Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (94 page)

Eleanor considered the comforting effect of being called ‘pet’. It was a nice way to speak to an older lady, better than the senior citizen label ‘ma’am’, which always made her feel as if paramedics were shadowing her with an oxygen mask.

And the woman in the tearoom wasn’t being condescending when she used ‘pet’ – it came naturally; she had a gentleness that reached out to people.

‘Would you like me to carry your coffee over to the table for you, pet?’ she’d asked Eleanor, the kind face with its fine dark eyes and dark brows beaming out over the cash register at her. She reminded Eleanor of someone, an actress, Ali MacGraw, that was it.

Yes, she was incredibly nice, Eleanor thought as she murmured, ‘Yes, thank you.’ She wasn’t quite up to social interaction yet. She was still in that place of mourning where she liked watching the world but wasn’t ready to let it in.

Maybe, she thought with a rush of black despair, she’d never let it in again.

In the apartment above hers lived two sisters whom she hadn’t met yet, but whose names she’d learned from the postman. The younger woman, Nicky, a petite blonde, appeared by her elegant suits to have a high-powered career, although Eleanor couldn’t guess what. Connie was tall, wore sensible clothes and marched out to her car in the mornings in flat shoes and bearing piles of schoolbooks, looking every inch the capable teacher.

Watching her, Eleanor decided that Connie carried herself like someone who had no time for femininity or girlish flounces. Perhaps she’d never been told she was in any way attractive. Eleanor had certainly seen much of that in her practice. The lessons people learned in youth sank in so deep, they
became almost part of a person’s DNA. It could be hard to change.

Nicky was, by contrast, confident and pretty, like a flower fairy. She had a boyfriend, a tall slim lad who followed her round like a puppy, or held her hand when they walked through the square to the convenience store. The sisters fascinated Eleanor: they were each so different.

Over the way lived the chiropodist whom her doctor – well, she’d had to introduce herself to the doctor, it made sense at her age – had recommended.

‘Nora Flynn, she’s very good, you’ll like her. No time for prattle or sweet talk, Nora. But she’s excellent at what she does, runs a great practice.’

Eleanor liked to take care of her feet and she’d had one appointment with Nora already.

Nora was exactly what the doctor had said: good at her job and not a prattler. She didn’t enquire why Eleanor had moved to Golden Square. She merely talked about bad circulation, the cold of these early January days, and how people still didn’t understand the need to look after their feet. Eleanor had since seen Nora out walking her dogs in the square. The chiropodist wore very masculine clothes, yet talked to her little dogs like a mother to small children.

Eleanor hadn’t made it across the square to The Nook yet, although she could see the little convenience store from her window. She didn’t really need it, what with internet shopping. She ordered online and a nice young man from the supermarket delivered it and carried everything into the house for her. When he saw there was no one to help her put it away, he’d asked her where it all went and laid everything on the correct counter, so she wouldn’t have to bend down to lift the bags.

That day, after he’d gone, Eleanor had nearly wept. It was the kindness that got to her. Rudeness, she could handle, but any kindness breached her defences and she felt as if she might sob on a total stranger’s shoulder.

Next door to her building, she could just see the steps down to a basement flat where a big bear of a man lived with his daughter. Eleanor occasionally saw him taking the little girl – a tall, skinny child with red curly hair – to school. He seemed happy when he was with her, but when he was alone he looked different: deeply sad and unreachable.

Eleanor felt an overwhelming urge to find out what was wrong and help.

Ralf, her darling husband, used to gently chide her for trying to fix the world:

‘It’s not your job to make them all better.’

Eleanor remembered the early days of psychotherapy in college and the desire to improve the lives of everyone she met.

People weren’t just people to her, they were potential cases of obsessive compulsive disorder, Electra complex, or separation anxiety.

Everyone in her class had thought like her.

They’d had to stop going to the main campus cafeteria for a whole month because they’d all become fixated on one of the waitresses who, in their eyes, was suffering from a psychosomatic wasting disorder and they wanted to help.

Eventually, someone confessed to Professor Wolfe, their tutor, and wondered what should they do?

Professor Wolfe hadn’t taken this the way they’d hoped.

‘Why do you think you can help this waitress?’ he asked, head to one side, fabulously detached. ‘What makes you want to help her? Has she asked to be helped?’

‘I bet if you asked him the way to his office, he’d put his head on one side and say “Why do you need to know?”’ grumbled one of Eleanor’s classmates.

‘He’s right, though,’ Eleanor had sighed. Psychotherapeutic help wasn’t a bandage you put on a cut. It was a tool for life and it couldn’t be applied unless the person wanted it applied. All the psychoanalyst could do was gently help the patient
find their own particular tools; it was up to the patient to use them.

