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‘Cold? No.’ Nola took the rug and spread it across them. ‘It’s just… that letter. It felt as if…’ She shivered.
‘As if he was still here?’ Iris smiled.
‘I don’t know, exactly,’ Nola said, and a small tear ran down her cheek. ‘It just all seems like such a waste, doesn’t it?’ She looked into Georgie’s eyes and then towards Iris.
‘It was too long ago for it to make any difference now.’ Georgie heard her own voice much surer than she actually felt.
‘I’m sure he wanted it to make all the difference in the world to us,’ Iris said quietly, and her voice cracked. ‘Right up to the end, he just wanted us to be there for each other.’
‘It’s too much.’ Nola stared ahead at the fire.
‘I’ve often thought about you both – you know that…’ Iris said softly. Georgie assumed she was tipsy.
Georgie kept her eyes on the glass of gin in her hand. She was suddenly uncomfortable sitting here on the sofa next to her sisters. She wanted to jump up and fold herself into the armchair, but somehow doing so felt almost disloyal to her father’s wishes, so instead she sat rigidly on the sofa with a woollen rug over her knees, and felt completely at odds with herself.
‘He’s not asking for very much, just that we look out for each other… that maybe we could become…’ Iris’s words faded away.
‘Friends?’ Nola asked, and there was no missing the cynicism in her tone.
‘Maybe, eventually…’ Iris’s voice trailed off again, and Georgie knew they were all thinking the same thing: no matter how much they wanted to do the right thing by their father’s wishes, being friends was more than any of them could ever realistically imagine.
‘Or maybe just sisters.’ Nola sounded wistful, perhaps the gin was stronger than they realised. Wordlessly, she raised her glass, and after a moment’s hesitation, Iris met it with hers, Georgie held her glass to theirs and a tight silence stretched between them for a moment. Still, it felt as if it would be churlish not to toast, even if it was the one promise they couldn’t keep.
*
They sat for another hour, sipping their drinks in what Nola supposed might have been companionable silence if it wasn’t for the fact that she, for one, was counting down the time until she could escape up to the sanctuary of her room. She wasn’t used to gin and was tipsy before she knew it, but then an unexpected sense of loneliness began to creep in around the edges of her thoughts. She wondered if the others felt the same.
The fire was roaring up the grate and the only sounds in the house were the once-familiar cranks and rattles of old pipes and worn floorboards. She listened as outside, somewhere in the distance, the seagulls cried their last for the night. Maybe she was imagining it, but she thought she heard the tide turning and the rocks on the shore crackle against each other as the current dragged around them. She sank back into the deep sofa. It was strangely anchoring, sitting here, and she snuggled further beneath the rug that stretched across all three of them. She almost felt as if Ballycove and this house could pull her back. Perhaps it was the gin, but instead of racing upstairs and packing her bags as fast as she could, she found herself wondering if perhaps there was something more she needed to do before she cut her ties forever.
‘It seems wrong to say it, now Dad is buried, but it feels a little bit like it used to, years ago, being home,’ Iris said softly.
‘That’s the gin talking, for sure.’ Nola laughed at the other two. They were each on their fourth glass and there was no mistaking the stuff was potent. Nola knew that too much of it could make her let her guard down and whatever else was going to come out of this, that was the last thing she wanted to happen. She put her glass down.
‘Do you remember when we were young and Mammy would throw her big Christmas parties?’ Iris said wistfully.
‘We’d spend days trying to figure out where we could hide so we didn’t have to miss out on any of the fun.’ Georgie shook her head.
‘I remember that,’ Nola said. ‘I remember both of you stuffing me into one of those cupboards in the hall – I thought I’d never get out.’ It was the vaguest memory.
‘Mammy nearly lost her mind trying to find you,’ Iris said and then she started to laugh, looking across at Georgie. ‘And we forgot we’d put you in there.’
‘You’d fallen fast asleep,’ Georgie said shaking her head. She was laughing so much, there were tears rolling from her eyes. ‘When you finally crawled out, even you had probably forgotten we’d put you in there.’
‘You were a great kid.’ Iris looked across with near affection in her eyes for a brief moment. ‘You never told a soul it was us and we all got to stay up as late I can ever remember for one of those soirees just because Mammy felt so bad about having lost you.’ She threw her hands up in the air. ‘God, we were terrible. How on earth did they put up with us?’
‘We all snuggled up in your bed afterwards, Iris,’ Nola said. It was all coming back to her now. Even then, Iris had always been the mammy of the three girls and Nola wondered now why on earth she’d never had a family of her own.
‘God, I’d almost completely forgotten about that,’ whispered Georgie, looking down at the blanket thrown across them.
It actually felt as if they could be back there again. And suddenly, Nola was brought back to that feeling of warmth and camaraderie they’d shared together – the sisterhood. She’d thought it would never end. She had been such a silly kid. Because of course it had ended, and when she really needed them most, they’d turned their backs on her.
‘Do you remember Aiden Barry?’ Iris asked Georgie.
‘There’s a blast from the past.’ Georgie shook her head. Aiden had been Georgie’s graduation date. They’d been great friends, but nothing more. ‘He was at the graveside today. I wonder whatever happened to lead him back here.’
‘Quite a bit, as it turns out. He’s been all round the world and he came back to Ballycove a couple of years ago to take over the family farm.’
‘But that was a tiny place. He’ll never make a living at that, surely?’
