My Mother's Secret (30 page)

Colette explained about summers at Aranbeg. ‘But when we were kids. It’s different now.’

‘You remain close to Davey’s parents?’

Colette shrugged just as Davey returned with a bottle of Corona. She was careful to accept it with her right hand, keeping the left out of sight.

‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘Thanks again for the brilliant driving earlier, Colette.’

‘It was the car, not me,’ she told him.

‘Funny, I never saw you as a four-by-four sort of person.’

‘Oh? What sort of person am I then?’

‘A Volkswagen Beetle,’ he said. ‘Or maybe a Fiat 500.’

‘Comedy cars,’ she said.

‘Quirky,’ he amended.

‘You think I’m quirky?’ As she spoke, she looked down at the stripy dress and the fluffy slippers and gave a rueful smile.

‘They’re cars with personality,’ said Davey. ‘You have tons of personality, Colette.’

She wished he’d said that years ago.

‘I don’t have a car,’ said Camilla. ‘But if I did, it would be a Leaf.’

‘Environmentally friendly,’ Davey agreed.

‘But not exactly designed for ploughing through flood water,’ said Colette.

‘If more people don’t drive environmentally friendly cars, there will be more floods in the future,’ said Camilla.

‘That’s true,’ said Davey.

He and Camilla began to talk about environmental issues. Colette listened for a moment or two and then, realising that they were becoming more and more engrossed in their own conversation, left them to it.

‘You know what the worst of all this is?’ asked Pascal.

He and Jenny had come downstairs and were alone in the front room. She was standing in front of the sketches she’d done of the children, remembering the feel of the charcoal on the paper, remembering how back then they’d believed she was invincible. She turned from the sketch of Steffie to look at the man she’d always thought of as her husband.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘We’re stuck with that lot till tomorrow,’ said Pascal.

Jenny smiled. She couldn’t help it. Pascal had sounded totally indignant at the idea of interlopers spending the night in his home.

‘We were already expecting a full house,’ she reminded him.

‘But not this full,’ he said. ‘Not nieces and nephews, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends and the unexpected new model.’

‘True.’

‘And they’re all getting sloshed now because they’ve no place to go.’

‘Surely not.’

‘Summer is making cocktails and they’re going down a treat.’

‘Oh well,’ said Jenny. ‘I suppose anyone stranded here needs something to cheer them up. It’s pretty grim.’

‘One day Roisin will learn to ask before she does things.’

‘It wasn’t her fault,’ said Jenny. ‘And it was hugely thoughtful.’

‘Hmm.’

The two of them were silent. The sounds of muted conversation drifted towards them.

‘You know what?’ Jenny stood up straighter and looked at her husband.

‘What?’

‘You’re right. We’re stuck with them. And they’re stuck with us. But the thing is, they came to celebrate. Not to sit around having boring conversations about us and feeling embarrassed and miserable.’

‘Nothing we can do about that now.’

‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be a party, isn’t it? Let’s get in there and turn it into one.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’ve spend enough time crying and sniffing and moping,’ said Jenny. ‘There are things I have to deal with, of course, but I can’t do it all now. I know Steffie is OK. We have guests in the house. The least we can do is look after them.’

Pascal stared at her.

‘So come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go inside and be the perfect host and hostess and insist that they have a good time.’

This time Pascal grinned. ‘OK,’ he said.

But when they walked into the living room, Jenny realised that she was too late. Because the guests were being organised into having a good time already. Roisin had inserted the SingStar disc into the PlayStation and told them that it was time to have some party fun.

‘Oh, good,’ said Daisy, who’d come back downstairs a few minutes earlier, telling Roisin that her brother and sister were asleep and that she was bored. Roisin had expressed surprise that Daisy could possibly be bored, since she usually spent hours chatting to her friends on her smartphone whenever she was alone, but Daisy admitted that she wanted to know what was going on. Roisin realised that it was both unfair and unnecessary to banish her teenage daughter upstairs again, and so Daisy had curled up in one of the living-room chairs.

‘We should divide into teams,’ Roisin said. ‘Write your names on pieces of paper and we’ll draw them.’

‘This is very professional,’ murmured Camilla.

‘It’s Roisin in her element,’ Davey murmured back as he wrote his name. ‘Can you sing?’

