The Family Gift Read online

  Dedication

  For my four rocks – John, Dylan, Murray and Mum.And for Emma, whose light will always burn brightly

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  About the Author

  Also by Cathy Kelly

  Copyright

  1

  Dance like nobody’s watching

  The boxes are going to break me – I can see that, now.

  Up until this point, everything was about filling them, closing the house sale and making sure the movers got every single item, every single box, from our old house installed in their truck.

  But at this moment, exhausted from being up since half five rushing round tidying and stuffing everything left into boxes, I have a sudden, horrible realisation: I will now have to unpack it all.

  It’s a Friday mid-afternoon in May: Dan and I and four house-movers, who had been looking singularly underwhelmed with the uncool and inexpensive contents of our old house, are staring at our new one.

  They’ve stopped arguing about sports, so I think they might be mildly impressed.

  Number Nine, Rowan Gardens was a tall, narrow house with on-street parking and the garden, such as it was, consisted of two olive trees in pots outside the front door.

  Kellinch House – I know, a name and not a number! – is set in its own eighth of an acre, boasts several trees and is in a whole different league for myself and Dan.

  Our new home, I think, looking up at it from the drive which is half gravel/half weeds.

  It’s a slightly run-down Edwardian red-brick that needs more than a lick of paint to dolly it up.

  In fact, it probably needs a live-in handyman who works for free to fix all the wonky doors, fallen-off skirting boards and the gap between the bottom of the kitchen door and the garden which must be heaven if you’re a mouse.

  But – this is the important bit – it’s a structurally sound, detached house with it’s very own gate and, really importantly, high walls.

  We will be safe in this new house with the big wall.

  Safe.

  Dan puts his arm around me and I lean in to him, determined not to let unpacking anxiety – I’m sure it’s a disease – get the better of me.

  ‘Freya, you’re right. Buying this is a sound economic decision,’ he says in his ‘are we mad?’ voice, and I laugh because Dan always makes me laugh, even when I know he’s saying this to convince both of us that we haven’t put ourselves into unmanageable debt for a detached house with issues.

  ‘I don’t know why they say economists aren’t sexy,’ I tease, to change the subject, ‘because they so are.’

  Dan slides one large hand up under my now-dirty T-shirt and encounters bare skin. ‘We need to christen this house,’ he murmurs.

  ‘Can we wait till the movers are gone?’ I deadpan back. ‘Or do you want an audience, because the gravel will be uncomfortable and phone footage of the whole thing could ruin my career . . .’

  He laughs out loud and we stand there, entwined, enjoying the warmth of the slanting afternoon sun, with the scent of flowers driving the bumblebees mad.

  ‘Dan, are we starting to unload or are you going to stand there all day?’ demands one of said movers, Big Brian, to distinguish him from Young Brian, who is blithely hauling boxes of china out of the van as if he was about to fill a skip.

  Big Brian defers all questions to Dan because he is The Man and knows all things.

  I packed the boxes and allegedly I know all things box-wise but Brian and his crew will be gone soon enough, so I ignore this rampant misogyny.

  Dan looks at me, understanding instantly that I get irritated by men who assume women are idiots, but I wave him off.

  ‘It’s falling apart: you know that, right?’ says Martin (Gaelic football all the way and driver of the second truck).

  ‘Martin, how else would we be able to buy it?’ says Dan reasonably, and he strides towards the truck. ‘We haven’t won the lottery yet.’

  As the movers and Dan all laugh, I watch him walk towards them.

  Dan is dark and sexy, with olive skin that tans, ruffled dark hair that looks as if he never brushes it, even when he has, conker-brown eyes and enough charisma for at least four normal people. I swear, women’s eyes follow him on the street, watching those long legs and broad shoulders.

  We’ve been married blissfully for ten years, together for thirteen, and adore each other but somewhere deep inside (a residue of my horribly uncomfortable teenage years and something that would make a Jungian analyst suggest years of therapy) I feel that physically, I do not measure up to his hotness.

  I am too tall. Always have been. Not skinny model-tall, either, which appears to be the only way the world wants its tall women.

  I don’t have the permanently bent neck of many lofty women, stooping to decrease myself. My mother wisely made me do ballet for three years as a child, but I was too tall for school, too tall for dating, felt too tall for everything: until I met Dan.

  At the age of forty-two, I am generally happy with myself, but sometimes, just sometimes, I wish I had been born tiny, with a retroussé nose, exquisite bones and size four shoes, instead of my canal-boat size nines.

  When you’re tall, you can never blend into the crowd.

  The plus is that when you’re tall, you have an inbuilt desire to take care of people. I mean, look at the Amazons and Wonder Woman, right? Makes total sense. Plus, I love Wonder Woman, both versions.

  An hour after we arrive at Kellinch House, I’m in the hall looking at the vast quantity of our possessions and wondering how exactly we have so much stuff and why I haven’t dumped half of it, when my younger sister, Scarlett, phones.

