The Women Who Ran Away - Sheila O'Flanagan Page 0,1

broad, and even if his waist was thicker than it had been in his twenties and thirties, he’d managed to maintain his athletic build. Rather unfairly, in Deira’s view, he achieved this without any great effort other than golf twice a week and an occasional visit to the swimming pool of the nearby gym. Metabolism, he’d say airily, when she complained that, at seventeen years younger, she put on weight simply by looking at a packet of biscuits. He made no comment at all about her monthly trip to the hairdresser to have her own increasing number of greys covered with an approximation of her natural chestnut brown.

Definitely not fair, she thought now. But life wasn’t fair, was it? Because if it was, she wouldn’t be standing here with a rapidly cooling cup of coffee in her hand wondering if he would set the police on her when he got home.

She took a sip of the coffee. There was no need to worry. He wouldn’t set the police on her because he wouldn’t know that the car was gone until the end of the following week, and even then he wouldn’t know she was the one who’d taken it. Besides, even if he did suspect her, she’d be miles away and there’d be nothing he could do about it. Interpol would hardly worry about a missing car, after all.

She shook her head. Car thief. Interpol. None of that was part of her life. France was supposed to have been a holiday. For both of them.

Their original plan had been to explore Brittany for a few days before heading to Paris. Deira had told Gavin that if he was going to indulge in his dream of open-top cruising down the motorway, she wanted to be able to say she’d driven around the French capital in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair. When he’d looked at her in bewilderment, she’d explained that one of her late mother’s favourite songs had been the haunting ‘Ballad of Lucy Jordan’, in which a thirty-seven-year-old woman feels so trapped in her life that she knows she’ll never get to do just that. When Deira was old enough to understand the lyrics, she’d sympathised with Lucy Jordan and wondered if her mother had ever felt the same way. Now approaching her own fortieth birthday, she’d visited Paris on a number of occasions but had never driven an open-top car around the city’s streets – and had never particularly wanted to until the day they’d collected the convertible.

Until recently, she would have felt enraged at the notion that any woman would feel washed up by the age of thirty-seven. But she’d come to realise that there was more to it than how you felt, and she knew there were things she’d previously considered unimportant that she’d never have the chance to do. And that, more than anything else, was why she’d cried every single day for the past two months.

She glanced at the clock again. She knew she was cutting it fine. It was a three-hour drive to Ringaskiddy, and she was supposed to be at the ferry terminal forty minutes before the ship sailed. Unless she was going to abandon her plan, she had to leave now. Yet something was holding her back. She wasn’t sure exactly what. A reluctance to commit herself to all the driving? The knowledge that she was poking a hornets’ nest? Fear of what people would say?

‘If he rings, it’s a sign and I won’t go,’ she said out loud, even as she knew he wouldn’t ring, and that if he did, she’d be in a panic to get the car back before he realised it was gone. Even thinking about him ringing was a sign of her weakness, not her strength. Anyhow, she didn’t believe in signs or omens, good or bad.

Life was life, she often said to her friend Tillie, who had a more open view on random signals as pointers for making important decisions. Seeing a white feather floating on the air or a sudden shaft of sunlight on a dismal day didn’t mean anything more than the fact that a bird had flown by or there was a momentary break in the clouds. Tillie would shake her head and tell her that she needed to be in touch with her inner self a bit more. But Deira was afraid of her inner self. She wasn’t sure it was a part of her that needed