Once in a Lifetime (29 page)

She closed her eyes to pray but couldn’t concentrate.

Abruptly, she picked up the red roses and hurled them far off over the cemetery wall where they could bounce down into the sea. She was the person who got to leave red roses for David, nobody else.

That evening at dinner in a small restaurant on the far side of Ardagh, Flora was talking about a programme she’d heard on the radio about bats. ‘Absolutely fascinating,’ she said. ‘It turns out they aren’t as blind as scientists originally thought.’

‘Really, Flora,’ said Sigrid, ‘we’re eating our dinner. I don’t want to think about bats.’

‘Well, I’m interested,’ said Flora.

Ingrid could almost hear David’s voice saying, ‘She is a bit bats, perhaps that’s why she likes them so much,’ and she had to try not to laugh.

‘I love this place,’ Molly said, looking around her. She gave her aunt a hug, diffusing the bat row. ‘Thanks, Aunt Flora.’

‘I decided we shouldn’t avoid places where we went with David,’ she said firmly. ‘We’re not going to do the “avoiding”

thing, we’re going to do the “celebrating the life” thing.

‘Fine,’ said Ingrid; it was better not to argue with Flora when she was in that sort of mood.

‘I think Aunt Flora’s right, Mum,’ said Molly. ‘We should be celebrating Dad’s life in every way.’

‘Yes.’ Ingrid thought of her meeting with Tom and the discussion about selling Kenny’s. Her husband had had a meeting with the head of DeVere’s and he’d never told her.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘we should celebrate his life.’

She tried to smile at her family, patting Ethan’s hand where he sat beside her, smiling across the candles at Molly. They were all so good, but she felt too empty to enjoy it.

Ingrid couldn’t taste the food. It looked beautiful, even smelled nice. They were having Wicklow lamb with a herb crust and fresh vegetables, and it all tasted like cardboard animal

feed marinated in brackish water. She went through the motions of eating and trying to smile because she didn’t want to be the spectre at the feast. Everyone was trying so hard for her.

Ethan’s eyes had been suspiciously red when Flora had handed him the wine list and said ‘You choose, darling. Your dad taught you all about wine, go on, you pick.’

David hadn’t really taught him all about wine, Ingrid knew.

They weren’t big wine drinkers, definitely not wine snobs, and Ethan’s knowledge was about on a par with her own: pick something mid-range in the list and you couldn’t go too far wrong. She’d seen, though, how he was grateful to Flora for saying that, making him feel in some way his father’s successor.

At the beginning of the meal, Molly had been doing what she used to do as a small child when she was nervous, twirling her hair endlessly in her right hand, twirl, twirl, but as the evening wore on she stopped doing it. Everyone was able to relax except for Ingrid. What would they feel if she just got up to go and said, ‘I’m really sorry, this is kind of you, but I can’t do this. I’m not ready yet.’

There were flowers on the table, carnations. She hated carnations and their peppery scent. On the next table was a yellow orchid, much nicer, and further along at a big table for ten, there were red roses. Something sparked in her mind.

Red roses … what was it? She remembered the red roses on David’s grave. Nobody else would leave red roses except somebody’s wife, somebody’s lover, and yet there they were, a little bouquet, beautifully tied.

‘I went to David’s grave today,’ she said, and they all looked up, sad at the image she conjured up. The widow with no life beyond her husband’s grave. ‘There were lovely red flowers there, but the card had blown away. Were they from you, Sigrid?’ she asked.

‘No, sorry,’ Sigrid said. ‘I’ve some plants I thought we could put at the head of the grave, but I haven’t brought them yet.’

‘Not me,’ said Molly.

‘Sorry,’ said Ethan guiltily. ‘I meant to buy something today.

Can we go to the grave before I fly off?’

Nobody here, none of the people closest to him, had left roses for David.

He’d had secrets from her: she’d found that out this morning from Tom. And there was a locked drawer in his office desk for which Stacey didn’t have the key. Something was being hidden from her.

