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

As she walked out into the cool evening air, she didn’t notice the car parked opposite. She certainly never thought it might be Harry’s car. He’d driven a battered old Fiat that was verging on the antique it was so elderly. This car was a very respectable saloon with not a bit of rust in sight. Hannah barely looked at it. So she was astonished when the door opened and Harry got out, calling her name.

She stared at him, wondering if this was a mirage and knowing it wasn’t. For what felt like hours but was actually only a minute, she stared silently, unable to summon up an intelligent sentence. Then her brain reasserted itself.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ she demanded.

‘I came to see you, Hannah. We have to talk,’ Harry said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to turn up on the doorstep of the woman you’d dumped a year and a half previously for a trip to find yourself.

‘You’ve seen me. Now fuck off,’ she replied, marching towards her car.

‘Hannah, don’t be like that. You can’t walk away from ten years, you know.’

She glared at him. ‘That’s supposed to be my line, Harry. You, if I remember correctly, were the one who walked away. Now you can do it again – out of my life, and don’t ever set foot near me again or I’ll report you as a stalker, got that?’

Boiling like Mount Etna, she reached the Fiesta, unlocked it, wrenched open the door and threw her papers in. Harry followed her and stood behind her. She knew he was standing with his hands falling limply by his sides: that was what he always did when he didn’t know what else to do. She ignored him, amazed at the rage she felt. It was as if he was Harry and Felix rolled into one, deserving of all the fury she’d directed at both of them.

‘Hannah,’ he said again, hesitantly this time, ‘please stop and talk to me, that’s all I want. Please. I’m sorry.’

It was the ‘I’m sorry’ that did it. At no time during his rapid departure from her life had Harry ever apologized. He’d never looked embarrassed as he bluntly told her he had to get out or he’d stagnate. He’d never asked her forgiveness, not even when she sat down on the end of their bed, her legs gone from under her with shock and weakness at his announcement. Even his bizarre letter from South America the year before had been full of inane chatter about what he was doing and lacking in any mention of their life together and how sorry he was he’d destroyed it.

Hannah put her handbag on the passenger seat before facing Harry.

‘You’re sorry?’ she said calmly. ‘Now? Isn’t it a bit late to be sorry? I thought the time for apologies was when you dumped me like a sack of old potatoes, not when you return nearly two years later, looking for…’ She put her head on one side and surveyed him with narrowed eyes. ‘What, I wonder. Somewhere to live, perhaps? Or a loan of money? You must be looking for something, Harry, if you’re back.’

He looked pained. ‘You obviously have a terrible impression of me, Hannah, to think I’d only come back for money or something like that.’

‘And you haven’t given me any reason to have a bad impression of you, is that right?’ she said caustically.

He lowered his eyes first. ‘I am sorry, Hannah, though you obviously don’t believe me. I know I can’t make it up to you, but I just wanted to talk to you, to explain.’

Weariness flooded Hannah’s limbs. She hadn’t the energy to fight with him any more. Let him try and explain what she found inexplicable.

Hannah knew there was nothing he could ever say that would explain what had happened. She’d recovered from it, though. She’d suffered and come out the other side, stronger – she hoped – than ever. But if he had to tell her, then so be it. ‘I’ll meet you in McCormack’s in half an hour,’ she said abruptly. ‘We can talk then, for about fifteen minutes. Then, I’ll have to go.’

Without waiting to see whether this suited Harry or not, Hannah jumped into her car, slammed the door and drove off down the street like a possessed Formula One driver with the rest of the grid on her tail.

There was nothing she needed to do that would take half an hour. But Hannah had needed some time alone to get to grips with Harry’s reappearance in her life. She drove quickly to the pub and then sat in her parked car outside, with the newspaper spread on the steering wheel in front of her. She was too tired to read and no matter how many times she stared at any particular paragraph her eyes glazed over and she saw Harry’s face instead of newsprint. When he’d suddenly appeared in front of her, she’d known what to say. Driven by pent-up fury, she’d bitten his head off. But now, after thinking about it all, Hannah couldn’t think of a word to say. All those missile-shaped words had deserted her. If only she’d taped the late-night drunken speeches she’d declaimed when she was on her own, ones where she’d told Harry exactly what he could do with himself. Fuelled by Frascati, they’d been eloquent, if tearful, and they’d be so useful now. She could simply press ‘play’ on her tape recorder and let him listen to a perfectly encapsulated, very emotional précis of how she’d felt and what sort of a bastard she thought he was. Thinking of Harry forced to listen to a drunken speech made Hannah smile for the first time in hours. He was looking good, she had to give him that. Still long on boyish charm, but his body had filled out and the sprinkling of fine lines around his eyes suited him. So did the tan. He’d always tanned well, going a coffee colour while Hannah’s freckles were merely joining up.

And he looked very presentable, not his usual slacker self in droopy trousers and some type of ancient sweatshirt that no self-respecting charity shop would let past the front door. In its place, he wore chinos and a cream cotton sweater that looked brand new. Stylish almost; very unlike the Harry she used to know.

