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

Mary shook her head guiltily. ‘Promise you won’t tell?’ she pleaded.

‘I won’t.’

‘It’s not Jackie that made me leave. I’m in love with someone and Jackie found out.’

‘What?’

‘You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.’

‘I won’t,’ said Hannah. ‘Now tell me.’

She could see her cousin’s eyes shining like candles in a dark night as she recounted the tale of the handsome fitness instructor she’d met one day at a parent-teacher meeting.

‘Jackie always left those meetings to me,’ Mary protested. ‘He never went to one of them. If Krystle had been a boy, he’d have been there, all right, trying to get him into the school soccer scheme before he was seven, but Jackie isn’t interested in girls. Now Louis,’ she breathed his name reverently, ‘is different. His wife is a bit strange. That’s why he was there without her. She works all the hours God gives and he has to look after their little girls while she’s away. The oldest one is in the class ahead of Krystle. It just went on from there.’

‘How long have you been seeing each other?’ asked Hannah.

‘Six months. He’s going to leave her for me, but Jackie found out yesterday and there was war.’

‘I can understand why,’ Hannah said mildly. ‘But why didn’t you tell Mam what had happened? It’s not fair to leave her in the dark like that. Jackie might turn up, you know, screaming blue murder, and Mam will be in a rage when she finds out that you’ve lied to her.’

‘I haven’t lied.’

‘OK,’ Hannah said, ‘lied by omission.’

Mary scowled. ‘I couldn’t tell her because you’re the perfect daughter. She’s always talking about you and how well you’re doing. Now you’ve got some famous boyfriend and I couldn’t very well break it to her that I’ve been carrying on with this man and that my husband had found out, could I?’

‘If she finds out, you’ll wish you had.’ Hannah was amazed. Imagine her mother telling everyone that she was the perfect daughter. Hannah had assumed her mother wasn’t too interested in her life. That’s how things had been when she was growing up. Then, Stuart, Hannah’s older brother was the one Anna had involved herself with. Stuart had only to get reasonable results in an exam for Anna to bake him a special cake in celebration; when he announced he was getting married after his girlfriend, Pam, became pregnant, you’d have thought he’d been awarded the Nobel prize for Biology instead of screwing up on the most basic bit of human biology. Anna had gone crazy trying to buy the perfect wedding outfit and had knitted enough babyclothes for quadruplets. Now here was Mary telling her that Anna spoke about her reverently. It was all too hard to believe.

‘I suppose you’ll advise me to give him up and go back to Jackie like a good little wifey,’ Mary added sharply.

Hannah laughed. ‘Are you mad?’ she demanded. ‘It’s not up to me to advise you, Mary, and I’m not the sort of woman who believes the answer to every question is: a man. You’re a grown-up. Just look after yourself and the girls. Don’t rely on any man too much, that’s all I’ll say.’

‘I thought you were in love,’ her cousin remarked. ‘You’re not sounding like it.’

Taking a sip of Guinness gave Hannah a moment before she had to respond. She didn’t want to discuss her own life, and saying that all men were lying, cheating scum might give Mary some hint that everything in Hannah Campbell’s garden was not rosy. ‘Men are all right,’ she said. ‘I’m very fond of them but I’m not in love right now.’ Her nose would grow longer any minute, like Pinocchio’s. ‘I’ve been seeing somebody, that’s all.’

‘Real love is wonderful,’ Mary said, eyes glowing again. ‘You were in love with that Harry, weren’t you? What went wrong there?’

‘I trusted him,’ Hannah said bluntly. ‘Don’t make that mistake, Mary. For your sake and for the girls’.’

Christmas Day dawned cool but dry with a pale sun casting watery light along the front of the house. There was still no sign of her father. Hannah didn’t ask where he was. She could guess. Sleeping off a gallon of porter in the back of the car, still half out of his skull. By ten thirty, the girls were tiring of their presents from Santa and they all trooped to morning Mass in Hannah’s car. Hannah, who hadn’t been in a church for ages, kept standing up in the wrong places and sitting down when she should have been kneeling, earning herself a reproving stare from six-year-old Krystle.

‘That’s wrong,’ she hissed at Hannah with the piety of a child who was in training for her Holy Communion.

‘Sorry,’ said Hannah meekly, holding on to Courtney’s small hand and trying not to laugh at Krystle’s stern face. Courtney had taken a shine to her auntie and insisted on sitting beside Hannah, holding on to her new crying, nappy-wearing doll with the other chubby little hand. Occasionally, she’d give the doll to Hannah and would sit, thumb in her rosebud mouth, leaning against her new friend, utterly content. It was nice to sit there with Courtney’s little body against hers and look around at all the people, Hannah thought.

She felt vaguely guilty about not having been to Mass for so long. Religion hadn’t seemed important in her life and yet, today, with Anna, Mary and the children beside her and with the hard-working people she’d grown up with united in worshipping God, she felt as if she’d been missing something. She was what Leonie called a submarine Catholic – they only came up when there was trouble. It might be nice to go more often, she decided.

