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‘There are going to be loads of famous people there. The guest list is like flicking through Hello!’ one of Hannah’s hotel receptionist colleagues had wittered excitedly about the launch weeks beforehand. ‘We’ve got to pull out all the stops, girls. We can’t let the hotel down.’
So Hannah had pulled out all the stops, had set her long dark hair in curlers so it rippled down her back like a sheet of raw silk and had shoe-horned herself into the ruinously expensive dress she’d nearly taken back to the shop so many times on the grounds that it was a waste of money. All the other Triumph Hotel receptionists had gasped in shock at the sight of the normally staid Ms Campbell in something other than her off-duty uniform of crisp white shirt, ironed blue jeans, blazer and loafers. She looked phenomenally sexy, they said, stunned. Who’d have thought she could transform herself from a frostily polite receptionist into a siren with just a dress?
Jeff Williams, who ran the hotel’s new gym and was as yet unfamiliar with Hannah’s reputation as a bit of an ice maiden, had gasped with pleasure at the sight of her gym-toned, curvaceous body clad in a wisp of filmy chiffon that clung in all the right places.
Unlike the starstruck members of staff who spent the night gazing cow-eyed at the various stars knocking back Moët in the roped-off area of the nightclub, Jeff and Hannah spent the evening discovering that they both loved to dance. They drank far more mineral water than alcohol as they moved sinuously on the dance floor, jiving, boogieing, salsaing and even waltzing when the DJ played some slow, jazzy numbers. High on having fun, it only took two glasses of white wine to give Hannah a heady buzz where the idea of letting Jeff kiss her seemed natural really, rather than a complete mistake.
‘I’m ten years older than you,’ she reproved as they squashed up together on one seat, his muscular arms wrapped around her and his fair head bent over hers. She felt ridiculously like a teenager on a date, but it was fun.
‘Thirty-six is hardly old,’ Jeff had murmured, kissing the tendrils of dark hair that clung to her cheekbones.
As his bachelor pad was miles across town and sounded like a laddish bombsite shared with three other young men, it seemed more sensible to have that cup of coffee in Hannah’s immaculate apartment, a mere stone’s throw from the Triumph Hotel.
Sitting on the small, hard sofa-bed, Jeff had admired the unusual brocade cushions that Hannah had hand-stamped with gold fabric paint one weekend, and then attempted a little handiwork of his own, stroking fingers up and down Hannah’s arm in a very erotic manner. He hadn’t pounced on her. She’d known he wouldn’t: used to having women swoon at his gym instructor physique, Jeff didn’t have to bother at all to attract gorgeous women, so he always made a point of making sure they knew what they were doing when things got intimate.
‘Are you sure you want to?’ he asked, his eager and ardent eyes proof that he certainly wanted to.
Hannah, who’d already decided she deserved a celebratory bonk after twelve months of celibacy, had said yes. It had been wonderful, rather like picking up the old tennis racquet you hadn’t used since you’d fallen in love with Wimbledon and Ivan Lendl sixteen years ago, and realizing that you could still lob the ball over the net without making a complete fool of yourself.
Jeff wasn’t to know that the last time she’d had that much exercise, she’d been in the middle of a class of fellow step-aerobics fans, all sweating like pigs with their T-shirts glued to their backs, their thighs aching and a supermodel-lookalike screaming at them to ‘move your arms, girls!’
Neither was she about to tell him that he was the first person other than herself to sleep in the queen-sized bed with the yellow brocade headboard Hannah had re-covered because she hated the original peach Dralon fabric. Men, particularly young men, she always felt, were nervous of the concept of both celibacy and women who made a conscious decision to have sex, instead of just getting carried away by too much vodka and a nice line in flattery. Conscious decisions implied another big C – commitment.
She figured that if Jeff discovered he was the one she’d chosen to break her enforced year of celibacy, he’d probably have run out of the apartment like the clappers, imagining he’d got himself involved with a neurotic bunny boiler. If only he knew.
