Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (105 page)

‘I’d like us to be friends,’ Keith went on, ever hopeful. ‘We’ve been together for so long.’

‘I don’t want us to be friends,’ Connie said, sobbing now. ‘I want us to be together, that’s all.’

‘It’s over, Connie,’ he said. ‘You need to face facts. We should never have got engaged. The past month has shown me that. I don’t want to get married. At least we hadn’t got as far as putting a deposit on a house. Now that would be a nightmare to sort out.’

And telling everyone that the engagement was off – a month after it had been announced –
would not
be a nightmare? Connie stared at him, shocked and hurt. But it had been no good. He was strangely unmoved by her pain.

‘You must have known,’ he kept saying, as if she was only denying it to annoy him.

A day later, he’d moved his stuff out of the pretty flat they shared. Connie had been numb.

‘Phone me, won’t you, and tell me how you’re doing?’ Keith said.

Connie seized upon these words as proof that Keith did love her and was merely going through a crisis brought on by friends phoning up delightedly asking them about wedding plans now that they were engaged.

‘Please, Connie, don’t kid yourself,’ said Gaynor angrily when she heard this new theory. ‘He’s simply hoping you
won’t throw yourself down the stairs and blame him in your suicide note. That’s all the asshole cares about.’

Instead of making peace with the fact that Keith had inexplicably changed his mind, Connie tormented herself over not having noticed how he’d felt. This not noticing was her fault. If she had noticed, she could have changed herself, changed
something.
When he started going out with other women, she tortured herself wondering where she’d gone wrong.

Should there have been more romance in their relationship? Connie had never been a woman for sexy knickers and bedroom stripteases – was this a mistake? She cast her mind back to their engagement. Keith had definitely asked her to marry him, but they’d been at a friend’s wedding at the time. He’d been hit by wedding-envy, the thought that this gorgeous party with friends could be theirs.
That
was what had gone wrong.

His proposal hadn’t been heartfelt and yet she’d been carried away, convinced it was, because marrying Keith was what she wanted.

Connie joined the queue at the Louvre and decided she would set her mind to art and culture for the rest of the day. There was something infinitely soothing in great museums: if love had deserted you, at least you could lose yourself in the brilliance of long-dead civilisations.

Besides, how many artists had painted their greatest works when they were dying inside of love? Exactly. She’d be among friends in the Louvre.

Home from Paris after Sylvie’s wedding, Connie told no one how it had been. Even Nicky. Freddie was in the apartment even more than usual and it seemed as if there wasn’t any time alone with Nicky to confide in her.

Besides, it would have sounded so sad and hopeless. As if
she wanted Nicky to sort it out, and that wasn’t Nicky’s job.
She
had to look after Nicky, not the other way round.

No, Connie decided resolutely, she would keep her misery to herself. She needed to get a life and stop obsessing about her lack of love and the decreasing chances of her ever becoming a mother.

She would not spend weekends in the homestore buying more rubbish to prettify her bedroom – she had three sets of twinkling fairy lights over her mirrored dressing table already. Any more and the room would be a fire hazard.

Connie wasn’t a pink person in any other area of her life except her bedroom. The apartment had wooden floors, pale walls and pretty Scandinavian-style furniture in shades of white. Inspired by a magazine photospread of a Swedish designer’s house, Connie had gone for neutral soft furnishings accented with pale blue curtains and cushions. It was all calm, simple and pretty.

Except in her bedroom, where she’d lost the run of herself. The walls were covered in a sprigged pink wallpaper, the bed had a draped pink muslin canopy and there were so many fluffy and frilled throw pillows on the rose-coloured satin bedspread that it took five minutes to throw them off when it was time for bed.

The single woman’s bedroom was her castle, Connie liked to joke to her sister.

But it had gone too far. Its romanticism now mocked her. Especially in February, season of red envelopes and roses. No, she was going to find something to make herself useful.

For a start, the postman had left them a letter addressed to ‘Mrs E. Levine’ that should obviously have gone to the elderly lady downstairs. Rather than just put it in the correct slot, Connie decided to use it as an excuse to visit their new neighbour. Maybe she could offer to go to the shop for her, or fetch some books from the library. Grabbing a box of luxury chocolate cookies that she happened to have in the cupboard, she
walked downstairs and rang the bell of the ground-floor apartment. After a moment the intercom crackled into action.

