Other Women

by Cathy Kelly

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'A burst of warmth and wit, twists and turns' MARIAN KEYES
'This is Cathy Kelly on top form writing about warm, believable women with real, messy lives' RACHEL HORE
'Other Women captures the stories of three modern women... A real feel-good read' HEAT
'The brilliant storyteller is back with another perfectly concocted tale' OK!

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Three women. Three secrets. Three tangled lives...

Sid wears her independence like armour. So when she strikes up a rare connection with unlucky-in-love Finn, they are both determined to prove that men and women can just be friends. Can't they?

Marin has the perfect home, attentive husband, two beloved children - and a secret addiction to designer clothes. She knows she has it all, so why can't she stop comparing herself to other women?

Bea believes that we all have one love story - and she's had hers. Now her life centres around her son, Luke, and her support group of fierce single women. But there's something that she can't tell anyone...

With her inimitable warmth and wisdom, Cathy Kelly shows us that in the messy reality of marriage, family, and romance, sometimes it's the women in our lives who hold us together.

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Praise for Cathy Kelly's irresistibly comforting storytelling:

'Honest, funny, clever, it sparkles with witty, wry observations on modern life. I loved it' - Marian Keyes

'This book is full of joy - and I devoured every page of it gladly' - Milly Johnson

'Filled with nuggets of wisdom, compassion and humour, Cathy Kelly proves, yet again, that she knows everything there is to know about women' - Patricia Scanlan

'Packed with Cathy's usual magical warmth' - Sheila O'Flanagan

'Comforting and feel-good, the perfect treat read' - Good Housekeeping

'With nuanced and believable characters, each grappling with complex, messy lives, the drama explodes from the first two pages of Other Women and doesn't let up until the final chapter' - Carmel Harrington

Release date: April 15, 2021

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

1

Sid

Oscar Wilde was right – work is the curse of the drinking classes. Not that there’s any drinking done in Nurture itself. I wend my way through the hordes in The Fiddler’s Elbow, neatly avoiding a guy who thinks – mistakenly – that small, dark-haired women in their thirties are only in pubs on a Friday to find handsy hunks like himself, and congratulate myself on not sweeping his feet from beneath him. Krav Maga is a great self-defence tool but there’s a time and a place for everything.

I’m heading for the snug at the back of the pub where my Nurture colleagues will be settled in.

Nurture is an advocacy group, semi-funded by the state, set up to improve the health of the people of Ireland and to educate anyone who thinks curry chips, a deep-fried burger and a sugar-laden soft drink is a fully balanced meal.

However, education is a tough job and we need a Friday-night decompress as much as any other worker, so on Fridays, even the most goji-berry-loving among us move blindly en masse across the road to The Fiddler’s Elbow to reward ourselves for a week of meetings, phone calls, Zoom meetings and enough unanswered emails to bury us with guilt till kingdom come.

Because of how bad the optics would be if the health gurus were spotted regularly having a drink, eating salt-laden pub snacks and enjoying that ritual of workplace comparing whose week was worse, we converge in the pub’s small closed-off snug where nobody can see us.

‘The figures came in today from the Department of Health. Diabetes Two is on the rise, despite the campaign. A year-long campaign,’ laments Robbie, who’s been in Nurture thirteen years, as long as I have, and is also a campaign director. I’m responsible for school health, which is like trying to hold back a flood with a very small bucket.

I pat a disconsolate Robbie on the back, trying not to spill what looks like a big brandy, and find an empty stool beside Chloe, an intern on a gap year who seems so young, she makes me feel seventy instead of just thirty-four.

Right now, Chloe looks miserable.

‘Sid!’ she says, eager and anxious in equal measure, and I can sense more misery coming on.

‘Adrienne shouted at me today, shouted,’ she tells me. ‘Just because we were out of the coffee pods she likes. It’s not my job to replace them, is it? Do you think she has a psychiatric illness?’

Chloe, a wet week out of school and not yet toughened up enough to cope with actual shouting in an office, stares at me over the top of her drink and waits for me to answer. She can’t be twelve or else she couldn’t be interning, but she looks it, despite the carefully applied modern eyeliner, very grown-up suit and the I-am-clever big-framed glasses.

I think of all the things I could say: ‘Adrienne’s good at her job but, sometimes, it gets the better of her and she goes into the kitchen for a little meltdown and a caffeine hit.’

Chloe only knows teachers, who are not supposed to shout.

