What She Wants

Sam took a large gulp of wine. How could she have let herself down like that? She should have fixed him with a steely glare and told him exactly what forces of the law she’d use to make him stop his horrible party. When she’d suitably reprimanded herself, Sam went to bed. But sleep evaded her.

It was like being fifteen again, fifteen and horribly embarrassed because the boy in chemistry class had overheard her saying she fancied him like mad. Even twenty-four years later, that memory could still make her burn with shame. Now she’d done it again.

Finally, Sam got up and took one of the sleeping tablets she kept for emergencies. This certainly qualified. She slept eventually but her hot fevered dreams were full of a tall, laughing man in a soft, loose white shirt, a man who laughed at her for behaving like a petulant, hormonal fifteen year old.

When Sam left for work the next morning, she waited to check her mobile for messages until she was outside. She wanted to be doing something when she passed the house next door, she didn’t want to be vulnerable and on her own in case she met him.

‘You have no messages,’ taunted the impersonal voice on her phone almost before she’d got to the front gate. Instead of hanging up, Sam was forced to listen to all her old, undeleted messages in order to keep up the pretence of being a busy, high-octane career woman who wasn’t interested in men. Suddenly she noticed the dilapidated house’s front door swinging open. Quickly averting her eyes in case she saw him again, she began talking into the phone.

‘I’ll be there soon, we’ll have the meeting if you’ve got all the documents lined up from New York,’ she blathered. A taxi sailed up the road and Sam stuck out her hand to hail it.

‘Bye, talk soon,’ called a female voice behind her.

Sam automatically turned to see a beautiful dark-haired girl leaving the house, smiling at the man in denims and bare feet who was holding the door. Bare chested too, Sam noticed with a jolt, and blowing kisses at the girl who looked around twenty-two at most, a stunning doe-eyed twenty-two who’d clearly stayed away from home all night if the silvery dress she was wearing under a big, man’s coat was anything to go by.

‘Take care,’ the man said in that caressing voice, but he was looking mockingly at Sam who stood there, mobile in hand and her mouth open.

‘Do you want a taxi or not, love?’ demanded the taxi driver.

‘Oh, er yes,’ stammered Sam, pulling open the door and half falling in, with her raincoat trailing after her.

‘Late night?’ inquired the driver with a smirk.

‘No,’ hissed Sam, reasserting herself. ‘Covent Garden please.’

What an asshole, she thought. Loud parties, having flings with women half his age. I mean, that girl was twenty and he has to be late thirties at least. Bloody playboy. Probably some trust fund moron who’d never had a job in his life but lived off inherited cash. Sam stared grimly out the cab window and simmered. She hated men like that.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_cff08345-538c-5909-8543-53b544c4aae1)

‘I can’t believe you’re moving in a little over two weeks. I can see it now,’ sighed Betsey dreamily. ‘A summery little cottage in a beech glade, with a thatched roof and pretty sun-bleached rooms, gorgeous home grown food and quaint little pubs where you can sit outside and eat oysters and watch the world go by with the Riverdance music in the background.’

Hope glared at her over a plate of fisherman’s pie. ‘It’ll be November, not summer.’

‘I think that’s Hollywood’s version of rural Ireland,’ laughed Dan from his position beside three-year-old Opal where he was attempting to clean up the mess she’d made squelching the insides out of several packets of brown sauce. Despite his efforts, Opal managed to fling a few opened packets on the floor before he could tidy them all away.

‘No,’ joined in Matt, ‘it’s the tour operator’s version of Ireland when they’re trying to sell you a time share. You know, Dan, maidens at the crossroads, sheep in the middle of the road and a friendly local with no teeth, a pipe and a tweed cap welded to his head waving at you!’

‘Haven’t we made an ad like that already?’ Dan asked.

‘Don’t think so. But we will, we will. I love the originality of advertising,’ Matt joked.

Matt, Betsey and Dan all laughed merrily. Hope stabbed her fish pie. Hilarious. Trust them all to make a joke about it all. It was her life they were talking about, not a location shoot for a bloody commercial. She was the one who’d be transported into another country, away from her friends and Sam, so that Matt could live the advertising man’s dream. His dream, her sacrifice. A fortnight after her sister’s visit, her delight that her marriage wasn’t over had disappeared to be replaced by a gnawing fear of the unknown. Matt and Millie were thrilled with the idea of moving; Toby was thrilled because he was going up in an aeroplane; Hope was terrified.

‘It’s going to be great, love, isn’t it?’ Matt said, noticing the tautness around his wife’s jaw. ‘You’ll love Kerry, I promise you.’ He was about to reach over and hug her, but Millie, sitting between them, catapulted her plate of chips all over the table.

All four children started giggling.

Hope sighed, grabbed a handful of kitchen towels out of her bulging, ever-present toddler bag, and began cleaning up.

Sunday was family day in the local pubs and that meant a war zone of small children rampaging up and down the premises while their exhausted parents rocked irate babies in their pushchairs and mashed up food for toddlers who were straitjacketed into high chairs, in between trying to shovel some pub grub down their own throats.

Hope, Matt, Betsey and Dan had often shared Sunday lunch together but the birth of Millie, Toby, Ruby and Opal meant lunch no longer took the form of a civilized clinking of wine glasses over sea bass fillets in elegant restaurants. Now, Sunday lunch was a grab-while-you-can bean fest in whichever local child-friendly establishment wasn’t jammed by twelve thirty.

