Never Too Late (25 page)

speak, just hold a card with the words “Yes” or “No”

written on it. You’d only need two of them after all.’

Evie reddened. She knew she’d been monosyllabic during

lunch but she hadn’t thought anyone would notice.

They were all having such a nice time, her father and Vida

so wrapped up in each other, that she’d felt totally surplus

to requirements. Who’d have observed her sitting quietly?

Cara, that’s who.

‘What I don’t understand, Evie,’ she said finally, abandoning

any pretence at washing up, ‘is why you spent years

teaching me to think about other people, to be a kind,

decent, thoughtful person with a sense of responsibility

and sensitivity, when all it takes is for one shock to the system and you’re behaving like some infantile, immature, witless idiot.’

Evie was speechless but Cara still wasn’t finished. ‘I

know you’re finding this wedding hard to take but you’re

not even trying to accept reality. It’s happening so deal

with it,’ she snapped. ‘I’d hate to see what sort of a cow

you’d have turned out to be if something really awful had

happened to you. You don’t know how lucky you are, Evie.

You just don’t know.’

Cara’s voice was bitter now, so bitter that Evie wondered

where this was all coming from.

‘Get down off your high horse and have a look at the

real world. Dad deserves some happiness and if we hadn’t

both been so tied up in our own little lives, we might have

seen he was lonely. I’m grateful to Vida for coming along

because I don’t want him to spend the rest of his life on his

own. And if you could stop thinking about yourself for five

minutes, you’d agree.’

Cara left the kitchen then and didn’t speak to her sister

for the rest of the evening. The following day she got the

bus back to Dublin. Their phone conversations since then

had been brief and all about surface matters, the memory

of that heated discussion looming over them like a thunder

cloud nobody wanted to talk about.

Evie felt guilty about Cara. Guilty and resentful. Cara

was supposed to be on her side, not Vida’s. If her own

sister couldn’t understand her point of view, who could?

What niggled her was the feeling that Cara hadn’t been

speaking in general terms when she’d yelled about having

something awful happen to you. She’d been talking about

something specific, Evie was sure of it. Something Cara

had never told her. That thought nagged at the back of her

brain. What had happened to Cara and why had she kept it

a secret?

Rosie was still talking about wedding outfits.

‘Cara said she’d like to buy a suit but she’s a bit broke,’

she revealed.

“I hope she does get a suit,’ Evie said. ‘I mean, you never

know what sort of rig out she’s going to turn up in. I’ve

been afraid she’ll arrive in combat trousers and a Tshirt

and show us all up in front of Vida’s posh friends.’

At that precise moment, what to wear to her father’s

wedding was probably the furthest thing from Cara’s

mind. She was bending over her drawing board putting the

finishing touches to a campaign which had been left on her

desk when she and Zoe returned from lunch the day

before.

‘It’s an emergency,’ Bernard had written on the carelessly

scrawled note. ‘Get it done by Monday.’

No please, thank you or I’m sorry if I interrupted your

Friday, your Saturday or indeed, your whole bloody life,

Cara simmered. No. That’s because I don’t have a life, do I?

No bloody life and no bloody career either. Just a psychopathic nutcase for a boss who thinks I can work late on

Friday and all day Saturday without so much as a bit of

common courtesy.

She hated working at the weekends, loathed the way the

office was silent after lunchtime on Saturday, couldn’t

stand the way the building creaked eerily as if there were

hordes of unseen burglars shimmying up and down drain

pipes and sneaking around the office, concealing themselves

behind filing cabinets when she sneaked downstairs

to look.

Cara knew the noises were a combination of the heating

pipes cooling down and creaky old floorboards, but that

didn’t make it any less scary.

A final ten minutes of concentrated effort did it. There.

Finished.

Wearily, she brought the finished design over to

the colour photocopier and made several copies. Then she

packed up her stuff, and went downstairs to drop the

design on the creative director’s desk. She’d just laid it

carefully down when she heard footsteps behind her and

froze with shock.

‘Cara, what are you doing here at half-six on a Saturday

night?’

In front of her stood Ewan from copywriting, looking

totally different from the way he normally did in a dark

suit instead of his usual casual gear.

Like all the copywriters, he dressed down most of the

time and she’d never seen him in anything other than jeans

or sloppy trousers, dark curly hair flopping over his collar. But the smart grey suit looked good on him.

‘You gave me a shock,’ was all she could say. Her knees

felt weak and she found herself leaning shakily against a

desk.

‘Sorry.’ He touched her shoulder briefly. ‘I didn’t mean

to startle you. I didn’t expect there’d be anyone here at

this time. Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘a Bernard special? The

“have this for me before the weekend is over” lark?’

‘Ten out of ten for observation,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been

here the whole bloody weekend and I’m shattered and

can’t for the life of me see what’s so vital about a paint

shop campaign that we have to have it by nine on Monday.

Or will the entire country go into DIY meltdown if I

don’t?’

Ewan grinned, which showed off a broad flash of very

white teeth. Me was gorgeous when he smiled, Cara

thought, offhandedly. Pretty gorgeous even when he

didn’t, actually. She’d never gone along with the office

gossip that he was a ‘fine thing’, to use Bernard’s

secretary’s drooling accolade. But now Cara could sec

Ewan was actually extremely attractive, with those sleepy

greenish eyes, that lop-sided grin and that big mouth of

his. She idly wondered if he could kiss. Cara! What are

you like?

‘I think Bernard likes setting impossible tasks just for the

hell of it,’ Ewan said, distracting her as he leaned against a

desk and stretched out long lean legs. ‘He did it to my boss

when he started here but my boss - well, you know Ken he

worked one weekend and said never again. Bernard

would have to pay him quadruple overtime. Which meant

it never happened again.’

