Читать книгу Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday - Cathy Kelly - Страница 26

Suki had travelled all over the world and she collected things on her travels. Not the sort of knick-knacks other people might collect. No, Suki collected amulets and precious stones, talismans from other cultures. Tiny jade buddhas, a little brass goddess she’d picked up in the Far East that somebody said had come from Bhutan. ‘It’s the goddess of hope and fertility,’ she’d been told. She wasn’t sure she needed the fertility, but the hope, she certainly needed that.

From trips to South America she had pre-Columbian gold-plated amulets. ‘Show me the feminine ones, the ones for female gods,’ she’d told the guy in the shop selling them. He looked surprised, maybe no one else had ever asked him this question. Usually tourists wanted the colourful lizards and the strange-shaped men who looked as if they were dancing to some unseen music. But Suki wanted something specific, something for joy.

There was no joy.

‘This one—’ Suki said, pointing to something that looked like a heart with beautiful scrolls on top of it.

‘This is for long life,’ said the man.

‘I’ll take it,’ said Suki.

From Canada she had beautiful Inuit dreamcatchers, with tiny shell wolves carved on them and dangling feathers; from the Native American reservation near Four Corners in the US, she had beautiful turquoise necklaces and bracelets on leather thongs.

And when she wasn’t shopping for her amulets on her travels, she was trawling for psychics. Stopping in some rural town on a book tour, she would ask any locals she met – the concierge, the maid doing her room, the staff in the bookshop – if they knew of anybody. The men were often startled by such requests, the women less so. Women understood the need to find out what the world had planned for them. To find out if it would all work out OK, if you would live long and be happy – which sounded like something Captain Kirk might say.

At the coffee shop she went to some days when she was visiting the other side of Falmouth, where the good bookshop was, Suki had seen a sign for a new psychic. It was a plain notice, nothing fancy, not even well written. A travelling woman, Suki suspected, in the trailer park, far out of town. Definitely the wrong side of the tracks. Suki always felt at home in trailer parks. She’d gone out with a guy once who’d come from a trailer park; he’d felt the difference between them was a chasm, but it hadn’t seemed that way to Suki.

‘I spent a lot of time in the trailer park in my home town,’ she told him. ‘Cabana-Land.’ She said it the way she’d always said it, like it was slightly dangerous, because it had been. For sixteen-year-old Suki Power, daughter of Avalon House, Cabana-Land definitely spelled danger, but she’d managed to sidestep trouble many times.

‘You just like roughing it, you rich broad,’ the guy had said, and he’d dumped her, his pride seriously dented. And that made Suki feel ugly and unloved. If her allure wasn’t able to overcome his basic insecurity, then she must definitely be losing it.

The trailer park on the outskirts of Falmouth, Massachusetts was the sedate sort of affair one would have expected: hidden behind lots of trees, screened off from the highway. When Suki had phoned to ask for directions, a young man answered, perhaps the son of the woman. The directions were pretty simple: second row, the trailer at the end, on the right-hand side. At least these days her car wasn’t the sort to attract attention. She drove a subcompact, an old one at that. Nobody would look twice at it. And when she pulled up outside the psychic’s trailer, which boasted a red Thunderbird no less, her car blended in nicely.

The door of the caravan was opened by a teenage boy, the voice on the phone.

‘Mom’s in the back,’ he said, before moving past her to go outside.

Suki had often wondered why so many psychics and fortune tellers were poor when they theoretically had a gift that could have made them rich. If only they could predict which horse would win a race or which lottery numbers would come up. She’d been told that it didn’t work that way; those who had the gift of sight couldn’t use it for themselves, only for other people. And if you managed to make enough money doing that, great.

This woman was probably Suki’s age, though she looked older. A bad dye job had turned part of her hair rich red, the roots greying. The woman looked at Suki, taking in her face and her clothes. Suki had instinctively dressed down. She didn’t want to be the femme fatale today or wear any of her designer clothes, things she’d bought a long time ago. People in trailer parks might not be able to afford Michael Kors originals or Donna Karan dresses, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t recognize them.

