Someone Like You

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘Let’s ask her over for a drink,’ she said now. ‘We’re asking her, not Ma and Pa as well,’ she added. After all, she thought silently, if she was befriending one lonely soul on this holiday where she’d planned for total solitude, she may as well befriend another. ‘I promise you, Leonie, if her father wants to sit with us and they drive us mad, I’ll get rid of them!’

  Leonie laughed. ‘If he annoys me, don’t worry, I’ll do the honours.’

  Hannah walked gracefully over to the other girl’s table, Leonie watching her new friend enviously. Hannah was so slim and God! so sexy. Leonie would have given five years of her life to look like Hannah for just one night.

  ‘Hello, I’m Hannah Campbell. Since you’re on your own, would you like to have a drink with us?’

  The girl’s face creased into a pleased smile.

  Hannah loved being right: the girl was pretty when she smiled. She had a sweet, shy smile and her eyes were a lovely smoky blue colour fringed with fair lashes. If only she’d do something with that hair.

  ‘I’d love to,’ Emma said in her hesitant, throaty voice. ‘I always feel so self-conscious sitting on my own with a drink. I’m Emma, by the way. Emma Sheridan.’

  Carrying her drink, she followed Hannah over to the table and held her hand out to Leonie.

  ‘Emma Sheridan,’ she said formally.

  Leonie grinned. ‘Leonie Delaney,’ she replied.

  ‘Do you mind me joining you?’ Emma asked.

  ‘Thrilled,’ Leonie said.

  ‘Right.’ Hannah decided she needed to do something to liven things up. ‘We all need a drink. What do you want, girls?’

  ‘I’ve loads of mineral water left,’ Emma said, holding up her glass.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Hannah said briskly. ‘You need a proper drink.’

  The other woman’s expression faltered. ‘I shouldn’t, really. My father, you know…’ she hesitated, catching herself just in time. Imagine telling these two women that she wasn’t going to have a drink because her father disapproved of women drinking more than a sherry and she couldn’t face his disapproval. They’d think she was a complete nutcase. ‘My father says the beer here is supposed to be very strong.’

  ‘A glass of wine won’t kill you.’

  Something fell to the floor and Hannah picked it up. It was a small bottle of Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy, the herbal antidote to stress. You took four drops on your tongue to calm your nerves, she knew, having consumed enough of it when she was recovering from Harry’s round-the-world bombshell.

  Emma gave her a wry look. ‘Travelling makes me stressed,’ she said bluntly. She left out the words ‘travelling with my father…’

  Hannah handed the bottle back. ‘Well, you definitely need one drink then.’

  Leonie pronounced her white wine unusual but drinkable, so that was that. The barman brought three glasses of white wine.

  Emma, who seemed to be relaxing with every moment, took an enormous sip of her drink. She gasped and gave a happy little shudder. ‘I needed that. So,’ she said, ‘I presume you two are friends.’

  ‘No,’ Leonie said, ‘we met on the plane. I’m terrified of flying and Hannah swapped seats with me. But as we’re travelling on our own, we sort of linked up.’

  ‘I’m here with my parents,’ Emma explained, then felt herself redden because she knew damn well the other two knew that.

  Everyone who’d been on the plane had known it: you couldn’t miss her father. Now they’d really think she was some sort of weirdo who was tied to her parents. ‘My husband had to go to a conference and couldn’t come with us,’ she added. Nervousness made her tactless: ‘Do your partners not like cultural trips either?’

  Hannah grinned. ‘I’m not seeing anyone right now and my last lover’ – her full lips curved into a smile at the thought of Jeff – ‘well, I don’t know if he’d have been into a trip to Egypt.’

  ‘My husband and I are divorced,’ blurted out Leonie. ‘We meant to come to Egypt on our honeymoon, but we were too broke at the time. I figured that if I waited until I was married again to come here, I’d be waiting a long time.’ She slumped in her seat, feeling miserable. It must be jet lag or something.

  ‘Don’t be so defeatist,’ Hannah said kindly. ‘If you want something, you’ll get it. If you want a man, go out and get one.’

