Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (90 page)

‘I don’t know,’ Ingrid said. ‘Don’t you get it, Marcella? All that doesn’t matter. David and I looked like we had it all and we didn’t, it was just appearances. So stop worrying about appearances, they can lie. If you care about this Lorcan guy, go for it. You’re the one who’s sleeping with him, not all the nay-sayers.’

‘Wow, I never thought you’d say that.’

‘I’ve changed,’ Ingrid said. ‘I loved David, loved him more than anything, and you know what…?’ She paused. ‘I can’t stop thinking that if only I’d known about
her
at the time, I’d have forgiven him and we’d have moved on with our lives.’

Marcella couldn’t hide her gasp.

‘Yes,’ said Ingrid. ‘Life is short, Marcella. David’s death showed me that we don’t have that much time here, so we ought to enjoy it with the people we love. Go get your Lorcan. Who gives a damn about what anyone else thinks?’

‘But you’re missing one important point here, Ingrid–babies. Children, offspring. Lorcan is a very macho sort of man and he’s great with children. He’s not going to want a woman who’s too old to have them.’

‘Did you ask him?’ asked Ingrid, as crisply as if she were interviewing on camera.

‘Well, no…’ She had done all the talking on that point, and no listening, she remembered now, guiltily.

‘How about you ask him and then decide. Otherwise,’ Ingrid
said, ‘you’ll always be wondering. And, as I know, that’s not a nice way to be. Now,’ she added, ‘do you want to hear my news? It’s not as exciting as having a fabulous young man throwing himself at you, but it’s pretty good all the same.’

On the other end of the phone, Marcella smiled. Ingrid wasn’t entirely back to her old self again, but she was getting there. ‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘I may have found a wonderful investor for Kenny’s. Co-incidentally, that’s another thing that came about after our night out with the girls. It’s Eric Johannsen.’

‘Handsome Eric?’

‘Marcella,’ chided Ingrid, ‘it’ll be a long time, if ever, before I’m in the market for a man–’

‘But he is rather gorgeous,’ Marcella said gently.

‘He’s rather clever too. I can see why he’s so successful. He knew who I was, knew all about Kenny’s and had clearly heard we were in some sort of trouble. He phoned me two days later to talk.’

‘That’s wonderful,’ Marcella said. ‘As we say in my business: “I never met a billionaire I didn’t like.”’

His phone was off, so Marcella phoned Lorcan’s office to see where he was.

Josie, who handled all the calls and had come to know Marcella, was delighted to hear from her.

‘Thought you were off the scene,’ Josie said with her usual bluntness.

‘I was a bit, but I’m back now,’ Marcella replied.

‘Good on ya, girl. He’s been like a bear with a sore head this past week. What can I do you for?’

‘His phone is off. Where is he?’

‘Down by the docks in the new apartment block,’ Josie said. ‘Don’t know why he’s bothering his backside. With the state of the economy, nobody’ll buy them now, but you know Lorcan: when he says he’s finishing a job, he finishes it.’

Josie appeared to be right. Not only were there no people viewing the beautiful apartments but there didn’t appear to be any builders or plumbers working on them either. Lorcan’s truck was the only one in the parking area. The door to the apartment complex was locked. Marcella considered her options for a moment, then stood beside his truck and gave it a huge kick. Instantly, the alarm went off.

She counted to thirty before Lorcan appeared, running. He stopped when he saw her, held out his key to flick the alarm off, then opened the door to the building to let her inside.

‘I take it you didn’t come here to look at the apartments?’

‘I came here to say sorry and ask you out to dinner,’ Marcella said.

Lorcan looked stony-faced for all of two seconds.

‘I thought I was too young for you, you were too old for me, and my mother was a major stumbling block?’

‘You are, I am and she is,’ Marcella said honestly. ‘So we need to talk, but I can’t let you out of my life without discussing the problems.’

‘My mother isn’t that much of a problem,’ Lorcan said. ‘She’s tough, but she doesn’t run my life.’

‘That’s not what I’m most anxious about.’

She looked around. There wasn’t much to sit on, so she went over to a low, dusty window sill and sat on that. He joined her, close but not touching.

Marcella steeled herself. Being brutally honest in business was a piece of cake; being brutally honest in relationships was terrifying.

