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 49

‘I can’t believe you’re moving in a little over two weeks. I can see it now,’ sighed Betsey dreamily. ‘A summery little cottage in a beech glade, with a thatched roof and pretty sun-bleached rooms, gorgeous home grown food and quaint little pubs where you can sit outside and eat oysters and watch the world go by with the Riverdance music in the background.’

Hope glared at her over a plate of fisherman’s pie. ‘It’ll be November, not summer.’

‘I think that’s Hollywood’s version of rural Ireland,’ laughed Dan from his position beside three-year-old Opal where he was attempting to clean up the mess she’d made squelching the insides out of several packets of brown sauce. Despite his efforts, Opal managed to fling a few opened packets on the floor before he could tidy them all away.

‘No,’ joined in Matt, ‘it’s the tour operator’s version of Ireland when they’re trying to sell you a time share. You know, Dan, maidens at the crossroads, sheep in the middle of the road and a friendly local with no teeth, a pipe and a tweed cap welded to his head waving at you!’

‘Haven’t we made an ad like that already?’ Dan asked.

‘Don’t think so. But we will, we will. I love the originality of advertising,’ Matt joked.

Matt, Betsey and Dan all laughed merrily. Hope stabbed her fish pie. Hilarious. Trust them all to make a joke about it all. It was her life they were talking about, not a location shoot for a bloody commercial. She was the one who’d be transported into another country, away from her friends and Sam, so that Matt could live the advertising man’s dream. His dream, her sacrifice. A fortnight after her sister’s visit, her delight that her marriage wasn’t over had disappeared to be replaced by a gnawing fear of the unknown. Matt and Millie were thrilled with the idea of moving; Toby was thrilled because he was going up in an aeroplane; Hope was terrified.

‘It’s going to be great, love, isn’t it?’ Matt said, noticing the tautness around his wife’s jaw. ‘You’ll love Kerry, I promise you.’ He was about to reach over and hug her, but Millie, sitting between them, catapulted her plate of chips all over the table.

All four children started giggling.

Hope sighed, grabbed a handful of kitchen towels out of her bulging, ever-present toddler bag, and began cleaning up.

Sunday was family day in the local pubs and that meant a war zone of small children rampaging up and down the premises while their exhausted parents rocked irate babies in their pushchairs and mashed up food for toddlers who were straitjacketed into high chairs, in between trying to shovel some pub grub down their own throats.

Hope, Matt, Betsey and Dan had often shared Sunday lunch together but the birth of Millie, Toby, Ruby and Opal meant lunch no longer took the form of a civilized clinking of wine glasses over sea bass fillets in elegant restaurants. Now, Sunday lunch was a grab-while-you-can bean fest in whichever local child-friendly establishment wasn’t jammed by twelve thirty.

Today, they were in the Three Carpenters, a huge pub with an adventure playground outside. This was very useful for exhausting small children but it was raining today, so the kids had turned the inside of the pub into an adventure playground.

There was always one family, Hope thought crossly, who let their kids run riot and didn’t move a muscle to stop them. Millie and Toby weren’t saints but she wouldn’t dream of letting them behave like those brats who were now trying to dismantle a high chair in the corner after spending at least half an hour ripping up beer mats.

‘Seriously though,’ said Betsey, waving at the harassed young waitress in the hope of getting more wine, ‘I’ve always had a yen to live in the country. There’s something about the whole rustic life that appeals to me.’

‘Betsey, honey,’ Dan said affectionately, ‘you couldn’t survive without the buzz of traffic, a shop that sells the perfect cappuccino around the corner and your monthly waxing or whatever it is you do in that wildly expensive beautician’s emporium.’

Not to mention a hairdresser to transform her hair from brown to a glossy chestnut every six weeks, thought Hope with unusual bitchiness.

Betsey, with her perfectly styled short hair, tiny personal-trainer-honed body and predilection for weekly massages, was a high maintenance woman. Hope, who got her bikini line waxed when she went on beach holidays and who’d had one massage in her life when the girls in the building society had bought her a voucher as a birthday treat, felt like a no-maintenance woman.

‘Anti-ageing facials not waxing,’ Betsey said unperturbed. ‘You make me sound like a yeti. Anyway, I have sugaring done these days. It’s much better.’

The talk turned to business, with Matt and Dan discussing work before Betsey made them all laugh by telling them about an interview she’d done with a TV comedienne.

Hope half-listened because she was keeping an eye on the four children. The two men and Betsey seemed to think that as long as none of the children were actually choking to death, they were fine.