Life had taught Hannah that men were useful for only one thing, and it wasn’t earning money, either. She’d learned her lessons early on, from her feckless father. When you were born in the wilds of Connemara where only the hardiest of livestock could survive, farmers like her father either toiled away until their fingers were gnarled with arthritis and they were old before their time, or they turned to the bottle and let their wives shoulder the burden of feeding the kids and paying the electricity bill. Hannah’s father had chosen the second path.
Her mother was the one who’d grown old before her time, her strong-boned face a mask of lines and misery by the time she was forty. Watching Anna Campbell come home white with exhaustion from cleaning out the kitchens in the local hotel and then sit down to knit another piece of the Aran sweater she was being paid buttons to finish, made Hannah vow never to end up in the same position. No man would ever enslave her in unholy matrimony or come home roaring drunk, screaming for a dinner he hadn’t contributed a penny to. No way.
She’d earn her fortune and be utterly independent, a career warrior who’d never have to strain her eyes knitting by the lights of a feeble lamp for the extra few pounds to kit her children out in reasonable clothes for Sunday Mass.
Failing her final school exams and the arrival of Harry had been the fatal glitches in this foolproof plan. But, thought Hannah, grinding her teeth even though the dentist had warned her to stop doing it, she was back on track now. Sort of. A new job, a cultural holiday to give her some of the education she knew she lacked, and a new life. Jeff, lovely though he was, wasn’t part of the new life. He’d get in the way and make her think about love and things. She’d had enough of love to last her a lifetime, thank you very much.
The water was getting uncomfortably cold and she was going to be late if she didn’t move soon. Hannah stood up gracefully and climbed out of the bath.
‘You’re in great shape,’ Jeff said, admiring her toned arms and small waist.
‘You mean for someone of my age,’ she teased, wrapping a towel around her body and rubbing her jawbone where she felt the most pain from her constant teeth grinding.
‘For anybody,’ he emphasized. ‘You must work out a lot. I see so many women who let themselves get out of shape. They think if they’re not an athletic build, why bother. But you really work at it.’
Hannah paused in towelling her hair dry and thought of the hours she’d spent on the StairMaster in the past year, jaw clenched as she pounded Harry out of her mind. Getting him out of her life had been difficult enough: eradicating him from her thoughts was another thing entirely.
Before Harry (or BH as she liked to think of it) she’d been in reasonable shape for a twenty-seven-year-old who smoked like a chimney. Of medium height and with a genetic tendency to put on weight, she was still young enough not to bother much with exercise, preferring the Marlboro Light Exercise Plan of lighting up whenever she felt hungry.
But during the Harry years, she’d spent far too long cuddling up next to him on their old sofa, sharing mammoth takeaways and entire boxes of chocolates as they watched videos. Life was one long Little House on the Prairie fantasy of delicious meals and lazy evenings toasting their toes in front of the fire while Harry discussed the novel he was going to write and Hannah stopped caring about leaving her dead-end job in the dress shop to pursue her dream of being rich and utterly independent. She stopped caring about her figure and was even persuaded to give up smoking when Harry went off the fags for an article he was writing about nicotine tablets. No cigarettes meant more chocolates and cups of tea with three sugars to make up for the pain of wanting a fag. Harry didn’t put on a pound: Hannah put on another twelve.
In cohabiting bliss, her ambition had disappeared along with her waistline. Until that awful August day she’d thrown him out and had started reclaiming her life – and her figure.
‘I go to the gym and to three aerobics classes, one toning class, and I walk about ten miles a week,’ she told Jeff.
‘You can tell,’ he said solemnly. ‘You gotta put the work in to get the body you want.’
Hannah nodded sagely. It was a pity she was leaving the hotel. It would have been fun to work out with Jeff, even if their fling probably wouldn’t have lasted very long.
Men like Jeff were always looking over your shoulder to see who was coming along behind you. One pretty, pouting twenty-something in a thong leotard asking him to explain the lateral pull-down machine and it’d have been all over.
Mind you, if she’d been staying on at the hotel, she wouldn’t have gone off with Jeff in the first place. The Triumph Hotel’s gossip network was far superior to the actual hotel network. It took over half an hour to have an omelette delivered to a guest’s bedroom via room service and only ten minutes for a juicy bit of news to travel all the way from the kitchens to the concierge desk, having reached the business centre and the restaurant into the bargain. The gossiping that would have gone on if Hannah had been seen walking out with the gym’s new manager would have been hilarious to behold.
