Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (81 page)

‘Carlos wants you to come along to today’s editorial meeting,’ Gloria said.

Ingrid nodded. In for a penny…

It was like she’d never been away, except for the presence of Joan, who was more groomed than Ingrid remembered. Her hair was blonder, sleeker, and her clothes were sharper. She sat at the exact other end of the boardroom table and watched Ingrid the way Wile E. Coyote watched Road Runner.

When did I become the enemy?
Ingrid stored it up to talk about to Marcella later. She could remember mentoring Joan a few years ago, when Joan had come into the show after being at the coalface as the station’s court reporter. Joan had been eager then, fond of wearing anoraks to fend off the cold of live outside broadcasts, and admiring of Ingrid. Not any more. She wanted Ingrid’s job.

The queen is dead, long live the queen,
Ingrid thought to herself. Well this queen was very much alive. And would kick if necessary.

The first story was about the energy crisis, although Martin, who’d clearly had a going-over from his wife’s divorce lawyer, had a solution to the problem: ‘The venomous soon-to-be-ex-wife power supply,’ he said balefully. ‘Who needs nuclear energy when you have first wives going nuclear all on their own. It’s an endless supply of rage. Could power a whole country.’

‘Martin, enough,’ groaned Jeri.

‘You wait,’ he snapped, ‘until Mr Perfect Triathlon person says he made a mistake, that you probably shouldn’t have ever got together, but at least you’d never had kids and could you possibly be civilised about the break-up…and then, you’ll lose it.’

‘Martin!’ Carlos rarely raised his voice, but when he did, people listened.

‘Sorry.’ Martin got up and left the room.

Ingrid stared at his departing back. Did all spurned wives turn into nuclear power stations of fury? Would she have done the same if David had given her the option and left instead of dying?

She’d have hated to become that kind of person.

The meeting ended with a discussion about a forthcoming interview with the Minister for Finance. Without a word being said, everyone turned to Ingrid as they spoke about this. She knew it was because she had the most experience interviewing him, she’d done it many times. She could just about see Joan’s face, cold with anger. Ingrid was back and had slipped effortlessly into her old role without anybody saying, ‘But what about Joan?’

Once, Ingrid might have gone to Joan afterwards to discuss this. But she had no energy left in her for such things. If Joan stuck around long enough, she would have the job one day. Ingrid herself knew she didn’t have forever. But right now, she needed it more than Joan did.

‘It’s yourself!’

The mailroom man saw her as she crossed reception on her way out.

‘We’ve got a pile of post for you in the mailroom. Bags of it.’ He suddenly appeared to remember what the post was likely to say. ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Ingrid,’ he added. ‘You’ve been missed around here.’

‘Thank you,’ she said and she meant it.

Today, she was able to be grateful for even the small things. She’d come back to work, she had a big interview to do next week, and people had missed her. It wasn’t everything she wanted, but it was enough for today.

Life seems so long when you’re in the middle of it, but when you know it’s going to end soon, you realise how little time we have on earth. Don’t waste it.

Kitty, Brendan and Charlie sat in a box in the theatre, waiting for the curtain to come up. It was the first night of Iseult’s new play,
Dancing With Their Lives,
the theatre was groaning at the seams and Iseult had arranged for an enormous bottle of champagne in an ice bucket to be delivered to the box, a bottle which Kitty had made Brendan open as soon as they’d arrived.

However, Iseult, the guest of honour, wasn’t with them. She was backstage talking to the cast and the director. Kitty was quite cross that she’d only been allowed backstage for five minutes before being gently, but nonetheless firmly, ushered out by Iseult. Charlie had been surprised to see her mother return so quickly.

‘You weren’t long,’ she said, taking in her mother’s flushed cheeks that matched the burgundy raw-silk dress she was wearing.

Her mother looked great, she had to hand it to her. Nobody would have guessed that a few weeks ago, Kitty had been
hobbling around after breaking her hip, devoid of make-up and despondent.

Tonight, her hair was a triumph of the hairdresser’s art, with lots of little Medusa curls clustered around her face. Her make-up looked amazing and Charlie figured her mother had definitely had some cosmetic work done, although she would undoubtedly deny it if she asked.

‘Good genes, taking care of myself,’ she liked to say if anyone asked.

Whatever, the effect of Botox or fillers was now slightly ruined by the irritated look on her mother’s face.

‘There’s sort of palaver going on back stage,’ Kitty said crossly, settling herself in the box like the Queen Mother at a command performance ‘They don’t want outsiders there. As if I’m an outsider!’

Behind her, Charlie and Brendan exchanged a grin. Charlie reached out and took his hand. It was lovely being here with Brendan. He calmed her so much. She had been dreading tonight. It wasn’t that she wasn’t looking forward to seeing the play itself. Iseult was so talented and the play was bound to be fascinating. No, it was more that she knew her mother would be in I’m-the-playwright’s-mother mode, with attendant airs, graces and tantrums.

Kitty had been delirious with joy earlier in the week when a profile of Iseult was printed in the
Irish Times.
In it Iseult was quoted uttering the immortal words:
My mother has been such an inspiration.

