the terrace.
Her first and only true love, Ray, had seen beneath the layer of Max Factor panstick to see the deeply insecure woman she really was. But she and Ray just weren’t meant to be. Their marriage had been a mistake. She’d been grateful to be rescued from loneliness, and being grateful was no reason to get married, as she knew now. Neither was being pregnant. Sometimes she felt guilty because she’d married him for all the wrong reasons and then she’d ended it, after ten years of marriage.
They’d been opposites, she and Ray. He was a quiet arts student who’d never gone to wild parties and who spent every spare minute in the library. Leonie had been the grande dame of first-year science. While Ray was reading Rousseau, Leonie was reading the riot act to the impertinent agricultural student who’d teased her about her heavy make-up. (She’d cried over that later but, at the time, she’d been magnificent.)
They met at a screening of Annie Hall and ended up spending the evening together laughing at Woody Allen’s humour. In the later years of their marriage, Leonie realized that a sense of humour and a love of Woody Allen movies was one of the few things they’d actually shared. Otherwise, they were poles apart. Ray liked non-fiction, political discussions and avoiding parties. Leonie loved going out, disco dancing, and reading potboilers with a glass of wine and a Cadbury’s Flake in her hand. It wouldn’t have lasted but for advance warning that baby Danny was coming in seven months. They got married quickly and were blissfully happy until the honeymoon wore off and they discovered just how unsuited they really were.
It was a testimony to something, Leonie always thought, that they went through another ten years of being civilized and kind to each other, even though there were more sparks in the fridge than there were in their relationship. She’d lived with the knowledge for a long time, enduring it and the barrenness that was her marriage for the sake of Danny, Melanie and Abigail. But finally, something had snapped in Leonie and she knew she had to get out. She felt suffocated, as if she was slowly dying and wasting her life at the same time. There had to be more, she knew it.
She didn’t know how she found the courage to sit Ray down and ask him what he thought about them splitting up. ‘I love you, Ray, but we’re both trapped,’ she’d said, given Dutch courage by two hot ports. ‘We’re like brother and sister, not husband and wife. One day, you’ll meet someone or I’ll meet someone and then this will turn into a nuclear war of retribution, you fighting me and vice versa. We’ll hate each other and we’ll destroy the kids. Do you want that? Shouldn’t we both be honest about this instead of kidding each other?’
It had been a tough time. Ray had insisted that he was happy, that their way of muddling along suited him. ‘I’m not a romantic like you, Leonie, I don’t expect great love or anything,’ he’d said sorrowfully. ‘We’re happy enough, aren’t we?’
Once the doubts were out in the open, it was as if the wound couldn’t heal. Gradually, Ray and Leonie drifted apart until, finally, he had said she was right, it was a half-marriage. He’d shocked her by how quickly he found another life, but she was too busy trying to explain things to three uncomprehending children to think about it. Away from her, he’d blossomed. He had scores of friends, went on interesting holidays and changed jobs. He went on dates, bought trendy clothes and introduced the kids to his girlfriends. Leonie had worked hard, looked after the kids and hoped that Mr Right knew he could safely step into her world now that she was a single woman again. So far, zilch.
As she told Penny sometimes: ‘I should have stayed married and had affairs. That was the right way to do it! True love and romance with a safety net. Trust me to get it wrong trying to do it right.’
She and Ray were still the best of friends and he was a good father.
Now the only people who saw Leonie as she really was were her three children.
With them, she only wore two coats of mascara and a bit of lipstick and they were allowed to see her in her dressing gown. God, she missed them.
Determined not to blub over the kids again, Leonie thought of how she’d always wanted to visit magical Egypt. Fear of flying was no reason to cry off. For a start, she couldn’t afford to waste the money the holiday had cost her and, secondly, when did Leonie Delaney balk at anything? She got out her eyeliner brush and fiercely painted on a thick line of dusky kohl that’d have made Cleopatra proud.
How could you jump-start your life if you quailed at the very first fence – a holiday on your own?
Four hours later, Leonie stood in the queue at the airport clutching her guide book to her chest and wishing the plane journey was over. Ever since she’d seen that disaster movie about the guys in the Peruvian mountains who’d had to resort to cannibalism to survive after a plane crash, she’d hated flying. Loathed it.
‘I’ll give you some ketamine for the trip,’ joked Angie the previous day, referring to the heavy-duty animal tranquillizer.
‘I’d almost take it,’ Leonie had replied, not joking. She’d bought a bottle of herbal relaxant tablets, her travel sickness wrist-bands and some aromatherapy oil to rub on her temples, but she still felt more stressed than Mrs Reilly’s hyperactive cat when it was getting its claws clipped. A lovely, sweet animal in the home – or so Mrs Reilly regularly assured them immediately after Sootie had mauled somebody – the five-year-old tabby was labelled ‘dangerous’ in the surgery. Heavy gloves and sedation were required to calm Sootie before even the simplest job. Leonie wished that cabin crew sedated their patients.
She pushed her trolley further along the queue and looked at the other passengers taking Flight MS634 to Luxor. Nobody else appeared to be sweating with fear. Especially not the very slim woman at the front of the queue who had the nervous expression of a purebred Saluki hound. Long, silky, light brown hair that fell over her big saucer-like eyes added to the effect. In an unflattering cream knit outfit, she looked terribly thin and unhappy. She must have been about thirty, Leonie guessed, but she carried herself with the unease of a teenager going on a hated family holiday when she longed to be at home.
An older woman, obviously her mother, stood beside her talking animatedly. The older woman was wearing a very old-fashioned floral dress, the sort of thing Leonie’s rather Bohemian mother would have refused to wear years ago because she might have to wear gloves or a pill-box hat with it. A giant of a man with a beard appeared beside them and started arguing with the girl behind the airline counter, his booming voice easily audible along the length of the queue as he roared.
‘I’d make a complaint to you, young lady, but I don’t see the point,’ he thundered at the airline girl. ‘I’ve made my feelings more than plain to the travel people. You mark my words, they won’t be taking advantage of me.’
The Saluki Woman looked away, eyes wide with embarrassment, and caught sight of Leonie gazing at her. Abashed, Leonie looked down at her trolley. She loved people-watching but hated being caught. Figuring out what they did and what sort of people they were from peering into their trolleys in the supermarket was her favourite hobby, and she couldn’t sit on the train into Dublin for longer than five minutes without speculating on the relationship between the passengers sitting opposite her. Were they married, going out, about to break up? Did the woman with a trolley full of Häagen-Dazs chocolate chip but a figure like Kate Moss actually eat any of the ice cream or did she have a fat portrait of herself in the attic?
Up ahead, the woman at the desk said ‘Next’ with a relieved voice. When the difficult trio finally walked back down the queue
