by Cathy Kelly
Inwardly Grace was seething. Bloody Howard. Already taking over and ordering champagne for everyone. Premier cru, she’d bet. Stephen was right: he was an alpha control freak. She’d always wondered whether he served the best champagne only at the start of his parties, decanting cheaper stuff into the bottles as soon as everyone was sozzled and couldn’t tell the difference. She wouldn’t put it past him.
How he’d fathered a wonderful girl like Katy was astonishing, really.
Grace beamed up at the waiter. ‘Mr Desmond knows I love champagne, so I’ll have a glass now,’ she said – which was a fib, as she was hardly a drinker, and even if she were, Howard wouldn’t have paid any attention to her likes and dislikes. But tonight Grace felt a little wild. Not herself.
A glass of Howard’s champagne before he got there and announced they were having it would be a childish way to get even, but even grown-ups were allowed to be childish sometimes.
‘I love you, do you know that?’ Michael said, sitting in the back of the taxi and inhaling the sweet scent of Katy’s hair. She smelled of coconut and perfume and something else, something just Katy.
‘I love you too,’ she murmured in reply, wondering how they could be so lucky.
Nobody else knew what love was, nobody, just them.
Howard rushed into the restaurant ahead of Birdie, aware that he was late and annoyed by it.
‘Grace,’ he said, embracing her tightly. ‘I am so sorry. Beautiful women shouldn’t have to drink alone.’
He clicked his fingers imperiously at the waiter and shouted ‘Champagne!’ and both Grace and Birdie shrank a little bit.
‘Birdie,’ said Grace, leaving Howard quickly to go over and hug Birdie. Grace knew she was puce from both Howard’s treatment of the waiter and his comment about ‘beautiful women’, but as she looked at Birdie’s small face, incredibly pretty despite not a shred of make-up, she saw that Birdie hadn’t flushed at all.
After so many years of being married to Howard, she must be used to his behaviour, and so too must the waiters at La Vie.
‘Hello, Grace, you look so lovely, as always,’ said Birdie, almost shyly. ‘You got your hair done. I should have had mine done too.’
She put a guilty hand up to the tousled knot that Howard had already commented unfavourably on, and Grace said: ‘Nonsense. I love your hair. It suits you – and you look lovely too.’
‘Thank you,’ said Birdie, so gratefully that Grace knew for sure nobody had said such a thing to her in a long time.
Grace thought that Birdie had undoubtedly been very beautiful in her youth – it was all there in the delicate bones of her face – but years of Howard had almost worn it out of her. Through Michael, she knew that Katy was always trying to get her mother to have beauty treatments and get her hair dyed, but Birdie refused.
‘She’s such a lovely person, it doesn’t matter how she looks,’ Michael said. ‘Her spirit is what matters,’ and Grace had felt a surge of pride in her beloved son that he automatically thought in such a way.
Howard was busily organising who would sit where when Fiona, Katy and Michael walked in together.
‘Greetings, oh young people!’ said Howard loudly, and Fiona shot him a horrified look before slipping into the seat next to her mother.
And then everyone was chatting, admiring Katy’s ring, and if Grace sensed a look of mild disapproval on Howard’s face at the size of the gemstones, for once he had the sense to say nothing.
They were all sad that because Leila was in Dublin she couldn’t make it, but what with her poor mum in hospital, she was under huge stress.
Birdie had dropped into the hospital to see Dolores.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ said Katy, reaching over to squeeze her mother’s hand. ‘How is she?’
‘Shaken,’ said Birdie sadly. ‘I think the shock of the accident has really shattered her confidence.’
‘It’s not about falling off the horse, it’s about how you get back on,’ said Howard loftily.
Grace and Michael found each other’s eyes across the table.
‘I think it’s a little different when you’re involved in a serious car accident, Howard,’ said Grace gently, wanting to ward off any arguments. Michael had that look in his eyes: the look that said he was annoyed but hiding it.
They were on to the first course before Stephen arrived. He went around the table saying hello, giving Howard an almighty and manly slap on the back that made Howard bang into the table and cough.
