Sheila O'Flanagan's No. 1 bestseller ALL FOR YOU is a wonderfully engaging read not to be missed by fans of Veronica Henry and Fern Britton.
As TV's favourite weather forecaster, Lainey is good at making predictions. But what she doesn't foresee is that her own life is about to hit a stormy patch. With a string of failed relationships behind her, surely history isn't about to repeat itself with her beloved Ken?
To add fuel to the fire, her career-woman mother is returning to Dublin. Deanna has never approved of Lainey's decisions about men, and her mother's views are the last thing Lainey wants to hear now!
Yet is there more to her mother than she knows? Uncovering some long-concealed family secrets, Lainey begins to reassess her life. Is the happy-ever-after she's always dreamed of really what she wants after all?
Release date:
July 7, 2011
Publisher:
Headline
Print pages:
351
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Regular readers may now be as familiar with the people I thank after each book as I am. But that’s because they are there
behind me for every one and they deserve their place between the covers!
And so, once again, many thanks to:
My super-agent, Carole Blake
My lovely editor Marion Donaldson
My fantastic translators, copyeditors and publishers in Ireland, the UK and around the world
And, of course, booksellers everywhere!
No matter what I do I always have the support of my wonderful family and friends, thank you so much. Colm has always been
with me on more than the book journey. A thousand thanks for the non-book stuff and even more for the proof-reading.
In writing All For You I had to do a lot of research, which was made all the more enjoyable because of the fantastic people who were so forthcoming with their time and expertise.
At Met Eireann enormous thanks to Gerald Fleming, Head of Forecasting, for his time and his knowledge, and especially for
allowing me to stand in the studio and pretend I was presenting the weather – it was a very sunny day by the time I’d finished
with it so they should let me do it more often …
In Monterey, I met some warm and generous people who shared so much about their town and its history. A big thank you to Karen
Nordstrand of the Monterey County Film Commission for pointing me in the right direction; to Jeanne McCoombs and Dennis Copeland
of the Monterey Public Library who unearthed so many gems for me; and to Jean Richards for her extensive information on the
Women’s Movement in the area. Special thanks to Diane Mandeville of the Cannery Row Company and Brenda Roncarati, Mentor of
the Boys & Girls programmes, for the wonderfully informative and fun breakfast in Monterey. I hope I’ve treated your lovely
town with the respect and accuracy it deserves.
As always, thank you so much to my readers who have created a community around my books, who keep in touch with me and who
spur me on. It’s always great to hear from you. You can reach me through my website www.sheilaoflanagan.com or my Facebook Fan page. And you can follow me on Twitter too!
Meteorology: the study of the atmosphere and its interaction with the earth’s surface, oceans and life in general
She was never sure whether it was a memory or a dream. It often came to her when she was drifting off to sleep. Or sometimes
just before she woke, like a YouTube clip in her head. She was watching it even though she was part of it, which was an odd
feeling. She could see the scene: a small wooden house with a blue and white striped awning over the narrow deck; a green
and yellow hosepipe snaking across the flagstoned yard; a small wheelbarrow full of hedge clippings with a rusted rake perched
precariously on top. She could feel the warmth of the air too, hot and muggy but with the occasional tiny wisp of breeze.
She could hear people talking inside the house, voices muted, suddenly raised, clearly angry, and then muted again. She didn’t
know what they were saying, but the flashes of anger worried her. And then she was in the scene herself, still a child, sitting
on the bleached steps outside the house, a collection of brightly coloured building bricks on the ground in front of her.
She was arranging them into piles. Most of them were in an orange pile. Fewer in a blue pile. Fewer still in a yellow pile. She was dividing them
carefully, the tip of her tongue peeping out of the corner of her mouth.
She placed the last brick on the blue pile. And then she felt the sudden drop of rain on her arm. A big drop. Warm.
She looked up at the sky. It had been grey all morning. Big, lowering, bruised clouds covering its previously brilliant blue.
And now the clouds were unleashing a deluge on the dried earth below. She held her hands up to the rain, enraptured by the
feel of the warm, heavy drops on her skin, letting it soak through her pretty lilac and white checked dress.
