A Posy of Promises_a heartwarming story about life and love

by Sharon Dempsey

  They had clapped appreciatively. Someone wolf whistled. It wasn’t seedy or full of dirty old men. The crowd were mainly office workers, and a hen party, young people out for entertainment and a night of laughs. Ava had never felt such a surge of sparky energy before. She felt lit-up from her toes to the ends of her hair. Everything felt electric and alive. At one point, she’d taken a selfie and sent it to Joseph.

  Afterwards, Ava, Niamh and Cal had screeched with laughter and recounted the scene with Cal giving a full-on rendition in the middle of Shaftesbury Square with the same ostrich feather sticking out from between his bare bum cheeks as he dropped his trousers for the hell of it.

  Beyond that, Ava could not remember making it home. Come to think of it, this didn’t feel like her bed. She turned over, in spite of the dull headache threatening to explode into a fierce furnace of pain, and there right beside her in the bed was something or someone warm and solid.

  Please God, let me be in Niamh’s bed with her and not Cal or some poor hapless fella I’ve accidentally picked up at the club, Ava thought with terror.

  Tentatively she opened one eye, the other was glued solid and wouldn’t budge. She could make out the smooth, muscular back which told her instantly that her bed companion was neither Niamh nor the delicately built Cal.

  Think, think, think. Who did she meet last night? Had she run into Finlay and kissed and made up? No, she would have remembered, and besides, she was sure this wasn’t Finlay’s bedroom or his back she was looking at with her one good eye. She tried to cast a glance around the room to find some clue as to where she was. The pillow was soft and the bed felt solid, comfortable and luxurious so at least she hadn’t woken up in some student dive.

  The curtains were closed but seemed to be some sort of silvery voile material, thin enough to let some light through to enable her to see around. The early morning sunlight had cast a soothing creamy yellow glow on the walls and she could just about see a tall set of drawers which were covered in bottles of hair products, aftershave and cologne. On the wooden oak floor, over in the corner, she could make out a television and gaming console which was sat next to a pile of dirty clothes, jeans and T-shirts and her own strappy sandals.

  Then whoever was beside her groaned and moved. Ava ducked her head under the duvet, desperate to hide and put off the inevitable moment, when she would have to face whoever had hauled her home with them. She was sure she hadn’t jumped on the first fella she had seen. It wasn’t her style to pick up random strangers. God, she could have been raped or murdered. Shame and embarrassment made her flush crimson red. Maybe he had spiked her drink and had taken advantage of her.

  She felt a warm hand reach down for her breast and give it a playful squeeze. Shit, I’m naked, she thought as his fingers stroked her, making her nipples stiffen involuntarily.

  ‘Come here, you,’ he said, his voice rough and sexy, thick with sleep, as he wriggled under the duvet to be close to her.

  And then she remembered: hard, passionate kisses, deep tongues and grasping hands roaming all over her body as she yanked at his zipper and pulled him out into her eager hand.

  Ava thought she was going to black out from the shock of what she had just remembered. She was in bed, naked, having done the dirty deed with none other than Ben Dale, her boss’s son.

  7

  Ava studied her face in the mirror, trying to detect a change. Somehow, between finishing with Finlay and deciding to move into number ninety-seven, she felt that her whole life was in a state of flux and that she must surely be visibly different. She could barely believe that she had participated in a wild night out which had culminated in sex with Ben.

  To say it was out of character was an understatement. Ava Connors played it safe. She didn’t do wild one-night stands and she could count on one hand the number of boys she had kissed. It was as if she had taken leave of her senses.

  But no, she couldn’t deny that the same girl who had played it safe all her life, the one with the sweetheart-shaped face looking back at her, was the one who had shifted her boss’s son. God, the mortification of it. Any time she had met him in the shop he had been courteous and nice but was most definitely too young for her. How could she ever look him in the eye over the pots of peonies again?

