Homecoming

‘I don’t know how you do it,’ she said.

‘Nonsense,’ said Gaynor briskly. ‘You’d be able to, if you had to.’

‘No, I wouldn’t.’

It was easier to say that. Easier than picturing herself with a child of her own. Her own child to hold and love forever. No, it was too painful to imagine that, because she wasn’t going to get it. So she cut off all thoughts of children.

She worked with kids every day, but they were teenagers and if anything was destined to put a person off the concept of motherhood, it was facing thirty bored teenage girls five times a day in St Matilda’s.

Gaynor had never tried to set Connie up with men.

‘She’s got too much sense,’ said Nicky, Connie’s younger sister. ‘Blind dates are so insulting. It’s like saying you can’t find a man on your own and a third party has to step in to fix you up.’

Connie was nine years older than Nicky, and occasionally it seemed that those nine years were an enormous chasm.

She had never felt insulted by people trying to find a Mr Right for her. When the man in question was a bit odd, she did wonder if her friends knew her at all, but she appreciated that they were doing their best.

What she’d found mildly insulting was when they stopped trying to set her up. When the blind dates dried up; when she was asked only to girls’ nights out because the husbands and boyfriends were at football matches: that was upsetting.

Am I now officially too old to date? she wondered. But she couldn’t share this with Nicky.

Even though the sisters had the same parents, shared an apartment in Golden Square, and spent a lot of time together, Connie had come to realise that they were from different generations. Nicky glowed with confidence, enthusiasm and a firm belief that, if she wanted something badly enough, she’d get it. Connie, teetering at the sharp end of her thirties, knew from painful experience that wanting something wasn’t enough. Life didn’t give you what you wanted all the time.

When she’d been Nicky’s age, she’d been engaged to Keith, sure that life would bring her marriage, children and happiness. And then Keith had told that he loved her ‘but not like that. Not in love love, if you know what I mean…’

Connie hadn’t, but Keith wasn’t asking her opinion. He was telling her.

‘We’re like brother and sister now,’ he’d gone on. ‘You’re so funny, Connie, and we have great fun, but that’s not enough.’

He’d gone off, dated many women, and was now, apparently – Connie still had a few spies in the Keith camp – seeing a twenty-four-year-old Texan philosophy student and telling people he wanted to marry her.

It was simple. There weren’t enough men to go around, and the ones that were around could afford to be choosy and wait till they were forty-five, then marry child brides.

Connie had somehow missed her chance.

She wasn’t thinking of missed chances this icy Thursday morning in January as she stood under the shower in Apartment 2B in 14 Golden Square, fiddling with the shower controls. She was cross that the shower had broken again and wondering where she had put the attachment for the bath taps, because she couldn’t go to work without a shower, and she wouldn’t have time for a bath. Baths were a nighttime activity, when there was time to luxuriate and when Nicky was out with Freddie, her boyfriend. Freddie was in the apartment so often, he almost lived there and Connie had too often wandered out of the bathroom with a towel half round her, only to find Freddie had miraculously appeared and was sprawled all over the couch watching Sky Sports.

Not that Freddie was the lascivious sort. On the contrary, he treated Connie like a sweet elderly lady and would have had to be given CPR if anyone had suggested otherwise, towel or no towel.

‘Nicky!’ she yelled now, giving up and stepping out of the bath. She wrenched open the cupboard under the hand basin and an avalanche of shampoo, fake tan and body lotion bottles fell across her feet. ‘Have you seen the hose attachment for the taps? The shower’s broken again.’

‘What? No,’ yelled Nicky from her bedroom.

Nicky had been out at a book launch the night before and was going into work late. There were times when Connie envied her sister her fabulous job and this was one of them. In St Matilda’s, even if you’d been in the school till midnight every night for a whole week during the end-of-term run of a play – Lady Windermere’s Fan last year – there was no option for arriving later in the morning to make up for it. Classes started at ten to nine and both pupils and teaching staff were in trouble if they were late. Whereas at Peony Publishing, where Nicky was an assistant editor, when there was a book launch the night before, some laxity was given with regards to office hours the following morning.