  Leonie stared at her in astonishment. Most of her friends – well, Anita and the female members of the gang, really – changed the subject brusquely if she mentioned her single status. They muttered that men weren’t everything and, God, sure didn’t they nearly murder Tony/Bill/whoever every five minutes for leaving the loo seat up or for never washing up so much as a spoon. ‘Wouldn’t you be as well off on your own,’ they chorused with fake cheeriness. ‘Nobody to act hopeless around the washing machine. And you have the kids, after all…’

  But Hannah had no such compunction. ‘We’ll help you find a nice single bloke on the cruise,’ Hannah said. ‘There’s bound to be someone on the boat who’s longing for the love of a good woman.’

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ Leonie protested.

  ‘I’m not saying it is, but you can do it if you want to. It just takes a different approach these days. You’ve so much going for you, Leonie, you’d get a man no bother if you really put your mind to it.’ She patted Leonie’s arm reassuringly.

  Leonie was still mouthing in shock. How lovely of Hannah to say she had a lot going for her, but how mad as a bicycle to imagine that getting a man was just a simple matter of deciding to do so and accomplishing it. Perhaps that’s how it happened to people like Hannah but not to her. I mean, she thought, where had all the available men been over the last few years? Waiting for her to emerge from the chrysalis of having children under the age of fourteen?

  ‘What do you mean by “putting your mind to it”?’ she asked finally.

  ‘Dating agencies, magazine adverts, even carmaintenance classes,’ Hannah said matter-of-factly. ‘You’ve got to try them all. That’s the way to meet people these days.’

  ‘My friend Gwen met her boyfriend through a dinner club,’ Emma pointed out.

  ‘A dinner club?’

  ‘It’s a club for singles and you all go out to dinner once a month and see what happens. Gwen says she met loads of men. Some strange guys too, mind you. But she met Paul and that’s all that matters to her.’

  ‘I’d put any man off me if he saw me eating,’ Leonie said, only half joking. ‘Or I’d have to do like Scarlett O’Hara and eat before I went out so I’d be able to nibble daintily in front of Mr Right. Women with big appetites put men off, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘I’d probably order the sloppiest thing on the menu and end up with sauce all over my chin and chunks of bread roll flying off to hit other people in the eye,’ laughed Emma, getting into the swing of things now that she’d had that wonderful glass of wine. ‘I’m so clumsy when I’m nervous.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ Hannah groaned.

  Both Emma and Leonie thought that was unlikely. Hannah looked so self-possessed and calm. Even her hair obeyed her. Sleek and perfectly groomed, not a stray dark hair dangled from her neat ponytail.

  ‘Honestly, I am,’ she protested, seeing the looks of disbelief on their faces. ‘I went for a job interview a month ago and when I was supposed to be reaching into my attaché case to hand them details of this computer course I’d done, I stupidly reached into my handbag instead, and stuck my fingers right into my hairbrush. You know the way you get a bristle under the nail…?’

  They all winced.

  ‘It bled like a ruddy artery and I had to get tissue, wrap the finger in it – all while my hand was still in my handbag! – and pretend nothing had happened for the rest of the interview. They must have thought I was hideously tense because I kept one hand clenched up all the time, trying to hide the tissue so I wouldn’t look like a casualty victim in need of a transfusion.’

  ‘You poor thing,’ Leonie said sympathetically. ‘Did you get the
job in the end?’

  Hannah’s grin of triumph lit up her face and the toffee-coloured eyes sparkled. ‘Yes. Bloody finger and all.’

  She waved at a waiter and tried to order more wine.

  ‘I’ll have mineral water,’ Emma said quickly, thinking of both the baby and her father. She could still remember that awful moment at Kirsten’s wedding when he’d ticked Emma off in front of all the guests for having too much to drink.

