The Honey Queen (24 page)

‘Morning,’ said Freya, determined to bring a little bit of normality to the house.

‘Breakfast?’ said Opal, cheering up at the sight of her niece.

‘Em, yes,’ said Freya unexpectedly, and she hugged her aunt. ‘Meredith’s scrambled eggs look amazing, I might manage some—’

‘Of course, pet, I’m always saying you need filling up,’ said Opal.

Freya didn’t really want eggs, but she knew it would cheer her aunt up to make them, especially given that Meredith clearly hadn’t touched any of hers.

‘Morning, all,’ said Uncle Ned, coming into the kitchen with the morning paper tucked under his arm. ‘Beautiful day out,’ he said, eyes staring anxiously at his daughter all the while.

‘Morning, Ned,’ said Freya cheerily.

Meredith sat mute.

You could have cut the tension with a knife, Freya thought. She had to fix it somehow. This was ridiculous. Making herself some black coffee, she switched on the radio, but instead of the morning news programme that everyone normally listened to, she tuned it to something suitably bright and sparky with songs from the fifties and sixties that she knew Opal and Ned loved. Then she turned it a shade higher than normal.

‘I love that station,’ said Opal, a smile in her voice.

‘I know,’ said Freya.

That would cheer up her aunt and uncle. Freya wasn’t sure what could be done with Meredith.

Her cousin had seemed incapable of speech the night before and had just wanted to be allowed to go to bed. ‘She didn’t even get undressed,’ Opal said later. ‘I made up the bed, then she just took off her shoes, got under the duvet and pulled it over her head. Oh good Lord, what are we going to do? I’ve never seen her so upset, I don’t even know what it is. Something to do with the job, she said, and money missing from investments and the gallery’s involved.’

‘Dear God,’ Ned blessed himself. ‘Well, it will be nothing to do with Meredith,’ he said, as if this was the most obvious fact in the world. ‘Not our Meredith. She wouldn’t steal a ha’penny off anybody.’

Freya reckoned he was probably right. Meredith didn’t look as if she’d steal so much as a nail varnish from the euro shop.

Opal slid some eggs on to a plate for Freya and put them on the table. Freya sat down and started to eat, managing to stroke Foxglove’s head at the same time. The cat purred, luxuriating in the tenderness of Freya’s touch.

‘Must be nice to be a cat,’ Freya said to no one in particular. ‘No worries. Just letting people stroke you. Catching the odd mouse as a token of affection. Did she do that when you lived here, Meredith?’ she asked.

Meredith looked up at Freya as if seeing her for the first time. Without the lip-gloss, the eyeliner and the carefully styled hair, Meredith was pretty in a natural sort of way. She’d always looked as if she was trying too hard, that was it, Freya decided. She must have changed in the night, for now she was wearing an old pair of pyjamas that she must have pulled out of a cupboard, and she looked like a normal person. Someone who suited St Brigid’s Terrace.

It transpired that even the music station wasn’t free of news. At eight o’clock, a solemn-voiced newscaster came on. He kicked off with the usual stuff about tensions within the government, business as usual. Then an item about new jobs being created in Naas.

Next up was a fraud case involving millions of euros, similar to the New York Madoff scandal. ‘The fraud squad are investigating gallery owners Keith and Sal—’

Meredith’s face went white.

‘I don’t think we want to hear any more,’ said Freya, leaping up and turning the sound down. Whatever had happened to Meredith was clearly very big if it was the third item on the news. Freya decided she couldn’t leave poor Opal and Ned here all day with Meredith in this state. Somebody needed to sort this out. It was going to have to be her. She took a slurp of her coffee.

‘Meredith, love,’ she said, turning sideways on her chair to face her, ‘tell us, what happened?’

‘I can’t,’ said Meredith, not looking up. ‘It’s so awful … it’s all over the papers and I’m going to have to give the police a statement because they think I’m involved. I am a partner in the gallery, you see, and it looks so bad.’

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Ned said – a man who never cursed. Out of the corner of her eye, Freya could see Opal blanch and bless herself.

Meredith’s face went even paler, if such a thing was possible.

‘Everyone’s going to be so shocked and ashamed. I can’t tell you. I can’t. I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

With that, she shoved back her chair and ran to the door, which she wrenched open and banged behind her, startling poor Foxglove, who leapt off her chair in alarm and whizzed out the cat flap.

