by Sue Margolis
“I love her, too,” Cyn smiled.
“She ees complicated, though, non?”
“How do you mean?”
“She pretend to be tough, but I can see she ees vulnerable. She make ze jokes all ze time to try and ’ide eet, but I can see srough her.” The man was truly multiskilled—sort of Rambo meets Jamie Oliver meets Frasier.
“She had a hard childhood,” Cyn said. “There was no choice, she had to be tough.”
“I know.”
“She told you?”
He nodded. “We talk all ze time. Zere ees a chemistry between us. I have a feeling of coming ’ome when I am wiz her. Do you know zat feeling, Ceen?”
Cyn began stabbing a teaspoon into the bowl of sugar. “Oh, yes. I know it. I know it very well.” She was thinking about Joe.
“Zen you understand, non?”
She carried on stabbing the sugar. “Laurent, please don’t hurt her. Her last relationship just ended and she’s very fragile at the moment.”
“I know. Zees Justin. He was a fool, an idiot, non? I could never ’urt ’Armony. Never. You ’ave my word.”
She believed him. Of course in the end it might not work out between them. But Cyn had high hopes. There was no doubt that Laurent possessed a heart as big as he was and that unlike Justin, he didn’t seem to have a fear of commitment. In fact it was the very opposite. He desperately wanted to look after Harmony. She had managed to work her way out of poverty with only herself to rely on. Now she deserved a soft place to fall: a place that all the money in the world couldn’t buy.
Harmony arrived looking like Sandy from Grease in a flared acid-yellow skirt with black polka dots. On top she wore a black button-through blouse with a turned-up collar and three-quarter-length sleeves. It suddenly occurred to Cyn that her best friends seemed to be forever at her parents’ house. For a few seconds she felt about nine again.
Harmony could barely contain her excitement. “I just got the results of my blood test,” she whispered. “I’m fine. Not remotely menopausal.”
Cyn threw her arms round her friend. “Oh, hon,” she said, squeezing her, “that’s wonderful news.”
“You were right. The doctor says my periods have been messing around because I’m stressed. He reckons working too many hours, doing up the house and the whole Justin thing just got too much. He says I just need to slow down and have more fun.”
“But you’ve never slowed down in your life.”
“I agree I might have to work on that, but in the meantime I’m going to start on the fun part. I’m taking Laurent back to my hotel where I have a bottle of Cristal on ice. This will be our third date. Time to move to the next level, I think.” She gave Cyn a wink and turned to Laurent, who was coming down the stairs. “Come on, chéri, allons-y.”
Laurent’s face lit up when he saw her. He wrapped her in his arms, kissed her and told her how magnifique she looked. He was wearing old, indifferently fitting jeans and an ancient leather bomber jacket, which had never been trendy, even when it was new. But Harmony didn’t seem to notice. As he scooped her up, she was all girlie giggles and fake swoon. When he finally let her go, she turned to Cyn. “Isn’t this man just gorgeous?”
Cyn agreed he was.
“Oh, by the way, don’t forget,” Harmony went on. “Thursday night—party at the salon.” Cyn had completely forgotten. Harmony had mentioned the party weeks ago and it had gone straight out of her head. She had poached some hotshot stylist from John Frieda and was having a drinks do to welcome him. “I’ve got a stack of celebs coming. It’ll be a laugh.”
“OK if I bring Joe?”
“Of course. I think it’s about time I checked him out.” She turned to Laurent. “Cyn’s going out with some guy she met in her therapy group. Me and ’Ewge are worried he might be bonkers.” Laurent clearly had little understanding of what she meant by therapy group or bonkers. Harmony said she would explain later.
“Oh, God, you’re not going to start giving Joe the third degree, are you?” Cyn said, “just because he’s in therapy . . .”
“It’s not just because he’s in therapy. The man is thirty-six and has never had a proper relationship—remember?”
Laurent shrugged. “Eet can ’appen. Maybe he has not met ze right woman yet.”