The elderly Ford was parked outside the house when Hannah drove up. He was back.

‘Don’t be giving out to your father, Hannah,’ warned her mother in a low voice so that Mary wouldn’t hear. ‘I don’t want a row. This is Christ’s day, so let’s pretend to be a normal family.’

Once, Hannah would have fought with her mother for even daring to say that to her. He’s as bad as he is because nobody ever says anything to him, she’d have hissed. If he didn’t get away with spending every penny he gets on drink, then we’d all be a lot happier.

That was a different Hannah. This one didn’t want a fight today, she wanted peace and goodwill to all men, and if that meant managing a cold smile for her father, then she’d do it.

The children rushed into the house and stopped in fear at the sight of Willie Campbell slumped in the armchair beside the fire. As fat as his wife was thin, he was an almost comical figure with his threadbare tweed jacket and a shirt that had probably been white when he’d put it on but was now stained with beer. He still had a full head of thick dark hair but it was growing grey now, the same colour as the eyes that roamed over the visitors. Guilt and remorse were written all over his face.

‘Mary,’ he said slurring his words slightly. ‘Welcome. And little Hannah. Have you got a kiss for your old father?’

Hannah looked at the hopeless creature in front of her and wondered why she’d made him into such an ogre in her mind. He wasn’t bad, she realized. Just weak. Weak and a drunk. It wasn’t his fault he’d given her a lifelong distrust of other men. It certainly wasn’t his fault that she was so hopeless with men that she kept picking ones who’d let her down just like he’d done all her life.

‘Hello, Dad,’ she said, making no move to embrace him. ‘Long time no see. Happy Christmas.’

‘Happy Christmas, Uncle Willie,’ said Mary, dragging the two girls over to their uncle. She hugged him but they were not keen to do the same.

‘Come on, girls,’ said Anna firmly, taking them by the hand and leading them away. ‘Let’s go up to your bedroom and take off those coats. Willie,’ she said to her husband, ‘go and have a wash and change your clothes. This is Christmas Day and you could do with a fresh shirt. If you want to have a rest, we’ll wake you for dinner.’

Nothing had changed, Hannah thought. Her mother carried on as usual, giving her father a way out with the usual coded messages, messages telling him he could sleep his hangover off and that he’d be welcome at the table when he was clean and sober. It was her version of see no evil, hear no evil. When she’d been growing up, Hannah had raged against this, what she saw as her mother’s blind acceptance of his alcoholism. Stop making excuses for him. Leave, get out! Or make him leave! she wanted to scream in frustration. But her mother wouldn’t. Her marriage was all she had and she’d been brought up to accept what she’d been given in life.

Perhaps it was having been away from home for so long, or maybe it was because she’d changed too, but Hannah no longer felt the need to fight with either of them.

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea to bring to bed, Dad,’ was all she said now. Her father looked at her gratefully.

‘Thanks, love.’

When he’d shuffled off to the bedroom he shared with her mother, Hannah heaved a silent sigh of relief. She felt as if she’d passed some sort of test. Not his test but one of her own making. Accepting who you were in life meant accepting your parents for what they were. She’d managed it, just about.

They had dinner at five and it was great fun thanks to the presence of the two small girls. Getting Courtney to eat anything green was a trial and Hannah was in charge of that mission.

‘Don’t wan’ it!’ Courtney would say petulantly, throwing her Winnie the Pooh fork across the table with great force when presented with a bit of broccoli.

‘Me neither,’ declared Krystle.

‘I’m surprised at you, girls,’ Willie remarked, ‘not eating your dinner when you know that Santa is watching.’ He’d said very little during the meal, merely mentioning that everything was lovely and eating ravenously.

‘We’ve got our presents already,’ Krystle said smugly.

Willie raised his eyebrows. ‘But he can always take them back, can’t he, Mary?’

The broccoli was consumed with great zeal after that. Nobody was more amazed than Hannah at her father bothering to get involved with the children. He’d never been much good with kids, had he? She tried to remember and somehow a hazy memory came back of when she’d been little and had loved sitting on his knee listening to him tell stories. He’d had a big rust-coloured armchair and she used to curl up in it when he wasn’t there, missing him. She had to pretend to sneeze to conceal the fact that her eyes had brimmed with tears.

‘You’re not getting a cold, are you, Hannah?’ asked her mother.

‘No, Mam, I’m not.’

There was never any alcohol in the house, but her father still seemed to sink into a tipsy haze that evening, although Hannah never saw him with a drink in his hand. He must have some hidden somewhere. The following day, he went off at lunchtime and didn’t come back. The three women had a lovely day, playing with the children, talking, and going for a long walk up the mountain before returning home in the dusk to make steaming hot cups of tea and rest their aching legs in front of the fire.