The Guesthouse on the Green Series Box Set 2

by Michelle Vernal

  ‘That’s a fine sounding name for a gerbil,’ Patrick said, receiving a hug. He was easily bought her son, Roisin thought, not for the first time as her brother pulled a tube of M&M’s from his pocket and gave them to Noah.

  ‘Come on and sit down,’ Maureen urged, patting the space between her and Moira they had left for him to squeeze into. He did so.

  ‘Rosi, Aisling, go and see that your brother’s room’s made up and put his and Cindy’s bags in there while you’re at it. We’re all very modern here,’ she added.

  Roisin resisted the urge to tell Mammy nobody had chopped Patrick’s legs off. She supposed he had just flown in from LA though. Just this once, she thought, and she begrudgingly followed her equally begrudging sister from the room. Noah seized the opportunity to sit next to Cindy, delighted to secure a position next to her and certain she would be the type of girl who would love gerbils and not the type to try and pinch the M&M’s off him.

  ‘WHY DO YOU THINK HE’S back?’ Roisin said, tucking in her corner of the bed and smoothing the sheet.

  Aisling did the same. ‘I don’t know but if he’s any plans of putting the squeeze on Mammy about selling O’Mara’s again, I’ll personally stick him in a box and send him back to Los Angeles with a do not return sticker.’

  ‘Ah, Ash, maybe we should give him the benefit of the doubt. You know maybe he just misses us and thought it would be nice to spend Christmas with his family. Or, maybe things are getting serious between him and Cindy and he thought he should introduce her to us all.’

  Aisling sighed. ‘Rosi, it’s Patrick you’re talking about. The only person Patrick’s ever had a deep and meaningful relationship with is himself. No, he’ll have one of his deals on the go, it’ll be business that’s brought him back, not us.’

  ‘You’re too cynical,’ Roisin said, although her sister’s description of their brother was bang on. ‘What did you make of Cindy?’ she asked, pausing in her stuffing of the pillow into the case. ‘I think she seems sweet, but I can’t stop staring at her breasts.’

  ‘Me neither, they’re enormous, but sure, she must be used to it. There’s no way they’re natural. I reckon she went along to yer plastic surgeon one and said, ‘I’ll have the Pam Anderson special please, and speaking of unnatural. Who am I?’ Aisling cracked a cheesy grin and said, ‘Ah, Mammy, you’re the best mammy in the whole world and I’m a fecky big brown noser, so I am.’

  Roisin giggled. ‘Pat. The state of those teeth. Honest to God any whiter you’d want to wear sunglasses around him.’

  Aisling plumped her pillow and put it on the bed. ‘It will be strange having him back in his old room.

  ‘I wonder if you’ll hear the old headboard banging.’ Roisin pointed to it.

  ‘That’s disgusting, so it is. Besides I’m off round to Quinn’s later and Moira’s going to Tom’s so Pat and Ms Pneumatic Breasts can bang away to their hearts delight, but I won’t be changing the sheets at the end of the week.’ She paused in her smoothing of the eiderdown. ‘How does Mammy seem to you?’

  ‘Oh, you know, Mammy’s Mammy.’

  ‘You don’t think she seems a little,’ Aisling cast about for the word she was looking for. ‘Preoccupied?’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. She had dinner at the yacht club a weekend or so back. She got her hair done and everything for it because it was quite a posh do she reckons, and she’s been wandering around with her head in the clouds since. Moira reckons she’s after meeting a fella.’

  ‘No!’ The thought of Mammy with anyone other than their daddy was a bizarre one, but it was over two years since he’d passed now and while their mammy was their mammy, she was also a woman in her own right. That was a bizarre thought too! ‘Although she did say there was dancing and that she’d had a grand time.’

  ‘Well, something’s up and she’s not saying whatever it is but when I quizzed as to how her night was, she was very cagey. She had that look on her face, you know, the one where she’s after borrowing something like your lipstick, or—'

  ‘Yoga pants and I know the look well.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Aisling smiled.

  ‘How would you feel about it if she did meet someone?’ Roisin probed.

  ‘Weird at first, I guess, but she has every right to be happy and it wouldn’t mean she loved Daddy any less.’

