Chapter 4 #2
‘No, darling, nothing like that,’ Helen said to him.
‘I doubt we’re planning anything so pleasant,’ Lorcan said darkly. He was getting a bad vibe about this meeting.
‘Oh, stop carrying on like you’re the only person here who cares about Kate,’ Grace snapped.
‘We all care about her – which is why we’re here.
’ She paused – she knew how to capture and hold an audience’s attention as much as Helen did.
‘None of you is supposed to know this yet, but Kate is engaged to Brian.’
‘Oh, well done, Kate!’ Tom exclaimed cheerily. He was met with a stony silence and much eye-rolling from Rachel. ‘Oh, aren’t we pleased about it? Sorry. Some objection to the bloke, is there?’
‘Only the fact that he’s the biggest nob on the planet,’ Rachel snarled. ‘Engaged? I can’t believe Kate would be so stupid.’
‘I couldn’t either. She only told me on Friday.’ Grace was relieved to be able to bitch about it with someone who was on the same wavelength. Rachel was such a comfort.
‘God,’ Rachel fumed, even more incensed than Grace. ‘I thought we could at least rely on that creep to avoid marriage at all costs.’
‘Yes, it’s a bit conventional for him, isn’t it?’ Helen commented.
‘It’s not a conventional engagement, though,’ Grace said, pursing her lips.
‘Which lets him out of buying her a ring, the shagger,’ Jack growled.
Grace was touched by Jack’s support. She knew he didn’t approve of what she was doing, but he approved of the Tree-hugger even less and had reluctantly agreed to be party to the plot.
‘And none of us is supposed to know about this?’ Lorcan asked.
‘No.’
‘So you thought it would be a good idea to call a family meeting to tell us.’
‘We need all the time we can get,’ Grace said defensively.
‘This isn’t about deciding what to get them for a wedding present, is it?’ Tom asked. He was entertaining serious doubts about the kind of family he had married into.
‘No, Tom, I’m afraid not,’ Lorcan answered dolefully. ‘I think my mother has something much more Machiavellian up her sleeve.’
‘So what exactly are we here for?’ Conor asked, impatient to get down to the business at hand, whatever it was. If someone would spit it out, he could get it sorted and everyone out of the house. He had important calls to make.
‘We’re here,’ Grace said, ‘to decide what we’re going to do about it. We can’t just let it happen and do nothing. We’re going to have a brainstorming session, and I want us to put our heads together and come up with some ideas.’
‘Ideas for what?’ Tom asked.
‘For breaking it up, of course,’ Lorcan told him.
‘Oh, come on, Lorcan,’ his mother chided. ‘You hate him as much as the rest of us. And you know he’s wrong for Kate.’
‘Yes, but don’t you think maybe we should respect Kate’s decision?’ he asked tentatively. ‘She’s old enough to know what she’s doing.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ His mother dismissed his qualms, as though she were swatting a fly. ‘Where would we be if we all minded our own business and let everyone run their own lives? Look at your auntie Sheila.’
Auntie Sheila was always trotted out at times like this, a cautionary tale to anyone who advocated a non-invasive approach to family affairs.
‘What happened to Auntie Sheila?’ Tom asked.
‘She married a cult leader,’ Lorcan told him.
‘I’ve never heard about this before!’
‘He’s a skeleton in our closet,’ Lorcan said.
Sheila’s husband may have been a skeleton in the O’Neills’ closet, but Grace had no compunction about dragging him out and giving his bones a good rattle in the interests of bringing the family into line.
‘Her husband was a charlatan, Tom,’ Grace embellished. ‘He made poor Sheila’s life a misery – took all their money and ran off to Arizona to set up a commune.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes, it was quite a shock.’
‘He now lives somewhere in the Sedona Desert with his ever-dwindling flock,’ Lorcan informed him. ‘There were only about six of them last we heard.’
‘He hadn’t started his cult when Sheila first met him, of course. But we always knew something wasn’t quite right about him. There were little signs,’ Grace continued, gazing melancholically into the middle distance. ‘He started wearing a poncho.’
‘A what?’ Tom thought he must have misheard.
‘A poncho, Tom,’ Lorcan prompted him. ‘Try to keep up.’
‘Ah, right,’ Tom nodded, as if this was a universally recognised sign of messianic tendencies.
‘In hindsight, of course, it was obvious. But it was the seventies,’ Grace said. ‘Everyone was wearing them. And Clint Eastwood wore a poncho in those cowboy films, and there’s nothing wrong with him, is there?’
‘Well,’ Tom said uncertainly, ‘wasn’t he hanging around with that monkey for a while?’
‘It was more of an orangutan,’ Lorcan corrected him, clearly struggling to keep a straight face.
‘Still, doesn’t make it right,’ Tom said staunchly.
