Читать книгу Best of Friends - Cathy Kelly - Страница 12

The other travellers boarding flight NR 706 from Chicago to Cork that Saturday morning watched the tall elegant young couple with interest. They were definitely both somebody, even though they wore comfortable faded jeans and didn’t make a fuss or anything when there was a horrendous queue down the gangway because the plane was delayed.

Martine Brady, flying home to Cork after a colder-than-expected month in the States staying with her sister, watched them enviously. She hadn’t seen a single famous person in all her time here. Not even a glimpse of Oprah, and she was supposed to be Chicagoan through and through. Martine, five people behind the glamorous couple in the queue, and bored, watched them with naked curiosity.

The woman was someone from the television, for sure. Her auburn hair was glossier than a Kentucky thoroughbred’s coat, her fine-boned face was clear-skinned and subtly made up. And that camel overcoat she wore to keep out the Chicago chill was definitely cashmere. Martine would have loved a coat like that, though you had to be tall and slim to wear it well. And rich. A newsreader, that was it. She looked like a newsreader – all polished and intelligent, even though she couldn’t have been but a few years older than Martine’s twenty-five. She wasn’t a movie star, Martine decided. Movie stars were always perfectly beautiful and this woman wasn’t. Her nose was too big and her face was just a bit too long. She was more interesting-looking than beautiful. The man was good-looking but not quite as polished. His coat was a bulky navy greatcoat that would have dwarfed most men but he was tall and broad enough to get away with it. His hair was jet black and cut close to his skull. Maybe he was some famous sportsman Martine didn’t recognise – a footballer or something. Those American footballers were all built like tanks. They were certainly Americans, that was for definite. Rich American women had a certain, unmistakable gloss to them, and Martine wondered how you could recreate it back home. All those manicures and visits to get your hair blow-dried every five minutes.

The queue moved and the couple boarded the plane. As they stepped on, the man smiled at his partner to let her go first, an excited smile that made it entirely clear to Martine that the couple weren’t married at all but were business people going on a trip and they had more than business in mind. The woman’s eyes gleamed as she smiled back at him. Bingo! thought Martine. She imagined dinner in fancy restaurants and then afterwards, the lure of the office romance would be too much for them and they’d end up in one bedroom, drinking champagne and trying not to answer the phone because it would be someone from home calling and the guilt would kill them and…

‘Your seat number, please?’ asked the stewardess.

Martine dragged her eyes back from the business-class section where the couple had just been shown to their seats.

‘Fifty-six,’ she said, returning to the real world.

‘Right-hand side, down the back,’ smiled the stewardess.

‘Down the back,’ repeated Martine. One day, one day, she’d be sitting up the front just like that woman with the gleaming copper hair and the gorgeous companion.

Erin took off her new cashmere coat and stroked it with something approaching awe. It was the most beautiful item of clothing she’d ever owned in her whole life and she still shuddered to think how much it had cost. Greg had arrived home with it the previous night, exquisitely folded in acid-free tissue paper in a huge Bloomingdale’s box.

‘A going-away present to say thank you for coming with me to Ireland,’ he said, kissing her.

‘This must have cost an arm and several legs,’ Erin breathed as she slipped on the coat. ‘It’s gorgeous, Greg.’ She looked at herself in the mirror of the wardrobe, which, being fitted, was one of the few pieces of furniture now left in the apartment since everything had been shipped the day before. The coat flattered her slim figure, transforming her instantly from an ordinary woman in jeans and a sweatshirt into a lady who looked as if she wore designer labels right down to her underwear.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said again, ‘but we can’t afford it.’

They weren’t broke but they weren’t far off it. They certainly couldn’t afford cashmere coats. Erin’s two-year-old black wool would have done her fine for a while yet.

‘New coat for a new beginning,’ Greg insisted. ‘And you want to wow them at home, don’t you?’

Now she began to fold the coat carefully so she could stow it on top of her carry-on bag in the overhead locker, but a pretty blonde stewardess appeared and said she’d hang it up.

‘It’s too beautiful to get creased,’ the stewardess said.

‘Isn’t it?’ agreed Erin ruefully, thinking of their bank balance.

