Once in a Lifetime

‘Waste of time and money,’ he was heard to snap. ‘It’s not as if it even makes any difference. Buy her flowers, cut your wrists, whatever! Like the bitches actually care.’

Ingrid had enormous sympathy for Martin because reliable rumour had it that his wife had hired one of the country’s top divorce lawyers, a woman whose motto was ‘Take him for everything he’s got.’ It wasn’t a snappy motto, but it worked. Outraged ex-wives were queuing up to hire her.

Meanwhile, Jeri, the show’s production assistant, was deeply in love with a new man she’d met on a blind date–a teacher, who was ‘…kind, funny, has a dog and does triathlons!’ She was walking around in the glorious haze that only came from receiving a public display of affection that showed the people she worked with that she was Someone’s Special Person.

‘Twenty-four red roses,’ whispered Gloria, Ingrid’s personal assistant, ‘and a teddy bear holding a red satin heart that says I Heart U.’

‘Gorgeous,’ said Ingrid with pleasure. She hoped it would last. Jeri was a sweet girl and deserved someone nice.

‘Wait till you see your bouquet,’ Gloria added.

Ingrid was surprised. David didn’t normally go in for the whole red roses schtick.

‘Unless it’s your secret lover,’ Gloria went on, seeing the surprise on her boss’s face. ‘I just assumed they were from David–’

Ingrid burst out laughing. ‘Secret lover, indeed! Where would I find the time, Gloria? And can you imagine the fun the political parties would have if I did have a man hidden away somewhere? They’d never answer a question of mine again–they’d be too busy smirking at me on-air, ready to say “Don’t ask me anything, Ms Fitzgerald, until you tell viewers where you were last Saturday…”’

Gloria giggled.

Ingrid’s first thought on seeing the arrangement of creamy Vendella roses was that only a secret lover with exquisite taste and pots of money would send flowers so beautiful. Displayed in a cut-glass vase, with pale pink crepe tissue and a hand-tied satin bow around them, they were lovely.

She surprised herself at how touched she felt as she read the card: Happy Valentine’s Day, love David.

She hadn’t got him anything; they rarely exchanged cards or gifts today. David wasn’t prone to romantic gestures, and, anyway, romance shouldn’t be confined to one day in the calendar, Ingrid felt, a theme she’d elaborated upon many times. And yet here she was, feeling as moony as a teenager at the sight of her beautiful bouquet.

David was amazing. He could still surprise her after all these years.

She wished she could meet him for lunch to say thank you, but she was seeing her sisters today. They met up every month for lunch and she couldn’t let them down.

But she could make a special dinner tonight, perhaps ask Mrs Hendron, their housekeeper who came twice a week, to buy some fish so that Ingrid could make her special fish pie, which David adored but which she rarely made any more because it took so long and was so fiddly. She phoned David’s direct line in Kenny’s and Stacey, her husband’s assistant, answered.

‘Hello, Stacey,’ Ingrid said, surprised. David’s personal line was sacrosanct. It was unusual for anyone else to answer

‘Hello, Ingrid,’ Stacey trilled. ‘Mr Kenny’s at a meeting. He won’t be long now, I’ll tell him you rang as soon as he gets back.’

‘Oh, not to worry,’ Ingrid replied. ‘I just wanted to thank him for the flowers.’

She felt that shivery thrill again, and it was a lovely feeling. The man in her life had sent her flowers. Was she finally turning into a girlie-girl in middle age?

‘Did you like them?’ Stacey asked eagerly. ‘They’re part of the new range in the last-minute gift department, came in last week and I hear they’re flying off the shelves today. It was all Claudia’s idea. That girl is a marvel. She’s only been with us a few months and she’s smashing, worth her weight in gold. She insisted all the men send the flowers to their wives,’ Stacey went on guilelessly.

Ingrid recovered in an instant. ‘Yes, they’re lovely,’ she said automatically. ‘What a marvellous idea of Claudia’s.’

‘She’s so young and so sparky, and she never stops,’ Stacey went on. ‘Here till all hours at night, working on new stuff. I don’t know what Mr Kenny would do without her.’

‘No, me neither,’ Ingrid replied.

