Be Careful What You Wish For
From the author of THREE WISE MEN, a wise, funny and uplifiting novel of women, men, love and friendship.Have you ever had a secret you couldn't even tell your very best friend?Molly and Helen have been friends for ever – well, since university in Dublin. Now in their thirties, they have successful careers, go everywhere together, share everything – or so it seems.Outgoing Molly is wistfully thinking it would be nice to meet a man who'd make her want to bolt to the altar at breakneck speed, when she finds herself juggling two. There's Fionn, her renegade ex, returned from a failed marriage to woo her (to Helen's disapproval), and gorgeous Georgie who runs the local off-licence.Helen, meanwhile, is steadfastly against long term relationships. So Molly is astonished when Helen confides that she's fallen in love with someone she shouldn't have, so head-over-heels that resistance is futile – but she won't tell Molly who it is.
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For my own Molly, Molly Eccles, an aunt who’s also a friend … although infinitely better behaved than her namesake.
Contents
‘Red wine or white?’ asked Helen.
‘Red – our bodies need the iron,’ said Molly. ‘But imagine having both in stock. Helen, it’s official, you’re a grown-up.’ She lolled on the sofa, waiting for her friend to prise open the bottle.
Despite a smorgasbord of corkscrews, Helen was fundamentally challenged in the uncorking department. Every so often she’d say wistfully, ‘Isn’t it a pity that Liebfrausquilch in the screwtop bottle tastes revolting? It’d be so handy,’ and Molly would threaten to report her to the taste Gestapo.
‘Give it here, Sharkey,’ she ordered now. ‘I’ll die of iron deficiency if I wait for you to relieve me.’ And she extracted both Merlot and corkscrew from Helen’s fumbling hands. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a foolproof gadget,’ she added. ‘Didn’t the Image magazine testers give it the full Orion’s Belt of stars?’
‘Misled again,’ mourned Helen. ‘I read, I bought, I faltered. Fill up my glass to the brim there, Molly, this is an emergency. I need to funnel the alcohol into my bloodstream in jig-speed time.’
‘You know what getting drunk on alcohol is called,’ said Molly, dribbling only a few drops as she poured.
Helen waited for Molly to fill her own glass and then clinked. ‘Tell me.’
‘A return on your investment.’
They swigged in companionable silence, facing each other on Helen’s somewhat mauled matching sofas from which, until she could afford two identical new ones, she wouldn’t be parted. Helen favoured pairs, whereas Molly shuddered if she accidentally found herself with a double – mugs, earrings, socks, towels were all deliberately mismatched. Shoes were about all she’d concede needed to come in pairs. ‘Eclectic’ was the word she dredged up whenever anyone suggested her taste veered towards the idiosyncratic; nobody came right out and told her she looked like a walking jumble sale, at least not since being staffed, after years as a freelance journalist, allowed her to relax her financial guard enough to buy clothes in the Powerscourt Townhouse.
‘So what’s the emergency, oh inheritor of the face that launched a thousand computer blips?’ she asked Helen, who was a software programmer.
The reference usually didn’t fail to make her friend blush or giggle, or at least twiddle an eyebrow, but tonight she didn’t react – an ominous sign. Helen took a protracted swallow that emptied her glass and said, ‘Thanks for galloping around at a moment’s notice.’
‘You know me,’ shrugged Molly. ‘I’d do the Lough Derg pilgrimage if it meant a drink in the heel of the hunt.’
‘I won’t ask you to walk on rocks here,’ said Helen, ‘but you might be obliged to walk on water. I need a miracle. Or failing that, electric shock treatment.’
‘So it’s a red-alert emergency, sirens blaring, traffic lights contemptuously ignored and cars bulldozed aside. It can only be man trouble.’
Helen frowned and refilled her glass without topping up Molly’s – which meant she was really distracted because Helen was renowned for her impeccable manners.
‘Just supposing …’ began Helen, rotating an opal heart earring in her left lobe, ‘… just supposing you fell in love with someone you weren’t meant to, but it crept up on you, and before there was any chance to erect the barricades you were head over heels and resistance was futile. How do you hold the feelings at bay – feelings you’re landed with whether you want them or not? Even though you refuse to meet him or return his phone calls you still think about him constantly. You can’t sleep, can’t concentrate on your job, and your life – which didn’t seem so unsatisfactory until the thunderclap – is so sterile and empty and meaningless there’s no way forward. Actually it’s more of a lightning bolt than a thunderclap, but no less elemental, and it’s left wasteland in its wake. God knows why I’m banging on about the weather.’ Helen twisted her earring so ferociously the back dropped off but she disregarded it. As Molly bent to retrieve the sliver of metal Helen continued, ‘The joy has been sapped from everything: going to work is like wading through fog; coming home to an empty house is so disheartening it’s tempting to stay on the DART train to the end of the line, and a day off stretches endlessly like a prison sentence with no remission.’
Her voice dropped until it was virtually a whisper. Molly’s stomach contracted at the misery on her friend’s face. She leaned across the sofa and wrapped her arms around the slight frame. She’d no inkling Helen was interested in anybody, never mind running the gauntlet of thwarted love.
