Once in a Lifetime (22 page)

The three mourners grinned.

Babe was the one who should have been on television, not

her, Ingrid thought. The old lady was doing a marvellous job of making them remember better times, and all so subtly that neither Ethan nor Molly appeared to realise they were being distracted. Ingrid looked down at Babe’s fragile, blue-veined hand clasped in hers and thought that perhaps the old lady had had the right idea after all. If you never tied yourself to one man, you could never feel your heart break when that man died.

But then you wouldn’t have had the joy of having children with that same man, and the children were the only thing keeping Ingrid upright. Without them, she wasn’t sure she could have done this whole funeral thing. It all seemed so horrendously pointless, so … nothing. David was gone and, no matter what anyone said to her, Ingrid couldn’t escape that.

She felt a frail hand on hers. Babe was looking at her, those shrewd old eyes wet with tears. ‘Chin up, my love,’ she said.

‘Although you’ll hear it a million times from people who didn’t really know David, I can tell you: it’s what he would have wanted.’

Kitty Nelson - well, there was a sight for sore eyes! Star thought with a grin. She hadn’t seen Kitty for what felt like a million years and yet she seemed virtually unchanged, still walking with that sexy little sashay, still shoe-horned into a figure-hugging outfit more suitable for lying on a piano in Vegas than a funeral in Ardagh. Star watched with fascination as Kitty tip-tapped her way up the centre of the church, looking imperiously into pews to determine whether she’d deign to sit there or not. She had a fox-fur around her shoulders and one hand was toying with the fox’s shrunken head, flicking it this way and that as she progressed. Hurrying along behind her was one of her daughters, Charlie, the one who worked in Kenny’s. The older one, Iseult, was a famous writer and the image of her mother, so if she’d been here, there

would have been two women sashaying up the church in improbably high heels, deciding where to sit. Once, after she’d split from David, Star had been out with some friends and seen Kitty with her daughters. Kitty hadn’t noticed Star: of course, if David had been with Star, Kitty would have noticed her then.

Charlie had come across as a sweet little girl, gentle and tentative and absolutely the wrong sort of child for a household like Kitty’s. In the battle between the sexes, Kitty had been made in the Valkyrie mode: entirely at home in warrior breastplate with a horned helmet, putting the fear of God into hapless men. A thoughtful, anxious child would have curled up into a ball with such a mother. Star’s mother used to say that unborn babies picked their parents for a reason. They chose the families they went to because they had a lesson to learn in life. It would be a tough lesson to learn with Kitty. Perhaps that was why Charlie had those soft, hurt eyes Star had noticed when she’d recognised her in Kenny’s cosmetics hall.

She watched now as Charlie spotted some friends of hers in the church and had the temerity to grab her mother and steer her back to a pew Kitty had already rejected. Despite the sadness of the occasion, Star grinned. Good for Charlie.

Charlie was crying: she always cried at funerals, no matter who the deceased was. The combination of the sad music, the sense of the assembled people wishing they could help and knowing that they couldn’t - it all touched her in such a way that she wanted to weep.

Beside her, a jaunty black velvet hat atop her platinum whirl of hair, Shotsy’s whole body shook as she sniffled into another tissue.

Shotsy was convinced that stress over having to sell to DeVere’s was what had killed David.

‘Those bastards!’ she’d said to Charlie. ‘Look what they’ve done to him!’

She felt guilty about having doubted his loyalty to his staff too. ‘I was bitching about him and he died, and after all he’s done for us.’

Charlie reached into her bag and plucked another tissue from the packs she’d brought with her. The plus side of her crying was that she always came prepared.

‘What’s wrong with her?’ demanded an irritated voice on Charlie’s other side.

Charlie wished her mother hadn’t accompanied her, but Kitty wasn’t about to be dissuaded.

‘Of course I’m coming,’ Kitty had snapped when Charlie tentatively mentioned that the funeral would be attended by close friends of the family and Kenny’s employees, so Kitty didn’t need to come. ‘You can drive me. But not in your old wreck of a car. Borrow Brendan’s. Better still, we’ll get Iseult’s car.’

Charlie had driven Brendan’s car. Iseult was uncontactable.