When Charlie and Brendan picked Kitty up from her house to take her to the theatre, the cutting was stuck to the fridge with sellotape. She’d probably frame it, Charlie thought crossly, and then was angry with herself for sounding all bitter and resentful.

Detach with love.
She had to let go. Her mother’s relationship with Iseult was their business and if it was strong, lucky
for them. Neither of them had what she had, which was a wonderful marriage and a wonderful son.

Her new mantra was that you can’t change how people carry on or think, you can only change how you react to them.

Well, that was the theory. No matter how often she tried to tell herself these things, in reality it was different.

‘Relax,’ Brendan mouthed to her across the box.

She stuck her tongue out at him good-humouredly and he did the same back. What was it about being in Kitty’s presence that made them feel so juvenile? Charlie could think of no other circumstance where she’d dream of sticking her tongue out.

It was the Kitty effect, for sure. Brendan was amazing. He tolerated her so well, given that he had nothing in his past to help him understand someone like that. His family were totally normal.

At the weekend, they’d been at his parents’ house for Sunday lunch and it had been so relaxing. Jenny and Stephen were retired school teachers. Stephen was a quiet man who said little and smiled often, like Brendan himself. Jenny was a lovely, strong woman who’d reared six children and gone out to work, which hadn’t been easy. She was a stalwart of the local church, a fabulous cook and was very involved in her children and grandchildren’s lives, but never in an overbearing way.

Needless to say, Kitty hated her.

‘She’s very pious, isn’t she?’ Kitty would say. ‘And the hair. You’d think she could do something with her hair!’

Jenny’s hair was short and wispy and never saw the inside of a hairdresser’s salon.

Kitty’s dislike of Jenny had upset Charlie for years but not any more. The gratitude journal must be working, Charlie decided. Reading back over things she’d written helped her understand them. She now understood, for example, that her
mother’s dislike of Jenny was more to do with jealousy than anything else. Kitty was always going on about women’s rights and the importance of work, yet she hadn’t worked outside the home after getting married.

Jenny had raised her family while succeeding at a full-time career that saw her ultimately become vice-principal of a national school. It wasn’t superiority that made Kitty dislike her, Charlie thought, it was a sense of inferiority.

‘Is this damned play ever going to start!’ snapped Kitty now.

Yes, Charlie decided, it was merely that her mother was upset at having been sent away from the backstage excitement. She was like a child denied fun. Understanding did help.

By the end of Act Two, Charlie had forgotten her mother’s temper and was riveted to the stage. The central character of the play was a dying woman who was looking back over a life that took in one world war, and many deaths, marriages and love affairs, through a series of flashbacks. Her family were at her bedside and through each of their eyes, Iseult’s play examined their relationship with their mother. The play had such depth and the actors were so marvellous that Charlie found it hard to remember the funny stories about rehearsals that Iseult had told them. All those things were forgotten as she stared at the stage and watched this amazing story unfold in front of her.

One strand of the play that absolutely fascinated her was the story of the youngest daughter, the person who sobbed most at her dying mother’s bedside. Slowly it became clear that she didn’t share the same father as the other children.

Her father was the mother’s true love. A man she had to love in secret but adored more than anyone else, even her other children. That, Iseult seemed to be saying, was why there was this special bond between mother and child.

‘Oh, I see,’ breathed Charlie out loud, although nobody could hear her because everyone was watching the stage.

The theatre seemed to recede and she thought suddenly of the first time she’d had an ultrasound when she’d been pregnant with Mikey.

Brendan had been beside her, holding her hand, the two of them watching the screen as the sonographer traced the shape of the baby inside Charlie’s womb. On the screen, the picture looked like lots of random speckled dots, and Charlie, although she was desperate to see what her baby looked like, couldn’t work it out.

‘Now, there, that’s the head. See?’ said the sonographer, reaching out and touching the screen.

Instantly, it had all made sense. Charlie could see her baby’s fragile face, then one little hand stretched out with tiny stubby fingers, and the legs, all curled up.

Charlie had got the picture. Like now. Iseult might have claimed, as she had in the
Irish Times
interview, that she was writing about a fictional family, but there was something at the core of this play that was very dear to her. She might convince everyone else that it was fiction. In fact, she might believe that herself. But even though there was no other character and no other scenario in the play that bore any resemblance to Iseult’s real life, Charlie was quite sure that her sister’s heroine was really Iseult herself. Which meant she and Charlie weren’t both Anthony Nelson’s children.

The producers had taken a suite in the Merrion Hotel for the after-show party, but before the cast, director and playwright even got there, drink flowed in the stars’ dressing rooms.

Charlie hadn’t wanted to go to the dressing rooms, she was still reeling from what she’d seen on stage. Was that what Iseult and her mother had been hiding from her for all these years? Was that the simple, crude answer to why she had no loving relationship with her mother? Had Iseult’s father meant more to Kitty than Charlie’s had? When had Iseult found out and why hadn’t she shared it with Charlie? Charlie burned
with anger and impotent fury. To think of all the years she’d spent worrying about pleasing her mother, trying to be the perfect daughter, and it had all been in vain. There had been nothing she could have done to be Kitty’s favourite: that role had been assigned by the simple, unchangeable circumstances of their births.