After a year when she had gossiped with nobody, dated nobody and revealed not one item of information about herself to the naturally inquisitive staff, Hannah couldn’t have coped with seeing the floodgates of curiosity come rushing open. But she had her reference, her new job was lined up for when she returned from holiday and nobody could touch her for one carefree fling. ‘Indulge yourself,’ advised all the women’s magazines when it came to getting over unhappy love affairs. ‘Have a massage, treat yourself to an aromatherapy session.’ Jeff was her first AH (After Harry) treat. More fun than aromatherapy and less painful than a facial, but guaranteed to give you an inner glow that Oil of Olay couldn’t manage.
Happily unaware of his status as a reward for a year of celibacy, Jeff let more hot water flood into the bath and lay back in the bubbles. Trying not to let herself get irritated because he obviously had no intention of leaving, Hannah concentrated on rubbing moisturizer into her face.
She had been able to reshape her body with endless hours of exercising but her face remained stubbornly the same as ever: rounded with a pointed chin, slightly too-beaky nose and bright almond-shaped eyes the exact colour of toffee. With a sprinkling of amber freckles scattered across her nose and cheekbones, the cumulative effect of sparkling eyes and the rippling nutbrown hair should have been that of a casually pretty woman. Attractive but no beauty, would be the conclusion if someone had described Hannah to a stranger.
But a simple description would leave out the very thing which transformed her. Hannah glowed with that fleeting, most unbottleable quality that people lacking it did everything to acquire – sex appeal. From the way she walked with that languid sway of her enduringly curvy hips, to the way she drank her tea, wide mouth pursing up softly around the china to take a first sip, screamed of sexuality. She didn’t do it on purpose: in fact, she didn’t have to do anything. Hannah Campbell, thirty-six-year-old hotel receptionist and spinster of this parish, had been born like that. And it drove her insane.
When her long shaggy hair was tamed into the gleaming knot she wore for work and her small tortoiseshell glasses sat on her nose, Hannah could look as stern as the headmistress of a school for delinquents. Which was why she’d never bothered to get contact lenses. Nowadays she wanted to be able to hide her natural sexuality, to conceal it with sedate clothes, fierce glances and Reverend Mother spectacles.
Sex appeal was all very well in its place but all it had ever given Hannah was Trouble, with a capital T. Being naturally sexy in her rural home town meant you either got an undeserved reputation as a complete slapper or you aroused rage amongst the local lads who didn’t take kindly to being constantly given the cold shoulder.
Sex appeal was all very well for Hollywood starlets, Hannah felt, but for normal women it brought sheer, unending hassle. Well, she amended, with a smidgen of guilty pleasure, her sex appeal had given her the delectable Jeff. But he had overstayed his welcome so it was time for Sexy Hannah to disappear and Ms Cojones of Steel Campbell to take her place.
She expertly coiled her wet hair into a scrunchie and fixed her visitor with the steely look she’d perfected when departing hotel guests insisted they’d had only two drinks in the hotel bar the previous night instead of the ten doubles itemized on their bar bill.
‘Jeff, you’ve got to get out of the bath and leave. I need to be out the door in three-quarters of an hour and I need time to myself. Come on, now.’
Responding to her schoolmarm voice the way he hadn’t responded to her gentle wheedling, Jeff climbed out of the bath, stood in front of her and stretched, his splendid naked body dripping water on to the black and white tile-effect lino.
Hannah couldn’t help staring. God, he was beautiful: from his short blond hair down to his big feet. Six foot of rippling muscle without a flaw anywhere. Poor Michelangelo would have killed to sculpt something like Jeff Williams.
Hannah gulped as she tried to concentrate on what she simply had to do in the next hour. Packing and sorting out her guide books. She wanted to learn something from this holiday and she’d hoped to spend a while reading her Let’s Go: Egypt so that she wouldn’t embarrass herself in front of all the other people on the trip, people who probably knew about history and mythology…Then Jeff smiled a slow, lazy smile and traced one finger along her chest until it hooked under her towel and pulled, tumbling the towel to the floor along with her mental timetable.
