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

‘I haven’t been away for a year and neither have you,’ Hugh went on. ‘Just a week in Italy later this month; maybe two weeks. It’ll be black with tourists in August but we’ll have a great time.’

‘I know it sounds lovely,’ Leonie began. It was hard when everyone and their granny were talking about summer holidays and you had nothing planned. But she hadn’t felt like taking a break with the twins away and Hugh’s idea that they should go away together had come at a bad time. The girls were due home next week and she ached to see them. Every day that passed was a day nearer to her hugging them and telling them she loved them so much. ‘I can’t leave the girls on their own now,’ she pointed out.

‘They’re happy enough away from you to last for a couple of months without you. They were only supposed to go for six weeks,’ Hugh said sharply.

That hurt. The fact that Mel and Abby had wanted to be away from her for nearly three whole months pained Leonie more than she dared tell anyone.

‘They may as well stay with us when we go to Charlie’s ranch in Texas this summer,’ Ray had said on the phone in early July when the girls’ six weeks was up. ‘They could learn how to ride and have fun. It’s only a few more weeks. Abby is blossoming. She’s doing so well, why not let them stay, Leonie?’

Mel and Abby had begged to be allowed to stay. ‘Please, please, Mom,’ they’d pleaded.

She had given in and then cried for two days afterwards, feeling betrayed by her darling daughters who wanted to spend time away from her. It was different with Danny. He was older and more independent. He’d announced that he was spending a month with pals backpacking around Europe and Leonie hadn’t minded. She’d worried and fretted, naturally, afraid he’d come to harm, or be mugged, or get mixed up with drugs or something. But he was twenty since May and it wasn’t her job to rein him in any more. Without him and the girls, the cottage was like a morgue. Penny was depressed and even Herman the hamster had gone into a decline, not playing on his wheel or anything.

Even the lure of Portofino in the sweltering heat couldn’t drag Leonie away from home once her beloved twins returned.

‘I can’t go now,’ she said reluctantly. ‘If only you’d thought of it earlier, we could have gone and come back by now.’

‘I’m down on the roster for holidays at the end of this month,’ snapped Hugh. ‘Anyway, that’s not the issue. It’s Melanie and Abigail. They’re not babies any more. You’ve got to let them go.’

‘That’s a bit rich coming from you,’ Leonie retorted.

‘What do you mean by that?’ he demanded.

‘Oh, come on, you don’t need me to spell it out, do you?’ she said, angry now. ‘You’ve got a twenty-two-year-old daughter and you wouldn’t let her make her damned bed if you could possibly do it for her! Jane is totally ruined, spoilt. You give her money all the time, even though she has a perfectly good job, and you run to help her at the drop of a hat. Look at that time she got a flat tyre going to a party and you left me sitting like a fool in the restaurant to rush off and change it for her! That’s not normal! My girls are still teenagers, they’re not even sixteen yet. You’re the one treating a grown-up woman like a little girl.’

Hugh was staring at her furiously. ‘I love Jane – ’ he began.

‘Tell me something I don’t know!’ shrieked Leonie. ‘It’s obsessive, it’s not normal. And then you accuse me of not being able to let my kids go. The words pot, kettle and black come to mind.’

‘You have no right to talk to me like that.’ Hugh’s face was choleric.

‘Why not? You think you’ve the right to say anything to me about my kids, but nobody is allowed to breathe a word about yours. No, not both of them, actually,’ Leonie said suddenly, ‘only Jane. Poor Stephen never gets a look in.’

The doorbell chimed at that instant. Hugh looked out the window and the stricken look disappeared from his face. ‘It’s Jane,’ he hissed. ‘Perhaps we can keep this argument to ourselves?’

‘Suits me,’ Leonie snapped back.

Jane waltzed in, arms full of bags, with the dogs dancing around her feet.

‘Hello, Leonie,’ she said, almost friendly. ‘I was out in Liffey Valley shopping and I thought I’d drop in on Dad on the way home.’

Leonie stared at the carrier bags. Five bags, all jammed with clothes. All purchased by a woman who still hadn’t paid her father back for booking her holiday on his credit card.

