The Kinsella Sisters (9 page)

‘Will I have to clean the loo?’

Dervla looked taken aback. ‘Well–yes,’ she said.

‘In that case,’ said Río with mock hauteur, ‘I might have a few conditions of my own.’

‘Shoot.’

‘Can I keep a marmalade cat?’

‘Yes,’ said Dervla, with a laugh.

‘Then I guess it’s a done deal. W.B.’ll be glad to know that he’s found a home. Have you got your Dalmatian yet?’

‘No. I’ll have to move into the Great House first.’

‘With the Pierce Brosnan lookalike?’

‘I’ve lowered my standards a bit since then.’

‘What are you two on about?’ asked Finn.

‘We used to have a fantasy,’ said Río, ‘when we were little, that Dervla would marry a man who looked like Pierce Brosnan and live in a Great House with a Dalmatian and manicured lawns.’

‘And where were you going to live, Ma?’

‘I was going to marry a Pierce Brosnan lookalike too, and I was going to live in a cottage by the sea with an orchard and a marmalade cat. Ha! I’ll have to forgo the orchard–unless I get a load of bonsais for my balcony.’

‘Well, at least you got the cat bit right,’ said Finn, as WB. marched into the room, authority manifest in his ramrod-stiff tail. He was followed by Mr Morrissey, who was saying: ‘Yes, yes, yes. I am, of course, Your Grace’s most obedient servant.’

Mr Morrissey ended his call, and slid his phone back into the pocket of his suit. ‘His Grace is ebullient as ever,’ he announced with a self-satisfied smile. ‘Now. Is everything settled?’

‘We think so,’ Dervla told him.

‘Excellent!’ said Mr Morrissey, with great enthusiasm. ‘In that case, I’ll be off. His Grace has invited me to cocktails at the palace.’

‘As the actress said to the bishop,’ quipped Finn.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Stop being facetious, Finn,’ said Dervla, waspishly.

At the front door, they all shook hands, and Mr Morrissey said: ‘May I just say again how sorry I am for your trouble. Your father was a real character.’

And Río and Dervla smiled and waved as he walked to where his Lexus was parked further down the street.

Río stooped to pick up a cigarette butt that someone had ground out on the doorstep. ‘Time to clear up,’ she said.

‘I’ll start on the dishes.’ Finn retreated into the kitchen trilling, ‘Where are my Marigolds?’

Dervla raised her eyes to heaven and retrieved her Hermes handbag from the hall table. ‘We’re nearly out of washing-up liquid. I’ll nip up to the shop for some.’

‘You might get some Solpadeine too. I feel a headache coming on.’

Río felt very tired suddenly. She shambled back into the study to begin tidying up the remains of the party. And as she started collecting plates and glasses and piling them onto a tray, she thought about what Finn had said earlier, when he’d told her he’d find a place of his own to live. She knew she could survive without him for a year, while he was off doing his round-the-world thing–especially now that there were loads of ways of checking that all was well via Skype and MSN and email. Keeping in touch wasn’t what it had been when she was his age, when long-distance phone calls had been too expensive and letters too much of an effort. But she hadn’t allowed herself to think about what it would be like once Finn left home for ever.

For ever! Río remembered what Dervla had said on the day
of their father’s death, about putting childish things behind her, and she understood that that was what her son was trying to do. She supposed it couldn’t be easy for him–a twenty-year-old man to be living with his mammy still. Maybe he got grief about it from his mates. Maybe he’d been angling to move out of their little rented house for years, but just hadn’t had the bottle to tell her because he knew how much she’d hate to lose him, hate to find herself living life solitaire–a childless hackney driver who scraped by working in other people’s gardens and part time in bars, and painting indifferent watercolours to sell like some old-time spinster. Hefting the tray piled with dirty dishes, Río moved down the hallway and kicked the kitchen door open with such force that Finn looked round as she came through.

‘Ma? Are you OK?’ he asked. The concern in his voice made her want to drop the tray and fling her arms around him and weep.