She heard the adult voices raised again and then someone say, ‘Where’s the child?’
There was the sound of chairs scraping against tiles, of footsteps drawing nearer. And then a short exclamation, and she felt
herself scooped up into his arms. Warm, comforting arms. She could smell the spicy scent of aftershave and she could feel
the swift kiss to her forehead.
Then women’s voices asking was she all right and him replying, although she wan’t quite sure what he said.
They all clustered around her.
And then, as always, the clip faded.
Nimbostratus: a dark grey featureless cloud producing lots of rain
The first thing Lainey did when she woke up on the morning of the wedding was to listen for the sound of rain. For the briefest
of moments as she lay there, burrowed beneath the duvet with her arm lightly across Ken’s sleeping body, she thought that
she’d been wrong, and her heart leaped. And then she realised that the relentless drumming against the roof wasn’t part of
the dream after all. It was real. It was raining. Chucking it down, just as she’d predicted.
She snuggled closer to Ken as she listened to the gurgle of the water cascading through the pipes outside the window. The
truth was, she hadn’t ever doubted that it would rain. She’d pretended to be uncertain for everyone else’s sake, but she was
never wrong about wet weather. She had an instinct for rain. And badly as she felt for Carla and Lennart (but especially for
Carla, because she’d be the one in the long white dress, and long white dresses didn’t go well with slick wet pavements and
sodden muddy gardens), she couldn’t help feeling just a little bit pleased with herself that her instincts – as well as her powerful forecasting programmes –
had been right this time too.
Despite the fact that she was right, though, the downpour was as disappointing for her as for everyone else. She’d been looking
forward to today ever since Carla had announced her engagement, and had been almost as excited about the wedding as her friend.
She’d wanted clear blue skies and warm south-westerly breezes so that they could pose for pictures in the grounds outside
the old stone church and on the sand at Ballyholme beach (although, in fairness, even glorious sunshine couldn’t make an Irish
beach look quite as glamorous as those on Barbados, which apparently had been Lennart’s suggestion for the wedding location).
But as she’d studied the weather in the fortnight leading up to Carla’s big day, Lainey had realised that grey skies were
much more likely than blazing sunshine. So when she met her friend for coffee a few days beforehand, she told her to be prepared
for the worst.
‘What’s the worst?’ Carla asked.
Lainey broke the news about the probability of heavy downpours.
‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ Carla wailed. ‘It’s July, for heaven’s sake. Surely I should be entitled to a dry day and a
bit of sunshine in July!’
Lainey was tempted to remind her that the last couple of Julys had been total washouts, and that planning for a dry day in
an Irish summer was an exercise in hope over experience, but she simply looked at her friend in sympathetic silence.
‘It’s fabulous now.’ Carla gestured in frustration at the china-blue sky, which looked so calm and settled, with its scattered streaks of ethereal white cirrus clouds. ‘You can’t possibly tell me that this will be gone by the weekend.’
Lainey knew it would be gone by the following day. It was always hard to accept, sitting in balmy sunshine, that the grey
clouds would come rolling in, but she knew that they would. They weren’t all that far away even now. She opened the meteorological
chart she’d brought from her office on the table in front of her. Carla, who was tipping brown sugar into the foamy latte
that the waitress had left with them a couple of minutes earlier, looked at it intently.
‘You see this front? Coming from the Atlantic?’ Lainey pointed at the chart, placing a saucer on the corner to stop it lifting
in the summer breeze. ‘That’s the big problem. It’s the tail end of the hurricane that hit the Florida coast earlier this
week. My bet is that it’s going to be sitting slap bang on top of us by tomorrow evening. And that’s why it’ll probably rain.
And keep raining. All the same …’ she tried to sound optimistic and encouraging as she pushed her sunglasses on to her head
and looked at Carla from her dark blueberry eyes, ‘you know forecasting is about probabilities. I could always have got things
completely wrong and the weekend might be an absolute scorcher.’ Although if she believes that, Lainey said to herself, she’s
either totally blinded by love or I’m a more convincing liar than I ever thought.
