Wishful Thinking (a journey that will change lives forever) (14 page)

“Well, we all know what these hard-nosed career women can be like.  Too busy doing power lunches, having meetings and obsessed by money to even think about anyone other than themselves.  I don’t want Linda to turn into someone like that. What good is money to her if she’s left on her own?”

Dara was so annoyed she could hardly speak.  Hard-nosed career women?  Why were career men always described as hardworking, but career women as hard-
nosed
?  Gillian’s attitude was exactly the small-minded and pathetic approach her friends had taken with her
.  ‘Don’t be so obsessive about work, Dara!  Men don’t like neurotic career women, Dara!’
  Yet, almost as soon as she’d married Mark, the comments stopped and everyone gave a collective sigh of relief.  Ah, great, Dara’s married now.  At last she’s one of us – she’s normal.  

Sensing his wife’s annoyance, Mark spoke up. “Gill, you and Jeff were very lucky to find one another when you did.  But it’s not that easy for everyone, especially these days – regardless of your career or lifestyle,” he added diplomatically.

“But she doesn’t even try!” Gillian persisted.  “She said herself she’s too tired to go out these days.  You can’t order in a boyfriend like you can a pizza, you know.”

Dara resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

“And I know most of her friends are attached now, so it’ll get to the stage where she’ll have nobody at all to go out with.”

“Why?  Do your friends automatically stop being your friends once they become attached?” Dara enquired.

“Well, no, but it is different.  No couple wants a single girl hanging around with them when they go out, especially a good-looking one like Linda.  It’s not good for the relationship.”

“I see.  So, a single girl, any single girl – even a good friend – is a threat all of a sudden?” 

Unfortunately, she knew well where Gillian was coming from.  Some of Dara’s married friends had stopped asking her on nights out once it became apparent that there was no sign of her following suit and getting married. 

“Well, not exactly, but at the same time …” Gillian’s words trailed off as Linda came back into the room. 

The younger girl smiled shyly as she resumed her seat at the table.

Mark licked his lips exaggeratedly. “I can’t wait to see what you’ve got for the main course, Gill,” he piped up. “‘Cos this will be very hard to beat.”  He nudged Dara under the table, and she knew he was trying his utmost to drop the subject and keep things upbeat. “Seriously, why can’t
you
cook like that?”

Because I’m one of those poisonous hard-nosed career women, Dara wanted to say, but instead she followed her husband’s lead.

“I can actually,” she teased, with a surreptitious wink at Linda, “but I don’t want to spoil you too much, otherwise you’ll go all soft on me!”

Gillian went straight in for the kill. “There’s nothing wrong with spoiling a man,” she said, smiling beatifically at Dara. “In my book, it’s a woman’s duty.”

Dara harrumphed. Well, your book must have been written in the last century, she said to herself.

And you certainly won’t find it on my bookshelf.

                                                         *******

“That really wasn’t fair of Gillian to go on at Linda like that,” Dara said to Mark on the train home.  “I know it isn’t really any of my business, and she is her sister but …” she let the rest of her sentence trail off.

“Look, don’t mind Gillian – she’s always been a bit of a bossy boots and is never afraid to make her feelings known.  To be honest, I think she acts the mammy more than Mum does.  She was the same with me before I met you, always making comments about finding a good woman to look after me.”

Dara grimaced.  “She must be thrilled with me then.  I don’t think I’m quite what she had in mind for you.”

“Do you think I care what she thinks?  I’ve told her often enough to keep her nose out of my affairs.  The problem with Linda is that she’s too soft to do the same.”

“I got the impression that tonight wasn’t the first time she’d been needling Linda about it. Thinking of it now, I did wonder why she seemed so apologetic about bringing one of her girlfriends to the wedding instead of having ‘a proper date’.” She exhaled deeply.  “I wouldn’t have got so annoyed, only I know exactly how the poor girl feels.  I never heard the end of it from my crowd until I met you.”

