Cathy Kelly - Just Between Us

‘I’d hate to see the papers if a respected lawyer and a respected businessman were arrested for obscene behaviour,’ chuckled Stella.

‘It was only a kiss,’ said Nick.

Their eyes met and they both grinned. What a kiss.

He helped her into the first taxi they saw and then took her hand and softly kissed the back of it. Stella smiled at him with affection. From anyone else, such a gesture would have seemed corny but not from Nick.

‘I’ll phone tomorrow.’

He shut the door and the taxi drove off into the night.

For a brief moment, Stella thought about men and phoning. Everyone from Vicki to Tara said that men promised to phone but rarely did.

It was a game, Vicki insisted miserably. To ring or not to ring.

But sitting in the back of a taxi, feeling the car’s heater slowly warm her bones, Stella allowed herself to smile happily. Nick wasn’t like that. He’d phone. She knew it.

‘Rose, have you seen my waterproof jacket?’ Hugh roared up the stairs.

Rose, on her hands and knees on the upstairs landing as she did an emergency sort-out of the airing cupboard, rolled her eyes. She’d left Hugh’s waterproof on the kitchen chair nearest the hall door. Unless he was walking round the house with his eyes closed, he couldn’t miss it.

‘It’s in the kitchen,’ she yelled back, suppressing the desire to add, ‘stupid.’

‘Where in the kitchen? I can’t see it?’

Rose got creakily to her knees. The cold, damp weather definitely made aching bones worse. If January had been cold and wet, February was proving to be even worse, with gale force Northern winds that made Rose glad of decent heating that kept Meadow Lodge toasty. Braving the great outdoors was another matter, and Rose had decided she wasn’t leaving the house that morning without her long-sleeved thermal vest. She knew it was somewhere and she’d been searching fruitlessly when Hugh called.

She was halfway down the stairs when Hugh found his waterproof. ‘There it is,’ he yelled. ‘I didn’t leave it there,’ he added indignantly.

Rose managed not to reply. She walked into the kitchen to find Hugh ready for a Saturday morning walk with his best friend, Alastair. The kitchen, just tidied up by Rose, was a mess again because Hugh had cleaned out his pockets by the bin, brushed the worst of the muck from his walking shoes and made himself a cup of tea, the debris of these three tasks having ruined all her good work.

Hugh spotted Rose’s exasperated look in the direction of the mess.

‘Oh er…sorry about that but I have to rush, love,’ he said, dropping a speedy kiss on her cheek. ‘I’m meeting Alastair in ten minutes. I’ll tidy up when I get back.’

He raced off, leaving Rose crossly thinking that if she had a penny for every time Hugh promised to clean up, she’d be lying on a beach in the Bahamas by now. She tidied up again, went back upstairs to finish ransacking the airing cupboard, then got ready for her trip out with Adele. It was Hugh’s birthday in a few weeks and Adele, who’d stopped driving several years previously after a collision with a gatepost, had asked Rose to take her shopping for his present. This was Rose’s idea of pure torture but she’d said yes. Charity did, after all, begin at home.

Adele lived in the old Miller family home eight miles on the other side of Kinvarra and Rose never drove there without thanking her lucky stars that she and Hugh had bought their own house when they first got married. She didn’t like to imagine what would have happened if they’d ended up living with Adele, without the eight-mile buffer zone.

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