‘I recognise that accent. You and your husband are Irish?’ the stewardess asked chattily, her own accent a gentle Northern Irish lilt.

‘Yes, we are,’ Erin said.

‘Were you on holiday in Chicago? Wasn’t it freezing? Chicago layover is the coldest there is.’ The stewardess shivered in her chic green suit as though she could still feel the wind chill.

‘We weren’t on holiday. We lived in Chicago for five years, actually. And I was in Boston for four years before that,’ Erin said, responding to the woman’s friendliness. ‘We’re leaving the States and going back to Ireland because my husband’s starting a new job in Cork.’

‘Coming home,’ sighed the stewardess as she turned in the direction of the long locker. ‘Welcome back!’

‘Thanks.’ Erin sank down into the seat and stretched out her long legs. Even with her enormous handbag under the seat in front, there was still loads of space – a welcome change from economy class. Greg eased into the seat beside her and grabbed her arm tightly.

‘Finally,’ he said, face alight with pleasure, ‘we’re finally going. It all starts here.’

‘Champagne or juice?’ asked a different stewardess.

Greg’s grin widened and he took two glasses of champagne, handing one to Erin.

‘Let’s hear it for business class,’ he said appreciatively. ‘Not just room for your legs but free booze too! Let’s hope this is the only way we travel from now on. To our new life.’

Erin smiled back at him and took a celebratory sip. ‘This certainly is the way to fly,’ she agreed, thinking of their normal vacation flights with Greg’s huge frame squashed into a tiny airline seat. ‘If your new bosses weren’t paying for our tickets, we’d be swimming to Ireland, which would ruin my fabulous new coat.’

‘You look like a million dollars in it,’ he said, ‘and I don’t mean all green and crinkly.’

‘We still can’t afford it,’ she pointed out, squeezing her husband’s hand.

‘Actually we can,’ he admitted. ‘I sold my David Bowie special edition vinyl collection to Josh. He’s lusted after it for years. The Ziggy Stardust album’s one of only five hundred.’

‘Oh, Greg,’ sighed Erin, incredibly touched. ‘You shouldn’t have.’ She knew how much he loved his precious record collection.

‘What the heck, we’ve got enough stuff.’ Greg took another gulp of his drink. ‘This is good champagne,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll have another glass.’

Erin fixed him with a faux stern glare. ‘Greg Kennedy, if you get legless and start blowing kisses at the stewardesses so the plane gets diverted to Newfoundland to have you arrested, remember, you’re on your own.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ saluted Greg. ‘Just one more and then I’ll stick to water. I promise not to disgrace you.’

Erin kissed him impulsively. Greg might look serious and the perfect corporate man, but underneath he was irrepressible. He loved silly jokes, chuckled for hours over Gary Larson cartoon books, adored comedy shows and could recite the Abbott and Costello baseball sketch in his sleep.

He was also fired up with a boyish excitement over their move. To Greg, this was an adventure, the same way helicopter skiing was an adventure. He loved the fact that usually Erin matched this spirit in him and was always just as eager to try white water rafting or whatever. Only this time, Erin didn’t feel as thrilled about their new move: home to Europe after many years in the US. She was doing it for him.

She’d been fine about it all at first. This new job was what they’d both been waiting for ever since the shares scandal hit the company they both worked for and the firm’s blue chip status wavered. There was talk of huge job losses and neither Greg, who was rapidly climbing the corporate ladder, nor Erin, who worked in human resources, could consider their jobs as safe.

It was a wake-up call, Greg said soberly as they sat up late in their not-yet-paid-for apartment and tried to work out what their financial position would be if the industry went belly up. Erin had known he was right. But that’s when he started talking wistfully about going home.

Home for Greg was just outside Wicklow, a bustling large town where his father, who had run a post office, was recently retired. Although he hadn’t been home for four years, his whole family had been to Chicago for the wedding. They’d been politely curious about the absence of any of Erin’s family. But she was used to that.

‘My grandmother brought me up and she’s too old to travel,’ was her stock answer. It was also untrue.

