The Matchmaker

by Marita Conlon-McKenna

  ‘Sure do,’ they all agreed.

  ‘Remember those bad old days when we were stuck filing and typing letter after letter? One mistake and you had to start all over again!’

  ‘God bless computers and printers and the Internet,’ exclaimed Louisa, who since her separation had been immersed in a part-time course in computers and web design, which was useful for the small stationery business she’d set up, selling exquisite wedding and party invitations.

  The salmon was delicious and Maggie noticed all the chairs and tables around them had filled up.

  ‘Maggie, are you by any chance free on Saturday?’ Rhona asked as she passed around a jug of iced water. ‘It’s just that Mike’s cousin Eamon will be in town for the night. He’s playing golf with Mike in the afternoon and I wondered if you’d be interested in joining the three of us in the golf club for dinner afterwards.’

  Maggie widened her eyes. Eamon Farrell was a nice man who had separated from his wife two years ago. She’d met him at various dos at Rhona and Mike’s over the years but now all he ever talked about was the ins and outs of his separation and the sale of his house in Kildare. Just because she was a widow, why did everyone assume she was available and in the market for a male companion?

  ‘Rhona, thanks for the invite but I’m actually babysitting for Sarah on Saturday,’ she fibbed. ‘And I don’t want to let her down.’ She ignored the glances from her friends darting around the table.

  ‘And how are your girls?’ Fran asked diplomatically.

  Maggie took a deep breath. These were her closest friends. ‘Actually, Grace and Shane have broken up and she’s taking it very badly.’

  ‘That’s the guy that works with her and used to go out with the journalist girl?’ quizzed Louisa.

  ‘Yes, but she’s not an ex any more. He’s back with her.’

  ‘Oh, poor Grace,’ sympathized Fran. ‘Nothing worse than getting your heart dinted.’

  ‘With them both working in the same firm it’s making it all very awkward,’ Maggie explained. ‘Grace is used to things going smoothly so it’s going to be hard for her in the office.’

  ‘Bloody men and break-ups, that’s the awful part of single life from what I remember,’ sighed Rhona. ‘But then just when you’re about to throw in the towel and swear the oath of spinsterhood you go and meet someone when you least expect it!’

  They all burst out laughing, remembering how Rhona had met her husband Mike: she had been reversing out of a car park and and crashed into his brand-new car. They all knew that meeting Mike Farrell had been a huge changing point in Rhona’s life, their marriage and the birth of their two sons bringing her the happiness she had always craved.

  ‘I don’t mean that she’s got to crash a car,’ she protested, ‘but the guy of her dreams could be right under her nose!’

  Mark McGuinness was most definitely right under the Ryan family’s nose, thought Maggie; he was still single and, from what she could gather, sparks had flown when Grace and he had met. He’d annoyed her eldest daughter intensely with his know-it-all attitude, but she knew many couples who had positively hated each other at first. Besides, Mark and Grace had a lot in common with their work. Maybe the next time they met up things might go a bit better?

  ‘And how’s my sweetheart Evie?’ asked Fran.

  ‘You won’t believe it, but she’s going to be six at the weekend!’

  Maggie could still remember how supportive her friends had been when Sarah had got pregnant. The fact that she had thrown away her education and was far too young to have a baby had been glossed over. When Evie had been born Sarah had been inundated with baby gifts from Maggie’s friends, all welcoming her first grandchild to the world. She’d always remember the kindness and care they’d shown to her daughter and her child.

  ‘How’s Sarah doing? Any love interest?’ asked Louisa, full of curiosity.

  ‘She says guys run a mile when they hear she has a child! It scares them off.’

  ‘More fool them,’ retorted Fran hotly.

  They all nodded wisely; men could be such fools where girls were concerned.

  ‘I’d love her to meet someone,’ Maggie confided. ‘My new tenant would have been perfect but unfortunately he already has a girlfriend.’

  ‘Maggie, you are such a schemer,’ teased Rhona. ‘Fiddling in people’s lives.’

  ‘No, I’m not!’ she protested.

  ‘Yes, you are,’ they all chorused.

  Maggie had to laugh. ‘Well, if it wasn’t for my fiddling, Fran and Liam might never have met!’

