If Only You Knew

by Claire Allan

  Ava laughed and Hope thought of how, really, she hated that little boxed space where she worked at home. It was a direct reflection of her state of mind – messy, unloved and a bit rough around the edges. She felt trapped in it – day after day, sitting there and trying to generate work before escaping downstairs for an hour to watch Jeremy Kyle or Judge Judy.

  “Perfect reason to get on with doing something different then,” Ava offered.

  Hope looked at her. She had, just about, forgiven her for landing her in it with Jean-Luc earlier. Admittedly the fact that Jean-Luc was one of the most gorgeous creatures she had ever set eyes on had helped take the sting out of Ava putting her on the spot like that.Still, in her hungover fug, she had felt her cheeks blaze all the way home.

  “He’ll think I’m a sad case,” she had said.

  “How do you figure that? As cover stories go, this one is pretty good. And you did say you were thinking of going back into travel writing.”

  “Yes,” Hope had admitted, “but that was in a kind of vague, possibly still a little drunk way.”

  “So you don’t want to do it?”

  Hope had looked at Ava who was staring straight ahead at the road in front and smiling to herself. Fecker. She had Hope pegged well and truly.

  “No, I’m not saying that . . . I . . . I . . .”

  “Are you just trying to make excuses?”

  “No!” she replied forcefully. “It’s just a bit mad. I went to bed last night sobbing about the state of my life.”

  “You weren’t sobbing. You were singing, loudly.”

  “In my head, I was sobbing,” Hope said with a smile.

  “Thanks to your singing I wasn’t so far off sobbing either,” Ava laughed.

  Hope pulled a face.“Very funny!”

  “Yes. Yes, it was,” Ava said, still laughing.

  Hope laughed too and felt the sun shine on her face. This was nice. Okay, so technically she had been railroaded into a day out on the arm of Jean-Luc visiting the must-see sights of Provence and part of her still wanted to kill Ava over that, but this was nice – the way they were talking and laughing. Hope couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent any time with a female friend laughing and joking and talking about how sexy the man opposite had been. In fact the only conversations she seemed to have these days were with A) grumpy-arsed editors who weren’t keen to give anyone any freelance work at all, B) the faceless people in call centres employed by her bank who she called frequently to beg for an increase to her overdraft or credit-card limit, or C) Dylan who refused, with decent grounds she supposed, to comment on the sexiness of any men in the vicinity.

  “I’m a metrosexual, not a homosexual,” he would say.

  So by the time Ava and Hope had taken to Betty’s study and started working through her paperwork and books she was actually mildly excited about her day out with Jean-Luc and definitely okay with Ava and her meddling ways. Those meddling ways were good. They made things happen.

  Flicking through the books on the floor, she smiled. There were books of every genre among Betty’s collection from well-thumbed classics in both English and French to yellowing copies of modern Irish classics.

  “I loved this book when I was a teenager,” she said, flicking through a copy of City Girlby Patricia Scanlan. “I wanted to be Devlin so much!” She recalled how engrossed she had been in the down-on-her-luck Dublin girl who went on to set up her own successful franchise and meet the man of her dreams. “Sadly I even had my hair cut like her but the frizzy curls inmy hair meant I never quite got the sleek bobbed look I had been after. I looked more Coco the Clown.”

  “I wanted to be Cathy from Wuthering Heights, for some bizarre reason,” Ava laughed. “I mean her life didn’t end well, and when she was alive she was a complete bitch, but somehow that didn’t penetrate when I was seventeen and obsessed with Heathcliff.”

  “I think everyone went through an obsessed-with-Heathcliff phase,” Hope said, looking through the books in front of her, finding Betty’s copy of the Emily Brontë classic and showing it to Ava. “She had all the best ones. Les Misérables, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, Light a Penny Candle. Someone will get a lot of joy out of these books. Here, keep Wuthering Heights for yourself and relive the madness. I read it last year when I was going through a particularly ‘My life has been crap since I was eighteen’ phase and wanted to relive my angsty years.”