‘I’d love to have your babies, I told you, but I can’t. I’m too old. When you hit forty-nine your time has run out in the baby-making department’

The slight joke was her way of coping with the harsh words.

Lorcan reached over and took her hands in his.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’d love you to have my babies too, but I’d already figured out that wasn’t on the menu. I’m not stupid.’

She grinned weakly.

‘I know all that and I still want us to be together.’

‘You already thought about it?’

‘Yes, how could I not with my mother mentioning it to me? But, like I told her, I want to be with you and I can live without kids if you can.’

‘What if it’s not enough?’ Marcella asked anxiously. ‘What if five years down the road, you change your mind and hate me for being old and not being able to give you babies?’

‘Marcella…’ He knelt in front of her on the marble floor. ‘Do you think anything in life has guarantees? It doesn’t. We love each other now and that has to be enough. You might want to dump me in five years to move on to a younger model.’

‘Cheeky!’ she said, but she was smiling, even though she was starting to cry. ‘You really want to make a go of it?’

His answer was a kiss and she felt herself melt.

How could she have ever thrown this away?

Marcella leaned against the hardness of him and closed her eyes. The sense of him holding her close, that was her home, even in a half-finished apartment block.

‘I’ve missed you, crazy woman,’ he murmured into the cloud of her hair.

‘Missed you too,’ she said.

The Mariner Pub was where the majority of the television station employees went at lunchtime. Cheap sandwiches, large portions of dessert and enough noise via the sound system to drown all the plots and gossip, made it a honey-pot for staff.

It was big enough to be anonymous and better than the station canteen because the higher-ups never went there. The last person Ingrid expected to see in the Mariner was Jim Fitzgibbon, David’s old friend, the one she’d only ever endured meeting.

‘Ingrid–at last!’ he said, as she stood in astonishment at
the till paying for her soup and sandwich. ‘I went into the television canteen looking for you,’ he said, ‘and they said a load of youse from the
Politics Tonight
office had come here.’

So much for privacy, Ingrid thought. Any mad stalker would be able to locate her within minutes.

You’ve a delivery of boiled bunny rabbit for Ms Fitzgerald? No bother, she’s just down the road.

‘Hello, Jim,’ she said, drawing on years of experience in appearing mildly pleased to see people she disliked.

She didn’t have the heart to ask him how poor Fiona was. The last time she’d seen her was at David’s funeral, and Fiona had come over to offer her sympathies. Alone. The separation was obviously final. Next up, divorce. Jim had shuffled across from the other side of the church, with the hideous Carmel–replete in floor-length mink–accompanying him. In her wild grief, Ingrid had barely been able to look at Carmel, thinking of the last time she’d seen her, when David had been by her side, when life had been hers.

‘I need to talk to you, Ingrid,’ he said now.

He always sounded as if he wanted to off-load a shipment of fake handbags. Ingrid had never been able to gauge what David had seen in him; maybe it had just been a case of maintaining links with people he’d known at school. But Jim would never be her friend.

‘What can I do for you, Jim?’ she asked. He would want something from her, not the other way round.

‘Isn’t there a quiet spot where we can talk?’ Jim asked.

The place was emptying out after the lunchtime rush and a small table in an alcove had just been vacated.

‘Grab that one,’ she told Jim.

He sat and waited while Ingrid cleared away the previous occupants’ empty cups and plates, and cleaned the table down with a paper napkin. He was useless, she thought crossly, just watching her working.

Eventually, she was able to sit down and began to eat. It
was mushroom soup, her favourite. If only Jim would ask for whatever he wanted, and go, so she could read her paper and eat in peace. Her social skills were rusty; she didn’t want to go through the motions of being polite.

‘How have you been?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ said Ingrid. ‘Coping.’

‘Is probate sorted out?’

She eyed him suspiciously. Probate was a long, drawn-out legal nightmare. ‘What’s this about, Jim?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, clearly uncomfortable.

He fiddled with the knot of his tie.

‘I know what was worrying David,’ he blurted out suddenly. ‘I didn’t have the courage to tell you before.’

Ingrid instinctively looked around to see if anyone could overhear them.

‘The business,’ she said with deliberate calm. ‘I know, Jim. As the person with a controlling interest in the store, the auditors have me on speed-dial, I know the store is in trouble. We’ve been doing everything to try to save it. Is that what you wanted to tell me? That we should sell Kenny’s if we’ve any sense?’

