Woman to Woman (5 page)

Charming, she thought, wondering whether he made his girlfriend get to parties on her own or did he sweep up to her house bearing flowers and offers of X-rated antics in the back of a taxi?

“Ash, try this on,” Fiona’s voice broke into her daydream and she stared at the dress her friend was holding up in astonishment.

“Red is perfect for your colouring and with a bit of trollopy crimson lipstick and your hair done, you’ll knock them all for six.” Fiona said encouragingly.

Aisling took the dress, a low-cut swirl of red crepe, into the changing room and held it up to her face. Brighter than anything she’d worn for ages, the rich colour made her pale face seem paler than ever.

“Make-up, Ash, you need make-up,” advised Fiona before pulling the changing cubicle curtain over.

“Does Liz Hurley look like that without make-up? See what I mean? All you need is half an hour in front of the mirror and you’ll look stunning in that dress.”

As she stared at her reflection in the large mirror, Aisling made a decision. Why not, she thought? If I’m going to face all the people

who know what’s been going on, I might as well do it in style.

Bending slightly sideways in her grey swivel chair, Jo reached down and slowly slid the chemist’s paper bag out of her briefcase. She was trying to remove it with as little rustling as possible, hoping that Brenda, who was sitting at the opposite desk blowing kisses down the phone to her current boyfriend, wouldn’t hear anything.

If only she’d stuck the package in her fake crocodile-skin handbag in the first place, she wouldn’t have to smuggle it clandestinely out of her briefcase now. She’d been waiting all morning for the right moment to sneak the distinctive blue and white bag into the toilet without someone demanding to know what she’d been buying in the chemist when they had enough make-up around to cover Claudia Schiffer from head to toe.

That was one of the main problems of working in such a small office, and the office of a women’s magazine into the bargain, she thought ruefully. Everyone knew everything about you and, being inveterate shoppers, they wanted to know what you’d bought when you came back from the shops at lunchtime.

Personal matters were totally public in the cramped offices of Style, where the only privacy to be had was when you locked the door of the tiny toilet and shower cubicle. Everyone who worked in what the interior designer described as a ‘… relaxing contemporary open-plan workspace …” could listen to your most intimate phone calls, could hear you talking to the bank about your overdraft, and knew when you’d forgotten your mother’s birthday.

What’s more, they were all endlessly curious about shopping, shopaholism being the main qualification necessary for working in a

women’s magazine. Entire lunch-breaks could be spent oohing and aahing over a sale bargain hat for that wedding or a new baby gro for baby Jessica.

Jo wanted to keep this latest purchase to herself. A pregnancy testing kit was not the sort of thing you could hold up and scream, “Look what I got for a tenner in Marks and Spencer’s this morning.” Absolutely not.

It was all so unexpected, such a surprise. Jo was still too stunned to know what she thought about it. She certainly didn’t want the rest of the office to know anything about it until she knew whether she was pregnant or not. Or until she knew how she felt about being pregnant, which was more to the point. God, it was confusing.

She sighed, jammed the paper bag into her open handbag and closed her eyes briefly. It wasn’t as if she’d had much time to think about being pregnant. She’d only worked out that her period was late when she opened the phone bill that morning.

Late for work as usual. She was trying to gulp down a cup of coffee while opening her post and sticking folders into her tattered old briefcase when she came upon the phone bill.

Astronomical, what else? All that time ringing Sligo talking to her mother and the boys. She was about to jam it behind the coffee jar when she stopped herself.

Write it down, you moron, she muttered, remembering how very irritating it had been to have to pay the phone company a reconnection fee the last time she’d filed a bill behind the coffee and forgotten about it.

Three pens had to be thrown in the bin before she found one that worked and opened her diary to write, “Pay phone bill’ in the following week. And then she noticed it. Or rather didn’t notice it.

The capital P which stood for period wasn’t there. Details of her fluctuating bank balance were noted along with appointments for interviews and a green biro squiggle she couldn’t read. But no mention of her period. She flicked through the pages rapidly.

“Omigod,” Jo muttered.

