Those Faraday Girls

by Monica McInerney

  ‘Well, what should I have said?’ Miranda said defiantly. ‘The truth? She kidnapped Maggie so we’ve banished her from the family for the foreseeable future?’

  ‘Of course we can’t tell people that,’ Eliza said. ‘Imagine the talk around town.’

  ‘Miranda’s right, Dad. We have to tell people something,’ Juliet said. ‘But for God’s sake, Miranda, why say she’s become a hippy? Of all people. The closest Sadie ever got to being a hippy was that mohair jumper she bought at the market.’

  ‘You really have gone too far this time, Miranda.’ Leo ran his fingers through his hair. Another time they might have laughed at all the tufts standing up.

  Miranda crossed her arms. ‘So you come up with a better story.’

  ‘Clementine, can I have a word?’ Leo asked.

  The two of them were gone for nearly ten minutes. When they emerged from the kitchen it was obvious from their expressions that there was no change in the situation. Clementine’s jaw was set. Leo’s hair was standing on so many ends it looked like he’d been electrocuted.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘Perhaps this is the best option we have.’

  It was sealed the next day when Maggie came home from school. One of her classmates had asked where Sadie was. They were used to her collecting Maggie after school.

  ‘Is Sadie coming back soon, Juliet?’

  ‘Not for a little while, Maggie.’

  ‘Why not? I miss her.’

  Juliet shot a glance at Clementine. ‘Ask your mum, Maggie.’

  ‘She’s decided she wants to live a different sort of life,’ Clementine said. ‘Away from us for a while.’

  ‘But will she be back at Christmas?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But when will I see her again?’

  ‘One day. Just not yet.’

  ‘Then can I write to her?’

  ‘No. I don’t think she wants us to.’

  Maggie had become upset. ‘But she’d want me to write to her. I know she would.’

  Leo had come in and overheard. ‘Of course you can write to her. What a great idea. You go and get your pencils and we’ll write her a letter now.’

  Clementine barely waited for her to leave the room. ‘I don’t want Maggie writing to her, Dad.’

  ‘If Maggie wants to write to her, Clementine, Maggie can write to her.’

  ‘How can she?’ Juliet said to Leo after Clementine left the room. ‘We haven’t a clue where she is. She made it clear to you she doesn’t ever want us to know where she is.’

  Leo had come up with a tangled solution to use a friend’s address as a halfway house. It would be easy enough to do. One of them would post Maggie’s letter to Leo’s friend, enclosing a brief reply to it, hoping Maggie wasn’t old enough to know it wasn’t Sadie’s handwriting. A week or so later the letter would arrive back.

  Before they’d had a chance to put that plan into action, though, out of the blue they heard from Sadie. A card arrived, delivered by Father Cavalli. He turned up at the house one day, asking to see Leo.

  Leo filled them all in later. Sadie had rung Father Cavalli. She’d asked him to be a go-between.

  ‘She wants to stay in touch?’

  ‘Not with us. With Maggie.’

  ‘No, Dad.’

  ‘Clementine, she wants to be able to write to Maggie. And Maggie wants to write to her. I want this to happen too. I want to know she’s all right.’

  ‘I don’t want her anywhere near Maggie, ever again. She’s lucky I didn’t press charges.’

  ‘Clem, we don’t know why she did it, but try to understand —’

  ‘There’s nothing to understand. She kidnapped my daughter.’

  ‘She didn’t see it like that.’

  Clementine stood up. ‘There’s no other way to see it. You think I could ever trust her near Maggie again?’

  ‘It’s just a letter, Clementine. And it’s important to Dad. He needs to know she’s all right.’

  Clementine hadn’t been happy about it, but she finally agreed. Leo rang Father Cavalli. The first letter came a week later, sent via the priest’s address, delivered to the Faraday house by the priest himself. It was an ordinary sixth birthday card, with a drawing of six mice in fairy costumes on the front. The note inside was short, just five lines: Dear Maggie, A very Happy Birthday to you! I hope you had a great party. I am having fun too. Lots of love, Sadie xxx

  Maggie was delighted with it. She put it with all the others on the mantelpiece. Clementine didn’t read it. Leo, Juliet, Miranda and Eliza all did, trying to glean more information from the envelope, from the card itself. There was none to be had. No postmark, no address.

