Once in a Lifetime (25 page)

But flirty men were thin on the ground. There was the Polish cleaner who spoke little English and looked alarmed when the woman painting her lips red began to make eyes at him and murmur about getting her pillows plumped up. There were male patients in the next ward, but they all looked as if they were on their last legs and Kitty stared at them with disgust when they shuffled past her ward, slippers flopping on the lino.

There was one male nurse, but according to Kitty there was something emasculating about a man being a nurse.

Then are doctors,’ she said, ‘not nurses.’

‘That’s sexist,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘You fought against sexism and the glass ceiling.’

‘That was for women,’ her mother retorted crossly.

”That’s even more sexist,’ dared Charlie, and it was a measure of how tired her mother was that she didn’t instantly contradict her.

There were herds of young male doctors roaming around, but they were all too exhausted and busy to notice freshly applied red lipstick or batting eyelashes, and when they stood at the end of Kitty’s bed and discussed her case, they focused on medicine instead of the person.

The only other man on the premises was the priest, a spindly man named Father Farrar, who was thinness personified and had a saintly expression on his face.

Priests were among the small minority of men for whom Kitty had no time. They weren’t supposed to flirt, so what was the point of them?

The third time Father Farrar made an attempt to give Kitty Holy Communion, she threw her magazine at him.

‘I’m not interested in being converted to your man-god,’

she screeched. ‘Come back to me when He lets women into the club!’

Charlie paled. Father Farrar took a few steps backwards, and a nurse came in and hauled the curtains around Kitty’s cubicle at high speed.

‘Now, Mrs Nelson, we’ve talked about this,’ the nurse said.

‘It’s not fair to Father Farrar or to the other patients. If you don’t want him near you, that’s fine. But no shouting.’

‘I did tell him not to come near me again,’ Kitty said, shrugging.

‘He’s the one you should be telling off, not me.’

Visitors made her worse, bringing out the more flamboyant side of Kitty’s personality.

Hospitals in the old days let patients have fun, Kitty muttered, with little parties and a blind eye turned to bottles of Scotch being smuggled in with the grapes.

Gwen, an old campaigning friend who arrived with another, quieter lady called Fiona, had a cache of stories from the past.

She turned up in the hospital bearing library books, a

trailing ivy with dusty leaves, and a bottle of something the colour of pee that was clearly homemade, alcoholic and probably dangerous.

‘Gwen!’ shrieked Kitty with a delight she’d never shown when Charlie arrived with grapes, chocolate biscuits and a new talking book for her mother’s CD player.

‘Kitty, my love!’ Gwen threw herself and her belongings on to the narrow hospital bed and had it not been for Charlie making a grab for the bottle, it would have smashed into pieces on the floor. ‘Look at you! What have they done with you?’

Gwen had been on the 1970s contraception marches, at a few French riots, and had even lived in a commune in West Cork for a few years until someone nearly died of listeria from homemade cheese and an absence of refrigeration, and social services had become involved. Gwen was fond of crumpled linen clothes, henna in her hair and perfume that managed to combine the scents of a Moroccan souk with full-strength YSL Poison.

‘I hope they’re giving you decent drugs.’ Gwen poked around on the small side table looking for jars with skulls and crossbones on them.

‘Nothing decent at all,’ said Kitty. ‘Painkillers that wouldn’t knock out a mouse. Now come and sit on the bed, Fiona,’

she said to the quieter lady. ‘Charlotte will get us coffee or tea.’

Not Please could you get us coffee or tea.

‘Of course,’ Charlie said automatically. She felt a brief stab of pain at being pushed to the sidelines again. If Iseult were here, her mother would have embarked on the litany of Iseult’s latest triumphs. Charlie was ordered about like a waitress.

She spent ages getting drinks and when she came back, her mother was telling Gwen and Fiona a dirty joke.

‘And then he said, “Madam, that’s not where I was going to put the thermometer!”’

The three women cackled. Together, they were like the witches in Macbeth, only scarier.

When Kitty came home from hospital, things had got worse.

At least in hospital, Charlie had been able to leave the premises.

Not so any more. She was a prisoner with a very bad tempered jailer. As there was no need for Kitty to put on make-up in the morning and nobody to be bright and chatty with, she lapsed into irritation twenty-four seven. Charlie, who’d taken leave from work to look after her, bore the brunt of it.

Without her make-up, Kitty looked her age and then some.

The fall hadn’t shocked her, but being confined to bed and being unable to get around had. Charlie realised how accustomed she was to seeing her mother in full war paint.

