Читать книгу Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection: Someone Like You, What She Wants, Just Between Us, Best of Friends, Always and Forever, Past Secrets - Cathy Kelly - Страница 29

There was nothing to beat the satisfaction of a job well done, Hannah thought with pride, as she phoned the office to tell them 26 Weldon Drive was finally sold. Nothing. Not that first glass of wine after a hard week, not amazingly orgasmic, earth-shattering sex, nothing. Well, she allowed herself a faint grin, not that she’d had much experience of the orgasmic, earth-shattering sex thing lately. Not for over a month. A month and two days to be utterly exact.

Celibacy had its good points, she conceded. You didn’t have to bother with uncomfortable G-strings sliding into the crevices of your body in an attempt to look permanently ready for sex, nor did you have to worry about whether your bikini-line resembled a hippie with a shaggy perm instead of a smooth expanse of hairless flesh. Nobody saw these bits when you were celibate, except the women in the showers in the gym, so why bother?

Hannah reckoned you could always tell the desperately in love women in the gym by the state of their bikini-lines. Women with perfectly waxed pubic mohicans were in the throes of a love affair, madly exfoliating, plucking and manicuring so that their beloved would think them perfect examples of womanhood. While women hairier than Demis Roussos were either single or in a very long-term relationship where they were in such an advanced state of intimacy – sitting on the loo while their beloved was in the bath – that they didn’t bother with waxing or plucking.

Still, it was a disgrace not to bother with these feminine things, Hannah decided. There was no excuse to be slovenly. She’d book a beauty salon session later. Just because Felix wasn’t hanging around like a male rabbit on heat, there was no reason to let her standards drop.

She shut and locked the front door of number 26, admiring the garden, which was awash with crocuses of every colour. Vermilion ones drooped beside vibrant yellows, with a few shy, creamy white flowers bending their bell-like heads beside the privet hedge as if overwhelmed by the gaudy glory of their friends. The woman who’d been selling the house loved her garden, that was for sure. If only she’d taken as much care of the interior, it mightn’t have taken four months to sell the place.

On the market in November, it was now nearly February and the office had despaired of ever flogging this particular des res. It didn’t matter how many coffee beans or loaves of bread you stuck in the oven or what sort of fragrant lilies you displayed on the hall table when buyers were coming round, the most outstanding smell in number 26 was of unneutered tomcat and unwashed clothes.

Hannah had been given the house as one of five properties in her portfolio. David gave senior agents at least fifteen each, many of which were for auction, but as she was only a junior, she had five for sale by private treaty.

She loved her new job. She loved the freedom of driving around from property to property, organizing viewings and seeing clients. Normally, David would have put her working on customer service for at least a year before letting her manage properties as a junior agent. But he had a lot of faith in her.

She was studying auctioneering part-time now, one night a week and some weekends, and had vowed to pass her exams in record time. Donna had been a great help, giving her advice on tricks of the trade, telling her how to handle any lone viewer who made her nervous (‘Stand near the door,’ Donna warned. ‘I know you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on the place to make sure they don’t steal anything, but you’re more valuable than any trinket they can pocket.’)

There was so much to learn, about negotiating, the legal aspects of the job, and how to deal with difficult clients. ‘Most people are so incredibly grateful when you sell their home,’ Donna explained. ‘That’s a huge part of the buzz of the job, it’s very rewarding. But there are difficult ones too, and you’ve got to know how to deal with them.’

Donna grinned. She had lots of hilarious stories about her years in the business. There was the one about the man who’d been drunk and goosed her as she led him upstairs to see a flat, another about a wet dog who’d been inadvertently let into the property when the owners were out. ‘I gave that dog an entire pack of biscuits to get him back into the garden!’ Donna laughed. ‘The viewing was due to start at half two and I had this huge wet animal running around the house like a lunatic, throwing himself on to beds and destroying the place.’

She’d even come across one couple making love on a dining-room table when she let herself into a house. ‘The woman was one of the owners,’ Donna recalled, ‘but the man wasn’t her husband. I bit my lip to stop myself laughing. They were so embarrassed.’

Hannah had a few stories of her own now. Like the awful occasion when she’d lost a set of keys to a house. She’d searched high and low and hadn’t been able to find them.

David had grinned when she came to tell him, cringing in case he’d be furious.

‘You can’t qualify as an estate agent if you haven’t lost at least one set of keys,’ he said kindly. ‘Tell the client we’ll get the locks changed at our expense.’

Her mobile rang, blistering the quiet of the mid-morning suburban street.

‘Hannah, urgent message for you,’ said Sasha, the office manager who’d been appointed when Hannah began to work as an estate agent full-time. ‘Mrs Taylor, from Black-friars Lodge in Glenageary just rang up in a complete panic. Her daughter’s got measles and she can’t take her out of the house for the viewing. She wants to know if there’s any way we can let people see the house but stay out of that room. I know,’ Sasha added, ‘it’s crazy. But she asked me to ask you.’

‘Does she not realize that the viewers will be at risk of getting measles into the bargain, not to mention the fact that they’ll all want to explore every centimetre of the place, the under-the-stairs cupboard included?’ Hannah laughed. ‘I’ll phone her back, don’t worry about it.’

Once she’d persuaded Mrs Taylor to stop panicking and promised to reschedule the viewing for the following week, she phoned Leonie to make sure she was still on for lunch. Hannah had to drive to Enniskerry in County Wicklow for a viewing that afternoon, so she had arranged to meet Leonie for a quick sandwich half-way.

‘Can you make it?’ Hannah asked, once she finally got through after waiting five minutes with a canine barking chorus in the background in place of ‘Greensleeves’.

‘Yes,’ sobbed Leonie.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Hannah in alarm. ‘Is it Abby again?’

‘A guinea pig just bit me and, ouch, it’s sore.’

Giggling erupted from the other end of the phone. ‘Is that all?’

‘You want to get bitten by a guinea pig some time, sweetie,’ Leonie retorted. ‘They’ve got teeth like chisels. And now he’s squealing like an Italian tenor – you’d think he was the one who’d been bitten! Cuddly little thing, my backside! You won’t believe his name: Peaches. Honestly, the names people give animals. They should have called him Pavarotti, the way he sings. Or maybe Fang.’

‘Will you be recovered enough from your encounter with Peaches to join me for a sandwich in half an hour?’ Hannah enquired.

‘Only if I can have a slice of cheesecake too,’ Leonie bargained. ‘I’m celebrating.’

‘What are you celebrating?’

‘You’ll have to buy me the cheesecake first.’

‘Spill the beans, Ms Delaney,’ Hannah ordered, plonking the tray with their lunch on it down on the table in the corner of the pub. ‘What are you celebrating? If it’s a man, I don’t want to know. Poor single old dears like me don’t want to hear about other people’s sex lives.’

Leonie laughed. ‘That’s moving a bit fast, even for me,’ she joked. ‘Particularly as I haven’t actually met him yet.’

‘So it is a man,’ Hannah said triumphantly. ‘I knew it. You are a terrible tart! You know, Leonie, you only ever light up when it’s something to do with a man.’

‘I might be unlit when I meet him, because it mightn’t work out,’ Leonie pointed out. ‘He’s one of my personal advert men and I got the courage to phone him the other day. He sounds amazing, so friendly and clever and sensitive and…’ She grimaced. ‘Then I get the collywobbles when I think about Bob and what a disaster that turned out to be. He sounded lovely on the phone too, so this guy could be terrible.’

‘Nonsense. He’s probably wonderful.’ Hannah took a bite of her tunafish sandwich.

‘I’m hoping for a six foot blond Adonis with a body to die for and healing hands,’ Leonie said dreamily. Then gasped. Talk about putting your foot in it. That was almost a perfect description of poor Hannah’s Felix. Leonie had finally seen him on a sitcom on ITV and he was gorgeous. Gorgeous and somewhere else. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

‘Sorry about what?’ Hannah didn’t appear perturbed; she continued eating her sandwich. ‘I’ve got to be at the next house in half an hour,’ she apologized, ‘so I’ve got to wolf this down. Spill the beans on the new bloke.’

‘His name’s Hugh.’

‘Wonderful name,’ Hannah said delightedly. ‘You can sing that Whitney Houston song now: “I Will Always Love Hugh”! Geddit? Hugh and not You?’

‘I’m glad you’re an estate agent and not trying to break into the comedy circuit,’ Leonie said calmly. ‘But I digress. Hugh – ’ she shot Hannah a stern look – ‘works in a bank. He’s an investment adviser and he’s separated too.’

‘That’s good.’

‘He’s older than me and he’s mad into dogs. He’s got three: a spaniel, a Jack Russell and one Heinz 57 variety. Ludlum, Harris and Wilbur, after the novelists. He’s into adventure thrillers.’

‘And you discovered all that over the phone? He must be some talker.’

‘He is,’ Leonie said happily. ‘Imagine if we got married and at the wedding we had to talk about how we met and what we remembered about it. I’d have to say I fell in love with him when he told me he rescued Wilbur from certain death when someone tried to drown him as a puppy. Someone had put him in a sack and thrown him into the Grand Canal. If not for Hugh, poor Wilbur would be dead.’ Her face had that moony, dreamy quality that said she was in fantasy land. And she was.

Leonie was picturing the wedding, complete with four dogs in their Sunday best as bridesdogs (Penny) and groomsdogs (Wilbur, Harris and Ludlum) with beribboned sachets of Mixed Ovals on the tables instead of pastel fondant sweets.

It was Hannah’s turn to deliver a stern look. ‘Leonie, stop confusing people who love animals with people you’re going to fall in love with. It’s not the same thing. And I wouldn’t mention weddings to him, either. Men aren’t as keen on the idea as women are, I think.’

Leonie finished her sandwich and started on the cream-laden slice of cheesecake. ‘You’re right. I have become a bit obsessed with weddings since Ray and Fliss got married. I can’t help it. That Calvin Klein dress haunts me. Every time I pass Madame Lucia’s Bridal Boutique in town, I peer in the window to see if there’s anything suitably elegant that I should put a deposit down for. I mean, it’s mad. Mel caught me looking in one day and I had to pretend I was straightening my rain hat in the window.’

‘When’s the big date?’

‘Saturday night.’

‘That’s good, because at least you know he’s really separated and not just married but pretending to be separated to get women,’ Hannah said without thinking.

Leonie looked shocked.

‘Some people do use personal adverts to spice up their life when they’re actually already involved,’ Hannah explained, sorry she’d started this. ‘But a date on a Friday or Saturday is a good sign.’

