Once in a Lifetime (16 page)

a bit of a caveman,’ said Lizzie dismissively. ‘And there isn’t an artistic bone in his body. You hate men like that. Remember how much you hated dopey Alan at school?’

‘I didn’t hate him,’ Natalie said. ‘I just didn’t fancy him, that’s all.’ Alan was a strapping farmer’s son who’d adored Natalie for years, but her constant refusal to go out with him had eventually upset him to the point that he’d called her a ‘stuck-up cow’.

‘That was years ago, Lizzie. It’s ancient history.’

‘Just reminding you.’

It was as if, Natalie thought, Lizzie wanted their past laminated and untouched so she could visit it from time to time.

Lizzie hadn’t seen how much everyone else had changed, but then, perhaps she hadn’t changed that much herself.

When Rory came back with Mrs Kinsale, he asked Natalie up to dance.

The tempo had changed and the band, who’d been warned to mix old and new, were tentatively trying out a version of ‘Wonderwall’.

‘I love this song,’ said Rory as they found a place on the heaving dance floor.

‘By Oasis, though?’ asked Natalie mischievously.

‘This version has its good points,’ Rory replied, not taking his eyes off her.

‘You mean the lead singer’s only a teeny bit off key?’

‘No, I mean the company,’ he said, and Natalie’s heart skipped a beat.

He could dance. Not many big men could. Natalie had known many who’d lurched around like fridges on wheels, looking ungainly. But Rory had rhythm. He was fit too. By the time ‘Wonderwall’ was over and the entire fast Elvis canon had been gone through, Natalie was sweaty and exhausted.

‘Let’s slow it down,’ crooned the lead singer and the

drummer went at his drums with the brushes as the band launched into a slow set.

Natalie laughed at the corniness of it all and had been about to walk back to her seat, when Rory caught her hand and pulled her to him.

‘Shall we dance?’

His body was hard and muscular up close, and she felt light as thistledown in his arms, but the effect was ruined by the fact that she was sweating profusely. She’d bet the damn pale pink dress was stained under the armpits and her hair was wet at the roots from dancing. Impossible to feel romantic under the circumstances.

And yet she did feel romantic. Natalie was tall and even so, her nose was about level with his chin. There was something beguiling about being with a man who made you feel like a fairy straight out of a children’s film.

‘I wanted to ask you something, but is it fair to ask without the lady at your table here?’ he said. ‘She’s so interested, it doesn’t seem right to continue the whole thing without her.’

Natalie laughed. ‘You can ask me anything,’ she said.

‘Can I see you again?’

The pleasurable feeling Natalie felt from being pressed up close to Rory increased. ‘I’d like that,’ she said.

‘Great.’ He stopped dancing long enough to wave over to Mrs Kinsale. ‘She said yes,’ he roared.

Six

Its never too late to stop and change the way you are going. Never.

Marcella Schmidt’s mother had always told her she was too picky. If Marcella had been given two choices, she wanted a third, just to be absolutely sure. Back then, she’d been Marcella Doyle, a name she couldn’t wait to change. Doyle was fine on its own, the same as Marcella was: but together, the two sounded ridiculous. The exotic Marcella teamed with the utterly non-exotic Doyle. Her mother, Jane, had defended her choice in children’s names.

‘Marcella is a name you’d notice,’ said Mrs Doyle, who’d hated being plain Jane all her life. There might have been some Janes who lived exciting lives with thrilling things happening to them, but she wasn’t one of them. Her children wouldn’t be saddled with the same problem. Nobody could forget girls called Marcella, Regina and Concepta. And if their surname was quite ordinary, it didn’t entirely matter. Their given names were the ones people remembered.

Marcella’s Confirmation outfit had been the source of much drama in the Doyle household. Her mother had wanted

Marcella to wear the same cream lace dress her older sisters had worn. Marcella had balked at that.

Regina, who’d left their small farm in Mayo to work in an office in Dublin, had promised to send a dress from Arnotts’

children’s department. ‘A little dress, something in velvet?

You’d look very smart.’

Marcella didn’t see herself looking smart in either cream lace or velvet. She’d spotted a very nice coral-pink shift dress and matching jacket, a la Jackie O, in a boutique in Ballina.