Connie pulled her fleecy pyjamas back on and marched into the kitchen to begin rummaging through the big cupboard where the vacuum cleaner, the ironing board and the mop lived. It was crammed with junk and many weekends started with Connie deciding that this was the one where she’d tidy it out. Sadly, this never happened. The lure of buying the Saturday papers and enjoying them in Titania’s Palace with a latte and a couple of cupcakes always won out.

‘Damn, blast and double blast!’ Connie gave up. It was nearly eight and she had to be out the door by twenty past. In the bathroom, she performed an imperfect toilette with an inch of lukewarm bath water, then ran through her normal high-speed make-up application. There was no point doing too much, as working in a girls’ school had taught her that it was impossible to compete with the professional level of make-up application the girls managed. Any dodgy eyeliner work would be noticed and, if it was the fifth years, commented upon.

‘Miss O’Callaghan, what happened to your eyes?’

Connie would not be able to resist a joke under the circumstances, which the fifth years loved, and which the principal, Mrs Caldwell, hated.

‘You’re too familiar with the girls, Ms O’Callaghan,’ she’d sniff.

Connie no longer cared about the principal’s dressing downs. She liked being able to have fun with her pupils and the day she could no longer crack a joke, she’d give up teaching.

Now, she dressed in navy, with black tights, her voluminous grey coat and flat black shoes. Unlike her sister, who was of fairy proportions, Connie had taken after her father’s side of the family and was five nine in her socks. Another reason it was hard finding a man. The world was full of small men who took it as a personal insult to their masculinity if a woman was taller than them. Comments about Napoleon only enraged them further.

‘Did you find it?’ Nicky hung on the door jamb, half asleep, wearing bed socks and a stripey nightie. Her highlighted hair was sticking out at all angles, yesterday’s mascara was creased round her brown eyes, but she was still pretty. Connie never thought for a moment about whether it was difficult having a sibling so gorgeous. In her eyes, Nicky was just Nicky, the baby sister Connie had longed for and had mothered ever since she was born.

‘No, I didn’t. Start running a bath now if you want to wash without developing hypothermia.’

‘Crap,’ muttered Nicky. ‘I need to wash my hair.’

‘What time are you due in work?’ Connie asked. ‘Patsy will fit you in for a quick wash and blow-dry, I’m sure.’

Both sisters loved the old-fashioned hair salon round the corner.

Nicky rubbed her eyes. ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

Connie whisked a brush through her hair, it was her crowning glory, their mother liked to say. Her hair was shoulder length, the rich brown of a cinnamon stick and glossier than any L’Oreal commercial. Her eyes were large like her sister’s but they were a plain old brown and didn’t flash with amber fire the way Nicky’s did. Compared to Nicky, Connie knew she was ordinary and she didn’t mind, because Nicky deserved all that was good and wonderful. But sometimes, just sometimes, Connie wished she was beautiful too.

Unlike the rest of the planet, where being paired-up was practically compulsory for everyone from humans to swans, it was easy to be single in St Matilda’s. Many of the teachers had been there donkey’s years and the place was split fifty-fifty between married and single. The scattering of nuns from the convent helped. Old Sister Benedict, who’d been in the order since the Pope was in short pants, froze in horror if she so much as heard anyone discussing boyfriends. The equally old but entirely adorable Sister Laurence looked fondly on any talk of the opposite sex, but believed – as she often told wide-eyed girls in her religious education classes – that men were innocent folk and intelligent women knew better than to rely on them for anything.

‘A career, girls, a career is the answer!’ was her mantra.

Nobody in the staffroom set up dates and nobody in the school looked down on anyone for being single, apart, perhaps from Sylvie Legrand, who had wanted to get married since she knew such a thing existed.

Today was Sylvie’s last day at St Matilda’s before her wedding. Sylvie taught French, chemistry and, unofficially, how to wear a scarf like a good Parisian. Chic was a hopelessly inadequate word to describe her. Connie felt another word needed to be invented, something with greater scope to encompass how utterly glamorous Sylvie managed to be for all that she wasn’t particularly good looking.

It was a talent, Connie decided.

‘You look tired,’ were Sylvie’s welcoming words to her in the staffroom.

