Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (104 page)

Your aunt Agnes got the most wonderful cookbook from Mrs Fitzmaurice.

Some foreign lady had left it behind in the big house, although Agnes and myself laughed at the notion of a real lady knowing the slightest thing about cooking. Not that I knew many ladies, but being in service in the big house, Agnes met them all. None of them knew how to cook, although they probably thought they did on account of all the time they spent discussing menus with their housekeepers. There could be seven courses easily at a meal, Agnes told us, with soups, salads, terrines, fowl, meat, syllabubs, ices.

The cookbook was French, written by a Madame St Martin, and we pored over it. There were sauces for everything and Madame St Martin insisted that copper-bottomed pans were an absolute necessity. We ignored that bit on account of not having copper anything. My best cooking pot had a heavy iron bottom that the gypsy metal man had put on for me. You could put a hard bit of lamb shoulder in there for hours without it ever getting overcooked, and at the end it would simply melt off the bone.

Madame St Martin’s chicken soup had loads of garlic in it and it was a miracle.

That winter, there was a lot of snow and Joe spent most of his time out in the byre with cows that were calving. He’d come in perished with the cold, and I got into the habit of having a pot of chicken soup on the range.

Up to then, I’d only known how to make a bit of gruel, so the chicken soup was a godsend.

Your aunt Agnes said we should write to Madame St Martin and tell her how well it had all gone, and I said that was a great idea. We never got round to writing that letter, but I like to think that every time we cooked her chicken soup, I said thanks in my heart.

Connie hated February for two reasons: the winter gloom and Valentine’s Day. She did her best to ignore them both. During February, she never bought magazines because they were full of recipes for romantic dinners for two. Instead, she went to the local library every week and immersed herself in crime novels. Crime scenes, bodies, cops arguing with the Feds and a nice detective with personal problems and a case to solve. Perfect.

She also worked on her list. Her fantasy ideal man list.

Long legs.
Definitely.

Had to be taller than she was.

No children, ex-wives or former girlfriends he was still in love with.

Great sense of humour a must.

Fit, but not obsessed with the gym. Not a yoga person.

No insane mother in the background who didn’t like him dating people.
Connie had never personally gone out with such a man, but a colleague had, and Connie had told her right off that any man who’d cancel a night out because
‘Mummy isn’t in the mood to be left all on her own’
, was not a serious proposition for happiness.

All his own hair,
obviously. None of that comb-over or pernickety fluffed-up hair that couldn’t be touched. Connie had once, briefly, dated a man who was going bald and it was as if his entire life’s work was hiding this fact. Connie’s affectionate nature had been rebuffed because head-stroking wasn’t allowed in case it ruined the careful arrangement of the front of his hair. Tom was the man’s name and the romance hadn’t lasted. He spent much more time looking in mirrors than Connie ever did. He used a lot of hairspray on the fluffy bit of hair he had left at the front, and God forbid that the wind should blow it back to expose his forehead. Connie felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to keep seeing him. She liked people who were realistic. If you were going bald, it made sense to have one of those short haircuts and be done with it. Connie was realistic about herself: after all,
she
didn’t think she was Angelina Jolie, now, did she?

She liked working on her list. It was fun, a bit like having double chocolate chip cookies in bed with hot milk watching a soppy film. A guilty secret. Even talking about the list would be like admitting that she had given up on finding a real man and was now entering the realms of fantasy man.

It would be like saying ‘I love romance novels and costume dramas with Mr Darcy-ish men,’ and she could never own up to that because people would laugh at her.

Strangely, she’d wanted to tell Megan that first day in Titania’s Palace. She’d had the weirdest feeling that Megan would understand that it was easier to imagine a fantasy man than place any trust in the world of real men. And then she’d come to her senses. Saying she was pretty much done with love herself might have sounded defeatist.

Megan might have been bruised by love but she had time on her side. Time to find endless men and reject them.

Connie had no time left.

Without Mr Perfect, there would be no baby nuzzling into her breast, looking up at her adoringly. She never made a list about babies, their names, whether she wanted a girl or a boy: that would have hurt too much and too deeply. No, a fantasy list about a perfect man was a nice way to wile the hours away.