“Thank you,” Cyn said to Laurent. “At last, somebody who understands.” She turned back to Harmony. “Look, I know you mean well, but Joe and I are getting serious. You know how Gran’s always going on about there being a lid for every pot. Well, I think I’ve found my lid. I really want you to be pleased for me.”
Harmony looked sheepish. “Oh, Cyn, I’m sorry. Of course I’m pleased you’ve found your lid.” But there was no mistaking the concern on her face.
Barbara boiled Mal a couple of eggs for his supper and took them up to him with some buttered toast and a cup of tea. While she was gone, Cyn made a couple of gin and tonics.
“Here, get this down you,” Cyn said to Barbara as she came back into the kitchen. “You look like you could do with it.” Her mother’s face was taut and drawn. Cyn suspected it had little to do with organizing the wedding and everything with the shock of finding Mal collapsed on the floor last week.
“You read my mind.” Barbara smiled. “Cheers.” She swallowed hard. Cyn insisted she sit down. “I’ll get the supper. Pasta OK? I found a jar of tomato sauce in the cupboard.”
“Perfect.” Barbara sat down, pulled out another chair and rested her feet on it. “This thing with your dad has been quite a shock.” She took another slug of her gin and tonic.
“I know. We were all shaken up by it.”
“I started thinking about him dying.”
Cyn lit the gas under the pasta water and came and sat down at the table. “Mum, don’t worry. Dad’s got decades left.” She took her mother’s hand.
Barbara shrugged. “I hope so. I really love him, you know—more now than ever. Something seems to happen as you get older. The children are grown up, you’re freer than you’ve ever been and life starts to be fun again. The love seems to get deeper, more intense. It’s wonderful, but I’ve been wondering if it comes about partly because you know you might not have that much time left. “
“I can see how it might,” Cyn said gently.
“Sometimes I look back and wonder where all the years went. It seems like yesterday that you and Jonny were babies. You used to wear this cute little rabbit sleep suit with ears. You looked so gorgeous. Do you remember the first time we took you on a plane and you asked if we were going to Heaven?”
“Yes, and you said we weren’t exactly going to Heaven, but Ibiza was pretty close.”
Barbara sat swirling the ice around in her glass. “My cancer really affected you, didn’t it?”
Blimey. Where had that come from? Cyn was knocked completely off balance. She couldn’t think what to say. “When I was ill,” Barbara went on, “and Daddy had to look after you, you were so good. Too good. He reminded me the other day how he never had to shout at you.”
“You talked about this with Dad?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I? Tell me, is it the reason you’re in therapy?”
Cyn looked down at her drink and up again. “Mum, now isn’t the time for this. You’ve got enough to worry about.”
“It is, isn’t it? Please tell me.”
Cyn took a sip of her gin and tonic. “I think it probably is. A lot of the time I find it hard to stand up for myself. I feel I have to be good all the time and I think maybe it’s a legacy from having to be so good when you were ill.” Barbara was looking forlorn. There were tears in her eyes.
“Oh, God, now I’ve upset you,” Cyn said. “It’s the one thing I promised I would never do. It wasn’t your fault you got ill. I’m not blaming you. It’s just that it affected all of us.”
“It certainly affected Jonny. He told me.”
“God, you really have been busy. He didn’t tell me you’d talked.”
“I’m sure he will. He said my illness made
him feel insecure and frightened and that’s why he’s so scared to take risks now.”
“He told me the same.”
“Sweetie, I am so sorry.” She pulled some tissue out of her trouser pocket and wiped her eyes.
“Sorry? What for? Mum, for crying out loud, you didn’t choose to get breast cancer.”
“I know, but you weren’t much more than babies. I suppose a bit of me still feels responsible for what happened.”
“You mustn’t. It was out of your control.”
“In my head I know that, but my heart is another matter.”
“Oh, Mum.” Cyn squeezed Barbara’s hand.
“We should have talked about this years ago. It was my fault we didn’t. When it was over you both seemed pretty OK and I didn’t want to risk making you unhappy by raking it all up again.”
