What She Wants (45 page)

a writer: writing ad campaigns and writing a novel weren’t the same thing. They were a million miles apart; like being able to play the piano and assuming that meant you could also play the violin. Similar, definitely, but still different enough to ensure that doing one did not necessarily mean you could do the other. That hurt, hurt terribly. But even worse was the knowledge that his mistaken belief that he could write meant he’d uprooted the entire family to Kerry. He’d given up his job, their home and their life, for nothing. ‘Coffee,’ mouthed Ciaran, appearing suddenly beside him. Matt nodded gratefully. Anything to get away from that malevolently winking laptop cursor. Together they went downstairs, past the two big art studios where the sound of muffled laughter signalled that the morning art class was coming to an end. To make the centre profitable, the committee rented it out for two and three-day art courses and week-long writing courses during the year. Today’s group had abandoned the idea of drawing outdoors and Matt had seen them dragging in branches of trees and mucky great lumps of rock for a still life session when he’d arrived. Luckily, he wouldn’t have to exchange idle chit chat with the visiting painters. The visitors always had their mid-morning coffee in what was called the library, a small room decorated with unsold paintings and books written by the centre’s past and present writers. Ciaran had an entire shelf to himself. Matt miserably decided that the only way his work was going to ever be exhibited in the library was if he took up art. Making potato prints was probably his level, he thought bitterly. ‘How’s it going?’ Ciaran said kindly. He would never betray for a second that he could recognize the signs of someone who was struggling. Ciaran had seen people come to write in the centre and discover that they had some glorious hidden talent buried inside them: their fingers flew over the keyboards with joy as they wrote, finally letting the

creativity ring out like a triumphant piece of music. And he’d seen the people who’d spent years promising themselves that they’d write one day, people who’d saved up for a week at the famous Redlion Artistic Centre, only to discover when they sat in the big attic room, that it wasn’t as easy as it looked, that the words didn’t fly out but had to be dragged forth, kicking and screaming. Words that didn’t work on any page and never would. Matt didn’t look like the former: he had the stunned, depressed look of the latter, the face of a man who’d made a big mistake and didn’t know how to face up to it. ‘OK,’ said Matt guardedly, ‘it’s OK. I’m still thinking about the plot really.’ ‘Of course,’ said Ciaran soberly. ‘That’s very important.’ He went back to spooning coffee into his cup and reflected that he was never able to work on the plot without writing anything. Poor Matt. Ciaran felt sorry for the younger man, and sorry for his sweet, quiet wife. He just hoped that Matt realized writing wasn’t for him before it affected their whole family. He’d seen Hope dragging those two little kids listlessly into the village a few times, all of them looking as bored and misplaced as a refugee family. Now she was working a few times a week so money was obviously a problem. It would be fairer if Matt upped sticks and went home. Fairer for Hope and much better for him too. Torturing oneself over not being able to write wasn’t good for the soul, Ciaran knew, from having seen too many people like Matt. ‘Finula asked me to invite you to ours next week, we’re having a bit of a party,’ he said casually. ‘We’d love to go,’ Matt said. Anything to break the monotony. Maybe he could get totally plastered and forget, for a few brief moments, that he was a failure.

A week later, Matt negotiated a bend in the road at what Hope considered to be a deadly speed. There was no point saying ‘slow down.’ Such a remark

would only make him drive faster and rely on his brakes even more. She wouldn’t mind so much but the Metro was not built for hurtling over bumpy country roads. Her knuckles white from clenching the side of the seat, Hope stared tightlipped into the back of the car where Toby was asleep in his car seat. Millie was learning from ear to ear. No speed was too fast for her. Like her father, she preferred the white-knuckle style of driving and had been known to squeal ‘faster, Daddy’, on occasion. They were driving back from a shopping expedition in Killarney where new shoes had been purchased for both children. Millie was thrilled with her sky blue suede MaryJanes. Hope was less thrilled on the grounds that Curlew Cottage and sky blue suede were not compatible. Exactly how did you get mud out of suede? Matt was what passed for happy these days because he’d bought a new thriller and a couple of expensive computer magazines, Toby was happy because, well, Toby was always happy. Hope was depressed and grumpy because she hadn’t bought anything - apart from some groceries. Sadly, two-for-the-price-of-one for toilet cleaner could only thrill a woman so much. She’d planned to buy something cheap and stunning to wear to Finula’s party that night but strangely enough, the shops were all out of garments that fitted the ‘cheap and stunning’ bill. Hope tried to take her mind off Mart’s Formula One driving and flitted over everything partyish in her wardrobe, mentally discarding at least half of it. There was a direct correlation between clothes and dislike, she decided. The more you disliked someone, the better dressed you wanted to be when you met them. On that basis, Hope knew her only sensible option would be to phone up Milan and ask Donatella Versace to send over a dress. If only there was some way out of going to the damn party, but there wasn’t. Babysitting problems couldn’t be blamed because Finula had insisted that the children be brought and put to bed in one of her spare rooms.

