obediently gone there, to his former home on the other side of the city instead of to his current one.

He wouldn’t be late for dinner with Cassie and the girls because he wouldn’t be eating with them at all. Antoinette would have ‘something small in the oven, pet, seeing as you’ve come all this way’.

To add to this, Shay might not even text or phone to explain where he was and Cassie’s blood would boil all evening. ‘But sure, you knew I’d be with Ma, didn’t you?’ he’d say in bewilderment when he’d roll up at half ten or eleven, fed and happy after an evening with his mother. He wouldn’t have had to put away groceries, organise the next day’s dinner, put on washing, drag the recycling bin to the gate or do any of the normal jobs associated with family life.

Nobody could castigate a man for taking care of his widowed mother. Cassie certainly wouldn’t have done so until over three years ago when her father-in-law had died.

Arthur had been like Shay: a big man, fair-haired and freckled, larger than life, great fun and endlessly practical. Like his son, he worked in engineering and, consequently, both men knew their way around a tool kit and could put together flat pack furniture with good-humoured expertise.

Then a massive heart attack had taken Arthur away and Antoinette’s life had changed. Shattered, Antoinette had not been able to cope and Cassie had felt enormous pity for her fragile mother-in-law.

Despite her clothes being modern and fashionable, the internal Antoinette was like a woman from another time, one of the timorous gentle ladies from eighteenth century novels who had fits of the vapours at all aspects of painful modern life. It would be difficult for her to live on her own, Cassie thought, but at least Antoinette had two daughters as well as Shay. Three grown children to be there for her.

Ruth was single, worked in television production and lived in an all-white apartment not too far from her mother, while Miriam was married with one teenage son, worked part-time and lived about four miles from Antoinette’s Clontarf home.

Unfortunately, Miriam and Ruth weren’t on Antoinette’s emotional radar at all. Only Shay could fill his beloved father’s shoes. And Shay, to Cassie’s astonishment, was filling those shoes with vigour. Antoinette’s emergencies were twice-weekly events at least.

‘Doesn’t she ever phone Miriam or Ruth?’ Cassie had asked once, six months on from her father-in-law’s death, when Antoinette’s frantic phone calls were still coming fast and loose, and Shay appeared to be half living with his mother.

‘Ah, the girls are hopeless with house stuff, you know that, Cass,’ said Shay. ‘Miriam never answers her phone and Ruth’s so busy.’

‘Busy?’ Cassie heard the rage in her voice but was too angry to quell it. ‘And you’re not busy? You have a family and a job. Ruth only has one of those. It wouldn’t kill her to phone her mother once in a blue moon, and I don’t know why Miriam doesn’t answer her bloody phone. Push the button, say, “
Hello, Mum, yes, I’ll come round.
” It’s not rocket science. You are not your mother’s only child.’

‘Ma needs me right now,’ Shay said, managing to look a combination of irritated and hurt. ‘I don’t know how you can’t understand that, Cass. She’ll adjust. She’s lonely, that’s all. We live five minutes away from your grandmother, so it’s no big deal if you need to drop in. It’s only because Mum lives on the other side of the city that it seems like I’m gone for ages. I’m not. It’ll pass.’

But over the past three years, Antoinette hadn’t become any less lonely.

Other than the time aspect of it all, what hurt was the never coming first. Never. Shay had a list of important people in his head and after almost four years of his dropping everything to see to his mother’s emergencies, Cassie felt she was right at the bottom of it.

In her darker moments, she decided that if she drove off a bridge and Antoinette phoned simultaneously with a message about having pranged her car on the garden gate, Shay would throw Cassie a lifebuoy, roar, ‘I know you’ll be able to sort yourself out, love, you’re so capable,’ and he’d be gone. Gone to his mother who was too fragile for life.

Cassie, who prized herself on her ability to cope with anything, was seen as strong enough to manage on her own.

‘What’s for dinner, Mum?’ asked Lily, looking at the shopping.

‘Fish pie,’ said Cassie, putting an arm around her younger daughter and hugging. Sometimes a person needed a hug and Beth had become very unhuggy these days. Something to do with her animal instincts making her pushed loved ones away before they pushed her away: defensive tactics in the evolution of a teenager. It still hurt like hell.

