Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘And I don’t go out on romantic dates with my mother,’ he said now. ‘Except when we’re planning to appear on Jerry Springer.’

  Marcella laughed loudly, spraying wine everywhere.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, reaching over with her napkin. She dabbed his face and then his throat, and it felt as if they had both stopped breathing.

  ‘If you go any further down with the napkin, we’ll never be able to come to this restaurant again,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’ve had enough cheese,’ she said.

  ‘Me too.’

  They both made gestures to the waiter to bring the bill, but he won the battle to pay.

  He drove slowly, not speaking, and Marcella felt the tingle of anticipation grow inside her. At her house, he parked the car and they sat in silence for a moment.

  ‘Do you want to come in for a coffee?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you want me to come in?’ The blue eyes bored into hers. ‘If I come in, I don’t know if I’ll be able to leave.’

  Marcella wondered if she was stone mad, but she reached up and touched his cheek where the five o’ clock shadow was breaking through. Like a cat, he moved his face so the line of his jaw was cupped in her hand.

  ‘You don’t have to leave,’ she said.

  Marcella had never kept a secret from Ingrid in all the years they had been friends. No matter what happened, they talked about it. But Marcella couldn’t tell Ingrid about this, this was like breaking all the commandants of being a good friend: enjoying yourself when your friend was devastated and betrayed.

  Enjoying yourself with a younger man made it worse.

  When she thought about the age gap in isolation, she felt like Hugh Heffner with one of the Playboy girls. She thought of how she and Ingrid had spoken of such men, the sort of men who grew older and older, got covered in liver spots, had frail bodies, wrinkly skin and eyes that still gleamed when they saw nubile flesh.

  ‘They’re disgusting,’ Marcella used to say. ‘Why don’t they date women their own age or thereabouts? Why twenty-year-olds?’

  ‘It’s about power,’ Ingrid used to say sagely. ‘Having a young girlfriend signals to the world that they have the money and the power to attract such a woman. If they didn’t have that, they would just be an ordinary, much older guy.’

  So doing it in reverse, dating a younger man, made Marcella feel hypocritical and secretive.

  But, oh, he was wonderful.

  Lorcan. Marcella rolled his name around in her mouth.

  Her younger lover. In the media world she belonged to, that made her a cougar–a woman in her prime with a younger lover.

  When she was with Lorcan, laughing with him, making love with him, they were just people.

  Thinking of herself as a cougar changed that, it smacked of some sort of desperation, for all that articles in magazines always made being a cougar sound fabulous: have a younger man as your lover, let him appreciate your inner beauty as well as your experience.

  But in reality, it felt different. A secret she needed to keep. Nobody could know, not anyone at work, not even Ingrid.

  If Lorcan had been less good looking, or even worked in a different field, it would have been different. But there was a Lady Chatterley’s Lover quality to falling for the plumber.

  She couldn’t tell anyone that, truly, he was one of the smartest men she’d ever met. Well-read, funny, clever. In the world of media–a world where, ironically, people tended to have a very blinkered view of reading and pored over little else but media pages in the papers and articles written by people they knew–a professional woman dating a plumber was a little like a successful man dating a beauty queen.

  Trading down.

  None of them would believe Marcella was with him for his mind. They’d disregard the brain cells and look at the sculpted body, the handsome face and the powerful charisma that emanated from him, and they’d think: Bingo!! Yeah, you’re with him for his mind, Marcella. Sure.

  On the third date, he’d taken her home to meet his mother and brothers.

  That’s what you did with someone you were serious about, Lorcan said, and Marcella, who hadn’t been taken home to meet the mother of one of her boyfriends for at least twenty years, had thought it was very sweet–until she got there.

  Lorcan’s family home was a sprawling semi-detached house in a suburb where his mother, Antoinette, had raised her six sons alone after her husband died. Immaculately presented but comfortable, the house spoke of a warm family life. When they arrived for dinner, three of Lorcan’s brothers were there, all nearly as gorgeous and charming, making Marcella think they could fill half a calendar of hunks.

