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

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СКАЧАТЬ Or Burger King?’ joked Río, stapling on a grin. She’d smile and smile and joke and joke, and she’d get through the next couple of weeks somehow until Finn was gone from her, and then she’d launch herself into the fray again, because Río was resilient. She’d gone through tough times–name her one single parent who hadn’t–but she’d always somehow emerged on the other side battle-scarred and weary, but otherwise intact.

      ‘No, he’s not waiting table this time,’ responded Finn. ‘He’s got acting work.’

      ‘He has?’ Río was genuinely astonished. Shane had done nothing but wait on tables for at least two years now.

      ‘Yeah. He’s got a part in a pilot for a new TV series.’

      ‘Oh. The title of which is presumably The Series That Will Never Be Made.’

      Shane had appeared in numerous pilots for projects that had never got off the ground. He had played a cowboy in something called Clone Rangers, and a vampire in something called Blood Brothers and an alien commander in something called Ace of Space, which Río had renamed Waste of Space. She and Finn had dutifully watched the DVD he’d sent them and tried not to laugh, but after a couple of glasses of wine not laughing had proved impossible, and Río had guffawed so hard that wine had come spurting out of her nose. The pair of them had gone round quoting from Ace of Space for weeks afterwards, intoning such gems as ‘Instruct the hyperdrive to convey us to Twelfth Warp!’ and ‘Planet Quatatanga is ours!’

      ‘Well, you know what Dad’s like,’ said Finn. ‘He’s always convinced that whatever he’s in will be the next Lost. He said to tell you how sorry he is that he won’t be able to make it to the funeral. He’s shooting all this week and next.’

      ‘That’s sweet of him to even think about coming over, but I wouldn’t have expected him to travel all that way for Frank.’

      ‘Sure, it’d be no problem for him with the auld Hyperdrive. That conveyed him to the Twelfth Warp in no time at all’

      ‘But the Hyperdrive exploded on Planet Quatatanga, taking Captain Ross and his crew members with it. And that was the end of that pay cheque. I got my winter coat and my Doc Martens out of that pilot.’

      ‘And I got my Xbox.’

      ‘I wonder what we’ll get out of this one?’

      ‘I know what I want.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘My scuba-dive instructorship.’

      ‘Oh, Finn! It breaks my heart to think that if Frank hadn’t left me out of his will—’

      ‘Ma, Ma! Please don’t beat yourself up over it! I’ll find a way to get my certification, I promise I will’

      ‘But it’s so expensive—’

      ‘Please, please don’t worry about me, Ma. That’s the last thing I want you to do. You’ve enough on your plate.’

      Río made a face. ‘I just wish it was scallops and lobster.’

      ‘I’ll fetch you scallops on my next dive. I know where there’s a big bed off Inishclare. Hey! Let’s check the EuroMillions results.’ Finn reached for the mouse and set sail on Internet Explorer. ‘Maybe we’ll be lucky tonight.’

      There was a pause, then Río stapled on that grin again. ‘Knowing our luck,’ she said, ‘Dervla’s probably already won it.’

      That night–after she’d said goodbye to Río, and driven the forty kilometres back to her penthouse in the Sugar Stack in Galway, and sipped a glass of chilled Sancerre, and performed her Eve Lom routine, and slid between her Egyptian cotton sheets–Dervla did something she often did after she’d recced a property. As she lay in bed, she walked through it in her head, retracing her steps in a kind of virtual tour.

      The front of Frank’s house would clean up well. White-washed walls, a new front door painted a tasteful shade of duck-egg blue, window boxes. Inside, the porch would have to be retained. Porches were important on this stretch of the Atlantic coast, not just as storage space for fuel and wellie boots and umbrellas, but because they acted as buffers against the wind that beat up against the fronts of the houses in wintertime. Beyond the porch, the hallway, the sitting room and the kitchen could be knocked through into one vast, L-shaped living space, with the kitchen housed in the extended foot of the ‘L’, and with the old scullery beyond serving as a utility room. The study could be converted into a spare bedroom.

      Downstairs and up, huge, double-glazed picture windows could be installed to frame that panoramic vista of sea and sky and mountains. The front bedroom was sizeable enough to accommodate an en suite shower room if a section of the landing was annexed. The bathroom would have to be ripped out, and all fittings replaced with state-of-the-art sanitary ware. A home office could be fitted under the stairs, library shelves in the stairwell, and the spare room overhauled and fitted with storage units. A deck could be constructed on the roof of the downstairs extension that housed the kitchen and utility room, with double doors opening onto it from the landing.

      The only conundrum was–what to do about the attic?

      That night, after saying good night to Finn, Río poured herself a glass of rough red wine and took it into the bathroom to sip while she cleaned her face. Studying herself in the mirror, she searched for some physical manifestation of her paternal genes. Her nose? No, it was definitely her mother’s retroussè. Her hair? That red-gold mass was her mother’s legacy too. Her eyes held her mother’s faraway gaze, and when she smiled, her mouth–with its slightly too-short upper lip–curved into something that men seemed to find a lot more lethal than a cupid’s bow. Had Rosaleen smiled that way at her father? Oh, how Río hoped she had! She deserved to have had some fun in her life, and some romance too, even if it had been clandestine.

      What she had learned today explained the dearth of family resemblance between her and Frank, and between her and Dervla. But while Dervla had inherited the dark Kinsella colouring, in effect, Frank had been no more father to Dervla than he had to Río. He’d neglected them both equally. Did she feel any less connected to Dervla now that she knew they had been fathered by different men? No. If anything, today’s revelations could only have brought them closer. Having a half-sister certainly felt a whole lot better than having a sister from whom you were estranged. Any kind of sister was far, far better, Río decided, snapping the top back on her Simple night cream, than having no sister at all.

       Chapter Five

      ‘We’ll need to have a long talk.’

      ‘Oh God, will we?’ Río turned towards Dervla, who was standing in the doorway of their father’s study, looking business-like in a black suit with a little boxy jacket. Río didn’t own anything black to wear to Frank’s funeral. She had rifled through her wardrobe that morning and selected a chiffon and velvet skirt in saffron yellow, which she’d teamed with a woolly sweater and a pair of Doc Martens. She didn’t care if it was inappropriate garb for a funeral. Frank had turned up drunk at their mother’s funeral, and how appropriate was that?.

      ‘I’ve asked Mr Morrissey to stay on after the wake—’

      ‘Who’s СКАЧАТЬ