Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection: Someone Like You, What She Wants, Just Between Us, Best of Friends, Always and Forever, Past Secrets

Hannah handed the bottle back. ‘Well, you definitely need one drink then.’

Leonie pronounced her white wine unusual but drinkable, so that was that. The barman brought three glasses of white wine.

Emma, who seemed to be relaxing with every moment, took an enormous sip of her drink. She gasped and gave a happy little shudder. ‘I needed that. So,’ she said, ‘I presume you two are friends.’

‘No,’ Leonie said, ‘we met on the plane. I’m terrified of flying and Hannah swapped seats with me. But as we’re travelling on our own, we sort of linked up.’

‘I’m here with my parents,’ Emma explained, then felt herself redden because she knew damn well the other two knew that.

Everyone who’d been on the plane had known it: you couldn’t miss her father. Now they’d really think she was some sort of weirdo who was tied to her parents. ‘My husband had to go to a conference and couldn’t come with us,’ she added. Nervousness made her tactless: ‘Do your partners not like cultural trips either?’

Hannah grinned. ‘I’m not seeing anyone right now and my last lover’ – her full lips curved into a smile at the thought of Jeff – ‘well, I don’t know if he’d have been into a trip to Egypt.’

‘My husband and I are divorced,’ blurted out Leonie. ‘We meant to come to Egypt on our honeymoon, but we were too broke at the time. I figured that if I waited until I was married again to come here, I’d be waiting a long time.’ She slumped in her seat, feeling miserable. It must be jet lag or something.

‘Don’t be so defeatist,’ Hannah said kindly. ‘If you want something, you’ll get it. If you want a man, go out and get one.’

Leonie stared at her in astonishment. Most of her friends – well, Anita and the female members of the gang, really – changed the subject brusquely if she mentioned her single status. They muttered that men weren’t everything and, God, sure didn’t they nearly murder Tony/Bill/whoever every five minutes for leaving the loo seat up or for never washing up so much as a spoon. ‘Wouldn’t you be as well off on your own,’ they chorused with fake cheeriness. ‘Nobody to act hopeless around the washing machine. And you have the kids, after all…’

But Hannah had no such compunction. ‘We’ll help you find a nice single bloke on the cruise,’ Hannah said. ‘There’s bound to be someone on the boat who’s longing for the love of a good woman.’

‘It’s not that easy,’ Leonie protested.

‘I’m not saying it is, but you can do it if you want to. It just takes a different approach these days. You’ve so much going for you, Leonie, you’d get a man no bother if you really put your mind to it.’ She patted Leonie’s arm reassuringly.

Leonie was still mouthing in shock. How lovely of Hannah to say she had a lot going for her, but how mad as a bicycle to imagine that getting a man was just a simple matter of deciding to do so and accomplishing it. Perhaps that’s how it happened to people like Hannah but not to her. I mean, she thought, where had all the available men been over the last few years? Waiting for her to emerge from the chrysalis of having children under the age of fourteen?

‘What do you mean by “putting your mind to it”?’ she asked finally.

‘Dating agencies, magazine adverts, even carmaintenance classes,’ Hannah said matter-of-factly. ‘You’ve got to try them all. That’s the way to meet people these days.’

‘My friend Gwen met her boyfriend through a dinner club,’ Emma pointed out.

‘A dinner club?’

‘It’s a club for singles and you all go out to dinner once a month and see what happens. Gwen says she met loads of men. Some strange guys too, mind you. But she met Paul and that’s all that matters to her.’

‘I’d put any man off me if he saw me eating,’ Leonie said, only half joking. ‘Or I’d have to do like Scarlett O’Hara and eat before I went out so I’d be able to nibble daintily in front of Mr Right. Women with big appetites put men off, I’m sure of it.’

‘I’d probably order the sloppiest thing on the menu and end up with sauce all over my chin and chunks of bread roll flying off to hit other people in the eye,’ laughed Emma, getting into the swing of things now that she’d had that wonderful glass of wine. ‘I’m so clumsy when I’m nervous.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ Hannah groaned.

Both Emma and Leonie thought that was unlikely. Hannah looked so self-possessed and calm. Even her hair obeyed her. Sleek and perfectly groomed, not a stray dark hair dangled from her neat ponytail.

‘Honestly, I am,’ she protested, seeing the looks of disbelief on their faces. ‘I went for a job interview a month ago and when I was supposed to be reaching into my attaché case to hand them details of this computer course I’d done, I stupidly reached into my handbag instead, and stuck my fingers right into my hairbrush. You know the way you get a bristle under the nail…?’

They all winced.

‘It bled like a ruddy artery and I had to get tissue, wrap the finger in it – all while my hand was still in my handbag! – and pretend nothing had happened for the rest of the interview. They must have thought I was hideously tense because I kept one hand clenched up all the time, trying to hide the tissue so I wouldn’t look like a casualty victim in need of a transfusion.’

‘You poor thing,’ Leonie said sympathetically. ‘Did you get the job in the end?’

Hannah’s grin of triumph lit up her face and the toffee-coloured eyes sparkled. ‘Yes. Bloody finger and all.’