“And all this time I’ve been desperate not to upset you.”
Barbara smiled. “We’ve both been so stupid . . . So, is it good, this group?”
“I’m not sure. Some of the people are a bit weird.” She paused—trying to decide whether or not to tell her mother about Joe. She decided that since they had started being honest with each other, she would. “I met a man there. His name’s Joe. He was the friend I was in Derbyshire with.”
“You met a man at your group? Is that wise? I mean, some of these people in therapy are terribly unstable.”
What was it with everybody? Why did the whole world assume people in therapy were unhinged?
“He’s not remotely unstable in the same way that I’m not unstable. Quite the opposite, in fact. He’s lovely. He had a lousy upbringing, that’s all.” She decided not to say anything about his lack of a long-term relationship. Then she really would start to worry. Instead she said, “He’s Irish.”
“Catholic?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, fantastic.” Barbara smiled, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Tell you what, you break the news to your grandmother, I’ll alert the paramedics.” Although Faye now adored Flick, her initial reaction to being told her granddaughter-in-law-to-be was Catholic had owed less to modern liberal thinking and more to late-nineteenth-century Yiddish theater.
“But you don’t mind, right?”
“Sweetie, how can you even ask? If this Joe makes you as happy as Flick makes Jonny, I couldn’t be happier and I know your dad will feel the same.” She looked hesitant, as if she was psyching herself up to ask her next question. “Are you in love with him?”
“It’s very early days, but yes. I think I am.”
They were still hugging and crying when Cyn heard the sound of water boiling over. She leaped up and turned down the gas.
“So,” Barbara said, “are you better now at standing up for yourself?”
Cyn tipped fusilli into the water. Once again she considered telling Barbara about the Chelsea affair, but she decided the time still wasn’t right. What with the wedding and Mal’s mumps, her mother had enough on her plate. She didn’t need to know her daughter was doing something so reckless it was putting her in serious danger of losing her job. “I’m getting there,” was all Cyn said.
“Good girl. You know, I’m really proud of you.”
“Thanks.”
“So are we OK?”
Cyn came back to the table and took her mother’s hand again. “Mum, we were never not OK. You can be a bit bossy and interfering sometimes, but I love you so much.”
“And I love you, too.”
Cyn returned to the counter and began spooning pasta sauce into a microwave dish.
“So, exactly when do I interfere?” Barbara said with the teensiest hint of defensiveness. “I mean, it’s not like I’m on the phone every five minutes telling you how to live your life. Just because I care about you and want to see you happy, is that interfering? Is it so wrong that a mother should want to see her daughter happily married with children? No, go on, tell me. I’d really like to know . . .”
Chapter 17
The next day Cyn e-mailed Gazza to let him know that the auditions for the Droolin’ Dream commercial had been arranged for the following Monday and that Dan, the director, was aiming to start filming the following week. Gazza came straight back to say he was happy for Cyn and Dan to be in charge of the auditions, but he would be there for the filming.
By the way, got a freebie boxed set of k.d. Lang CDs and wondered if you would like them. Thought they might be up your street. She couldn’t help laughing. She hated lying to Gazza. In his own clumsy way, he meant well. She e-mailed back to say she would love the CDs.
She also got a voice mail message from Chelsea to say her back was improving gradually with physiotherapy and she would be leaving hospital in ten days or so. “I won’t be ready to come back to work for another couple of weeks, but I will be stopping by the office to check how everything’s going. Also, I want to go to Slough to see the Droolin’ Dream people. I hope Gary Rossiter will be back from his vacation by then.”
Cyn’s heart lurched. The moment Chelsea got back, she would find out what had been going on behind her back and there would be an explosive, probably public confrontation. The new Cyn felt she could cope with this, but she needed to be certain it would be Chelsea who was going to end up exposed and humiliated. What scared her was that the opposite might happen and that when Graham Chandler got back from New York, it would be she who was out on her ear.