  ‘No, you’re right. I hadn’t thought about it like that but it wouldn’t.’

  ‘Moira surprised me because you know how much of a daddy’s girl she was. I always thought she’d struggle if Mammy did meet anyone else but she was kind of nonchalant about it all. That trip to Vietnam changed her. For the better too.’

  ‘Who’d have thought?’

  ‘I know, and I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself. We don’t know she has met anyone but with all the clubs she belongs to she’s bound to hook up with a merry widower at some point.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose she is.’

  They finished their task in silence and then Roisin remembered the dessert. ‘Do you reckon, Moira’s cut into the cheesecake yet?’ Seeing as she was the only sibling who would not be doing any riding tonight, she planned to compensate with a big helping.

  ‘I hope not, I want to make sure she doesn’t give Patrick a bigger slice than me.’

  On that note they took themselves off back to the living room.

  WHAT A STRANGE TURN the evening had taken, Roisin thought, wiping the last of the dishes dry as Aisling, the washing up done, began making everybody coffee. Patrick was regaling them with stories about life in the LA fast lane while Mammy sat on one side of him on the sofa, Moira on the other, hanging off his every word. Poor Cindy was squished down the end next to Mammy and hadn’t taken her eyes off Pooh; her legs were tightly crossed. Neither Pooh nor Noah who was sprawled on the carpet, elbows resting on the floor, chin cupped in his hands, had taken their eyes off Cindy.

  It was then that her phone began to vibrate in her pocket and pulling it out she expected it to be Colin wanting to know they’d arrived safe and sound. It wasn’t Colin though. It was Shay.

  Chapter 11

  Clio

  Clio stared down at the card, open on the table in front of her, almost afraid to read the words squeezed around the bog-standard Christmas greeting. The phone ringing in the hallway jolted her from her trance. ‘You’re being silly, Clio, old girl. It was over four decades ago. And you can sod off.’ She directed the latter at the telephone. It was probably Mags, her agent, and she could wait. Sure, if it was that important, she’d call back she decided, waiting for it to ring off. She’d always thought the literary agent’s role was to support their author but Clio felt as though she were the one keeping Mags on an even keel since the book had hit the shelves. When her house was once more bathed in silence apart from him next door’s motorcycle engine revving off into the distance she began to read.

  Dear Clio,

  I realise this card will be a bolt from the blue but when I read the review of your book in the Irish Times I had to write and congratulate you. You always said you’d write a novel that would be a bestseller and now you’ve only gone and done it! Congratulations, what an achievement. Of course, I rushed straight out and bought a copy which I devoured over three days. It’s wonderful, but Harry and Lyssa’s story raised a lot of questions because I can’t help but wonder if you wrote it about us. Or am I being arrogant? That’s something I’ve been accused of before. I still live in Boston in case you were wondering but I’ve always liked to keep my finger on the pulse of what was happening in Dublin. I’ve subscribed to the Times for over forty years. I followed your reporting and well-written pieces with interest over the years too. I miss stumbling across them. I always felt inordinately proud when I’d see your name in the byline. I’d want to nudge the person on the train next to me and tell them that I knew you when you were a girl. And that you were the most feisty, determined woman I ever met. I’m going to run out of room and there’s so much more I’d
like to say. The thing is, Clio, I’m writing to you because I’m coming back. Your story made me nostalgic for all my old haunts from that wonderful year and now that I have finally hung my hat up and retired, the time is ripe. I arrive on the afternoon of the 24th and I would like to invite you to share Christmas dinner with me. I have made a booking for two at the Merrion Hotel in the Garden Room at one o’clock and will be waiting in the Drawing Room at 12.45pm. Please don’t think me presumptuous, merely hopeful.

  Yours, hopefully,

  Gerry.

  Clio’s tea had gone cold and her toast, although filling the air with its malty aroma, was long since popped and had been forgotten about. The almost milky scent of fresh toast usually filled her with a sense that all was well in her world just as cigarettes once had. Oh, how she used to eat the things when she was working! She’d given up before it had a chance to catch up with her though. Right now though, feeling as though her world had been upended, she’d kill for one. Gerry had always had that effect on her but she’d been too young to know better then. At eighteen her defences had been down and she’d had a trusting openness to seize all the possibilities life had to offer her. Now she was a fifty-nine-year-old woman who should know better than to allow her breath to quicken and pulse to race at the memory of the man she’d once loved with her whole being. A man whose heart she’d had to break.