When Megan had come to Connie and Nicky’s for dinner shortly after they’d first met up, Freddie had been banished so the three women could have a female-only night.

‘I’d like to meet her,’ grumbled Freddie.

‘You will,’ said Nicky, ‘but she’s coming for a nice comforting girlie dinner because Connie says that’s what she needs, not to be looked at by someone who has seen her first film four times and used the freeze frame till he almost wore the DVD out.’

Connie had smiled at Nicky’s wonderful confidence: she trusted Freddie’s love for her and she trusted in her own sense of self. Nicky didn’t imagine that Freddie would be blinded by Megan’s looks or status.

Megan had been visibly anxious when she’d arrived, bearing a pot of white hyacinths as a gift.

But Connie’s huge welcome and Nicky’s impressed, ‘Oh, you are so tiny, even smaller than you look on the television!’ had instantly broken the ice.

‘You’re the teeny, tiny generation,’ Connie laughed. ‘I’m part of the Amazonian goddess generation and you pair are the small pixie generation. I hope you brought your appetite,’ she added to Megan, enveloping her in a big hug. ‘I’ve ordered deluxe pizza, garlic dough balls and coleslaw.’

‘Connie’s a slave to coleslaw,’ Nicky revealed.

‘And Diet Coke,’ Connie added, ‘as a sop to our figures. Well,
my
figure.’

It had been an enjoyable evening. Nicky and Megan got on like a house on fire, and only the fact that both Connie and Nicky had work the following morning broke it up before midnight.

‘I wish I was going to work,’ Megan sighed. ‘I’m going slightly mad right now. Nora says Birdie is going away to Spain later this month and I could stand in for her.’

‘I wish we had something you could do,’ said Nicky thoughtfully. ‘You could read for me, perhaps?’

‘You could take the fifth years for history when I’m at Sylvie’s wedding in Paris,’ Connie added.

‘You never know, there might be a fabulous man there for you,’ said Nicky hopefully.

‘Yes,’ said Connie. Nicky was right, you never knew. She mustn’t be defeatist.

The right man hadn’t been at Sylvie’s wedding in Paris, although Connie, thanks to Nicky’s prodding, had gone over there with high hopes.

The wedding had been great fun and had started off fabulously.

Connie was travelling with four other teachers from the school – all single – and they were, they all agreed, as mad as any tour of schoolgirls.

‘If the principal could see us now,’ Grace, who taught geography, laughed as they raced round Dublin Airport duty-free, spraying themselves with expensive scents none of them could afford.

‘There’s still time for her to come,’ said Connie mischievously. ‘I could phone and say, “Mrs Caldwell, you’d love it, we’re going night clubbing every night, and you know how much you like to dance…”’

‘Perish the thought,’ shuddered Vivienne, who taught art and whose creative style of dress and behaviour made it unlikely she would ever feature on Mrs Caldwell’s Teacher of the Month board.

The hotel Sylvie’s mother had recommended turned out to be tiny, very chic and close enough to the Seine that they
could see it from the small balcony in Grace and Connie’s room.

They’d doubled up to save money, but Grace pointed out that if she got lucky with a delectable French man, she’d go back to his place, so Connie could sleep alone in peace. ‘Makes sense,’ she’d said to Connie.

The unspoken message was that Connie would hardly be bringing a handsome Frenchman back to the room.

‘Absolutely,’ said Connie, who felt her own confidence breaking into smithereens. Grace was only thirty-two and very attractive. Of course the delectable Frenchmen would fall for her, while Connie didn’t have a hope with any of them. What had she been thinking? She should have stuck with her idea that her dating days were over.

Gorgeous French guys would fancy younger women who would consider passion on a first date, not a sailing-towards-forty schoolteacher who hadn’t had sex in so long, she’d pass out with shock if a man suggested it without six months of courtship. French men would also know that a woman of her age was listening to the ticking of her biological clock. They might see the desperation in her eyes that few other people seemed to be aware of.

