Читать книгу: «Once in a Lifetime», страница 2

1

Be kind to other women. It really works–most of the time. And even on those days when it doesn’t, it’ll make you feel better inside.

That night, Ingrid sat at the beautifully laid dinner table in a grand old house, with her husband David and eleven other elegantly dressed couples, and wished with all her heart that she wasn’t there. The scent of the freesias in the crystal bowl in the centre of the table fought valiantly with the women’s perfumes, which were predominantly musky with the odd note of sharp florals. Ingrid loved scent, but she hated the heavy, cloying perfumes so many women wore at night, as if they were using pheromones to attract a caveman rather than attending a civilised dinner party with their husbands.

She reached across the snowy white tablecloth and pulled the bowl closer to her, leaning forward to smell the pure, clean flowers. Instantly, she was transported to her terrace on a late spring day, where she would sit revelling in the seclusion as she read the morning papers. Pity she wasn’t there now. Stop, she told herself. The evening wasn’t going to grow magically shorter by wishing it was over.

The problem was that these people were David’s friends. Odd how a couple could be married for thirty years and still have such disparate friends. They shared some, people they’d known all their married life, but their careers had brought them a collection of acquaintances from two completely different worlds.

Tonight was a night for David’s people, in particular their host, the owner of a large transport company, useful to Kenny’s. Three other businessmen whom David knew were also present: wealthy men with glamorous wives; women with beautiful hair and nails and wearing diamonds of every possible cut.

Looking around the table, Ingrid decided that the dinner party was entirely made up of successful men and their wives. There were no business women; Ingrid could spot them from fifty paces, for no matter how successful they were, they were never quite as polished as the wives of alpha men. Years interviewing the great and the good on Politics Tonight had taught her that it was rare for an alpha man to form a lasting relationship with a woman who had as much power as he did. People were probably amazed that she and David had stuck together; most men would have been uncomfortable sharing the limelight with a woman who made her living grilling politicians on live TV. But then, David wasn’t most men. He was, Ingrid thought, smiling across the table at him, special.

He caught her eye and smiled back, and she thought how well he looked in his grey suit and pale pink shirt. She knew he was tired because of the lines around his eyes, but nobody else would pick up on that. They’d see the usual handsome, charming David Kenny, the man who’d inherited the family firm and taken it on to a whole new level. In the same way, nobody looking at Ingrid would see a woman with a mild headache who didn’t want to be here. They’d see what she wanted them to see: a woman who’d pulled out all the stops with hair and make-up, yet remained modest in the diamond department. Ingrid felt that knuckle-duster rings were like push-up bras: you either liked them or you didn’t.

The only interesting thing about nights out schmoozing David’s business acquaintances was that Ingrid ceased to be Ingrid Fitzgerald, the television personality who’d kept her maiden name from her days as a radio producer; she was Ingrid Kenny, David’s wife. And sometimes, just sometimes, that made her deliciously invisible. Like now.

The man seated on her left turned to talk to her.

‘You’re Mrs Kenny, aren’t you?’ he said. He was sixty something, balding, with a weathered complexion that spoke of many hours spent outdoors, probably on the sea, Ingrid decided. His outfit, a blue blazer with gold buttons, had a hint of ‘Commodore of the Yacht Club’ about it.

‘Yes,’ said Ingrid gently, sensing that he had no idea who she was professionally. ‘I’m Ingrid, David’s wife.’

‘Marvellous business,’ the Commodore said, grabbing his glass of red wine. ‘Kenny’s–what a store. I don’t suppose you have time to be involved yourself, do you? I know what you ladies are like; so many other things to do, charities, committees…’ He smiled at her benignly. ‘My wife, Elizabeth–that’s her over there in the red–she’s on four committees. I don’t know where she finds the time.’

Elizabeth was a steely-eyed brunette, who was expertly made-up and wore an exotic beaded creation. She was watching Ingrid and her husband with interest. Ingrid reckoned that Elizabeth recognised her from the television and was just as sure that Elizabeth knew the poor old Commodore wouldn’t.

