by Cathy Kelly
‘Which is why both our wives glared at you for the first year after you broke up with Coco. Alix said you broke her heart,’ said Dan.
‘Dolly said the same,’ agreed Mike. ‘Now you told us that Coco dumped you, and everyone else thinks you two-timed her, so what did happen?’
Red sighed. ‘I was asked to do a favour for a friend …’ he began.
‘She’s a brilliant accountant, Red,’ said Teddy Mitchell. ‘She just needs a start and she’s having trouble getting off the starting blocks.’
‘Why?’ said Red.
‘The country’s falling down with kids with good degrees, and there are no jobs right now. The other problem is that she’s drop-dead gorgeous, got a Cameron Diaz thing going, and everyone thinks she’s going to walk out of the job one day and straight on to the set of Britain & Ireland’s Next Top Model, so why would they bother hiring her.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’ said Red wryly.
‘I’m not. Her father told me one HR person actually said that to her. They told her to tone down her looks, but to be honest, and I’ve known her since she was a baby, she can’t. Unless she goes in like a plain-clothed nun, she hasn’t a hope.’
‘I don’t buy that. Rightly or wrongly, good-looking people do better in business,’ said Red matter-of-factly. ‘She needs to try harder. Has she tried getting female mentorship?’
‘Look, Red, just talk to her, give her a job for a few months,’ begged Teddy. ‘You must have a space somewhere for her, just to get her started. All she needs is some job on her CV. Her father’s my oldest pal and she needs a start someplace.’
‘Fine, Teddy. Send me her CV, but I’ll need to meet her too. Lots of places to hide on a CV, but none in person. I can’t believe that being good-looking is a disability in getting a job. Now I’ve got to rush, Coco and I are off out to dinner.’
‘You’ve set the date, I hear?’
Red smiled. ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘I can’t wait.’
The brilliant accountant’s name was Kirsten Marker, and her CV sounded pretty brilliant too. She’d aced her way through college, so there had to be a good reason why she wasn’t employed yet. Red didn’t buy all this stuff about being too beautiful and scaring people off – there had to be more to it than that. So he phoned her up and she sounded shocked to hear from him.
‘I’m off on a trip on Friday but I could see you Thursday night,’ he said. ‘I’ve a business dinner in the city at six thirty, so I could meet you briefly afterwards. L’Ecrivain at nine. Coffee for half an hour and then I’m gone.’
Kirsten searched her wardrobe for something to wear: something as unsexy as possible. She had clear glasses and tied her naturally blonde hair back into a knot to try to dampen her natural sex appeal, but then guys kept saying she looked like a really hot ice-maiden type. She’d had four years of that in college and she was sick of it.
‘Dye your hair, why don’t you?’ her sister had said, who didn’t have Kirsten’s looks and was fed up with being told how being good-looking was a problem when it came to getting a job.
There was just no winning.
If tonight didn’t work out, she might well go for the hair dye, she thought grimly. Tonight she was going to look like Ms Corporate when she met Red O’Neill. Her grey trouser suit, which kept her long legs hidden, with the button-up white shirt underneath, was perfect. As well as tying her hair back, she wore almost no make-up.
‘Don’t I know you from TV?’ asked the guy on the bus as Kirsten paid her fare.
‘No,’ she sighed. Brown hair might be nice. Or should she go the whole hog and go for coal black, which really wouldn’t suit her and therefore might be the answer?
Red had asked Kirsten to wait downstairs for him in L’Ecrivain until he phoned and asked her to join him upstairs.
Didn’t want the guys he was with to see him with her, Kirsten reasoned, which made her like the sound of him even more. According to the gossip columns, Red was engaged to a girl named Coco, who ran a fabulous vintage shop and looked like a petite and gloriously dark-haired showgirl in all the photos. Red looked pretty good in the photos too – the tall, brooding type. Lucky Coco, thought Kirsten.
Finally, at five past nine, she got a text on her phone.
Come on up, Ms Marker.
