Page 98 of The Last Love Song
As she walked down the ramp from first class and into the terminal building, Helen felt a spring in her step. Things weregoing better than she ever dreamt. She was a rich, successful young woman.
Work was more than enough to compensate for the loneliness of her personal life.
Still no love, but enough power now to make up for it.
31
Sorcha nibbled at a piece of toast and reread the article dominating the front page ofThe Daily Telegraph.
AMERICANS WALK ON THE MOON
She looked up and out of the window at the burning blue sky. Neil Armstrong andApollo 11were somewhere up there, a tiny craft amongst the vastness of space. Sorcha shook her head. It was impossible to comprehend. Her newspaper predicted that the recorded pictures of the first walk on the moon would be broadcast at around lunchtime. She would watch them on the new colour TV they had just had installed in the sitting room.
Sorcha stood up and placed her plate, cup and knife in the sink. She looked out of the kitchen window across the immaculately manicured lawns and sighed.
A beautiful house in Hampstead, overlooking the heath, a rich, successful husband that thousands of women the world over dreamt about at night, and more money than she could ever imagine spending.
Yet she felt miserable and unfulfilled.
Why, oh WHY did I turn down that contract?
She sighed.
Con had been thrilled when she had told him of her decision to go to the States with him. As the adulation for The Fishermen grew, and Con found himself mobbed by screaming girls everywhere he went, Sorcha was sure she’d made the right choice. She knew she could trust Con – it was the women she was not so sure of.
One night, the two of them had arrived home at their flat in Hampstead in the early hours to find a young girl in their bed. Stark naked. Con had managed to get her to leave with an autographed photo and one of his old unwashed T-shirts.
This had prompted them to move to somewhere more secure. After they returned from the States, they’d rented a flat in Chelsea with twenty-four-hour porterage, very near to Todd and Lulu.
The Fishermen had gone from strength to strength. Another two number-one hits had followed in that first year. The time seemed to fly as she and Con were wined, dined and fêted by all that met them. It had been huge fun in the beginning: jetting off all over the world, staying in the best hotels, meeting the kind of people that Sorcha had only read about in magazines or seen on the television.
And Con was always attentive and loving, apologising if he had to leave her in the hotel room to go off for an interview or a rehearsal. He’d furnish her with money to go shopping. Sorcha had a wardrobe filled with expensive clothes bought from all over the world.
Then, slowly, the constant travel and screaming fans had started to take their toll. Sorcha would never have believed that she could grow tired of shopping, but that was the truth. Lulu had been there to keep her company at first, but as her career as an actress had taken off, she’d spent less and less time on the road with Todd. Sorcha had begun to yearn for some stability and a break from the endless rounds of packingand unpacking suitcases. So, two years ago, they’d found a lovely Victorian house on the edge of Hampstead Heath. It needed major renovations, and Sorcha had elected to stay at home more often to oversee them. Refurbishing the house had been a challenge she had relished. She only wished Con was home more to enjoy it.
His absences, however, did not deter his fans. There were always three or four young girls on vigil outside the front gate, desperate for a glimpse of their hero. The high wall surrounding the house now boasted an ugly necklace of barbed wire to keep out Con’s unwanted admirers. On more than one occasion, girls had spat at Sorcha when she drove out of the gates in the little Austin that Con had bought her for her birthday.
She hated the animosity, the uncomfortableness of being disliked not because of who she was but because of whom she was married to. Running the gauntlet of the fans outside caused Sorcha to think twice before she went out anywhere. Consequently, she spent more time than was good for her closeted inside the house.
Lately, she’d begun to feel a little like a prisoner.
She’d talked to Con about it, and all he could suggest was that she start to travel with him more often. However, the thought of hanging around in endless hotel rooms was even less appealing than staying at home, where she at least had her comforts.
Subsequently, she’d seen less and less of Con in the past few months.
Is he happy?she wondered to herself, then felt horrified that she didn’t know the answer. Con was her husband. They lived in the same house, shared the same bed, and yet she had felt lately that they were somehow drifting apart.
‘If only, if only the baby would happen,’ she whispered.
Despite two years of letting nothing stand in their way, Sorcha had not yet fallen pregnant. She thought how ironic it was that when Con and she had first met, she’d been completely terrified of conceiving a child. And now, when it was so very much what she wanted, God would not oblige.
Maybe this was her punishment.
For some reason, lately she’d been thinking a lot about the past, and Ballymore. Her mother still wrote monthly, enclosing press cuttings of Con that she thought her daughter might have missed. Sorcha thanked her profusely each time she wrote back, not having the heart to tell her that The Fishermen had their own press department which collated news about the supergroup from the four corners of the earth.
Her mother included news of her father in her letters – of how his business was thriving, of the fact that he was now head of the Ballymore Board of Trade and Commerce. It was obvious from her mother’s letters that Seamus had still not softened in his attitude towards his daughter. She had accepted the fact that she’d probably never see her father again.
Sorcha busied herself around the kitchen even though she knew Miriam the cleaner would be in tomorrow, which made her own domestic energies pointless.
