What She Wants (24 page)

for the anonymity of Dublin. In Redlion, everyone knows everyone else’s business.’

‘Did you never have the chance to marry?’ Virginia asked, then immediately felt sorry for it. ‘I’m sorry, that just slipped out. It was a very personal question and you’ve just been talking about nosy neighbours.’

‘No, it’s fine. Sure, I’ve been asking you things. There was a man but it didn’t work out.’ Mary-Kate shrugged and gently changed the subject. ‘As you don’t know many people in the village, I’ll have to introduce you around. You really must meet Delphine,’ she added.

Virginia noticed the sudden change of subject but didn’t comment.

‘Delphine’s my niece and she’s wonderful. You’d love her. She’s a beautician at the Manoir Rouge Leon up the road and she’s a lovely girl. A bit eccentric, you see, which is why she and I get on so well. Delphine can go into Lucille’s boutique and actually buy things there that suit her.’

They both giggled at this thought. Delphine must be very unusual, Virginia reflected.

‘We go out every couple of weeks, sometimes to the cinema,’ Mary-Kate said, ‘sometimes for a meal. I’d love you to come along and meet her.’

‘I’d like that,’ Virginia found herself agreeing.

The train shuddered to a stop in Killarney and both women collected up their belongings. Virginia’s hip ached and she thought again of her anti-inflammatory tablets. It would definitely be an early night tonight after a hot, soothing bath.

‘Can I offer you a lift?’ Mary-Kate asked.

‘No thanks, I’m driving too.’

‘Well, here’s my phone number,’ Mary-Kate said, handing Virginia a piece of paper. ‘Phone me when you feel like company.’

As Virginia walked to her car, clutching her woolly cardigan close around her to ward off the icy wind, she smiled to herself. It was nice to feel she had a new friend.

Hope listened to the steady thrum of the rain falling on the corrugated roof of the outhouses and wondered if she could ring Dr McKevitt’s surgery, plead an emergency, and be sent a crate of Prozac immediately. Or Valium. Or some other mood-altering drug to make her feel happy.

They’d been in Redlion an entire month, it was now an icy December, and she didn’t think she’d ever been as miserable in her life. Every morning, an increasingly grumpy Matt headed off to the creative centre with his laptop and didn’t return until at least six. She had no idea how much he’d written since they’d arrived because whenever she asked him about it, Matt snapped her head off and muttered that ‘creativity can’t be rushed.’

So now, she asked nothing and wondered if Mrs Shakespeare had to put up with this sort of behaviour. But even if Matt was bad tempered, he was at least adult company, someone who could converse about things other than the chicks’ pooh and the latest episode of Tweenies.

Once Matt was gone, the day stretched ahead of her blankly, with nothing to fill it except Toby and Millie’s latest craze, which was making endless Christmas decorations out of bits of coloured paper. They now had enough glittery garlands to cover four cottages. The only other diversion was the inevitable rainy walk through the mud into Redlion. She adored the children and, in theory at least, loved the idea of being able to spend quality time with them but the problem was, the quality dimmed when there was so much quantity. Except for the weekends when Matt mucked in, she was the only person looking after Toby and Millie and no matter how much she loved them, being sole carer in an isolated little cottage with no other grown up help meant they spent every moment together. Hope simply never had a moment to herself even to read a magazine or blowdry her hair properly.

Even having a bath in the evening when the children were supposedly in bed was impossible as Millie was so demanding she’d clamber out of bed and insist on getting

into the bath too. The simple fact was that the children were bored, too and needed the company of other kids but there didn’t seem to be any young families nearby.

Hope thought longingly of Your Little Treasures and regretted ever giving out stink about the sergeantmajorish Marta. She’d have done anything to get the children into a local playgroup but when she’d investigated, there wasn’t a place to be had for miles around and wouldn’t be until late January when Hunnybunnikins on the far side of the village would have room. Roll on January. Then, of course, Hope would face the question of exactly what she’d do while the children were at playgroup. Redlion didn’t even have a bank and she didn’t fancy trekking into Killarney to work, assuming she’d even be eligible for a job here. She wasn’t qualified for anything else apart from bank work, so what else could she do?

Another nine months and they’d be gone. Nine whole months. She sighed.

Now it was Monday and another week loomed ahead of her, empty except for her by-now daily trips into Redlion for the shopping. If she hadn’t had Sam to talk to by email and Mary-Kate to talk to in person every day, she’d have gone completely mad. Visiting Mary-Kate constituted her entire social life as she never set eyes on anyone else. Finula kept inviting them to her house for dinner but on the one occasion they’d gone, Finula had been so patronizing to her that Hope hadn’t wanted to go again. Matt went on his own after that which frequently left Hope alone in the evenings.

