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

‘She’ll be fine,’ announced Jimmy, slamming the front door.

Emma sent Pete and Patrick home. She didn’t fancy staying with her father any longer, but felt she should be there for her mother. Jimmy didn’t appear to know how to handle Anne-Marie.

The three of them sat in front of the television for a while before Anne-Marie said she was tired and wanted to go to bed. It was only half past eight.

Her mother didn’t quibble when Emma accompanied her upstairs and helped her with her clothes. Instead, she seemed happy at the company. When she was tucked up in bed, Emma sat down beside her and smoothed her mother’s long fair hair gently.

‘I’m sorry you were so upset earlier,’ she said softly.

‘You were telling me I had to go to that bad place again,’ Anne-Marie said sleepily, one hand holding Emma’s tightly.

‘I didn’t mean it,’ Emma said, thinking that it was probably kinder to pretend that she knew what her mother was on about.

‘Talk to me, Emma,’ murmured Anne-Marie. ‘I like to hear your voice.’

Emma started a soft, gentle monologue about what she was going to do the next day and how she’d come over in the evening and see Anne-Marie. Her voice certainly seemed to soothe her mother, who drifted off to sleep, still clutching her hand.

Emma remembered being a child and how the roles had been reversed: whenever she had a nightmare, her mother, wearing one of her lovely soft brushed-cotton nightdresses with lily-of-the-valley-scented handcream on her soft hands, would hurry in once she’d heard Emma’s screams and sit comfortingly beside her, stroking her fevered forehead and telling her that the hobgoblins had all gone.

Now she had taken the role of the mother comforting her child instead of the other way round. How strange to have someone to mother after so long dreaming of a baby; only now, her baby was a sixty-year-old woman who’d sunk into childhood again. But why? And would she get worse in the future?

She wished she had a night-light to leave on the bedside table, something dim and soothing in case Anne-Marie woke up suddenly and couldn’t remember where she was.

Emma could recall the tiny light with a caterpillar inside that her mother had bought when Kirsten had been small: his green glowing body let off enough light to scare away the bad dreams. Maybe that was why Kirsten never had nightmares. She’d had Mr Caterpillar to keep her safe at night.

Her mother was breathing easily now. Emma got off the bed and silently tidied up the room. She folded clothes and sorted out the jumble of toiletries on the once-immaculate dressing table. That was proof in itself that things were amiss: Anne-Marie had always been incredibly house proud. She’d never have allowed any surface in her home to become dusty and untidy. Cotton buds lay scattered around and talcum powder had been spilled and not cleaned up. Emma vowed to tidy it soon.

Her mother’s handbag was dumped carelessly under the dressing-table stool, its gilt clasp open, displaying the contents. Sitting down on the stool, Emma looked into the handbag. Instead of the usual neat array of glasses, lipstick, powder compact, purse and linen handkerchief, there was a tangled mess with lots of little scrunched up bits of paper. Emma took a bundle out and slowly unfolded them. ‘Teabags in blue tin,’ read one. ‘Glasses on dressing table. Don’t forget!’ read another. One had Emma’s home phone number, with the digits written slightly wrong in two separate places and then scribbled out. It was as if her mother had tried to write it down but couldn’t manage to do it correctly until the third try.

Slowly, she unfolded each pathetic scrap of paper, reading each sad message that Anne-Marie had written to herself. Reminders about where the milk was kept and what day the window cleaner came round. Most poignant of all was one with her mother’s name and address carefully written on it. As if she could conceivably get lost and not know who she was or where she lived.

Emma used a tissue from the dressing table to wipe her wet eyes.

At the bottom of the handbag were buttons, lots of buttons. She counted out fifteen of them, ranging in size and colour from tiny mother-of-pearl ones to bigger navy ones that looked as if they’d been cut from Jimmy’s big overcoat. God love her, Emma thought wearily. Collecting buttons. Perhaps she thought they were coins.

‘Is she asleep?’ asked her father, appearing at the bedroom door.

Emma nodded. She couldn’t talk to him just then. He angered her so much. Today, he’d done what he always did: bulldozed over anyone who had a different opinion to his and insisted that he was right. Anne-Marie was seriously ill but, as usual, Jimmy refused to see any viewpoint other than his own.

He could face the reality on his own tonight, then. Emma wasn’t going to hang around and help him deny his wife was sick. She grabbed her things and left. She could walk home; it wasn’t far.

The phone call woke her and Pete at six thirty the following morning. Emma reached groggily over to the small table where the phone sat. ‘Hello?’ she mumbled. She could feel Pete dragging the covers over his head to block out the noise.

‘Emma, it’s your father,’ said a voice. ‘Can you come over? I can’t cope.’

CHAPTER TWENTY (#ulink_2faba624-32c6-59b3-b8bc-442bfadea303)

There was nothing to beat the satisfaction of a job well done, Hannah thought with pride, as she phoned the office to tell them 26 Weldon Drive was finally sold. Nothing. Not that first glass of wine after a hard week, not amazingly orgasmic, earth-shattering sex, nothing. Well, she allowed herself a faint grin, not that she’d had much experience of the orgasmic, earth-shattering sex thing lately. Not for over a month. A month and two days to be utterly exact.

Celibacy had its good points, she conceded. You didn’t have to bother with uncomfortable G-strings sliding into the crevices of your body in an attempt to look permanently ready for sex, nor did you have to worry about whether your bikini-line resembled a hippie with a shaggy perm instead of a smooth expanse of hairless flesh. Nobody saw these bits when you were celibate, except the women in the showers in the gym, so why bother?

