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

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. Lucky Mrs Bolger will get a tasty settlement when her divorce comes through.’

‘They’re getting divorced?’

‘That’s what the dogs on the street are saying.’

Shaking back her hair, Río stretched, got to her feet, and wandered to the window. On the street below, there were indeed dogs–quite a few of them. Her neighbour’s Yorkshire terrier was sitting on the harbour wall chatting to the postmistress’s Airedale, and Seamus Moynihan’s lurcher was looking out to sea, waiting for his master’s trawler to arrive back with the lobster pots. The bichon frise that belonged to Fleur of Fleurissima was posing prettily in the doorway of the shop, waiting for one of the local curs to pluck up the courage to ask her for a date.

Fleurissima was the village’s sole boutique. Río’s friend Fleur specialised in non-mainstream designers sourced from all over Europe: her beautiful shop was a mecca for those with some wealth and a lot of taste, who were seeking unusual and elegant one-offs. It opened for just nine months of the year, because it didn’t make financial sense to stay open after October. In wintertime there were no well-heeled visitors around to snap up her exquisite garments, so Fleur opened the shop only in the run-up to Christmas, but she always took New Year off to fly to some exotic location with her latest lover. This year, she planned to celebrate New Year’s Day by swimming in the Blue Lagoon in Jamaica.

Río had helped run the shop once upon a time; now she just dressed the window. In the old days, she and Fleur had acquired their stock from the house auctions that were held every few weeks in estates and big houses all over Ireland. They’d pull up in Río’s ancient, battered Renault, and drive away with cardboard boxes crammed with silk and satin and velvet and chenille, some bearing labels with legendary names: Ossie Clark, Yves Saint Laurent, Mary Quant. It broke their hearts to sell their spoils–in fact, sometimes they ‘borrowed’ the frocks themselves before they sold them–but that had been how they made their living in the days before Lissamore had become a playground for plutocrats.

Lissamore was one of the prettiest, most picture-postcard-perfect villages in the whole of the west of Ireland: there was even a sign to say so, a quarter of a mile down the road from Río’s house. It read: ‘You are now entering Lissamore–possibly the most picturesque village in Ireland.’

Since the sign had gone up a couple of years earlier, Río had been tempted to deface it by crossing out the word ‘possibly’. Opposite her front door, fishing boats bobbed cheerfully in a photogenic harbour against a backdrop of purple mountains. Islands shimmered in the bay beyond, rimmed with golden beaches–the kind of beaches that would be bound to win awards if only Condé Nast copped on to them. On the outskirts of the village, leafy boreens wound their way here and there, mostly leading to random beauty spots. Boats and boreens, mountains and islands–all could have been designed by a deity in a benevolent mood, or by the Irish Tourist Board.

Río’s house was on the main street, one of a nineteenth-century terrace of two-storey cottages. It was the kind of house that epitomised the estate agent cliché ‘oozing with character’, the kind of house that tourists chose to pose in front of for photos. There were, however, two major drawbacks to the property as far as Río was concerned. She didn’t actually own it, and it didn’t have a garden.

All her life Río had dreamed of tending a garden by the sea. When her mother had lain dying, she had sat by her bedside and told her stories about how one day she, Río, would own Coral Cottage, where she and Mama had used to go to fetch freshly laid eggs. She promised to plant there all the flowers her mother had grown in the garden of their family home, and build a bower for Mama to rest in on warm summer days, and a tree house for her future grandchildren to play in, and a picnic table, for when they felt like entertaining. And she’d promised her mother that when she died–and oh! she could have years ahead of her still! Mama could outlive Río!–her ashes would be scattered on the promontory by Coral Cottage, which overlooked the Atlantic. This last promise Río had kept; but of course the bower and the tree house and the picnic table had never been built. Instead there was an ostentatious yoga pavilion in the garden of what had once been Coral Cottage, and which was now known locally as Coral Mansion.