Homecoming (16 page)

‘I wish I was going to work,’ Megan sighed. ‘I’m going slightly mad right now. Nora says Birdie is going away to Spain later this month and I could stand in for her.’

‘I wish we had something you could do,’ said Nicky thoughtfully. ‘You could read for me, perhaps?’

‘You could take the fifth years for history when I’m at Sylvie’s wedding in Paris,’ Connie added.

‘You never know, there might be a fabulous man there for you,’ said Nicky hopefully.

‘Yes,’ said Connie. Nicky was right, you never knew. She mustn’t be defeatist.

The right man hadn’t been at Sylvie’s wedding in Paris, although Connie, thanks to Nicky’s prodding, had gone over there with high hopes.

The wedding had been great fun and had started off fabulously.

Connie was travelling with four other teachers from the school – all single – and they were, they all agreed, as mad as any tour of schoolgirls.

‘If the principal could see us now,’ Grace, who taught geography, laughed as they raced round Dublin Airport duty-free, spraying themselves with expensive scents none of them could afford.

‘There’s still time for her to come,’ said Connie mischievously. ‘I could phone and say, “Mrs Caldwell, you’d love it, we’re going night clubbing every night, and you know how much you like to dance…”’

‘Perish the thought,’ shuddered Vivienne, who taught art and whose creative style of dress and behaviour made it unlikely she would ever feature on Mrs Caldwell’s Teacher of the Month board.

The hotel Sylvie’s mother had recommended turned out to be tiny, very chic and close enough to the Seine that they could see it from the small balcony in Grace and Connie’s room.

They’d doubled up to save money, but Grace pointed out that if she got lucky with a delectable French man, she’d go back to his place, so Connie could sleep alone in peace. ‘Makes sense,’ she’d said to Connie.

The unspoken message was that Connie would hardly be bringing a handsome Frenchman back to the room.

‘Absolutely,’ said Connie, who felt her own confidence breaking into smithereens. Grace was only thirty-two and very attractive. Of course the delectable Frenchmen would fall for her, while Connie didn’t have a hope with any of them. What had she been thinking? She should have stuck with her idea that her dating days were over.

Gorgeous French guys would fancy younger women who would consider passion on a first date, not a sailing-towards-forty schoolteacher who hadn’t had sex in so long, she’d pass out with shock if a man suggested it without six months of courtship. French men would also know that a woman of her age was listening to the ticking of her biological clock. They might see the desperation in her eyes that few other people seemed to be aware of.

Grace was the belle of the Irish contingent. The grey silk dress that Connie had privately thought was far too understated that morning in their hotel room, turned out to be the perfect thing to wear to an elegant Parisian wedding. It was Connie’s cerulean blue chiffon skirt and matching blouse with a grosgrain belt which looked overdone and fussy among all the crisp, eau de nil shift dresses, real pearls and two-tone Chanel pumps.

Nicky had prophesied that there would be no table for singles at a French wedding.

‘They’re too cool for that in France,’ she’d told Connie. ‘Bet they’ll mix everyone together, English- and Frenchspeaking, married and non-married. Here, we stick all the poor single people together at hopeless tables full of the mad single cousins and strange uncles, so they feel like losers as soon as they get there. They won’t do that in Paris.’

Connie had wondered when Nicky had become so wise on the subject of matrimonial customs, but it turned out, she’d been right. Connie and Grace had been seated at a table with some of Sylvie’s old schoolfriends. There was no sense that anyone was looking to set them up with single French men. There didn’t appear to be any single French men. Besides, Connie quickly learned that Sylvie hadn’t described her as a woman on the lookout for love. No, Connie discovered that her reputation was as Sylvie’s fun Irish friend, the jolly one whom everybody loved, who had a great sense of humour. She wasn’t the girlfriend type or the wife type. None of Sylvie’s friends looked speculatively at Connie as though she was a threat. No, they beamed at her and cheerfully told their husbands to dance with her.

Grace was a different matter. None of the husbands were told to dance with her.

Connie ate two chocolate puddings – much to the shocked amusement of the slim women on her table, who hadn’t even eaten all their actual main courses, never mind pudding – and danced with everyone with such gaiety that nobody could have known that she was crying inside. If she was destined to be the mad, fun auntie at the party, she’d play the part.