Beside Hope, Toby was half asleep in his high chair. Opal and Millie were, for once, playing together, and even Ruby, a four-year-old terror with her father’s innocent gaze and her mother’s devil-may-care attitude to life, was busy investigating something under the table. For once, Hope didn’t feel like checking what it was. Ruby was Betsey’s daughter: let her sort it out. Hope was fed up of being the designated babysitter at these get-togethers.

She ate the rest of her lunch, half-listened to the chat going on around her, and wished she felt more cheerful.

It was two weeks since Matt’s bombshell and he’d made startling progress for someone who’d spent a year promising to do something about bleeding the air from the bathroom radiator. He’d got Adam Judd to, reluctantly, give him a year’s sabbatical, although the sporty company Audi had to go back. The only caveat was that Matt had to promise to help on certain campaigns if necessary and he’d be paid on a contract basis, which suited Matt fine.

He’d also found an estate agent who assured them there’d be no problem letting the house for a year; he’d checked out transporting their belongings to Ireland; had told his uncle’s solicitor that he’d be flying over to take possession of the house shortly. In short, Matt was on a high, joyous that he’d made the move and was now on his way to making a long-cherished dream come true. Hope felt the way she had three days after Millie had been born: depressed and liable to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. When she’d mentioned the fact that Millie should be starting primary school the following September, Matt had merely nodded and said they’d be back. Probably.

Probably? thought Hope weakly.

It was after two when Dan went to get the bill and Matt went to the gents. Betsey turned to Hope.

‘You’re a bit down in the dumps,’ she said. ‘Is it the move to Ireland?’

Hope nodded, not wanting to say too much in front of the kids. Little pitchers had big ears.

‘It’s such a big step,’ Hope whispered to Betsey now. ‘I feel as if I’m being swept along on a tidal wave and I can’t stop it, do you know what I mean? It’s frightening. A new country, new people, a new home and I won’t have a job there. Matt knows what he’s doing but I don’t.’ She stopped miserably. She didn’t want to say too much but she was sure Betsey would understand. Betsey knew Matt and knew how much Hope adored him, but she’d surely see Hope’s side of things and would know how scary it felt to be swept along on somebody else’s dream. ‘I mean, imagine if you were expected to give up your job to travel with Dan? That would be tough.’

‘It’s a bit different, isn’t it?’ Betsey said. ‘It’s taken me a long time to get where I am on the magazine. I mean, I could work anywhere in the world, obviously, but I’ve got a great career here.’

‘And I’m only working in the building society,’ Hope said acidly. She was still steeling herself to hand in her notice. Mr Campbell would not be impressed.

‘Don’t be so touchy. I didn’t mean that at all but our situations are rather different after all. You’ve got to learn not to be so uptight about everything, Hope,’ she added. ‘Go with the flow.’ She waved one hand languidly. ‘Treat it as an adventure. You’ll have a ball. I’d adore a year off to have fun, play in the country and get out of the rat race.’

Hope looked Betsey straight in the eyes but Betsey had finished draining her wine glass and was looking around for her handbag. Had the other woman heard one word she’d said? She’d hoped for female bonding over how she was going to deal with this enormous upheaval in her life and instead, she’d been treated to Betsey’s views on how much she’d have liked a year in the country. And been told in no uncertain terms that Betsey did not consider working in the building society to be a career on a par with the fabulous world of magazine journalism.

‘Ruby, what are you doing under there? Is that my handbag?’ Betsey said sharply. A heavily-made up Ruby emerged from under the table, her face plastered with Clarins base, vampish dark Chanel eyeshadow and plenty of Paloma Picasso red lipstick. Betsey only used the very best cosmetics.

Her mother gasped with rage and pulled her neat little Prada handbag from Ruby’s red-lipsticked grasp. The bag was smeared with base and lipstick and had obviously been sitting in a pool of brown sauce left by Opal’s earlier game.

‘It’s ruined,’ Betsey shrieked. ‘Three hundred pounds worth of handbag ruined!’

Hope patted her arm. ‘Oh well,’ she said benignly, ‘you’ve got to go with the flow when you’ve got kids, haven’t you, Betsey?’

Matt sang along to the children’s tape they played on the drive home. Millie and Toby sang along too, making Hope feel like old prune-face in the passenger seat because she wasn’t deliriously happy too.

‘Dan told me he’s dead jealous about what we’re doing,’ Matt confided as they pulled up outside their house.