  Ava reached out and Hope passed it over.

  “Anything much in that stuff you’re going through?” Hope asked.

  “Mostly old letters. Mostly in French. Not sure any of it is important. I think maybe we should just shred it all. Unless either of us want to try and decipher what it’s all about. But, from what I can see, it is mostly utility bills and the like. Not exactly the stuff of family heirlooms.”

  “Fair enough,” Hope said. “Search and destroy.”

  When the books were packed Hope moved onto the desk which mostly contained stationery, neatly sorted into piles, pens and pencils, paperclips and thumbtacks and a neat pile of Post-Its beside a bundle of crisp white envelopes.

  “I wonder did she write the letters here,” Hope said, lifting a pen and poising it over a sheaf of white paper on the desk. “This would be a lovely place to write letters – looking out over that garden.”

  “She had a way with words,” Ava said. “She probably could have been a writer herself. Maybe that’s where you get it from.”

  “Ah no, I get it from a combination of being exceptionally nosy, the inability to live my own life therefore having an obsession with other people’s lives, and also from an obsession with Lois Lane when I was a teenager. I always thought if I got a job as a journalist there would be some Clark Kent hunk of burning love waiting for me in a newsroom. I was never under any illusions that he would turn into Superman at a moment’s notice, but I thought, at least, he wouldn’t be a complete dick. But as it turns out, the newsrooms of Northern Ireland aren’t exactly heaving with romantic male leads. And in terms of freelancing – working on your own definitely decreases the chance of meeting Mr Right.”

  She watched Ava smile and sit forward, pushing her glasses to the top of her head. “I always thought you had the most glamorous life. My mum was always telling me how my cousin Hope was living it up in Belfast, writing for all the big papers and always out at some launch or another.”

  Hope shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong. It does have its high points and I’ve definitely had some good times. But it isn’t all that glam and I can tell you that in recent years the numberof launches has taken a dive with the recession and those that have happened have been seriously short of the glam factor. These days you’re lucky if you get a cup of tea and a wilting sandwich never mind a glass of fizz and the chance to wear a posh frock.”

  She thought back to the last launch she had been at. There hadn’t even been a cup of tea, or a wilted sandwich, and the assembled journalists had left in very bad form indeed. Hope had walked away scunnered that she had wasted an afternoon – and a taxi fare in and out of Belfast – to attend it in the hope of getting some exclusive for one of the glossies only to find every other freelance in the greater Belfast area there vying for the story.

  “It’s a crowded market,” she said, sitting back and looking out the window. “And not exactly fulfilling. Unless you are selling something a little different, people just don’t want to know.”

  “Well, travel stories would be different?”

  Hope nodded. The initial outlay would be tough but she had lived off the beaten track before. She had blagged her away around the world with Dylan and she had worked where necessary to fund their next adventure. She wasn’t afraid of hard work. She was, admittedly, mildly terrified at the prospect of doing it on her own but this could well be one of those cases where she would have to just feel the fear and do it anyway.

  “They would,” she said, the cogs in her mind whirring into gear and thinking about the practicalities of it all. “I’ll have
to give it some thought but you know what, I think it could work.”

  “Good woman,” Ava said. “And don’t forget to send some postcards.”

  “Oh, I promise,” Hope said. “Actually Betty here has inspired me a little. The way she wrote these letters – proper old-fashioned letters and not emails or text messages. I’m going to start doing that.”

  “Good woman.”

  Hope sat upright, lifted the pen and started to doodle on the paper in front of her. She would definitely start writing properly again, ink and paper. She might even write something a little creative. Maybe about a woman who falls in love with her best friend just that little bit too late. She could write that on the long lonely nights as she circumnavigated the world alone. “You’re never alone with a book,” her old school friend Tina used to say. So technically that counted for writing one too, didn’t it?

