Twenty minutes later Hilary watched the lollipop lady escort them across the road, and smiled as Sophie turned to give her a wave and a kiss. It was hard to believe she had two children of school-going age. Where had the years gone? she wondered as she crawled along in the school-run traffic.
It shocked her sometimes that she was a wife and mother to two little girls and settled into the routine of family life that didn’t seem to vary much when the girls were at school. At least she’d spent a year au pairing in France after leaving school, and she’d spent six weeks on the Greek Islands with Colette O’Mahony, her oldest friend, having an absolute blast the following summer! That had been fun. Hilary grinned at the memory, turning onto the Malahide Road, and groaning at the traffic stuck on the Artane roundabout.
Colette would never in a million years be stuck in school-run traffic, she thought ruefully. Colette had a nanny to bring Jasmine to school in London. No doubt her friend was sipping Earl Grey tea in bed, perusing the papers before going to have her nails manicured or going shopping in Knightsbridge. Their lives couldn’t be more different. But then, even from a very young age, they always had been.
Colette, the only daughter of two successful barristers, had had a privileged, affluent childhood. Her parents fulfilling her every wish, but handing her over to the care of a succession of housekeepers, as they devoted themselves to careers and a hectic social life, before packing Colette off to a posh and extremely expensive boarding school.
In contrast, Hilary’s mother Sally had been a stay-at-home mother, although she did work a few hours on Saturdays in the family lighting business. Hilary’s dad, Mick, owned a lighting store and electrical business and Hilary had worked there every summer holiday, either in the large showrooms, that stocked lights and lamps and shades of every description, or in the office working on invoices and orders and deliveries.
Her parents, unlike Colette’s, were extremely family orientated. Hilary and her older sister Dee had grown up secure in the knowledge that they were much loved. Sally and Mick enjoyed their two girls and had bought a second-hand caravan so they could all spend weekends and holidays together. Hilary’s abiding memory of her childhood was of her mother making scrumptious picnics in the little caravan kitchen, and her dad lugging chairs and windbreaks and cooler bags down to the beach and setting up their ‘spot’. And then the games of rounders, or O’Grady Says, with their parents and aunts, uncles and cousins joining in, a whole tribe of Kinsellas, screeching and laughing. And then the sand-gritted picnic with tea out of flasks, or home-made lemonade, and more often than not, a gale whipping the sand outside their windbreak as clouds rolled in over the Irish Sea, the threat of rain somehow adding to the excitement. And when it did fall, all hands would gallop back up the bank to the caravans, and Mick would laugh and say, ‘That was a close one,’ when they’d make it inside before the heavens opened.
Sally enjoyed the company of her girls and, when time and work permitted, they would head over to Thomas Street, and ramble around the Liberty Market, browsing the stalls, especially the jewellery ones, oohing and aahing over rings and bracelets. Kind-hearted as ever, Sally would fork out a few quid for a gift for Hilary and Dee. Their mother had steered them through the ups and downs of their teen years and had urged her daughters to spread their wings and see the world and follow their dreams. She had been fully behind Hilary’s decision to go to France after her Leaving Cert and be an au pair and become fluent in French.
After her year of au pairing and her six weeks roaming the Greek Islands with Colette, Hilary had planned to do an arts degree with a view to teaching languages but Mick had suffered a heart attack the August before she was to start university, and she had felt it incumbent on her to put aside her own plans for her future, especially as she’d been abroad for more than a year, enjoying the freedom to be carefree and unfettered. She had stepped up to the plate to help her parents in their hour of need. Her older sister Dee was in the middle of a science degree and there was no question of her dropping out of university.
Hilary was desperately disappointed at having to postpone her degree course; she had been so looking forward to going to university and enjoying the social side of life. Dee might study hard, but she partied hard too and lived on campus, free of all parental constraints.
Hilary had been looking forward to moving out of the family home. Having spread her wings in France, she was keen to have the freedom to live her own life but her father’s illness put paid to that. She buried her regrets deep and put her shoulder to the wheel to keep the showrooms ticking over, while Bill O’Callaghan, Mick’s senior electrician, looked after that side of the business.
Hilary had taken a bookkeeping and accounts course at night school soon after, and it was at a trad session one sweltering bank holiday weekend, in the college grounds, that she had met brown-eyed, bodhrán-playing Niall Hammond. She had tripped over someone’s handbag and tipped her Black Velvet Guinness drink down his back.
He’d given a yelp of dismay and jumped to his feet and then started to laugh when he’d turned round and seen her standing, hand to her mouth in horror, her glass almost empty.
‘I . . . I’m terribly sorry,’ she stuttered; dabbing ineffectually at his shirt with a