Tactless was another inadequate word to describe Sylvie – or perhaps the tactlessness was just an absence of Irish flummery. Plámás, as it was named in the Irish language. Plaw-maws. Even if a person were half dead and in urgent need of medical assistance, in the Irish rulebook it was customary to say, ‘You’re looking great!’

Connie liked the Irish kindness better, but then which one of them was getting married in a few days and which one was pathetically single? Maybe men liked straight-talking women and didn’t rate ones who were trained to say the right thing instead of the honest thing.

She might have saved herself years of boredom if she’d said, ‘I don’t fancy you,’ within minutes of each new date instead of spending weeks working up to saying something kinder that approximated to the same thing.

‘I stayed up late watching the Mad Men box set,’ Connie admitted to Sylvie now. There was no point lying to her French colleague, she’d get it out of Connie, one way or the other.

‘Why always the box sets?’ demanded Sylvie, who tended to get more exotically French, losing all sense of grammar, when she was irritated. ‘Why not the wine bar or the salsa classes, huh?’

Sylvie had dragged Connie to a tango class once. It had not been a success. As with life in general, there hadn’t been enough men to go round and few of them were tall enough to partner Connie.

‘I like box sets,’ Connie pointed out. ‘And I’ve given up wine bars and salsa classes for good. Anyway, you can make me look less tired later, for tonight. I’ll need a lot of that under-eye-bag-banisher thing you use.’

It was Sylvie’s hen night that evening and the teachers who were invited were all going to Sylvie’s house first to get ready. Connie suspected it was so that all of them would be turned out to her French friend’s high standards and not let her down in the restaurant.

It would not be a wild, crazy night, partly because it was a week night and partly because Sylvie didn’t like wild nights. It was to be a dinner in an elegant French restaurant in the city. No mad drinking in a crazy bar, and definitely no wearing of L-plates and fake wedding veils for Sylvie.

In a few days, Sylvie would fly home to Paris for her wedding to the gorgeous Isaac, a tall, dark Belfast man with saturnine good looks and a low, deep voice. She’d met him at a rugby match in Dublin and he’d swept her off her feet. Only a few of the staff, Connie included, would be attending the wedding. The principal had been very annoyed that it was taking place in the middle of term, but Sylvie had somehow talked her round. Isaac’s brother would be home from Australia, Sylvie’s sister would be back from Argentina: with family dotted around the globe, the time suited perfectly. Sylvie didn’t want a little thing like work to get in the way.

Tonight, Sylvie would look stunning, no matter what she wore. Connie herself planned to dress in a pair of black jeans with a loose chiffon blouse, which hid a multitude. Thirtynine was definitely a watershed in terms of figure. Connie couldn’t seem to shift that extra bit of fat around her middle.

Luckily, Connie never felt any hint of envy towards her friend. Sylvie was just Sylvie, you couldn’t change her.

Connie’s mother didn’t see it the same way and was forever anxiously telling her daughter that there was no point hanging around with a glamorous woman like Sylvie, because all the men went mad for her, and no wonder Connie was still on her own.

‘With friends like that, how do you expect to find a man? The coal won’t shine beside the diamond, will it?’

There wasn’t really an answer to that. Her mother didn’t mean it to be cruel: just honest in a worried way.

Perhaps once Sylvie was married, her mother would look round and find something else to blame for Connie’s inability to get a man. Connie sighed at the thought.

‘I won’t have time to make you all up,’ Sylvie was protesting. ‘There are eight of us. I am not Wonderwoman.’

‘You are to us,’ laughed Connie. ‘All right, I’ll plaster a bit more make-up on later. We won’t let you down.’

‘Tell me again: what do you mean, you are giving up wine bars?’ Sylvie demanded. She was like a dog with a bone when it came to Connie’s single status. ‘You will be alone forever if you do not try. Do you think men lurk on the streets waiting for us to find them? Non! We have to look for them!’

‘I have looked,’ protested Connie. ‘I’m exhausted looking. I want him to start looking for me.’

‘How will he find you, if you are at home watching television?’

‘He’ll have a ladder and he’ll see me in my window,’ sighed Connie. ‘I don’t know. I give up, Sylvie. I’m taking this month off.’