‘Not well,’ she replied.

‘It’ll be a competition,’ he told her. ‘Everything with the Sheehans is. So do your best.’

She was startled by the intensity of his voice.

‘Right.’ Roisin put the slips of paper into a bowl and began to call out the teams.

‘I’ve never done SingStar before,’ said Summer, who was on the same team as Carl. ‘It’ll be fun.’

Bernice, who was on the third team, snorted loud enough for Carl to hear.

‘OK, hun,’ said Roisin, who was on the same team as Daisy. ‘You’re up first. Give it socks.’

Daisy got up and gave a very good rendition of Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, which left her with a Superstar score.

‘Excellent,’ said Roisin. ‘Glad you’re on my team. OK, up next …’ she looked at the list, ‘Aunt Sarah.’

‘Oh well, you all know my party piece,’ said Sarah. She threw back her head and belted out ‘I Will Survive’, accompanied by much cheering and whooping by everyone else.

‘She’s robbed my song,’ Bernice muttered to Alivia. ‘It’s the only thing I feel like singing right now.’

‘Of course you’ll survive.’ Alivia squeezed the other girl’s arm. ‘You’re doing great today.’

Bernice said nothing as Alivia took out her mobile and checked it again. Still no response from Dermot to her texts. She didn’t know whether to be annoyed or concerned.

Paul was up next and to everyone’s amusement he opted for ‘I’m Every Woman’, which he sang out of key but with lots of enthusiasm.

‘Full marks for interpretation,’ Roisin assured him as he sat down again. ‘Now you, Camilla.’

Camilla stood up and took the mic gingerly. She cleared her throat a few times and then, as the music blasted out, started to sing Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’. She accompanied it with a selection of athletic dance moves that left everyone looking at her in awed amazement.

‘I thought you said you couldn’t sing?’ said Davey when she’d finished to rapturous applause.

‘You were distracted by the dancing,’ replied Camilla breathlessly. ‘I had to learn that song as part of a team-building exercise at work. It’s the only one I know.’

‘You’re unbelievable.’ He grinned at her.

‘Summer!’ cried Roisin when the applause for Camilla died down. ‘It’s your turn. C’mon, do our team proud.’

Summer beamed as she took hold of the mic. She fluffed out her blond hair, struck a confident pose and then began.

‘Wow,’ whispered Alivia as Summer’s tuneless voice filled the room. ‘Even Paul was better than her. She makes Cameron Diaz sound like Celine Dion.’

‘Don’t.’ Bernice’s shoulders were shaking with laughter. She looked up. Carl’s face was a mask of horror as he watched his date for the night.

Summer’s score was awful but she didn’t care.

‘I know I can’t sing,’ she told them cheerfully. ‘But if I ever get a big break I can release something anyhow. They’ll auto-tune it or whatever and it’ll sound perfect. It’s all about the performance really.’

‘Right.’ Roisin looked grim as she told them that Davey was up next. She’d been counting on Summer to get a good score for the team, especially after Camilla had wowed for the opposition. But Carl’s girlfriend had totally bombed. It was unbelievable that such a terrible sound had come out of her mouth.

‘And now Colette,’ she said when Davey had finished singing ‘New York, New York’.

Colette wasn’t a particularly good singer and usually tried to get out of karaoke nights, but as nobody could be worse than Summer, she got up and grabbed the mic. She’d chosen ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’, and as she sang, she lost herself in the words and skipped around the room, not caring that she was still wearing the pink fluffy slippers. It didn’t matter. Having fun was the most important thing and what was wrong with that? She needed to throw off the shackles of thinking that she was in love with Davey Sheehan and embrace life on her own terms. Which she was going to do. Right now. She was going to have her own walk in the sun.

She bowed low as she finished the song and her happy mood evaporated almost immediately. Because in her singing and jumping and skipping around the room, Camilla’s engagement ring had somehow turned on her finger so that the magnificent diamonds were clearly visible. Using the mic to shield her hand, she turned it around again, hoping that nobody had noticed. But when she looked up, she realised that her hopes had been in vain. Because Davey had. And he was looking at her with an expression of utter disbelief on his face.