‘Birdie, you light up the room, as always,’ he said, kissing her hand.
Stephen certainly did, Grace found herself thinking. At fifty-eight, he was still as handsome as ever, and more debonair now – a man who gave the impression that he must have been born in an Italian hand-stitched suit. His dark hair was heavily greyed at the temples and his face was lined, but he looked like what he was: a kind and definitely charming man with a heart of gold.
‘Darling daughter, will you let me sit in your place beside your old mother?’ he said, kissing Fiona on the top of her head.
‘Less of the old,’ said Grace in mock outrage.
Fiona moved.
‘Your legs!’ Stephen said to his daughter, pretending shock. ‘They’re out without jeans. You’re wearing a skirt. I may need my medication.’
‘I do dress up for work, Dad,’ Fiona complained. ‘I don’t live in jeans.’
‘She’s wearing a dress for our wedding, aren’t you, Fi?’ said Katy from across the table. ‘We have ages, though, five months; no rush to get started on the dresses just yet.’
‘We need to,’ said Birdie. ‘You have to allow at least four months for a bride’s dress.’
Katy beamed. ‘I can’t wait to start looking,’ she said.
‘You’ll look like a princess, darling,’ said Michael, ‘but no denim bridesmaids’ dresses, Fi,’ he teased affectionately. ‘Or those damn motorcycle boots.’
A good-humoured row started up about what Fiona considered suitable bridesmaid wear.
‘A black dress, perhaps?’ she suggested, putting on her most innocent expression.
Stephen slipped into the chair beside Grace, kissed her on the cheek, then whispered into her ear: ‘I’ve got a plan to cook Howard’s goose – I’m going to steal his enormously large wallet, report all his cards stolen, then sit back and enjoy it as he tries to pay the bill later.’
Grace made a noise that she just knew sounded like the hysterical giggles of some of the smaller girls in school.
‘Don’t you dare!’
‘Don’t you dare what?’ asked Michael.
‘Nothing,’ said Grace cheerfully, thinking of Birdie’s sad little face earlier and how grateful she’d been to be given a compliment. Perhaps Howard’s wallet should be appropriated after all. Punishment for his treatment of his poor wife.
Grace finished her starter and Stephen ate bread with too much butter while they talked. Grace thought he shouldn’t have butter – at his age, heart and cholesterol problems were a worry. But then it wasn’t her job to worry about him: that was Julia’s role.
‘How’s Julia?’ she asked.
‘Fine,’ he said, which was his stock response.
You can talk to me about her, you know, Grace wanted to say in exasperation. I won’t disappear in a puff of sulphur and brimstone. But she said nothing of the sort.
In their effort to change the subject, they somehow landed on a similar one, and found themselves talking about couples they knew who’d broken up. Always people you’d never have expected to separate. Like Harry and Megan, who’d seemed to fit together like a complex jigsaw – until they’d split up the year before.
‘He was boring me to death,’ a chain-smoking Megan had explained to Grace when they met for a drink one evening. Megan hadn’t smoked since teacher training college and Grace was stunned in every sense of the word.
‘But—’ It was out of her mouth before she’d been able to stop it.
‘I know,’ said Megan bitt
erly. ‘But he was lovely and everyone thought we were the perfect couple. If I hear that once more, I will scream. Nobody, I mean nobody, has any idea what goes on in other people’s marriages. You should know that, Grace.’
Grace held her tongue after that and listened to a litany of Harry’s failings, none of which sounded too awful to her, but then she hadn’t been living with them for thirty years.
Besides, she’d probably been like that when she and Stephen had split up – although only to Nora, her closest confidante; she’d have never ranted about him to anyone else.
He’s obsessed with work … He’s never there for me and the children … His career comes first and he’s determined to move to Dublin, even though we’re all perfectly happy here.
Some of it had been the need to let off steam, to tell someone how annoying he was, but it wasn’t entirely fair, and Grace had known that even at the time.
‘I’m astonished about Harry and Megan,’ said Stephen. ‘They always seemed so … together.’
He went on to tell her that Ed and Cara had split up too.