‘You need a facial,’ said Sylvie, peering at Connie’s face with a beady eye. ‘You are all congested. Too many pastries. Look at your pores!’

‘You can make me look fabulous tonight and hide my big pores,’ said Connie, and hurried off to her class.

The day flew.

Her congested pores notwithstanding, Connie had a quick sandwich and a cup of tea at lunch in the staffroom where a cake was cut for all those people who wouldn’t be coming to the hen night. Then she headed to the library because it was the only quiet place to do some marking.

After lunchbreak, she had the first years, followed by double history with the fifth years, which she wasn’t looking forward to because she was too tired for their antics. You had to be in the whole of your health for a giddy bunch of sixteen-year-olds.

Today, there was wild excitement because they’d got something planned as a send-off for Miss Legrand, who was their class teacher.

After history class, there was to be a small party for her departure. Needless to say, not a shred of work was being done and as Connie watched her students pretend to read about Charles Stewart Parnell, she knew they were all communicating with each other about the party. Notes, sign language, whispered sentences – if only they were as good at history as they were at plotting.

There was absolutely no point in trying to counter this behaviour. A wise older teacher had once told Connie that a class is like a tidal wave and once it turns, it turns. ‘Save the lesson for another day, or you’ll go insane with impotent rage.’

She’d also told Connie that deafness was a useful aid for teachers too.

So Connie admired the girls’ party hairstyles and thought about how it felt like the end of an era. When this school year was over, Sylvie would be leaving St Matilda’s for good. It seemed like only yesterday that the two women had started out as new teachers in the school together. Now Sylvie would be gone to start married life with her husband in his home city, Belfast, and Connie would stay on at St Matilda’s, growing old with the nuns.

The school bell rang lustily, taking Connie by surprise. She liked to give pupils a five-minute warning near the end. But today, it didn’t look as if the fifth years cared. They leapt to their feet and swept the books off their desks at high speed.

‘Bye, Miss O’Callaghan,’ they murmured as they raced out, dropping their textbooks on her desk.

So many of them were impossibly glamorous, Connie thought. Their long shaggy hair was exquisitely styled each morning. Outwardly, they looked like confident young Valkyries. It was only through teaching the girls that a teacher would learn how young and worried they sometimes were.

It seemed as if half the school was crammed into the fifth years’ classroom by the time Connie made her way there. Sylvie was sitting on the desk surrounded by cards and with a giant sparkling gift bag on her lap.

‘Please tell me this is a present and not something to do with a tampon and red ink from the art room?’ Sylvie said loudly.

The assembled girls roared with laughter.

‘You laugh, huh? But poor Mr Shaw, he did not laugh, non?’

Only Sylvie could get away with a joke about the trick played on the quiet maths and physics teacher.

‘Non, mademoiselle!’ the girls roared back.

Finally, Sylvie unwrapped the package inside the gift bag. It contained two Irish crystal champagne glasses with a bottle of champagne.

‘There is writing,’ Sylvie exclaimed. ‘For Mademoiselle Legrand, for the most romantic day of your life, Year Five. I love it, girls!’ she cried.

Connie, who’d been expecting a jokey present or even a red satin negligee with white marabou – it was from the fifth years, after all – choked back a tear. Why this touched her after a whole day thinking about Sylvie’s hen night, she had no idea. But suddenly, she realised that Sylvie was going to have the most romantic night of her life next month when she got married, while she, Connie, had no hope of ever sharing something so special with a loved one. Sylvie would now have what Connie wanted so much: her own family. Sylvie and her husband had bought a pretty three-bedroomed house in Belfast. Everyone had seen the photographs.

The second bedroom was to be a spare bedroom and Sylvie was going to keep her clothes in it like a proper dressing room, she’d informed Connie. The third bedroom was to be the nursery.

‘I will paint it yellow. Yellow is good whether it is a boy or a girl,’ Sylvie pointed out.

Connie had said nothing but thought again of how wonderful it must be to be able to plan your life with such confidence. Sylvie was getting married and she was sure that a baby would follow. She’d probably got her eye on a diamond band in Tiffany’s to mark the birth of said baby.

Connie had nothing planned for the rest of her life.

She’d never cried watching Gone with the Wind or even Sleepless in Seattle, but now, standing at the back of the fifthyear classroom, she wanted to burst into tears.

