She hoped that lanky, queeny friend of Hilary’s was suffering too. Colette scowled, still miffed at being made to feel she’d gatecrashed their private party. She wouldn’t bother ringing Hilary to see how she was. She’d ring Lindsay Kennedy and Marcy Byrne instead and see if they were available for lunch. It would be good to meet and catch up with the Sutton gang and let them see how fabulous she looked and how well she was doing. Lindsay and Marcy were well-heeled ladies-who-lunch but they didn’t have anything like her wealth, style or status, Colette thought happily, throwing off the bedclothes to go and find her trusty Filofax. She used a mobile phone in London and it was so handy, but they were only coming into vogue in Ireland and most of her friends and acquaintances were, unfortunately, still slaves to the landline.
Colette poured herself another cup of coffee and took it to the chair by the big window that overlooked St Stephen’s Green. It was a glorious sunny morning, and the lush green of the trees, interspersed with frothy splashes of pink from late-flowering cherry blossom, was etched against a sapphire sky. A welcome foil to the lanes filled with slow-moving traffic that circled the Green. As bad as Piccadilly, Colette reflected, remembering how she and her teenage friends had invariably made their way to Grafton Street and the Dandelion Market on Saturdays, all those years ago. Just across the park where a big shopping centre now stood, Dublin’s most famous market had flourished. The old stables, mews and courtyards had hosted many fabulous stalls selling bang up-to-date fashions that had thrilled their youthful hearts. Colette even remembered seeing a very young U2 playing one of their first gigs in the courtyard, and had thought The Edge was the coolest guy she had ever seen.
She was happy then, and she hadn’t even realized it, too busy trying to impress her peers, and worrying about who would marry her or fretting that she would be left on the shelf. Spinsterhood was something they had all agonized about. She wondered if Hilary hadn’t made the first move towards marriage, causing her to panic, would she have ended up marrying Des?
She who, like her peers, had felt she was such a ‘liberated’ young woman of the eighties, with the world as her oyster, had still been unable to shake off the notion that marriage was the holy grail for a woman. Centuries of conditioning had not been eroded by the advance of so-called feminism, whatever feminists might like to think, she thought wryly, thinking of a banking acquaintance of theirs who had shot up through the ranks, was highly skilled and competitive, but was desperate to be married before she was forty when her ‘successful high-flying career-woman’ label would inevitably change to ‘sad singleton who never got a man’. Better to be divorced even than to be one of them.
Hilary and Niall had married for love, and for years Colette had secretly envied them that. The way they looked at each other, the intimate little manner they would hold hands or hug or make each other laugh. No matter how much Colette had sparkled or flirted, Niall had only ever had eyes for Hilary, much to her chagrin because she had always fancied him.
The Hammonds’ marriage was far different from hers and her husband’s. She and Des were a perfect match. They always looked designer good; they had the same aspirations: to be wealthy, successful, and well placed in society. They each recognized what the other brought to their marriage and appreciated it, but were they deeply in love? Colette sighed. Love was for fools! Love hurt! And love didn’t last. She had seen that at first hand, thanks to Rod Killeen. She preferred what she had, thank you very much, she decided briskly, flipping through the phone section of her diary to find Marcy Byrne’s number.
‘Honestly, Frank, Colette could have let us know she was going to be in Dublin for the weekend, and she could have brought Jasmine. She has no consideration for us after all we did for her,’ Jacqueline groused, placing the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. ‘She makes no allowance for the fact that we rarely see our granddaughter. The child will soon be a stranger to us. Sometimes I think Colette’s trying to punish us for something.’
‘Don’t be silly, Jacqueline,’ Frank said irascibly. ‘What would she be punishing us for? We gave her the best of everything. A car when she was eighteen, foreign holidays, college in London. All she ever wanted. We paid a fortune for that wedding in Rome! What’s her problem?’
‘She’s always been the same, a little madam,’ Jacqueline declared. What kind of a family were they when their only child didn’t let them know that she was coming for a visit, and instead preferred to stay in a hotel? She sighed deeply, staring out at the sea, framed by two spiky palm trees, that shimmered and glittered at the end of their immaculately kept landscaped gardens. A house, not much bigger than theirs, half a mile away, had sold for a million recently causing huge excitement at the golf club. Prices were beginning to climb after all the grim, grey days of the eighties recession and the economy was powering ahead. She and Frank were seriously thinking of buying a villa beside a golf course in the
