Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection
Someone Like You
What She Wants
Just Between Us
Best of Friends
Always and Forever
Past Secrets

Cathy Kelly

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2017

Cover illustration based on a painting by Nicholas Hely Hutchinson. Cover lettering © Stephen Raw.

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 970007389360, 9780007389377, 9780007389322, 9780007389315, 9780007389308, 9780007389353

Ebook Edition © March 2017 ISBN: 9780008252441

Version: 2017-10-28

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Someone Like You

What She Wants

Just Between Us

Best of Friends

Always and Forever

Past Secrets

About the Author

Also by Cathy Kelly

About the Publisher

Someone Like You
Cathy Kelly

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Cathy Kelly 2000

Cathy Kelly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007273928

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780007389360

Version: 2017-10-28

To John, with all my love

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

Hannah stretched one slim, tanned leg in the direction of the taps, clasped the hot tap expertly with her dripping foot and felt hot water flood deliciously into the bath.

‘You’ve done that before,’ said Jeff in amusement as she sank back against him in the water, her back slick against his bare chest, nothing but lemon verbena-scented bubbles between them.

‘I love reading in the bath and, in the winter, it’s horrible sitting up out of the water to turn on the taps, so I’ve learned how to do it with my feet,’ Hannah murmured as the water level rose slowly in the cracked old roll-top bath and the heat flooded all over her limbs. She felt gloriously tired yet happy, every inch of her body satiated even though she’d had practically no sleep last night. Sharing a bath after such a wonderful, marathon lovemaking session had been a brilliant idea. The bath water eased the aches caused by Jeff’s very energetic lovemaking. There had been one mad moment when they’d almost fallen off Hannah’s bed and she’d just managed not to shriek out loud in agony as a shooting pain had rocketed up her back into her neck. That was obviously the drawback of flings with younger men, she decided gleefully: they had no concept of back problems and were keen to do gymnastic things with mirrors, armchairs and the ties of your dressing gown. The only thing poor Harry had ever done with the ties of his dressing gown was to let them trail behind him all over the kitchen floor picking up bits of fluff, spare cornflakes and dust.

What was she calling him ‘poor Harry’ for anyway? ‘Poor’ my eye. Parasitical, Lying Bastard Harry suited him better. Thinking of parasites, she grimly hoped that his year-long trek around South America meant he’d finally met that infamous parasite that lived in tropical rivers and swam up the urine stream of any man stupid enough to pee in a river. Once it swam into your system, you were in big trouble. Hannah hoped eradicating it would involve some agonizing operation where Harry couldn’t sit down without wincing for a week. Something like the duck-billed speculum thingy which women had to endure being inserted for cervical smear tests, but much, much worse.

‘Is there anything else you can do with your feet?’ Jeff asked wickedly, whisking her away from the Amazon and agonizing medical experiments by nibbling her ear provocatively.

‘No,’ Hannah said firmly, concentrating on letting the water soothe the nagging ache in her right hip. She closed her eyes and began planning the next hour: her small suitcase was neatly stowed on top of the wardrobe in the boxroom and the clothes she wanted to take to Egypt were carefully arranged on the boxroom bed. It would take half an hour to pack, ticking off every item of clothing and every toiletry on her pared-down list. Then she had to empty the fridge. No point coming back to a disgustingly smelly kitchen through carelessness. When the kitchen was linked to the sitting room by badly fitting double doors, limiting bad smells was particularly important. Logistically, Hannah thought as her mind ran through her preparations with the precision of a Swiss watch, she only had a couple of minutes more to soak in the bath.

Jeff had other ideas. His mouth began trailing down her neck on to her shoulders while his hands rippled under the water, stroking Hannah’s thighs suggestively. She could feel the muscular chest with its six-pack stomach contracting with desire as he touched her.

She sat up abruptly and turned off the hot tap, her dark hair slicking against her skin like a tangle of seaweed.

‘We don’t have time, Jeff,’ she said sternly. ‘It’s half nine already. I’ve got to be at the airport in a couple of hours and I’ve got some phone calls to make, not to mention the fact that I haven’t packed yet.’

Jeff pulled her effortlessly back into the bath with arms used to bench-pressing double her body weight. ‘If I was going with you, you wouldn’t need to pack very much,’ he said, nuzzling her ear. ‘Just a couple of G-string bikinis and a sexy dress like that one you were wearing last night.’

Hannah had to smile. The amethyst dress was incredibly daring and unlike anything else in her limited and quite conservative wardrobe: two flimsy spaghetti-strap little slip things worn together, she’d bought it in a designer shop in a sale and it had hung in her wardrobe for a year before she’d felt brave enough to put it on. But last night, for the launch of the hotel’s new nightclub, Jupiter, she’d decided to drag it out and wear it.

‘There are going to be loads of famous people there. The guest list is like flicking through Hello!’ one of Hannah’s hotel receptionist colleagues had wittered excitedly about the launch weeks beforehand. ‘We’ve got to pull out all the stops, girls. We can’t let the hotel down.’

So Hannah had pulled out all the stops, had set her long dark hair in curlers so it rippled down her back like a sheet of raw silk and had shoe-horned herself into the ruinously expensive dress she’d nearly taken back to the shop so many times on the grounds that it was a waste of money. All the other Triumph Hotel receptionists had gasped in shock at the sight of the normally staid Ms Campbell in something other than her off-duty uniform of crisp white shirt, ironed blue jeans, blazer and loafers. She looked phenomenally sexy, they said, stunned. Who’d have thought she could transform herself from a frostily polite receptionist into a siren with just a dress?

Jeff Williams, who ran the hotel’s new gym and was as yet unfamiliar with Hannah’s reputation as a bit of an ice maiden, had gasped with pleasure at the sight of her gym-toned, curvaceous body clad in a wisp of filmy chiffon that clung in all the right places.

Unlike the starstruck members of staff who spent the night gazing cow-eyed at the various stars knocking back Moët in the roped-off area of the nightclub, Jeff and Hannah spent the evening discovering that they both loved to dance. They drank far more mineral water than alcohol as they moved sinuously on the dance floor, jiving, boogieing, salsaing and even waltzing when the DJ played some slow, jazzy numbers. High on having fun, it only took two glasses of white wine to give Hannah a heady buzz where the idea of letting Jeff kiss her seemed natural really, rather than a complete mistake.

‘I’m ten years older than you,’ she reproved as they squashed up together on one seat, his muscular arms wrapped around her and his fair head bent over hers. She felt ridiculously like a teenager on a date, but it was fun.

‘Thirty-six is hardly old,’ Jeff had murmured, kissing the tendrils of dark hair that clung to her cheekbones.

As his bachelor pad was miles across town and sounded like a laddish bombsite shared with three other young men, it seemed more sensible to have that cup of coffee in Hannah’s immaculate apartment, a mere stone’s throw from the Triumph Hotel.

Sitting on the small, hard sofa-bed, Jeff had admired the unusual brocade cushions that Hannah had hand-stamped with gold fabric paint one weekend, and then attempted a little handiwork of his own, stroking fingers up and down Hannah’s arm in a very erotic manner. He hadn’t pounced on her. She’d known he wouldn’t: used to having women swoon at his gym instructor physique, Jeff didn’t have to bother at all to attract gorgeous women, so he always made a point of making sure they knew what they were doing when things got intimate.

‘Are you sure you want to?’ he asked, his eager and ardent eyes proof that he certainly wanted to.

Hannah, who’d already decided she deserved a celebratory bonk after twelve months of celibacy, had said yes. It had been wonderful, rather like picking up the old tennis racquet you hadn’t used since you’d fallen in love with Wimbledon and Ivan Lendl sixteen years ago, and realizing that you could still lob the ball over the net without making a complete fool of yourself.

Jeff wasn’t to know that the last time she’d had that much exercise, she’d been in the middle of a class of fellow step-aerobics fans, all sweating like pigs with their T-shirts glued to their backs, their thighs aching and a supermodel-lookalike screaming at them to ‘move your arms, girls!’