The day after the wedding, Grace had been determined to stay in bed late. There was no sign of the others at breakfast, so Connie assumed they’d all partied till the small hours. She’d been in bed at a very respectable twelve thirty. There had to be some compensations for being the cheerful, funny one. Sylvie’s friends had insisted on driving her back to the hotel and one of the husbands had been ordered to escort her to the hotel door.

In bed, wild-eyed with the pain of discovering her status as funny, non-marrying woman, she’d stayed awake till three: long enough to hear Grace creep in.

‘’S me, Connie, sorry to wake you. Oops. Sorry about the noise. Oops.’

Grace knocked over everything in the bathroom when she stumbled in there but finally made it to bed and, eventually, Connie drifted off to dreams of herself as the bride with no groom in sight.

‘I think I’ll go to the Louvre and meander around,’ she told the Grace-shaped lump in the other single bed after breakfast.

‘Whatever,’ mumbled Grace.

Paris wasn’t any more romantic a city than any other, Connie decided as she walked along the streets. It was more its reputation than anything else. A fabulous marketing ploy.
Come here if you’re in love and, if you’re not, you will feel incomplete and like a total loser, so you have to come back as soon as you
do
fall in love with someone.

It was a win-win situation for Paris all round. She and Keith had never been a city-break couple. They’d liked activity holidays like skiing and that sailing course they’d taken off the coast of Turkey.

He’d worked in a bank but the perks had included decent holidays, so they’d gone away on amazing vacations. In the seven years they’d been together, they’d gone skiing every winter and had toured South America as well as the Far East.

They’d been engaged a month and had been tentatively discussing a honeymoon trip to Australia when Keith had dropped the bombshell.

‘You know the way we say honesty is the best policy…’ he’d said, and Connie had been about to tease him over sounding like an insurance commercial, when he went on: ‘I have to be honest with you, Connie: it’s over. Us. For me, anyhow. I know you must feel it too. I love you, but I’m not
in love
with you, and I should be, shouldn’t I?’

‘Shouldn’t you what?’ Connie had heard exactly what he’d said. It was simply that she couldn’t believe he’d said it. This was Keith, the man who’d lain his head on her belly in front of the fire the weekend before, and said he was perfectly happy. Admittedly, they’d been out with friends and some wine had been consumed, but still. How could you be perfectly happy one week, and not the next? How could he have asked her to marry him and then break it off a month later? Shouldn’t there have been some signs of him not loving her any more, and if there had been, why hadn’t she noticed?

‘I’d like us to be friends,’ Keith went on, ever hopeful. ‘We’ve been together for so long.’

‘I don’t want us to be friends,’ Connie said, sobbing now. ‘I want us to be together, that’s all.’

‘It’s over, Connie,’ he said. ‘You need to face facts. We should never have got engaged. The past month has shown me that. I don’t want to get married. At least we hadn’t got as far as putting a deposit on a house. Now that would be a nightmare to sort out.’

And telling everyone that the engagement was off – a month after it had been announced –
would not
be a nightmare? Connie stared at him, shocked and hurt. But it had been no good. He was strangely unmoved by her pain.

‘You must have known,’ he kept saying, as if she was only denying it to annoy him.

A day later, he’d moved his stuff out of the pretty flat they shared. Connie had been numb.

‘Phone me, won’t you, and tell me how you’re doing?’ Keith said.

Connie seized upon these words as proof that Keith did love her and was merely going through a crisis brought on by friends phoning up delightedly asking them about wedding plans now that they were engaged.

‘Please, Connie, don’t kid yourself,’ said Gaynor angrily when she heard this new theory. ‘He’s simply hoping you won’t throw yourself down the stairs and blame him in your suicide note. That’s all the asshole cares about.’

Instead of making peace with the fact that Keith had inexplicably changed his mind, Connie tormented herself over not having noticed how he’d felt. This not noticing was her fault. If she had noticed, she could have changed herself, changed
something.
When he started going out with other women, she tortured herself wondering where she’d gone wrong.