‘Why doesn’t he give up his job for a year, then?’ Hope demanded. ‘Betsey wouldn’t stand for it, that’s why. She’d have heart failure if Dan suggested upping sticks for a year in the country.’

‘Betsey was very enthusiastic,’ Matt pointed out helpfully. ‘What was it she said: she loved rustic things.’

‘Betsey doesn’t know the first thing about living in the country and would hate it,’ Hope hissed. ‘Her idea of rustic is jam pots with gingham covers on them. She thinks the country will be like Bath with livestock and handsome farmers in Range Rovers thrown in.’

Matt annoyed Hope by laughing heartily. ‘Oh darling, you’re so funny sometimes,’ he said. ‘You’re the one who should be in advertising and not me.’

Proving that she wasn’t quite as thick-skinned as a rhinoceros, Betsey phoned Hope at work the next day and apologized for upsetting her.

‘I’d hate you to think I didn’t value your career. I didn’t mean to imply that my career was worth more than yours,’ Betsey said, while Mr Campbell, Hope’s boss, looked on disapprovingly. Personal phone calls were a no-no unless the person at the other end was about to drop dead and was phoning with details of where they’d hidden their last will and testament. Despite having his own office, Mr Campbell never received any personal phone calls. Yvonne and Denise, the other woman who worked on the counter, had decided that he was secretly gay and too scared to come out publicly, so he ruthlessly instructed his lovers not to phone.

Hope thought it was because Mr Campbell was very keen on rules and regulations and wouldn’t dream of asking his staff to follow a dictum he wouldn’t follow himself.

‘I think we should meet for lunch,’ Betsey was saying, blithely oblivious to the fact that Hope couldn’t really talk. ‘I’m working from home today and I’ve got my eye on these fabulous kitten heels in that new shoe shop near Pulteney Bridge and I feel today’s the day to splash out. Do you fancy a trip up there?’

‘Betsey, I can’t talk at work,’ whispered Hope anxiously.

Betsey commuted to London a couple of times a week to work in an office where making personal phone calls was part and parcel of the day. She didn’t understand Hope’s office environment.

‘Outside Accessorise at one, then?’ said Betsey.

‘Yes,’ Hope answered. Anything to get her off the phone before Mr Campbell self-combusted with disapproval.

The morning flew past, giving her little time to think. So it was only when Hope was belting out of the office door buttoning her coat, that she realized she wasn’t in the mood to go shopping for extravagant shoes. And that she wasn’t really in the mood for Betsey either.

She liked Betsey, had considered her her best friend, really, but there were days when she wondered was their friendship one of those which existed purely because their husbands were best friends and therefore, the four of them spent a lot of time together. After that infamous holiday in France which Dan and Matt had arranged one day at work without asking, she and Betsey had been great pals. Mind you, Hope thought, it hadn’t bothered Betsey to go on holiday with someone she barely knew. Quite happy to relax from noon on with a bottle of Burgundy and a paperback while the children splashed about in the toddlers’ pool, Betsey was very laid back about holiday companions. Hope always felt that nothing much upset her, except when somebody else got a better assignment in the women’s magazine she wrote for. She was great fun and an amusing friend. But, Hope wondered, with Dan and Matt out of the picture, would she and Betsey ever meet up to have lunch or to trail around the shops together? Was Betsey really her best friend, either?

No, she decided an hour later as she sprinted back to the office, trying to eat a Mars bar simultaneously because they hadn’t had time for lunch.

‘Did you buy anything?’ asked Yvonne as Hope slid into her seat behind the counter at one minute past two.

Hope shook her head. ‘Betsey was on a shoe shop trawl. We trekked round four shops and ended up buying the ones she’d tried on in the first shop. Pale blue leather and very dainty. Plus, we didn’t have time for a sandwich so I’ve just eaten a Mars bar,’ she added guiltily.

‘She’s a selfish cow, that Betsey,’ Yvonne remarked. ‘When she meets you for lunch, she knows she can swan off home and have lunch whenever she wants to but you daren’t have so much as a bag of crisps here.’

‘She just didn’t think,’ protested Hope, used to standing up for Betsey because Yvonne didn’t like her. They’d met once and it had been handbags at dawn. With her black curtain of hair and dancing green eyes, Yvonne was far too vampish for Betsey’s tastes. Plus, she was younger than Betsey. Yvonne hadn’t taken to Betsey much either, because she had a better job than Yvonne and kept boasting about it. Proof positive that trying to link up friends from different parts of your life didn’t work.