The fact remained that Cyn possessed no hard, incontrovertible evidence that Chelsea had stolen her idea. Luke’s evidence was useless since he believed the potentially incriminating conversation Chelsea had had in the loo was with a drug dealer called Skippy. Only Cyn knew that it was with Charlie Taylor, the ad man in L.A. who was supplying all her ideas.
Somehow in the next ten days, Cyn had to prove that Chelsea was a fraud and that when Charlie refused to come up with any more ideas for her, the fear of being found out had driven her to steal Cyn’s Droolin’ Dream proposal. Her task seemed so impossibly ridiculous that it was almost funny. “Right, not much pressure there, then,” she laughed out loud.
She was still preoccupied with all this as she sat in the coffee shop across the road, drinking cappuccino and waiting for Joe to arrive. He was flying to Dublin from City Airport. Since his flight wasn’t until three and the PCW office was pretty much on his way, he and Cyn arranged to meet up for a quick bite. He texted her to say he would be another fifteen minutes or so.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said breathlessly. “Couldn’t find anywhere to park.”
He sat down opposite her and reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a plastic bag, which clearly had a book inside. “I found this yesterday in a secondhand bookshop. I thought it would be perfect for you.” He put the bag on the table in front of her. She looked puzzled. “Go on, open it,” he said, smiling.
She opened the bag and took out a battered paperback. The moment she saw the title she burst out laughing and read it aloud. “Take a Hike—The Couch Potato’s Guide to Country Walks. That’s brilliant. I love it.” She realized in that moment how little she minded being teased by him. In fact she adored it. It brought with it an intimacy that she had rarely felt with a man.
She reached across the table and kissed him. The kiss turned into something slightly more than a peck. It wasn’t until they pulled apart that they realized the waitress was standing next to them waiting to take their order. With a certain amount of embarrassed throat clearing, they asked for a couple of ham-and-cheese paninis and two more cappuccinos.
While they waited for their food to arrive she started telling him how worried she was about not being able to prove it was Chelsea who stole her idea rather than the other way round.
“I’m wondering if I should phone this Charlie Taylor,” she said. “See what he has to say.”
“You could try, but I’m not sure he would say anything. You told me that his father worked with Chelsea’s father. There’s a family connection. At the end of the day he’s bound to stay loyal to Chel
sea, no matter what he really thinks of her.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. I need to give this some thought. Maybe there’s another way of approaching him.”
Their cappuccinos arrived. As he sat scooping up the froth, a faraway look came over him.
“So,” she said, suspecting what was the matter, “all geared up for seeing your mum?”
“I guess so,” he said quietly, still looking down at his coffee.
“You sound like you might be getting cold feet.”
He abandoned his froth scooping and looked at her. “A bit, maybe.”
“That’s understandable. Seeing her is going to be hard, but I reckon it’ll be worth it.” She decided to tell him about her heart-to-heart with Barbara the night before. “Turns out she always suspected her illness had taken an emotional toll on Jonny and me, and she’s been carrying the guilt around for all these years. My only regret is that I didn’t say something sooner. It would have helped both of us.”
“Come on,” he said gently, “you did what you thought was right. You can’t start blaming yourself.”
“I know, but it’s hard not to.” She paused. “In the group you said you weren’t angry with your mother. In fact, if I remember rightly, you said you didn’t feel very much at all toward her. So, has that changed?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. You know, I realize I need to be in therapy and it is definitely helping, but I’m still not very good at all this feelings stuff.” His face broke into a smile. “I guess it’s a bloke thing.”
She shrugged. “Not all men find it hard. What about Ken?”
“He’s been a priest—you’d expect it.”
She thought for a moment. “What about Woody Allen? And then there’s Ross from Friends.”
“OK, first, Ross isn’t real, he’s made-up. Second, they’re both American. Americans don’t do anything other than talk about their feelings. I mean, Oprah’s practically had every citizen’s inalienable right to emote written into the Constitution.”
She gave a gentle laugh and said she got the point.