by Cathy Kelly
Ten minutes later, Junior and his wife appeared, obviously having rushed down because Antoinette didn’t like being kept waiting.
“Hello, everyone!” said Leesa excitedly, going over and giving Antoinette a big hug.
To Suki’s intense surprise, Antoinette seemed pleased to see her daughter-in-law. There was a definite show of warmth as Leesa embraced her. Now this Suki couldn’t figure out. She felt a frisson of irritation: Antoinette was the type of woman who would never approve of any woman her darling son was married to. Suki had always assumed that was why Antoinette had hated her.
And Leesa was precisely the sort of woman she’d have expected Antoinette to look down her patrician nose at. Even though Leesa had all the right connections, came from old money and had no aspirations for herself beyond taking care of Junior, she was entirely brainless and invariably had to be kept away from reporters at fund-raisers in case she said the wrong thing.
Yet Antoinette seemed to like her. Crossly, Suki drained her sherry and wished it was a double vodka tonic.
Junior was looking well. He was a tall, well-built man, tanned from lots of outdoor pursuits, and he had the same mane of leonine hair as his father. The difference was that Kyle Senior looked like the wily old lion that he was, while Junior was a slower, duller version. Not that this seemed to have harmed his inexorable rise in the direction of the Republican presidential nomination.
“Good evening, Suki,” he said, giving her a dutiful peck on the cheek. She could feel the frost in the air.
“Hello, Suki,” said Leesa, holding out a hand for Suki to shake, as if she were a duchess.
Suki felt herself getting angrier.
She could have been the wife who’d get Junior into the White House, not this idiot. Instead, she was being made to feel like a total outsider—and it hurt.
As usual, Antoinette didn’t beat around the bush but got straight to the subject everyone else would have preferred to avoid.
“We must discuss this wretched book,” she said. “I’ve had four telephone calls this week from friends who’ve been approached by his researchers. They’re all saying the same thing: Redmond Suarez wants to hear ‘the real story’ of the Richardsons.”
She paused while Mrs. Lang came in with drinks for Leesa and Junior. Suki was outraged to see that they were getting cocktails. Leesa’s drink looked suspiciously like a martini. Nobody had offered her a martini.
“I think we need someone we can trust to meet him and find out what he knows,” said Leesa.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” snapped Suki. “That’s like saying, We’ve got something to hide, so tell us what you have found out.”
Antoinette interrupted. “I think Leesa has a point,” she said. “Not one of us, not one of the family. But we need someone who is loyal to us to meet with this Suarez.” She spat the name out. “Kyle Senior has some ideas on how to do this . . .” She coughed and took a sip of the water on the small table beside her.
Leesa got up and sat beside her mother-in-law, patting her gently on the arm.
“Don’t get all worked up, Antoinette, my dear. You know what the doctors told you, you’ve got to take care of your heart.”
“What doctors?” demanded Suki.
Junior looked lazily at her over the top of his highball glass. “Mother had a minor heart attack last month,” he said.
“You should have told me!” said Suki, shocked.
“I wanted to keep it very private,” Antoinette announced. “Keep it in the family—”
“I was family once,” Suki said quietly. She stared at her former mother-in-law and ex-husband. Both of them knew why she was no longer a part of the family, and she needed their help to keep Redmond Suarez out of her life too.
Perhaps they needed reminding of the past.
“Immediate family,” Junior said coldly.
Suki knew then that she hadn’t been imagining the polar blast she’d felt when he’d said hello. She was truly on the outside now, it seemed. They’d obviously decided that she had sunk so far down the totem pole that what she knew couldn’t hurt them.
Well, she’d get him back. He knew what had happened, he had to know that it hadn’t really been her fault. And if he’d given her a decent divorce settlement, then she wouldn’t need to scrape to make a living. She bet bloody Leesa had never done a day’s work in her life.
“Suki, you mustn’t be upset,” soothed Leesa, sensing the anger raging inside her but misunderstanding the reason. “Mother didn’t want anyone to know, and the easiest way to keep it quiet was to tell nobody, that’s all.”
