Always and Forever (22 page)

Cleo ignored him and looked at her father, who was stil busy with the other champagne bottle. It was as if he was waiting to see how Cleo would react before he spoke.

Cleo wil ed him to tel her it was al a mistake, that they hadn’t real y made the decision to sel her home. But he kept silent. ‘There’s not quite as much money as we hoped there might be,’ Barney said quickly, ‘not as much as if the place wasn’t mortgaged to the hilt, but it’s a good move financial y. For al of us.’ He sneaked a pleased smile at Sondra, who looked as if she might pass out with joy, dreaming no doubt of what she could buy with her share of the money.

‘Dad?’ Cleo turned to her father again.

For the first time, he looked into her eyes. ‘It’s true, Cleo,’

he said quietly. ‘We’ve been losing so much money that we can’t keep the hotel in business. It was going to bankrupt us. This was the only option and we didn’t real y have a choice. Beggars can’t be choosers.’

‘There’s always a choice,’ Cleo whispered.

‘I’m tired,’ he said, speaking to her as if they were the only two people in the room. ‘Your mother and I are tired and we want a bit of peace for ourselves.’

‘You didn’t have to sel the hotel for that,’ Cleo said. ‘I could have run it for you.’ She didn’t add: if only you’d have faith in me, but that’s what she meant.

‘You run it?’ demanded Jason, blustering the way he did when there was conflict. ‘Get real, Cleo. You’re only out of col ege. What hope would you have had to turn this place around? Anyway, the deal’s done. This is the best move for al of us. The developer wants to build ten big houses here.

It was always going to happen. I reckon this land is too valuable to keep a hotel on. We did the right thing.’

‘We could al see the writing on the wal , Cleo,’ Barney said.

‘Except you with your pie-in-the-sky ideas. We’re realists.

It’s better that you were away for it al . We al knew you’d never understand. You can’t be emotional about these things, sis.’ Cleo realised her brothers were speaking the truth. It was a done deal. The Wil ow had been sold. Just like that.

The only way she could cope with the moment was to remove herself from it mental y. Think of another place, she told herself, a happy place, or a simple word and say it over and over again. But she’d never been the meditating type and her mind was too ful , too chaotic. It was horrible to sit there in silence with the family watching her anguish.

Her happy place was under the apple tree and her simple word was home. Al these would now be taken away so that Barney and Sondra could drive an even bigger car and impress the neighbours, and so that Jason could admit to the world at large that he didn’t real y enjoy working and would far rather sit at home with the satel ite remote in one fist and a beer in the other. Bitterness wel ed up in her like bile. ‘Why did you decide al of this while I was away?’ she asked, so harshly that everyone except Sondra, who was staring into the distance smiling smugly, looked at her in surprise. ‘I said I’d be back this evening; we could have talked about it.’

‘We’ve been talking about it for a long time,’ Harry Malin said slowly. ‘That’s al we do - talk. While the bank are never off the phone to me and I lurch from week to week trying to pay the staff.’

‘Dad, what do you mean, we’ve been talking about it for a long time? Where was I when al this “we” stuff was going on?’ Cleo demanded, her face red. ‘Where was I when you were unilateral y making decisions that affect me? Did nobody think to ask me what I think or why I spent years slaving away at hotel management col ege so you could sel the hotel out from under me? You could have told me when the accountant was here. That must have been what you were talking about!’

‘Calm down, little sis,’ attempted Barney.

Cleo rounded on him like a tigress, eyes blazing. ‘Don’t

“little sis” me, you slacker.’

‘How dare you cal him that?’ Sondra’s mind wrenched itself away from the purchase of shiny expensive things and she tried to stare down her sister-in-law. ‘He’s a hard worker and he has the sense to see that this place is like a mil stone that never made any money til now.’

‘Money!’ Cleo spat the word out. ‘That’s al you think about, Sondra. Money and more money. You’d throw away a lifetime’s work so you can shop til you drop and never have to work for it. That’s al you’re good for and that’s al Barney’s any good for either. Parasites, the pair of you.’

She was frightening in her rage and her father looked aghast. ‘Don’t talk to your brother like that,’ begged Sheila.

‘Please, love. It’s not worth fighting over. It’s only a business. We can’t let it destroy us. And it would have kil ed us al if we’d had to close because the bank cal ed the mortgage in. Can you see us coping if everyone knew it had been repossessed? It would be a nightmare. This way is better, surely?’