Nicky O’Callaghan beamed as she skipped down the steps of the house and hopped into the driver’s seat of her car. She almost waved at the silver-haired, older lady who lived in the apartment below hers, and who was sitting in her bay window, looking out on to the square. Such was her happiness, that Nicky wanted to smile and wave at everyone. But the woman wasn’t really staring at Nicky in her car: she was gazing into the middle distance, there but somehow not there.

She did, however, send a bright glinting smile at the man at the roadworks where she got held up for ten minutes. Nicky’s smile was infectious.

The man at the roadworks looked back suspiciously. It was unheard of for gorgeous blonde women with glossy red lips to grin at him with delight when he was on kango-hammer detail for roadworks that brought the traffic down Amiens Street to a standstill.

He chanced a wink at her as the lights finally turned green and she managed to edge her Mini Cooper forward and off down the bare expanse of road ahead.

And she winked back! He decided he’d chance the lottery at lunchtime. It was definitely his lucky day.

Nicky wanted to wink and smile at everyone today. Not that she didn’t smile a lot anyway: she had a lot to smile about, she knew. But today was special.

Today was her first day as an engaged woman. Last night, after the book launch, Freddie had taken her out to a late dinner.

There was rarely much in the way of food at book launches, just nibbles and wine, so if you stayed too long, you ate nothing, drank too much and made a holy show of yourself in front of your colleagues, your boss, and if you were spectacularly unlucky, press photographers too. Nicky was far too clever to fall into that trap, so she drank water at launches and ate afterwards.

She’d been telling Freddie all about the author’s speech, and how gratifying it was to have been thanked by the author.

‘Scarlett’s the first author I’ve edited from the start of her career. I feel like I’ve been a part of everything that’s happened, I can’t tell you, Freddie, how amazing that feels…’

When she’d started in Peony as an editorial assistant five years ago, she’d had to prove herself by spending a lot of time doing the vital but painstaking copy-editing work that took place after the author and their main editor had agreed on a final manuscript. Scarlett Ryan was the first author she’d been let loose on, so to speak, and when Scarlett’s debut novel had been a success, she’d insisted that Nicky was part of that success.

‘Dominic, the managing director, was there and Scarlett kept saying how much she owed me and what a fabulous editor I was! She said I’d showed her how to find her true voice. It was wonderful.’ She stopped long enough to take a sip of wine.

‘This is delicious,’ she remarked appreciatively. ‘Expensive, I bet. I thought you were broke, Freddie. Are we celebrating something?’

And that’s when it had happened. Freddie, wunderkind of Mesmer Marketing, boyishly handsome with his floppy dark fringe, hopeless at laundry but sterling when it came to doing dishes, had slipped off his chair in the fashionable Le Pinot Noir bistro, got to his knees and whipped a small box from his inside breast pocket.

Normally, nothing surprised Nicky. She was legendary for it. She noticed everything, from how low they were on milk in the office fridge, to how up-to-date the department was with getting through the slush pile of manuscripts. But in the excitement over Scarlett, she hadn’t registered Freddie’s air of excitement. She noticed it now, along with the glint of something that sparkled.

‘It’s a diamond,’ she said in shock, fingers brushing Freddie’s as she held the small blue box.

‘Do you like it?’

The ring was clearly new but made to look old, with a small round diamond surrounded by teenier specks of diamonds in a platinum band. For all her fondness for labels and fashionable clothes, Nicky was a romantic at heart. Huge diamonds meant nothing. This tiny but beautiful ring was proof of Freddie’s love for her. He’d gone and chosen it himself, which was quite something because Nicky had strong opinions on such things.

‘Here,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Put it on.’

With shaky fingers, he took the ring from the velvet surround and slid it on to Nicky’s delicate finger.

‘Oh.’ They both sighed as they admired it.

Nicky was so petite that on her finger, the tiny ring looked totally at home.

‘I was thinking,’ said Freddie, ‘let’s get married soon. We don’t have the money for a big bash, so we could have a small wedding. Nobody will mind, everyone’s broke, things are different now.’ He rushed on. ‘That way, we can save money for somewhere to live. What do you think?’