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

‘Cool it, Ma. I’ll start now,’ Danny said.

‘Where are your sisters?’ she demanded.

‘I’m here, Mum,’ said Mel meekly, appearing in her dressing gown with what had to be the remains of Leonie’s last bit of avocado face mask plastered all over her face.

‘Is that my face mask?’ Leonie asked.

‘Er yes, I’m going out in half an hour and my skin’s a mess…’

‘Going out in half an hour? So when exactly were you going to help clean the house?’ Leonie demanded icily.

‘Well, I didn’t think it’d matter…’

‘“Didn’t think it would matter,”’ her mother said angrily. ‘No, let stupid old Mum do it all, that’s all she’s good for, isn’t that what you thought?’

‘No,’ protested Danny and Mel in unison.

‘Where’s Abby?’ Leonie asked suddenly.

‘Gone jogging.’

‘Jogging! It’s pouring from the heavens, what’s she jogging in this weather for?’

‘Dunno. I’m sorry, Mum. I’ll do my share now,’ Mel said, remarkably docile for her. ‘I’ll hoover and dust, Danny, if you do the bathroom. You did mess it up,’ she began, then stopped when her mother shot her a fiery glance.

‘I don’t want to have this conversation again,’ Leonie said, still angry. ‘You all expect to be treated like adults, yet none of you will actually behave like adults. I’m not a skivvy, remember that!

‘You can put the shopping away, Danny,’ she ordered. Bringing Penny, who hated the vacuum cleaner, with her, Leonie marched into her room and slammed the door.

When she came out later, Abby had returned and cleaned the kitchen in a very haphazard fashion. Even though Leonie’s rage had passed, she still had some harsh words for Abby about duties and how they all had to pull together to keep their home running smoothly.

‘Smoothly?’ shrieked Abby. ‘If this is what you call smoothly, I want to leave. I’m sure Dad and Fliss would like me to live with them! I hate you.’ With that, she ran into her room and slammed the door. Too shocked to go after her, Leonie stood like a statue for a few stunned minutes then did the only thing she could think of in her distraught state: she drove to her mother’s house.

Claire was in the garage practising her golf swing when she arrived. She’d only taken the sport up in the last month and was keenly going to the driving range with her friend, Millie, at least twice a week.

‘You should try golf,’ Claire advised, putting her eight iron back in her bag and escorting her daughter into the house.

‘I have enough trouble coping with all the things I do now,’ Leonie said tearfully, ‘without taking up something else I’d be useless at.’

‘Nonsense.’ Claire was brusque. She raked her eyes over Leonie’s flushed face, spotting the tell-tale signs of impending tears. ‘What’s Mel said now?’

‘It’s not Mel, that’s the awful thing, it’s Abby.’

When she’d recounted the whole sorry tale, Leonie felt somewhat better. Tash, one of Claire’s beautiful Siamese cats, had deigned to sit on her lap and Leonie always felt better when she had an animal to hug. Her own cat, Clover, wasn’t the sitting-on-laps variety, so her animal comfort normally came in the form of cuddling Penny. Tash rewarded her with a few rumbling purrs and arched her graceful neck.

‘Abby sounds a bit like you when you were younger,’ Claire said reflectively.

‘I was never like that!’ Leonie protested.

‘Yes, you were,’ her mother pointed out, ‘when you were about sixteen and decided you were huge and ugly. It was awful, but there wasn’t much I could do. You blamed me in the absence of anyone else to blame.’

‘But Abby is miles prettier than I was then and she’s always been such a sweet person,’ Leonie said helplessly. It was totally different. She did everything she could to make Abby feel serene and secure in herself. Not that Claire hadn’t tried to do that with her, but, well, it was different. Wasn’t it?

Claire took a tin of catfood from the fridge and Tash leapt off Leonie’s lap, claws tearing into her skirt as she left. The other two cats mysteriously appeared, all trying to look uninterested in the catfood, but eyeing each other warily all the time, as if determined that the others wouldn’t get any more than they did.

‘She is pretty and growing prettier, but don’t forget that you didn’t have a beautiful twin sister to compete with all the time,’ Claire pointed out.

‘I had you to compete with,’ Leonie said wryly, looking at her mother’s petite and trim figure, slim in navy trousers, a matelot jersey and a jaunty red scarf round her neck. Claire had Gallic style, the ability to make the simplest outfit look chic. ‘You looked miles better than me when I was a teenager. Remember that awful striped crochet bikini I insisted on buying for that holiday in Spain?’