The reason Erin hadn’t been home to Dublin for nine years and the reason none of her family made the journey to Chicago for her wedding had nothing whatsoever to do with her grandmother’s age. Erin had left home and Ireland at the age of eighteen to get away from her family. She had never been back. Now twenty-seven, the guilt she felt at that abrupt departure had grown into a solid block of pain. When she’d cut the ties to her family, Erin couldn’t have foreseen she’d feel so strangely adrift in the world. But it was impossible to explain that to the honest and genuine Kennedy family, although Greg knew. For his parents, roots and family were important. People who didn’t appreciate family had to have something wrong with them.

Erin adored their son and wanted them to feel that he’d made a good choice in marrying her. She couldn’t tell them the truth. ‘Gran would love to be here but the trip would have been too much for her,’ she said, feeling terrible for the lie.

‘I suppose you’ll fly home later this year, then,’ said Mrs Kennedy hopefully, thinking that if the newlyweds visited Dublin, well, they’d certainly spend a couple of nights in Wicklow too.

‘We’ll see,’ said Erin politely, privately thinking that there was as much chance of her being picked to play for the New York Yankees as there was of her flying home to the bosom of her family. They wouldn’t want to see her now. Why would they? Yes, she’d been so hurt by them, but to run off and stay away – apart from those first few phone calls soon afterwards to let them know she was still alive – what family could forgive that, even a messed-up one like hers? And clearly they hadn’t forgiven her. When she and Greg got engaged, the longing for home had become intense and she’d written several letters to her family. Nobody had replied.

Four years after the wedding, Erin and Greg’s circumstances had changed.

The day after their heart-to-heart about their finances, Greg heard from a head-hunter friend about a job heading the Irish division of a multinational telecoms company. They particularly wanted someone with his international experience. It seemed like a good omen.

The relocation fee would take care of their debts until they managed to sell the apartment, and their friend, the head-hunter, assured Erin that a human resources manager of her calibre would have no problem getting a job. Even better, the Cuchulainn Telecoms people, Greg’s new bosses, promised to rent a beautiful home for the couple for the first six months.

The job sounded like the sort of challenge Greg loved, and he’d been told great things about his management team and particularly his recently promoted second-in-command, a guy named Steve Richardson. The final plus was the location: a heritage town outside the city of Cork that looked incredible when Greg and Erin checked it out on the Web. Neither of them had ever visited Dunmore when they’d lived in Ireland, but they’d certainly heard of it.

Greg told the company they’d have to think about it.

‘It’s a big move, honey,’ he said to Erin. ‘I don’t want to force you to move back to Ireland because of me.’

‘Oh yeah, and who said I was going to move back with you?’ she teased. ‘I might stay here and be frivolous with our money while you work your butt off in Cork.’

‘Money? We have money?’ he said, nuzzling her earlobe.

‘The jar of quarters in the kitchen is getting awfully heavy. There’s at least forty dollars in there,’ began Erin.

‘Forty dollars! You hussy. You could go wild with that, splurging on wine, men and song. I can’t leave you here without me. You have to come. I’ll pine without you.’

Erin looked at him affectionately. Whatever was wrong with the rest of her life, she’d struck it lucky when she’d met Greg. Other guys might bleat on about being the bigger earner and about how she had to go where his job took them, like women following soldiers following the drum. But even though Greg earned more than Erin, it had never made any difference, either to how they spent their money or to the balance of power in their relationship. If Erin insisted on staying in the States and the only job Greg could get was putting out the trash for McDonald’s, then Greg would become the best trash man in the country – he loved her that much.

That love, and the sense that he would always be fiercely loyal to her, were the traits that had made her finally stop running. When she met Greg Kennedy, Erin realised that you could experience the sensation of coming home with a person too, and for her, wherever Greg was, was her home. It helped, of course, that he was utterly gorgeous. Erin was a tall woman but Greg could pick her up as if she were no heavier than a child. When he’d carried her over the threshold of the apartment on their return from honeymoon, she’d felt like a heroine in a fairy tale.

Erin made the decision. Nobody could ever accuse her of not being up for a new challenge. ‘What the hell?’ she said. ‘That forty bucks might go further in Cork than it will here. And you’ve been talking about going home since I met you. Let’s go for it.’

