The Matchmaker
Authors: Marita Conlon-McKenna
Maggie Ryan can’t help it! She constantly finds herself trying to match things and people together and with three bright, beautiful,
single
daughters she decides that a little romantic matching is needed.
However, Maggie’s quest to find the perfect partner for each of her reluctant daughters is proving difficult. Grace has had enough of heartbreak and given up on men, deciding instead to concentrate on her career, and Anna believes that no man can ever live up to her romantic ideals. While single-parent Sarah devotes so much time to her little girl Evie that romance constantly passes her by.
Determined to get ‘
rings on those fingers
’ Maggie Ryan believes that the arrival of new neighbour, bachelor Mark McGuinness, is an opportunity far too good to be missed!
Contents
MARITA CONLON-McKENNA
For mothers and daughters everywhere
To Francesca Liversidge, my wonderful editor, for her constant encouragement and for making writing and working together such a pleasure.
Special thanks to Lucie Jordan, Rebecca Jones and Richenda Todd for all their assistance with
The Matchmaker
, and continued gratitude to the rest of the brilliant Transworld team.
To Caroline Sheldon, my agent, for all her hard work and support. For all at Gill Hess, Dublin with enormous gratitude to Gill and Simon Hess, Declan Heaney, Geoff Bryan and Helen Gleed O’Connor for looking after me and my books so well.
For my own perfect match, James; thanks for always being there.
For my family: Mandy, Laura, Fiona and James, my son-in-law Michael Hearty and my little granddaughter Holly. Thank you for making my life so happy and for giving me plenty to write about!
Thanks to my sister Gerardine, her husband Blaine and children Rachel and Graham.
For three very special aunts: Angela Conlon, Una Doyle and Genevieve McKenna, who have been so supportive and helpful since I started writing.
For ‘
les girls
’: Ann, Grace, Karen, Yvonne, Helen and Mary for all the fun and friendship we’ve shared over the years.
Vive la France!
Thanks to Anne Frances Doorly for making me smile and laugh for the most part of my life.
Thanks to Sarah Webb for her kindness, insight and the gift of her friendship.
Thanks to Catherine Harvey for being such a wise and wonderful best friend.
Thanks to Anne O’Connell for reading the first chapter of my first book, and encouraging me to write the rest.
For all my writer friends in Irish PEN – a great club to be in.
For my fellow ‘Irish Girls’ writers; thanks for all the great book launches, dinners and regular get-togethers.
Thanks to all the bookshops and booksellers who bring writers and readers together and have given me such great support.
Thank you to all my lovely readers, especially those who have been there from the beginning.
For everyone involved in the publication and sale of this book, a heartfelt thank you from a grateful author.
The most beautiful thing in the world is a match well made.
Jane Austen,
Emma
The Matchmaker’s Tips for a perfect Match . . .
- Opposites do definitely attract.
- Best friends can make the ‘best’ husbands.
- Interfering in the lives of daughters, sisters and friends usually helps . . .
- Distance can make the heart grow fonder; but usually of someone else!
- Remember bad boyfriends make equally bad husbands.
- Men who are still living at home with their ‘Mammies’ at thirty will (no matter what a girl does) always be Mammies’ boys!
- Good Men are not like the 46A bus . . . they do not come along that often!
- Seeing a man when he is sick, in his pyjamas and is at his absolute worst, and still managing to find him somewhat attractive, is very encouraging.
- Always accept lunch, dinner and party and concert invitations as given time they may lead to a diamond ring.
- Remember falling in love can happen at any age.
It seemed to Maggie Ryan that she had been matching things all her life, from simple socks and underwear in drawers and linen baskets to table mats and table settings and menus, furniture, curtains and clothes, to the more complex choice of the perfect gift for the people she cared about, or the talents of her children with school subjects and hobbies. Matching people was another matter as it always tended to get a bit more complicated. Bringing people together, however, was what she was good at, and something that she actively enjoyed. She smiled thinking about today’s big Sunday lunch with family and friends gathered around her rather ancient dining table.
As she looked out over the square of elegant red-brick Georgian houses that formed a neat rim around the lush hedges and greenery of Pleasant Square, she smiled again. ‘Pleasant’ was the perfect word for it, she thought, this historic square with its old family houses tucked between Leeson Street and Ranelagh where she had lived for thirty-two years. She and Leo had raised their family here, opposite the east gate of the park with its tantalizing view of the herbaceous borders and flower beds.
