The sisters drove along a straight road, past tiny turn-offs with no signposts and past a little chapel with a tractor parked neatly outside. A girl on a bike flew along the road beside them, dark hair flying in the breeze made by her movement, and as Toni slowed on the narrow road, they both saw that a small dog wearing a blue ribbon on its topknot sat in the basket on the front.
‘I always wanted a dog,’ said Lou suddenly as they passed the girl on the bike. ‘Lillian had one in the house during the week. Some artist friend of hers had a little dog and he couldn’t stay in The Ashling B&B with it, so Lillian invited him to stay with her. I thought she hated dogs.’
‘Lillian doesn’t hate dogs.’ Toni negotiated the first left turn, which took them down an even narrower road. ‘She hates extra work. Anything that puts her out: that’s what she hates.’
Lou stared out the window at the view. The road had carried them to a point where they were now facing the ocean. She thought of the change of perspective of her mother. She didn’t merely have to negotiate the concept of a different birth father. Her vision of her mother had been turned quite upside down, and that was utterly bewildering.
‘Lillian implied she was scared of dogs.’
No, not implied. Her mother had definitely once said she’d been bitten by a dog and that was why she didn’t like canines in general. There had been a palaver about seeing where the dog had bitten her leg, Lou was sure of it. But her mother hadn’t pulled up her cigarette-leg pants to show the mark. They were tight above her shapely ankles. Lillian loved her ankles. No matter what dirty work she was doing in the studio, or before, when she taught art at a girls’ school, a job she loathed, Lillian was always beautifully dressed. Sexily dressed, now that she thought about it.
‘Lillian was bitten. Wasn’t she?’ Lou hated that she was doubting her mother now.
A new father, dogs ... what next?
‘She wasn’t bitten,’ said Toni without thinking. ‘My friend Jules used to bring Pogo, her lurcher, around when he was small before he became all leggy and huge. When he grew up, Julia couldn’t walk him on her own then because he was too easily scared and hard for her to hold onto. But Lillian quite liked Pogo. He was that silky grey colour she painted the studio in. You know: the purpley grey colour? He was beautiful, she liked that. If Lillian was going to like any sort of dog it would be a very beautiful one, all gleaming musculature like a bronze.’
Lou stopped admiring the ocean and sat very upright.
‘So – Lillian was never bitten by a dog?’ she asked, just to be sure.
Toni’s own emotions were too close to the surface for her to be able to protect her sister’s.
‘No,’ she sighed. She felt a headache coming on. The stress of the day was making her jaw tight with tension. Talking about Oliver made it all very real: the betrayal and the fear that came with it. She would have to start again to make money to feel secure.
Weary anger made her blunt.
‘Lillian wasn’t bitten, Lou,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen her with dogs. She’s not scared. I’m sorry. I’ve told you that not everyone is wonderful and honest. I really thought you’d figured our mother out. She’s a dreadful fibber.’
‘Why would she lie to me?’ Lou asked, aware that she sounded like Emily, the small child version.
Why is the sky blue? When will I be a grown-up?
‘Because she felt like it on the day in question,’ replied her sister bleakly. ‘You wanted a dog and she didn’t. Lou, you can’t have believed everything she ever told you? I didn’t. Mind you, I should have learned that lesson better. I believed my own husband, Itrustedhim, and look how well that’s worked out.’
Lou wished she could ignore the dreadful ache inside her.
Her mother had lied about many things. But thenshe’dlied too. Her mother knew vaguely about Lou’s anxiety but not that she took medication for depression ... Why had she kept that a secret? Why did she feel that she had no right to bother other people with her problems when they had no problem bothering her with theirs?
Toni was being no help: her mind was totally somewhere else.
The only sure bit of information Lou had to hold on to was that her mother lied about lots of things. Had lied about the dog and had lied about Lou’s father, although she could still be lying about this Angelo man. A lie within a lie.
Who knew? Lou wasn’t sure she knew anything anymore. Her mother was no longer the beloved woman who called her ‘the milk of human kindness’, the woman Lou did her very best to please. In her place was a temperamental mother who’d blithely destroyed Lou’s peace of mind at what should have been a special occasion. This version of her mother was one Lou didn’t recognise.
‘Look, we’re here,’ said Toni.
Here was precisely as Margo had described it: an old-fashioned two-storey farmhouse painted a muted grey with a small walled garden to one side and some run-down sheds with galvanised roofs to the other side. White-painted rocks formed the edge of the driveway, which was filled with grey pebbles. One ragged rose clung to a bit of trellis to the left of the door and was trying to bloom.
‘We can’t simply drive in like this,’ said Lou, feeling the familiar surge of anxiety. ‘Somebody might be here.’
They might be shouted at or get into trouble for trespassing. Lou’s fear of getting into trouble was strong. It was why she never walked across the road without waiting for the traffic light’s green man; why she parked before answering her phone in the car. Someone might shout at her, and Lou spent a lot of her life trying to avoid that possibility.
‘There’s nobody here,’ Toni said. ‘Margo or her mother said they thought it was empty at the moment. I’d say a blade of grass doesn’t grow around here without the pair of them knowing about it. Trust me: nobody’s home.’
She parked on the pebbled driveway and got out of the car. After a moment, Lou got out too, following Toni toward the little walled garden. It was built with the cool grey pieces of rock used in all the dry-stone walls in the area, but in order to make a taller structure, these stones had been fused with thin layers of concrete. The gate was a warm green which was now flaking, and inside the garden were crab-apple trees, what might possibly be a cluster of fruit bushes and a long vegetable patch.
Someone had clearly been in and planted something recently in the vegetable patch, though Toni, who knew precisely zip about where food came from until it was on the shelf in a shop, had no idea what it could be at this time of the year. Those insanely big leaves on one side were from rhubarb, she thought, recalling a programme she’d done once on the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. Rhubarb leaves were like something from a dinosaur movie: giant things.