‘Hello, Mrs Levine, it’s Connie O’Callaghan from upstairs,’ she called.

‘Hello, Connie,’ a soft American voice replied.

Once the door opened, Connie forgot all thoughts of the library. The woman standing before her was not her vision of a little old lady who needed friendship, large-print romantic novels from the library or soft mints she could eat in spite of her dentures.

‘How very nice to meet you,’ Mrs Levine said.

She was still tall and straight despite her age, and although age had probably dimmed their colour, her eyes were the shining blue of sapphires. Her hair was a cloud of soft white curls around an oval smiling face that, though lined like a piece of exquisite old vellum, glowed with inner light. Mannish tweed trousers and a cream silk shirt worn with a long woollen cardigan gave her the air of Lauren Bacall in an old movie, and around her neck were tortoiseshell glasses on a neat gold chain. Although she could be anywhere from seventy to eighty years old, Connie realised that there was absolutely nothing little-old-ladyish about Eleanor Levine.

Connie found her voice, said, ‘Hello, Mrs Levine,’ and held out her hand, which was grasped in a surprisingly firm and warm grip.

‘Please come in. And you must call me Eleanor.’

Connie had never been in the apartment below hers, even when the Taylors lived there. She saw now that it was the same layout but entirely different, thanks to its period furniture and gold-framed paintings on the wall.

The windows were larger though, and Connie saw that her neighbour had been sitting at a chair beside the vast bay window, a cup of tea and an upturned book on a small table beside the chair.

‘The square keeps distracting me,’ Eleanor Levine said. ‘I
read a bit, then find myself staring out at the garden or watching the playground.’

‘Me too,’ said Connie. ‘It’s addictive, looking on to the square. Whole scenes unfold in front of your eyes like a movie.’

‘Exactly,’ said Eleanor, looking impressed. ‘I can see you’re a kindred spirit. I spend altogether too much time watching my neighbours. I’ve never done it before, but here, I seem to look out every five minutes. I expect the cops to turn up any day to arrest me for stalking.’

Connie laughed. ‘Golden Square lends itself to people-watching. I didn’t look out the front window once when I lived at home, and I come from a small town where it’s almost an Olympic sport. But that’s more…’ she searched for the right the word ‘…
nosey
looking out. What we do here is watching with interest.’

‘That’s good,’ Eleanor agreed. ‘
Watching with interest.
Shall I make coffee and you can tell me what you watch with interest?’

‘I can make the coffee for you?’ offered Connie, suddenly realising she’d come to help her elderly neighbour and she wouldn’t be much help if she sat down and let the old lady do everything.

‘I’m fine on my feet today,’ Eleanor said with a wry smile. ‘I have, as you might have noticed, bad days when I use the stick, but today my aches and pains are manageable. Thank you for my letter and the cookies.’

‘Ah.’ Connie waved her hand. ‘They’re only a token to welcome you.’

‘It’s very neighbourly of you to visit with me, Connie. I haven’t had many visitors so far.’

Eleanor led her into the kitchen and Connie sat on a stool at the counter and watched as she ground coffee beans and put them in the coffeemaker.

‘Tell me about yourself,’ Eleanor went on. ‘I’ve seen from your piles of books that you’re a teacher. What do you teach?’

‘History.’

‘That must be exciting.’

‘It is, I love it. Although, it’s not without its hard days. Teaching, that is. There are days when nobody wants to learn and you don’t really want to teach any more. Then sometimes you get the kid who wants to learn.’

‘I know, the ones with the spark in them,’ breathed Eleanor, her blue eyes so very bright.

They were, Connie decided, a young woman’s eyes, full of vitality, staring out of this lovely old face.

‘Did you teach?’ she asked, because Eleanor clearly knew what she was talking about.

‘For a time. I’m a psychoanalyst and I did a little teaching here and there.’

‘Wow.’ It was Connie’s turn to be impressed. She sat up straighter on her stool.

‘You’re doing it,’ Eleanor said, and turned back to the coffee. ‘When people hear what I do, they sit up straight. Some people think I’m going to start analysing them on the basis of how they hold their wine glass. Others jump right in and tell me how they’ve been feeling down since their pet died and they divorced their husband, and do I think therapy would help, because they’re on medication and it’s not really working.’

