A Time for Friends (10 page)

‘Just as well we didn’t stay with you then. You’re quite booked up – we would have hardly seen you,’ Colette said lightly, if a touch sarcastically.

‘I wouldn’t have made the arrangements if I’d known in advance that you were coming, Colette. I’m sure you must have had some idea of when you were arriving,’
Jacqueline said sharply. ‘It doesn’t really matter about lunch, the club can fit you in without prior notice, but if you are coming to dinner I’ll need to ring The Commons and
advise them that we will have two extra guests.’

‘Why don’t you and Dad stroll over to the Horseshoe after dinner and we can have a drink with you here?’ Colette suggested, not wanting to listen to her parents and the
Reilly-Carrolls trying to outdo each other in loquacious legalese.

‘I suppose we could do that.’ Jacqueline tried not to sound disappointed. She wasn’t a fan of the Horseshoe Bar with its drink-fuelled, testosterone-filled atmosphere, and
standing room only, thronged with journalistic hacks, minor celebrities, high-flying business tycoons, drunken politicians and legal eagles, all trying to outdo each other. ‘Or you could come
to brunch or lunch tomorrow? What time do you fly back?’

‘Around 4.30.’ Colette struggled to suppress a yawn.

‘Well then come for brunch around 12.30 and that will give you plenty of time to get to the airport,’ her mother said briskly.

‘Let me check with Des, but I think that will probably work for us,’ Colette said, relieved that she had got off relatively lightly.

‘Excellent,’ Jacqueline approved. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you.’

‘Me too,’ Colette reciprocated, feeling it was required of her.

‘And your father will be delighted,’ Jacqueline added.

‘Bye, Mum, talk later.’ Colette hung up and stretched, glad that their meeting was sorted and she hadn’t got too much of a lecture over not staying with her parents. Her mother
was annoyed but that was her problem. Colette wasn’t going to let it affect her unduly. She had enough to worry about with this impending relocation and all it entailed.

She had pre-booked a facial and massage and she was going to have a leisurely day of pampering and shopping. A stroll along Grafton Street to Brown Thomas was just what the doctor ordered. She
wondered would Hilary be interested in coming into town for lunch but then remembered that her friend was going to pick up the girls from her sister’s. Hilary would have the mother and father
of a hangover anyway, Colette reflected, remembering how Hilary was sprawled asleep when she had left her the previous night.

She hoped that lanky, queeny friend of Hilary’s was suffering too. Colette scowled, still miffed at being made to feel she’d gatecrashed their private party. She wouldn’t
bother ringing Hilary to see how she was. She’d ring Lindsay Kennedy and Marcy Byrne instead and see if they were available for lunch. It would be good to meet and catch up with the Sutton
gang and let them see how fabulous she looked and how well she was doing. Lindsay and Marcy were well-heeled ladies-who-lunch but they didn’t have anything like her wealth, style or status,
Colette thought happily, throwing off the bedclothes to go and find her trusty Filofax. She used a mobile phone in London and it was so handy, but they were only coming into vogue in Ireland and
most of her friends and acquaintances were, unfortunately, still slaves to the landline.

Colette poured herself another cup of coffee and took it to the chair by the big window that overlooked St Stephen’s Green. It was a glorious sunny morning, and the lush green of the
trees, interspersed with frothy splashes of pink from late-flowering cherry blossom, was etched against a sapphire sky. A welcome foil to the lanes filled with slow-moving traffic that circled the
Green. As bad as Piccadilly, Colette reflected, remembering how she and her teenage friends had invariably made their way to Grafton Street and the Dandelion Market on Saturdays, all those years
ago. Just across the park where a big shopping centre now stood, Dublin’s most famous market had flourished. The old stables, mews and courtyards had hosted many fabulous stalls selling bang
up-to-date fashions that had thrilled their youthful hearts. Colette even remembered seeing a very young U2 playing one of their first gigs in the courtyard, and had thought The Edge was the
coolest guy she had ever seen.

She was happy then, and she hadn’t even realized it, too busy trying to impress her peers, and worrying about who would marry her or fretting that she would be left on the shelf.
Spinsterhood was something they had all agonized about. She wondered if Hilary hadn’t made the first move towards marriage, causing her to panic, would she have ended up marrying Des?

