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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       Chapter Three

      Mrs Murphy had been busy upstairs. Frank’s bedroom had been Mr Sheen’d and Shake-and-Vac’d and Cif’d. The bed linen had been stripped, and the curtains taken down. A glance through the window told Río that they had been Ariel’d in Mrs Murphy’s machine, because they were billowing about brightly on the washing line in her back garden. Neither sister made a move to open the wardrobe door.

      The attic, next. As Río climbed the stairs, she felt like a revenant. The ghost of her childhood self resided here, the little girl who had sat on the steps, hugging her knees to her chest and listening to the raised voices coming from the sitting room below. Looking back at Dervla, who was following her up the staircase, she sensed that her sister felt exactly the same way.

      Neither of them had been in their attic bedroom since they had packed their bags and left Frank’s house for the last time, full of hatred and rage. At the top of the stairs, the door hung off its hinges. As they passed through into the room, they reached for each other’s hand.

      The place was catastrophic. It was clearly a repository for everything Frank had decided he no longer needed. Trunks, boxes, old shoes, books, clothes, broken furniture–all lay as if they had been slung there by some giant hands. The beds had been dismantled, and dumped in a corner. Cobwebs big as mantillas hung from the ceiling, and a rather pretty fungus filigreed a section of wall. The glass in the skylight was broken, and the surface of a table that stood beneath was so blistering with damp it resembled a bad case of adolescent acne. The place smelled dank.

      ‘OK,’ said Dervla. ‘I’ve just knocked a couple of hundred grand off the asking price.’

      ‘We’ll never get this sorted before the funeral!’ wailed Río, looking around in dismay.

      ‘You’re right. But it’s not as if we’ll be inviting people into the attic. We’ll just have to concentrate on the downstairs.’

      ‘What are we going to do with all this crap?’

      ‘We’re going to hire a skip.’ Dervla moved into the centre of the attic, stepping over a rusty fire guard and kicking a cushion out of the way. ‘Look,’ she said, stooping to pick up a velour elephant. ‘It’s Ella. Remember how you couldn’t sleep without her, and Mama had to send a taxi to pick her up from some place once?’

      ‘I’d left her behind at a birthday party, and Dad was too “tired” to drive.’ Río took the elephant from Dervla and brushed dust from her ears. ‘I wondered where she’d got to. I’ll hang on to her now I’ve found her. She’ll be useful for hugging when I’m feeling blue.’

      ‘She’s probably the only thing here worth salvaging.’

      ‘She smells a bit musty. She’ll have to go through the washing machine.’ Río set Ella on top of a magazine rack. ‘Poor darling. She’ll hate that.’

      Dervla raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t you think you’ve reached the age where it’s time to put childish things behind you?’

      ‘It’s never time to do that. Oh, look! There’s my copy of The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey.’ She picked up a book that had a picture of two children on the front, perched on a cart drawn by a little grey donkey.

      ‘It’s mine, actually,’ said Dervla. ‘Grandma gave it to Mama, and Mama gave it to me.’

      ‘She did, did she? Lucky old you. It’s a first edition–with illustrations by Jack B. Yeats. It could be worth a lot of money.’

      ‘It’s mine,’ repeated Dervla. ‘You got the Arthur Rackham Midsummer Night’s Dream—’

      ‘That Dad ruined by spilling Guinness all over it.’

      ‘And I got The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey. Look at the flyleaf. It’s got my name on it.’

      Río looked. The words ‘Dervla Kinsella’ were there, all right, printed in Dervla’s neat hand. She shrugged, and handed it over. ‘I hope you get a good price for it.’

      ‘What makes you think I want to sell it?’

      ‘I dunno. I guess, when I visualise your penthouse, I picture a place that’s not cluttered with books and keepsakes and stuff. Like a showroom kind of joint.’

      Río saw Dervla stiffen. ‘You don’t have the monopoly on art and literature, Río, just because of your boho credentials.’

      Ow. Río had clearly hit a nerve here, by labelling Dervla as some kind of philistine. She’d have to backtrack. She realised with sudden alarm that she didn’t want to have Dervla revert to spiky mode. In the past hour they’d started to unravel a lot of tangled history–a cat’s cradle of loose ends and missing threads and dropped stitches. Río had her sister back in her life, and she wanted to keep her there: she needed an ally to help her through this horrible time. Frank may have been an irresponsible and neglectful father, but he’d still been family. Now that Finn was on the verge of disappearing from her life, Dervla was the only family Río had left.

      ‘I just–I’d just have thought you were the kind of gal who prefers minimalism.’

      ‘But I also like to surround myself with beautiful artefacts. I embrace the aesthetic that decrees that one should have nothing in one’s life that is neither beautiful nor useful. And I happen to consider this book rather beautiful.’ Dervla hugged The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey to her bosom. ‘Mama used to read it to me.’

      Río wanted to remind Dervla that Mama had used to read it to her too, but decided against it. She didn’t want hostilities to resume at any second. Instead she started to root through a cardboard box full of old books and papers, and said: ‘Whereabouts exactly in Galway is your apartment?’

      ‘It’s in the Sugar Stack development, by the docks. Do you know it?’

      Río did. Privately, she thought the development was hideous. ‘Oh–the Sugar Stack! Of course I know it. It’s…astonishing.’

      ‘Yes. It’s been nominated for an award for best city-centre residential development.’

      ‘How do you find city life?’ Río was genuinely curious. The only time she had lived in the city had been in a kind of commune, with baby Finn and a load of arty СКАЧАТЬ