‘They probably won’t even wake up when it’s time to bring them home,’ Matt had said happily when he told Hope about this plan. And if they did, Hope vowed, he could sit up with them. He’d been so bad tempered for the past month, so hellish to live with, that she’d had to do everything with the kids. Well, she hadn’t wanted to go to this bloody party, he had, so he could deal with two crying, confused children who wouldn’t appreciate being woken at midnight to go home. The entire Parker family were dressed in their best when they parked outside the Headley-Ryans’ at eight o’ clock that night. Millie and Toby were in their best pyjamas, Millie wearing the new shoes which she refused to take off. Matt was looking particularly handsome in a Paul Smith suit he’d rarely worn before, complete with a grey shirt worn open without a tie. The effect was both casual and effortlessly classy. Hope felt she never managed to combine casual and classy, so she’d gone hell for leather towards classy and was shoehorned into a scoop-necked little black dress from Next that had clung a bit too tightly around the waist when she’d bought it and which hadn’t got any looser with age. Pearl earrings, her hair up and sheer barely black tights with classic suede court shoes finished the look. You couldn’t go far wrong with a little black dress, screamed all the best fashion magazines. As she was also wearing the uncomfortable, constricting all-in-one underwear that was supposed to suck all your fat in, Hope prayed that the magazines were right. She felt like a piece of chicken breast in the supermarket: squashed up into an odd shape with her boobs bolstered across the front. It would be worth it, though, if she looked better than Finula. ‘There are a lot of cars here,’ Matt remarked. Big, expensive cars, he added mentally. Their Metro looked lost among the BMWs and sporty Audis. Matt thought of the low slung sports car he’d driven until the move. A company car, it had gone back while he was on

sabbatical and he hadn’t thought he’d miss it until he was forced to drive Hope’s elderly Metro. The Metro couldn’t compare to the elegant lines of his old car, the powerful engine and the throaty roar it made when he put his foot to the floor. They couldn’t afford a second car at the moment. Hope didn’t seem to mind but Matt did. He was fed up being broke. Ciaran greeted them at the door and led them off to the spare room to settle the children. ‘Will I get Finula to drop in and say hello?’ he asked before he bore Matt off to the party. Hope smiled and shook her head. She’d recently decided that Ciaran was a nice man, after all. It was Finula she couldn’t stand. Naturally, Millie had no plans to go to sleep without having milk, water and several trips to the bathroom. It was nearly nine, therefore, and the party was in full swing when Hope finally left the children asleep. She felt tired instead of partyish. ‘Darling, lovely to see you, are the kiddies asleep?’ said a voice. Finula’s vowel sounds were even more strangulated than usual. No surprise, there, Hope thought. Finula was on impress-mode, which meant she’d be littering her conversation with French, mentioning distant artist acquaintances as if they were close friends, and carrying on as if she had champagne for supper every evening. It was very wearing. After ten minutes, Hope wanted to go and lie down. There was a great film on the telly that night, she remembered crossly. Clearly, Finula was bored with Hope too. ‘Now, you must meet my sister, Priscilla Headley-Clarke,’ Finula said, as a woman approached. Priscilla was a thinner, more conventionally dressed version of Finula, with the same fascination for red talons, too much jewellery and a faux posh accent. ‘Priscilla Headley-Clarke,’ Priscilla said, holding out

