The Reunion

by Roisin Meaney

Genres: General Fiction; Siblings; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'A thoughtful, engrossing read. Warm and insightful. Roisin Meaney is a skillful storyteller' - Sheila O'Flanagan, author of The Missing Wife, on The Reunion.

It's their twenty-year school reunion but the Plunkett sisters have their own reasons for not wanting to attend ...

Caroline, now a successful knitwear designer, spends her time flying between her business in England and her lover in Italy. As far as she's concerned, her school days, and what happened to her the year she left, should stay in the past.
Eleanor, meanwhile, is unrecognisable from the fun-loving girl she was in school. With a son who is barely speaking to her, and a husband keeping a secret from her, revisiting the past is the last thing on her mind.
But when an unexpected letter arrives for Caroline in the weeks before the reunion, memories are stirred.
Will the sisters find the courage to return to the town where they grew up and face what they've been running from all these years?

The Reunion is a moving story about secrets, sisters and finding a way to open your heart.

(P)2021 Hachette Books Ireland

Release date: July 1, 2016

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 336

Sample

‘I NEED A TENNER.’

She turns from the sink and regards his glum face across the room. When did she last see him smile?

‘A tenner,’ he repeats. A hair’s breadth more slowly, for the benefit of his retarded mother.

She doesn’t miss it. ‘What for?’

‘A book. For school.’

‘A book? I thought we got them all.’

A millisecond of silence, filled with his impatience. Overflowing with it. ‘It’s notes. For history.’

‘Notes? Were they not on the list?’

He shoves back his chair abruptly. It screeches across the tiles, making her start. ‘Forget it,’ he says, and something else under his breath that she doesn’t hear.

He’s gone before she can respond, letting the door swing not quite closed after him. She hears him galloping up the stairs like he always does, taking three, four steps at a time in giant bounds, with the long legs he didn’t inherit from either of his parents. He’ll wake Gordon, who never gets to bed before one.

Of course she’ll give him the money. It might be for notes, like he says, and she doesn’t want to get on the wrong side of his new school this early on. Or it might be for something else entirely, like the cigarettes he thinks she doesn’t smell on him, or the alcohol he may well be sampling by now. She had her first swig of cider when she wasn’t much older than fourteen: she can still remember the excitement, the tart, forbidden burn of it. She’d be surprised if he wasn’t up to something similar by now.

Hopefully he’s not into anything worse. She knows so little about him. Such a gulf there is between them.

She wipes her hands on her apron and tries to squeeze the dripping hot tap shut again. A washer, she knows that’s all it needs, but she’s afraid to chance doing it herself. Gordon keeps promising to get it sorted but she’s still waiting. She’ll ask Mike, two doors down, next time she sees him. Retired plumber, could do it with his eyes closed. Gordon won’t even notice.

She takes her purse from her bag and finds two fivers. She folds them and places them carefully on the edge of the white plate that holds the remains of Jacob’s breakfast: the smear of egg yolk, the curves of toast crust.

As she waits for him she picks at crumbs on the tablecloth, which is white like the crockery, and crisp with starch. She likes a nicely dressed table, a legacy from her days of working in Fennellys, and washing and ironing the cloths gives her something to do.

She dabs butter onto Jacob’s crusts and eats them one by one, standing at the sink. She sips lukewarm coffee and watches the second hand of the wall clock float around silently. The radio presenter is indulging in painfully humourless banter with the AA Roadwatch girl. He plays decent music: if only she could tune out the blather in between.

The upstairs toilet flushes: the bathroom door is flung open immediately afterwards. No hands washed, she’ll bet. She hears him crashing about in his room, yanking out drawers, slamming them shut. Ironic that someone so frugal with his words, so silent in her presence, can be so noisy in other ways.

Then again, he always has plenty to say to his father.

She brings his dishes to the sink, scrubs the egg residue from his plate. She enjoys washing up, likes the feel of the hot sudsy water, the shiny crockery that emerges from it. She rubs a finger across the wet plate just to hear it squeak. She pulls out the plug and watches the water swirl away.

‘Come and get it,’ she calls, when she hears him flying down the stairs. Damned if she’s going to bring it out to him.

He reappears and stands on the threshold, rucksack slung across a shoulder, hip jutting out beneath. Looking but not looking at her. The fourteen-year-old mystery she and Gordon created.

‘There’s your money,’ she says, and he crosses to the table and claims it.

‘Thanks.’ He shoves it into his trouser pocket.

‘How’s school?’ she asks. ‘How are you liking it?’