Suki fingered her pre-Columbian necklace with the talisman for long life.

‘Sit down, please,’ said the woman.

They were in the living-room part of the trailer, all veneer wood, plaid cushions. There were no crystal balls around. Although the woman had very old and well-used tarot cards to one side, she didn’t touch them.

‘It’s a hundred and ten dollars for a reading,’ she said to Suki.

‘Fine,’ said Suki, and passed the money over.

‘When was your last reading?’ the woman asked her.

‘I can’t remember,’ Suki said truthfully. She genuinely didn’t know. When she’d left Jethro, she’d been to see so many people: angelologists, fortune tellers, psychics, shamans … Once, she’d got her hopes up over a woman who was supposed to be ‘am-aa-zing’, in LA parlance. It turned out the woman worked out of a small premises on Hollywood Boulevard, wore a pink fur wrap and cowboy boots with rhinestone jeans. The day Suki turned up, the psychic was clearly out of her mind on drugs.

‘Wow, you’re kinda blue today. Blue haze around you. I like it,’ the woman had slurred. ‘Do you like it?’

At the time Suki was so desperate to make sense of it all, desperate to know when the pain would go, that she’d almost stayed. But she realized that a woman who was obviously hallucinating might not give her what she wanted: clarity about the future. That she had a blue haze around her was not exactly the kind of insight she’d been looking for.

‘I’d guess it’s been at least a year since I’ve seen anyone else,’ she said now.

‘You have an addiction,’ the woman said bluntly.

Suki stared at her, thinking of the years with Jethro and the drugs. There had been lots of drugs. Suki wasn’t entirely sure what they’d all been, because it seemed so un-rock’n’roll to ask. She’d swallowed all kinds of little tablets and, well, who knew what the heck they were, they just kept coming, along with lines of coke and vast hash cigarettes fat as cigars. But she’d been able to give them up. Had given them up the day she finally regained some of her pride. The day she’d walked out of the beautiful hotel in Memphis with nothing but a collection of suitcases to show for two years of her life, and nobody to help her into a cab, apart from a disinterested concierge who’d clearly seen many dishevelled women leaving in the wake of rock bands.

‘No,’ the woman said, ‘not drugs, not drink – men. Powerful men, that’s your drug.’

Suki stared at her, astonished. Nobody had ever said this to her before. The woman was clearly as crazy as the girl in the pink fur wrap. It didn’t make any sense.

‘You didn’t come for fancy language, did you?’ the woman asked.

‘I came to see if I could finish my book, get some money and get my life back on track,’ Suki blurted out without meaning to. She tried not to tell them anything: that way, you could tell pretty easily if they were genuinely psychic or merely clever mentalists.

‘You will,’ the woman said thoughtfully, ‘but not in the way you expect it to happen. You have to face your demons first. You try to pay them off with jewellery,’ she gestured at the amulet and instinctively Suki grabbed it. ‘That will only work when your spirit is well. There are two wolves inside you. The wolf who leads you to pain, and the wolf who leads you to happiness. Which wolf will prosper?’ The woman smiled as if this was a story she had told a hundred times before. ‘The wolf you feed.’

‘But how can I do it?’ Suki asked, feeling desperation rise. This wasn’t going the way she’d expected at all. She wanted to hear that it was going to be all right, that she was strong enough, that she would find success, and maybe a little bit of self-respect and possibly some fame and money. Damnit, she wanted money because she hated being poor, she’d been poor too long. And now it was back again, gnawing away at her insides the way few pains ever could. She didn’t want to shrivel into old age in poverty, she knew what that would mean. Going home to Avalon at best, ekeing out an existence on State benefits, thinking of what could have been.

‘I can see lots of futures for you,’ the woman said, ‘but you must deal with the spirit inside. Let go of the addiction, and then you can be the woman you want to be. What did you expect to hear? To beware of dark strangers? Always wear the colour green?’

