Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (106 page)

‘Yes,’ said Eleanor. ‘I’ve seen her. I’d like to meet her, and your sister.’

Talking to Connie, it came to Eleanor that perhaps meeting people was the answer. She’d spent far too long here in the apartment, alone with her thoughts.

‘We’ll fix it up,’ said Connie, pleased.

Eleanor poured more coffee.

‘Who’s the nice-looking man who lives next door in the basement apartment?’

Connie looked confused. ‘Which man?’

Eleanor smiled inwardly. She was pretty sure Connie was unattached, unlike her sister who was obviously dating that sweet young man. And yet Connie hadn’t even noticed the not unattractive guy next door. Tallish, well-built and with close-shorn reddish gold hair. Although he rarely smiled when he was alone, when he was with his daughter, a skinny little girl with the same colour hair, his smile would break any woman’s heart. ‘Red hair and he’s got a daughter.’ She couldn’t say definitely that he was single, but the only women she’d noticed seemed to be other parents ferrying the girl home.

‘Oh yes, I’ve seen them,’ Connie remembered without much interest. He always looked a bit distracted and hadn’t noticed Connie. ‘I don’t think they can have lived there long. A year or two maybe.’

Eleanor couldn’t help herself: she had to dig deeper.

‘Nicky’s dating someone, isn’t she? How about you?’

‘Nicky’s seeing Freddie and I’m available,’ said Connie lightly.

‘OK.’ Eleanor paused. Years of practice had made her an
expert at emotional archaeology: the trick was the correct question and a neutral tone of voice. ‘Were you married before?’

‘No, nearly married.’ Connie fiddled with her coffee cup restlessly. ‘We split up. Probably just as well,’ she said, without conviction. ‘I’m better off without him.’

Again said without conviction, Eleanor thought. It was as if Connie was repeating what everyone else had said to her but she didn’t really believe it.

‘This way, I can look for the perfect man,’ Connie added lightly.

Definitely said without conviction, Eleanor thought.

‘Love is never where you think it is,’ she agreed. ‘Research suggests that lots of people meet their partner at work.’

Connie grinned. ‘Not an option for me, unless they sack most of the teachers and hire new ones. Besides, there’s more to life than a man.’

Ah,
thought Eleanor. She loved it when her instincts were right.

‘Of course,’ she said neutrally. ‘Family, career –’

Connie’s sweet open face fell and Eleanor felt a moment’s doubt. What was she
doing
? She wasn’t here to analyse people who dropped her mail off for her. But she was so sad and lonely, and this was the only thing she knew. It was a little exploration, that’s all…

‘You must love your job.’

‘I do,’ Connie said slowly. ‘I didn’t make a choice, if that’s what you’re thinking. The fabulous career as a trade-off for no personal life. It just happened.’

‘Most people don’t make that choice, per se,’ Eleanor said. She would never have said such a thing in an actual session, but then this wasn’t an actual session. ‘We find ourselves doing things because of old scripts we’ve never let go of.’ How to summarise all this easily? ‘The man you think you’re better off without, he’s had an effect on you and your choices.’

‘You mean him leaving me affected me more than I think?’

Eleanor nodded. She drank some of her coffee, let the caffeine flow into her. She loved coffee but it no longer loved her. More than two cups a day and her sleeping patterns went awry, and she ended up awake in the middle of the night. The philosopher Sartre had hated three o’clock in the morning. She hated it too. In the middle of the night, failure and sadness came to roost in her mind.

‘I have a list,’ Connie said suddenly. ‘It’s a bit silly. Actually, it’s totally silly. I do it for fun because I’m not going to ever meet a man like the one on the list. It’s a list of criteria for the perfect man. First requirement is, he has to be tall.’

‘Why is that so important?’

‘Because men don’t like women who are taller than them.’

‘Don’t they?’ Eleanor had a way of asking questions that bounced the need to reply right back at a person, a bit like playing tennis. ‘Why do you think that?’

‘They don’t, though, do they?’ Connie said weakly. ‘I’ve never met a man who was with a woman taller than he was. Well,’ she considered, ‘Keith, my ex-fiancé, he was just the same height as me and I could never wear heels with him. Not that I’m a great one for high shoes – they hurt, don’t they? – but he didn’t like me being taller, you see…’

Eleanor let the silence lie there comfortably for a while.

