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

Like a Persian potentate receiving gifts, Penny graciously accepted both biscuits, got crumbs all over the flowery duvet as she crunched them and immediately went back to sulking. One paw flattening Teddy ominously, she stared at Leonie crossly, her usually smiling Labrador face creased into a look that said, I’m phoning the ISPCA now, and then where will you be? Up in court on charges of cruelty to animals, that’s where. Imagine abandoning me for a crappy holiday.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t go,’ Leonie said in despair, thinking that she couldn’t possibly leave Penny, Clover and Herman for eight whole days. Penny would waste away, despite being cared for by Leonie’s adoring mother, Claire, who let her sleep on the bed all the time and fed her carefully cooked lambs’ liver.

But Leonie’s three children had gone to stay with their father in the States for three weeks and Leonie had vowed to give herself the holiday of a lifetime just to cheer herself up. She couldn’t let herself be blackmailed by spoiled animals. Really, she couldn’t.

Clover, Leonie’s beloved marmalade cat, didn’t get on with Claire’s cats, hated the cattery and would no doubt lurk miserably at the back of her quarters for the entire visit, going on feline hunger strike, determined to look like an anorexic for her owner’s return. And even Herman, the children’s rescued hamster, went into a decline when his luxury hamster duplex was moved into Claire’s home. All right, so Claire’s three Siamese cats had an unnatural interest in little Hermie and did spend many hours staring at his Perspex home in a very calculating manner as if figuring out exactly how yummy he’d taste once they’d worked out how to open the trap door, but still…it wasn’t abandonment.

Nevertheless Leonie felt guilty leaving her beloved babies while she went cruising down the Nile in the luxury of an inside cabin on the Queen Tiye (single supplement £122, Abu Simbel excursion and Valley of the Kings dawn balloon trip extra, bookable in advance).

‘I shouldn’t go,’ she said again.

Penny, sensing weakness, wagged her tail a fraction and smiled winsomely. For good measure, she pounced on Teddy and chewed him in a playfully endearing way. How could you leave cute, adorable me? she said, her degree in Manipulation of Humans coming to the fore.

What was the point? Leonie wondered, weakening. She could have her eight days off at home and make herself tackle the bit of overgrown garden down by the river. Why own an artisan’s cottage on an eighth of an acre in County Wicklow’s scenic Greystones if you let the garden run to rack and ruin with enough floral wildlife for a butterfly sanctuary?

And she could paint the cupboards in the kitchen. She’d been meaning to do that for the entire seven years they’d lived there. She hated dark wood, always had.

Oh yes, and she could clean out Danny’s bedroom. He and the girls had been in Boston for nearly ten days already and she hadn’t yet touched his pit. No doubt the usual teenage debris was festering beneath his bed: socks that smelled like mouldy cheese and old T-shirts that had enough human DNA on them in the form of sweat to be used for cloning. The girls’ room was perfect because Abby had been overcome with a fit of tidiness one afternoon before they’d left and had forced Mel to help her clean up. Together they’d filled a bin-bag with old Mizz magazines, cuddly toys that even Penny no longer wanted to chew, old pens with no lids and copybooks with half the pages torn out. As a consequence, their room looked so tidy it was unlikely to be identified as the bedroom of two pop star obsessed fourteen-year-olds – apart from the dog-eared poster of Robbie Williams that Mel had refused to be parted from.

‘Don’t get upset, Mum,’ Abby had said when Leonie had looked into the bedroom and blurted out that it looked as if the girls were leaving for ever and not coming back. ‘We’ll only be away with Dad for just over three weeks. You’ll be having such a whale of a time in Egypt and out every night drinking and flirting with handsome men that you won’t notice we’re gone.’

‘I know,’ Leonie lied, feeling terribly foolish and sorry she’d broken her golden rule about not letting the children know how terrible it was for her when they spent time with their father. It wasn’t that she begrudged Ray time with his children: not at all. She simply missed them so much when they were staying with him and Boston seemed such a long way away. At least when he’d lived in Belfast, it had only been a couple of hours away from Dublin. Leonie wouldn’t have dreamed of gatecrashing her children’s visit with their father, but she was always comforted by the idea that if she wanted to see them on a whim during the month-long summer holiday, she could.

That was partly why she was off to Egypt on a holiday she couldn’t really afford: to stave off the pangs of loneliness while the kids were away. That and because she had to break out of the cycle of her humdrum existence. An exotic holiday away seemed like a good starting point for a new, exotic life. Or at least it had .

The phone on her bedside table rang loudly. Leonie sat on the bed and picked up the receiver, straightening the silver-framed picture of herself and Danny beside the roller coaster at EuroDisney as she did so. Nineteen-year-olds didn’t go on holidays with their mothers any more, she reminded herself, knowing there’d be no more holidays with the four of them ever again.

‘I hope you’re not having second thoughts,’ bellowed a voice down the phone. Anita. Loud, lovable and bossier than a First Division football manager, Leonie’s oldest friend could speak in only two volumes: pitch-side screech and stage whisper, both of which could be heard from fifty yards away.

‘You need a break and, seeing as you won’t come to West Cork with the gang, I think Egypt’s perfect. But don’t let that damn dog put you off.’

Leonie grinned. ‘Penny’s very depressed,’ she admitted, ‘and I have been having second thoughts about going on a trip on my own.’

‘And waste your money?’ roared Anita, a coupon-snipping mother of four who’d re-use teabags if she could get away with it.

Leonie knew she couldn’t bear another holiday in the big rented bungalow with ‘the gang’, as Anita called the group who’d been together for over twenty years since they’d met up as newly weds all in Sycamore Lawns. Gangs were fine when you were part of it in happy coupledom, but when you were divorced and everyone else was still in happy coupledom, it wasn’t as easy.

Being the only single member of the gang was sheer hell and would be worse now that Tara (briefly unattached) had remarried and was no longer keen on sharing a room with Leonie where they could moan about the pain of singledom and the lack of decent men. After last year’s group holiday where one husband had surprised her with a drunken French kiss and an ‘I’ve always thought you were a goer’ grope in the kitchen late one night, Leonie had promised herself never again.

When she and Ray had split up ten years ago, she’d been so hopeful about her future. After a decade of a companionable but practically fraternal marriage, they’d both been hopeful of the future. But Ray was the one who’d come through it all with flying colours, happy with his string of girlfriends, and Leonie was still longing for the one true love who’d make it all worthwhile.

She hadn’t been on a date for six years and that had been a blind one Anita had fixed up with a college lecturer who was a dead ringer – in every sense – for Anthony Perkins in Psycho . Needless to say, it hadn’t been a success.

‘Leonie, there’s always a bed for you in West Cork,’ Anita interrupted. ‘We’d all love to have you with us again, and if you’re having second thoughts – ’