‘Busy, busy,’ muttered her mother approvingly.

Charlie had had to turn to her anti-gratitude diary for consolation.

Iseult is busy when my mother can’t reach her - I’m being difficult when I don’t return any phone call within twenty minutes. Why?

‘What’s she so upset about?’ Kitty asked loudly, gesturing in Shotsy’s direction. She lowered her voice a hint. ‘Was she involved with him?’

Charlie closed her eyes and prayed for a thunderbolt to take her mother. Please let nobody have heard. Her mother had always been a nightmare, but at least she used to be a semi-discreet nightmare. Clearly that was no longer the case.

‘No,’ she hissed. ‘David wasn’t like that, Mother. He was a good man. Shotsy’s upset because she cared about him. We all did.’

‘I was only asking,’ Kitty sniffed, unperturbed. She leaned forward for a good look, as if trying to work out whether Shotsy might have what it took to be an important man’s bit on the side. ‘You’re probably right, Charlotte,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘Too thin.’

Luckily, Shotsy only got the last bit.

‘Who’s too thin?’ she asked.

Charlie shook her head to imply that it didn’t matter.

She wished she could order her mother to leave the church if she wasn’t going to behave in an appropriate manner, but since her mother had never behaved in an appropriate manner in her entire life it was unlikely she could start now.

‘It seems wrong to talk about it, but what happens to us now?’ asked Dolores as they filed slowly out of the church.

‘Suppose it’s down to Ingrid and the kids.’

The Kenny’s staff all approved of Ethan and Molly. Both had done lots of summer work experience in the store and it was clear that they hadn’t been brought up with silver spoons anywhere near their mouths. Molly had worked with Shotsy for two summers running, at the end of which Shotsy had sighed and said there was nothing she could do with the poor girl, for Molly had no interest in shoes, bags or clothes. ‘Criminal,’

Shotsy had sighed. ‘She could be pretty if she made a bit of an effort, but she doesn’t. I think she likes that unmade up look. And as for secondhand clothes - well, that’s fine if it’s all you can afford, but I don’t think you can ever get the smell of sweat off them.’

‘I can’t believe he’s gone,’ sobbed Lena beside them. Claudia was holding on to her and trying to comfort her, but it was no use. ‘He was so kind,’ Lena went on. ‘Talked to me like we were friends, real friends.’

Everyone looked sadly at her. They knew what she meant.

David Kenny had been special, there was no doubt about it.

Natalie could remember hearing a snippet of a radio programme about country funerals in the old days. Everyone had gone to ‘see the corpse’, as it was called. Young or old, they all went to offer sympathies and drink tea with the bereaved. The person on the radio had talked about having to lean into the coffin and kiss the forehead of the dead person, at which point Natalie had groaned and switched channels. How horrible!

Molly’s father’s funeral would be her first. Or rather, the first she could remember. Apart from that one snippet of radio, all she knew about the procedure came from the TV or films.

Graveyards were the preserve of horror movies in which some gang of stupid kids always ended up in the graveyard five minutes before a curse made lots of desiccated hands claw their way up from the earth beneath.

The church service had been sad but uplifting, with a choir singing hymns she didn’t recognise, and some lovely Russian sounding peasant music that a man beside her had murmured was John Taverner. The event had been so triumphant and moving that everyone was smiling, even the people halfway down the church who were crying as they remembered David Kenny.

Outside in the bitter cold of the mountainside graveyard, it was a different matter. The wind raged around the mourners, whipping up skirts and flattening hair. The ground around the freshly dug grave was laid with sheets of fake grass, and Natalie winced at how stupidly false it looked, as if a few bits of pretend grass could fool everyone into thinking this was a soft green bed, rather than a dark hole burrowing into the earth where the coffin would lie before being covered with heavy black soil.

Even the things the priest was saying sounded wrong.

He was talking about eternal life and a journey to God’s side.

Natalie loved the gentleness of Mass and the familiar words she’d heard a hundred times before but here, in this churchyard with Molly shuddering with tears, clinging to her mother and brother, all of them looking as if their lives had been utterly

destroyed, this talk of life felt as wrong as the astroturf beneath their feet. David was gone. Did it matter that he was somewhere else looking down? Who knew that for sure? They needed him here, now, and he was gone. That was the reality.

