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Be Careful What You Wish For
Martina Devlin
From the author of THREE WISE MEN, a wise, funny and uplifiting novel of women, men, love and friendship.Have you ever had a secret you couldn't even tell your very best friend?Molly and Helen have been friends for ever – well, since university in Dublin. Now in their thirties, they have successful careers, go everywhere together, share everything – or so it seems.Outgoing Molly is wistfully thinking it would be nice to meet a man who'd make her want to bolt to the altar at breakneck speed, when she finds herself juggling two. There's Fionn, her renegade ex, returned from a failed marriage to woo her (to Helen's disapproval), and gorgeous Georgie who runs the local off-licence.Helen, meanwhile, is steadfastly against long term relationships. So Molly is astonished when Helen confides that she's fallen in love with someone she shouldn't have, so head-over-heels that resistance is futile – but she won't tell Molly who it is.
For my own Molly, Molly Eccles, an aunt who’s also a friend … although infinitely better behaved than her namesake.
Contents
Cover (#u0df02093-41dc-55f2-b762-30d7230f5bd4)
Title Page (#ulink_4620e78a-3e89-5101-8597-3741ddab31c9)
Dedication (#u4be698ec-e7f1-52f6-9f2b-2a9ffe36d93a)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_e06a0b0c-4dba-5619-bac5-ded4983ce116)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_fa292cfb-8ce8-53c0-a35c-c482d1c6891e)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_788fc33e-9956-566d-b336-d43fb23f0434)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_7e9ce611-adec-5de1-8e3e-d758451d678b)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_6eaaedd7-a754-500e-8ee1-e64492eea98b)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_06a0c95d-7c69-5c3b-9ad4-4ed04a1dfab2)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_855fdbe8-7a69-53f9-b3d1-55d89c1a23ad)
Chapter 8 (#ulink_a6b93641-4172-5e96-9927-daf4f58c8230)
Chapter 9 (#ulink_88e108a5-1edd-539b-9f16-33bc9c4e7997)
Chapter 10 (#ulink_6363de10-50ac-5c28-b953-ad7be4c2d98e)
Chapter 11 (#ulink_8d9d968f-4e28-53e5-88fb-1ed8bfef1d91)
Chapter 12 (#ulink_eb320157-364c-569b-84ba-f7ad77590aff)
Chapter 13 (#ulink_23ab003b-69b6-58d5-8c25-c94d9a32b678)
Chapter 14 (#ulink_d67392e9-a584-5b6c-a133-127c69195d65)
Chapter 15 (#ulink_ad50d674-c3aa-56ce-a831-251b75bc6620)
Chapter 16 (#ulink_0af8b72e-5a8f-5405-a428-f8da3f62ee80)
Chapter 17 (#ulink_88cb00a5-59bc-55f3-ad40-1ab03077d4b6)
Chapter 18 (#ulink_50359c81-8ed6-597d-8b4f-2f903c2a2eda)
Chapter 19 (#ulink_41794532-e4f9-5f63-8bb8-baf01875da64)
Chapter 20 (#ulink_42ce9466-9294-5acb-867d-e63648071639)
Chapter 21 (#ulink_1600310d-6086-57b4-bf31-c173a287976d)
Chapter 22 (#ulink_6c220782-9d2a-51cb-aa12-ff5af0289b4c)
Chapter 23 (#ulink_ab86867a-9739-5c90-bcc9-a4a374d9aa99)
Chapter 24 (#ulink_7e89c2d9-2f96-56c4-a0ca-f2d63437b9bd)
Chapter 25 (#ulink_d9cdade5-f5be-5431-8344-292982712931)
Chapter 26 (#ulink_b02c5cc0-eca0-5a68-996a-8c9ec2ae9eaa)
Chapter 27 (#ulink_aae3c1c0-890f-55aa-873f-f6f2dbb65a84)
Keep Reading (#ufb633eec-f970-5268-946f-164ccabb7081)
About the Author (#ulink_fe190bfa-3da3-5d6f-a8b2-02654348e1ea)
Also by the Author (#ulink_c95e2c72-711f-5528-85f2-f8cca69f9c78)
Copyright (#ulink_397bae4d-4f30-5fd9-96c4-eea938439cb7)
About the Publisher (#ulink_9d3041bf-339e-5399-8de7-1bb9d95aa2b9)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_50afbea0-5e9d-5fcf-a715-91f3c35da842)
‘Red wine or white?’ asked Helen.
