For my own Molly, Molly Eccles, an aunt who’s also a friend … although infinitely better behaved than her namesake.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

‘Red wine or white?’ asked Helen.

‘Red – our bodies need the iron,’ said Molly. ‘But imagine having both in stock. Helen, it’s official, you’re a grown-up.’ She lolled on the sofa, waiting for her friend to prise open the bottle.

Despite a smorgasbord of corkscrews, Helen was fundamentally challenged in the uncorking department. Every so often she’d say wistfully, ‘Isn’t it a pity that Liebfrausquilch in the screwtop bottle tastes revolting? It’d be so handy,’ and Molly would threaten to report her to the taste Gestapo.

‘Give it here, Sharkey,’ she ordered now. ‘I’ll die of iron deficiency if I wait for you to relieve me.’ And she extracted both Merlot and corkscrew from Helen’s fumbling hands. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a foolproof gadget,’ she added. ‘Didn’t the Image magazine testers give it the full Orion’s Belt of stars?’

‘Misled again,’ mourned Helen. ‘I read, I bought, I faltered. Fill up my glass to the brim there, Molly, this is an emergency. I need to funnel the alcohol into my bloodstream in jig-speed time.’

‘You know what getting drunk on alcohol is called,’ said Molly, dribbling only a few drops as she poured.

Helen waited for Molly to fill her own glass and then clinked. ‘Tell me.’

‘A return on your investment.’

They swigged in companionable silence, facing each other on Helen’s somewhat mauled matching sofas from which, until she could afford two identical new ones, she wouldn’t be parted. Helen favoured pairs, whereas Molly shuddered if she accidentally found herself with a double – mugs, earrings, socks, towels were all deliberately mismatched. Shoes were about all she’d concede needed to come in pairs. ‘Eclectic’ was the word she dredged up whenever anyone suggested her taste veered towards the idiosyncratic; nobody came right out and told her she looked like a walking jumble sale, at least not since being staffed, after years as a freelance journalist, allowed her to relax her financial guard enough to buy clothes in the Powerscourt Townhouse.

‘So what’s the emergency, oh inheritor of the face that launched a thousand computer blips?’ she asked Helen, who was a software programmer.

The reference usually didn’t fail to make her friend blush or giggle, or at least twiddle an eyebrow, but tonight she didn’t react – an ominous sign. Helen took a protracted swallow that emptied her glass and said, ‘Thanks for galloping around at a moment’s notice.’

‘You know me,’ shrugged Molly. ‘I’d do the Lough Derg pilgrimage if it meant a drink in the heel of the hunt.’

‘I won’t ask you to walk on rocks here,’ said Helen, ‘but you might be obliged to walk on water. I need a miracle. Or failing that, electric shock treatment.’

‘So it’s a red-alert emergency, sirens blaring, traffic lights contemptuously ignored and cars bulldozed aside. It can only be man trouble.’

Helen frowned and refilled her glass without topping up Molly’s – which meant she was really distracted because Helen was renowned for her impeccable manners.

‘Just supposing …’ began Helen, rotating an opal heart earring in her left lobe, ‘… just supposing you fell in love with someone you weren’t meant to, but it crept up on you, and before there was any chance to erect the barricades you were head over heels and resistance was futile. How do you hold the feelings at bay – feelings you’re landed with whether you want them or not? Even though you refuse to meet him or return his phone calls you still think about him constantly. You can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on your job, and your life – which didn’t seem so unsatisfactory until the thunderclap – is so sterile and empty and meaningless there’s no way forward. Actually it’s more of a lightning bolt than a thunderclap, but no less elemental, and it’s left wasteland in its wake. God knows why I’m banging on about the weather.’ Helen twisted her earring so ferociously the back dropped off but she disregarded it. As Molly bent to retrieve the sliver of metal Helen continued, ‘The joy has been sapped from everything: going to work is like wading through fog; coming home to an empty house is so disheartening it’s tempting to stay on the DART train to the end of the line, and a day off stretches endlessly like a prison sentence with no remission.’

Her voice dropped until it was virtually a whisper. Molly’s stomach contracted at the misery on her friend’s face. She leaned across the sofa and wrapped her arms around the slight frame. She’d no inkling Helen was interested in anybody, never mind running the gauntlet of thwarted love.

‘Is it truly hopeless?’ asked Molly.

‘Yes.’

Pause.

‘He’s married?’ prompted Molly.

‘No.’

‘Gay?’

‘No.’

‘A priest?’

‘No.’

‘In love with someone else?’

‘No.’

‘Indifferent?’

‘No.’

‘Struck down by a fatal disease?’

‘No.’

‘Helen, I submit. I can imagine no more obstacles. If it isn’t a love that dare not speak its name, seek its flame or shriek its shame, if it isn’t a love potholed by a wife and four children, or even a love with a continent, an incurable illness and a clerical collar between you, I don’t see the barrier.’

At this Helen sank her head on Molly’s shoulder and sobbed, while Molly furtively reached for her glass. It could be a long night, no point in it being a dry one. But after Helen had a weep and accepted Molly’s offer of a cup of tea she calmed down.

‘I’m being stupid,’ she snivelled, juggling alternate sips of wine and tea. ‘It’s not love, it’s infatuation. If I’m patient it will fade.’