Mary-Kate had twice invited her out with her female friends but Hope had refused both times, partly because Matt hated her going out without him and partly because she didn’t want to feel like a burden on anyone. It was one thing to go into the chemist every day for something, it was another entirely to impose on a group of old friends going out at night. Sweet Mary-Kate never pushed her, unlike Sam who was getting increasingly pushy via-email.

‘Your life is revolving around Matt’s,’ Sam wrote. Hope

could almost hear her sister’s voice rising in anger as she read her words. ‘He has set himself up with a new life and he expects you to kow tow and have the dinner on the table when he gets home. Tell him it’s not on!!!’

Sam was right, Hope decided firmly. She needed to do something about her life. She needed to get out and meet people and get a job. She even daydreamed about the old days in the building society where there was a constant stream of conversation. But first, she’d better clean out the chickens’ box.

The raising of the chicks was going remarkably well. She found that she liked looking after them and decided that, when they were old enough to live outside in the hen house, she’d get more chicks. The thought of having her own eggs made her feel smugly self-sufficient and she was determined to get the back garden cleared so she could grow vegetables. And maybe herbs, she decided. Basil and rosemary that would scent the entire garden deliciously. Unlike the chicks’ box, which did not smell delicious.

Nobody had mentioned that chicken shit smelled, she reflected as she stood at the hidey hole by the back door and peered into the box. Finula’s chicks lived in her roomy scullery, Matt had informed her, so the Headley-Ryans never had to put up with the pong. And smell it did.

‘Oooh yucky!’ declared Millie holding her nose ostentatiously. ‘I thought you liked chicken pooh,’ Hope laughed. ‘You’re always talking about it.’

Millie giggled endearingly.

Both children liked the chicks’ coop being cleaned out because it was the only time they got to play with the chicks. Well, the only time officially. Hope was forever finding Millie standing on tiptoes and trying to squeeze one fat little hand under the wire into the coop to catch a hysterical chick. At the first sight of her, all the chicks ran like lemmings, frantically trying to hide under each other. Hope didn’t like to think what Millie had done to them to cause this panic.

Hope took the wire cover off and put the first chick in a smaller box, which she then gave to Toby to hold. She had decided that it was more important that Toby get over his fear of countryside creatures than to be hypersensitive about germs. She went through loads of disinfectant hand wash as it was. ‘Don’t kiss her and don’t put your hands near your face if you touch her,’ she warned. Toby gazed at his squeaking chick with awe. ‘Where’s mine?’ wailed Millie. Hope handed her another box. ‘What chick is that?’ Millie asked, already sticking her hand into the box to grab her prey. ‘Mopsy,’ lied Hope. She was never totally sure which was which as they all looked pretty alike at this point. The grand naming ceremony had made for an enjoyable few days when Toby and Millie came up with all sorts of mad suggestions. Millie was keen on Beatrix Potter names and refused to believe that Mopsy and Flopsy were traditionally names for rabbits. Toby had come up with Bear (after his favourite teddy) and Thomas (after the Tank Engine). Hope named the smallest chick Fifi and had been considering a sixth and final name when Millie piped up that they could call the fattest chick Auntie Finula. ‘You can’t do that,’ Hope said, desperately trying to keep a straight face. ‘But I want to,’ said Millie. ‘Why do you want to call that chick Auntie Finula?’ Hope knew she shouldn’t go down this road but she couldn’t resist. ‘I don’t like Auntie Finula. I don’t like that one,’ Millie said firmly, pointing her finger at the innocent chick in question, an enormous cuckoo of a bird who looked as though her skinny little legs shouldn’t be capable of supporting her fat body. Hope bit her lip. ‘We can’t call it Auntie Finula, it might upset the real Auntie Finula.’ Millie’s impish dark eyes glinted. ‘Don’t care!’

Mary-Kate was having more success with persuading Virginia to come out. They’d got into the habit of talking on the phone quite a bit and had already had one night out at the cinema where Delphine had come along too and enchanted Virginia.

Now Mary-Kate had asked Virginia to go to the Widow Maguire’s pub the following night.

‘Just yourself, myself and Delphine,’ Mary-Kate had said on the phone. ‘A girls’ night out before Christmas.’

Virginia didn’t feel up to it and wondered how she could politely wriggle out of the invitation without upsetting her new friends.

