Just Between Us (22 page)

‘Mrs Miller!’ gasped Hugh’s assistant when Rose peeped round the door of her office.

‘Hello, Suzanna, I thought I’d surprise Mr Miller by taking him to lunch.’

Suzanna’s eyes widened dramatically. ‘He’s gone already,’ she said nervously. ‘I’m so sorry you missed him. I’ll tell him you called.’

‘I could catch up with him,’ Rose said. ‘Has he gone with a client?’

‘No, er yes. Well, yes.’

For a brief moment, Rose wondered if Suzanna was always this hyper. Hugh hated nervy people.

‘Never mind,’ Rose said, ‘tell him I’ll see him tonight.’

She set off again, this time determined to take a quick trip round the market in case she spotted something for Stella. Occasionally, she found real gems, like the square bottle with the silver top which Stella had adored.

It was nearly two when she began her walk back to the car, weighed down with a dozen free range eggs from the market and lamb cutlets from the butchers. She’d wandered round the market for ages, and had a cup of coffee and a sandwich with a neighbour she’d bumped into. Feeling guilty for idling round town when the house needed a final tidy up before Adele’s visit, Rose took the short cut down a winding street to the car park. At the bottom of the lane was the town’s latest restaurant, an intimate little French brasserie set on the corner, with big windows looking out onto the lane and the main street. She and Hugh hadn’t been to it yet and Rose looked in the big picture window as she passed, so she could decide if she liked the look of it or not. She’d always liked low lighting in restaurants, especially nowadays, as she joked to the girls. Candlelight was more flattering to older faces than any amount of facelifts.

This restaurant was suitably dark. It looked nice, Rose thought, as she emerged from the lane onto the street beside the shopping centre car park. She stopped to look right and left before crossing the road, then took a sharp, shallow breath as she noticed a couple leaving the restaurant. One of them was Hugh in the grey suit he’d gone off in that morning, and he was smiling down at his female companion in an intimate manner. Rose didn’t recognise her, she was petite and red-haired and about ten years her junior. And she was staring up at Rose’s husband in a way that suggested their lunchtime conversation had involved more than legal
matters. There could be no mistaking that look. Or the one Hugh was giving back. Cautiously, Hugh pecked the woman on the cheek; a careful gesture obviously made so that any observers would think they were friends only. But Rose wasn’t any old observer. She’d known Hugh for over forty years and she knew his every nuance intimately. She’d only seen Hugh look at one person in that way: herself.

Some presence of mind made her dash into the shop beside her, not caring that she was hardly the sort of customer that Guyz fashions had in mind. Her hands shook as she pretended to rifle through shirts near the window, while she peered out to see where Hugh and the woman were headed. Hugh must have turned up the lane back to his office, but Rose was perfectly placed to watch the woman walk past Guyz, her every delighted step the movement of a woman who’d just had an expensive lunch with a man she found fascinating. Rose watched until the woman was long gone, then she moved woodenly towards the door. Deep inside her, she’d been expecting this ever since Christmas Eve. It had just been a matter of time.

Somehow, she got to her car and sat in it, shell-shocked, and oblivious to the driver who’d seen her get into the car and wanted her parking space. Eventually, he gave up and drove off to look elsewhere. Rose sat there and stared blankly out of the window.

She’d known about the affairs. There had been three, until now, anyhow. It was hard not to know in a place like Kinvarra. There was always somebody prepared to mention that they’d seen Hugh having dinner with a person they didn’t recognise, and…well, they’d uncomfortably add that they thought Rose should know. At this point, Rose would smile and say she knew all about it; that Hugh had been at dinner with an old friend of the family and she’d have gone along herself that evening if she hadn’t had a cold. Her calm self-possession generally wrong-footed even the most concerned messenger.

Clearly if Rose knew about the tête-à-tête in the restaurant fifty miles from Kinvarra, everything must be above board. And anyhow, who would want to cheat on the lovely Rose Miller?

But Rose had known each time, without the outside information. She wasn’t one of those women who lived in a cosy world of their own, the ones who bleated that it was all a big shock. How on earth could they not know, she wondered? She’d known intuitively and knowing was her defence. And her armour. She knew that Hugh would never want to leave the girls because he was devoted to them. It was up to her to protect her children and she had, by saying nothing.

A loud buzzing noise shocked her into alertness. Her mobile phone. Rose had forgotten she had it with her. She still hadn’t assimilated this modern convenience into her life. She reached into her handbag, fished out the phone and looked at the name flashing in dark green on the little screen. ‘Stella.’

‘Hi, Mum,’ said her oldest daughter brightly. ‘I’ve got an idea, can you talk?’