‘I’m not sure any of it’s a good sign,’ Leonie said, still looking startled.

‘Sorry. I really am, Leonie. I’m so anti-men right now I’m turning into an embittered old cow. I should just stay at home and write a feminist polemic and be done with it. Hugh sounds really nice, and well done you for getting the courage to phone him. Ask him if he has any brothers,’ she joked. ‘No! Only kidding, don’t. I’m not in any condition to see a man. I don’t want a man, either. They’re nothing but trouble.’

‘No word from Felix, then?’ Leonie asked delicately.

Her friend shook her head. ‘Not a whisper. He left a very nice Paul Smith T-shirt behind in the laundry basket and I only found it the other day buried right at the bottom. I cut it into pieces and now I’m using it to clean the bathroom,’ Hannah said with quiet satisfaction.

‘Anyway, I’m over him. Felix was proof that I’m not the sort of woman who should get involved with men. It’s too messy. Maybe I should be ultra modern and become a mistress. I was reading this article in the Daily Mail about a woman who says she’s got her career and a bloke once a week and it suits her fine. His wife gets the dirty socks.’

‘You’d hate that,’ Leonie argued. ‘You’re an all-or-nothing sort of person.’

‘Yeah, you’re right. So I’m sticking to nothing,’ Hannah said firmly. ‘No men, ever again.’

She was sitting quietly at her desk later that afternoon when the phone rang. Hannah picked it up absently, her mind on her paperwork, and then she froze. She would have recognized that voice anywhere. Low, soft and light-hearted, as if something had amused him and he was quietly laughing at it while he was speaking to you.

‘Hannah, great to talk to you.’

She slammed the phone down with such force that Sasha, Steve and Donna all looked up from their respective desks in surprise.

‘The phone went dead and I got that high-pitched squealing noise,’ Hannah lied blatantly. She was not about to say that Harry-fucking-Spender had phoned her out of the blue, after eighteen months in South America, eighteen months of swanning up and down the bloody Amazon having a whale of a time while she tried to pick up the pieces of her life again. How dare he? How bloody dare he? The computer document she’d been working on disappeared and the monitor darkened into screensaver. Everyone in the office had a different one. Hannah’s was a kitten chasing after a ball of wool. Normally it amused her, watching the kitten pounce excitedly on the wool only to see it bounce away. She slapped the return key sharply and the kitten vanished. Her phone rang again. Without betraying the knot in her stomach at the sound, Hannah picked up the receiver and cradled it between her neck and chin the way she normally did.

‘Hello, Hannah Campbell speaking,’ she said for the second time in sixty seconds, her voice professional.

It was him.

‘Don’t hang up, Hannah,’ he begged, not sounding quite as amused this time.

Tough titty, she thought victoriously as she put the receiver down again without speaking another word.

‘Must be something wrong with my line,’ she said to the others, wide-eyed.

When the phone finally rang for the third time, it was one of the people to whom she’d shown the Enniskerry house earlier that afternoon.

Relieved that it wasn’t Harry, Hannah heaved a sigh of relief. He’d got the message, thankfully. He wouldn’t be ringing back. She wondered briefly how he’d got her work number but realized that people gossiped and that one of their group of friends – Hannah’s ex-friends – was bound to know where she was working and had passed on the information. Dublin was such a small city: you couldn’t hiccup without someone remarking on the fact a month later.

She stayed in the office until six, trying to catch up on paperwork. The business was booming, turnover was up by three hundred per cent, David James had announced proudly. Which was wonderful, but it also meant there really weren’t enough hours in the day. Sipping the coffee Sasha had brought her, Hannah kept her head bent and worked. But at the back of her mind remained niggling thoughts about Harry. She’d been so heartbroken when he’d left. After ten years together, she’d never have imagined that he could leave her, but he had, to find himself ‘because he was being stifled by their relationship,’ apparently. At the time, it felt like the worst thing in the world, but the passage of time had dimmed the pain. Guys like Jeff and Felix had helped, except that she hadn’t meant to fall in love with Felix. She hadn’t planned to fall in love ever again. Harry should have cured her of that. Felix certainly did.

As she worked, she thought about Harry, about how he used to spend hours wandering around in his dressing gown, something which had irritated her beyond belief. He’d been such a slob. If he didn’t have to get up and go into work, Harry would slouch around half-dressed all day, phoning Hannah at work and asking her to buy milk/ fags/bread on the way home. And she used to do it, she remembered with shame. She’d been a bigger eejit than he was to let him get away with it. He never washed a cup or emptied an ashtray if he could help it, and she’d rarely remonstrated with him about it either. More fool Hannah.

Oh yeah, and the novel. Harry’s great opus. He’d been talking about it for years, how he was going to be able to give up the day job when it was written and how it’d win literary prizes left, right and centre. He was worse when he got drunk, telling her he’d be famous some day, famous and filthy, stinking rich. Oh yes, you mark my words, incredibly rich and famous. Thirty seconds later, he’d ask her for a loan of a tenner so he could run out to the twenty-four-hour garage and buy cigarettes and Pringles.

Donna was still at her desk when Hannah finally switched off her computer and tidied up the manila folders on her desk.

‘Fancy a drink?’ Hannah asked, suddenly overcome with the desire to talk to someone about Harry’s phone call. She liked talking to Donna: the other woman never judged, never jumped to conclusions and never breathed a word of their conversations to anyone else.

‘I’d love to,’ confessed Donna, ‘but I’m picking Tania up from a friend’s house in an hour and I’ve got some paperwork to finish first. Sorry.’

‘That’s fine, no sweat. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ve got an early start anyway, I don’t know why I’m even thinking about the pub.’ Hannah laughed. ‘See you tomorrow.’

As she walked out into the cool evening air, she didn’t notice the car parked opposite. She certainly never thought it might be Harry’s car. He’d driven a battered old Fiat that was verging on the antique it was so elderly. This car was a very respectable saloon with not a bit of rust in sight. Hannah barely looked at it. So she was astonished when the door opened and Harry got out, calling her name.

She stared at him, wondering if this was a mirage and knowing it wasn’t. For what felt like hours but was actually only a minute, she stared silently, unable to summon up an intelligent sentence. Then her brain reasserted itself.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she demanded.

‘I came to see you, Hannah. We have to talk,’ Harry said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to turn up on the doorstep of the woman you’d dumped a year and a half previously for a trip to find yourself.

‘You’ve seen me. Now fuck off,’ she replied, marching towards her car.

‘Hannah, don’t be like that. You can’t walk away from ten years, you know.’

She glared at him. ‘That’s supposed to be my line, Harry. You, if I remember correctly, were the one who walked away. Now you can do it again – out of my life, and don’t ever set foot near me again or I’ll report you as a stalker, got that?’

Boiling like Mount Etna, she reached the Fiesta, unlocked it, wrenched open the door and threw her papers in. Harry followed her and stood behind her. She knew he was standing with his hands falling limply by his sides: that was what he always did when he didn’t know what else to do. She ignored him, amazed at the rage she felt. It was as if he was Harry and Felix rolled into one, deserving of all the fury she’d directed at both of them.

‘Hannah,’ he said again, hesitantly this time, ‘please stop and talk to me, that’s all I want. Please. I’m sorry.’

It was the ‘I’m sorry’ that did it. At no time during his rapid departure from her life had Harry ever apologized. He’d never looked embarrassed as he bluntly told her he had to get out or he’d stagnate. He’d never asked her forgiveness, not even when she sat down on the end of their bed, her legs gone from under her with shock and weakness at his announcement. Even his bizarre letter from South America the year before had been full of inane chatter about what he was doing and lacking in any mention of their life together and how sorry he was he’d destroyed it.

Hannah put her handbag on the passenger seat before facing Harry.

‘You’re sorry?’ she said calmly. ‘Now? Isn’t it a bit late to be sorry? I thought the time for apologies was when you dumped me like a sack of old potatoes, not when you return nearly two years later, looking for…’ She put her head on one side and surveyed him with narrowed eyes. ‘What, I wonder. Somewhere to live, perhaps? Or a loan of money? You must be looking for something, Harry, if you’re back.’

He looked pained. ‘You obviously have a terrible impression of me, Hannah, to think I’d only come back for money or something like that.’

‘And you haven’t given me any reason to have a bad impression of you, is that right?’ she said caustically.

He lowered his eyes first. ‘I am sorry, Hannah, though you obviously don’t believe me. I know I can’t make it up to you, but I just wanted to talk to you, to explain.’

Weariness flooded Hannah’s limbs. She hadn’t the energy to fight with him any more. Let him try and explain what she found inexplicable.

Hannah knew there was nothing he could ever say that would explain what had happened. She’d recovered from it, though. She’d suffered and come out the other side, stronger – she hoped – than ever. But if he had to tell her, then so be it. ‘I’ll meet you in McCormack’s in half an hour,’ she said abruptly. ‘We can talk then, for about fifteen minutes. Then, I’ll have to go.’

Without waiting to see whether this suited Harry or not, Hannah jumped into her car, slammed the door and drove off down the street like a possessed Formula One driver with the rest of the grid on her tail.

There was nothing she needed to do that would take half an hour. But Hannah had needed some time alone to get to grips with Harry’s reappearance in her life. She drove quickly to the pub and then sat in her parked car outside, with the newspaper spread on the steering wheel in front of her. She was too tired to read and no matter how many times she stared at any particular paragraph her eyes glazed over and she saw Harry’s face instead of newsprint. When he’d suddenly appeared in front of her, she’d known what to say. Driven by pent-up fury, she’d bitten his head off. But now, after thinking about it all, Hannah couldn’t think of a word to say. All those missile-shaped words had deserted her. If only she’d taped the late-night drunken speeches she’d declaimed when she was on her own, ones where she’d told Harry exactly what he could do with himself. Fuelled by Frascati, they’d been eloquent, if tearful, and they’d be so useful now. She could simply press ‘play’ on her tape recorder and let him listen to a perfectly encapsulated, very emotional précis of how she’d felt and what sort of a bastard she thought he was. Thinking of Harry forced to listen to a drunken speech made Hannah smile for the first time in hours. He was looking good, she had to give him that. Still long on boyish charm, but his body had filled out and the sprinkling of fine lines around his eyes suited him. So did the tan. He’d always tanned well, going a coffee colour while Hannah’s freckles were merely joining up.

And he looked very presentable, not his usual slacker self in droopy trousers and some type of ancient sweatshirt that no self-respecting charity shop would let past the front door. In its place, he wore chinos and a cream cotton sweater that looked brand new. Stylish almost; very unlike the Harry she used to know.

