Best of Friends

‘It’s freak weather, lowest temperatures for March in fifty years,’ Sally said. ‘We never usually get really icy weather because we’re beside the sea. How about coming out to lunch with me? Steve phoned me to say he got Cindy in personnel to have a word with the rental company boss. Cindy loves a challenge.’ Sally grinned. ‘You’ll have a maintenance guy out at half three.’

‘I may offer to have sex with him in gratitude,’ Erin deadpanned. ‘Sorry, that was a joke. That’s incredibly kind of you and Steve. Lunch sounds great.’

While Sally sat amid the boxes in the kitchen, Erin rushed upstairs to change into a less padded outfit. She hadn’t washed her hair since the day after they’d left and she knew it was greasy. So she stuck a black felt beret on it, added mascara and lipstick, and was ready.

‘Oh, I wish I could wear hats,’ said Sally in genuine admiration when Erin arrived downstairs, willowy in a mocha corduroy coat, her long legs endless in suede bootlegs. ‘I’m too short but you’re so graceful and elegant, you can get away with it.’

And Erin smiled and said, ‘This is the lazy woman’s hairdo. It’s been too cold to shampoo my hair, so a hat is the only option.’

‘Well, if that’s how you look when you haven’t made an effort, you must be pretty amazing when you have.’

They went to a cosy pub and sat beside a crackling log fire to eat chilli wraps and fat chips.

Sally seemed to know without it being said that Erin didn’t want to be cross-examined on where she and Greg had come from and why. Instead, she filled Erin in on Dunmore and Cork, explaining that the Cork people looked down their noses at Dunmore for being a sleepy country town, and the Dunmore people looked down on Cork for being a city.

‘I was brought up in Cork, mind you, and I love it,’ she said. ‘There’s a real buzz to the place. But I love Dunmore too. It’s so tranquil here. You feel as if you’re in a small community, yet the city is only a few miles away. The best of both worlds, really. We moved here because I had this dream of setting up my own beauty salon and we heard about some perfect premises on the Lee Road here.’

Erin, who had told Greg in no uncertain terms that she didn’t want to cosy up with the locals until she’d found her feet, heard herself saying that she’d love to visit the salon soon.

‘I haven’t had a manicure for two weeks and my hands are chapped with the cold,’ she said ruefully, examining her long slender fingers.

She regretted it as soon as she’d said it. Now Sally would leap on her and before she knew it, she’d book Erin in and take over.

But no. ‘Come in when you’re ready,’ Sally said equably. ‘Settle in first. You don’t want to make lots of friends right away and then spend the next two years trying to shake them off!’

This was so much what Erin had been afraid of that she stared open-mouthed at her new friend.

‘I know what it’s like to move into a new area,’ Sally added. ‘People want to be friendly and you end up intimately acquainted with half the town and promising to have a drink with the other half by the end of the first week.’

‘Now that sounds like the Ireland I know and love,’ Erin said wryly. ‘I’m originally from Dublin and in my neighbourhood, when a new family arrived, if the neighbours hadn’t been invited in for tea and heard their life history within a week, the new arrivals were considered oddballs of the highest order.’

Sally grinned. ‘Same as where I came from. They’d live in your ear. My mother used to say there was no need for a local paper, just take a trip down to the corner shop and you’d hear the news from the five nearest parishes.’

They laughed conspiratorially and were soon swapping stories of gossipy neighbours who could pick up a rumour faster than a submarine’s radar could detect another vessel.

‘When I met Steve, he had this clapped-out old van, and, the first night, he drove me home in it and we sat outside my house for an hour talking,’ Sally explained. ‘Next day, my mum’s next-door neighbour leaned out her window when I was going off to work and said he looked like a lovely lad, wasn’t he the image of a young, blond Rock Hudson, and was it serious?’

‘A blond Rock Hudson, huh?’ Erin couldn’t stop smiling.

Sally nodded. ‘She loved him, poor dear. Don’t think she ever took it in that he wasn’t the macho man she’d fallen for in the back seat of the cinema.’

‘But wow, he was a looker. Is Steve really like him?’

It was Sally’s turn to smile. ‘Better looking, although he’s got a bit of grey in the blond now, which I love teasing him about.’ Without a trace of self-consciousness, she began to tell Erin how they’d met, fallen in love and got married.

Listening to Sally talking about her husband and her two adorable but utterly mischievous children, Erin realised that it was a breath of fresh air to hear someone genuinely content with their life. Sally finished explaining about how Steve had hoped to make a living out of teaching art classes, but had ended up going back into the corporate world for financial reasons.