‘Well, I am involved in some charities,’ Ingrid said to her neighbour. She was a patron of an AIDS charity, on the board of a domestic abuse, and regularly hosted charity balls. ‘But I don’t have that much time, because I work too.’

‘Oh, really,’ said her neighbour airily, as if the notion of a woman working was highly eccentric and would never catch on. ‘And what is it you do?’

It was moments like these that Ingrid stored up to tell her friend, Marcella, whenever Marcella claimed that everyone and their lawyer knew who Ingrid was.

‘You’ve such a recognisable face,’ Marcella insisted.

‘It doesn’t work that way,’ Ingrid replied. ‘Famous is for film stars and singers, not people like me. People recognise me, they just don’t know where from. They think they must have seen me in the supermarket or something.’

The downside of her being on television a lot was going into Marks & Spencer’s and nipping up to the underwear department to find several people watching her with fascination as she searched among the briefs, trying to find a five-pack of knickers that suited her.

Anyway, here was this sweet man who clearly had no idea who she was and it was quite nice, although difficult to explain what she did without making it sound as if she was big-headed about it. She knew that some people in her position might have fixed him with a grim glare and told him she was one of the highest paid broadcasters in the State and could make politicians whimper for their mummies. But Ingrid preferred a low-key approach.

‘I work in television,’ she said simply.

‘Oh really! Interesting. My daughter worked in television for a while, researching stuff. It was a terrible job, awful pay and, goodness, there was no hope of really climbing the ladder. Only a few seem to make it,’ he went on.

‘Yes,’ echoed Ingrid, ‘only a few do seem to make it.’

Ingrid thought of her years climbing the television ladder. It had been challenging at times, but she hadn’t had to stiletto anyone in the groin to make it to the top–a fact that many people, interviewing her these days for newspaper profiles, found incredible.

‘It must be so much tougher for a woman,’ they said, eager to hear about glass ceilings, male-dominated power structures and male broadcasters bitching about her as they got subtly patted with Mac Face & Body in make-up.

‘The media–this part of it, anyway–is one of the few areas where women can do well easily,’ Ingrid would explain. But nobody appeared to believe that her own calm self-confidence and native intelligence had made it work.

‘What about you,’ she said politely to the Commodore, ‘what do you do?’

It was all the encouragement the Commodore needed. He was soon explaining the difference between a yacht and a boat, and Ingrid let her attention wander. Across the table, her husband seemed to be enjoying himself talking to a lovely woman who’d been introduced to her earlier as Laura.

She liked watching David. He was charming to everyone, not in a false way but in a way that said he was interested in other people. His father had been the same: always ready to talk to everyone in the store, from the cleaners to the general manager.

OK? David mouthed at her across the table.

Ingrid nodded imperceptibly. She was fine.

‘Sorry, you got stuck with Erskine,’ he said three hours later in the back of the taxi on their way home. He put his hand in hers and held it tightly, as they both sat back after what had turned out to be an incredibly heavy meal. Double cream with everything. Ingrid’s insides yearned for Pepto-Bismol.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ Ingrid said. ‘He was quite nice really, but I’m now an expert on boats and if I ever need to interview anyone on the subject, Erskine is the man I will ask.’

David laughed. He had a great laugh, rich and deep, the sort that made everyone else want to join in. Out of the corner of her eye, Ingrid could see the taxi driver grin as well. They were undoubtedly the sort of customers the driver liked: polite, sedate, middle-aged people being picked up from one beautiful suburban house and whisked off to another, with no chance of anyone throwing up in the back of the cab or not having the money to pay him.

‘Erskine probably didn’t have a clue who you were, did he?’ David asked perceptively.

‘Not the foggiest,’ Ingrid said. ‘I may have left him with the impression that I made the tea in the television studios.’

‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done that!’ David laughed. ‘That’s cruel. I bet his wife knew, all right. She’s probably telling him the truth right now.’

‘No, it’s not cruel,’ Ingrid said. ‘He was terribly sweet and everything, but you know, he does live on this planet, he should be interested in politics.’

‘I’m quite sure he is interested in politics, darling,’ David replied mildly, ‘but not everyone watches television.’