She who, like her peers, had felt she was such a ‘liberated’ young woman of the eighties, with the world as her oyster, had still been unable to shake off the notion that marriage
was the holy grail for a woman. Centuries of conditioning had not been eroded by the advance of so-called feminism, whatever feminists might like to think, she thought wryly, thinking of a banking
acquaintance of theirs who had shot up through the ranks, was highly skilled and competitive, but was desperate to be married before she was forty when her ‘successful high-flying
career-woman’ label would inevitably change to ‘sad singleton who never got a man’. Better to be divorced even than to be one of them.

Hilary and Niall had married for love, and for years Colette had secretly envied them that. The way they looked at each other, the intimate little manner they would hold hands or hug or make
each other laugh. No matter how much Colette had sparkled or flirted, Niall had only ever had eyes for Hilary, much to her chagrin because she had always fancied him.

The Hammonds’ marriage was far different from hers and her husband’s. She and Des were a
perfect
match. They always looked designer good; they had the same aspirations: to
be wealthy, successful, and well placed in society. They each recognized what the other brought to their marriage and appreciated it, but were they deeply in love? Colette sighed. Love was for
fools! Love hurt! And love didn’t last. She had seen that at first hand, thanks to Rod Killeen. She preferred what she had, thank you very much, she decided briskly, flipping through the
phone section of her diary to find Marcy Byrne’s number.

‘Honestly, Frank, Colette could have let us know she was going to be in Dublin for the weekend, and she could have brought Jasmine. She has no consideration for us after
all we did for her,’ Jacqueline groused, placing the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. ‘She makes no allowance for the fact that we rarely see our granddaughter. The child will soon
be a
stranger
to us. Sometimes I think Colette’s trying to
punish
us for something.’

‘Don’t be silly, Jacqueline,’ Frank said irascibly. ‘What would she be punishing us for? We gave her the best of everything. A car when she was eighteen, foreign
holidays, college in London. All she ever wanted. We paid a fortune for that wedding in Rome! What’s her problem?’

‘She’s always been the same, a little madam,’ Jacqueline declared. What kind of a family were they when their only child didn’t let them know that she was coming for a
visit, and instead preferred to stay in a hotel? She sighed deeply, staring out at the sea, framed by two spiky palm trees, that shimmered and glittered at the end of their immaculately kept
landscaped gardens. A house, not much bigger than theirs, half a mile away, had sold for a million recently causing huge excitement at the golf club. Prices were beginning to climb after all the
grim, grey days of the eighties recession and the economy was powering ahead. She and Frank were seriously thinking of buying a villa beside a golf course in the Algarve. The Sheedys had bought one
near Albufeira and were always boasting about their fabulous views of the Atlantic, visiting several times a year and coming home with terrific tans and much improved handicaps. She and Frank had
worked like Trojans for years: it was time to start winding down a little and enjoy their hard-earned affluence.

Someday this house and all their wealth would be Colette’s, for all the thanks her hard-working parents were getting from their ungrateful child. It would be good enough for her if they
left it all to charity.

They weren’t close, she and Colette. They’d never had that great mother–daughter bond that some of her friends enjoyed. Jacqueline had got pregnant unexpectedly at the very
worst time in her career, just as she was starting to make a name for herself. She and Frank had gone into business together, and O’Mahony and Co. were clawing their way up the legal ladder.
A baby was the last thing Jacqueline had wanted. It was a huge shock to realize that she was not as in control of her life as she thought she was and that the rug could be pulled from under her
arbitrarily, whether she liked it or not.

Jacqueline sighed, remembering how furious she had been that, despite going on the pill and taking responsibility for her life choice, her wishes had counted for nothing in the grand scheme of
things. It was the same kind of fury she felt, even to this day, when she lost a court case.

She had always been a control freak, Jacqueline conceded, wiping her Italian marble countertops with more vigour than was necessary. That had come from being the child of a mother who had
frittered away housekeeping money on bingo, horses and the slot machines in the sleazy arcades in town. Money that meant eating more cheap mince and beans than she could stomach, and going to
school in her sister’s hand-me-down uniform. When she grew up she would be in charge of her own life, the young Jacqueline vowed, after the umpteenth time of telling the gas meter man her
mammy wasn’t in when he came to collect payment. ‘Good girl,’ her mother would say. How could her mother get her to tell lies and then make her go to confession religiously every
Saturday? It just didn’t make sense.

