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

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       Chapter Eight

      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!’