Stella had laughed at that.
Tara was equally supportive when she rang, but more direct: ‘Think of what a kick you’ll get from turning up looking a million dollars. You and I have certainly improved since school. At my reunion, everyone was stunned when I turned up looking good. Go for hot, Holly. Impress the knickers off them. Make them jealous. I’m sure you’ve lots of great clubbing gear at home, and you get a staff discount in the store, don’t you?’
This was true but Holly didn’t use her staff ten per cent to purchase going-out clothes. What was the point if you only went to the pub? Tara believed her younger sister shared the same sort of lively social life she did. Tara was always at parties and glitzy media events. It was part of her job. But although Holly could wisecrack with the same insouciance as her older sister, she could only do it with close friends and family. In company, her wit deserted her and she clammed up.
Naturally, the generous Joan did offer to design an outfit for Holly.
‘I can see you in a space-age, semi-Edwardian bondage look; a comment about school in general,’ Joan said, sketching on a bit of an old envelope. Somebody had given her a video of the director’s cut of Blade Runner and she had got a bit carried away with visions of the future.
‘Space-age, semi-Edwardian bondage!’ groaned Kenny, who lived with Joan, though not as a couple, as they both constantly informed everyone. Kenny was gay, worked in a designer men’s boutique, devoured Vogue as his bedtime reading and wished Joan would give up being avant garde so she could worship at the altar of designer Tom Ford, Kenny’s greatest idol. They made ideal flatmates because they could argue endlessly about fashion and, together, they could afford the pretty flat with the balcony that neither would be able to afford on their own. ‘Holly wants to make all her classmates pea green with envy,’ Kenny insisted. ‘Not make them laugh at her. Six-stone fourteen-year-old models from Eastern Europe with cheekbones like razors can wear that type of thing but on anybody else, it looks ridiculous. What Holly wants is something…,’ Kenny paused dramatically, ‘fabulous. And credit-card droppingly expensive.’
Bunny, practical as ever, had come up with a suitably fabulous outfit which hadn’t involved any credit-card action. Holly would never be able to thank her enough. Encased in her borrowed finery – Holly had promised Bunny she wouldn’t spoil the effect by telling anyone it wasn’t actually hers – even someone as self-critical as Holly had to admit that she looked OK. Well, reasonable. Passable. All she needed to do was not spill anything on herself.
Satisfied that her nails were dry, Holly stood up and took a deep breath before attempting to bend down and put on her boots. After what felt like ages, she zipped them both up and stood up, gulping in air like a deep-sea pearl diver.
She stood in front of the mirror, gave her hair one last brushing, and then picked up her handbag. She’d have killed for a cigarette but Gabriella would go ballistic if the corset came back smelling of Marlboro Lights, so she’d had her last one before she got dressed. How she’d stay off the fags tonight, she didn’t know, but she had to. It was a small price to pay. Holly practised her tough-but-sexy look in the mirror again. She even tried her Lauren Bacall, lowered eyes, look (Holly adored Lauren), but gloomily decided that the effect was more Bogie than Bacall. It was time to go. Holly had arranged to meet her friend at the train, take her for a drink, and then travel to the hotel in time for Donna to check in and change. What she hadn’t mentioned to Donna was that this plan would make them fashionably late for the reunion. That had been Bunny’s suggestion.
‘Make an entrance,’ Bunny had advised. ‘You don’t want to be hanging around aimlessly waiting for the party to get going. Arrive twenty minutes late and you’ll look as if you’re far too busy to get to things on time.’
Caroline and Lilli had made a cosy corner of the hotel bar their own, with handbags and jackets marking the spot and a double vodka barely diluted with Diet Coke in front of each of them for Dutch courage. The reunion was taking place in an annexed corner of the hotel restaurant, but the committee hadn’t been able to arrange a private area of the bar, so Caroline and Lilli had come down early to pick a suitable spot for their gang. Even ten years after they’d left Cardinal School, they still thought of their schoolmates as ‘their gang’. Of course, their lives had moved on a lot since then. Caroline had three small children and was a leading light in the Kinvarra Drama Society. Lilli had two little girls and worked part time. Sasha, another gangette, was assistant manager in the local video shop. The other girls, including TV star Michelle, had moved from Kinvarra, and were home rarely, which was why tonight was going to be so exciting: to see how well everyone had done. Lilli and Caroline knew that reunions weren’t really about meeting up with old friends – they were about chalking up the successes and failures of their peers.
Lilli consulted her list. ‘Twenty-five yeses, three nos and two who didn’t reply,’ she said. ‘That’s not a bad tally.’
‘I wonder if Michelle’s had any work done,’ Caroline said, getting stuck into her drink.
‘Definitely not,’ said Lilli knowledgeably. ‘Michelle was always naturally pretty. Her eyebrows are done properly now, that’s it. I don’t believe in plastic surgery myself.’
‘Me neither, of course,’ agreed Caroline, who cherished a long-range plan of having her eyes lifted before they got baggy like her elder sister’s.
‘You shouldn’t tamper with nature,’ Lilli continued, holding her glass with fingers tipped with rock-hard acrylic nails. ‘These don’t count,’ she added hastily, noticing Caroline’s eyes on the acrylic tips. ‘You can’t have decent nails when you’ve got small children.’
A lone woman entered the bar, looking round nervously and clutching a small handbag. Short and thin, she was not dressed in the frontline of fashion and her dark, un-styled hair hung limply to her shoulders. Caroline and Lilli surveyed her.
‘Brona Reilly,’ Lilli whispered to Caroline. ‘She hasn’t changed a bit.’
‘You’d think she’d have made more of an effort for tonight,’ Caroline whispered back. She and Lilli had pulled out all the stops and had made a trip to the city to check out wildly expensive, fashionable looks they could copy. They’d both had their hair and make-up done professionally for the night and Caroline, though she hadn’t told Lilli, had even had a seaweed wrap in Kinvarra’s poshest beauty salon in order to lose a few inches. Her corset-style dress was very unforgiving round the middle.
They pretended they hadn’t seen Brona and watched her go hesitantly up to the bar and order a drink. The reunion might have been about meeting people, but it was important that they were the right people.
Brona had been one of the people that the girls in Michelle’s gang had ignored. Mind you, so had Donna, who was now a friend of theirs. But that was different.
Any mild guilt over how they’d once treated Donna had vanished, because Donna herself didn’t seem to remember it. When Caroline, Lilli and Donna had accidentally met up three years ago at the school gates on the children’s first day, there hadn’t been any bad feeling at all.
‘Imagine, three little girls the same age,’ Donna had sighed. ‘They can go to school and be friends like us.’
Caroline, who was more thoughtful than Lilli, blushed at this, remembering how the more popular girls like herself used to ignore the school mice like Donna except when they wanted to copy their homework. Now that she was a mother herself, Caroline would have personally ripped apart any child who dared to ignore her own beloved Kylie. But Donna clearly had no bad memories of either school or Caroline and Lilli. All was happily forgotten.
‘Would you like to have coffee in my house when we drop the girls off?’ Caroline had said quickly that day, wanting to make amends.
‘That would be lovely,’ Donna smiled.
And that had been the start of their friendship. But despite three years of trying to get them together, Donna had never managed to reintroduce them to Holly.
Both