By the time Greg’s new career move was sorted out, the job losses had started at their old company. Erin sold their car, which would, she said wryly, keep her in pantihose until she got a new job. They packed up the apartment, had lots of leaving dinners with friends, sorted out change of address cards and bank accounts. They were both wildly busy and neither of them had time to feel morose over leaving the city they’d called home for so long.

Then, a week ago, something odd had happened. Erin had been standing in Stuker’s Dry-Cleaners waiting in line to get a pile of suits back. Her purse slung over one shoulder, she was ticking off items in her red Things To Do notebook when the enormity of it all hit her and she felt her lungs compress, as if all the air had been squeezed out of them. She’d stumbled and almost fallen as her legs gave way beneath her.

‘Sit, missy, sit,’ said the sweet Korean lady who ran Stuker’s. She eased Erin into a plastic chair, which, even in Erin’s dazed state, seemed weird, because Erin was five feet eight and the Korean lady was barely up to her shoulders.

‘You pregnant?’

Erin laughed in genuine amusement. Thankfully, there was zero chance of that. Before their marriage, Erin had been utterly straight with Greg and told him that she wasn’t sure she’d want children after what her mother had done to her. It wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, but she wasn’t certain she was mother material. And he’d said he understood. Another reason to love him, she knew, because she was sure it was hard for him to accept her decision.

Now she shook her head at the kind Korean lady. ‘Not a chance. I’m just dizzy,’ she said. ‘Low blood sugar.’

The rest of the line, familiar with medical problems from lactose intolerance up, went back to waiting. Rendered almost invisible because she was slumped in a plastic chair like a well-heeled dope-head, Erin let the panic flow away from her body until she was able to examine the problem from a distance.

She was going home and she’d never really planned to. Oh yes, she’d talked about it. What person didn’t? Home was like some magical and unchanging world of childhood for so many of her and Greg’s friends. Scottish, Australian, Irish, Italian, every nationality possible – everybody talked about their homeland as though viewing it through misty, uncritical eyes. Not only was the grass greener at home but life was simpler.

‘Different times,’ everyone would sigh when they had enough drink inside them and the mournful music of home was playing on the CD player.

Erin had long suspected that those who did return home drove everyone in Italy or Australia mad by telling them how wonderful America was and how they missed it and how the roads/hospitals/coffee were better there.

She, on the other hand, never indulged in shows of nostalgia for the country of her birth. Not that anybody ever noticed. With a name like Erin and her swathe of rippling copper silk for hair, she seemed as Irish as they came. People assumed she quietly longed to be sitting in an Irish pub on Paddy’s Day, proudly wearing a clod of shamrock and sighing mournfully into her Guinness. They didn’t know she felt she’d recklessly thrown away her Irishness the day she abandoned her family.

When their friends heard that she and Greg were leaving the States, they all said the same thing: ‘We knew you would.’

Erin felt like remarking: ‘You knew more than I did, that’s for sure.’

The line in the dry-cleaner’s was gone but Erin didn’t have the energy to leave the plastic chair and pick up her stuff. She was going home and she didn’t know how to face the guilt.

Greg fell asleep halfway through the new Spielberg movie. Erin, who’d been watching the latest Nicole Kidman offering on her tiny screen, leaned over and gently removed his headphones. She pulled the grey airline rug over his shoulders so he wouldn’t be cold and moved his empty water glass onto her own tray in case he knocked it over, smiling at the realisation that she only gave in to her mothering instinct with Greg when he was asleep.

Conscious of getting dehydrated, she drank some more water, and settled back to watch the movie but her concentration had been broken.

As the plane flew through the night, Erin cast her mind back to her last hours at home. She remembered the stricken face of the woman she’d always called Mum but who was, in fact, her grandmother, when she’d shouted that she was leaving because they’d lied to her all her life. She remembered leaving many of her childhood treasures behind when she fled the house because she’d wanted to demonstrate the depth of her rejection. Most of all, she remembered the pain she’d felt when she found out that the most important people in her life – her mother, her father and her sister – weren’t who they said they were. Thanks to Erin’s shocking discovery, all her family relationships had shifted. Dad was really her grandfather, bolshy Kerry wasn’t her sister but her aunt, and the long-absent sister Shannon, the wild one who never came home but sent postcards from exotic locations when the mood took her, was really Erin’s mother.

