Free Woman to Woman by Cathy Kelly Page A

after outfit until she came upon the perfect one an elegant midnight blue slip dress which looked deceptively simple unless you knew how much it had cost and realised that only brilliant and expensive designers made bias-cut gowns so flattering.
    Jo twirled in front of the mirror, twisting and turning to see her figure from every angle. She looked beautiful. A string of glass beads, tiny pearl earrings and high-heeled shoes completed the outfit.
    With her tortoiseshell hair cascading down her shoulders in the natural waves she’d never managed to tame, dark eyes shimmering with a faint dusting of Lancome’s silvery grey eyeshadow and the dress swirling around her, she felt like some Thirties movie star. Katharine Hepburn maybe, she thought, remembering rainy Saturday afternoons watching I old movies on the TV. She sprayed her neck and wrists lightly with
    perfume. Go get ‘em, Jo.

CHAPTER FOUR
    It was eight o’clock exactly according to the clock on the dashboard. It was time to go in, time to face her husband and the entire staff of the News who undoubtedly knew exactly what was going on in her marriage. Or her non-marriage as the case might be, Aisling thought glumly.
    The launch party had been going on for at least an hour already, she reckoned. But she had been sitting quietly in the car since she’d arrived, nervously fiddling with her car keys and wondering how to slip in as unobtrusively as possible.
    Jo would be there, she reminded herself. Thank God for that. Even though it was over twelve years since she’d shared a matchbox-sized flat in Rathmines with the lively trainee journalist, they’d still remained friends.
    Aisling knew that it was largely thanks to Jo’s determination that they’d seen each other regularly over the past ten years.
    When their lives had diverged one of them climbing up the career ladder and the other climbing the stairs with piles of laundry Aisling had begun to wonder whether a high flyer like Jo would be bothered to keep in touch.
    The question became academic when the demands of Jo’s job meant she had neither the time nor the energy to socialise outside work. Aisling found that two adorable baby boys required twice as much work as one. Consumed by love for her darlings, she retired from normal non-baby life until the boys reached school-going age and she began to pick up the pieces of her old life again.
    Meeting Nuala, an old friend from work, Aisling realised that her world had changed utterly over the past few years while Nuala’s was just the same. Nuala talked about flexitime, staffing cutbacks and brokers who
    irritated her on the phone. Aisling felt instantly boring, another mother droning on about her lovely children.
    She wasn’t surprised when Nuala didn’t ring back to arrange another lunchtime meeting. That was why Aisling had assumed Jo would be the same. Too busy to squeeze in a hurried sandwich with someone she’d been close to years before. People changed, moved on.
    It was a pleasant surprise to find out that she was wrong. Jo was determined to keep in contact, always on the phone or arriving for lunch when she was in the vicinity.
    No matter how long an interval between their meetings, they would always slip back into their familiar friendship, laughing at the same things and reminiscing about the days when they hadn’t enough money for the gas meter and wrapped themselves up with blankets to keep warm while watching their tiny portable TV.
    “I still have this recurring nightmare about not having the rent money and coming back to the flat to find our clothes on the road,” Aisling said, one freezing December morning when Jo had dropped by with Christmas presents for the boys and a beautiful enamelled brooch for
    “I wake up thinking the landlord is banging on the door and the relief to find it’s all a nightmare.”
    “I know the feeling,” Jo shuddered, even though they were sitting in front of the fire in Aisling’s primrose yellow living