‘Clever Ken,’ muttered Cara. ‘But I’d like to see Bernard’s

face if I started demanding quadruple overtime. Lowly

graphic designers are on the bottom rung of the Yoshi

Advertising ladder.’

‘I know what you mean.’ Ewan smiled ruefully. ‘Have

you much more to do tonight?’

‘Actually, I’m finished.’

‘Great. Fancy a drink?’

Cara didn’t need to think about it. Unwinding over a

drink and bitching about Bernard seemed like a nice way

to end a totally crappy day.

‘Sure, I’ll just get my stuff from upstairs.’

She sprinted up the back stairs happily, glad that she had

something to do that evening. Phoebe was going out to a

party and, although she’d been invited, Cara wasn’t in the

mood to go along and play gooseberry. An enjoyable gin

and platonic evening out with Ewan would be a nice

alternative to another evening of Blind Date and trying to

control her consumption of frozen Mars Bar ice cream.

Three boxes a week was just too much for two women to

get through effortlessly.

She grabbed her rucksack off the floor by her desk,

dismissed the idea of combing her hair and sticking on some lip balm - Ewan was just a guy from work, after all and bounced downstairs to where he was waiting.

‘What are you all dressed up for?’ she asked as they

walked companionably along the street to the bright lights

of O’Dwyer’s. He was as tall as she was, which was nice.

‘Funeral,’ he answered.

‘God, I’m sorry!’ she replied, shocked. ‘Was it anyone

close to you?’

‘No, a friend of my mother’s. I was dragged along for

moral support. Or in case anybody started a fight.’

‘Wow!’ Cara said. ‘What sort of funeral was it? A Hell’s

Angels one?’

‘Nothing like that,’ he chuckled as they found spare bar

stools and ordered two Beck’s. ‘It’s a bit complicated but

my mother and the guy who died had been involved for

years but then he finally left his wife a couple of years ago

and moved in with another woman. I can tell you, my

mother and his wife weren’t pleased! Putting the three of

them together at the funeral seemed like a recipe for

disaster but they all maintained a dignified silence, amazingly enough. He was a great guy’

‘Was he sort of your stepfather?’ asked Cara, intensely

curious about this rather unusual family set up.

‘No, I never had a real father figure,’ Ewan said, not

sounding particularly upset about the fact. ‘My mother had

boyfriends and Stan, the man who died, drifted in and out

of our life. But it was really just me and my mother. I never

knew my real father. He left when I was a baby. Bit of a

free spirit, apparently. He went to Australia and never

came back.’

‘And I thought my family were weird,’ Cara said, taking

a deep slug from her bottle of beer.

‘What’s weird about them?’

‘Absolutely nothing compared to yours,’ she said

jokingly. ‘My mother died when I was six and my father

never married again until now. He’s met this American

widow and they’re getting hitched on Friday.’

‘Good for him,’

‘Ah, but the problem is,’ Cara interrupted, ‘my elder

sister has a bit of an Electra complex about my dad and

she’s foaming at the mouth about the wedding. She’s also

harbouring conspiracy theories about his fiancee of the

Black Widow sort.’

“I get it,’ Ewan leaned back in his seat and loosened his

tie. ‘Your dad is happy as a pig in shit until, two months

later, he keels over in his sleep and your new stepmum

runs off with the family millions?’

Cara chuckled, amused that he’d put his finger on it so

aptly. ‘The fatal flaw in this theory is that the family

millions don’t exist or,’ she fingered the frayed hem of her

second-hand man’s linen jacket. ‘I wouldn’t be dressed like

this.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Ewan said, eyeing her from her

tangled curls and flushed, high cheekbones down to the

faded, tight jeans she’d only put on that morning because

everything else was in the laundry basket. ‘You look pretty

good to me. That second-hand chic look suits you.’

Cara blinked for a moment, unsure what was coming

next.

He continued. ‘I can’t see you in a twinset and pearls

somehow, even if they came from Armani.’ He drained his

beer. ‘Your round, I believe, Ms Rich Bitch.’

She laughed. What seemed to have started out as a

compliment had segued neatly into a joke. A flattering joke

that she looked good, but a joke nonetheless. And it was

her round, as Ewan had pointed out. Cara preferred it

when men treated her like one of them, one of the lads.

Standing her own round, being as tough as any of them, that was the way to be safe. There could be no mixed signals when you swore as proficiently as any male, wore

bigger Doc Marten’s than they did - she was size eight and

could tower over most of them.

They sat and talked for a couple of hours and Cara

enjoyed herself so much, she wondered why she’d never

taken the time to talk to Ewan before. Maybe it was the

fact that he was attractive and had a certain devil-may-care

air about him that had kept her away.

She was wary of men who were gossiped over in the

women’s loos and always scored high on the ‘Who in the

office would you like to sleep with most?’ games when

the female staff were on the piss. Cara never joined in

those games.

‘Spoilsport,’ Zoe would say.

‘Trollop,’ Cara would answer lightly.

Ewan bought the next round and they chatted, laughed,

bitched and generally had a whale of a time.

At half-nine, Ewan said he had to go. ‘I’m playing

football tomorrow afternoon and the coach will kill me if I

turn up hungover.’

‘On a Sunday?’ she asked, piqued that their cosy little

evening out was ending so abruptly.

‘It’s a charity match for this mentally handicapped

school. We do it every year. It’s good fun - unless you’re

dying after a Saturday night bender, that is. Do you want to

come?’

For the second time that evening, she was speechless.

The, come to your match?’ she gulped.

‘Yeah, you’d enjoy it.’ Ewan grinned at her. ‘You’ll like

the lads on the team, they’re good crack. We always go out

after this match and have a slap up dinner and some

drinks. A bit of a party really. You’ll come, won’t you?’ His