Page 2 of The Gin Sisters' Promise

1

London, November, Present

Iris closed her front door behind her with a kick that felt like a final exclamation mark on a very long day. It had been that way for a while. Her sister Georgie would probably say that work should fulfil you but, Iris thought irritably, not everyone could be as lucky as Georgie when it came to finding a career that could jam up all the other cracks in her life. She pushed the notion of her sister from her mind as quickly as it had arrived. It was automatic now. She didn’t waste time thinking of either of them anymore. What was the point when there was no forgiving or forgetting the hurt they’d caused her all those years ago? It was much better not to think of them at all.

Iris groaned. Her head was throbbing. She wasn’t tired, just irritated with another day like every other. She was sick to the back teeth of reminding people to turn up to dental appointments they didn’t want to keep. She was bored of having the same conversations about the cost of root canals and crowns and children’s braces. Becoming a receptionist at a busy London dental practice probably wasn’t anyone’s burning ambition. It was a job, a way to make a living – nothing more, and if she could afford to throw in the towel she would have left years ago. But someone needed to earn a steady wage in the house. In fairness, her employers were generous with her wages and a hefty Christmas bonus was always thrown in to keep her there for another year. Maybe she was expecting too much from life.

She was early. She’d meant to stop off at the fish market – they were having homemade fish and chips for dinner. Myles’s favourite. She hoped it would pull him out of the distanced silence he’d put between them over the last few weeks. But in the rush to catch her morning train, she had forgotten her purse and so she’d come directly home.

Though she didn’t think so at the time, later, she wondered if maybe she knew that this was it. The day she’d dreaded since the very first day of her marriage to him.

His bag stood ready at the foot of the stairs. Myles was a cameraman, freelance for a news channel. It paid a pittance but gave him access to all the big news stories and held a certain glamour he’d leaned on more these last few years, now that his looks were beginning to fade.

‘Iris.’ He stopped, dead still in the hallway, as if he’d been confronted by a raging lion on the savannah instead of his wife home from work on a wet and miserable Wednesday afternoon. ‘I…’ he started. ‘You’re early. I wasn’t expecting you yet. I’m…’

‘Yes?’ Iris waited, working to keep her face blank while the wordsplease, please, please don’t do thisexploded in her mind. Iris folded her arms about herself. Perhaps it would stop her trembling when she heard the worst. Of course, she knew what it was. It was a woman – younger, prettier and probably with enough money to make up for the loss of the house and their savings that leaving her would cause him.

‘I’m leaving you. I’ve met someone else.’ His words were faltering, but she hardly noticed because it felt as if the world had already started to spin away from her. ‘She’s called Amanda… She’s—’

‘Please, Myles, please don’t do this. Don’t leave me for some bit of skirt that’s going to be by the wayside in a matter of weeks. Come on, we can work through this…’ She was pleading, but she might as well have been reciting a shopping list, because he just went on gathering up his belongings. His keys. His watch. And then in the kitchen, he hovered for a minute before picking up four of the fresh scones she’d baked that morning. She watched him, wordlessly now, because she’d run out of things to say, or was it that she didn’t know where to start or where to end?

‘It’s not likethat… This is different.’ He dragged a hand through his hair. For a moment, his expression seemed to dip into something like anguish and Iris experienced a dart of panic. Could he really be in love with someone else?

‘I’m begging you, Myles, please, don’t do this. What do you want me to do? I’ll do anything, anything for you to stay.’ She was shrieking, unable to control either the words or the desperation. Hysteria pummelled against her ribcage where her heart should have been.

His restraint silenced her, suddenly, as if a plug had been pulled from the very heart of her. And for a moment, the only sound in her world was the low buzz of the refrigerator.

‘You need me, Myles, don’t you see?’ She took a step closer to him, and tried not to notice that he took a step back from her. ‘This is us, Myles.’ She waved her hand around their little semi. ‘Twenty-three years of us! We’re meant to be together. Think of everything I’ve given up for you, everything—’

‘Oh, please, Iris, I’m sick and tired of hearing the same old saga. No-one asked you to follow me to London or to cut your family out of our lives.’ He spun around with a look of pure disgust as his eyes travelled over her. She felt the power going from her legs, could hardly stand straight beneath his loathing stare. ‘That was all you, all your doing. We might have been millionaires if your old man included us in his will, but that’s never likely to happen now, is it?’ He shook his head, as if it had been that simple, when they both knew there was so much more to it all than that. There was so much more to them. ‘And as for those crazy sisters of yours – you can’t blame me for falling out with them.’

‘All right, all right, let’s forget Georgie and Nola. This isn’t about them; it’s about us. Look at how far we’ve come. Most couples don’t make it past…’ She stopped, because suddenly, she knew there was something else. Something she hadn’t figured into this scenario in all the times she’d played it out in her worst nightmares. If it was possible to imagine anything worse than Myles leaving her, she had a feeling that there was even worse to come.

‘No. I can’t do this anymore. Iris, there’s something you should know…’ His voice became almost a whisper and she had to lean forward to hear him properly. ‘Amanda is pregnant.’