It wasn’t a child’s outfit, but she was tall for her twelve years, and it would fit her.

Concepta, who was three years older but shorter, thought it totally unfair that her little sister might look glamorous on her Confirmation Day, when she’d looked like a child in that ridiculous cream dress with babyish white ankle socks and white patent shoes. Marcella was growing up far too fast.

‘Regina’s going to send you a dress from Dublin,’ she wailed. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’

‘Regina still thinks I’m a child,’ Marcella said calmly. ‘I’m not.’

‘She has great taste; she’ll send you something lovely,’ Jane Doyle soothed. ‘And you can’t parade down the church in a grownup’s dress, Marcella. You’re only twelve. Besides, where are we going to get the money for it?’

‘If Regina’s going to pay for a dress from Dublin, she can pay for this instead,’ Marcella said. She’d thought it all out.

‘I want to look just right, Mam.’

‘You’re too picky, love,’ her mother had sighed. ‘It doesn’t pay to be picky.’

Marcella disagreed. On her Confirmation Day, everyone had said she looked marvellous in her coral pink. The adult effect of the dress meant the grownups didn’t talk to her like she was a child, and the older boys she fancied - brothers of the lads in her class in school - clearly fancied her back.

‘You always get what you want,’ said Concepta crossly, as if it was a bad thing.

‘What’s wrong with that?’ Marcella asked, stung. She wanted her sister to approve of her.

‘You’re a tonic,’ said their father, smiling at his youngest daughter proudly.

Marcella forgot about Concepta’s remarks and basked in her father’s praise. She adored her dad. He didn’t think she was picky: he thought she was right.

Thirty-seven years on, Marcella was no longer sure about the benefits of being picky - or discriminating, as she liked to call it now.

It worked in business: Marcella’s company was one of the top three in the country and could pick and choose clients.

It worked in finance: her portfolio of shares was doing better than most, despite the horrific stock market downfall. And it worked in clothes: Marcella loved shopping and wore a clever mix of investment clothes alongside High Street stuff so that nobody could tell the difference.

But pickiness simply didn’t work when it came to men.

With men, pickiness meant that you ended up alone.

It wasn’t that she’d made a deal with the Devil and opted for work success over home and hearth. Marcella had wanted both and would have sacrificed some workplace success if it had been necessary; if she’d met a man who’d wanted less spin doctor and more of a wife. The sisterhood who sang her praises as a feminist might have been shocked to discover this, but it was true. The end justified the means.

But the right man hadn’t asked her - either subtly or in an outright fashion - to compromise her career, and she wondered now if it had been her fault because her criteria for the perfect man was too stringent? Marcella didn’t want someone who would ‘do’. She wanted it to be perfect or she didn’t want it at all.

So many people seemed to think she had it all, particularly

women friends who’d split from their husbands and found themselves back in the world of dating again. Marcella, they seemed to imply, had everything sussed, knew how the system worked. She went out to dinners and parties, got her picture in the society pages, had a lovely life for herself and never sat at home moping with a bottle of wine and a DVD. She could guide them, the friends said, happy to have compatriots in their new single life.

Adept at appearing utterly content and in control, Marcella never allowed herself to shriek that of course she didn’t have it all sussed: if she had, she’d be sharing a bottle of wine and a DVD with her own man instead of schlepping around town with newly-liberated girlfriends.

Ingrid was one of the few people with whom she could be honest. How ironic that her confidante on the subject of loneliness was a woman with the perfect marriage.

‘It’s not all about a man, Ingrid,’ she explained. ‘I have so much and I’m lucky. I have the best job in the world; but at night, the job’s not much comfort. I keep thinking that it’s a lonely life, that I wanted more all those years ago, that I still want it. Not sex, really, but companionship.’

The running joke about the telly star, Ken Devlin, was a part of that: a game she and Ingrid played to pretend that men were just playthings and a woman like Marcella didn’t have time for them. But she did. And when friends like Ingrid spoke about their husbands, idly mentioning that they were going out for a pizza together or taking a spur-of-the-moment weekend away thanks to a cheap flight, Marcella felt horrendously lonely. There was nobody to do those things with her.