“Really?”

“Yes, you know that. I’ve told you often enough how Mum used to drive me mad with all these loaded comments and little digs.  She couldn’t rest until she saw me married.  The strange thing was she never seemed that bothered about Serena or Amy as they always
seemed to have boyfriends.  But I went through what you could call a dry period a few years ago, and once I hit thirty poor Mum thought there was no hope for me.  She started saving novenas – anything to help the cause.”

Mark guffawed.  “No wonder she was all over me when I came to the house that first time.”

It was true.  Hannah had fawned over Mark so much that day Dara wondered if she had actually taken a fancy to him herself. But no, Hannah had been on her best behaviour so that they wouldn’t frighten away such a decent prospect.  It was pathetic. 

When Dara had announced that she was bringing her new boyfriend home for Sunday dinner, she could almost hear the popping of champagne corks in her mother’s brain. 

At last! And a nice respectable lad, a normal down-to-earth fellow, it seemed – not a bit like that Morgan layabout Dara had spent so long pining over. Who ever heard of taking off and travelling the world like that. And at his age!

Mark had immediately won over her parents, and indeed the girls with his unassuming, easygoing manner.  He just chatted away about normal, everyday things and there was no high falutin’ talk about seeing the world and ‘not being ready’ for marriage and kids.

And best of all, he seemed mad about Dara, and didn’t seem at all threatened by her high-powered career and her fancy wardrobe.  Somehow, Mark seemed to understand how women were these days.

“So you’re a physiotherapist then, Mark?” Hannah began, nice as pie. “Some kind of doctor, is it?”  Dara could see her mentally working out how to bring this impressive piece of information about Dara’s new man into conversation at the following week’s farmers’ market. A doctor, no less!

“Well, no, not a doctor,” Mark replied amiably.  “What I do is quite specialised and I trained specifically for it.  It’s a great job though, and I love it.”

“It sounds very interesting indeed,” Eddie said agreeably.

Dara knew he wasn’t sizing Mark up as a prospective son-in-law as much as trying to determine if he liked him.

“So, you’re doing well for yourself then?” Dara’s mother ventured.

“Well, it’s hard work at times, but sure what isn’t these days?” Mark said with his trademark mischievous grin – the one that had won Dara over in the first place.

Hannah’s head bobbed up and down approvingly, and inwardly Dara groaned.  Great, another point scored in Mark’s favour.

She could almost hear a collective sigh of relief when they left the house that evening and the phone call that followed the next day was full of talk about how Mark was a lovely guy, so respectable and such a great catch for her. 

“Yes, my mother certainly was all over you that first visit,” Dara said dryly. “In fact, she actually used the words ‘great catch’ when she phoned me the next day.”

Mark stifled a grin. “Well, wasn’t she right?” he teased, standing up as the train pulled into their station. “I
am
a great catch.”

Dara smiled at him as they alighted from the train. “I suppose you are in your own way,” she said, tucking her arm into his as they walked out of the station and back towards their apartment.  “Still, I can’t help but feel sorry for Linda – no, I take that back, I
don’t
feel sorry for her because I used to hate the fact that people felt sorry for me.  What I mean is I feel bad for her that she has to listen to that sort of rubbish from Gillian.  If she starts to feel bad about herself, it’ll only make things worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if she starts feeling the pressure from people to find a man, then she won’t be at all relaxed and at ease with herself if she does happen to meet someone she likes.  She won’t be able to just take things slow and see how it goes.  Instead she’ll be constantly wondering ‘Is this Him? Is this The One?’.” She shrugged.  “I did it myself for long enough – I know how it works.”

“And men sense it too, I suppose,” Mark nodded. “I came across that myself a few times before I met you.” He looked at her sideways. “That’s what got me interested, you know.”

“What did?”

“The fact that you didn’t seem all that bothered about me.  You didn’t give off that whiff of desperation that some women did.  I liked that about you.  It made things much more interesting.”