Well, Hannah smiled grimly, if he was different, so was she. She wore a severely tailored Jesiré suit with a knee-length skirt to show off toned-up legs in barely black seven deniers. Nothing under the jacket – just a bra. And perilous fuck-me stilettos from Carl Scarpa. Her hair, instead of the taut knot she’d worn during the Harry years, was a glossy shoulder-length mane that swung when she walked. She’d finally dumped the granny glasses for contacts and her lips gleamed sexily in strawberry lipgloss.

This look of restrained, business-like sexuality still drove men mad. Let Harry suffer a little, Hannah decided, getting out her strawberry gloss to give her mouth that PVC look.

When she saw Harry drive up in his distinctly unrusted car, she hopped out of hers and ran inside, grabbing a table at the back. Immersed in her newspaper, she pretended not to notice Harry’s loping progress towards her until he said her name.

‘Oh,’ she looked up in astonishment, as if she’d completely forgotten she was to meet him. ‘Harry. I’ll have a soda and lime with ice.’

He returned with their drinks and sat down heavily, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. ‘Thanks,’ Hannah said cheerily. She’d decided that emotionally she wasn’t up to a huge row with yelled recriminations that could be heard half-way across the bar. Far better to behave like a benevolent friend talking to a younger pal who’s always in trouble. A sort of ‘You scamp, what have you done this time?’ type ploy with a smattering of ‘I couldn’t care less, really,’ thrown in for good measure.

‘You look wonderful, Hannah,’ Harry said earnestly.

Her savoir-faire took a direct hit and she had to grind her teeth hard not to screech that break-ups were good for the figure on account of all the stepping you had to do in the gym to pound your ex out of your mind.

‘Thanks,’ she replied evenly. ‘Harry, I haven’t got all night. Can you get to the point?’

‘You’ve got a date, then?’ he asked idly.

She blinked at him steadily before replying: ‘None of your business, OK?’

‘Fine, fine, I was just wondering…’

‘Stop wondering. Why are you here? I thought we didn’t have anything to say to each other any more.’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I wanted to apologize, Hannah. I’ve thought about you so much, about the fun we had together. I feel,’ he hesitated, ‘that it’s all unfinished. That we shouldn’t have done it, do you understand?’

‘No.’

‘But you must – you said yourself, Hannah, we were good together.’

‘Harry, if you remember correctly, you’ll remember that I said that when you were collecting up the CDs you were afraid to leave in the flat. I was telling you we were wonderful together and you were scanning the room for valuable personal objects I might destroy in a rage when you’d gone because you’d dumped me. Things have changed since then.’ Harry looked as if he was about to speak but Hannah kept going. ‘You have had eighteen months of adventure where you could occasionally think fondly of the girl you left behind,’ she said with heavy irony, ‘because you did the leaving. You had what the Americans call “closure”. You made the choice to leave and you did. I, on the other hand, didn’t have closure because I was the person to whom it all came as a big shock. A massive bloody shock. Since then, I have got over it, over you, and have reached, acquired, whatever the damn word is, closure. So why exactly do you think I’d welcome you with open arms? Was I really that stupid that you’d imagine I’d be thrilled to see you?’

He grabbed her hands with his. ‘No, you’re the least stupid person I know.’

Hannah pulled her hands away roughly. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she said.

The couple at the table next to them looked round. Harry flashed them an apologetic half-smile. Hannah resisted the impulse to slap it off his stupid face.

‘Are you here to convince me to go out with you again?’ she asked bluntly.

‘No. Yes. Sort of. I want us to be friends,’ he said lamely.

‘I have enough friends,’ Hannah announced. ‘I don’t need any more.’

She was about to grandly throw her untouched soda and lime all over him when some inner force made her look up and she saw Felix approaching the table.

There must be hallucinogens in the air-conditioning unit in work, Hannah decided, her mind in slow-motion, as she watched Felix coming nearer. There really was no other explanation for today. I mean, to meet one ex-boyfriend was misfortune, to meet up with two…

‘Hello, Hannah,’ Felix growled, looking at Harry with dislike. ‘I hoped you might have come here for a drink after work because you weren’t at home when I phoned.’

‘Hello, Felix,’ she said calmly, as if she hadn’t just spent the past month in silent misery over him, wondering where he’d got to and asking herself if she should buy one of those self-help books for women who love bastards.

She peered around as if expecting a Candid Camera host to appear suddenly and tell her she was the star of the latest show. The coincidences that were piling up were way off the Richter scale and there had to be a reason.

‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ Felix said, sitting down on Hannah’s other side, quite clearly not giving a damn if he was interrupting anything. In fact, he was pleased to be interrupting it, Hannah deduced, if the cool smirk he’d directed at Harry was anything to go by.

‘What brings you here?’ Hannah asked. ‘I didn’t know you were back in Ireland.’

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’ Felix said, ignoring her question and placing substantial emphasis on the word ‘friend’.

Hannah ground her teeth some more. ‘Harry Spender, Felix Andretti,’ she said.

‘How do you know each other?’ said Harry pointedly, looking at Felix as if he were Hannah’s father and Felix was a particularly unsuitable boyfriend who’d just rolled up.

‘We went out together, Harry,’ Hannah explained kindly. ‘But it didn’t last.’

‘Oh,’ said Harry, pleased. He reached for Hannah’s hand again.

She moved out of his reach and encountered Felix’s long, muscled thigh against hers. He stared at her, smouldering in his own special way. If smoulderability could be marketed, Felix would be a billionaire.

‘How long since you broke up?’ asked Harry, piqued.

‘We haven’t,’ hissed Felix.

Hannah arched an eyebrow. Talk about l’embarras de richesses. One minute, she had no man on the horizon. Suddenly, she had two and they wanted to fight over her, like medieval knights jousting in a tournament for the hand of the fair lady. Well, she had news for them: the fair lady had to be game before there was any point in jousting for her hand. And this lady wasn’t keen at all. She’d finished with both knights and they could get stuffed.

‘Enough chitchat, boys. I’m afraid I have a date and I’ve got to go. Nice talking to you, Harry, and you too, Felix.’ She gave them a bright smile and got up.

Both of them looked dismayed, although on Felix’s handsome face, dismay was wedded with displeasure.

‘You can’t go,’ he said, flicking back his golden hair, his trademark gesture.

The little creature who stoked Hannah’s inner rage got out the bellows and gave things a huge blast of air. She felt the fire inside her grow into an inferno of fury.

If she thought she’d been irritated to see Harry, that was nothing to what she felt at the sudden reappearance of Felix. A month and nothing. At least Harry had actually dumped her. Felix had just vanished and his mobile number had bleated that it was no longer valid when she’d rung it in tears. And here he was again, behaving as if nothing had happened despite his mysterious absence.

‘You’ve got a date?’ Felix said hotly, as if he disapproved of this idea.

Etna erupted.

Hannah turned on him. If the eyes were the window of the soul, she hoped he’d see flames in hers.

‘What I do is none of your business, Felix,’ she breathed. ‘Don’t forget that. I’m leaving, goodbye.’

She stormed out, daring either one of them to follow her. If they did, she’d kill them with her bare hands, so help her God.

The rage left her before she reached home and by the time she was sticking her key in the lock, she was grinning at the lunacy of the whole thing. It was official: she had yo-yos for boyfriends. They kept coming back, in spite of their best efforts to keep away.

Within an hour, Felix yo-yoed back again. He rang the doorbell continually for ten minutes and, when Hannah stuck her head out of the window and told him to piss off, he started ringing everyone else’s doorbells. Finally, she stomped downstairs and let him in.

‘What are you doing here, Felix?’ she demanded as he followed her up to her flat. She was irrationally pleased that she hadn’t changed out of her work clothes, which meant that Felix was getting an eyeful of swaying hips and long legs as he walked behind her.

‘To see you, Hannah. We need to talk.’

Déjà vu or what? she thought grimly, remembering Harry saying those very words to her only hours before.

‘Is this International Ex-Boyfriend Day?’ she enquired. ‘Was there something about it on the news? No, don’t tell me. You were stuck in a time machine for four weeks and have only just come back to this century. Am I right?’

‘I’ve been so stupid, Hannah,’ murmured Felix. While Harry had relied on verbal reasoning to put his case for disappearance, Felix used much more carnal means. He slid his arms round her waist and began to kiss her, his soft lips scorching hers. Hannah felt her stomach contract with sheer, animal lust. Felix was a superb kisser. If he ever decided to leave the world of acting, he could undoubtedly make a fortune as a gigolo.

Momentarily, she let herself sink into his kiss, leaning her body against him, feeling his hips grind against hers erotically. It was wonderful, glorious, so sexy. After a month without him, Hannah felt like a thirsty Saharan traveller faced with a rippling, icy-cool stream. Her hands roamed eagerly over his back, one pulling his head down to hers, the other moulding him closer to her. And then she stopped. What was she doing? If she wanted cheap sex with no strings, all she had to do was hit the nightclubs and pick up a bloke who’d hidden his wedding ring in his back pocket. Why succumb to Felix when all he was doing was lulling her into a false sense of security? He’d have her eating out of his hand again and then, when he felt like it, he’d leave. Dump her. Like Harry had.

She imagined them sharing notes once she’d left the pub. Stupid Hannah, what a pushover.

Give her the puppy-dog eyes and she’s putty in my hands, Harry would say smugly.

No, no, Felix would smirk, she is sexy, she loves making love. Tease her with kisses and wonderful sex and she’ll fall into my arms.

Hannah pushed him away forcefully.

‘Hannah?’ he gasped.

‘Felix, you left me without a word. I can’t forgive that. It’s over,’ she said, panting with a mixture of desire and temper.

‘I know, but it’s because I’m weak, Hannah,’ he said. ‘And scared. I was ashamed to phone you after Christmas, I knew you’d be so angry with me and I couldn’t…You’re so strong, you’re my rock. I need you.’

‘What a load of old crap!’ she hissed, not sure who she was more furious with: Felix for waltzing back into her life unannounced, or herself, for falling for his tactics and kissing the face off him. ‘You knew I’d be angry, I’d every right to be. But I’d have forgiven you. I loved you. One week, two weeks, I’d have forgiven you after that long. But four is pushing it, Felix. And at Christmas into the bargain. The season to be jolly, my backside. I’m sorry. Get out. You wanted to talk and we have. You’ve got what you came for.’

‘I came for you. You’re my rock, Hannah,’ he repeated. It sounded so corny, like a line from a second-rate TV movie.