‘I don’t feel well, I’ve got a headache. I’m going home,’ she told her mother as they left their box. She couldn’t face looking at Kitty for the rest of the night.

‘Nonsense!’ said Kitty, refusing to brook any opposition. ‘I’ve got some painkillers in my bag, you’ll be fine–come on,’ and she dragged Charlie along behind her, with Brendan following.

Charlie looked back at Brendan helplessly.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, looking worried. Charlie was so pale.

‘No,’ Charlie mouthed at him. ‘I’m not.’

She wanted to sit down and cry in the middle of the theatre, but there was no hope of that because Kitty had her in her grasp, a surprisingly strong grasp for somebody who not that long ago had been very frail. Kitty battled their path backstage where the triumphant sound of champagne corks popping mingled with shrieks of excited relief after a successful first night.

‘They loved it, loved it!’ roared somebody.

‘They loved
us!
’ echoed somebody else.

‘You were fabulous!’

‘No,
you
were fabulous!’

‘Was I really, darling?’

Charlie had never resented Iseult’s success for a moment. Still didn’t. But tonight, she didn’t have the heart to cheer this particular play. She felt shocked because an important secret of her life had been revealed to her in front of hundreds of other people. If only Iseult had told her about it beforehand, if only Kitty had.

As soon as Kitty spotted Iseult’s tall figure, her blonde Valkyrie head visible above so many other people, she was off over to her, shrieking ‘Darling, it was breathtaking.’

And Charlie watched them embrace, feeling angry and excluded.

‘Mrs Nelson, you must be so proud,’ said a woman with a notebook in her hand and a photographer beside her. The notebook was pressed close to Kitty’s face, as if it was a microphone.

‘Yes, I am,’ Kitty began. ‘It’s nights like this that you remember the hardship of bringing up a child alone.’

Even Iseult looked a bit stunned at this. Their mother had hardly reared them alone. Iseult had been eighteen when Anthony moved out. And why ‘child’ and not ‘children’? It was as though Charlie didn’t exist. She felt angry tears prickle.

‘I am so very, very proud of my daughter,’ Kitty went on, flicking back a bit of hair so she could elongate her neck for the photographer. It was too easy to look pudgy in close-up.

‘Proud of both your daughters, obviously,’ said the reporter smoothly, catching sight of Charlie.

Kitty blinked as the flash went off.

‘Well, yes, of course, both,’ she said, entirely wrong-footed. She flicked a mascara-lidded gaze over at Charlie, who turned and stalked off.

‘Mother!’ hissed Iseult. Kitty kept a fixed smile glued on her face.

‘Yes, darling?’ she said.

Teeth only slightly gritted with the long practice of many years talking to journalists, Iseult managed to steer her mother out from under the newspaper woman’s nose. ‘Excuse us,’ she said, still smiling her glued-on smile.

‘Mother!’ Iseult said when they’d reached a nook where nobody could hear them. ‘What did you say that for? Look at poor Charlie; you know it must be hard for her when everyone is congratulating me. You can’t say that you’re proud
of me and talk as though you only have one daughter with her standing beside you!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kitty said. ‘She didn’t mind.’ But she wasn’t so sure. Charlie had looked very upset.

Iseult suddenly saw someone she needed to talk to and moved off, leaving Kitty feeling something quite alien to her: guilt.

She didn’t do guilt. It was a complete waste of time. She and Mairead used to talk about it all the time, usually over Kitty’s favourite vodka martinis.

‘Why do guilt?’ Mairead would say, waggling her glass for a re-fill. ‘Only women are supposed to feel guilt.’

The reason they could talk about guilt so successfully was that they both rarely felt it.

But now Kitty did. Charlie had looked stricken. Kitty hadn’t meant that she was only proud of Iseult; of course she was proud of both of her daughters. But Iseult’s success was so much more obvious, people could see it. That did make it extra special, slightly more wonderful. Besides, Charlie was probably just going to get headache tablets and she’d be back in a moment to drive Kitty to the party. It would all be fine, Kitty knew it.

Charlie didn’t come back. Kitty had to hitch a ride with Iseult, who hadn’t brought her own car and was being ferried around with the producers in a big black limousine, that surprisingly barely had room for Kitty to squash in. She’d felt quite affronted, particularly as, just before they’d got into the car, the journalist she’d been talking to earlier had tried to corner her to talk about her feminist days, and Iseult had shuffled her along going, ‘Not now, Mother, you’ve done enough damage!’

‘What do you mean “damage”?’ Kitty demanded, when they were packed side by side in the big black limo.

‘That woman writes a gossip column and anything you say
will be twisted,’ Iseult snapped. ‘This evening is supposed to be about the play, not real-life warring families. It’s been bad enough you implying that you’re only proud of one daughter.’

‘Why didn’t you warn me about her?’ said Kitty crossly. ‘It’s not as if I haven’t talked to the press before, I know what to say.’

‘Oh, Mother,’ sighed Iseult. ‘The only time you talked to the press was when you were a cog in the feminist wheel. You were hardly the President. That was then, this is now!’