‘You don’t understand, do you, Mum?’ Cleo said. ‘Dad does, although he won’t say it. This is more than a hotel to me - it’s something else, it’s in my blood.’

‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ snapped Sondra. ‘You only chose hotel management because you knew there was an easy job here for you when you left col ege. If you’d real y wanted to work you wouldn’t have turned down that perfectly good job in Donegal so you could stay here in the lap of luxury and be the boss’s daughter. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re like, madam. My poor sister Tamara sees what you’re like too. Lording it over us because we don’t have degrees.’ Al the pent-up bitterness was coming out now.

‘I turned that job down so I could be here and change things,’ Cleo said, not even bothering to reply to Sondra’s ridiculous claims. ‘I wanted to make a difference. Do you honestly think I couldn’t see how the place was being run into the ground, Dad?’ She faced her father and the fire had gone out of her face, to be replaced by defeat. ‘It kil ed me to love you and look up to you and yet see you do it wrong.’

Harry could only look at her sadly.

‘I love you,’ she said, now speaking only to him. ‘I respect you and I wanted you to respect me but you haven’t. If you had, you’d have had faith in me to bring this place round but you didn’t. I’m just the kid in the family,’ she added bitterly.

‘And you’re acting like one now,’ Jason snapped.

‘If being childish is tel ing the truth as you see it, then yes, I’m childish,’ Cleo said.

‘Listen, Cleo, if you don’t like it, get the hel out of here,’

yel ed Barney.

Cleo ignored him and looked at her parents. ‘Is that what you want?’ she asked quietly.

Her father merely looked jittery, as he always did during family rows.

‘We want you to cop onto yourself,’ Barney said, obviously feeling braver now that his father didn’t appear to be kowtowing to his bloody sister.

Cleo could feel the balance of her life lying like a tiny bead on the palm of her hand. Tilting gently in one direction, she knew that her parents needed to get away and to let go.

They’d worked hard and it would have been lovely if their three children could have taken over the hotel. If she tilted the other way, she could see Barney and Jason were to blame for so much of what had gone wrong. If they’d joined with Cleo and made it work, together they could have saved the hotel. But she was afraid that her brothers were too lazy, too stupid, too keen for the quick fix without any of the hard work. It was time to restore the balance. Her dream was shattered but the deed was done and they had to move on.

Cleo might have had the fire of her grandmother but she had something else that Evelyn Malin had always lacked: she had enormous loyalty. She had

to support Mum and Dad. I hate what you’ve done but I’l support you. The words were in her head, en route to her mouth, when Sondra jumped in to fan the flames.

‘Are you going to stay, Cleo, and get your share of the money, or stand by your convictions and walk off?’ she demanded. The entire Malin family looked at her and then at Cleo, who waited for someone to tel Sondra to back off, that this wasn’t the way they did things and that Cleo had just had a huge shock. Loyalty had to work two ways.

‘We’l work it out,’ she thought her mother might say, before ordering someone to put on the kettle and find Jacqui’s secret stash of shortbread biscuits. And Dad would hug her and say he was sorry, but how did she feel about helping him set up his B & B? And at least they’d sold to a local developer, instead of people like Roth Hotels. Cleo could never have coped with that. Even her brothers would mutter that there was no need for it to come to this and the Malin temper was a terrible thing, and would she just have a glass of champagne and calm down? But nobody said a word.

Up to that point, there had been hope. The awful silence of her family saying nothing to comfort or support her dashed that hope. Nobody wanted to comfort or support Cleo. They were al looking after number one.

‘Stand by my convictions, of course,’ Cleo said firmly, determined that nobody would know how terribly hurt she felt. ‘I never thought you’d al do something so awful behind my back. I thought I was a part of this family but I can see that I’m not. So the only thing I can do is leave.’ She was shaking with emotion although she tried to hide it. ‘I’d hate to stay here and watch them tear our home apart. I couldn’t face it. You’re al making a big mistake.’

When Trish got the phone cal five minutes after the big row, she was dumbfounded. Her own family had always fought like cats and dogs, but Cleo’s family were different. Her parents genuinely seemed to like peace and serenity and did their best to quel any minor wars. If there was any rift, it had to be because Sondra, Barney or Jason had run amok and upset Cleo. ‘No,’ said Cleo sadly. ‘It wasn’t them.’ Yes, they’d added to it, but it wasn’t just them. She couldn’t bring herself to tel her best friend that the person who’d real y betrayed her was her dad. The person she’d watched and idolised and admired al her life, the person she’d wanted to impress by graduating at the top of her class. The person who’d decided to sel the family hotel, sel her birthright. The person who hadn’t stood up for her when he knew she was hurting.