Suki forced herself to smile. “How are you now, Antoinette?” she asked, as politely as she could. “Was there any damage to your heart?”
That was a joke—Antoinette had a heart of cold, black stone, so how could that be damaged? Suki had a sudden vision of herself leaking the news of Antoinette’s heart attack to the papers. She could see the headline now: Antoinette Richardson Has a Heart—Doctors Astonished.
Antoinette talked about how awful it had all been and how she was so grateful to Junior and—she smiled up at her doting daughter-in-law—to darling Leesa for being there for her. Jacqueline and Anastasia, Junior’s younger sisters, had both been away at a wedding in Europe when it happened, so Antoinette had had to rely upon Leesa for so much.
Jacqueline and Anastasia were always away. Both had married rich men and spent their time trailing around the world on endless holidays with friends. Suki didn’t know what they had to take holidays from, since neither of them had worked a day in their lives.
When Mrs. Lang came back into the room to check on drinks, Suki ordered a martini.
“Make a strong one, Mrs. Lang,” she muttered grimly. “Make it a Kyle Senior Special.”
That was code for double measures of everything. Suki had never asked for such a thing in the Richardsons’ house before—that was the prerogative of Kyle Senior—but she didn’t feel like playing the dutiful ex-daughter-in-law right now. A martini with a powerful kick was what she needed.
When dinner was ready, the four of them made their way to the dining room and sat in state at the huge dining-room table.
The food was good, but there wasn’t enough wine. Suki emptied her glass quickly and had to wait an age before anyone filled it up. They were on to a cheese and fruit course before the subject of the unauthorized biography was raised again.
“Father says that nobody”—Kyle stared hard at Suki—“nobody is to cooperate with this man.”
Suki glared back at him. “I have no intention of cooperating, and I’m insulted at the implication that I might,” she snapped. “It’s not as if I don’t know where all the bodies are buried in this family, but I have never spoken about any of that, to anyone.” She paused purposefully and looked Antoinette straight in the eye. There was a silence and then Antoinette intervened.
“Of course nobody is suggesting that you would do something like that, Suki,” she said. “Kyle is merely reiterating his father’s wishes. Nobody in this room would do anything to upset the family, we know that. But other people, other people don’t have the same loyalty. Loyalty is something that is sadly missing today. I’ve often said that. When I was young, loyalty was one of the most respected virtues, but not today, sadly.”
“My grandpa always says that loyalty is so important,” echoed Leesa virtuously.
“I believe in loyalty,” said Suki, looking from Antoinette to Kyle. “As long as people are loyal to me in return.”
She’d had enough. She couldn’t understand why they’d summoned her, unless it was to intimidate her. She got to her feet. “You must forgive me, everyone, I am overtired and I think I’ll go to bed.”
Unable to endure one more minute with them, she said good night and went to her room, where she sat on the bed and tried not to cry.
The Richardsons were so much more powerful than she was. Compared to them, she was a nobody. If the truth came out, they could easily twist it so tha
t she came out the villainess. One way or another, the family would come up smelling of roses, while her name would be mud.
11
Stanley the estate agent had no gush left. There was, he had learned, no point. People either had the money or they hadn’t. And if they hadn’t, no amount of gushing and going into raptures over beautiful club fenders, stone fireplaces and plaster moldings that had once been painted delicately by hand with gold leaf was going to make a difference. No, the sort of person with the money to buy and restore somewhere like Avalon House would not be susceptible to having their head turned by a eulogizing estate agent.
That certainly seemed to be the case where Cashel Reilly was concerned. An alpha male with knobs on, in Stan’s estimation. He’d arrived from Dublin in a Maserati Grand: a sleek, dolphin-gray, quite subtle-looking Maserati, but a Maserati nonetheless. Everything he wore, everything about him, reeked of money, power . . . and precisely zero patience with not getting his own way.