‘No.’ He looked mightily affronted. ‘Not at all, I wouldn’t wish that on you, Ingrid. Don’t I know what Kenny’s meant to David, to you all.’ His red face was very earnest and Ingrid knew she’d offended him. ‘It’s worse than that. He was very worried.’

Jim stopped looking at her and began to stare into her soup bowl.

‘I won’t lie to you, Ingrid. He was terrified what would happen if you found out. About her.’

Ingrid’s hand began to shake and she had to put her spoon down. She had been able to hold herself together in the editorial meeting, and in her confrontation with Joan, but now, with her husband’s oldest friend telling her he knew about David’s darkest secret, she felt all her strength ebb away.

‘As God is my judge, Ingrid, I can tell you he loved you. Loved you more than anything. He wanted to end it, honestly, no kidding.’

Jim chanced a look up at her face.

‘I thought that if they did any of that, you know, forensic accounting, they might come up with credit-card statements and the like…’

‘I found them,’ she whispered.

‘That can’t have been a walk in the park, if I may say so. But I tell you, it was in the past. He was ending it, Ingrid, except these things take time. No offence.’

‘None taken,’ she murmured.

Jim’s pudgy hand patted hers in comfort. He was kind, she could see this for the first time. Behind all the bluster, Jim was a kind man, and no matter how hard it had been to come here today, he’d done it because his friend would have wanted him to. Jim knew she’d find out about the other woman, and he wanted to reassure her.

‘How do you know he was ending it?’ she begged, dignity forgotten.

‘He was trying to organise a job for her in London, away from here.’

‘Maybe he wanted to go with her?’ Ingrid said, all manner of scenarios springing up in her head. She wanted so much to believe what Jim was telling her. She’d meant it when she told Marcella that she would have forgiven David if only she’d known.

‘Oh no, he didn’t. He wanted her gone, believe me. He wanted her gone. He wanted me to give her a hand finding a flat.’

‘That’s what you were talking about that night at dinner.’

‘A little bit, that’s all. He made a mistake, Ingrid, and he knew that. David wasn’t like me. He appreciated you, and he told me I was an idiot for letting Fiona get away. He was terrified you’d find out and leave him. Now that doesn’t sound
like a man who was setting up shop with another woman in London, does it?’

Ingrid shook her head.

‘Oh and don’t forget the anniversary trip,’ he added, delighted to have thought of it. ‘You’d been talking about a short cruise, but he wanted to take you on one of those round-the-world ones–three weeks! He was like a kid about it. He’d hardly have been so excited if he wanted to head off with a young wan to London, now, would he?’

Jim beamed at her, and Ingrid thought of her David and a young wan, as Jim had put it. How young was young? And who was it? She knew that Babe had said it didn’t matter, that the only important fact was that the woman wasn’t someone in Ingrid’s life. Yet she wanted to know, yearned to know. Who was she, what age was she, was she young and beautiful, with unlined skin and a body that hadn’t lived through fifty-seven years?

‘Who was it?’ she asked.

‘Nobody you knew, just a girl.’

‘A girl?’ Hateful words.

‘Nobody you knew, a girl he had a fling with.’ Jim was getting loud now. ‘He made a mistake, Ingrid. That’s all you need to know. She’s gone, she was gone, really. He’d told her and he was trying to be kind to her by helping her with the job.’

‘Why did she need help with a job?’

Jim pulled at his tie again. ‘She wasn’t like you. She wasn’t clever or anything. I think it drove David mad, to be honest. There’s only so much of that daft-girl thing a man can put up with. You know, the sort of girl who doesn’t know how to change a tyre. Fiona could change a tyre,’ he added wistfully. ‘But she couldn’t change me.’

‘And David didn’t like this girlish behaviour?’

‘Ah, you know yourself, Ingrid, it’s very wearing. She wasn’t you, that’s all I know. That was enough for him. It was you he loved. Men do stupid things,’ he added.

Men do stupid things,
Ingrid repeated to herself. Yes, they did, and then they were sorry for them. David had been sorry. She could feel it.

She wasn’t sure why, but this conversation with Jim had eased her in a way that nothing else had. Jim was incapable of telling a successful lie, not one that would convince her, anyway. He was telling the absolute truth. Whatever this girl/woman had been to David, it had been over. She had to believe that. It gave her hope and strength.