  A thought struck her then, rather like the stinging slap her mother wielded to the back of her legs when she’d been cheeky as a child. ‘He won’t look like you remember him, Clio. He’s been forever frozen in your mind as he was but time hasn’t stood still. He’s a pensioner, old girl.’ It was swiftly followed by the realisation that she no longer had the dewy skin of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. She too was rapidly approaching her pensionable years, unless of course the government pushed back the age for hanging one’s hat up as they’d been making noises of doing. Of course, it made no bones to her. She was a long way from putting her hat anywhere other than firmly on her head. Still, fifty-nine, how on earth did that happen?

  How did one go from being a girl who thought she had the right to have it all to being a woman who now thought nothing of holding a discussion with herself?

  She remembered how bereft she’d been when Gerry left. He’d never lied to her. He’d never made promises he couldn’t keep, but she’d been swept along by the heady tide of first love and had believed that somehow it would all work out. It hadn’t and it had been her fault. She’d decided to throw herself into her work at the paper, dragging herself up the rungs of the ladder in a male dominated era. It hadn’t been easy. It had taken her fifteen years to smash through that glass ceiling. She’d known when she’d had to make her choice that it was sink or swim time for her career and she’d chosen to swim. Gerry Byrne and his family obligations would not sink her.

  It was presumptuous on his part to assume she would drop everything and have her Christmas dinner with him. How did he know she didn’t have a family who were desperate for her to be a part of their festivities? Sure, there was Fidelma and her lot expecting her. She’d spent every Christmas with her sister’s brood since Mam passed. Fidelma’s children, although now adults with children of their own, would surely miss their aunt if she weren’t there? She’d spoiled them enough over the years to warrant the title of ‘favourite aunty’.

  Clio’s neatly trimmed nails, a must when one spent the majority of one’s time on a typewriter, drummed the table. She wouldn’t think about it anymore. She would tuck the card away in the top drawer of her sideboard over there and she would bin the cold toast and make some more. She’d have her breakfast and begin her day. ‘You’ve a novel you’re supposed to be writing, Clio. You’ve a deadline to make and you do not have time for Gerry Byrne to come-a-calling. You’re going to pretend you never received his card. It went missing in the post, so it did, like hundreds of letters and cards do at this time of the year. There, problem solved.’ As she pushed her seat back and stood up, she didn’t believe a word she’d just said.

  Chapter 12

  ‘I better not see anybody I know,’ Moira grumbled, flicking her hair back over her shoulder as they elbowed their way into Easons. ‘I feel like a complete eejit next to you lot.’

  ‘Odds are you will then. That’s what always happens. It’s like when you nip out to Tesco’s with no make-up on and your rattiest Sunday sloth clothes and there’s your arch nemesis from the high school looking like they’re off clubbing.’ Aisling was embittered by personal experience. She pointed through the sea of faces. ‘Oh look, speaking of high school, isn’t that your old school pal, Emma, over there? You know the one who fancied herself as Ginger Spice getting around in that Union Jack T-shirt.’

  ‘Where?!’ Moira looked panicked as she stared around at the sea of faces.

  ‘I’m joking with you.’

  ‘Oh, feck off, Ash.’

  ‘You feel like an eejit, Moira, because you look like one. We all do,’ Roisin stated, keeping a tight hold of Noah’s hand. It was a mosh pit of mammies and their offspring in here. She glanced down at her son; even he looked eejitty in his crew neck, red sweater. He reminded her a little of Charlie, from their favourite Christmas film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His nana had presented the sweater to him this morning and combed his hair into a smooth side parting rather than leave it to stand on end like Roisin did. She’d had one of her golfing ladies, a prolific knitter, whip the cable patterned red, sweater up specially for him.

  ‘It itches, Mummy, do I have to wear it?’ he’d whispered in her ear.

  ‘What do you think?’ she replied, gesturing at his nana who was singing her heart out to Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas on the radio as she waited for her toast to pop. He’d slunk off miserably to play with Mr Nibbles. Poor love looked like it was choking him, she thought now. Mammy had insisted, in a way that brooked no argument, on them all wearing red tops and blue jeans for this, their family Christmas photo.

