Claudia Carroll - Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

This, by the way, would be the one, single decorative change that I’ve made since moving into the house; the first and the last. How could I have even thought of doing such an insensitive thing? I’ll never forget Audrey whimpering at me, laid prostrate on our sofa like Elizabeth Barrett Browning having an attack of the vapours and glaring accusingly at me with her pale, fishy eyes. No messing, all the woman was short of was a hoop skirt, a cold compress on her forehead and a jar of smelling salts. Not only had I completely destroyed the look of that whole room, she sniffled…but did I even appreciate that the wallpaper had been there since she first came to The Moorings as a bride?

Ohh…way back in the early eighteenth century, most likely.

The Moorings, I should tell you, is a vast, seven-bedroomed crumbling old mansion house; relentlessly Victorian, with huge, imposing granite walls all around it – exactly the kind of location that film scouts would kill to use on an Agatha Christie-Poirot murder mystery and decorated in a style best described as early Thatcher. Which is a crying shame, because with a bit of TLC and if I was really allowed to get my hands on the place, I know it could actually be stunning. I often compare it to Garbo in a bad dress; you can see the bone structure’s there, if you could only strip away all the crap. All the house’s features are intact and perfect: the coving, the brickwork, the stunning, sixteen-foot high plastered ceilings, but layered in a blanket of someone else’s old-fashioned, long-faded taste. With the result that I permanently feel like I’m a guest in my own home.

From the outside though, it’s so scarily impressive that the very first time Dan took me here, aged fifteen, I remember joking to him that it was half posh mansion, half the kind of place you’d go to get your passport stamped. And he laughed and little did I think it would one day be my home.

Trouble is that ever since Dan’s father died, Audrey, Queen Victoria-like, has pretty much wanted the house to remain exactly as it was when he was alive – a living mausoleum. Right down to his boots in the outside shelter which are still in exactly the same place he’d always left them. And his favourite armchair, that no one is allowed to sit in, ever, just where he liked it to be – in the drawing room, right by the window.

Grief does funny things to people, my Dan, Dan Junior, gently reminded me after the whole wallpaper-gate debacle, so of course I apologised ad nauseam and solemnly vowed not to do anything that might bring on a repeat performance. Nothing to do but bite my tongue and support Audrey for as long as she needed. Let’s both just be patient with her, Dan said to me; together we’ll help get her though this.

Course that was around the same time that he buggered off to start working eighteen-hour days and started communicating with me via Post-it notes stuck on the fridge door, telling me not to bother waiting up for him, that he wouldn’t be home. And of course, Jules was in college at the time and just couldn’t have been arsed doing anything.

Leaving me alone, to handle Audrey all by myself.

You try living inside a memorial with a mother-in-law who still considers it to be her home, a husband who’s never around and who, when he is, barely bothers to speak to you anymore.

Go on, I dare you.

Anyway, back to the book shop, where my mobile keeps on ringing and ringing and still I keep ignoring it, wondering for the thousandth time if Audrey has any conception of basic office etiquette – that you can’t take phone calls when you’re supposed to be working. But then, that’s the kernel of the problem; she doesn’t consider what I do to come under the banner heading of ‘work’. No, in her book, being a vet like Dan is an actual hardcore, proper ‘job’, what I do is just arsing around. Just in case, God forbid, I got any kind of notions about myself.

By lunchtime, business is so slack that poor, worried old Agnes tells me I can finish up early for the day. In fact apart from a lost backpacker sticking his head through the door looking for directions and Mrs Henderson waddling in from across the street, not to buy, but to give out that she can’t pronounce the place names in any of Stieg Larsson’s books, we haven’t had any other footfall the entire morning.

Mrs Henderson, by the way, is something of a crime book aficionado and she drops into the shop pretty much every day to tell us the endings of whichever thriller she’s stuck into at the moment. Well, either that or to describe all the twists and red herrings, and then to tell us exactly how she saw them coming from miles off.

Anyroadup, between one thing and another, it’s just coming up to one o’clock before I even get a chance to check any of the messages on my mobile.

To my astonishment, not a single one of which is from Audrey.

A Dublin number, one that hasn’t flashed up on my phone, since, oooh, like the George Bush administration. One Hilary Williams. Otherwise known as…drum roll for dramatic effect…my agent.

OK, the CliffsNotes on Hilary: firstly, she wasn’t exactly a fan of my decision to move to The Sticks. In fact, she’s a sixty-something, bra-burning, first-generation feminist of the Germaine Greer school and the very idea that I’d sacrifice a budding theatre career to, perish the thought, actually put my marriage first, was almost enough to have her lying down in a darkened room taking tablets and listening to dolphin music.

Secondly, her nickname is Fag Ash Hil, on account of the fact that she smokes upwards of sixty a day and climbing. She’s the only person I know who actually went out and organised protest marches against the smoking ban, and among her clients, it’s an accepted rule that you don’t even think about crossing the threshold of her office without at least two packs tucked under your oxter for her.

Hence she normally sounds deep, throaty and gravelly, a bit like a man in fact, but…not today. Four messages, in a voice designed to wrest people from dreams and all rising in hysteria till by the last one she sounds like she’s left Earth’s gravity field and is now orbiting somewhere around Pluto.

‘Oh for GOD’S SAKE, ANNIE, why are you not returning any of my calls?! Can you please stop please stop role-playing Mrs James Herriot from All Creatures Great and Small and kindly get back to me? Like…NOW?’

This is delivered, by the way, like an edict from the Vatican. I listen to what she has to say, call her back toot suite…then hop straight into my car.

And faster than a bullet, I’m on the long, long road to Dublin.

Sticking to the speed limit, it generally takes the guts of three hours to get from The Sticks to Dublin and believe me the drive is not for the faint-hearted. It’s motorway for a lot of it, but you still have to navigate a good fifty plus miles before that on narrow, twisting, secondary roads that would nearly put the heart crossways in you. Anyway, anyway, anyway, fuelled by nothing more than adrenaline, I manage to a) drive at breakneck speed, b) not get caught by the cops and c) even beat my own personal record of getting to the city in under two-and-a-half hours flat, with my foot to the floor and my heart walloping the entire way.

I finally arrive in Dublin late in the wintry afternoon, avoiding the worst of the rush-hour traffic and miraculously managing to find a space in a handy twenty-four hour car park, right in the middle of town and conveniently close to Hilary’s office. In my sticky, sweat-soaked, heart palpitation-y state I amaze myself by even remembering to pick up a few obligatory packets of Marlboro Lights for her.

‘Annie, get your arse in here and sit down!’ is her greeting, which might sound a bit harsh, but coming from Hil, can actually be taken as a term of endearment. I obediently do as I’m told and head inside, dutifully handing over the cigarettes as we air kiss.