She found it hard to concentrate on work that morning. At the pre-production meeting for the next night’s show, a special weekend broadcast because of the by-election, all the talk was about what the wrong result would mean for the government. Old surveys and political swing sheets were reprinted, and comparisons were made with the last time the government had lost a by-election. Ingrid found her mind drifting aimlessly, running back over David’s strange mood and the flowers sent, ostensibly, by Claudia. Something felt not quite right, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

David loved her, she knew that, but he was anxious about something and not sharing it. He wasn’t the sort of person to cheat on her with someone else. She’d bet her life on that. But there was something.

It was tied up with the store and he was keeping it to himself. She knew business had been tough over the past year. She was a director of the company, albeit not an active one, so she’d seen the profit and loss accounts. But if there had been a serious problem, David would have called a directors’ meeting and she’d have been invited, along with Tim, the company’s chief financial officer, and Lena, marketing director. And he hadn’t.

‘Men!’ she muttered.

‘Ingrid?’

Everyone around the coffee-ringed meeting table was staring at her.

‘Just remembered that the computer repair man is due at my house today,’ she improvised.

Everyone nodded. Repair men and their cosmic black-hole schedules: they all understood.

Ed, the director, put in his own story about the dishwasher repair man who needed wooing to get him to come at all.

‘That’s what you get when you have a fancy dishwasher with two separate compartments,’ teased Jeri.

Finally, the meeting ended.

Ingrid had plenty of work to do, but she couldn’t imagine doing it while her mind was elsewhere.

She dumped her stuff on her desk and picked up her bag. ‘Gloria, I’m going to lunch early.’

‘With your sisters?’ Gloria had met Flora and Sigrid many times. They were nothing like Ingrid, of course: she was unique. But they were lovely women, with enough of the Fitzgerald eccentricity for Gloria to see where it had come from.

‘Yes, I might be late back.’ Ingrid had a plan: she’d drop into Kenny’s after lunch. There was nothing urgent she had to do, nothing that couldn’t wait till tomorrow, broadcast day. And this was…well, it felt like an emergency.

All the way down to Ardagh, Ingrid kept the radio turned up loud to a talk show because she couldn’t quite bear to be alone with her thoughts. But they invaded her mind anyway. It was that niggling feeling she’d had for weeks now that something was wrong with David.

Ingrid never acted on impulse: she was thoughtful, careful, considered. But not today.

She knew about Claudia. David never kept anything about Kenny’s from her. Claudia was second-in-command to the unflappable Lena, who ran the company development office. Lena’s job was to come up with new marketing strategies for the business and to protect their core brand. If anyone had an idea, they went to Lena and she made sure it passed the Kenny’s branding test.

Claudia had been hired to strengthen Lena’s team. Ingrid could recall the recruitment process, with David poring over CVs in their living room. Ingrid loved reading curriculum vitaes: to her, they were glorious pictures of people and their lives.

‘I didn’t know anyone still listed “hang-gliding” in their Interests section,’ she’d said, leafing through them, fascinated. There had been a time when everyone professed to like sky-diving, deep-sea diving and reading out-of-print French novels in the hope it would make them sound more interesting. But now the interests tended to be more realistic, and if someone put ‘travelling round India on a bike’, chances were, they’d actually done it. Unlike the mythical sky-diving.

‘Show me.’ David peered through his glasses at the CV in question. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t like him. Too cocky. Didn’t say thanks to Stacey when she brought in the coffee.’

Ingrid laughed. If only the guy had been trained by Marcella, he’d have known that how he treated the people who weren’t theoretically important was a very useful tool in grading candidates. Being rude to the person serving tea was fatal. She’d never hire someone like that.

‘Now she was good,’ David went on, finding another CV and passing it to Ingrid.

Claudia Mills was twenty-eight, with a masters in marketing and another in business development. She’d worked in the States for a year and was keen to move back home.

‘Pretty,’ Ingrid said, admiring a professional colour photograph of a dark-eyed girl with a knowing expression, a glossy brown bob and shiny lips. ‘Sexy too.’

‘You’d have to ask Lena that,’ David said without pausing. ‘She notices if they’re cute-looking, I just watch out for who can do the job.’