It was an idea that Ingrid had heard many times before, but one that she could never quite grasp. She was of the opinion that people should know what was going on in the world, and television news and debate was an inherent part of that.

‘I’d say old Erskine sits at home reading copies of Yachting Man and books about naval battles from three hundred years ago,’ said David. ‘Happy in his own world. And why not?’

Ingrid shrugged. She and David would never agree on this one. He was able to forgive people for not wanting to read four newspapers a day, she wasn’t.

‘You were lucky,’ she said now, ‘sitting beside that gorgeous Laura person.’

‘She was a sweetheart,’ David said. ‘Although she did spend a fair proportion of the evening telling me about her daughter, who’d love to get some experience in the store and has lots of marvellous ideas for fashion design.’

‘God no,’ groaned Ingrid, ‘not another one of those.’

When she went to media parties, she was forever being cornered by people desperately pitching their CVs or their sons’ or daughters’ CVs in the hope of breaking into television via a personal introduction from the powerful and famous Ingrid Fitzgerald. When David went to parties, people told him about sons and daughters who were clothes designers or who had created a range of pottery that Kenny’s couldn’t afford to be without.

‘Did she sound OK?’ Ingrid asked.

‘She sounded very promising,’ David said. ‘I told her to send the CV to Stacey.’

Stacey O’Shaughnessy was his executive assistant. A wonderfully kind person who ran his office life as expertly as Ingrid ran his home life.

‘You’re a terrible old softie, do you know that, David Kenny?’ Ingrid said.

‘Right back at you,’ he said. ‘You could have flattened poor old Erskine by telling him exactly who you were, but you didn’t, did you?’

‘No,’ Ingrid said. ‘I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I was mean to the Erskines of this world, even though I disapprove of their ignorance.’

‘I’ll tell that to the Minister for Defence,’ murmured David.

‘Erskine is an old duffer who obviously inherited money and never had to do more than put on an old school tie to get on in the world. The Minister for Defence is a highly paid public representative who should know better than to write character references for a man on trial for rape, just because the accused’s parents happen to live in his constituency. There’s a difference,’ Ingrid said. She could feel herself getting heated again, the way she had before the programme in question. Ingrid never lost it on the show: then, she was coolness personified. She used her passion for her preparation, when she worked out how to phrase her questions in such a way her subject couldn’t avoid answering.

‘True. You were right to nail him,’ David said. ‘He deserved it.’

‘Yes, he did,’ Ingrid sighed, the flare of anger gone. At least David understood why she did what she did. She couldn’t bear injustice. The idea that a government minister’s character reference could hinder the conviction of a rapist incensed her. David knew her so well, he understood her crusading spirit.

‘Just here is fine, beside those big gates,’ David said to the taxi driver.

They got out and Ingrid found her keys in her handbag while David paid the driver. She was delighted to be home on the early side. It wasn’t even twelve yet. With luck, she’d be asleep before one and get up late the following morning; maybe the two of them could sitting in the conservatory with some coffee, reading the Saturday papers. She had just keyed the security number into the side gate when David joined her.

‘Lie-in tomorrow?’ she said, as they walked up the path to the house.

‘Sorry, afraid not,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to go into the office for a couple of hours. I’ve an absolute ton of work on.’

‘Oh, David,’ she said, ‘you live in the bloody place.’ The words were out before she could stop them. Ingrid hated sounding whingey. Her own job could be all-consuming at times and if anyone understood how work could claim a person, she did.

‘Just for a few hours,’ he said, ‘all right? I’ll be back by two; three at the latest.’

‘OK,’ she said and squeezed his hand. ‘Sunday morning lie-in?’

‘Promise,’ he replied.

‘I’m holding you to that. I have my needs, you know,’ she added in a teasing voice.

‘I know all your needs, Ingrid Kenny,’ he said, ‘and wouldn’t the public love to, too!’ His voice trailed off mischievously.

The dogs greeted them as they opened the front door. While David went to switch off the alarm, Ingrid got down on her knees to pet them. ‘Hello, darlings,’ she said, ‘sorry we were out, but we’re back now.’