Chapter 27

Steffie would have been relieved to know that she was missing out on SingStar. She had Summer’s voice without Summer’s confidence, so she never even got close to sounding good. The last time she’d been forced into joining in, at one of Daisy’s birthday parties, she’d sworn never to get involved again. It was mortifying to sound like a hippo on heat in front of everyone and know they were creased up in hysterical laughter wondering how it was she was so tone deaf when the rest of the family could all keep in tune.

The music that Liam was playing in the flat wasn’t for singing along to. It was mellow lounge music and it was making her feel very chilled as she reviewed the events of the day in her mind. Her initial fury at Jenny had finally begun to dissipate and she was now feeling a certain sympathy for a woman who’d twice found herself in the situation of having an unplanned and unwelcome pregnancy. She remembered Roisin once remarking that it was disconcerting to think that her mother’s first reaction when she thought she was pregnant with her had doubtless been one of unmitigated horror.

‘It’s not a nice feeling,’ Roisin had said, ‘to know that your mother was probably thinking you were the worst thing that had ever happened in her life.’

Steffie had told her not to be silly, that although Jenny must have been shocked, she’d also been happy enough to marry Pascal and become a family and so Roisin had simply hurried the inevitable along. But now Steffie was experiencing her sister’s feelings herself (half-sister, she told herself again) and she wished she’d been more sympathetic and more understanding when Roisin had spoken about it before. Basically, Steffie thought, the only one of us who was born without background drama was Davey. And who knows if they planned him either?

So Steffie allowed herself to feel a smidgen of sympathy for Jenny and her pregnancies, but that was as far as it went because there was no doubt in her mind that her mother should have told her about her biological father years ago. She was also upset that Pascal hadn’t insisted on it. It had been a wonderful gesture on his part to raise her as his own daughter, but the truth was that she wasn’t. She was someone else’s. And she should have been told.

She also finally understood Alivia’s need to meet her own father, despite Lucinda having been so set against it. It was all about knowing who you were, thought Steffie. Where you’d come from. She’d been secure about it before. Now she felt lost.

‘You OK?’ Liam turned to her as her breath escaped in a low sigh. She nodded and told him what she’d been thinking.

‘I can imagine it’s difficult to deal with the fact that everything you thought you knew has changed,’ agreed Liam. ‘But
you
haven’t changed, Steffie. You’re still the same person.’

‘Am I?’ She furrowed her brow. ‘I want to think so, and yet part of me feels different already.’

‘You suddenly know all about sheep farming?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Or nude modelling?’

She gave a faint smile. ‘Well, no, obviously. Thing is, Liam, I’ve always felt a little different from Roisin and Davey. I thought it was because of the age gap between us. Now I can’t help thinking it’s because we really are different.’

‘Don’t overanalyse things,’ said Liam. ‘Of course nature and nurture explain some differences. Like why you’re so devastatingly gorgeous whereas Roisin is … well, not as pretty.’

‘Liam! That’s an awful thing to say.’

‘I’m pointing out a fact, that’s all,’ he said. ‘You’re a really attractive girl, Steffie. And your biological father had to have been good-looking too, given the modelling thing.’

Steffie said nothing.

‘But outside of that,’ Liam said, ‘you’re still the person you always were. Nevertheless, if you want to look for your biological dad, there’s bound to be help you can get from various agencies.’

‘I hadn’t even thought of it,’ she said. She told him about Alivia’s search for her own father and how that had impacted on her relationship with Lucinda.

‘It’s funny how proprietorial we get over people,’ said Liam. ‘We want them to react in the way we want. But that doesn’t always happen. We hurt them and we don’t mean to. They hurt us and they don’t mean to. Yet we end up feeling bad all the same.’

‘Have you had any hurtful experiences?’ asked Steffie.

‘I’m thirty-three years old,’ said Liam. ‘It’d be weird if I hadn’t. But the way I look at it, I’ve just had to get on with my life.’

‘And you’ve made a real success of it.’

‘I’m doing what I want to do,’ he said. ‘Which I reckon is the most important thing of all.’

‘And do you share that with someone special?’ she asked.

‘Not right now,’ he said. ‘There has been from time to time, but when you’re working all the hours God sends, it’s difficult to juggle the relationship thing. You’ll understand that, working for yourself too.’

Steffie nodded, although she’d never really got to the stage where she was working all the hours God sent.