Tentatively she lifted her head off the pillow; the room was shuddering but not wholly spinning. That was something at least. A cotton tote containing thirty-two tiny wooden houses on the dressing table reminded her that she had a meeting at the solicitors’ this morning. Vanessa had booked them in for what she called an “informal catch-up,” by which Simone hoped she meant “free of charge.”
The first muted rays of morning eked in through the gap in the curtains and she steeled herself to get up. Today would require coffee and carbs—fried where possible. She was glad of the claw-foot bath in the ensuite; a good long soak was the first order of the day.
* * *
“WEEE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS, WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS, WE WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR! AWAY IN A MANGER, NO CRIB FOR A BED, THE LITTLE LORD JESUS LAY DOWN HIS SWEET HEAD!”
“Jesus, Mother Mary, and Joseph. Verity, light of my life. I will give you five pounds if you’ll just stop singing.” Maggie’s breakfast of black coffee and paracetamol was threatening to return. She couldn’t remember when she’d last had a headache this ferocious. She laid her forehead on the cool wooden table and prayed that the room would stop spinning.
“But, Mama, I have to practice for the school play. I’m part of the fruit chorus.”
“Can you practice in your head? Please? Just for this morning?”
“No, Mama, Miss Baker says we have to project our voices. Like this: LITTLE DONKEY. LITTLE DONKEY!”
Maggie felt, rather than saw, Joe come into the kitchen; he went back to his room at the pub every night and arrived back at her place early each morning. She was always keenly aware of his proximity to her; even now as she felt barely human, her body was alive to his presence.
“How you doing, sunshine?” He ruffled her hair on his way to the coffee machine. She remained face-planted to the table. “Good morning, Verity. Lovely singing. Excellent projection.”
“Thank you, Joe. Shall I sing you the new song we’ve learned? It’s called ‘The Holiday Frog Hop.’？”
Maggie groaned.
“I tell you what, let’s leave that one for later,” he answered diplomatically. “I think right now you’d better get dressed, unless you want to go to school in your pj’s and lion slippers?”
“Can I?”
“No,” Maggie mumbled. “We’re leaving in ten minutes.”
Ordinarily Maggie would have been up at 5 a.m., taking produce deliveries from local farms and putting together orders for the various businesses and households she supplied. But not this morning. She had stumbled home in the early hours, tripping over the rug and clumsily attempting to seduce Joe before collapsing on the sofa, which is where Joe found her—when he’d let himself back in this morning—fully clothed, lying in a wet patch of her own dribble that had left a dark stain on the cushion and caused the hair on one side of her head to stick to her face.
With Verity gone to get dressed, she asked, “Last night, did we?”
“That’ll be a hell no.” He laughed softly. “You were in no fit state. I tried to get you to go to bed before I left, but you insisted that you were quite capable of doing it yourself.”
“Oh god. Thank you for babysitting.”
“Anytime. Did you remember you’ve got a meeting at the solicitors’ this morning?”
“Just kill me.”
“Come on, party girl.” He helped her up and ushered her gently toward the bathroom and left her to shower away her shame. She felt so ill she couldn’t even feel embarrassed. She had the sensation that she had been stuffed into a hamster ball and kicked around for four hours. She wondered if her sisters felt as bad as she did. She really hoped so.
* * *
Star stretched out on the carpet and reveled in her Savasana at the end of her yoga session. She let her body relax and her mind drift to a place of peace. Though she didn’t practice nearly as much as she should these days, she always did it after a night’s overindulgence. She didn’t suffer from hangovers per se, but alcohol always left her feeling tense and groggy-headed the next day.
Slowly she brought herself back to the present. Her thoughts regathered like spun sugar strands in a candy floss machine and she recalled her conversation with Evette in the early hours of this morning.
She had always liked her sister-in-law, the yin to Simone’s yang; they complemented each other. Some people were better together than apart, and to her mind Simone and Evette were the former.
Still, she was surprised to get a panicked phone call from her in the middle of the night. She was even more surprised when Evette stayed on the phone and confided in her about their problems. She had wondered if she ought to try to close down the conversation, if it was somehow disrespectful to her sister to be listening to problems that Simone herself would never have divulged, especially not to Star. But the words torrented out of Evette like she’d spent too long trying to plug the dam and the force of it had finally become too great. Perhaps she needed, Star reasoned, to speak to someone who knew and loved and understood Simone, like she did.
It would be easy to feel annoyed at Simone’s closed-book approach to life; it felt to Star like wanton self-destructiveness to internalize feelings that bred toxicity rather than air them and remove their power. Being aloof didn’t do her any favors, especially when people assumed that her attitude was born out of conceit rather than caution.
It was strange. She had always viewed her sisters through a lens of capability and infallibility. But now she was beginning to realize that neither of them had all the answers and that their shit was far from being together, and that frightened her; surely somebody had to be in control? Because the alternative was that nobody knew what the hell they were doing and where did that leave her?
She stood slowly and began to dress, looking out over the garden and the woods beyond as she did so. A low mist hung over the land like yards of silver tulle. Perhaps it was a good thing that the scales had fallen from her eyes, because now she would have to woman up and become her own fallback, and maybe in the process become someone her sisters could lean on too.
15
Vanessa was—as Simone had hoped—surprised when they handed over the tote bag containing the Monopoly houses later that morning. She dutifully verified each house against Augustus’s list and passed Simone a small, tarnished key on a piece of brown string in return.
“According to his notes, everything you will need to re-create the winter solstice celebrations of years gone by is waiting for you inside the strongbox.”
“And where is the strongbox?” asked Maggie.
Simone was pleased to see her sister looked as green as she felt. Star, however, was annoyingly chirpy.
“I don’t know. You didn’t come across it during your house hunting?”
“We came across plenty of things. What does it look like?” asked Simone.
Vanessa shook her head and shrugged. “I can’t help you, I’m afraid; I’ve never seen it. All I can tell you is what your father wrote in his instructions: that it was to be found somewhere on the property.”
“We’ll find it,” said Star brightly as they got up to leave.