“Have you been here before?” said Stan, cautiously, wanting to figure out which way the ground lay. If what he’d heard was true, and Cashel Reilly really had grown up in the area, perhaps he’d lived here at some stage. It wasn’t as if there were any other houses in the town that fitted the profile . . . But no, the Powers had lived here. Stanley was a blow-in and didn’t know all the families properly. Perhaps Mr. Reilly had visited a childhood friend who’d lived here. But looking at Cashel’s stony face, Stan decided it would be inadvisable to ask.
“Yes, I’ve been here before,” said Cashel.
Clearly a man who never used more words than necessary.
“I won’t do the spiel then,” said Stan.
“No,” agreed Cashel.
Stan used to love showing these old Irish houses in the days when people actually had money to buy them. It gave him such a buzz, pointing out all the original features to some delirious client with money to burn and an urge to spend it on historically correct plastering and historically correct painting of fiddly ceiling moldings. They’d thrown money at these houses, thrown it. Now, you couldn’t shift this type of place for love nor money. Most clients didn’t have the wherewithal, and the ones that did weren’t about to spend it on some run-down pile without the benefit of central heating or modern plumbing.
Stan took a risk.
“Since you’ve been here before, do you want to walk around yourself while I wait in the hall?”
He was rewarded with the glimmer of a smile.
“Good plan,” said Cashel. “I know my way around.”
There wasn’t a lot of furniture left in the old house, but Stan found a shabby-looking kitchen chair and pulled it out to the hall, sat down and began to go through his text messages. This Reilly fellow certainly seemed like the sort of bloke who had enough money to buy Avalon House, but whether he would or he wouldn’t, who could tell?
Having long since learned that what would be would be, Stan applied himself to his phone:
YES, LOVE, HOME FOR DINNER, FISH PIE WOULD BE GREAT, XX STAN
What astonished Cashel most was how different the house felt. As a child, it had been like some magical palace, home to the amazing Power family, Avalon’s gentry. Whether they were broke or not was immaterial: they could trace their ancestors back hundreds of years. Most people in Avalon would be lucky if they could go back three generations. The Reilly clan did not have a particularly long or noble family tree. When he was a teenager, that had upset him. Mainly because, by then, he had got to know the Powers and was aware of their long heritage. And felt slightly diminished by it.
Suki and Tess could boast a lineage of noble earls and kings. He and Riach were descended from a man who lived his life in the bookmaker’s shop or the pub.
Now, he was proud of his rootlessness. Proud of the lack of rich relatives. Everything he had achieved had been a product of his own hard work. There had been no family money to help him on his way.
Whenever he was invited to give talks to groups of youngsters on how he’d got where he was today, he’d conclude by telling them:
“It’s not who you are that matters. It’s what you do with who you are. The blood running through your veins is the only blood that matters. When you go out into the world, you have the chance to leave the past behind.”
It was strange how the past seemed so close now as he began his tour of Avalon House.
He started off in the ground-floor drawing room, purely because it was one of the rooms he’d never seen as a child. The left side of the house had always been off limits, according to his mother and Tess. They were the grand rooms, relics of a bygone age when there had been parties and balls up here on the hill. He’d imagined glamorous titled ladies and gentlemen wandering around in evening dress, listening to scratchy gramophones and talking about hunting and estates in the colonies—the way he’d seen people behave at parties in the movies. To a boy whose mother had to clean other people’s houses to keep food on the table, it had seemed an alien and mysterious world.
Stalking past Stan the estate agent, sitting engrossed in his phone, he made his way to the kitchen. That was the room he’d always liked best; a big room, built in the days when many people had lived here, gentry and servants. The huge ovens remained, but the hooks from which saucepans and serving cloches had hung were all gone. Sold, he wondered, or stolen?