Therefore a workplace meltdown has to be incorrectly categorised into a mental-health box and can’t be normal people at the end of their tether. Apart from babysitting, I’d say we are her only work experience.

‘This job is not what I thought it would be,’ Chloe goes on. ‘How do you handle it, Sid?’

Chloe has seen me with my kid sister, Vilma, who is nineteen, and I’m getting the vibe that she thinks I am Vilma’s mother, therefore a nurturing sort.

I am not a nurturing sort. Not by a long shot.

Plus, she can’t really think I’m Vilma’s mother? I’m thirty-four, not forty-four, although my skincare regime is a little lax, if I’m honest.

The barman finally hands me my large glass of wine and I’m about to test how acidic it is before replying when I think, who am I kidding? I’d drink battery acid at five-thirty on a Friday. Still, the battery acid works and I sigh deeply after my first deep drink.

‘Chloe, without meaning to sound unhinged, sometimes I go into the office kitchen and have a little rant at the microwave. It lets off steam.’

I had a mini-canteen breakdown yesterday when a frantic phone call came in about a pancake-and-cream franchise setting up shop right beside a school which famously has no sports area whatsoever. I tell Chloe this.

‘But you didn’t shout at anyone, did you?’ says Chloe, sounding younger every moment.

Patience has never been one of my finer qualities, but I try my best.

‘Work can push people, Chloe. Adrienne’s brilliant at her job; passionate. It was nothing personal, I’m sure, but I’ll talk to her if you like. Did she say sorry?’

Chloe blushes. ‘Yes, several times, but that’s not the point, is it?’

‘The workplace can be a tense environment,’ I say, thinking that the pub is doing its job and I am relaxed enough to stop myself throwing the contents of my glass over Chloe to show her how people can really react when they’re irritated.

‘Want a nacho?’ I hand Chloe the packet to change the subject.

‘I don’t eat processed foods,’ she says piously.

‘Suit yourself.’ I snap my packet back.

Chloe hasn’t a clue as to what work is really like as opposed to what young people think it is going to be. The microwave getting shouted at and that accountant who’d faked his CV and nearly lost us our government funding because of the subsequent funds-going-missing fall-out are about the worst things that have ever happened there. The money’s not great and I’d be better off if I’d moved jobs years ago, but Nurture is a nice, steady place to work, despite the setbacks like cream-and-pancake franchises. Nurture is truly my second family.

If Chloe knew what horrors some offices held in store for newcomers, she’d take being screamed at in the kitchen any day.

When I finish my wine, I use an app to call a taxi from the only taxi company I ever use. Everyone else has different systems and can’t understand why I prefer to wait twenty minutes for someone I know to turn up and bring me home, but I don’t care. When the text comes that my driver’s here, I say goodbye to everyone and try not to get sucked into any more open-ended discussions about terrible work traumas. Everyone is relaxed by now and it’s a good time to go. My own couch, possibly a hot bath and a box set await me. I never drive into the office on Fridays and walk in because my bijou apartment – very bijou – is only two miles away from our city-centre offices. But I never do the walk home.

Tonight, my driver is a lovely man called Gareth, who looks like a bouncer and has a husband and two apricot-coloured chugs (pugs crossed with chihuahuas: ‘Their breathing’s much better, Sid, love, when they’re mixed breed’) at home. As he’s finishing his shift, he’s perfectly happy to sit without much conversation – the chugs are losing weight as per the vet’s instructions, thankfully – and listen to Lyric FM playing quietly over the radio.

I phone Vilma from the car: ‘Hi, Vilma, tell me – do I look old enough to be your mother?’ I ask.

My little sister snorts down the phone, then hits protective mode: ‘No! Who said that?’

I sink into the back seat. ‘A girl in my office, about eighteen, an intern. She’s probably seen you come to get me for lunch because I had the distinct feeling she thought I was your mother.’

‘Don’t be an idiot.’

‘Really.’

‘What did she say?’

‘It’s not what she said – it’s that she thinks I’m the motherly type,’ I mutter, sorry I started this.

‘You’re the “take down the patriarchy” and the true sisterhood type,’ says Vilma. ‘You look out for the women you work with. You dumbass.’ She uses the term with affection. ‘You like them to be prepared, same way you prepared me for life after school, and in school for that matter. That’s why my friends love you. You tell us to take no shit and we don’t. You’re our special ops trainer, Sid: leave no woman behind. Sort of like the Army Rangers – be ready for anything.’