  Then she’d met Antoinette, who’d come out of the kitchen in an apron, drying her hands on a tea towel.

  ‘Hello, Marcella,’ Antoinette had said and Marcella had felt her gut clench.

  This was no little old lady with fluffy white hair. Lorcan’s mother didn’t seem that much older than she was, although miles apart in all obvious ways. Antoinette made Marcella think of what she’d have become if she’d stayed in her hometown and married one of the boys who’d been after her all those years ago. Antoinette had short hair–Marcella remembered how her own mother had cut hers as soon as she’d hit forty, saying that long hair was for younger women.

  Antoinette wore a cream blouse tucked into a sensible plaid skirt and shoes that were undoubtedly comfortable but positively anti-fashion.

  Marcella had gone for her version of casual, which meant a Ralph Lauren sweater with a white shirt underneath and denims that looked ordinary but were actually expensive ones cut by a former jeans model who understood the female body. Her hair hung around her shoulders in glossy, dark waves.

  Worse, one of Lorcan’s brothers, Tony, had brought his family with him, including his wife, Sarah, and their eighteen-month-old baby, an apple-cheeked little girl named Lulu.

  Antoinette was polite to all, but Marcella felt a frost every time Lorcan’s mother looked in her direction.

  Tony, Sarah and Lulu were a proper family unit, was the silent message. You, older woman taking my boy, are not.

  Everyone wanted a go of Lulu, and when she landed on Marcella’s lap, Marcella felt the frisson of loss she always felt when she held a small child.

  No matter that she’d done her grieving for that, it still hurt to have a perfect little creature staring up at her with pale blue eyes and an inquiring face. She would never have this now.

  Marcella was good with children. She’d spent a lot of time with her nieces and nephews, and was adept at amusing them.

  It took two minutes of smiling, talking and tickling Lulu’s chubby little hand in ‘Round and round the garden,’ before Lulu was hooked.

  ‘Aren’t you beautiful?’ Marcella crooned, as a delighted Lulu examined Marcella’s necklace and gave a few exploratory tugs on one of her earrings.

  Lulu refused to be passed along and clung to Marcella.

  ‘She likes you,’ said Sarah happily, and began to relax enough to eat her dinner.

  In other circumstances, Marcella would have liked Antoinette, but when Marcella was helping tidy up, Antoinette spoke to her alone and destroyed any chance of happy families.

  ‘I can’t say I’m delighted you’re going out with Lorcan,’ Antoinette said, ‘but he’s a man and he knows his own mind. I don’t tell him who to see. That said, I’d prefer if he was with a woman his own age, to be frank. You’re not going to give him children, are you, no matter how good you look. You’re too old for that.’

  Marcella, who’d faced down fleets of fierce alpha males in the boardroom and chewed up bitchy female types for breakfast, felt close to tears.

  ‘No,’ she managed to say.

  She wouldn’t say she didn’t think she was able to have them now even if she wanted to, no matter how clever Italian fertility doctors were with women well beyond child-bearing years. Her grief over not having had babies was her own business, not anyone else’s, not even Lorcan’s mother
.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ remarked Lorcan as they drove off.

  Quiet? she thought. If only he knew how hard she’d tried not to run out of the house and hail a taxi to take her away.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said tightly, then regretted it. ‘I’m fine’ was classic female hedgehog prickle-time, meaning I am anything but fine and you better find out why that is, you moron.

  ‘My mother likes you,’ he added.

  ‘She’s very nice,’ Marcella said. What was she like? Nice and fine. They were non-words, used to pad out a conversation that was going nowhere.

  ‘Actually, I don’t think she liked me at all,’ Marcella said, unable to hold it in.

  ‘Trust me, she did. You’d know if she didn’t like you. She made one girlfriend cry.’ He was smiling ruefully at the memory.

  Marcella had to control the urge to beat him around the head with her mobile phone. Typical bloody man: they were all martyrs to their mothers, thinking they could do no wrong. God knows what Antoinette had done to make one poor woman cry. And she was suddenly jealous of this old flame. Was she younger than Marcella? Or the same age, another cougar in a line-up that made Lorcan’s family shrug helplessly and wait for the moment he came to his senses and dated women who could give him children.