  ‘Can I bring the children round?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m not a child, Scarlett, I’m a teenager,’ says the deeply wounded voice of Lexi, our oldest daughter, fourteen and two months, who argued hotly to be allowed in as soon as we got the keys and the moving trucks rolled up.

  ‘Getting keys on moving day is a bit chaotic,’ I’d explained to her. ‘With Rowan Gardens, we only got the keys at five to five. We’d been waiting since one . . .’

  ‘Sorry, Lexi,’ apologised Scarlett. ‘Can I drive over with two children and one fabulous teenager.’

  ‘Come on,’ I say. ‘It’s ninety per cent packing boxes all over the place. I’ll leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the hall so you can find me.’

  I hear Lexi giggle.

  ‘Mum.’ Lexi has grabbed the phone. ‘Can you come and get me? Liam is playing with Uncle Jack’s computer and he says it’s cooler than ours and Teddy’s using Aunt Scarlett’s make-up. I don’t think they’ll move.’

  Lexi, who is not tall but is petite and so darkly beautiful that she looks like a Disney princess, has a sweet, slightly husky voice that soars in the scho
ol choir.

  Unlike me, before long she will have boys following her around like lovesick puppies, which both worries me and makes me happy for her. She will not need to lurk in the home economics room at lunchtime because the school canteen is a place of high anxiety to those kids who are different.

  ‘No, Lexi, honey,’ I say, with regret. ‘I can’t leave now. The moving guys need me and Dad here because they are moving stuff in at speed and have to be told where to put things. Get Scarlett to close up the make-up shop, switch off Jack’s computer and tell them I’ve double chocolate brownies heating in the oven.’

  This is not true. Yet. But my superpower is cooking and if I can’t whisk up brownies in half an hour, then nobody can.

  ‘Love you, Mum.’

  ‘Love you, Lexi.’

  Scarlett comes back on the line: ‘Message being delivered. We’ll be there as soon as I de-sparkle Teddy and drag Liam away from the computer.’

  ‘Good luck with that,’ I say, laughing.

  Liam, eleven and a gloriously even-tempered boy, loves the computer but is wonderfully biddable.

  Teddy, four and the empress of all she surveys, needs careful handling to make her do what you want her to do. Bribery, fibbing and serious manipulation are always involved. It doesn’t matter how often I read Raising Girls, I still can’t find a chapter which deals with a child with the iron will of Teddy. I bet she’ll turn up wearing most of Scarlett’s make-up and clutching all the bright, shiny lip glosses in her chubby little hands.

  I abandon the hall and go into the kitchen which is large, pretty, the only updated part of the entire property and is the reason I managed to persuade Dan that we needed this house, despite having an upstairs main bathroom with an original, not retro, avocado suite.

  ‘Not that I’m Mr Elle Decoration or anything,’ said Dan slowly when he first saw the avocado explosion, ‘but I’m not that keen on the main bathroom.’

  ‘We can live with it,’ I said brightly. ‘Think of the garden for the children! And the kitchen for my show.’

  I am a chef, which proves that all those years in the home economics classroom were not wasted. Eight years ago, I was plucked from obscurity by a TV producer who spotted me doing a high-speed food demo at a city food festival and thought I had ‘promise’. Since then, I’ve a new job as a chef with her own TV series and I’ve written four best-selling cookery books. Four books and five TV shows, to be precise.

  I’ve even been named Sexiest Cook of the Year – once – which made me laugh and made Dan get me an apron with the logo printed on.

  ‘At least they agree with me,’ he said with a grin that was X-rated.

  ‘And where do you think I can wear that?’ I asked.

  Dan grinned some more. ‘In our room . . .?’ he suggested.

  I’ve always cooked. It’s my thing.

  In the same way Scarlett’s was how to do make-up and inadvertently make boys/men drool; while my older sister Maura’s was to boss people about without them quite noticing. I have a baby brother, too, Con, and at twenty-nine, I think his superpower is telling perfectly nice women he’ll phone them, which is nearly always a lie.

  Truthfully, I learned how to cook from my mother who can stare into an empty fridge, see nothing but a few bits of bacon, leftover potatoes, a rind of cheese and a shrivelled pepper and conjure up the most amazing ‘throw in everything’ frittata you have ever tasted, followed by a crumble made with those apples you’d forgotten about. But training at the world-famous Prue Leith culinary school in London meant I knew my stuff.

  I race into the kitchen, start ripping open one of the many boxes labelled ‘pantry’ and finally find all the ingredients. A bit more ripping provides a brownie tin, my palette knife and the emergency hand mixer that’s got me out of so many kitchen crises. You can’t take a pale silver Kitchen Aid to cookery demonstrations in tents is all I’m saying.

  Seven minutes later, the brownies are in the oven and I’m making tea and coffee for the masses.

  ‘I’m an almond milk flat white man, myself,’ Big Brian is saying, looking with distaste at the instant coffee.

  ‘Ah, Brian,’ I say kindly, ‘we’re not up and running yet. Can I interest you in a millionaire’s shortbread?’

  ‘You made them, Freya?’ he asks.