I say nothing for a moment: I always wanted Vilma and her friends to be prepared for life because women are notorious for playing by the rules when the other half of the human race long since ripped up the rule book. I adore Vilma – nobody is going to hurt her on my watch.

‘That’s probably it,’ I say, aiming for cheerful.

‘Besides, you’ve got Mum’s skin: olive and anti-ageing, horrible sister. I’ve got Dad’s: pale and liable to burn after five minutes in the sun. You look way too young to be my mum . . . You’d have to have had me when you were fifteen, and in all the pictures I’ve seen of you at fifteen you look like you’re considering entering a convent.’

‘I was a nerd,’ I protest. ‘Nerds wore undistressed jeans and fluffy sweaters with cats on them.’

Vilma laughs.

She and I are technically half-sisters and she takes after my beloved stepfather, Stefan, who required no make-up when he’d adoringly dress up as a vampire to accompany her and other small children on the endless Hallowe’en rounds. He is actually Lithuanian but has the bone structure and height of someone who just drove down from the Carpathians in a black coach. Vilma, whose name means ‘truth’ in Lithuanian, is the same as Stefan – pale skin, pale eyes, hair like the woods at midnight. I’m like my mother: my hair’s chocolate with what Vilma fancifully likes to call bronze highlights, and my eyes are like Mum’s, hazel. But Mum’s a perfect hippie with her hair long and trailing, which goes with her Stevie Nicks’ vibe, while mine’s short. And if anyone ever catches me in a hippie outfit, kill me immediately.

‘What’re you up to tonight?’ I ask Vilma, imagining her in the bedroom she shares in a college house, deciding whether it’s a jeans night or time to break out the big guns and wear one of the floaty skirts she borrowed from Mum – to be worn ironically, of course.

‘Going to Jojo’s for a Netflix binge. Drag Race old seasons.’

I can hear the rattle of clothes hangers as she speaks.

‘What—’

I know what’s coming next.

What are you up to tonight?

‘Just here,’ I say, as if here is somewhere exciting instead of outside my building. I can’t face Vilma’s sadness at the fact that my life revolves around almost nothing social. ‘Talk tomorrow and be—’

‘—safe, yes,’ she replies. ‘Love you.’

‘Love you more.’

It takes another few minutes to get me home.

‘Thanks, Gareth,’ I say, climbing out right in front of the steps to my apartment-block door. That’s the great thing about my taxi guys. There’s none of that, ‘We’ll just drop you on the corner here and sure, you can walk the rest of the way’ with them. I tip well and I always ask to be brought as close to the door as possible.

I’m on the tenth floor, which is utterly wonderful from the point of view of getting burgled, because there’s a great shortage of ten-storey ladders. Any would-be intruders would have to come from inside the building and, given the concierge system and security cameras all over the place, which I do not regret paying for in my management fees, it’s very unlikely that anyone in our apartments would ever get burgled. Plus, I have three locks on the door. And a baseball bat inside it.

Marc, who’d been my significant other for twelve years, hadn’t said a word when I insisted on getting three locks. It was one of the many things I loved about him.

Loved: is there a sadder word?

I open my three locks, step inside, relock them quickly and walk through the hall, which, finally, is no longer bare-looking, because Vilma had persuaded me to give her money for frames for some art prints, which we then hung with sticky wall hangers because we are both lethal with hammers.

Marc had taken all his pictures when he’d left.

‘Sid, you really don’t care about interiors, do you? It looks like you just rent the place and expect to be evicted at any moment,’ said Vilma one day when she was visiting. ‘Give me a few quid and I’ll find pictures to give some vague sense that you’re staying longer than a week.’

And she had.

Vilma is a wonderful sister, a conduit to another world. I’m not sure how I would have got by this past year without her because Marc and I were like an old married couple with our own happy routines. Without him, I was rudderless.

There was no one to make me morning coffee, no one to cook up scrambled eggs when we’d run out of groceries, no one to sit with in companionable peace while we surfed the TV stations and our various cable subscriptions.

Sometimes, when I get home, it feels as if somebody has died and left me alone in my little universe.

I conquer this by watching more and more TV and making cocktails – only at weekends – from The Butler’s Friend, a vintage book from the 1920s which has taught me to make the perfect Boulevardier, where the secret is not just rye whiskey, sweet vermouth and Campari, but to stir and never shake.

Apart from trips home to see Mum and Stefan, my stepfather, and when Vilma comes to see me, I exist in a world of work, home and online supermarket deliveries.