Should there have been more romance in their relationship? Connie had never been a woman for sexy knickers and bedroom stripteases – was this a mistake? She cast her mind back to their engagement. Keith had definitely asked her to marry him, but they’d been at a friend’s wedding at the time. He’d been hit by wedding-envy, the thought that this gorgeous party with friends could be theirs.
That
was what had gone wrong.

His proposal hadn’t been heartfelt and yet she’d been carried away, convinced it was, because marrying Keith was what she wanted.

Connie joined the queue at the Louvre and decided she would set her mind to art and culture for the rest of the day. There was something infinitely soothing in great museums: if love had deserted you, at least you could lose yourself in the brilliance of long-dead civilisations.

Besides, how many artists had painted their greatest works when they were dying inside of love? Exactly. She’d be among friends in the Louvre.

Home from Paris after Sylvie’s wedding, Connie told no one how it had been. Even Nicky. Freddie was in the apartment even more than usual and it seemed as if there wasn’t any time alone with Nicky to confide in her.

Besides, it would have sounded so sad and hopeless. As if she wanted Nicky to sort it out, and that wasn’t Nicky’s job.
She
had to look after Nicky, not the other way round.

No, Connie decided resolutely, she would keep her misery to herself. She needed to get a life and stop obsessing about her lack of love and the decreasing chances of her ever becoming a mother.

She would not spend weekends in the homestore buying more rubbish to prettify her bedroom – she had three sets of twinkling fairy lights over her mirrored dressing table already. Any more and the room would be a fire hazard.

Connie wasn’t a pink person in any other area of her life except her bedroom. The apartment had wooden floors, pale walls and pretty Scandinavian-style furniture in shades of white. Inspired by a magazine photospread of a Swedish designer’s house, Connie had gone for neutral soft furnishings accented with pale blue curtains and cushions. It was all calm, simple and pretty.

Except in her bedroom, where she’d lost the run of herself. The walls were covered in a sprigged pink wallpaper, the bed had a draped pink muslin canopy and there were so many fluffy and frilled throw pillows on the rose-coloured satin bedspread that it took five minutes to throw them off when it was time for bed.

The single woman’s bedroom was her castle, Connie liked to joke to her sister.

But it had gone too far. Its romanticism now mocked her. Especially in February, season of red envelopes and roses. No, she was going to find something to make herself useful.

For a start, the postman had left them a letter addressed to ‘Mrs E. Levine’ that should obviously have gone to the elderly lady downstairs. Rather than just put it in the correct slot, Connie decided to use it as an excuse to visit their new neighbour. Maybe she could offer to go to the shop for her, or fetch some books from the library. Grabbing a box of luxury chocolate cookies that she happened to have in the cupboard, she walked downstairs and rang the bell of the ground-floor apartment. After a moment the intercom crackled into action.

‘Hello, Mrs Levine, it’s Connie O’Callaghan from upstairs,’ she called.

‘Hello, Connie,’ a soft American voice replied.

Once the door opened, Connie forgot all thoughts of the library. The woman standing before her was not her vision of a little old lady who needed friendship, large-print romantic novels from the library or soft mints she could eat in spite of her dentures.

‘How very nice to meet you,’ Mrs Levine said.

She was still tall and straight despite her age, and although age had probably dimmed their colour, her eyes were the shining blue of sapphires. Her hair was a cloud of soft white curls around an oval smiling face that, though lined like a piece of exquisite old vellum, glowed with inner light. Mannish tweed trousers and a cream silk shirt worn with a long woollen cardigan gave her the air of Lauren Bacall in an old movie, and around her neck were tortoiseshell glasses on a neat gold chain. Although she could be anywhere from seventy to eighty years old, Connie realised that there was absolutely nothing little-old-ladyish about Eleanor Levine.

Connie found her voice, said, ‘Hello, Mrs Levine,’ and held out her hand, which was grasped in a surprisingly firm and warm grip.

‘Please come in. And you must call me Eleanor.’

Connie had never been in the apartment below hers, even when the Taylors lived there. She saw now that it was the same layout but entirely different, thanks to its period furniture and gold-framed paintings on the wall.

The windows were larger though, and Connie saw that her neighbour had been sitting at a chair beside the vast bay window, a cup of tea and an upturned book on a small table beside the chair.