Oh, what the hell, thought Hannah, letting her sex drive shift into fifth gear. After all those evenings trying to forget what physical pleasure had been like and watching endless re-runs of Inspector Morse, she deserved this. It wouldn’t take her that long to pack. She could read her guide book on the plane.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_f603a41b-f432-55f1-8b2e-1b6e658282c7)
‘Lord! Would you look at the mess in here. I’m all for salads but you’ve really got to take them out of those awful little white plastic containers when you get them home. They leak everywhere. What’s this?’ Anne-Marie O’Brien squinted over her glasses at the supermarket label on the tub of couscous which had made an oily puddle in the middle of the otherwise spotless fridge. ‘Couscous? Messy, that’s what it is.’
Emma Sheridan said nothing as her mother searched for a clean J-cloth, rinsed it out in hot water and then zealously scrubbed the middle shelf of the fridge with the help of a bottle of antiseptic kitchen cleaner Emma had forgotten she’d possessed and had meant to throw out. An overpowering scent of pine disinfectant filled the room. It smelled nothing like any pine tree Emma had ever come across, unless pines were mating with bleach factories these days.
‘Much better now,’ Mrs O’Brien said, straightening up. She briskly rinsed the cloth out again, inspected the rest of the kitchen with narrowed eyes, then gave the melamine surfaces a quick squirt of cleaner, her every movement the work of an expert with a PhD in Cleaning the Home. Only then did she take the precious Tupperware and tinfoil-wrapped parcels and place them carefully in the fridge, giving her daughter a commentary on her actions at the same time.
‘Can’t have poor Peter eating that supermarket stuff. Proper dinners is what he should have. I know your father wouldn’t touch anything that had to be microwaved, but if I was away from him for a week, it’d be a different matter. Husbands! I’ve made lasagne that’ll last for at least two days, shepherd’s pie for tonight and these two are chicken and mushroom pies – I’ll put them in the freezer part. Emma, dear! Do you ever defrost this thing? It won’t do it itself. Never mind, I’ll just sort it out…’
Emma tuned out. Thirty-one-years of her mother had taught her that listening to the ‘nobody does things the right way, my way’ monologue would put you in a mental home if you didn’t tune out. Especially when the monologue was designed to tell you what a slatternly housekeeper/student/driver you were and how your poor husband would drop dead from salmonella if you didn’t start boil washing both the tea towels and his underpants immediately.
It was immaterial that Emma had spent most of the previous day cleaning and polishing Number 27 The Beeches from top to bottom; immaterial that she’d used up her precious day off work cleaning instead of swanning around the shops buying last-minute bits and bobs for her holiday. She’d toyed with the idea of going into Debenhams to see if she could get one of those black uplift bikinis she’d spotted in a magazine. Even if you were as flat as a pancake boob-wise, this bikini would give you a cleavage that’d take the sight out of people’s eyes, or so the magazine claimed.
As the only way Emma’s cleavage was going to take somebody’s eye out was if a wire from one of her AA cups escaped and actually poked them in the eye, she desperately needed a new uplift bikini.
But as usual, the only overdeveloped part of her person, namely guilt, had swung into action and put the kibosh on the shopping trip. Emma’s sense of guilt was like a medical textbook description of the heart: a large muscle which contracts unconsciously. Guilt at leaving Peter on his own at home for an entire week while she sailed down the Nile with her parents overcame her desire for a skilfully padded bikini, so she’d given Debenhams a miss and spring-cleaned the house instead. Peter, who wouldn’t notice if he had to eat his dinner off the table because they’d run out of plates, would be unaware of her feverish scrubbing. However, Emma’s Guiltometer had worked out that an entire day of cleaning would go a long way (fifty-five per cent) to making up for having a holiday without her beloved husband. Buying him an enormous present she couldn’t afford and cooking him his favourite dinners for a week after her return would almost compensate for the remaining forty-five per cent.
Sadly, she’d forgotten to buy new rubber gloves for the cleaning fest so her hands were now dry as an overcooked chicken thanks to scrubbing the toilet bowls with bleach. But the house was a veritable palace, with clean carpets, clean loos and not an unironed item of clothing anywhere.
