Something in Common (37 page)

H
e was balding, although
his face didn’t look more than midthirties. His forehead was shiny, his nose long, his teeth crooked but startlingly white. He wore a blue denim shirt and beige corduroy jeans, and when he stepped around the low table to greet her she saw his cowboy boots underneath. He gripped her hand in both of his.

‘Sarah,’ he said, his voice as rich and warm as it had sounded on the phone. ‘Paul Donnelly. Good to meet you.’

He’d come all the way from Dublin, even though she’d offered to travel to him. ‘Not at all,’ he’d said. ‘I like any excuse to get out of the office. Give me the name of a hotel near you, and I’ll see you in the lobby,’ and here he was in Uncle John’s old hotel, with a coffee pot already on the table in front of him, and a briefcase on the floor by his chair.

He indicated the
pot. ‘This is still fresh – or would you rather something else?’

‘Coffee’s fine, thanks.’ She rarely drank it, and certainly not an hour before dinner – but it didn’t matter in the least what he poured, since she was far too nervous to touch a drop.

He’d given nothing away on the phone, simply said he thought they should meet and have a chat.

‘Of course
he’s interested,’ Christine had said. ‘He’d hardly come all the way here if he wasn’t.’

‘Maybe he’s just letting me down lightly.’

‘Don’t be daft.’

She hadn’t stopped thinking about the cookery book since she’d finally plucked up the courage to lift the phone and ring him in January, like Helen had ordered, six weeks ago now, and he’d given her his address and asked her to send him the manuscript.

Five weeks and six days since she’d slipped the pages into an envelope and posted it off to him, her hands actually shaking as she’d stuck on the stamps. Five months it had felt like, until he’d phoned last Tuesday and told her he wanted to meet her, and what day would suit.

‘So,’ he said when coffee had been poured, ‘your children’s cookery book.’

She wore the blue skirt she’d bought for her fortieth, and a grey jacket over it that she’d thought made her look businesslike. Now, in the face of his denim and corduroy, she felt overdressed. She added milk to the coffee she had no intention of drinking as she waited for him to go on.

‘I road-tested it on my two girls, aged eight and twelve,’ he said, ‘neither of whom had shown any interest in cooking. I challenged them to cook dinner one evening.’

He raised his cup and drank. With difficulty, Sarah resisted the urge to slap it from his hands. He set it back in its saucer.

‘It was a disaster,’ he said.

Sarah’s heart plummeted.

‘They fed us for a week,’ he went on, straight-faced. ‘My wife hardly saw the kitchen. I gained four pounds. My wife went shopping with the time on her hands and did severe damage to our bank account. It’s all your fault.’

He smiled. ‘I would like to offer you a publishing deal,’ he said. ‘I think you’re onto something good here. Really good.’

Sarah was afraid to return his smile. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Well, not
about the bank account,’ he said. ‘Thankfully, my wife has her own job. But yes to the rest – including, sadly, the weight gain.’ Patting his stomach, which, as far as she could see, wasn’t a bit bigger than it should be. ‘The girls found your instructions very easy to follow, and really enjoyed the experience. Maureen, my older girl, wants the book for her birthday – but considering it’s next month, I told her she might not have it on time.’

Sarah laughed delightedly. ‘You mean it? You really want to publish it?’

‘I certainly do. I can see why Helen was so enthusiastic about it.’

Helen, enthusiastic? She hadn’t even seen the manuscript, hadn’t read a word of it. Sarah decided to keep that information to herself.

He reached for his briefcase and snapped it open. ‘I take it,’ he said, ‘that you don’t have an agent.’

An agent. Sarah Flannery with an agent. Don’t laugh. ‘No.’

‘I’ve drawn up a contract,’ he went on, pulling out a thin sheaf of paper. ‘Bring it home, have a read, see what you think.’

Because he imagined there was a possibility, did he, that she might turn down a publishing deal? She accepted the pages with what she hoped was a pleasant smile, rather than a grateful beam of such brilliance it might just blind him, and tucked them into her bag as he produced a diary from the briefcase.

‘Let’s talk again,’ he said, ‘in a week or so. If you’re happy with the contract, I’d like to get moving on this, to have it on the shelves as soon as possible. I’ve had a few ideas about format that we’d need to discuss.’

He’d been thinking about it, he had a few ideas. He was serious about wanting to publish her recipes, and he was thinking about how best to do it. He was talking about it being
on the shelves.

She had an urge
to pull the contract out of her bag and sign it now, before he had a chance to change his mind, and possibly to accompany this with a kiss. Instead she found herself agreeing, in as normal a voice as she could manage, to let him know by the end of the following week if she was happy with the contract.

Driving to Christine’s to collect the children, she remembered the book she’d started several years earlier, before she and Neil had even met. She remembered the hours she’d spent working on it, choosing her characters, writing their story, changing the plot umpteen times, the years of rewriting and changing again and more rewriting that had all come to nothing.

She recalled Helen’s angry letter, the hurtful things she’d said about a manuscript she hadn’t even seen. Funny that she was doing the opposite now, talking up something else she hadn’t read, as if they’d come full circle.