This is it, Kirsten thought nervously. This man had the power to give her a job and finally get her started on her career. People would stop thinking she was nothing but a good-looking girl and appreciate her brain.
Red O’Neill was better-looking in the flesh than in photos, but he looked sternly forbidding as he showed her where to sit, which was as far away from him as a four-person table with two empty spaces could allow.
‘Tell me about yourself, Ms Marker,’ he said, ‘and how you could help my company if you came to work for me, as Teddy thinks you can.’
Definitely not a cheesy flirt merchant, Kirsten thought with relief, and found herself relaxing a little.
Coco loved late-night city shopping on Thursdays. Red was still hinting about their honeymoon, and even though Coco knew for a fact that they were going island-hopping in Greece via a luxury yacht, he was still pretending she might need a few sweaters.
‘You can’t penguin-watch without a few sweaters,’ he kept saying. ‘A few fleeces too. Take that old navy one with the paint on it: I love that.’
Messer, she thought fondly.
Tonight she’d bought two bikinis and a colourful chiffon cover-up, along with a sun hat and a pair of sandals far more expensive than the sort of footwear she’d normally buy.
Red was always going on about how it was their money, but Coco was sort of old-fashioned that way and liked buying her own stuff.
She bundled everything into her car and thought about Red’s business dinner. It was in L’Ecrivain, he’d told her, which was only a few minutes’ drive away. He said he hoped to be finished and home by ten, so she thought she might meet him there for a drink. Normally she didn’t crash his business meetings, but he was always so precise about times, so if she got there at twenty-five past nine, he was sure to be nearly on his way out the door.
Red liked Kirsten. She was smart, savvy and was clearly trying very hard not to look even vaguely attractive with that ugly grey suit and a shirt buttoned up to her neck.
‘Are those real glasses?’ he asked, gesturing to the heavy black frames that took up so much of her face but still couldn’t hide her natural beauty.
She blushed. ‘No, but I hope they’re off-putting.’
When he laughed, she blurted out: ‘It’s not funny! Guys say why do I want to work in accountancy when I could be a model or an actress. I don’t want to be either of those things. I’d like to run my own consultancy eventually, but I’ll never get my foot in the door when people keep thinking I’m nothing more than the sum of my looks.’
‘Sorry,’ Red apologised, and rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s been a long day. Hey, do you want a glass of wine? I am not hitting on you, by the way,’ he added, holding his hands up, but grinning at the same time. ‘I’ve only had water myself because I wanted a clear head, and a nice glass of wine would be lovely. By the way, I’m getting married in a month and I adore my fiancée, right? So I’m not falling for what Teddy calls your drop-dead gorgeous looks,’ he said with heavy irony.
Kirsten blushed.
Lucky, lucky Coco.
‘You’ve a first-class degree,’ he said, flicking through her CV. ‘Teddy Mitchell says the problem is you’ve got the face to be a model, and in this day and age, people assume that if you look like one, why the heck would you not want to be one.’
‘And I don’t,’ said Kirsten earnestly. ‘Nothing against models, but I want to use my degree, and I need a start. Please, Mr O’Neill, that’s all I’m looking for.’
Red was tired and his eyes felt gritty. Thank heavens that dinner meeting wa
s over; he just needed to sort out this thing for Teddy Mitchell and he could go home to Coco. He liked this girl, though – she had determination and he liked that in an employee. He opened his top button and loosened his tie, while Kirsten signalled a waiter and they ordered two glasses of wine.
Red had Kirsten’s CV open on the table but wasn’t looking at it by the time Coco made it up the stairs and looked around the room for her fiancé. They’d gone through her college highlights and Kirsten, in an attempt to make herself sound like a rounded person, because that’s what you were supposed to do in interviews, was telling him the story of how she’d done a sky-diving jump, even though she was terrified of heights, and how she’d screamed the poor tandem guy’s ears off all the way down.
‘Hilarious,’ said Red.
It was ludicrous that nobody could see beyond her looks. Sure, she was stunning if you liked that sort of thing, but she wasn’t as stunning, in his opinion, as his darling Coco.
