Homecoming

‘I won’t have time to make you all up,’ Sylvie was protesting. ‘There are eight of us. I am not Wonderwoman.’

‘You are to us,’ laughed Connie. ‘All right, I’ll plaster a bit more make-up on later. We won’t let you down.’

‘Tell me again: what do you mean, you are giving up wine bars?’ Sylvie demanded. She was like a dog with a bone when it came to Connie’s single status. ‘You will be alone forever if you do not try. Do you think men lurk on the streets waiting for us to find them? Non! We have to look for them!’

‘I have looked,’ protested Connie. ‘I’m exhausted looking. I want him to start looking for me.’

‘How will he find you, if you are at home watching television?’

‘He’ll have a ladder and he’ll see me in my window,’ sighed Connie. ‘I don’t know. I give up, Sylvie. I’m taking this month off.’

‘You need a facial,’ said Sylvie, peering at Connie’s face with a beady eye. ‘You are all congested. Too many pastries. Look at your pores!’

‘You can make me look fabulous tonight and hide my big pores,’ said Connie, and hurried off to her class.

The day flew.

Her congested pores notwithstanding, Connie had a quick sandwich and a cup of tea at lunch in the staffroom where a cake was cut for all those people who wouldn’t be coming to the hen night. Then she headed to the library because it was the only quiet place to do some marking.

After lunchbreak, she had the first years, followed by double history with the fifth years, which she wasn’t looking forward to because she was too tired for their antics. You had to be in the whole of your health for a giddy bunch of sixteen-year-olds.

Today, there was wild excitement because they’d got something planned as a send-off for Miss Legrand, who was their class teacher.

After history class, there was to be a small party for her departure. Needless to say, not a shred of work was being done and as Connie watched her students pretend to read about Charles Stewart Parnell, she knew they were all communicating with each other about the party. Notes, sign language, whispered sentences – if only they were as good at history as they were at plotting.

There was absolutely no point in trying to counter this behaviour. A wise older teacher had once told Connie that a class is like a tidal wave and once it turns, it turns. ‘Save the lesson for another day, or you’ll go insane with impotent rage.’

She’d also told Connie that deafness was a useful aid for teachers too.

So Connie admired the girls’ party hairstyles and thought about how it felt like the end of an era. When this school year was over, Sylvie would be leaving St Matilda’s for good. It seemed like only yesterday that the two women had started out as new teachers in the school together. Now Sylvie would be gone to start married life with her husband in his home city, Belfast, and Connie would stay on at St Matilda’s, growing old with the nuns.

The school bell rang lustily, taking Connie by surprise. She liked to give pupils a five-minute warning near the end. But today, it didn’t look as if the fifth years cared. They leapt to their feet and swept the books off their desks at high speed.

‘Bye, Miss O’Callaghan,’ they murmured as they raced out, dropping their textbooks on her desk.

So many of them were impossibly glamorous, Connie thought. Their long shaggy hair was exquisitely styled each morning. Outwardly, they looked like confident young Valkyries. It was only through teaching the girls that a teacher would learn how young and worried they sometimes were.

It seemed as if half the school was crammed into the fifth years’ classroom by the time Connie made her way there. Sylvie was sitting on the desk surrounded by cards and with a giant sparkling gift bag on her lap.

‘Please tell me this is a present and not something to do with a tampon and red ink from the art room?’ Sylvie said loudly.

The assembled girls roared with laughter.

‘You laugh, huh? But poor Mr Shaw, he did not laugh, non?’

Only Sylvie could get away with a joke about the trick played on the quiet maths and physics teacher.

‘Non, mademoiselle!’ the girls roared back.

Finally, Sylvie unwrapped the package inside the gift bag. It contained two Irish crystal champagne glasses with a bottle of champagne.

‘There is writing,’ Sylvie exclaimed. ‘For Mademoiselle Legrand, for the most romantic day of your life, Year Five. I love it, girls!’ she cried.

Connie, who’d been expecting a jokey present or even a red satin negligee with white marabou – it was from the fifth years, after all – choked back a tear. Why this touched her after a whole day thinking about Sylvie’s hen night, she had no idea. But suddenly, she realised that Sylvie was going to have the most romantic night of her life next month when she got married, while she, Connie, had no hope of ever sharing something so special with a loved one. Sylvie would now have what Connie wanted so much: her own family. Sylvie and her husband had bought a pretty three-bedroomed house in Belfast. Everyone had seen the photographs.