Like curtains, thought Molly, unable to stifle the stray comparison that sneaked into her mind.

Helen continued, ‘I simply have to wait for the feelings to evaporate. It’s just so –’ and here her composure quivered – ‘dreary in the meantime. The one person to whom I could describe how confused and destabilised I feel, because he’s probably experiencing something similar, is the one person I can’t approach. Him.’

‘You can talk to me, angel face.’ Curiosity and compassion were battling it out within Molly as she wondered who this unattainable paragon could be. Helen steadfastly stonewalled efforts to probe his identity, and Molly assumed it had to be someone from work. Where else did thirty-two-year-old women meet men? It certainly wasn’t in the supermarket, despite those magazine articles about checking out the contents of a man’s basket in the check-out queue. Small cartons of milk, individual pizzas and a decent bottle of wine meant singles; trolleys with a rainforest of loo roll and reservoir-sized cola bottles equalled daddies. Or so the article claimed. Molly wasn’t convinced it could be so self-evident. People weren’t tailored from Lycra for a one-size-fits-all finish.

Whoops, Helen was talking again – concentrate, Molly chided herself. Mentally assessing other men, even mythical ones, was verboten when your best friend was in emotional hyperventilation.

‘I know I can talk to you, you’re a saint to put up with my moaning –’

‘Let me have that in writing,’ interrupted Molly. ‘I’ll never be believed unless I can produce proof.’

‘You know you’re a strawberry cream, not the nut brittle you like to pretend, Moll. The problem is I don’t feel free to go into details here. I can’t name names. This involves two people and it wouldn’t be right to reveal his identity. Information leaks out – honestly, I’m not pointing the finger at you – but it could be harmful. For both of us. Least said soonest mended, as the Bible doesn’t say. But probably implies somewhere.’

‘Right, of course you can’t say any more,’ agreed Molly, monumentally disappointed. ‘I expect it would be a breach of confidence if I knew him already …’

She looked hopefully at Helen to see if her shot in the dark had struck home but there was no response. Feck, she was longing to know the identity of this adonis who had the normally self-contained Helen sobbing into her wine glass. But after a brief internal tussle Molly acknowledged she was being selfish; the priority now was to distract Helen from her conviction that life was pointless. All this talk of staying on the DART until the end of the line had unnerved Molly with its bleakness. Depression ran in the Sharkey family – Helen’s uncle had thrown himself under a double-decker after he lost his job. She wasn’t about to stand by while Helen caved in to the black dog. This called for decisive measures.

What Molly liked to do when sad was to party. Also when she was happy, bored and feeling stressed. So her solution to Helen’s dilemma, or the two-dimensional aspect of it she’d glimpsed, was glaringly apparent.

‘We’re going on the lash tomorrow night, Helen,’ she announced. ‘That’ll take your mind off him. We’ll get chatted up and flirt outrageously. It’s cast-iron therapy. I’ll wear my foolproof on-the-pull T-shirt, Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent – jackpot guaranteed every time. Perhaps we’ll even buy you one too, just to prove we’re both the answer to a young man’s prayer, cherchez la indiscriminate femme.’

‘But we’re not,’ objected Helen.

‘I know that and you know that, angel face, but no harm in stringing them along for a few drinks. So will I pick up one of my Shakespearean soundbite numbers for you? Something that intimates “Ready when you are, big boy”, only in ye olde English to show you’re sophisticated?’

‘No,’ shuddered Helen. ‘What works for you wouldn’t carry the same, er, conviction for me. I don’t know that I have the heart for a session, Molly. The city centre’s so congested, there’s nowhere to sit in pubs and you can’t hear yourself speak.’

‘You’ve lost the plot, my little wounded bird. That’s the whole point of Saturday nights on the town. We’re both thirty-two, not a hundred and two, so let’s get cracking and prove we’re irresistible women in the prime of our lives. I’ll meet you in the Lifer at eight and –’

‘Not the Life Bar, it’s too young and trendy,’ complained Helen.

‘So are we. And wear something jam-tarty.’

Helen looked dubious at this final injunction.

‘The nearest you can manage,’ amended Molly. ‘Nothing buttoned up or navy.’

No point in expecting an overnight metamorphosis.

Just as well, reflected Helen, in one of her frequent reflective moments, after Molly left, that friends didn’t have to share characteristics because the two of them would never have lasted the distance.

Just as well, reflected Molly, in one of her infrequent reflective moments, after she left, that friends didn’t have to share characteristics because the two of them would never have lasted the distance.

Instead they had instantly formed a bond when they’d met on day one at university fourteen years ago. Admittedly they’d been thrown together as first year Arts students by mutual terror of Sarah Daly, who was acquainted with Helen from school and Molly from sharing lodgings. Sarah had been superbly informed – she’d known which bus would take them to the Belfield Campus at University College Dublin and where the bus stop was located and she’d even identified the lecture theatre location for their first session on Longfellow or some other fellow. Meanwhile Helen and Molly had both been desperately intimidated and even more desperate not to betray it. Sarah’s savoir-faire – and their discovery over coffee that they each abhorred her for it – had sparked a chemical reaction friendship.