  ‘And I will never forget the night that you introduced us.’ Fran smiled. ‘Remember – we went to dinner in Captain America’s and you got him to join us for a hamburger and he asked me out when we were leaving.’

  ‘Life was a lot simpler then,’ mused Maggie. ‘I don’t know why but my girls don’t seem to have any intention of getting engaged or married, and as for Anna, no man can match up to her high standards.’

  ‘So no wedding bells in your house then!’ remarked Louisa. ‘You’ve three dedicated singletons on your hands by the sound of it.’

  ‘I suppose,’ admitted Maggie, suddenly finding herself defending her daughters. ‘You can’t force people to fall in love and settle down. It isn’t as simple as that!’

  Afterwards, as they tucked into banoffi pie and coffee, she wondered how it had all got so complicated. Finding someone to love and to love you should be easy. There’d been no mobile phones or texts or emails or Internet in her day to aid communication, and yet things had been far simpler than they were now.

  She had met Leo when she’d least expected it, at an awful rugby club dance that her brother had dragged her along to. He’d asked her to dance and when the music ended, he had written her number down on a piece of cardboard from a beer mat and kept his promise and phoned her the next day. They’d arranged to meet in Kielys in Donnybrook, and Maggie was astonished when she realized just how attractive she found him. A year later to the day he had proposed. They were total opposites and had absolutely nothing in common except the fact that they loved each other – which is more than enough for any marriage.

  ‘Your girls or my boys, we never get to stop worrying about them,’ remarked Rhona as if reading her mind. ‘No matter how old they are or how much they earn they will always be our babies and we just want the best for them.’

  ‘Too true. It doesn’t make any difference if it’s school or college or work or careers or their love life,’ Maggie admitted. ‘I guess it’s part of being an Irish mammy – we can’t let go.’

  ‘I’d let go of my two lumps,’ Rhona joked, ‘but no one will have them.’

  Maggie burst out laughing. Rhona had two very handsome sons; Colm, the elder, had disappeared to Australia for the year and judging from rumours had half the female population of Sydney drooling over him, and her younger son, Gareth, was in his final year in college and was so busy between studying and playing rugby for Leinster that he scarcely had time to notice women.

  ‘Give them time!’ she warned.

  ‘Honestly, Maggie, I’ll be scouring the country looking for good wives for the pair of them. I don’t want any brazen hussies for daughters-in-law!’

  Driving home Maggie decided she had no intention of scouring the country for eligible bachelors for her girls. Things were not that desperate. However, a little old-fashioned matchmaking right on her own doorstep might not go amiss.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Pulling on a clean pair of jeans and a vintage floral-print shirt Anna grabbed her green velvet jacket and the present in the hallway. Today was Evie’s sixth birthday and although the thought of a gang of screaming six-year-olds chasing around her sister’s cluttered garden flat didn’t bear thinking about, she had offered to give Sarah a hand with the party and she wasn’t about to let her down. Afterwards, if she wasn’t too banjaxed, she’d chase in to the opening of Philip’s new play in the Beckett Theatre.

  ‘Auntie Anna!’
shouted Evie, greeting her in a pink tutu with fairy wings.

  ‘Aren’t you a pretty birthday fairy!’ she laughed, lifting Evie up into her arms. Shit. She had totally forgotten it was a fairy party and that all the kids were coming dressed up for the occasion in wings and floaty fairy costumes, with little wands and tiaras.

  ‘I thought I told you to dress up,’ reproached Sarah, who was sporting a pink net ballet skirt over a pair of black leggings, with a pair of wings pinned on her back. ‘We’re all meant to be fairies!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Anna apologized, suddenly feeling like a party pooper. ‘What can I do to help?’

  ‘Well, Mum’s in the kitchen helping with the food but there’s all the party games.’

  Anna’s heart sank. If there was one thing she hated more than dressing up in silly pink it was games. She’d hated them ever since she was young but it wasn’t fair to expect Sarah to single-handedly deal with this onslaught from the fairy kingdom.

  ‘The first game we’re going to play is Musical Toadstools,’ announced Sarah enthusiastically.