‘Now I’m shocked,’ Grace said. But then if she thought about it, she hadn’t seen them for years, so it was no wonder she’d missed the transition from deeply-in-love to clearly-on-the-verge-of-murdering-each-other. They were one of the couples Stephen had somehow won in the divorce without trying. It seemed impossible to share friends once you’d split up. The friends took sides, and many, Grace knew to her cost, chose the husband, because a single man was still welcome at any party whereas a middle-aged woman with a failed marriage behind her was both difficult to partner up and something of a spectre at the feast.
‘It’s as if divorce is a communicable disease,’ she’d told a friend, ‘and they’ll catch it if they hang around with me.’
Howard was loudly announcing that he wanted a toast and more champagne would be needed.
‘He’ll be plastered soon,’ Stephen whispered. ‘Just the time to steal the wallet …’
Grace shot him a look.
‘To our beautiful children, Katy and Michael, and the most fabulous wedding of the year,’ Howard said, raising his champagne flute.
Fiona raised her glass and wondered if Howard knew he was a class-A moron.
Birdie looked at her darling daughter and thought about after the wedding and the terrifying year of backpacking. How would she endure it? She would say nothing, of course. Katy and Michael had to live their own lives …
Grace thought how proud she was of Michael and Fiona. She and Stephen must have done an all-right job of raising them.
Stephen caught her eye and grinned at her.
Katy and Michael stared at each other, marvelling at how wonderful life was.
And Howard drank deeply, thinking of how he was going to organise the perfect wedding, the most amazing one Bridgeport had ever seen. Then he raised a hand to summon a waiter, did that clicking thing with his fingers that he’d found worked a treat, and demanded more champagne.
‘Start as we mean to go on!’ he boomed.
Grace mentally noted a few things for her nightly gratitude list: having such a wonderful night with her family would certainly be on it. Having Howard around, even if he was paying for it all, would not.
Early on Saturday morning, Leila drove out of Dublin feeling cranky and out of sorts. Devlin had been weird with her all Thursday and Friday – something that wouldn’t normally have bothered her because he had moments of wild impatience with everyone. He always apologised afterwards, which went a long way to explaining why he was a popular boss. But the past couple of days it wasn’t that he’d been impatient with Leila, more that he seemed to be avoiding her. And when he did speak to her, the tone was very different from his merely being irritated.
‘Genius at work,’ murmured Dave, Eclipse’s Director of Marketing and the only other staff member at Leila’s level, when Friday’s boardroom meeting to run through the week’s business had been overwhelmed by Devlin’s dark mood. The elegant suit had been replaced by a black shirt, black jeans, stubble – which added to the pirate look – and a grim face.
First the coffee was too weak.
‘Is it too much to get someone in to fix the machine so we’re not drinking this pale brown slop?’ Devlin demanded.
‘Cranky level one,’ said Dave quietly to Leila, who had to smother a grin.
Then the blinds could not be adjusted to keep the low winter sunlight from shining into his eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ Dave said jokily. ‘It gives you a halo effect. Angelic …’
Instead of grinning back as he normally would, Devlin glowered. ‘Funny, is it?’ he snarled. ‘If comedy hour’s over, let’s look at the week’s numbers.’
Dave and Leila didn’t look at each other, but surprise radiated between them. Devlin was never rude.
At least, Leila tried to console herself as the meeting progressed, it wasn’t just her. Something else was bothering him. Maybe the woman he wanted to cook dinner for had said no. Although why? If Leila allowed herself for one moment to think of Devlin in that way, she knew that no woman in her right mind would say no to him.
Still, the after-effects of his bad temper lingered as she drove to Bridgeport, and no amount of pulse-quickening music – nor coffee and a cinnamon muffin in a small café en route – could lift her spirits. She could trace her boss’s bad mood to when she’d called in to see him first thing on Thursday.
Never assume it’s about you, an old mentor had once told her. Pre-Tynan, she’d practised this motto with ease. Post-Tynan, emotionally fragile and blaming herself for everything, she tended to assume the fault must be hers.