‘Tom Stoppard not writing your lines, then?’ she said bitchily. ‘You need something snappier than that, Felix.’

‘Nobody I know is as funny as you, Hannah,’ he said fondly.

‘Not even all the bimbos you’ve been fucking since you left me?’ she spat. ‘I saw the piece in Hello! about you and “your lovely companion” at that horror movie premiere. She looked like girlfriend material from the way she was clinging to you. Either that or she’s an aspiring actress practising for a role where she plays your girlfriend. Or maybe she’s someone important’s daughter and you’re dating her as a favour, although it isn’t much of a trial going out with some babe in slashed to the waist Gucci. Was she someone helping your career, Felix?’

The photo had cut her to the bone, the sight of Felix mid-laugh with one arm around a blonde vision in barely there jungle-print silk, the picture of twenty-one-year-old beauty. He was described as the handsome actor who’d been a big hit in the TV sitcom Bystanders. She was an unidentified blonde, but they were two fabulous blondes really, glamorous other-worldly creatures. Hannah had felt like a bog-trotting beast by comparison.

A woman not given to self-criticism when it came to her looks, she’d felt ugly as she looked at Hello! No wonder he’d left her, she’d thought in misery, when he could have a woman like that.

‘I can’t imagine you were missing me too much that night, eh, Felix?’

He hung his head in sorrow. ‘I know. I don’t deserve you, Hannah. But please – ’ he sank on to her couch and put his face in his hands – ‘please don’t send me away. I need you, so much. You can’t tell me you haven’t missed me too.’ He turned beseeching eyes up to her.

Christ, he was handsome, she thought irrationally. Almost impossible to resist. She had to.

‘I have missed you,’ she said slowly. ‘You have no idea how much. Which is why I won’t have anything to do with you any more, Felix. I’m not a masochist. Please leave.’

He uncurled his long body from the couch, graceful as ever, and gave her another heart-rending look with those soulful eyes. He was going.

‘I want to explain one thing before I go,’ he said softly. ‘You don’t understand; I didn’t want to fall in love with you. Having a person I loved wasn’t part of my career plan. I didn’t want to be in love, I wanted to play around and have fun, but I met you and it went haywire. I fell in love with you, Hannah.’ His face was strangely bleak as he spoke, the lines around his eyes more noticeable than usual. He did look weary and anguished; it wasn’t an act. ‘I know it doesn’t show me in a very good light if I admit that I tried to fight what I felt about you, Hannah. I wanted you to be like all the others, to be with me for a month before we both got bored with each other. But it didn’t work that way. I love you, in spite of myself. I’m not proud of how I’ve behaved, but it’s the truth. I wanted you to understand and I’m sorry I hurt you.’

Hannah said nothing, she couldn’t trust herself to speak. She hoped she could keep her face stony for as long as it took him to leave the flat. He didn’t say anything else as he left, closing her door behind him quietly. Watching him leave without calling him back was one of the hardest things Hannah had ever done.

She wanted to desperately but she couldn’t, wouldn’t. She waited motionless until she heard the front door slam shut and then she broke down.

Tears flowed down her face as she wept with grief. She’d been kidding herself. She wasn’t over Felix, not even a little bit. She was still crazily, horrifically in love with him. She longed for him, longed to hold him and kiss him and let him make love to her. And the sensation of holding him earlier had been such bliss…It was agony to think he was gone from her life, that she’d never hold him again, never touch him, never feel his hot breath on her skin. It was as if he was dead to her. Imagine a life where Felix existed but she couldn’t see him or talk to him ever again, never hear his voice husky with love, never touch his face tenderly. Waves of sheer misery swept over her as she cried helplessly, standing alone in her flat, with nobody to love her or care about her ever again. She cried for what felt like hours. For once, the tears simply wouldn’t stop. She cried thinking of all the wonderful times they’d had together and she cried because she knew Felix would have stayed with her, if only she’d let him. She didn’t care what he did, whether he had ten women as well as her, as long as she could be with him sometimes. In her hubris, she’d sent him away and now she was paying for it. Alone, alone for ever.

Finally, she forced herself to stop sobbing. Mechanically, she went into the bathroom to wipe her face and almost didn’t recognize the stranger staring back at her from the mirror: a hollow-eyed woman with mascara trails running blackly down her face. She looked a hundred, not thirty-seven. No wonder Felix had wanted to date a carefree blonde child. He wanted a woman who was girlish and pretty, not a neurotic hag with enough emotional baggage to fill an airport. She listlessly removed her make-up and then washed her face with a flannel, scrubbing her skin as if to punish herself. Then she stripped off her work clothes and pulled on the most comforting thing she could find: old soft jeans that had been washed so often they were the palest blue imaginable, and a giant sloppy grey jumper she’d had for years. Barefoot, she padded into the kitchen and looked around. She’d been making dinner when he’d arrived: pasta with tuna, garlic and onions. The garlic she’d been chopping scented the air enticingly, but Hannah didn’t have an appetite any more. She never wanted to see food again.

She scraped the garlic into the bin and threw the plastic chopping board into the sink. Meals for one, that was her life from now on. She’d never cook up a delicious feast for two again. Not that she’d ever been much of a cook, but Felix had always been so appreciative of her meals.

‘I love the things you can do with pasta and a tin of supermarket spaghetti sauce,’ he’d tease her when she was assembling a meal with the help of a tin-opener.

Everything came back to Felix, she sighed. Why had she fallen in love with him? Why hadn’t she been able to resist? It wasn’t as if she didn’t know the problems men brought with them, but she hadn’t taken her own advice. She’d fallen for him hook, line and sinker. All she was left with now was a sense that a huge part of her life was over for ever. The things she’d valued so much seemed curiously hollow – her job, her flat, her independence. They paled into insignificance beside love. Or lack of it. Loving somebody shouldn’t be important, that had been her mantra. True love was such a pile of rubbish, she was sure of it. The only person in life who truly loved you was yourself. Nobody else could be trusted. People like Leonie, who longed for love with incredible intensity, were mad.

Leonie. A picture of her friend’s laughing, kind blue eyes came to her suddenly. Yes, she’d go and see Leonie. Hannah couldn’t bear the thought of spending the rest of the evening alone in the flat. Her heart ached and she couldn’t think of anyone better to comfort her. Leonie understood pain, heartache and love. Hannah looked at her watch: it was only ten to nine. How strange that her life should receive such a mortal, shattering blow, yet a mere two hours had passed.

Leonie’s sympathy on the phone was like a balm to Hannah’s wounded heart.

‘Come and stay the night,’ Leonie urged. ‘You can go into work from here tomorrow and that way you can have a couple of glasses of wine with me. Have you eaten?’ she asked, practical as ever.

‘I couldn’t eat,’ Hannah said dully.

‘Yes you can.’ Leonie was firm. ‘I’ve just the thing for you: seafood chowder. I made it earlier and there’s loads left.’

Hannah couldn’t imagine eating a single morsel of food. Drinking was another matter, however, so she stopped at an off licence en route and recklessly bought three bottles of wine. But when she arrived at Leonie’s, the scent of fragrant hot chowder made her stomach leap with hunger.

‘I didn’t think I could manage a single mouthful, but that smells wonderful,’ she said, peering into the saucepan where the soup bubbled invitingly. Leonie’s lovely golden dog leaned against her legs, eager to have her ears rubbed.

‘Aren’t you a good girl,’ Hannah crooned at Penny, after crouching down on the floor to hug her properly. Penny basked in this new source of adoration.

Mel, Abby and Danny all trooped into the kitchen to say hello but Leonie shooed them away after a few minutes.

‘You were all grumbling earlier that I wanted to watch The Bodyguard and you hated it,’ she informed them. ‘Now you have the telly to yourselves and you all decide you want to be in the kitchen. Scram.’

‘You’re not going to drink all that wine, are you?’ said Danny, mildly scandalized at the thought of his mother and Hannah consuming three bottles between them. He and his pals wouldn’t think twice about drinking that much, but his mother. He was sure he’d heard that women shouldn’t drink as much as men.

‘Yes, we are,’ she said with a wicked grin, shutting the kitchen door firmly behind him.

On their own at last, she hugged Hannah tightly. ‘Don’t cry,’ she warned. ‘Wait till you’ve had your chowder and then we’ll get the wine going and you can sob till you drop. But you need something in your stomach.’

Hannah nodded tearfully. It was lovely being mothered like this. She sat at the table while Leonie ladled up a huge steaming bowl of chowder. Hannah buttered a soft roll and tucked in. Penny sat by her side, looking mournfully at Hannah as if to say she never got a bite in her life and would dearly love just a teensy, weensy little crumb.

‘That was gorgeous,’ Hannah said appreciatively when she put down her spoon finally after finishing the whole lot. ‘I wish I could cook like that. Felix joked that I should start my own cookery school – the Tin-Opener Cook.’

Her mouth trembled. Felix again. He was haunting her thoughts. She began to cry softly and Leonie whisked away the dishes, produced a box of tissues and opened the first bottle of wine.

‘Tell me everything,’ Leonie said gently, pouring glasses for them both.

Half-way through the second bottle, Leonie was groaning that she’d regret it in the morning and Hannah was feeling a lot better. Good food, nice wine and the comfort of her dear friend had helped immeasurably. So had the presence of the lovely golden retriever, who seemed to understand that Hannah was heartbroken, and had sat loyally near the table all evening, distributing licks to both women at intervals.

When Hannah was worn out talking about Felix, Leonie talked about Ray’s wedding and how insecure she’d felt when she watched the twins with their new stepmother.

‘You should see her,’ Leonie sighed. ‘Fliss is incredible, your basic nightmare. Clever, gorgeous, slim, nice. That’s the killing thing, you know. She’s a lovely person, genuinely lovely. If she was a conniving bitch it would be much easier to hate her, but she’s kind, warm and wonderful. The twins adore her and Danny would do anything for her.’

Hannah poured Leonie another glass of wine.

‘I shouldn’t,’ said Leonie, taking a deep slug. ‘She and Ray phoned three times from their honeymoon. Now, I know Ray loves the kids, but I also know that he wouldn’t have phoned three times. It was Fliss’s idea. She told me on the phone it’s vitally important that the kids don’t think she’s taking their father away from them. She wants them to be more a part of his life than ever before.’ Miserably, she took another huge gulp of wine. ‘How can you hate someone like that? And she keeps sending the most incredible presents to them all. Donna Karan denim jackets for the girls because they liked her one, and some new MP3 thing for Danny. Oh yeah, stacks of perfume and silly things like sparkly nail varnish. I’m too busy cooking dinner to think about buying them sparkly nail varnish,’ she finished gloomily.

