by Claire Allan
“Well, I look forward to reading it,” Ava said, genuinely impressed at how relaxed and happy her cousin looked.
“Can we swim in the pool?” Maisie shrieked, running full pelt through the house and throwing herself into her mother’s arms.
“Of course, sweetheart. Will we get our swimsuits?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Hope said, handing Beth to her daddy and putting her arms out to Maisie. “Hi, Maisie Moo! Do you know me? We’ve spoken on the phone loads!”
Maisie eyed Hope with a little trepidation before turning to whisper in her mammy’s ear. “Is that Auntie Hope?”
Ava nodded.
“She’s pretty,” Maisie said, wandering over to allow Hope to hug her. “Do you want to come swimming too, Auntie Hope? I won’t splash you,” she said solemnly.
“Well, I sure would love to go swimming. Let’s get our suits, and some towels.”
“That sounds like a good idea, indeed,” Jean-Luc said, grinning.
“Pool party!” Connor said, placing a still sleeping Beth in the buggy he’d just pushed through the house.
“Well, we are on our holidays,” Ava said, smiling. “And this house likes parties.”
“It sure does,” said Hope, linking arms with Ava and walking back into the shade of the house to get ready for their first party of the week. Smiling she offered a silent thank-you to Betty and promised that before the night was out, and despite whatever protestations from the menfolk around her, she would launch into a chorus of Danny Boy. For old times’ sake.
If you enjoyed If Only You Knew by Claire Allan
why not try What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?coming soon by Poolbeg?
Here’s an Exclusive sneak preview of Chapter One and two
Chapter One
Kitty
The bomb dropped at 4.17pm on a Thursday. It had been a fairly ordinary kind of day before then – maybe even a good kind of a day. The shop had been busy and I had made two mammies and two bridesmaids cry with joy. Two brides-to-be had left feeling like the most beautiful girls in the world.
I had been planning to make celebratory lasagne to mark the general loveliness of the day and had developed a craving for a very nice bottle of Merlot which I knew they sold at the off-licence two doors down from Mark’s office. I had tried to call him to ask him pop in but, rather unusually for a man whose Blackberry even went to the toilet with him, he didn’t answer.
So I did something I never, ever do because I didn’t ever want to seem like one of those of needy wife types who call their husband at work. He didn’t have a direct line, you see, and I would have to go through the gatekeeper aka the harridan of a receptionist who worked at his building, I chewed on one of my false nails, balking at the slightly plastic taste while I contemplated just picking up a bottle of wine from the supermarket. But no, even though it was only a Thursday, I decided we should treat ourselves. A bottle of wine. A nice feed of lasagne. Maybe an early night? I smiled as I dialled his office number and asked for him.
It was then, in the second between me asking “Hi, can I speak to Mark Shanahan, please?” and the receptionist answering that something shifted forever in my world.
That’s all it took – the time it took her to breathe in and start to speak – for things to shatter. I kind of wish I’d known. I can’t help, when I look back at it now, but feel like a bit of a stupid bitch for smiling so brightly as I spoke to her. If I had known, my voice would have been more sombre, doom laden . . . I might even have sobbed.
“Mr Shanahan doesn’t work here any more,” she cheeped. “Can anyone else help you?”
It was the strangest thing. I heard what she said and it did register – and a weird floating feeling came over me – but I felt kind of calm and maybe even a bit giddy.
“No, no, it’s fine,” I said.
“Okay then. Can I ask who’s calling?” she cheeped back.
I suppose a part of me wanted to just hang up, but another part of me was thinking of the lasagne which probably wasn’t going to get eaten and the bottle of wine that I had really been looking forward to and I knew things had changed – and changed utterly.
“Kitty Shanahan,” I replied, “his wife.”
There was a pause, and I could hear her sharp intake of breath and I could almost hear her brain ticking over and as she spoke, softly and slowly, all hints of the cheerful but very guarded gate-keeperness gone, I almost felt sorry for her. She must have felt in an utterly awful position to be honest.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Mr Shanahan left last week. I’m sorry.”
I thought of Mark, doe eyed and smiling as he lifted fixed his tie that morning and turned to kiss me as I left to open the shop. He had looked at his watch and declared he was running late and wouldn’t be long leaving after me and had rushed downstairs and into the kitchen. He had shouted to me if I knew where his keys were and I had replied that yes, that they were on the worktop.
It had been ordinary – absolutely ordinary and now it really wasn’t. I put the phone down, resting the old fashioned cream Bakelite receiver on the hook and I sighed. Her sense for scandal piqued, Rose peeked at me over the rim of her glasses and raised one eyebrow.
“Everything okay?”
“Hmmm,” I replied, not quite sure what was going on. I didn’t want to say my husband had been going out to a fictitious job for the last week and I had known nothing about it so I sat back on the cream-covered stool behind my desk and looked at my hands.
“Hmmm good, or hmmm bad?” Rose asked, putting down the delicate lace she had been hand-stitching from her armchair in the corner of our workroom and looking at me again. I couldn’t lie to Rose, especially not when she was giving me her full and unadulterated attention.