The first thing that struck Erin as she and Greg followed the Cuchulainn driver out of Cork airport to the car park was how warm it was. There was no sign of the beating rain that was part of her memory of home. Instead, a soft spring breeze shimmied over her face, like a silky scarf just out of the dryer. The acid bite of Chicago’s wind chill seemed a lifetime away.

‘Lovely day,’ said Greg appreciatively, filling his lungs with clean air after so many hours in the stuffy cabin.

The second thing Erin noticed was that the driver was refusing to fit the chatty Irish cabbie mould. There was none of the blarney she had expected, no third degree as he tried to work out where they were from, had they any family in Cork or did they know so and so in Chicago, which was the kind of thing Erin remembered from home. Oh well, she shrugged. She’d changed, so it was only fair to assume that Ireland had changed too.

Eager to see a bit of the place, Greg asked for the scenic route, so instead of taking the most direct road to Dunmore, which bypassed the centre of the city, the driver drove them along Patrick Street, pointing out places of note.

Erin tried to look at the sights but kept getting distracted by stylish people, who could have stepped off a Manhattan sidewalk any day. This, she didn’t remember.

Sure, there were the usual few ould fellas in jackets so dated they could have taken part in a centenary of clothes exhibition, but for the most part, the citizens of Cork looked…well, marvellous.

When they finally drove through the hills to reach Dunmore, it looked marvellous too: very cute in a picture-postcard way, like the upmarket towns she and Greg had visited in New England on their honeymoon.

‘Dunmore looked lovely on the Internet but those pictures didn’t do it justice,’ said Greg, admiring the Victorian town square, which was dominated by a forbidding grey statue of some long-dead mayor. ‘I can’t wait to see our house.’

After the beauty of the buildings they had passed in Dunmore, the home the company had rented for them was a definite disappointment. The box-like terraced house on a shabby 1980s estate was so small that it was completely filled by their packing cases and their furniture, which had arrived the day before. Even a deeply apologetic letter from the agent on the kitchen counter top, explaining that due to unforeseen circumstances the house they’d been supposed to have was unrentable, didn’t bring a smile to their faces.

‘“I apologise to both you and Mrs Kennedy,”’ Greg read from the letter,‘“but if you could just bear with us for the next couple of weeks, we’ll have other, more suitable premises for you then.” I’d better get on to Steve Richardson about this. His office are supposed to have sorted the house out. Oh, the letter says there’s champagne in the refrigerator as compensation,’ he added, cheering up as he read the next paragraph.

Erin looked round the kitchen, which, although heroic last-minute efforts had been made, had clearly been rented out for years to people not familiar with basic cleaning equipment. One wall in the kitchen diner was obviously where the kitchen table had stood, for it bore a line of suspicious reddish stains that scrubbing hadn’t been able to remove. The mustard-yellow cabinets and the pink-tinged walls hinted that at least somebody had a sense of humour, but wafting down from upstairs there was a definite hint of tomcat in the air.

‘There’d better be two bottles of champagne,’ Erin said, wrapping her arms round Greg’s waist, ‘because I’d hate to find out that the cat peed in the master bedroom and, at least with a bottle each, we’ll sleep.’

Greg lifted her up effortlessly and sat her on the counter, so that her legs were free to lock round his waist.

‘I vant to take you here, in ze kitchen, my Irish maiden,’ he said, nuzzling into her neck. ‘But I zink we bettair clean up first.’

‘Good idea, Casanova,’ said Erin, kissing him on the mouth. ‘You wouldn’t know what you’d catch here and I’m not taking off my knickers until this place is spotless.’

‘Ooh, stop with ze durty talk,’ moaned Greg.

‘Later.’ She held him close, loving the feeling of his heart beating next to hers. ‘You open the champagne and I’ll find the carton with the rubber gloves in it.’

Three days later, Erin was fed up. The day after they’d arrived, the weather had suddenly become unaccountably cold and the heating was either a very mysterious system that normal humans couldn’t work, or it was broken.

Greg fiddled around with the timer for half the evening but he was so exhausted with the combination of jet lag and starting the new job that he failed to make any improvement.

