Someone Like You by Cathy Kelly Page B

patted Leonie’s arm reassuringly.
    Leonie was still mouthing in shock. How lovely of Hannah to say she had a lot going for her, but how mad as a bicycle to imagine that getting a man was just a simple matter of deciding to do so and accomplishing it. Perhaps that’s how it happened to people like Hannah but not to her. I mean, she thought, where had all the available men been over the last few years? Waiting for her to emerge from the chrysalis of having children under the age of fourteen?
    ‘What do you mean by “putting your mind to it”?’ she asked finally.
    ‘Dating agencies, magazine adverts, even car maintenance classes,’ Hannah said matteroffactly.
    ‘You’ve got to try them all. That’s the way to meet people these days.’
    ‘My friend Gwen met her boyfriend through a dinner club,’ Emma pointed out.
    ‘A dinner club?’
    ‘It’s a club for singles and you all go out to dinner once a month and see what happens. Gwen says she met loads of men. Some strange guys too, mind you. But she met Paul and that’s all that matters to her.’
    ‘I’d put any man off me if he saw me eating,’ Leonie said, only half joking. ‘Or I’d have to do like Scarlett O’Hara and eat before I went out so I’d be able to nibble daintily in front of Mr Right. Women with big appetites put men off, I’m sure of it.’
    ‘I’d probably order the sloppiest thing on the menu and end up with sauce all over my chin and chunks of bread roll flying off to hit other people in the eye,’ laughed Emma, getting into the swing of things now that she’d had that wonderful glass of wine. ‘I’m so clumsy when I’m nervous.’
    ‘Aren’t we all?’ Hannah groaned.
    Both Emma and Leonie thought that was unlikely.
    Hannah looked so self-possessed and calm. Even her hair obeyed her. Sleek and perfectly groomed, not a stray dark hair dangled from her neat ponytail.
    ‘Honestly, I am,’ she protested, seeing the looks of disbelief on their faces. ‘I went for a job interview a month ago and when I was supposed to be reaching into my attache case to hand them details of this computer course I’d done, I stupidly reached into my handbag instead, and stuck my fingers right into my hairbrush. You know the way you get a bristle under the nail … ?’
    They all winced.
    ‘It bled like a ruddy artery and I had to get tissue, wrap the finger in it - all while my hand was still in my handbag!
    - and pretend nothing had happened for the rest of the interview. They must have thought I was hideously tense because I kept one hand clenched up all the time, trying to hide the tissue so I wouldn’t look like a casualty victim in need of a transfusion.’
    ‘You poor thing,’ Leonie said sympathetically. ‘Did you get the job in the end?’
    Hannah’s grin of triumph lit up her face and the toffee coloured eyes sparkled. ‘Yes. Bloody finger and all.’
    She waved at a waiter and tried to order more wine.
    ‘I’ll have mineral water,’ Emma said quickly, thinking of both the baby and her father. She could still remember that awful moment at Kirsten’s wedding when he’d ticked Emma off in front of all the guests for having too much to drink.
    ‘So what is the job?’ asked Leonie. ‘What do you do?’
    ‘I was a hotel receptionist but I decided it was a dead-end job. It was a terrible hotel, really, but I took that job to get out of my old one which was even more dead-end, in a shop. My new job is office manager in an estate agent’s.
    I know it’s totally different, but I wanted to move jobs.
    I’ve done night courses in a management school for the past eight months and I’ve started an estate agent’s course.
    Not that I think I’d be lucky enough to branch into that part of things, you have to have loads of qualifications from what I can see, but it’s good to know all about the business.’
    It was funny, Hannah realized. She hadn’t talked about herself to anyone for over a year, since Harry. And here she was,