Always and Forever

Cleo couldn’t say it. She couldn’t say they’d close down.

‘Or else we’ll see the profits dive,’ she added lamely.

‘Cleo, we’ve got twenty covers for dinner tonight,’ Sheila Malin added. ‘That’s hardly bad for a week night.’

Everyone but Cleo smiled at this clear proof of the hotel’s success.

‘Make that twenty-two covers. Or even twenty-three.’ Sondra patted her belly happily.

‘You don’t have any steak, Jacqui?’ called Barney. ‘I’m ravenous.’

‘Chef does not have time to whip up private meals for you, Barney,’ Cleo snapped at her brother. ‘You’ve been up here four times in the past week for dinner. Can neither of you cook?’

‘I’m pregnant,’ Sondra said, looking daggers at her sister-in-law. ‘Cooking makes me sick. I don’t know why they call it morning sickness, when it’s all-day sickness.’

‘Lots of women have to work when they’re pregnant and they can’t afford to give up their jobs at the drop of a hat because their husband’s family business will keep doling out money to support them,’ Cleo said, taking the gloves off. She knew that her parents supplemented Barney’s income with handouts. Handouts that Barney felt were entirely his due.

‘It’s a loan,’ snarled Sondra.

‘Four loans in the past two years?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘It’s my business when the hotel profits are being siphoned off into your pockets.’

‘Cleo.’ There was a warning in her father’s tone but neither Cleo nor Sondra took heed.

‘You could be contributing something if you were still working on reception, Sondra,’ Cleo went on. ‘We all know that Tamara is hopeless. She spends the whole time doing her nails.’

‘How dare you talk about my sister like that?’ shrieked Sondra.

‘Don’t, please,’ Sheila begged her daughter.

‘Yeah, who do you think you are, Cleo?’ Barney said, remembering his husbandly duty. ‘Apologise.’

Cleo was just about to say that she had no intention of apologising because every word she’d said was true, when Harry interrupted. ‘Yes, apologise, Cleo.’

Stunned, she spun round to look at her father. ‘For telling the truth?’ she demanded.

‘We don’t have big rows in this family, Cleo,’ Harry went on. ‘That gets nobody anywhere. Please apologise to Sondra.’

Cleo felt betrayed. Her father rarely interfered in squabbles and it was hardly a family secret that she and Sondra didn’t get on. They were grown-ups; they were entitled not to get on if they didn’t want to. She loved and respected her father but he wasn’t always right. All she’d done was tell the truth and she was being punished.

Although she knew why: her father hated rows and tried to avoid conflict at all costs. His mother had been what he euphemistically called ‘fiery’ and Harry had grown up watching his parents face each other like bullfighters, circling in rage, screaming insults several times a week. A person could have too much plate-throwing in their life, he used to say. Cleo knew she’d inherited her grandmother’s passion – although not her harsh tongue. She would never hurt anyone with a rash word – she knew better than that, no matter how passionately she felt about something. Her grandmother’s way was not the right way to do things.

‘You’re right, Dad,’ she said calmly now. ‘I went about it the wrong way. I’m sorry for talking about Tamara like that,’ she said to Sondra. But not sorry for the other parts. ‘That wasn’t fair. I’m going out for a walk.’ And she got up to go.

Her father muttered something about going into the office for a few moments, and he left too, by a different door.

Cleo went and sat where she’d always gone when she was wildly annoyed but trying to hide it. Down at the bottom of the garden, behind the orchard wall, on the cracked stone seat under the apple tree. The bark of the tree was coated with silver and there were no acid-green buds appearing. The tree was dying from neglect. Nobody in the Willow knew the first thing about trees and the men who worked on the garden had their hands full sorting out the front in the limited time available.

Some of the hotel’s brides had found this secluded spot over the years and had been photographed there, just the bride and the groom, smiling under the apple tree. For that reason alone, the tree should have been taken care of but nobody had listened to Cleo when she said it. They never did. And they probably never would, Cleo realised with a jolt.

She knew she’d changed from a tomboyish kid, but to Mum, Dad, Jason and Barney, she was still the baby of the family.

Idly, she picked a bit of bark off the tree. Several beetles fell out, shocked at losing their home. Feeling like a murderer, Cleo tried to replace the bark but it wouldn’t stick.

‘Sorry, boys,’ she said to the beetles who’d made a rapid exit on the stony ground at her feet.

They’d lost their home and the Malins would lose their home too.

She took the piece of newspaper from her jeans pocket and unfolded it for the nth time. Nat had seen it in a trade paper and had sent it to her. He’d understood what it meant.