Sitting in the taxi home, with only a sixth of an ear (and even that was probably excessive) tuned to the driver ranting about teenage pregnancies and moving on seamlessly to refugees bleeding the social security system dry, Molly decided to unmask Helen’s love bug. Not to be inquisitive, God no. So she could splat him on behalf of her unhinged friend. Helen wasn’t the best at romance; come to think of it she’d only had one grand passion. That had been just after graduating, with a marketing executive called Eugene. He’d been more than presentable – apart from his predilection for wearing dark shirts under beige linen jackets, which had prompted Molly to christen him the Black and Tan, although he’d insisted he preferred Gene if a nickname were essential. That relationship had juddered to a halt when he’d shown the temerity to propose. Marriage. Time for the short step followed by the long drop for Eugene.

‘I’m never getting married,’ Helen had insisted and Molly had concurred. Never didn’t mean not ever, as Molly understood it, it meant not while you were in your twenties and could pick and choose. In your thirties, now, you might consider it. In fact Molly was actively, not to say compulsively, contemplating it. But Helen seemed curiously inflexible on the matter. One after the other their college friends had teetered up the aisle disguised as shepherdesses or woodland nymphs, surrounded by a bevy of miniature ruffians purporting to represent cherubs. Helen and Molly, meanwhile, bought cartwheel hats because there was nothing like them for creating allure, and mouthed along to The Wedding Feast at Cana during the service. By now they were word perfect.

Lately Molly had been gazing at those brides in their ivory tower dresses and wishing she were one. Wishing she were standing at the back of a church, with a man, razor nicks on his chin from an unsteady hand, waiting in the front pew for her. Not just any man, one who made her want to bolt to the altar at breakneck speed instead of decorously swishing up.

In the meantime there were best men – and second-best men – to audition at friends’ weddings. At the last wedding she’d attended, Molly had been disposed to give the best man the glad eye on the back of a spark of wit, despite his goatee beard, but a woman in a crocheted dress, complete with sausage-shaped baby-sick stain on the lapel, had swiftly signalled her prior claim.

Molly sighed. Despite fighting talk in her twenties, she wouldn’t mind being the one in satin slippers for a change, hemmed in by all those aunts from Killybegs and Gortnagallon never encountered except at weddings and funerals. Being thirty-two had much to answer for – perhaps she’d have passed safely through the stage by her mid-thirties. Everyone sympathised with women over their biological clocks but what about the ones saddled with a ticking Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. It left her wishing … wishing she were the one weighed down by Irish linen tablecloths and napkins bought in Clery’s sale and stockpiled until a gift was required. Tablecloths she’d never use because they belonged to the era of laundresses and starch, but that wasn’t the point – every newly-wed should have a selection. It left her wishing there was someone who regarded her as the most ravishing woman on the planet even when she couldn’t be bothered sliding in her contact lenses and blinked at the world from behind glasses. It left her wishing to exchange her apartment in Blackrock, with its undernourished fridge, for a house with a bulging fridge-freezer. One of those in-your-face Smeg jobs the colour of an ice lolly.

Once or twice she’d hinted as much to Helen but the shutters had grated down and her friend had made it crystalline there was to be no backsliding as far as she herself was concerned. Wedding cake was off the menu unless it was someone else’s.

Whereas Molly was finding the single life a little, well, single. She’d been in enough relationships – heck she was always falling in love; she was hooked on the adrenaline high – to know it wasn’t all roses as part of a couple. But the thorns seemed less prickly the older she waxed. Sometimes she daydreamed about how agreeable it might be to have someone to cut the grass. Not that she’d much call for gardening services living in a second-floor apartment, but it was reassuring to know you had the absolute right to dispatch a male with a lawnmower to your patch when you felt inclined to exert your authority or play at being a girlie or when – and this had to be a last resort – the grass needed it. Rules were rules. Everybody knew the marriage service ran along the lines of ‘do you promise to love her, honour her and cut the grass at her bidding as long as you both shall live?’

It was tricky, Molly reflected, imagining yourself immersed in marital bliss when you didn’t have a boyfriend. On the contrary, disagreed her opinionated inner voice, that made it easier. There was no need to cast your eye over the current boyfriend title-holder and realise this was it: this was as good as it got. Whereas the imagination, a particularly accommodating tool, allowed you to step out with Liam Neeson, who’d just happen to be rediscovering his thespian roots with a play at the Abbey when he’d bump into you one Sunday lunchtime. You’d be reading the newspapers on a caffeine and chill-out binge, despite the contradiction in terms, and you’d drop one of the sections and bend to retrieve it just as he reached it to you, and your gazes would collide. Naturally you’d both be sitting down because otherwise you’d need a stepladder to make eye contact. And even though you always looked like a regurgitated dog’s dinner on Sundays, this time you’d have bothered to wash your hair and wear something clean and pressed instead of picking over the pile of rejects on your bedroom floor and …

‘Blackrock, what street did you want, love?’

The taxi-driver curtailed Molly’s fantasy. I’m not finished with you yet, she instructed it, as she fished out her purse and advised the driver where to pull over. She debated withholding a tip in protest at his unreconstructed views on asylum seekers, hadn’t the courage, and compromised by rounding up the fare by a minimal amount.