‘She just doesn’t care,’ Yvonne retorted. ‘She’s out for one person and that person is her. I bet you a tenner she’ll be the first one who’ll put her name down for a free holiday in Ireland with you. You wait and see, Madam Betsey will turn up with hubbie and kids, stay for a week and not lift a finger except to ask for more drink and another blanket for her bed.’

The thought had crossed Hope’s mind.

‘Well, if she’s so keen on the country, maybe we can do a swap and she can stay in the cottage while I live in her place back here,’ Hope remarked.

Yvonne shot her an inquisitive look.

‘You don’t want to go, do you?’

‘That obvious, huh?’ Hope stopped trying to look merry and let her face reveal how she felt: utterly depressed.

Yvonne’s bosom welled up with indignation like an enraged bullfrog. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You can’t go, Hope,’ she said, ‘not if you don’t want to. You’d be mad.’

A cluster of tourists, just disgorged from a tour bus, swarmed into the building society before Hope could answer.

Hope, Yvonne and Denise expertly changed travellers’ cheques for the hordes and engaged in a bit of friendly chatter. When they’d all cleared out, one of Hope’s favourite customers, a sweet little old lady who wore a fox collar wrapped around her neck come rain, hail or shine, arrived to discuss how much money she should take out of her account to go on holiday.

‘Where are you going?’ Hope asked Mrs Payton.

The old lady’s dark eyes sparkled under her felt hat. ‘The Greek Islands,’ she said. ‘I’m going with a friend. I haven’t been there since the Fifties. We’re going to do the Oracle at Delphi first. Can’t wait.’

My god, I’m turning into a boring old cow, Hope told herself as she processed Mrs Payton’s savings book. This woman is eighty if she’s a day and she’s all fired up about a trip to Greece, while I’m only thirty-seven and I’m whinging about going the short trip to Ireland.

When she was gone, Yvonne was busy with some teenage boys, and then a stream of people kept coming into the office, all with complicated business. It was nearly closing time before they had a chance to talk. Denise was making tea in the cubby hole kitchen behind the photocopier because they’d been too busy to have their afternoon tea break.

‘Don’t go,’ said Yvonne.

‘It’s not that easy.’ Hope was fed up with the whole subject.

‘It is,’ asserted Yvonne. ‘Can you imagine what you’ll feel like when you’re there if you’re this depressed now? You’ll be down the doctor looking for tablets for your nerves like a shot.’

Hope laughed. ‘I think I need tablets for my nerves as it is,’ she joked.

Yvonne didn’t laugh. ‘Yeah and you’ll be on double strength ones when you’re dying of depression next month. Think about it, you’ll be away from your friends, your sister, everyone. It’s not fair to expect you to go along with this.’ Yvonne scowled. ‘Men can be right bastards, you know.’

‘It is only for a year,’ Hope said.

‘Hope, you’re the sort of person who wouldn’t expect someone to sit through a two-hour film you’d like in case they didn’t enjoy it. You never ask anyone for anything. Matt’s asked you to do this huge thing and you don’t want to go but you don’t want to say no either. There’s a fine line between keeping the peace and getting walked on, as my mother would say. And what are you going to do? You love working, even here, you’ll go out of your head with no job. Matt’s asking too much.’

Hope took her tea from Denise and thought of what Yvonne would say if she knew that Matt hadn’t really asked her anything: he’d told her, wheedled a bit, and had assumed she’d go along with it. She was so happy that he wasn’t having an affair, she’d said yes quicker than a hooker touting for business on a rainy night.

Yvonne would levitate with temper if she knew the truth. ‘My Freddie wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that,’ she’d say, and it was true. Freddie had to work hard to keep Yvonne. She was not the sort of person who got walked on. As far as Yvonne was concerned, if anyone was going to do any trampling over anyone else, she’d do it, thank you very much.

‘It’s what everyone dreams of, Yvonne,’ protested Hope. ‘Giving up the rat race to live in the country, spend quality time with the children and not work.’

‘Yeah right,’ said Yvonne grimly. ‘You and your winning the lottery dream. Except if you won the lottery and bought some palatial mansion down the road, you might not be working but you’d have the cash to do whatever you wanted and you’d be able to afford to have someone look after the kids if you wanted to get the chauffeur to drive you into town. You haven’t won the lottery, but I reckon Matt has.’

For the rest of the afternoon, Hope thought about leaving Witherspoon’s. She did love her job, Yvonne was right. She didn’t want to be some high flying executive like Sam but she enjoyed working, enjoyed having her own money and her independence, and liked meeting new people. Of course she adored the children, but surely she wasn’t a bad mother to want to combine loving them with a job?