Today, they were in the Three Carpenters, a huge pub with an adventure playground outside. This was very useful for exhausting small children but it was raining today, so the kids had turned the inside of the pub into an adventure playground.

There was always one family, Hope thought crossly, who let their kids run riot and didn’t move a muscle to stop them. Millie and Toby weren’t saints but she wouldn’t dream of letting them behave like those brats who were now trying to dismantle a high chair in the corner after spending at least half an hour ripping up beer mats.

‘Seriously though,’ said Betsey, waving at the harassed young waitress in the hope of getting more wine, ‘I’ve always had a yen to live in the country. There’s something about the whole rustic life that appeals to me.’

‘Betsey, honey,’ Dan said affectionately, ‘you couldn’t survive without the buzz of traffic, a shop that sells the perfect cappuccino around the corner and your monthly waxing or whatever it is you do in that wildly expensive beautician’s emporium.’

Not to mention a hairdresser to transform her hair from brown to a glossy chestnut every six weeks, thought Hope with unusual bitchiness.

Betsey, with her perfectly styled short hair, tiny personal-trainer-honed body and predilection for weekly massages, was a high maintenance woman. Hope, who got her bikini line waxed when she went on beach holidays and who’d had one massage in her life when the girls in the building society had bought her a voucher as a birthday treat, felt like a no-maintenance woman.

‘Anti-ageing facials not waxing,’ Betsey said unperturbed. ‘You make me sound like a yeti. Anyway, I have sugaring done these days. It’s much better.’

The talk turned to business, with Matt and Dan discussing work before Betsey made them all laugh by telling them about an interview she’d done with a TV comedienne.

Hope half-listened because she was keeping an eye on the four children. The two men and Betsey seemed to think that as long as none of the children were actually choking to death, they were fine.

Beside Hope, Toby was half asleep in his high chair. Opal and Millie were, for once, playing together, and even Ruby, a four-year-old terror with her father’s innocent gaze and her mother’s devil-may-care attitude to life, was busy investigating something under the table. For once, Hope didn’t feel like checking what it was. Ruby was Betsey’s daughter: let her sort it out. Hope was fed up of being the designated babysitter at these get-togethers.

She ate the rest of her lunch, half-listened to the chat going on around her, and wished she felt more cheerful.

It was two weeks since Matt’s bombshell and he’d made startling progress for someone who’d spent a year promising to do something about bleeding the air from the bathroom radiator. He’d got Adam Judd to, reluctantly, give him a year’s sabbatical, although the sporty company Audi had to go back. The only caveat was that Matt had to promise to help on certain campaigns if necessary and he’d be paid on a contract basis, which suited Matt fine.

He’d also found an estate agent who assured them there’d be no problem letting the house for a year; he’d checked out transporting their belongings to Ireland; had told his uncle’s solicitor that he’d be flying over to take possession of the house shortly. In short, Matt was on a high, joyous that he’d made the move and was now on his way to making a long-cherished dream come true. Hope felt the way she had three days after Millie had been born: depressed and liable to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. When she’d mentioned the fact that Millie should be starting primary school the following September, Matt had merely nodded and said they’d be back. Probably.

Probably? thought Hope weakly.

It was after two when Dan went to get the bill and Matt went to the gents. Betsey turned to Hope.

‘You’re a bit down in the dumps,’ she said. ‘Is it the move to Ireland?’

Hope nodded, not wanting to say too much in front of the kids. Little pitchers had big ears.

‘It’s such a big step,’ Hope whispered to Betsey now. ‘I feel as if I’m being swept along on a tidal wave and I can’t stop it, do you know what I mean? It’s frightening. A new country, new people, a new home and I won’t have a job there. Matt knows what he’s doing but I don’t.’ She stopped miserably. She didn’t want to say too much but she was sure Betsey would understand. Betsey knew Matt and knew how much Hope adored him, but she’d surely see Hope’s side of things and would know how scary it felt to be swept along on somebody else’s dream. ‘I mean, imagine if you were expected to give up your job to travel with Dan? That would be tough.’

‘It’s a bit different, isn’t it?’ Betsey said. ‘It’s taken me a long time to get where I am on the magazine. I mean, I could work anywhere in the world, obviously, but I’ve got a great career here.’

‘And I’m only working in the building society,’ Hope said acidly. She was still steeling herself to hand in her notice. Mr Campbell would not be impressed.

‘Don’t be so touchy. I didn’t mean that at all but our situations are rather different after all. You’ve got to learn not to be so uptight about everything, Hope,’ she added. ‘Go with the flow.’ She waved one hand languidly. ‘Treat it as an adventure. You’ll have a ball. I’d adore a year off to have fun, play in the country and get out of the rat race.’

Hope looked Betsey straight in the eyes but Betsey had finished draining her wine glass and was looking around for her handbag. Had the other woman heard one word she’d said? She’d hoped for female bonding over how she was going to deal with this enormous upheaval in her life and instead, she’d been treated to Betsey’s views on how much she’d have liked a year in the country. And been told in no uncertain terms that Betsey did not consider working in the building society to be a career on a par with the fabulous world of magazine journalism.

‘Ruby, what are you doing under there? Is that my handbag?’ Betsey said sharply. A heavily-made up Ruby emerged from under the table, her face plastered with Clarins base, vampish dark Chanel eyeshadow and plenty of Paloma Picasso red lipstick. Betsey only used the very best cosmetics.