However, the interruption returned her attention to Helen. Helen, who not only never wanted to marry but seemed disinclined for a little light relief in the jiggery pokery stakes too. Her last boyfriend had been booted into touch eighteen months ago, by Molly’s reckoning, the Daniel O’Donnell lookalike she’d dubbed Kitten Hips because he practised a panther walk. He had to practise it, reasoned Molly; nobody swayed naturally like that. Anyway, he went the way of all flesh that came into contact with Helen: namely she dumped him after four months when he turned serious, although her definition of too intense was his suggestion they should plant sunflowers in the 10-foot square of back garden where she used to live. His subtext: I intend to be around next year to see them flower. Her reaction: Pervert. What manner of man wants to make a commitment like that?

So for Helen to fall head over neat Cuban heels for someone off limits was a manifestation of natural justice. And while Molly was sorry for her friend’s palpable grief, she couldn’t help thinking: Cupid’s got you sorted, love, in one of those streetwise accents they use on television cop shows to portray gritty reality. Besides which, she was convinced Helen was overreacting. Too much red wine had blurred Molly’s recollection of the wan face weeping against her shoulder and the dejection in tones that described how life seemed to have dimmed from colour to monochrome. Molly wasn’t unsympathetic, she simply needed convincing the script was as unremittingly dire as Helen read it.

‘We’ll sort her out tomorrow night, Nelson,’ she told her teddy bear, named because he’d spent twenty-five years in a cupboard before being liberated (she’d been frightened of him as a child for no logical reason). ‘We’ll canter her out in the showing ring and she’ll be fighting them off with a broom handle. That’ll take her mind off the fellow she can’t have. And if it doesn’t, at least she might tell me some more about him. I’m agog to sneak a peek at the man who can send Helen Sharkey’s pulse ricocheting. Doesn’t the whole of Dublin know she’s the next best thing to celibate, barring lapses every eighteen months or so?’

As Molly was slinging Nelson onto the floor and climbing into bed without taking off her makeup – but remembering to collect a tumbler of water from the kitchen because Merlot furred her tongue – Helen was washing the wine glasses and bowls she’d filled with nibbles for her perpetually peckish friend. She sat on for the longest time after Molly left, her light-hearted reassurance warming the air behind her – ‘Chin up, Helen, we’ll all be dead in sixty years’ time.’ But now that she was alone again the temperature had plummeted and the solitary allure of her terraced cottage in Sandycove, just ten minutes’ walk from the seafront, seemed less acceptable – indeed, it was insupportable. She wallowed for a while, wondering why some malign fate had earmarked her for turmoil. Why couldn’t she have settled for Kitten Hips or the Black and Tan, or one of the other men who’d flitted through her life? They’d have stayed if she’d allowed them but she wouldn’t give them houseroom. Helen wasn’t a ‘settling for’ type of woman, however. And her mind had been made up about love a lifetime previously.

Movement, that’s what she needed. If she were busy she wouldn’t be able to dwell on him. She couldn’t even allow herself to think his name, although sometimes she said it aloud for the sheer pleasure of shaping her mouth around the syllables. Helen loved his name, the pattern of the K sounds in his Christian name and surname, the evenness of the double syllables in both. One time she’d been driving through Balbriggan and thought she was hallucinating because she’d passed a hardware shop and there was his name above the door. She’d had to retrace her steps to check whether there was actually a shop painted yellow and green on the corner of the main street with the name of the man she loved above it. There was. And it had made her laugh aloud with pleasure. She’d gone inside and felt herself suffused with joy as her eyes drifted along the shelves stacked with colour charts and tools whose purpose she couldn’t begin to fathom. Helen had bought a paintscraper to prolong the euphoria and kept it, unused, in a kitchen drawer alongside spare batteries and scissors.

But there wasn’t much gladness in her heart now as she dropped two red wine bottles into her recycling bin and recorked a third with only a glass or so eked from it. Although her feet were leaden, she knew there’d be little enough sleep that night.

‘Bring some hot chocolate to bed and read the new Maison Belle interiors magazine you’ve been saving for a treat,’ she urged herself. ‘That’ll make you feel better.’

Molly, who renamed everything, called it the Maison Smelly magazine, partly because Helen loved to lower her nose to the pristine scent of its unopened pages. Also because it inevitably offered free samples of potpourri refresher or fabric conditioner. Helen willed herself to believe that Maison Belle and a bedtime drink would reverse the decline in her flagging spirits. She knew all the tactics to manipulate a slump in mood – it was essential she did. Imagine if he contacted her on a day when she was feeling vulnerable and she succumbed to temptation and … Helen’s face crash-landed on her hands. She wished. She hardly knew what she wished for. Careful, don’t even think it, don’t let the narrowest scintilla of possibility edge around your mind. She leaped up and washed and wiped, perfecting her home; she’d as soon wedge the front door open with an All Burglars Welcome Here neon sign as retire to bed leaving dishes on the worktop or CDs separated from their holders.

At the bottom of the stairs, magazine under an arm and mug in hand, she cast an eye back over her immaculate domain. At least some aspects of life were under her control. Control. It was what rendered existence manageable. When she reached the top stair the phone rang. She counted as its bells pealed twelve times. Her fingers itched to lift it but she willed them to cup her drinking chocolate, breathing suspended as she waited for the jangling to cease. When all was silent she walked into the bedroom and pressed a button to read the confirmation – he was calling. The magazine slipped to the floor and she placed the drinking chocolate sightlessly on her bedside table, toppling the alarm clock. Her uncharacteristic clumsiness flung tongues of milky liquid from the mug but Helen didn’t notice the pool’s inching progress towards the table’s edge, or the way it dribbled onto her chrysanthemum-embroidered duvet cover. She curled, foetal fashion, with a pillow clutched to her cheek, too distressed to weep. Longing washed over her. And remembering.