‘Fine.’

He leaves the room. She listens to the click of the front door closing. ‘Goodbye,’ she says, to nobody at all. ‘Have a lovely day.’

He’ll leave this house for good as soon as he can, probably as abruptly as that. He’ll never visit again unless he needs something from her. He and Gordon will still see one another but it’ll be somewhere else, somewhere she’s not.

Or he and Gordon might leave together. The thought slices into her like a blade. She elbows it away.

She dries the dishes and stores them in neat bundles in the press. She leans against the sink and finishes her coffee, cold by now, as a washed-out sunbeam lights up the dust motes in the air and Hozier sings about rhythm and blues, and Clarence paces on the outside sill, mewing crossly. Poor old Clarence, she forgot about him again.

The reunion invitation sits where she dropped it on the worktop. She scans the few lines for the second time. Can it really be twenty years? Who is principal of the school now? She has no idea. Sister Carmody died, didn’t she? A good while back, she thinks. Dad it must have been who told her – he always kept an eye on the death columns, still does.

As a schoolgirl, Eleanor came to know Sister Carmody’s office well. Usually she was summoned after a teacher complained – homework not done, cheek given – but one time, towards the end of her Junior Cert year, it was because she’d been spotted coming out of a pub with Andrew and a few others. Some busybody with nothing better to do, ringing the school to report her.

Your parents would be so disappointed, Sister Carmody had said, like getting a bit sloshed at sixteen was the worst thing you could do. Poor woman didn’t know the half of it.

St Finian’s is co-ed now – she knows that much from Mum. Joined forces with the Christian Brothers down the road eight or nine years ago. Did away with the uniforms too: no more tartan tunics to be seen on the streets when she goes back home to visit. Probably no nuns left on the staff now either, or brothers. Vocations a thing of the past, people reluctant to ally themselves with a toxic institution.

Twenty years since Leaving Cert, though: hard to believe. She turned eighteen that year, three months after Caroline’s nineteenth birthday in May. Chalk and cheese the two of them, Caroline the quiet sensible older one, her nose always stuck in a book. No wonder the nuns couldn’t believe she and Eleanor were sisters.

But despite their differences – or maybe because of them – they never had a falling-out, or nothing serious, all through childhood and puberty and adolescence. They weren’t close, not in the way you’d expect two sisters so near in age to be, particularly when they had no other siblings – but they weren’t enemies either.

Ironic that it was Caroline, not Eleanor, who ended up in trouble when she was just seventeen. Packed off to England by Mum before she could disgrace them all. And Eleanor, to her surprise, found that she missed her elder sister.

Nothing was ever the same after that. Caroline was changed when she came home to them, no denying it. Still quiet, still the perfect student, but there was something different about her. Never really settled again, never really fitted in the way she used to, at home or in school. And the minute she could, she went back to England. Couldn’t wait to get back.

She and Eleanor have kept in touch, of course. They talk on the phone roughly once a week. Granted, their conversations aren’t exactly deep and meaningful; they’re more like the chit-chat you’d put on someone beside you in the doctor’s waiting room. But the main thing is they’re keeping track of one another, not letting their lives drift apart.

Twenty years: Eleanor still can’t get her head around it. All the plans she had growing up, her future mapped out at sixteen. Nothing turned out like she’d expected it to; nothing went the way she’d thought it would after she left school.

It started off OK though. When she married Gordon Fennelly she was just twenty, and mad about him. She was five foot four in her stockinged feet and weighed eight and a half stone, give or take a pound or two. Her stomach was flat and firm, her thighs lean, her curves where she wanted them.

Those days she lived in tight size eight jeans and skimpy T-shirts, or sweaters that moulded to her shape, clothes designed to show off her figure. Same weight no matter what she ate, no matter how little exercise she took. She was lucky, everyone said so.

And then came two pregnancies in rapid succession, and her weight went shooting off the Richter scale, of course it did. She was happy and in love and well able to cook, and she had a husband who was very good at feeding her, and who didn’t give a damn what the scales said when she stepped up on them. But by the time her second child was born she weighed over twelve stone, and she decided, happy as she was, that enough was enough, and she set out to lose the extra blubber.

And she did, pretty much.

By the beginning of July 2002, ten months after giving birth to baby number two, she weighed just under nine stone. And if her stomach wasn’t anything like as flat as it used to be, and her thighs had a bit more wobble to them than before, she didn’t much care. She was a mother of two: she was entitled to a few wobbles.

