Once in a Lifetime (21 page)

Kitty had been furious, but she’d got over it. Men were strange, there was no doubt about it.

She reached for her cigarettes, extracted one from the pack and lit it in a single fluid movement. Sitting at her dressing table, ignoring the film of dust illuminated by the February sun, she admired the way she looked in the mirror as she smoked. Who cared what all the bloody medics said? Smoking was sexy. What could be more erotic than a mouth circling a smooth column, inhaling, and then blowing out a wisp of smoky promise at the man in front of you?

What man could resist that?

Few of them, that’s who. Except for David, and only because he’d been in thrall to Star at the time. Oh, and Anthony. Bloody Anthony. Always her mind ran back to her ex-husband.

Kitty stopped admiring herself in her triple mirror and took a long pull on her Dunhill, wanting her beloved nicotine to wipe him out of her mind.

Yes, it if had been his damn funeral, she’d be wearing pink or purple, or even pillar-box red with a fur collar for sheer extravagance. Anything to show the world that she was still there even if he wasn’t.

I’m still here.

She could picture how shocked Charlie would be if she knew what her mother was thinking.

‘Mum!’ she’d say, dragging one syllable into three.

Charlie was so naive, really.

Iseult, her older daughter, would say nothing. Very little got Iseult going. She was well able for the world and its pain.

Like herself.

Poor Charlie, alas, wasn’t. Hadn’t a clue, Charlie. Not a clue. No idea whatsoever how it had been for Kitty. Didn’t understand, never would.

Had it been Anthony’s funeral instead of David Kenny’s, Kitty would be throwing a massive party afterwards with unending booze, jazz musicians and food only available at breakfast for the hardy souls who’d lasted the course.

The house would have been perfect for a wake. Her house, that is. The house that went in the divorce settlement and left her living in this box.

Though it hadn’t been a particularly big house, it was detached, with a conservatory. Perfect for parties.

A hint of heat in her hand made her realise her cigarette had burned right down.

‘Shit!’ She let the tendril of ash fall into the crystal ashtray and automatically reached for a fresh cigarette.

The momentary sexiness she’d felt admiring herself had gone. That brunette bombshell who made a moue with her full lips had been gone some twenty years. Low-angled sunshine lit up the room and cast a harsh light on her face.

Kitty knew that with the right lighting - candles, preferably - and when she’d had her skin freshly lasered and her fillers in, she could pass for late fifties. Today, in the dark burgundy suit she’d dragged from her closet for the funeral, with her hair still dark against the paleness of her skull, she looked every inch her sixty-nine years.

Suitably deathly for a funeral, she grinned at herself. At

least she still had her sense of humour. If you could laugh at life, you had one weapon left. This morning was going to be short on laughs, so Kitty wanted to get them when she could.

Charlie would be weeping beside her and Kitty hated crying.

She’d tried hard to teach her daughters that crying got you nowhere. Anger, determination and feral hunger for survival: now those worked. Nobody taught you that in college.

‘It’s going to be such an awful funeral,’ Charlie had said.

‘He wasn’t even sixty, Mum. Poor Ingrid. And the children are in shock. OK, they’re grown up, but still, he’s their dad.

Everyone says Ingrid is very strong, but I don’t know how she’s going to cope.’

‘She’ll cope just fine.’

Kitty picked up a coral lip pencil and began to draw her mouth on. Men leave. Better get it over with now rather than later. Better to have your husband drop dead of a heart attack and be able to mourn him, than to have him run off because he ‘isn’t happy’. Isn’t happy? In some ways, Kitty would have preferred it if he’d run off with some little madam twenty years younger. At least she’d have been able to bitch about young trollops out to steal other women’s husbands. But for a man to leave without there being someone else, for a man to leave because he simply couldn’t live with you! The humiliation had been epic. Try mourning that.

‘You’re better off without him, Kitty,’ all her friends had said at the time.

‘At least you have your career.’

‘You’re gorgeous, you’ll meet someone else like a shot.’

Wrong! Wrong on all counts.

Red, Kitty decided: she’d wear red for Anthony’s funeral.