  She dragged a hand through her straggly, turf-brown hair and rubbed at her sorrowful eyes, feeling the remains of dried mascara crumbling under her fingertips. All that warpaint and look where it got her. Cal had plucked and shaped her eyebrows into perfect arches that lifted her face and made her seem slightly surprised, and shaded and highlighted her previously non-existent cheekbones, but ultimately, the operation recovery makeover had ended in disaster.

  In the cold light of day, she was left looking at the original Ava Connors. Boring, predictable Ava. Ava who had never done anything out of the ordinary in her life before. Who went to work every day, visited her poor sick grandmother, and returned to her ordinary little house to watch predictable soap operas and read crime novels while nibbling on bars of Galaxy chocolate and drinking tonic water — without the gin. She was the first to admit it — she was plain boring. Dull as drizzle.

  But then she smiled, remembering Ben’s thick muscular legs, the feel of his smooth torso and the gentleness of his touch on her skin. She felt flushed just thinking about him. The long lingering, beer-tasting kisses and the smell of his skin, damp with a musky sweat.

  If someone had told her she would end up sleeping with Hazel’s — her friend and boss — twenty-year-old son, Ava would have balked at the idea, gagged even. Ben may have been big, beautiful and blonde, but he was oh so wrong for her. For starters, he was twenty. Twenty, for God’s sake. What had she been thinking? Not a lot beyond being shagged senseless, if she were honest. The alcohol combined with a night of watching Betty Boom Boom do her stuff with the Velvet Vixens in the Kitty House had awakened something in Ava which she didn’t know existed.

  And then there was the whole issue of working for his mother who thought the sun shone out of his peachy cute ass and hated every girlfriend he ever brought home. Not that Ava was under any illusions of being brought home to meet the parents. She cringed as she thought of how Hazel would sometimes call him Benji, pinching his cheeks like he was an errant schoolboy. If only Hazel knew what a bad boy he really was. But stop, Ava thought, she couldn’t even allow herself the luxury of enjoying the memory. The night had come back to her in random scenes: ear nibbling, shared drinks in some dark corner of a bar, giggling while he kissed her neck and then later pleasuring each other in that big soft bed. In other words, behaving badly. Very badly.

  Again, Ava reprimanded herself for acting so out of character.

  It wasn’t that Ben wasn’t good looking, funny and kind, but he still lived at home, a home he treated like a hotel according to his often-exasperated mother and while he had elements of the mammy’s boy about him, he led a boy-about-town existence in hot pursuit of a good time fuelled by women and beer. Okay, so Ava wasn’t so quick to have flown the family nest herself, but sure girls could get away with it more so than boys, she reasoned, all too aware of how sexist that was.

  She had accepted his offer of breakfast and while he was putting it together she excused herself and went to the bathroom to pee and freshen up. With her hair dragged into a hasty ponytail, courtesy of an elastic band nicked from Hazel’s Clarins-Dermologica-and-Aveda-cluttered bathroom shelf, Ava went back downstairs intending to call a taxi. It would cost a small fortune to get from Crawfordsburn to home, but she didn’t want to expect Ben to give her a lift. She didn’t need to be in an enclosed space, watching him and blushing at the thought of what they might have done the night before.

  ‘Hey, where are you rushing off to?’ he asked in his slow, sexy voice, taking her into his arms as she came down the stairs. He had a way of filling up the room just with his presence, no mean feat since Hazel’s hallway was near enough the size of the whole of the little house on Moonstone Street.

  ‘I’m
off home. Thanks for a great night, Ben. I mean it, from what I can remember it was a great night but please, your mum can’t ever know about this.’ Ava was pleading as she looked up into his eyes which she noticed for the first time were sea green with flecks of vibrant amber.

  ‘Hey, I’m a big boy. So what if we’re going out together. Mum won’t mind she loves you,’ he said, his eyes wide and innocent.

  ‘Be real, will you, Ben, you’re twenty and I’m… I’m too old to be going out with you. We had a nice night together. Let’s leave it at that and keep it to ourselves.’

  ‘Yo, bro. Hiya, Ava.’

