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

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СКАЧАТЬ did the photographs. They were mostly of Finn. Finn aged seven, in a rowing boat with his father, both squinting with identical green eyes against the sun; Finn at thirteen, climbing a mast, black hair a-tangle with wind and sea salt; Finn at fifteen, kitted up in scuba gear, poised to perform a backward roll from a dive boat; Finn on his twentieth birthday, smiling to camera with a pint of Guinness in his hand…

      ‘Ha! Get a load of Dad’s ponytail!’

      ‘What? Show me!’

      ‘I could blackmail him with this if he had any money. Look.’ From out of the bureau Finn handed Río a yellowed newspaper cutting. Underneath a headline that read ‘Flawed Hamlet Fails to Engage’ was a picture of Shane gazing moodily at a skull. ‘What year was this taken?’

      Río frowned, thinking back. ‘It must have been’ eighty-seven, because I was pregnant with you during the run of that show. I remember climbing ladders to paint the backdrop, and trying desperately to hide my bump–I was scared they’d fire me for health and safety reasons if they found out. No wonder you’ve a head for heights’.

      ‘And depths. I was down at forty metres this morning.’

      ‘Finn! Don’t scare me!’

      ‘Pah! It’s a piece of piss, Ma. I could dive in my sleep now. I got gills.’ Finn started rummaging in the drawer again, and produced a carrier bag stuffed with mementoes. ‘Baby shoes!’ he said, pulling out a pair of teensy bootees. ‘Jeepers! Were my feet ever that small?’

      ‘Give me those!’ Río grabbed the bootees from him, and set them reverently aside in a box she’d labelled ‘Things to Keep’.

      ‘And here’s more newspaper stuff about Dad. Hey! Listen to this. “Shane Byrne glowers sexily as Macheath, but he should not also be required to sing.” Was Dad a really crap actor, Ma?’

      Río laughed. ‘No, he wasn’t. He just never got the breaks he deserved. Good-looking actors can be at a real disadvantage. Casting directors tend to want to bed them rather than hire them.’

      Finn gave her a cautious look. ‘Ahem. Casting directors are mostly women, yeah?’

      ‘Yip.’

      ‘Thank Jaysus for that. You want to keep this?’

      Río shook her head, and Finn screwed the newspaper cutting into a ball and batted it across the room. Next out of the carrier bag was a photograph mounted on pretty, marbled card.

      ‘Well, hello!’ said Finn. ‘Who are these foxy ladeez? Don’t tell me it’s you and Dervla, Ma? Take a look!’

      Río looked–and looking took her straight back to the spring of 1987, the year her mother had died. The picture showed a seventeen-year-old Río walking hand in hand with her sister through the garden of their childhood home. Both girls were wearing silk kimonos–one patterned with birds of paradise, the other with cherry blossom–and both were barefoot. Yellow-faced monkey flowers and blushing meadowsweet stippled the banks of the pond in which a lamenting willow trailed her arms, and a pair of lazy koi drifted. You could practically smell the damp earth.

      Río remembered that Shane had taken the photograph–from the sitting-room window, to gauge from the angle. And sure enough, when she turned the print over, there on the back were some lines he had adapted from a Yeats poem, written in his scrawly black script:

      The light of morning, Lissamore,

       Sash windows, open to the south,

       Two girls in silk kimonos, both

       Beautiful, one I adore.

      ‘You were beautiful, all right,’ observed Finn. ‘Both of you. Jaysus, if I’d been Dad, I’d have been hard-pressed to choose between the pair of you.’

      Río looked up from the photograph. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked uncertainly.

      ‘Well, he’d obviously already made his choice, hadn’t he? You were the adored one. Otherwise I would never have happened.’

      ‘Oh. Yes.’ Río’s eyes dropped back to the image on the photograph, of the two girls wandering through an Impressionist garden, waiting in anguish for their mother to die. She remembered how her older sister’s hand had felt in hers, the reassuring coolness of her palm, the comforting pressure of her fingers. They’d held hands again at the funeral the following week, and slept together in their mother’s bed afterwards, with their arms wrapped around one another. But just months later, Dervla had turned on her heel and stalked out of Río’s life.

      Río looked at the photograph for a long time, and then she reached for an envelope and slid it inside.

      ‘What went wrong between you and Dervla, Ma?’ asked Finn.

      Río affected a careless attitude. ‘Sisters fall out. It happens all the time.’

      ‘But you must have been close once. You can tell by that photograph.’

      ‘Dervla and I were all each other had for a couple of years. On the day that picture was taken, my father was most likely slumped over the desk in his study with a whiskey bottle beside him, while Mama lay dying in the bedroom above.’

      ‘What about friends? Had you no one to help you?’

      ‘Young people are no good at handling death, Finn. It embarrasses them. Most of our friends tended to steer clear. Apart from Shane.’

      ‘Good for Dad.’

      ‘He was a rock, all right.’ Río set the envelope aside in the ‘Things to Keep’ box, then looked back up at Finn, who was unfolding another press cutting.

      ‘Hey–here’s a pic of you in the paper,’ he remarked. ‘I remember that dress from when I was about ten.’

      ‘You were nearer thirteen,’ Río remarked, peering over his shoulder. ‘That was taken in my activist days, when I kicked up a stink about Bully Boy Bolger pulling down Coral Cottage.’

      ‘I thought Coral Cottage had fallen down years before?’

      ‘It was derelict, but not a ruin. And it was slap-bang in an area of outstanding natural beauty. It should have been resurrected, not built over. It still makes me mad when I think about that barnacle of Bolger’s getting planning permission.’

      ‘How did he wangle it?’

      ‘Brown envelopes stuffed with cash, presumably. That kind of carry-on was rampant in those days.’ Río took the cutting from Finn, scanned it, then sat back on her heels and tossed it onto the pile, where it joined the jetsam of her past. ‘I suppose I wouldn’t mind so much if anybody actually lived there. But apart from this Christmas, the Bolgers haven’t been near the joint for yonks. Imagine spending all that money on building a holiday home with all mod cons, and mooring for a boat, and a fecking yoga pavilion, that you never even bother to visit!’

      ‘Maybe they bugger off to Martinique and the Seychelles and places like that instead. I wouldn’t blame them, given this climate.’

      ‘I wonder what it’s like to have that kind of dosh. СКАЧАТЬ