Best of Friends

‘Course I’m not upset.’ Abby’s hands shook as she took out her make-up pouch. She daren’t try to use her lipliner. Her face, pale and haggard with shock, stared back at her. Her new chestnut streaks looked ridiculously harsh against her pale face. Her previous all tawny tint had suited her colouring better.

Flora was watching her. Somehow, Abby recovered.

‘This is a job, after all, and job descriptions change. I’m a professional, Flora. You should know that,’ she said.

‘Sorry.’ Flora gave Abby’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze. ‘I forgot. They don’t call you the most down-to-earth presenter on the box for nothing.’

Abby did her best to look down-to-earth, even though she felt like lying down on the tiled floor of the ladies, drumming her heels and screaming about the unfairness of everything.

‘You know, I wasn’t sure I liked Roxie at first, to be honest with you,’ Flora was saying, redoing her plait, ‘but she has some great ideas and she’s all right behind that tough exterior.’

‘Yeah, for sure.’ Abby zipped up her handbag. ‘Must fly, Flora. I’ll talk to you soon, OK?’

She managed to leave the building without meeting Brian or Roxie.

‘Oh, Abby,’ sang Livia as Abby rushed past reception, ‘Mr Redmond was looking for you.’

‘Can’t stop. Sorry, Livia,’ said Abby politely. She could not face Brian Redmond now. ‘Bye.’

She rushed to the car park, leather skirt creaking wildly. Only when she was in her car and past the security barrier did she allow herself to break into floods of tears.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_71e0f290-fd8f-581c-adf8-b62b7bc7717d)

That same afternoon, in the doctor’s surgery in the centre of Dunmore, Lizzie Shanahan searched the correspondence pile for a letter to the specialist. Mrs Pender stood in front of the desk, looking only slightly less shocked than she had the previous day when she and Mr Pender had emerged from the surgery with the gently delivered but nonetheless startling news that Mr Pender needed to see a specialist for further discussion on the results of his blood test for prostate cancer.

Lizzie found the letter and the attached Post-it note on which she’d written directions to the specialist’s office.

She smiled warmly at Mrs Pender, doing her best to radiate both calmness and complete ignorance of whatever was in the letter to the specialist. Lizzie knew exactly what it said because she’d typed it and because the doctor’s receptionist knew almost as many secrets as the doctor. But the patients were better off not really being aware of that.

This patient was too worried to go along with the sanctity-of-the-surgery façade. ‘I haven’t slept a wink since I heard,’ Mrs Pender said weakly. ‘Do you think it’s bad, since they got him an appointment so quickly?’

Lizzie, who’d been told to plead emergency on the phone to the specialist’s office because Mr Pender’s blood test results signalled prostate cancer, felt a huge surge of pity for the woman but managed to look innocently surprised at the question.

‘They may have had a cancellation, Mrs Pender,’ she said kindly, weighing up the merits of lying and deciding that the poor woman would possibly hear enough bad news from the specialist tomorrow without lying awake all night from anxiety.

Sleeplessness was a problem Lizzie knew all about. And she was aware that women worried five times more about their husbands’ health than they did about their own. Not a problem Lizzie had any more.

‘Yes, a cancellation, that could be it.’ Mrs Pender brightened at the news and went off with her letter.

Lizzie scanned the reception room. It was a quarter to five. There were two people waiting. One was an elderly gentleman who’d looked uncomfortable on being told that Dr Morgan, the lady doctor, was on. The other patient was a weary-looking young woman with a small, red-faced baby on her denim lap. The baby cried non-stop, the tormented tears of teething that could reach ear-shattering decibel levels. The woman shot apologetic looks at Lizzie as the baby launched into another miserable aria. Lizzie had paid her own dues at the coalface of teething babies and gave the young mother an understanding grin in return. Lizzie had a very infectious grin. It was something to do with the combination of her wide, smiling mouth, rosy cheeks that shone through all cosmetics, and lively chocolate-brown eyes that sparkled beneath her shaggy blonde-streaked fringe.