‘Hello Red,’ said a cool voice behind him, and he turned to see Coco staring at him, doing her best to look fierce, but instead just looking grief-stricken. ‘I was late-night shopping and I thought I’d crash your business meeting,’ she said, looking now to Kirsten, who had taken off her horrible black glasses because it was clear that she didn’t need to wear them anymore.
To Coco’s eyes, it was all very simple: Red was with an exquisite-looking blonde woman when he’d told Coco he was meeting three guys for a business dinner. Game over.
‘Coco!’ Red jumped to his feet. He felt cold all over. He knew exactly how this looked, and so did Kirsten.
‘I’m related to a friend of Red’s, Teddy Mitchell,’ Kirsten said frantically. ‘Mr O’Neill was kind enough to say he’d meet me about the possibility of working at his company.’
Coco could only stare at this vision, the sort of five-foot-eight beauty she’d always longed to look like: Grace Kelly mixed with Cameron Diaz mixed with the magic of a fairy-tale princess. Utterly beautiful. What tosh about wanting a job with Red. She was clearly a model. And what job interview took place over a glass of wine in one of the city’s top restaurants?
She didn’t waste her time looking at the Cameron Diaz girl but stared at Red instead, who was watching her horrified face. ‘Please, Coco, this is so not what it looks like. It’s honestly a job interview. I’m doing someone a favour.’
‘Is that what they’re calling it now? I think I’ll go,’ said Coco, and she ran down the stairs.
In the moments it took for Red to quickly pay the bill and for Kirsten to apologise endlessly to him, Coco was gone.
He drove to her flat but she wasn’t there; she wasn’t at Cassie’s either, or at Pearl’s.
It was like she’d disappeared off the face of the earth.
‘Some gossip columnist was in the restaurant and wrote a piece in the paper about it,’ he told his brothers. ‘Remember?’
‘Yeah: What up-and-coming businessman had his tête-à-tête with a lady friend interrupted by his fiancée?’ recited Dan.
‘Teddy Mitchell rang and said Kirsten had gone to London. I don’t know where she got a job but he said she was very, very sorry and if only she could talk to Coco, she could explain it,’ Red said. ‘What was the point of that? If Coco didn’t believe me, what sort of relationship did we really have? Coco closed the shop, wouldn’t return my calls, although I begged her. She wouldn’t speak to me. She left me one message: “I know what I saw”. And wouldn’t let me explain.’
‘But you met her?’ Mike said.
‘I did,’ said Red sadly, ‘in town on the street, as if she didn’t trust me enough to sit down anywhere with me. I tried to explain, but she said she’d seen what she’d seen – she’d even seen the piece in the newspaper – and I said that if she couldn’t trust me, then we couldn’t get married, and that was it.’
‘Well played, big bro,’ congratulated Dan in fake tones. ‘Don’t you know anything? Women need to make you suffer. You needed to keep apologising, you needed to explain it a hundred times. She loved you.’
‘If she had, she’d have listened,’ said Red testily.
‘Bull! She needed you to keep apologising. But no, you have to fly off and not come back to the country for a whole year.’
‘Ma will never forgive you for that, by the way,’ Dan added. ‘Never.’
‘I tried to talk to her,’ protested Red.
‘You didn’t try hard enough,’ said his brothers in unison.
‘You been practising this?’ Red asked sourly.
‘Yeah,’ said Dan. ‘We can do it a cappella too.’
‘So what are you going to do now?’ asked Mike.
‘I saw her in the airport the other day,’ Red replied. ‘I wanted to go over to say hello but I didn’t, and since then I can’t stop thinking about her.’
‘We’re here because you can’t decide what next,’ finished Dan.
‘Exactly.’
His brothers looked at each other.
‘At the risk of repeating myself, you really know nothing about women, do you, bro?’ said Dan. ‘You needed to apologise till you were dizzy saying it, and then she’d have forgiven you. That’s what works with Alix.’
‘And with Dolly.’