  It was Leo who put the card away safely after Maggie’s birthday had passed. It was also Leo who helped Maggie write a reply, and dropped it back up to Father Cavalli, to send on to whatever address Sadie had given him. Dear Sadie, Thank you for the card, Maggie wrote. I had a great birthday. I miss you. Hope to see you soon, love, Maggie xxxxxx

  The cards arrived from Sadie each year. Even after Father Cavalli retired, his successor kept delivering them, and also sending on Maggie’s reply. Leo enclosed a letter each time, passing on messages from Juliet, Miranda and Eliza. Each year Juliet knew Leo hoped Sadie’s card would acknowledge their letters, contain more news about her life, or say she was coming for a visit. They never did.

  Juliet found it hard, especially as the years passed and the awful-ness of that time when Maggie was missing faded. What remained was a gap in the family, an empty space at every meal time, at every Christmas celebration. Juliet read once about an amputee describing his missing limb, how sometimes he woke up and imagined it was still there, that if he were to look down he would see his leg. Sadie’s absence felt like that. That all of this had been a silly joke and she would walk in to the house any moment, as if nothing had happened.

  Juliet had never told her sisters, or Leo, but she had tried to find Sadie many times. At first, she’d called hospitals, worried that Sadie had had a nervous breakdown, that something had happened to make her take Maggie in the first place. The stress of uni exams sparking it, perhaps, until they discovered to their additional shock she hadn’t done a university exam for years. Juliet had rung directory enquiries for every state in Australia. She’d tried the electoral roll in every state as well. Nothing. In recent years she’d regularly done Internet searches. Still nothing. It was as if Sadie had disappeared off the face of the earth. Except for the annual cards and the fact that twice a year, at both of their Christmas celebrations, they would lift their glasses and let Maggie propose a toast to Sadie. ‘To Sadie,’ they’d all echo.

  One more tradition added to the already overflowing Faraday family vault.

  The sun was streaming through the front windows by the time everything was unpacked into the fridge, freezer and cupboards. Juliet went outside into the yard, enjoying the sound of the gravel crunching under her feet, the feel of the sunshine on her face, the light breeze. She’d better enjoy it; the weather in Donegal was contrary at the best of times.

  She leaned against the stone wall, idly picking at the moss growing in the cracks, wondering as she often did whether her mother had ever stood by the wall at that old house up the road, doing this same thing. She wondered what Tessa would think about her July Christmas idea still being celebrated, all these years on.

  Juliet herself had tried to call a halt to the Donegal gatherings three years ago. That awful year, when she and Myles had been doing nothing but fight. She’d had no energy for family. She’d phoned Leo to tell him, and also to ask him to let the others know. There had been uproar, loudest of all from Miranda, of all people.

  ‘What do you mean you’re calling it off? You can’t. It’s our Christmas, not just yours.’

  ‘Then you organise it.’

  ‘But you’re the cook. You do it so well. It would kill Leo. And you know how much Maggie loves it. She’ll have bought all the presents already. J
uliet, how can you be so selfish?’

  That was rich, coming from Miranda, the Queen of Selfishness. The woman who had never done anything in her life if it didn’t suit her plans. Juliet had been very angry about it. If Myles still had the patience to hear her talk about her family, he would have said, ‘It’s water under the bridge, Juliet. Let bygones be bygones.’ But she couldn’t. She could let a skin grow over it, she could try to get on with her life, but these fights and disagreements felt like little tumours, still inside her, festering away.

  She’d gone ahead with the July Christmas that year, of course. Flown to Ireland the week before as usual, spent the whole time cooking, and of course Miranda had breezed in, spent most of the weekend on the phone catching up with old friends in Ireland and the UK, then breezed out again. Juliet had barely had a conversation with her.

  When she brought it up with Leo, she got even more frustrated with his response.

  ‘That’s just what Miranda is like, Juliet, you know that. A flibbertigibbet.’