All that and her mother was still tut-tutting over the only visible blemish in the entire premises. Emma could just picture Pete wrenching open the couscous and eating it with his finger beside the fridge that morning, shoving the greasy tub back in carelessly afterwards before grabbing the orange juice carton for breakfast. He adored couscous – and he hated shepherd’s pie with a vengeance. Still, what was the point of telling her mother that? Anne-Marie O’Brien wouldn’t listen: she never listened to anyone. Except her husband, James P. O’Brien, boss of O’Brien’s Heating Contractors, master of all he surveyed and the person who absolutely always had to have the last word on every subject.
Emma sat down wearily on one of her kitchen chairs and examined her newly painted nails. The rosy pink colour she’d bought for her holiday was pretty but still didn’t camouflage either the bleach damage or the nibbled bits. She’d chewed her index fingernail into an ugly stub during a long phone conversation the night before where her mother had fussed about the heat in Egypt, the food, the locals, the thought of covering up her shoulders at tourist sites and ‘…would your father be able to get proper milk for his tea.’ That idea had summoned up a bizarre mental picture of her father trying to milk a camel, him red and sweating as he stood with his teacup in one hand and a camel teat in the other.
She nibbled a stray sticking up bit of index fingernail. Well, who’d be looking at her bloody nails anyway. She felt too tired to care: she hoped she could sleep on the plane to Egypt. If she could steal one of her mother’s Valium tablets, she could blank out the entire journey.
While her mother busied herself with the fridge, Emma surreptitiously touched her breasts through the soft fabric of her denim dungarees. She’d been doing it all day, giving herself a pleasurable thrill that had nothing to do with sex. This thrill was provided by her biological clock heaving a sigh of relief. Nervously, she slid one hand under her T-shirt to reach her bare breast and touched it cautiously. Sensitive, definitely.
They’d looked bigger in the mirror earlier, she was sure of it. The nipples were bigger, weren’t they? Yes, yes, yes, she grinned. She was pregnant. It was quite incredible how happy she felt when she thought about the baby, her baby. The glow filled her up inside, like that advert for breakfast cereal where the boy cycling to school was lit from within because he’d eaten his Ready Brek that morning. Emma felt lit from within with a combination of sheer joy and relief. Relief that after so long hoping, it was finally happening. She wanted to dance around the room with delight, but her natural caution advised her to be careful. Say nothing to jinx it. Wait until you’re sure and then tell darling Pete the wonderful news, she told herself. All she had to do was get through the hateful week with her parents and then everything would be wonderful. Her secret would keep her going during the next week. It was only a week, after all.
Ignoring the ‘this place is a mess’ monologue, she picked up a pad from the table and began writing a quick note to Pete, telling him she loved him and would miss him desperately.
‘Well, madam, having a rest while your poor mother works as usual.’
The sound of her father’s voice made Emma jump to her feet guiltily. She felt as if she really was doing something wrong, the way she felt when she passed a police car with a radar gun out the window, even if she was only crawling along at thirty miles an hour. His very presence could plunge her into nervous tension, even now when she was so very hopeful about her precious baby.
‘Anne-Marie, there’s really no need to be doing Emma’s dirty work for her,’ Jimmy O’Brien said, treating his elder daughter to a disapproving stare. ‘She’s big enough and ugly enough to do her own housework. I won’t have you skivvying for her.’
‘I wasn’t skivvying,’ said her mother, her voice losing its liveliness and becoming weary.
‘Mother was just rubbing up something spilt,’ Emma protested, feeling all her good humour fade away as it so inevitably did whenever her father was involved. ‘I cleaned that fridge out yesterday…’
But her father was no longer listening. Striding over to the bin, he knocked out the old tobacco at the bottom of his pipe and began to fill his wife in on his recent activities.
‘I’ve filled the car with petrol, checked the air in the tyres and put in half a litre of oil,’ he announced. ‘We’re all shipshape, if you’re ready to go, Anne-Marie.’
You’d think we were driving to bloody Egypt, Emma thought with irritation.
