Homecoming

What she’d found mildly insulting was when they stopped trying to set her up. When the blind dates dried up; when she was asked only to girls’ nights out because the husbands and boyfriends were at football matches: that was upsetting.

Am I now officially too old to date? she wondered. But she couldn’t share this with Nicky.

Even though the sisters had the same parents, shared an apartment in Golden Square, and spent a lot of time together, Connie had come to realise that they were from different generations. Nicky glowed with confidence, enthusiasm and a firm belief that, if she wanted something badly enough, she’d get it. Connie, teetering at the sharp end of her thirties, knew from painful experience that wanting something wasn’t enough. Life didn’t give you what you wanted all the time.

When she’d been Nicky’s age, she’d been engaged to Keith, sure that life would bring her marriage, children and happiness. And then Keith had told that he loved her ‘but not like that. Not in love love, if you know what I mean…’

Connie hadn’t, but Keith wasn’t asking her opinion. He was telling her.

‘We’re like brother and sister now,’ he’d gone on. ‘You’re so funny, Connie, and we have great fun, but that’s not enough.’

He’d gone off, dated many women, and was now, apparently – Connie still had a few spies in the Keith camp – seeing a twenty-four-year-old Texan philosophy student and telling people he wanted to marry her.

It was simple. There weren’t enough men to go around, and the ones that were around could afford to be choosy and wait till they were forty-five, then marry child brides.

Connie had somehow missed her chance.

She wasn’t thinking of missed chances this icy Thursday morning in January as she stood under the shower in Apartment 2B in 14 Golden Square, fiddling with the shower controls. She was cross that the shower had broken again and wondering where she had put the attachment for the bath taps, because she couldn’t go to work without a shower, and she wouldn’t have time for a bath. Baths were a nighttime activity, when there was time to luxuriate and when Nicky was out with Freddie, her boyfriend. Freddie was in the apartment so often, he almost lived there and Connie had too often wandered out of the bathroom with a towel half round her, only to find Freddie had miraculously appeared and was sprawled all over the couch watching Sky Sports.

Not that Freddie was the lascivious sort. On the contrary, he treated Connie like a sweet elderly lady and would have had to be given CPR if anyone had suggested otherwise, towel or no towel.

‘Nicky!’ she yelled now, giving up and stepping out of the bath. She wrenched open the cupboard under the hand basin and an avalanche of shampoo, fake tan and body lotion bottles fell across her feet. ‘Have you seen the hose attachment for the taps? The shower’s broken again.’

‘What? No,’ yelled Nicky from her bedroom.

Nicky had been out at a book launch the night before and was going into work late. There were times when Connie envied her sister her fabulous job and this was one of them. In St Matilda’s, even if you’d been in the school till midnight every night for a whole week during the end-of-term run of a play – Lady Windermere’s Fan last year – there was no option for arriving later in the morning to make up for it. Classes started at ten to nine and both pupils and teaching staff were in trouble if they were late. Whereas at Peony Publishing, where Nicky was an assistant editor, when there was a book launch the night before, some laxity was given with regards to office hours the following morning.

Connie pulled her fleecy pyjamas back on and marched into the kitchen to begin rummaging through the big cupboard where the vacuum cleaner, the ironing board and the mop lived. It was crammed with junk and many weekends started with Connie deciding that this was the one where she’d tidy it out. Sadly, this never happened. The lure of buying the Saturday papers and enjoying them in Titania’s Palace with a latte and a couple of cupcakes always won out.

‘Damn, blast and double blast!’ Connie gave up. It was nearly eight and she had to be out the door by twenty past. In the bathroom, she performed an imperfect toilette with an inch of lukewarm bath water, then ran through her normal high-speed make-up application. There was no point doing too much, as working in a girls’ school had taught her that it was impossible to compete with the professional level of make-up application the girls managed. Any dodgy eyeliner work would be noticed and, if it was the fifth years, commented upon.

‘Miss O’Callaghan, what happened to your eyes?’

Connie would not be able to resist a joke under the circumstances, which the fifth years loved, and which the principal, Mrs Caldwell, hated.

‘You’re too familiar with the girls, Ms O’Callaghan,’ she’d sniff.

Connie no longer cared about the principal’s dressing downs. She liked being able to have fun with her pupils and the day she could no longer crack a joke, she’d give up teaching.

Now, she dressed in navy, with black tights, her voluminous grey coat and flat black shoes. Unlike her sister, who was of fairy proportions, Connie had taken after her father’s side of the family and was five nine in her socks. Another reason it was hard finding a man. The world was full of small men who took it as a personal insult to their masculinity if a woman was taller than them. Comments about Napoleon only enraged them further.

‘Did you find it?’ Nicky hung on the door jamb, half asleep, wearing bed socks and a stripey nightie. Her highlighted hair was sticking out at all angles, yesterday’s mascara was creased round her brown eyes, but she was still pretty. Connie never thought for a moment about whether it was difficult having a sibling so gorgeous. In her eyes, Nicky was just Nicky, the baby sister Connie had longed for and had mothered ever since she was born.

‘No, I didn’t. Start running a bath now if you want to wash without developing hypothermia.’

‘Crap,’ muttered Nicky. ‘I need to wash my hair.’

‘What time are you due in work?’ Connie asked. ‘Patsy will fit you in for a quick wash and blow-dry, I’m sure.’