  ‘Why do we let her get away with it? Year after year after year?’

  ‘Because we just do.’

  ‘What if I started behaving like that? Forgot to do the shopping? Decided I felt like sleeping in rather than cooking?’

  ‘But you wouldn’t, Juliet, that’s the difference. We’ve always been able to rely on you.’

  ‘How do you manage it, Juliet?’ Miranda had drawled the previous year. ‘So effortlessly too.’

  Effortlessly? she had nearly shouted back at her. There was nothing bloody effortless about this. It was nothing but effort. But Miranda had moved away to unpack or phone one of her endless bloody male admirers who filled her perfect bloody life…

  Her phone beeped to alert her to a text message.

  Myles. He was in Glasgow on a business trip.

  All ok?

  Fine, she texted back. No point telling him the truth. He had long ago tired of her family dramas.

  Juliet returned inside, made herself a cup of tea and carried it into the living room. She didn’t sit down, preferring to stand in front of the window, staring out at the water and the sky. The weather had changed dramatically even in the last ten minutes, the blue now covered in a grey haze of mist. She’d seen violent rain storms in the middle of July here, and had spent unexpectedly warm days on the beach in October. She had a longing to stay on beyond Leo and Miranda’s visit this time. Perhaps she would. The business didn’t need her any more. It hardly needed Myles either. It practically ran itself these days. She checked all the weekly reports, of course, attended meetings with their bright-eyed area managers, studied the figures, queried some decisions, but if she and Myles had wanted to – financially, at least – they could have retired several years before. They had more money than they knew what to do with. And it wasn’t as if they needed to keep any tucked away for their children’s education, or to set them up in business, or to give them a lovely nest egg to buy their first home.

  The truth was, of course, that money only protected you from things you expected. You could build a big house against cold weather, buy plenty of food to stop yourself getting hungry, prepare detailed plans for your business. But what good had money been to any of them when the truly sad, unexpected things started happening to the Faradays over the years? The terrible time with Sadie, twenty years ago. Eliza’s accident. The awful events Maggie had been through this year. All that had happened between herself and Myles too. No protection at all. The rooms upstairs that would remain empty this week were testament to that.

  Juliet forced herself away from the window and from that train of thought. The worst was over, surely. All right, this July Christmas would be hard without Maggie, but they had to respect her choice. As they’d had to respect Sadie’s choice to leave the family all those years ago.

  Respect. Understand. Forgive. Were they one and the same thing? She still didn’t know the answer. She didn’t know if she ever would. Not for the first time, she decided to bury her thoughts under a pile of food and housework. She turned away from the view and walked back to the kitchen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  On runway five, gate thirty-three of Singapore’s Changi Airport, Miranda Faraday was buckling herself into her business-class seat and looking with pleasure around the small upstairs cabin. Twelve hours to Heathrow, a quick jaunt across to Athens, a delicious week in an island villa before she flew over to Ireland and God-only-knew what kind of weather. Why hadn’t their mother been born in Tuscany to olive-growing, wine-making Italian parents? She loved Donegal, and she loved staying in Sea View – or Cloud View, as she called it to annoy Juliet – but only in small doses.

  She would enjoy the journey. She always did. Read a bit, watch one film, doze. She had removed all her make-up and applied the rich moisturiser to her lips, the special light cream to her eyelids, the super-strength cream to her face. She was wearing a soft tracksuit and pure cotton socks. A bottle of distilled water was in easy reach. The pre-take-off champagne was the only alcohol she ever drank on a flight. She also knew to eat only one of the meals on offer. There definitely was such a thing as jet lag but it was easy enough to repel if you had enough self-discipline. And that, as she proudly liked to tell her students, was practically her middle name. There didn’t have to be a use-by date for flight attendants. Keep yourself trim, well-groomed and fit, and you could fly for years.

  That had been her intention, at least. Now she had the best of both worlds – six months of the year spent training new attendants in the airline’s training centre in Singapore, two months off, the remaining months spent in charge of first- and business-class cabins on the best flights between Singapore and the Gulf States. Varied, interesting and wonderful for her social life. She had met her past three paramours (she had never liked the term boyfriend, and partners signified something much more long term that she had ever managed) on those flights. Lovers would have done equally well as a term, she supposed, but she liked all that paramour suggested – expensive gifts, romantic dinners, sad but swift endings…

  She took a sip of the champagne, staring out of the window, idly taking in the view of the runways bathed in the hazy, orange tropical light she loved.