‘You’re never wrong,’ conceded Carla glumly as she added more sugar to her coffee. ‘In that case, I suppose we’d better rethink
the photo shoot on the beach. Being soaked to the skin isn’t my idea of a good look, and I’m certainly not going to ruin my
gorgeous Pronuptia dress by dragging it over wet, seaweedy sand. I should’ve listened to Lennart and gone to Barbados after
all.’
‘Actually,’ Lainey said comfortingly, ‘you might have been just as badly off. There are more tropical storms due there this
week.’
Carla laughed. ‘Oh well! I suppose the weather isn’t the most important thing anyway.’
‘Of course not.’ Lainey’s voice was cheerful. ‘The most important thing is that you’re marrying the man you love.’
‘And a man who’s single and solvent and without any emotional baggage,’ Carla told her with a grin.
‘A rare and wonderful combination,’ agreed Lainey. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting him.’
‘I can’t wait for you to meet him too,’ said Carla. ‘I’ve so struck it lucky, Lainey. I really have.’
‘Looks like we all have,’ said Lainey. ‘Val and Nick. You and Lennart. Me and Ken.’
Carla looked at her in surprise. ‘You and Ken? Are you … have you …?’
‘Nothing definite yet,’ said Lainey quickly. ‘But … well, I really think that this time I’ve found Mr Right at last.’
‘You do?’ There was the merest hint of concern in Carla’s voice.
‘Absolutely,’ Lainey said.
‘Well, that’s great.’
‘I mean it,’ she told Carla. ‘This time it’s different. This time I’m sure I’ve got it right.’
She understood why Carla was a little sceptical. Lainey had been sure she’d got it right twice before. Unfortunately, in both
cases, despite having become engaged to first Ross and then Denis, she’d never made it as far as the altar. Admittedly the
last time she’d had a ring on her finger had been five years earlier; she’d been twenty-six then and utterly certain that she’d found the man of her dreams. But the engagement had only lasted four months. It had taken her almost a year to
get over it. Denis had told her that he cared about her a lot but, in all honesty, he’d come to realise that she was a bit
too high-maintenance for him. And he couldn’t commit his life to a high-maintenance woman. She’d asked what high-maintenance
meant, and he’d said that if she didn’t know, then he couldn’t help her.
Lainey had been deeply hurt by Denis’s remarks, but there was a part of her that knew she hadn’t handled being engaged to
him very well. That, in reality, it had taken her over. She’d accumulated folders and binders and all sorts of brochures about
hotels, car hire, flowers and everything else wedding-related, and it had been her main topic of conversation whenever they
were together. She understood that Denis might have been overwhelmed by her control-freaky plans and incessant wedding chatter.
After he’d broken it off with her, she’d tried to explain to him that she’d lost the plot a little and that she’d get it all
together for the future. But it was too late. The next time she’d seen him had been in a bar, and he’d been chatting animatedly
to a petite blonde who was laughing at one of his jokes. It was hard to tell if she was a high-maintenance girl or not.
I used to laugh at his jokes too, Lainey had thought, as she did an about-turn and left the bar. I didn’t realise our engagement
was about to become one. And I never thought this would happen to me a second time.
She’d been twenty-one when she’d first got engaged. It had been two weeks before Christmas and she and Ross were walking home
late one night from a party. He asked her what she’d like for a Christmas present and she snuggled up to his heavy jacket and said, ‘You.’ He kissed her and then she said half jokingly, ‘And maybe a diamond ring too.’
On Christmas Eve he’d handed her the jewellery box with the ring nestling in the soft red velvet and she’d shrieked with delight
and covered him in kisses before allowing him to slide the ring on to the third finger of her left hand. She loved the idea
that someone cared about her enough to want to be with her for ever. And she loved Ross too. He was cute and kind and she
was always happy to be with him. She reckoned that they were ideally suited. But by New Year’s Day, after she’d told all her
friends, shown them the ring and arranged three different engagement parties, he’d begun to wonder if they were rushing things.