  ‘I don’t like feeling disapproved of,’ Marcella blurted out. Blast him, he had a strange effect on her and made her say what she felt. No man had ever done that before, not even Harry.

  ‘It’s not a good feeling,’ he agreed. ‘Sort of what you’re afraid of happening to me with your friends, right?’

  Marcella gasped. Another thing about Lorcan: he made her totally forget all her neat tricks about presentation. She reacted with him, couldn’t hold anything in. ‘I am not afraid of my friends disapproving of you,’ she lied.

  ‘Yes you are,’ said Lorcan. ‘I’m not, by the way. I’d like to meet them because they’re important to you, but I’m not afraid of what they think. That’s up to them and we’re up to us. You can’t live your life worrying about what other people think.’

  And with that, he was back concentrating on the road, the conversation was over.

  He was such a MAN.

  18

  Speak out of love and a desire to make things better.

  Ingrid had never done nights out with the girls. She hadn’t avoided them on purpose; it was simply an aspect of popular culture that had passed her by.

  ‘It’s because of who you are, I dare say,’ Marcella said. ‘You’re too famous for normal people and if you went out with a group of famous women, there would inevitably be someone there with an iceberg-sized ego who would want the conversation to be about them, their show, their publicist, their fans.’

  Ingrid found herself grinning. Marcella was right. She hated to think of her fame as making her different, but it did. There were people who didn’t care how often your face was on the television and treated you normally, but there were twice as many who did the opposite, asking personal or rude questions on the grounds that famous people had no right to privacy.

  Tonight, Marcella had organised an evening with Ingrid and two other women friends, Carla and Nikki, women they both knew and loved.

  It wasn’t exactly a wild night out with the girls, but Marcella said that Ingrid needed to get out and do things that weren’t entirely work-related. Although work was going well and she had slipped back into the driving seat much more easily than she had expected, Ingrid had been avoiding all social events.

  ‘Your hand will get welded to the Sky Box zapper if you spend any more time at home in the evenings,’ Marcella had scolded. ‘Let me organise something nice and quiet.’

  Carla was a high court judge, who was married with three adult children. Nikki was single and a successful clothes designer who’d launched an international handbag line to great success. They were lovely women, good friends, but as she and Marcella sat waiting in the restaurant, sipping Kir Royales, Ingrid felt deeply uncomfortable. It was her first evening out, her first non-family, non-work evening since David had died.

  There was something scary about it. The safety blanket that had been her marriage was gone. No, she corrected herself mentally, the safety blanket that she’d thought was her marriage was gone.

  Marcella’s BlackBerry beeped with the arrival of a message.

  ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, ‘must reply to this.’

  Marcella was distracted, Ingrid thought idly. It must be work.

  Ingrid sipped her drink and looked around the room.

  An elegant older woman arrived, flicking an arrogant gaze over Ingrid and Marcella as if to say a party of women was beneath contempt.

  Ingrid watched the woman with interest as she joined a wealthy-looking elderly man at a nearby table. She was thin, far too thin really; the thinness of savage self-control at every meal for the past twenty years. Ingrid would have been fascinated to see her bone-marrow density scans. The woman was clad in a subtle shift dress with lots of detailing around the arms to distract from the creping of her skin. She had to be over sixty, yet her hair was a girlish blonde bouffant, combed and fluffed high at the front over a surgically smooth high forehead, with a rounded flicky-out curl all around.

  The contrast between the Barbie hair and the rest of her made Ingrid shiver. Was this what getting older was all about? Fighting age with the weapons of girlhood?

  Ingrid’s hand went automatically to her own hair and she had a sudden overwhelming desire to have it all cut off. Short, sharp and sleek à la Judi Dench. That would be different. Nobody could accuse her of trying to look younger than she was then. Was that where she’d gone wrong in her marriage? Had she assumed she and David would be together forever when, in reality, she should have faced the fact that nothing lasted forever. Had his mystery lover been younger? Of course. Ingrid knew she must be–

  ‘Hello, sorry we’re late. Traffic was mental.’

