23

‘IT’S A GOOD THING you’re here, Freya. I totally forgot about it until I got her text…’

Cara is rooting in the cupboard, pulling out glass jars of grain and beans. She passes Freya a tall Kilner with a badly rusted clasp. ‘What was I thinking, inviting them? I don’t have time for this…’

Freya opens the jar: a sweet smell reminiscent of sweat. There’s a dried apricot at the bottom, wizened and complexly wrinkled, like a shrunken head. ‘I’d throw out this jar, Cara.’

‘… I wanted to work tomorrow. I really wanted to get to bed and work in the morning – Aha! Duck confit! Is it in date though…? Don’t tell them it’s from a tin, will you?’

‘Relax, Cara, it’s fine. It’ll be fine. Will I make devilled eggs for starter? You’ve loads of eggs. And then you make your main course. You have lentils – simple. Lentils and leek mash and duck. Do you want me to run out to the shops? Ice cream or something for dessert?’

‘Thanks, Freya. I have ice cream. Homemade ice cream. I’ll text Pat to get chocolate and wine. Peig’s asleep, Megan’s down; will you just get the others to bed and I’ll make a start here? What do I do? Just hard-boil the eggs?’

‘Yeah, just boil them for three minutes, then put them in cold water and I’ll deal with them. Make sure you leave me two eggs to make the mayonnaise with… Jem! Denise! Upstairs now it’s time for bed! Jem?’

*

She finds them on the landing. Denise is on her knees, crunching tin foil around one of Jem’s feet.

‘Silver shoes, Mammy.’

‘Magic shoes!’ Denise leans back on her bum and kicks her legs. Her feet are covered in layers of aluminium.

‘Don’t let your mammy see that, Denise. She’ll go spare. Come on you two, in your jammies quick. Put those shoes in your cupboard, Den.’

‘Is it because of the waste, Mammy?’

‘Is what because of the waste?’

‘That Aunty Cara will go spare?’

‘Yes.’

‘Told you, Den. And is it because of ‘Our Planet’ too, Mammy?’

‘Get into your pyjamas you two. I’m going to roll up the rest of the foil now so your mammy doesn’t notice, Den. If you hurry we can have a story.’

‘I want a story with just you, Mammy. No Den. And Grandma.’

‘Not tonight, darling.’

‘Mammmeee!’ calls Den. ‘Jem hurt my feelings!’

‘Oh stop it, Denise, your mammy is busy. Get into your pyjamas or there’ll be no story.’

*

When Jem is tucked in, he says, ‘How much longer, Mammy, before we can go home to Mimi? I don’t mind if her brain is tired. I don’t mind.’

‘In a little while, Jem. In a bit… another few weeks, baby, I think.’

‘When can I see Mimi? I need to tell her something.’

*

Pat is just in when Freya comes downstairs. His shirt and his paint-scabbed trousers are dull with wood dust, and there are parings dangling from his hair. He drops his trousers onto the doormat and steps out of them, begins to unbutton his shirt.

‘Hi Freya. What’s the story, alright?’

‘Hi Pat.’

Cara comes out of the kitchen with a tea towel over her shoulder. She kisses Pat’s cheek and then his mouth. ‘How was work?’

‘It was work.’ He has stripped down to a thick, sleeveless vest and long boxer shorts. He has strong arms, strong legs, two hairless patches at the tops of his thighs, long, frizzed underarm hair of glossy jet-black.

Cara picks up his clothes, opens the front door, and shakes them in the drizzle and wind, before rolling them into a ball.

‘Did you get the chocolate?’

‘Yes, what’s it for?’

‘We have dinner guests.’

‘What? What dinner guests? You didn’t tell me you invited people!’

Cara hugs the bundle of laundry. ‘I know, I forgot, I’m sorry, baby. It’s a pain, I know. It’s a couple whose kid is in Denise’s music school…’

‘I was looking forward to… I wanted an early night. I’ve had a long day. A long and boring day.’

‘I’m sorry, baby.’

‘Are the girls in bed?’

‘I just turned Denise’s light out.’ Freya moves towards them. ‘Megan is asleep. I’ll stick a wash on, Cara, will I?’ She reaches for the clothes. There is an adult smell – clean wood, dust and wet, day-old sweat.

Cara nods, relinquishing the ball of dirty clothes. ‘I’ll run your bath, baby.’

‘Oh, it’s hard for men,’ says Freya softly, a hint of Grandma in her intonation. Cara laughs, picking up the joke. She shakes her head the way Grandma does, ‘Oh it’s very hard for men.’

‘She’s dead right,’ says Pat. ‘Grandma knows a thing or two. You should take a leaf out of her book. Dinny wouldn’t have put up with this, would he? Unexpected guests? Can you imagine?’

‘Poor darling,’ says Cara.

