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

‘Dunno,’ answered Hannah tiredly. She was beginning to feel the after-effects of her sleepless night with the energetic Jeff. All she wanted now was to fall into her bed and sleep until morning. But she shouldn’t really skip the talk with Flora. Otherwise, she might miss out on what was happening for the voyage – and Hannah couldn’t bear the thought of missing out on information. You could never rely on other people to tell you things.

When everyone had filled in a registration card, Flora organized cabin keys. Hannah and Leonie’s cabins were opposite each other.

‘Isn’t this fun?’ Leonie asked in childish delight as the two of them walked down a narrow passage to their cabins. She’d never been on a boat like this before.

The big ferries to France were different. Modern and boring. This was all so different, so exotic. The walls were covered in rich dark wood and hung with tiny prints of Victorian watercolour desert scenes offset by filigree gold frames. Even the cabin keys were decorated with little brass pyramids. Leonie wished the kids were here with her to experience it all. Mel would be thrilled at the thought of buying silky Egyptian scarves, Abby would be in raptures at the thought of seeing the temples, and Danny would be pestering the crew to let him steer the ship. She hoped they were having a good holiday.

She opened her cabin door in a fizz of excitement which quickly abated when she saw the room which was to be her home for the next week. The cabin was tiny, not even as big as her bathroom back in the cottage. There were none of the filigree gold paintings or rich wood of the rest of the boat: the cabin was painted plain cream all over with yellow curtains and yellow-striped covers on the two single beds.

A six-inch square ledge served as a dressing table, with another as a bedside table between the beds. There was a small fridge beside the wardrobe, which was really just a niche in the wall with doors. Leonie stuck her head inside the bathroom to find a minuscule room with a sink, toilet and a shower. Her suitcase would barely fit in the cabin, never mind trying to cram her vast store of clothes into the wardrobe, and as for dressing table space – she’d obviously have to use the other bed to lay her make-up and jewellery out.

‘Compact, huh?’ Hannah put her head round the door.

‘Compact is not the word. It’s just as well I haven’t brought my toyboy lover for a week of passionate thrashing around on the Nile.’ Leonie grinned. ‘We’d concuss ourselves every time we launched off the dressing table on to the bed!’

‘Lucky you with a toyboy,’ joked Hannah. ‘We must compare stories later.’ She disappeared as the porter brought her case along the corridor.

My side of that conversation won’t take long, Leonie thought regretfully.

She opened the curtains and let the quayside lights shine into the cabin. Opening the window, she looked down to see the placid dark waters of the Nile. She was really here, she realized with a happy shiver. She hadn’t balked with fear and run home; she’d taken her first holiday on her own. That had to be worth something in the independence stakes.

Once unpacked, she showered quickly, thrilled at the fact that the compact shower room had only a tiny mirror so she didn’t have to stare at her huge, pinky-white naked self. She spent the usual ten minutes trying on clothes, then ripping them off and throwing them on the bed when she looked awful in the long wardrobe mirror.

Her burgundy velvet embroidered dress was too hot even if it was the nicest thing she’d brought and her other dress, the sleeveless black one, revealed so much of her plump arms she couldn’t bear it. Hannah would not be having this problem, she sighed, thinking of what a fantastic figure her new friend had. Slim and elegant, Hannah had looked wonderful in her simple travelling clothes. Leonie would have killed to look that good in jeans.

Eventually, she settled on the sleeveless dress worn with an open pink silk shirt, the long tail covering up her bum, she hoped. She left the cabin full of anticipation for the night ahead.

The informal meeting before dinner in the top-deck bar was in half an hour but Leonie decided to go up now, so she could daydream quietly and watch the world go by.

In her daydreams, she had a vision of herself sitting on the upper deck, glass of wine in hand and a swarm of admiring men surrounding her like something from Scott Fitzgerald. Instead, she caught sight of herself in the smoky mirrors which lined the stairs and saw the familiar reflection: the solid peasant’s body and a mass of hair like untamed hay that no anti-frizz serum could help.

Scott Fitzgerald’s heroes would probably hand her their empty martini glasses and ask for refills, presuming she was the serving girl.

Wishing she’d stuck to a diet for her holidays, she stomped upstairs to the bar. Decorated in ornate carved wood, it was certainly from another era with its Art Deco furniture and French lithographs behind the counter.

She ordered a glass of white wine from the smiling, dark-eyed young barman and, once she’d signed her room number on the bill, took her glass outside to the bar-level deck where she could feel the night air on her skin and listen to the noises of the river.

There was nobody else there and she breathed in the silence broken only by a distant hum of Arab music from one end of the boat. It was still gloriously warm and Leonie felt herself relax finally as she stared out over the tranquil darkness of the Nile. She wasn’t going to obsess about being forty-something and manless: she was going to enjoy herself.

Moored to the other bank, she could see the tall sails of river boats. Feluccas, her guide book had explained. You could rent one and sail down the river for a couple of hours, travelling the way people had for thousands of years. How romantic.

She picked up her glass and was about to take a sip when she heard a hesitant, rather husky voice through the vast open doors order a mineral water with no ice.