Lily, in a moment of respite from the hormonal dark side, embraced her mother, snuggling in for a hug the way she used to.

She was like a little sprite in school uniform: dark hair growing out of a pixie cut, with knowing blue eyes that saw everything, a ready smile when the hormones weren’t torturing her, and a fondness for teenage fiction set in dystopian worlds.

‘Yum,’ she said now, blue eyes lighting up. ‘Is there any Chunky Monkey left for afters?’

‘Did you eat it all last night? If so, it’s just ordinary supermarket vanilla.’

‘Think I did,’ Lily said, sighing. ‘Can I melt Nutella on to the vanilla, then?’

‘Sure.’ Burying her head into the soft cloud of Lily’s hair and breathing in the scent of flowery girl perfume, Cassie closed her eyes and wished everything was as simple as what to have for dessert.

Don’t grow up anymore
, she wanted to beg Lily.
Please go back to being my little girl for a bit longer. Let just one thing stay the same …

Lily wriggled out of her mother’s embrace and skipped out the door.

‘Take your coat and put it in the cupboard,’ Cassie begged.

‘’K,’ said Lily.

At least Lily still did what she was told. Telling Beth to do anything was akin to co-ordinating a rocket launch and hoping nothing exploded.

Although Cassie firmly believed that people, even teenagers, had to clean up after themselves, it was sometimes easier to put Beth’s stuff away herself rather than wait for a missile strike from hormone central.

It had been an exhausting day. She’d been drenched twice, had to deal with the whole Springfield Hotel crisis, and then being balled at on the phone by Loren, who’d shrieked – as if Cassie didn’t already know – that one messed-up conference would have a hugely negative impact on their reputation.

‘You are supposed to let that moron know that I will rip his guts out through his nostrils if he screws this up,’ had been Loren’s grim advice when Cassie had phoned in. In a chaotic world, one could always rely on her boss to be enraged about something.

And it seemed as though one could always rely upon her husband to be at his mother’s house, Cassie thought.

She glumly surveyed the shopping. She had picked the groceries off the shelves, put them into the trolley, loaded them on the conveyor belt, packed them into bags, hauled it all in a wonky trolley to the car, and now she had to put them all away again.

At least dinner was ready to go. All it needed was reheating in the oven, which she switched on now. She clicked on the radio and found something with a pumping beat to keep her energy up so she could force herself to begin unpacking. As she listened to the music and drank her wine, she tried to keep the tears from her eyes. Crying and drinking: she was like a student in a flat, she reflected grimly. And then that thought shifted on to girls and tattoos.

She might get a tattoo.

Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.

She’d always loved W. B. Yeats. She’d get it somewhere secret so nobody would see it or need know what it meant, because she would. That was enough.

By twenty to eleven, Cassie had all the washing done, some of it dried, and had ironed the girls’ school blouses for the next day. She’d taken out the next day’s dinner from the freezer but that was the last of her stash; tomorrow she’d have to cook up a few meals for the rest of the week. The wine was long gone and Cassie had, with great difficulty, stopped herself opening another bottle. She’d had too much already.

Upstairs, Beth was in bed reading her history textbook and listening to music at the same time. Cassie had switched off Lily’s light twice already.

‘Just one more chapter! They’re about to get into the time reactor to try and switch everything back to the previous month before the invasion,’ wheedled Lily at ten, when Cassie crept upstairs with her ironing to find that Lily was reading again despite the 9.30 school night lights-out rule.

‘No,’ Cassie said firmly, but patted her daughter’s hand in case she sounded irritable. ‘You need your sleep, darling.’

‘Here are your shirts,’ Cassie said quietly, entering Beth’s domain.

In bed, with the eye make-up off and in her fleecy pyjamas, Beth looked more like the fifteen-year-old she was and less like the seventeen-year-old she seemed desperate to turn into. She had her aunt Coco’s heart-shaped face and perfect eyebrows, and her father’s eyes with those unusual striations of amber in the centre. All in all, it made for a pretty amazing package and Cassie worried endlessly about her daughter’s effect on the male population and the tangles a young girl could get herself into.