LITMIR.BIZ

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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, practically giving her life story to these two strangers. Holidays certainly had a bizarre effect on you – maybe it was the air.

      ‘Wow,’ Emma said admiringly. ‘A woman with a mission.’

      ‘I’ve got a mission all right – to make a career for myself. I got side-tracked for a few years,’ she added, not wanting to mention that the side-track had been nearly ten years with Harry, who’d let her sink into the squalor of coupledom before abandoning her for his South American trip.

      ‘And your mission,’ Hannah said to Leonie, deciding to change the subject, ‘is to find yourself a man, because that’s what you want. If I can turn myself into an office manager, you can find a man.’

      ‘Men, the root of all evil,’ sighed Leonie, starting on her second glass of wine. ‘I don’t mean that, really. I love men. That’s the problem,’ she added gloomily. ‘I think I scare them off. But I never thought of a dating agency. To be honest, I always thought only oddballs tried blind dating. Knowing my luck, I’d meet a serial killer or some nut with a fondness for PVC knickers and autoerotic asphyxia.’

      Hannah laughed grimly. ‘I’ve met enough nuts without the help of a dating agency. Not PVC fetishists, mind you, but still mad. My last long-term boyfriend should have come with a government health warning and I met him in the safest place in the world: McDonald’s at lunchtime. So you may as well try dating agencies, Leonie. At least you get to pick who you’ll meet and who you won’t bother with.’

      ‘Harrison Ford,’ said Leonie dreamily. ‘I want a Harrison Ford clone who loves children, animals and overweight blonde divorcées.’

      ‘What about your man?’ Hannah asked Emma, who immediately smiled at the thought of Pete.

      ‘He’s lovely,’ she admitted. ‘I’m very lucky. He’s kind and funny and I love him to bits.’ Pete’s face appeared in her mind: the open, smiling face with the brown eyes, big grin and the dark hair cropped close to his scalp. Well, Pete always argued, there was no point wearing your hair long when there was so little of it. She loved his seriously receding hairline, loved kissing him on the top of his head and telling him that bald men were more virile. She wouldn’t have wanted Harrison Ford, or even Tom Cruise, for that matter. She couldn’t imagine either of them making her breakfast in bed when she felt ill, or massaging her shoulders when she got backache or insisting that she read a magazine while he made dinner on nights when she felt tired. Or leaving a lovely note buried in her suitcase telling her he loved her and that he couldn’t wait for her to get home. Pete adored her. Only his dislike of her father meant he’d let her go away for a week without him.

      ‘We’ve been married three years and he’s really good to me,’ she said. Then, because she couldn’t resist, she told them about the sweet note he’d left hidden between her T-shirts in the suitcase.

      ‘Oooh, that’s lovely,’ Leonie said.

      She and Hannah were half-way down their second glasses of wine and they’d all been talking happily about why they’d decided to come to Egypt when the sound of Jimmy O’Brien’s booming voice could be heard from the doorway.

      ‘…if this is their idea of a first-class boat, I’ll be having words with that young courier woman, I’m telling you,’ he was saying loudly to another guest. ‘The shower’s useless and my towels got soaked because the shower curtain wasn’t any good. Call that first class? I don’t think so. Rip-off merchants, that’s what these bloody fellas are, pretending this is a first-class boat. Hmmph.

      ‘I’m not sitting outside,’ he added to his wife, ‘we’ll be eaten alive. Bloody mosquitoes.’

      Hannah watched as Emma visibly shrank into her seat, her eyes briefly filled with an emotion Hannah could identify easily: wariness. Hannah’s mother’s face had often looked that way, usually when her father rolled home after a day at the races, roaring drunk, bad-tempered and looking for someone to take it out on. He’d been small and ran to fat, mostly beer fat, unlike Emma’s father who was a formidable man, tall and strong. A man who could intimidate people and liked doing it. He didn’t need alcohol to make him bad-tempered: it was obvious he was like that all the time.

      Emma looked as if she’d rather have been keelhauled than face an evening with her parents. A surge of pity made Hannah reach out and touch her arm gently: ‘Would you like to sit with us at a separate table tonight?’ she asked quietly.

      Emma looked relieved at the idea, then shook her head. ‘I couldn’t, they’ll expect…’

      ‘Say you’re sure they’d like their first evening to be just for themselves, a romantic evening where you’re not a gooseberry,’ Hannah urged.

      Emma stifled the desire to snigger at the thought of her parents having a romantic evening. Her father reckoned romance was for wimps. He’d openly laughed at Pete for buying her a dozen red roses on Valentine’s Day.

      ‘Yeah,’ said Leonie, getting into the swing of things. ‘We need a third musketeer.’ Poor Emma was a lovely girl and obviously in need of saving from that obnoxious man. ‘Say you know one of us already and you want to chat.’

      ‘They’d never swallow that,’ Emma replied.

      Mr O’Brien had spotted his daughter with two women he didn’t recognize and marched over to their table, his wife in his wake like a tug boat following a liner into port.

      ‘I don’t have a wide circle of friends and if we pretended, my father would give you the third degree and soon work out you were lying.’

      Leonie tapped her nose enigmatically. ‘I happen to be a superb actress. We’ll say we know each other through your work. What do you do, anyway?’

      ‘I work for KrisisKids Charity. I’m in special projects,’ Emma said.

      ‘That’s run by that retired politician, Edward Richards, isn’t it?’ Leonie insisted. ‘His family owns Darewood Castle and the stud farm.’

      Emma was pleased that Leonie knew enough about the charity to know who ran the organization. It meant their public relations company were doing their job. But she couldn’t see how Edward fitted into this particular evening’s equation.

      ‘I’m a vet nurse,’ Leonie added. ‘Our practice used to be their vets. Very posh, I believe,’ Leonie said.

      ‘Hello there,’ boomed Mr O’Brien, sizing up the seating arrangements and noticing with displeasure that there was only room for three chairs at the small table.

      Emma immediately got up, smiled a nervous goodbye to the girls and led her parents to another table.

      ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us to your friends?’ her mother asked peevishly.

      ‘I thought you wanted to sit down, Mum,’ Emma said, not wanting to ruin her new friendship by making Hannah and Leonie meet her father. Grumpy after the flight, lord only knew what he’d come out with. ‘You can meet them later. Will I order you a mineral water?’

      Her mother immediately started fanning herself with her hand and looked faint. ‘Yes, it’s so hot, that would be lovely.’

      ‘Sit down,

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