Woman to Woman

Cathy Kelly is a feature writer and film critic for the Sunday World newspaper in Dublin, where she also writes the Dear Cathy agony column. Woman to Woman is her first novel and it spent eight weeks at Number One on the Irish Times bestseller list. Cathy Kelly lives in Dublin and is busy writing her second novel.

Praise for Woman to Woman:

“All the ingredients of the blockbuster are here … Kelly satisfies the most important requirement of the writer … her book is a page-turner’ Sunday Independent, Madeleine Keane “The funny and clever tale of two modern women struggling with life and love …” Sunday World “This is a powerful story for the Nineties woman… sharp, sexy and witty with a large dose of real life thrown in … so realistic you really feel you’re in on the action yourself Star, Olivia McMahon “A good read’ Woman’s Way, Deirdre O’Flynn “A tour-de-force of the Jilly Cooper genre, a must as a pool-side companion’ Lifetimes, Tim O’Brien “It’s a good read to bring on your holiday or just to relax with in the evenings’ Evening Herald, Lara MacMillan “An unprecedented success

story for a debut novel’ Sun Also by Cathy Kelly She’s the One

Copyright 1997 Cathy Kelly The right of Cathy Kelly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1998 by HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING 40 39 38 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN 0 7472 6052 4

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St. Ives pic

HEADLINE BOOK “PUBLISHING

A division of Hodder Headline PLC ” Fusion Road 338 Euston Road London

NW1 3BH To Mum, with all my love

To John, who told me to stop talking about writing a book and to just do it, and for encouraging me all the way when I actually did. To Lucy, who gave me so much support, made the coffee, poured the gin and brought Tamsin out to meet her boyfriends while I typed. To Mum, who’s been saying I could do it ever since we started that ill-fated Mills & Boon, and who has helped me in so many ways, always. To Dad for minding the zuppies, to Francis and Anne for their endless encouragement, and to Laura, my godchild, for being so absolutely adorable and a complete bookworm at the age of two. And of course, to Tamsin, who was here for all of it. Thanks to Saran Hamilton for being a wonderful friend and for coming up with the title, thanks to Moira Harmon, Joanne McElgunn and Lisa McDonnell for reading bits and not telling me it was brutal. Thanks to the Sunday World’s editor, Colm MacGinty and deputy editor, J. P. Thompson for making this a fantastic time in my life career-wise. And thank you to all my friends and colleagues in the Sunday World who are too numerous to name and who encouraged me, asked how it was going, helped me with computer nightmares and never asked if I was writing a sequel to War and Peace because it was taking so long. You know who you are. Thanks also to my fellow movie critics for the same thing.

Thanks to Padraig O’Reilly for amazing poster shots and lots of advice for the next book, and to Siobhain McClafferty or Cover Shots and her team for the others.

Last, but by no means least, thanks to everyone at Poolbeg for their enthusiasm, hard work and sheer professionalism. To Joe Bruise O’Brien

for being a marvelous editor, who was endlessly encouraging when I was down in the dumps with brain rot, who helped me learn the difference between writing a book and writing for a newspaper and who gave me lots of wine (thanks, Joe.) to cheer me up. I couldn’t have done it without you, Kate. To Philip MacDermott, Paula, Kieran, Sarah, Nicole and everyone else at Poolbeg for their hard work. And thanks to Jilly

Cooper whose wonderful novels kept me going through all the dreadful bits. CHAPTER ONE

Aisling stared at the crumpled-up receipt in her hand and tried desperately not to cry. A credit card counter foil with smudged writing, it lay forlornly on the palm of her hand with the words “Lingerie de Paris’ plainly printed on the left-hand side.

Her hand trembled slightly as she pulled out a chair and sat down by the kitchen table, blind to the fact that her sleeve was resting on an island of marmalade and toast crumbs left by the boys’ usual breakfast commando raid. She closed her eyes and crunched the receipt into a ball, willing the words to have changed when she looked again.

Just moments before, Friday had stretched out in front of her in a comforting and familiar routine. A visit to the dry-cleaner’s with Michael’s suits, a quick detour to the hairdresser’s to get her hair blow-dried for the party and coffee with Fiona in the Merrion Centre for a thoroughly enjoyable gossip over a slightly too-big slice of carrot cake smothered in cream.

No carrot cake, she admonished herself automatically. A brown scone with a tiny bit of Flora and a cup of black coffee with no sugar. Got to stick to the diet. The first week was always the hardest but you’ve got to stick to it, or so the diet gurus repeated endlessly.

Dieu What am I thinking about bloody diets for, she wailed out loud. What was the point of living on dry toast and two ounces of lean turkey with a mini-Kit Kat treat a day when your entire life had just disintegrated.

Suddenly her regular trip to the dry-cleaner’s and the itching session with Fiona seemed a million miles away. Michael never remembered to leave his suits out for dry cleaning and she’d stopped reminding him

since it was easier to bring them downstairs herself than listen to him stomp around the bedroom muttering about women with premenstrual tension and complaining about being late for work.

She had also given up telling the twins to put their dirty football jerseys in the laundry basket. They copied their father slavishly in everything and, if he managed to escape from all things domestic, they followed suit. Aisling was used to finding remnants of tissues and receipts glued to every wet item of clothing when she emptied the machine. She had finally realised that she was stuck with two ten-year-old fledgling domestic incompetents along with a card-carrying anti-housework husband. She simply cleaned out the pockets herself.

That morning had been no different.

“Don’t forget to bring my navy suit, Aisling, and tell them about the red wine stain on my yellow silk tie, will you?”

Michael had shouted downstairs.

