A junior midwife popped her head round the door. ‘Indy, if you could have a look-in next door, we’ve got—’ her voice dropped – ‘meconium-stained waters.’
‘Tanya, I’ll leave you with Clare and Fiona, who’ll deliver the placenta.’
‘Yuck,’ said Mandy, moving right up to the head of the bed.
‘Congratulations, Tanya, you were wonderful,’ said Indy. ‘I’ll be back later to see how you’re doing.’ And she was off. She’d organised a half-shift so she could be at the coffee meeting with Mum and her sisters, but that was ages away and she ordered her bladder to forget about peeing anytime soon.
3
Meg
Meg sat with her morning coffee on the sea-facing veranda of The Beach Hut, the ridiculously overpriced, boujis café on Hilton Road. The old Meg probably would have refused to enter into The Beach Hut on the grounds that it was selling coffee at inflated prices. The new Meg, the softer version, no longer sweated the small stuff.
That’s what over six decades on the planet did for a person, she felt. Filtered out all unnecessary angst and left serenity in its place. She shifted in her seat to watch a swimmer bobbing out on an epic swim in the June sunlight.
Only six days to the wedding. The thought, unbidden, sprang into her mind again: was she mad? Marrying the same man for a second time seemed like an absolute triumph of hope over experience.
But in the past year, since she and Stu had begun seeing each other again – a ridiculous way of describing sleeping with a man she’d once been married to – she’d decided that they were destined to be together. Despite everything, their friendship had never wavered. Stu made her laugh like nobody else. Made love like nobody else. Held her at night like nobody else.
If she thought, in the dead of night, that she was marrying him because she didn’t want to be alone anymore, she quenched that thought. She was perfectly able to be alone. Hadn’t she proved that already?
When she’d married Stuart Robicheaux the first time round, she’d been four months pregnant with Lucinda, convinced that love could overcome any tribulations and her main worry had been that Stu’s mother would explode with rage when she found out that after he married his pregnant, low-rent – his mother’s words – fiancée, he was going to spend his uncle’s precious inheritance on buying the run-down hotel close to the beach.
There was a far more beautiful and well-run hotel by the beach and theirs couldn’t compete with that but they planned to run the house as a small, intimate place, a boutique hotel where nobody would expect silver service.
‘Don’t tell your mother about it today, darling,’ Meg had wheedled as they drove a friend’s off-white MG sports car – complete with the requisiteJust Marriedwritten in shaving foam on the rear window – to the yacht club where Jacqueline Robicheaux would be holding court to two hundred of her dearest acquaintances.
‘Why not?’ said Stu, who liked winding up his mother.
‘Because she already thinks I’ve trapped you by being pregnant,’ Meg said. The widowed Mrs Robicheaux believed that Meg O’Reilly was nothing but a lower-class little tramp who’d sunk her predatory claws into innocent Stuart.
Meg’s family lived just beyond the edge of posh Killiney, where the district became Ballybrack, not posh in the slightest. She’d been brought up in one of the old council estates with one sister, her mother and an often-absent dad. Now most of the homes were privately owned, like Ann O Reilly’s, where she now lived alone, with handrails on the walls courtesy of the occupational therapist.
One could fit the O’Reillys’ entire house into one wing of La Casa, the Robicheaux’ Killiney home, with its rolling gardens, view of the sea and a summer house in front of which Jacqueline’s Jaguar was parked.
Their wedding was only the second time Meg’s family, the O’Reillys, and the Robicheaux clan had met. The first time had been pregnant with both silence and actual pregnancy.
Meg secretly wanted to screech to her new mother-in-law that she’d had plans before she’d got pregnant, that she had a degree in hotel management, that she wasn’t after anyone else’s money. But there would have been no point.
Jacqueline did not believe in social mobility and thought the have-nots infiltrated the haves by getting knocked up.
At least Mum had triumphed over Jacqueline in the style department at the wedding: Ann O’Reilly was a tall, lithe woman, like her daughter, and even if the dress she wore had come from a chain store Jacqueline wouldn’t be seen dead in; it looked far superior on her than Jacqueline’s eye-blindingly yellow Chanel-style dress-and-jacket-combo which served only to highlight her dowager’s hump and the sparrow arms which rattled with expensive bracelets.
‘They’re not real diamonds, are they?’ asked Vonnie, who had been Meg’s best friend since she was four, staring in astonishment at the biggest bracelet on Jacqueline’s crêpey arm. ‘I mean, it’s diamante, right?’
‘Real diamonds,’ confirmed Meg.
‘Holy Mother of God,’ said Vonnie.
St Gabriel’s National School, where they’d met, had been heavily into religion. They could both still recite a litany of prayers in Irish as well as in English. ‘You could buy a—’ Vonnie scrambled mentally for a comparison – ‘a car for that.’
‘You could buy the whole garage of cars with what that woman has in jewellery,’ Meg said.
Vonnie was silenced for a moment.
‘No wonder she hates you,’ she said, finally.
Jacqueline was now buried in the family plot, probably rotating at speed in it at the notion of the forthcoming nuptials, but at least she would not have to witness her son marrying Meg again, although the boot was somewhat on the other foot now. Meg’s mother, less lithe these days, a formidable woman who’d just had her ninetieth birthday, had said: ‘You sure, pet? I love Stu like a son but he’s not an easy man. Gave you the runaround a bit, did your Stu.’
