‘Er, I’d better just tell Pippa and Dan I’m here,’ he said, before she could get him onto the dance floor.
A wave of sobriety suddenly hit Marianne. What was she doing? She never ever behaved like this. What must this stranger have thought of her? But a more reckless side of her said, so what? It was New Year and her life was in tatters. She quickly brushed her embarrassment to one side, grabbed herself another vodka and orange and started dancing wildly to ‘I Will Survive’.
Someone shouted, ‘It’s nearly midnight.’ Suddenly, without warning, her sense of joyous abandon deserted her. Midnight. The countdown to New Year. Everyone singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Suddenly Marianne couldn’t bear it. She stumbled out into the garden, barely noticing that the temperature was below freezing. The alcohol coursing through her veins was keeping her warm. She sat down on a bench, and stared up at an unforgiving moon. The Shropshire hills loured out of the darkness at her, appearing gloomy and oppressive for the first time since she’d been here. She looked back into Pippa’s warm, friendly house, full of bright lights and cheerful people. Everyone was having such a good time and she was out here in the cold on her own, sobbing her heart out.
The back door opened and a shadowy figure came towards her.
‘Anything I can do?’ it said.
‘10, 9, 8…’
‘Nothing,’ sobbed Marianne. ‘My life is a disaster, that’s all.’
‘7, 6, 5…’
‘Well, if you’re sure. Only…you seemed…sorry, forgive me. None of my business. I’d better go in. You know.’
‘4, 3, 2, 1…HAPPY NEW YEAR!’ Screams and shouts came from inside. Marianne suddenly felt hatred for all these people she didn’t know who were having such a good time, and suddenly she couldn’t bear this stranger’s kindness. She didn’t want kindness. She just wanted Luke.
‘Yes, you’d better,’ she spat out.
‘Oh.’ The man looked slightly put out.
‘I hate everything,’ said Marianne, attempting to stand up, before falling back in the rose bushes. Her unlikely hero came to help her up. She sat up, looked into his deeply attractive brown eyes, and promptly threw up on his feet.
Noel sat at his desk wading through emails, most of which were completely irrelevant to him. Did he really need to be on the Health and Safety Committee’s minutes list? There were emails about three leaving parties at the end of January, he noted, people yet again leaving for ‘personal reasons’. The credit crunch was hitting his industry hard; building was always the first thing to go. And without anyone buying all those shiny flats in city centres, there wouldn’t be any need for new eco-friendly heating systems designed by the likes of him either. Gerry Cowley had been muttering under his collar for weeks before Christmas about the business needing to be leaner and trimmer. In the past, Noel felt he could have relied on his reputation as the brightest engineer GRB had ever employed, but then Matt had joined the firm. Matt, with his lack of dependants, bright-eyed young-man’s energy, and brown-nosing abilities. There was someone heading for the top if ever anyone was. And Noel had a nasty feeling that it would be at his expense.
No point thinking about what might never happen. Noel could almost hear his mother’s voice. It had been her favourite phrase when he was growing up. Way back when they’d had some kind of relationship, before she’d turned into the mother-in-law from hell and, according to the kids, Granny Nightmare. Not that he’d ever had an easy relationship with his mother. Noel had spent most of his childhood feeling that somehow he’d disappointed her. Particularly after his younger sister was born, who apparently could do no wrong. He envied Cat her relaxed relationship with her mother, Louise, who was Granny Dreamboat in every way possible.
Cat. Something was happening to them. He felt like the sands were shifting beneath him, and the world was changing without him. Ever since Cat had started the blog, and the Happy Homemaker thing had taken off, Noel felt Cat had had less and less time for him. All she seemed to focus on was her work and the children. The money it brought in was undoubtedly welcome, particularly when his own job was looking increasingly dodgy. But when a whole week had gone by and he’d barely seen Cat, let alone spoken to her, he wondered if it was all worth it. Sometimes Noel wondered if there was any place in Cat’s heart left for him anymore. And, after the way he’d behaved on Christmas Day, he wasn’t sure he blamed her.
This was no bloody good. Time he pulled himself together and got on with some work. Noel started to check through the plans he’d drawn up before Christmas for the air-con system at a nearby leisure centre and sighed as he saw the notes from the architects querying why he couldn’t match their exact specifications. When would they learn that the real world didn’t operate in shiny boxes and out of plush offices but in the mathematical parameters that physical laws allowed you?
A head popped round the corner. Matt Duncan, looking mighty chipper with himself.
‘Have you heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Davy Chambers has copped it.’ Matt drew a finger underneath his throat, with barely concealed glee.
Shit. Dave Chambers was going? Dave was part of the furniture at GRB. If he was going, no one was safe.
Noel shivered. January seemed to have set in both chill and drear. He had a feeling a cold wind was blowing over the horizon.
So, Christmas over, turkey stuffed, cooked and eaten, house full of plastic toys—mainly broken—children back at school. It’s time for a spring clean. Yes, I know, technically we’re still in winter, but post-Christmas, full of New Year’s Resolutions, is as good a time as any to clear out the rubbish and it’s always good to start the year as you mean to go on…
Catherine stopped typing and looked idly out from her eyrie-like study at the top of the house as a half-starved crow flapped and flopped its way across the frosty attic roof. Bloody blog. Bloody Happy Homemaker. Some days she wished she’d never started it. It had begun as a piece of fun, posted between Ruby’s feeds, something to keep her sane while she worked out what to do about her career.
Catherine,whose idea of domesticity involved the minimum amount of cleaning compatible with reasonable hygiene requirements, had struck on the idea of an ironic take on the life of the twenty-first-century housewife—or homemaker, a term Catherine utterly loathed. She’d sat down and typed sarcastically:
So, here you are, once a busy, successful businesswoman, tied to the home with a squawling baby and a stroppy toddler. Is it possible to be a twenty-first-century homemaker and survive, sanity intact? By applying the same management skills to your home life that you did to your work, I believe that not only can you survive, but that you can actually embrace the challenges being at home throws you. A happy home is one organised with military precision, which is why every Sunday evening we sit down as a family and work out our timetable for the week. A colour-coded copy sits on the freezer, so I can keep track of Kumon lessons and French club and when the baby needs her next set of jabs. I’ve even perfected my own clocking-in system. It works for me. It can work for you.
So had the Happy Homemaker been born and, to her astonishment, had been an instant hit. Unfortunately a lot of her readers failed to get the irony and took her far too seriously. Somehow she had stumbled into some kind of zeitgeisty thing where women appeared to be sitting at home with their offspring, willing to be lectured at by a complete stranger about how to run their homes. Soon she was getting several hundred hits a day, and achieving a massive following. Her blog became so popular it even got mentioned in the broadsheets, much to Cat’s wry amusement.
Before she knew it, she was doling out domestic advice on a near daily basis, and soon the Happy Homemaker was attracting attention in the wider world, not least from Bev, her old boss from Citygirl magazine, where she’d been features editor till the arrival of Ruby had