Cathy Kelly - Cathy Kelly 6-Book Collection - Someone Like You, What She Wants, Just Between Us, Best of Friends, Always and Forever, Past Secrets

‘Only kidding,’ Leonie said hurriedly. ‘I’m looking forward to it, honest. I’ve always wanted to go to Egypt. I can’t wait to buy some marvellous Egyptian jewellery,’ she added with genuine enthusiasm. Her collection of exotic costume jewellery took up most of her crowded dressing table already, filigree earrings tangled up with jangling metal Thai necklaces, most of it purchased in ethnic shops in Dublin and London instead of in their original, far-flung homelands.

‘Watch those souks and markets though,’ warned Anita, a distrustful traveller who believed that anywhere beyond the English Channel was off the beaten track. ‘They love big women in the East, you know.’

‘Oooh, goodie,’ growled Leonie, instinctively reverting to the Leonie Delaney: wild, sexy, earth goddess image she’d been projecting for years. If Anita guessed that the image was all fake and that most of Leonie’s hot dates were at home with the remote control and a carton of strawberry shortcake ice cream, she never said anything.

After a few more minutes’ chat where Leonie promised to enjoy herself, she hung up, privately thinking that if any white-slave trader wanted to whisk her away to a life of sexual servitude, he’d have to be bloody strong. At five eight and fifteen stone, she was hardly dancing harem girl material and was powerful enough to flatten the most ardent Egyptian bottom-pincher.

Anita was sweet to say it, she thought later, examining the effect of her saffron Indian skirt worn with her favourite black silk shirt and a coiled necklace of tiny amber beads. Black wasn’t really suitable for travelling to a hot country, she knew that, but she felt so much more comfortable wearing it. Nothing could hide her size, Leonie knew, but black camouflaged it.

Rich colours suited her and she loved to wear them: flowing tunics of opulent crimsons, voluminous capes in soft purple velvet and ankle-length skirts decorated with Indian mirrors and elaborate embroidery in vibrant shades. Like an aristocratic fortune-teller or a showily elegant actress from thirties Broadway, Leonie’s style of dressing could never be ignored. But black was still her favourite. Safe and familiar. As satisfied as she’d ever be with her reflection, she started on her face, applying the heavy panstick make-up expertly.

If she hadn’t been a veterinary nurse, Leonie would have loved to have been a make-up artist. She hadn’t been blessed with a pretty face, but when she’d worked her magic with her pencils and her brushes and her eyes were hypnotically ringed with deep kohl, she felt she looked mysterious and exotic. Like the girl in those old Turkish Delight adverts who sat waiting in the dunes for her sheikh. Certainly not too big, too old and too scared of a lonely, manless future.

Her mouth was a lovely cupid’s bow that would have looked fabulous on some petite size-eight model but seemed slightly incongruous on a tall solid woman. ‘A fine hoult of a woman,’ as one of the old men who brought his sheepdog into the vet’s used to call her admiringly.

Her face was rounded with cheekbones she adored because, no matter how fat she got, they stayed defiantly obvious, saving her face from descending into plumpness. Her hair, naturally rat-coloured as she always said, was golden from home dyeing because she couldn’t really afford to have it done professionally any more.

But Leonie’s most beautiful features were her eyes. Huge, naturally dark-lashed, they were the same stunning aquamarine as the Adriatic and looked too blue to be real.

‘Your eyes make you beautiful,’ her mother would say encouragingly when she was growing up. ‘You don’t need to speak, Leonie, your eyes do it for you.’

Her mother’s attitude had always been that you were whatever you wanted to be. Glamorous herself, Claire told her daughter that stunning looks came from the inside.

Unfortunately, Leonie had decided at the age of nineteen that her mother was wrong and that lovely eyes weren’t enough to make her the beautiful woman she longed to be, a Catherine Deneuve lookalike. This realization had come about when she went to college after years of being educated in the closeted female environment of the convent school. At University College Dublin, she discovered men for the first time. And also discovered that the ones she fancied in biology lectures were much more keen on her less intelligent but smaller classmates. Her long-distance paramours asked Leonie if she’d join in their Rag Week mixed tug-of-war team, and asked other girls to go to the Rag Ball with them.

Miserably, she concluded that she was nothing more than a plain, fat girl. Which was why she’d decided to reinvent herself. Leonie Murray, shy girl who was always at the back at school photographs, had become the splendidly eccentric Leonie, lover of unusual clothes, wacky jewellery and plenty of war paint applied as if she was ready for her close up, Mr De Mille. As she was physically larger than life, Leonie decided to become literally larger than life. Vivacious, lively and great fun, she was invited to all the best parties but never asked to go outside for a snog on the terrace.

Her first and only true love, Ray, had seen beneath the layer of Max Factor panstick to see the deeply insecure woman she really was. But she and Ray just weren’t meant to be. Their marriage had been a mistake. She’d been grateful to be rescued from loneliness, and being grateful was no reason to get married, as she knew now. Neither was being pregnant. Sometimes she felt guilty because she’d married him for all the wrong reasons and then she’d ended it, after ten years of marriage.

They’d been opposites, she and Ray. He was a quiet arts student who’d never gone to wild parties and who spent every spare minute in the library. Leonie had been the grande dame of first-year science. While Ray was reading Rousseau, Leonie was reading the riot act to the impertinent agricultural student who’d teased her about her heavy make-up. (She’d cried over that later but, at the time, she’d been magnificent.)

They met at a screening of Annie Hall and ended up spending the evening together laughing at Woody Allen’s humour. In the later years of their marriage, Leonie realized that a sense of humour and a love of Woody Allen movies was one of the few things they’d actually shared. Otherwise, they were poles apart. Ray liked non-fiction, political discussions and avoiding parties. Leonie loved going out, disco dancing, and reading potboilers with a glass of wine and a Cadbury’s Flake in her hand. It wouldn’t have lasted but for advance warning that baby Danny was coming in seven months. They got married quickly and were blissfully happy until the honeymoon wore off and they discovered just how unsuited they really were.

It was a testimony to something, Leonie always thought, that they went through another ten years of being civilized and kind to each other, even though there were more sparks in the fridge than there were in their relationship. She’d lived with the knowledge for a long time, enduring it and the barrenness that was her marriage for the sake of Danny, Melanie and Abigail. But finally, something had snapped in Leonie and she knew she had to get out. She felt suffocated, as if she was slowly dying and wasting her life at the same time. There had to be more , she knew it.

She didn’t know how she found the courage to sit Ray down and ask him what he thought about them splitting up. ‘I love you, Ray, but we’re both trapped,’ she’d said, given Dutch courage by two hot ports. ‘We’re like brother and sister, not husband and wife. One day, you’ll meet someone or I’ll meet someone and then this will turn into a nuclear war of retribution, you fighting me and vice versa. We’ll hate each other and we’ll destroy the kids. Do you want that? Shouldn’t we both be honest about this instead of kidding each other?’