As she leaves for the utility room, Freya sees her sister take Pat’s hands and kiss them. She puts her face into his palm, as though she wants to drink him.

*

The guests have brought a bottle of wine in an unbleached cotton wine bag. The woman pushes it at Cara: ‘It’s organic.’

The husband – soft-featured, a bald head peaked like the tip of an egg – rolls his eyes at Pat. ‘Organic!’ he says. ‘Anything to up the price. Am I right?’

Freya stands in the hall, watching the two couples crowd inside the front door while the husband tells an anecdote about a friend who manages a sugar packaging plant: ‘… I’m telling you, literally the same mound of sugar and they bag it up: so many bags of organic, so many bags of own-brand. What a racket!’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ says the wife. She is pale and pretty, with carefully done blonde hair, enough volumising spray and rouge as to suggest latent ill health. ‘But I like this wine, I have to say.’

‘This is my sister, Freya,’ says Cara. Her voice has lifted a notch above her usual pitch. She is wearing heavy-looking earrings and a square silver pendant on a too-long silver chain, which she keeps touching. ‘She’s staying with us for a while…’

The woman’s name is Gwen. Pat takes her by the elbow. As he turns her towards the lounge, he gives Cara a wink and Freya feels left out of some joke. Her sister’s marriage is a puzzle. Most days, it looks like a work agreement. Until the children are asleep there are things to be done, and the couple bustle about the house, giving each other orders and discussing schedules like friendly colleagues. But sometimes they pass each other in the kitchen, or the hall, and they smile at each other – huge, goofy smiles just for no reason at all.

Pat makes them all very strong cocktails, which the woman refuses. ‘I’m driving. I’ll save myself for a glass of wine.’

At first, no one touches the devilled eggs, but then the husband takes one. ‘Must be decades since I’ve seen a stuffed egg! My mother used to make them for parties.’ They are all eaten up quickly after that.

Over the course of the meal, Pat stealthily tops up the glasses. The blonde lady’s face grows ruddy and she starts to talk very earnestly about her child. She frames her anecdotes as concern, and it takes a few minutes for Freya to realise she is boasting: ‘Some days I just wish she’d run outside and play like a normal little girl, you know? Can I ask you, what’s Denise’s reading speed?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Cara.

‘You should get it checked. Gifted kids need extra support too you know, as much as the slow ones. Well, Ellie reads and reads. She would read a dictionary, honestly. We had her assessed when she was five…’

When they ask what Pat and Cara do, Cara’s body language changes. She begins to move her hand with flourishes, and she shakes her hair about. Freya has never seen her in this light before. ‘We’re artists,’ she says, ‘but you know, we do other things. I illustrate children’s books. Pat does woodwork.’

‘Ha! I finish furniture,’ says Pat, ‘Laura Ashley furniture. I’m a glorified assembly man!’ and he hunches a little as he fills all the glasses.

‘We met at the National College of Art and Design.’ Cara says it like a question. ‘My grandfather taught there for a while, actually. You might have heard of him?’

Pat knocks back glass after glass of wine and leans his head on his hand while Cara talks. His face is blank but for a childish thrust to his lower lip, and a question suddenly twists in Freya’s throat – does he love her sister? Because it seems so clear to her now: some bitterness or resentment there in the clamp of his jaw.

‘Oh, Kearney, Eugene, was that the exhibition we went to last summer…’

‘No, Gwen. That was Bacon.’

‘Oh, Bacon, yes…’

‘Ellie does a sculpture class on a Wednesday, doesn’t she, Gwen?’

‘The woman is brilliant,’ says Gwen, nodding eagerly, ‘but I mean, the standard is mixed. They’ve had to move Ellie up a class already. Her fine motor skills have always been excellent. Sometimes I wonder if I overdid it on the quinoa when I was pregnant with her, you know! I read it was good for fine motor skills, so I ate buckets of quinoa the whole nine months…’

Covering his eyes and sighing as though speaking is a great effort, Pat says, ‘Of course it’s killing the Bolivians.’

For a moment, no one speaks, and it seems as though there might be some collusion to ignore the comment. Then Gwen says, ‘It’s killing the Bolivians? What do you mean? I – I thought it was good for you. That’s what I read?’

‘Well, not quinoa. Quinoa’s not killing them, but aspirational westerners like ourselves, eating up all their staple food. It’s driving the price up. Natives aren’t able to afford it.’

‘Sure. But you can get Fairtrade quinoa,’ says Cara, ‘and they grow it in France too…’

‘Freya,’ says the husband, ‘you never told us what you do.’

‘I’m a children’s entertainer. I do magic shows for kids’ parties.’

‘Very good,’ says the man.

‘I’d say that’s great fun,’ says his wife.

‘And she’s in her last year of law,’ says Cara, ‘at Trinity.’

