Always and Forever (3 page)

That was before the children had come along, and before they’d moved to Carrickwel . Seven was a lie-in these days, now that Carrie woke up bright and breezy at six every morning.

‘Heyyo, Mummy,’ she’d lisp when Mel hurried into the darkened, Winnie-the-Pooh-papered bedroom, showered but sleepy.

It was hard to be grumpy when that little smiling face shone up at her, eyes bright with anticipation of the day ahead and smal , fat hands outspread to be scooped from the cot.

Although she was two and a half, she stil didn’t like to clamber out of the cot on her own, unlike her older sister, who’d been doing it from the age of two, but Mel knew it would happen any day now.

Early morning was one of Mel’s favourite parts of the day.

The pure unadulterated joy of being with her children, them kissing her hel o, their childish pleasure at another day - it was what kept her going.

No perfume in the world was as beautiful as the morning scent of baby skin, a magical smel of toddler biscuits, baby shampoo and pure little person. Carrie loved being cuddled and wanted at least five minutes of snuggling before she’d consent to being dressed. Mel was usual y torn between wanting just as much cuddling but knowing that the clock was ticking on. Sarah was a morning person, al questions at breakfast. ‘Why is Barney purple?’ was her current favourite.

It was Mel’s job to come up with funny reasons as she raced round the kitchen, sorting out breakfast for al of them. ‘He fel into some purple custard and he liked it so much he didn’t wash it off. Now he jumps into purple custard every day.’ ‘Mommy, that’s sil y!’ Sarah had giggled that morning. Carrie, slavishly adoring of her big sister, giggled too. At her desk in the tiny cubicle on Lorimar’s third floor, with its stunning views of Dublin’s docklands, Mel reached over and touched the shel photo frame with Adrian, Sarah and Carrie’s faces beaming at her. The three people she loved most in the whole world. The three people she did it al for.

Mel spent two hours working on the website with the help of two coffees and a Twix bar. Lunch was for people who had time to make sandwiches before they left the house in the morning, or the money to buy the overpriced ones from the guy who came round the office every lunchtime.

As she drank her second coffee, Mel looked at her list and idly circled the word ‘zoo’. She and Adrian had taken Sarah to the zoo for the first time when she was two. Showing your child real tigers and elephants after so long looking at them in picture books was one of those parental milestones.

How many parents never got to do things like that any more? she wondered. How many mothers missed the actual trip and instead got to read the nursery school diary:

‘Carrie saw lions and seals, and piglets in the petting zoo.

She had an ice cream and got upset when she saw the monkeys because of the noise. She was a good girl!’

Lunch over, Mel went through the most recent pages for the website, scanning every line and photo like a hawk. The previous month, a huge error had occurred when a paragraph on new procedures for hip replacements had slipped into an article about erectile dysfunction. There had been much giggling in the office at the idea that ‘innovative keyhole surgery under local anaesthetic may do away with the need for painful replacement operations and would mean that patients wil be back in action in just twenty-four hours’.

‘I’d say a lot of male customers vowed to keep away from the doctor when they read that bit,’ Otto from accounts had teased, as he’d delivered the expenses cheques. ‘Wil y replacement isn’t exactly what every man wants to hear about when he’s having trouble in that department.’

Mel’s boss, Hilary, had been less amused, and completely uninterested in Mel’s explanation that the error had surfaced mysteriously when the web designer was working on the page. Mel was responsible, end of story.

‘This is an appal ing mistake,’ Hilary had said in that cold tone of disappointment that was far more scary than if she’d actual y screamed at Mel. Hilary was Olympic standard at making people feel as if they’d failed. ‘Maybe someone in design did it as a juvenile joke, but you should have spotted it. I’d bet my bonus it’s going to be in al the Sunday papers’ quote of the week sections.’

Hilary hadn’t said that Edmund, who noticed everything, would undoubtedly blame Mel and that this would not look good on her file. Mel knew that herself. And mistakes on the file of a working mother were multiplied by a factor of ten.

Being a working mother was like being a marked woman in Lorimar. Once a woman had children, no matter what sort of ambitious powerhouse she’d been beforehand, she was living on borrowed time afterwards. One child was seen to be careless, two was asking for trouble.