‘Yes. I’m fine,’ she said.

Stapling on a smile, Río looked at her son standing by the sink, waiting for the washing-up bowl to fill. He’d kicked off his trainers; they lay beside her Doc Martens on the kitchen floor, making them look like Barbie boots in comparison. He wasn’t her little boy. He was a grown man; he was his own man. He didn’t belong to her any more. And, as she’d said to him earlier that week, he never really had belonged to her. He’d only been hers to borrow for a couple of scarily short decades, and now she was counting down the days until he was no longer even on loan to her.

But what would become of her without him?

After Frank Kinsella’s wake, Izzy and Adair had gone for a walk along Lissamore strand, Izzy swapping her heels for trainers. They’d spotted a seal making its way up the estuary towards the oyster beds, and Izzy had told her dad the legend of the selkies, those beautiful creatures who shed their seal skins in order to seduce humans. Legend had it that if a man could steal a selkie’s pelt, he could prevent his lover from returning to the sea. Without her pelt, trapped on land, the selkie swims forever in the shallows, yearning to return to her ocean home. To Izzy’s mind, it was one of the saddest and most romantic of all the Irish myths.

‘Well, princess,’ said Adair, taking a final look at the sea before sliding the cardkey into the ignition of his streamlined Mercedes coupe. ‘That’s probably the last beach I’ll hit till Thailand.’

‘But that’s months away! Can’t you take any time off between now and August, Dad?’

Adair shook his head. ‘This year’s going to be a tough one, sweetheart.’

It was going to be a tough one for Izzy too. She was finding Business Studies not a little boring. Izzy was bright and loved a challenge, but her degree course didn’t supply her with many opportunities to stretch herself. She was beginning to wonder if
she shouldn’t have taken Film Studies instead. That had been her original subject of choice; but she’d allowed her dad to persuade her to go for the more practical option.

Adair startled the Scissor Sisters into action, and Izzy cringed despite herself. Why, oh why, couldn’t he listen to something more appropriate to his age, she thought, like the Beatles or Bruce Springsteen or Elton John? She hated it when Adair picked her up from friends’ houses with the soft-top down and Franz Ferdinand blasting out of the sound system. Why did middle-aged people these days insist on keeping up to speed with their teenage offspring? She loved her dad, but she wanted to die when he went ‘Yo!’ to her mates, and came out with awful phrases like ‘Gotcha!’ and ‘Coolaboola!’ And the clothes he wore were dead inappropriate too. He had a leather jacket on today, and aviator shades. But at least he hadn’t grown a paunch, like Lucy’s dad, Izzy conceded and at least he still attracted admiring looks from women his own age.

And as for her mother! Talk about mutton dressed as lamb. She remembered one day watching her mother walking away from her down Grafton Street after a shopping session in Brown Thomas. Felicity had come away with two pairs of Jimmy Choos, a pair of vertiginous Christian Louboutins, an obscenely expensive Roberto Cavalli dress, and tons and tons of anti-ageing and ‘age-defying’ products that had cost her a fortune. As she’d sashayed off, Izzy had observed a couple of men eyeing her trim figure appreciatively, because from the back, with her expensively styled blonde hair swishing over her shoulder blades, and her gym-toned arse wrapped in Gucci, she really did look quite tasty. But when she turned round Izzy had noticed the expressions on the men’s faces falter. Despite all the surgery her mother had had done and all the age-blasting products she’d splashed out on, and the St Tropez spray tan, there was no disguising the fact that this was a woman in her fifties.

Felicity and Adair had married very young, and because their only child had arrived comparatively late in their marriage, Izzy had always believed that she had been a mistake. She’d been delivered by Caesarean section, and this knowledge fuelled Izzy’s paranoia. Had Felicity opted for a Caesarean for the safety of her baby, or had she been in the vanguard of the ‘too posh to push’ brigade? Izzy sensed that, while her father was perfectly happy with a single daughter, her mother would have preferred a boy. Sometimes she found Felicity looking at her with something akin to resentment, and Izzy figured that, as her mother aged, she couldn’t handle the fact that her skinny little daughter with the braces was turning into a beautiful young woman.