David had never cheated on her in his life. She’d never worried for even a moment on that score. But the notion that the newest member of staff had insisted that everyone, including the boss, send their wives flowers on Valentine’s Day, set Ingrid’s sensors on full alert. Only someone flirtatious or very sure of her position in the company would do such a thing. What’s more, it was a calculated insult to the women involved: like saying, ‘Your husband wouldn’t think of doing it himself, but I asked him to send flowers to you.’ A very subtle insult, but an insult all the same.

Ingrid’s sisters, Sigrid and Flora, were ten and twelve years older respectively. She’d been the baby of the family, an adored ‘accident’ who’d grown up feeling loved and surrounded by kindness.

Flora’s passion in life was music. She taught piano and lived in blissful happiness in a cottage in Wexford with Brid, a violin teacher. Flora had been married, had three grown-up children, and had stunned them all when she’d left her bemused husband, Paul, for Brid.

She was fifty-five then; now, on the final approach towards seventy, apart from a dodgy back, she said she’d never been happier. The children came to visit with their children, her grandchildren, Paul came round every Tuesday for dinner, and Brid and Flora were planning to accompany a group of adult music students to Rome in April. Life was good, she said.

‘We’re going to a special Mass in the Vatican, too,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait.’ Brid’s cousin, who was a priest at the Irish College in Rome, had organised it. Neither Flora nor Brid seemed to find it in any way odd that two women living very much outside the rules of the Church should visit the Holy See, for all its vehement disapproval of lesbian relationships.

But then, Ingrid knew that nobody was likely to throw them out of the Vatican since they looked for all the world like two genteel music teachers whose idea of a good time was a bit of Mozart followed by a mug of cocoa.

She was careful not to say this in Flora’s hearing, for anyone who leapt to such conclusions would be told in no uncertain terms that Flora and Brid enjoyed a perfectly healthy sexual relationship, thank you very much: ‘Why do young people think that they invented sex?’ she once protested over dinner. ‘It’s like playing the piano, you get better with practice and though you mightn’t have as much stretch in your fingers as you get older, you’ve got the technique to make up for it.’

David had choked on his soup the night Flora had said that.

‘Do you think they’re still at it?’ he’d asked Ingrid later.

‘Why not?’ she replied. ‘We are, aren’t we?’

Sigrid had the family dodgy back too, but she refused Flora’s litany of fabulous new osteopaths and kept supple with yoga.

Yogalates was her latest fad, although she had to travel to Dublin once a week for classes and all that driving was playing havoc with her sacroiliac joint.

Sigrid’s only complaint was that TJ, her husband, had no interest in keeping supple and was going to fuse to his old armchair one day from sitting in it and listening to horse racing on the radio.

‘If I were to drop dead tomorrow, he’d have to look at the Racing Post to see what time he could bury me between races,’ she said, but it was a joke. Both Flora and Ingrid knew that if anything happened to Sigrid, TJ would follow her into the grave within the week. They might mutter and moan at each other, but they were practically joined at the hip.

The sisters sat in the Speckled Trout pub at a corner table beside a roaring fire, and looked at the menu in between catching up on the gossip of the past month.

‘Brid and I named stars after each other for Valentine’s Day,’ Flora said proudly, when the waiter had left.

‘How gorgeous!’ said Sigrid, delighted. ‘I should get TJ to name a horse for me! You can do that, you know, name horses–you just have to put up some money for the training. Not that we could, or anything, but still–’

‘That’s lovely, Flora,’ Ingrid said, conscious of that whiplash of anxiety again.

Her nearly-seventy-year-old sister was getting better Valentine’s Day gifts from her lesbian lover than she was, and the comparison was making her sad. But why? She had no time for Valentine’s Day commercialism. Never had. But thinking she’d been given something wildly romantic had stirred up the desire in her for such gifts. If David was going to send her flowers, he should have done it off his own bat.

When lunch was over, she drove to Kenny’s and parked in the store’s public car park instead of using the staff one. Without quite knowing why, she wanted to see David at work without him knowing she was coming.

She entered the shop through the front entrance and let the whole Kenny’s experience flow over her.

‘Red is gorgeous on you!’ she heard a woman in a flowery shirt sigh to her friend as they stood in front of one of the cosmetics counters. The friend was wearing a slash of shiny red on her lips and was looking aghast at her face in a small mirror.

‘No, it’s desperate!’ She began wiping it off at high speed.