  ‘So what is the job?’ asked Leonie. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I was a hotel receptionist but I decided it was a dead-end job. It was a terrible hotel, really, but I took that job to get out of my old one which was even more dead-end, in a shop. My new job is office manager in an estate agent’s. I know it’s totally different, but I wanted to move jobs. I’ve done night courses in a management school for the past eight months and I’ve started an estate agent’s course. Not that I think I’d be lucky enough to branch into that part of things, you have to have loads of qualifications from what I can see, but it’s good to know all about the business.’

  It was funny, Hannah realized. She hadn’t talked about herself to anyone for over a year, since Harry. And here she was, practically giving her life story to these two strangers. Holidays certainly had a bizarre effect on you – maybe it was the air.

  ‘Wow,’ Emma said admiringly. ‘A woman with a mission.’

  ‘I’ve got a mission all right – to make a career for myself. I got side-tracked for a few years,’ she added, not wanting to mention that the side-track had been nearly ten years with Harry, who’d let her sink into the squalor of coupledom before abandoning her for his South American trip.

  ‘And your mission,’ Hannah said to Leonie, deciding to change the subject, ‘is to find yourself a man, because that’s what you want. If I can turn myself into an office manager, you can find a man.’

  ‘Men, the root of all evil,’ sighed Leonie, starting on her second glass of wine. ‘I don’t mean that, really. I love men. That’s the problem,’ she added gloomily. ‘I think I scare them off. But I never thought of a dating agency. To be honest, I always thought only oddballs tried blind dating. Knowing my luck, I’d meet a serial killer or some nut with a fondness for PVC knickers and autoerotic asphyxia.’

  Hannah laughed grimly. ‘I’ve met enough nuts without the help of a dating agency. Not PVC fetishists, mind you, but still mad. My last long-term boyfriend should have come with a government health warning and I met him in the safest place in the world: McDonald’s at lunchtime. So you may as well try dating agencies, Leonie. At least you get to pick who you’ll meet and who you won’t bother with.’

  ‘Harrison Ford,’ said Leonie dreamily. ‘I want a Harrison Ford clone who loves children, animals and overweight blonde divorcées.’

  ‘What about your man?’ Hannah asked Emma, who immediately smiled at the thought of Pete.

  ‘He’s lovely,’ she admitted. ‘I’m very lucky. He’s kind and funny and I love him to bits.’ Pete’s face appeared in her mind: the open, smiling face with the brown eyes, big grin and the dark hair cropped close to his scalp. Well, Pete always argued, there was no point wearing your hair long when there was so little of it. She loved his seriously receding hairline, loved kissing him on the top of his head and telling him that bald men were more virile. She wouldn’t have wanted Harrison Ford, or even Tom Cruise, for that matter. She couldn’t imagine either of them making her breakfast in bed when she felt ill, or massaging her shoulders when she got backache or insisting that she read a magazine while he made dinner on nights when she felt tired. Or leaving a lovely note buried in her suitcase telling her he loved her and that he couldn’t wait for her to get home. Pete adored her. Only his dislike of her father meant he’d let her go away for a week without him.

  ‘We’ve been married three years and he’s really good to me,’ she said. Then, because she couldn’t resist, she told them about the sweet note he’d left hidden between her T-shirts in the suitcase.

  ‘Oooh, that’s lovely,’ Leonie said.

  She and Hannah were half-way down their second glasses of wine and they’d all been talking happily about why they’d decided to come to Egypt when the sound of Jimmy O’Brien’s booming voice could be heard from the doorway.

  ‘…if this is their idea of a first-class boat, I’ll be having words with that young courier woman, I’m telling you,’ he was saying loudly to another guest. ‘The shower’s useless and my towels got soaked because the shower curtain wasn’t any good. Call that first class? I don’t think so. Rip-off merchants, that’s what these bloody fellas are, pretending this is a first-class boat. Hmmph.

  ‘I’m not sitting outside,’ he added to his wife, ‘we’ll be eaten alive. Bloody mosquitoes.’

  Hannah watched as Emma visibly shrank into her seat, her eyes briefly filled with an emotion Hannah could identify easily: wariness. Hannah’s mother’s face had often looked that way, usually when her father rolled home after a day at the races, roaring drunk, bad-tempered and looking for someone to take it out on. He’d been small and ran to fat, mostly beer fat, unlike Emma’s father who was a formidable man, tall and strong. A man who could intimidate people and liked doing it. He didn’t need alcohol to make him bad-tempered: it was obvious he was like that all the time.

