From The Heart by Sheila O'Flanagan Read Free Book Online Page B

is a bit of a wine buff and so I didn’t take part in the conversation but allowed my eyes to wander over the rest of the diners. When you’re at an all-inclusive hotel, particularly a relatively small and certainly exclusive one like White Sands, you tend to get to know your fellow guests fairly quickly. At least you get to recognise them enough to nod at them every morning, every lunchtime and every evening in a kind of complicit ‘Look, I know that there are probably loads of brilliant local restaurants out there but I’m spending a fortune to stay here and, well, what the hell!’ kind of way. I’d already spoken to the older woman, Esther, who was here on her own and who reminded me very much of those Miss Marple TV programmes. The ones starring Joan Hickson, not the more recent ones. Esther looked like Joan Hickson in the role and acted like her too – slightly dippy but not really, if you get my drift. I felt as though she was altogether stronger than she let on. I’d also spoken to the guy on his own with his son who’d arrived the previous day. He seemed really nice but terribly jumpy and I guessed that it was probably the first time he’d ever been on his own with the kid, even though the boy was about nine or ten years old.
    I wondered how Aidan would have been had he ever gone on holiday on his own with the kids. Funny, I wasn’t even able to imagine that, because Aidan just wasn’t the sort of guy who thought that taking the kids away on his own was something a bloke should ever do. Sounds crazy now (at least I think it does, because more and more men talk about wanting to be proper fathers to their kids and wanting to spend time with them), but back when Aidan and I had the twins, the concept of a New Man was one who poked the fire while you fed, bathed and changed the baby before washing the dishes from the meal you’d just cooked. And having done that, he felt as though his work was done. Maybe I’m being unfair on loads of guys in their forties and fifties. But I’m talking about my experience and the experience of most of my friends. Things did change over the next twenty years or so. But not as dramatically as many women would have us believe.
    Thing was, of course, I didn’t mind what Aidan’s contribution was. The fact that he was there at all was enough for me. My life without Aidan would surely have been a whole heap worse.
    I met him at work. Back in the late 1970s lots of girls met their future husbands at work. Work was one of the biggest social events that existed in our calendars because there wasn’t an awful lot else to do. A few tawdry night-clubs, maybe. Getting chatted up in a dingy bar (and most of them were dingy even if they’d stippled the walls, painted them white and hung red lampshades from the ceiling in an effort to make it look faintly exotic). Meeting a guy at night class – honestly, that’s what the magazines of the day recommended. The only night class I ever went to (car maintenance for beginners) was crammed with women hoping to meet men. Work, if you worked in a big organisation, was the best option by a mile. And I worked in a big organisation. I worked in a bank.
    Getting a job in the bank was like winning the jackpot. The pay was good and so were the conditions. People treated you with a level of respect. You dealt with money at a time when nobody had very much. It’s changed now, of course. You probably get more respect at a supermarket checkout than as a bank teller. (And fewer supermarket checkout workers have been replaced by machines too.) But I was thrilled when I turned up for my first day’s work. Doubly thrilled because I was in head office, and that had a certain cachet about it too. I wasn’t working in some poky little branch. I was in the modern new glass and steel building which housed a couple of hundred people all feeling slightly proud of themselves for having got a job here in the first place.
    I met Aidan Rourke at my very first