‘Bright red is hard to wear,’ came the gentle voice of the woman behind the counter. ‘This beigey pink would be nice with your skin tones, and not so dramatic.’

Snippets of conversation floated around her.

‘Where’s the food hall?’

‘I’m looking for those suck-it-all-in knickers? What floor they are on?’

The scent of Kenyan coffee mingled with all kinds of perfume, and from every corner of the store, Ingrid could hear chatter, laughter and murmured thank yous as people were handed back their credit cards and the store’s subtle cream paper bags with the gold font that spelled Kenny’s in elegant Art Deco lettering.

She hadn’t been here for ages, she realised. It had become David’s work, the same way the television studios were her ‘work’. A place where they spent huge chunks of their lives separately. She felt guilty at that. No wonder he wasn’t talking to her about the store: she’d removed herself from it and he probably felt he couldn’t talk to her about it.

Quietly, she entered the back part of the store and made her way upstairs to David’s suite of offices.

The door to Stacey’s office was open, as was David’s. No sign of illicit meetings there.

‘Ingrid,’ said Stacey delightedly. ‘How lovely to see you. I was just making coffee for David, would you like some?’

‘No thanks,’ said Ingrid, smiling and walking into her husband’s office. He was at the big table where he sometimes had meetings and there were lots of papers spread out on the polished walnut.

‘Ingrid,’ he said, pleased, ‘what brings you here? Isn’t it your day for lunch with Flora and Sigrid?’

He put out his arms to give her a kiss, and Ingrid felt some of her apprehension melt.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d drop in on the way back. I haven’t been here in ages.’

‘Stacey’s making coffee,’ he added, going back to his papers.

‘I wanted to thank you for the flowers,’ Ingrid went on. ‘The roses. I’ve heard the flowers were Claudia’s idea,’ she said evenly.

‘Were they nice?’ David asked absently, head still bent over his paperwork.

Ingrid would have growled if she’d been able to, so she said nothing. The silence worked.

David’s head shot up and he looked at her inquisitively. ‘You all right?’

‘No,’ she snapped, keeping her voice low, conscious of the open door. ‘I am not all right. I am your wife and today you sent flowers to my office at the behest of your sparky little girl Friday, Claudia. So no, I am not all right. I am very much not all right.’

Nobody could ever call David stupid. He got it instantly.

‘This is about Claudia?’ he asked. ‘Claudia who works here?’

His look of absolute astonishment was all the evidence Ingrid needed. Nobody could fake astonishment with such utter truth. And Ingrid had seen plenty of people try it in her years as an interviewer. The faintest gleam of bemusement appeared on his face.

‘You’re worried about Claudia,’ he said and she could have sworn he looked relieved, as if there was something else she should be worried about.

The frisson of fear inside her diminished and she felt guilty at having wronged him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘You did,’ he agreed, but he didn’t laugh with her or even hug her for thinking such a thing. ‘Claudia and Lena are so thrilled with the whole “last-minute gift” idea and yesterday Claudia came up with this plan to share how wonderfully it was going, that’s all.’

‘They were lovely flowers,’ Ingrid conceded.

Something was still wrong. David hadn’t said ‘How could you think such a thing?’ or hugged her.

‘What’s wrong? Is it the business? Please tell me, David. Tell me what’s wrong.’

He shook his head. ‘Nothing’s wrong, Ingrid. Please don’t interrogate me, I don’t need that.’

She never interrogated him.

‘But you’re worried, I can tell. Don’t lock me out.’

He rubbed his eyes as if getting grit out of them. ‘Money’s always a problem, especially in the credit crunch, but we’ll manage, we always do. Now, I need to finish this quickly, love. We can go to the café and have coffee then, if you’d like? I just need another half an hour.’

Ingrid shook her head. ‘I have to go back to work. I was going to make us fish pie this evening?’

His face lit up. ‘Great.’

Ingrid wandered round the store for half an hour before she left. She still felt guilty for not having been there lately, and she couldn’t help but want to set eyes on Claudia, just to see.

Kenny’s was a real jewel, she realised, walking through the home department with its carefully chosen pieces. The shop couldn’t compete with the big department stores in the area, so they’d specialised in things you simply couldn’t get elsewhere. There was unusual china, the gorgeous pottery with indigo glazes, wooden lamps with bases of carved flowers, Tiffany lamps held up by brass fairies, and the Bluestone Tapestries that Ingrid adored, even though they were worlds away from the sort of decor she normally liked.