‘Everyone can’t be mad,’ said Susannah, her roommate in college, who’d studied molecular biology and had heard many of the late-night ‘who do we think suffers from X or Y?’ conversations. Susannah saw life in absolutes. She was a postdoctorate student working on cancer research and there was no room for emotion. Things worked or they didn’t. The mice died and you moved on.

‘Mad is not an expression we tend to use in psychoanalysis,’ Eleanor had said, laughing.

‘You could have fooled me,’ Susannah said.

There was a birthday card in Eleanor’s treasure box signed
Susannah, Mrs Tab Hunter.
Susannah had been obsessed by the fifties movie star, but you couldn’t call her mad.

Eleanor wondered where Susannah was now. They’d lost touch around about the time Eleanor and Ralf got married. Susannah went off to live in Switzerland to work at a university there. Eleanor pictured her: still tall, eccentric and in love with people she saw only on cinema screens.

A gust of wind made the branch of the rowan tree outside the window bang against Eleanor’s window. The tiny scarlet berries on the holly bushes beneath it were all gone now. Sometimes a lone robin sat on the tree and look quizzically at Eleanor, as if asking for food.

Eleanor smiled sympathetically at him but she wasn’t able any more to hang seed balls outside. That took dexterity and suppleness, things she no longer had.

There were many things she no longer had. Her beloved Ralf being the most important. No one needed her now. Her family back in New York loved her, but they had their own lives. Naomi and her devoted husband, Marcus, were busy with their furniture import business. Filan’s Furniture was much in demand and, despite the credit crunch, they were expanding.

Gillian, Eleanor’s adored grand-daughter, had settled into her second year at UCLA and had thrown herself madly into her new life there.

They would manage without her. She was too broken, too wild with grief to be a proper mother or grandmother any more. Worse, in her present grieving state, she might be a burden.

It was an odd feeling. All her life, Eleanor had worked and strived, both for her family and in her professional life. She solved problems, she didn’t create them.

In an instant of loss, all that had changed.
She
had changed.

Which was why she’d turned her back on New York and returned to Ireland. Here she might find the answer, find out what she had to do. She hoped so with all her heart.

Being able to boil an egg means you’ll never go hungry. Duck eggs make the most wonderful breakfasts. When you crack open the fragile shell and peer into that golden yolk, the colour and consistency of honey, and breathe in the scent of the land, your heart sings.

The problem is the ducks. We always had a couple in the yard, Muscovy ducks, with black and white feathers and red bills, and Lord, those birds could fight. They were like a warring family. In the end, I kept them in separate pens in the coop. It was the only way.

Some people are like that too, by the way. No matter what you do, they’ll fight. That’s their business, love. You can’t stop them fighting. Might as well let them at it, but don’t get involved.

You might wonder why I’m telling you this, Eleanor, but you see, I don’t want you to grow up without learning all these things, the way I did. It wasn’t my mother’s fault, mind. It was mine. I was a sickly child, although you wouldn’t think it to look at me now. As I sit at the table with my writing paper, I’m a few
months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday and I’ve never felt better. But as a little one, I spent a lot of time in bed with fevers and coughs. My mother dosed me with a drink made of carragheen moss and lemon juice. A weak chest, was what the doctor said, although we didn’t go in much for doctoring. They were hard years, then, at the start of the century and there wasn’t money for doctors for the likes of us.

My mother once took me to visit an old man who lived way over the other side of one of the islands, to a house on the edge of the cliff, because he had the curefor a bad chest. Someone said his cure was mare’s milk and some herbs and a bit of the mare’s tail – it had to be a white mare, mind you – but whatever, it didn’t work on me.

The long and the short of it is that I didn’t learn how to cook alongside my mother. Most girls learned from watching their mother at the fire. I was wrapped up in the bed in the back room with only a few books for company. Agnes brought home books from Mrs Fitzmaurice’s house, and I read them all: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Tom Jones, even.

And then one day I just grew out of the bad chest. My mother wanted me to go to school because I’d been there so rarely. Again, I had my head in the books and never so much as peeled an onion. Then Mam became ill and suddenly I was the woman of the house. Agnes was gone all week and back on Sundays, the lads were out working on the land, and the only person left to cook and clean was the one person who didn’t know how to do any of it.

But I learned, Eleanor, I learned. The hard way, I might add.

That’s what I want to tell you. About the joy of cooking and feeding the people you love. About the
skill of making dinner for ten from a few scraps. There’s magic in cooking. It’s like prayer, you know. All those heads bent, hearts joined together. That’s why it works. It’s because of people coming together. Cooking’s the same.

