Best of Friends. Cathy Kelly
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intervals, to the pupils’ delight.
All he could talk about every evening was the difficulty of getting a substitute teacher at short notice and the endless but vain attempts by the alarm repair people to find the fault in their sophisticated system.
Abby began to wonder whether, if she got a robot to sit at her place in the kitchen every night and programmed it to mutter, ‘That’s terrible,’ at intervals, he would even notice.
To cheer herself up, she went to Sally’s beauty salon for what Sally called ‘the works’. Since she’d moved to Dunmore, Abby went to The Beauty Spot once a month, a luxury unheard of in the pre-Declutter days, when a trip to a salon like Sally’s happened a couple of times a year.
The works included a manicure, an anti-ageing facial, possibly an eyelash tint and sometimes leg waxing, all the while chatting with Sally and letting the relaxing gossipy atmosphere drift round her. Other posher beauticians were now keen to get Abby to patronise their establishments but Abby stayed loyal to Sally and her jewel of a salon. Their friendship actually went back ten years to when Sally was working in Cork as a junior teacher with Tom. When Tom had raved about this new recruit and spoke of how she was a breath of fresh air in St Fintan’s, Abby had half expected an earnest do-gooder with mousy hair, jam jar spectacles, bitten-down fingernails and a crush on Tom.
Sally turned out to be nothing like Abby’s imaginings, of course, and far from being keen on Tom, she was wildly in love with Steve Richardson, the dashing Zhivago to Sally’s Lara. Sally had left teaching long ago to follow her dream of setting up a beauty salon. She and Steve had been idealists and when he’d left the corporate world to teach art, Sally had taken the plunge and given up teaching to do a beauty course. The Beauty Spot was the result. With its fifties-inspired décor, complete with raspberry-pink gingham curtains, the salon was certainly different from the normal temples to beauty. The women of Dunmore loved it and, from its humble beginnings, the business went from strength to strength.
‘What colour would you like?’
Sally’s pixie face stared expectantly up at Abby’s from behind the manicure trolley. Her fingers hovered over the creamy beige Abby usually favoured, because she insisted that her fingers were too short to take rich shades of polish.
But Abby was in a wild mood. ‘That one,’ she said, pointing out a juicy cherry colour.
‘Femme Fatale,’ Sally read the label. ‘Gorgeous and very different.’
‘I’m in the mood for something different,’ murmured Abby.
After an hour relaxing as Sally’s sensitive fingers did their anti-ageing magic, Abby was feeling light-headed and prone to day-dreaming. There was something so sensual about Sally’s facials: when her gentle fingers massaged the heavenly, sweetly scented oils into Abby’s face, neck and décolletage, she found herself thinking of how wonderful it would be to have Jay touching her skin like that. His fingers trailing along the sensitive hollows at the base of her throat, and her beautifully manicured fingers touching him in return…
‘Have you ever thought of cheating on Steve?’ said Abby idly now.
Sally looked up from the polish she was carefully applying to Abby’s fingernails. ‘Why?’
‘Well…just…you know, seven-year itch,’ blustered Abby, feeling caught out. Whatever had possessed her to say that?
‘It’s the three-year itch these days,’ interrupted Ruby, who was doing a French manicure beside them. Ruby was a statuesque thirty-something with hair the colour of a raven’s wing, a warm, eager face, and notoriously bad luck with men. Her last boyfriend had thrilled Ruby when he’d murmured how he’d never felt this strongly about any woman ever before, and two weeks later he’d ended up in bed with a girl in his office. ‘I wouldn’t mind, but she’s not even thinner than me!’ Ruby had raged for at least a month afterwards.
‘He wasn’t the right one for you, Ruby,’ comforted Sally now, knowing that Ruby was reflecting on her ex. ‘If he’d been the right one, he’d have been able to resist other women. Oh, sorry, Abby.’ She wet a cotton bud in nail varnish remover to wipe away the splodge of cherry-pink polish that had dripped onto Abby’s finger.
Abby, who knew it was her fault because she’d jerked convulsively at Sally’s words, shook her head. ‘My fault. I’m jittery today. Hormones, I suppose,’ she lied.
‘Steve wouldn’t want to cheat on you, Sally,’ Ruby went on mournfully. ‘He really does cherish the ground you walk on. Until I met you pair, I thought that was just a cliché – a sickening cliché at that,’ she teased, ‘but now I know it can be true.’
Sally flushed to the roots of her hair. She was one of the few people Abby knew who could blush prettily: that creamy complexion flushed a delicate rosy pink, unlike Abby herself, who developed a wildly unflattering scarlet fever circle in the centre of each cheek at times of stress.
‘Steve has his moments,’ Sally said sternly.
Both Abby and Ruby burst out laughing at this.
‘What?’ demanded Sally.
‘You never say a bad word about him, do you know that?’ Abby said affectionately.
‘Well, you never say a bad word about Tom,’ countered Sally, recovering.
Abby felt the scarlet fever hit her face with vigour. It was all very well for Sally, she thought as she sat with her fingers splayed to dry. She and Steve were only married eight years, not seventeen numbing ones. Nobody could be expected to feel passionate about anyone or anything after seventeen years. Where was the excitement, the thrill?
Seventeen years of watching someone leave their socks on when they’d taken off their trousers, so they stood there in underpants and socks. Not a pretty sight. Women made such an effort with their underwear, trying thongs and low-slung pants that bypassed comfort utterly, but try getting a man to wear anything other than the boring sort of jocks he’d worn since the year dot.
And that way he cleared his throat when they were watching television that made him sound like an elderly sea lion coughing up a fishbone. Abby was convinced he didn’t even know he did it but it was so irritating.
Wait till Sally and Steve had been together as long as she and Tom. Then Sally mightn’t feel the same way.
‘Dry?’ Sally checked Abby’s fingernails for tackiness. ‘A minute more, I think. Now, Steve and I are throwing an impromptu party on Saturday and we’d love you to come – all of you, Jess included.’
‘Lovely. What’s the occasion?’
‘It’s to introduce Steve’s new boss and his wife to the area. They’ve lived in the US for years and they don’t know anyone here. I thought it would be nice, and this is the only weekend we can do it. He and Steve get on like a house on fire and Steve keeps saying Greg is taking the company places.’
Abby perked up. Sally and Steve’s parties were legendary. They’d thrown one for Steve’s birthday six months before. The police had come at three and politely asked for the music to be turned down. One man had put his back out showing everyone that he could still stand on his head, while even Abby, who’d planned to take it easy because she didn’t know any of the people of Dunmore, had joined the drunken conga around Sally’s tiny alpine rockery. Tom had the photographic proof: a picture of a glassy-eyed Abby clinging to a dwarf conifer, wearing a hastily improvised Carmen Miranda headdress of two bananas and an orange all tied up with a tea towel.
Spur-of-the-moment parties, the type Sally and Steve were so good at, were always fun.
‘Their names are Erin and Greg Kennedy and they’re lovely. You’re going to love her, Abby,’ Sally continued. ‘She’s funny, very warm and absolutely stunning-looking.’
Abby, who’d had a mental vision of a glossy corporate wife determined to patronise the inhabitants of Dunmore, was even more turned off by this description. Stunning-looking women made her feel