CHAPTER 2

He throws himself onto the ground and subsides against a tree trunk, mute with misery. Sweating from his headlong pelt, he tugs open his shirt buttons to create a current of air against his torso. His pain is so intense she reaches out instinctively, chafing his inert hand. Helen searches for words of comfort – lies or truth, no matter so long as they soothe – but can find none. Every angular line of his body exudes desolation and it gashes her to witness it almost as much as it wounded her to watch the scene five minutes earlier between the boy and his rabid father.

Impulsively she slides onto her knees in front of him, the leaves crackling on impact, and takes his face between her hands. He’s no longer sprawling, disconsolate, but watching her now, mesmerised, as she edges ever closer, bridging the gap between their bodies. Helen’s unaware of what she’s about to do until it happens. Her pulse is erratic, her body curves forward of its own accord; her lips sink onto his and cling there for the space of a heartbeat. There’s a momentary hesitation, then she feels his lips move under hers, warm and moist.

Pinpricks of perspiration flare around the pulse-point map of Helen’s body. She’s tingling and the intensity of her reaction causes her to waver – she pulls back and looks at him, leaning on one hand to steady herself. An indefinable gleam in his expression touches her immeasurably. She subsides towards his mouth, even as he moves towards hers. Their lips collide, his chin rubs against hers and she experiences surprise at the grating of his stubble, then has no further conscious thought.

The two are subsumed by sentience, mouths softening into one another, captivated by the delirium of pleasure. Her hand cradling his head scrapes against the abrasive texture of the tree trunk but the pain does not register. She presses against him, winding her arms around his neck, and her body against his incites a change of mood for his mouth is no longer whispers; there’s urgency in his serrated breathing and in kisses that clash teeth against teeth.

She disengages and rests her face in the hollow of his shoulder. A smattering of hairs clump in the sternum hollow between the salmon-pink nipples and her own hair tickles him as she kisses her way along his chest until she arrives at the downy belly button. And stops. She’s paralysed by a mole an inch to the left of his navel which she recognises as the twin to one she has on her own body. He pulls her to him, attempting to reignite her fire with his, but it’s too late. Reality has doused her and she’s dripping from it. She pushes him away and runs as though flight alone can promise expiation.

‘It didn’t happen,’ she moans, grinding to a halt. But the sensations whirling through her body are a contradiction.

‘Ready to come out and play?’

It was Molly on the doorstep, encased in a calf-length black Afghan coat, collar pulled high against the wind.

‘You look like Snow White in that collar,’ said Helen. ‘I thought we were meeting in the Life Bar. Anyway, we’re not supposed to be there for another forty-five minutes.’

‘I used to be Snow White but then I drifted.’ Molly’s hip-jutting Mae West impersonation backed Helen directly into the living room of her house – the hallway was knocked down to maximise space – and she kicked the door shut behind her with ankle-strapped heels so spindly Helen was amazed she could stand upright, let alone manoeuvre in them.

‘I can tell from those shoes you’re aiming for slut appeal tonight,’ remarked Helen. Only half-critically.

She was still in her bathrobe, although she’d invented a face and drawn it on and her dark Cleopatra bob was blow-dried into symmetrical perfection. Throwing on clothes was always the shortest component in the exercise, providing the brain-squeezing decision about what to wear had been reached. She’d solved that conundrum lying in the bath in her seaweed solution, bought on a weekend trip to Enniscrone when she’d luxuriated in the seaweed baths that had been a tourist attraction in the seaside town since Victorian times. It had taken a few minutes to overcome her repugnance when initially she’d seen the massive cast-iron bath really was packed with seaweed; somehow she’d imagined a sanitised version. But after a while she’d stopped noticing she was sharing the water with an excess of vegetation – and it had velvet-coated her skin like no other softening agent. Helen had balked, however, at obeying the notice which invited her to empty out her seaweed into the bucket provided. It was repugnant enough floating alongside slithery black-green vines, she couldn’t reconcile herself to handling them too. Skulking out, in case she were called back to clear away her detritus from the tub, she’d nevertheless paused to buy a jar of powdered seaweed because of the mermaid undulating across the front and because it promised to caress her skin.

‘That’s the only kind of stroking I can expect,’ she’d remarked, selecting the family-sized container.

But back to Molly, beaming as she produced a half-bottle of champagne from inside Afghan folds with the flourish of a magician conjuring up a dove. ‘The Lifer at eight was a serviceable plan A but it was elbowed aside by plan B. We can share a cab into town. In the meantime this will start us on the right foot, oh Helen of Athboy.’

‘You know I’m from Kilkenny not Meath,’ objected Helen, extracting champagne flutes from the narrow cherrywood sideboard in her living room. ‘Is it cold enough?’ Her tongue was already mentally capturing and splatting the bubbles and savouring their scratchy descent at the back of her throat.