‘Maybe not all men are like Keith?’ Connie said finally.

‘Probably not,’ agreed Eleanor.

‘Maybe I’ve made the list too precise so that nobody can ever live up to it?’ Connie didn’t know why she was telling Eleanor all this, but she was, and Eleanor seemed to understand what she was talking about without being emotionally involved. It wasn’t like discussing it with Nicky (too young and happy) or Sylvie (too in love) or even Gaynor, her married friend (too exhausted from endless cooking and childcare). Eleanor seemed to like talking about deep things and she had such an interesting overview. Like she was devil’s advocate or something.

Eleanor nodded. ‘Lists can…’

She was considering her words carefully, Connie could see, giving the conversation such concentration.

‘…be self-defeating,’ Eleanor went on. ‘Lists can become a way to lessen the importance of something. It’s too enormous to cope with, so we break it down into a list and then it has less power over us. And that’s shutting the door on what we have to deal with. Do you think?’

This was clearly Connie’s cue to reply. She nodded. She’d never thought of it that way before. Was writing a list of all the things she wanted in a man really just an avoidance tactic or a way of lessening the power of it in her head?
Here’s my funny list and, no, I don’t want a man anyway, it’s just a laugh, I’m happy the way I am.

‘But it can be useful too,’ she protested. ‘I like making lists, it clarifies ideas in my mind.’

‘Perhaps when it’s “things to do”, that sort of list,’ Eleanor said. ‘But for the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, can that be broken down into component parts? Also, is this list an avoidance tactic so you don’t have to face something you’d rather not?’

Connie’s mouth fell open but she shut it sharply.

‘Right,’ said Eleanor calmly. ‘Once you get it all firmly in your head what you r
eally
want from a relationship instead of the ideas left over from Keith, then you can start again.’ She decided to go off-piste, so to speak, and deliver one of the truths she’d forgotten until recently. ‘Life is about getting by, Connie. Surviving. It’s never perfect and we self-sabotage for any number of reasons, but if you try to understand all that about yourself, you can be happy.’

At home afterwards, Connie realised she had asked almost nothing about Eleanor herself. For sure, Eleanor hadn’t volunteered anything, but Connie still should have asked.

She was becoming self-obsessed. So she didn’t have everything she wanted in life, but so what? And yet Eleanor hadn’t
said that it was OK to accept not having it. In fact, she implied that it wasn’t foolish to look for more.

You can start again
, Eleanor had said.

Had Keith taken all the fight out of her? She’d been youthful and full of energy with him. When he left, she’d become old overnight.

On a whim, she sat down at the small laptop computer she and Nicky shared, and Googled Keith.

It took a while to find him and when she did it was on a social networking site.

Because she wasn’t a member of the site, his photo only came out as a hazy silhouette, but it was him, she was sure of it. She’d recognise the shape of his head anywhere.

His relationship status said:
engaged.
Connie stared at the screen without moving.

Engaged.

His ‘favourite things’ were condensed into five words:
Michaela, love of my life.

A twinge of pain hit her.

Then Connie peered more closely at the listing. That couldn’t be right. Keith was the same age as she was. Forty in August. And yet, according to this, he was only thirty-six. His birthday fell on the correct day, just the wrong year.

He was pretending he was younger!

Quite why this cheered her up, she didn’t know, but there was something infinitely amusing to think of Keith claiming to be in his mid-thirties because he had a much-younger girlfriend.

She closed the site and turned off the laptop. No more mindless surfing over Keith. Pretending-he-was-younger-Keith.

No more self-sabotaging.

She felt better already.

‘You still haven’t told her?’ Freddie couldn’t believe it.

It had been three weeks since he’d proposed and Nicky still
kept the ring on a long golden chain around her neck, because she couldn’t wear it on her finger until she’d told Connie.

‘Why not? And put it on your finger. She won’t notice,’ he said.

Nicky looked at him grimly. ‘Just because you wouldn’t notice it, doesn’t mean Connie wouldn’t. Of course she’d spot an engagement ring on my finger. Women notice things like that. Just like you noticed that woman in the pub last night who wasn’t wearing a bra, and had the fakest tits I’ve ever seen in my life.’