Grace was the belle of the Irish contingent. The grey silk dress that Connie had privately thought was far too understated that morning in their hotel room, turned out to be the perfect thing to wear to an elegant Parisian wedding. It was Connie’s cerulean blue chiffon skirt and matching blouse with a grosgrain belt which looked overdone and fussy among all the crisp, eau de nil shift dresses, real pearls and two-tone Chanel pumps.

Nicky had prophesied that there would be no table for singles at a French wedding.

‘They’re too cool for that in France,’ she’d told Connie. ‘Bet they’ll mix everyone together, English- and Frenchspeaking, married and non-married. Here, we stick all the
poor single people together at hopeless tables full of the mad single cousins and strange uncles, so they feel like losers as soon as they get there. They won’t do that in Paris.’

Connie had wondered when Nicky had become so wise on the subject of matrimonial customs, but it turned out, she’d been right. Connie and Grace had been seated at a table with some of Sylvie’s old schoolfriends. There was no sense that anyone was looking to set them up with single French men. There didn’t appear to be any single French men. Besides, Connie quickly learned that Sylvie hadn’t described her as a woman on the lookout for love. No, Connie discovered that her reputation was as Sylvie’s fun Irish friend, the jolly one whom everybody loved, who had a great sense of humour. She wasn’t the girlfriend type or the wife type. None of Sylvie’s friends looked speculatively at Connie as though she was a threat. No, they beamed at her and cheerfully told their husbands to dance with her.

Grace was a different matter. None of the husbands were told to dance with her.

Connie ate two chocolate puddings – much to the shocked amusement of the slim women on her table, who hadn’t even eaten all their actual main courses, never mind pudding – and danced with everyone with such gaiety that nobody could have known that she was crying inside. If she was destined to be the mad, fun auntie at the party, she’d play the part.

The day after the wedding, Grace had been determined to stay in bed late. There was no sign of the others at breakfast, so Connie assumed they’d all partied till the small hours. She’d been in bed at a very respectable twelve thirty. There had to be some compensations for being the cheerful, funny one. Sylvie’s friends had insisted on driving her back to the hotel and one of the husbands had been ordered to escort her to the hotel door.

In bed, wild-eyed with the pain of discovering her status as funny, non-marrying woman, she’d stayed awake till three: long enough to hear Grace creep in.

‘’S me, Connie, sorry to wake you. Oops. Sorry about the noise. Oops.’

Grace knocked over everything in the bathroom when she stumbled in there but finally made it to bed and, eventually, Connie drifted off to dreams of herself as the bride with no groom in sight.

‘I think I’ll go to the Louvre and meander around,’ she told the Grace-shaped lump in the other single bed after breakfast.

‘Whatever,’ mumbled Grace.

Paris wasn’t any more romantic a city than any other, Connie decided as she walked along the streets. It was more its reputation than anything else. A fabulous marketing ploy.
Come here if you’re in love and, if you’re not, you will feel incomplete and like a total loser, so you have to come back as soon as you
do
fall in love with someone.

It was a win-win situation for Paris all round. She and Keith had never been a city-break couple. They’d liked activity holidays like skiing and that sailing course they’d taken off the coast of Turkey.

He’d worked in a bank but the perks had included decent holidays, so they’d gone away on amazing vacations. In the seven years they’d been together, they’d gone skiing every winter and had toured South America as well as the Far East.

They’d been engaged a month and had been tentatively discussing a honeymoon trip to Australia when Keith had dropped the bombshell.

‘You know the way we say honesty is the best policy…’ he’d said, and Connie had been about to tease him over sounding like an insurance commercial, when he went on: ‘I have to be honest with you, Connie: it’s over. Us. For me, anyhow. I know you must feel it too. I love you, but I’m not
in love
with you, and I should be, shouldn’t I?’

‘Shouldn’t you what?’ Connie had heard exactly what he’d said. It was simply that she couldn’t believe he’d said it. This was Keith, the man who’d lain his head on her belly in front of the fire the weekend before, and said he was perfectly happy. Admittedly, they’d been out with friends and some wine had been consumed, but still. How could you be perfectly happy one week, and not the next? How could he have asked her to marry him and then break it off a month later? Shouldn’t there have been some signs of him not loving her any more, and if there had been, why hadn’t she noticed?