‘Does my granny go to confession?’ responded Molly. ‘Wouldn’t hand over the cash until the Greek god in the off-licence immersed it in his four-and-a-half-minute cooler machine.’

‘And did he chat you up during the waiting game?’

‘Didn’t even remark on the weather.’ Molly’s face epitomised mournfulness. ‘His customer relations skills are non-existent.’

‘Maybe he had a rush on.’

‘One other person came in and bought a few cans of lager.’

‘So you stood there reading wine labels and being ignored for four and a half minutes? Poor Molly, this will wash those bitter dregs away.’ Helen reached her a frothing glass.

‘He didn’t even pretend to be stocktaking. He presented his flawless profile and stared out of the window. Impassive throughout. I might as well have been a nun buying communion wine instead of a gorgeous blonde teetering provocatively on skyscraper heels and handing over my credit card – so at least he’d know my name – for champagne.’

It looked as though Molly were fated to sin with the Greek only in her fevered imagination – ‘Thought crimes again this week, Father.’

Still, there was always alcohol. She rallied, clinking glasses with Helen. ‘Death in Ireland. But not just yet.’

It was her St Augustine toast. She’d acquired it during her two years working in London and still nursed a fondness for it. All the expats chanted it; some even meant it.

As she followed Helen upstairs, Molly sighed. It was just her luck to have a crush on the one Greek in the country who didn’t flirt, didn’t notice women and wouldn’t recognise he was being given the glad eye if he found it giftwrapped in his Christmas stocking. Call himself a Mediterranean – he must have Cidona pumping through his veins.

‘He probably wears a vest. All those fellows from hot countries do, for sweat containment,’ consoled Helen.

‘Checked again tonight: no telltale lines,’ said Molly. ‘Hercules’ body is a vest-free zone.’

She still didn’t know his name but she’d christened him Hercules because he was the strong, silent type. She was sure those capable hands of his could strangle serpents, no bother to them. But he was sturdy rather than large, her usual preference in men. Heck, here she was bending the rules for him and he still wasn’t interested. She had leaned against his counter in rock-chick shoes complete with peep toes on a January night cold enough for snow drifts and he hadn’t so much as looked let alone leered. It was disheartening. It was insulting. It was enough to make a woman throw away her high heels and buy desert boots. Where was the point in shimmying into a man’s shop in black shoes with red heels that added at least four inches to your leg length if he didn’t betray a flicker of lust? It was downright unnatural. But no one with a glass of champagne in her hand could be truly woebegone. Molly knocked it back.

‘Drink it while the bubbles are still smiling at you, Helen.’

She felt the familiar rush as it hit her blood stream at warp speed and added, ‘He’s probably too young for me anyway; he can’t be more than mid-twenties. Now, never mind my legendary Greek, make some room in your glass for the rest of the champagne and show me what you’re wearing. The image we’re aiming for is strumpet with a soupçon of class.’

Helen, who never left anything to chance, already had the clothes laid out on the bed. Molly eyed them disapprovingly.

‘Dear me no, these won’t do at all. These don’t spell “unattainable Jezebel”. There’s nothing that says look but you can’t afford to touch. Moleskin trousers, matching waistcoat and Chelsea boots are all very well if you’re going to the pub for a few drinks and want to be left in peace but that’s not what we’re after at all tonight. Our mission is to have the lads fretting into their pints because we’re so distracting.’

Helen stroked her charcoal-grey waistcoat. ‘And how does a “Come, woo me, woo me” T-shirt strike that quintessential note which puts us beyond their grasp?’

‘Abandoned that idea. I decided to shuffle the deck and bring on the ace – the little black number.’ Molly opened her coat to reveal a dress that chastely covered everything from neck to wrist to knee but clung for dear life to each square inch of flesh between, undulating over hips and breasts with a brazenness that drew the eye, pinioned it and ridiculed the concept of allowing it time off for good behaviour.

‘Janey Mac, I’d fancy you myself if I were a man,’ said Helen. ‘Are you sure the rabble are ready for that?’

‘Ready or not, here I come. Now let’s throw comfort to the wind and drape you in something equally alluring.’

‘I don’t have anything in that category,’ protested Helen, but Molly was already rummaging in her wardrobe.

She produced a gold slip-dress, discarded its modest surcoat and handed it to Helen.

‘You’re a demon in female form, Molly. I can’t wear a bra with that, which means my nipples will show through.’ She held her champagne flute before her like a talisman.

‘You’re flat-chested, it doesn’t matter. But your legs aren’t bad,’ Molly added kindly, ‘and that slit up the side will show one of them off, depending on –’ she swivelled the silk dress on the hanger – ‘which way around you wear it. I can’t tell the back from the front on this, Sharkey. Shouldn’t there be a label?’

‘I’m not. Wearing. A gold dress. To the pub.’ Helen drained her glass defiantly. ‘Since you’re determined to make a harlot of me, I’ll put this on.’ She produced a wispy dark blue dress. ‘I’ve had it by for an emergency. But there’s no need to break the glass,’ she added, as Molly flung herself on the bed, kicking over her empty flute.

‘A half-bottle wasn’t enough. I should have gone for the full monty,’ she ruminated, waiting for Helen to morph into a seductress. She brightened. ‘Perhaps I should nip back and buy another half, see if Hercules is pining without me.’