It was ten to five when Dr Morgan opened the surgery door and called in the elderly man. Lizzie was due to leave at five and Clare Morgan, who was the most considerate employer Lizzie had ever encountered, leaned round her office door and said: ‘Lock the door when you go, Lizzie. I’ll let the patients out when we’re finished.’

Lizzie smiled her thanks and began to tidy up, leaving a list of the evening’s patients for Dr Jones, who’d be in at seven for two hours. There was no receptionist on in the evenings, and although Lizzie could have done with both the money and the time out of the house, she’d never suggested working at night too. Dr Morgan, who’d been kindness itself since the divorce, would have been shocked at the notion of Lizzie spending all her time working. Dr Morgan, divorced and the mother of adult children herself, was a firm believer that freshly single women had to make new, exciting lives for themselves. Lizzie outwardly agreed with all of this and inwardly wondered whether Clare Morgan planned her week’s television viewing on a Saturday too, circling the programmes she wanted to watch in the TV guide, putting asterisks beside interesting documentaries. Probably not.

Lizzie locked the surgery door and, twenty minutes later, she was walking round the supermarket on Dunmore’s Cork Road, a basket over her arm as she debated what to buy for dinner. That was one of the nice things about living alone, she thought to cheer herself up. You could eat whatever you wanted. Myles had hated tuna in tins, while Lizzie could have eaten it every night. He loved proper dinners too, not speedy suppers like beans on toast. Now, she could eat beans and tuna together if she felt like it. She rounded the frozen pizza corner and went bang into Josephine who lived four doors up. Josephine, a gossiper of professional standard, was wielding a loaded trolley that proclaimed to the world that she had a husband and four big sons to feed. Giant family packs of meat and many loaves of bread were packed precariously on top of each other. If her trolley could speak, it would have loudly said, ‘I have a life.’

‘Oh, hello, Lizzie,’ she greeted. ‘How nice to see you.’

Lizzie made a sudden decision. She couldn’t face Josephine’s gentle probing. Her single-person basket clearly said that she had no life and the carafe of red wine that had been on special offer would proclaim that she coped with this lack of a life by knocking back litre bottles of booze.

‘Lovely to see you!’ she said gaily, and kept walking. ‘Sorry, but I’m rushing. I have someone dropping in and I’m late!’ Lizzie smiled broadly to imply a busy, action-packed existence that left no time for concerned ‘how are you doing?’ conversations amid the frozen food.

From the corner of her eye, Lizzie could see Josephine’s garrulous husband amble over to the trolley. Thank God she’d made her escape. She couldn’t face both of them. She rushed round another corner and hurried down the tea and coffee aisle, knowing exactly what Josephine would be saying: ‘Poor Lizzie, isn’t she wonderful, though?’

Lizzie knew that was what people said about her: ‘Isn’t she wonderful?’, as if she was some simple soul who’d finally learned to tie her shoelaces. What they meant was ‘Isn’t it great that she isn’t riddled with bitterness and with a long-term Prozac habit since Myles left her?’ She had not been people-watching all her life for nothing. Her natural intuition told her what they were really thinking and she hated it. She knew that her friends and acquaintances had half expected her to slide into a decline when she and Myles had split up five years previously. But she had proved them wrong. She hadn’t buried her head in the sand and told people they were ‘taking time apart’, like one neighbour who’d kept blindly insisting that her dentist husband was merely working a long distance away when everyone and their lawyer knew he’d set up home with a curvaceous female colleague.

Prevaricating wasn’t Lizzie’s style. When Myles had moved out, she’d told people the truth. Well, most of the truth. ‘We’re getting a divorce. It’s over, I’m afraid,’ she’d said brightly. What she hadn’t said was how shocked and devastated she felt, how humiliated, at the abrupt end of their marriage.

Tellingly, nobody seemed surprised. Not her friends, not her family. They all seemed to have half expected it. Only Lizzie, who’d prided herself on being practical, hadn’t.

‘I know things haven’t been right for years,’ her elder sister, Gwen, said comfortingly. ‘It’s for the best.’