her hand, as if Hope was deaf and hadn’t heard the double-barrelled moniker moments before. ‘Hope Parker,’ Hope said, suppressing both a giggle and the desire to call herself Hope Smith-Parker. She could just imagine Priscilla hearing that her elder sister was adopting a double-barrelled surname by linking hers with her new husband’s. ‘If she’s having one, so am I!’ Priscilla would scream, determined to be Headley-Clarke if Finula could be Headley-Ryan. Hope wondered if Priscilla had made her husband go double-barrelled, as Finula had with Ciaran. And what happened if double-barrelled daughters got married, she wondered idly. Treble-barrelled last names or quadruples? Released from having to listen to Finula drone on about how all the pictures in the house were painted by personal friends of theirs, Hope found Priscilla easier to talk to. A Galway-based interior designer, Priscilla wasn’t averse to mentioning the famous people she’d worked for but at least she didn’t try and score intellectual points every few minutes, unlike her sister. And she actually listened to what Hope said, also unlike her sister. ‘It must be difficult to up sticks and move,’ Priscilla commented when they began talking about the Parkers’ move to Kerry. ‘I miss friends,’ Hope said, ‘although I’ve made some good ones here.’ ‘Finula, of course,’ Priscilla said reverently. Hope didn’t correct her. ‘We’ve only been here a few months and some of the time, I feel as if we’ve been here forever. This place does grow on you.’ ‘Don’t you get bored?’ Priscilla asked. ‘I find the country a bit dull. I like city living, I must admit.’ Hope realized that she hadn’t been bored lately. She worked two days a week for Erwin, although that would be coming to an end soon, as his wife was on the mend. However, she wouldn’t be out of work for long. Delphine had

told her that the accounts office in the hotel urgently needed some part-time help. On the social side, Hope regularly met Mary-Kate or Delphine for coffee, she and Matt went to dinner with someone at least once a week, and now that she’d started walking with Delphine at lunchtimes twice a week as part of a getthin-for-summer plan, she was busy. Plus there was the Macrame Club which was fun because they all let their hair down and talked about anything and everything. The only minus was the fact that Mary-Kate had a very heavy hand with the vodka. Every time they met, Hope promised herself she wouldn’t have any martinis but then she fell by the wayside and ended up with a killer headache the next day. The only sad thing was that Sam was in London but they phoned each other every second day now, not caring about the phone bills but wanting to keep in touch. Hope knew Sam was taking one day at a time and trying to change her life, but she was still worried about her sister. ‘It must be dull compared to Bath. Isn’t that where you lived before?’ inquired Priscilla. ‘Actually no, I love it here,’ Hope said, surprising herself. ‘There’s a great sense of, I don’t know … community here. I like that, it’s like having a very big extended family where you know everyone.’ Priscilla snorted. ‘Finula’s been here for ten years and she says she still feels like a stranger.’ Hope suppressed a smile, thinking of how Finula descended upon the village shops like Lady Bountiful condescending to the natives, talking loudly as if she were in Outer Mongolia and nobody could understand her or her desire for organic lentils. It was even worse if she bumped into anyone who was in Redlion to work at the artistic centre. Hope had witnessed Finula buttonholing some poor poet in the butcher’s, telling him how she loved the rural simplicity and the simplistic wildness of both the people and the landscape. The butcher’s wife, a highly educated, marvellously funny woman, had been apoplectic with rage behind the counter

and had been in danger of slicing off the butcher’s assistant’s fingers with her boning knife as she overheard the conversation. ‘Well,’ Hope said, trying to be kind, ‘not everyone fits in.’ ‘Oh Finula’s fitted in,’ Priscilla insisted. ‘She just says the locals are very unfriendly.’ Eventually Hope escaped from Priscilla and got to talk to Mai, her fellow Macrame Club member. Neither Mai nor her husband, Chan, were artistic but had been invited on the grounds that Chan was something big in the computer factory. Finula liked the idea of mixing art and industry at her gatherings. It was one before they left. ‘Did you have a good time?’ asked Matt, caressing her thigh through her silky sheers. ‘Great,’ said Hope. And it had been fun once she’d managed to escape the double barrelled sisters. ‘How about you?’ ‘Yeah, I miss going out.’ ‘We get out here,’ Hope said, stung. ‘You know what I mean, that’s just us. I mean going out to parties with Dan and Betsey. Talking to different people, networking, I suppose.’ They were both silent. Matt, realizing that he missed the social aspect of his old job, Hope upset at the idea that her conversation wasn’t good enough. They drove home slowly, trying to avoid potholes and miraculously, the children didn’t wake when they were transferred from the car to their beds. Hope was taking off her murderously painful all-in-one underwear when Matt rushed into the bedroom, eyes glittering excitedly. ‘There’s a message on the answer phone from Dan. You won’t believe it. Adam Judd’s had a heart attack. He’s all right,’ Matt added, ‘he’s not in any danger, but he’d going to be off work for six weeks. He asked Dan to find out if I would come back and fill in for him until he’s better.’ Hope stared at him blankly. ‘It’s an emergency,’ he added, unable to stifle his joy. He