by Cathy Kelly
‘Mel!’ hissed Abby.
‘We do not say that word all the time, and I don’t want to hear you say it either, got it?’ Leonie snapped, wondering why the Von Trapp family reunion wasn’t working out the way she had planned. So much for giant hugs and tearful murmurings of: ‘Mum, we missed you so much, we’ll never go away again.’
One child had become an American overnight and couldn’t wait to get back there to see her father’s fiancée, another was immersed in music and had refused to be hugged. Only dear sweet Abby seemed vaguely pleased to be home.
‘Tell me about this gorgeous fella you’re not going out with,’ Leonie requested in an attempt to get the conversation back on an even keel.
Both girls giggled. ‘Brad is his name,’ explained Abby eagerly. ‘He’s sixteen, tall, with naturally blond hair and he drives a jeep. He was nuts about Mel. He brought us both for a pizza.’
‘Brad, mm,’ said Leonie with a fake smile, her mind doing cartwheels. A sixteen-year-old with his own transport going out with her little girl! Melanie was only fourteen – a very knowing fourteen it had to be said, but still fourteen for all that. What the hell was Ray thinking of! She could have been assaulted, raped, anything!
‘His parents are Dad’s friends, and we weren’t out long,’ Abby added. ‘Dad said he’d murder Brad if we were gone more than an hour and a half, and the pizza place is just down the street.’
‘I wasn’t that interested,’ Mel said airily. ‘He’s too immature for me.’
‘He wasn’t,’ protested Abby and, with a catch in her voice, added, ‘he was lovely.’
I wished he’d fancied me instead of Mel, were the unspoken words.
Leonie’s heart ached for her much-loved daughter, the one who looked just like her. Abby had none of her twin’s effortless prettiness. Abby was as tall as Mel but stocky, with a solid body, mousy brown hair like Leonie’s before she got at it with the bleach, and a round, pleasant face that was only enlivened by her mother’s startling blue eyes. She was a steady, reliable estate car to Melanie’s sleek, capricious Ferrari, and she knew it.
Leonie adored her and saw such beauty and strength of character in Abby’s kind, loving face. But fourteen-year-old girls didn’t want strength of character: they wanted to look like drop-dead gorgeous movie stars and have teenage boys falling at their feet like flies. Mel did, Abby didn’t. And there was nothing their mother could do to even matters up.
At home, the girls rushed out of the car, eager to see their beloved Penny, Clover the cat and Herman.
‘Penny,’ they squealed in unison as their grandmother opened the front door and Penny sprang out like a caged tiger, hysterical with delight. A huge group hug ensued, with everyone trying to cuddle Penny and have it proved that they were her favourite and had been missed the most. With typical feline indifference, Clover refused to have any truck with cuddles, flicked her tail sharply in disapproval and shot off into the garden.
‘She’s affected by the paint fumes,’ muttered Leonie’s mother wickedly.
Luggage was dropped carelessly in the hall, waiting for Leonie to haul it to the various bedrooms.
‘Mom!’ said Mel, aghast, on entering the kitchen which had been magnolia the last time she’d seen it. ‘What have you been doing?’
‘Having an orgy with Francis Bacon,’ laughed Danny, coming up behind his sister and staring at the brightly coloured disaster area which his grandmother had failed to tidy up completely. ‘Were you helping, Gran?’
‘No, and don’t tease your poor mother. She’s been trying to brighten this place up,’ she said sternly, heading to the cooker where a chicken stew was bubbling appetizingly. ‘Your mother needs a hand to tidy up.’
‘I’ve got people to phone,’ said Mel, backing out of the room rapidly at the notion of ruining her nails cleaning up all that horrible newsprint and emulsion. Fliss had given her a French manicure before they’d left for Logan Airport. Domestic work would ruin the effect and she wanted her hands perfect for the next day when she’d pay a visit to her arch enemy and supposed friend, Dervla Malone.
‘Me too.’ Danny was gone like a shot, leaving Abby, her mother, grandmother and a still joyous Penny amid the endless paint-splattered newspapers and cans of paint.
‘I’ll help, Mum,’ said Abby loyally.