‘Roth Hotels Expansion Plans’ ran the headline. The article reported how the vast international chain of Roth Hotels had decided to turn their attention to the Irish and UK markets. Not city hotels, the article went on to say, but some of their hugely successful country resorts complete with golf, health club and riding facilities. Locations mentioned included the eastern part of Ireland. Cleo felt sick to the pit of her stomach when she thought about it.

If a Roth Hotel opened up in Carrickwell, it would sound the death knell to the Willow.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_d936c401-a9d5-5e8f-bb60-e5a0cd809e59)

Daisy Farrell had thought that tidying out her wardrobe was the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon when Alex was away in London for the weekend working. But the task had palled somewhat as the day dragged on. Five o’clock and dusk arrived at the same gloomy moment, and every single item of clothing Daisy owned was still piled on the bedroom floor in their normally immaculate apartment, in so many tottering piles. All black, of course. Despite the fashion bibles screeching that red or pink or white were the new black, Daisy knew – like every fashionista worth her salt – that black would always be the new black.

Black made every lump and bump disappear and turned slender into skinny. Who needed bulimia when you had black?

She had so much stuff, she reflected, wishing she’d never started. How was it that a woman whose very job was picking clothes for other people – she was a buyer for Carrickwell’s chicest designer shop, Georgia’s Tiara – seemed to have so many fashion mistakes in her own wardrobe?

‘This will have to go,’ Daisy decided, holding up a tweedy skirt that had never quite suited her. ‘And this.’ Drapey chiffon shirts had never been her style, yet she loved them. They’d sold buckets of them in the shop, though. Daisy’s style might waver when it came to dressing herself, but her instinct was spot on when it came to her job.

‘How do you do it?’ asked people, fascinated at how she knew the shop’s customers would buy the clothes she bought at the fashion fairs six months in advance of stocking them.

‘You pick clothes in January and then when summer comes, you hope they’re in fashion and that women here buy them?’ was the usual question when Daisy explained what being the fashion buyer for Georgia’s Tiara meant. ‘How do you know they’ll like them?’

‘I don’t,’ Daisy would say pleasantly. ‘I’ve been doing it for years and it’s a combination of experience, skill and, well…you’ve got to have an eye for it.’

‘Ah.’ That answer pleased most of the crowd because an eye was the same thing as luck: you either had it or you didn’t. They could not be blamed for not having an eye, and therefore not having the apparent good fortune of Daisy Farrell. A nice apartment in the restored old mill in the centre of Carrickwell, a lovely red sporty car, two decent holidays a year, not to mention all that flying to fashion fairs in Germany and London, having champagne in club class, and a man like Alex Kenny. Some women had all the luck.

‘Don’t tell them that it’s just down to having an eye for fashion. You make it sound too simple,’ Alex chided. ‘Tell them it’s bloody hard work and there’s no guarantee you’ll sell a single thing you buy.’

Alex worked in investment banking in Dublin city, a job where it was mandatory to blow your own trumpet. Even after fourteen years with Daisy, Alex still couldn’t understand her natural reticence. She was brilliant at what she did – what was wrong with telling people? And Daisy, safe in the love of the one person in the world who made her feel good about herself, laughed and said that being a fashion buyer was impossible to explain to the uninitiated. It was like wearing Prada and looking effortlessly cool, so effortlessly cool that nobody would ever guess all the hard work that went into the whole outfit.

Besides, Daisy, like all people who doubted their worth, had a horror of boring other people. She felt she’d bore everyone rigid if she told them about the years of following fashion from the sidelines and of how she’d tried to make clothes from odd scraps of fabric almost before she was old enough to sew. Daisy might have been blessed with an eye for fashion, but her lengthy apprenticeship had sharpened it.

‘It’s a female thing,’ she added. ‘Women don’t like showing off.’

‘It’s a Daisy thing,’ Alex replied. ‘My office is full of women who have no qualms about telling people how talented they are.’

‘Only because they’re trying to impress you,’ Daisy laughed. And it was true. At thirty-six, Alex still had the physique of the college rower he’d once been. Long and lean, he looked good in his office suits, even better out of them, and his glossy wolf’s pelt hair and strong, intelligent face meant that women noticed him. One of the many, many things Daisy loved about him was that Alex didn’t notice them back.

It never occurred to her that he might ever have to worry about men noticing her. Daisy had no illusions about her own beauty. A person didn’t grow up overhearing their mother call them an ugly duckling, like Daisy’s mother did, without drawing their own conclusions. But she had style, fabulous shoes, and Alex, the man she’d adored since their first meeting in a dingy college pub a lifetime ago.