Somewhere in the back of her mind was the awareness that David hadn’t reacted in the way he normally did to her flirtatious reference to needs: once, he’d have grabbed her by the hand and taken her upstairs to bed. Instead, he’d made a joke about it.

He was tired, she told herself. She was too. She was so used to reading nuance into every sentence for work: it wasn’t fair to do it to poor David.

The duty dinner done, the weekend stretched ahead of her. She had no work, no functions to attend, no charity events, it would be one long, glorious rest and she was looking forward to it. Molly, their daughter, was coming for lunch on Sunday, which would be wonderful. If only Ethan was coming too…Ingrid felt the magnetic pull of her laptop in the study. She could just nip in and see if Ethan had emailed her from Vietnam, which was where he and the gang were now. But if he hadn’t emailed, that would make it four days since his last contact, and Ingrid found that, after three days, she went into a kind of slow panic if she hadn’t heard anything. No, she’d go to bed. If he hadn’t emailed, she wouldn’t sleep for worrying. Though even if he hadn’t emailed, it didn’t mean anything bad had happened, did it?

Ingrid woke alone the following morning, star-fished in their huge bed. Her hands reached over to David’s pillow and found nothing. He must have gone to the store, she thought drowsily, and wriggled further under the covers to doze again. The sheets felt warm, the bed was soft. She felt in the bed, her limbs a part of it. If she kept her eyes closed and allowed her mind to drift, she’d be asleep again.

After about five minutes, she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Her mental database had started up. Ingrid often wished there was some system whereby she could plug a USB cable into her head and connect it directly to the computer, so that all the stuff that rattled around in her mind could be magically transferred to her laptop hard drive instead. She could compose entire emails in her head, write letters, draft speeches, imagine exactly what she’d say to the opposition health spokesperson on the programme that night, all while lying in bed at five o’clock in the morning. Some of her best work was done in that perfect stillness of the pre-dawn. She’d once been asked to take part in a feature for a magazine about career women’s hints for success. She’d said the normal stuff everyone else did: about making lists and trying to be organised, doing grocery shopping on-line, catching up on phone calls on her phone headset in traffic…She did all those things, but she’d never mentioned the early-morning mental download. It sounded too manic, as if she was constantly switched on. But then, she was–her mind racing, scanning ideas, deleting them, speeding on to the next one. Like now.

Fighting it never worked. It was better to go with the flow. She needed to take the cream dress with the caramel beading on it to the dry cleaners, because she was going to need it for the Domestic Abuse Association’s dinner at which she was the guest speaker on Thursday night. It was a good dress, always worked; it didn’t matter whether she had put on a few pounds or not. Which reminded her, she hadn’t been to the gym all week and she needed two workouts and a swim to keep that awful middle-aged spread at bay. Ethan might have emailed. She sent a silent prayer that he had. Please God, please keep him safe.

She had to reply to the latest batch of emails from people looking for a start in the TV industry. She loved helping people, but sometimes she got so many emails that it was impossible to deal with them all. She liked to answer those ones herself, they weren’t something she could hand over to her personal assistant, Gloria. Gloria was wonderfully efficient, handled Ingrid’s diary and organised all the reams of research she needed for her job, but Ingrid preferred writing a lot of her letters herself. No journalist could let someone else write for them. Hell, that was another thing, she’d been asked to be a patron of a journalism course.

Ingrid had never attended a journalism course. She had come into the business by a rather circuitous route: after her politics degree she got her start in radio, working behind the scenes as a researcher, and then producing, before moving into television news and from there, taking the totally unexpected giant leap into presenting. She approved of journalism courses and approved of helping people, but there really wasn’t enough time. Her schedule was always hectic, too hectic for all the causes she wanted to support. And even though the children were grown up, she still needed to make time for her family.

Tomorrow, Molly was coming for Sunday dinner. As she lay in bed with her eyes closed, Ingrid smiled. Her darling daughter was the reason the beautiful cream dress needed a trip to the cleaners. Molly had borrowed it for a formal event two months before.