They were still at college, he reminded her. They weren’t equipped to get married. He, in particular, wasn’t ready yet. He
was sorry for thinking that he had been. And so maybe it would be better to put it on hold, take a breather from each other
and think about it for a bit longer. He hadn’t said anything about her being high-maintenance. But after Denis’s comments
five years later, she wondered if her enthusiasm for everything wedding-related had seemed high-maintenance to Ross too.
She’d asked him if what he wanted was to be engaged without setting a date for the wedding, and he’d looked uncomfortable.
It was then she realised that what he really wanted was to break it off altogether. That getting engaged to her in the first
place had made him rethink their entire relationship and find it wanting.
Lainey had handed back the ring and told him that if he was unsure about marriage, it was absolutely the right decision. She’d
waited until she was at home and locked in her bedroom before she burst into tears. When he heard about the broken engagement, her grandfather had murmured drily that the Christmas decorations had lasted longer, a comment that
had caused her grandmother, Madeleine, to poke him in the ribs and tell him to shut up and keep his views to himself.
Two engagements, but no husband. Even though she’d been hurt each time the relationship hadn’t worked out, Lainey reminded
herself that they were worthwhile experiences. She’d learned from them, she told her grandparents. And her friends.
She’d said that to her mother too. (Well, the first time she’d simply told Deanna that it had been a silly mistake born from
the romance of Christmas. The second time she’d said that she was the one who had doubts. She didn’t want her mother to think
that she’d been dumped again; that would have been too pathetic for words.) Deanna had sighed deeply on both occasions – although
probably, Lainey thought, with relief – and told her that she should have more sense than to want to get married in the first
place. She reminded her that nearly seventy per cent of divorces were initiated by women and that many of them said that they
wanted to regain their self-identity in the process. She pointed out that men were possessive about women, especially beautiful
women, which was probably why both Denis and Ross had wanted to put a ring on Lainey’s finger and brand her as their own,
regardless of how short-lived the branding was. And then she said that Lainey was very lucky to have escaped both times. Being
considered beautiful, she reminded her, was a curse, not a blessing. It was important to keep that in mind.
People had always said she was beautiful. Even now, she remembered adults looking at her as a child and cooing over her with
delight, murmuring that she was the loveliest girl they’d ever seen. It hadn’t really made any impression on her back then.
It just seemed natural. Later on (and whenever she was around to comment), Deanna would remind her sharply that most of the
people who said she was pretty were just being polite. As well as which, she would add, beauty came from within and so counted
for nothing if you weren’t an intellectually curious person with it. Lainey was fairly sure that having a daughter who was
considered beautiful rather than one who was famed for her intellectual curiosity was one of the biggest disappointments of
her mother’s life. And she agreed with Deanna (perhaps the one thing in life they completely agreed on) that being regarded
as beautiful truly wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Besides, she didn’t consider herself to be as beautiful as all that.
When she looked in the mirror she always saw the flaws that other people seemed to miss.
Lainey Ryan was five foot eleven tall, and slender. (Too tall, in her opinion. It made her noticeable, and Lainey didn’t like
being noticed; however, she conceded that having a good figure was an asset, because she liked her food and it was nice not
to be on a constant diet like some girls she knew.) Her hair was a glossy russet and fell in loose curls to her shoulders,
framing a heart-shaped face with dark blue eyes and a rosebud mouth. (Hair: a bit unmanageable and always tangled first thing
in the morning. Face: OK but prone to occasional dry patches, and, of course, there was the tiny silver scar over her eye
that she’d got the day she’d jumped from the roof of the garden shed for a dare and cracked her head on the concrete path below. She was five at the time. Mouth: there was no denying it was sexy. Which wasn’t always a
good thing.) She had to admit that the whole package wasn’t unattractive. The problem, though, was that being beautiful was
a burden as much as a blessing. She read books and saw films in which the awkward, ungainly and plain girl (well, less pretty;
it was Hollywood after all, and their view of plain was skewed beyond measure) always got the man in the end, because even
though she didn’t have the looks, she had a good heart. She would feel sorry for the prettier one then, doomed always to be
unlucky in love because she didn’t have a good heart and couldn’t help her vanity. So Lainey also tried very hard not to be
vain. She realised that there was no point in complaining about her height or her hair or even her scar, because her friends
would snort and tell her that she was gorgeous and had nothing to worry about and then go on to complain about their own beauty
problems. She had to learn to live with her looks. There was no getting away from them.