Therefore she was possibly in the worst state of mind to arrive at her mother’s house to be greeted by an exhausted Susie, who had clearly been waiting for somebody to blame for all her problems.
‘Jack woke up at five. Five! It’s sleeping in a different bedroom, having a chest infection – and the fact that Mum is in hospital. Kids are so sensitive to all that. I brought him into my bed but he wouldn’t go back to sleep. I’m exhausted – I need to lie down for an hour. You’ll have to take over.’
Leila, who was still standing in the hall and hadn’t got so much as a hello into the conversation, stared at her sister. Susie looked positively unhinged, white-faced and stressed.
‘Well, sure—’
‘Great.’
With that, Susie turned and marched upstairs.
‘Where’s Jack?’ called Leila after her sister’s departing back.
‘In the kitchen, making “buns” from flour, salt and water,’ said Susie, still in the same high-pitched, stressed-to-the-tonsils voice. ‘It’s a disaster area in there. Flour all over the place and the dog in the middle of it.’
Leila winced, picturing the kitchen she’d scrubbed to within an inch of its life earlier that week. But the mention of Jack made her smile. She felt a stab of guilt at the thought of Susie coping with him on her own all this time, but willed herself to put on a cheerful face as she headed into the kitchen.
Pixie was on the floor, wriggling happily like a seal in the flour. Despite herself, Leila grinned.
‘I’m making buns, Leelu,’ said Jack proudly, showing his aunt a muffin tray half filled with little lumps of dough with faces made of raisins and squiggly dough worms.
Leila grabbed him, flour and all, and hugged him. His small body was solid and warm, the sweet little face full of love and happiness, and Leila thought that no matter how grumpy Susie was with her, she was clearly doing a very good job of raising her beloved son.
He was so gorgeous: that olive skin and the dark eyes of his long-gone father, all so different from Susie and Leila’s colouring. He’d be handsome when he was grown up, but for now, he was adorably six and a bit. The bit was important, apparently.
‘When will those yummy buns be ready?’ said Leila. ‘I am SO hungry.’
Jack untangled himself and went back to the serious business of squiggle rolling.
‘Not until I finish them all,’ he explained gravely. ‘You can help.’ He shoved a lump of dough at her. ‘I’ll show you how to do them.’
Pixie leapt up at Leila, covering her with flour.
‘Pixie can’t help,’ said Jack. ‘She sneezed all the flour.’
Leila laughed at the thought.
‘Look,’ commanded Jack. ‘You get a bit, make it into a sausage, then roll it into a caterpillar. Mum calls them worms, but I wouldn’t like to eat a worm,’ he confided.
‘Caterpillars would be nicer to eat?’ asked Leila, dividing her dough into several sections so she’d have enough for the face.
‘Yeuch. Gunge might splodge out. Green gunge!’ Jack looked delighted at this notion. ‘But it wouldn’t taste nice.’
Leila shook her head. ‘No,’ she agreed.
‘Leelu, you say funny things,’ said Jack happily. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too, munchkin,’ said Leila, feeling as if she might burst into tears.
Nobody else called her Leelu, but Jack had been too little to get her name right when he’d started talking, so she’d become and stayed Leelu.
Nobody else said I love you to her either.
She knew her mother loved her, knew that Susie did too, somewhere in there. Katy loved her, as did Michael in a brotherly way. But the words didn’t often emerge. They had become the exclusive property of romantic love, something that was totally missing from her life.
The purest, most frequently enunciated love came from Jack. Little Jack whom she hadn’t seen since before Christmas.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t with you at Christmas, Jack,’ she said in a rush. ‘I should have been there. Sometimes grown-ups can be selfish, and I was selfish.’
‘Can you come this Christmas?’ Jack asked, head bent over a particularly tricky bun face. ‘This is a king,’ he explained. ‘Crowns are hard to do.’
‘I will come this Christmas,’ vowed Leila. She reached out her smallest finger for his smallest one. ‘Pinkie promise.’
‘Can Pixie eat the buns?’ asked Jack suddenly.
‘Well, they might make her tummy sick. Why?’