Being in here brought it all back though, especially seeing that familiar table, so big it was more like a refectory table from a monastery. He ran his hands over it, feeling the wood, willing some electrifying jolt of memory to leap up into his fingers, but there was nothing. After school, he and Tess used to sit here doing their homework while his mother cooked on the big gas stove. She didn’t know how to cook the sort of food that Tess’s father was used to, so she stuck to the food she knew: peasant food, like bacon and cabbage, barley and lamb shank stew. The food that Cashel had grown up on.
He used to help Tess with her homework. He was five years older and it was fun to help her; she was so sweet, so grateful. Suki, her older sister, never helped in any way. Not that Suki was ever big on homework, even when it was her own. She had made a name for herself in school, a name for being wild, untamed, not caring. She hung around with the most dangerous kids, the ones who had left school and were serving apprenticeships or working with their fathers. She didn’t want to be tied to people her own age, oh no. Suki Power had always wanted to be different.
He walked into the big scullery at the back, where the eggs used to be kept in the water glass to keep them fresh. The meat safe was kept there, a big, green-painted metal cage where piles of meat would sit on the shelves. Every time the dogs came past, they’d put their paws up and whimper and someone would have to slap them down. It was here in the scullery, the least romantic spot in the whole place, that he’d first kissed Tess.
It had been so innocent and unexpected. Because she was younger, he’d never seen her in that way. He’d loved her, but it had been the sort of love you feel for a kid sister; they got on so well, teased each other, laughed, joked.
And then came that summer day.
He’d been away, working in Dublin. When he arrived home, the house was empty, so he’d headed up to the Powers’ hoping to find his mother. Instead, he’d found Tess. She’d turned eighteen while he’d been gone. The skinny little kid with the lanky legs, the questioning eyes and the hair tied back in an untidy ponytail had vanished. In her place was a new Tess: taller, with a woman’s curves, and the face of a woman, with beautiful rounded lips. His mother had been nowhere to be seen, so he’d stood in the scullery with Tess, feeling strangely dumbstruck in her presence.
She behaved as if nothing had changed between them, chatting happily about leaving school and about her plans to go to college. “You know,” she said, laughing, “same old same old. And what about you? What’s it like in the big city? Come on, tell all—are there any fabulous girlfriends on the scene? Your mother will be delirious! She wants you to settle down, you know, Ca
shel. She wants the patter of tiny feet. Have you found your perfect woman up there in the city?”
Cashel remembered how he’d looked at Tess in that moment and thought with utter astonishment that she was the woman, how could he have not seen this before? Maybe it was the distance that had made it obvious. She’d grown up, he’d been away: suddenly he’d come back to this new woman.
“No,” he muttered, “no women.”
“Oh, go on,” she said. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
“No really,” he said. “What if I was saving myself for someone?”
“Someone in Avalon?” she said. “Tell me—who? Not Suki, please.”
He’d roared with laughter at that. No, not Suki. It was no secret that Cashel and Suki didn’t get on. They squabbled like two fighting cats whenever they were in the same room.
“There might be a girl,” he’d said idly, moving closer to her, wondering if she could see it in his face, in his eyes. He didn’t want to shock her, but surely she must feel it too, that electricity in the air?
She’d turned away from him, opening the meat safe to take out a leg of lamb for dinner. It looked heavy. He’d gone to help her, naturally. What else would he do? And their fingers had touched. That was when she felt it too, and she let go of the wrapped meat so that he was left holding it alone. Tess stared at him and said his name, although he couldn’t hear her; he just saw her mouth the words as if she’d been saying them into her mirror for years.
Cashel.
And he’d leaned forward and placed a kiss on her forehead because he didn’t want to frighten her, after all.
It was crazy to buy a house because of a scullery, but he wasn’t buying it because of that. No, Cashel Reilly hadn’t become as rich and powerful as he was today by doing things on a whim. Instead, he told himself he wanted to buy the old De Paor house as a declaration, a declaration that said I wasn’t good enough for the daughter of this house nineteen years ago when she rejected me, but now I’ve returned, and this house that the Powers lost, that has been gone from the family all these years, I can come back and buy it, just like that. With one phone call, I can have the money here.