If making the perfect Boulevardier, staying in all weekend and having a loving relationship with my couch cushions were what it took to keep me sane, then that’s what I’d do. Marc’s leaving had shocked me and made me feel stupid all at the same time. Because, under the circumstances, our relationship was hardly built to last. It was a miracle it had lasted as long as it did, but still, I missed him. We’d grown into adulthood together but that childhood-sweethearts-lasting-forever thing is a hard trick to pull off.

Still, what we’d had was special and I knew I’d never have it again. Besides, I needed another man in my life like I needed a hole in the head. I had everything I wanted. Except for those new biker boots I was longing for.

Who needs men when you’ve got fabulous boots, right?

2

Marin

I have my hand on the handle of conference room four and I’m steeling myself to open it.

I take a deep breath, hold it for a count of five, and let it out again slowly – a concept brought to me by my daughter, Rachel, who says nobody breathes properly.

‘We’d all be dead, then,’ pointed out Joey, my other child, nine and three quarters and hilariously determined to annoy his elder sister.

‘Properly, dopey head,’ said Rachel. ‘We tense up and don’t use the correct muscles.’

She might have a point. To open the door to conference room four, I think I need a brown paper bag to breathe into because I know exactly what I’ll find in there and, some days, I just can’t cope with the toxicity.

Eighteen years of working as an estate agent has taught me that the early gut impression of a disintegrating marriage can be as good as being their divorce mediator.

In other words: you’d be surprised how much you can tell about people when you are selling their home.

The Ryans, inside the room, are enriched uranium toxic.

Like when I do Pilates and think my stomach might explode with the pain of unused muscles being worked out, I force myself past the feelings and enter the room.

The Ryans are each glaring at the window behind the desk.

They both accompanied me on the initial valuation of their three-bed, semi-detached house in the lovely suburb of Glenageary. Every opened door was a failure of their life together. For example, the two unused children’s bedrooms, one of which was where Charlotte Ryan now stored her clothes.

Leo opened one closet door aggressively: ‘See? Half of this stuff still has tags on it. Unworn.’

I like to think I’m always professional but I nearly needed the brown paper bag then, too. Unworn clothes. Expensive unworn clothes. I yearned to sort through the piles with Charlotte and offer her anything to try them on. She’s probably my height, five six, about the same size – twelve – and is clearly a shopaholic, with money.

There the similarity ends because her hair is expensively highlighted while mine is at the growing-out-the-mistake-fringe stage, and is my natural chestnut colour, constantly tied up at the back of my head and nourished with dry shampoo.

Still, the thought of her wardrobe haul is affecting my brain like the thought of a line of cocaine must affect a coke addict. I stifled the urge but the clothes haunted me all the way around the house.

If only I had the perfect clothes, then everything in my life would be wonderful. I’d feel complete, not less-than.

Random female clients wouldn’t look at me as if I was the downtrodden hired help in my black trousers – where are the fashion people hiding the perfect ones? – worn to hide my big hips. My mother wouldn’t remark every time she saw me in work clothes that it was a pity my firm didn’t have a uniform. My mother has a normal nose but she can look down it as if it was a ski jump in Val d’Isère.

If I had the right jeans, trousers and crisp white shirt, I’d like me more and Nate, my husband, would fancy me the way he used to fancy me back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth. But then, maybe marriages are like that, right? Wild lust in the beginning settles down to ‘Did you put out the bins?’.

Now that they’ve accepted my valuation and have chosen Hilliers and McKenzie to sell their property, the Ryans are here in person to discuss the reams of paperwork required to sell a house and sign the company contract. Today.

Charlotte’s wearing Isabel Marant. Hideously expensive and, like most high-end clothes, utterly impossible to sell on after being worn. I know because occasionally I shop for expensive clothes, then find out they don’t suit me, and try to sell them on.

I know I have a problem, OK? For some people, it’s chocolate. For others, wine o’clock.

Anything to fill the gaping hole of emptiness.

For me, it’s frantic, addict-level shopping until I’m sitting breathlessly in the car with my haul and I realise, again, that this has all been a mistake. Like all addictive things, my chronic compulsive shopping hits my pocket ruthlessly.

I cannot ask a client about her clothes.

Get a grip, Marin Stanley, I tell myself firmly. You are a professional.