“Omigod!” Unless her contact lenses needed to be replaced, she hadn’t

had a period since the second week in April and it was now the beginning of June.

She had either stopped menstruating because she was menopausal unlikely at the age of thirty-four or she was pregnant. But it couldn’t be. They always used condoms and spermicide, so how could she be pregnant?

She’d bought the pregnancy testing kit at the chemist across the road from her apartment, but she was running too late to do the test at home.

Which was why she was waiting for the right moment to slip nonchalantly into the office loo without catching anyone’s eye. Well, it wasn’t the sort of news to broadcast to your colleagues when your brain was still reeling from the shock and your boyfriend was still blissfully unaware of impending fatherhood.

She thought of Richard: clever, witty, good-looking in a boyish way, a talented photographer and an inveterate charmer of women. Of all the words you could use to describe her boyfriend of the last two years, fatherly would have been last on her list. Well, maybe conventional would be last on the list but fatherly wouldn’t be far behind.

Three years older than she was, he looked as if he was heading towards thirty, never mind forty, and thought that settling down was something other people did when they were ten years older than he was.

The thought of being married with 2.5 kids, a semi with a conservatory and an estate car filled him with the dread most men reserved for having their mothers-in-law to stay. At the mention of the word commitment, his eyes glazed over and he would pick up the remote control and switch channels rapidly, searching for something which involved a muddy field, a football or a newscast with in-depth sports coverage.

Of course, when you were a sports photographer you had to keep up with current sporting events, but one tiny piece of Jo’s mind was beginning to think that the manic channel hopping which ensued the last time she talked about buying a place together was a ploy to avoid talking about

settling down. She known what he was like when she first met him, shortly after he’d given up his secure and pension able job with one newspaper to set up a sports agency with a couple of other like-minded, risk-taking photographers.

“It was driving me out of my mind working for just one paper.” He told her about his low boredom threshold as they drank red wine and completely ignored the press photographer awards ceremony going on around them.

“This way, we’re our own bosses and we control what we do and what we don’t do.”

“Absolutely,” breathed Jo, fascinated by his ambition and his Scandinavian blondness. She thanked God that she’d agreed to make up a party of ten people to cheer on Style’s fashion photographer as he accepted his award.

She’d nearly cried off and stayed in to watch Coronation Street instead. There is a God after all, she thought happily.

She wondered whether she should risk going to the loo to reapply some Crimson Kiss lipstick and adjust her strapless dress in case someone else nabbed the most fascinating man she’d met in years. No, she decided firmly.

Who cared if her boobs were about to spill out of the figure-hugging hot red dress she’d borrowed from the fashion cupboard at work?

Her rippling tortoiseshell hair was piled on top of her head in a haphazard manner, designed to suggest she’d just got out of bed. Mascara emphasised her dark eyes beautifully and only the most observant onlooker would notice the wobbly dark line above her lashes where the hand holding her eyeliner pen had slipped. Jo knew she looked good and she wanted this fair-haired hunk to know it too.

“I can’t stand people who just sit still and let life happen to them. I want to make it happen, I want that excitement and that energy,” Richard said passionately.

“It’s what keeps me going.”

Gazing deeply into his eyes, Jo fell for him like a ton of bricks, low boredom threshold and all. She should have wondered what kind of man

would dump a perfectly safe job to run a risky freelance agency. But she hadn’t.

She was the sort of individual who woke in the morning with her guts spasming with nerves if she had a difficult interview ahead of her. She found Richard’s adventurous spirit intriguing. And frankly, very sexy.

There was something macho about taking such a huge gamble and something equally attractive about realising that his dream had paid off tenfold.

That wasn’t enough for Richard, though. Once the agency was making money, he was eager for the next challenge, longing for adventure, while Jo began to yearn for quiet domesticity. He wanted to take up parachuting. She was I scared of heights. He signed up for a scuba diving course and gave her a course of diving lessons for her birthday, even though she hated getting water in her eyes. But how could she now complain about the very traits she’d found so exciting in him in the first place?