She’d had experience of dealing with them early on, because she’d been the butt of jealousy from some of the girls at her
school, where she was regularly called Lanky Lay and where various cliques made it their mission to stop her getting too big
for her boots by telling her that boys would only ever go out with her for one thing, because they didn’t fall in love with
gorgeous girls, they wanted ones with good personalities. Lainey wasn’t sure how good her personality was, but she hoped that
deep down it was OK, although it was hard to tell because she was quiet by nature, and despite her looks, she wasn’t asked
out on dates by the guys who swarmed around the less pretty but certainly more popular girls. (You’re out of their league, Val, one of her small group of friends, told her. They’re afraid of you. Val was averagely pretty, averagely
intelligent and easy to get on with. She’d gone out with a few boys, but, she told Lainey with a sigh, none of them were as
much fun as she’d expected. Boys were quite boring really. It was just that nobody considered you were anyone until you’d
got off with one. Lainey had to take what Val said at face value back then. It wasn’t until she went to college that she started
dating properly.)
When she learned about the bullying, Deanna was angry. But Lainey couldn’t help feeling that her anger was directed at the
fact that the girls at school were caught up in caring about what the boys thought rather than the fact that they were making
Lainey’s life miserable. ‘I despair,’ Deanna had said, ‘at how society moulds women into submissive beings at such a young
age. And those damn brain-candy magazines that tell you how to make boys like you should be banned!’
Lainey didn’t think her classmates were submissive at all – rather the opposite, in fact – but years later, after she’d studied
Deanna’s work, she understood what her mother meant. Not that it had been much use to her at fourteen. Back then, all she
did was try to be liked by not drawing attention to herself and her looks, so she tied back her glorious hair, didn’t attempt
to make boys like her, and studied hard.
Later in life she decided that she’d probably applied herself to her studies to keep her mother happy too, and to prove to
her that she really was as intellectually curious as Deanna wanted. She had to admit that it hadn’t had the desired effect,
because Deanna never seemed to consider that she’d done well enough. No matter how successful Lainey was, Deanna always remarked
that she could have done better. And she was perpetually disappointed by the fact that her daughter’s essays were marked down for lack of arguments, or for undeveloped
thoughts.
Although she didn’t excel in essays or in school debates, Lainey had a greater talent for subjects like maths and statistics
that required definite answers rather than opinionated discussion. She chose to study physics at college because physics was
a route into working in weather, and weather was something she truly loved.
In fact, weather fascinated her. She was intrigued by clouds and cloud formations, by the unexpected chill of a breeze on
a sunny day, and by the sudden fog that sometimes rolled in from the sea. She liked finding patterns in warm and cold fronts,
knowing that they could predict how the days ahead were going to be. And regardless of everything, she was still Deanna’s
daughter. She wanted a job that relied on how she was inside, not out. She had no intention (despite the suggestions of some
of her college friends) of getting a portfolio of photographs and asking to be taken on by a modelling agency. She knew that
she wouldn’t be able to flaunt it the way women like Kate and Naomi and Erin and Claudia did. And she didn’t want to anyway.
She was happy to lose herself in warm and cold fronts, in isobars and isotherms, in things that she could understand even
if she couldn’t control them.
From the moment she’d started studying meteorology, Lainey had felt herself relax into her life in a way she hadn’t done before.
She liked knowing in advance whether skies would be clear or grey, and enjoyed being the one to tell other people to prepare
for rain or sun. She was delighted when she started her job at Met Eireann, and she got on with the people she worked with.