  They both turned, Ben’s arms still wrapped around Ava, as Daniel came padding down the stairs with his hand shoved down his boxer shorts, scratching his balls.

  ‘You two kept me awake half the night. Like a pack of dogs on heat.’ He laughed to himself as he sloped off to Hazel’s interior-designed kitchen.

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Ava groaned before rushing off to the downstairs bathroom. She could never allow this to happen again. It was so out of character. What was happening to her?

  Niamh had howled with laughter, the evening after, when Ava recounted wakening up beside Ben, in his mother’s luxurious house overlooking the Lough.

  ‘Ava, there was no prising the pair of you apart. You were at each other like your lives depended on it,’ Niamh said, flicking a cigarette into a makeshift ashtray of a saucer while sitting in the living room of the house on Moonstone Street.

  Ava told her how they had had a breakfast of croissants, fresh fruit and coffee thanks to the well-stocked cupboards Hazel had left before going to Sorrento with Robert.

  Ben had been the perfect gentleman; asking Ava could he get her anything, was she feeling okay, after she had puked her guts up and wiped her face with the Cath Kidston towel. He acted like it was perfectly normal for the two of them to be sharing breakfast, following a night of drunken debauchery.

  In fact, if anything, Ben was the one acting mature and grown-up. It was Ava who was shuddering at the flashback memories popping into her heavy head, like she was a teenager caught doing something she shouldn’t. Knowing Ben’s reputation as she did, thanks to Hazel’s frequent recounting, he had more experience of this sort of thing. He would have woken up in countless beds following one-night stands and thought nothing of making conversation the morning after the steamy and heavy night before. Whereas Ava, the normally dowdy, timid and meek Ava, was painfully new to this.

  She blamed Maggie; Ava had led such a sheltered life that when it came to men she was as green as a shot of Night Nurse. Ava had grown up to do what was expected of her. She didn’t stay out all night like Niamh so often did, and even when she did find a boyfriend it was the respectable Finlay with his nice manners and clean-cut ways.

  It was like discovering a fundamental gap in her education; she just didn’t know how to behave badly and then deal with it the next day.

  ‘How on earth am I going to face Hazel in the shop next week? I wish we had never gone to that student bar on Eglantine Avenue and then we wouldn’t have run into him and none of this mess would have happened.’ Ava groaned, burying her face in Maggie’s best floral tapestry cushion.

  ‘Calm yourself. Ben is hardly going to tell her so why should you mention it?’ Niamh reasoned.

  Ava lifted her face away from the cushion. ‘Yeah, I suppose you’re right. Hazel doesn’t need to know. Maybe I can just pretend it never happened and put it down to a night of too much drink and bad company.’

  ‘Listen, honey, you were the one dancing on a stage with tassels and a feather boa and then jumping the bones of the sumptuous Ben,’ Niamh said, acting all indignant at being referred to as bad company. ‘Sure, we had a great time, didn’t we?’

  Ava smiled; she couldn’t help herself. ‘The best!’

  But really, when she thought about it, to have fallen into bed with Ben was the height of ridiculousness. How could she face Hazel over the bunches of pussy willows and hollyhocks without dying a thousand deaths of red-faced shame?

  Despite all her protestations though, Ava had to admit, to herself and herself alone, that Ben Dale had something. There was something in the way he looked at her, in the way he said her name and let his fingers brush a stray croissant crumb from her mouth, lingering for just a second too long for it to be merely helpful, that unsettled her. He may have been playing a set routine, how to seduce in three simple steps, but Ava was frightened she was in danger of falling for it. Yet, she felt she shouldn’t be held responsible for any lapse in judgement – it simply wasn’t her fault that she was so unused to the wily ways of men like Ben.

  After Niamh had gone home and Ava had cleared away the saucer full of cigarette butts, she lit a Dunnes Stores honeysuckle-scented candle to disperse the smell of smoke, before curling up on the sofa to reread Maggie’s letter.

  The clear-out had proved to be therapeutic in more ways than one. Ava had felt different reading those words, as if she was unearthing something deep within herself.