‘No, love, we’ll eat in the living room,’ Leonie decided, looking dismally at the chaos and deciding that she couldn’t face a proper clean up. She’d bag all the newspaper and that would be it for the moment. ‘Thanks for cooking,’ she added, giving her mother a peck on the cheek.
They ate on their knees in the living room with the TV on while Danny controlled the remote and flicked from channel to channel in between wolfing down chicken and rice.
Green, thought Leonie, looking around the small but cosy room with its apple-green walls and profusion of plants. Green was the colour she should have painted the kitchen. Not horrible midnight blue. If they could cope with blue for a week, she’d re-do it all next weekend. Maybe a paler green…
Mel’s words intruded into her brain, dragging her away from paint.
‘…Fliss is really nice,’ Mel was whispering to her grandmother, who was nodding wisely and trying not to look at her daughter.
Leonie felt her face burn, knowing her mother pitied her and hating it. Claire had loved Ray and had been heartbroken when they’d got a divorce. ‘There aren’t as many fish in the sea when you’re actively looking, Leonie,’ she had said gently at the time. ‘You love each other: can’t you get on with it and stop looking for true love? I’m so afraid you’ll regret this.’
Ten years on, she’d been proved right, Leonie thought bitterly. Ray had had several long-term girlfriends while she, the great believer in true love, had had so few dates that flirting with the postman was her idea of romantic excitement. And he was past sixty and grizzled looking.
She pretended to concentrate on the sitcom Danny was watching and surreptitiously listened to Mel telling her grandmother all about the holiday.
‘Dad’s house is lovely but not big enough for us, Gran, although it had en suites everywhere,’ said the girl who’d been raised in a succession of small homes and now lived in a cottage with one bathroom and a constant queue for it.
‘Fliss wants to convert one bedroom into a dressing room for herself. She has so many clothes!’
Yeah, snarled Leonie to herself. Probably all band-aid skirts and second-skin leather things. She imagined a cheerleader type, shimmering blonde hair and teeth that had never eaten too many sugar-laden Curly Wurlys as a child. Or maybe she was a hard-bitten businesswoman, another lawyer, all power suits like someone from LA Law. Suddenly Leonie stopped, horrified at herself. What was wrong with her, she wondered blindly. She’d wanted to leave Ray, she’d started the whole agonizing process of separation and divorce – so why was she now jealous of this gorgeous Fliss? He was entitled to another life; she’d practically pushed him into it, hadn’t she?
What sort of person was she turning into if she begrudged Ray a little happiness? A bitch, that’s what. A cast-iron bitch.
Abby was eating very little of her dinner. She normally wolfed it down, eating far more quickly than her twin who nibbled daintily. Now, Abby pushed bits of chicken listlessly around her plate. ‘Are you feeling all right?’ Leonie asked in concern, staring across the coffee table to where Abby sat beside her grandmother on the sofa-bed.
Abby smiled brightly. ‘Fine, Mum, fine,’ she replied. ‘I’m just not hungry.’
‘That’d be a first,’ guffawed Danny.
Abby’s eyes glistened but she said nothing.
Leonie gave her an encouraging grin and vowed to kill Danny when she got him alone. He wouldn’t know how to spell ‘thoughtfulness’, never mind know what it meant. Abby silently took the plates out to the kitchen while Mel rummaged around in a very trendy vinyl handbag Leonie had never seen before. More holiday goodies from a doting father.
‘The holiday snaps,
’ Mel announced happily, finding a huge wad of photo envelopes. ‘I can’t wait any longer to show them to you, Mum.’
Leonie cranked her jaw into a steely smile and hoped she could fake a bit of pleasure at the sight of the beautiful Fliss.
Leonie, Claire and Mel squashed up together on the two-seater to view the precious pictures. The first batch of photos were typically Mel – ones where people had their heads chopped off or shots of the glamorous shops in Boston where the reflection from the glass meant you couldn’t see anything.
‘I don’t know how they didn’t work out so well,’ Mel said in consternation as they all tried to figure out who was who in one particularly blurry picture.
The next batch was better.
‘I took them,’ Danny said loftily from his position as king of the remote control.
After a couple of photos of the girls and Ray, who looked healthy and tanned, there was Fliss.