  I nod.

  ‘It’d be rude not to,’ he says happily, and takes two.

  The men are reluctantly getting back to work, when I hear a car horn tooting from outside along with the insistent press on the gate button.

  ‘It’s me, Mum!’ says Lexi’s voice on the intercom.

  I tear up. My babies. They might be four, eleven and fourteen, but to me, they’ll always be my babies.

  This house will keep us all safe.

  I close my eyes for a moment and pray. I’m not much of a one for prayer but in the last year, I’ve been living proof that fear and trauma make you want to pray to something or someone.

  I pray now: ‘Keep us safe, house.’

  *

  It’s Saturday morning and as I survey the endless boxes at the edge of our bedroom and on the landing of our new house, I wonder if I could hire a skip, fling all the contents of our old house into it, and start again?

  Feng shui the whole Abalone-Conroy family in one swoop without ever unpacking a box?

  People could interview me and instead of writing ‘Television chef Freya Abalone tells us how she cooks nutritious food for her whole family’, they could explain how the five of us live in a junk-free home where we all drift around in linen smocks like people in a Scandinavian clothes brochure.

  ‘We just got rid of everything when we moved into our new house,’ says Freya, who looks five (no, ten) years younger than her forty-two years . . .’

  The photos would show our new house with no excess stuff in it.

  Sadly, this idea is just a lovely dream. Sorting out will have to be done, to the soundtrack of my inner voice, Mildred, who spends all her time telling me where I am going wrong.

  How could you not have dejunked before you moved?

  Yoga pants, again? Really?

  You could fit in some exercise if you weren’t so addicted to Netflix, you know.

  Yes, we all have some version of a Mildred. She lives in our head and she says things no true friend would ever say to a woman. You’d dump a friend who says you’re about to be found out by the Imposter Police and fired.

  But that inner voice bitching at you non-stop . . .? You listen and you believe it.

  I hope that one day, with meditation, yoga, mindfulness and reading Eckhart Tolle on a loop, I will banish Mildred and replace her voice with a chorus of the lovely – deluded, possibly – people who said I was Sexiest Cook of the Year.

  Just not today.

  The box labelled ‘first morning’ is missing and all I can see are ones labelled ‘shoes.’

  In the story of my life, shoes take up a whole chapter. This is because I am hopeless with actual clothes but nobody can mess up buying shoes, right?

  Shoes used to take up all the space in the bottom of my wardrobe in our old house.

  Organising them has always been the problem.

  I thought about lining them up in boxes with Polaroid photos on the outsides but really . . . Who does that?

  So today, my many shoes are clogging up the landing in ten giant boxes and there is no sign of the vital ‘first morning’ box.

  You are hopeless, says Mildred.

  Yeah, yeah, I tell her. Enough already.

  With a mere two days to go to the actual moving truck turning up, my younger sister Scarlett asked: ‘Have you done lists for every box, so you know what’s in them all?’

  I gave her my seriously? face.

  ‘Do I look like I have time to do lists of what’s in every damn box?’ I said waspishly. I was also c
onsidering the fact that I would never, ever be able to buy a pair of shoes again. Yes, we will be that broke from buying this house.

  ‘I am too busy to do lists because I am overseeing things. Did you know that Teddy is unpacking her toy boxes even when I duct-tape them shut.’

  ‘Respect,’ laughed Scarlett. ‘I can’t open things shut with duct tape.’

  Scarlett does not have children – a source of much pain, I should add – which is why she is impressed with the things four-year-olds can do that their mothers do not want them to do.

  It is a mark of what an amazing human being Scarlett is that after years of infertility treatment, she can even be in the same house as a child. She has taken every hormone known to woman, still has no little beloved baba to show for it, and yet still takes care of my children all the time.

  Today, my fabulous childminder, Angela, has had to have a tooth out, so my afternoon help is absent.

  I continue my rant, albeit calmer: ‘Dan has gone off to do an interview, when I’ve cancelled all work for four days so we can get sorted. Lexi has done her boxes and wants me to take her and her friend to the cinema, as a last treat in this house, which is not happening.’

  Instantly, mothering guilt rages up in me.

  You can tell me that guilt is a wasted emotion and I know it is, but I still let it have its way with me. The same way I feel bad when I eat huge slices of cake on shoots for the cake bit of my books, even though I have to. All part of the job.

  Guilt is part of living, although I’ve bought several self-help books on the basis that they can help me banish it.

  ‘Plus,’ I continue, ‘Liam is spending far too long every evening playing Super Mario on the Super Mario yoke because I promised it was the last thing I’d put away. Dan should be here.’

  ‘Naughty Dan,’ says Scarlett, grinning.

  She loves Dan. All my family do. Con, annoying little brother, teases me that because Dan is younger than me – three years younger – he is infinitely cooler.

  Which is true. Dan is the economist everyone wants on their TV and radio shows.

  And in truth, everyone is cooler than me.

  ‘Don’t stand up for him,’ I say crossly. ‘I can’t do everything myself and I’m running out of time.’