Sally grinned. “Same as where I came from. They’d live in your ear. My mother used to say there was no need for a local paper, just take a trip down to the corner shop and you’d hear the news from the five nearest parishes.”
They laughed conspiratorially and were soon swapping stories of gossipy neighbours who could pick up a rumour faster than a sub-marine’s radar could detect another vessel.
“When I met Steve, he had this clapped-out old van, and, the first night, he drove me home in it and we sat outside my house for an hour talking,” Sally explained. “Next day, my mum’s next-door neighbour leaned out her window when I was going off to work and said he looked like a lovely lad, wasn’t he the image of a young, blond Rock Hudson, and was it serious?”
“A blond Rock Hudson, huh?” Erin couldn’t stop smiling.
Sally nodded. “She loved him, poor dear. Don’t think she ever took it in that he wasn’t the macho man she’d fallen for in the back seat of the cinema.”
“But wow, he was a looker. Is Steve really like him?”
It was Sally’s turn to smile. “Better looking, although he’s got a bit of grey in the blond now, which I love teasing him about.” Without a trace of self-consciousness, she began to tell Erin how they’d met, fallen in love and got married.
Listening to Sally talking about her husband and her two adorable but utterly mischievous children, Erin realised that it was a breath of fresh air to hear someone genuinely content with their life. Sally finished explaining about how Steve had hoped to make a living out of teaching art classes, but had ended up going back into the corporate world for financial reasons.
“He enjoys working in Cuchulainn,” Sally added, in case she’d made it sound as if Steve would give up work in a flash to go back to art. “Making a living from art was his dream but we’re both realists. We needed the money.”
“Hey, don’t apologise to me,” Erin chuckled. “I worked in human resources for years. Work is not everybody’s first love, I can tell you. They weren’t all buying lottery tickets for fun either. There were three big syndicates in my last company and if any of them had won, the office would’ve been wiped out.”
“I’m really lucky, then,” Sally said humbly. “I love the beauty salon.”
Erin leaned back in her seat, her slim belly full of chilli and chips, and gazed at her new friend. “It’s great to see someone so happy with their life.”
Sally shrugged. “When you’re happy the way Steve and I are, people like to imagine that we both went through some awful torment to be together or had terrible childhoods and now, because of all of that, we’re happy with each other. It’s not like that at all. We both had great childhoods and lovely families, we just appreciate each other and are thankful for what we’ve got.” The sweetly smiling face was serious now. “We know it’s special. Not many people have that. You have to appreciate it when you have it. You never know what’s round the corner, as my mum used to say.”
Erin studied Sally. She was an unusual woman: lively and warm, yet with an old soul in a young body. It was as if Sally had learned the secret to happiness and wanted everyone to share it. But despite her zest for life, there was an air of fragility to her. She was New York thin and there were defined violet shadows under the sparkling dark eyes.
“What about you? You and Greg, I mean. How did you meet?”
Erin gave in and opened the top button on her trousers. “First, please tell me there’s a good gym round here,” she groaned, looking down at her belly.
“There’s two.”
“Tomorrow,” vowed Erin, “I have got to join. OK, how I met Greg. It’s not your average romantic story, for a start. He’d recently been appointed in the company I worked for and he came to my office to say he couldn’t get on with his assistant, who’d been there for years and had worked for the guy before him. As I say, I worked in human resources,” she went on. “I’d also just heard a rumour that a guy on his floor was sexually harassing his assistant but she was so nervous about her job that she was scared to report him and I put two and two together, made six, and reckoned mistakenly that it was Greg.”
“Ouch,” winced Sally.
“Ouch indeed. I gave him a very hard time about why he wanted to get rid of his assistant and when I realised my mistake he took it really well. Said he’d fancied me from the beginning and thought I was trying to put him off by playing tough cookie.”
“Oh,” Sally sighed, “like a classic romance. First hate, then love.”
“No, first hate and then total and utter embarrassment,” pointed out Erin. “I nearly died when I discovered my mistake. I didn’t accuse him of sexual harassment but damn near it. I just cringed to think of how rude I’d been to him. Like, ‘And what is it
precisely
about your assistant that makes you feel you can no longer work with her?’”
“But he forgave you?”
“After a blow-out lobster dinner, yes.”