‘Mom, I’m really sorry, I meant to get it dry cleaned, only I knew I’d forget about it and it’d get left there, so I thought I better drop it back to you first and…’ she’d said.

‘It’s fine,’ Ingrid interrupted. ‘Honestly.’

And she meant it. Kind, wonderful Molly was twenty-three and hopeless at things like dry cleaning and having milk in the fridge, but she was a one-woman powerhouse when it came to campaigns to help other human beings. Molly’s ethical work made Ingrid feel like a capitalist pig. Molly was involved in so many causes that it was a miracle she found time to do anything. By day, she was press officer for Fight Poverty, an organisation that worked with disadvantaged children. At night and at weekends, she rattled tins for an animal shelter, and donated her services to a charity that funded a small school in Kenya and hoped to fund two more. She cared about her carbon footprint, cycled everywhere and owned two rescue cats. She didn’t care much about ironing her clothes or eating food before its best-before date. Her mother was endlessly grateful that Molly lived with Natalie, her best friend and a person with organisational skills to rival Madonna’s, otherwise both Molly and the cats would be in their respective hospitals with food poisoning.

If only Ethan, twenty-one and currently on a year-long trip around the world with a group of friends, had one person in his entourage to match Natalie, then Ingrid would sleep so much better at night.

Ethan was usually quite good at emailing home, although most of the time his missives were frustratingly short.

Hi Ma and Pa, having a brilliant time, weather not great but the people are. Don’t worry, we’re all fine. Love Ethan.

Ingrid, who looked at everything in the paper and had the news on practically twenty-four hours a day, could hardly bear to look at any story about twenty-something world travellers any more. When she came across stories about Vietnam and Thailand, she was terrified that she might see something that would spell impending disaster for Ethan. He was travelling with five friends, all big, strong lads, and clever with it, but that didn’t stop her worrying. At twenty-one, they were innocents abroad; a bunch of friendly Irishmen who thought the best of people, and had a smile for anyone. All it would take was for them to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who knew what might happen. No matter how hard she had tried to teach her children a little of her own cynicism, it hadn’t worked. Ingrid could imagine Ethan smilingly helping some sweet girl get on the plane, holding her rucksack to be kind–and he’d be the one caught with whatever drugs she was trying to smuggle. Nobody would believe Ingrid if she told them that her son didn’t do drugs, that he was a good kid, that he’d clearly been duped. She’d be like every other mother who protested her son’s innocence. And they’d say: ‘Of course she believes him, but we know he’s guilty.’

She couldn’t bear it. She had to get up and stop thinking like this.

Even if David had been there, Ingrid wouldn’t have told him about the anxiety. David simply didn’t seem to understand it.

‘Ethan will be fine, you know,’ he’d say, when she let herself go with a stream-of-consciousness rant against what could happen to six hopelessly naïve young guys. No, even worse, what was it David had said the last time?

‘You have to let him go, Ingrid. He’s an adult, not a little boy.’

She felt the rip of rage inside her again, the combination of anger and helplessness at knowing that she couldn’t give her son a quick hug, just for five minutes. That’s all she wanted: to jump on a plane to see him, to touch him, for five minutes, then she’d get back on the plane happy, because she’d know he was OK.

‘I have let him go,’ she hissed at David. ‘But he’s my son, I love him and he’ll always be a part of me, so I’m frightened.’

Then the analytical Ingrid Fitzgerald had taken over, the woman who had interviewed thousands of spin doctors and psychologists over the years, who knew how to skewer an interviewee but who never normally brought her interviewing skills home. ‘Letting go is not what I’m talking about,’ she said coolly. ‘You can let somebody go and still worry about them. I need to be able to share that with you, because if I can’t…well, we shouldn’t be together, should we?’

David had sat up straight then. He’d been lolling on the couch with an after-dinner brandy, idling through one of the many newspapers they had delivered to the house every morning. The sharpness of her words had hit him hard. Something flickered in his eyes: fear, Ingrid thought and she was glad she’d hurt him, glad she’d given him a kick to remind him that he had to work at this relationship too. Then, she’d done something she almost never did: she walked out of the room, because she didn’t want to talk to him any more. She loved David, absolutely. After thirty years of marriage, she still loved him, but she adored her kids. Children were the third point in the eternal love triangle. It’s a pity David didn’t understand that.

