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

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СКАЧАТЬ his condolences, and ended by telling Dervla how much he would miss her father’s custom.

      You betcha, thought Dervla darkly, as she finally disengaged and hotfooted it back to the Kinsella family home. As she let herself in, she waved at Mrs Murphy, who was gazing through the window next door with her phone clamped to her ear, probably trying to get through to the radio programme to complain about the cost of funerals.

      In the kitchen, Río was sitting at the table, perusing a document. Dervla saw at once that the stapled A4 typescript was their father’s will.

      Río looked up as Dervla came through the door, and gave her a mirthless smile. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ she said.

      ‘Oh! I hate that question,’ said Dervla, reaching for the corkscrew. ‘Just bring it all bloody on.’

      ‘Brace yourself. Frank divided his estate into separate entities–dwelling and land.’

      ‘Well, that’s probably fair enough,’ said Dervla cautiously. ‘With planning permission, the land could be worth almost as much as the house.’

      ‘In that case, you’ll be glad to know that you’ve inherited the lion’s share.’

      Dervla bit her lip. That clearly meant that Frank had bequeathed the house to her. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘So you’ve inherited the garden.’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Oh. Did he…could he have left it to Finn, then?’

      Río shook her head.

      ‘So who did he leave it to?’

      Río gave Dervla a mirthless smile. ‘He left it to Mrs Murphy,’ she said.

      ‘The ironic thing,’ Río said to Finn a couple of hours later, after she’d dried the copious tears she’d wept upon returning home, ‘is that we’d thought it would be a nice gesture to let Mrs Murphy have a memento of Dad. Some memento, eh?’

      ‘Maybe she’ll do the decent thing and refuse to accept it.’

      ‘Refuse to accept a prime wedge of real estate with development potential? Are you out of your mind, Finn? And even if she declined, her sons would be in like the clappers to claim it on her behalf.’

      Frank had known full well the passion Río had felt for that garden. She had tended it for years, growing the kind of plants that her mother had told her would thrive beside the sea, in the inhospitable soil of Coolnamara. She had brought in topsoil and compost and mulch to nurture her plantlings; she had even gathered donkey dung, which was the best fertiliser she knew of, and seaweed to wrap around the roots of saplings to keep them cosy in winter. She’d kept the pond clean–even though the koi no longer swam there–and she’d pruned and weeded and mowed and strimmed.

      She had done it because she knew Rosaleen would have wanted her to do it, and any time she spent in that garden, she felt as if her mother were smiling down at her beneficently from the blue-and-white-washed Coolnamara heaven.

      And then one day around two years ago her father had told her that he’d lost the key to the back door.

      ‘That’s all right,’ Río had reassured him, ‘I’ll get a locksmith in.’

      ‘No,’ Frank had said mulishly. ‘I don’t want to set foot in that garden ever again, and I don’t want you going out there either.’

      ‘But Mama would want me to take care of her garden for her,’ Río had protested.

      ‘What she wanted doesn’t matter any more. She’s dead, and her garden should be allowed to die with her. It’s morbid, so it is, to keep it alive when she’s not here to enjoy it.’

      ‘But don’t you want to be able to enjoy it, Daddy?’

      ‘I never enjoyed it. I hated it, and I resented the time your mother spent looking after it. She took better care of that effing garden than she did of me.’

      Can you blame her? Río thought, but didn’t say. What she did say, with a stroppy toss of the head, was: ‘Well, you’ve only yourself to blame if the place gets so overgrown you lose all your light.’ Which was exactly what had happened.

      And now Río wondered if perhaps it had been around that time that Frank had discovered the letters written to his wife by the man called Patrick. Had that been why he’d denied Río access to the thing he knew she loved best, and allowed the garden to become a wasteland? And had that been when he’d tampered with her kimono and drawn up his will so that she, the bastard offspring of his wife’s lover, would not profit from his death?

      She had never loved Frank. Now Río hated him. She had done her filial duty by him and looked after him without ever having received a word of thanks, and now she felt as though he’d shown her two fingers and slammed a door in her face as he’d made his final undignified exit from this life.

      What was she to do now? What would become of her? She knew it was venal, but she’d always expected to inherit half of Frank’s property, and hoped she might one day have enough capital to put a down payment on a place of her own. A place of her own! That dream was now as vestigial as the dream she had once woven around Coral Cottage and her orchard and her marmalade cat.

      Money was at the root of her problems–of course it was. Money–or the lack of same–was always a worry for Río, and money was especially tight off-season when there were no tourists around to be ferried to and from the airport. There were fewer people too, clamouring for pints of the black stuff in O’Toole’s bar where she worked so hard at charming them. And once Finn was off travelling she’d be hard-pressed to pay the rent on her house without his weekly contribution. Her landlord had hinted that a hike was due.

      She shook the thoughts away. She wouldn’t think about that stuff now; she’d think about it once the funeral was over and Finn was gone. In the meantime, she would have to put a brave face on things. She would have to play-act very hard indeed, because she knew that if she wept and wailed as she had done earlier in the evening, Finn would not leave Lissamore and set off on the adventure that was his life–he would stay here for her.

      ‘Ma?’ he said to her now. ‘I’ve been having second thoughts about going away. I mean now that Grandpa’s dead and–and all this stuff has happened, it wouldn’t be fair on you if I upped and left. I think it’s best if I hang around for a while.’

      Oh God. He was thinking about staying for her! No, no–she refused to allow him even to consider that option. She would not become one of those needy mothers who clung on to their children and ruined their lives.

      ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said smartly. ‘You know me, Finn. I’m resilient. I bounce back–always have. I won’t allow the bastard to get me down. I just won’t.’ She reached for the phone. ‘Now that I’m all cried out, I’d better phone your father. Tell him about Frank.’

      ‘I already did,’ said Finn. ‘He said he’d phone you later, and he said he was mightily sorry for your trouble.’

      Río smiled. ‘Begorrah, and did he now?’

      ‘He did. It seems you can take the man out of the bog, but you can’t take the bog out of the man, even after twenty years in Lala Land.’

      ‘How СКАЧАТЬ