Red lips and nails; and she’d get more fillers done around her mouth and nose. Pity she couldn’t afford another eye lift. Still, one of her old red suits - the vintage ones from the 1950s, when corsetry could give any woman a siren’s figure, regardless of middle-aged spread. All his old girlfriends would be

there. Not that he’d had many, and mousy creatures the lot of them. None like herself. And he’d not married any of them.

So she’d be the prominent one at his funeral; the ex-wife commanded respect, no matter what had gone before. She’d be the one people would offer their sympathies to. And she’d smile graciously and never let on that she was glad he was dead. Serve him right, the coward!

Kitty layered on the second coat of lipstick. The great thing about funerals, she thought, was that they gave her a chance to show people that she was still here. No matter what had happened in her life, Kitty Nelson was still here and still fighting. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

Star sat down the back of the church and looked around her with interest. She’d been in so few churches in her life and she adored them: the exquisite architecture and the beauty of the images around. There was such a sense of holiness here, and she respected the faith she’d grown up alongside.

Her best friends had worshipped in churches like this one, and Star had often been shocked when they spoke disrespectfully about their religion yet remained a part of it all. If you couldn’t give yourself totally, you were being a hypocrite, she felt.

But still, it wasn’t her place to comment.

Goodness and kindness were paramount in her faith: being good to humankind and being grateful for what you had were the main tenets. Not much different from what was preached here.

Only the words and the rules were different, she decided.

Religions run by men were always very keen on lots of rules.

Rules about behaviour in church, behaviour out of church, rules about sex - what was it about sex that fascinated them so? Surely the main thrust of any religion should be about kindness and spirituality, not about what people did in the privacy of their own beds?

She watched the congregation file into the church, some sombre in black and others clearly making a statement about celebrating David’s life by wearing bright colours. Star approved of that. She herself had worn white; the only splash of colour a red silk corsage pinned to her breast. It was a subtle tribute to her long-lost love.

A tall woman with glossy dark hair and a dramatic black coat swept into the church on the arm of an older man who seemed to be holding on to her in a bid to calm her down.

The woman’s eyes were red and her face was drawn. Obviously somebody close to David. A friend of Ingrid’s, too, Star decided. Good, Ingrid would need friends now. Star closed her eyes and sent healing and light towards the tall woman.

As she stalked up the aisle with Harry by her side, Marcella ran an expert eye over the funeral guests. Under normal circumstances, she’d have been able to gauge what they were like by their demeanour and their dress. Today, she felt too shocked by the fact that it was dear David’s funeral to be professionally distant about it all. He was her friend, he was darling Ingrid’s husband. Today, it was personal, and she glared at anyone who didn’t look suitably devastated.

Her usual rule of thumb was that people in perfect makeup, exquisite tailoring and shades were either members of the family determined to put the best side forward despite their pain, or media-savvy types who liked the sight of themselves in the inevitable newspaper photographs of the funeral.

There were some of that latter tribe present, sunglasses on and not a hint of a tear ruining their faces, chattering happily as if they were at a cocktail party where most of the people just happened to be clad in black. Marcella scowled at them.

‘Settle,’ murmured Harry, who was at her side and knew without being told what was upsetting her.

‘That bitch has never had a good word to say about Ingrid or David,’ hissed Marcella, gesturing to a woman in a leather

ensemble with a hint of an Hermes scarf peeping out from her collar and just-blow-dried hair tumbling about her shoulders.

‘She shouldn’t even be here. Why are people so hypocritical that they’ll turn up at the funeral of a person they had no time for in life?’

‘Look at all the people who are crying,’ Harry whispered.

‘David was loved, and Ingrid still is loved. There are plenty here for the right reasons.’

Marcella tried to stifle her rage. The church was filling up with people who looked genuinely devastated; many eyes met hers across the pews with sad resignation, and many people hugged her in lieu of hugging Ingrid. They knew that Marcella Schmidt was one of David and Ingrid’s closest friends.

‘I just can’t bear any hypocrisy today,’ Marcella sobbed, burying her face in her ex-husband’s solid shoulder. ‘Not today, not for David. I want it to be real.’

‘It’s real, all right,’ Harry said, gazing across at the empty pew at the front of the church where Ingrid, Ethan and Molly would sit.