‘Oh,’ says Gwen, ‘Eugene read law…’

*

Cara has made her ‘go to’ chocolate cake for dessert. It has melted chocolate on the inside, and they have homemade mint ice cream with it. They talk about the dessert all through its consumption and Cara writes the recipe down, assuring them that it’s ‘ridiculously easy’.

In the kitchen, Cara fizzes with busyness; opening the fridge, grinding the coffee beans. Freya matches some chipped little teacups with their saucers and arranges them on a tray. She can’t seem to catch Cara’s eye.

Watching the lovely curves of her sisters’ shoulders, the knuckle where her spine begins, and the way the light catches the fine film of hair on the back of her neck, Freya is suddenly overwhelmed with a desperate love. She hugs her sister around the middle and kisses her cheek, resting her chin on the taut bridge between neck and shoulder, and she can smell her sweet maple-syrup smell. Cara’s body, which usually feels sturdier and more maternal than her own, is stiff and bony under the rough muslin hippy blouse. There is something missing, and it occurs to Freya that her sister is usually pregnant or holding a child.

‘So it was fine in the end,’ says Freya.

‘God, I’m sorry, I know this must be boring for you.’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I’m not used to these people… other parents, you know? I’m not sure how to be.’ There is a vein showing beneath one of Cara’s eyes, a long, fine line curved like the crack of an egg. Cara isn’t pretty anymore. Her eyes are different shapes. When did that happen? Is that how it goes? Will Freya’s summer end just like that, with no warning, or will it wait for her to use it up on love and children?

‘They’re nice,’ says Freya, ‘they like you. It’s fine.’

‘The duck was too salty.’

‘Cara, don’t be silly. It was delicious. And the cake – the cake was SO delicious! The most delicious cake in the world. My favourite.’

‘Okay. Anyway. Let’s get the coffee going. I’ve left poor Pat in there on his own and he’s knackered after work. He’s only fit for bed.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘I – fuck, Freya. I spent the mortgage money. I spent a thousand euros in O’Sullivan’s. I was out of pens and ink and I needed a new board…’

‘It’s easily done. It’s only a grand, Cara, it’s fine.’

‘I’m due money in but my agent hasn’t got it yet. Pat will kill me.’

‘Do you want a loan?’

‘I wasn’t asking for a loan, Freya. I can’t take a loan. You’re my little sister. It’s pathetic.’

‘Don’t be stupid. I have it. I have it in cash. I’ll give you two grand, okay? I’ll give it to you in the morning and you can pay me back whenever, okay? I don’t need it. It’s savings.’

‘Okay.’

‘Does that solve things?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay, so it’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Come on, we better get back out there…’

Pat comes into the kitchen, grinning with his mouth closed.

‘Freya,’ he says, ‘I dare you to ask them if little Ellie is autistic.’

‘Stop it!’ says Cara, filling the cafetière, and ‘someone go out there. We can’t leave them on their own.’

Pat holds his wife by each shoulder. He rubs deep into her spine with his thumb, and plants a small kiss on the back of her neck. ‘Okay?’ he says. She nods, her features realign.

‘Just reminding you we have cream in the fridge. For the coffee.’

‘Go back out there,’ she says. ‘We can’t leave them on their own.’

*

Things seem easier when they come back in. They are playing music: some underrated Mexican–American musician with an Irish cult following, who Pat and the nice woman both know all about, and they are chatting excitedly. Freya sets the tray down on the coffee table – three half beer barrels that Pat has sanded and varnished and bound in steamed wood. Cara smiles apologetically at them all. ‘Now,’ she says, ‘coffee.’

‘So, Freya, do you live here during term time too, or on campus or what?’

‘Oh,’ says Freya, ‘it’s complicated. I actually—I live with our grandmother. Or I did, until recently.’

‘She had a fall,’ says Cara, ‘and she was in hospital for six weeks.’

‘Your grandmother?’ says Eugene.

His wife purses her lips and nods. ‘That’s always the way, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘That’s how it starts – a fall.’

‘So, while she’s there, our aunt gives Freya this typed letter, signed by our grandma, saying she wants her out of the house.’

‘Oh.’ The couple look at each other sidelong. ‘That sounds complicated,’ says Eugene.

Freya is already regretting the conversation. She shrugs, ‘Well, it is and it isn’t…’

‘It’s difficult,’ says Cara. She tugs the big pendant from side to side, and the chain presses into her neck. ‘Every time I visit she asks me where Freya is, she wants to know when she’ll be home. And Jem – that’s Freya’s little boy. She wants to know where he is.’

‘Oh.’ Gwen is interested now. ‘So she doesn’t remember writing it or what?’

‘You have a little boy?’ says Eugene, a note of admiration or horror. Freya nods, ‘Jem.’