I therefore adopt my professional smile, which is clearly set to ‘far too friendly’ as its appearance elicits a diatribe from Charlotte about how Leo is keeping the house like a pit and they’ll never sell unless he opens some windows and swears off the beer.

‘The place smells like a brewery!’

In turn, this makes Leo kick off about how Charlotte had better not start on him now because he can’t take any more of her bitching.

I am suddenly annoyed with these people. I steel myself to sound brisk and do what a mentor had told me years ago: carry on as if the argument simply is not happening.

‘Your contract with Hilliers and McKenzie,’ I say, rapping said document onto the desk. ‘I’ll go through the details again.’

They shut up.

After an hour of hostility so intense it could run the national grid, I escape the small office to lean against the wall near the giant ficus which brings the dual benefits of oxygen and a discreet hiding space into the office.

From her desk, which is, as ever, perfectly tidy, our office administrator, Bernie, sees me. For once, she appears not to be on the phone, although her ever-present headset is still plugged into her ear. She leaves her chair and is at my side in a moment.

‘Do we need someone to go in and clean up the bodies?’ she asks.

‘No, but I was tempted,’ I tell her.

‘Ha!’

‘I need caffeine,’ I mutter, ‘then I’ll go back in.’

Bernie pats my arm. ‘Leave it to me,’ she says.

She swoops into the office and closes the door. I imagine her telling Leo and Charlotte that once we get all the paperwork signed and have their booking deposit, we can move on to the other important issues like solicitors, contracts, PSRA forms, money-laundering legislation forms – all the important details of estate agents in a modern age.

I have briefly discussed all of this with them and I should be in there now but, luckily, Bernie can tell when anyone in the office is suffering from Separating Couple Anxiety. Empathy is both very useful and a hindrance in an estate agent.

Five minutes pass and I check the emails on my phone.

She glides gracefully out of the office.

‘I have given them all the papers,’ she says. ‘I considered asking if they wanted more tea or coffee, but thought they might throw hot liquids and we’d get sued.’

We grin at each other.

‘Quick, I gave them only one pen. So there is something physical to argue over. Coffee,’ she says.

We hurry into the little office kitchen where Bernie, after one crisp conversation with one of the senior partners, had a coffee-shop-standard machine installed. It would be the envy of every other estate agent in the country, I imagine, if they knew about it. But then we are a high-value agency and I doubt if anyone has an office administrator like Bernie. Deftly, she makes us two strong shots of espresso and we drink them, hers straight, mine with a little hint of sugar.

In the interests of full disclosure, I also like sugar, biscuits and chocolates.

‘It’s sad,’ Bernie says thoughtfully, ‘how sometimes the separating ones are so full of rage against each other. It’s not good for the soul.’

‘I don’t know how you subdue them,’ I say ruefully. ‘It felt as if they were about to kill each other and every word was a knife thrown.’

‘They are angry with the world and it spills over. We’ll let them sit in there on their own for a while and then I will go in and charm them. Don’t take on their rage.’

Finally, the Ryans leave the building and I find that Rachel is right. I am breathing better.

I take up my phone to message her something funny about this and find that because my phone was on silent for the meeting, I’ve missed a call, a text from my mother and that Nate has messaged me.

My mother texts like people once sent telegrams, as if words cost money. Particularly ones like ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘love’: I MUST talk to you about your brother! Phone soonest.

I add so many kisses and hearts to Rachel’s messages that they’re often a sea of pink and red. I know that when Joey gets a phone, in the very distant future, I shall have to call a halt to this outpouring of love. Boys go off to school holding their mothers’ hands, but by the time Joey is twelve and gets a phone, he’ll be teased mercilessly at any sign of a heart emoji.

Nate’s message is better than my mother’s but not much:

Talked to Steve earlier. I asked him and Angie to dinner tomorrow. Know it’s a bit last minute but you’re fabulous at pulling rabbits out of hats. Asked Finn too. He’s coming alone. What about Bea and Luke? Nate

Nate is not a man given to kisses at the end of messages. He finds my outpourings of adoring emojis ludicrous and he teases me mercilessly about them.

In person, however, he’s very affectionate, so I can live without smiley faces and hearts. He’s also the sort of man who’d have been called a bon viveur in another era. He’s tall, strong and muscular from lots of exercise, has a fine singing voice and is always delighted to get his old electric guitar out at parties, so he and his two best friends, Finn and Steve, can sing the folky rock they used to perform when they busked during their college years.