She went on to talk about how they’d got married, moved to a beautiful duplex and finally how the job market changed and brought them to Dunmore.
Although Sally noticed that, apart from the brief reference to her childhood in Dublin, Erin’s story was centred entirely on her time in the U.S. and had no reference to life before that, she didn’t say anything. It was as if Erin had blanked out the Irish part of her life, preferring to date her existence from her early days in Boston, waitressing and chambermaiding herself into the ground. There was, Sally reflected, a story to tell there with regard to Erin’s upbringing. But Sally was a gifted listener who knew when to probe and when to stand back and say “mm,” and she felt that Erin would prefer the standing-back approach. As she’d learned from the years in the beauty parlour, people talked when they wanted to talk.
“It’s disgraceful, you know. I’m here half a week already and I haven’t sent my résumé anywhere or made phone calls to the head-hunters whose names I was given,” Erin finished. Her work ethic was as insistent as her pulse and she was surprised to discover that the upheaval of moving continent had stifled her normal get-up-and-go. Worse, she felt almost… well, depressed or strangely anx-ious, which she was beginning to think was linked to being back home after all these years. The trauma of her departure from Ireland had come back to haunt her now that she’d returned.
“Give it time. You’ve only just got here. You need to settle in,” advised Sally, waving at the barmaid for the bill.
“We need to eat,” Erin pointed out. “Moving wiped us out and I get scared when I’m not working. It reminds me too much of when I first moved to Boston and didn’t have a cent.”
“Relax, you can be a powerhouse next month.”
“Power apartment block if I keep stuffing my face without work-ing out,” Erin said ruefully. “Thanks for lunch, Sally.”
“My pleasure,” Sally said. “There’s just one condition: we’ve got to do it again.”
“Deal.”
six
T
hree days later, on Friday morning just after nine, Abby pulled up outside a big house in a swish Cork suburb for a private de-cluttering job. Many people thought that Abby no longer took on private commissions since her television success but, in fact, the op-posite was true. Although television paid well, it wasn’t as lucrative as everyone imagined. The big sums of money bandied about in the who’s-earning-what articles in newspapers were generally wrong and often represented what Abby would earn if she sold herself and her entire family into slavery for ten years. A successful television series meant a reasonable amount of money in the bank and the possibil-ity of making more money if the series kept on attracting high rat-ings. It did not mean, as lots of people thought, that someone came round to her house with a Vuitton holdall stuffed with tenners. Pri-vate jobs were her bread and butter.
This morning’s job was one she felt wary of: Tanya Monaghan, a local socialite much given to appearing in the gossip column pho-tos, wanted Abby’s help to declutter her life. Fair enough. Except that Abby had a sneaking suspicion that Tanya’s house didn’t need anything in the way of de-junking and that she merely wanted Abby’s services because of the fame factor. It was like having your dinner parties catered by a famous chef or your garden landscaped by a well-known gardener.
“Abby Barton—you know, from the television—well, she sorts the house out for me,” Tanya would say airily.
There was an intercom built into the wall beside the electric gates of the Monaghan home. Tanya’s husband, who was some sort of construction magnate, was clearly rolling in funds. Abby lowered the Jeep window.
“Abby Barton for Mrs. Monaghan,” she shouted into the intercom.
“Come in,” said a gentle, heavily accented voice. Not Tanya’s, Abby was sure. Therefore the voice of some hired help, which meant the whole house was probably spotless as it was. She parked on a flawless gravel drive and didn’t have to ring the doorbell before the door opened. A shy, dark-haired woman in clumpy shoes smiled at her.
“Welcome,” she said in her quiet voice.
Tanya appeared from the top of the staircase. “I’ll take over, Manuela,” she said dismissively.
“Thanks,” Abby said politely to Manuela, who shot her a friendly look as though to say nobody in this household thanked her very often. Abby would bet her day’s wages that Manuela could tell some stories about her employer. Perhaps they could compare notes afterwards.
“Nice of you to drop in,” said Tanya, waving a languid hand in Abby’s direction. A skeletal blonde with size six hips in pink Versace jeans, she was coiffed to within an inch of her life and, from the studied bored look on her face, was clearly determined not to be fazed by her celebrity house declutterer.