The woman reached for a packet of cigarettes, tapped one out, lit up and inhaled with the practice of a forty-a-day smoker. For once, Suki didn’t feel like a cigarette.

‘You’re not a run-of-the-mill psychic are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m a psychic who can’t follow her own advice,’ the woman said laconically. ‘Look at this place.’ She gestured around her. ‘It’s no palace. Bad men: that’s what I go for every time and it’s brought me nothing but trouble, despite seeing all that I can see. And I can see, sister. But every time you think it’s going to be different, doncha? That’s it,’ said the woman. She motioned with the cigarette hand that it was time for Suki to go.

Suki was at the door of the trailer when the woman spoke again.

‘Oh yeah, you need to call your sister.’

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Suki anxiously.

Her reply was a shrug. ‘That’s all I saw. Call her.’

Suki left. She didn’t see the teenage boy and she wondered was he the only thing left from a lifetime of bad men. She slammed the door behind her, took out the keys to her car, backed out of the road and sped on the highway back to town.

Ring your sister and Give up powerful men. That was it?

Well, what did you expect for $110?

After twenty-six years of poverty, Suki Power Richardson had loved having money. It wasn’t hers, essentially, it was her husband’s. But she got to use it, to spend it. And spend it she did. She had accounts at all the big stores: Saks, Bloomies, Bergdorf Goodman. She found that she didn’t really like the old rock-chick clothes she’d worn for years, she’d been kidding herself when she said she preferred old jeans and scuffed leather jackets. It turned out that she loved new, elegant clothes made from luxurious fabrics that clung to her hourglass figure in all the right places and cost more than a month’s rent on her old apartment. Her failsafe tight black polyester pants went in the garbage and she bought beautifully cut pants off the rack at Donna Karan, along with marvellously draped jackets, and rabbit-soft knits. Her shoes were Italian, her fair hair was no longer given added oomph with a store-bought highlighting kit applied in a washbasin in her apartment: she went to a chichi hair salon where ordinary joes couldn’t even get an appointment.

Kyle loved to see her spending money on her appearance.

‘You need to look the part, honey,’ he’d say. ‘Daddy always says, “Look the part, son, and they’ll think you are the part.”’

For the first year of their marriage, Suki didn’t care what ‘the part’ was, she was simply pleased to be able to indulge in an orgy of spending. After a childhood of scraping by in draughty old Avalon House, it was like being released from prison and relishing the freedom. She bought art for the walls of the house on D Street, perused antique auctions with a gimlet eye and repainted the hall four times before she’d achieved the right shade of subtle grey. She bought flowers – too many for the house, sometimes. But she didn’t care about the excess: the Richardsons had serious money; nothing she could do could put even the slightest dent in it.

She and Kyle went to charity balls, dinner parties, and Republican party fundraisers where the wives of party bigwigs wore Chanel suits and worked the room. Even Antoinette seemed to be thawing towards her. Suki had been brought up in an important Irish mansion, she was clearly from upper-class stock and she knew how to behave.

But as Tess might have told them all, Suki got bored easily. She became fed up with statements referencing Kyle Senior. Daddy had an opinion on everything: he said it was a ludicrous idea to buy a house in Taos as Suki was suggesting instead of a cottage in Newport where Daddy wanted them to buy.

‘It’s none of his business where we buy,’ Suki shouted at Kyle as they stood at their matching his and hers sinks in the cream marble bathroom en suite.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Kyle angrily. ‘You’re not that naïve are you? I thought you prided yourself on your intellectual abilities, Suki. It’s like listening to a Renaissance painter saying he doesn’t want to paint what his patron wants him to paint. My father pays for it all!’

This last statement, and the way Kyle had hissed it at her, stuck in Suki’s mind: did his father’s absolute control over the whole family rankle with Kyle, or was he merely angry that she’d threatened to upset the applecart?

She flew to Taos to look at properties in spite of them all and then received an irate phone call from Antoinette.