Nobody to hold her hand during turbulence on a plane, nobody to buy her flu medicine when she wasn’t well, nobody to put the dustbins out on rubbish day. It wasn’t wild hot sex Marcella craved: it was another body to come home to and somebody to share her life.

‘Marcella, I’ve got Connor on line two. He says it’s urgent.’

Daniel, Marcella’s personal assistant, had a mellow voice that was very calming to listen to. He’d been with her for three years and no matter how frenzied the message he was delivering - and with the nature of their business, he sometimes had to deliver very urgent messages indeed - Daniel made it sound as if they had all the time in the world to sort the problem out.

‘Thanks, Daniel,’ said Marcella, flicking over to line two.

Connor Davitt was her partner in SD International, which stood for Schmidt-Davitt, and occasionally acted as a fire blanket to be thrown over disasters. Today, Connor was out on the road with one of their big corporate clients who were running a golf fundraiser and had been blessed with decent weather for it. It was part event management, part smiling and making sure all the right people met all the other right people.

Connor could do it in his sleep. Unless someone had hit the nineteenth hole too early in the day and was now running amok with a nine iron and a bottle of scotch, Marcella knew that the problem was likely to be unrelated to today’s event.

‘Connor, what’s up?’ she asked.

‘It’s what’s down that’s the problem,’ he said. ‘Trousers.’

‘For Chrissake, not again. Who?’

‘Mickey Roche, on a fact-finding jolly in the Bahamas. And the problem, among others, is a woman who says she hadn’t been paid and he owes her four hundred dollars.’

‘Fact-finding jolly in the Bahamas? Why do they persist in sending people like Mickey Roche to the Bahamas?’ she asked wearily.

‘Fact-finding is less fun in wet cities than it is in tropical paradises,’ Connor answered.

Marcella hated these fire-blanket jobs. Because people read about them, they assumed it was all a company like SD International did. It wasn’t; as Marcella frequently said, their job was making people achieve the best possible version of themselves.

‘Has he been arrested?’

‘No. They were on the balcony of his hotel smoking a joint and he thought it might be fun to sunbathe in the nude, as you do.’

‘As you do,’ agreed Marcella, thinking with distaste of Mickey Roche, a councillor who would never be entered in a Mr Universe contest unless the judging criteria changed to allow swollen beer bellies, forty per cent body fat and lascivious eyes. He was also an idiot. He’d spent a week on an intensive SD International media-training course and had promptly gone out to do a radio interview where he’d managed to insult the interviewer by implying that big bosoms had got her the job. Bizarrely, the public liked him. Mickey tells it like it is, they said proudly.

There was, Marcella thought, no accounting for taste.

Connor continued the story: ‘He took umbrage when the hotel staff told him to put his clothes on.’

‘Naturally.’

‘And then, he shut the door on the lady in question, throwing her clothes off the balcony into the swimming pool area, but neglecting to throw down any of the four hundred dollars he’d promised her. They’re sending him home with all the other councillors, who are embarrassed and ‘

‘- determined to shift any blame from themselves by letting everyone know what Mickey was up to, distancing themselves from the scandal.’

‘Precisely. Statements are expected by tonight. Only one of them was clued in enough to phone party headquarters to mention what had happened.’

Marcella knew it had been a slow news week. Mickey’s fun-packed jaunt had all the makings of a fabulous news story, offering the papers any number of angles, from the waste of tax-payers’ money onwards. Worst was the fun the tabloids would have with a story that involved public nudity and a man named Mickey.

‘Please tell me nobody’s got photographs?’ she said.

‘Can’t tell you that,’ Connor replied. ‘You’ll have to make some calls. I’m a bit stuck here.’

‘No problem,’ she said. ‘Talk later.’

Marcella swung into action. First, she needed to find out what the fourth estate knew about the problem. She phoned a journalist friend of hers.

‘Donald, it’s Marcella Schmidt. Can you talk?’

‘Private talk?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hold on. I’ll take this in the office.’

Marcella waited. She’d been in the Courier Mail often and knew that real privacy was almost impossible in a place where knowing other people’s business was the life blood of most of the inhabitants. As news editor, Donald had a glass-walled office, but the door was permanently open and, if he shut it, every reporter’s eyes would be on it, knowing that something interesting was happening. A few clever souls had learned to lip-read purely for moments such as these.