Best of Friends. Cathy Kelly
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Название: Best of Friends
Автор: Cathy Kelly
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780007389315
isbn:
‘It’s not her fault,’ snapped Kerry, temper rising. ‘Your bloody mother created all the hassle in the first place by screwing around and getting pregnant –’
‘Don’t blame her!’ shrieked Erin. ‘Don’t you bloody dare. You could have told me and I’d have found her. I was her child and you all kept if from me. How fucking dare you? What gave you all the right to act as God and only tell me what you wanted?’
Her grandmother sat quietly at the table, holding her head in her hands as if to fend off the hurtful words.
‘Talk to me, Mum,’ yelled Erin. ‘Why won’t you talk to me?’
Her grandmother looked up at Erin’s fiery, hurt face. ‘I don’t know what to say, love. I’m so sorry we hurt you but there never seemed to be a right time to tell you when you were small, and then you grew up so fast and the chance had passed.’ She reached out a tired, work-worn hand and beckoned for Erin to take it. But Erin stared stonily at her, refusing the gesture of reconciliation.
‘That’s rubbish. You knew I’d find out one day.’
Her grandmother’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I knew you would but I hoped you’d be able to understand…’
‘Understand what? That you lied to me about the most important thing in my life?’
Her grandmother had started crying then and Kerry had lost her temper, yelling that everyone assumed Erin knew, and how the hell could she blame anyone else for her stupidity. Still Mum cried and Erin couldn’t bear her tears but couldn’t comfort her either. She felt so betrayed that she had no comfort left in her for anyone else.
She’d packed up and left, taking only her clothes and a few photos. Everything else – her gold bracelet she’d been given by Mum and Dad for her Confirmation, the precious earrings Kerry had given her years before when her sister got her first full-time job – she left on the dusty dressing table.
For three days, she stayed with Mo, half hoping someone from the family would find her, half hoping they wouldn’t. Then she got on a plane. After six months travelling the world, working her way through bars and restaurants, she ended up working as an au pair to an American family in Greece when their own au pair left suddenly. When they went home to Boston, she went too.
A gentle knocking at the door woke Greg. ‘What the…?’ He sat up, his eyes sleep-filled, his cropped dark hair flattened against his skull from where his head had lain on the pillow.
The door opened a fraction and a pair of blue eyes peeked in. ‘Do you want your bed turned down?’ said a voice.
‘No, thanks,’ said Greg. He couldn’t see anything except the light coming in through the slightly opened door. ‘What time is it?’
‘Ten to seven.’ The door shut quietly and Greg fumbled for the bedside light.
‘We’ve booked a table for seven,’ he said, climbing out of bed. ‘We should get ready.’
Erin sat up in the bed, her hair in the same through-a-bush-backwards condition as Greg’s. She felt tired now and had no inclination to get up and dress for dinner. She lay down again and felt the old familiar misery envelop her. She and Greg should have stayed in Chicago. When she was there, she didn’t think about her family in the same way. Well, she thought about them, but she could deal with the pain because of the distance. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe the difference was in her – because she certainly felt unlike her usual self here. She didn’t want to be here any more. She wanted to be home. But then, where was home?
Home was a decidedly miserable place for the Barton family. By the end of the first week in April, with the Easter holidays in sight, Abby decided she must put the arguments of the past weeks behind her and do her best to raise everyone’s spirits. Unfortunately, the emotional barometer in Lyonnais still sat firmly at ‘mostly cloudy/storms expected’.
Jess was monosyllabic, despite Abby’s attempts to start mother-daughter chats.
‘I know you’re stressed about school, Jess, love,’ Abby said carefully, afraid she’d say the wrong thing, ‘but the exams will pass. Your dad and I don’t want you to feel under any huge pressure, right? We want you to do well for your sake but we don’t want you to crack up over it.’
Jess had looked at her mother with an expression that said ‘you don’t understand a thing’. Abby hated that expression.
At Tom’s school, the headmaster came down with a bad dose of flu, leaving Tom to deal with both the crisis over the physics teacher, who didn’t want to work out her notice, and the faulty alarm system, which was still going off at odd intervals, to the pupils’ delight.
All he could talk about every evening was the difficulty of getting a substitute teacher at short notice and the endless but vain attempts by the alarm repair people to find the fault in their sophisticated system.
Abby began to wonder whether, if she got a robot to sit at her place in the kitchen every night and programmed it to mutter, ‘That’s terrible,’ at intervals, he would even notice.
To cheer herself up, she went to Sally’s beauty salon for what Sally called ‘the works’. Since she’d moved to Dunmore, Abby went to The Beauty Spot once a month, a luxury unheard of in the pre-Declutter days, when a trip to a salon like Sally’s happened a couple of times a year.
The works included a manicure, an anti-ageing facial, possibly an eyelash tint and sometimes leg waxing, all the while chatting with Sally and letting the relaxing gossipy atmosphere drift round her. Other posher beauticians were now keen to get Abby to patronise their establishments but Abby stayed loyal to Sally and her jewel of a salon. Their friendship actually went back ten years to when Sally was working in Cork as a junior teacher with Tom. When Tom had raved about this new recruit and spoke of how she was a breath of fresh air in St Fintan’s, Abby had half expected an earnest do-gooder with mousy hair, jam jar spectacles, bitten-down fingernails and a crush on Tom.
Sally turned out to be nothing like Abby’s imaginings, of course, and far from being keen on Tom, she was wildly in love with Steve Richardson, the dashing Zhivago to Sally’s Lara. Sally had left teaching long ago to follow her dream of setting up a beauty salon. She and Steve had been idealists and when he’d left the corporate world to teach art, Sally had taken the plunge and given up teaching to do a beauty course. The Beauty Spot was the result. With its fifties-inspired décor, complete with raspberry-pink gingham curtains, the salon was certainly different from the normal temples to beauty. The women of Dunmore loved it and, from its humble beginnings, the business went from strength to strength.
‘What colour would you like?’
Sally’s pixie face stared expectantly up at Abby’s from behind the manicure trolley. Her fingers hovered over the creamy beige Abby usually favoured, because she insisted that her fingers were too short to take rich shades of polish.
But Abby was in a wild mood. ‘That one,’ she said, pointing out a juicy cherry colour.
‘Femme СКАЧАТЬ