Both sisters loved the old-fashioned hair salon round the corner.

Nicky rubbed her eyes. ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

Connie whisked a brush through her hair, it was her crowning glory, their mother liked to say. Her hair was shoulder length, the rich brown of a cinnamon stick and glossier than any L’Oreal commercial. Her eyes were large like her sister’s but they were a plain old brown and didn’t flash with amber fire the way Nicky’s did. Compared to Nicky, Connie knew she was ordinary and she didn’t mind, because Nicky deserved all that was good and wonderful. But sometimes, just sometimes, Connie wished she was beautiful too.

Unlike the rest of the planet, where being paired-up was practically compulsory for everyone from humans to swans, it was easy to be single in St Matilda’s. Many of the teachers had been there donkey’s years and the place was split fifty-fifty between married and single. The scattering of nuns from the convent helped. Old Sister Benedict, who’d been in the order since the Pope was in short pants, froze in horror if she so much as heard anyone discussing boyfriends. The equally old but entirely adorable Sister Laurence looked fondly on any talk of the opposite sex, but believed – as she often told wide-eyed girls in her religious education classes – that men were innocent folk and intelligent women knew better than to rely on them for anything.

‘A career, girls, a career is the answer!’ was her mantra.

Nobody in the staffroom set up dates and nobody in the school looked down on anyone for being single, apart, perhaps from Sylvie Legrand, who had wanted to get married since she knew such a thing existed.

Today was Sylvie’s last day at St Matilda’s before her wedding. Sylvie taught French, chemistry and, unofficially, how to wear a scarf like a good Parisian. Chic was a hopelessly inadequate word to describe her. Connie felt another word needed to be invented, something with greater scope to encompass how utterly glamorous Sylvie managed to be for all that she wasn’t particularly good looking.

It was a talent, Connie decided.

‘You look tired,’ were Sylvie’s welcoming words to her in the staffroom.

Tactless was another inadequate word to describe Sylvie – or perhaps the tactlessness was just an absence of Irish flummery. Plámás, as it was named in the Irish language. Plaw-maws. Even if a person were half dead and in urgent need of medical assistance, in the Irish rulebook it was customary to say, ‘You’re looking great!’

Connie liked the Irish kindness better, but then which one of them was getting married in a few days and which one was pathetically single? Maybe men liked straight-talking women and didn’t rate ones who were trained to say the right thing instead of the honest thing.

She might have saved herself years of boredom if she’d said, ‘I don’t fancy you,’ within minutes of each new date instead of spending weeks working up to saying something kinder that approximated to the same thing.

‘I stayed up late watching the Mad Men box set,’ Connie admitted to Sylvie now. There was no point lying to her French colleague, she’d get it out of Connie, one way or the other.

‘Why always the box sets?’ demanded Sylvie, who tended to get more exotically French, losing all sense of grammar, when she was irritated. ‘Why not the wine bar or the salsa classes, huh?’

Sylvie had dragged Connie to a tango class once. It had not been a success. As with life in general, there hadn’t been enough men to go round and few of them were tall enough to partner Connie.

‘I like box sets,’ Connie pointed out. ‘And I’ve given up wine bars and salsa classes for good. Anyway, you can make me look less tired later, for tonight. I’ll need a lot of that under-eye-bag-banisher thing you use.’

It was Sylvie’s hen night that evening and the teachers who were invited were all going to Sylvie’s house first to get ready. Connie suspected it was so that all of them would be turned out to her French friend’s high standards and not let her down in the restaurant.

It would not be a wild, crazy night, partly because it was a week night and partly because Sylvie didn’t like wild nights. It was to be a dinner in an elegant French restaurant in the city. No mad drinking in a crazy bar, and definitely no wearing of L-plates and fake wedding veils for Sylvie.

In a few days, Sylvie would fly home to Paris for her wedding to the gorgeous Isaac, a tall, dark Belfast man with saturnine good looks and a low, deep voice. She’d met him at a rugby match in Dublin and he’d swept her off her feet. Only a few of the staff, Connie included, would be attending the wedding. The principal had been very annoyed that it was taking place in the middle of term, but Sylvie had somehow talked her round. Isaac’s brother would be home from Australia, Sylvie’s sister would be back from Argentina: with family dotted around the globe, the time suited perfectly. Sylvie didn’t want a little thing like work to get in the way.

Tonight, Sylvie would look stunning, no matter what she wore. Connie herself planned to dress in a pair of black jeans with a loose chiffon blouse, which hid a multitude. Thirtynine was definitely a watershed in terms of figure. Connie couldn’t seem to shift that extra bit of fat around her middle.

Luckily, Connie never felt any hint of envy towards her friend. Sylvie was just Sylvie, you couldn’t change her.

Connie’s mother didn’t see it the same way and was forever anxiously telling her daughter that there was no point hanging around with a glamorous woman like Sylvie, because all the men went mad for her, and no wonder Connie was still on her own.

‘With friends like that, how do you expect to find a man? The coal won’t shine beside the diamond, will it?’

There wasn’t really an answer to that. Her mother didn’t mean it to be cruel: just honest in a worried way.

Perhaps once Sylvie was married, her mother would look round and find something else to blame for Connie’s inability to get a man. Connie sighed at the thought.