“Ah, you liked the chase.” Little did he know that the reason she didn’t give off that whiff of desperation was simply because she wasn’t desperate. And, at the beginning, she wasn’t that bothered.  It was only when they’d been together a while and they’d become good friends that she’d seriously considered him romantically.  

“So why weren’t you bothered about me?” Mark asked, as if reading her thoughts. 

Dara reddened a little.  “Of course I was.  But that was different.  You were Sinead’s friend so – ”

“And you didn’t realise that Sinead was trying to set us up?”

“Of course I bloody realised.  How could I not?” 

Sinead had been on a mission to find a man for Dara back then.  Mostly because she was always the odd one out at get-togethers and nights out. So when she met Mark at one of Sinead’s ‘Fix Up Dara’ dinner parties, she reluctantly admitted that this time her friend had made a good choice.  At that stage she was sick to the teeth of her friends’ obsession with finding a man –
any
man – for her, so when Mark turned out to be relatively normal and seemed good fun, she opened herself to the possibility of a few dates with him.

And as some of her married friends had been giving her a not-so-subtle brush-off whenever she invited herself on nights out, at least if she was with Mark they wouldn’t worry so much. 

Anyone would swear that she’d turned into this exotic femme fatale, she thought dryly, recalling the way the girls had clucked so possessively around their husbands in those days.  Simon and Nick were nice enough, but in fairness, Dara wouldn’t go near either of them with a bargepole.  And as far as she knew, the feeling was mutual.

But when she and Mark got together properly, Dara finally stopped being the odd one out at dinner parties or the uneven number at get-togethers. And amazingly, once she was once more officially attached, the invitations and suggestions for nights out returned.  Dara was ‘one of them’ again.  She’d joined the party – properly.  She was safe.

Now it seemed the same thing was happening to poor Linda, at least where her family was concerned.  She didn’t know about Linda’s friends, but from what she had said earlier, most of them were already attached.

When they were back in the warmth of the apartment, and Mark had put on the kettle for a late-night coffee, they discussed Linda’s situation once more.

“I always found that the hardest bit to take,” Dara said, recalling her not-so-distant single days. “The way my married friends used to always be a bit wary of me around their husbands – men who happened to be my friends too.”

“I know what you mean, but I do think it’s mostly a girl thing.  None of my mates batted an eyelid if I chatted with their wives or girlfriends or whatever.”  Handing her a steaming mug of coffee and a plate of warm buttered toast, he joined her on the sofa.

“But why is that, I wonder?” Dara continued between mouthfuls. “What about trust? And I don’t just mean between men and women, but what about between
women
and women?  I was friends with Sinead and Clodagh for years, and even if their husbands happened to be say … Josh Hartnett or even Matthew McConnaughey, I wouldn’t look twice.  They’re off limits!”  Although if they looked like those two, she might just be tempted, she thought with a grin.

“Matthew McConnaughey, eh?” Mark said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Now that you mentioned it, I’ve been mistaken for that fella a few times myself.”

“You wish,” Dara grinned. “No, wait, scratch that –
I
wish!”

“Think about it,” he insisted, draining his coffee mug. “The slightly ruffled fair hair, hunky tanned body, smouldering come-hither eyes.” He raised one eyebrow suggestively.

Dara had to laugh at his antics. “I’m really having trouble seeing the resemblance here,” she said, mocking him, “but if you say so.” Mark was fair-skinned and quite good-looking in his own way and he did have nice enough eyes.  But God love him, he was no movie star.

“I sure do, darlin’,” he drawled then, in an almost perfect imitation of the actor’s sexy Southern accent.

Dara burst out laughing. “That was really good!”  Then, putting her mug on the coffee table, she sidled up alongside him and smiled her most mischievous smile. “So, will you talk to me like that later – in bed?” she asked, fluttering her eyelashes at him in blatant exaggeration.