And then, on the fifth of July that year, a few weeks before her twenty-fifth birthday, Eleanor Plunkett Fennelly’s world collapsed around her, and she stopped caring about her weight or anything else – and all the fat came tumbling back, and more with it.

Imagine showing her face at the reunion, looking the way she does now. Imagine the glances of pity and disbelief, the turning heads when she’d appear, bringing her high blood pressure and cholesterol and increased risk of heart disease and stroke along with her. Imagine the stares she’d get, all decked out in a tent dress and nice shoes. She can still wear nice shoes, her feet the only part of her that hasn’t gone completely to pot: she just can’t stand in them for any length of time.

The principal and staff are delighted to invite you.

She opens the back door and Clarence hops down and sidles in, giving his guttural mew as he pours himself around her ankles, threading in and out as she attempts to cross the room. One of these days he’s going to trip her up: she’ll fall and break a hip, and he’ll walk over her on the way to his food. But for some reason she’s fond of him, the old scrounger. He doesn’t pretend to give a tinker’s curse about anyone but himself as he pads single-mindedly through his nine lives.

Clarence was never planned, he simply appeared. He invited himself into the kitchen one morning when Eleanor was in the garden hanging clothes on the line. When she came back there he was, sitting just inside the door washing his face, ignoring her until she found some cold meat in the fridge and set it on the floor beside him. That was six years ago, and he still turns up twice or three times each day.

Jacob used to watch out for him – he was the one who gave him the name – but around the time he entered his teens his interest in the cat trailed away, and now he pays him scant attention if their paths intersect. He’d like a dog, according to Gordon, but Eleanor can’t face the prospect of another creature around the place. She can just about handle Clarence.

She shakes pellets into the cracked saucer that serves as his bowl. By the way he attacks them, diving in, shoving her hand out of the way with his big head, you’d swear he hadn’t eaten in a week. A mouse-sized portion, the vet says, more than enough – but Clarence snuffles his way through twice that and looks for seconds. Having him around means Eleanor isn’t the only fatty in the house: maybe that’s why she likes him.

She sticks the invitation to the door of the fridge with a magnet that says I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food. A joke present from Caroline when Eleanor and Gordon opened Fennellys the year they got married, attached to the fridge door for the past seventeen years. When they’d been awarded the Michelin star in May 2002 Caroline had got them a crystal decanter from Avoca; another magnet would hardly have done Michelin justice.

Tenth of October the reunion is, less than six weeks away. Just for the hell of it she circles the date with a highlighter pen on the calendar that hangs by the door. Of course she’s not going. No way is she going. She lets the September page drop back into place and the twelfth stares out at her, five days from now.

She’ll get through it. She always does.

She turns her thoughts back to Jacob, beginning his second week in the school. Must be tough being the new boy in Junior Cert year, joining a group who’d already spent two years together. Boys that age not the most welcoming, maybe.

A few months before the summer, Gordon said they’d have to take him out of boarding school. The fees are crippling. We need to economise.

It was unexpected. She knew the restaurant was going through a lean time, but was it really necessary to move Jacob? He’d been boarding at a school fifty miles away for two years, coming home on the bus at weekends. He’d seemed happy enough there, and privately Eleanor found it easier without him around all the time – but now he was to be uprooted, just before his Junior Cert.

Still, what could she do, with Gordon saying they couldn’t afford the fees? It might be for the best, she told herself, if they had to live together full time. It might help to fix what was broken between them.

So far it hasn’t made a difference. He comes home in the afternoon, he makes a sandwich, he vanishes. Up to his room, or out with the few friends he’s kept in touch with since primary school. He reappears for dinner at seven, which he eats with Eleanor in near-silence – impossible to have a conversation with him: whatever she tries gets her nowhere – and takes his leave of her again as soon as he can.

The new school is a bit of a trek. It’s on the far side of Galway, because Gordon was dead set against the Christian Brothers down the road – You’d understand, he told Eleanor, if you’d gone there. So each morning Jacob gets a bus, and each afternoon the bus brings him home again, and so far he hasn’t complained.

Or not to her. When she asks, everything is fine. But Gordon hasn’t mentioned anything either, so hopefully the move is working out.

The morning passes like it always does. Gordon puts in an appearance around ten. He makes coffee and toasts sourdough while Eleanor loads the washing machine in the utility room and takes the ashes from the sitting-room fireplace and empties the various wastepaper baskets and checks the fridge to see what they’re out of.

He reads the paper as rapidly as he eats. He’s gone by half ten, calling goodbye from the hall. She can’t remember the last time he kissed her goodbye, or kissed her at all.