Neither was she about to tell him that he was the first person other than herself to sleep in the queen-sized bed with the yellow brocade headboard Hannah had re-covered because she hated the original peach Dralon fabric. Men, particularly young men, she always felt, were nervous of the concept of both celibacy and women who made a conscious decision to have sex, instead of just getting carried away by too much vodka and a nice line in flattery. Conscious decisions implied another big C – commitment.

She figured that if Jeff discovered he was the one she’d chosen to break her enforced year of celibacy, he’d probably have run out of the apartment like the clappers, imagining he’d got himself involved with a neurotic bunny boiler. If only he knew.

Life had taught Hannah that men were useful for only one thing, and it wasn’t earning money, either. She’d learned her lessons early on, from her feckless father. When you were born in the wilds of Connemara where only the hardiest of livestock could survive, farmers like her father either toiled away until their fingers were gnarled with arthritis and they were old before their time, or they turned to the bottle and let their wives shoulder the burden of feeding the kids and paying the electricity bill. Hannah’s father had chosen the second path.

Her mother was the one who’d grown old before her time, her strong-boned face a mask of lines and misery by the time she was forty. Watching Anna Campbell come home white with exhaustion from cleaning out the kitchens in the local hotel and then sit down to knit another piece of the Aran sweater she was being paid buttons to finish, made Hannah vow never to end up in the same position. No man would ever enslave her in unholy matrimony or come home roaring drunk, screaming for a dinner he hadn’t contributed a penny to. No way.

She’d earn her fortune and be utterly independent, a career warrior who’d never have to strain her eyes knitting by the lights of a feeble lamp for the extra few pounds to kit her children out in reasonable clothes for Sunday Mass.

Failing her final school exams and the arrival of Harry had been the fatal glitches in this foolproof plan. But, thought Hannah, grinding her teeth even though the dentist had warned her to stop doing it, she was back on track now. Sort of. A new job, a cultural holiday to give her some of the education she knew she lacked, and a new life. Jeff, lovely though he was, wasn’t part of the new life. He’d get in the way and make her think about love and things. She’d had enough of love to last her a lifetime, thank you very much.

The water was getting uncomfortably cold and she was going to be late if she didn’t move soon. Hannah stood up gracefully and climbed out of the bath.

‘You’re in great shape,’ Jeff said, admiring her toned arms and small waist.

‘You mean for someone of my age,’ she teased, wrapping a towel around her body and rubbing her jawbone where she felt the most pain from her constant teeth grinding.

‘For anybody,’ he emphasized. ‘You must work out a lot. I see so many women who let themselves get out of shape. They think if they’re not an athletic build, why bother. But you really work at it.’

Hannah paused in towelling her hair dry and thought of the hours she’d spent on the StairMaster in the past year, jaw clenched as she pounded Harry out of her mind. Getting him out of her life had been difficult enough: eradicating him from her thoughts was another thing entirely.

Before Harry (or BH as she liked to think of it) she’d been in reasonable shape for a twenty-seven-year-old who smoked like a chimney. Of medium height and with a genetic tendency to put on weight, she was still young enough not to bother much with exercise, preferring the Marlboro Light Exercise Plan of lighting up whenever she felt hungry.

But during the Harry years, she’d spent far too long cuddling up next to him on their old sofa, sharing mammoth takeaways and entire boxes of chocolates as they watched videos. Life was one long Little House on the Prairie fantasy of delicious meals and lazy evenings toasting their toes in front of the fire while Harry discussed the novel he was going to write and Hannah stopped caring about leaving her dead-end job in the dress shop to pursue her dream of being rich and utterly independent. She stopped caring about her figure and was even persuaded to give up smoking when Harry went off the fags for an article he was writing about nicotine tablets. No cigarettes meant more chocolates and cups of tea with three sugars to make up for the pain of wanting a fag. Harry didn’t put on a pound: Hannah put on another twelve.

In cohabiting bliss, her ambition had disappeared along with her waistline. Until that awful August day she’d thrown him out and had started reclaiming her life – and her figure.

‘I go to the gym and to three aerobics classes, one toning class, and I walk about ten miles a week,’ she told Jeff.

‘You can tell,’ he said solemnly. ‘You gotta put the work in to get the body you want.’

Hannah nodded sagely. It was a pity she was leaving the hotel. It would have been fun to work out with Jeff, even if their fling probably wouldn’t have lasted very long.

Men like Jeff were always looking over your shoulder to see who was coming along behind you. One pretty, pouting twenty-something in a thong leotard asking him to explain the lateral pull-down machine and it’d have been all over.

Mind you, if she’d been staying on at the hotel, she wouldn’t have gone off with Jeff in the first place. The Triumph Hotel’s gossip network was far superior to the actual hotel network. It took over half an hour to have an omelette delivered to a guest’s bedroom via room service and only ten minutes for a juicy bit of news to travel all the way from the kitchens to the concierge desk, having reached the business centre and the restaurant into the bargain. The gossiping that would have gone on if Hannah had been seen walking out with the gym’s new manager would have been hilarious to behold.

After a year when she had gossiped with nobody, dated nobody and revealed not one item of information about herself to the naturally inquisitive staff, Hannah couldn’t have coped with seeing the floodgates of curiosity come rushing open. But she had her reference, her new job was lined up for when she returned from holiday and nobody could touch her for one carefree fling. ‘Indulge yourself,’ advised all the women’s magazines when it came to getting over unhappy love affairs. ‘Have a massage, treat yourself to an aromatherapy session.’ Jeff was her first AH (After Harry) treat. More fun than aromatherapy and less painful than a facial, but guaranteed to give you an inner glow that Oil of Olay couldn’t manage.

Happily unaware of his status as a reward for a year of celibacy, Jeff let more hot water flood into the bath and lay back in the bubbles. Trying not to let herself get irritated because he obviously had no intention of leaving, Hannah concentrated on rubbing moisturizer into her face.

She had been able to reshape her body with endless hours of exercising but her face remained stubbornly the same as ever: rounded with a pointed chin, slightly too-beaky nose and bright almond-shaped eyes the exact colour of toffee. With a sprinkling of amber freckles scattered across her nose and cheekbones, the cumulative effect of sparkling eyes and the rippling nutbrown hair should have been that of a casually pretty woman. Attractive but no beauty, would be the conclusion if someone had described Hannah to a stranger.

But a simple description would leave out the very thing which transformed her. Hannah glowed with that fleeting, most unbottleable quality that people lacking it did everything to acquire – sex appeal. From the way she walked with that languid sway of her enduringly curvy hips, to the way she drank her tea, wide mouth pursing up softly around the china to take a first sip, screamed of sexuality. She didn’t do it on purpose: in fact, she didn’t have to do anything. Hannah Campbell, thirty-six-year-old hotel receptionist and spinster of this parish, had been born like that. And it drove her insane.

When her long shaggy hair was tamed into the gleaming knot she wore for work and her small tortoiseshell glasses sat on her nose, Hannah could look as stern as the headmistress of a school for delinquents. Which was why she’d never bothered to get contact lenses. Nowadays she wanted to be able to hide her natural sexuality, to conceal it with sedate clothes, fierce glances and Reverend Mother spectacles.

Sex appeal was all very well in its place but all it had ever given Hannah was Trouble, with a capital T. Being naturally sexy in her rural home town meant you either got an undeserved reputation as a complete slapper or you aroused rage amongst the local lads who didn’t take kindly to being constantly given the cold shoulder.

Sex appeal was all very well for Hollywood starlets, Hannah felt, but for normal women it brought sheer, unending hassle. Well, she amended, with a smidgen of guilty pleasure, her sex appeal had given her the delectable Jeff. But he had overstayed his welcome so it was time for Sexy Hannah to disappear and Ms Cojones of Steel Campbell to take her place.

She expertly coiled her wet hair into a scrunchie and fixed her visitor with the steely look she’d perfected when departing hotel guests insisted they’d had only two drinks in the hotel bar the previous night instead of the ten doubles itemized on their bar bill.

‘Jeff, you’ve got to get out of the bath and leave. I need to be out the door in three-quarters of an hour and I need time to myself. Come on, now.’

