‘Will Oliver mind you going away?’ Lou asked suddenly, as if the thought had only just occurred.
‘No,’ Toni said shortly.
‘I don’t want to disrupt your life,’ Lou said. ‘Just because mine has gone all ...’
At this, Toni felt a bitter laugh rise in her throat – as if her life could be disrupted any more than it already was – but she squashed it. Lou would ask questions and she wasn’t ready to talk, yet. Because if she did, she might cry, and Toni Cooper didn’t do tears. Not now, not ever.
‘Toni?’
‘Don’t worry about me, Lou,’ Toni said firmly. She wanted to get away more than anything else in the world. This was her chance.
Toni turned the key in the ignition, and turned to look at her sister.
‘Where to?’
‘Can we talk to Aunt Gloria, first?’ said Lou. ‘If Dad wasn’t my dad ... I have to know the truth.’
‘Sure,’ Toni agreed – anything to avoid thinking about her own life – and pulled out onto the road.
‘I don’t know what I’ll do, if it’s true,’ Lou said quietly. ‘My whole life, a lie.’
Toni didn’t answer. She didn’t know either.
Whitehaven was quiet, with none of the coffee shops open yet, so Toni pulled into 24-Hour-Snacks and got two coffees, bog-standard, out-of-the-machine things with no fancy milk or fluffing up for cappuccinos.
‘I wish I didn’t like nice coffee,’ said Toni, sipping a bit before putting the cup into the cupholder. ‘It adds a whole new level of effort to life. Have your hair done properly, don’t look too young but not too old either, find your favourite coffee and get it into the routine so it’s part of “me time” ...’ She trailed off, realising that she was talking as if she was doing a chatty interview on TV. An intro to a piece on modern women, perhaps. She glanced across at her sister.
Lou, whose hair was back to its normal state of uncurated dark wildness, would not be interested in conversations about hair. Certainly not now. But then, Lou never seemed bothered with whether she looked too young or too old. She just was who she was, just Lou, something Toni secretly envied. Lou wore the same sort of clothes all the time, her A-line dresses in navies and aubergines with flat shoes, long cardigans in matching colours and the same tortoiseshell glasses she’d favoured for years. Her make-up was lipstick and whatever she used to bring a blush to those high cheekbones, a rosy colour which set off her dark cloud of hair.
The hair. Lou’s hair had always been different to the rest of the family’s.
Their mother’s hair was still mainly jet black, though Toni knew it owed a lot to little bottles of colour in the salon, and Dad’s had been a pale ashy colour, the same as Gloria’s in old photos before they’d both gone white. Lou’s hair was a rich tone that owed nothing to artifice. Toni had occasionally wondered where in the family Lou’s hair colour and those warm dark eyes had come from – was this the answer?
Toni remembered listening to a podcast a few months ago about the percentage of children who were not related to their apparent fathers – and how the rise of genetic testing was opening up lots of cans of worms. Maybe there was truth in all of this.
Aunt Gloria still lived in the old house on Worcester Road, which sat perpendicular to Main Street. Her father, the girls’ grandfather, had been the town’s doctor for many years and had run his surgery in the basement of the old house. Gloria and Bob had grown up with the knowledge that their father’s mission in life was good works. Their mother had been the same. A natural nurse, she’d been there to help whenever the doctor was out. Dorothy Cooper had been a practical, kind woman who loved people, remained serene no matter how much blood spurted out of a wound and understood that what was said in the surgery was sacrosanct.
She had delivered two babies herself when her husband had been out on emergencies.
Toni and Lou’s father hadn’t followed his father directly into the noble art of medicine but had helped in a different way as a pharmacist. For years, he’d worked in Cooper’s, the small pharmacy he’d established, with its wooden shelves and quirky old bottles that stood high on the shelves with all the modern medicine underneath. When they’d been younger, Toni and Lou had sat behind the counter with their father on occasion and Toni’s biggest thrill had been being allowed to arrange the flowery perfumes and the boxes of soap that some of the customers loved.
Toni was glad Bob Cooper was no longer around to witness this family scandal, she reflected as she parked a few doors down from their aunt’s house. He’d been such a gentle and dignified man. He’d have hated Lillian’s outburst and truly hated that his beloved Lou had been hurt. No matter what the truth of the matter was, Toni was in no doubt that Bob Cooper was her sister’s father in all the ways that mattered. But, she acknowledged, knowing that he potentially wasn’t her biological father was a huge deal to her sister.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ she asked carefully. Lou might have changed her mind.
Lou nodded. They got out of the car.
The door to Aunt Gloria’s house was a rich, comforting russet colour: the colour of beech leaves in autumn. Bright plants had always sat in white pots outside the door, along with an elderly bay tree that appeared to have flourished in the Cork sunshine. Lou remembered her grandfather saying that patients liked a welcoming sense when they arrived at the doctor’s home.
‘One of a medic’s most important tools is the ability to make people feel at ease,’ Grandpa had apparently said often when he sat smoking the pipe that he knew, medically speaking, he should not have indulged in.
‘In that respect, Henry James was right,’ he liked to continue. ‘The most important words in the English language are kindness, kindness and kindness. Medicine and a wise ear help. But if we can’t put them at their ease, we won’t hear the full story.’
Of course, if everything her mother had said was true ... then Dr Cooper was not her actual grandfather. And Dad, who had dispensed cough bottles, antibiotics and kindly advice to the people of the town, was no longer her father. Lou raised her face to the sky, trying to hold back her tears. The anger she had felt on the beach was gone, and in its place waves of grief were flooring her. She felt as if she was losing her dad, her grandfather, her childhood, all at once.
Breathe in for six, hold for three, out for nine ...
But no breathing exercise in the world could help her today. The Barking Dog was going off, and there was nothing Lou could do to stop it. She felt so terribly afraid that she was shaking.