‘If you continue with this nonsense, Suzanne—’ only Antoinette refused to use the nickname Suki had had since she was three – ‘you will upset my husband. And we don’t want that now, do we?’

‘Don’t we?’ said Suki truculently. ‘What do I care if he gets upset?’

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

Finally, Antoinette spoke. ‘Kyle said you’d say that. Personally, I thought you were too clever, but I can see I over-estimated you. Kyle Senior and I control you, whether you want to admit it or not. That goes for everything: from where your children go to school to whether you holiday in Europe or on the Cape with the rest of the family.’

Suki felt rage overwhelm her. She wasn’t sure which part of the conversation infuriated her most: the fact that her husband clearly told his mother everything, or the veiled threat that Antoinette and Kyle Senior could stop her going home to Ireland for the summer, because she wanted to be in Avalon again and was fed up with Massachusetts and its social set.

‘Oh, and the house in New Mexico – don’t even bother. You won’t get a red cent for that. You’ll summer with us. Perhaps, in time, you might get a cottage of your own on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s it. You’re a Richardson now, Suzanne, and you play by our rules.’

Boredom wasn’t something Suki was used to, but in the gilded cage the Richardsons had constructed around her, boredom dominated her daily life. She wasn’t expected to do anything other than look beautiful at functions, know all the right people, do a little charity work, have her hair done expensively, learn how to make small talk at elegant dinner parties and never, as Antoinette explained to her, say anything controversial, even as a joke: ‘There are no jokes in Washington.’

At this, Suki had thrown her head back and let rip with a great, throaty laugh, but Antoinette had stared at her, stony-faced.

‘I am not joking,’ she said. ‘Junior has a very good chance of a Senate seat and he needs a wife by his side, not a loose cannon. I can see that in you, Suzanne – a certain wildness. It must be the Irish blood.’

Suki could take Antoinette’s insults because she always managed to get her own little barbs in. However, saying anything about her Irishness inflamed her.

‘My ancestors were living in a castle when yours were still …’ Suki searched her mind for some suitable retort, ‘digging for vegetables in a field somewhere, and on your knees at night praying for redemption.’

Antoinette glared at her. ‘I will not lower myself to your insults,’ she said.

‘Oh, but you can insult me and that’s fine, is it?’ said Suki. ‘We all know the truth, don’t we, Antoinette: I’m the one with the blue blood in this family.’

In truth, Suki didn’t really care about the Power name or what it meant. Her father had been proud of his De Paor ancestry, but proud in a gentle way. Proud to be able to trace back his family, and yet deeply sad that a succession of feckless Powers in the past had frittered away the family fortune. As a result, the Powers had lost the ability to keep their lovely home, had lost the ability to take care of the people of the village. Her father would have been a philanthropist, if only he’d had the cash. So Suki hadn’t been brought up to think that being a Power meant that she was better than anyone else. But if it riled Antoinette, then she would remind her at every opportunity.

Angry, she went off and signed up for a course in Women’s Studies and ostentatiously left the books lying around. The Feminine Mystique, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Incredibly, she found herself fascinated by the writers, by the work. She had always thought she was living a very different life from other women because she’d left her home and had to make a living for herself in America, yet it turned out she was only doing what countless other women had done before her. And like countless other women, she’d succeeded in marrying well, but not wisely.

Kyle didn’t like her studies.

‘For God’s sake, what are you doing with all those damn books?’ he said. ‘You’ve finished with school, you don’t have to go back to it.’

Kyle was not bookish in the least, despite his father’s attempts to get him to keep up to date with happenings around the world. Kyle Senior was a voracious reader of non-fiction, particularly biographies and accounts of war. He’d never served in the military and yet he thought like a military commander, Suki realized. If he hadn’t been such a cut-and-dry bastard, she might have admired him.

It didn’t help that the slow push to get Kyle Junior’s feet wet in the world of politics was beginning to gain momentum.

‘Children,’ said Kyle Senior, ‘you need children. The wife isn’t enough.’