It was her difficult childhood that had propelled her to achieve top marks at university, and that same drive fuelled her desire for success in her chosen career. And then she had fallen
pregnant.

No doubt her newly conceived daughter had absorbed the energy of her mother’s immense dismay, and the other myriad emotions Jacqueline had experienced. She had been sick morning, noon and
night, which only added to her resentment.

She hadn’t told her husband when a pregnancy test confirmed what she already knew. She had wrestled with the idea of going to England for a termination. She could have easily said nothing
and Frank would never have known. But she loved her husband dearly, and she knew one of his dreams was to have
O’Mahony and Son,
or
Daughter
etched on a discreet gold plaque
on their office door. The child was his as well as hers. Created by them both. It wasn’t all about her. To her consternation, Frank had been delighted. An only child, he’d told her when
they got engaged that he’d wanted a boy and a girl to make them a ‘proper’ family.

‘But, Frank, it’s crap timing.’ She’d burst into tears. ‘I can’t take time off to look after a baby! We haven’t planned it.’

‘That’s OK! We can get someone to mind it,’ he soothed. ‘We’re getting a lot of referrals, we can afford—’

‘Exactly, we’re up to our eyes, and this is the last thing I need. Why is it the woman
always
has to make the sacrifices? That’s my career up the Swannee,’ she
raged.

‘You won’t have to sacrifice your career. We’ll manage fine. Working mothers are becoming the norm now, it’s not like when we were growing up,’ Frank reassured her.
Their parents, family and friends had been thrilled with their news so she constantly had to stifle her negative feelings and keep them to herself, putting on a façade in the face of their
anticipation and delight.

Childbirth had been the most long-drawn-out, painful, embarrassing event of her life. Jacqueline had felt a complete and utter failure looking at her daughter’s screwed up little red face
as she screeched loudly when placed in her arms, and felt no overwhelming bond, just exhaustion and irritation that her freedom was curtailed and life as she knew it had changed completely and she
was now responsible for another being, whether she wanted to be or not.

Difficult as it was to admit now, all these years later, having a child had not brought a great deal of joy into her life. No wonder she and Colette weren’t close, Jacqueline conceded. She
had put her career before her child and now she was paying the price. And, much as it pained her to say it, her daughter was making the same mistakes with Jasmine. It was something she should try
and diplomatically point out. Perhaps at brunch tomorrow, Jacqueline decided. If Colette wanted a better relationship with her daughter than the one she had with her mother, something had to be
said.

‘She sounds very nice and a bit of a laugh as well.’ Orla munched on a slice of toast liberally smeared with pâté, snuggled up beside Jonathan on his
bed as he told her all about meeting Hilary at the lighting design course the previous day.

Orla had made them breakfast. Jonathan had been too tipsy the previous night when he had arrived home with her cheeseburger to have a proper conversation and after yawning his head off yet again
she’d sent him packing off to bed and told him she’d see him in the morning.

‘Hilary is lovely, really down to earth, a bit scatty, and good fun. Just my sort of woman! And you should see her showrooms. FABULOUS, darling.’ Jonathan took a slug of coffee and
forked half a sausage into his mouth. ‘The other one now, the Colette one, was a right little madam. I know she wanted me to leave, she kept giving me the evil eye, and if I’d felt that
Hilary wanted me to go I would have, but I kinda felt that Hilary wasn’t overly excited to see her. Colette was all Me! Me! Me! You know that sort,’ Jonathan observed tartly.

‘Oh dear! Me! Me! Me! And You! You! You! I’d say that was good,’ Orla murmured wickedly.

‘Cheeky hussy,’ Jonathan grinned. ‘Her clothes were gorgeous though, all designer, and the Louis Vuitton bag, and the Cartier watch.
Lashings
of dosh, I’d say.
The husband works in finance and she works in fine art. Lots of name-dropping. Her parents are that legal pair that are always in the papers. The O’Mahonys.’