Free Homecoming by Cathy Kelly Page B

diamond, will it?’
    There wasn’t really an answer to that. Her mother didn’t mean it to be cruel: just honest in a worried way.
    Perhaps once Sylvie was married, her mother would look round and find something else to blame for Connie’s inability to get a man. Connie sighed at the thought.
    ‘I won’t have time to make you all up,’ Sylvie was protesting. ‘There are eight of us. I am not Wonderwoman.’
    ‘You are to us,’ laughed Connie. ‘All right, I’ll plaster a bit more make-up on later. We won’t let you down.’
    ‘Tell me again: what do you mean, you are giving up wine bars?’ Sylvie demanded. She was like a dog with a bone when it came to Connie’s single status. ‘You will be alone forever if you do not try. Do you think men lurk on the streets waiting for us to find them? Non! We have to look for them!’
    ‘I have looked,’ protested Connie. ‘I’m exhausted looking. I want him to start looking for me.’
    ‘How will he find you, if you are at home watching television?’
    ‘He’ll have a ladder and he’ll see me in my window,’ sighed Connie. ‘I don’t know. I give up, Sylvie. I’m taking this month off.’
    ‘You need a facial,’ said Sylvie, peering at Connie’s face with a beady eye. ‘You are all congested. Too many pastries. Look at your pores!’
    ‘You can make me look fabulous tonight and hide my big pores,’ said Connie, and hurried off to her class.
    The day flew.
    Her congested pores notwithstanding, Connie had a quick sandwich and a cup of tea at lunch in the staffroom where a cake was cut for all those people who wouldn’t be coming to the hen night. Then she headed to the library because it was the only quiet place to do some marking.
    After lunchbreak, she had the first years, followed by double history with the fifth years, which she wasn’t looking forward to because she was too tired for their antics. You had to be in the whole of your health for a giddy bunch of sixteen-year-olds.
    Today, there was wild excitement because they’d got something planned as a send-off for Miss Legrand, who was their class teacher.
    After history class, there was to be a small party for her departure. Needless to say, not a shred of work was being done and as Connie watched her students pretend to read about Charles Stewart Parnell, she knew they were all communicating with each other about the party. Notes, sign language, whispered sentences – if only they were as good at history as they were at plotting.
    There was absolutely no point in trying to counter this behaviour. A wise older teacher had once told Connie that a class is like a tidal wave and once it turns, it turns. ‘Save the lesson for another day, or you’ll go insane with impotent rage.’
    She’d also told Connie that deafness was a useful aid for teachers too.
    So Connie admired the girls’ party hairstyles and thought about how it felt like the end of an era. When this school year was over, Sylvie would be leaving St Matilda’s for good. It seemed like only yesterday that the two women had started out as new teachers in the school together. Now Sylvie would be gone to start married life with her husband in his home city, Belfast, and Connie would stay on at St Matilda’s, growing old with the nuns.
    The school bell rang lustily, taking Connie by surprise. She liked to give pupils a five-minute warning near the end. But today, it didn’t look as if the fifth years cared. They leapt to their feet and swept the books off their desks at high speed.
    ‘Bye, Miss O’Callaghan,’ they murmured as they raced out, dropping their textbooks on her desk.
    So many of them were impossibly glamorous, Connie thought. Their long shaggy hair was exquisitely styled each morning. Outwardly, they looked like confident young Valkyries. It was only through teaching the girls that a teacher would learn how young and worried they sometimes were.
    It seemed as if half the school was crammed into the fifth years’