Secrets Between Sisters: The perfect heart-warming holiday read of 2018. Kate Thompson
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The sisters arranged to have their father buried in the graveyard near the beach, where all the headstones faced the sea, on Friday the fourth of January. The notice Dervla had composed for the paper read: ‘Kinsella, Frank. Husband of the late Rosaleen, beloved father to Dervla and Ríonach, and grandfather to Finn. At home, peacefully’ Both observations were lies. Their father had not been beloved by either of his daughters, and, although he had died in the comfort of his own bed, there was no way it could have been a peaceful leave-taking.
‘I’m hardly going to put the real cause of death in the paper,’ Dervla had said waspishly, when Río questioned the wording. ‘Everybody in the village knows he was a complete lush—’
‘And everybody in the village will know exactly how he died, Dervla.’
‘I realise that. Of course word will get out about what really happened, but there’s no reason to announce to all and sundry via the obituaries page that our father choked to death on a lamb chop.’
‘I wonder why he was eating a lamb chop in bed,’ mused Río.
Dervla shuddered. ‘Let’s not go there.’
Dervla and Río were sitting on the sea wall opposite their father’s house, trying to pluck up the courage to go in. Since Dervla had phoned Río with the grim news of their father’s undignified demise, the sisters had forged the kind of uneasy entente cordiale that is always necessary when families get hit by flak. Río had spoken to the local GP and the priest, while Dervla had spoken to Frank’s solicitor and the funeral parlour in Galway Together they had started to compile a list of other people who should be contacted personally, but had given up when they realised that there was actually no one outside of the village who would be in any way affected by their father’s death.
Dervla had noticed that Río was wearing red shoes today, which seemed a little inappropriate given the circumstances, but she’d resisted the temptation to be critical of her sister during this difficult time. She’d even managed a morose smile at Río’s latest alcoholic joke which went: ‘A drunk was walking through the woods when he found a skull. The first thing he did was call the police. But then he got curious and picked it up, and started wondering who this person was, and why this person had antlers.’
During their childhood, Dervla and Río had found that the best way to cope with their father’s alcoholism was by developing a sense of humour around it. The incident that had made them crease up most had been the evening they’d spotted Frank careering home along the coast road in his Volkswagen, clearly well over the limit. The car had lost one of its back wheels, which meant that sparks were ricocheting up from where the undercarriage was scraping the asphalt. Frank was hunched over the steering wheel–a manic expression on his face–and a garda patrol car was in hot pursuit. Dervla and Río had adapted ‘Three Wheels on My Wagon’ to fit the occasion, and for days afterwards simply humming the opening bars of the song had made them cry with laughter.
They’d even managed to make their mother laugh sometimes, and when the three of them started, they couldn’t stop. A musician friend had once remarked that the sound of the Kinsella women’s laughter had inspired him to write a ballad.
That had been Before Shane. When Shane Byrne entered their lives, everything changed.
Dervla had spotted him first, when he’d played Macheath in a student production of The Threepenny Opera in Galway, where she was studying Auctioneering and he was studying Photography. She had been blown away by Shane: she attended every production he was in, she volunteered her services backstage as an assistant stage manager, and she spent hours boring all her friends–including Río–about what a god he was. She’d even snogged him one memorable evening, when a friend of a friend had thrown an opening-night party. That had been the defining moment of their relationship: for Dervla it had been such a celestial experience that she couldn’t admit to herself that it might not have been quite so earth-shattering for Shane. But she was determined to make him realise how good they could be together, too infatuated to care that she was in danger of making a laughing stock of herself. When it came to Shane Byrne, Dervla had no pride left. And one night she decided she was going to bite the bullet and seduce him backstage, after the show.
But Río had got there first. Beautiful Río, gregarious Río, Río who had been their mother’s favourite and was beloved by everyone who met her. Río, who danced on the sand like the girl in the song, and who turned heads when she walked down the street, and who could fall out of bed looking like a young Brigitte Bardot. Río, who had landed an apprenticeship with a scenic artist because she painted so beautifully; Río, who looked adorable standing on a step ladder with a smudge of Crimson Lake on her nose; Río, who had invited Shane back to the house in Lissamore to take photographs, so that she could parade in front of him in her bird-of-paradise kimono just days before their mother died…
Dervla had never forgotten how she’d walked into the prop room that evening to find her sister and ‘her’ man in a hot clinch. Río had jumped like the guilty creature she was, then become abject. Dervla remembered the halting sentences, the pleas, the lamenting: ‘Please understand…’ ‘It’s been agony…’ ‘We couldn’t help ourselves…’ ‘I beg you, Dervla…’ Dervla had listened stony-faced, without comment, watching her sister stew while Shane sat on the sofa looking bemused. Then she had turned on her heel and made a dignified exit. The sisters had barely spoken since, and the cold war had continued to the present day.
What had upset Dervla most had been that the betrayal had taken place a bare two months after their mother had died. Until then, she and Río had been a force united against a home life blighted by cancer and soured by alcoholism. When Río betrayed her, Dervla had never felt more alone in her life.
She’d moved out of the family home and landed a job in an estate agency in Galway city, forty kilometres away from Lissamore, determined to become the most successful, most highly regarded estate agent in the entire region of Coolnamara. Because, after all, bricks and mortar were the only things that could be depended upon. Property was the most solid, most tangible, most proven form of investment there was, and Dervla craved constancy in her life. Other women sought constancy in the shape of a husband and children, but Dervla knew that there was no such thing as constancy in families. Her daddy had disregarded her, her mother had abandoned her, and her sister had betrayed her. Her ultimate aim was to own a house so classy that it would announce to the world that, in terms of self-sufficiency, she–Dervla Kinsella–was at the top of her game.
And Dervla had achieved that ultimate aim. She had set up on her own, worked her ass off, and assembled a team of razor-sharp agents. Her name was writ large on ‘For Sale’ boards all over the Galway/Coolnamara region, many of which boasted ‘Sale Agreed’ or ‘Sold’ banners. She hadn’t found her dream house yet, but she had found its urban equivalent in a gleaming penthouse apartment in a newly fashionable area of Galway city.
‘You do realise that we’ll have to clear the place before the funeral?’ she said, resuming scrutiny of her father’s scuffed front door. Behind that door, she knew, lurked unspeakable chaos.
‘Oh God.’ Río started swinging a scarlet-shod foot. ‘Can’t we leave it until afterwards?’
‘Of course not. We’ll be having the wake there. When was the last time you visited Dad, incidentally?’
‘A couple of days ago. I brought him some chicken casserole.’
‘So you know what kind of state it’s in?’
‘Yes. Worse than Francis Bacon’s studio. I volunteered to clean up for him, but he told me to eff off, as usual.’
‘That’s what he told me when I last visited, bearing Tesco’s Finest lasagne.’
‘Did you bring him the lamb chops?’
‘No, thank God. Did you?’
‘No.’