Responding to her schoolmarm voice the way he hadn’t responded to her gentle wheedling, Jeff climbed out of the bath, stood in front of her and stretched, his splendid naked body dripping water on to the black and white tile-effect lino.

Hannah couldn’t help staring. God, he was beautiful: from his short blond hair down to his big feet. Six foot of rippling muscle without a flaw anywhere. Poor Michelangelo would have killed to sculpt something like Jeff Williams.

Hannah gulped as she tried to concentrate on what she simply had to do in the next hour. Packing and sorting out her guide books. She wanted to learn something from this holiday and she’d hoped to spend a while reading her Let’s Go: Egypt so that she wouldn’t embarrass herself in front of all the other people on the trip, people who probably knew about history and mythology…Then Jeff smiled a slow, lazy smile and traced one finger along her chest until it hooked under her towel and pulled, tumbling the towel to the floor along with her mental timetable.

Oh, what the hell, thought Hannah, letting her sex drive shift into fifth gear. After all those evenings trying to forget what physical pleasure had been like and watching endless re-runs of Inspector Morse, she deserved this. It wouldn’t take her that long to pack. She could read her guide book on the plane.

CHAPTER TWO

‘Lord! Would you look at the mess in here. I’m all for salads but you’ve really got to take them out of those awful little white plastic containers when you get them home. They leak everywhere. What’s this?’ Anne-Marie O’Brien squinted over her glasses at the supermarket label on the tub of couscous which had made an oily puddle in the middle of the otherwise spotless fridge. ‘Couscous? Messy, that’s what it is.’

Emma Sheridan said nothing as her mother searched for a clean J-cloth, rinsed it out in hot water and then zealously scrubbed the middle shelf of the fridge with the help of a bottle of antiseptic kitchen cleaner Emma had forgotten she’d possessed and had meant to throw out. An overpowering scent of pine disinfectant filled the room. It smelled nothing like any pine tree Emma had ever come across, unless pines were mating with bleach factories these days.

‘Much better now,’ Mrs O’Brien said, straightening up. She briskly rinsed the cloth out again, inspected the rest of the kitchen with narrowed eyes, then gave the melamine surfaces a quick squirt of cleaner, her every movement the work of an expert with a PhD in Cleaning the Home. Only then did she take the precious Tupperware and tinfoil-wrapped parcels and place them carefully in the fridge, giving her daughter a commentary on her actions at the same time.

‘Can’t have poor Peter eating that supermarket stuff. Proper dinners is what he should have. I know your father wouldn’t touch anything that had to be microwaved, but if I was away from him for a week, it’d be a different matter. Husbands! I’ve made lasagne that’ll last for at least two days, shepherd’s pie for tonight and these two are chicken and mushroom pies – I’ll put them in the freezer part. Emma, dear! Do you ever defrost this thing? It won’t do it itself. Never mind, I’ll just sort it out…’

Emma tuned out. Thirty-one-years of her mother had taught her that listening to the ‘nobody does things the right way, my way’ monologue would put you in a mental home if you didn’t tune out. Especially when the monologue was designed to tell you what a slatternly housekeeper/student/driver you were and how your poor husband would drop dead from salmonella if you didn’t start boil washing both the tea towels and his underpants immediately.

It was immaterial that Emma had spent most of the previous day cleaning and polishing Number 27 The Beeches from top to bottom; immaterial that she’d used up her precious day off work cleaning instead of swanning around the shops buying last-minute bits and bobs for her holiday. She’d toyed with the idea of going into Debenhams to see if she could get one of those black uplift bikinis she’d spotted in a magazine. Even if you were as flat as a pancake boob-wise, this bikini would give you a cleavage that’d take the sight out of people’s eyes, or so the magazine claimed.

As the only way Emma’s cleavage was going to take somebody’s eye out was if a wire from one of her AA cups escaped and actually poked them in the eye, she desperately needed a new uplift bikini.

But as usual, the only overdeveloped part of her person, namely guilt, had swung into action and put the kibosh on the shopping trip. Emma’s sense of guilt was like a medical textbook description of the heart: a large muscle which contracts unconsciously. Guilt at leaving Peter on his own at home for an entire week while she sailed down the Nile with her parents overcame her desire for a skilfully padded bikini, so she’d given Debenhams a miss and spring-cleaned the house instead. Peter, who wouldn’t notice if he had to eat his dinner off the table because they’d run out of plates, would be unaware of her feverish scrubbing. However, Emma’s Guiltometer had worked out that an entire day of cleaning would go a long way (fifty-five per cent) to making up for having a holiday without her beloved husband. Buying him an enormous present she couldn’t afford and cooking him his favourite dinners for a week after her return would almost compensate for the remaining forty-five per cent.

Sadly, she’d forgotten to buy new rubber gloves for the cleaning fest so her hands were now dry as an overcooked chicken thanks to scrubbing the toilet bowls with bleach. But the house was a veritable palace, with clean carpets, clean loos and not an unironed item of clothing anywhere.

All that and her mother was still tut-tutting over the only visible blemish in the entire premises. Emma could just picture Pete wrenching open the couscous and eating it with his finger beside the fridge that morning, shoving the greasy tub back in carelessly afterwards before grabbing the orange juice carton for breakfast. He adored couscous – and he hated shepherd’s pie with a vengeance. Still, what was the point of telling her mother that? Anne-Marie O’Brien wouldn’t listen: she never listened to anyone. Except her husband, James P. O’Brien, boss of O’Brien’s Heating Contractors, master of all he surveyed and the person who absolutely always had to have the last word on every subject.

Emma sat down wearily on one of her kitchen chairs and examined her newly painted nails. The rosy pink colour she’d bought for her holiday was pretty but still didn’t camouflage either the bleach damage or the nibbled bits. She’d chewed her index fingernail into an ugly stub during a long phone conversation the night before where her mother had fussed about the heat in Egypt, the food, the locals, the thought of covering up her shoulders at tourist sites and ‘…would your father be able to get proper milk for his tea.’ That idea had summoned up a bizarre mental picture of her father trying to milk a camel, him red and sweating as he stood with his teacup in one hand and a camel teat in the other.

She nibbled a stray sticking up bit of index fingernail. Well, who’d be looking at her bloody nails anyway. She felt too tired to care: she hoped she could sleep on the plane to Egypt. If she could steal one of her mother’s Valium tablets, she could blank out the entire journey.

While her mother busied herself with the fridge, Emma surreptitiously touched her breasts through the soft fabric of her denim dungarees. She’d been doing it all day, giving herself a pleasurable thrill that had nothing to do with sex. This thrill was provided by her biological clock heaving a sigh of relief. Nervously, she slid one hand under her T-shirt to reach her bare breast and touched it cautiously. Sensitive, definitely.

They’d looked bigger in the mirror earlier, she was sure of it. The nipples were bigger, weren’t they? Yes, yes, yes, she grinned. She was pregnant. It was quite incredible how happy she felt when she thought about the baby, her baby. The glow filled her up inside, like that advert for breakfast cereal where the boy cycling to school was lit from within because he’d eaten his Ready Brek that morning. Emma felt lit from within with a combination of sheer joy and relief. Relief that after so long hoping, it was finally happening. She wanted to dance around the room with delight, but her natural caution advised her to be careful. Say nothing to jinx it. Wait until you’re sure and then tell darling Pete the wonderful news, she told herself. All she had to do was get through the hateful week with her parents and then everything would be wonderful. Her secret would keep her going during the next week. It was only a week, after all.

Ignoring the ‘this place is a mess’ monologue, she picked up a pad from the table and began writing a quick note to Pete, telling him she loved him and would miss him desperately.

‘Well, madam, having a rest while your poor mother works as usual.’

The sound of her father’s voice made Emma jump to her feet guiltily. She felt as if she really was doing something wrong, the way she felt when she passed a police car with a radar gun out the window, even if she was only crawling along at thirty miles an hour. His very presence could plunge her into nervous tension, even now when she was so very hopeful about her precious baby.