Lizzie, who was rarely speechless, was reduced to utter silence. Gwen had always been an old-fashioned advocate of marriage, and thought that women who didn’t get married had a screw loose and were to be pitied. What desperate lack of harmony had been so apparent in Myles and Lizzie’s marriage that even Gwen thought they were better off apart?

Unfortunately, in the months after Myles moved out, Lizzie had a lot of time to think about this.

It was their younger child, Debra, turning eighteen and moving to Dublin that had been the catalyst. Until then, all appeared well in the Shanahan household. They had a nice home in a small housing estate on one of the older, tree-lined roads in Dunmore: a red-brick semi with four bedrooms, a dining room that, admittedly, was used less and less, and a small garden in which Lizzie spent an increasing amount of time. She had her job, her friends, her garden, and Myles had his work in the planning department in the council and his pals in the squash club.

If life wasn’t exactly exciting, then Lizzie consoled herself that it would be once the children had both left home.

She and Myles were, or so she was led to believe, in the enviable position of having had their children early. Very early, she used to laugh, thinking of herself in maternity tights at the wedding. But that had its advantages. With twenty-one-year-old Joe in art college in London, and Debra starting nursing in Dublin, it was just Lizzie and Myles again. She could barely remember what life felt like without the kids.

But there was going to be no empty-nest syndrome in her house. No way, José. Not for her the resigned gaze at the empty places round the table. She adored the children, adored them, but they wouldn’t thank her for turning into a resentful old woman just because they’d moved on and grown up. Lizzie and Myles Shanahan were going to live life to the full.

In this new, zestful frame of mind, she’d wondered if they could install a conservatory, maybe, or go on the sort of dream holiday they’d always promised themselves but had never been able to afford because there were always things to be bought for the children. A safari, she thought, wistfully imagining dawn Jeep rides into the grassland like the ones on the holiday programmes.

Lizzie looked after herself too. No sliding into slatternly ways for her. When tendrils of grey began to sneak into her shaggy light brown curls, she got streaks put in at the hairdresser’s. Myles seemed pleased with all of this.

He hadn’t let himself grow old before his time either, Lizzie thought approvingly. They were both forty-four. Some people were only just getting married or dealing with young kids at that age, and they’d done it all!

She got brochures for the conservatory and one day, just for the fun of it, picked up some safari ones too.

That evening, Myles sat in his armchair in front of the fire and looked mutely at the brochures Lizzie had left with such excitement on the coffee table. Then, in a quiet voice, he told her that he wanted a divorce, that he was so sorry but hadn’t she realised? Didn’t she agree that it was the right thing to do?

Lizzie, who’d already checked her husband’s diary to see if he’d be able to take holidays during the best season for a safari, stood frozen beside the mantelpiece, one hand clutched around the china seal Joe had given her after a childhood trip to the zoo.

‘I thought you knew; I thought you agreed with me,’ pleaded Myles. ‘You were getting on with your life and I was getting on with mine. We were only together for the kids and now they’re gone, well…’ His voice trailed off.

With terrible clarity, Lizzie saw that he meant what he said.

‘We married too young, Lizzie,’ he added sadly. ‘We didn’t have time to think about the future or whether we were really suited. If you hadn’t been pregnant with Joe, we’d have never done it, would we?’

Lizzie gazed back at him. The shock of this made her remember another: the shock of discovering she was pregnant, standing in the loo of the restaurant where she was working and thinking that the test had to be wrong, it had to be. She’d only ever slept with Myles and she knew girls who’d slept with scores of men, so why did she have to be the one to get caught? The slender streak of independence that ran through her shrivelled at the prospect of coping with this momentous happening on her own. Her parents were good and kind people, but they were locked in the morality of the past. Their beloved daughter becoming pregnant – pregnant and single. This would shake their world.

Lizzie would never forget the relief when Myles had said, with a lump in his throat, that they’d get married and he could support her and the baby on his salary from the council.

Now Myles was earnest again as if he could convince her by the force of his argument.