  Emma looked as if she’d rather have been keelhauled than face an evening with her parents. A surge of pity made Hannah reach out and touch her arm gently: ‘Would you like to sit with us at a separate table tonight?’ she asked quietly.

  Emma looked relieved at the idea, then shook her head. ‘I couldn’t, they’ll expect…’

  ‘Say you’re sure they’d like their first evening to be just for themselves, a romantic evening where you’re not a gooseberry,’ Hannah urged.

  Emma stifled the desire to snigger at the thought of her parents having a romantic evening. Her father reckoned romance was for wimps. He’d openly laughed at Pete for buying her a dozen red roses on Valentine’s Day.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Leonie, getting into the swing of things. ‘We need a third musketeer.’ Poor Emma was a lovely girl and obviously in need of saving from that obnoxious man. ‘Say you know one of us already and you want to chat.’

  ‘They’d never swallow that,’ Emma replied.

  Mr O’Brien had spotted his daughter with two women he didn’t recognize and marched over to their table, his wife in his wake like a tug boat following a liner into port.

  ‘I don’t have a wide circle of friends and if we pretended, my father would give you the third degree and soon work out you were lying.’

  Leonie tapped her nose enigmatically. ‘I happen to be a superb actress. We’ll say we know each other through your work. What do you do, anyway?’

  ‘I work for KrisisKids Charity. I’m in special projects,’ Emma said.

  ‘That’s run by that retired politician, Edward Richards, isn’t it?’ Leonie insisted. ‘His family owns Darewood Castle and the stud farm.’

  Emma was pleased that Leonie knew enough about the charity to know who ran the organization. It meant their public relations company were doing their job. But she couldn’t see how Edward fitted into this particular evening’s equation.

  ‘I’m a vet nurse,’ Leonie added. ‘Our practice used to be their vets. Very posh, I believe,’ Leonie said.

  ‘Hello there,’ boomed Mr O’Brien, sizing up the seating arrangements and noticing with displeasure that there was only room for three chairs at the small table.

  Emma immediately got up, smiled a nervous goodbye to the girls and led her parents to another table.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friends?’ her mother asked peevishly.

  ‘I thought you wanted to sit down, Mum,’ Emma said, not wanting to ruin her new friendship by making Hannah and Leonie meet her father. Grumpy after the flight, lord only knew what he’d come out with. ‘You can meet them later. Will I order you a mineral water?’

  Her mother immediately started f
anning herself with her hand and looked faint. ‘Yes, it’s so hot, that would be lovely.’

  ‘Sit down, Emma, and stop fussing,’ ordered her father brusquely. ‘The waiter will come – eventually. These Egyptians don’t seem keen to work. At home, you’d have a drink in your hand within a minute of arriving at the bar, but here…oh no, it’s a different kettle of fish altogether.’ He glared around at the bar where the waiter was busy serving a group of people who’d just arrived and were clamouring for cocktails. ‘No bloody concept of service,’ said Jimmy O’Brien loudly.

  A few feet away, Hannah and Leonie grimaced at his rudeness. Emma cringed in her bamboo chair. This was a disaster. It didn’t matter that she was sitting in the balmy night air with the vibrant city of Luxor yards away and the treasures of the Nile waiting to be explored: she was on holiday with her father and he was going to ruin everything.

  ‘I’ll get the drinks,’ she announced suddenly, thinking she just had to get away before her father said something utterly offensive about the waiter.

  Watching Emma practically run to the bar, her face bright pink with embarrassment, Leonie nudged Hannah: ‘Poor girl isn’t going to have much of a holiday if he carries on like that all the time. The man’s a pig and she’s mortified.’

  ‘I know,’ Hannah nodded. ‘But what can you do? He’s her father and she’s stuck with him.’

  Leonie grinned wickedly. ‘Maybe not.’