For about the hundredth time since the trip had been booked, she wondered why she was going. It had been her father’s idea: the holiday of a lifetime to celebrate his and his wife’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Emma couldn’t figure out why he’d picked such an exotic destination as Egypt. Her father was a man who, for the past fifteen years, had been perfectly content to go to Portugal, sit watching sports coverage in a bar and comment loudly on how downmarket the place was getting what with all the football hooligans and brazen young girls running around with suitcases full of condoms looking for men.
‘Tarts,’ he’d say darkly every time a gang of carefree, tanned girls in skimpy T-shirts and bum-skimming shorts appeared on the scene.
Emma used to gaze wistfully at these modern babes: she was damn sure they wouldn’t still be going on holiday with their parents when they were in their twenties, too afraid of the furore to suggest a holiday with their boyfriends. Until she’d been married, she and Pete had only been away to the sun once when she’d pretended to be away with some girlfriends.
His comments about how young people’s standards were dropping notwithstanding, her father appeared to enjoy Portugal. But one holiday programme presenter enthusing over a Nile cruise had changed everything. Jimmy had ordered a vast assortment of brochures and spent many happy hours over Sunday lunch reading out the bits he was most interested in.
‘Listen to this,’ he’d say, blithely interrupting any other conversation with the insensitivity of a despot, ‘ “Enjoy the spectacle of Luxor and Karnak temples. Both monuments are perfect examples of ancient Egyptian architecture. Parts of Karnak Temple date back to 1375 BC.” That’s bloody incredible, we’ve got to go.’
Unfortunately, the ‘we’ also meant Pete and Emma.
‘No way, Emma. Why can’t they go on their own and just make each other miserable instead of making us all miserable,’ Pete complained, which was quite an out of character thing for him to say. Genuinely kind and warm, Pete couldn’t be nasty if he tried, but even his legendary patience was strained by her parents. Well, her father, really. Jimmy O’Brien strained a lot of people’s patience.
‘I know, love,’ Emma said wearily. She felt so torn; torn between doing what easy-going Pete wanted and what her domineering father wanted. ‘It’s just that he hasn’t stopped talking about it and he’s assuming we’ll go too. He’ll harp on about how ungrateful we are if we don’t go.’ Emma didn’t need to say any more. Ever since her father had loaned herself and Pete the deposit money for their house, he’d been holding it over their heads like a sword of Damocles.
Going out with friends for Sunday instead of going to the O’Briens’ for lunch was seen as a sign of ungratefulness. So was being too busy to pick up Jimmy’s new bifocals from that shop in town, or not being able to drive Anne-Marie to the shops because she’d got nervous about driving her own car for some unaccountable reason. The way things were going, the next time Emma refused a liquorice on the grounds that she didn’t like the taste, that too would be seen as ungratefulness.
Pete said nothing more about the trip. Emma knew he wanted her to stand up to her father for once and refuse to go so that they could spend the money going away together later. But Emma, who knew she’d feel guilty about leaving Pete but would suffer ten times more if she crossed Jimmy O’Brien, finally figured out a solution.
‘Pete can’t go to Egypt that week, Dad,’ she lied. ‘He’s got a two-day conference in Belfast. But I’ll go – won’t that be nice, just the three of us together, like old times?’
The old times reference did the trick. Which was ironic, Emma thought. Her memory of bygone holidays consisted of the feeling that they’d merely changed the setting for her father’s daily sarcastic remarks. But, hilariously, he didn’t see it like that: Jimmy was delighted with the holiday plan.
Pete was staying at home, sweetly telling Emma that it was all right, he’d go away with the lads for a football weekend later in the year, so she wasn’t to worry. All she had to do now was actually get through the damn trip.
‘I think I need a cup of tea before I go,’ her mother said, dropping the cloth and leaning against Emma’s sink, the perfect picture of fatigue. Her mother’s put-upon act was like a red rag to a bull where Jimmy was concerned. Somebody had to be to blame for his wife’s exhaustion.
Emma knew what would come next: she’d have to make tea and be berated for making her poor mother do her housework. There was no point explaining what had really happened. This particular tableau had taken place so many times over the years, they were all like pantomime characters acting out parts they’d played for thirty years.