  Anna looked around noticing that every stool, pouffe, foot rest and even piano stool the house possessed had been commandeered and placed in a circle. Her sister must have spent ages making the bright red-and-white-spotted cushions which covered them.

  ‘Wow!’ said the kids as they began to move around in a circle to Kylie Minogue. It was hilarious watching them as they danced and screamed with excitement when the music stopped. There was a mad rush for the stools and one poor fairy was left standing.

  ‘Will you look after Tara?’ suggested Sarah as the music started again.

  Anna looked at the stricken fairy; she knew what it was like to be a loser. She began to hop up and down as the music began again. ‘Come on, Tara. We’ll dance too, we’re the fairy cheerleaders. We’ll cheer them all on!’

  Tara looked momentarily puzzled and then began to follow her lead.

  As the game continued more little girls joined the fairy cheerleaders dancing and jumping and consoling the losers; Evie grinned as she joined the merry bunch.

  Next it was Pin the Wings, Crown, Wand on the Fairy. It was ingenious: Sarah had done a huge drawing of a fairy which she had Blu-Tacked on to the sitting-room door.

  ‘Everyone must be blindfolded,’ she insisted, producing a fuchsia-pink chiffon scarf.

  ‘Me first,’ pleaded Tara, who was determined to win at least one game. Everyone held their breath as blindfolded Tara groped madly at the picture with a pair of wings in her hand. There was mad tittering when she placed them firmly on the fairy’s bum.

  ‘Cold, cold!’ hinted Sarah as Tara tried again. The fairy now had a pair of wings floating from the top of her head and a wand poking out from her nose.

  Tara herself burst out laughing when she saw the result. Anna had to admire Sarah who was endlessly patient with the kids, urging everyone to try again. She slipped away to the small galley kitchen.

  ‘How’s it all going?’

  Her mum was putting the finishing touches to a tray of butterfly buns, her face flushed with the heat from the oven as she placed the sponge wings carefully on the top of another bun. They were Anna’s favourites when she was a kid, light melt-in-your-mouth sponge filled with whipped cream.

  ‘Take one,’ offered her mother.

  There was a range of home-cooked goodies laid out for the kids. Rice Krispie buns, marshmallow top hats, chocolate brownies and a fabulous fairy cake with her mother’s butter icing and decorated with a cluster of little hedgehogs, ladybirds, frogs and six pink candles.

  ‘Mum, it’s fabulous, Evie will love it.’

  ‘It did turn out rather well,’ she agreed, for if there was one thing Maggie Ryan excelled at it was making cakes for special occasions. ‘I still can’t believe she’s six. It seems like only yesterday that Sarah told us she was pregnant.’

  Anna could still remember the utter chaos that ensued when Sarah had finally worked up the courage to tell everyone she was going to have a baby. They’d been having Sunday lunch when Sarah had blurted it out before making a run to the bathroom to throw up her meal. Mum and Dad had almost collapsed and she and Grace had been stunned by the fact that their ‘little sister’ had jumped right ahead of them in the motherhood stakes.

  It had been tough for Sarah, going it alone with no doting boyfriend or husband. Evie had arrived three weeks early in a huge drama which involved the Lynches from next door driving Sarah and herself to the hospital and breaking every traffic light to get there on time. Grace was away in Hong Kong, and Mum and Dad had arrived at Holles Street Maternity Hospital absolutely flootered from a dinner party. Sarah, composed and calm, had delivered a perfect, beautiful baby girl in thirty minutes; her crazy family had been a bundle of tears and hysterics as they greeted the tiny new member of the Ryan clan. Evie was adored by them all and had brought such life to the house and comfort to her mother, especially since Dad’s death.

  ‘Where are they going to eat?’ she asked, nibbling a butterfly bun.

  ‘Thank God it’s dry and sunny because we’ve got the picnic all set up in the garden.’

  The garden had been transformed into a fairy pink paradise, the lawn spread with pink coverlets and a collection of cushions and parasols lay enticingly around. There were twelve perfect picnic baskets, old mushroom baskets transformed and covered in a variety of pink patterns with a little girl’s name written on each in coloured sparkles.

  ‘Did Sarah do all these?’

