Free Eloise by Judy Finnigan Page A

just a teenager, can’t they?’
    I looked carefully at my sweet girl.
    ‘Why? Have you met someone you really like?’
    ‘God no, Mum. You mean like all those idiots at school like Josh and Harry? Do me a favour.’
    I felt slightly disappointed at her dismissal of Harry. He was, in his gauche way, actually rather charming.
    Eloise and I often talked about the kind of boy we’d like to see our daughters marry. We wanted so much for them – men who were successful but kind, ambitious yet sensitive, intelligent and funny. How strong the matchmaking instinct is. Ellie and I wanted the best for our girls – love, passion, happiness – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
    I sighed. Eloise would never see her twin girls married, never play with her grandchildren. I must be there for Rose and Violet, I told myself, I must try to make sure those motherless little girls grew up happy. Never mind that Ted and Juliana would look after them. I, too, would do my best. I was their godmother, after all. I would try to make sure that, somehow, Eloise’s hopes for them did not die.
    And then I remembered a conversation Eloise and I had. So many years ago, before she married Ted.
    I had asked you if you were tired of being single, Eloise. I was long married by then, with three children who definedeverything about me. You were only a few months younger, and you seemed sad. There were many days I sat beside you and watched your lovely face sink into a soft despair, especially when you watched my little ones squabbling, cuddling and wrestling their baby days away.
    ‘Tired of being single?’ you said with a weak smile. ‘Devastated, more like. I long for what you have with Chris. That wonderful bridge of love and companionship. But I won’t have that, I think. I lost it a long time ago, and it won’t come back.’
    I was shocked. What were you talking about?
    ‘Tell me about it,’ I said. ‘I’ve never heard about this. Christ, Ellie, this sounds important. Tell me what’s wrong.’
    You smiled and shook your head.
    ‘I can’t. It’s far too painful and only my … ’
    You suddenly sat upright and became your usual gay, sparkling self.
    ‘Sorry, Cath. I’m an idiot. Can’t help myself. Once a drama student, always a drama queen.’
    Eloise and I had met when we studied drama at Bristol University. It had affected us both very strongly, but in completely different ways. She had loved the whole thespian culture; she was a classic exhibitionist, dressed in the New Romantic fashions and totally at home on the stage. She was a good little actress too, although it was clear this was alwaysgoing to be for fun. Eloise, with her trust fund and stately home, was never going to need a serious career.
    I, on the other hand, did. But I knew by the end of our first year that I was never going to make it as a professional actor. I so loved the poetry and the prose; was totally carried away on the waves of those gorgeous cadences, swellings and sighings of words; the sad sudden plunge from high romance into deepest tragedy; but I couldn’t deliver the words at a level they needed. I never resented it. I was stoical. Acceptance was my lot. I just got on with it, got my mediocre degree, took a typing course and ended up at the BBC in London as a ‘graduate secretary’, working on the venerable science programme
Horizon
. Hoping, with all the other girls in those hallowed establishment offices, that I would somehow leap over the rest of us ‘graduate’ girls and get a job on the creative side. As a researcher. That’s all I, and we, asked for.
    And it might as well have been for the moon. You grew up fast in those little rabbit warrens at the BBC, full of testosterone and fear that a young girlie from the typing pool will make it onto the next rung, depriving an earnest Oxbridge graduate of his birthright; his admittance into the ranks of the fantastically pensioned and revered great and good of the BBC.
    But I was never really