‘Red – our bodies need the iron,’ said Molly. ‘But imagine having both in stock. Helen, it’s official, you’re a grown-up.’ She lolled on the sofa, waiting for her friend to prise open the bottle.
Despite a smorgasbord of corkscrews, Helen was fundamentally challenged in the uncorking department. Every so often she’d say wistfully, ‘Isn’t it a pity that Liebfrausquilch in the screwtop bottle tastes revolting? It’d be so handy,’ and Molly would threaten to report her to the taste Gestapo.
‘Give it here, Sharkey,’ she ordered now. ‘I’ll die of iron deficiency if I wait for you to relieve me.’ And she extracted both Merlot and corkscrew from Helen’s fumbling hands. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a foolproof gadget,’ she added. ‘Didn’t the Image magazine testers give it the full Orion’s Belt of stars?’
‘Misled again,’ mourned Helen. ‘I read, I bought, I faltered. Fill up my glass to the brim there, Molly, this is an emergency. I need to funnel the alcohol into my bloodstream in jig-speed time.’
‘You know what getting drunk on alcohol is called,’ said Molly, dribbling only a few drops as she poured.
Helen waited for Molly to fill her own glass and then clinked. ‘Tell me.’
‘A return on your investment.’
They swigged in companionable silence, facing each other on Helen’s somewhat mauled matching sofas from which, until she could afford two identical new ones, she wouldn’t be parted. Helen favoured pairs, whereas Molly shuddered if she accidentally found herself with a double – mugs, earrings, socks, towels were all deliberately mismatched. Shoes were about all she’d concede needed to come in pairs. ‘Eclectic’ was the word she dredged up whenever anyone suggested her taste veered towards the idiosyncratic; nobody came right out and told her she looked like a walking jumble sale, at least not since being staffed, after years as a freelance journalist, allowed her to relax her financial guard enough to buy clothes in the Powerscourt Townhouse.
‘So what’s the emergency, oh inheritor of the face that launched a thousand computer blips?’ she asked Helen, who was a software programmer.
The reference usually didn’t fail to make her friend blush or giggle, or at least twiddle an eyebrow, but tonight she didn’t react – an ominous sign. Helen took a protracted swallow that emptied her glass and said, ‘Thanks for galloping around at a moment’s notice.’
‘You know me,’ shrugged Molly. ‘I’d do the Lough Derg pilgrimage if it meant a drink in the heel of the hunt.’
‘I won’t ask you to walk on rocks here,’ said Helen, ‘but you might be obliged to walk on water. I need a miracle. Or failing that, electric shock treatment.’
‘So it’s a red-alert emergency, sirens blaring, traffic lights contemptuously ignored and cars bulldozed aside. It can only be man trouble.’
Helen frowned and refilled her glass without topping up Molly’s – which meant she was really distracted because Helen was renowned for her impeccable manners.
‘Just supposing …’ began Helen, rotating an opal heart earring in her left lobe, ‘… just supposing you fell in love with someone you weren’t meant to, but it crept up on you, and before there was any chance to erect the barricades you were head over heels and resistance was futile. How do you hold the feelings at bay – feelings you’re landed with whether you want them or not? Even though you refuse to meet him or return his phone calls you still think about him constantly. You can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on your job, and your life – which didn’t seem so unsatisfactory until the thunderclap – is so sterile and empty and meaningless there’s no way forward. Actually it’s more of a lightning bolt than a thunderclap, but no less elemental, and it’s left wasteland in its wake. God knows why I’m banging on about the weather.’ Helen twisted her earring so ferociously the back dropped off but she disregarded it. As Molly bent to retrieve the sliver of metal Helen continued, ‘The joy has been sapped from everything: going to work is like wading through fog; coming home to an empty house is so disheartening it’s tempting to stay on the DART train to the end of the line, and a day off stretches endlessly like a prison sentence with no remission.’