The fact that Hilary herself had three children was not a help. In al the years Mel had been working for Hilary, she’d never seen her boss either leave early over some child emergency or take a sick-baby day off.

‘How does she do it?’ Vanessa used to ask in September, when she was up to her eyebal s getting Conal sorted out with school books and uniform, desperately trying to take half-days here and there, while Hilary was at her desk at al times, mercilessly watching out for people skiving off.

‘They can’t be kids, they’re robots,’ Mel decided. ‘That’s the only answer.’

‘Or is it having a husband who works from home and a nanny who gets paid more than the chairman of Microsoft?’

asked Vanessa.

‘You could have something there,’ Mel agreed.

By five, Mel had returned al her phone cal s and was finishing a batch of letters. There was stil a report on the month’s publicity activity to write for Hilary but she had to be out the door by five fifteen or she’d miss her train and be late to pick UP the girls. She’d have to take the work and do it on the journey home.

Twenty minutes later, Mel swapped her heels for her commuting flats, fil ed her travel Thermos with coffee, and raced off into the cold. With luck, she’d be home by seven.

It was ten past seven before Mel parked the car in the drive and she helped Sarah and Carrie out and gathered up al their bags. It was a relief, as always, to be home.

‘Carrickwel is such a gorgeous, mel ow place,’ their friends had al agreed when Mel and Adrian had given up their apartment in Christchurch to move to the country. Sarah was stil a bump beneath Mel’s ‘Under Construction’

maternity Tshirt then. ‘Perfect for bringing up children. And the schools are great.’

Mel and Adrian had agreed and, catching each other’s eye in the almost telepathic way of a couple who knew each other inside out, had said nothing about how they’d muddled their way to their decision.

Both of them were city people, born and bred, so the idea of this country idyl wasn’t as appealing as everyone else seemed to think. There were other factors involved.

Mel’s parents had moved out of the city ten years before to a smal house halfway between Carrickwel and Dublin, which meant Mel’s mum would be nearby to help take care of the bump.

In Dublin, they wouldn’t have been able to afford a semi in such a pretty road. And both of them felt it would be good for the children to have the countryside on the doorstep, perfect for family picnics. Or that was the theory.

In reality, al Mel saw of the countryside now was from the confines of the train to and from work.

The clincher had been the local schools. However, they were now made to feel they had missed the boat there.

Sarah and Carrie were down for al the best Carrickwel schools but the local Mummy Mafia had it that they should have had their names listed when they were embryos to guarantee a place in the very best, the Carnegie Junior School. Not to mention the

fact that learning the recorder wasn’t a part of the curriculum at Little Tigers. Serious mummies had their four-year-old poppets playing Bach on their recorders to impress the panel at the Carnegie. Sarah could play the television remote pretty wel but Mel suspected this wasn’t the same thing.

It was the large back garden at Number 2 Goldsmith Lawn that had real y sold Carrickwel to them.

‘We could have apple trees in it,’ Adrian had said as they flicked through the auctioneer’s brochure and saw the long, narrow swathe of lawn with a shabby green shed at the end.

‘And we could put a swing on the cherry tree,’ sighed Mel.

They’d smiled and she’d patted her burgeoning bel y, conveniently forgetting that neither of them was able to so much as hammer in a nail without bringing down a shower of plaster. Five years later, there were stil no apple trees in the garden and the weeds had declared an independent state over by the shed, but there was a plastic swing under the cherry tree. Sarah loved it.

She ran happily ahead of her mother to the front door now, holding her pink and white spotted rucksack, while Mel struggled in behind with her briefcase, Carrie, and al Carrie’s belongings. The front door of Number 2 was a glossy green, flanked by two dwarf conifers in matching green wooden containers on the step. When they had moved in, Mel and Adrian had spent two months’ worth of weekends sorting out the front garden so that it was maintenance-free and would fit in with their neighbours’

beautiful y cared-for gardens. The tiny sliver of grass had been replaced by beige gravel with various ornamental grasses and plants grouped in the two planting areas at either end. It al looked wel cared for but this was a clever il usion. Once Mel opened the front door, reality prevailed.

The hal looked tired, the peeling paintwork and battered wooden floor badly in need of a month of DIY enthusiasm.