Ingrid thought she might be sick. She shoved her chair back from the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and she moved off, napkin spilling on the floor, everyone looking at her. ‘Headache.’

‘I’ll come with you, Mum,’ said Molly, leaping to her feet.

Ingrid controlled herself long enough to say, ‘No, love, you stay here. Please.’

Somehow, she managed to get out of the restaurant and into her car. It would take five minutes to drive to the store, that was all.

The Kenny’s security man, Abel, clearly thought she was under the influence of something.

‘There is nobody in, Mrs Kenny,’ he kept saying gently, as though he were speaking to a small child.

‘I know,’ Ingrid hissed, doing her best to maintain her calm public persona. ‘There’s something I need to check.’

‘They’ll all be here in the morning -‘ he said.

‘Now - I want to check it now,’ Ingrid snapped.

‘Of course, madam.’ Abel’s professional mask went up. He was polite, a tall, immaculately turned out man from Sierra Leone. David used to say he had the intelligence and gravitas of a judge. What might he have done with his life if circum stances hadn’t brought him and his large family to Ardagh where he had to work the shifts that nobody else wanted?

She wondered whether David had come here late at night and had Abel been accustomed to letting him in with someone else clinging to his coat, laughing at their daring … No, she wasn’t going to think that way. Not until she was sure.

Her mobile phone rang as she was inserting the key in David’s suite of offices. Probably Flora, checking she’d got home all right. Flora was unlikely to be comforted by a message that read: Not home yet, decided to go to dead husband’s office to see if my instinct that he was hiding something from me was correct.

It would probably be padded-cell-and-soft-focus-drug-time if Flora got that message.

She checked her phone.

The text was from Molly, seeing if she was all right. Whatever was going on, Ingrid didn’t want Molly involved.

Nearly home, sorry for rushing, headache bad, talk in morning. Love Mum. She sent the text.

Lying was actually an OK thing to do when your husband had just died. If you told people the truth about how you felt, they’d have you locked up.

Ingrid flicked on all the lights, swept through Stacey’s office, then found the correct key for David’s. The Lucite lamp on his desk lit up jewel-green when she pressed the switches on the wall. Clever. Like everything David did, it was all perfectly organised: no fiddling around with desk-lamp buttons. Just flick two switches and everything worked. Attention to detail was David’s trademark.

Which was why the red roses on his grave and the locked drawer sounded a duff note in Ingrid’s head.

The drawer was still locked. Ingrid pulled it again to make doubly sure. No, still firm. She looked around the office for something to pry it open, but there was nothing obvious lying around.

She wrenched open the drawers on the other side of his desk.

They contained paper, files, pencils, even, ominously enough, one of the big suction corkscrews, but nothing useful. Next, she tried Stacey’s desk and hit paydirt: a lethal-looking letter opener.

‘Perfect,’ Ingrid said grimly.

It took about ten minutes, much longer than it took thieves

in burglar movies. But then they always had delicate lock picks and she was hammering away at the keyhole with the tip of a letter opener. Finally, the lock broke. She threw the blunted letter opener down. Stacey would wonder what happened to it. Not Ingrid’s problem.

For a couple of seconds, the opened drawer looked like any other drawer in David’s desk: an innocent space with neat piles of stationery. She’d been picturing something awful. Grief did terrible things to people. Made them imagine all sorts of wrongs.

She poked through the paper with a forensic eye.

And there they were: a neat pile of handwritten letters. She lifted them out.

The goddess of cliches was kind today. The letters weren’t tied up in ribbon or - she sniffed them - scented with perfume.

But they were love letters just the same, written on decent stock writing paper in a looping, feminine hand:

Darling, I dreamed about you last night. I woke up and thought you here with me. I hate it when that happens.

America seems such a long way away and I want you beside me, making love to me. Love and kisses, Me.

David’s wastepaper bin was made of metal, which was just as well because Ingrid had to throw up into something and she didn’t want to ruin the carpet. This thoughtfulness seemed odd under the circumstances. Her heart was destroyed, why not the carpet?