‘Coco’s different. You know how sensitive she is about her mother not ever having been around. She thinks I dumped her the same way.’
‘Yeah but the mother was a dope head, wasn’t she? Coco can’t compare you. Go on: see her. What have you got to lose?’ Mike said. ‘Self-respect doesn’t keep you warm at night, man.’
Red woke early the morning after meeting his brothers. It was so early, he had time to go to the hotel gym, pounding away with weights, running – doing anything to get the excess energy out of his body. Coco used to laugh at him in the kindest possible way.
‘Can you do ten minutes for me at the gym?’ she’d say when he’d leave her in bed in the morning on Saturdays for his workout. Leaving her was always difficult: rosy from lovemaking, smiling with tendrils of her crazy dark hair all over the pillows. Sometimes Red wouldn’t go to the gym at all: he’d get straight back into bed.
‘We could do some exercise now,’ he’d growl, and Coco would giggle.
Saturday morning would fly by with them getting the papers and coffee, lounging around her apartment, discussing plans for the future, what they’d do, all the places they’d go to …
Today he got a taxi to her shop. He was pretty sure it was still in the same place because he checked it on Facebook occasionally. Read those cheery missives from Coco where she chatted to her customers.
Red got the taxi driver to drop him a street away from The Twentieth Century Boutique. He needed to build up the courage to walk in there. Imagine – him, Red O’Neill, having to build up the courage to do anything. This was what she’d reduced him to, he thought wryly.
When he reached the shop, he paused for a minute, and then thought, You’ve got to do this, so he pushed the door inwards. Instantly he could see there was no sign of Coco, but a tall, attractive young woman stood behind the counter and beamed at him.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sorry, the door shouldn’t have been open – I forgot to lock it. We don’t open till ten. You can come back then – or do you need a special gift?’
Phoebe couldn’t help herself – a sale was a sale, even if she was just meeting Coco first thing for a chat about a plan for the shop.
Red couldn’t help grinning. The tall girl had him sussed out immediately: it must have been the slightly anxious look on his face.
‘Er, no,’ he said. If Coco wasn’t there, there was no point hanging around. He turned to leave but then he heard her voice.
‘… you could stay with Phoebe in the shop this afternoon after school. I have to go to the accountant.’
‘I want to stay with Phoebs,’ said a child’s voice
firmly.
Red turned slowly and saw Coco emerging from down the stairs, a little girl glued to her side. The girl looked like Coco, which was crazy because of how old she was; it had only been four years and this child was, what – seven, eight, nine? Red was bad on children’s ages.
The girl threw her arms around Coco. ‘I’ll miss you, though,’ she said.
He watched longingly as Coco buried her face in the child’s neck. ‘I’ll miss you, too, honey bunny,’ she said. ‘But when I come to collect you after the accountants, we’ll do something exciting. Maybe drop into Grammy Pearl’s and take Daisy and Apricot for a walk, OK?’
‘Do you think Apricot’s all right on her own at home?’
‘She’ll be fine, honey,’ said Coco. ‘Now that she’s stopped eating the kitchen table, she’s been very good.’
‘Yeah, suppose,’ said the child.
Coco turned, and that’s when she saw him. Red closed his mouth. Coco’s jaw dropped at the exact same moment.
‘Red,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’
Red had it all worked out in an instant. His mother was wrong – Coco did have someone else, someone with a little girl. She’d always loved kids and now she was dating some guy with a ready-made family. This child looked as if she loved Coco like a mother, even if she wasn’t her real mother. She talked about Coco’s grandmother as Grammy Pearl. Coco had replaced him with someone she liked even more: someone who had a ready-made family.
Some lucky bastard was in Coco’s life, someone who’d given her the things Red had always wanted to. Who was he to think he could waltz back into her life and mess all of that up? He’d never seen her look so happy as she did staring into the kid’s eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I was in the area and I just thought I’d drop in.’
Coco stared at him mutely because she couldn’t speak, she could only stare. ‘I … I …’ she kept trying to say.