‘That was the day we took the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard,’ Mel said wistfully as she passed the photo along to her mother.
Leonie stared in shock. Instead of the young, gorgeous girl she’d imagined, Fliss was at least her own age. But there the similarity ended. As tall as Ray, she was slim with dark, boyishly cut hair and the sort of beautiful unlined face that made Leonie wonder when Revlon would be signing her up for a moisturizer advertisement for stunning women over forty. She wore faded jeans on endless legs and a navy polo shirt tucked in at the waistband. In every picture, she was smiling, whether she was hugging Ray or laughing with Mel and the notoriously camera-shy Abby. Even Danny had been coerced into the photos and had posed, long hair windswept, on the ferry beside Fliss.
‘She’s lovely and she’s very clever, you know. She’s a lawyer in Daddy’s firm,’ Mel prattled on, unaware that Leonie was passing the photos along to Claire with the frozen movements of a robot. ‘She has the most wonderful clothes. Daddy teases her for being voted Best Dressed Lawyer in the firm two years in a row!’
Leonie knew she’d never be voted best dressed anything, not unless outsized silk shirts and all-encompassing voluminous skirts suddenly became haute couture.
‘The most incredible thing is she practically never wears make-up,’ Mel added in awe, knocking the final nail into her mother’s coffin. ‘Mascara and a little gloss, that’s all. Although she gets her nails done. Everyone does in America.’
Leonie thought of her own pancake-plastered face and the long minutes she spent applying her goodies every morning. She wouldn’t leave the house without lipliner, kohl and blusher, never mind just a bit of gloss and mascara.
The pride in her daughter’s voice when she talked about this elegant, glamorous stepmother-to-be made her wonder what Mel really thought of her. Had Mel longed to have a mother just like Fliss, instead of a faux-jolly one who flirted outrageously and laughed loudly at even the most unfunny jokes in order to cover up her insecurities? Painfully, she saw herself through Melanie’s eyes: a big fat woman who tried to hide her bulk with ludicrous flowing clothes and tried to make herself interesting with make-up.
‘Time for Coronation Street,’ announced Claire loudly. ‘You’ll have to show me the rest of your pictures tomorrow, Mel – I can’t miss Coro. Now, get out to the kitchen and make us a pot of tea. I’m an old woman and I need sustenance. Biscuits would be nice too.’
Mel responded to her grandmother’s voice with total obedience. It was Claire’s manner that did it, Leonie thought, grateful for the interruption. If Leonie had asked for tea, Mel would have moaned, ‘Let Abby do it. She’s out there.’
As it was, she collected up her photos and went out to make tea, humming happily to herself.
‘Change the channel, Daniel,’ ordered Claire imperiously.
He did and the strains of the soap’s theme tune filled the room. Claire patted her daughter’s knee in a gesture of solidarity. Leonie knew her mother would never speak about Ray’s new love unless asked for her opinion, but she would be aware just how raw Leonie felt, simply because she knew her so well.
They sat through two hours of television before Claire took her leave. ‘I’ve got four bridesmaids’ dresses to make this week, so I need an early start,’ she said as she collected her keys from the pottery bowl in the hall. The girls appeared from their room to kiss their grandmother goodbye; Danny roared ‘bye’ from the kitchen where he was making a crisp-and-cheese sandwich for himself.
Claire hugged her daughter last of all: a tight, comforting hug. ‘Phone me tomorrow if you need to chat,’ was all she said, a coded message that meant: If you want to sob down the phone about Ray and Fliss.
After she was gone, Leonie pottered about, tidying up the sitting room and starting on the disaster area that was the kitchen. Mel had left the photos on the coffee table in the sitting room and they drew Leonie like a magnet. She wanted to look at them again, to see how beautiful Fliss was, how slim, how perfect.
Like a dieter drawn inexorably to the last KitKat nestling at the back of the cupboard, she couldn’t resist looking. Danny was engrossed in some cop show and wouldn’t notice, she hoped. Quietly, she snatched the photos and brought them into her bedroom. Penny followed her loyally and lay down on the bed with her as she flicked through the envelopes feeling guilty.
Afraid Mel would somehow know which order the photos were in, Leonie carefully went through them so as not to mix them up. There were loads more of Fliss, more than Mel had shown them.
