her period paraphernalia out of her suitcase, hadn’t brought even one single tampon or pair of heavy-duty, enormous knickers in case they would bring her bad luck. Emma allowed herself a little quiver of excitement at the thought.
When her father marched up to them, giving out yards about how far away he’d had to park the car, Emma managed to look sympathetic.
‘All set then?’ he asked. ‘Let’s queue.’
He put one arm round his wife. ‘Egypt, eh? This will be a holiday to remember, Anne-Marie, love. I just wish dear Kirsten could have come along. She’d love it and she’s the best company in the world. Still, she’s busy with her charity work and looking after Patrick.’ He sighed a fond father sort of sigh and Emma started nibbling the thumbnail she’d managed to leave alone up to now.
Calm down, she repeated to herself, using the broken-record technique so beloved of her self-help books. Don’t let him get to you. She could cope with him when she had this wonderful feeling of hope lighting her up from the inside. A baby. She had to be pregnant this time, she just knew it.
Penny lay on the bed with a half-chewed teddy squashed between her golden paws and stared at Leonie balefully. It was hard to imagine that those huge brown eyes could portray anything other than pure canine love but then, Penny was not your average dog. Half-Labrador, half-retriever, she was all personality. Most of it human and all calculated to cause her owner the most guilt possible. Only her frenzied excitement at the rattle of her dinner bowl made Leonie realize that her best friend was actually a dog and not a person. Then again, Leonie thought with amusement, why did she confer ravenousness as purely doggy behaviour? She ate like a pig herself. Dogs and owners invariably looked alike so if Penny was a slightly overweight little glutton who was a slave to Pedigree Chum, then her owner was a carbon copy. A large shaggy blonde with a fat tummy and a propensity for biscuits. Just exchange Mr Chum for Mr Kipling and they were twins.
Leonie extracted an ancient khaki sarong from the back of the cupboard and rolled it into a corner of her suitcase alongside a selection of her trademark exotically coloured silk shirts. Penny, watching sulkily from the bed, snorted loudly.
‘I know, Honey Bunny,’ Leonie said consolingly, stopping packing to sit on the edge of the bed and stroke her inconsolable dog. ‘I won’t be long. It’s only eight days. Mummy won’t be away for long. And you wouldn’t like Egypt, darling. It’s too hot anyway.’
Penny, seven years of abject devotion and huge amounts of spoiling behind her, refused to be comforted and jerked her head away from Leonie’s gentle hand. Another little snort indicated that mere petting wouldn’t be enough and that doggy biscuits might have to be involved if she was to be satisfactorily cheered up.
Leonie – who’d only the previous morning told a Pekinese-owning client in the veterinary practice where she worked as a nurse, that dogs were terrible blackmailers and that little Kibushi shouldn’t be given human food no matter how much he begged at the table at mealtimes – hurried into the kitchen for a Mixed Oval and half a digestive biscuit.
Like a Persian potentate receiving gifts, Penny graciously accepted both biscuits, got crumbs all over the flowery duvet as she crunched them and immediately went back to sulking. One paw flattening Teddy ominously, she stared at Leonie crossly, her usually smiling Labrador face creased into a look that said, I’m phoning the ISPCA now, and then where will you be? Up in court on charges of cruelty to animals, that’s where. Imagine abandoning me for a crappy holiday.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t go,’ Leonie said in despair, thinking that she couldn’t possibly leave Penny, Clover and Herman for eight whole days. Penny would waste away, despite being cared for by Leonie’s adoring mother, Claire, who let her sleep on the bed all the time and fed her carefully cooked lambs’ liver.
But Leonie’s three children had gone to stay with their father in the States for three weeks and Leonie had vowed to give herself the holiday of a lifetime just to cheer herself up. She couldn’t let herself be blackmailed by spoiled animals. Really, she couldn’t.
Clover, Leonie’s beloved marmalade cat, didn’t get on with Claire’s cats, hated the cattery and would no doubt lurk miserably at the back of her quarters for the entire visit, going on feline hunger strike, determined to look like an anorexic for her owner’s return. And even Herman, the children’s rescued hamster, went into a decline when his luxury hamster duplex was moved into Claire’s home. All right, so Claire’s three Siamese cats had an unnatural interest in little Hermie and did spend many hours staring at his Perspex home in a very calculating manner as if figuring out exactly how yummy he’d taste once they’d worked out how to open the trap door, but still…it wasn’t abandonment.
Nevertheless Leonie felt guilty leaving her beloved babies while she went cruising down the Nile in the luxury of an inside cabin on the Queen Tiye (single supplement £122, Abu Simbel excursion and Valley of the Kings dawn balloon trip extra, bookable in advance).
‘I shouldn’t go,’ she said again.
Penny, sensing weakness, wagged her tail a fraction and smiled winsomely. For good measure, she pounced on Teddy and chewed him in a playfully endearing way. How could you leave cute, adorable me? she said, her degree in Manipulation of Humans coming to the fore.
What was the point? Leonie wondered, weakening. She could have her eight days off at home and make herself tackle the bit of overgrown garden down by the river. Why own an artisan’s cottage on an eighth of an acre in County Wicklow’s scenic Greystones if you let the garden run to rack and ruin with enough floral wildlife for a butterfly sanctuary?
And she could paint the cupboards in the kitchen. She’d been meaning to do that for the entire seven years they’d lived there. She hated dark wood, always had.
Oh yes, and she could clean out Danny’s bedroom. He and the girls had been in Boston for nearly ten days already and she hadn’t yet touched his pit. No doubt the usual teenage debris was festering beneath his bed: socks that smelled like mouldy cheese and old T-shirts that had enough human DNA on them in the form of sweat to be used for cloning. The girls’ room was perfect because Abby had been overcome with a fit of tidiness one afternoon before they’d left and had forced Mel to help her clean up. Together they’d filled a bin-bag with old Mizz magazines, cuddly toys that even Penny no longer wanted to chew, old pens with no lids and copybooks with half the pages torn out. As a consequence, their room looked so tidy it was unlikely to be identified as the bedroom of two pop star obsessed fourteen-year-olds – apart from the dog-eared poster of Robbie Williams that Mel had refused to be parted from.
‘Don’t get upset, Mum,’ Abby had said when Leonie had looked into the bedroom and blurted out that it looked as if the girls were leaving for ever and not coming back. ‘We’ll only be away with Dad for just over three weeks. You’ll be having such a whale of a time in Egypt and out every night drinking and flirting with handsome men that you won’t notice we’re gone.’
‘I know,’ Leonie lied, feeling terribly foolish and sorry she’d broken her golden rule about not letting the children know how terrible it was for her when they spent time with their father. It wasn’t that she begrudged Ray time with his children: not at all. She simply missed them so much when they were staying with him and Boston seemed such a long way away. At least when he’d lived in Belfast, it had only been a couple of hours away from Dublin. Leonie wouldn’t have dreamed of gatecrashing her children’s visit with their father, but she was always comforted by the idea that if she wanted