Right on cue, the heavens opened as Hope ran, raincoatless, to her car after work. It was only a five-minute walk but by the time she wrenched the door of the Metro open and flung her handbag onto the passenger seat, she was soaked.

Shivering despite having the heater on at full blast, she drove home in worse than usual traffic. Yvonne didn’t understand. Yvonne was a blunt person who said what she thought. Hope was exactly the opposite. She longed for some way of telling Matt she didn’t want to leave Bath, but without the inevitable confrontation. Ideally, she wanted him intuitively to work out what she wanted, the way men did in films, and then agree that it was all a mad idea and that they should stay at home. No hassle, no arguments.

Only it wasn’t working out like that. Matt appeared to be taking her stoic silence for a thoughtfulness, as if she was busy mentally working out what the family would need to take. Why didn’t he see that she was upset? How could he be so blind?

The clock on the dashboard said it was six fifteen when Hope pulled up outside Your Little Treasures, not caring that she was double parked. Head down against the rain, she ran up the path to the glossy pillar box red door.

Marta was standing sentry in the small hallway, looking less Rottweiler-like than usual on account of her upswept hairstyle and a very un-Marta-like lacy dress. She was obviously going out for the evening.

‘You’re late,’ she snapped as Hope reached her.

The build-up of misery over the past few days came to a triumphant head in Hope’s mind. ‘So sue me,’ she snapped back with unheard of venom.

Marta took a step back at this unprecedented attack from the meek and mild Mrs Parker.

‘As long as it’s just this once,’ she muttered, giving Hope a wide berth.

Matt couldn’t remember when he’d felt this fired up over anything. Not the local television ads they’d won off a top London ad agency, not the excitement he’d felt when Hope had first become pregnant. Nothing had ever given him the buzz that this new adventure was giving him.

He arrived home with a bouquet of flowers for Hope and a bottle of rosé wine. She loved rosé. She was a bit unsure about the whole trip, but that was just Hope. Dear Hope, he loved her despite her nervousness about things and her fear of the unknown. She’d love Kerry when she got there.

Matt remembered when he was nine, and his parents, to whom he’d been an unexpected interruption in their marriage and careers, had shipped him off to Uncle Gearóid’s. At first, he’d hated the idea of leaving his home to travel to Ireland, but after that first summer, he’d wanted to go every year.

There was something magical about Redlion. Maybe it was the fact that Gearóid didn’t believe in rules so there was none of that palaver about being in by a certain time or eating three meals a day, but Matt had loved it.

Meals were whenever Gearóid took it upon himself to open a tin of beans and nobody batted an eyelid when the nine-year-old Matt was brought into the local pub (shop at the front and small snug at the back) to have his first taste of porter. They’d gone on fishing expeditions, on wild adventures to the Beara Peninsula, where Gearóid had practically gone into a coma after a drinking session with a fellow writer in a small hillside dwelling that Matt’s mother would have disapproved of no end. Matt had grown up with a mistily romantic memory of sitting on cracked leather stools in the dim, stained snug, listening to farmers talking of their herds and the trials of bovine mastitis, while Gearóid and his cronies rambled on about novels and poems, their plans for being the next Yeats, and how they’d got a consignment of good quality poteen and maybe after the next round they’d take a ramble back to Curlew Cottage for a wee dram.

Gearóid, with his wild woolly hair, long beard and fondness for brown corduroy suits he got directly from Dublin, had been an idol to his nephew. He lived outside the system, he told Matt proudly, which was why he’d left his home in Surrey to travel to Kerry and become a writer. Taking the Irish version of his real name had been part of the fun. The one-time Gerry had become Gearóid, more Irish than the Irish, a man who could sing old Irish songs for hours on end and knew the location of every stone circle in Munster. Gearóid supplemented his income by giving tours to the hordes of tourists who came to Kerry searching for their roots, but, as he got older, his fondness for the jar meant he was quite likely to turn on them and tell them they were all a pack of feckers and should feck off back wherever they came from.

To his shame, Matt hadn’t visited for over four years and he’d felt terrible about the fact that when Gearóid had died, he’d been in the middle of a vital campaign and hadn’t been able to make it to Redlion for the funeral. He’d make it up to Gearóid, he promised, by becoming a writer. Turning his back on Bath and his career, albeit only for a year, was his tribute to his maverick uncle.