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ANNE BENNETT
If You Were the Only Girl
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Anne Bennett 2012
Anne Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007359233
Ebook Edition © January 2013 ISBN: 9780007383702
Version: 2017-09-08
I would like this book dedicated to Judith Kendal in recognition of the many things she has done for me in our twenty-year friendship.
Contents
Keep Reading – If You were the Only Girl
Lucy Cassidy saw Clara O’Leary for the first time that she could remember that dull Sunday morning in late October as they were leaving the Sacred Heart church in Mountcharles, County Donegal, after early Mass. Clara was her mother, Minnie’s, oldest friend.
‘Since we were girls,’ her mother had told Lucy. ‘Even after we married we were friends, and then when you were born just a fortnight after her daughter, Therese, we were so happy to be young mothers together.’
Then Clara’s husband, Sean, developed typhus. He was a strong man, however, and was fighting the illness, but Therese caught it from him, quickly grew very ill and died on Lucy’s birthday.
‘Every year I think of that,’ Minnie said. ‘Sean had got over the worst and was recovering, but at the death of his small daughter it was as if he had given up and a fortnight later he died too.’
‘And that’s when her brothers took Clara O’Leary back to England?’ Lucy would prompt, though she knew the story well.
‘After