4
Savannah
Savannah drove along the coast road listening to the mindfulness podcast as she zipped the car past houses with names that conjured up the Italian riviera.
‘Breathe in and hold the sacred moment, that pause where one can let mindfulness in,’ went the soft voice of the woman in the podcast.
Savannah was breathing the way she always did, which was shallowly and high in her chest. Actual deep breathing hurt and after that time last year when she’d done a yoga class and found out that she’d been shallow breathing her whole life, she’d tried to breathe properly.
But it felt wrong. The yoga teacher – who was young and sweet – had been lovely about it, said lots of people didn’t breathe properly.
But Savannah had felt judged, she’d left early, had never gone back.
She was so useless, she couldn’t even breathe properly.
So now she listened to mindfulness podcasts and breathing meditations, all the while trying to learn what she was doing wrong. Because Savannah was clearly doing everything wrong: it was the only conclusion she could come to.
The road curved. The white house with the overflow of jacaranda flowers was next and Savannah felt a hint of the tension leave her chest.
She’d walked along these roads to school, down to the shops with her sisters, along to the beach on summer days. It was home, familiar.
Eboli Road was set between Killiney and Dalkey, a winding road set into the cliff where some of the country’s most expensive real estate lived. There were tiny cottages and giant mansions beside vast modern houses and bijou mews houses. The residents were people who’d lived there for decades and people who’d just arrived with a fleet of modern cars and moved into houses that were giant carcasses of Italian marble.
Savannah kept driving.
After the low stone wall where you could climb over it and down – perilously – to the rocks and the sea, was Savannah’s and Eden’s best friend, Rachel’s old home: The Dolphin. A rackety old house that clung to the cliff and housed Rachel’s granny on the top floor, The Dolphin was where they’d hidden out as kids.
Rachel had moved to Australia and was currently something big in TV in Sydney. Rachel was clever: she’d see what Savannah’s life really was, wouldn’t she? Savannah inhaled deeply. She had to stop thinking about random people coming into her world and seeing the truth. It was her deepest fantasy, the way she’d lived in a fantasy world as a child, a world she could disappear into when there were rowdy guests or arguments. In her fantasy world, a rescuer always plucked her from the scary bits of life.
As an adult, she saw that nobody could pluck you from your life; nobody rescued you. She had to stop hoping for someone to see what was happening.
Nobody would. There was no knight on a white horse: only her, battling away every day.
As she drove, she forgot about the mindfulness podcast and thought about the interview she’d just done for her business and about the wedding on Saturday.
Calum wanted her to wear the diamonds he’d given her for their tenth anniversary at her parents’ wedding on Saturday.
‘Non-conflict diamonds,’ he told people proudly.
Calum was very keen on being seen to do the right thing when it came to jewellery. When it came to everything, actually.
Savannah’s engagement ring was a giant Ceylon sapphire sourced from an ethical mine and handcrafted by artisanal jewellers in Barcelona. It suited her long fingers and apart from her watch, the pale-blue stone was the only thing she wore every day.
Every time she did an interview about her business, Velvet Beauty, someone mentioned the ring.
‘Oh, it’s stunning! How many carats?’ they asked.
Savannah always lied and said she didn’t know, although she did. Knowing the carat size of the gem on her finger was not relatable.
When you ran a business, being relatable was very important.
Savannah, who’d been so truthful at school except when it came to talking about her home life – ‘Oh, it’s all fine,’ she’d say to the guidance teacher who was head of the sixth-year class when the Sorrento was being mentioned in the gossip part of the newspapers in conjunction with ‘things not going well’ – had learned to lie marvellously.
She’d swiftly pass on the size and possible cost of the ring and breathlessly tell the interviewers that Calum chose it specially.
Actually, she made sure interviewers noticed it because it gave her something else to talk about.
Having a kitchen-table perfume business grow into the big company that candle-and-perfume business Velvet Beauty had become was not enough, it seemed, if you were a woman. You needed a ‘back story’. Savannah didn’t want ten-year-old Clary to be it. She refused point blank to put her daughter in lifestyle pics of the family, which annoyed magazine and newspaper people. They liked the whole family in their pictures.