Star felt Natalie’s presence before she saw her: the tiny hairs on her arms stood on end and the back of her neck prickled, and then a slender girl with a waterfall of dark wavy hair walked past, all bundled up in a grey woollen coat with a striped scarf twined around her neck, half hiding her face. It was like stepping back in time and seeing Dara’s profile, the same fine-boned nose and cheeks, the same determined chin, the dark sweep of eyebrows winging back over huge dark eyes. All of Star’s composure left her and a lump swelled up in her throat. This was Dara’s child and she’d grown into this beautiful young woman without Star witnessing any of it. She thought of the promise Dara had made them all swear, and she felt again how totally wrong it was. People had a right to know where they came from. The past couldn’t be wiped out like chalk on a blackboard. Not knowing who you were

could rip a person apart just as surely as remembering a’ painful past could. Maybe the time would come when Natalie would want to find out for herself. She really hoped so.

Funeral limousines were like coffins, Ingrid decided: bigger and with windows to the outside world, but still coffin-like. I Once you were in one, you were totally isolated. People could see you, but they didn’t want to look, as if looking might award them a seat beside you and your pain. The funeral home had sent their most luxurious limousine and she sat in the back with Molly on one side, Ethan in the seat facing, and David’s great aunt Babe on her other side.

Ingrid could barely cope with looking at her children’s faces because of the devastation she saw there. Ethan was pale with grief under his tan, and Molly’s eyes were a blur of red from crying. Ingrid wasn’t sure how she looked - she’d made herself up carefully as a tribute to her beloved David, even though she’d wanted to hurl the cosmetics from the window at the futility of ever trying to look normal again, now that he was gone. She knew her hair was clean because she’d numbly gone through the motions of washing it earlier, and she knew the black Jaeger coat and soft felt hat were suitable, but beyond that, she didn’t care how she looked. It shouldn’t matter today, it might never matter again.

Her sisters, Flora and Sigrid, were in the limousine behind. ‘Would you like to come in our car?’ Ingrid had asked.

‘No,’ Flora had said, ‘it should be just you and the children, Ingrid love. You in the first car, us in the second. That’s how it’s done.’

Ingrid didn’t want to follow any ludicrous funeral etiquette today. She didn’t want it to be just her and the children. It felt so lonely, so isolating, which was why Babe’s being there was a blessing. Ninety-two and still going strong-spirited, Babe was physically frail, with a cloud of white hair and pink glasses with wings, not unlike those on the back of a Buick.

She missed nothing and could be counted upon to speak her most private thoughts out loud.

The family knew that Babe’s eccentricity wasn’t connected to her age in any way. As David was fond of telling them, she’d always been mad.

‘The world has to take Aunt Babe on her own terms,’ David would laugh, describing how Babe had driven his grandmother crazy when they were young because she was forever misbehaving at the tennis club and had a string of unsuitable suitors and a motorbike by the time she was nineteen.

‘She’s as sharp as a tack,’ David added. ‘That charmingly mad thing is part of her schtick, don’t get taken in by it. She’s I had some life, I can tell you. If only we could get her to write I it down - but she’s adamant that a lady never kisses and tells.’

I Today, Ingrid was simply grateful for Babe’s presence, even I if she was wearing a floor-length astrakhan coat that smelled as if it hadn’t been out of the wardrobe since its heyday in 1938. Because Babe was there, Molly and Ethan were trying hard to take care of her, and she was making them smile with ? endless stories of their father when he was young.

Babe was well used to funerals and had long since learned I that remembering the dead person’s happier moments made the day pass more bearably.

I ‘Ingrid, do you remember that time David and his friends pushed a bed all the way from Earlscourt Terrace out to Malahide for a bet?’ asked Babe.

Ingrid shook her head. ‘Before my time, Babe,’ she said softly.

‘Oh, but he must have told you,’ Babe went on merrily, patting Ingrid’s hand. ‘It was him and his nice friend, Jonny - you must remember Jonny, he had a bad leg and practically no hair. Bald as a coot by the time he was twenty. Women loved him, you know. No accounting for taste.’