“Interest rates and conveyancing fees are probably responsible for more heart attacks than five pints of Guinness a day, darling,” he’d said only the week before when the most gorgeous cottage in the Wicklow mountains just jumped out of the property pages at her. The picture of the cottage bathed in sunlight made Jo long for the house with twelve-inch-thick stone walls and a box-tree herb garden.

“Darling, you know I love living in the city,” he said, throwing the property pages onto the floor and nuzzling her neck as he breathed in the scent of the vanilla perfume he loved her to wear.

“Anyway, setting up the agency has swallowed up most of my capital and I don’t want to take on a mortgage when I can keep renting my flat in Merrion Square for well under the market rate. You’d be mad to sell your apartment so soon after buying it,” he added.

“Let’s leave things the way they are.” And they went to bed.

Once Richard had his arms around her, making her feel more turned on and more desirable than any man had been able to do before, she wasn’t

able to think about anything, never mind buying a house together. All she wanted was his lean body wrapped around hers, his fingers tangled in her hair and his lips gently kissing her skin. When he murmured exactly what he was going to do just before he did it, she melted into a quiver of anticipation.

His voice did the most amazing things to her head, not to mention the effect he was having lower down. And when they finally came together in a surge of passion, the intensity of her orgasm made Jo shudder, and wonder how she’d ever thought she’d enjoyed lovemaking with anyone else.

“We’re wonderful in bed together,” he said afterwards. It was amazing the way they were perfectly in tune in bed, even though they weren’t so in tune out of it, Jo thought to herself.

As she was about to throw a bundle of old papers in the bin a few days later, she looked longingly at the property section and wondered was she mad to think about settling down.

Richard was happy the way things were, so why wasn’t she?

His bachelor pad in the city centre was perfect for a man who liked nothing better than to sway the few short yards from Dublin’s trendy hostelries to his front door on a Saturday night.

Trips to Anfield and Wembley where night clubbing the night away was par for the course, this was Richard’s idea of fun. Not getting up for the three a.m. feed.

Would he want their baby, she asked herself? You could go round and round in circles and never figure it out. What was the point in dreaming up problems for the future until she knew for sure?

Ten minutes in the loo would tell her for certain. She looked around at the empty desks abandoned in the lunchtime rush.

The only person in the editorial office was Brenda and she was thankfully otherwise engaged, telling Mark or was it Kevin about the lingerie catalogue she’d been perusing that morning, ostensibly for a feature on mail-order underwear.

“You’d really like the black bra with those teeny, weeny knickers,”

Brenda purred down the phone, no doubt sending poor Mark/Kevin into a frenzy with the seduction techniques she’d honed after three years of industriously filling in “How Sexy Are You?” questionnaires in Cosmopolitan.

At least Brenda was too busy to listen, thought Jo, as she psyched herself up to do the test. She gave up pretending to study a feature article on the latest tanning creams and had just picked up the small elegant handbag which went with nothing she owned, when she was rudely interrupted. Dropping the bag like a shot, Jo straightened up and smiled broadly at the editor.

“Got a minute, Jo?” inquired Rhona McNamara. She perched one well-upholstered hip on the desk and rearranged the silken folds of her expensive Jaeger skirt.

“Of course. What is it?” With as much nonchalance as she could muster, Jo casually scooped up the magazines from her desk and dropped them on top of the paper bag which was sticking out the top of her handbag in a very noticeable manner. You couldn’t do anything personal around here without someone landing on top of you, she cursed inwardly.

“What do you think about changing the format of the new beauty products section? I’ve been thinking that we should get readers to test certain things and give marks out of ten.”

Rhona’s fingers flew about as she spoke, a habit which would make the casual observer think she was using sign language. In fact, she was just trying to keep her hands occupied until they got hold of her next cigarette.

“I think that’s a great idea,” Jo answered. Obviously, she couldn’t say that she didn’t give a damn who tested the bloody make-up when she was faced with this momentous, no huge event in her life. When a pregnancy testing kit was burning a hole in her handbag just aching to be used.