‘Yes,’ said Rose automatically.

‘We’ve had this brilliant idea for you and Dad for your anniversary present. A weekend in Paris! Nick and I will tell you all the wonderful places to go to when we get back but it would be the perfect present from Holly, Tara and me. What do you think?’

Rose laughed mirthlessly. ‘Darling, that’s a very kind idea but I don’t think so.’

‘Mum, we’d love to do it for you both; please think about it.’

Rose closed her eyes and searched her confused mind for an excuse. ‘Dad’s so busy right now, it would be impossible,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we could manage it. Stella, can I phone you back later?’ she added lamely.

‘Of course, Mum. Call me tonight at home. Bye.’

Rose hit the off button and turned her key in the ignition.

If she was at home, she might be able to think about it all more clearly. She couldn’t fall apart in the supermarket car park.

It was a month since her father’s birthday lunch in Kinvarra and Kenny and Joan’s attempts to find a man for Holly had met a hitch: Joan thought that speed dating was the answer and Kenny was opposed to the idea.

‘You can’t meet an ideal partner at some gimmicky night out,’ he insisted. ‘We might as well send Holly to a football match and tell her to pick the first person who winks at her.’

‘I’d prefer to go to a football match,’ said Holly miserably.

But Joan was having none of it, which was how she and Holly ended up in the Purple Mosquito at eight o’clock on a rainy Thursday evening along with thirty-eight other people who’d each handed over €20 to be part of the Purple Mosquito’s Speed Dating Extravaganza (free cocktail included).

‘Stop shaking,’ muttered Joan under her breath.

‘How can I stop shaking?’ said Holly. ‘I’m terrified. I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t like dating, full stop, never mind speed dating.’

The customers were sitting at small tables ranged around the club’s minuscule stage and they’d each just been given a card with a number on it, a pencil and piece of A-4 paper. Holly’s number was six. She wondered what this meant. She had to go on dates with six men, one after another? She had to go on a date with six men at the same time? She’d been filmed when she entered the club and she’d been judged as rating six out of ten, or worse, six out of 100? Who knew?

‘Take deep breaths,’ hissed Joan. Joan was number eighteen.

Holly closed her eyes and took a deep breath. With any luck, when she opened her eyes she’d discover this was all a dream and she’d be on her couch at home, with the telly comfortably on in the background and no scary woman stomping around in thigh-high pink suede boots…

‘Wakey wakey!’

Holly sat bolt upright and opened her eyes. The scary woman in pink suede was still there and staring, well, glaring, at Holly who was sitting near the front, thanks to Joan. Holly would have hidden down the back given a choice.

‘I hope we’re not boring you,’ cooed the woman, insofar as it was possible to coo with half a tonne of panstick welded to her face. Miss Mindy, the evening’s compère and the club manager, went for the make-up-as-armour approach. Her maquillage would stop a bullet.

Holly shook her head mutely and Miss Mindy sashayed off to continue explaining the rules.

‘She’s the ugliest drag queen I’ve ever seen,’ whispered Joan.

‘She’s not a drag queen,’ hissed another voice in disgust. ‘She’s a woman. Look at those legs. Criminal!’

Despite her nerves, Holly burst into giggles and earned herself another glare from Miss Mindy.

The Purple Mosquito was a cutting-edge club much favoured by trendy fashionistas, models, actors, drag queens and a select crew of men keen to discuss the difficulty of getting sheer tights in extra large. Holly hadn’t been keen on the idea in the first place, but to add to the sense of unreality, the speed dating night was packed into the early part of the evening, while Miss Drag De Luxe—a beauty contest for drag queens, no heckling allowed—was the latenight attraction. Consequently, the dating arena was surrounded by drag queens in various stages of make-uplessness. Holly had never seen so many beautiful, long legs in her life. There was also a lot of PVC clothing and an abundance of flowing, glossy hair straight out of a L’Oréal commercial.

‘We’ve given you each a number and that’s to tell you which table to go to first,’ said Miss Mindy to the crowd of people who were watching with bated breath. ‘We’ll bang the first gong and you talk, then when the second gong goes, the woman gets up and goes to the next table but the man stays put. Right?’

The crowd nodded. Apart from a group of rowdy young men at a table clogged with beer bottles, they were all too nervous to speak.

‘The girl at number one goes to table number two, and so on. You make notes in your sheet of paper.’

Holly looked anxiously down at her piece of paper.

‘And to loosen us all up, the speed dating club will be providing a free cocktail from the list for all the daters.’

