CHAPTER ONE
Aisling stared at the crumpled-up receipt in her hand and tried desperately not to cry. A credit card counter foil with smudged writing, it lay forlornly on the palm of her hand with the words “Lingerie de Paris’ plainly printed on the left-hand side.
Her hand trembled slightly as she pulled out a chair and sat down by the kitchen table, blind to the fact that her sleeve was resting on an island of marmalade and toast crumbs left by the boys’ usual breakfast commando raid. She closed her eyes and crunched the receipt into a ball, willing the words to have changed when she looked again.
Just moments before, Friday had stretched out in front of her in a comforting and familiar routine. A visit to the dry-cleaner’s with Michael’s suits, a quick detour to the hairdresser’s to get her hair blow-dried for the party and coffee with Fiona in the Merrion Centre for a thoroughly enjoyable gossip over a slightly too-big slice of carrot cake smothered in cream.
No carrot cake, she admonished herself automatically. A brown scone with a tiny bit of Flora and a cup of black coffee with no sugar. Got to stick to the diet. The first week was always the hardest but you’ve got to stick to it, or so the diet gurus repeated endlessly.
Dieu What am I thinking about bloody diets for, she wailed out loud. What was the point of living on dry toast and two ounces of lean turkey with a mini-Kit Kat treat a day when your entire life had just disintegrated.
Suddenly her regular trip to the dry-cleaner’s and the itching session with Fiona seemed a million miles away. Michael never remembered to leave his suits out for dry cleaning and she’d stopped reminding him
since it was easier to bring them downstairs herself than listen to him stomp around the bedroom muttering about women with premenstrual tension and complaining about being late for work.
She had also given up telling the twins to put their dirty football jerseys in the laundry basket. They copied their father slavishly in everything and, if he managed to escape from all things domestic, they followed suit. Aisling was used to finding remnants of tissues and receipts glued to every wet item of clothing when she emptied the machine. She had finally realised that she was stuck with two ten-year-old fledgling domestic incompetents along with a card-carrying anti-housework husband. She simply cleaned out the pockets herself.
That morning had been no different.
“Don’t forget to bring my navy suit, Aisling, and tell them about the red wine stain on my yellow silk tie, will you?”
Michael had shouted downstairs.
“Yes, my lord and master she muttered from the depths of the downstairs coat cupboard where she was riffling through, duffel coats, soccer boots and the bits of the vacuum cleaner that she never used. She was looking for the boys’ tennis rackets. The three-week summer camp in UCD always seemed like a good idea at the time because it certainly kept the boys out of trouble during the too-long holidays. But it meant three times as much organisation as it took to get them off to primary school. The camp timetable was a bit erratic and the boys always forgot to mention that they wanted some vital bit of equipment until five minutes before they were due to go.
Yesterday, it had been swimming goggles. Today, tennis rackets.
“I know I left them there, Mum,” wailed Phillip, hopping from one leg to the other in agitation, his dark eyes huge with anxiety.
“Somebody must have moved them!”
Somebody was responsible for a lot of things in the Moran household, Aisling thought darkly as she rummaged through old papers and a battered plastic toy box she thought she’d thrown out.
Somebody regularly ate all the chocolate biscuits, broke dishes and lost school jumpers. She’d just love to shake somebody.
Michael’s voice, even more agitated than Phillip’s, broke into her reverie.
“Aisling, where did you put my linen jacket? I want to wear it tonight and I can’t see it in the bloody wardrobe! I’m going to be late, for God’s sake!”
Triumphantly dragging two battered rackets out of the cupboard, Aisling handed them to a delighted Phillip and shouted back up the stairs, “I put it in the spare bedroom wardrobe because your wardrobe is so full it would end up totally creased before you’d put it on.”
Two minutes later, Michael rushed the boys out the door to drop them at UCD before driving to work. Peace reigned again. The nine o’clock news blared loudly in the background.
She left the breakfast dishes on the table to go upstairs and collect the suits, trousers and ties she was bringing to the cleaner’s, scooping up her handbag and keys at the same time.
She draped the dry-cleaning pile on the back of a kitchen chair as she had dozens of times before and reached absently into every pocket.
Among the bits of pocket fluff and unused match books Michael always seemed to have stashed in his pockets, she found it. Tucked into the inside pocket of the fine wool navy suit that looked so good with his yellow Paisley tie, was an ordinary credit card receipt, the sort of thing she wouldn’t usually look at. But today was different. Something made her smooth it out and look. Fifty pounds’ worth of goods from one of Dublin’s most exclusive lingerie shops had been purchased with their joint credit card but had somehow never made it into her underwear drawer.
Unbelievably, her loving husband had been lying through his capped teeth when he muttered that expensive lunches with his newspaper colleagues and important contacts had sent his Visa card bill sky-high.
The receipt in Aisling’s hand made her think that the hefty bill he’d complained about had nothing to do with lunch at Le Coq Hardi. Instead of buying bottles of pricey Rioja and the best smoked salmon to loosen his political friends’ tongues, the deputy editor of the Sunday News appeared to have been splashing out on goodies of another kind. Luxurious silky goodies.
Fifty pounds. Aisling marvelled. And in Lingerie de Paris at that. She had never even stood inside the door of the plushest underwear shop on Grafton Street. She’d seen enough adverts for the shop’s dainty silk knickers and bras to realise that they were ruinously expensive.
Aisling felt a sliver of anger pierce the gloom in her heart. She’d been brought up to believe that spending money on clothes was practically sinful and she’d never spent more than fifteen pounds on a bra in her life.
Apart from the lacy crimson teddy the girls at work had bought for her honeymoon twelve years ago, and a few s.
frivolous satin bits and pieces which never felt comfortable under her jeans, Aisling’s lingerie collection consisted of the type of plain cotton knickers and sensible bras that wouldn’t look out of place on a Mother Superior.
If she was knocked down by a bus, nobody was ever going to think she was a sexpot once they’d ripped off her sensible navy cardigan and long, full skirt to reveal underwear about as erotic as suet pudding. It would all match, of course, saggy off-white knickers, saggy off-white bra and saggy off-white body.
No amount of lycra underwear could conceal her spare tyre and cellulite-covered bum. Why waste money looking for sexy lingerie? Anyway, the sort of bras that could contain a well-endowed 38C generally looked as if they could also accommodate a few basketballs at a push and were, therefore, passion-killers of the most effective kind.
Passion-killers, hah. She laughed out loud, a little rasping noise that turned into a sob at the thought of Michael walking into a lingerie shop to buy something for another woman.