‘No time, the taxi’s due any minute. Pass me those suede slingbacks. I know you haven’t seen them before, they’re part of the emergency package too. God knows if I’ll be able to totter in them. I’m only going to places that have waiter service because I intend to do absolutely no walking in these. In the interests of avoiding a visit to casualty.’

Helen struck a catwalk pose. The dress floated flimsily as a cobweb across her slim body and plummeted at the back.

‘Talk about capitulation. You certainly know how to do slut when you put your mind to it,’ breathed Molly. ‘Even in a navy dress.’

‘It’s not navy, it’s midnight blue.’

The doorbell punctured their quibbling.

‘That’ll be the cab,’ said Helen. ‘Let’s go to a hotel bar instead of the Lifer. The champagne has given me a taste for more of the good life.’

‘We’ll start in The Clarence where we’ll trifle with the affections of U2 fans and tourists. Then we’ll check the immediate vicinity for any pop stars who might be loitering, waiting for their limousines to pick them up. Obviously we won’t waste time toying with them – rock gods can have anything they want from us. Afterwards we’ll plunge into the night and cause all-purpose mayhem on the streets of Dublin.’

‘Promise me this.’ Helen clung to the banister as she negotiated the stairs. ‘We’ll do it sitting down.’

Helen reeled back indoors in the early hours, giddy from laughter and wine. She dangled her shoes by the straps and plotted a route towards bed, dimly aware that every stitch she was wearing reeked of smoke but beyond caring. She was about to nosedive and only her mattress could cushion the landing.

She giggled before oblivion claimed her. A mental image of Molly on her way to the ladies in the restaurant distracted her from sleep: urbane, sophisticated and with a ladder as wide as the Liffey snaking up the back of her tights. Helen chased in after her with the replacement pair she always carried in her bag, a Good Samaritan’s deed that had Molly calling her the battery-powered Little Miss Ever Ready.

But Molly admitted she was glad of Helen’s taste in sheer denier when they returned to their table and found the couple next to them had bailed out, to be replaced by four South African rugby fans weekending in Dublin for a Lansdowne Road match. What a result – the craic ratio was about to skyrocket up the Richter scale, although the friends had derived a certain entertainment value from spying on the first-daters preceding the foursome. Their body language had been fascinating. They could tell from the girl’s this was going to be another case of sudden-death dating; the end was as visible as if the fellow had a dagger protruding from between his shoulder blades. It was pitiful watching the polite indifference with which she treated him. Molly was prepared to gamble a month’s salary there’d be no good-night kiss; that girl would be ducking for cover before the car’s handbrake was on. The Boers were a distinct improvement, she mouthed to Helen, just before turning towards them, radiating a glow of invitation so brazen even the Statue of Liberty couldn’t have held her torch any higher.

The friends’ return from the ladies precipitated copious eyeball slewing while the fellows tried to think of an opening gambit. Easier said than done in view of the regularity with which they’d been raising and lowering their elbows since late afternoon. Despite Molly’s signals, which spelled out ‘Ready when you are, boys. Form an orderly queue and I’ll attend to each of you in turn’, the visitors had a few false starts before they were up and running. The whole point about picking up men was the fellows had to imagine they were the hunters. So Molly and Helen ignored ‘Do you always wear so much perfume?’ and a burst of ‘Molly Malone’ when they heard her name. ‘Must try harder’ was the subliminal message. Finally they decided to put the lads out of their misery and asked if they could recommend any of the South African wines on the menu, offering them a shatter-proof excuse to buy a couple of bottles and push their tables together. Mingling hands and mingling glances, step one of the courtship dance.

Molly automatically chatted up a massive specimen – Hercules truly was an aberration on her usual type, best categorised as the larger the better. Obviously, she’d once rationalised, she was in the grip of some primeval instinct to select the biggest troglodyte in the tribe – what could she do? It was genetic programming.

One of the South Africans pressed dessert menus on the women and tried to cajole them into choosing the restaurant’s cheesecake speciality. Molly was willing – she prided herself on being available to temptation at all times of the day or night – but Helen frowned.

‘You mean voluntarily order a dessert? A high-calorific, sugar-drenched, artery-clogging pudding? Ask for it and then eat it? I think not.’ Her look was withering. ‘And attempting to induce someone else to do it is even more reprehensible. I call that corrupt. It’s the sort of behaviour that might be acceptable in the Transvaal but it simply won’t pass muster in Temple Bar.’

A study in primness, Helen signalled to the waiter and asked for a chocolate fudge ensemble that made the cheesecake seem positively spartan. Meanwhile, Molly, not fully convinced she was witnessing a wind-up, heaved a sigh of relief and added banoffi pie – ‘with ice cream as well as cream’ – to the order.

The men had Irish coffees with whiskey chasers in case there was too much coffee in the coffees. Molly and Helen exchanged pitying glances at their ignorance – by the dregs of the weekend these visitors would have more faith in Irish coffees. Then Molly became engrossed in experimenting whether Hercules’ place in her affections could be usurped by a Goliath of a South African with blond hair and – a million points deducted for this – a moustache that settled on his upper lip like a third eyebrow. She was inclined towards giving him a chance, when she became aware that the foot tapping against hers under the table didn’t belong to … what was his name anyway – Pieter? … but to Helen. Who seemed to be suggesting, make that insisting, they adjourn to the ladies.

