Always and Forever (49 page)

‘I don’t mind coming in too, honestly,’ Daisy said again.

‘Thanks but I ought to do it on my own,’ Cleo said grateful y.

‘It’s fine. Barney doesn’t bite. Sondra sort of does but I can handle her, more or less. That was the problem al along, me not knowing how to deal with her and thinking that Mum and Dad liked her better than me. Very childish,’ Cleo sighed, thinking of herself, Sondra and the stand-up rows they used to have. In one way, it was a miracle the Malin family hadn’t had a huge fal ing-out years ago. Only Harry’s determination never to have arguments had kept things on an even keel - but perhaps that argument free atmosphere had been artificial, Cleo reflected. If there had been normal rows, then the air would have been cleared. ‘I wish there were lessons at school on adulthood,’ Daisy said thoughtful y. ‘Instead of Geography and Home Economics, we could have had Parents: A Guide, or Train Your Boyfriend in Three Months.’

‘Clever idea,’ agreed Cleo. ‘How about How to Speak Other People’s Languages - so you understand what they’re saying and don’t end up with constant misunderstandings?’

‘Would that be a two-year syl abus?’ asked Daisy in amusement. Cleo shook her head. ‘At least a twenty-year course.’

‘Put me down for the whole course,’ Daisy said. ‘I cannot speak man-speak at al .’

‘Bluntness works,’ said Cleo firmly. ‘Tel them what you think and let them deal with it.’

‘I’m not much good at saying what I think to men,’ Daisy muttered. ‘And neither are they. Alex would say one thing and he’d mean another entirely. He was never honest. Even at the very end, he couldn’t be honest. In female-speak, having sex means something. It’s this glorious fusion of two people who want to be as close as humanly possible and make a commitment that’s precious and intimate. In male-speak, sex means: I’ve left you and have another girlfriend with a baby on the way but hey, we’re alone. Nobody wil have to know, so, why don’t we have sex? Or maybe that was just Alex.’

Cleo laughed so much, her hastily applied mascara began to run. ‘It’s true,’ Daisy went on. ‘Isn’t that what men are always rabbiting on about - that women say one thing and mean another? They’re worse.’

‘You’ve got a point,’ Cleo said, thinking of Trish and her latest man disaster involving a guy named Lucas who’d dumped her by text after six ‘You are incredible, Trish. I’ve never met anyone like you in my life!’ dates. ‘For two whole weeks, he sent fifteen text messages a night, and then suddenly, he’s gone. Has his phone been stolen? Has he severed a limb? No, he was busy. “Like 2 end it. Sorry,” he texted. Two hundred and ten text messages professing huge interest, and then he’s sorry but it’s over. He hid behind messages. Why bother? What’s wrong with picking up the phone and saying sorry, but no thanks?’ Cleo demanded, rage at people like Tyler bloody Roth spil ing out onto the whole of the male race.

She’d been brutal y honest with Nat about their relationship and it had been incredibly painful for him, but she’d had the courage to do it. Not like awful Lucas, who’d been dating poor Trish.

But she’d walked out on Tyler without saying goodbye …

That was different, Cleo told herself firmly.

‘I’m going to be so truthful in future, I’m going to be a pain,’

Daisy insisted. ‘I’m going to say what I think al the time.’

‘Won’t that be a problem in the shop?’ asked Cleo. ‘If a woman tries on a horrible outfit, do you have to say it’s nice so you won’t offend her?’

‘I’d never lie to make a sale,’ Daisy said horrified. ‘That’s how we have customers who come back again and again.

If they look hideous in something, I’l tel them or Mary wil .

Mary’s good at it, actual y,’ she reflected. ‘She can get them out of the hideous outfit and into a fabulous one in about thirty seconds flat. And she whisks the bad one out of the dressing room and gets someone to hide it.’

‘I’l have to come in some day and try on clothes, but only if you promise to be honest with me.’

‘Unflinchingly,’ Daisy agreed.

‘And I don’t have much money,’ Cleo added.

‘Staff discount,’ Daisy said. ‘Shop owner’s prerogative.’

Cleo gave Daisy a quick hug before she got out of the car.

‘You’re coming to that yogalates class on Thursday, right?

Now I’m staff at Cloud’s Hil , I’ve got to plug the classes.

And it’s great.’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Daisy. ‘I was never very good at sports at school. I don’t want to be the only one there who can’t wrap their leg round the back of their head.