‘What did you buy?’ asked Hugh in his indulgent daddy voice.

Jane beamed and pulled out a lycra black dress that would have looked tarty on a nun. Leonie tried and failed to imagine Jane wearing it. Leonie could never figure out why Jane deliberately bought clothes that did nothing for her shape.

‘Bit revealing,’ Hugh said, eyeing the garment up and down. ‘I suppose you’re going to wow them at the office dinner in that?’

They both laughed conspiratorially.

‘Do you remember that last party when you picked us up from Buck’s and we were all plastered? And when you brought me back to Mum’s, you had to carry me up the stairs?’ Jane began.

She did that every single time they met, Leonie noticed: started a conversation designed to exclude Leonie. As if to say, Look at us, we have a history, we talk about things you know nothing of.

Jane chattered away on the ‘Do you remembers…’ for a few more minutes, shooting Leonie the odd sly glance of triumph.

Leonie picked up Harris again and cuddled him close to her. He favoured her with a couple of devoted licks.

‘What dinner dance?’ she said, attempting to be polite for Hugh’s sake. She couldn’t care less about any office dinner and thought the dress was seriously unsuitable for any professional occasion, unless the profession in question involved dancing sordidly around a pole on a stage in front of lots of drunken, drooling men.

‘We have a big party every summer,’ Jane explained, in the condescending tones of a professor explaining quantum physics to a three-year-old. ‘It used to be a barbecue but some of us complained that we wanted a proper do.’ She smirked. ‘We’re having it in the Great Room in the Shel-bourne this year. I can’t wait.’

Leonie would like to see those photos. The Shelbourne and black lycra hooker dresses didn’t match up in her mind.

‘I was about to make coffee,’ Hugh said. ‘Do you want a cup?’

‘Yeah,’ said Jane, sitting down on the couch and picking up the holiday brochures.

‘You going on holiday, Dad?’ she yelled after him.

The demon in Leonie’s head woke up. ‘No,’ she said sweetly, ‘your father and I are trying to pick a holiday together. He wants us to go to Italy but it’s a bad time for me.’

It was gratifying to see Jane’s cold little eyes widen in horror.

‘Maybe September,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I’ve always wanted to drive along the Italian coast in a sports car. Your dad would love that, wouldn’t he?’

She felt marginally guilty for being bitchy to a kid, but then Jane was hardly a kid. She was a kid the same way that girl in The Exorcist was.

‘I don’t know if he’d like that,’ Jane said coolly. ‘In September, we always used to rent a cottage in West Cork. Him, me and Stephen.’

‘But you haven’t done that for years,’ Leonie said, ‘have you?’

‘Done what?’ said Hugh, coming back into the room with a tray of coffee-filled mugs.

‘Gone to West Cork,’ said Jane wistfully. ‘Oh, Daddy, can’t we go again this year? That trip with the girls was nice but to be totally relaxed, we need a week in Clonakilty or somewhere. Pub lunches, traditional music sessions at night, walking on the beach…please, let’s go?’

She looked like a child, Leonie thought. A child of divorced parents who’d spent years successfully playing one off the other. That was what Leonie had been afraid would happen to Mel, Abby and Danny when she and Ray split up: that they’d become experts at playing on both parents’ guiltometers, lowering their eyes at opportune moments and saying, ‘Dad would let me do that…’ Luckily, it hadn’t happened that way. But Jane displayed all the symptoms. The only strange thing was, she’d been almost an adult when Hugh and his wife had split up. And she wasn’t using her wiles to manipulate them. She only wanted to manipulate Hugh so she could have him all to herself.

Hugh was now considering a cottage in West Cork. ‘You could come then, couldn’t you, Leonie?’

Without Jane, it would have been an appealing proposition. Leonie was very fond of Stephen and would have enjoyed a holiday with him along. But not with Ms Spoilt.

‘I’d have to bring Mel and Abby,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘I thought it would be just us, Dad,’ pouted Jane.

‘Leonie needs a break, Janie,’ he replied lovingly. ‘Maybe the girls could stay with their granny for the week,’ he suggested.