The man in seat 3C sneaked a look at the young woman sitting beside him on the Heathrow to Dublin plane. She was small, fine-boned and wearing one of those funny scarves wound around her head, the way old ladies used to wear turbans years ago. He couldn’t understand it himself. Why would a pretty girl do that to herself, like she
wanted
to look ridiculous? A bit of blonde hair had escaped the scarf: it was old-style blonde, platinum, actually. Otherwise, she was very un-done-up, as his wife might say. No make-up, wearing jeans, a grey marl sweatshirt and trendy rectangular glasses. Yet despite all that, there was
something
special about her. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

‘Are you eating with us today?’ asked an airline steward. The male passenger looked up.

The steward was definitely talking to him but his eyes were on the woman in the window seat, consuming her, as if he hadn’t had a good look yet and wanted his fill.

‘Er, yes,’ said the passenger. He liked airline food, couldn’t understand why other people didn’t. Food was food. ‘What is it?’

‘Choice of beef stew or chicken with pasta,’ said the steward, deftly putting a tray down on the man’s fold-out table.

‘Beef,’ said Liam, thinking he might as well eat a proper meal as it would be at least nine before he got home.

‘Anything to drink?’ the steward murmured as he set a small tinfoil-covered package on the tray.

‘Red wine.’ Liam unveiled his dinner with anticipation. It was pasta.

‘Sorry,’ he said to the steward, ‘I wanted beef.’

But the steward had already put a small bottle of red wine on his tray and his gaze was now fixed on the girl in 3A.

‘I wanted beef?’ said Liam plaintively, but it was no good. The caravan had moved on.

Megan knew the cabin crew had worked out who she was, even though she always flew under her real name, which was Megan Flynn, and not Megan Bouchier, the name the world knew her by. Bouchier was her paternal grandmother’s family name, and all those years ago at stage school she’d seen the sense of dropping the prosaic Flynn in favour of the more memorable Bouchier.

She’d hoped the Flynn would give her some protection now, along with the blue silk scarf hiding her trademark platinum curls and the little Prada glasses with clear lenses, but it hadn’t worked.

When you’d spent the best part of six years appearing on television and cinema screens, and in magazines and newspapers, your face burned on to people’s minds the way the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list never seemed to do. Murderers and master criminals might go unrecognised, but land a starring role in a series of mediocre television shows and one standout British movie, and your face suddenly became as recognisable as the queen’s.

The dinner trolley was locked beside her row and at least three members of the crew were looking at her while pretending not to look at her, which was a difficult trick to pull off. Airline staff were good at that: charmingly treating world-famous people with polite nonchalance.

Today’s crew were reacting to her differently, though. Perhaps it was because she was no longer the adored young actress who’d been listed in
Empire
magazine as one of the ‘ten most promising actors of the year’ not that long ago.
Instead she was the marriage-breaker pictured on the pages of every redtop in London alongside a photo of another actress, an older woman whose husband Megan was accused of stealing.

Megan had not wanted to see the papers when the story had broken. She’d tried not to look but she couldn’t avoid the headline that jumped out at her from a newsstand outside a Tube station.

‘Devastated!’ it screamed above a picture of Katharine Hartnell, her famous, Oscar-winning face drawn, cheekbones prominent, dark circles under her eyes. Apart from her Oscar, Katharine Hartnell had been famous for being fifty but not looking it. And she was famous for being in love with her movie-star husband after twenty years of marriage – light years in movie-star terms. Megan had seen many photos in magazines of Katharine and her husband looking very much in love. In the newspaper picture, she looked more than fifty and definitely devastated.

‘The other woman,’ was Megan’s caption, with a picture of herself she hated, showing her emerging, laughing, from a night club, her long hair askew, someone else’s fur coat thrown over her shoulders and a man on each side, one waving a bottle of champagne. She was wearing a silver sequinned dress that had sunk further down her cleavage as the night had gone on and by the time the photographer – who must have made a fortune from that one picture – had snapped her, the neckline was millimetres away from her left nipple.

The small, heart-shaped face that numerous photographers had described as ‘exquisite’ was creased up into a huge tipsy smile and her almond-shaped eyes, the kohl smudged, glittered with the excitement of being the ‘it’ actress of the day. All in all, the photo was like a dictionary illustration of the word hedonism.

The story and that iconic picture meant Megan had entered the terrible world of the media’s ‘most hated woman on the
planet’. Suddenly, people she’d never met talked about her over their skinny lattes and their newspapers, condemning her as a husband-stealer. Opinion articles were written on whether women like her put the cause of feminism back thirty years.

Megan had grown used to being loved, to having designers sending her handbags, to having magazines print admiring articles under photos of her gracing the latest premiere.

And now this. Megan the Mantrapper.

She’d fallen from grace faster than any archangel and the result was cold, hard hatred. Where once she’d been loved, now she was loathed. It was incredibly painful. Almost as painful as having her heart broken.

‘Would you like dinner? A drink?’ said the steward.
Somebody else’s husband?
were the unspoken words Megan heard.