Leonie smiled to herself and played one of her favourite games: guessing to whom the voice belonged. She thought of the couple of sedate blue-rinsed ladies who’d climbed on to the coach last of all, twittering with relief that one of their bags hadn’t been gobbled up by the carousel but had in fact been rescued from the wrong baggage cart by an apologetic airport official. Definitely one of them. Although that voice was very sexy, very whiskey and cigarettes as it said, ‘Thank you so much,’ in an anxious manner. Too sexy to be a genteel seventy-year-old, unless she’d had a lifetime of fierce chain-smoking behind her.

Twisting in her seat to see if she was right, Leonie was astonished to see that the owner of the voice was the anxious Saluki Woman with the parents from hell, still wearing her long cream outfit and still looking immaculate. But she looked different somehow.

Instead of her previously distant expression, the woman’s face was tired and, no, Leonie wasn’t imagining it, friendly. She even carried herself differently: her body was no longer tense and she gazed around as if some weight had been lifted from her. Before, she’d avoided eye contact like the plague. Now, she looked around, spotted Leonie and gave a half-smile that seemed almost apologetic.

Leonie, naturally friendly, smiled back and immediately regretted it. What if the woman and her awful family decided to sit with her and Hannah during dinner? Or attach themselves to them for the entire cruise? What a terrifying thought. Hannah was mad to think about it. Wishing she didn’t feel such a bitch, Leonie wiped the smile from her face just as abruptly and went back to studying the Nile as if she was about to sit an exam on What Sort of Objects You Might Find Floating By on a Summer’s Evening.

‘You look as if someone just pinched your bottom,’ remarked Hannah, sitting in the chair opposite and placing a glass of orange juice on the table. ‘Or is it because they haven’t pinched your bottom you look so glum?’ In loose white drawstring trousers and a simple caramel fitted T-shirt, she looked classy and comfortable at the same time. Leonie immediately felt overdressed in her floating pink silk.

‘I’m avoiding looking at yer woman in case Ma and Pa Walton decide to join us,’ Leonie explained in a whisper. ‘She smiled at me when she came in and I’m terrified of starting up a friendship I won’t be able to shake off. I can’t stand people like her father. I never lose my temper except with people like him and then I’m like a bomb, I just explode.’

‘I’d love to see you explode at him. Anyway, the poor girl’s lonely,’ Hannah insisted.

‘I collect enough lame dogs at home without collecting a few rabid ones abroad,’ Leonie groaned, knowing that Hannah was right. The poor girl was lonely and it wasn’t fair to ostracize her just because of the people she was travelling with.

They both sneaked casual glances at the woman, who had positioned herself at a table just outside the bar and was trying to take something from her handbag without anyone noticing. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, Hannah decided, and she looked thoroughly miserable, like a cat that had been locked out in the rain. The girl had a long face, Leonie was right about that. But having long straight hair trailing down her face didn’t help. Hannah suspected that some unkind person had once told her that wearing your fringe low detracted from a large nose. Probably that obnoxious father of hers. Hannah bet that if the girl smiled or if she wore something less colourless than that hideously old-fashioned cream thing, she’d be pretty in an understated way.

‘Let’s ask her over for a drink,’ she said now. ‘We’re asking her, not Ma and Pa as well,’ she added. After all, she thought silently, if she was befriending one lonely soul on this holiday where she’d planned for total solitude, she may as well befriend another. ‘I promise you, Leonie, if her father wants to sit with us and they drive us mad, I’ll get rid of them!’

Leonie laughed. ‘If he annoys me, don’t worry, I’ll do the honours.’

Hannah walked gracefully over to the other girl’s table, Leonie watching her new friend enviously. Hannah was so slim and God! so sexy. Leonie would have given five years of her life to look like Hannah for just one night.

‘Hello, I’m Hannah Campbell. Since you’re on your own, would you like to have a drink with us?’

The girl’s face creased into a pleased smile.

Hannah loved being right: the girl was pretty when she smiled. She had a sweet, shy smile and her eyes were a lovely smoky blue colour fringed with fair lashes. If only she’d do something with that hair.

‘I’d love to,’ Emma said in her hesitant, throaty voice. ‘I always feel so self-conscious sitting on my own with a drink. I’m Emma, by the way. Emma Sheridan.’

Carrying her drink, she followed Hannah over to the table and held her hand out to Leonie.

‘Emma Sheridan,’ she said formally.

Leonie grinned. ‘Leonie Delaney,’ she replied.

‘Do you mind me joining you?’ Emma asked.

‘Thrilled,’ Leonie said.

‘Right.’ Hannah decided she needed to do something to liven things up. ‘We all need a drink. What do you want, girls?’

‘I’ve loads of mineral water left,’ Emma said, holding up her glass.

‘Nonsense,’ Hannah said briskly. ‘You need a proper drink.’

The other woman’s expression faltered. ‘I shouldn’t, really. My father, you know…’ she hesitated, catching herself just in time. Imagine telling these two women that she wasn’t going to have a drink because her father disapproved of women drinking more than a sherry and she couldn’t face his disapproval. They’d think she was a complete nutcase. ‘My father says the beer here is supposed to be very strong.’

‘A glass of wine won’t kill you.’

Something fell to the floor and Hannah picked it up. It was a small bottle of Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy, the herbal antidote to stress. You took four drops on your tongue to calm your nerves, she knew, having consumed enough of it when she was recovering from Harry’s round-the-world bombshell.

Emma gave her a wry look. ‘Travelling makes me stressed,’ she said bluntly. She left out the words ‘travelling with my father…’