They made an odd threesome, Virginia thought. The outwardly prim Mary-Kate, herself grief-stricken and Delphine, Mary-Kate’s niece, with her wild Celtic beauty and mad clothes. Delphine’s idea of normal clothes were pinstripe trouser suits with a low-cut T-shirt underneath when she was in a businesslike mood or a long, purple velvet dress with huge costume jewellery when she was in party mode.

In Dublin, in her previous life, Virginia wouldn’t have made friends with such a diverse group. Her friends had all been women of her own age, women with husbands and grown up families, and their conversations had always taken well-established, conservative lines. They grumbled happily about how their husbands were always late home for dinner and talked about unsuitable sons-in-law. Now Virginia couldn’t bear to be around her old women friends: they reminded her too much of what she’d had and lost so suddenly. Her friends went red with guilt when they realized they were groaning about tardy husbands. They were kind and loved her, and did their best to change the subject, but Virginia was a realist. She knew that’s what long-married people talked about: their partners and their families. It wasn’t their fault that this topic sent shrapnel into Virginia’s heart.

Her new friends were very different. Straight-talking

Mary-Kate was forty-four, conservative on the outside and startlingly original on the inside. She may have looked sedate with her old-fashioned glasses and slightly prim manner, but she was wry and marvellously acute. Mary-Kate had some sadness inside her, Virginia felt, which was how they’d probably been drawn to each other. The man she’d loved and lost was obviously the secret but Virginia would never have dreamed of intruding by asking. The exotic Delphine, another Redlion inhabitant, was a mere twenty-nine, lived with Eugene, a delightful teddy bear of a man, and worked in the beauty salon of the luxury hotel five miles away. Manoir Rouge Leon was practically six star it was so posh, Mary-Kate informed Virginia. And it was managed by a hunk who set every woman’s heart aflame, Mary-Kate added, pointing out that for some strange reason, this hunk had never made it to the chemist to ask her out. ‘Christy De Lacy’s not your type,’ Delphine laughed when her aunt said this. ‘You’ve always told me that it’s what’s in a man’s heart that matters - not his face.’ ‘If he’s as gorgeous as everyone says he is, I could make an exception in his case,’ protested her aunt. Livelier than a firework, Delphine was Mary-Kate’s niece and god-daughter. When Mary-Kate took Virginia to her heart, so did Delphine. They’d brought Virginia to the cinema already and now the three of them were due to go to the Widow’s for a night of entertainment, food and wine. Virginia felt about as outgoing as a turkey at Christmas. ‘I think I’m getting a bit of a headache,’ she lied on the phone to Delphine, deciding that it was easier to lie to Delphine than to her aunt. ‘If you’ve a headache going into the Widow’s, you’ll be ahead of the rest of us then,’ Delphine laughed, ‘because we’ll all have a headache at the end. It’s the Nashville Springtime Girls tonight and they’re godawful.’ In spite of herself, Virginia laughed. ‘I’m tired,’ she tried.

Forget it,’ said Delphine in her lilting Kerry accent. ‘You’re coming and that’s it.’

The Nashville Springtime Girls were setting up their equipment when the three of them took up position at the back of the Widow Maguire’s, as far away from the speakers as possible. The Springtime Girls had obviously chosen their name in an ironic way, Virginia decided, seeing as how none of them appeared younger than her and looked like sexy grandmothers in their denim and cowboy boots. ‘Coming in early has its advantages,’ Mary-Kate said with relief, sitting back against the extra cushion she’d stolen off a nearby bench. ‘My sciatica is killing me. But I’ve taken two of those muscle relaxants and soon I won’t feel a thing.’ ‘You won’t be able to feel a thing if you drink either,’ Virginia scolded. ‘They’ll react with the whiskey and you’ll be as high as a kite.’ ‘Don’t nag,’ said Mary-Kate equably. ‘I lead a very dull life and I’m entitled to a bit of being high as a kite. Anyway, it’s okay to have a drink with these ones, I promise. I’m a professional and I can tell.’ ‘If that’s the case, can I have a supply of them for Christmas,’ begged Delphine. ‘I’ll need some sort of drugs to help me get through the festive season.’ Virginia shuddered at the thought of Christmas. She wished it could be wiped off the calendar. Last Christmas she’d been in a miasma of tranquillizers; this year, she’d be going without. ‘What are you and Eugene doing for the big day?’ Virginia asked, trying to sound normal. Just because her idea of Christmas was hell on earth, that didn’t mean it was the same for everyone else. Delphine’s pale Celtic skin paled even further and her misty dark-green eyes suddenly became liquid. Mary-Kate patted Delphine’s hand briskly. ‘I’m sorry,’ Virginia said anxiously, ‘I didn’t mean to say