In one, they were obviously all at dinner in some swanky restaurant. Mel was sitting beside Fliss wearing what looked like a very adult sparkly top that Leonie didn’t recognize. Abby looked her normal self in a white shirt, but Ray was utterly transformed. He looked as sparkling as Mel’s top. The next photo was a close-up of Ray and Fliss, and his face was animated in a way Leonie never remembered it being. He looked utterly content. He’d never looked that way with her, Leonie reflected sadly.
She flicked through the rest of the pictures, feeling more dispirited than ever. After a while, she put them back in the envelopes and stuck them in the kitchen in the old wicker basket on the table where she kept the bills and letters. That way, if Mel had been looking for them, Leonie could say she’d put them in the basket for safekeeping.
In the girls’ room, Abby was in bed reading Pride and Prejudice, her favourite book, while Mel was at the dressing table painstakingly cleansing her face with cold cream.
This was a new routine, Leonie realized. Normally, Mel didn’t bother with any cleansing ritual; she blithely imagined that acne was for other, less naturally pretty girls and never so much as wiped off the mascara she wasn’t supposed to wear. Now, she was industriously patting her face with cotton wool pads as if she was a restorer working on a muddy Monet.
Leonie sat down on the edge of Mel’s bed. ‘It’s lovely to have you back,’ she said, wishing she didn’t feel like an intruder in their bedroom after a mere three weeks’ absence.
‘Yeah,’ muttered Mel. ‘Wish we weren’t going back to school though. I hate school. I wish it was January.’
Unusually, Abby wasn’t in a mood to talk. She often followed her mother into bed, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed, stroking Penny’s velvety ears and talking nineteen to the dozen until they realized it was half eleven and gasped at the thought that they had to get up at seven. Tonight, she smiled a suspiciously thin smile at Leonie and went back to her book, obviously not wanting to be drawn into any conversation. Maybe she, too, was missing the perfect Fliss, Leonie thought sadly.
Feeling in the way and miserable, she retreated. She turned off the hall light, locked the back door after Penny had been outside for her ablutions, and warned Danny not to have the TV on too loudly. Then she went to bed.
She rarely switched on her clock radio at night but tonight she felt lonely, so she flicked the switch. A late-night discussion show was on and the subject matter was dating agencies.
‘Where would ya find a fella in the back of beyond without some help?’ demanded
one woman, fighting back against a male caller who felt that paying for introductions was the last resort of the hopeless.
‘I bet you look like a complete old cow,’ the male caller interrupted smugly, pointing out that he was married with four kids.
‘And I bet your wife is screwing around on ya, ya old curmudgeon,’ retorted the woman.
The radio host intervened, sensing the argument was going to hit the four-letter-word level. ‘We’ll be back after the news,’ he said smoothly, ‘for an interview with a couple who found true love in the personal ads.’
Leonie was hooked. An hour later, she turned the radio and her light off and lay in bed in darkness. She wasn’t alone after all. There were lots of people who felt lonely and didn’t know where to go to meet new partners, people who felt too old for the twenty-something pub scene and too young for tea dances. The woman on the radio had been like Leonie: a lonely woman who couldn’t imagine falling in love ever again. Two adverts in her local Belfast paper later, she was dating a lovely man. Now they were getting married and were going to be the subject of a documentary about finding love in unusual ways. Why shouldn’t I try that too, Leonie asked herself. If she had a man, she wouldn’t feel depressed about Ray and Fliss, or about how Mel seemed bored to be home, or about how fat she was getting, or anything.
She curled her toes up under the duvet at the thought of her exciting plan: she’d take out a personal ad or join a dating agency. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, was to find a man. That was it, she had to have one. And then she’d feel better about herself. Wouldn’t she?
‘What does GSOH mean?’ Leonie asked, staring at her horoscope in the tiny kitchen during the ten minutes they tried to snatch each day between morning rounds and the beginning of surgery.
Angie, the practice’s only female vet, looked up from the crossword she did effortlessly each morning in seven minutes flat. ‘Good sense of humour,’ she replied in her crisp Australian accent. Clear grey eyes scrutinized her colleague. ‘Why?’