This merited a nervous round of applause but Holly knew it would take more than a free cocktail to make her ready for this demented idea. A general anaesthetic might have had a hope.

If only Joan had never noticed the Purple Mosquito’s flier stuck to the notice board in college.

‘Look,’ she’d said brandishing it triumphantly at Holly, ‘this sounds brilliant, Holls. Listen to this: “Can’t find the one of your dreams and too lazy to chat up another frog? Try the Purple Mosquito’s Speed Dating Nite, hosted by Miss Mindy, €20 only. Twenty couples, five minutes each person, and a guaranteed night of fun and frolics. Book early to avoid disappointment. Gay night Tuesday, straight night Thursday.’”

‘We can’t go to that,’ Holly said, horrified. Even five minutes talking to someone was too long for her. What would she say to a whole series of men? ‘You go, Joan. Count me out.’

‘I’ve rung already and booked, we’re both going.’

It was all very well for Joan, who was used to cool clubs and strange people, but Holly knew she was the worst person in the world for a night of talking to strangers.

‘I’m not going,’ she finally announced to Joan early on
the Thursday evening in question. ‘I know you’ve booked but I’m too nervous.’

Joan looked outraged.

‘You’re always telling me to stand up for myself,’ Holly protested.

‘Not to me,’ said Joan, shocked. ‘You’re coming, that’s final.’

The Mosquito was all urban cool, with minimalist decor and deeply uncomfortable backless cube seating which looked hip but was actually murderous on the lower back. Still, the whole effect was ultra stylish, Holly thought, looking around. If she hadn’t been there for the speed dating thing, she might enjoy herself.

On stage, Miss Mindy banged a gong and Holly jumped in her seat.

‘Just testing! Everyone to their tables.’

‘Good luck!’ said Joan happily as she rushed off eagerly to table eighteen. Holly hastily picked up her shoulder bag and a crash of glass told her she’d managed to knock something off a table.

‘It’s alright, it was empty,’ said a girl at the next table, picking up the remains of a beer bottle from the floor.

‘Sorry,’ mumbled Holly, her cheeks burning.

A waitress ambled over and surveyed the damage.

‘Sorry,’ said Holly again.

She turned and somehow banged into the table she and Joan had been sitting at, but just in time, she grabbed the ashtray before it trundled to the floor. ‘Sorry,’ she said to nobody in particular.

Table six. Where was it? Still bright red, Holly peered round the gloom. In her confusion, she just couldn’t see table six. Everyone else seemed to be sitting down in pairs except…Just in time, she spotted a guy sitting on his own. That had to be six. She rushed forward, slipped between the seats, and landed heavily on the empty chair.

A lurid blue drink with a cocktail umbrella and a giant bit of pineapple in it sat in front of her. Without actually
meeting the eyes of the guy opposite, Holly looked up enough to establish that he had a blue cocktail too.

‘Is this mine?’ she whispered.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

On stage, Miss Mindy banged the gong enthusiastically. ‘The first five minutes have begun!’ she shrieked.

All at once, the buzz of frantic conversation began. It sounded like a swarm of locusts droning over a crop field. Holly and her date looked around them in awe, then looked guiltily at each other.

He was pale and freckly and was blinking at a rate that meant he either had a speck of dust lodged in both eyes or was very, very nervous.

He took a huge gulp of his cocktail, looked down at his bit of paper and began to curl the corner up in an obsessive way that Holly recognised as classic shy behaviour. Her stomach lurched in anxiety. He was clearly even shyer than she was and therefore, the onus was on her to talk to him because that was the polite thing to do. But whatever was she going to say? She took a gulp of her drink. It tasted like the sort of thing Joan concocted out of the dregs of bottles when they had no money for decent wine.

‘Did you get dragged along by your friends too?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Yeah.’ The look of gratitude on his face made Holly glad she’d forced herself to speak.

‘Me too. It was my friend’s idea. She’s over there.’

They both looked over to where Joan was sitting with a handsome blond guy who was wearing a leather jacket. Joan was gesticulating wildly with one hand and twirling a strand of her black hair with the other, while her date looked raptly on with his mouth open. Holly, who’d seen Joan’s technique before, knew that her next move would be to place one hand on the guy’s arm, gaze deeply into his eyes and say something along the lines of ‘You’re incredible, you know that?’ This didn’t always work but Joan always did it. She’d seen it in a film and firmly believed that it would be successful eventually.

Holly turned back to her date. She better get some information before the gong went. She didn’t want Miss Mindy to beat her up for not going along with the rules. Miss Mindy looked like she could stand in for her own bouncers if the need arose.

‘What’s your name?’ Holly asked the guy.