“Mark’s not at work,” I mumbled, lifting my mobile phone and walking absentmindedly down the spiral staircase to our dressing room and on through the French doors to the garden. I knew Rose would follow me, and I would let her, but now I had to try Mark again even though I knew he already had at least four missed calls from me logged on his phone and if he wanted to call me then he would have done. I supposed, then, if he had wanted me to know he had – for whatever reason – left his job a week before he would have told me too.
His phone started to ring and I tried to keep my breathing calm even though there was a distinct increase in the volume of adrenalin coursing through my veins.
It went to answer phone and I listened to voice – jauntily telling me he couldn’t take my call right now but would get back to me if I just left my number. As the message beeped to a halt, heralding my turn to start talking, I heard a strangled squeak spring forth from my lips.
“It’s Kitty. Your wife. Call me.” And for effect I added the number of the shop even though he knew it, or at least had it in his phone and would easily be able to find it, and I hung up. Then I turned, nodded to Rose who looked utterly confused – but not as confused as I felt – and I dialled his number again. He would answer this time. I felt it in my waters. It would be fine. There would be two Mark Shanahans working in his office and the other one would have left, or the gatekeeper had just been feeling extra vicious and gatekeeper-y and had decided to tell me a big fat lie. No. Everything was fine.
My waters were wrong, as it turned out. He didn’t answer. He didn’t even answer when I rang back a third time and shouted, “Answer the shagging phone!” at the handset in my hand. Rose walked towards me and very calmly said, “I think maybe we should close the shop early.” She had a point. No bride to be would want to walk in on this. This was not what anyone needed when they were contemplating their big day – a rather pale and shaking wedding-dress salesperson screaming into her IPhone for her husband to talk to her.
I nodded and watched as Rose left the garden to go and lock the door while I stared at my phone and willed it to burst into life. There was still time for this to be okay.
“A cup of tea will do the trick,” Rose said, bustling back through towards
me. “I’ll just go upstairs and put the kettle on.”
Rose knew I never drank tea. Not since I was ten and gave up sugar in my cuppa for Lent. It never tasted as nice since and I’d developed a semi-serious Diet Coke addiction which I still hadn’t kicked. And yet, in that moment, a cup of tea sounded nice. It sounded soothing, even, so I followed Rose up the spiral stairs and through the office into our kitchen – clutching my phone to me as I went and I sat down and watched as Rose boiled a kettle and put two cups out, making her tea.
Rose was like that – an oasis of calm. Nothing phased her. She was the kind of person, who if she developed a slight case of spontaneous combustion would simply douse herself off with some cold water and mutter “Ah well, never mind” before getting on with her day.
“Mark wasn’t at work,” I said, as she mixed milk into the china mug and stirred it gently.
“Yes,” she nodded. “Custard Cream?” She reached for our biscuit jar and offered it to me.
“He hasn’t been at work in a week,” I said, raising an eyebrow and challenging her to look surprised. “And he hasn’t told me. He hasn’t mentioned it to me at all.”
She looked at me, and bit on a custard cream before taking a sip from her mug.
“The receptionist had to tell me,” I said, willing her to agree with me that it was a Very Big Deal Indeed. She nodded, and polished off her biscuit.
“And he’s not answering his phone. I’ve tried, seven or eight times. He left a week ago,” I said, “but he’s been getting dressed every morning and heading out as usual and coming home his usual grumpy self.”
She nodded again. I fought the urge to snatch the biscuit from her mouth and give her a good shake.
“When I say ‘left’ I don’t mean just, you know, left. I mean he doesn’t work there any more. I phoned and the receptionist said, very clearly, that Mark Shanahan doesn’t work there any more.”
Rose sipped from her tea before sitting her mug, slowly and carefully, back on the work top.
“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” she said.
Which was bad. Rose saying she didn’t like the sound of something was akin to us mere mortals running around screaming hysterically that we were all doomed, doomed I tells ya.
Chapter Two
If 4.17pm marked the bomb-dropping, 5.43pm marked a full-on nuclear implosion which made the initial bomb look like the charge from a Christmas Cracker snapping. A very small Christmas cracker with a very, very small charge.
Rose drove me home – she said I couldn’t be trusted to drive safely and she was probably right. My hands were shaking as were my legs, and my arms, and my head slightly. In fact I was one big shaky wreck and that was no good for driving in rush-hour traffic.
Rose drove a Smart Car – which was an exceptionally bright pink. The steering wheel had an Hello Kitty cover on it, and the seats were covered with lurid pink nylon seat covers. There was a veritable sweetshop full of treats in the glove compartment which normally would have sent me into raptures but even the smell of the chocolate was making me feel slightly nauseated as Rose drove at full pelt back to my house, listening to her Andrew Lloyd Webber collection and warbling along to ‘Could We Start Again Please’.
Mark should have been home. He had been back as usual every night for the last week, pulling into the driveway at 5.35 and walking through the door a minute or so later with a smile on his face as if nothing at all was wrong or different.