‘He enjoys working in Cuchulainn,’ Sally added, in case she’d made it sound as if Steve would give up work in a flash to go back to art. ‘Making a living from art was his dream but we’re both realists. We needed the money.’

‘Hey, don’t apologise to me,’ Erin chuckled. ‘I worked in human resources for years. Work is not everybody’s first love, I can tell you. They weren’t all buying lottery tickets for fun either. There were three big syndicates in my last company and if any of them had won, the office would’ve been wiped out.’

‘I’m really lucky, then,’ Sally said humbly. ‘I love the beauty salon.’

Erin leaned back in her seat, her slim belly full of chilli and chips, and gazed at her new friend. ‘It’s great to see someone so happy with their life.’

Sally shrugged. ‘When you’re happy the way Steve and I are, people like to imagine that we both went through some awful torment to be together or had terrible childhoods and now, because of all of that, we’re happy with each other. It’s not like that at all. We both had great childhoods and lovely families, we just appreciate each other and are thankful for what we’ve got.’ The sweetly smiling face was serious now. ‘We know it’s special. Not many people have that. You have to appreciate it when you have it. You never know what’s round the corner, as my mum used to say.’

Erin studied Sally. She was an unusual woman: lively and warm, yet with an old soul in a young body. It was as if Sally had learned the secret to happiness and wanted everyone to share it. But despite her zest for life, there was an air of fragility to her. She was New York thin and there were defined violet shadows under the sparkling dark eyes.

‘What about you? You and Greg, I mean. How did you meet?’

Erin gave in and opened the top button on her trousers. ‘First, please tell me there’s a good gym round here,’ she groaned, looking down at her belly.

‘There’s two.’

‘Tomorrow,’ vowed Erin, ‘I have got to join. OK, how I met Greg. It’s not your average romantic story, for a start. He’d recently been appointed in the company I worked for and he came to my office to say he couldn’t get on with his assistant, who’d been there for years and had worked for the guy before him. As I say, I worked in human resources,’ she went on. ‘I’d also just heard a rumour that a guy on his floor was sexually harassing his assistant but she was so nervous about her job that she was scared to report him and I put two and two together, made six, and reckoned mistakenly that it was Greg.’

‘Ouch,’ winced Sally.

‘Ouch indeed. I gave him a very hard time about why he wanted to get rid of his assistant and when I realised my mistake he took it really well. Said he’d fancied me from the beginning and thought I was trying to put him off by playing tough cookie.’

‘Oh,’ Sally sighed, ‘like a classic romance. First hate, then love.’

‘No, first hate and then total and utter embarrassment,’ pointed out Erin. ‘I nearly died when I discovered my mistake. I didn’t accuse him of sexual harassment but damn near it. I just cringed to think of how rude I’d been to him. Like, “And what is it precisely about your assistant that makes you feel you can no longer work with her?”’

‘But he forgave you?’

‘After a blow-out lobster dinner, yes.’

She went on to talk about how they’d got married, moved to a beautiful duplex and finally how the job market changed and brought them to Dunmore.

Although Sally noticed that, apart from the brief reference to her childhood in Dublin, Erin’s story was centred entirely on her time in the US and had no reference to life before that, she didn’t say anything. It was as if Erin had blanked out the Irish part of her life, preferring to date her existence from her early days in Boston, waitressing and chambermaiding herself into the ground. There was, Sally reflected, a story to tell there with regard to Erin’s upbringing. But Sally was a gifted listener who knew when to probe and when to stand back and say ‘mm’, and she felt that Erin would prefer the standing-back approach. As she’d learned from the years in the beauty parlour, people talked when they wanted to talk.

‘It’s disgraceful, you know. I’m here half a week already and I haven’t sent my résumé anywhere or made phone calls to the head-hunters whose names I was given,’ Erin finished. Her work ethic was as insistent as her pulse and she was surprised to discover that the upheaval of moving continent had stifled her normal get-up-and-go. Worse, she felt almost…well, depressed or strangely anxious, which she was beginning to think was linked to being back home after all these years. The trauma of her departure from Ireland had come back to haunt her now that she’d returned.

‘Give it time. You’ve only just got here. You need to settle in,’ advised Sally, waving at the barmaid for the bill.

‘We need to eat,’ Erin pointed out. ‘Moving wiped us out and I get scared when I’m not working. It reminds me too much of when I first moved to Boston and didn’t have a cent.’

‘Relax, you can be a powerhouse next month.’

‘Power apartment block if I keep stuffing my face without working out,’ Erin said ruefully. ‘Thanks for lunch, Sally.’

‘My pleasure,’ Sally said. ‘There’s just one condition: we’ve got to do it again.’

‘Deal.’

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_300db7d1-044f-5419-bc97-b2e4af051aa9)