She waved at a waiter and tried to order more wine.

‘I’ll have mineral water,’ Emma said quickly, thinking of both the baby and her father. She could still remember that awful moment at Kirsten’s wedding when he’d ticked Emma off in front of all the guests for having too much to drink.

‘So what is the job?’ asked Leonie. ‘What do you do?’

‘I was a hotel receptionist but I decided it was a dead-end job. It was a terrible hotel, really, but I took that job to get out of my old one which was even more dead-end, in a shop. My new job is office manager in an estate agent’s. I know it’s totally different, but I wanted to move jobs. I’ve done night courses in a management school for the past eight months and I’ve started an estate agent’s course. Not that I think I’d be lucky enough to branch into that part of things, you have to have loads of qualifications from what I can see, but it’s good to know all about the business.’

It was funny, Hannah realized. She hadn’t talked about herself to anyone for over a year, since Harry. And here she was, practically giving her life story to these two strangers. Holidays certainly had a bizarre effect on you – maybe it was the air.

‘Wow,’ Emma said admiringly. ‘A woman with a mission.’

‘I’ve got a mission all right – to make a career for myself. I got side-tracked for a few years,’ she added, not wanting to mention that the side-track had been nearly ten years with Harry, who’d let her sink into the squalor of coupledom before abandoning her for his South American trip.

‘And your mission,’ Hannah said to Leonie, deciding to change the subject, ‘is to find yourself a man, because that’s what you want. If I can turn myself into an office manager, you can find a man.’

‘Men, the root of all evil,’ sighed Leonie, starting on her second glass of wine. ‘I don’t mean that, really. I love men. That’s the problem,’ she added gloomily. ‘I think I scare them off. But I never thought of a dating agency. To be honest, I always thought only oddballs tried blind dating. Knowing my luck, I’d meet a serial killer or some nut with a fondness for PVC knickers and autoerotic asphyxia.’

Hannah laughed grimly. ‘I’ve met enough nuts without the help of a dating agency. Not PVC fetishists, mind you, but still mad. My last long-term boyfriend should have come with a government health warning and I met him in the safest place in the world: McDonald’s at lunchtime. So you may as well try dating agencies, Leonie. At least you get to pick who you’ll meet and who you won’t bother with.’

‘Harrison Ford,’ said Leonie dreamily. ‘I want a Harrison Ford clone who loves children, animals and overweight blonde divorcées.’

‘What about your man?’ Hannah asked Emma, who immediately smiled at the thought of Pete.

‘He’s lovely,’ she admitted. ‘I’m very lucky. He’s kind and funny and I love him to bits.’ Pete’s face appeared in her mind: the open, smiling face with the brown eyes, big grin and the dark hair cropped close to his scalp. Well, Pete always argued, there was no point wearing your hair long when there was so little of it. She loved his seriously receding hairline, loved kissing him on the top of his head and telling him that bald men were more virile. She wouldn’t have wanted Harrison Ford, or even Tom Cruise, for that matter. She couldn’t imagine either of them making her breakfast in bed when she felt ill, or massaging her shoulders when she got backache or insisting that she read a magazine while he made dinner on nights when she felt tired. Or leaving a lovely note buried in her suitcase telling her he loved her and that he couldn’t wait for her to get home. Pete adored her. Only his dislike of her father meant he’d let her go away for a week without him.

‘We’ve been married three years and he’s really good to me,’ she said. Then, because she couldn’t resist, she told them about the sweet note he’d left hidden between her T-shirts in the suitcase.

‘Oooh, that’s lovely,’ Leonie said.

She and Hannah were half-way down their second glasses of wine and they’d all been talking happily about why they’d decided to come to Egypt when the sound of Jimmy O’Brien’s booming voice could be heard from the doorway.

‘…if this is their idea of a first-class boat, I’ll be having words with that young courier woman, I’m telling you,’ he was saying loudly to another guest. ‘The shower’s useless and my towels got soaked because the shower curtain wasn’t any good. Call that first class? I don’t think so. Rip-off merchants, that’s what these bloody fellas are, pretending this is a first-class boat. Hmmph.

‘I’m not sitting outside,’ he added to his wife, ‘we’ll be eaten alive. Bloody mosquitoes.’

Hannah watched as Emma visibly shrank into her seat, her eyes briefly filled with an emotion Hannah could identify easily: wariness. Hannah’s mother’s face had often looked that way, usually when her father rolled home after a day at the races, roaring drunk, bad-tempered and looking for someone to take it out on. He’d been small and ran to fat, mostly beer fat, unlike Emma’s father who was a formidable man, tall and strong. A man who could intimidate people and liked doing it. He didn’t need alcohol to make him bad-tempered: it was obvious he was like that all the time.

Emma looked as if she’d rather have been keelhauled than face an evening with her parents. A surge of pity made Hannah reach out and touch her arm gently: ‘Would you like to sit with us at a separate table tonight?’ she asked quietly.

Emma looked relieved at the idea, then shook her head. ‘I couldn’t, they’ll expect…’

‘Say you’re sure they’d like their first evening to be just for themselves, a romantic evening where you’re not a gooseberry,’ Hannah urged.