‘Oh no,’ said Opal, tears in her eyes, watching Meredith through the window as she stood just outside the door, shaking. ‘I don’t understand what it’s all about, but she’s in trouble, terrible trouble.’

‘I’ll stay here today,’ Freya said, going over to her aunt and enveloping her in as big a hug as a small skinny person possibly could.

‘No, love,’ said Opal, hugging her back. ‘You go off to school. Meredith will be here when you get home and maybe she’ll have been able to tell us all about it by then.’

‘If you’re sure,’ said Freya. She privately thought that by the look of things, Meredith wouldn’t be up to talking about anything – or facing anything, either.

Thanks to her mother, Freya had lots of experience of people who didn’t like facing reality. Trips to the doctor for tablets and the odd litre or two of wine with a pizza on a Friday night helped too, apparently. Freya glared at the hunched shape outside the back door. ‘I’ll be home later,’ she sighed.

She gave her aunt’s cheek one last kiss, hugged Uncle Ned, grabbed her bag and left. What sort of an idiot was Meredith and what sort of trouble had she got herself into? Anyone who upset Opal and Ned deserved to be shot, Freya thought furiously as she marched down the road.

In the kitchen, Opal kept herself busy cleaning and tidying.

Meredith came back in from the garden, threw away the milky coffee her mother had given her and made a fresh cup, this time black. She sat down at the table and stared into it without drinking.

When had she started taking coffee black? Opal wondered, and had to stop herself crying because it seemed there was so much she didn’t know about her daughter. She’d longed so much to see Meredith and now she was here, it was all hideously wrong. The radio was on in the background, nice and low to avoid anyone hearing the news. Apart from that and the sound of Opal’s dishcloth, there was almost silence. Ned kept himself busy eating his breakfast and making the odd comment about what he meant to do that day in the allotment. He had a small notebook where he wrote tasks and the odd little note to himself. This morning, he seemed deeply engrossed in it. Finally he could bear the tension no longer. He got to his feet, picked up his dishes and slotted them in the dishwasher.

He exchanged a brief look with Opal and then kissed her soft cheek. ‘I’m just going down the street to see if Michael’s off up to the allotment yet,’ he said a little too loudly.

‘Great,’ said Opal, again a little too loudly and cheerfully.

When he was gone, she went over and cleaned the space where he’d sat, rubbing the kitchen table where the family had eaten for so many years as though she could somehow rub away the pain. Finally, she could bear it no more. She sat down opposite her daughter.

‘Meredith, love, I need to know exactly what’s happened,’ she said. ‘Then we can try to help you.’

Meredith said nothing for a moment, then she raised her red-rimmed eyes to meet her mother’s gaze. ‘I can’t talk about it, Mum,’ she said.

‘You must,’ said Opal fiercely. ‘We have to hear it from you, not the news. What happened? Why would the police need to interview you? Tell me the truth.’

Meredith wanted to cry. There’d never been any criminal activity in this house, no taint of shame. None of the boys had been in trouble for one single thing their whole lives. No, Ned and Opal’s sons had been good lads, all of them, and it was she who had brought this down on the family.

‘I’ve sort of lost my job, Mum,’ Meredith said. It killed her to explain but she had to. ‘The gallery has been finding things tough lately, but I thought it was all right. Sally-Anne was doing her best …’ She knew she was rambling.

Opal nodded. She’d only met Sally-Anne once or twice and each time she’d been a little overwhelmed by her daughter’s business partner. That their Meredith could be working with this glamorous, exotic woman and her husband, high fliers, always in the newspaper, was hard to believe. ‘And …?’ prompted Opal.

‘It’s all gone,’ Meredith whispered.

‘What do you mean? The business is gone, is that it?’ said Opal hopefully. That was nothing. That they could cope with. ‘We’ll manage, it’ll be fine. If you lose the flat – sorry, apartment,’ she corrected herself quickly. ‘If you lose the apartment, we’ll figure something out. Your father and I have a nest egg. You won’t go hungry. Don’t worry. You’ll find another job anyway. Aren’t you as bright as anything?’