“Yes, my lord and master she muttered from the depths of the downstairs coat cupboard where she was riffling through, duffel coats, soccer boots and the bits of the vacuum cleaner that she never used. She was looking for the boys’ tennis rackets. The three-week summer camp in UCD always seemed like a good idea at the time because it certainly kept the boys out of trouble during the too-long holidays. But it meant three times as much organisation as it took to get them off to primary school. The camp timetable was a bit erratic and the boys always forgot to mention that they wanted some vital bit of equipment until five minutes before they were due to go.

Yesterday, it had been swimming goggles. Today, tennis rackets.

“I know I left them there, Mum,” wailed Phillip, hopping from one leg to the other in agitation, his dark eyes huge with anxiety.

“Somebody must have moved them!”

Somebody was responsible for a lot of things in the Moran household, Aisling thought darkly as she rummaged through old papers and a battered plastic toy box she thought she’d thrown out.

Somebody regularly ate all the chocolate biscuits, broke dishes and lost school jumpers. She’d just love to shake somebody.

Michael’s voice, even more agitated than Phillip’s, broke into her reverie.

“Aisling, where did you put my linen jacket? I want to wear it tonight and I can’t see it in the bloody wardrobe! I’m going to be late, for God’s sake!”

Triumphantly dragging two battered rackets out of the cupboard, Aisling handed them to a delighted Phillip and shouted back up the stairs, “I put it in the spare bedroom wardrobe because your wardrobe is so full it would end up totally creased before you’d put it on.”

Two minutes later, Michael rushed the boys out the door to drop them at UCD before driving to work. Peace reigned again. The nine o’clock news blared loudly in the background.

She left the breakfast dishes on the table to go upstairs and collect the suits, trousers and ties she was bringing to the cleaner’s, scooping up her handbag and keys at the same time.

She draped the dry-cleaning pile on the back of a kitchen chair as she had dozens of times before and reached absently into every pocket.

Among the bits of pocket fluff and unused match books Michael always seemed to have stashed in his pockets, she found it. Tucked into the inside pocket of the fine wool navy suit that looked so good with his yellow Paisley tie, was an ordinary credit card receipt, the sort of thing she wouldn’t usually look at. But today was different. Something made her smooth it out and look. Fifty pounds’ worth of goods from one of Dublin’s most exclusive lingerie shops had been purchased with their joint credit card but had somehow never made it into her underwear drawer.

Unbelievably, her loving husband had been lying through his capped teeth when he muttered that expensive lunches with his newspaper colleagues and important contacts had sent his Visa card bill sky-high.

The receipt in Aisling’s hand made her think that the hefty bill he’d complained about had nothing to do with lunch at Le Coq Hardi. Instead of buying bottles of pricey Rioja and the best smoked salmon to loosen his political friends’ tongues, the deputy editor of the Sunday News appeared to have been splashing out on goodies of another kind. Luxurious silky goodies.

Fifty pounds. Aisling marvelled. And in Lingerie de Paris at that. She had never even stood inside the door of the plushest underwear shop on Grafton Street. She’d seen enough adverts for the shop’s dainty silk knickers and bras to realise that they were ruinously expensive.

Aisling felt a sliver of anger pierce the gloom in her heart. She’d been brought up to believe that spending money on clothes was practically sinful and she’d never spent more than fifteen pounds on a bra in her life.

Apart from the lacy crimson teddy the girls at work had bought for her honeymoon twelve years ago, and a few s.

frivolous satin bits and pieces which never felt comfortable under her jeans, Aisling’s lingerie collection consisted of the type of plain cotton knickers and sensible bras that wouldn’t look out of place on a Mother Superior.

If she was knocked down by a bus, nobody was ever going to think she was a sexpot once they’d ripped off her sensible navy cardigan and long, full skirt to reveal underwear about as erotic as suet pudding. It would all match, of course, saggy off-white knickers, saggy off-white bra and saggy off-white body.

No amount of lycra underwear could conceal her spare tyre and cellulite-covered bum. Why waste money looking for sexy lingerie? Anyway, the sort of bras that could contain a well-endowed 38C generally looked as if they could also accommodate a few basketballs at a push and were, therefore, passion-killers of the most effective kind.

Passion-killers, hah. She laughed out loud, a little rasping noise that turned into a sob at the thought of Michael walking into a lingerie shop to buy something for another woman.

Had he given the salesgirl a blank look when she asked what size he wanted? Splaying out his hands as though cupping a couple of oranges for the bra measurements?

Men never managed to check their wives’ existing underwear before these shopping expeditions, Aisling had read in a magazine once. Instead, they muttered about small waists, ordinary hips and blushed when they said “About your size’ to shop assistants who’d seen it all before.

Had he asked for the best lingerie money could buy, keen to impress her! Or was she with him, smiling as he coughed up for knickers she knew he’d rip off later? Aisling couldn’t bear to think about it.

Michael wouldn’t cheat on her. He wouldn’t, she was sure of that. He barely had time to play with the kids these days, for God’s sake. He spent every spare moment working on the newspaper supplement which would ‘… push the circulation figures of the paper to the top!” as he was so fond of saying.

She was sick to the teeth of hearing about the last-minute problems, about how he nearly fired the darkroom technician who somehow managed to botch printing an entire roll of film from the fashion spread, shot at great expense in Cannes.

The newspaper had taken over their lives during the past year. Endless meetings and brainstorming sessions resulted in cancelled evenings out and lots of lonely weekends where Michael only appeared for bed and breakfast like a hotel guest who didn’t fancy his room that much. He’d even missed the twins’ Easter play where they played St. Peter and St. Paul in matching beige striped robes. Aisling had spent hours sewing the night before.