‘That’s all very nice,’ Hannah said tipsily, ‘but you’re their mother, Leonie. You shouldn’t feel so threatened by her. They’re not going to forget that for a designer denim jacket, are they?’

Leonie snorted. ‘They’re teenagers! They’d go off with Jack the Ripper if he came up with the correct designer wear.’

‘Well,’ comforted Hannah, ‘they don’t see her that much, do they?’

‘That’s the thing,’ Leonie said, draining her glass and holding it out for a refill, ‘she wants them to go to Boston as often as they can. Am I being selfish in not wanting them to go?’

‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ advised Hannah. ‘It’s a difficult situation. Do you have any crisps?

‘I’m so tired,’ Hannah said after just one glass of the third bottle she’d insisted on opening. It was half past twelve and she felt limp with exhaustion, the way she felt after a mammoth session in the gym. ‘I think I’ll go to bed. If you show me where the blankets are, Leonie, I’ll make up a bed on the couch.’

‘No you won’t,’ Leonie said. ‘I’ve got a double bed and you can bunk in with me. According to Danny’s mates, sleeping on that couch is like sleeping on a bed of nails; I wouldn’t put you through it. My bed’s lovely, as long as you don’t mind…’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Hannah said, a fresh crop of tears welling up in her eyes at Leonie’s kindness. ‘You feed me, take care of me and now you’re letting me sleep in your bed.’

‘Only if you don’t mind a big lump jumping into the bed in the middle of the night,’ Leonie said, trying to make Hannah laugh. ‘Penny sleeps on her bean bag for half the night and then gets lonely by about four a.m., when she dives on top of me. If you’re very good, she’ll lick your make-up off in the morning!’

They both laughed at this and Penny joined in, barking delightedly.

‘Come on,’ Leonie added, opening the kitchen door and leading Hannah to her room. ‘You sort yourself out and I’ll let Penny into the garden for her ablutions.’

‘You’re finally out of the kitchen?’ Danny said, popping his head round his bedroom door. ‘I’m starving and I didn’t want to interrupt the boozing session.’

‘I think he has a tapeworm living inside him,’ Leonie remarked to Hannah. ‘It’s the only explanation I can come up with for why he eats so much and stays like a whippet.’ ‘Well, if you’ve got a tapeworm inside you, Mum,’ Danny laughed minutes later, when Leonie returned to the kitchen to see him making a ham sandwich, ‘it’s drunk after all the wine you’ve had. Three bottles, you old alco!’ ‘Ha ha,’ she said, giving him a mock slap on the bum. ‘I’m still the boss round here, sweetie-pie. I’ll withdraw your fridge privileges if you keep slagging off your old mother, right?’

‘Yes, wonderful, non-alcoholic mother,’ Danny mumbled with his mouth full of sandwich. ‘Your wish is my command.’

Hannah’s head throbbed when she woke up, instinctively knowing she was in a strange place. The bed felt different and she didn’t have dusky pink sheets, surely? Just then, another pink thing loomed: a long pink tongue began affectionately licking her face.

‘Penny,’ said Hannah fondly, remembering where she was and why she had a hangover. ‘You darling. What a nice way to wake up, with someone kissing you.’

Penny threw herself down beside Hannah and waited to be petted. Hannah did so mechanically, that ache at the back of her eyes telling her that being licked awake by a dog was the nearest she was going to come to affection in the morning for the rest of her life. She gulped fiercely, determined not to cry again. Penny squirmed and made growly noises which Hannah correctly interpreted as meaning, Pet me some more, on my belly. Maybe she should get a dog. She’d love one, but it would hardly be fair to the poor dog seeing the hours she put in at the office. You couldn’t leave a dog on its own all day. Or maybe if she got two dogs, they could keep each other company.

‘Maybe I’ll steal you, Penny, and bring you home with me,’ she said, sitting up and playing with the dog.

Penny replied with more delighted growly noises, rolling on to her back for more comprehensive adoration.

‘She’s a shameless hussy,’ Leonie said, arriving with breakfast. ‘Rub her tummy and she’s anyone’s. I brought you some toast, juice and coffee. Danny is actually making bacon sandwiches, but I didn’t think you’d be up to anything that advanced.’

‘Quite right.’ Hannah’s stomach lurched at the thought of greasy congealed bacon. But toast and coffee she could manage. ‘You’re spoiling me, Leonie,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘Ah, shut up, would you,’ Leonie replied. ‘Wait till you get the bill. Get off the bed, Penny. She’ll spill your coffee if she decides to move,’ she told Hannah. With a disgruntled Penny off the bed, Leonie laid the tray on Hannah’s lap. ‘It’s half seven, so you don’t have much time if you want to be in work by eight forty-five,’ she warned. ‘I’m going to have a quick shower to make myself presentable. It’s all your fault I’m hungover, Campbell, you brat. I’ll have to use the liquid cement make-up this morning to cover up the ravages of last night.’

Hannah grinned and attacked her orange juice gratefully.

By eight forty-five, she was parking her car near the office, feeling a damn sight better than she had any right to. Leonie’s kindness, not to mention the hysteria that ensued in the Delaney household in the morning as three teenagers all vied with each other for bathroom time, had cheered her up immensely. Listening to Mel and Danny sparking off each other like two comedians would have to make you laugh. It was all part of the rich tapestry of post-Felix life, proof that life moved on no matter what.

She breathed deeply a few times, trying to fill herself with calming energy, as the yoga-teaching aerobics instructor in her gym advised. Then she marched into the office, determined to get through this day as best she could.

It wasn’t easy. Gillian had a grievance about Carrie, the receptionist, something to do with the pecking order, Hannah knew.

‘Honestly, I wouldn’t mind, but it’s the second time this week she’s told someone I wasn’t at my desk when I’d just nipped to the loo,’ Gillian droned, having hopped on Hannah as soon as she’d arrived, determined to get her side of the story to as many people as possible in case of repercussions.

‘What did you say to Carrie?’ Hannah asked wearily, knowing she should really tell Gillian that it was no longer her job to referee office squabbles. That was Sasha’s bailiwick now, thankfully. She was office manager, not Hannah. But she wasn’t up to a full-scale fight with Gillian.

‘I said she should mind her job because she wouldn’t be here long if she couldn’t tell the difference between someone being in the loo and not being at their desk,’ Gillian said hotly.

Hannah tried to make sense of this bewildering sentence. ‘Well, you weren’t at your desk, were you?’ she said, giving up her attempts to remain neutral. Gillian was so bloody irritating. ‘So Carrie was right to say you weren’t there. It’s better than saying you’re in the ladies’, isn’t it?’

Gillian swelled up in indignation. ‘I might have known you’d take her side,’ she hissed. ‘It’s outrageous. You’ve had it in for me ever since you came here! I know your type, Hannah Campbell. You’re nothing but a jumped-up, bog-trotting culchie from the back of beyond and I can see through you, even if nobody else does!’

Big mistake, Hannah thought icily. Gillian had picked the one day in a million when it wasn’t wise to argue with Hannah. Slowly and quietly, like a lioness selecting which impala she’d kill, Hannah moved closer to Gillian until she was standing a mere two feet away from her. The rest of the people in the office, who’d all heard Gillian’s last outburst, held their breath.

‘This sort of unprofessional behaviour is why you’ve been bypassed for promotion every time, Gillian,’ she said, making sure she was speaking loud enough for all the onlookers to hear. ‘You fail utterly to see that it’s your fault you haven’t been made office manager because the reality is that you are lazy, slapdash and determined to do as little as possible with maximum fuss. If you spent half as much time on your job as you do on manufacturing personal grievances against other members of staff, you might be worth something to this company. But you can’t see that, Gillian. You’re hyper-aware of everyone else’s faults and blind to your own. If you’re not at your desk when your phone rings, then Carrie is correct in saying you’re not at your desk. That’s not personal, that’s doing her job. And because I pointed that out to you, you decided to launch a vicious personal attack on me with everybody listening. Not very wise, if you want to keep your job.’

Gillian paled.

‘I will be writing a memo on all of this to Mr James, although I’ve no doubt he heard most of it.’ She gestured towards the reception where David stood listening, briefcase and newspaper in hand, an unforgiving expression on his face.

Gillian went even whiter under her orangey panstick. She hadn’t heard him come in.

‘Finally, Gillian, I am proud to come from the country, and if that makes me a “culchie”, then so be it. At least I don’t try and disguise my roots by adopting a false accent.’ She’d been professional up to then, but Hannah, tired, angry and heartsore, couldn’t resist one low jibe at Gillian, who did her best to hide her normal Dublin accent with a posh twist when she was trying to impress anyone.

‘Hannah, would you be so kind as to join me in my office,’ David James said, walking past. ‘We need to have a discussion on staff.’

Gillian clutched the chair behind her weakly. Hannah walked into David’s office and the level of conversation in the open-plan office went back to normal.

‘What was all that about, Hannah?’ he asked, settling himself behind his desk and phoning Sasha to bring him a coffee. ‘No, make that two – I guess you need it, Hannah.’

She sat down in front of his desk, glad that she had the sort of relationship with her boss that meant she could be completely honest with him. ‘Gillian resents me,’ she explained. ‘She was furious about Carrie this morning and wanted people on her side of the argument, so she started telling me all about it as soon as I got in. When I pointed out that Carrie hadn’t done anything wrong, Gillian flipped and it got very personal.’

‘I heard that,’ he remarked drily. ‘I understand the problem, Hannah. My difficulty is that I have a vision of the same scene if a client had been in the office. Gillian is a stupid, lazy woman and she was wrong to say what she did, but you shouldn’t have let it degenerate into a slanging match in the front of house. It’s unprofessional and’ – he looked at her searchingly – ‘most unlike you.’

Sasha arrived nervously with two coffees. When she was gone, Hannah sipped hers and hoped the caffeine would start to kick in soon. ‘This is no excuse, David, but a personal problem came up yesterday and I’m ashamed to say it affected my behaviour today. That’s no excuse, I know,’ she repeated. ‘It’s hardly intelligent management style to bawl out someone like Gillian with an audience.’

‘Will I sack her?’ he asked. ‘She certainly deserves it. Her work is mediocre at best and she behaves as if she owns the place.’

‘No,’ Hannah said. ‘I couldn’t have that on my conscience. She’d be fine if she’d stop believing that she’s hard done by and actually got on with her job. Gillian’s problem is that she feels everyone else is plotting against her all the time, trying to undermine her. If she recognized that they’re not, she’d be OK. But she’s blind to her own faults. I think she feels she’d be running Microsoft if other people didn’t keep ruining her opportunities.’