‘Anne-Marie, there’s really no need to be doing Emma’s dirty work for her,’ Jimmy O’Brien said, treating his elder daughter to a disapproving stare. ‘She’s big enough and ugly enough to do her own housework. I won’t have you skivvying for her.’

‘I wasn’t skivvying,’ said her mother, her voice losing its liveliness and becoming weary.

‘Mother was just rubbing up something spilt,’ Emma protested, feeling all her good humour fade away as it so inevitably did whenever her father was involved. ‘I cleaned that fridge out yesterday…’

But her father was no longer listening. Striding over to the bin, he knocked out the old tobacco at the bottom of his pipe and began to fill his wife in on his recent activities.

‘I’ve filled the car with petrol, checked the air in the tyres and put in half a litre of oil,’ he announced. ‘We’re all shipshape, if you’re ready to go, Anne-Marie.’

You’d think we were driving to bloody Egypt, Emma thought with irritation.

For about the hundredth time since the trip had been booked, she wondered why she was going. It had been her father’s idea: the holiday of a lifetime to celebrate his and his wife’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Emma couldn’t figure out why he’d picked such an exotic destination as Egypt. Her father was a man who, for the past fifteen years, had been perfectly content to go to Portugal, sit watching sports coverage in a bar and comment loudly on how downmarket the place was getting what with all the football hooligans and brazen young girls running around with suitcases full of condoms looking for men.

‘Tarts,’ he’d say darkly every time a gang of carefree, tanned girls in skimpy T-shirts and bum-skimming shorts appeared on the scene.

Emma used to gaze wistfully at these modern babes: she was damn sure they wouldn’t still be going on holiday with their parents when they were in their twenties, too afraid of the furore to suggest a holiday with their boyfriends. Until she’d been married, she and Pete had only been away to the sun once when she’d pretended to be away with some girlfriends.

His comments about how young people’s standards were dropping notwithstanding, her father appeared to enjoy Portugal. But one holiday programme presenter enthusing over a Nile cruise had changed everything. Jimmy had ordered a vast assortment of brochures and spent many happy hours over Sunday lunch reading out the bits he was most interested in.

‘Listen to this,’ he’d say, blithely interrupting any other conversation with the insensitivity of a despot, ‘ “Enjoy the spectacle of Luxor and Karnak temples. Both monuments are perfect examples of ancient Egyptian architecture. Parts of Karnak Temple date back to 1375 BC.” That’s bloody incredible, we’ve got to go.’

Unfortunately, the ‘we’ also meant Pete and Emma.

‘No way, Emma. Why can’t they go on their own and just make each other miserable instead of making us all miserable,’ Pete complained, which was quite an out of character thing for him to say. Genuinely kind and warm, Pete couldn’t be nasty if he tried, but even his legendary patience was strained by her parents. Well, her father, really. Jimmy O’Brien strained a lot of people’s patience.

‘I know, love,’ Emma said wearily. She felt so torn; torn between doing what easy-going Pete wanted and what her domineering father wanted. ‘It’s just that he hasn’t stopped talking about it and he’s assuming we’ll go too. He’ll harp on about how ungrateful we are if we don’t go.’ Emma didn’t need to say any more. Ever since her father had loaned herself and Pete the deposit money for their house, he’d been holding it over their heads like a sword of Damocles.

Going out with friends for Sunday instead of going to the O’Briens’ for lunch was seen as a sign of ungratefulness. So was being too busy to pick up Jimmy’s new bifocals from that shop in town, or not being able to drive Anne-Marie to the shops because she’d got nervous about driving her own car for some unaccountable reason. The way things were going, the next time Emma refused a liquorice on the grounds that she didn’t like the taste, that too would be seen as ungratefulness.

Pete said nothing more about the trip. Emma knew he wanted her to stand up to her father for once and refuse to go so that they could spend the money going away together later. But Emma, who knew she’d feel guilty about leaving Pete but would suffer ten times more if she crossed Jimmy O’Brien, finally figured out a solution.

‘Pete can’t go to Egypt that week, Dad,’ she lied. ‘He’s got a two-day conference in Belfast. But I’ll go – won’t that be nice, just the three of us together, like old times?’

The old times reference did the trick. Which was ironic, Emma thought. Her memory of bygone holidays consisted of the feeling that they’d merely changed the setting for her father’s daily sarcastic remarks. But, hilariously, he didn’t see it like that: Jimmy was delighted with the holiday plan.

Pete was staying at home, sweetly telling Emma that it was all right, he’d go away with the lads for a football weekend later in the year, so she wasn’t to worry. All she had to do now was actually get through the damn trip.

‘I think I need a cup of tea before I go,’ her mother said, dropping the cloth and leaning against Emma’s sink, the perfect picture of fatigue. Her mother’s put-upon act was like a red rag to a bull where Jimmy was concerned. Somebody had to be to blame for his wife’s exhaustion.

Emma knew what would come next: she’d have to make tea and be berated for making her poor mother do her housework. There was no point explaining what had really happened. This particular tableau had taken place so many times over the years, they were all like pantomime characters acting out parts they’d played for thirty years.

You’re a lazy, stupid girl, Emma.

Oh no I’m not!

Oh yes you are!

Emma watched her parents dispassionately for a moment, watched them taking over her house as if they owned it. She really wasn’t in the mood for a re-run of their familiar power-play game.

She’d recognized what it was ever since she’d bought the self-help books. Her father was a control freak and her mother was passive aggressive, able to slip into her ‘poor me’ routine as soon as her husband appeared in order to be fussed over. Or so it seemed. All the books had different variations on this type of relationship but Emma could see her parents in each one.

However, while it was all very well knowing what people were, it was a different kettle of fish altogether figuring out what to do about it. As Emma had long since worked out that she was plain old passive and desperately lacking in self-confidence when it came to her family, there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about their behaviour.

Her problem was herself, she had realized from Chapter Seven: ‘Taking Responsibility For Your Own Mistakes’. There was no use spending hours bitterly contemplating her family’s behaviour without changing her own. She let them get away with it. Only she could change things.

‘The power is within your own grasp,’ said guru Cheyenne Kawada, author of You Only Have One Life To Lead, So Don’t Waste It.

The problem was that she was two people: with her parents, she was clumsy Emma, the elder, less successful daughter – Kirsten was the prodigal – and the one who’d sidestepped a job in her father’s business (the only time she’d ever refused him anything). In the office, she was Emma Sheridan, the much admired Special Projects Coordinator of the KrisisKids Charity who had several people working for her and who organized the charity’s confidential child phoneline as well as two conferences a year.

Her parents had no idea that the businesslike, organized Emma existed, and certainly nobody at KKC would have recognized the put-upon Emma as their capable boss.

‘You sit down, love, let me make the tea,’ Jimmy O’Brien was saying manfully to his wife as he rummaged through Emma’s tidy cupboards for teabags, sending packets of sauce mixes and a jar of soy sauce flying.

Her mother waved the idea away, as if she was dying for a cup but had heroically decided to say no, like someone refusing a life jacket on the Titanic. ‘We don’t have enough time, Jimmy.’

‘We would have time if you hadn’t worn yourself to the bone tidying up after this lazy madam.’ Slamming the cupboard, Jimmy harrumphed and his entire body shook with the noise. His huge cream jumper-clad frame dwarfed everything in the compact room. He was easily as tall as the pine larder and just as wide, big shoulders and flowing white beard making him a dead ringer for Santa Claus.

Luckily for Anne-Marie O’Brien, she wasn’t Mrs Claus to her husband’s Santa. Tall but melba toast thin, her hair was a carefully dyed fading gold, worn long but with a front section drawn back from her forehead with a large hairclip that sat at the back of her head like an ossified tortoiseshell beetle. In her floral belted summer dress, she looked as trim as the housewife in a fifties commercial and amazingly youthful. Ten years younger than her husband, Anne-Marie had the clear unwrinkled skin of someone who was utterly sure she was going to heaven in the afterlife, thanks to her goodness and her constant devout prayers. She’d never contemplated whether her love of spreading gossip might hinder her immediate path to the Pearly Gates.