‘That’s not all, Mum,’ said Meredith. If only it were that simple. ‘You heard them mention it on the news. Sally-Anne and Keith have been running some sort of scam where they took money from people and invested it. We all thought they were proper investments. I invested in it and I told other people to invest too, even Laura and Con.’ She couldn’t bear to think about that. ‘Except it turns out Sally-Anne didn’t invest any money. She kept paying us off on a loop, getting more and more money out of us until, finally, something must have gone wrong. So they took all the gallery money and did a runner. Now it looks as though nobody will be able to get their money back – including me.’

She looked down as she spoke, staring at the kitchen table. It was so old. The kitchen had been redone maybe five or six years ago, but the table was the same big wooden one that had been in the house since Meredith was a child. She and the boys had had their tea there, done their homework on it, played games on it, got crayon marks on it. How safe life had been then.

‘You weren’t involved though?’ said Opal, and Meredith looked up, shocked at the catch in her mother’s voice. She had to tell the truth. She needed to feel the absolute shame of looking into her mother’s bewildered eyes and soft confused face and tell her everything.
That
was her punishment.

‘I haven’t done anything criminal, Mum, no, I promise. But I am involved because I invested, and some of the investors came to them via me. I recommended the scheme. I thought it was sound … And then on Friday, I did something really stupid. Keith got me to deliver the gallery’s most valuable painting to him. So now it will look like I’m an accessory to their crime, even though I knew nothing.’

Opal said nothing but her hand flew to her mouth and Meredith could hear her breathing harder. Her mother had always had high blood pressure. What if she killed her with this terrible story? Meredith couldn’t bear to think what other people would think, when they heard, but it must be twice as bad for her mother. Imagine raising your daughter to be a decent person and then having her turn out like this, someone who consorted with criminals and got investigated by the police.’

‘I was a business partner in the gallery,’ she went on once she saw that her mother had her breathing under control. She had to do this, had to. ‘So it looks as if I could have been part of their activities, but I wasn’t. I’ve hired a lawyer, a criminal lawyer,’ she added – might as well get it all out, all the badness. ‘He said that these cases are very serious and of course they’re more common these days. The fact that it’s clear I haven’t benefitted in any way should show that I didn’t know what was going on,’ Meredith went on. ‘But I ought to have seen that they were doing something wrong. I was so stupid not to have realized!’

Unable to look her mother in the eye, she got up and began pacing around the room. ‘The worst thing is that Sally-Anne and Keith invested money from the artists, from my friends. Nobody is selling anything these days and we all should have smelled a rat because Sally-Anne supposedly was. The thing is, my friends are all broke now. Those investments were their pensions.’ Meredith’s voice wobbled. ‘I don’t have a job or a nest egg or a pension and I won’t have my apartment much longer. I’ll have nothing but debts and I’ll be tied up in a horrible court case that will be all over the newspapers for years because that’s how long these things take to come to court,’ she finished shakily.

She found herself at the sink and automatically reached for the bar of soap and began to wash her hands. Was this how people got Obsessive Compulsive Disorder? she wondered.

Her mother hadn’t said a word the whole time. Meredith waited, her back turned, willing her to speak. In this house, Ned worried if he missed seeing the milkman when he came around to be paid once a month. Nobody in the family had to be reminded to buy a television licence or to pay a bill on time. Nobody had ever borrowed more than they could afford. Borrowing hadn’t been something Opal and Ned had gone in for. Her mother must be shocked to the core.

‘Oh love,’ said Opal tremulously, and her tone was Meredith’s undoing. She could have coped with anything, her mother shouting at her, accusing her:
We didn’t raise you to be this sort of person
. Anything but those tremulous words that told her Opal still loved her despite everything.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Meredith sobbed.

She banged into a chair in her haste to leave the kitchen, then she ran up the stairs two at a time until she reached her bedroom. Racing in, she slammed the door shut, threw herself on the bed and cried until she didn’t think there were any tears left.

After some time she heard her father come in with the paper. Heard their murmured conversation in the kitchen. She ought to go downstairs. What if something happened to Dad? What if he had a heart attack? What if Mum did? Her blood pressure had always been high.

But she couldn’t make herself get off the bed. She wanted to stay here in the safety of her childhood bedroom. After a while she turned over and looked round the room. The bed was in the same position it had always been in. Opal kept everyone’s rooms the way they were, merely removing some of the detritus so other family members could stay occasionally.