‘She’s got a second chance, then,’ David said, ‘thanks to you. Not that she’d believe it if I told her. I’m relying on you to make sure there are no more ugly scenes in the office and, if there are, or if she steps out of line again, I want to know. We’re not running a charity. Now that Dwyer is retired, she’s working for me, and if she can’t pull her weight or refuses to co-operate with the rest of the staff, she’s history. Right?’

‘Right,’ Hannah agreed.

‘I’ll get Sasha to send her in now and,’ he paused, ‘if you have any problem I can help you with, Hannah, my door is always open.’

‘Thanks.’ She got to her feet to leave.

‘I know my old pal Mr Andretti is back in town,’ he added carefully, eyes searching her face for something. ‘We’ve known each other for years and I’m fond of him, but as I’ve said before, he’s a bit of a lady-killer.’

Hannah grimaced, not wanting to blub again but feeling the tears threatening. ‘I think I’ve figured that out already,’ she said hoarsely.

‘Just be careful. I don’t want him messing up the most talented trainee estate agent on the block,’ David said lightly.

‘It doesn’t matter any more, David,’ Hannah said dully, misery making her not care what she said. ‘It’s over between us.’

‘Oh.’

Hannah wondered, had she imagined it or had David’s eyes lit up momentarily?

‘Tell you what, how about I bring you out to lunch to drown your sorrows?’ he said brightly.

Hannah was about to say no when she changed her mind. Might as well. After all, who knew when she’d next get invited out to lunch by an attractive man, even if he was her boss and was doing it out of pity?

‘Why not,’ she said, summoning up a smile.

Outside, Gillian shot her a daggers look as they passed in the hallway leading to David’s office. Hannah ignored her and went to her desk.

Whatever David said to her in the twenty minutes she was in his office, it must have been lethal. A subdued Gillian emerged, red-faced and silent. Hannah glanced at her and realized she really didn’t give a damn about Gillian and her neuroses. She had enough problems of her own.

Nevertheless Gillian approached. ‘Mr James said I was to apologize to you for what I said,’ she said stiltedly. ‘It was wrong and it won’t happen again, I promise.’

She sounded like a ten-year-old reciting a poem she’d learned by rote.

‘Apology accepted, Gillian. I’ll take your word for it that nothing like that ever happens again. This is too small a company for feuds.’

Duty done, Gillian stomped back to her desk. Hannah sighed. She’d made herself an implacable enemy.

She’d almost forgotten their lunch date when David appeared in front of her at twelve forty-five, drumming his long fingers on her desk. He’d splashed on some cologne, she noticed with a grin, smelling that soft scent redolent of musky, spicy nights.

‘Did you get a better offer for lunch?’ he enquired, eyes glittering.

Hannah laughed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll just be a mo.’ They walked to a small pub around the corner and ordered soup, sandwiches and a glass of wine each. David attacked his chicken sandwich hungrily, consuming half of it before Hannah had managed one bite of hers.

‘I’m ravenous,’ he said apologetically. ‘I was up early for a run in UCD and I didn’t have time for breakfast.’

Hannah pushed half of her sandwich over towards him. ‘Have this,’ she offered. ‘I’m not hungry.’

‘I hope it’s not Felix putting you off your food,’ David said lightly, eyes meeting hers.

Hannah looked away first.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,’ he said gently. One big hand crept over the table and landed on hers, clasping it in a comforting manner. It felt nice to be touched. Hannah missed that, even though Felix, for someone so sensual, wasn’t that affectionate. Tactile when lovemaking was involved, he wasn’t much of a man for little kisses or gentle, affectionate strokes as he walked by. David’s big warm hand enfolding hers felt lovely. Only he didn’t leave it there long. Clearing his throat, he removed his hand and took a gulp of wine. ‘I do put my size twelves in it sometimes,’ he remarked. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Hannah. That’s the last thing I’d want to do.’

She forced a grin to her lips. ‘Size twelve feet? How ever do you get shoes?’

David laughed, a deep throaty laugh that made several people look over at their table. One nearby diner gave a squeal of delight and got to her feet, hurrying over to where David and Hannah sat.

‘David James,’ she purred, pleasure written all over her pretty face.

The woman was probably around Hannah’s age but with a modern crop of dark hair and clothes far trendier than anything Hannah ever wore. Hipster lycra jeans, a childish-looking bright T-shirt and a fitted French Connection denim jacket clung to her slender frame.

‘Roberta,’ David said, getting chivalrously to his feet to shake hands with the woman. Roberta wasn’t into handshaking: she threw her arms around him. Hannah watched it all with interest.

‘I thought it was you, David! How lovely to see you,’ Roberta cooed. ‘You’re a terrible man, David James. I invited you to our Christmas party and you never turned up. All my single girlfriends went into mourning because I told them I’d found a gorgeous man for them and then you don’t show, you bad boy.’

The woman was flirting with him and Hannah found herself taken aback. She’d never seen David in that light really. It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought he was attractive. He was. Some women loved that sort of big, solid bloke with the rumpled face and the crinkled up eyes. And he had a commanding presence.

David was the sort of man who made everyone from waiters to managing directors dance attendance on him. He was very calm and relaxed, and treated everyone the same. In control, methodical and shrewd, he saw everything and forgot nothing.

But as a romantic possibility – never. Roberta obviously didn’t agree. She was actually twirling a bit of short dark hair in her fingers. Hannah began to get irritated.

‘We’re thinking of selling up again,’ Roberta said gravely. ‘Perhaps you’d come out and do a valuation for me…’

If it’s like you, honey, it’s cheap, Hannah glowered. Honestly, talk about throwing yourself at a man. What if she’d been involved with David and this cow turned up, ignoring Hannah and flirting like a sex-starved nymphomaniac. She sat there primly, eating her sandwich and pretending to ignore the other woman.

When David finally managed to pry Roberta’s French-manicured claw from his arm, he sat down wearily and rolled his eyes at Hannah.

‘She’s a bit intense,’ he whispered.

‘Not your type, huh?’ Hannah enquired nonchalantly, astonished to find that she actually cared.

‘You can say that again,’ he winced. ‘I sold a house for her a year ago and she’s been on my case ever since. I thought if I didn’t turn up at her Christmas soiree she’d get the hint.’

‘Are you not interested in meeting all her lovely single friends?’ prodded Hannah archly.

His head still bent over his sandwich, David raised his eyes to hers, dark eyebrows giving him an ironic gleam. ‘I’m not interested in them,’ he said, heavily emphasizing the word ‘them’. Their eyes locked, toffee-coloured orbs meeting the shrewd grey eyes that were suddenly warmer than Hannah had ever seen them before.

A laser beam of awareness pierced through her. David fancied her. It was so obvious! How come she’d never noticed before? That was why he wasn’t interested in any other woman the irritating Roberta could set him up with. To hide her shock and confusion, she quickly drank a spoonful of soup. To further discomfit her, the soup went down the wrong way and she began to choke.

As soon as she began to cough and splutter, David threw down his sandwich and started slapping her on the back.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked anxiously.

‘Yes,’ spluttered Hannah, coughing into her napkin. Her eyes had watered madly, so she wiped them and wished she could think of something to say, something to defuse the situation. She didn’t need to. As if aware that he’d stunned her with his revealing statement, David sat back in his seat and resumed eating his sandwich.

‘Roberta’s house was beautiful. A genuine Georgian townhouse. They’d put a lot of money into it,’ he remarked, as calmly as if they’d been discussing business a minute before instead of romance.

Embarrassing subject avoidance was something Hannah was becoming an expert at. She’d had enough experience every time someone asked her how Harry – and later Felix – was. ‘Really?’ she said brightly, as if she was enthralled in what sort of stately pile the nauseous Roberta had lived in. ‘What did it go for?’

They talked business for another fifteen minutes before Hannah said she really should get back to work.

‘Me too,’ said David.

As they reached the office, he touched her arm briefly. ‘Let’s have a proper lunch soon,’ he said. ‘The full works: not just a quick sandwich.’

‘Sure,’ Hannah agreed. She might possibly feel more normal in a week or so and capable of having a meal with a man who fancied her. Right now, she simply wanted to cry over the man who clearly didn’t fancy her.

It was an exhausted Hannah who drove home that night, worn down by the combination of a lingering hangover, a huge workload and Gillian sitting close by with a face like a thundercloud. She’d tried not to think about Felix all day but it had been hard. That afternoon, she had sat in the pine kitchen of a Dalkey cottage while a man and his wife ooh-ed and ah-ed over the cottage’s alpine garden and hardwood deck, and her thoughts had run to Felix. She could just imagine them living together in this house, she realized sadly, gazing around at the pretty kitchen. Two bedrooms with a split-level sitting room that had a mezzanine containing a tiny dining room: it would be perfect for the two of them.

Airy and stylish, wonderful for entertaining Felix’s friends and throwing marvellous dinner parties where guests from their various worlds mingled successfully. She loved the real fire in the bedroom. How nice to light it and snuggle up in bed on cold nights, watching the flames leap up until their own flames ignited…

She parked the car outside her flat, happy to find a space that wasn’t four blocks away for once. It was chilly even for January and she wrapped her red wool coat tightly around herself as she walked to the gate. And stopped. It looked as if someone had transplanted an entire florist’s shop to the garden. At least fifteen bouquets confronted her: giant white lilies trailing greenery, vast armfuls of red roses, with myriad pinks, purples and yellows dotted here and there. In the midst of this riot of stephanotis and blossoms sat Felix, scrunched up on the doorstep and looking as if he was freezing in just his suede leather jacket and jeans.

‘I didn’t want to come to the office so I waited here,’ he said with chattering teeth.

‘You poor love,’ Hannah said instinctively, rushing towards him. ‘You must be freezing. Did you bring all these flowers?’

He nodded. ‘I wanted to show you how much I loved you, and I know you adore flowers. I didn’t know which ones to pick, so I got them all.’

‘Are you here long?’ she asked.

‘Only half an hour. I knew you’d be home soon. Can I come in?’

While he sat with a cup of whiskey-laced coffee and warmed up, Hannah brought her flowers up to the flat, blushing puce with embarrassment when the people in the downstairs flat arrived and stared in wonderment at the blaze of colour in their usually barren garden.

‘Isn’t it more traditional to plant actual flowers and not just leave a load of bouquets out here?’ said the man waggishly.