Six weeks on, Kitty was supposed to be much more mobile, but she wasn’t improving as quickly as she should be - partly because she hated physiotherapy and often refused to go.

‘Charlotte,’ she roared now, breaking into Charlie’s precious early-morning me time.

Charlie sighed and got to her feet. Hello day.

‘I want my tablets,’ Kitty said when Charlie entered her bedroom. ‘Then I need my hair washed. It’s dreadful. In fact, I need it set. That place on Shop Street might be capable of doing it,’ she added.

Kitty hated Ardagh. She said it was a provincial town with pretentions just because it had a department store like Kenny’s there.

The city, now that’s where it was at. People could be themselves in a city, could live wild, vibrant lives and not be shackled by other people’s perceptions.

Since when were you shackled by other people’s perceptions? Charlie would have liked to ask, but didn’t. She couldn’t face the inevitable fallout.

‘Chloe’s, that’s the hair place on Shop Street,’ Charlie said.

She loved Chloe’s. It wasn’t as elegant as the tiny salon on the third floor of Kenny’s, but it was great fun. The owner was a fabulous man named Gordon, whom people thought was gay because he wore a brooch and made camp hand movements. Gordon had told Charlie he was heterosexual but women preferred gay hairdressers. ‘The business took off when I changed the name and put the picture of the kitten with eyelashes and a feather boa on the sign,’ he said. ‘Camp is comforting, and that’s what beauty’s all about, isn’t it?

Comfort.’

Charlie still wasn’t entirely convinced. Gordon was so good at being camp. There was no sense he was putting it on, just a feeling that he was totally at home wearing vintage brooches in the shape of salamanders, with a red spotted scarf sticking out from under the collar of his shirt.

‘Chloe’s - yes, that’s it. Stupid name for a hairdresser’s. I suppose I don’t need an appointment?’ Kitty assumed that any establishment catering to the yokels of Ardagh would hardly require advance booking.

Charlie had half a mind to let her mother trail in only to be sent packing, but then she knew that would only mean she’d have to trek downtown again when they’d made an actual appointment. ‘You have to book,’ she said evenly. ‘I’ll phone later.’

‘Phone now,’ demanded her mother.

Charlie counted to ten. ‘It’s half six, Mother,’ she said. ‘I’ll phone at nine.’

Chloe’s had an appointment available at ten that morning and at twenty to, Charlie duly drove her mother to the door.

She would have liked to sit at a mirror and have Gordon fuss over her, clucking at the state of her hair, ordering a treatment on the house, drinking latte with caramel syrup spirited over from Kool Koffee next door.

But having her mother beside her would take the gloss off the experience. It was bad enough to have Kitty in Chloe’s in

the first place, annoying people with her negative energy, peering down her nose at the place like a cardinal who’d been teleported into a whorehouse.

‘Mum’s a bit - miserable,’ she said tactfully to Gordon.

‘She broke her hip and, even though she’s mobile now, she’s in a lot of pain. Don’t mind her if she’s grumpy.’

‘Fine, love, no problem. We’ll look after her,’ Gordon said.

He was wearing a spider brooch today, modelled on one the Duke of Windsor had purchased for the Duchess from Carrier.

His fine-knit sweater was lemon yellow and his shoes looked suspiciously like ballet pumps, half-implying that he might pirouette across the salon at any moment. ‘Sure you don’t want to wait, have something done?’

Charlie smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t have a moment to myself, Gordon,’ she said. ‘This is the only chance I’ll get to run some errands.’

She did the grocery shopping, dropped off some dry cleaning, took one of her mother’s handbags to the repair shop, and paid a few bills in the post office, before racing back to Chloe’s with a fine sheen of sweat on her skin.

She was expecting her mother to be in the inevitable mood, but when she walked in, a newly happy Kitty beamed back at her.

‘Isn’t Gordon a marvel!’ she trilled, twisting her head to admire the Medusa curls that clustered delicately around her face, framing it. Gordon had applied colour, too: a softening chestnut with paler hints in it to flatter Kitty’s skin.

‘Lighter strands around your hairline, that’s the answer,’ Gordon was saying, tweaking a curl here and there.

Charlie was shocked at how angry she felt. How dare her I mother come in and annex Gordon! She had no right, he was Charlie’s friend.

At home, Kitty went off to her room to admire herself and Charlie phoned work to see what was happening.

