At least collarbones never got fat, unlike waists.
She’d had her hair blow-dried but made her own face up. After those early years as a model, Callie knew what worked. She knew other people saw beauty – full lips, her face a perfect oval and eyes that someone had once described as huge misty grey orbs that dominated her face. She, who’d been the skinny little kid in school with the weirdly big mouth, now saw only flaws: the lines, the inevitable sag of her jawline, and a tiredness no multivitamin could shift.
‘Like a Greek goddess with mysterious eyes, as if all the world’s knowledge is upon those slender shoulders . . .’ someone had once written about her.
Jason had teased her about it, but she knew that, secretly, he’d been pleased.
‘Greek indeed,’ he’d joked, ‘when we both know you’re pure Ballyglen.’
Callie had known he was pleased because normally he never mentioned their home town, having long since brushed its rural dust from his handmade shoes.
Their glamorous detached mansion in Dublin was a far cry from their council homes in Ballyglen, a small East coast town with no industry anymore, no jobs, and her family—
Stop thinking about the past!
She slicked on another sweep of lip gloss.
There had been little joking from her husband this week as the planner had consulted with Callie about the party. Jason, whose idea the blasted thing was, had been distant, on the phone a lot of the time hidden away in his study when he wasn’t at work.
Callie, whose perimenopausal emotional barometer was set to ‘high alert’ anyway, sensed him moving away emotionally.
Worse, Poppy had gone into overdrive in teenage cattiness, a type of meanness that must register on some Teenage Richter Scale of Narkiness somewhere.
‘Are you wearing that?’ she had asked her mother earlier in the week, spying the shift dress on its hanger.
‘Yes,’ said Callie, summoning all her patience, waiting for what Poppy and her friends called ‘the burn’ – a caustic remark that hurt as much as raw flames.
‘You wear that, it’ll look like the eighties threw up on you,’ said Poppy. ‘Plus, the waist is in, you know, Mum.’
There it was – the burn.
Her friend Mary, who was as all-knowing as Google, had warned her that the teenage era was tough.
‘Remember when you were the most fabulous Mummy in the world, small people snuggled up to you on the couch and said you were beautiful?’ Mary emailed gently, when Poppy hit thirteen. ‘That’s over. OVAH. You are now the thing Poppy tests her claws on, like a cat scratcher, only mobile. You’ve got to start reining her in, Callie, because it’s Armageddon time and she will pick on you, not Jason. You are going to be the cat scratcher.’
Mary had been right so far.
Mild acne and raging hormones that made Poppy question Callie’s every word both hit at the same time.
Armageddon, Callie thought, shell-shocked.
Poppy had fallen in with a different crowd at school, the gang with rich parents, the ultra-entitled gang who were always demanding money.
‘Do you remember that Christmas she wanted Santa Claus to give her presents to poor children?’ Callie asked Jason one morning.
‘Yeah,’ muttered Jason, scanning his iPad and barely listening.
‘Where has that person gone?’ Callie said earnestly.
Jason didn’t answer, his attention already elsewhere. Jason thought that as long as the family had plenty of money, that was all that mattered. Growing up poor could do that to a person. Once, she’d been the same.
But now . . . now she was afraid her beloved Poppy was becoming someone else: someone who knew the cost of everything and, truly, the value of absolutely nothing. A child of the wealthy who had nothing with which to compare her life. No memories of jam sandwiches for dinner all week, no recall of not having proper school shoes.
In giving their daughter everything she ever wanted, Callie wondered if she and Jason had damaged her by making Poppy spoiled.
Not that Jason thought so: he thought Poppy hung the moon.
But Callie, though she adored her daughter, worried and she was determined to teach Poppy the right things again.
First, she had to get through tonight – this enormous, entirely unwanted fiftieth birthday party that Jason had insisted on throwing for her.
‘People will expect it from us,’ Jason had said. ‘We’ve got an image to maintain, honey.’
Callie was sick of their damned image.
Sure, it seemed like Callie Reynolds had it all: the big house, the rich and glamorous businessman husband who never strayed, the looks of a former model, an interesting past, and a tall, beautiful daughter any mother would be proud of.
Yet it wasn’t perfect. Nothing ever really was. Real life was not like the pretend world on some people’s Instagram. Where was the Instagram that said ‘My Not So Damn Perfect Life’, with no happy-glow filters?
Jason had certainly pulled out all the stops, which meant a giant drinks party for two hundred people with the catering kitchen in the basement full of sous-chefs prepping for the plating of chocolate surprise bombes, tiny amandine biscuits shaped like stars, sashimi, sushi, cod and chips, Anjou pigeon (watch out for shot, warned the waiters and waitresses) and fat round pieces of beef that had been made into the most luxurious beef burgers ever. If any of the guests had an allergy, or even felt they might like to have an allergy on fashionable grounds, it would be catered for. There wasn’t a bag of Peruvian black quinoa or a tin of organic matcha tea to be had within a ten-block radius, just in case.
Holding her stomach in, Callie slowly made her way into the party, knocked sideways by expensive perfumes and the noisy clatter of hundreds of people drinking cocktails perfected by a mixologist.
‘Fabulous party,’ said someone, and a face Callie barely recognised from the newspaper air-kissed her. ‘The house is divine.’
Callie beamed her photograph smile.
‘Yes, it’s lovely,’ she said, poise in motion now that the Xanax had kicked in nicely and had chemically flattened her worries about Poppy or guilt over her family’s absence at this party. ‘Jason has such incredible ideas for the house.’
It was easier than saying that Jason was a nightmare when it came to the notion of improving everything he owned.
Everything had to be the best or most expensive. Like the recent renovation.
Thanks to endless months of building works on the mansion in the embassy belt, a huge basement had been dug for an extension which opened up to a three-storey conservatory complete with a walkway around the highest floor, at ground level, where tropical plants grew, and solar panels in the giant glass panes made the whole thing work.