‘Sorry, honey,’ he said. ‘I know you’re cold. Let’s get on to the agency tomorrow.’ Then he’d fallen into the deep sleep of the shattered, leaving Erin shivering in bed beside him, despite her bed socks and thermal shirt.

The agency said they would send round a maintenance man, but nothing happened. The next morning she phoned them again and they promised to send someone out that day.

Erin, who felt strangely out of sorts and still jet-lagged, wasn’t amused. ‘You said that yesterday,’ she pointed out drily. ‘Is there some kind of draw going on? You put all the names into a hat and when my name comes out, you actually send someone out. Is that it?’

The agency lady sounded quite sniffy and pointed out that two days of freezing weather had burst pipes in a few of their properties and that their maintenance men were busy.

‘Burst pipes?’ Erin enquired. ‘If that’s what it takes to get you guys out here, just tell me where they are and I’ll burst them. OK?’

She hung up and glared round at the empty kitchen. It had been too chilly to unpack things since the cold snap. She had only opened the boxes for the living room because there was a gas fire in there. Besides, if they were going to be moving into a better house soon there was no point in getting out everything. She made yet another cup of coffee for personal central heating and stomped into the living room, pausing only to pick up Greg’s old ski cap from the banisters and jam it on her head.

She was already wearing leggings under her track bottoms, two sweaters and an electric-blue padded ski gilet. All of which looked ridiculous, she knew. But who cared. She didn’t know anybody in this town so there was nobody to wonder what had happened to the normally exquisitely groomed Erin Kennedy to turn her into such a slut.

Plonking herself down cross-legged on the floor, she tackled a box destined for the study. She was engrossed in a pile of newspaper clippings she was sure she’d thrown out in Chicago, when the doorbell rang.

Fantastic. Losing it with the rental company was clearly the way forward.

But it wasn’t the maintenance man at the door. Instead, there stood a tiny Flower Fairy of a person, with round dark eyes, rippling ebony curls and a red hooded woollen coat that made her a dead ringer for Little Red Riding Hood.

‘I don’t know whether to invite you in or tell you that Grandma’s sick and the big bad wolf is around,’ said Erin before she could help it.

The woman laughed: a deep, throaty laugh utterly at odds with her Little Red Riding Hood image. ‘I’ll have to throw this coat out,’ she cried, pushing back the hood.

‘Sorry,’ Erin said quickly.

‘No, you’re right,’ insisted Red Riding Hood. ‘Grown women should not buy clothes because they’re cute. Then people call you cute and I hate that. Cute is an overused word. I’m Sally, by the way. Sally Richardson, Steve’s wife.’ When Erin still looked blank, she added: ‘Steve Richardson works with Greg in Cuchulainn.’

Erin grimaced at her own stupidity. Greg had spoken every day about Steve Richardson, the hardworking second-in-command, who, to Greg’s delight, did not appear to have applied for the top job, being newly promoted himself, and, therefore, who did not have a chip on his shoulder about a new boss.

‘Sorry again,’ apologised Erin. ‘My brain isn’t functioning these days. Jet lag. Or hypothermia, perhaps. The heating isn’t working.’

‘So I hear. Steve says Greg is worried sick because you’re stuck at home getting frostbite.’

‘I am wearing some fetching thermals.’ Erin pointed down to her Michelin Man outfit. ‘I didn’t think it would be this cold.’

‘It’s freak weather, lowest temperatures for March in fifty years,’ Sally said. ‘We never usually get really icy weather because we’re beside the sea. How about coming out to lunch with me? Steve phoned me to say he got Cindy in personnel to have a word with the rental company boss. Cindy loves a challenge.’ Sally grinned. ‘You’ll have a maintenance guy out at half three.’

‘I may offer to have sex with him in gratitude,’ Erin deadpanned. ‘Sorry, that was a joke. That’s incredibly kind of you and Steve. Lunch sounds great.’

While Sally sat amid the boxes in the kitchen, Erin rushed upstairs to change into a less padded outfit. She hadn’t washed her hair since the day after they’d left and she knew it was greasy. So she stuck a black felt beret on it, added mascara and lipstick, and was ready.

