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

‘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.