Izzy knew she was beautiful because people told her so. Strangers came up to her in the street and told her so. Photographers at the glitzy events she attended with her father told her so. Her girlfriends’ boyfriends told her so, especially after they’d had a few jars. Izzy believed the people who told her she was beautiful because she had no reason on earth to think that they would lie to her. But it did little for her self-esteem, whatever that was. Her mother had beaten that thing known as self-esteem out of her daughter years ago: Izzy had learned to her dismay that her very first word had been ‘Don’t!’ Unsurprising, really, since ‘Don’t!’ was Felicity’s favourite admonishment:
Don’t make a mess! Don’t fiddle with your hair! Don’t get your dress dirty!

The only time that Izzy felt comfortable in her own skin was when she was in water. She reckoned that her passion for all things aquatic stemmed from the fact that her mother had forbidden her to swim in the sea at Lissamore when she was a child: yet another
‘Don’t!’
But her mother hadn’t been able to keep her away from the pool on the terrace in the Villa Felicity, or the pool she’d had installed in the basement of their des res in Dublin, or the pools that the parents of their friends had on their rooftops and in their gardens. And she certainly hadn’t been
able to keep Izzy away from the 50 metre pool at the very exclusive boarding school she had attended.

Izzy reckoned that becoming a mermaid was her way of rebelling against her mother. While she hadn’t been the most academically inclined pupil in St Sepulchre’s, or the most gifted in the musical or artistic departments, she had been a star in the swimming pool. She didn’t mind the five a.m. training sessions, or the permanent circles around her eyes that goggles imprinted; and she didn’t heed her mother’s dire predictions that the chlorine would ruin her hair. Izzy was a naiad through and through, and every time she won a medal, her dad would hug her and tell her she was his water baby and buy her a new charm for her gold bracelet. The bracelet now weighed so much she was surprised her right arm wasn’t as muscly as Madonna’s.

The Scissor Sisters wailed their last as the automatic gates on the driveway of the Villa Felicity swung open, and the Merc glided through and along the tunnel of trees that led to the house.

The Villa Felicity was a copy of an achingly hip hotel that Izzy’s mother had used to frequent in Miami. It stood like a glass sentinel on its elevated position on the shore, and once inside, from wherever you looked the stunning views were framed by stark concrete or gunmetal grey steel or unyielding Perspex. In the architecture and design of the house, the theme was maritime. The floors were of quarried stone, the decks of teak planking, the structure ship-like. The lobby–which Felicity insisted on calling ‘the atrium’–was a cavernous construction of timber and glass, its walls hung with massive blow-ups of navigation charts, and all the rooms were fitted in shades of navy, grey and white.

The woman who had designed the interior had been a protègèe of Philippe Starck, and it showed. The furnishings were linear: square leather armchairs and rectangular leather sofas in the sitting room, and tall, triangular stools in the kitchen. Everything
was controlled from a built-in panel of electronic buttons on a console in the atrium, including the entertainment and security systems, the underfloor heating, and the sliding shutters that covered the floor-to-ceiling windows like metallic eyelids when the family was not in residence.

Izzy hated it. The only things to recommend the Villa Felicity were the pool and the view.

Adair drew up outside the house, pulled on the handbrake, and aimed the remote at the oversized front door. ‘Glass of wine, sweet pea?’ he said, as he got out of the driver’s seat and strolled into the house.

‘Yes, please.’

‘Open the doors, then, Iz, while I get the drinks.’

‘Isn’t it a bit cold to sit out on the deck?’

‘I don’t care. I’d rather be a part of the view than look at it from behind glass.’