Classes can be so humiliating when you’re bigger,’ she admitted. ‘Plus, I’m so unfit and wil be al stiff for ages afterwards.’

‘There’s no contortionism involved,’ Cleo promised. ‘It’s an easy-peasy class. Now Ashtanga - that’s one where you can’t walk for a week afterwards. But you’l love this.

Honest.’

Sondra and Barney lived on a smal street near the cathedral, one of the better preserved redbrick terraces in Carrickwel . It was at the end of the terrace, a slightly larger detached redbrick house, bought, Cleo knew, from a generous injection of funds from her parents.

Just as wel she wasn’t bitter about money, she thought, as she opened the black gate and walked up the path. Her brothers had both got huge payouts over the years from the hotel and she hadn’t. It would be easy to feel outraged and put upon by this unfair division of the family spoils but she never had. Money caused so many arguments. There was one wel -known Carrickwel family who’d split into two outraged factions over money left in a wil , with the ones who felt they’d been neglected loudly tel ing everyone how their relatives had conned them out of their inheritance. The other side ostentatiously crossed the street whenever they spotted any of the other gang. Cleo had always thought they were mad to fal out over a few pounds in an old woman’s wil .

She wouldn’t make the same mistake because she had every! intention of making her own fortune by running her own hotel,! Unfortunately, the hotel she’d be running couldn’t be the Wil ow, and she’d probably feel sorry al her life for that. You couldn’t grow up in a place, love it with every ounce of your being, and not feel devastated when it was taken away.

But she wouldn’t let resentment hold her back. What had Leah said? ‘Every obstacle is a learning opportunity.” Cleo had been so struck by this that she’d written it down. Leah was always saying things that deserved to be written down.

And Leah was dead right. Cleo had learned a lot in the past few months, and she’d use that knowledge to build up her own hotel. It would be hers and hers alone, so that nobody could take it away from her. Ever.

She rang the doorbel , noticing that the front of the house could do with some work. Neither her brother nor sister-in-law seemed to realise that heather bushes could actual y die and that their withered remains did not enhance any doorstep. No answer. Cleo almost regretted not phoning ahead but she hadn’t wanted to give Barney the chance to wriggle out of seeing her. She rang again, thinking that she’d go to Jason’s office next. Her brothers were going to tel her exactly what sort of stupid game they were playing.

Then she saw a shape through the opaque glass of the door. The shape shuffled closer, the door opened, and a woman said ‘Yes?’ in irritated tones.

It was Sondra, except that Cleo found it hard to equate her normal y polished sister-in-law with this tired-looking, vastly pregnant woman. Sondra’s once-shimmering blonde mane now sported two inches of brown regrowth and she didn’t have the usual inch of slap applied.

It was hard to know which of them was more surprised at the sight of the other.

‘Cleo!’ Sondra gasped.

‘Sondra, hi,’ replied Cleo. ‘Er … how’s the pregnancy going?’ ‘Aw, as you can see,’ Sondra said, ‘it’s not what I expected.

Radiant, healthy skin and thicker hair … they’re lying! I’m sick and hot and my back’s gone. Come in,’ she growled, turning and shuffling gingerly back down the hal , leaving Cleo to shut the front door. ‘Water retention as wel . My grandmother’s ankles are thinner than mine now. I can’t even sit down long enough in the salon to get my hair done.

Look at my roots! And - what are you doing here?’ she asked abruptly.

‘I came to see you and Barney.’ They’d reached the kitchen. It was ages since Cleo had been in this house. She remembered her first visit when the whole family had gone to admire the newly-marrieds’ lovely home, and Cleo had felt grim as she looked at the large flat-screen television and the expensive stereo system, knowing that these were funded by the family business. At the time she’d said something smart about how it was a very expensive house for two people starting out in life. ‘Would you prefer your brother to live in a hovel?’ her mother had demanded hotly.

Cleo felt ashamed of what she’d said now. It had been bitchy. The kitchen had improved a lot since those early days and Cleo was surprised to find it looked quite cosy with lots of feminine touches. Pretty cushions on the pine kitchen chairs, china ornaments of bal erinas on a walnut whatnot in one corner, and lots of other very un-Sondra-ish touches, Cleo thought. There were even fril ed red checked curtains bil owing at the windows. ‘Wil I make you tea?’

Cleo asked, seeing as Sondra had made her way to an armchair piled high with cushions and was settling herself in.

‘The pot’s in the dishwasher and the teabags are in the cupboard by the sink,’ Sondra ordered.