Her voice dropped until it was virtually a whisper. Molly’s stomach contracted at the misery on her friend’s face. She leaned across the sofa and wrapped her arms around the slight frame. She’d no inkling Helen was interested in anybody, never mind running the gauntlet of thwarted love.
‘Is it truly hopeless?’ asked Molly.
‘Yes.’
Pause.
‘He’s married?’ prompted Molly.
‘No.’
‘Gay?’
‘No.’
‘A priest?’
‘No.’
‘In love with someone else?’
‘No.’
‘Indifferent?’
‘No.’
‘Struck down by a fatal disease?’
‘No.’
‘Helen, I submit. I can imagine no more obstacles. If it isn’t a love that dare not speak its name, seek its flame or shriek its shame, if it isn’t a love potholed by a wife and four children, or even a love with a continent, an incurable illness and a clerical collar between you, I don’t see the barrier.’
At this Helen sank her head on Molly’s shoulder and sobbed, while Molly furtively reached for her glass. It could be a long night, no point in it being a dry one. But after Helen had a weep and accepted Molly’s offer of a cup of tea she calmed down.
‘I’m being stupid,’ she snivelled, juggling alternate sips of wine and tea. ‘It’s not love, it’s infatuation. If I’m patient it will fade.’
Like curtains, thought Molly, unable to stifle the stray comparison that sneaked into her mind.
Helen continued, ‘I simply have to wait for the feelings to evaporate. It’s just so –’ and here her composure quivered – ‘dreary in the meantime. The one person to whom I could describe how confused and destabilised I feel, because he’s probably experiencing something similar, is the one person I can’t approach. Him.’
‘You can talk to me, angel face.’ Curiosity and compassion were battling it out within Molly as she wondered who this unattainable paragon could be. Helen steadfastly stonewalled efforts to probe his identity, and Molly assumed it had to be someone from work. Where else did thirty-two-year-old women meet men? It certainly wasn’t in the supermarket, despite those magazine articles about checking out the contents of a man’s basket in the check-out queue. Small cartons of milk, individual pizzas and a decent bottle of wine meant singles; trolleys with a rainforest of loo roll and reservoir-sized cola bottles equalled daddies. Or so the article claimed. Molly wasn’t convinced it could be so self-evident. People weren’t tailored from Lycra for a one-size-fits-all finish.
Whoops, Helen was talking again – concentrate, Molly chided herself. Mentally assessing other men, even mythical ones, was verboten when your best friend was in emotional hyperventilation.
‘I know I can talk to you, you’re a saint to put up with my moaning –’
‘Let me have that in writing,’ interrupted Molly. ‘I’ll never be believed unless I can produce proof.’
‘You know you’re a strawberry cream, not the nut brittle you like to pretend, Moll. The problem is I don’t feel free to go into details here. I can’t name names. This involves two people and it wouldn’t be right to reveal his identity. Information leaks out – honestly, I’m not pointing the finger at you – but it could be harmful. For both of us. Least said soonest mended, as the Bible doesn’t say. But probably implies somewhere.’
‘Right, of course you can’t say any more,’ agreed Molly, monumentally disappointed. ‘I expect it would be a breach of confidence if I knew him already …’
She looked hopefully at Helen to see if her shot in the dark had struck home but there was no response. Feck, she was longing to know the identity of this adonis who had the normally self-contained Helen sobbing into her wine glass. But after a brief internal tussle Molly acknowledged she was being selfish; the priority now was to distract Helen from her conviction that life was pointless. All this talk of staying on the DART until the end of the line had unnerved Molly with its bleakness. Depression ran in the Sharkey family – Helen’s uncle had thrown himself under a double-decker after he lost his job. She wasn’t about to stand by while Helen caved in to the black dog. This called for decisive measures.