‘Oh, I wish I could wear hats,’ said Sally in genuine admiration when Erin arrived downstairs, willowy in a mocha corduroy coat, her long legs endless in suede bootlegs. ‘I’m too short but you’re so graceful and elegant, you can get away with it.’

And Erin smiled and said, ‘This is the lazy woman’s hairdo. It’s been too cold to shampoo my hair, so a hat is the only option.’

‘Well, if that’s how you look when you haven’t made an effort, you must be pretty amazing when you have.’

They went to a cosy pub and sat beside a crackling log fire to eat chilli wraps and fat chips.

Sally seemed to know without it being said that Erin didn’t want to be cross-examined on where she and Greg had come from and why. Instead, she filled Erin in on Dunmore and Cork, explaining that the Cork people looked down their noses at Dunmore for being a sleepy country town, and the Dunmore people looked down on Cork for being a city.

‘I was brought up in Cork, mind you, and I love it,’ she said. ‘There’s a real buzz to the place. But I love Dunmore too. It’s so tranquil here. You feel as if you’re in a small community, yet the city is only a few miles away. The best of both worlds, really. We moved here because I had this dream of setting up my own beauty salon and we heard about some perfect premises on the Lee Road here.’

Erin, who had told Greg in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want to cosy up with the locals until she’d found her feet, heard herself saying that she’d love to visit the salon soon.

‘I haven’t had a manicure for two weeks and my hands are chapped with the cold,’ she said ruefully, examining her long slender fingers.

She regretted it as soon as she’d said it. Now Sally would leap on her and before she knew it, she’d book Erin in and take over.

But no. ‘Come in when you’re ready,’ Sally said equably. ‘Settle in first. You don’t want to make lots of friends right away and then spend the next two years trying to shake them off!’

This was so much what Erin had been afraid of that she stared open-mouthed at her new friend.

‘I know what it’s like to move into a new area,’ Sally added. ‘People want to be friendly and you end up intimately acquainted with half the town and promising to have a drink with the other half by the end of the first week.’

‘Now that sounds like the Ireland I know and love,’ Erin said wryly. ‘I’m originally from Dublin and in my neighbourhood, when a new family arrived, if the neighbours hadn’t been invited in for tea and heard their life history within a week, the new arrivals were considered oddballs of the highest order.’

Sally grinned. ‘Same as where I came from. They’d live in your ear. My mother used to say there was no need for a local paper, just take a trip down to the corner shop and you’d hear the news from the five nearest parishes.’

They laughed conspiratorially and were soon swapping stories of gossipy neighbours who could pick up a rumour faster than a submarine’s radar could detect another vessel.

‘When I met Steve, he had this clapped-out old van, and, the first night, he drove me home in it and we sat outside my house for an hour talking,’ Sally explained. ‘Next day, my mum’s next-door neighbour leaned out her window when I was going off to work and said he looked like a lovely lad, wasn’t he the image of a young, blond Rock Hudson, and was it serious?’

‘A blond Rock Hudson, huh?’ Erin couldn’t stop smiling.

Sally nodded. ‘She loved him, poor dear. Don’t think she ever took it in that he wasn’t the macho man she’d fallen for in the back seat of the cinema.’

‘But wow, he was a looker. Is Steve really like him?’

It was Sally’s turn to smile. ‘Better looking, although he’s got a bit of grey in the blond now, which I love teasing him about.’ Without a trace of self-consciousness, she began to tell Erin how they’d met, fallen in love and got married.

Listening to Sally talking about her husband and her two adorable but utterly mischievous children, Erin realised that it was a breath of fresh air to hear someone genuinely content with their life. Sally finished explaining about how Steve had hoped to make a living out of teaching art classes, but had ended up going back into the corporate world for financial reasons.

‘He enjoys working in Cuchulainn,’ Sally added, in case she’d made it sound as if Steve would give up work in a flash to go back to art. ‘Making a living from art was his dream but we’re both realists. We needed the money.’

‘Hey, don’t apologise to me,’ Erin chuckled. ‘I worked in human resources for years. Work is not everybody’s first love, I can tell you. They weren’t all buying lottery tickets for fun either. There were three big syndicates in my last company and if any of them had won, the office would’ve been wiped out.’