Emma, as tall and slim as her mother but with silky, pale brown hair and a sweet, patient face instead of a smug one, watched tight-lipped as her mother meticulously wiped the chrome-plated toaster and kettle, oblivious to the fact that they needed to be polished with a dry cloth if you didn’t want to leave big smeary streaks on them.

Pete’s favourite present from their wedding three years ago, the chrome appliances were by far the poshest things in their kitchen. Dear Pete. He always told her to ‘turn the other cheek’ when her father irritated her. Pete’s devout upbringing had equipped him with a biblical quote for every situation in life. He was certainly right this time. No matter how hard it was to stoically turn the other cheek when Jimmy O’Brien’s famously sharp tongue carved you up, Emma knew it was the only way to cope. Arguing with her father merely drove him into the white-hot rage of ‘I’m only doing this for your own good, madam.’

‘Turn the other cheek,’ she repeated mantra-like, slipping out of the kitchen. She went upstairs to her and Pete’s bedroom. Decorated in a mixture of forest green and warm olive, it was the most masculine room in the house.

Emma had picked the colours herself, determined that the first bedroom she slept in as a married woman would be nothing like the frilled, pink chintz girlie rooms her mother had insisted on in the family home. After a lifetime living with more frills than Scarlett O’Hara’s wedding dress, Emma had wanted a room that was comfortingly simple. Pete, so laid back décor-wise that he’d have slept happily in a Wendy house, said he’d like anything Emma chose.

So she’d picked simple olive green curtains, a modern blonde wood bed with its stark green duvet cover and had painted the fitted wardrobe unit that surrounded the bed in cool cream. There wasn’t a flounce, a ribbon or a ballerina print in sight. The Flower Fairies drawings her mother had donated ‘to brighten the place up’ had pride of place in the downstairs loo because Emma never went in there except to clean it.

‘Are you coming, Emma?’ demanded her father from downstairs.

Picking up her handbag and her suitcase, Emma struggled out on to the landing, with one last fond look at her bedroom. She’d miss it. And Pete. She’d miss cuddling up to him in bed, feeling his solid body spooned against hers. She’d miss his sense of fun and the way he loved her so much. Emma could do no wrong in Pete Sheridan’s eyes, which was certainly a change from the way her parents felt about her.

They stood at the bottom of the stairs, one impatient, the other anxious.

‘You’re not wearing that, Emma?’ said her mother in a shrill tone as Emma rounded the bend in the stairs, suitcase in hand.

Instinctively, one hand shot up to her chest, touching the soft denim fabric of her dungarees. Cool and very comfortable, they were ideal for travelling. ‘I was wearing this when you came in,’ Emma muttered, wishing she didn’t feel like a teenager being chastised for wearing PVC hot-pants to dinner with the bishop.

She was a thirty-one-year-old married woman, for God’s sake! She would not be bullied.

‘I thought you’d gone up to change,’ sighed her mother in martyred tones. ‘I’d prefer to travel looking respectable. I’ve read that people who dress up for travel are most likely to get upgraded,’ she added with a satisfied sniff at the thought of being escorted past the riffraff to a luxury bit of the plane worthy of the O’Briens of the poshest bit of Castleknock.

‘Well, you’d better go and put on another outfit, hadn’t you? Or we’ll be later,’ Jimmy said impatiently.

Emma decided not to mention that their chances of being upgraded were non-existent because there was no first class on a charter flight. Her mother’s fantasies about an elegant lifestyle never had the slightest basis in reality, so what was the point?

For a moment, she toyed with the idea of saying she wasn’t changing her outfit. But the sight of her father’s taut face made up her mind. As she’d learned during her twenty-eight years living under her father’s roof, he hated ‘butch’ clothes and women in trousers.

‘I’ll just be a moment,’ she said with false gaiety and ran back upstairs.

In the bedroom, she got down on her knees and banged her head on the bed. Coward! You decided yesterday that your dungarees were perfect for travelling in. You should have said something!

Still berating herself, Emma fished the little red book out from under her side of the bed and opened it on the affirmation page: ‘I am a positive person. I am a good person. My thoughts and feelings are worthwhile and valid.’

Repeating those three phrases over and over again, Emma ripped off her dungarees and T-shirt and pulled on a cream knitted long skirt and tunic she sometimes wore to work in the summer when all her other clothes were in the wash.

Today, all her decent summer clothes were in the suitcase at the bottom of the stairs. Bought on a hateful shopping trip with her mother, the cream knit suit made her look like an anaemic café latte come to life – tall, straight as a schoolboy and colourless.

While the soft blues of her denim clothes made her pale blue eyes with the amber flecks stand out, creams and taupes reduced her face to monotones: pale skin, pale hair, pale bloody everything. She sighed; she felt so boring and colourless.

She’d never been good with make-up and, anyway, lipstick only made her thin lips look even thinner. If only she’d had the courage to have a nose job, Emma thought. Long and too big for her face, it was hideous. Barry Manilow’s nose was practically retroussé beside hers. Wearing her fringe long was the only way to hide it. Her sister Kirsten had been blessed with the looks in their family. She was vibrant, sexy and a huge hit with the male of the species who loved her unusual sense of style and her joie de vivre. The only unusual thing about Emma was her voice, a low, husky growl that seemed at odds with her conservative, shy image. Pete always told her she could have worked in radio with a voice like that.

‘What you mean is that I sound like a bombshell so I’d be perfect for radio where people can’t see me and realize I’m not one,’ she’d tease him.

‘You’re a bombshell to me,’ he’d say lovingly.

‘Come on,’ roared her father from downstairs. ‘We’ll be late.’

Emma closed her eyes for a brief moment. The idea of an entire week with her parents made her dizzy. She must have been mad to agree to go with them.

She’d always wanted to go to Egypt and take a Nile cruise, longed to go since she’d first read about the dazzling Queen Nefertiti and the beauty of Karnak Temple as a child. But she’d dreamed of going with Pete, Emma thought miserably, tucking her self-help book into her small handbag.

She hadn’t planned to bring Positive For Life – Your Guide To Increasing Your Self-Esteem by Dr Barbra Rose with her. She must have been off her rocker. On this trip, she wouldn’t simply need the book – she’d need Dr Rose herself, complete with a case packed with the most cutting-edge pharmacology to keep her father in a coma. Now that would be the holiday of a lifetime.

Satisfied that her daughter was now suitably dressed and wouldn’t disgrace the family en route to the pleasures of the Nile, Anne-Marie O’Brien happily kept up her monologue all the way to the airport: ‘You’ll never guess who I met this morning,’ she said cosily, with not the slightest intention of drawing breath long enough for either Emma or her father to guess. ‘Mrs Page. Lord Almighty, if you could have seen the get up she was wearing. Jeans. At her age! I wouldn’t have bothered to talk to her at all, but she was beside the toothpaste and I wanted an extra tube in case I can’t get any when we’re away. I can’t imagine the Egyptians will be too keen on the hygiene products,’ she added.

Squashed in the back seat of the Opel with the luggage threatening to fall on top of her every time they went round a corner, Emma closed her eyes wearily. Was there any point in explaining that the Egyptians lived in a sophisticated, highly civilized society, built the pyramids and studied astronomy when the O’Brien ancestors were still banging rocks together and trying to figure out how to make things with sharp stones?

‘…If you’d heard her going on about that Antoinette of hers, well.’ Mrs O’Brien’s voice registered the fiercest of disapproval. ‘Scandalous, that’s what it is. Living with that man with two children and not a ring on her finger. Does she not think that those little children deserve the sanctity of marriage instead of being…’ her voice sank to a whisper, ‘illegitimate!’

‘Illegitimacy doesn’t exist any more.’ Emma had to say something. Antoinette was a friend of hers.

‘It’s all very well for you to say that,’ her mother said, ‘but it’s not right or proper. It’s a mockery of the Church and the ceremonies. That girl is making a rod for her own back, mark my words. That man’ll up and leave her. She should have got married like normal people do.’

‘He’s separated, Mum. He can’t get married until his divorce comes through.’