  Smiling, she put the pen down and continued sorting through Betty’s desk while Ava finished dealing with the paperwork. Before they knew it, it had hit six o’clock and Hope’s stomach was rumbling. It had been a long time since her mid-morning croissant. They had just been so caught up in sorting through the study they hadn’t thought to stop for food, and the lack of something to eat was making her hangover threaten to resurface.

  “Shall we get something to eat?” she said, breaking the silence.

  “Oh yes, please,” Ava said. “I’ve been sitting here starving for the last hour but didn’t want to speak up.”

  “Well, then, let’s definitely get something to eat. Should we make something or head out to the village? I promise not to drink and end up singing any 90s pop songs, or any pop songs at all for that matter.”

  “It would be a shame not to get out and see some more of the village.”

  “Then the village it is. How about we freshen up? I’ll look at that guide Jean-Luc left and get us booked in somewhere.”

  “Brilliant,” Ava said. “I’ll go and get ready and we can be off.”

  Hope closed the second drawer on the desk, put the lid on her latest box for the nursing home and vowed to come back to the room later to finish things off. They had got through a lot today. The room looked a little less homely but she was confident that everything was going where it should be. Lifting the copy of City Girl from the floor and carrying it through to her room, she slipped it into her bag and smiled as her mind turned to how she was going to change her life and indeed to her own circle of friends back home. Not that her group of friends was much of a circle. Not, in fact, that her group of friends was much of a group. It was pretty much Dylan. And that was that. Nonetheless she thought he would be happy for her and her new ideas about where her life might go.

  She didn’t know whythe idea of going back to travel writing hadn’t come to her before, but now that it had, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. And now was the perfect time. Freshening her make-up and adding a spritz of perfume, she lifted her bag and with a spring in her step she walked back to the living room and set about making reservations for dinner in perfect French.

  Chapter 21

  Ava brushed her hair, pulled it back in a neat chignon, took a bright maxi dress from the wardrobe and started to get changed. Glancing in the full-length mirror as she stood in her underwear, her eye was drawn to her stomach. Nope. She didn’t look pregnant yet. Yes, she had a slightly protruding tummy but if the truth was known she’d never quite got rid of that stomach paunch since she’d had Maisie, despite her best attempts. Her boobs looked bigger – her bra definitely felt tighter and, looking down, the veins in her breasts resembled a map of the underground. She looked in the mirror again and stuck her stomach out, rubbing her hand over her belly.

  It wouldn’t be that long until she was belly-big and drinking Gaviscon by the litre. Oh God . . . why did pregnancy have to be so undignified and unpleasant? Maybe Karen had a point. Okay, Karen had taken that point and exaggerated it wildly, making it into more of a horror story than a point, but it was a point nonetheless.

  Blinking, she looked again at her outline in the mirror and willed herself to focus on the positives.

  She would get a cute, teeny tiny baby whose teeny tiny bum would fit in the palm of her hand and make her heart swell with love.

  Babies smell nice. Most of the time. When they haven’t pooed. Or been sick. Focus on the nice times – on the sweet smell of their soft skin.

  Yes, babies have soft skin.

  Maisie would love having a baby brother or sister. Sure hadn’t she Ava’s heart tortured about wanting a baby all of her own while Ava had wanted to scream at her “But you are a baby!”.

  Shopping. She would get to wander, guilt-free, around the pretty baby section in Next and legitimately have a feel of the tiny Babygros without coming across as a potential baby-snatching mentalist.

  Oooh, a new pram. Much as she tried to deny it, Ava was a pram-a-holic. She had gone through three with Maisie, all of which were probably still in a usable condition for baby number two but she would ignore that fact.

  People would stop saying “Oooh, isn’t time you had another child?” every three seconds or looking at Maisie then back to Ava and saying with a laboured sigh: “You won’t leave her on her own, will you? Such a sin. To be an only child.”

  She might make new mammy friends who weren’t Karen.

  She would have a legitimate reason to eat as much chocolate as she wanted over the next eight months.

  Connor would be delighted.