  ‘You know what she’s like,’ laughed her mother. ‘She should have been on Blue Peter.’

  Anna laughed too; her youngest sister was one of the most creative people she knew. She always had paints and glue and sticky tape on hand to make things!

  ‘The fairies are getting restless, I think that they’re ready to eat,’ said Sarah, appearing from the living room.

  The girls oohed and aahed over their baskets as they skipped out to the garden and sat down on the cushions.

  ‘I’ve got chocolate marshmallows!’

  ‘I’ve got a pink bun!’

  Anna helped to pass around the cocktail sausages and jugs of orange squash. The kids tucked merrily into their baskets laden with food.

  ‘What they don’t eat, they can take home in their baskets!’ Sarah said.

  Grace arrived wearing pale blue jeans and a knitted white sweater, relieved to hear that she hadn’t missed the birthday cake.

  Sarah poured her a glass of wine. ‘The rest of the grownups will be along soon,’ she told her, pulling a few garden chairs up around the table.

  ‘I invited Mark McGuinness too,’ added their mother. ‘I dropped an invitation in his letter box last week.’

  ‘Mum!’ groaned Anna and Grace in unison. ‘This is hardly his kind of thing.’ Their mother was utterly incorrigible; imagine inviting their new neighbour whom they barely knew to a children’s party. It was so embarrassing!

  ‘I thought I was being neighbourly, but he can’t make it,’ she said, clearly disappointed that whatever plan she was hatching had failed.

  Relieved, the girls watched as Angus Hamilton walked up the garden pathway towards them carrying a large pink-wrapped present.

  ‘Hey, you didn’t tell me you’d invited him,’ teased Anna, taking in the long floppy hair, stubble and Transformers T-shirt.

  ‘Evie and Angus are great friends,’ blazed Sarah as Angus hugged her warmly.

  ‘Angus,’ yelled Evie, throwing herself at him and spattering chocolate Rice Krispies all over his T-shirt.

  ‘Happy birthday to the beautiful fairy princess.’ He bowed and produced a bubble-blowing machine and a set of fairy hand puppets, which caused a huge stir.

  ‘Angus, I’ll get you a glass of wine!’ offered their mother.

  Aunt Kitty, and Karen and her husband Mick, who were two of Sarah’s best friends, suddenly appeared, greeting everyone as they grabbed seats under the parasol.

  ‘Sarah, you’ve been blessed with the day,�
� said Aunt Kitty approvingly.

  Grace went to get more wine glasses as Oscar from next door arrived. They all noticed his walking was stiffer and slower than usual but he tried to disguise the pain he was in as Angus pulled out a comfortable chair for him to sit on. Anna helped Evie use the bubble machine, and the bubbles drifted across the garden with the fairies in hot pursuit.

  ‘I think we’ll have the birthday cake now,’ whispered Sarah, disappearing to the kitchen.

  All eyes turned to Sarah as she reappeared carrying the cake with the six candles lit. They all sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Evie. Anna squeezed her mother’s hand as the two heads, one dark, one fair, bent towards each other.

  Evie, utterly over-excited, blew out the candles before joining her friends for the last party game: a treasure hunt.

  ‘There is a precious fairy ring hidden in the garden for every fairy,’ Sarah promised them.

  ‘What a great party.’ Karen’s husband Mick was full of praise. ‘Most people would just take the kids to the cinema or McDonald’s.’

  Maggie reminded him that she would expect any of her daughters to make their best effort for a birthday. It was a family tradition.

  ‘And you have another birthday in a few weeks’ time,’ reminded Aunt Kitty. ‘Grace’s.’

  Grace could kill her aunt! She was totally dreading her upcoming thirtieth birthday.

  Half an hour later the parents began to arrive to collect their kids. Some stayed to join in the celebration and have a piece of cake and wine or coffee while others had to get home.

  All the kids came up and thanked Sarah and Evie for the great party.

  ‘It was the best party ever,’ declared Hannah and Ashling, two of her schoolfriends.

  ‘You’ve given us a hard act to follow,’ joked Hannah’s mother, a wealthy solicitor.

  Anna was so proud of Sarah who, on a very limited budget, had with a bit of imagination created such a memorable day for Evie and her pals.