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local news, TV shows, all the cast and daily apparatus of their life—and Alison had the Donnelly gift of reducing something complex to a clichéd phrase, and saying it over and over, singing it almost. She had the same strange numerous compartments of expectation and orthodoxy, growing predictably outraged—like Kenneth—because a Christmas card was not returned, or a neighbor’s lawn was left to get too long, or the tip was automatically added to a bill.
If, occasionally, Judith liked to complain on the phone to Liz about Alison, it was with the understanding that Liz would not offer her own criticisms of her sister but simply listen and agree. Whatever competition there had been for their parents’ affection, Liz was certain that she’d withdrawn, honorably, from it, having accepted defeat. During the years when their parents had argued continually—when Spencer was a toddler—Judith had moved out for a night, to the flat above the estate agency, and so little did she trust Liz not to fight with Kenneth, and to look after Spencer, who was hysterical and wouldn’t leave his father, that she took Liz with her, entrusting Alison with her little brother’s care. Alison was the steady one, the responsible daughter.
Her father lifted a cork-lined, laminated coaster from the stack on the little table by his chair and lobbed it at Liz for the coffee she had in her hand. It landed on the sofa and she ignored it.
“Oh, dear,” Judith said, straightening up from looking in the cupboard under the sink, holding a can of Brasso and a cloth. “It’s so sad when a family just disappears.”
Everyone murmured in agreement. It was indeed awful when a family disappeared, though it did make your own look much more solid.
After Liz had helped her mother tidy the bathrooms, and put out fresh towels, and organize the glasses in the utility room, and clear various surfaces for the caterer to set her wares on, they found they had everything done, suddenly, at least until the caterers and marquee people started turning up the next day, and Judith announced she was “going to have a wee nap.”
“Does she often go and lie down during the day?”
Liz had never, as far as she could remember, known her mother to go to bed during the day. She’d rarely seen her sit down. Sometimes, in the late evening—after the dinner was served and the dishwasher loaded and the pots and pans washed and dried, and every surface cleared and wiped down, and the laundry done, and the piles of ironing completed—she might perch for a half hour before bed on the arm of a chair, watching TV distractedly, offering everyone tea or traybakes, always threatening to jump up again. Occasionally she’d sit properly, draw her legs up under herself, and read a paper from the rack by Kenneth’s chair—the Belfast Telegraph or the Mid-Ulster Mail—scanning it for people she knew. Sometimes she’d be working on a fat novel that one of the girls—her group of sixty-something female friends—had recommended, and would read steadily while Kenneth flicked the channels between football and golf and the news. But mostly she was vertical, industrious, quick.
“I think she’s tired,” Kenneth replied, not looking up from the quiz show.
“Has she been getting tired a lot?” Liz pushed on.
“None of us are getting younger. You want up here? You want up?”
Kenneth had been feeding Atlantic scraps from his ham sandwich, and Atlantic had found—what all dogs want—a brand-new god to worship. She stood now on her back legs, resting her front paws on the side of Kenneth’s armchair, her long foxy head propped on the little fanned paws. Animals sometimes seemed the only remaining recipients of Kenneth’s affection. Five or six years ago, home for Christmas, she’d been sitting reading in the conservatory and looked up to see him through the glass door, alone, wiping away a tear. Kenneth was sobbing, actually sobbing, as an Australian vet in Animal Hospital put down a black Labrador, whose big dumb beautiful eyes looked up at the vet and then were stilled. Her father, she realized suddenly—and wondered why she hadn’t put it in these terms before—was seriously depressed. In the intervening years, the evidence accumulated for this point of view. Several times she had tried to broach the topic with him, but he would not have it. She watched Atlantic lick his paw as her father looked at the dog with more pure affection than she could ever remember him showing his children.
“Where’d you say you got this beast then?”
He was rubbing Atty’s head.
“On a subway platform. She’d been abandoned.”
“Manky-looking thing.”
“She’s a sweetheart.”
“You get it injections?”
“All of them.”
“What about fleas?”
“She doesn’t have them.”
Despite himself, her father was grinning at the dog.
Liz knew Kenneth’s objections were only in principle. He had a sentimentalist’s adoration for all large-eyed mammals, excepting humans. Animals didn’t try to negotiate a lower percentage on commission, or let a leak in a boiler cause a ceiling to collapse, or fall behind on their rent. You knew where you stood with a dog, and where you stood was on a pedestal. Kenneth let Atlantic jump up onto his lap.
“How’s the teaching?”
“Fine, fine, I had a promising class this year really. One or two who’ll—”
“I see your man Dan Andrews is doing very well.”
Dan Andrews was a TV historian. He’d been in the year above Liz at Edinburgh, where his most famous action had been to fellate a future cabinet minister in the corridor of one of the residency halls.
“Oh yes?”
“He does a very good one on Tuesday nights. About the Tudors. It must be his fifth or sixth TV show.”
“Must be. Which reminds me.”
Her father un-muted the telly.
“I meant to tell you I’m off on Sunday to Papua New Guinea to make a TV show.”
Before anyone could reply, Liz left the room, like a boxer landing a knockout punch and striding from the ring.
The Donnelly home had broadband, technically, though in practice it was unbearably slow. Over the years Liz and Alison and Spencer had each spent several hours on the phone to British Telecom complaining, rebooting, inserting various adaptors and splitters, but it was still not feasible to download photographs. At least, not feasible in human time. In geological time, maybe, or if you experienced the world as an oak tree did. Still, Liz was making a determined effort. As she waited for the system to boot up, she propelled herself slowly in a circle in the office chair with her right foot, taking in the study.
Alison in graduation gear from Stranmillis—her head tipped slightly forward in embarrassment, though there was pride in her glance. Her blond hair had been permed to an awkward frizz, and she wore a touch too much blue eye shadow. One of Liz in the same getup, staring defiantly at the camera—her short brown hair hardly coming out from under the mortarboard. In lieu of a graduation photo for Spencer, there was one of him on the eighteenth hole of Killyreagh golf course handing over, on behalf of the estate agency, an outsized check to Cancer Research.
If you met the sisters you’d have no reason to think that Alison and Liz shared the same parents. One so fair and blue eyed and one so dark with eyes so brown that in certain lights they were almost black. But then Spencer arrived and made sense of the gene pool; he grew up with Liz’s dark complexion and Alison’s blue eyes, and both his sisters doted on him. Had it made him a little infantile? A little protected? Even in photographs you could see he had always been loved—his broad physique, his ready smile. He was at home in the world, convinced of his place in it.
Kenneth had three desks in the study, none of them for studying. They were mostly covered with prizes for various charitable lotteries and raffles he was running for Rotary, the golf club, and the Save the Children Coffee Morning. The computer screen began filling up with e-mails. There was nothing from Joel.