‘Anyway, I don’t think there was really anything going on between them,’ Lorcan whispered, as Grace shot him a furious look.
‘Ah! One of those trumped-up romances to promote their film?’
Grace was sorry she’d ever mentioned Clint Eastwood now. So was Conor – Tom and Lorcan could go off on a riff like this for hours on end.
‘The point,’ Grace said firmly, bringing them back on track, ‘is that we knew something was wrong but we kept making allowances, turning a blind eye.’
‘To the poncho?’
‘To everything, Tom. Until it was too late.’ She sighed heavily. ‘We could have saved poor Sheila from a lifetime of misery, but we didn’t. Well, that’s not going to happen again in my family.’
‘So what happened to Auntie Sheila?’ Tom asked. ‘She wasn’t at our wedding, was she?’ He looked to Rachel.
‘She hooked up with a Greek billionaire and they spend all their time sailing around the world. They’re in the Caribbean at the moment,’ Rachel told him.
‘Oh!’ Tom was surprised. He had expected to hear that she had died of a broken heart. ‘Not exactly a lifetime of misery, then, was it?’ he said cheerfully. He was surprised that Grace didn’t seem more pleased that things had turned out so well for her sister.
‘That’s not the point, Tom,’ Grace corrected him. ‘The point is that we could have saved Sheila from a disastrous marriage, but we stood back and did nothing. Well, I’m not going to stand idly by and watch Kate ruin her life. We’re her family. It’s our duty to interfere.’
‘So, any ideas, anyone?’ Helen asked, aware that Conor was getting antsy and was anxious for everyone to leave.
‘She needs to find someone else,’ Rachel said.
‘Not much chance of that happening,’ Grace said. ‘She considers herself off the market.’
‘We could tell her about the floozy he was with at the wedding,’ Jack suggested.
Grace considered this. ‘No, we don’t want to be seen to be interfering. We have to make her see for herself what he’s like.’
‘She needs to find someone else,’ Rachel said again, more insistently.
‘There isn’t time for that,’ Grace said impatiently. ‘We don’t even know how much time we’ve got – they’re planning to spring the wedding on us at the last minute!’
‘We need to show him up, make her see him in a bad light,’ Conor mused, thinking aloud. This meeting was going on far too long and he wanted to wrap it up.
‘And how do we do that?’ Grace asked.
‘We invite him for a family weekend in the Cork house,’ Conor suggested, as if he was presenting them with the definitive solution.
Grace was surprised he could be so dense. This wasn’t about making friends with the twerp.
Lorcan voiced her concerns. ‘What will that achieve,’ he asked, ‘apart from ruining a perfectly good weekend?’
‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Conor said to the room at large, meeting a lot of blank faces. Apparently it wasn’t obvious so he’d have to spell it out.
‘When we’ve got him there, we do what we do best, apparently.’
Everyone gazed at him questioningly. ‘We overwhelm him,’ he said, as if stating the blindingly obvious.
Everyone digested this.
‘Kill him with kindness sort of thing?’ Helen clarified. ‘It might work.’ She looked hopefully at Grace.
‘It’s worth a try, I suppose.’ Grace wasn’t convinced.
‘Of course it’ll work,’ Conor said. ‘Kate’s an O’Neill. He can just about pass muster when she has him on her own, one on one. Once she sees him in the family context, she’ll realise what a tosser he is.’
‘We could all go to work on him,’ Grace mused. ‘Everyone could do their bit.’
‘Well, I’m afraid I won’t be able to join in the fun,’ Lorcan said. ‘I’ll be in America.’ He had been invited to direct A Streetcar Named Desire in a Tennessee Williams festival on Broadway and would be gone for most of the summer.
‘Well, we’d hate you to do anything against your principles, anyway,’ his mother said waspishly. ‘Just don’t come crying to me if you end up with the Tree-hugger as a brother-in-law. At least the rest of us will have the satisfaction of knowing we did all we could to prevent it.’
Shortly after that, the meeting broke up. As Rachel was leaving, she darted a glance at her mother. ‘I’ll call you later, Mum,’ she said.
* * *
‘Mum?’
‘Rachel, hi!’ Grace was a little alarmed that Rachel was calling her so soon. She’d only just got home.
‘Look, I have an idea about this Tree-hugger thing, but I couldn’t say it with everyone there – especially Lorcan. He’d never agree. But desperate situations call for desperate measures.’
Grace’s heart leaped. She liked the sound of ‘desperate measures’. She didn’t feel the family had grasped the enormity of the situation, and, despite Conor’s assurances, she wasn’t convinced that they could scare off the Tree-hugger just with a weekend en famille. ‘What is it?’ she asked excitedly.
‘Well, like I said, the only way to get Kate away from the Tree-hugger is to get her interested in someone else. You know she’s never had much luck with men. I think she believes he’s the best she’ll ever get.’