‘That’s more of it, Emma. I can’t understand young people today. Does the catechism mean nothing to them? At least your father and I never had any problems like that with you. I told Mrs Page you and Peter were so settled and happy, that Peter is Assistant Sales Director at Devine’s Paper Company and that you’re Special Projects Co ordinator.’ Pleasure at remembering a most enjoyable bit of boasting made Mrs O’Brien smile.

‘He’s one of the assistant sales directors, Mum,’ Emma said in vexation. ‘There are six of them, you know.’

‘I didn’t say anything wrong,’ her mother insisted, tart at being corrected. ‘And you are Special Projects Coordinator. We are so proud of our little girl, aren’t we, Jimmy?’

Her father never took his eyes off the road where he was busily making it a dangerous morning for cyclists. ‘We are,’ he said absently. ‘Very proud. Of both of you. I always knew our Kirsten would do well,’ he said happily. ‘Chip off the old block there.’

Emma smiled weakly and made a mental note to phone Antoinette Page when she got home to apologize for her mother’s insensitive remarks, which would no doubt have filtered through by then. If Anne-Marie O’Brien continued boasting about Peter and Emma’s brilliant careers as if they were rocket scientists with matching Porsches and millions in the bank, they wouldn’t have a friend left. Pete worked as a salesman in an office-supply company and her job involved huge amounts of exhausting work of the envelope-stuffing-and-organizing-shifts variety rather than swanning around at posh charity lunches, which was the way her mother explained KrisisKids to everyone.

Emma’s job was administration rather than fund-raising. She organized the phoneline, which abused or frightened kids could phone anonymously, as well as taking care of the day-to-day running of the KrisisKids office. There were glamorous lunches where rich, well-connected ladies paid hundreds of pounds for a ticket, but Emma never went to those functions, to her mother’s dismay.

Still, Emma thought, determined to see the positive side of things, it was nice to think that her parents were proud of her, even if they only voiced it when they were trying to lord it over other people, and never to her personally. Naturally, they were prouder of her younger sister Kirsten. It was just as well that Emma adored Kirsten, because a lifetime of hearing how clever/pretty/cute Kirsten was could have destroyed any relationship between the sisters. But they were close, in spite of Jimmy’s unwittingly divisive tactics.

‘Mrs Page was delighted to hear about Kirsten’s new house in Castleknock,’ Anne-Marie continued. ‘I told her there were five en suite bathrooms and that Patrick was driving a…oh, what’s that car called?’

‘Lexus,’ Jimmy supplied.

‘That’s it. “Hasn’t she done well for herself?” I said. And I told her Kirsten didn’t have to work any more but was involved in raising funds for that environmental project…’

Emma could have written a book on her younger sister’s achievements as dictated proudly by her mother. Kirsten had managed to pull off the treble whammy of marrying an incredibly rich stockbroker, avoiding seeing her parents except at Christmas, and still being the prodigal daughter all at the same time.

Even though she loved Kirsten and, with only one year between them, they’d grown up almost like twins, Emma was sick and tired of hearing about how wonderful Kirsten’s charity work was when she knew for a fact that her sister was only interested in environmental charity on the grounds that she might meet Sting and so that she had something to talk about with the other ladies who lunched when they were teeing up at the ninth. Emma was also fed up with the way Kirsten and Patrick managed to wriggle out of all the Sunday lunches, leaving Pete and herself to suffer through at least seven hours of ‘What I Think is Wrong With the World – A Personal View by Jimmy O’Brien’ every two weeks. Driving home after the last lunchtime rant against emigrants arriving in Ireland looking for work, Pete had asked Emma if there was such a word as ‘pan-got’.

‘What’s that?’ she’d asked merrily, happy in the knowledge that their duty was done for another fortnight.

‘A person who’s bigoted against everything and everyone. You know, the way “pan” means everything.’

‘Probably not until Dad came along, but I’m sure we could tape him and send it into the Oxford English Dictionary people,’ she suggested. ‘Pan-got would be in the next edition, certainly.’

Anne-Marie was fretting as they neared the airport. ‘I hope Kirsten will be all right for the week; she told me on the phone that Patrick is going to be away.’

Emma raised her eyes to heaven. In direct contrast to herself, Kirsten was one of life’s survivors. Put her on the north face of the Eiger with nothing but a tent and a jar of Bovril and she’d turn up twenty-four hours later with a tan from skiing, lots of new clothes and a host of phone numbers from all the other interesting people she’d met en route, who’d all have yachts, villas in Gstaad, personal trainers and Rolexes. A week without Patrick meant Kirsten would have carte blanche to go mad with her gold card in Brown Thomas’s and would end up knocking back vodka tonics in some nightclub every evening, with a besotted admirer in tow. Emma didn’t think her sister had been unfaithful to her stolid and reliable husband, but she certainly enjoyed flirting with other men.

‘She’ll be fine, Mum,’ Emma said drily.

At the airport, her father let them off outside the departures hall with all the luggage and then drove off to find a parking spot. Anne-Marie went into fuss mode immediately: tranquil when her husband was there and bossing everyone around, she became anxious and hyper as soon as he was out of sight.

‘My glasses,’ she said suddenly as she and Emma joined the slow-moving queue at the check-in desk. ‘I don’t think I brought them!’

The note of rising hysteria in her mother’s voice made Emma gently take her hand and pat it comfortingly. ‘Will I look in your handbag, Mum?’ she said.

Anne-Marie nodded and thrust the small cream leather bag at her. The glasses were in the side compartment in their worn tapestry case, blindingly obvious if only her mother had looked.

‘They were here all the time, Mum.’

Her mother’s anxiety faded a little. ‘I’m sure I’ve forgotten something,’ she said. Closing her eyes as if running through a mental list, she was silent for a minute. ‘Have you forgotten something?’ she said abruptly.

Emma shook her head.

‘Sanitary stuff and things like that,’ her mother hissed, sotto voce. ‘Who knows what you’ll be able to buy out there. I bet you forgot. I should have got some for you this morning in the supermarket, but that Mrs Page took my mind quite off what I was doing…’

Emma tried to tune out, but her mother’s words mocked her. Sanitary stuff. She probably should have brought tampons with her but had hoped it would be tempting fate to bring them.

Her period was due in four days and maybe it wouldn’t come this time. This could be it: pregnant! She’d been so tired all week and she was sure her nipples felt sensitive, the way her pregnancy book said they would. They never felt like that normally. So she’d been reckless and left all her period paraphernalia out of her suitcase, hadn’t brought even one single tampon or pair of heavy-duty, enormous knickers in case they would bring her bad luck. Emma allowed herself a little quiver of excitement at the thought.

When her father marched up to them, giving out yards about how far away he’d had to park the car, Emma managed to look sympathetic.

‘All set then?’ he asked. ‘Let’s queue.’

He put one arm round his wife. ‘Egypt, eh? This will be a holiday to remember, Anne-Marie, love. I just wish dear Kirsten could have come along. She’d love it and she’s the best company in the world. Still, she’s busy with her charity work and looking after Patrick.’ He sighed a fond father sort of sigh and Emma started nibbling the thumbnail she’d managed to leave alone up to now.

Calm down, she repeated to herself, using the broken-record technique so beloved of her self-help books. Don’t let him get to you. She could cope with him when she had this wonderful feeling of hope lighting her up from the inside. A baby. She had to be pregnant this time, she just knew it.

CHAPTER THREE

Penny lay on the bed with a half-chewed teddy squashed between her golden paws and stared at Leonie balefully. It was hard to imagine that those huge brown eyes could portray anything other than pure canine love but then, Penny was not your average dog. Half-Labrador, half-retriever, she was all personality. Most of it human and all calculated to cause her owner the most guilt possible. Only her frenzied excitement at the rattle of her dinner bowl made Leonie realize that her best friend was actually a dog and not a person. Then again, Leonie thought with amusement, why did she confer ravenousness as purely doggy behaviour? She ate like a pig herself. Dogs and owners invariably looked alike so if Penny was a slightly overweight little glutton who was a slave to Pedigree Chum, then her owner was a carbon copy. A large shaggy blonde with a fat tummy and a propensity for biscuits. Just exchange Mr Chum for Mr Kipling and they were twins.