It felt as if she’d been slapped across her face. She reeled backwards and fell against the wall, felt herself drift slowly towards the ground. Could you actually die of shock? Or of a truly, truly breaking heart? ‘Pregnant? How on earth could that be?’ Myles wasn’t ready to be a father. He’d told her that so often, it was like a mantra. It was always next year, or the year after, or after I get this job finished or when we have more money. Of course, there were times when she had pined for a child, but she told herself nothing was more important to her than Myles.

‘We are having a baby.’ He said it so simply, he might as well have been talking about the football results.

‘But…’ She felt the words that she had intended to say trickle away from her. Myles was going to be a father. It had all been for nothing. It was the annihilation of her very soul. She let her body go, floated up above it and watched as it fell about her like a puddle to the floor. Pathetic. He bent and picked up his bag, stepped over her, like someone else’s rubbish on the pavement. He stood for a second that could have lasted a lifetime or might not have happened at all. And then he was gone.

*

The house was desolately quiet. The hours somehow drew themselves out into days and then one week fell into a second and there was still no contact from him. The stillness clawed at her imagination. Here, in the pristine tidiness of a life spent ignoring the ever-widening gap between hope and acceptance, it seemed as if the silence was taunting her. Could she really go on like this forever? She was still a young woman, just forty. Forty, had seemed to be ancient to her when her own mother died of septicaemia all those years ago, but now, women her age were starting companies, starting families, starting over. Women her age were looking forward, but all Iris could do was look back.

She played her relationship with Myles over in her mind from that very first day. She’d had a crush on him long before he ever noticed her, but then at the village fete, it seemed the sun shone extra bright and he’d ambled up to the Delahaye Distillery table. Iris still felt butterflies in her stomach when she thought about that first time he’d walked her home and kissed her at the gate. Long and lingering, much too grown up for her age. She’d been a kid, just sixteen and never been kissed. God, how had they ended up here?

He’d been gone a month and still wretchedness flooded her; it felt as if she was drowning most days. And strangely, she knew, the worst part wasn’t losing Myles, rather it was the fact that he’d betrayed her so badly. A baby. She had always wanted a family but somehow, for Myles, there had never been arighttime. Today she rolled out of bed after midday and staggered towards the hall mirror. She examined her reflection: prematurely grey hair, pallid complexion – the most fresh air she got these days was rushing for the London Underground. She tried smiling, but it didn’t seem to fit her anymore, rather it was an unnatural use of her muscles, which had gotten out of the habit of joyfulness. She’d even lost weight, not that she needed to, but her wedding ring slid up and down her finger now as if it too wanted to get away from her. What did it matter if she faded away, miserable and alone, really? She should reach out; she should have people to reach out to. Wasn’t that what you did in times of crisis: find a shoulder to lean on, share your misery and halve it in the process? Friends and family. Hah!

She hadn’t really made any close female friends over the years, or none that had actually stuck. Her own fault. She’d become jealous and distrustful of any woman coming too close to Myles. As for family, Georgie and Nola were the last people she’d call; she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of turning their backs on her as she had so willingly done to them all those years ago. They hadn’t spoken in ten years, not since that disastrous party at the family distillery when they’d had the mother of all fallings-out. Perhaps, she should have reached out to them, just as her father had reached out to her a few months earlier. They wereIn Touch. Something she’d never expected would happen again, but the letters he’d started to send her months earlier had found a chink in the armour she’d worn against her family for the last two decades. They had graduated to phone calls. God, who’d have thought these would become the highlight of her otherwise empty life?

Outside, a tapping noise broke into her miserable thoughts. She looked out the window to see a crow, digging in the eaves opposite, as if he might eventually come across nuggets of gold. Iris found herself wishing he might find something worthwhile. His beak went up and down,tap, tap, tap, tap,and all the while dark, voluminous clouds loomed heavier over the rooftops with each passing minute. That meant only one thing. London weather was nothing like in Ballycove, Ireland; everything – even the storms – were far more civilised here. Why was it that after so many years, she still compared the two places and always Ballycove came out the best? She sighed, flicking across the lock on the window – not that it was likely to so much as rattle. This little semi hadn’t enough personality to make a sound she couldn’t identify.

It would have to be sold, of course. Wasn’t that what happened when people got divorced? It had been her home for the past twenty-plus years and despite its lack of character, the thought of losing it made her heart ache.

Or maybe Myles would want to buy her out of it somehow. Suddenly, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to hand it over to Myles and the new family he was embarking on – not that he’d suggested it yet. As far as Iris had managed to glean from his Facebook page, he was living with this woman, Amanda Prescott.

Sometimes she saw her whole situation with terrible clarity. What if her sisters had been right all along? All those years, when she’d believed they were jealous, maybe Nola hadn’t wanted to take him for herself and maybe Georgie really had seen him steal from the distillery? Perversely, that only made her hate them all the more. Well, at least it was unlikely she’d be running into Georgie or Nola anytime soon.

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