me again. I didn’t hear.’
‘I love you, Snow Maiden,’ he murmured.
This is a fictionalised account of a real-life couple, Gerda Nielsen and Jack Welsh, who met on the ship and were married on Thursday 13th May, 1915, just six days after the sinking, in a Manchester registry office. Of the 1,959 passengers and crew on board the Lusitania, only 761 survived.
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Gill Paul is a full-time write of both fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include Women and Children First, about a steward on the Titanic, and The Affair, which takes place in Rome in 1962 on the Cleopatra set as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor fall in love. Her new novel, No Place for a Lady, set amongst the chaos and carnage of the Crimean War, will come out in July 2015.
CLAUDIA CARROLL
Single, Forty and Fabulous The Feel-Good One
Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015
Copyright © Claudia Carroll 2015
Claudia Carroll asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008136109
Version: 2015–01–23
Table of Contents
Oscar Wilde once said that the tragedy of ageing isn’t that you’re older, it’s that you’re still young. And guess what? Today I’m discovering exactly what he meant.
It’s my fortieth birthday and I’m not a happy woman. Compounded with the fact that it’s also Valentine’s Day which of course ups the ante on the whole of this nightmarish day tenfold. Only people who had the misfortune to be born on either Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve will believe it, but trust me, if your birthday comes on a red letter day like this it frankly couldn’t suck any more.
Now normally I’m not a moaner or a whinger at all, I promise, but it’s my fortieth, so you’ll just have to indulge me. And yes, yes, of course I know that life is too short to dwell on every little bump in the road and that we shouldn’t measure our happiness against other people’s, but – well, it’s just on this of all days, I can’t help but feel deeply unfulfilled, stuck in a rut and don’t even get me started on my love life, which seems to have gone from a slump to an all-out strike.
Finally forty. Finally old enough to know that there’s more to life than sex and shoes and parties, but still young enough to know that they are the best bits. And that lately, I’ve been seeing damn all of any of them.
‘Oh for God’s sake, would you just listen to yourself!’ I say out loud in spite of the fact that I’m all alone, in a vague attempt to snap myself out of this pity-fest. My ‘surprise’ birthday-cum-Valentine’s night party over at the tennis club started half an hour ago and here I still am, still in my flat, still only half dressed and still bloody whingeing. I mean yes, OK, I may have reached this milestone age without a) having a husband/boyfriend/partner/any combination of the above or b) having kids and a family of my own, but I haven’t exactly been sitting around filing my nails all these years, have I?
’Course not.