‘No thank you,’ she said with all the dignity she could muster. She’d have liked a bottle of water but couldn’t face the actual transaction, having to look at the cabin crew and see what was written on their faces: pity, contempt, abject fascination. Instead, she turned to look out the window as if there was something to be seen out there instead of cloudy darkness.

Her sister Pippa had told her that escaping to Ireland was a good plan, and she trusted Pippa with her life. Once upon a time, Pippa might have run away with her but now her running-away days were over: she was the mother of two small children, with a real life in Wales and a husband. Megan would have gone to stay with them, but the press had already been sniffing around their home, making a nuisance of themselves. Besides, it wasn’t Pippa’s job to protect her little sister any more. That hurt too.

‘Megan, love, you’ve got to get out of London,’ Pippa had urged her. Megan’s agent had been saying the same thing, but with much less kindness.

Carole Baird was not one of the ‘tell them they’re fabulous, no matter what’ agents. Her motto was ‘tell them like
it is – with knobs on’. Megan’s behaviour might lose her film roles and impact on her career – and therefore, on Carole’s bottom line. Twenty per cent of nothing was nothing. Carole’s concern wasn’t moral, it was financial.

‘You should go to Aunt Nora’s – Kim!’ Pippa shouted. ‘Put that down! Sorry, Megan, she’s at the dishwasher again. We just made a cake and she wants to lick the bowl and spoon again. No, Kim. Dirty, no!’

Aunt Nora’s home in Dublin was where the sisters had spent the normal part of their childhood years. As different from their mother as chalk was from cheese, Aunt Nora had toned down all Marguerite’s wilder suggestions when the girls were growing up. Aunt Nora said that the French school on the Caribbean island where Marguerite was living at the time probably wasn’t the best place for two kids who didn’t have much education behind them, and couldn’t speak French. Aunt Nora enrolled them in the Sacred Heart Convent just off Golden Square and took care of them until Marguerite’s latest love affair had gone sour and she went back to London.

Aunt Nora had always been there. Solid, dependable, as unstarry a person as you could find.

Which was why Megan didn’t want to have to talk to her about what had happened. Her mother hadn’t judged Megan because she didn’t know what judgement was. Marguerite had made too many disastrous romantic choices in her life to comment on anyone else’s, but Nora – a single woman who went to weekly Mass – might.

‘What about Australia?’ Megan had wondered when she’d spoken to Carole. It seemed far enough away to hide from the photographers who had been camped outside her flat in London for the past ten days.

‘You need family,’ her agent said sagely.

I’d be out of your control in Australia, Megan thought grimly.

‘Who knows what you’d get up to in Australia,’ Carole said, on cue. ‘Too many gorgeous men.’

Megan had to laugh, although it was one of those painful laughs. ‘You don’t trust me,’ she said.

‘Why should I?’ said Carole. ‘You’re screwing up your career and mine too. Let’s put all the cards on the table, Megan. It’s not doing the agency any good being linked to someone who’s wrecking her career so successfully. People are wondering why I didn’t stop it. As if I damn well knew about it. You’re not a pop star. People practically expect that from music industry stars, but it’s not good if you’re trying to make a name for yourself as a serious actress. Nobody’s going to cast an actress who’s just broken up what’s been held up as one of the rare long-lasting Hollywood marriages. Producers and directors want a reasonably blank canvas or at least someone who can play innocent – what they don’t want is a PR nightmare. All moviegoers will see now on the screen is Megan the homewrecker. This stunt has thrown away years of hard work. I’m not sure what you can do to ride out the storm, but you need to keep your head down for at least six months. And I mean down. No partying, no going to fashion shows and getting papped having fun. You need to look sorry.’

‘I
am
sorry,’ Megan said bitterly.

‘Nobody wants to hear empty words, Megan,’ Carole said. ‘Only an idiot would say they
weren’t
sorry. Sorry isn’t the issue. People want your head on a platter. That’s the downside of fame. The public get to give it and they get to take it away.’

Megan stilled. For a few moments, she’d considered telling Carole what she really felt. That she’d loved Rob Hartnell. That she’d never have gone with him otherwise. Now she was glad she hadn’t.

Carole had a very simple view of the whole episode: Megan had had a badly judged fling with a happily married movie star. They’d been caught and instead of the movie star standing
by Megan’s side, he’d run away. Three lives were wrecked, the sympathy was with Katharine, and Megan was portrayed as a femme fatale who’d chiselled Rob away from his wife.

Rob, very sensibly, had not hung about for the fall-out. He had simply disappeared, the way only the very famous or the very rich can disappear. Since that day in Prague – was it only just before Christmas? – when a photographer had caught Rob and Megan cuddling up in a tiny bar near their hotel, Rob Hartnell hadn’t been seen. Megan was left to face the storm alone. ‘I’m devastated, too,’ she wanted to cry. But it was no use. No one, not even her agent, cared what she felt.