‘What do they say? “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come.” I’m sure it’s all happening the way it’s meant to.’ Marie-Claire smiled at her great-aunt. ‘And right now, my path is leading me to this.’ She indicated right and parked in front of a pretty bistro called 53 Avenue. ‘I booked us a table. The food is fab. I hope you’re hungry.’

‘I’m hungry all right,’ Brigid agreed. ‘That rubbish they serve on planes these days is woeful. I didn’t eat anything.’

‘We’ll feast in here, so,’ Marie-Claire said cheerfully. ‘Their seafood risotto is out of this world, and their chicken wings . . . yum, yum.’

‘I’ll be putting on weight! I’m eating like a horse since I retired,’ Brigid confessed. ‘My discipline is going to pot.’

‘You’ve had enough discipline for this lifetime,’ Marie-Claire told Brigid as they made their way into the restaurant. Having agreed to drive her great-aunt to Glencarraig tomorrow, they were both going to need sustenance. What happened when they got there was in the lap of the gods.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Imelda wheeled her grocery trolley along the frozen food aisle and threw a packet of Aunt Bessie’s roast parsnips on top of the packets of Jus-Rol puff pastry, to which she was particularly partial. Noticing Carmel Hennessy up ahead of her, she hastily rearranged the shopping so that the pastry was well covered. She wouldn’t give Carmel the satisfaction of knowing that she no longer made her own puff pastry. Shortcrust yes, but the palaver of rolling the butter in, folding the pastry, adding more butter and doing more rolling was so time consuming that the readymade was a godsend.

Carmel was, as usual, looking like she’d just stepped out of Vogue. Dyed jet-black hair coiffed and sprayed to within an inch of its life (Carmel always did her weekly shopping after getting her hair done), red tailored trousers with a crease so sharp it would cut butter, and a very smart paisley-print devoré-velvet jacket that looked as though it had cost a fortune.

Carmel was a great woman for the designer gear, and the body maintenance. It was rumoured that she’d had a facelift. She certainly had a very surprised look about her. Her skin was stretched taut and shiny across her cheekbones and the McDonald’s arches of her eyebrows nearly reached her hairline. ‘Definitely done,’ was the word in the book club.

She wasn’t the only one to have had ‘work’ done, Imelda thought smugly, squaring her shoulders and holding in her tummy. She was wearing her Karen Millen black belted trench coat, bought in the Brown Thomas sale last January, and a pair of smart L.K. Bennett ankle boots, bought during the same spending spree. After the ‘party episode’, as Imelda privately called it, she’d felt the need to spoil herself.