And today they’d made a new connection – Sarah had met someone who knew Helen personally, who’d seen her face to face, who knew what she sounded like, and how tall she was, and the way she moved.

Sarah must write with the news as soon as she got home. If it wasn’t for Helen she wouldn’t have got a publishing deal so easily, might not have got one at all. A publishing deal – the phrase made her laugh out loud, in the darkness of the car. She was going to be published. Her cookery book was going to sit on bookshelves all over the country. Someone might even buy it.

She turned
slowly and carefully onto Christine’s road, hugging her happiness.

O
n February the
sixteenth, shortly before her fifty-third birthday, Frank Murphy proposed to Helen Fitzpatrick for the sixth time in five years.

‘You can’t be serious,’ she said, pulling the duvet over her head.

‘I am,’ he replied, not a bit put out. ‘I’m seriously asking you, once again, to be my wife. To have and to hold, and so forth. God loves a trier.’

She threw back the duvet and grabbed the fan that was sitting on the locker, and began flapping it in front of her face. ‘
Jesus
, I’m burning up again. I thought I’d made it abundantly clear that I’m perfectly happy the way we are.’

‘And wouldn’t you like to make me just as happy by wearing my ring? That’s the only difference, that you’d have a nice sparkly ring on your finger.’

She continued to flap. ‘God, I’m going to die, I’m going to burst into flames. Look, Frank, it’s sweet of you to keep asking me, and I’m sure you’d buy me a very sparkly ring, but honestly I’d rather not. Feel free to write me into your will, if that’s what’s bothering you: I won’t put up any objections to that. Now would you be a dote and bring me up some ice?’

He sighed as he
got out of bed. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this, woman. I’ll wear you down yet.’

She watched him shamble from the room, his pyjama bottoms bagging unflatteringly around the rear. They were as comfortable with one another as any husband and wife – why was he so fixated on tying the knot?

And why, she wondered, listening to his bare feet thumping down the stairs – he couldn’t be quiet if he tried – did she feel so compelled to keep refusing him? What difference would it make, as he’d pointed out, apart from a ring on her finger? He’d buy her the Hope diamond if she asked for it. And if it made him happy, shouldn’t she swallow her reservations and just do it?

And still there was some instinct that stopped her from saying yes every time. Let them stay together for the rest of their lives – and she had no objection to that – but let them stay as they were, and avoid that final step.

She flapped her fan, remembering how eagerly she’d looked forward to being Cormac’s wife, how she couldn’t wait for them to be married. But what she had with Frank was different: it didn’t have to lead to a walk down an aisle.

So they continued to live together, with her mother coming to them every week now for Sunday lunch – Frank’s idea, naturally – and Alice and Jackie, still together in Cardiff, visiting periodically.

Her relationship with her mother, since her discovery of the truth, had undergone its own change. Nothing overt, nothing anyone observing them would notice, Helen was sure, but the knowledge of her parents’ suffering had brought with it a sort of acceptance, a quieting of the rage and resentment that she’d carried for years.

She didn’t excuse them – even if they hadn’t meant to, they’d still punished her unfairly – but she found herself able to forgive, finally, and move on. She was somewhat gentler with her mother now, and more patient, and her mother, she felt, sensed it and was glad.

Frank returned, carrying
a little bowl of ice and a tea towel, the newspaper and a padded envelope wedged under an arm. He set the bowl and tea towel on her locker and let the envelope drop onto the duvet – ‘From your penfriend’ – before climbing back into bed with the newspaper.

‘Thanks.’

Helen tipped ice into the tea towel and pressed the bundle to her face, feeling the waves of heat gradually begin to ebb from it as she inhaled the frosty air. Eventually she dropped her damp bundle into the bowl and ripped open the envelope and pulled out a slim hardback book.

Party Food for Little People
was written in sky blue on a bright green background, above a line drawing of two beaming children, a boy and a girl, wearing aprons and chef’s hats. The girl held a plate of buns iced in primary colours, each studded with a lighted candle, and the boy clutched the string of an enormous yellow balloon on which the words
Happy Birthday
were inscribed in red.

Running across the top of the page was the now familiar
Cooking is Child’s Play
logo of the series, blue letters on a banner that matched the yellow of the balloon.

Helen opened the book and found a notelet paper-clipped to the first page. She detached it and began to read.

Helen laid the letter aside and picked up the book again, the fifth in the series. It had taken two,
Easy Peasy Dishes
and
C is for Cooking
, before people had begun to sit up and take notice. By the time
More Kitchen Fun
hit the shelves, the first two were being reprinted to cope with the demand, and with the publication of
The Smallest Cook in the House
last year the series was getting top billing in bookshops, with its own dedicated display units.

The idea was beautifully simple. Each book contained just ten dishes, and each recipe was presented in comic-strip form by two young chefs, Martina and Charlie, who demonstrated the steps using few words and lots of pictures. Martina, the elder, led the way, having to stop every so often to scold Charlie, who would inevitably spill or drop something, or furtively eat some of the ingredients. It was children teaching children how to cook, and it slotted perfectly into the gap that had existed.

And it was all down to Sarah, who, Helen was quite sure, bent over backwards to meet whatever rewriting deadlines Paul threw at her – no wonder he called her obliging.