Her mother laughed. ‘You donated it to me.’

‘And you looked fantastic in it,’ Leonie said. ‘Ursula Andress, compared to me as Two Ton Tessie.’ She watched the cats circle their respective dinners, tails aloft as they assessed the food like disgruntled restaurant critics trying to ascertain whether the pesto oil was home-made or not, purely by sniffing it. ‘Life was easier then, wasn’t it?’

‘Life is always easier in retrospect,’ Claire said. ‘What else is wrong? You hardly drove over here on a Saturday afternoon just for that.’

Leonie shook her head. ‘There’s nothing else wrong, apart from the fact that Danny’s failing college, Mel isn’t even vaguely interested in school, except when it comes to getting the bus there so she can bat her eyelashes at boys en route, and now Abby has turned from the best, most well-adjusted person I know into this prima donna I barely recognize who never stops talking about her stepmother. I’m sick of dealing with it on my own,’ she said in an unguarded moment.

Her mother sniffed. Leonie groaned inwardly. She knew what that meant.

‘If you hadn’t broken up with Ray, you wouldn’t be on your own and the children wouldn’t have a fairy godmother for a stepmother,’ Claire said primly.

‘Mum, I don’t want a lecture.’

‘I’m not going to give you one. But if you come over here and ask my advice, you have to expect to get something. It’s tough bringing them up all on your own, but that was your choice, Leonie. You decided you wanted true love and that Ray didn’t measure up. You’re living with that choice now,’ Claire said heavily. ‘That’s all I’m saying. End of lecture. So, what are you up to this evening? Myself and Millie are going to the cinema. We can’t decide whether to go for improbable thriller, improbable courtroom drama, or something with Sean Connery in it. Do you want to come? It might do your terrible offspring some good if you leave them to their own devices for once. They’ve got so used to having meals cooked for them and the house magically cleaned that they’ll die of shock if you’re not there to dish up some cordon bleu meal.’

‘I’m…er, actually going out this evening,’ Leonie stuttered.

‘With the girls?’ asked her mother absently, then catching sight of Leonie biting her lip, she pounced. ‘With a man! I’m right, aren’t I? Good woman, Leonie. About time you got yourself a man. Who is he and where did you meet him?’

It was either the Spanish Inquisition or the How to Live Your Life lecture, Leonie realized. ‘He’s a friend of Hannah’s,’ she lied.

‘Really. Tell me all about him – or will that jinx the entire enterprise?’

‘No, his name is Hugh Goddard, he’s an investment adviser with the bank, he’s separated and he loves dogs.’

‘His CV sounds wonderful, but what’s he like as a person and what does he look like?’ demanded her mother.

Leonie paused. She could hardly admit that beyond knowing he was sensitive – well, he’d rescued a poor dog from the Grand Canal, so he must be – she hadn’t a clue what he was like and no idea what he really looked like. Solid, one-time rugby fanatic, works with money, no spring chicken but GSOH. Prospective partners must be animal nuts might be very descriptive as far as personal ads were concerned but didn’t yield the private nuggets to describe the person in detail to interested parties. She went for the vaguely impatient approach: ‘Really, Mum, he’s just an ordinary guy, honestly. We met at Hannah’s and he seemed very nice, so I’ve agreed to meet him for a drink, that’s all.’

‘OK, don’t get your knickers in a twist,’ Claire said. ‘I was only asking. Will I ever get to meet him?’

‘If he turns out to be the love of my life and we decide to emigrate to the Bahamas leaving you with the kids, then, yes, you will meet him. It’ll be the least I can do. Must dash, Mum.’

Hugh had suggested meeting in a pub in Dublin so Leonie decided to take the DART into town rather than drive. Hobbling a bit in her new and slightly tight court shoes, she left the house at a trot after giving explicit instructions on how to reheat lasagne and on how she didn’t want to return and find Danny had gone out leaving the girls on their own.

‘Where you going to in your finery, anyway?’ Danny enquired, taking in her best ruched velvet skirt, the silky red shirt with the top three buttons opened and her Egyptian scarab necklace.

‘Out with the girls,’ his mother fibbed, dragging on the black suede jacket she only wore on special occasions. As Abby had been sulking all day, she didn’t want to start another row by mentioning that she was going to meet a man. Who knew what sort of extreme reaction that would provoke? In her current emotional state, Abby would probably race for the airport to fly to Boston, stopping only to phone the ISPCC to report her mother for child cruelty.