You’re a lazy, stupid girl, Emma.
Oh no I’m not!
Oh yes you are!
Emma watched her parents dispassionately for a moment, watched them taking over her house as if they owned it. She really wasn’t in the mood for a re-run of their familiar power-play game.
She’d recognized what it was ever since she’d bought the self-help books. Her father was a control freak and her mother was passive aggressive, able to slip into her ‘poor me’ routine as soon as her husband appeared in order to be fussed over. Or so it seemed. All the books had different variations on this type of relationship but Emma could see her parents in each one.
However, while it was all very well knowing what people were, it was a different kettle of fish altogether figuring out what to do about it. As Emma had long since worked out that she was plain old passive and desperately lacking in self-confidence when it came to her family, there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about their behaviour.
Her problem was herself, she had realized from Chapter Seven: ‘Taking Responsibility For Your Own Mistakes’. There was no use spending hours bitterly contemplating her family’s behaviour without changing her own. She let them get away with it. Only she could change things.
‘The power is within your own grasp,’ said guru Cheyenne Kawada, author of You Only Have One Life To Lead, So Don’t Waste It.
The problem was that she was two people: with her parents, she was clumsy Emma, the elder, less successful daughter – Kirsten was the prodigal – and the one who’d sidestepped a job in her father’s business (the only time she’d ever refused him anything). In the office, she was Emma Sheridan, the much admired Special Projects Coordinator of the KrisisKids Charity who had several people working for her and who organized the charity’s confidential child phoneline as well as two conferences a year.
Her parents had no idea that the businesslike, organized Emma existed, and certainly nobody at KKC would have recognized the put-upon Emma as their capable boss.
‘You sit down, love, let me make the tea,’ Jimmy O’Brien was saying manfully to his wife as he rummaged through Emma’s tidy cupboards for teabags, sending packets of sauce mixes and a jar of soy sauce flying.
Her mother waved the idea away, as if she was dying for a cup but had heroically decided to say no, like someone refusing a life jacket on the Titanic. ‘We don’t have enough time, Jimmy.’
‘We would have time if you hadn’t worn yourself to the bone tidying up after this lazy madam.’ Slamming the cupboard, Jimmy harrumphed and his entire body shook with the noise. His huge cream jumper-clad frame dwarfed everything in the compact room. He was easily as tall as the pine larder and just as wide, big shoulders and flowing white beard making him a dead ringer for Santa Claus.
Luckily for Anne-Marie O’Brien, she wasn’t Mrs Claus to her husband’s Santa. Tall but melba toast thin, her hair was a carefully dyed fading gold, worn long but with a front section drawn back from her forehead with a large hairclip that sat at the back of her head like an ossified tortoiseshell beetle. In her floral belted summer dress, she looked as trim as the housewife in a fifties commercial and amazingly youthful. Ten years younger than her husband, Anne-Marie had the clear unwrinkled skin of someone who was utterly sure she was going to heaven in the afterlife, thanks to her goodness and her constant devout prayers. She’d never contemplated whether her love of spreading gossip might hinder her immediate path to the Pearly Gates.
Emma, as tall and slim as her mother but with silky, pale brown hair and a sweet, patient face instead of a smug one, watched tight-lipped as her mother meticulously wiped the chrome-plated toaster and kettle, oblivious to the fact that they needed to be polished with a dry cloth if you didn’t want to leave big smeary streaks on them.
Pete’s favourite present from their wedding three years ago, the chrome appliances were by far the poshest things in their kitchen. Dear Pete. He always told her to ‘turn the other cheek’ when her father irritated her. Pete’s devout upbringing had equipped him with a biblical quote for every situation in life. He was certainly right this time. No matter how hard it was to stoically turn the other cheek when Jimmy O’Brien’s famously sharp tongue carved you up, Emma knew it was the only way to cope. Arguing with her father merely drove him into the white-hot rage of ‘I’m only doing this for your own good, madam.’
‘Turn the other cheek,’ she repeated mantra-like, slipping out of the kitchen. She went upstairs to her and Pete’s bedroom. Decorated in a mixture of forest green and warm olive, it was the most masculine room in the house.