Suki was in the room while this conversation was going on and she sat, quite astonished. ‘Talk about me as if I’m not here, Senior,’ she said. ‘Absolutely fine. I’m a brood mare, am I?’

Kyle Senior laughed. ‘Yes, honey, I guess you are. And we’re looking for sons.’

That night Suki went out on her own to a bar across town and proceeded to get very, very drunk. She arrived home at two in the morning, having danced the night away in a jazz club and extricated herself with some difficulty from the very good dancer who’d wanted to take her back to his place. ‘I can’t, my husband wouldn’t like it,’ she’d managed, which was strange because the old Suki would have leapt at the chance.

‘You’re drunk,’ Kyle had said as she’d thrown herself into bed, clothes on, her mascara sliding down her face.

‘Yeah, I am,’ she said. ‘So what?’

The next day she’d felt sorry. She loved Kyle. It wasn’t his fault that his family were pigs and treated her as if she was nothing but an accessory in a political campaign.

‘Maybe we should have a baby,’ she said.

The baby-making plan brought them closer together – at first. Six months down the line, and still no baby, it was a different matter.

‘Maybe we should go see Dr Kennedy?’ Suki had suggested. ‘There’s lots of tests you can have these days and stuff you—’

‘We will not go to the doctor to discuss this,’ said Kyle, his nostrils flaring. For a second, he looked exactly like his father. Oddly, Suki found this a turn-on.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Let’s give it another few months.’

But nothing happened. Kyle started to spend nights in a different bedroom, said he couldn’t get to sleep at night, he didn’t want to wake her, but Suki knew the real reason. He couldn’t bear to make love to her any more. He could barely get an erection when he came near her. In their desire for a baby, somehow Kyle Junior had been emasculated.

She began going out on her own more, hanging out with women from her college course. Nobody on the course had any money, but Suki would buy them all drinks, cocktails. ‘You’re gonna love this one,’ she’d say. ‘It’s a Long Island Iced Tea and it is fantastic.’

Carlotta, a fiery Latina on the course, wanted to write a thesis on racism and stereotyping of Hispanics in American culture. Her father had threatened to disown her. ‘He wants us to fit in,’ she said, dark eyes flashing. ‘I do not want to fit in, I want to be myself. I do not want to be put into a box I need to fit.’

‘Me neither,’ said Suki.

‘And you drink too much, Suki,’ said Carlotta, ‘if we are being straight with the truth.’

‘Yeah, thanks for telling me, honey,’ Suki said. ‘You might drink too, if you had my life.’

‘You might drink if you had my life,’ countered Carlotta. ‘I pay for this course by cleaning houses at night. Maybe I clean yours too?’

‘Oh, gimme a break, Carlotta! We’re supposed to be in this together.’

‘Money separates us,’ said Carlotta. ‘Don’t forget that, chica.’

Kyle Senior rang her up. ‘I want you to stop this ludicrous college course immediately,’ he said. ‘From what I hear, it’s all rubbish about women’s rights, that tired old turkey. You’ve got plenty of rights, you don’t have to work, you’ve got money to buy clothes. What else do you want?’

‘A life,’ said Suki sarcastically. ‘A life where I’m not the Richardson family brood mare.’

‘If you can’t have a baby, you’re not much of a brood mare, are you?’ said Kyle Senior.

‘What do you mean, if I can’t have a baby?’ said Suki. ‘Who says it’s me? Your bloody son can’t even get it up when he sees me.’

She wondered if she’d gone too far, but Kyle Senior never shied away from plain talking.

‘We’ll have to make sure he does then,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want you going out at night with your girlfriends, going to bars. There are rumours starting, rumours about you having fun in bars. Inevitably, sooner or later somebody will pick up on the rumours and start to wonder whether you’re playing around. No Richardson wife plays around. So you be very careful, because I’ll be watching you.’

‘There’s nothing to watch,’ snapped Suki, and slammed the phone down, but she felt frightened. Kyle Senior was not a man to cross.