Even when she felt tense and uncertain inside, she’d learned to project a confident exterior, especially when it came to making forecasts. She enjoyed
discussing weather with her colleagues and was happy that they accepted her opinions as worthwhile. Over the years she’d learned
that people mistrusted beautiful women, assuming that they could be beautiful or brainy but not wanting them to be both. At
work, they didn’t seem to notice her looks; as far as they were concerned, it was her ability to interpret the data in front
of her that was the most important thing about her. (Carla, one of her best friends since her college days, said that it was
because nerdy meteorologists preferred graphs to gorgeousness. They don’t notice your contours, she said; they’re too obsessed
with the ones on their charts.) However, Lainey accepted that it was the way she looked as much as her skills as a meteorologist
that had led to her being on the roster of forecasters who presented the weather on TV. She wasn’t naive enough to think otherwise.
When her department head had asked, almost a year earlier, for more staff who would be interested in being on the television
weather roster, and Lainey hadn’t bothered answering the email, he’d come to her and talked to her about it.
‘I really don’t think it’s for me,’ she said. ‘I’m not into the idea of standing up in front of millions of people and making
a fool of myself.’
‘You won’t make a fool of yourself,’ said Martin.
‘I don’t like being the centre of attention.’ She looked uncomfortable.
‘They’ll help you out,’ he told her. ‘You’ll get training.’
‘Even so.’ Lainey shook her head. ‘It’s a lot harder than people give credit for.’
‘You don’t want to do it because it’s too hard?’ Martin Browne looked puzzled. He’d always thought that Lainey liked new challenges. She was usually quietly determined in getting
on with projects that interested her and firm about the resources she needed to complete them.
‘It’s not that,’ she said hastily. ‘It’s just that there are plenty of others who are properly interested and who’d be way
better at it than me.’
‘But you’d look great.’ Martin tried not to sound defensive.
‘You want me because of how I look?’
‘Not just that,’ said Martin hastily. ‘I think you’d be good at it.’
Her looks had never really helped her before, thought Lainey. They’d landed her in hopeless relationships and kept Deanna
away, they’d worked against her when she wanted to be taken seriously and they’d set her apart from people all her life. This
time maybe it would be different. This time being pretty was giving her an opportunity, even if getting a job because of her
appearance seemed to be against every principle that had been drilled into her. And yet in a world obsessed with beauty, perhaps
she was ridiculously old-fashioned. Maybe Deanna had always been wrong. Maybe it was time that she used every asset at her
disposal to get ahead.
So she told Martin that she’d do the screen test and see how it went but that he wasn’t to be surprised if they rejected her
as being beyond help because she knew that not everyone could actually multitask in the way that you had to be able to to
give a good weather forecast. Besides, she might be pretty, she added darkly, but she was also renowned for her ability to
trip over her own two feet. So it was entirely possible that she’d reduce the studio to rubble and be written off as utterly hopeless.
But she wasn’t hopeless. She didn’t trip up. The camera loved her gentle voice and her easy way of building the weather story.
Easy on the eye, easy on the ear, easy on the brain, she’d heard one of the cameramen say. A natural in front of the camera.
She couldn’t help feeling a little bit pleased at that. Although she wondered how Deanna would feel when, and if, she ever
saw her on screen.
Lainey knew she looked good on TV. And suddenly she didn’t mind. It was fun to make the most of her appearance, nice to chat
to the make-up artists about various products, many of which she’d never used before. It was OK to read the beauty pages in
glossy magazines and wonder about different looks. Because it was part of her job now. Not as important as actually getting
the forecast right, of course. But being on TV gave her permission to be beautiful. And she couldn’t help liking it.
It had been shortly after she’d started doing the broadcasts that she’d met Ken. At the time she’d been at the in-between
stage of getting over another messy break-up (though thankfully not another engagement!) yet feeling that she should be making
a bit more of an effort to get out and meet people. Carla and Val, still her two closest friends, had been nagging at her
to start socialising instead of asking them over to her apartment for girlie evenings in, and she knew they were right. (She
missed flat-sharing with them, because they’d been great every time she’d broken up with someone. But with Val now married
and Carla dividing her time between Drog
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