That was too painful to tel even her closest friend. ‘And you’re not going back on what you said?’ asked Trish, stil unable to believe al this. ‘You’re not going back?’ ‘No, I’m not,’ said Cleo.

‘Imagine, thrown out of the family home like some eighteenth century heiress who shamed her family by having a passionate fling with a gorgeous farmer’s son who’s promised to another and beneath her station,’ joked Trish, trying to make light of the situation.

‘Nobody’s throwing me out. I’m leaving - or I wil as soon as that taxi gets here,’ Cleo said, sounding like her old self for a minute.

‘There isn’t another room in our house but you could kip on my bedroom floor,’ Trish said, trying to be practical.

‘Thanks, but no. I would not be able to face another bus today. Could you phone Eileen for me and ask if I can stay with her for a few days?’ Cleo said. ‘I can’t explain it again or I’l cry.’ Eileen lived in a smal apartment complex in Carrickwel and it boasted a cupboard that the estate agent described as a second bedroom but that she had never managed to let out to anybody.

‘Wel , it’s only Wednesday, so I can’t bunk off work but I’l be down on Friday night and we’l go out and go wild,’ Trish promised. ‘It won’t solve anything but it’l be fun.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said Cleo mechanical y.

‘Come on, Cleo,’ Trish tried to cheer her up. ‘It’l al blow over. They’l come round.’

Cleo’s voice was steady. ‘They might but I won’t.’

The taxi driver had dropped off and picked up at the Wil ow many times in his career in Carrickwel , but it was the first time he’d had to shove bin bags stuffed ful of clothes into the cab. The girl he was picking up, one of the Malin family, he knew, was a tal , long-legged Amazonian creature who could have dragged al seven bags into the car herself, but she looked so woebegone that he wanted to help her.

When the last bag was squashed in the car, he asked ‘Is that it?’ with an attempt at levity, having decided that he wouldn’t try the time-honoured ‘cheer up, it may never happen’ approach. Clearly, it had happened.

‘That’s it.’ She got into the passenger seat. ‘Drive. Please,’

she added.

‘You moving out?’ he said as they rattled off down the drive.

Potholes galore, he thought. They’d need to do something about the drive or it’d take the bottom out of somebody’s car. ‘Yes,’ said Cleo, concentrating on not looking back, like Lot’s wife.

It was a funny way to be moving out, the taxi man thought and he said as much. ‘No suitcase in your house, then, eh, seeing as you’re already in a hotel?’

The old Cleo would have smiled her beaming smile at him and perhaps laughed, saying, ‘Yes, they had loads but I was in a rush, you know …’

The new improved Cleo, the hardened version whom she hoped would never, ever trust anyone as long as she lived, said: ‘I’m al ergic to suitcases, actual y. That’s why I’m getting out of the business. It’s hard to work in hotels when you can’t handle a suitcase.’

‘Wel , no,’ said the taxi man, ‘undoubtedly that would be a hard one. Although I knew a girl once worked in a hairdresser’s and couldn’t be within fifty foot of perming solution. Al ergic to work, she was.’

‘That’s me too,’ Cleo agreed. ‘Al ergic to work.’

Eileen took the arrival of Cleo and seven bin bags ful of belongings quite wel .

‘Trish said it was a row,’ Eileen said, opening the white door to her smal flat wide to al ow the bin bags to come in.

Cleo, who suddenly found she couldn’t be trusted to speak now she was in the company of a friend, nodded. ‘Double mocha chocolate-chip ice cream or Mo’s chocolate and vanil a pudding?’ Eileen asked.

Cleo’s bottom lip trembled.

‘Both, I think,’ Eileen said. ‘Right so.’

In a town like Carrickwel , the news didn’t take long to spread. By lunchtime the next day, the story of Cleo’s departure had mysteriously linked up with the news of the big developer who wanted to buy the Wil ow. By half-four, the latest story was that Cleo Malin had run off into the night after tel ing her family she was pregnant and the family were sel ing up to dodgy people from abroad who wanted to set up a lap-dancing club … ‘And the father of the child has abandoned her?’ asked Mrs Maguire in shock when she heard the gossip in the newsagent’s as she queued for the evening paper. She liked Cleo, she was a nice girl. But stil , she must have had no luck at al to get herself entangled with a man who’d dump her as soon as she was pregnant.