Since she’d had to take so much time off, Charlie felt she

was missing out-on the events in Kenny’s. In the first weeks after David’s death, everything had continued as normal, apart from the fact that David himself wasn’t there. Everyone said that the systems he’d put in place operated seamlessly and the store ran itself. Tom, the store manager, had stepped into David’s shoes with Lena as his second-in-command.

‘It can’t last,’ Shotsy explained on the phone. ‘Sales are definitely down, like pretty much everywhere else in the luxury market. They’re going to have to sell, but Ingrid hasn’t been in to talk to anyone yet.’

Both women were silent at the thought. Ingrid had phoned Tom and Stacey, but she’d been too grief-stricken to actually venture in.

‘Tom’s going to see her, though, to talk.’

‘How horrible.’ Charlie shuddered. ‘Coping with your husband’s death and his business being in trouble at the same time …’

‘I hope we still have jobs at the end of it all,’ Shotsy added.

‘I know, but it seems awful to be thinking that way,’ Charlie said. ‘We can find other jobs, but Ingrid can’t find another David, can she?’

At lunchtime, Iseult arrived and Kitty’s mood improved even more.

‘Hello, girls,’ Iseult said, dumping a bag from the delicatessen on to the table, along with an orchid in a china pot, and a stack of magazines.

Nobody could ever call Iseult anything but generous.

She hugged Charlie warmly, before picking up the orchid and giving it to Kitty.

‘Flowers for a flower,’ she said, and Kitty smiled a smile that made her look lit up from the inside.

Charlie stared at her mother, wondering how on earth Iseult did that. Was it the things she said, or the way she said them?

Or was it simply that Iseult had a better relationship with their mother than Charlie could ever achieve?

‘Your hair is fabulous, Mother,’ Iseult went on.

‘I know, it’s lovely,’ Kitty said, preening. ‘Had it done in a little place here. I can’t believe what a good job they did.

From the outside, it looks like a bit of a dump, but they can do hair.’

Charlie stifled anger on behalf of both Chloe’s and Gordon.

‘You look marvellous, too, love,’ Kitty said to her elder daughter.

Iseult was tall, leggy and had long hair bleached to Scandinavian goddess standard. Tumbling blonde curls were her trademark, involving much time with heated rollers. She was also, like their mother under normal circumstances, heavily into grooming and never appeared without nail lacquer, mascara and shaped eyebrows tamed with a hint of wax.

‘Thanks, sweetie. I’m parched,’ Iseult said, opening the fridge and looking inside. ‘I could kill a cup of tea. Or even a drink. Have you any wine open?’

‘In this house?’ Kitty was scathing. ‘Divil a bit. There’s a decent red in that cupboard by the back door.’

Which Brendan bought ages ago and which we were saving, Charlie thought with annoyance, but said nothing.

The wine was opened, tea was made, a packet of handmade delicatessen cheese biscuits unwrapped, along with lots of delicious antipasti. And all the while, Iseult entertained them with stories about her new play.

The backers weren’t theatre people at all, but what was known as theatre angels - rich do-gooders, brought in to keep a production going. They hadn’t a clue what it was all about.

They thought being involved in the theatre meant wall-to wall fun and late nights at the Trocadero trading stories about great plays. In reality, it meant mixing with anxious, jumpy actors who worried over their lines, their roles and their direction, and needed lavish amounts of ego-boosting.

There was some fun, Iseult added, explaining how Edwin, the director, had a passion for the female lead’s understudy,

which was making the lead very cross. And then some screw up with wardrobe resulted in five corseted gowns needing to be remade from scratch.

‘They’re raw silk, they cost a fortune, and they’re all tiny.

None of them would fit a child, even with the laces fully extended. Jennifer, that’s the leading lady, tried hers on just to see, and of course her tits burst out over the top. Then, Iarlath, who plays her son in the play and who is a nightmare when it comes to women, says he’s going to rouge her nipples. He grabs a stick of greasepaint and goes for it. We all laughed like drains, but the costume woman’s new and she was white as a sheet watching Iarlath drooling as he tried to rub the greasepaint on, and all the stage hands crowded round like a shot, and someone had a camera phone, so Jennifer’s screeching that she turned down photoshoots in the lads’ magazines and she’s not going into them with red tits on some dodgy camera-phone picture. Leo, who’s playing her husband, and who can’t stand Jennifer, says the magazines would need to be paid to feature Jennifer’s tits, and then Edwin, the director, has to take her off to the pub to console her and tell her she’s fabulous, wonderful, etc,
etc.
And it all delayed rehearsals by another two hours.’