‘Ron.’

‘I’m Holly. I didn’t want to be here either but we can pretend, can’t we?’ she said lightly. It was quite an experience for her to be the outgoing one in any conversation.

Ron nodded.

Holly wrote his name down.

‘What do you do, Ron?’ she asked in her newly-acquired chatty voice. She took another slurp of cocktail while she was waiting.

‘I’m at college,’ he said, looking down at his bit of paper.

Holly waited for him to say what he was studying but he didn’t. For a brief moment, she wondered was
she
this difficult to talk to? Did other people cast around wildly for conversational gambits that would work? Making conversation with someone as painfully shy as Ron was hard going.

Holly vowed that would change. Buoyed up by this self-improving decision, she tried again.

‘I work in Lee’s Department Store,’ she said.

Ron kept looking at his bit of paper.

‘In the children’s department.’

Still no answer.

‘What do you study?’ she asked in desperation.

The gong banged. Ron still wasn’t talking. The time was up.

‘Nice to meet you,’ said Holly and got up. She brought her drink with her, being very careful not to spill it as she moved to table seven. She needed it.

‘Hi,’ said her new date. He wasn’t bad looking, she realised, dark hair, dark eyes, a nice shirt with a few buttons open to reveal a bit of chest hair, a laid-back attitude to
him. He was perhaps two or three years younger than she was. Cute. From table nineteen, Joan gave her a thumbs up signal.

Holly sat down and put her glass on the table carefully. This guy was definitely one of the rowdy gang of students. They were probably out for a night of fun, they weren’t seriously looking for dates. Now that she was determined to talk, she could enjoy herself too.

‘Hi, I’m Holly. This is a bit of fun, isn’t it?’ she said brightly, astonished at her own daring.

‘I’m Carl and yeah, it’s great fun,’ said the guy, baring his teeth in a wolfish grin. ‘So, you’re looking for a man, Holly?’

‘What?’ said Holly.

‘A man, I said are you looking for a man, or are you here for some fun?’

He was drunk, Holly realised.

‘Fun, really,’ she said. ‘My friend and I came here for a laugh.’

‘You could have a laugh
and
some fun,’ Carl said meaningfully. He reached under the table and gave Holly’s leg a suggestive grope.

She drew back in shock and just managed not to spill her drink.

‘We’re here to talk,’ she gasped.

He looked fed up at this. ‘Why do all girls want to talk?’ he grumbled. ‘It’s boring. Talk, talk, talk. That’s all they do.’

‘So what do you study?’ asked Holly, determined to interrupt his moan.

‘How did you know I’m a student?’ Carl demanded.

‘You’re here with a gang and you all look like students,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me, you’re studying brain surgery.’

‘Very funny,’ slurred Carl.

Holly beamed back at him. She’d done it. She’d been talkative and she’d made a joke! So, she’d managed it because the people involved were very shy and very drunk, but it was a start.

‘God,’ Carl said, staring mesmerised at her chest. ‘You’ve a great pair of tits.’

Holly’s eyes grew wide. For an instant, she thought of flinging the rest of her cocktail all over his face. But cocktail-throwing was for brave women. Tara would probably do it without a second thought. Joan would possibly land him a punch. She’d done a bit of kick boxing.

But what was the point? Carl was plastered

‘If you don’t want me to get Miss Mindy over here to tell her what you’ve just said to me, shut up and be polite!’ she said calmly.

It was his turn to widen his eyes. Miss Mindy scared everyone.

‘Very sorry,’ he said drunkenly.

At the next table on Holly’s dating odyssey, the man had disappeared, leaving his piece of paper behind.

‘He’s gone to the loo,’ said Miss Mindy, swooping like a giant flamingo. ‘How are you getting on, love?’

Holly looked down at her list. She’d written:
Ron, v quiet. Carl, v drunk.
She had no phone numbers or dates set up, although her boobs had been praised. She didn’t know whether Miss Mindy would see this as a negative or a positive reaction.

‘Fine,’ Holly said. ‘I’ve been getting on fine although it’s not what I expected.’

Miss Mindy raised her eyes to heaven. ‘The story of my life, love.’

By ten, Holly had met nineteen men (one of the contestants had gone home) and knew for a fact that she hadn’t met the love of her life.

The best had been a sturdy guy in his early thirties who worked in a lab and told jokes through the entire five minutes, which was funny, but struck Holly as obsessive shy behaviour under another guise.

‘How can you tell you’re talking to an extrovert lab researcher?’ he asked.

‘Don’t know.’

‘He looks at
your
shoes when he’s talking to you.’