Hannah reckoned you could always tell the desperately in love women in the gym by the state of their bikini-lines. Women with perfectly waxed pubic mohicans were in the throes of a love affair, madly exfoliating, plucking and manicuring so that their beloved would think them perfect examples of womanhood. While women hairier than Demis Roussos were either single or in a very long-term relationship where they were in such an advanced state of intimacy – sitting on the loo while their beloved was in the bath – that they didn’t bother with waxing or plucking.

Still, it was a disgrace not to bother with these feminine things, Hannah decided. There was no excuse to be slovenly. She’d book a beauty salon session later. Just because Felix wasn’t hanging around like a male rabbit on heat, there was no reason to let her standards drop.

She shut and locked the front door of number 26, admiring the garden, which was awash with crocuses of every colour. Vermilion ones drooped beside vibrant yellows, with a few shy, creamy white flowers bending their bell-like heads beside the privet hedge as if overwhelmed by the gaudy glory of their friends. The woman who’d been selling the house loved her garden, that was for sure. If only she’d taken as much care of the interior, it mightn’t have taken four months to sell the place.

On the market in November, it was now nearly February and the office had despaired of ever flogging this particular des res. It didn’t matter how many coffee beans or loaves of bread you stuck in the oven or what sort of fragrant lilies you displayed on the hall table when buyers were coming round, the most outstanding smell in number 26 was of unneutered tomcat and unwashed clothes.

Hannah had been given the house as one of five properties in her portfolio. David gave senior agents at least fifteen each, many of which were for auction, but as she was only a junior, she had five for sale by private treaty.

She loved her new job. She loved the freedom of driving around from property to property, organizing viewings and seeing clients. Normally, David would have put her working on customer service for at least a year before letting her manage properties as a junior agent. But he had a lot of faith in her.

She was studying auctioneering part-time now, one night a week and some weekends, and had vowed to pass her exams in record time. Donna had been a great help, giving her advice on tricks of the trade, telling her how to handle any lone viewer who made her nervous (‘Stand near the door,’ Donna warned. ‘I know you’re supposed to be keeping an eye on the place to make sure they don’t steal anything, but you’re more valuable than any trinket they can pocket.’)

There was so much to learn, about negotiating, the legal aspects of the job, and how to deal with difficult clients. ‘Most people are so incredibly grateful when you sell their home,’ Donna explained. ‘That’s a huge part of the buzz of the job, it’s very rewarding. But there are difficult ones too, and you’ve got to know how to deal with them.’

Donna grinned. She had lots of hilarious stories about her years in the business. There was the one about the man who’d been drunk and goosed her as she led him upstairs to see a flat, another about a wet dog who’d been inadvertently let into the property when the owners were out. ‘I gave that dog an entire pack of biscuits to get him back into the garden!’ Donna laughed. ‘The viewing was due to start at half two and I had this huge wet animal running around the house like a lunatic, throwing himself on to beds and destroying the place.’

She’d even come across one couple making love on a dining-room table when she let herself into a house. ‘The woman was one of the owners,’ Donna recalled, ‘but the man wasn’t her husband. I bit my lip to stop myself laughing. They were so embarrassed.’

Hannah had a few stories of her own now. Like the awful occasion when she’d lost a set of keys to a house. She’d searched high and low and hadn’t been able to find them.

David had grinned when she came to tell him, cringing in case he’d be furious.

‘You can’t qualify as an estate agent if you haven’t lost at least one set of keys,’ he said kindly. ‘Tell the client we’ll get the locks changed at our expense.’

Her mobile rang, blistering the quiet of the mid-morning suburban street.

‘Hannah, urgent message for you,’ said Sasha, the office manager who’d been appointed when Hannah began to work as an estate agent full-time. ‘Mrs Taylor, from Black-friars Lodge in Glenageary just rang up in a complete panic. Her daughter’s got measles and she can’t take her out of the house for the viewing. She wants to know if there’s any way we can let people see the house but stay out of that room. I know,’ Sasha added, ‘it’s crazy. But she asked me to ask you.’

‘Does she not realize that the viewers will be at risk of getting measles into the bargain, not to mention the fact that they’ll all want to explore every centimetre of the place, the under-the-stairs cupboard included?’ Hannah laughed. ‘I’ll phone her back, don’t worry about it.’

Once she’d persuaded Mrs Taylor to stop panicking and promised to reschedule the viewing for the following week, she phoned Leonie to make sure she was still on for lunch. Hannah had to drive to Enniskerry in County Wicklow for a viewing that afternoon, so she had arranged to meet Leonie for a quick sandwich half-way.

‘Can you make it?’ Hannah asked, once she finally got through after waiting five minutes with a canine barking chorus in the background in place of ‘Greensleeves’.

‘Yes,’ sobbed Leonie.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Hannah in alarm. ‘Is it Abby again?’

‘A guinea pig just bit me and, ouch, it’s sore.’

Giggling erupted from the other end of the phone. ‘Is that all?’

‘You want to get bitten by a guinea pig some time, sweetie,’ Leonie retorted. ‘They’ve got teeth like chisels. And now he’s squealing like an Italian tenor – you’d think he was the one who’d been bitten! Cuddly little thing, my backside! You won’t believe his name: Peaches. Honestly, the names people give animals. They should have called him Pavarotti, the way he sings. Or maybe Fang.’

‘Will you be recovered enough from your encounter with Peaches to join me for a sandwich in half an hour?’ Hannah enquired.