Around an hour later, as she plugs in the kettle for more coffee, her phone rings. She follows the sound and sees it sitting by the bread bin. She reads her husband’s name on the screen.

‘I need a clean shirt,’ he says. ‘My pen leaked on this one.’

‘I’ll drop it in,’ she replies, lifting the bread bin lid to peer inside.

‘No need, I’ll send Keith. He’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

He doesn’t want her in the restaurant: she bats away the thought before it can take root. ‘I got an invitation,’ she says quickly, not giving him time to hang up. ‘My school, a twenty-year reunion.’ As she speaks she pulls a piece of crust from the remains of the sourdough.

‘Right.’ His absent tone means he’s doing something else. Checking the lunch menu, or seeing what the bookings look like for this evening.

‘I won’t go,’ she says. ‘They’d laugh if they saw me now.’

‘Whatever you think,’ he says. ‘Look, I’d better get moving.’

She hears the tiny click of his disconnect. She can’t blame him. She pushed him away, pushed them both away, and now they’re out of her reach. There’s nothing left of what she and Gordon had, nothing except Jacob to hold them together, for however long he does.

She spreads butter on the crust and chews it silently as Paloma Faith sings on the radio. Eleanor saw her in some music video not so long ago, all blonde hair and red lipstick. Perfect dainty little figure.

She brushes crumbs from her hands. She unties her apron and drapes it over the back of a chair. As she heads upstairs to find a clean shirt and to put on a bit of lipstick for Keith, she thinks about giving her sister a ring.

Or she might wait until tomorrow.





THE LAST TIME SHE WAS IN THE ABBEY LODGE HOTEL was in May 2000. She was a week past twenty-four, wearing a fake tan and a green dress she’d made herself. Sparkly clips in her hair, a smudge of gold on her eyelids.

You’re looking well, he’d said. Fortified, no doubt, by a few Harvey Wallbangers, or whatever concoction he’d gone for at the cocktail bar. Lying in wait for her near the women’s loo, his wife Sophie safely out of earshot. Caroline could see her near the buffet table in conversation with Eleanor, who had yet to tell anyone that she was pregnant with Jacob, and widowed Mrs Lee, second next door to the Plunketts, whose only son Douglas, Dougie, would be dead in sixteen months.

Tragic Mrs Lee, who’d boast to everyone she met about Dougie and the fine job he’d landed himself in New York, who’d show them the postcard he’d sent of the monstrously tall silver towers where his office was located. The ninety-fourth floor, she’d say, pointing to the red oval he’d drawn around a row of tiny windows. Imagine being up that high every day. Pitiable Mrs Lee, who’d taught Caroline the piano, or tried to, years before. Eleanor, of course, had flatly refused any kind of music lessons.

So how are you? he’d asked, looking good still at fifty-four, in his white shirt and black suit and red dicky bow, his drink cradled in the manicured hand that seven years earlier had found its way inside her underwear. He’d pulled twenty pounds from his wallet fifteen minutes later with the same hand, thanking her for babysitting Nadine, telling her that Sophie would be in touch when they got back from France. Cool as a cucumber, as if he hadn’t taken a detour when he was driving her back to her parents’ house. As if he hadn’t done what he’d done when he’d parked the car.

So how are you? he’d had the gall to ask, after turning his back on her when she’d gone to him six weeks later in tears, after his denials and his insinuations and his snarled threats. Throwing money at her, as if it could fix what he’d broken.

None of your business, she’d replied, whisking her dress out of the way as she steered around him, continuing on her way to the ladies’ toilet while her mother tapped a fork against a glass so that everyone would shut up and listen to the speech she’d written for her husband to recite. Their silver wedding anniversary, twenty-five years of her telling him what to do. Twenty-five years of golf outings and tennis tournaments and two foreign holidays a year, and never, ever a hint of a scandal. A quarter of a century of happy family life, if you didn’t count the time that poor Caroline had her breakdown and had to spend the best part of a year away from them.

Only of course that wasn’t what had happened at all. What had happened was Jasper D’Arcy, and everything that had followed him. But things are better now, most of them. Truth be told, they’re better than better now.

Most of them.

She drops the invitation onto the dressing table and sprays floral, talcum-powdery scent from Italy on her wrists and behind her ears. The aroma brings Matteo to mind, as it always does. Put some here, he would whisper, and here. Wicked man.

Today is Tuesday. In three days she’ll see him. She smiles into the mirror as she sets down the perfume bottle. Four more days and she’ll be spraying perfume in different places.