Once she’d got rid of the beautiful dinner which had tasted like sawdust, she sat back against the wall holding weakly on to the bin, her legs spread out in front of her, eyes closed.

She didn’t want to move because, if she moved, she might feel sick again. She had so many feelings inside her, all jostling for recognition, that she couldn’t cope with any more.

After a while, she felt strong enough to put the bin down.

She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her grey cashmere cardigan and for a moment she thought how incongruous the scene would have appeared to an onlooker: Ingrid Fitzgerald sprawled on the ground, a wastepaper bin of vomit beside her, a smear of sick on her cardigan. She hauled herself on to the desk chair.

She laid the pile of letters to one side. David had kept them together with big paperclips. No red ribbons. He’d never been a romantic, had he? There was a modicum of pleasure in the fact that his lack of romance stretched to both of his women.

She’d look at them later, when she felt able.

There was something else in the drawer - credit-card bills that told the story of the affair. Lunches at beautiful restaurants on the outskirts of Dublin, nights at exquisite hotels where nobody ever went for business meetings, a three-day stay at the George Cinq in Paris. That stung, despite the barrier Ingrid had created around herself. Paris, their city, where they’d gone when the children were small, and again for their first adult-only holiday after Ethan and Molly left home.

They’d had coffee in the George Cinq but never slept there.

Instead, they’d stayed in the Crillon, where they’d lain in an antique French bed made up with endless pillows and snowy sheets, enjoying room-service champagne and the hotel’s famous breakfasts.

They’d visited Paris many times since, and Ingrid’s favourite shop was the beautiful Anne Fontaine shirt shop where elegant sales ladies had sat David in an armchair, plied him with coffee and he Monde, and generally patted him in an understanding Gallic way, so he was happy while she tried on exquisite blouses that fitted as though made for her.

‘If we go bankrupt because you like that shop so much, we’ll be able to say: “We’ll always have Paris,”’ David said once and laughed heartily at his own joke.

‘We won’t go bankrupt with you working such long hours,’

she’d joked back.

Not so funny now.

Ingrid stared at all the receipts, some with faded printing, through the small reading glasses she never wore on air because she felt they made her look old. She felt that if she tried hard enough to distance herself, it would be like reading the research compiled on a cheating politician.

She would be at her desk with Gloria bringing in the details and everyone in the office would wonder about the ethics of using such evidence. Was the moral life of a politician open for public consumption?

But this evidence wasn’t about a politician for whom she cared nothing. It wasn’t about a poor maligned politician’s wife, waiting patiently at home while even the dogs in the street knew her husband spent more time than was necessary with a colleague. Ingrid always felt so sorry for the women who kept the home fires burning, hauled children to and from school, answered phone calls from irritated constituents while the man himself was wined and dined in Dublin and Brussels, making it all look so easy. It was easy because of his wife, and he was cheating on her.

Now Ingrid was in exactly the same position. It hurt so much.

What really surprised her was the anger, pure and sharp, that roared through her. How could David have done this to her? She had never nagged him the moment he got home, irritated by his life, bored by her own. She was a career woman, damn it. She dealt with big issues every day, wasn’t afraid of responsibility.

If he wasn’t happy, he could have left, but this - having someone else who wrote him adoring letters and missed him so much in a needy way - this was sheer betrayal.

Ingrid would have fallen to pieces privately if he’d asked her for a divorce, but if David had said, ‘I’m in love with another woman,’ she’d have given him his divorce. Only a fool or a masochist would try to repair the cracks in a marriage after that.

Except he’d never said it. He’d gone on playing happy families.

He’d died letting her believe he was true. She’d stood at his grave and sobbed her heart out for a man who loved someone else.

If David hadn’t been dead, Ingrid could have killed him with her bare hands.

She bent and threw up again, bile this time. There was nothing else left in her stomach. She closed her eyes until the nausea passed, then got up and went to the small fridge in Stacey’s office. There were cans of fizzy lemonade and she drank one.

Slowly, Ingrid felt her energy return, along with a little bit of herself.