But as we pulled up the driveway was strangely empty and I was smart enough to realise that this was probably not a good thing. Even Rose looked mildly perplexed which sent me rocketing to a whole new level of anxiety – one which I never knew existed before.
“Do you want me to come in with you?” Rose asked, sucking on a Werther’s Original and nodding her head towards my house as if it were a crime scene, which I suppose it could well turn into before the day was over.
“Could you? Please?”
“Sure what else have I do with my time? Go home and cook your dad his tea? He can make himself beans on toast or a tuna sandwich. I bought some of that lovely brown bread in the baker’s this morning.”
She was talking in the way she always did but she reached over and gave my hand a squeeze and I had to swallow hard. It would be fine. Rose would come in and her calming presence would wait with me until he came home and then she might just stop me from killing him which, I figured was probably a good thing in the long run.
She followed as I pushed the key into the lock and turned it and walked down the hall and looked at the kitchen where I saw the note he had left for me pinned to the fridge. She watched as I lifted it, opened it and read it as I learned that my husband had not only just walked out of his job a week before but he had also walked out on our marriage and he absolutely and completely and totally did not intend on ever coming back.
The swimming slightly numb sensation eased off a fair whack at that stage, it had to be said. It was as if my brain suddenly switched itself back on.
“He’s not coming back,” I stuttered in a half whisper, the words sounding strange in my throat.
Rose looked at me and there was a momentary hesitation in her reassurance which I didn’t miss.
“Of course he’s coming home,” she said.
“He’s really not,” I said, handing her the letter and walking to the sink and switching the tap on. Shaking, I looked at the water spill into the sink and wondered where the holy hell we kept our glasses? I looked at our cupboards but they all just swam in front of my eyes like they didn’t really exist, like nothing really existed any more.
I could hear Rose’s voice fading in and out as the screaming rose and fell in my head. She was on the phone to my father, calmly telling him there was tuna in the cupboard and that she had bought some Bourbon creams which she had stashed in the biscuit barrel. “You can have two,” I heard her say before telling him that everything was fine and that she would be home soon but she needed to be there for me just now. As I slammed my fourth cupboard door in a row and finally found a glass, I also found myself wishing I had an ounce of stepmother’s calm in a crisis. I sipped from the glass hoping it would steady me – it didn’t. I choked and looked at Rose. She was reading the letter again and shaking her head.
Part of me began to doubt myself. Had I read it right? Mark. Leaving. “Not working” and “nothing personal”. Nothing personal? We’d been married for four years. How the hell could it not be personal? I grabbed the letter from Rose and read it again. He had typed it. The bastard. He had sat down and switched on the computer and opened a file and typed it.
Kitty,
I’m sorry to do this. You will never know how sorry I am. But you must have known. You must have felt it too. We’ve not been working, have we? Not for a long time.
I have tried. I’ve tried to make it better but I don’t know – something in me has changed. It’s not you, Kitty. It’s not personal. I changed. I wanted more and I just can’t go on pretending what we have is good for either of us any more. I know you won’t understand that and that you are probably angry but, believe me, you will understand. One day. One day you won’t be angry any more. One day, you will feel relieved that one of us had the guts to admit this before we went any further. At least we have no children to complicate things. It would have been worse then, for sure.
I’ve left work. It wasn’t working either. You know I hadn’t been happy for a while. I just need to be me for a little bit – to try more and to do more. I just feel as if I’ve not lived and I want to live a little. Please don’t try and find me – Mum and Dad don’t even know where I am. But I’m safe and I think I’m going to be happy.
Don’t hate me. I’m not a bad person.
I’ll be in touch when things have calmed down a little and when you have had the chance to realise this is a good thing.
I’m sorry.
Mark
PS: There is no one else.
The words were no easier to read t
he second time around. If anything it just seemed a little more absurd.
“A breakdown,” Rose declared, switching the kettle on and lifting two cups from the cupboard (which she got right the very first time). “It’s a breakdown. I wouldn’t be convinced he means it.”
“It sounds to me like he means it.”
“That’s because you’re in shock.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s because he pretty much says it in the letter.”
“Your dad had a mini-breakdown, you know, about ten years ago. You know, that time we went to Vegas and he came back with a goatee?”
“Facial hair is hardly on the same level,” I answered, lifting the letter and glancing over it again. It sounded so . . . well . . . wanky. So “I need to live a little” . . . what the frig did he think we had been doing over the last seven years? It felt like living to me – falling in love, getting married, setting up in business, buying this house . . . choosing names for the babies we’d not even conceived yet. It felt pretty damn real to me.
If you enjoeyd these chapters from
What Becomes of The Broken Hearted
by Claire Allan
Why not download the full book below
What Becomes of The Broken Hearted
Also by Claire Allan
Rainy Days and Tuesdays
Feels Like Maybe
Jumping in Puddles
It’s Got to be Perfect
If Only You Knew
The First Time I Said Goodbye