Ashling was also a little nonplussed. What have I done?

When Lisa booked a taxi to take her to the Morrison, she asked – with mild embarrassment – for Liam. She’d started doing that lately. She could only suppose that she liked Liam, with all his salt-of-the-earth Dublin chat.

By the time she arrived at the hotel she’d taken her upset about Jack and Mai and reconfigured it into something manageable. Hadn’t she promised herself only that very morning that she was going to bag herself a bloke? And that it didn’t have to be Jack. Not yet, in any case.

‘Where do you want to be dropped, Lisa?’ Liam interrupted her thoughts.

‘Just up here, at the building with the black windows.’

There was a young man, decked out in a beautiful grey tailored suit, loitering by the front door of the hotel.

‘Ah, look, love,’ Liam’s voice softened. ‘Your fella’s waiting on you. And all done up like a dog’s dinner in a whistle and tie. Is it your birthday? Many happy returns of the day. Or is it your anniversary?’

‘That’s the doorman,’ Lisa muttered.

‘Is he?’ Disappointment made Liam very high-pitched. ‘I thought he was your chap. Ah well. D’you want me to wait for you?’

‘Yes please, I’ll only be about fifteen minutes.’

Briskly, Lisa tested the bounciness of the Morrison’s beds, the crispness of the sheets, the size of the bath – it was big enough for two – the amount of champagne in the mini-bar, the aphrodisiac foodstuffs available from room service, the CDs in the room and, finally, the handcuff opportunities. All in all, she concluded, you could have a very nice time here. The only thing that was missing was the right man.

Returning to work, her eye was caught by a huge billboard advertising a new ice-cream called Truffle. She was going to the launch that very evening. Then she noticed the magnificent man on the poster, his ravishing mouth wrapped around a Truffle, his eyes glazed with what was meant to be lust, but could just as easily have been achieved with a couple of Mogadon.

I’d love to have sex with him.

God, she realized, I’m turning into a sad old spinster. Fantasizing about a photograph. The sooner I get laid the better.

35

The launch party for the new Truffle ice-cream started at six that evening. Because it was basically a choc-ice, it had no Unique Selling Point, in a marketplace crammed to capacity with products boasting USPs. So the manufacturers were pelting money at it, holding the launch in the Clarence and luring journalists there with promises of champagne. It promised to be a fairly glitzy affair.

‘Want to come?’ Lisa asked Ashling.

Ashling, still uncomfortable after the way Lisa had humiliated Mercedes, was about to refuse, then decided it would kill an hour before her salsa class. ‘OK,’ she said, cautiously.

Before they left, Lisa went to the ladies’ to do her hourly check on her appearance. Sweeping a cruelly appraising eye over her slender, tanned reflection in a white Ghost dress, she was pleased. This was no misplaced arrogance. Even her worst enemy (and competition was stiff) would have acknowledged that she looked good.

She’d want to, she admitted. She worked hard enough at it. She was her masterpiece, her life’s work. Not that she was ever complacent about her appearance: she was also her own harshest critic. Long before it was ever visible to the naked eye, she could tell when her roots needed to be done. She could feel her hair growing. And she always knew – even if the scales and the tape-measure disagreed – when she’d put on even an ounce of fat. She fancied she could hear her skin stretch and expand to accommodate it.

She paused and narrowed her eyes. Was that a line she saw on her forehead? The merest whisper of a hint of a wrinkle? It was! Time for another Botox injection. She was from the attack-is-the-best-form-of-defence school of beauty therapy. Get it before it gets you.

Touching up her already perfect lip-gloss, Lisa was finally ready. If she didn’t pull this evening, it wouldn’t be her fault.

It turned out that both Kelvin and Jack were also going along to the Truffle shindig. As Truffle was sponsoring the new drama series on Channel 9, Jack was reluctantly playing the corporate game.

‘And what’s your excuse? Which of your many magazines are you going to cover it for?’ Lisa sarcastically asked Kelvin.

‘None. But I’m in the mood to get stotious and I’m skint after the bank holiday.’

Lisa flinched at the mention of the awful, endless bank holiday. Never again.

As soon as they arrived. Lisa disappeared into the well-dressed, rowdy throng, Kelvin made straight for the bar and Ashling circled the room cautiously. She knew no one and couldn’t get too drunk because of her salsa class. And she must go to her salsa class, it was only the second lesson, way too soon to be skiving off. Occasionally through the crowds she spotted Jack Devine uncomfortably trying to be backslappingly jovial and failing miserably. Lack of practice, she deduced.

Somehow she ended up standing beside him, on the edge of things.

‘Hello,’ she said nervously. ‘How are you?’

‘I’ve a headache from smiling,’ he said grumpily. ‘I hate these things.’ Then he lapsed into muteness.

‘I’m very well too,’ Ashling said, tartly. ‘Thank you for asking.’

Jack pulled a surprised face, then turned to the passing waitress. ‘Nurse,’ he waggled his empty glass, ‘something for the pain.’

The waitress, a young, appealing girl, handed him a glass of champagne. ‘One of these every half-hour should do the trick.’

She dimpled prettily and he smiled back. Sourly, Ashling monitored the exchange.

As soon as the ‘nurse’ was gone, Ashling tried to think of something to say to Jack, any kind of vague conversational gambit at all, and couldn’t. And Jack was no better. He stood in silence, shifting from foot to foot, drinking his champagne far too fast.

Another waitress passed, this time carrying a tray piled high with Truffles, which Ashling accepted eagerly. Not so much because she loved ice-cream, although she did, but because it would give her something to do with her mouth other than not talking to Jack Devine. She applied herself to it with gusto, twirling her tongue around the top. Abruptly she sensed she was being watched and peeped up to see Jack Devine looking amused and suggestive. A prickly blush crawled up her neck. Still holding his look, she bit the top off her choc-ice with a savage crunch. Jack winced and she laughed with serves-you-right wickedness.