Once the bouquets – twenty in total – were installed in the flat, most of them in the bath as Hannah certainly didn’t have enough vases for them, she sat down beside Felix on the couch.

‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ she said softly. It was hard to be angry with someone who’d just brought you twenty bouquets, especially when you’d spent the whole day thinking of them, missing them desperately.

‘I wanted to think of a way to make you see I was serious, Hannah,’ Felix said, taking her hands in his and giving her the full effect of his soulful eyes. ‘I missed you so much…I need you, you’ve got to understand that.’

Hannah gulped. She knew she should say something about flowers being no substitute for trust in a relationship, but the words froze in her mouth. She couldn’t help it: she was so in thrall to Felix, she could refuse him nothing.

‘I know,’ she said, biting her lip, ‘I missed you so much too, Felix. I just can’t let you hurt me again.’

He nodded and kissed her. It was like coming home after years away: lovely, gentle and caring. His mouth was soft on hers. A tender, loving kiss quite unlike the passionate ones they usually enjoyed. When he finally pulled away, Hannah sat with her eyes closed, feeling glorious peace flood through her.

Then she felt something cool on her fingers. She looked down to see Felix sliding a ring on to her wedding finger, a modern gold band with a cabouchon diamond set grandly in the middle. She gasped in astonishment.

‘You will marry me, Hannah, won’t you?’ Felix said, slipping the ring over her knuckle until it rested properly on her slender finger. ‘Say you will.’

Of all the things Hannah had expected, an engagement ring was not on the list. She stared at it, stunned. She’d never owned anything like it: a large diamond had hardly been on her must-buy list. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she breathed. And it was. It suited her slim hand perfectly.

‘Well?’ Felix asked.

Hannah’s face lit up, her toffee-coloured eyes gleaming as if the gods had sprinkled stardust in them. ‘Yes!’

This time, their kiss was the passionate variety, with Hannah only breaking away to warn Felix of what she’d do if he left her again: ‘I’m never going through that again, ever. You hear me?’ she said fiercely.

‘No, no, darling,’ he said, busy undoing the buttons of her work blouse, his lips sliding sensuously down her neck into the soft velvet of her cleavage.

‘I mean it, Felix. If you ever run away on me again, that’s it. Finito. No matter how much I love you, I won’t let you destroy me.’

‘Never, darling,’ he said gravely. ‘Never. I promise, I promise with all my heart that I’ll never hurt you again. I love you too much. Let me show you how much.’

Hours later, satiated with sex and nicely fed, thanks to an Indian takeaway, Hannah lay entwined with Felix in bed, glorying in the sensation of his body next to hers. Only yesterday, the flat had seemed barren and lonely with just her there. Now it was a home: lively, warm and comforting. She snuggled up beside him, listening to his slow, easy breathing. Imagine it: she was engaged to Felix.

She couldn’t wait to tell the girls. Leonie and Emma would be delighted, she knew it. Of course, there were things to be ironed out – like where they’d live, for a start. She knew that a lot of Felix’s work was in the UK, but with more and more films and television series being made in Ireland, there was surely a case for them living here. He could always commute on those occasions when he needed to be anywhere else and, anyway, Ireland was such a Mecca for international actors and musicians, Felix would feel right at home. He’d love it.

She felt a brief moment of regret about David James. He was a nice man, sexy really, if she thought about it. It would be easy to fall in love with him: he was a wonderful mixture of dependability and drive. A self-made man. And he certainly liked her. But he couldn’t compare to Felix, movie-star handsome and passionate. Nobody could compare to Felix, Hannah beamed. And he was all hers.

The flowers had been lovely, she thought dreamily, managing to forget how much she’d have liked even one bouquet on her thirty-seventh birthday the week before. But Felix hadn’t known about that, she thought forgivingly. Next year, it’d be different. Twenty bouquets on her birthday, she was sure of it.

Leonie put the phone down. Hannah hadn’t answered and that was the fifth time she’d tried since seven o’clock. She just hoped her friend was all right. Hannah had been so devastated yesterday, her world ripped apart by love. Or the lack of it. Normally, Hannah was the positive, optimistic one of their little group, teasing Emma when she went all maudlin about her father’s moods, cheering Leonie up by telling her the perfect man was out there for her, it was just a matter of finding him and nailing his feet to the floor. It was a shock, therefore, to see Hannah hollowed out with misery, a slave to love like the rest of us, Leonie thought gloomily. She wondered did men suffer the same pangs about love. Probably not. They wouldn’t waste valuable time thinking about whether they were hopeless specimens because they didn’t have the right partner, or worrying about whether the size of their feet might put off would-be suitors. This last bit was getting to Leonie quite a lot lately, ever since she’d gone shopping for a new pair of ‘going-out’ shoes only to discover that dainty mules didn’t exist in size nine.

Her feet had never really bothered her before: she was tall, statuesque, end of story. A big woman, in plain words. Which meant large feet. The problem was that she’d never had any trouble buying shoes up to now because she’d always stuck with low, sensible ones, not wishing to make herself look any taller.

Exposure to the glam crowd in Vail had changed this. Tall, short, built like supertankers or famine victims, they went for fierce glamour in all social situations. So Leonie had decided that she needn’t bother hiding her size in voluminous velvets and low boots. No way. It was going to be high-class elegance all the way from now on, complete with hair by the actual hairdresser, instead of by Leonie herself wearing rubber gloves to protect her hands from dye, and shoes by Cinderella’s fairy godmother. Except Cinderella shoes didn’t exist in sizes over seven. She was in love with those spindly things that looked as if you’d twist your ankles in them, sex-on-stilettos she called them. But after size seven, dainty spindly things vanished and you were left with granny shoes.

‘Would Madam like to see those in her size?’ enquired the male assistant in the last shoe shop, holding up a pair of cushioned sandals you could conceivably hike up the Himalayas in.

Not unless Madam also buys long thermal drawers, American tan support tights, a floral pinny and a zimmer frame, Leonie wanted to hiss at him. She was forty-three not eighty-three!

She came out of the shop with a pair of court shoes that looked like every other pair of court shoes in her wardrobe: plain, black and unlikely to set any man on fire. They were also a smidgen too tight, but she planned to stretch them with her trusty shoe trees.

Sighing, Leonie tried Hannah’s number one more time. It rang out.

‘Mum, are you off the phone yet? I want to ring Susie,’ yelled Mel.

‘Yeah,’ Leonie answered.

Feeling miserable on Hannah’s behalf, she went into the kitchen and started on dinner. She was half-way through chopping up bits of chicken when Danny arrived home from college, obviously in a foul temper about something. Leonie figured this out because normally he and Mel had at least ten minutes’ grace before they started killing each other on any given evening: tonight, he was barely in the door when roars could be heard from the sitting room.

‘You can’t be on the phone and be watching television at the same time,’ yelled Danny. ‘I want to watch Star Trek, not some crappy soap.’

‘Bugger off, you big pig!’ hissed Mel.

‘Bugger off yourself,’ screamed back her brother.

The advantages of paying a fortune for private education, Leonie thought grimly as the four-letter words flew. She yelled that they’d better stop fighting or they could cook their own dinner.

Moments later, Danny barged into the kitchen, having obviously lost the battle of the remote control. Mel could be tough as old boots when the need arose.

‘What’s up?’ Leonie asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said, wrenching open a cupboard and poking around inside it aggressively. Finding a packet of crisps, he slammed the door shut, slumped on a kitchen chair and crunched moodily.

Leonie knew better than to say anything else. Even when he’d been a toddler, waddling around the house with his Dinky cars, he’d been happiest with his own company, not appearing to need anyone except the family’s dog, then an elderly and sadly incontinent bitza named Otto. When he was older, that solitariness had developed into a fierce need for privacy. Once, when he was ten, he’d stopped talking to her for days because she’d cleaned out his wardrobe. Experience had taught her that giving Danny time was the best way to deal with him. Eventually, if the need to discuss the subject was strong enough, he’d tell her.

She browned the pieces of chicken in her casserole dish, chopping up button mushrooms and grabbing a handful of chives from the window-box in between stirring. The scent of sizzling meat filled the room and Penny gave up begging crisps from Danny to sit at Leonie’s feet longingly, hoping in vain that a stray bit of chicken would hop out of the dish into her drooling mouth. The casserole was finally in the oven and Leonie was measuring rice into her most invaluable piece of culinary equipment, the rice steamer, when Danny decided to spill the beans.

‘Remember that exam I had last month?’

‘Yes,’ Leonie said absently. Sounding as if you were half-listening was the best trick, she’d learned. If you became immediately intense and interested, Danny would change his mind about telling you.

‘Well, I failed it, and my tutor says if I don’t pass all the others over the next term, I’ll fail this year.’

Leonie felt her stomach lurch. Fail the year! Oh Lord, don’t let this be happening. She knew plenty of families who were at their wits’ ends with third-level students who dropped out when the going got tough. Please, please, let this not happen to Danny.

‘That sounds pretty severe,’ she said as nonchalantly as she could. ‘Is he serious about it, or is it just an attempt to scare you?’

Danny considered this. ‘Think it’s serious. Nobody else in my group failed.’

Leonie’s heart sank further. ‘How exactly did you fail?’ she asked, trying to make it sound like an innocent question and not the terrified probing of a shocked parent.

‘It was fermentation, a section I hate. I think I hate the whole fucking course.’

For once, she didn’t correct him for swearing. There was a time and a place for everything.

‘Fermentation’s all maths and I hate that. I’m good on stuff that isn’t so mathematics-related. It’s all about how the vats work and the amount of mixing and air,’ he muttered, more to himself than to his mother.

Leonie didn’t say anything about how, on a personal level, Danny was keen on fermentation. Access to lots of home-made wine was the sole reason she could see for membership of the college Microbiology Club. He’d brought home a bottle of the club wine one night. Stronger than paint stripper, it tasted roughly the same, but Danny loved it.

‘I mean, medical micro might be a better major for me…’ he was saying.

‘Danny, look,’ Leonie interrupted, ‘if you hate the course right now it’s probably because it’s not working out. Why don’t you put your head down and work hard for the next month – ask for extra tutorials, perhaps. And if you fail, we’ll look at your options then. You could always repeat the year with a view to specializing in another area, like medical micro. You liked the virology section, didn’t you?’ She knew she sounded a hundred times calmer than she felt, but giving Danny the impression that they could cope with this calmly was vital.