Freddie objected. ‘I only glanced at them. At her,’ he amended.

‘I’m just saying: men notice fake tits and women notice engagement rings.’

‘I can’t tell my parents until you tell yours and Connie,’ he said. ‘I know we’re only going to have a small wedding, Nicky, but we have to get going with it or there won’t be one at all.’

‘I’ll tell her soon, I promise.’

‘When?’

‘Tonight, OK?’

Connie looked at all the short men in the supermarket that afternoon. Normally, she only noticed tall men and petite women. Petite women reminded her of Nicky, and tall men made her run through her mental checklist.

But not today. No, this was a new start to her life. Talking to Eleanor had given her new hope. So what if Keith had liked her to wear flat shoes and had been threatened by her height? Not all men would be. She’d put the Keith baggage in the mental dustbin and was moving on.

The supermarket was jammed with Saturday afternoon shoppers but Connie was serene as she wheeled her mini trolley up and down the aisles. Nicky had said Freddie was at a football match and, for once, he wouldn’t be around that evening, so the sisters had arranged to have dinner together.

‘We could order in an Indian takeaway, and I’ll get wine and dessert,’ Connie said happily, looking forward to it.

She spent so many Saturday evenings at home alone. Of course, Freddie and Nicky went to the cinema with her and took her to concerts and parties, but she often felt like a third wheel. Not any more. Look out short men!

As she was parking the car, she spotted the man from the next-door apartment out of the corner of her eye. Eleanor had mentioned him, so Connie tried to look closer without it being obvious.

He was hefting groceries out of his truck and the little girl was helping by picking things she liked the look of out of the bags and just carrying those in. Her russet hair was in a long, neat plait down her back and Connie had a moment of wondering if the little girl’s father had plaited it. He must have. Her mum was never around, he was clearly a single father. There was something both touching and sad about the idea of him patiently plaiting his daughter’s hair.

Something made him look over at Connie, who went red because he might guess she’d been staring, and then gave a little wave hello. He smiled politely and turned away. Feeling unaccountably disappointed, she dragged her own shopping from the car and lugged it up the steps.

‘I’ve something to tell you,’ Connie said, when she and Nicky sat down at the table that evening. She’d lit candles, had taken the good glasses out for their wine and water, and the takeaway had all been decanted into Connie’s best dark-red tableware. The curtains were closed, Michael Bublé was crooning quietly on the stereo, and everything was cosy.

‘You do? Me too,’ said Nicky, her mouth full of naan bread.

‘Oh, you first!’ said Connie cheerfully. Nothing could dim her enthusiasm.

Talking to Eleanor had been like a tonic: she felt so energised, so ready to take on the world.

‘Well, I wasn’t sure how to tell you. We’ve talked about it…’ Nicky hesitated. There was no point in beating around the bush, she had to just do it. ‘Freddie and I are getting married. In April, hopefully. We want to do it quickly. I mean, why hang around when you’ve made up your mind? I want you to be bridesmaid, of course.’ The words came out in a rush.

She looked at Connie’s kind, round face with its warm eyes and gentle, usually smiling mouth. Connie blinked quickly, as if she had an eyelash in her eye.

Magnificently, she rose to the occasion. ‘Nicky! I’m so thrilled for you!’

And she was utterly thrilled that her darling, precious little sister had found absolute happiness. Connie shoved her plate aside, pushed her chair back, and was beside Nicky, hugging her.

‘I was so worried!’ Nicky was saying. ‘I know how hard it must be for you because of Keith. He’s a waster, a total louser. He wasted years of your life, and Freddie wanted me to tell you straight away –’

‘You should have, but I’m happy you’re telling me now,’ Connie exclaimed. ‘It’s wonderful. When did he ask, have you made any plans?’

‘None yet. We wanted you to know first. Oh, Con, I love you. I wanted to tell you straight off because it’s so exciting.’ Nicky drew a gold chain out from under her sweater. On the end of it dangled a delicate engagement ring, which Connie grasped and pronounced ‘beautiful!’.

At Connie’s urging Nicky slipped the ring on her finger and they both admired it, then Connie had to turn on the main light so they could see the jewels more clearly.

‘But Freddie should be here if I’m the first person you’re telling,’ Connie said. Inspiration struck. ‘He’s not really at a football match, is he?’