Leonie extracted an ancient khaki sarong from the back of the cupboard and rolled it into a corner of her suitcase alongside a selection of her trademark exotically coloured silk shirts. Penny, watching sulkily from the bed, snorted loudly.

‘I know, Honey Bunny,’ Leonie said consolingly, stopping packing to sit on the edge of the bed and stroke her inconsolable dog. ‘I won’t be long. It’s only eight days. Mummy won’t be away for long. And you wouldn’t like Egypt, darling. It’s too hot anyway.’

Penny, seven years of abject devotion and huge amounts of spoiling behind her, refused to be comforted and jerked her head away from Leonie’s gentle hand. Another little snort indicated that mere petting wouldn’t be enough and that doggy biscuits might have to be involved if she was to be satisfactorily cheered up.

Leonie – who’d only the previous morning told a Pekinese-owning client in the veterinary practice where she worked as a nurse, that dogs were terrible blackmailers and that little Kibushi shouldn’t be given human food no matter how much he begged at the table at mealtimes – hurried into the kitchen for a Mixed Oval and half a digestive biscuit.

Like a Persian potentate receiving gifts, Penny graciously accepted both biscuits, got crumbs all over the flowery duvet as she crunched them and immediately went back to sulking. One paw flattening Teddy ominously, she stared at Leonie crossly, her usually smiling Labrador face creased into a look that said, I’m phoning the ISPCA now, and then where will you be? Up in court on charges of cruelty to animals, that’s where. Imagine abandoning me for a crappy holiday.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t go,’ Leonie said in despair, thinking that she couldn’t possibly leave Penny, Clover and Herman for eight whole days. Penny would waste away, despite being cared for by Leonie’s adoring mother, Claire, who let her sleep on the bed all the time and fed her carefully cooked lambs’ liver.

But Leonie’s three children had gone to stay with their father in the States for three weeks and Leonie had vowed to give herself the holiday of a lifetime just to cheer herself up. She couldn’t let herself be blackmailed by spoiled animals. Really, she couldn’t.

Clover, Leonie’s beloved marmalade cat, didn’t get on with Claire’s cats, hated the cattery and would no doubt lurk miserably at the back of her quarters for the entire visit, going on feline hunger strike, determined to look like an anorexic for her owner’s return. And even Herman, the children’s rescued hamster, went into a decline when his luxury hamster duplex was moved into Claire’s home. All right, so Claire’s three Siamese cats had an unnatural interest in little Hermie and did spend many hours staring at his Perspex home in a very calculating manner as if figuring out exactly how yummy he’d taste once they’d worked out how to open the trap door, but still…it wasn’t abandonment.

Nevertheless Leonie felt guilty leaving her beloved babies while she went cruising down the Nile in the luxury of an inside cabin on the Queen Tiye (single supplement £122, Abu Simbel excursion and Valley of the Kings dawn balloon trip extra, bookable in advance).

‘I shouldn’t go,’ she said again.

Penny, sensing weakness, wagged her tail a fraction and smiled winsomely. For good measure, she pounced on Teddy and chewed him in a playfully endearing way. How could you leave cute, adorable me? she said, her degree in Manipulation of Humans coming to the fore.

What was the point? Leonie wondered, weakening. She could have her eight days off at home and make herself tackle the bit of overgrown garden down by the river. Why own an artisan’s cottage on an eighth of an acre in County Wicklow’s scenic Greystones if you let the garden run to rack and ruin with enough floral wildlife for a butterfly sanctuary?

And she could paint the cupboards in the kitchen. She’d been meaning to do that for the entire seven years they’d lived there. She hated dark wood, always had.

Oh yes, and she could clean out Danny’s bedroom. He and the girls had been in Boston for nearly ten days already and she hadn’t yet touched his pit. No doubt the usual teenage debris was festering beneath his bed: socks that smelled like mouldy cheese and old T-shirts that had enough human DNA on them in the form of sweat to be used for cloning. The girls’ room was perfect because Abby had been overcome with a fit of tidiness one afternoon before they’d left and had forced Mel to help her clean up. Together they’d filled a bin-bag with old Mizz magazines, cuddly toys that even Penny no longer wanted to chew, old pens with no lids and copybooks with half the pages torn out. As a consequence, their room looked so tidy it was unlikely to be identified as the bedroom of two pop star obsessed fourteen-year-olds – apart from the dog-eared poster of Robbie Williams that Mel had refused to be parted from.

‘Don’t get upset, Mum,’ Abby had said when Leonie had looked into the bedroom and blurted out that it looked as if the girls were leaving for ever and not coming back. ‘We’ll only be away with Dad for just over three weeks. You’ll be having such a whale of a time in Egypt and out every night drinking and flirting with handsome men that you won’t notice we’re gone.’

‘I know,’ Leonie lied, feeling terribly foolish and sorry she’d broken her golden rule about not letting the children know how terrible it was for her when they spent time with their father. It wasn’t that she begrudged Ray time with his children: not at all. She simply missed them so much when they were staying with him and Boston seemed such a long way away. At least when he’d lived in Belfast, it had only been a couple of hours away from Dublin. Leonie wouldn’t have dreamed of gatecrashing her children’s visit with their father, but she was always comforted by the idea that if she wanted to see them on a whim during the month-long summer holiday, she could.

That was partly why she was off to Egypt on a holiday she couldn’t really afford: to stave off the pangs of loneliness while the kids were away. That and because she had to break out of the cycle of her humdrum existence. An exotic holiday away seemed like a good starting point for a new, exotic life. Or at least it had.

The phone on her bedside table rang loudly. Leonie sat on the bed and picked up the receiver, straightening the silver-framed picture of herself and Danny beside the roller coaster at EuroDisney as she did so. Nineteen-year-olds didn’t go on holidays with their mothers any more, she reminded herself, knowing there’d be no more holidays with the four of them ever again.

‘I hope you’re not having second thoughts,’ bellowed a voice down the phone. Anita. Loud, lovable and bossier than a First Division football manager, Leonie’s oldest friend could speak in only two volumes: pitch-side screech and stage whisper, both of which could be heard from fifty yards away.

‘You need a break and, seeing as you won’t come to West Cork with the gang, I think Egypt’s perfect. But don’t let that damn dog put you off.’

Leonie grinned. ‘Penny’s very depressed,’ she admitted, ‘and I have been having second thoughts about going on a trip on my own.’

‘And waste your money?’ roared Anita, a coupon-snipping mother of four who’d re-use teabags if she could get away with it.

Leonie knew she couldn’t bear another holiday in the big rented bungalow with ‘the gang’, as Anita called the group who’d been together for over twenty years since they’d met up as newly weds all in Sycamore Lawns. Gangs were fine when you were part of it in happy coupledom, but when you were divorced and everyone else was still in happy coupledom, it wasn’t as easy.

Being the only single member of the gang was sheer hell and would be worse now that Tara (briefly unattached) had remarried and was no longer keen on sharing a room with Leonie where they could moan about the pain of singledom and the lack of decent men. After last year’s group holiday where one husband had surprised her with a drunken French kiss and an ‘I’ve always thought you were a goer’ grope in the kitchen late one night, Leonie had promised herself never again.

When she and Ray had split up ten years ago, she’d been so hopeful about her future. After a decade of a companionable but practically fraternal marriage, they’d both been hopeful of the future. But Ray was the one who’d come through it all with flying colours, happy with his string of girlfriends, and Leonie was still longing for the one true love who’d make it all worthwhile.

She hadn’t been on a date for six years and that had been a blind one Anita had fixed up with a college lecturer who was a dead ringer – in every sense – for Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Needless to say, it hadn’t been a success.

‘Leonie, there’s always a bed for you in West Cork,’ Anita interrupted. ‘We’d all love to have you with us again, and if you’re having second thoughts – ’

‘Only kidding,’ Leonie said hurriedly. ‘I’m looking forward to it, honest. I’ve always wanted to go to Egypt. I can’t wait to buy some marvellous Egyptian jewellery,’ she added with genuine enthusiasm. Her collection of exotic costume jewellery took up most of her crowded dressing table already, filigree earrings tangled up with jangling metal Thai necklaces, most of it purchased in ethnic shops in Dublin and London instead of in their original, far-flung homelands.