What Molly liked to do when sad was to party. Also when she was happy, bored and feeling stressed. So her solution to Helen’s dilemma, or the two-dimensional aspect of it she’d glimpsed, was glaringly apparent.
‘We’re going on the lash tomorrow night, Helen,’ she announced. ‘That’ll take your mind off him. We’ll get chatted up and flirt outrageously. It’s cast-iron therapy. I’ll wear my foolproof on-the-pull T-shirt, Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a holiday humour, and like enough to consent – jackpot guaranteed every time. Perhaps we’ll even buy you one too, just to prove we’re both the answer to a young man’s prayer, cherchez la indiscriminate femme.’
‘But we’re not,’ objected Helen.
‘I know that and you know that, angel face, but no harm in stringing them along for a few drinks. So will I pick up one of my Shakespearean soundbite numbers for you? Something that intimates “Ready when you are, big boy”, only in ye olde English to show you’re sophisticated?’
‘No,’ shuddered Helen. ‘What works for you wouldn’t carry the same, er, conviction for me. I don’t know that I have the heart for a session, Molly. The city centre’s so congested, there’s nowhere to sit in pubs and you can’t hear yourself speak.’
‘You’ve lost the plot, my little wounded bird. That’s the whole point of Saturday nights on the town. We’re both thirty-two, not a hundred and two, so let’s get cracking and prove we’re irresistible women in the prime of our lives. I’ll meet you in the Lifer at eight and –’
‘Not the Life Bar, it’s too young and trendy,’ complained Helen.
‘So are we. And wear something jam-tarty.’
Helen looked dubious at this final injunction.
‘The nearest you can manage,’ amended Molly. ‘Nothing buttoned up or navy.’
No point in expecting an overnight metamorphosis.
Just as well, reflected Helen, in one of her frequent reflective moments, after Molly left, that friends didn’t have to share characteristics because the two of them would never have lasted the distance.
Just as well, reflected Molly, in one of her infrequent reflective moments, after she left, that friends didn’t have to share characteristics because the two of them would never have lasted the distance.
Instead they had instantly formed a bond when they’d met on day one at university fourteen years ago. Admittedly they’d been thrown together as first year Arts students by mutual terror of Sarah Daly, who was acquainted with Helen from school and Molly from sharing lodgings. Sarah had been superbly informed – she’d known which bus would take them to the Belfield Campus at University College Dublin and where the bus stop was located and she’d even identified the lecture theatre location for their first session on Longfellow or some other fellow. Meanwhile Helen and Molly had both been desperately intimidated and even more desperate not to betray it. Sarah’s savoir-faire – and their discovery over coffee that they each abhorred her for it – had sparked a chemical reaction friendship.
Sitting in the taxi home, with only a sixth of an ear (and even that was probably excessive) tuned to the driver ranting about teenage pregnancies and moving on seamlessly to refugees bleeding the social security system dry, Molly decided to unmask Helen’s love bug. Not to be inquisitive, God no. So she could splat him on behalf of her unhinged friend. Helen wasn’t the best at romance; come to think of it she’d only had one grand passion. That had been just after graduating, with a marketing executive called Eugene. He’d been more than presentable – apart from his predilection for wearing dark shirts under beige linen jackets, which had prompted Molly to christen him the Black and Tan, although he’d insisted he preferred Gene if a nickname were essential. That relationship had juddered to a halt when he’d shown the temerity to propose. Marriage. Time for the short step followed by the long drop for Eugene.
‘I’m never getting married,’ Helen had insisted and Molly had concurred. Never didn’t mean not ever, as Molly understood it, it meant not while you were in your twenties and could pick and choose. In your thirties, now, you might consider it. In fact Molly was actively, not to say compulsively, contemplating it. But Helen seemed curiously inflexible on the matter. One after the other their college friends had teetered up the aisle disguised as shepherdesses or woodland nymphs, surrounded by a bevy of miniature ruffians purporting to represent cherubs. Helen and Molly, meanwhile, bought cartwheel hats because there was nothing like them for creating allure, and mouthed along to The Wedding Feast at Cana during the service. By now they were word perfect.