Everything in their house needed work - don’t we al ? Mel thought grimly. There was never enough time. Adrian worked in IT in an

industrial estate thirty minutes’ drive from their home and since he’d been doing a Masters degree at night, he never had a moment for anything as mundane as Destroy It Yourself.

‘Hi,’ yel ed Mel as she dumped her load onto the hal floor and kissed Carrie on the forehead before putting her gently down on her chubby little legs.

No reply, but the kitchen door was closed. With yel s of delight,

Sarah and Carrie erupted into their playroom. Mel felt that you needed somewhere to keep al the kids’ stuff or it just took over the house, so the dining room was now the playroom, with the table shoved up against the wal and toys spil ing out of al the big pink and purple plastic storage boxes. In the rigid tradition of children’s colours, everything for little girls was lurid pink and purple. Mel longed for some subtle colours to take over.

‘The dishwasher’s broken,’ announced Adrian as soon as she walked into the kitchen with the gym bags of dirty clothes from

Little Tigers.

Sitting with his course books spread out over the kitchen table, he looked up at his wife and gave her a weary smile.

Adrian had Scandinavian colouring, with short blond hair, pale blue eyes, and skin that reacted to a hint of sun so that he always looked golden, unlike Mel, with her Celtic complexion.

Sarah and Carrie both had his fair hair and skin, but their mother’s fine bones and lovely eyes. When Mel had first met

Adrian, he’d had the build of a marathon runner, despite living off Chinese takeaways and pizzas. But over the years, lack of exercise and a fondness for the wrong sort of foods had made him more solid. Cuddly, she said.

‘Needing to go to the gym,’ Adrian would remark good humouredly.

If they could afford the gym, that was.

Mel patted him affectionately on the arm on her way to the utility room to get a wash going.

‘Are you sure the dishwasher’s real y broken?’ she asked.

Broken appliances meant organising someone to come and fix them at a time when someone would be in, a task on a par with choreographing Swan Lake on ice. ‘The dishes are dirtier now than when they went in,’ Adrian said.

He gestured to the worktop, where a white mug speckled with food particles sat. ‘Sure there isn’t a spoon stuck in the rotor?’ asked Mel hope

ful y.

“Fraid not.’

She set the washing machine going, emptied out Carrie’s juice cup and snack box, then tackled Sarah’s spotty bag of equipment, her mind whizzing through al the tasks she had to complete before bed. Then she stuck the mushroom and pepper chicken for the girls’ dinner in the microwave, put a pan of pasta on and got out a new wiping-up cloth, flinging the old One into the utility-room washing basket like a basketbal pro. ‘Wil you keep an eye on the girls while I change?’ Mel was halfway out the door as she spoke.

‘Yeah,’ replied Adrian absently.

Upstairs, Mel ripped off her work clothes and pul ed on her grey sweatpants and red fleece. She removed her earrings quickly - Carrie loved pul ing earrings and Mel had lost a real y nice silver one already this week - and was back downstairs to finish the children’s dinner within three minutes. The girls were already on their father’s lap, his col ege books shoved out of the way as they told him al about their day. ‘I did a picture for you, Daddy,’ said Sarah gravely. She was a daddy’s girl and could cope with any childish trauma as long as her father’s arms were around her. ‘You’re so clever,’ said Adrian lovingly, and kissed her blonde head. ‘Show me. Oh, that’s wonderful. Is that me?’

Sarah nodded proudly. ‘That’s Carrie and that’s Granny Karen -and that’s me.’ From beside the cooker where she was stirring Mel looked over. Like al Sarah’s pictures, it was in the yon triad of pink, orange and purple, with Adrian, Mel’s her, Karen, and Sarah al big and smiling. Carrie, whom

Sarah had never quite forgiven for being born, was a quarter the size, like a dwarf stick-person. There was no sign of Mel. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ asked Adrian.

Mel, who’d read plenty on separation anxiety, wouldn’t have asked, but her breathing stil ed to listen to the answer.

‘She’s on another page. At work,’ Sarah said, as if it were perfectly obvious. She produced another picture, this time of a bigger house with her mother outside with her briefcase in her hand. The briefcase was nearly as big as Mel herself, but she had to admit that Sarah had got her hair right: half brown, half blonde and frizzy.