On the deck outside the big sitting room, aluminium recliners faced the view. Izzy sat down on one, giving a little yelp as her arse made contact with the unyielding cold steel, and wound her scarf once more about her neck. She remembered the way Finn had taken her in earlier, allowing his eyes to travel from the pearls around her throat to the tips of her toes, and she wished now that she’d worn something less frivolous, something more suitable for a funeral. However, she wasn’t sure she owned anything suitable for a funeral. Nobody seemed to be dying any more: all her friends had grandparents who were living in luxury nursing homes, being kept alive by gerontologists because if they died the families would sue.

‘Here’s your wine, Izzy Bizzy’

‘Thanks, Dad.’

Adair set a long-stemmed glass of white on the aluminium side table. It was Meursault, Izzy knew; not cheap at fifty-something euro a bottle. They’d brought a bottle to the wake as a gift, and Izzy had spotted Finn’s mother sloshing it into a glass
with abandon, without bothering to check out its bouquet. Her own mother, who had done a wine appreciation course, would have been horrified.

Izzy hadn’t spoken to Finn after he’d been called away to help out. She’d seen him doing the rounds of guests, talking and laughing easily, keeping an eye on glasses and proffering canapés and amuses-bouches. Except they weren’t canapés and amuses-bouches, she scolded herself. They were chicken skewers and cocktail sausages. Why couldn’t she call a spade a spade? Why did she talk so posh? Talking posh meant that people didn’t want to talk back to you because they assumed that you were stuck up and unapproachable. Or else they hurled abuse at you, the way those arseholes had done earlier that day.

Adair loosened his tie, and sat down on the recliner next to his daughter. ‘Just look at that view!’ he said with a contented sigh.

‘Dad?’

‘Mm-hm?’

‘Have you ever thought about selling this place?’

‘Why do you ask? Don’t you like it here?’

‘Well, of course I love the view,’ she told him. ‘But I have no friends here. And–well,
you
have no friends here either, Dad.’

Adair made an expansive gesture with his arm. ‘Who needs friends when you have a view like this! And who says I have no friends, missy? I’ve invited Dervla Kinsella round for cocktails tomorrow, and I told her she was welcome to bring her sister along.’

‘Her sister–Finn’s mother?’

‘Who’s Finn?’

‘He’s the boy who was going round pouring drinks at the wake.’

‘Oh, yes. He was very efficient. A very presentable lad.’

‘I got talking to him—’ Izzy had been about to say, ‘I got talking to him when a crowd of local lads started slagging me
off,’ but stopped herself just in time. Instead she said, ‘I got talking to him on the sea wall’

‘What does he do?’

‘He works on boats.’

‘Is he trustworthy, do you reckon?’

Izzy didn’t need to think twice about it. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I wonder would he be interested in earning a few bob on the side?’

‘Doing what?’

‘Caretaking this place. Old boy Carvill’s done his back in, and he’s thrown in the towel. Says he’s too long in the tooth to be lugging around garden furniture and strimming lawns.’

Old boy Carvill was the local odd-job man. Izzy had seen him at the wake, downing whiskey from a hip flask, presumably to anaesthetise his back.

‘Well, there’s no point in asking Finn to caretake, because he’s going off travelling soon. And honestly, Dad, is there really any point?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we hardly ever come here any more. Where’s the sense in employing a caretaker for a place that lies empty most of the year?’

‘Because houses need airing and gardens need minding, and things need fixing from time to time.’

‘It just seems such a
waste!’

‘Ah, but, Izzy, in a decade or so I’ll be retired, and you’ll be coming here to visit with your own children. I can picture it now–you in the pool with your very own water babies.’

‘You’re planning on retiring here?’

‘Where else would I go?’

Izzy had a sudden image of her father rattling around on his own in this great steel and glass bunker with the Atlantic raging outside and the wind battering against the windows and the rain lashing down on the roof, and she felt such a surge of sorrow
for him that she wanted to weep. She took a sip of wine to cover her emotion, and then she reached for his hand.

‘I love you, Dad,’ she said.

Adair Bolger turned to his daughter and smiled. ‘I love you too, princess,’ he said.