  Red, she’d declared last night over coffee and the after dinner mints Patrick had picked up in duty free, was festive and the blue jeans added the perfect casual accompaniment. She didn’t want the photograph to look contrived. All three sisters had said, ‘Bollocks,’ in reply to this and Roisin could tell Cindy would have liked to have joined in with the sentiment but was too intimidated by Mammy to do so. Patrick had said a family photo sounded just the ticket and Roisin had heard Aisling mumble her favourite phrase where her brother was concerned, ‘brown nosey fecker,’ under her breath as she helped herself to two of the chocolate mints before stuffing them both in her mouth. Aisling always ate when she was feeling stressed.

  ‘We look like we’re a family band, you know like the Corrs except we’re not cool,’ Aisling said, now nibbling on the chocolate chip muesli bar she’d stashed in her handbag for emergency situations. Being forced out in public wearing matching outfits with her mammy, nephew, siblings and her brother’s girlfriend counted as such.

  ‘Or like we’ve stepped out of the television screen from some cheesy family sitcom,’ Roisin said. ‘We’re the Keatons from Family Ties, remember that show?’

  ‘Bags be Mallory,’ Aisling said through her mouthful.

  Roisin ignored her. ‘Mammy always used to say, why couldn’t we be more like the Keaton family and sort our problems out without all the bickering, remember?’ She rolled her eyes at the memory.

  ‘I do. It was very annoying.’ Aisling sniggered as she pointed at Patrick’s back ahead of her. ‘And there’s ole Michael J. Fox over there.’ He’d had to shoot off down to Grafton Street earlier that morning with Cindy to get something suitably red for them both to wear—there was no chance of Cindy getting that chest of hers inside anything the O’Mara women owned. Although suitable was a term that could be used loosely when it came to Cindy’s choice of plunging red mesh top and jeans that had Mammy whispering in the sisters’ ears, would need to be surgically removed at the after hours later on.

  Aisling glanced
down at her filmy blouse; it was chiffon, the sort of thing she wouldn’t normally be seen dead in. It reeked of Arpège, Mammy’s signature fragrance. She’d thrust it at her earlier that morning when she’d arrived at O’Mara’s with Roisin and Noah meekly following behind announcing she’d come early to ensure her wardrobe instructions were obeyed. ‘It’s alright for you three, red suits you with your colouring but it makes me look like I’ve picked up some sort of chronic disease.’ She’d not been happy, telling Moira to shut up when she smirked at the state of her in the blouse. Mammy had told her she’d better be careful or the wind would change and she’d be stuck with a face on her like a gin-soaked prune forever. Roisin had got off lightly, borrowing a turtle neck from Moira that looked very well on her and Moira looked the part in her preppy red jacket.

  ‘We’re the fecking Addams family,’ Moira added her pennies’ worth. ‘And there’s Morticia,’ she pointed at Mammy, who had—thank the Lord—opted for chinos with her red shirt.

  ‘The Bundys, and Mammy’s Peg Bundy.’ Aisling giggled getting into it now, and Moira and Roisin joined in.

  ‘No, I’ve got it.’ Roisin jiggled on the spot. ‘The Waltons.’ This time there was proper giggling as Aisling and Roisin chimed, ‘John Boy’ as they pointed at their brother. Roisin began humming the theme tune.

  Mammy looked back over her shoulder. ‘What are you three on about.’

  ‘Nothing, Mammy.’ Moira smiled sweetly. ‘Just saying what a grand idea of yours this was.’

  Maureen narrowed her eyes, unsure if she was picking up on sarcasm in her youngest daughter’s tone or not.

  ‘I suppose we should be grateful she didn’t try and bring Pooh along in a little red doggy coat for the occasion,’ Roisin said, once Mammy had returned to her chat with Patrick. She’d had to have words with Noah who’d been desperate to introduce Father Christmas to Mr Nibbles. She’d only managed to dissuade him by saying that if Mr Nibbles got frightened and had an accident, Father Christmas might not be too happy about it and it could possibly have a roll-on effect as to what appeared in Noah’s Christmas stocking.