‘How are we going to rid ourselves of the away team?’ hissed Helen, surrounded by mirrors and wash-hand basins.

‘I didn’t know we wanted shot of them.’

‘Eejit, of course we do. We don’t want to go clubbing with that crew playing albatross.’

Molly brightened. So Helen was up for a stint in clubland. Usually she ended their evenings out when the restaurant staff stacked chairs around them. Molly flicked one of her corkscrew curls and waited for an escape plan to inspire her. Nothing happened.

‘It’s a long shot, angel face, but there’s just one course of action open to us,’ she said eventually.

‘Name it.’

‘We tell them we’re tired and we’re going home.’

Helen considered. ‘They’ll suggest accompanying us,’ she pointed out. ‘Should we mention our boyfriends will be waiting up?’

‘Shame on you, Sharkey, depending on a man – or the shadowy outline of one – to spring the trap. So much for your feminist principles.’

Helen pulled a face. ‘Fair’s fair, we’ve been leading them on. Behaviour like that isn’t in the feminist handbook. And backless dresses don’t leave much room for principles. So here’s what we’ll do: you ring for a taxi on the mobile from in here and when it arrives we’ll have our handbags and coats at the ready, leap to our feet and exit in a flurry of “wonderful to meet you and enjoy your stay” civilities, blowing air kisses two yards west of their cheeks. Deal?’

‘Deal. And the taxi will convey us straight to a club, not back to Sandycove via Blackrock.’

‘Certainly. You can choose whichever club you like, as long as it’s not too noisy, too dark, too funky, too happening, too crowded or too hot.’

‘Wonder which club is most popular with Dublin’s Greek community,’ puzzled Molly.

‘Dublin doesn’t have a Greek community. Now I’ll wend my way back to the table while you set our fiendish plan in motion.’

The nightclub was predictably grim – ‘face it, Moll, we’re too ancient for clubbing’; ‘speak for yourself, Sharkey’ – but Helen enjoyed the sense of connection with the wider world that she experienced simply by being immersed in a communal mass of bodies. Sometimes she had the feeling she was too self-contained and an evening like this reminded her she wasn’t an island. An isthmus existed, even if it tended to flood over.

Molly was right, there was nothing like a night on the tear. But in the aftermath Helen was jaded, spent both financially and physically. Her head was pounding – she couldn’t consume alcohol at the rate Molly packed it away – and her system by the following lunchtime hankered for caffeine slightly more than it craved licence to lie on the sofa. Although both were imperatives. So Helen wandered out to the kitchen. As she pressed the button on the kettle, realisation slammed her with the jolt of a cattle prod. She hadn’t thought of him once since 6.10 the previous evening. That totted up to eighteen hours in succession. Could this mean she was cured? Maybe the attraction was something she’d magnified out of proportion. Impossible to resist checking the answerphone, however.

She approached the phone, lifted it and the automated voice said: ‘You have three new messages.’ When she played them there was only static on the line – none of the callers had left a name. Except Helen knew there was only one caller and his identity was no mystery to her. A worm of unquiet niggled as she spooned granules into a mug patterned with an inverted comma – all right, it was a Celtic spiral although she tended to shy away from ostentatiously Irish objects. She made an exception in this case because it amused her to have a symbol representing infinity on an object with a lifespan as limited as a mug.

The phone rang: once, twice, three, four times. On the fifth peal she answered it.

‘Helen, I’ve caught you in at last. Where were you last night? Never mind, you can tell me when we meet. I’m in Dublin, staying at the Fitzwilliam and I’m coming to see you. We need to talk. You must give me your answer. I’ll order a taxi and be with you in half an hour or less.’

‘No, wait. I’ll meet you somewhere.’

‘Where?’ The man’s accent was similar to hers, but with an English intonation overlaying the Kilkenny pronunciation.

‘I’ll collect you from your hotel; we can find a park to walk in.’

‘See you in half an hour then. I’ll be waiting in the foyer.’

‘Patrick, I’m not even dressed yet. Make it an hour.’

Why oh why had she agreed? Why oh why had she stayed out so late last night? The hollows under her eyes would be sagging to her jawline. Why oh why hadn’t she sprung up and taken a shower as she intended, instead of diving below the duvet for an extra snooze? Why oh why was she thinking in cliché-ridden why-oh-whys? But a final one – why oh why was she developing a spot slap-bang between her eyebrows? Still, she could take care of that in seconds; concealer was up there with the polio vaccination in terms of service to humankind as far as Helen was concerned.

She washed and dressed at warp speed, cramming herself into last night’s moleskin rejects and adding a heavy woollen coat and velvet scarf. Her car keys went AWOL and she spent a frantic ten minutes turning her bag upside down and combing the pockets of all her jackets, until she found them in their usual place in the letter rack.

‘Catch a grip, Sharkey,’ she instructed the pallid face in the hall mirror. ‘It’s daylight, he’s not going to pounce. And, above all, remember you have willpower. Use it.’

But as she jammed the gearstick into reverse instead of first she had a premonition it would take more than self-control to bring her home unscathed from this encounter. For he had a knack of dissolving any resolve she managed to muster.

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