She patted his shoulder encouragingly. ‘Don’t let this get to you, Danny, love. There’s nothing so awful that we can’t face it realistically and without panicking. You’re an adult and you know you have to deal with whatever life throws at you. If that means more studying, then I know you’ll do it. You’re too bright to let one section of the course mess up your chances.’ She smiled and ruffled his hair, the way she used to when he was smaller. ‘I bet that tutor doesn’t have a clue what he’s up against with the Fighting Delaneys! He’ll pass out with shock when you get the best results for your year in the exams.’

Danny grinned and didn’t give out to her for messing up his hair. ‘Yeah, Mum, I’d love to see his face if I did. Tim has great notes. I’ll give him a ring and ask can I photocopy them at the weekend. I was hoping to go to Galway with the lads tomorrow morning, but I better give it a miss now. Shit.’

Leaving his empty crisp packet on the table along with the crumbs of his snack, Danny ambled off to use the phone. Leonie only hoped Mel had finished whatever conversation she’d been having, because another argument might wreck the fragile ceasefire. Feeling shattered, she sank on to the chair Danny had vacated and put her head in her hands. This was when she missed having Ray or anyone else around: when some crisis erupted and she felt hopelessly alone.

That was the difficulty of single parenthood: not worrying about childminding, fitting in doing the grocery shopping, or working out how to rob Peter to pay Paul, but the gut-clenching trauma of a crisis when there was nobody else to turn to.

Leonie always acted on instinct when it came to parenting. In this case, she’d felt that giving out to Danny would have been totally counterproductive. He’d desperately wanted to confide in her, but had been afraid she’d be furious to learn he might fail the year. So she’d decided to act very calmly, to treat him like an adult who had to take responsibility for it himself, hoping he’d actually do that.

But maybe she should have yelled at him like a fishwife, demanding to know what he’d been doing to fail the most vital part of the year and telling him he could forget about pocket money until he upped his grades.

She rubbed her temples, feeling a low-grade migraine percolating. Noise in the hall made her jump to her feet. She didn’t want to ruin the ‘let’s all be ultra laid-back’ effect by letting Danny see her moping at the kitchen table. So she was peering pointlessly into the oven at the casserole when Abby meandered into the kitchen, with her French grammar book.

‘What’s for dinner?’ Abby asked, perching on a chair and pulling her tracksuit-covered legs up under her.

‘Coq au vin with a twist – the twist being there’s no vin in it.’ Leonie rarely cooked with alcohol. When she bought a bottle of wine, she preferred to save it for those nights when she needed a restorative glass or two.

‘Yuck,’ Abby said. ‘Do I have to eat it? I’d prefer a baked potato.’

‘Yes, you do have to eat it and we’re having rice tonight, so there’s no baked potato option.’

‘Mum! Nobody should have to eat what they don’t want. Meat is murder,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘Meat has only become murder recently in your mind,’ Leonie remarked, thinking that tonight was turning into one of those restorative glass of wine nights. ‘You ate sausages on Tuesday.’

Abby sniffed. ‘Can’t I have a veggie burger?’

‘Darling, I’ve made dinner. If you wanted veggie burgers, you should have said so before I started cooking. And anyway, I can’t spend the evening making different meals for everyone. This isn’t McDonald’s.’

Abby said nothing but stomped off sulkily. Leonie closed her eyes and counted to ten. Abby had become so difficult about food lately. She was drinking loads of water, apparently to improve her skin, and she was so fussy about what she ate it was like running a health farm. Nowadays Abby insisted on fruit and cereal for breakfast, shunning Danny’s inevitable bacon sandwiches although she used to love them. Leonie was spending a fortune in the supermarket buying exotic fruit because Abby said she’d love starfruit and mango salad in the morning. Then, Abby would decide she didn’t actually like mango and the poor thing would sit in the fridge going off until Leonie had to throw it out.

She remembered those marvellous days when they’d all eaten everything she put in front of them. Abby particularly had always had a great appetite, probably too good really, because she was overly fond of dessert and anything with chocolate sauce on it. Leonie had watched her putting on weight and had cringed at the thought that some cruel kid would come along and taunt her about her figure and she’d feel fat forever.

If she had told Abby to cut down on desserts, it would have given the poor girl the impression that even her mother thought she was too big. So Leonie had held her tongue and tried to serve healthy foods, hoping that Abby would lose her puppy fat sooner rather than later. But now Abby appeared to have made the connection between dessert and being plump. At least the new healthier diet was having a good effect on her figure. She’d been much heavier than the dainty Mel for years, but now the difference was lessening. Abby still didn’t possess her twin’s sleek limbs and tiny waist, but she was much slimmer than she had been.

Leonie hoped she wasn’t being too careful about what she ate. Both girls were still growing and needed plenty of protein, vitamins and minerals. They’d discuss it over dinner, she decided.

Come dinnertime, Leonie had succumbed to the lure of a glass of wine and Mel was back on the phone, squealing excitedly to Susie about ‘this amazing thing that happened…!’

‘Whatever marvellous thing it was, could you talk about it later?’ Leonie said, poking her head into the sitting room where Mel was perched on the arm of a chair, one eye on Home and Away.

‘And could Susie phone you next time,’ Leonie added, ‘because the last phone bill was the size of the national debt.’

Mel raised her eyes heavenwards.

There was more raising of eyes when Abby slouched into the kitchen and looked at the dishes on the table.

‘I told you, I’m not eating that,’ she said shrilly, pointing to the bubbling casserole.

‘I’ll have yours, then,’ said Danny, loading up his plate.

‘You won’t,’ Leonie said patiently. ‘You have to eat some dinner, Abigail. And you’re not leaving the table until you do. Tomorrow, I’ll make you veggie burgers but, today, this is what we’re eating.’

She missed the look of panic that crossed Abby’s face before she sat down and helped herself to a minuscule portion of chicken and a slightly bigger spoonful of rice.

‘That’s hardly enough,’ Leonie said, turning back to the table with a steaming bowl of mangetout and broccoli.

‘It’s loads.’ Abby helped herself to a huge portion of vegetables. She then got a large glass of water and drank it down before filling another one.

Dinner was a silent affair. Danny just wolfed his down in ten minutes while Mel picked at her food delicately, reading the magazine she’d hidden on her lap. Leonie hated people reading at the table when they were all eating together.

Abby ate slowly, endlessly rearranging the food on her plate until Leonie told her to eat it all. ‘I know you’re trying to eat carefully, Abby,’ Leonie began, ‘but you are still growing and your body needs nutrients. I don’t want to see you on a diet,’ she warned. ‘You’re too young to diet. Eating sensibly is one thing, but missing meals is another. If I get you both some multivitamins, will you take them?’

‘Mmm,’ said Mel, engrossed in her magazine.

‘I suppose,’ answered Abby in a tight little voice.

She continued to fiddle with her food. Leonie knew she shouldn’t say anything but couldn’t help herself.

‘Abigail, stop playing with your dinner and eat it!’ she said, much more sharply than she’d intended.

‘Stop telling me what to do!’ shrieked Abby in retaliation. ‘I’m not a child! Stop treating me like one. Fliss and Dad don’t!’

Everyone looked at her in surprise. Abby never got into a rage, ever. But she was in one now.

‘I hate this sort of horrible food, and I hate you for making me eat it!’ she roared at her mother. ‘When are you going to learn that I’m not like you? That I’m different, a different person. Not a bloody child!’

Leonie stared at her beloved daughter in shock; not just shock at Abby using bad language, but shock at the whole thing. ‘Abby, stop it,’ she said weakly.

But nothing could stop Abby now: ‘It’s my body and I can do what I want with it!’ she said fiercely. ‘You don’t understand what it’s like, Mum. Nobody does.’

Shoving her chair back violently, she ran from the room.

‘Hormones,’ said Danny sagely.

‘Must phone Louise about homework,’ Mel said, before racing off.

It was their turn to do the washing up, but Leonie was too shell-shocked to say a word.

What was happening to them all?

Chicken casserole was horrible, especially the way Mum made it, with olive oil and stuff. It was bound to make you huge if you ate it. And as for rice, that couldn’t be good for you. She’d have to look it up in her calorie book, Abby decided, as she leaned against the bathroom door, taking a few deep breaths to calm herself before she started. She hadn’t meant to shout, but she had felt so tense, it had just happened. It was important that Mum didn’t cop on to what was happening.

Veggie burgers were her favourite meal now; there was only just over two hundred calories per burger and it looked like a big meal to everyone else, particularly if you ate it with a baked potato. No butter on the potato, though. Butter was a killer. And lots of water with the meal. Abby had told everyone she was drinking plenty of water because it was good for your skin. Mel had even started joining her, trying to outdo her in the eight-glasses-a-day stakes. The only thing was that Mel had no idea the real reason her twin consumed so much water with meals: it made throwing up easier.

It was handy in school because there was less time to spend in the loo after lunch, so drinking lots of water meant Abby could simply rush into the upper years’ bathroom, wait for someone else to flush and then puke quickly and efficiently. She always saved her apple and ate that afterwards; otherwise, her stomach rumbled terribly all afternoon. It had been quite noticeable in History one day. Luckily, the history teacher, Miss Parker, had such a loud voice that her droning on about Lenin quite drowned out Abby’s intestinal rumbling. Mel had given her a funny look at one point, though.

She’d have to be careful in case Mel copped on to what she was doing. That was the problem with a twin: they noticed stuff that other people didn’t. Like Mum never noticed her giving her cereal to Penny in the morning, and she didn’t seem to realize that Abby never ate the chocolate biscuits she brought out at night when they were watching the telly. Instead, Abby would hide them in her sleeve and put them back in the cupboard later, although once she’d kept some under her bed and ate eight of them in one go. Puking them up had been horrible; her throat hurt like hell and she was sure she hadn’t got them all up.

But Mel was cute enough. Even though she always seemed more interested in herself than in anyone else, she just might notice what Abby was up to. Anyway, it was none of her business if she did. Mel was so bloody lucky to be naturally thin, like Fliss. She didn’t need to puke four times a day to lose weight. So she’d better keep her mouth shut if she did cop on. This was Abby’s secret.

As for Mum, she’d apologize to her later. She hated upsetting her mother but she had to do this, had to.

When she was finished, she sat on the floor of the bathroom, shattered from retching, her stomach aching and her throat burning. She felt terrible. Hot tears ran down her face and, as she wiped them away, her jade bracelet rattled. Fliss had sent it to her as a present from the honeymoon in China. Abby loved it. It was so pretty. Fliss was kind and knew exactly what things she liked without having to ask. Fliss would understand about this, Abby thought darkly, even if her mother didn’t.