  She smiled again, positive affirmations floating around her head, and slipped her feet into her sandals before sitting on the bed and phoning Maisie. She would be going to sleep soon, Ava thought. She could almost see her daughter now, a little bit sleepy and possibly a little bit cranky, rubbing her eyes and looking for a cuddle. Her heart ached with longing – suddenly Dublin felt too far away – much too far away and she wished she was there to hold Maisie’s chubby little hand and kiss her button nose. The phone rang three times before her mother-in-law Brigid answered.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Hello, Brigid.”

  “Hang on a minute. Maisie, no. Not now. No, the other one. Clodagh, could you help your cousin?” Clearly flustered, Brigid’s usually clipped phone voice had slipped a little into her full-blown Northside Dublin drawl. “No, no, I don’t know where your daddy is. He’ll be back in a while. He’s just away on a message. Hello? Hello?”

  Unsure as to whether Brigid actually was talking to her or still to one of her many grandchildren, Ava paused until her mother-in-law spoke again.

  “Look, if this is one of those sell-you-insurance or begging calls then I’m very busy and not at all interested so I’m going to hang up now.”

  “No! Brigid! Wait! It’s me – Ava! I was just phoning to speak to Maisie and Connor. But I’m guessing he has left you in charge.”

  “Oh, Ava pet,” Brigid said, softening, “how are you? Wait a minute – I’ll just escape into the kitchen. Clodagh! Mind your cousin. And Niamh, share those toys.”

  Ava listened to a clatter of children’s voices, her daughter’s soft Northern accent amongst them and smiled. She would, she supposed, have to go through the niceties of talking to Brigid first before she spoke to her daughter.

  “Connor and his dad have gone for a swift one,” Brigid said. “About an hour ago, so I’m hoping they’ll be back soon. I said one but you know men, they always push their luck.”

  Ava could hear the hiss of a kettle as Brigid rattled around her kitchen.

  “Well, my dear, are you having a lovely time? I bet France is lovely. Never been myself. Not so great with foreign travel. A week in Salthill does me just fine. But still, France, it must be lovely. Is it lovely?”

  Ava smiled. Connor was so unlike his mother – he was quiet and relatively reserved. Chances are it was because he was never able to get a word in growing up. But Brigid was a great woman – with a house which filled and emptied constantly with a host of grandchildren, all of whom she spo
iled rotten. Brigid would be delighted to hear there was another little Campbell on the way.

  “France is great. I’m missing Maisie and Connor like mad though.”

  “Of course you are, pet, but they are fine. Maisie is ruling the roost. All her cousins are delighted to see her. They were putting on a show for us just now. She has a great little voice on her.”

  “Yes,” Ava said, her heart swelling with pride and her eyes filling with tears. Fecking hormones. “She’s a darling. Do you think I could maybe have a wee word with her? What do you think?”

  “Oh silly me,” Brigid said. “Of course. You should have said. I’ll get her for you now.”

  Ava listened as her mother-in-law put the phone down and went to retrieve her daughter. She was almost breathless with excitement and longing when Maisie’s voice came on the line.

  “Mammy! I did a show. I was singing. And dancing. And singing. And Clodagh was singing and dancing. And Niamh too. And Nana Brigid said I was brilliant!” Maisie was almost stratospheric with excitement.“And Clodagh’s going to sleep in my bed tonight and I am going to sleep in it too and Nana Brigid said we better be good girls and go to sleep and not be tortures.”

  “That’s great, baby,” Ava said, thinking that her daughter loved to talk almost as much as her beloved granny. “So you’re being a good girl?”

  “The bestest.”

  “And is daddy being a good boy?”

  “Yes!” her daughter replied earnestly. “Mammy?”

  “Yes, pet?”

  “Are you being a good girl?”

  “Yes, darling, I am, and I’ll be home soon.”

  “When?”

  “Soon, pet.”

  “Are you coming to Nana Brigid’s too? We could do our show for you?”

  “Maybe, pet,” Ava said, lying back on the bed and revelling in her daughter’s voice. God, she sounded so cute on the phone. Her voice was softer, higher, lighter. “I would love it if you did your show for me.”