He’d apologised and she’d forgiven him, almost. Ingrid didn’t believe in nursing grievances or in letting old arguments take root, but it had been very hard to accept David’s apology without screaming at him that he didn’t understand her at all.

Molly and Ethan might be grown up, but they would always be her children, and when it came to protecting them she would kill with her bare hands if it came to that.

She turned the shower off, wrapped herself in a towel and faced herself in the mirror. She looked tired today, every inch of her fifty-seven years. It took longer in the make-up chair at the studio now to make her look like Ingrid Fitzgerald, longer to make those shrewd grey eyes appear open and alert, especially with that drooping skin above her eyelids. She’d had her skin lasered to reduce fine lines but the next step was an eye lift, something she was putting off. She’d seen too many women who were preternaturally young, and while photographic retouching could make surgery look good in photographs of movie stars, in real life, women could appear strangely wrong, as though their faces were denying the wisdom of the lines they’d earned. Only the best surgeons were able to make people look like themselves but better. Ingrid knew such a surgeon, but she was still scared. Regular Botox was an occupational hazard. She was fundamentally opposed to the very notion of that, too. But she was also a realist who liked her job. Youth had such power. She was lucky–and yes, she knew there was some luck in there–that current affairs was a medium where age was less important than in other television arenas. If her job had been presenting a chat show, she’d have been fired when she turned forty-three. But in her field, age and gravitas were valued among men and women. Yet who knew when that might change? Ingrid accepted the fact that one day, her face would be judged too old for television. All it would take was some focus group led by a twenty-one-year-old hot-shot pronouncing that young viewers switched off in droves at the sight of a post-menopausal woman, and that would be it. Ingrid Fitzgerald’s television career would be summarily over, except for voice-overs on history compilations or an occasional documentary. She was far too shrewd not to know that one day this would happen.

Still, there was nobody here to see her or her wrinkles today. God knew when David would be back. Off with his mistress, she thought, with a hint of bitterness: the store.

Down below, the dogs began to howl. They weren’t allowed upstairs, but when they sensed someone was up and wasn’t rushing down to play with them, they began to whine pitifully.

‘Be down in a minute,’ roared Ingrid. It was nearly ten, so it had been a lie in after all.

When she was ready, she hurried down and sat on the bottom step as the dogs nuzzled into her with frantic delight. ‘Don’t pretend that David didn’t let you out earlier, you little scamp,’ she said affectionately as Lucinda, a golden cocker spaniel, started her desperate-for-a-pee dance. Then Sybil, a black-and-white bitza they’d got from Molly’s dog shelter, began to do the dance too.

Ingrid opened the kitchen’s double doors into the garden and both dogs barely made it out before they sank to their haunches in prolonged peeing sessions.

Ingrid stared, puzzled. They clearly hadn’t been out. The only explanation was that David, up at the crack of dawn, had left without going into the kitchen for breakfast and the dogs hadn’t heard him. Occasionally, if Ingrid woke early, she found the dogs snoring peacefully in their baskets and had the pleasure of seeing them wake and sleepily wag their tails. They were both old and their hearing wasn’t as good as it had once been, rendering them pretty hopeless as guard dogs.

What was David doing, racing off so early on a Saturday that he hadn’t even had time for a coffee or to let the dogs out?

A flutter of disquiet beat in her heart. True, he’d always been obsessed with the store, even more so in the past five years since the expansion.

‘When you borrow that much money, you need to spend more time at work,’ David told her in the months after the store re-opened following its twelve-million-euro revamp, and he was there morning, noon and night. ‘Nobody else can do it but me, Ingrid. I have to be there. You know that.’

Ingrid, who normally felt a certain relief that David was the main shareholder of Kenny’s because she knew of other family-run businesses where there were constant arguments over each mug bought out of petty cash, wished for the first time that he had brothers or sisters to help him.