Well, Hannah smiled grimly, if he was different, so was she. She wore a severely tailored Jesiré suit with a knee-length skirt to show off toned-up legs in barely black seven deniers. Nothing under the jacket – just a bra. And perilous fuck-me stilettos from Carl Scarpa. Her hair, instead of the taut knot she’d worn during the Harry years, was a glossy shoulder-length mane that swung when she walked. She’d finally dumped the granny glasses for contacts and her lips gleamed sexily in strawberry lipgloss.

This look of restrained, business-like sexuality still drove men mad. Let Harry suffer a little, Hannah decided, getting out her strawberry gloss to give her mouth that PVC look.

When she saw Harry drive up in his distinctly unrusted car, she hopped out of hers and ran inside, grabbing a table at the back. Immersed in her newspaper, she pretended not to notice Harry’s loping progress towards her until he said her name.

‘Oh,’ she looked up in astonishment, as if she’d completely forgotten she was to meet him. ‘Harry. I’ll have a soda and lime with ice.’

He returned with their drinks and sat down heavily, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. ‘Thanks,’ Hannah said cheerily. She’d decided that emotionally she wasn’t up to a huge row with yelled recriminations that could be heard half-way across the bar. Far better to behave like a benevolent friend talking to a younger pal who’s always in trouble. A sort of ‘You scamp, what have you done this time?’ type ploy with a smattering of ‘I couldn’t care less, really,’ thrown in for good measure.

‘You look wonderful, Hannah,’ Harry said earnestly.

Her savoir-faire took a direct hit and she had to grind her teeth hard not to screech that break-ups were good for the figure on account of all the stepping you had to do in the gym to pound your ex out of your mind.

‘Thanks,’ she replied evenly. ‘Harry, I haven’t got all night. Can you get to the point?’

‘You’ve got a date, then?’ he asked idly.

She blinked at him steadily before replying: ‘None of your business, OK?’

‘Fine, fine, I was just wondering…’

‘Stop wondering. Why are you here? I thought we didn’t have anything to say to each other any more.’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I wanted to apologize, Hannah. I’ve thought about you so much, about the fun we had together. I feel,’ he hesitated, ‘that it’s all unfinished. That we shouldn’t have done it, do you understand?’

‘No.’

‘But you must – you said yourself, Hannah, we were good together.’

‘Harry, if you remember correctly, you’ll remember that I said that when you were collecting up the CDs you were afraid to leave in the flat. I was telling you we were wonderful together and you were scanning the room for valuable personal objects I might destroy in a rage when you’d gone because you’d dumped me. Things have changed since then.’ Harry looked as if he was about to speak but Hannah kept going. ‘You have had eighteen months of adventure where you could occasionally think fondly of the girl you left behind,’ she said with heavy irony, ‘because you did the leaving. You had what the Americans call “closure”. You made the choice to leave and you did. I, on the other hand, didn’t have closure because I was the person to whom it all came as a big shock. A massive bloody shock. Since then, I have got over it, over you, and have reached, acquired, whatever the damn word is, closure. So why exactly do you think I’d welcome you with open arms? Was I really that stupid that you’d imagine I’d be thrilled to see you?’

He grabbed her hands with his. ‘No, you’re the least stupid person I know.’

Hannah pulled her hands away roughly. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she said.

The couple at the table next to them looked round. Harry flashed them an apologetic half-smile. Hannah resisted the impulse to slap it off his stupid face.

‘Are you here to convince me to go out with you again?’ she asked bluntly.

‘No. Yes. Sort of. I want us to be friends,’ he said lamely.

‘I have enough friends,’ Hannah announced. ‘I don’t need any more.’

She was about to grandly throw her untouched soda and lime all over him when some inner force made her look up and she saw Felix approaching the table.

There must be hallucinogens in the air-conditioning unit in work, Hannah decided, her mind in slow-motion, as she watched Felix coming nearer. There really was no other explanation for today. I mean, to meet one ex-boyfriend was misfortune, to meet up with two…

‘Hello, Hannah,’ Felix growled, looking at Harry with dislike. ‘I hoped you might have come here for a drink after work because you weren’t at home when I phoned.’

‘Hello, Felix,’ she said calmly, as if she hadn’t just spent the past month in silent misery over him, wondering where he’d got to and asking herself if she should buy one of those self-help books for women who love bastards.

She peered around as if expecting a Candid Camera host to appear suddenly and tell her she was the star of the latest show. The coincidences that were piling up were way off the Richter scale and there had to be a reason.

‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ Felix said, sitting down on Hannah’s other side, quite clearly not giving a damn if he was interrupting anything. In fact, he was pleased to be interrupting it, Hannah deduced, if the cool smirk he’d directed at Harry was anything to go by.

‘What brings you here?’ Hannah asked. ‘I didn’t know you were back in Ireland.’

‘Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?’ Felix said, ignoring her question and placing substantial emphasis on the word ‘friend’.