  Carla and Nikki arrived with a tall, grey-haired man beside them.

  ‘This is Eric Johannsen,’ introduced Nikki. ‘We met him in the lobby.’

  Marcella and Ingrid smiled hellos and shook hands with Eric, whom Ingrid tried hard to place.

  She’d definitely seen him before. On the business pages, perhaps, a picture in the Financial Times…

  He had the keen eyes of a successful businessman, for sure: coolly assessing, analysing, working out where the next billion was coming from.

  ‘Good evening, pleased to meet you,’ he said.

  His accent was neutral with the perfect enunciation of the multi-linguist. Ingrid was always fascinated by men like him, ones who ran empires and could speak Japanese, Chinese and Russian, and had secretaries in every major city, taking speedy dictation.

  He lingered only a minute before heading off to his own table, where the inevitable group of men in suits awaited him with bulbous burgundy glasses in front of them.

  ‘If I wasn’t married…’ murmured Carla, sitting down.

  ‘Hands off,’ said Nikki. ‘Let us free agents have a chance.’

  Nikki had dated a property billionaire from Seattle for a few years but he’d left her for his masseuse. Since then, she’d sworn off men. ‘Isn’t he a dish?’ she asked Marcella.

  ‘Well, er–yes,’ said Marcella.

  Nikki whooped. ‘Marcella Schmidt–you’re seeing someone! Tell all.’

  ‘I am not,’ protested Marcella.

  Ingrid could see that Carla and Nikki believed her. Marcella was, after all, marvellous at fibbing. But Ingrid had seen her blush slightly and knew better. Marcella must have a new man in her life and she hadn’t said anything. Ingrid felt a pang of guilt. Dear Marcella felt she had to pussyfoot around her, as if any good news would devastate Ingrid. That wasn’t true. Just because Ingrid’s life had been shattered didn’t mean everyone had to suffer too.

  ‘Where do I know that man from?’ Ingrid asked, to take the heat off Marcella.

  ‘Another billionaire property/business/delete-where-appl
icable magnate,’ Carla said. ‘I don’t know where Nikki finds them. Is there a dating club for lonely billionaires, Nikki?’

  ‘I wish,’ Nikki sighed. ‘Money’s not everything, anyway, is it?’

  The other three laughed.

  ‘I’m never interested in men because they have money,’ Nikki claimed. And then she grinned, a wicked little grin. ‘But they’re nicer when they do.’

  ‘Maybe not nicer, but the push-off-I’m-over-you gifts are better when they’re rich,’ Marcella joked.

  Nikki jangled her bracelet, a platinum-and-diamond confection that Mr Seattle had bought her. ‘Doesn’t keep you warm at night.’

  ‘Eric might keep you warm at night,’ suggested Carla. ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘Last year at a skiing party in Courchevel.’

  ‘What is he in? Property, the space programme, buying other nations…?’

  More laughs.

  ‘Just your general mega-rich bloke,’ Nikki said. ‘Very nice, actually. Swedish, still has his company’s main base in Stockholm. Houses all over the place–you know the drill. I didn’t ask what he’s in Dublin for. You know these guys, they hop all around the world in private jets doing deals.’

  The waiter appeared with menus.

  ‘Food, I’m starving!’ said Marcella. She was permanently ravenous these days, something to do with being unable to eat when she was with Lorcan. When she was away from him, she ate like a horse.

  The evening was very enjoyable, despite Ingrid’s anxieties over it, and as they left the restaurant, the four of them promised to meet up again next month.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Marcella asked her quietly when the other pair had gone off in taxis.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Ingrid said. ‘Tonight was fun, like practising being normal and happy. If I practise long enough, I might remember how to do it.’

  ‘You don’t have to pretend to be normal and happy,’ Marcella said. ‘It’s all right to be sad.’

  ‘Not every hour of every day,’ Ingrid said. ‘It’s not good for the soul. But tonight was fun, so thank you.’