The second bedroom was to be a spare bedroom and Sylvie was going to keep her clothes in it like a proper dressing room, she’d informed Connie. The third bedroom was to be the nursery.

‘I will paint it yellow. Yellow is good whether it is a boy or a girl,’ Sylvie pointed out.

Connie had said nothing but thought again of how wonderful it must be to be able to plan your life with such confidence. Sylvie was getting married and she was sure that a baby would follow. She’d probably got her eye on a diamond band in Tiffany’s to mark the birth of said baby.

Connie had nothing planned for the rest of her life.

She’d never cried watching Gone with the Wind or even Sleepless in Seattle, but now, standing at the back of the fifthyear classroom, she wanted to burst into tears.

Nicky O’Callaghan beamed as she skipped down the steps of the house and hopped into the driver’s seat of her car. She almost waved at the silver-haired, older lady who lived in the apartment below hers, and who was sitting in her bay window, looking out on to the square. Such was her happiness, that Nicky wanted to smile and wave at everyone. But the woman wasn’t really staring at Nicky in her car: she was gazing into the middle distance, there but somehow not there.

She did, however, send a bright glinting smile at the man at the roadworks where she got held up for ten minutes. Nicky’s smile was infectious.

The man at the roadworks looked back suspiciously. It was unheard of for gorgeous blonde women with glossy red lips to grin at him with delight when he was on kango-hammer detail for roadworks that brought the traffic down Amiens Street to a standstill.

He chanced a wink at her as the lights finally turned green and she managed to edge her Mini Cooper forward and off down the bare expanse of road ahead.

And she winked back! He decided he’d chance the lottery at lunchtime. It was definitely his lucky day.

Nicky wanted to wink and smile at everyone today. Not that she didn’t smile a lot anyway: she had a lot to smile about, she knew. But today was special.

Today was her first day as an engaged woman. Last night, after the book launch, Freddie had taken her out to a late dinner.

There was rarely much in the way of food at book launches, just nibbles and wine, so if you stayed too long, you ate nothing, drank too much and made a holy show of yourself in front of your colleagues, your boss, and if you were spectacularly unlucky, press photographers too. Nicky was far too clever to fall into that trap, so she drank water at launches and ate afterwards.

She’d been telling Freddie all about the author’s speech, and how gratifying it was to have been thanked by the author.

‘Scarlett’s the first author I’ve edited from the start of her career. I feel like I’ve been a part of everything that’s happened, I can’t tell you, Freddie, how amazing that feels…’

When she’d started in Peony as an editorial assistant five years ago, she’d had to prove herself by spending a lot of time doing the vital but painstaking copy-editing work that took place after the author and their main editor had agreed on a final manuscript. Scarlett Ryan was the first author she’d been let loose on, so to speak, and when Scarlett’s debut novel had been a success, she’d insisted that Nicky was part of that success.

‘Dominic, the managing director, was there and Scarlett kept saying how much she owed me and what a fabulous editor I was! She said I’d showed her how to find her true voice. It was wonderful.’ She stopped long enough to take a sip of wine.

‘This is delicious,’ she remarked appreciatively. ‘Expensive, I bet. I thought you were broke, Freddie. Are we celebrating something?’

And that’s when it had happened. Freddie, wunderkind of Mesmer Marketing, boyishly handsome with his floppy dark fringe, hopeless at laundry but sterling when it came to doing dishes, had slipped off his chair in the fashionable Le Pinot Noir bistro, got to his knees and whipped a small box from his inside breast pocket.

Normally, nothing surprised Nicky. She was legendary for it. She noticed everything, from how low they were on milk in the office fridge, to how up-to-date the department was with getting through the slush pile of manuscripts. But in the excitement over Scarlett, she hadn’t registered Freddie’s air of excitement. She noticed it now, along with the glint of something that sparkled.

‘It’s a diamond,’ she said in shock, fingers brushing Freddie’s as she held the small blue box.

‘Do you like it?’