She scans the invitation again. Finger food, it says. That’ll be cubes of rubbery cheese impaled between grapes on wooden sticks. That’ll be wings of chickens, more bone than flesh. That’ll be baby tomatoes with their insides replaced, and halves of hardboiled eggs cowering under yellowing mayonnaise.

Finger food. They couldn’t even stump up for a proper dinner.

She won’t go, of course. No question. She drops the invitation into the tin bucket that serves as her bin. She painted it red, stuck some flower transfers onto it. You missed your calling, Florence had said when she saw it. You should have been a hippie.

Her phone rings. Her sister’s name on the screen evokes the same mix of guilt and impatience that it has done for years.

‘Hi there,’ she says, hearing the horrible jollity that her voice always assumes for Eleanor.

‘Did you get an invite to the reunion?’

‘I did, this morning.’

‘Mine came yesterday. Are you going?’

‘Probably not.’ Definitely not. Absolutely not.

‘Me neither. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me.’

No surprises there. Eleanor doesn’t do socialising any more, unless Gordon asks her along to some Fennellys thing – but as far as Caroline knows, that hasn’t happened in quite a while. Eleanor doesn’t do fun any more.

But Caroline must be kind, with Beth’s fourteenth birthday coming up in four days. ‘How are things?’ she asks. ‘How are you feeling, El?’

‘I’m alright.’ Pause. ‘You know yourself.’

But Caroline doesn’t know, because her child didn’t fall into a swimming pool before he was one. As far as she knows her child is still alive, still out there somewhere. Twenty-one since March, a man now – and the hope still fervent in her that one day he’ll come looking for her.

‘Why don’t you come for a visit?’ she asks, like she has so often asked. ‘You could stay for a night or two. I’m not going to Italy till Friday evening. We’d love to have you.’ Hating herself briefly for the lie – Florence would not love to have her – but it’s a safe lie because Eleanor never takes up the invitation.

‘Not just now, maybe another time. Thanks.’

Same answer as always, and neither of them ever pins down another time.

Caroline lets the silence drift, turning her head to look through the tiny square of bedroom window. Putty-grey sky again today, no Indian summer for them yet, no consolation for a dismal July and an only marginally better August. Thank God for Italy, with its mile-high blue skies and sun that shines when it’s supposed to. September in Italy is magical. She thinks of Matteo again, and smiles again.

‘How’s Jacob?’ she asks. ‘How’s the new school?’

Her sister’s sigh rushes into her ear. ‘Oh, he’s alright – I think. He tells me nothing.’

‘It’s his age,’ Caroline says, when both of them know his age has nothing to do with it.

‘He asked for a tenner yesterday. For books, he says, but we paid his book list before the summer.’

‘They must have forgotten one.’

‘Mm.’

She feels sorry for Jacob, the child who didn’t drown, whose mother pretty much abandoned him when Beth died. Poor Jacob, caught in the middle of that tragedy, too young to understand what had happened, but suffering the fallout ever since.

‘Tell him his godmother says hello anyway. And how’s Gordon?’

‘Oh, he’s … the same.’ Her voice fading a little, as if she’s turned her head to avoid the question. Twenty when she married him, Gordon more than double that at forty-two. He’s ageing well though, despite the sad, lost life he and Eleanor have had together. His face is nicely shabby, his melancholy smile endearing.

Hanging in there, he’d said, the last time Caroline asked how Fennellys was doing – but they’d lost their precious Michelin star last year, and Eleanor told her a month or so ago about another restaurant opening not too far from theirs. The recession finally being spoken about in the past tense, people daring to start new businesses again.

But Fennellys had weathered the bad times, had come through the recession when others were collapsing around it. Surely it will survive now; surely Gordon will pull it out of its slump. She remembers how hungry he was at the start, how driven to succeed he and Eleanor both were, working all hours to get the recognition Fennellys eventually achieved.

She remembers well the day they got married. Valentine’s Day 1998, Eleanor looking radiant, happier than Caroline ever remembered. Twirling before her bedroom mirror in the ivory silk dress that had cost a bomb. How do I look? she’d asked, and Caroline told her beautiful, and it was true. Crazy about Gordon then, despite the age difference – you only had to look at her to know. Crazy about him still maybe, but the evidence, anytime Caroline meets them, is lacking.

He’s only fifty-nine now, not old these days. Funny how the gap between them seems to narrow as the years go on, as if Eleanor is catching up with him. If she’d only lose some of the weight, find a therapist, take some pride in her appearance—

She cuts off the thought: no point. I suggested a co. . .