‘Watch those souks and markets though,’ warned Anita, a distrustful traveller who believed that anywhere beyond the English Channel was off the beaten track. ‘They love big women in the East, you know.’

‘Oooh, goodie,’ growled Leonie, instinctively reverting to the Leonie Delaney: wild, sexy, earth goddess image she’d been projecting for years. If Anita guessed that the image was all fake and that most of Leonie’s hot dates were at home with the remote control and a carton of strawberry shortcake ice cream, she never said anything.

After a few more minutes’ chat where Leonie promised to enjoy herself, she hung up, privately thinking that if any white-slave trader wanted to whisk her away to a life of sexual servitude, he’d have to be bloody strong. At five eight and fifteen stone, she was hardly dancing harem girl material and was powerful enough to flatten the most ardent Egyptian bottom-pincher.

Anita was sweet to say it, she thought later, examining the effect of her saffron Indian skirt worn with her favourite black silk shirt and a coiled necklace of tiny amber beads. Black wasn’t really suitable for travelling to a hot country, she knew that, but she felt so much more comfortable wearing it. Nothing could hide her size, Leonie knew, but black camouflaged it.

Rich colours suited her and she loved to wear them: flowing tunics of opulent crimsons, voluminous capes in soft purple velvet and ankle-length skirts decorated with Indian mirrors and elaborate embroidery in vibrant shades. Like an aristocratic fortune-teller or a showily elegant actress from thirties Broadway, Leonie’s style of dressing could never be ignored. But black was still her favourite. Safe and familiar. As satisfied as she’d ever be with her reflection, she started on her face, applying the heavy panstick make-up expertly.

If she hadn’t been a veterinary nurse, Leonie would have loved to have been a make-up artist. She hadn’t been blessed with a pretty face, but when she’d worked her magic with her pencils and her brushes and her eyes were hypnotically ringed with deep kohl, she felt she looked mysterious and exotic. Like the girl in those old Turkish Delight adverts who sat waiting in the dunes for her sheikh. Certainly not too big, too old and too scared of a lonely, manless future.

Her mouth was a lovely cupid’s bow that would have looked fabulous on some petite size-eight model but seemed slightly incongruous on a tall solid woman. ‘A fine hoult of a woman,’ as one of the old men who brought his sheepdog into the vet’s used to call her admiringly.

Her face was rounded with cheekbones she adored because, no matter how fat she got, they stayed defiantly obvious, saving her face from descending into plumpness. Her hair, naturally rat-coloured as she always said, was golden from home dyeing because she couldn’t really afford to have it done professionally any more.

But Leonie’s most beautiful features were her eyes. Huge, naturally dark-lashed, they were the same stunning aquamarine as the Adriatic and looked too blue to be real.

‘Your eyes make you beautiful,’ her mother would say encouragingly when she was growing up. ‘You don’t need to speak, Leonie, your eyes do it for you.’

Her mother’s attitude had always been that you were whatever you wanted to be. Glamorous herself, Claire told her daughter that stunning looks came from the inside.

Unfortunately, Leonie had decided at the age of nineteen that her mother was wrong and that lovely eyes weren’t enough to make her the beautiful woman she longed to be, a Catherine Deneuve lookalike. This realization had come about when she went to college after years of being educated in the closeted female environment of the convent school. At University College Dublin, she discovered men for the first time. And also discovered that the ones she fancied in biology lectures were much more keen on her less intelligent but smaller classmates. Her long-distance paramours asked Leonie if she’d join in their Rag Week mixed tug-of-war team, and asked other girls to go to the Rag Ball with them.

Miserably, she concluded that she was nothing more than a plain, fat girl. Which was why she’d decided to reinvent herself. Leonie Murray, shy girl who was always at the back at school photographs, had become the splendidly eccentric Leonie, lover of unusual clothes, wacky jewellery and plenty of war paint applied as if she was ready for her close up, Mr De Mille. As she was physically larger than life, Leonie decided to become literally larger than life. Vivacious, lively and great fun, she was invited to all the best parties but never asked to go outside for a snog on the terrace.

Her first and only true love, Ray, had seen beneath the layer of Max Factor panstick to see the deeply insecure woman she really was. But she and Ray just weren’t meant to be. Their marriage had been a mistake. She’d been grateful to be rescued from loneliness, and being grateful was no reason to get married, as she knew now. Neither was being pregnant. Sometimes she felt guilty because she’d married him for all the wrong reasons and then she’d ended it, after ten years of marriage.

They’d been opposites, she and Ray. He was a quiet arts student who’d never gone to wild parties and who spent every spare minute in the library. Leonie had been the grande dame of first-year science. While Ray was reading Rousseau, Leonie was reading the riot act to the impertinent agricultural student who’d teased her about her heavy make-up. (She’d cried over that later but, at the time, she’d been magnificent.)

They met at a screening of Annie Hall and ended up spending the evening together laughing at Woody Allen’s humour. In the later years of their marriage, Leonie realized that a sense of humour and a love of Woody Allen movies was one of the few things they’d actually shared. Otherwise, they were poles apart. Ray liked non-fiction, political discussions and avoiding parties. Leonie loved going out, disco dancing, and reading potboilers with a glass of wine and a Cadbury’s Flake in her hand. It wouldn’t have lasted but for advance warning that baby Danny was coming in seven months. They got married quickly and were blissfully happy until the honeymoon wore off and they discovered just how unsuited they really were.

It was a testimony to something, Leonie always thought, that they went through another ten years of being civilized and kind to each other, even though there were more sparks in the fridge than there were in their relationship. She’d lived with the knowledge for a long time, enduring it and the barrenness that was her marriage for the sake of Danny, Melanie and Abigail. But finally, something had snapped in Leonie and she knew she had to get out. She felt suffocated, as if she was slowly dying and wasting her life at the same time. There had to be more, she knew it.

She didn’t know how she found the courage to sit Ray down and ask him what he thought about them splitting up. ‘I love you, Ray, but we’re both trapped,’ she’d said, given Dutch courage by two hot ports. ‘We’re like brother and sister, not husband and wife. One day, you’ll meet someone or I’ll meet someone and then this will turn into a nuclear war of retribution, you fighting me and vice versa. We’ll hate each other and we’ll destroy the kids. Do you want that? Shouldn’t we both be honest about this instead of kidding each other?’

It had been a tough time. Ray had insisted that he was happy, that their way of muddling along suited him. ‘I’m not a romantic like you, Leonie, I don’t expect great love or anything,’ he’d said sorrowfully. ‘We’re happy enough, aren’t we?’

Once the doubts were out in the open, it was as if the wound couldn’t heal. Gradually, Ray and Leonie drifted apart until, finally, he had said she was right, it was a half-marriage. He’d shocked her by how quickly he found another life, but she was too busy trying to explain things to three uncomprehending children to think about it. Away from her, he’d blossomed. He had scores of friends, went on interesting holidays and changed jobs. He went on dates, bought trendy clothes and introduced the kids to his girlfriends. Leonie had worked hard, looked after the kids and hoped that Mr Right knew he could safely step into her world now that she was a single woman again. So far, zilch.

As she told Penny sometimes: ‘I should have stayed married and had affairs. That was the right way to do it! True love and romance with a safety net. Trust me to get it wrong trying to do it right.’

She and Ray were still the best of friends and he was a good father.

Now the only people who saw Leonie as she really was were her three children.

With them, she only wore two coats of mascara and a bit of lipstick and they were allowed to see her in her dressing gown. God, she missed them.

Determined not to blub over the kids again, Leonie thought of how she’d always wanted to visit magical Egypt. Fear of flying was no reason to cry off. For a start, she couldn’t afford to waste the money the holiday had cost her and, secondly, when did Leonie Delaney balk at anything? She got out her eyeliner brush and fiercely painted on a thick line of dusky kohl that’d have made Cleopatra proud.

How could you jump-start your life if you quailed at the very first fence – a holiday on your own?

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