Ms. Size-Six-Hips lit up the first of many cigarettes and took Abby on a tour of the house. It was so big that Abby was glad she’d worn flat shoes. It was also as perfectly tidy as a house in a style magazine. They went upstairs.
“As you can see, I haven’t any room in here,” Tanya said when they reached a dressing room roughly the same size as Abby’s own bedroom. With clothes crammed into every space, it was defi-nitely the messiest room in the Monaghan house, but still nowhere near the scale of disaster that Abby had encountered on the show. One family had lived for three years with all their clothes stored in plastic bin liners because their wardrobes were jammed full of really old clothes and nobody had been able to face tackling either the mouldy wardrobes or the moths. Com-pared to that, Tanya’s dressing room was perfect enough to stand in for a clothes shop display.
“Do you think you can sort it out?” Tanya said, not looking at Abby but scrutinising an immaculate nail.
Abby thought of the endless perfect rooms, which required little work. It would be wrong of her to take on a job where there was none. Only this room needed anything doing to it, and judging by the labels hanging from many of the obviously unworn clothes, the main solution would be to take away Tanya’s gold credit card. The money for the commission would be nice but Abby was intrinsi-cally honest. Besides, she wasn’t in the mood for spending much time with the self-obsessed and rude Tanya Monaghan.
“Tanya, there’s not a lot to do here,” she said bluntly. “This room needs a day’s work but that’s all. I couldn’t take your money for nothing.”
“Well,” Tanya looked almost offended at the idea that her house wasn’t suitable, “can’t you do
something?
”
“Tanya, it would be wrong of me to say the whole house needs doing. You’ve no clutter at all.”
“This room, then,” Tanya said eagerly.
“OK.”
“Great. I’ll send Manuela up in case you want tea or coffee,” Tanya said, smiling now she’d got her way. “I have to go out. I’ll be back much later. Have fun.”
And she was gone, leaving Abby feeling decidedly irritated.
Working in Tanya’s dressing room had another big minus, Abby de-cided when she’d finished the job and was pulling on her jacket: those floor-to-ceiling mirrors were as unforgiving as the ones in the hairdresser’s, and magnified every line. She should have asked Tanya for advice on plastic surgery. Tanya would be the sort of person to know where to go to have eyebags miraculously lifted. The only problems with surgery, Abby decided, were that it hurt and there was always a risk of it going wrong. Look at all those women with lips that looked like inflated Lilos. No, Abby only wanted surgery if she could be guaranteed that she’d look herself, only younger.
On her way home, she stopped at a row of shops to buy a ba-nana and some bottled water to keep her going. Emerging from the shop, she passed a glossy chemist’s and the lure of shiny new lip-sticks drew her in. She’d had a dull but lucrative day. She deserved a treat, like a new lippie or maybe some nail varnish. After an enjoy-able ten minutes dawdling at the beauty counter, Abby decided to buy a new, even more expensive eye cream as well as a lip-plumping lotion, an ultra-moisturising face mask and, to cheer herself up, a mascara that promised spidery lashes like a sexy French actress. With huge jet-black lashes batting, perhaps nobody would notice Abby’s crow’s-feet. As her credit card was processed to debit a horri-fyingly large sum, Abby decided that an eye lift would still be cheaper in the long run. Still, she signed the bill, turned away from the till and went whomp straight into the raincoated body of a man.
The impact winded her and she dropped her bag of make-up to the ground with a loud clank.
“Excuse me,” she muttered, not looking at the man but bending down to retrieve her package, hoping nothing was broken. Clumsy
and
wrinkly. Was there no end to her talents? No wonder her hus-band was bored with her.
“Abby Barton,” said an amused voice. “Long time no see.”
Crouched down, she peered up at the voice and her stomach lurched the way it did when she drove the Jeep at high speed over bumps in the road.
The owner of the expensive-looking raincoat, staring down his long aquiline nose at her, was Jay Garnier.
A man she hadn’t seen for what… eighteen years? Nineteen? At somebody’s wedding, if she remembered correctly, when she’d won-dered in advance if the old magic would be there and had been mildly upset when Jay had rolled up with an exquisite Brazilian girl with blue-black hair and a slim waist measurement which, even so, was undoubtedly a higher figure than her age.