My Nate loves parties, always has, always will. He’s never happier than when the house is full of our friends, but these days, I feel too tired to entertain so much. The endless cycle of work, housework, grocery shopping and making dinner is getting to me.

Sometimes, I simply need time to relax with just us. But I can’t break his heart like that.

I fire off a couple of messages, telling Nate it’s fine – although it’s not, really – and texting my mother that I will phone her on the way home.

At my desk, instead of working, I scribble a few frantic menu ideas. I love dinners with my family. Weekend cooking is the best: when there’s no rush, I can mess around with recipes and we all have a lazy dinner where there’s no studying, homework or anything to hurry us. I don’t even mind lazy last-minute dinners where I throw the takeaway menus on the table and we come to a consensus, but there’s no hope of that with Steve and Angie.

I like Steve. He and Finn are Nate’s oldest friends: they met at college through the running club and now, two and a half decades later, they’re still friends. The fourth part of the gang was Jean-Luc, Bea’s husband, who died in a car accident nearly ten years ago.

We’ve kept our friendship going through those awful years after Jean-Luc was killed, when Bea couldn’t cope with get-togethers because it was too painful to remember how it used to be. Somehow, we got her back into the fold because, as Nate insisted, she was part of us. We’d be letting both her and Jean-Luc down if we didn’t try.

Bea is amazing: she’s raised their son, Luke, on her own, works part-time as a secretary in a dental and medical clinic, so she is always there to collect Luke from school, and she’s a lioness protecting him, trying to give him everything his dad isn’t there to give. Her coming back to our group is partly because of Luke – he and Joey are the same age and, I like to think, because the three men provide role models for a fatherless son.

I like Steve but I admit to loving Finn like a brother. He’s kind, warm, clever and, since he broke up with his long-term girlfriend, Mags, has demonstrated unerringly bad taste in girlfriends. I wish I could find someone fabulous for him; I had hopes for him and Bea, to be honest, but they are just friends.

Plus, I don’t think you can make other people fall in love with each other – it happens organically or not at all.

Steve used to fly through women as if he thought the world was ending and spreading his seed was paramount. Then he met Angie.

I can’t honestly say how I feel about Angie because she makes me feel inadequate on so many levels that I’ve never managed to reach the bedrock of knowing whether I like her or not. There: I’ve said it. I feel guilty saying it because she’s so nice but I can’t help it. Some people push us into being our worse selves.

First time I met her, I saw this vision of sexy, beautifully dressed blondeness getting out of a taxi at the restaurant and my insecurities covered me like a warm, sticky blanket. I felt like I used to when I was a child and my mother was listing my imperfections.

That night, Angie was perfectly pleasant to everyone, talked warmly to me and Mags and discussed work – it would have been easier if she’d been beautiful and brainless but no, she’s an award-winning architect in a practice with another woman. She enthralled every guy at and near our table. Her existence pushed every button in me, the ones that said my hair is wrong (goes frizzy so easily), my clothes are wrong and I could lose six pounds without it putting a dent in my overall body mass.

Eleven years later, nothing has changed.

Duh.

A dinner with Angie will mean me pulling out all the stops on my precious Saturday morning off.

Maybe not all the stops, I remind myself, because the grocery bank account is not looking particularly healthy right now. The mortgage is still not paid off and even though people assume that any financial job like Nate’s is the equivalent of having a money-printing press in the basement, we are not rich.

I tell myself to go through the bank direct debits and payments this weekend. A financial audit. Although that scares me, because an audit will make me face up to why I bought Lululemon – Lululemon! – track pants for running when I never run. But the leggings were so soft and lovely, I just thought, maybe with the right leggings I would run? Hopefully?

I work my way through a pile of paperwork, make some phone calls, write some emails and finally finish for the day.

In our business, the working day is anything but a nine-to-five one. Evening and Saturday showings are part of the business and if you’re a mother, you need a brilliant child minder.

But I have been in Hilliers and McKenzie for a long time and have moved up the ladder enough to ease that pressure. Happily for me, gone are the days of standing for several two-hour bursts in a series of show houses where you cannot use the facilities, make tea or barely sit on one of the mini-sized couches brought in to make the rooms look bigger, all the while fingering speed dial on your phone in case a weird viewer comes in and you are alone. Now, I am a senior negotiator and handle bigger-value properties and the one-offs, which means I have more power over my own diary. I still have to spend plenty of Saturdays and late nights showing houses but I can arrange it all myself, rather than the more junior staff members who have their showi. . .