‘Oh no, she didn’t write it,’ says Cara. ‘It was our aunt or our mother, we think. She signed it but she was on a lot of medication in hospital and she has no memory of signing it or knowing anything about it – I mean she really wasn’t with it. Anyway, she’s home now and she’s getting better. Our mother is living there with her, but I’d say she’ll be moving back to her own house soon – our mother will. There are tenants in her house but they’ll be out soon. We’re just waiting for her to move back to her house, and then Freya will move back in. It’ll be fine.’

‘We don’t want to rock the boat,’ says Freya. ‘I don’t want a big showdown in front of our grandma, you know… she’s quite fragile, after her fall.’

‘Always the way,’ says Gwen. ‘After a certain age a fall changes everything.’

‘So you said your own mother made her sign this thing, you think?’ says Eugene.

‘Yes.’ Cara’s face turns red. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘Our grandparents raised us,’ explains Freya. ‘Our mother is… she’s a baddy. She has personality disorders and stuff.’

‘Munchausen by proxy,’ says Cara, and Gwen’s face grows tight with discomfort.

‘Narcissistic personality disorder,’ says Freya. ‘At least, that’s what one analyst told her she had.’

‘So she fired her!’ adds Cara. She tries to laugh but no one joins her.

Pat rubs his face with the whole of his hand, takes a gulp from his cup and says, ‘Lovely coffee, baby.’ Cara smiles, a brittle, grateful little movement of her lips, and half nods. She turns to Eugene: ‘So where did you do law?’ Gwen’s face lights up, and Eugene starts giving his credentials. Freya has an impulse to touch his head. It would be satisfying in a way she can’t put her finger on, like holding a golf ball or a sea-smoothed pebble. She had a teddy bear as a child, with a silky label on it that she used to twiddle her finger in. That is what it would be like to touch the smooth, domed head. Now Cara is explaining how she finds the time to work.

‘But I’ve found recently, you know – well, we read them a story every night, and then Den reads to herself in bed for a bit – I think books are so important, don’t you? But I’ve found that when the kids are all in bed I run myself a bath and I always intend to read in it but I can’t – I’m too tired. I don’t read anymore, I’ve only just noticed it. We go to all this effort to get the kids into books and the result is there’s no energy left to read ourselves! So, you know, I mean. I said to Pat, what are we preparing them for? What example are we setting?’ Her voice rises, thinning, and a panic starts in Freya… She can’t help her sister out of this, wind her back up and hold her tight.

‘But parents are like teachers, I suppose!’ Her shrillness makes Freya squirm. ‘Those who can’t do… we teach our kids to do the things we know are good for them, we dedicate our lives to it, but in doing so we…’

Pat puts his hand on Cara’s knee. ‘But you paint still, baby – what are you on about?’

‘We don’t read,’ says Cara. ‘We teach them to read so that they can have a richer life, but as a result of all this we no longer read ourselves… I mean, I don’t even read the paper anymore.’

Freya looks at her knees. Cara never read the papers anyway. She can remember Grandad giving out to her about it.

Pat laughs. ‘Well. We’re only lousy humans!’

Then he unlocks a drawer that he’s made in the beer barrels, and takes out a tin of tobacco and a little wooden box, and some cigarette papers. The couple look shocked but neither Pat nor Cara seem to notice. Licking the cigarette papers, he opens the tin.

‘Do you smoke a bit?’ he asks the man, and this time the entire head flushes. He nods like a teenager in the bike sheds. ‘Yeah, not so much these days but…’

‘I’ll drive,’ says Gwen, who seems to share her husband’s alarm, but nods to him, sanctioning his participation. Pat’s face has taken on an expression of mirth and mockery. When the joint is rolled, Cara gives an artificial sigh and says, ‘This will be the one big perk of weaning Peig. No need to pump and dump.’

‘Oh,’ says the woman, nodding slowly and smiling and peeking at the weed out of the corner of her eye, as though the twists of grass were some irresistible sexual image that she doesn’t want to be caught looking at. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Oh, you know, express and then dump the milk… It probably wouldn’t do any harm… I mean the tobacco is Fairtrade organic and the weed is locally grown – I wouldn’t buy it otherwise. I wouldn’t support that industry, you know… But obviously if I’m feeding, I pump and dump four hours later. Just to be sure.’

*

Freya is relieved when Jem calls down the stairs for her. He says his cheek is too hot, so she opens the little window that faces out onto the silent drive, and she lies beside him long after he’s fallen back to sleep. The couples’ voices rise up through the house, settling like smoke in this little room. There is a short silence before the long goodbyes in the hallway, the click of the front door.

As the guests move outside, the sounds become suddenly crisper, as though they have emerged from a fog – the clip of Gwen’s heels, the beep of their car unlocking.

‘He’s not as bad as she is…’ says Eugene.

‘Shush.’

‘… he’s alright. Poor bastard.’