Connie laughed. ‘I suppose it’s like meeting someone who is a hairdresser and your hand instantly reaches up to your hair and you start making excuses. “I meant to wash it today but I didn’t have time, and it looks better than this normally, honestly!”’

‘That’s it,’ Eleanor replied.

‘I guess the psychoanalyst version of that is “I’ve been meaning to do some work on my ego, but my subconscious won’t let me.”’ Connie suddenly wondered if that made sense. Were the ego and the subconscious the same thing? She’d never got the hang of psychology. ‘Are you working while
you’re here?’ she asked, changing the subject rapidly.

‘I’ve retired.’ Eleanor said it with a finality that put an end to that conversation as she placed cups on the counter and poured the coffee. ‘Sugar or cream?’

‘Both,’ said Connie.

They talked about the people Eleanor saw from her window.

She was fascinated by the tawny-haired woman who lived with her husband in the tall white house opposite and called her ‘pet’ in the tearooms.

‘That’s Rae Kerrigan and her husband’s Will. She runs the tearooms and works for Community Cares. She’s fantastic. I don’t know her that well, but she has a kind word for everybody. Goodness shines out of her.’ Connie stopped. ‘I know that sounds strange, but it does. When I meet her in the tearooms, I feel warm and healed, somehow. Too much caffeine, probably!’

Uses humour as armour, Eleanor noticed. A powerful protection, and one that was just as hard to break through as people who used bitterness as a shield.

Eleanor stifled the urge to ask what Connie’s feelings of warmth felt like and what sadness the warmth was healing? This was a new neighbour, not a patient.

‘What is Community Cares?’ she asked instead.

‘It’s a charity that takes care of people in need: underprivileged families, people who’ve lost their jobs. Most of the people who work at local level are volunteers.’

‘I see,’ said Eleanor. ‘Can’t be easy work.’

‘I doubt it,’ Connie replied and sighed. ‘I’ve often thought I should do something like that, but I’ve never actually got round to doing it.’

She didn’t say that she’d put off talking to Rae about Community Cares because somehow working for the charity seemed to symbolise putting aside her own hopes and dreams.

In her hometown on the east coast, women got involved in charity work after they’d reared their children. You gave
back to society when your little ones had grown up. It would seem too much like giving up on the idea of Connie having her own family if she started doing that now.

‘Two doors down from Rae is Prudence,’ she said, moving on, ‘and trust me, she does not make you feel warm when you see her. She’s got short dark hair, is very keen on a pale blue anorak that she wears no matter what the season and has a scowl that would turn the milk sour, as my granny, Enid, would say.’

‘I love those old sayings,’ Eleanor said. ‘My mother had a store of them and I can’t quite recall them all. I’ve seen Prudence.’ Short, thin and walked in a furtive manner, Eleanor thought. Like someone who was always running fearfully.

‘She’s a total cow. Was very rude to Megan, who’s staying with her aunt, Nora Flynn, at the end of this row. Megan’s an actress and she was in the papers over something.’ Loyalty forbade Connie to say more about Megan than this.

Connie had felt stupid for not knowing who Megan was, but proud of how kindly Nicky had handled the matter that evening at dinner in their house.

‘We’ll find a nice Irish guy for you,’ Nicky told Megan firmly. ‘Someone with no strings attached who will worship you like the goddess you are.’

Megan had half-laughed and half-cried.

‘And who is this Megan?’ Eleanor asked.

Connie considered how to answer this. Megan wasn’t the sort of person who could be confined to a one-line answer. Connie could see precisely how outsiders might see Megan merely as a starlet who’d snared a famous movie star, but she reckoned that the situation was more complicated than this. Even though she assumed that horrific publicity and having to hide would undoubtedly have affected even the hardest person, Connie instinctively felt there was a deeper vulnerability to Megan.

‘Megan Bouchier. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her. She’s
mid-twenties, very beautiful – almost unreal looking, actually, like that Afghan girl who was on the cover of
National Geographic
all those years ago: haunted green eyes and a gorgeous face. She used to be blonde but now her hair is short, very dark. You might have seen her walking her aunt’s dogs, a greyhound and a fluffy little white dog.’