The square itself, though not very big or imposing, was still considered one of Dublin’s most desirable places to live, and the houses that surrounded it architectural gems. Verdant oak, ash, beech and chestnut formed leafy pathways through the small park, enjoyed by generations of the square’s inhabitants. Pleasant Square’s appearance had barely changed over a century and a half and Maggie couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
She glanced at the ‘Sold’ sign outside number 29, on the corner opposite. She had to admit she was curious to know who had bought the O’Connors’ house. It had gone to auction about two weeks ago. Over the past month streams of visitors, would-be purchasers and inquisitive locals had viewed the three-storey home. Property prices in the city had literally gone through the roof and an old house with character so near town coming on the market was bound to attract interest. Despite being rather ramshackle and a bit run-down the house had sold for a fortune and rumour had it that the purchaser was a man of property, a wealthy investor. Whoever the mysterious buyer was, he had made a wise decision!
She remembered moving into this house, number 23, when she was a bride, Leo Ryan sweeping her up into his broad arms and insisting on carrying her up the steps and across the threshold, the two of them racing up the stairs and along the landing to the huge bedroom and the big bed, where they had stayed for hours, scarcely believing that they were man and wife and were now legally able to sleep together.
The house had been let as flats for years and was much the worse for wear when they first saw it, but Leo, with his eye for investment, had seen the potential. Over time they had both worked to restore the old house to its original condition, junking flimsy partition walls, sinks and two-ringed gas hobs, replacing multicoloured carpet and lino with polished floors, restoring original plasterwork and revealing the magnificent boarded-up fireplaces in the drawing room and dining room. Year by year they had turned a house full of tatty bed-sits into a comfortable family home as they worked and raised their three daughters.
The girls were grown up now. Grace, Anna and Sarah were independent young women, bright, beautiful, kind and good-hearted, just as daughters should be. She was proud of them, all so different. Grace, an architect, wrapped up in her career; Anna lost in the world of literature and academic life; and Sarah, who was still struggling to find a niche of her own but was devoted to her small five-year-old daughter Evie, who was the apple of her grandmother’s eye. She loved them dearly but she had to admit their single state perplexed her.
Sometimes she wished that she could stop the clock, turn back time, have Leo alive again, back beside her, the children still young. But it seemed nothing could stay the same: Detta and Tom O’Connor deciding to move to England to be near their son Cormac and his family and selling up was just another example of it. Soon a new neighbour would be moving into the old Georgian house on the square. It was stupid for her to get sad and emotional about it. Pull yourself together, she told herself. You’ve a busy day ahead. She’d invited everyone for lunch to say a fond farewell to Detta and Tom before their big move to Bath next week. Lord knows they deserved a nice meal and a proper celebratory send-off from the square.
Grabbing the Sunday newspapers off her doorstep she retreated to the warmth of the kitchen and the promise of a quick read, a mug of fresh roast coffee and two slices of wholemeal toast with honey before ten o’clock mass. Then she would come home and pop that enormous leg of lamb she’d got from John Flanagan the butcher into the oven with a few sprigs of rosemary from the garden and begin the preparations for lunch.
Pulling the duvet up over her face and ears, Anna Ryan tried to keep herself warm and block out the nasty world that was waiting for her to emerge from her cocoon of sleep, drink and daydreaming. Her mouth, tongue and throat felt as if they were growing some kind of obscure turgid bacteria; how she wished she had had the foresight to bring a glass of water to bed with her last night. She contemplated the clock and the skinny strip of daylight that teased through her heavy chocolate-brown curtains. It was midday already.
Why did she do it? Waste her time going to one of those awful student-type parties in an overcrowded apartment in Temple Bar where you had to shout over the Killers to be heard and where everyone was dressed in black and drinking cheap red wine, talking about scripts and trying to be sophisticated? Why did her drama students always have to be so predictable! She should have had more sense and left early like she had planned – made a polite appearance and then got a taxi home instead of staying there till four a.m. arguing about the state of the Abbey Theatre and whether plays should aim for Broadway or broke. She must be mad talking to a load of twenty-year-olds about the complicated influences on the structure of Irish drama on a Saturday night. She was pathetic. She had hoped Philip would turn up, only discovering at midnight when she texted him that he had gone to Kilkenny to run a workshop with a theatre group over the weekend, a fact that he had forgotten to mention to her. Philip Flynn worked with her in the college’s English department and as neither of them was involved with anyone, a somewhat unusual relationship had developed between them. With a mutual passion for theatre and literature, they often attended events together, sharing a bottle of wine or supper afterwards. There had been one or two late-night boozy romantic skirmishes between them but somehow good sense had prevailed and they had managed to avoid spoiling it. He was an interesting man and although others considered him self-centred – self-absorbed – and somewhat aloof, she understood the passion for drama and poetry that drove his personality. Still, a phone call from him would have been nice and saved her making an absolute eejit of herself!