As Natalie stood at the grave, it came to her: a memory from some locked-off part of her mind. She had been to a funeral before. And on that occasion too the wind had played around the trees in the graveyard and the cold had cloaked her. She’d been in her father’s arms, clinging to him and not looking down. She hadn’t wanted to stand because she was tired, and she could feel rather than see herself wearing a dark green tweedy coat with a soft collar. Velvet, perhaps? And there was a smell too, some perfume like musk and amber mixed, warm and comforting. Her mother’s perfume. Her mother would kiss Natalie when she was wearing the coat, and her perfume had sunk into it.

Natalie thought again about how not having a real mother made her feel. It set her apart, even though Bess had been such a rock all her life: steady, kind, loving and never, ever claiming, ‘I’m your mother.’ No, Bess had judged that fine line to perfection, something Natalie was old enough to see now. It must be difficult to parent your husband’s previous wife’s child and love them like your own.

Because Bess had got it right, there had never been a moment in her teenage years when Natalie had screamed: You can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my mother!

Now, as the wind made the stately poplars in the country graveyard groan and bend, with the smell of actual earth rising up from the ground, a powerful reminder of where the body was ultimately going to lie, Natalie thought of another grave with her real mother inside it.

The woman she’d never really known, the woman whose memory was confined to a few photos in a frame in her childhood bedroom, and whose perfume she could suddenly remember after forgetting it for twenty years.

Her real mother had lived, breathed and danced, had given her life, and Natalie knew precisely nothing about her.

A deep shame rose up inside her at the thought. She knew nothing about her mother, had never stood at her grave and cried or prayed. Somewhere her real mother lay unmourned and unloved while she, the person who should have mourned her and loved her, had gone on with her life.

Natalie had never fainted before, so nobody was more surprised than she when she began to tremble and pitched forward on to the astroturf.

She was hardly aware of the woman caught who caught her, a tall slender woman with pure white hair who wore a white coat with a silk red corsage on her breast like a splash of blood.

Despite her age, the woman was surprisingly strong, and she laid Natalie down to the ground gently, all the while saying: ‘It’s all right, Natalie, my dear, you’re safe.’

Natalie did feel safe, strangely, although she could still smell the powerful scent of the earth, and know what it was like to be her childlike self and cry at another grave. But from the white-haired woman emanated an aura of calmness so strong that it dowsed the pain.

Other people rushed to Natalie’s side, so that the white-haired woman moved away, not wanting to draw attention to herself.

The red silk flower had become unpinned and had fallen on to ; Natalie’s dark coat. Star Bluestone didn’t want to pick it up. Let Natalie keep it. Star had probably worn it twenty years ago I when she’d known Natalie’s mother. Natalie looked so like her, the same wild, earthy beauty, the same air of vulnerability about her. On this awful day so redolent with pain and memories of what might have been, Star didn’t want to look back any further. If only she hadn’t made that vow to Dara, Star could have felt some peace. Now Dara’s death and David’s were tied up together in a strange unsettled way. She hurried away with an overwhelming feeling of unfinished business about both deaths.

Charlie felt a murmur of shock run through the crowd at the graveside. Someone had fainted. Beside her, reeking of smoke and at least half a bottle of Shalimar, her mother wobbled and had to grab Charlie for support. Charlie looked down at her mother’s ridiculously high heels, patent leather with ankle straps and stilettos slender as masonry nails. Stupid footwear for a funeral. No wonder she was wobbling.

The funeral party was so large that people were squashed together in the graveyard, some standing on the low, stone surrounds of other graves. Standing on actual graves was considered positively blasphemous, but the little walls were fair game.

In order to see everything, Kitty had positioned herself on one such wall and was peering over the sea of heads with interest.

Charlie thought that accidents were supposed to happen in slow motion, but her mother falling over the gravestone happened with such speed that Charlie thought she must have imagined it. One moment, Kitty was standing beside her, long painted fingernails playing with the sad, shrunken little head on that awful fox-fur she’d worn; the next, she was on the ground.