‘I’m really lucky, then,’ Sally said humbly. ‘I love the beauty salon.’

Erin leaned back in her seat, her slim belly full of chilli and chips, and gazed at her new friend. ‘It’s great to see someone so happy with their life.’

Sally shrugged. ‘When you’re happy the way Steve and I are, people like to imagine that we both went through some awful torment to be together or had terrible childhoods and now, because of all of that, we’re happy with each other. It’s not like that at all. We both had great childhoods and lovely families, we just appreciate each other and are thankful for what we’ve got.’ The sweetly smiling face was serious now. ‘We know it’s special. Not many people have that. You have to appreciate it when you have it. You never know what’s round the corner, as my mum used to say.’

Erin studied Sally. She was an unusual woman: lively and warm, yet with an old soul in a young body. It was as if Sally had learned the secret to happiness and wanted everyone to share it. But despite her zest for life, there was an air of fragility to her. She was New York thin and there were defined violet shadows under the sparkling dark eyes.

‘What about you? You and Greg, I mean. How did you meet?’

Erin gave in and opened the top button on her trousers. ‘First, please tell me there’s a good gym round here,’ she groaned, looking down at her belly.

‘There’s two.’

‘Tomorrow,’ vowed Erin, ‘I have got to join. OK, how I met Greg. It’s not your average romantic story, for a start. He’d recently been appointed in the company I worked for and he came to my office to say he couldn’t get on with his assistant, who’d been there for years and had worked for the guy before him. As I say, I worked in human resources,’ she went on. ‘I’d also just heard a rumour that a guy on his floor was sexually harassing his assistant but she was so nervous about her job that she was scared to report him and I put two and two together, made six, and reckoned mistakenly that it was Greg.’

‘Ouch,’ winced Sally.

‘Ouch indeed. I gave him a very hard time about why he wanted to get rid of his assistant and when I realised my mistake he took it really well. Said he’d fancied me from the beginning and thought I was trying to put him off by playing tough cookie.’

‘Oh,’ Sally sighed, ‘like a classic romance. First hate, then love.’

‘No, first hate and then total and utter embarrassment,’ pointed out Erin. ‘I nearly died when I discovered my mistake. I didn’t accuse him of sexual harassment but damn near it. I just cringed to think of how rude I’d been to him. Like, “And what is it precisely about your assistant that makes you feel you can no longer work with her?”’

‘But he forgave you?’

‘After a blow-out lobster dinner, yes.’

She went on to talk about how they’d got married, moved to a beautiful duplex and finally how the job market changed and brought them to Dunmore.

Although Sally noticed that, apart from the brief reference to her childhood in Dublin, Erin’s story was centred entirely on her time in the US and had no reference to life before that, she didn’t say anything. It was as if Erin had blanked out the Irish part of her life, preferring to date her existence from her early days in Boston, waitressing and chambermaiding herself into the ground. There was, Sally reflected, a story to tell there with regard to Erin’s upbringing. But Sally was a gifted listener who knew when to probe and when to stand back and say ‘mm’, and she felt that Erin would prefer the standing-back approach. As she’d learned from the years in the beauty parlour, people talked when they wanted to talk.

‘It’s disgraceful, you know. I’m here half a week already and I haven’t sent my résumé anywhere or made phone calls to the head-hunters whose names I was given,’ Erin finished. Her work ethic was as insistent as her pulse and she was surprised to discover that the upheaval of moving continent had stifled her normal get-up-and-go. Worse, she felt almost…well, depressed or strangely anxious, which she was beginning to think was linked to being back home after all these years. The trauma of her departure from Ireland had come back to haunt her now that she’d returned.

‘Give it time. You’ve only just got here. You need to settle in,’ advised Sally, waving at the barmaid for the bill.

‘We need to eat,’ Erin pointed out. ‘Moving wiped us out and I get scared when I’m not working. It reminds me too much of when I first moved to Boston and didn’t have a cent.’

‘Relax, you can be a powerhouse next month.’

‘Power apartment block if I keep stuffing my face without working out,’ Erin said ruefully. ‘Thanks for lunch, Sally.’

‘My pleasure,’ Sally said. ‘There’s just one condition: we’ve got to do it again.’

‘Deal.’