Free Past Secrets by Cathy Kelly Page A

would not be the wrong way round when Dennis Maguire was in charge.
    The cloakroom in the Galway apartment was the last room Maggie had painstakingly redecorated. Now it was all cheery blues and whites, like a small beachside restaurant from their last holiday, a glorious, special-offer week in the Seychelles. Holidays had been off the agenda for the past few months as they were broke but Maggie had an almost physical longing for the feeling of sweltering sun toasting her skin while her toes wriggled in sand.
    We need a break, she thought as she stepped out of the lift on to their floor. Sun, sand and no conversations with irritated students when they’d discovered that the very book they needed for that night’s rush-job essay on Greco-Roman funerary practices wasn’t in its place.
    Grey was a politics lecturer and Maggie was one of six librarians in the vast, modern Coolidge College library, a job she loved because it allowed her mind to wander over many varied subjects from medicine to literature. The downside was that pre-exams the stress levels of the students went up and people who’d spent six months working on the formula for the perfect Long Island Iced Tea to fuel a party suddenly required actual research materials for their courses. And Maggie was the one they got mad at when the research material in question was booked out by someone else.
    ‘But, like, I need it today,’ a radiantly pretty brunette girl had said only that morning, slim fingers raking through her hair, which irritatingly made her look even better. What hair product did she use? Maggie wondered briefly but didn’t ask.
    Instead, she said, ‘I’m really sorry but I can’t help you. We’ve only two copies and they’re both booked out every day for the next week. You’ve got to make arrangements in advance with some textbooks.’
    ‘Well, thank you very much,’ snapped the girl sarcastically. ‘You’ve been a great help, I must say.’ And she marched off in high dudgeon.
    ‘You can’t win ‘em all,’ commiserated her colleague Shona. ‘Still, she’s not like the back of
     
    a bus, so she can always sleep with her prof if the going gets tough.’
    ‘Shona! That’s so sexist. I thought you were reading The Female Eunuch?
    ‘I did and it’s marvellous, but I’m on to the new Jackie Collins now. I know Germaine Greer wouldn’t approve, but I’d have slept with my prof if it’d have improved my degree,’ countered Shona wistfully. ‘He was sex on legs, so it wouldn’t have been a hardship.’ Shona’s degree had been in European Literature. ‘When he talked about the Heart of Darkness that was in all of us, I swear, I felt a shiver run right down my spine into my knickers.’
    Shona was, in fact, happily married but she was an irrepressible flirt and batted her eyelashes at every passing cute guy, despite many weary conversations with the head librarian about appropriate behaviour in the workplace. ‘Just because I’ve eaten doesn’t mean I can’t look at the menu,’ was her motto.
    Fortunately her husband Paul, whom she adored and would never cheat on, was merely amused by all this.
    ‘Professors don’t have sex with students, except in the fevered imaginations of people like you,’ Maggie retorted. ‘Besides, she’s in third-year history. Have you seen Prof Wolfowitz? Brilliant, yes. Beddable, no. He is totally bald except for that one eyebrow. Every time I see him, I want to pluck a few of the middle hairs out and give him two eyebrows instead of one.’
    ‘Maggie, Maggie,’ sighed Shona. ‘The eyebrow is immaterial. Sleeping your way to success has precisely nothing to do with how good-looking the powerful person is. You may wear scuffed cowboy boots and a tough attitude, but you’re Haven’t-a-Clue Barbie at heart. You don’t have a calculating bone in your body apart from the one hot Dr Grey Stanley puts there, of course.’ Shona laughed like a drain at her own joke.
    Maggie groaned. She was used