A woman with a baby in a buggy stood in front of the tapestries, fingering a large mermaid one with longing. Ingrid could remember when Molly and Ethan had been babies, and she’d had so little time to meander around shops. She felt a strange yearning to have that time back again, and she’d do it differently. Make more time to meander, like this woman with her baby.

But she’d always been so busy, trying to fit work and housework into a day that was still only twenty-four hours long.

The woman with the baby turned and caught Ingrid’s eye.

‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ she sighed, meaning the tapestry. ‘But a bit expensive for me.’

‘I love them too,’ Ingrid agreed. ‘I’ve actually got one in my hall.’

‘Lucky you,’ said the woman.

Yes, thought Ingrid, lucky me.

5

Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

Lizzie’s wedding morning was bitterly cold. Unusually low temperatures for the time of year, the radio weather forecaster said chirpily as Natalie and Molly sat beside the range in Natalie’s parents’ farmhouse.

Natalie was waiting for her stepmother’s porridge, which was slowly cooking on the range and tasted very different from anything she ever heated in a microwave in her flat.

Molly was foolishly having toasted home-made bread: foolish because a trio of dogs sat at her feet, making hungry, abandoned expressions and drooling.

‘I did tell you,’ Natalie said. ‘They think it’s their toast, not yours.’

‘They’re sweet,’ said Molly, who was a sucker for big brown eyes.

The back door opened and both girls could feel icy cold rush into the kitchen.

It was Des, Natalie’s dad, and even he was rubbing his hands together with cold.

‘This cold would take the balls off a brass monkey. I hope Lizzie’s wearing a blanket today,’ he said, going to the range and holding his hands over it.

‘Dad, you know how stubborn Lizzie is,’ Natalie said. ‘This is her Valentine’s fairytale and she’s refused all suggestions about wraps and fake-fur throws. She’s going to look like a princess, no matter how cold.’

‘Being covered in goosepimples isn’t going to look very nice in the photos,’ pointed out Molly mildly. She was wearing a vintage woollen dress, a coat and a pashmina to the church, and was already wondering if that was enough.

‘You try telling Lizzie that,’ Natalie said.

‘A bit of a mule, is our Lizzie,’ grinned Des, winking at Molly to show he agreed with her.

Molly loved Natalie’s dad, and she loved going to visit Natalie’s home.

Part of the charm was that it was so very different from her parents’ elegant house with its perfectly designed garden maintained by a gardener who came once a week.

Any grass around Woodenbridge Farm was nibbled low by a pet ram called Sydney who maintained decent lawn standards and ran to greet visitors when they got out of their cars. Sydney had been hand-reared indoors with milk from a bottle with a baby’s teat on it, until he got too big. As a result he thought he was a dog.

The house itself was a small and sturdy stone farmhouse, Natalie’s father’s family home for generations. It was heated solely by open fires and the giant range in the kitchen, with a few gas heaters here and there for people prone to cold.

Staying overnight in winter had made Molly finally realise why Natalie never turned the gas heating on in their flat. Natalie was used to the cold.

‘Here, you put clothes on to go to bed,’ explained Natalie cheerfully. ‘When it’s really cold, you have to bring two hot-water bottles with you, or else let the dogs lie on the bed. I always feel that people who don’t like dogs on the bed have never lived somewhere without central heating.’

All the floors were stone or wood and nobody minded when the three dogs, four cats and the odd chicken wandered in and out, leaving fur or feathers in their wake. The two old couches and faded threadbare rug in the snug living room were originals and not expensive copies trying to give off a country vibe. This was a working farm, with a small herd of beef cattle grown for the Italian market, and no money for any luxuries.

The family ate their own vegetables and the eggs that their hens laid.

The relaxed atmosphere was very beguiling. Bess, Natalie’s stepmum, presided over the house with the easygoing charm of a den mother minding a campful of scouts. She even looked like a den mother: a trim figure always dressed in jeans and long hand-knitted sweaters, her greying hair cut sensibly short as if any messing around with hairdryers or curling tongs was a nuisance she didn’t have time for.