  Maggie deciding to sign herself into the nursing home had been a huge adjustment for Ava. For the first time in her life, Ava was living alone. Finlay moving on had affected her deeply too. She was unsettled and uneasy. Life seemed so precarious, full of uncertainties, but there was a tiny sense of excitement in knowing that it was not necessarily mapped out after all.

  She could admit to herself that Maggie’s letter and the scrapbook full of memorabilia had fulfilled a sense of identity that Ava had longed for without even really knowing it. By the soft glow of candlelight, she read Maggie’s words again.

  I learnt from my mistake. When you came along with the gift tag of Ruby, I thought that name could spell trouble and I would be living your mother’s teenage years all over again. So, we decided to call you Ava, your second name, which your mother chose out of respect for your great grandmother, a holy and good woman if ever there was one. As you probably know, Ruby Ava are the names on your birth certificate but as I’m sure you will agree you are much more of an Ava than a Ruby. Your mother tried to stick with Ruby but we soon wore her down and besides, later she couldn’t really complain too much when she had taken herself off, but more of that later.

  Anyway, I am getting off the point again. Your mother, the aptly named Scarlett, felt she was too big for a wee town like Belfast. She couldn’t wait to take herself off to the bright lights of London.

  She had a lovely voice. Oh, you should have heard her singing “Carrickfergus”, it made the hairs on the back of your neck stand to attention. So, she set her sights on making a living singing in clubs in London. But our Scarlett wasn’t satisfied with smoky nightclubs and a bartender’s tips, so she thought America was where it was at. She had gone to London with some fella, a boyfriend if you will, long hair and a tattoo of a swan, and the two of them thought they could make it in LA. And they did by all accounts. Johnny was his name. Came from here so I was happy enough that he would look out for her.

  When she went to America, we had the odd letter, full of herself, your granddad said, telling us all about her wonderful apartment on the beachfront, the great people she was mixing with, artists, actors and musicians and the like.

  She was gone for almost two years when one day, out of the blue like, she turns up on the doorstep — I’d only just finished scrubbing it too — when this black taxi pulls up, and out she comes, larger than life, looking a bit tired and run down, I have to say. The taxi man took the suitcase out of the boot and left it at her feet, red suede platform boots they were too, distracted me for a moment I must say, for it took a second for me to realise that our Scarlett was right there in front of me and in her arms, she had a wee bundle. I near enough dropped to my knees on the spot.

  Scarlett home, and with a baby. It was too much to take in. Anyways, I hurried her in off the doorstep before the neighbours clocked her, paid the taxi man, and put the kettle on.

  I could hardly speak for the excitement of having he
r home, weeun an all.

  I wasn’t going to start on her. She looked done in to tell the truth, so I thought, ‘Take it easy, Maggie.’ I knew she had probably had a long flight and she looked wrecked. Pale and thin, so thin despite having had a baby just a month or so previous.

  The baby was as good as gold, just lay there looking as content as anything with her eyes taking the place in. I put the pair of them to bed after giving Scarlett a good feed of eggs and bacon with a bit of soda bread fried in the pan, just the way she liked it.

  We made a makeshift cot for the baby out of a drawer and a couple of blankets. God, you looked like a wee doll lying there in all snug and cosied-up.

  When your granddad got in from work, he had many a question. Where had she been? Why hadn’t she been in touch for the past year and where did the weeun come from? Couldn’t she have let us know she was expecting? I rolled my eyes at that one. Once a baby is born you just get on with it, no point laying blame and asking how or why.

  Our Scarlett wasn’t too happy by the looks of her. She said she had been sick with the pregnancy and hadn’t been able to travel. She didn’t want to tell us she was pregnant in a letter so she thought it was best to wait until she could face us in person and come to visit us to let us see the baby.

  That was all well and good but over the next few days she talked about going on the road again. She had the chance of singing back-up for some big band and she couldn’t miss the opportunity. Your granddad knew what was coming next; she wanted us to look after you for a couple of weeks, maybe a month or so at the most.