Some things didn’t change.

Sondra put her feet up on a stool, took charge of the remote control and redirected her gaze towards the smal television on the counter. Ricki Lake was on, exhorting an audience of irate women to say what they thought about an unattractive man who’d just described his devastated wife as ‘a big fat woman’

live on TV. Cleo wondered where Ricki got her guests.

Howl dumb would a man have to be to go in front of a hostile, mainly’

female, television audience and say that?

‘Idiot,’ muttered Sondra. ‘Can you believe this stuff? Ricki wil soon sort him out. It’s not as if he’s an oil painting. I love Ricki. Yesterday she had this woman on who was going out with four men at the same time. It was amazing …’ Cleo made a pot of tea while Sondra talked. She knew how Sondra liked her tea: she’d made enough cups for her in the kitchen in the Wil ow. She found butter shortbread biscuits in a tin and put them on a plate. The whole kitchen was remarkably tidy, she realised. Sondra obviously wasn’t the undomesticated creature Cleo had assumed she was.

Either that, or Barney was tidying up, and as Cleo knew her brother was al ergic to housework, this seemed unlikely.

Tea made, she carried it to the table and pul ed up a stool beside her sister-in-law. ‘Being pregnant’s not agreeing with you, then?’ she said. ‘No. I have to pee every twenty minutes, I can’t eat anything or I get heartburn and look at my face with red veins, I’m an eyesore!’

Cleo had to laugh. She’d never seen this side of Sondra before. ‘You’re not,’ she said.

‘Mm, easy for you to say,’ Sondra grumbled.

The man on the Ricki Lake show was taking a battering from al comers, and the two women sat in companionable silence, watching the show, drinking their tea and eating biscuits. Sondra ate six.

Cleo reflected that if she’d eaten six in the old days, Sondra would have made some spiky remark about the connection between biscuits and unlovable love handles. And Cleo would have declared that she’d prefer love handles than spindly flanks like a greyhound. They’d been as bad as each other, she realised. Had she demonised Sondra - or had Sondra demonised her? They chatted in the ad breaks. Tamara of the no-smiling receptionist fame was back working in the beauty salon. ‘She’s happier there. She never real y took to the hotel business.’ Cleo held her tongue.

Jason had a new girlfriend. Liz. ‘Sweet,’ Sondra pronounced her. ‘Not interested in her looks.’ Once, that would have been the ultimate Sondra put-down. ‘She wouldn’t fit into my pregnancy jeans, never mind my normal ones.’ Sondra looked miserably down at herself. ‘Suppose I’l never fit into my normal ones again.’ She sighed. ‘Liz is good for Jason. She gets him out of the house. You know what he was like for sitting in on his own at night playing computer games. She gets him out al the time. He was mad to buy a new car too and Liz said that just because he’d made a bit of money from the hotel, there was no need to go mad. She’s very sensible …’ Sondra paused at the taboo subject. The Wil ow.

‘That’s why I’m here,’ Cleo said easily.

‘To give out stink to us al again?’

‘No. To build bridges. Although before the bridge gets built, I’d love to know why Barney and Jason didn’t bother getting in touch with me the way Mum and Dad asked them to?’

Even in front of this new, improved Sondra, Cleo couldn’t help but add a little bite to her voice.

‘It’s your own fault, Cleo,’ said Sondra wearily. ‘You make them feel so stupid, you know. You go on about how you know what’s right for the hotel and they’re a pair of idiots who know nothing. It’s hurtful and I don’t think you understand that.’ ‘What do you mean?’

Sondra reached for another biscuit. ‘Ah, come on, now.

You’re always banging on about what you learned in col ege and your degree. Your father never stops singing your praises: “Cleo this”, and “Cleo that”. Of course that’s going to have an effect on your brothers. Neither of them went to col ege. Barney has a complex about it, you know.

He says our baby’s going to third level education no matter what.’

‘I don’t bang on about my degree,’ said Cleo, wounded.

‘And

I’d never try to make Jason and Barney feel stupid. They used to laugh at me for working so hard at school!’ she protested. She remembered as a child when the three siblings were doing homework, Barney and Jason had always struggled with theirs. Cleo got top marks at everything and had kept some treasured copy books as mementoes. Her brothers hadn’t been able to wait to leave school before ceremonial y burning their books in the hotel incinerator.

It was because of them, in a way, that Cleo knew she’d never felt that women were in any way lesser than men. She was younger than Barney and Jason, yet much smarter.