  ‘Madam? More champagne?’

  ‘Why, thank you, young man. I don’t mind if I do.’

  ‘It’s all right for some,’ he whispered as he topped up her glass and placed a crisp copy of that day’s International Herald Tribune on her tray table.

  ‘Play your cards right with me and one day all this will be yours,’ she whispered back. The young man serving her had been one of her earliest students and knew her habits well – champagne and newspapers were the start. ‘Full capacity today?’

  ‘Ninety per cent.’ He lowered his voice some more. ‘There’s a spare seat in first class. I can move you across if —’

  ‘I’m fine here.’

  ‘Are you mad? There’s a vacancy in economy too, if you’re that relaxed about where you are.’

  She laughed. ‘Darling, I haven’t turned right when I got on the plane in twenty years and I’m not about to start now.’

  She shut her eyes then. Glen didn’t need his training to tell him that meant the end of the conversation. He turned to greet another passenger with his best white-toothed smile.

  She felt someone approach her seat and half opened an eye to take a look. A businessman, unsurprisingly. About her age, late forties, perhaps a bit older. A quick glance. No wedding ring, though that didn’t mean anything these days. His suit was well cut. He carefully removed his jacket. The steward was there in an instant, offering to hang it up. A gracious thank you. A good sign. He was a man of manners and intelligence. Miranda herself had been at the receiving end of too many patronising thank yous, or no thank you at all, not to mention imperious orders, sleazy pick-up lines or blatant groping.

  If there was ever a job with an image problem, it was that of a flight attendant. Glorified waitresses, trolley dollies, sex-mad men and
women – she’d experienced all the prejudices over the years. If they only knew what went on behind her perfect make-up and wide smile. It was akin to being a psychiatrist sometimes, she thought. She could judge a person’s personality in moments. As the flight lengthened she’d watch all the protective layers fall away. The brusque arrogant businessman who’d fall asleep after one too many brandies and let his guard slip, mouth slack, head lolling, showing his true self. The businesswoman who spent the first three hours of the flight engrossed in paperwork and spreadsheets later found sleeping with a small cuddly toy slipped out of a designer handbag. It was also surprising how many men on flights slept with their hands tucked inside their trousers. A comfort thing, she gathered. Off-putting, though, to say the least.

  The flight attendants on each plane were as varied. Some had joined the airline straight from university. Some were models, actors, performers. Some just wanted to travel and get paid for it. Others, like Miranda, just wanted to escape.

  The social life was what made the job. Miranda had been enjoying herself for years. Planes were like dating clubs in the sky. She had read once that Marilyn Monroe was able to turn her sex appeal on and off at will. Miranda had discovered she could do the same. Some flights she was the consummate flight attendant: professional. But if she was in the mood, if she had a two-day stopover ahead of her or was in need of some attention, it was like flicking a switch on inside of her. As she greeted passengers at the doorway, she would make special eye contact, a flirty remark, linger that little bit longer over a passenger’s boarding pass. Only business-class or first-class passengers, of course. Phone numbers exchanged at the end of the flight, or sometimes even at the beginning. Sometimes more than two or three phone numbers were exchanged. She had never joined the Mile High Club, though – a woman had to have some standards.

  The wages were good, but she realised early on they weren’t good enough for her to be able to afford the jewellery she aspired to wear, the clothes she liked. So it was a charming thing to discover that rich businessmen often liked to give pretty flight attendants expensive gifts in exchange for their good company, and sometimes more than their good company. Rich men also often had houses around the world, and were more than happy to make them available to friends. Rich men away from home also liked to have a beautiful, witty, well-groomed woman join them for dinner, for a night at the theatre, a day at the races – the Hong Kong Derby was Miranda’s personal favourite. It had been fun when it first began all those years ago, and it was fun now. No strings attached.