Once in a Lifetime (26 page)

‘I wish I’d acted,’ sighed Kitty dreamily.

‘You’d have been great, Mother,’ Iseult obliged.

‘I’d have loved the costumes.’

‘And the red nipples,’ said Iseult, laughing.

‘God, yes!’ roared Kitty, and the pair of them were off, giggling with delight.

When lunch was over, Charlie tidied up around them and felt a certain relief when her mother went outside with her wine glass and an ashtray for a post-prandial cigarette.

Iseult patted the chair beside her and motioned for Charlie to sit down.

‘Are you doing OK?’ she asked gently.

‘Yes,’ Charlie fibbed. Then, ‘No, not well at all, actually.

Mother is not going to win any patient of the year awards and she’s ‘

Iseult interrupted. She did it all the time, too eager to say her piece to let others finish theirs. ‘Yes, but she’s still in pain, Charlie, and think how hard it must be for her to have her routine broken. This is a vision of mortality, too, don’t forget that. Imagine falling and having bones break: the vision of the future it presents is simply terrifying.’ She drew breath, but before Charlie could intervene, she was off again. ‘It’s fascinating, don’t you think? It’s a story that has to be told, of old age and all it represents. I’m working on a screenplay on that precise subject. Well, it’s very rough right now, but the germ of the idea is there. Crash! Your life changes, you start to recognise the prospect of ageing, the familiar routines of your life are ripped asunder …’ Iseult was no longer seeing her sister. Her eyes were shining, focused on a distant point in her imagination.

‘Iseult,’ interrupted Charlie, ‘I know all that. I am being totally understanding, but my routines are being ripped asunder too. It’s hard for us all. It would be great if Mother could stay with you for a while. I can’t take any more time off work.’

‘Well, I certainly can’t. It’s out of the question. I’m so manically busy,’ said Iseult. Suddenly, for Charlie, it was like being a child again.

Three years wasn’t a big difference when you were a grownup, but to a child, it was for ever. Iseult had given up playing with baby dolls and dolly nappies and pretend feeding bottles by the time Charlie got into them.

‘That’s for kids,’ Iseult would sniff, wrapping a bit of a skirt around a svelte Sindy doll with long legs, a waspie waist and plastic breasts moulded like smooth mountain peaks.

When Charlie eventually inherited Sindy, Barbie and their by-now tattered wardrobes, Iseult was only interested in her own wardrobe and what to wear to impress the boys in her class.

Whatever Iseult was doing took precedence over everything else. Iseult’s first State exams plunged the Nelson household into a quiver of anxiety. When Charlie was doing the same exams, her mother told her: ‘Exams aren’t everything, for heaven’s sake. You’re only fifteen, Charlotte. It hardly matters at this stage.’

Now they were adults and nothing had changed.

Iseult could be very entertaining, and she was at least interested in Charlie, Brendan and Mikey in a way that their mother never could be. Yet there was always a slight undercurrent that her life and her exploits were far more important.

Charlie always felt that Iseult’s interest was a benign fascination with those less blessed than herself in both the brains and the success department.

There was no way Iseult could take their mother in; Charlie must do it - that was her role.

It was hard to hold in the anger and the hurt, but Charlie managed bravely. What was the point in fighting with either Iseult or her mother? They didn’t count her or her life as important. It would take an earthquake in their lives to change that.

Late that night, when everyone was asleep, Charlie sat up in bed and wrote some more in her gratitude diary.

I want it to matter to my mother and my sister that I have a husband I adore who adores me, and a son who lights up my world. That’s something precious and I need them to understand.

Charlie stopped writing. This stupid journal suddenly seemed so hopeless because nothing had changed since she’d started it.

Perhaps her mother and Iseult would never understand.

Never, ever. It wasn’t as though Charlie could beat it into their heads. It was impossible to change what other people

thought. The only thing she could alter was herself and how she dealt with them. Forget about changing other people: you can’t. You can only change yourself.

My mother is right: I am stupid. I’ve spent years thinking I could change her, and I can’t. How dumb is that? I’m going to stop now. Stop writing and stop hoping. She is who she is. If she doesn’t like me - even writing it felt strange, prickly - then she doesn’t like me.

I can’t do anything about that. There’s no law that says your mother has to love or even like you, is there?

Iseult’s the same. To her, the only important life is hers. That’s always been the way it is. How do I change forty-something years of conditioning? The answer is: I can’t.

There was something very freeing about writing this. As if giving up trying to fix the problem was the only answer. Let it go, as Shotsy might have said. Charlie decided to give it a try.

Ten

Live for now. Not for tomorrow or yesterday. Now. You don’t know what will happen tomorrow, and yesterday is gone, so all you have is this moment. Enjoy it.

Marcella hated Mondays: waking up early after luxuriating in bed at the weekend, having to rush through all the little pleasures like having her morning tea staring out at the sea from her top-floor apartment with its vast picture windows.

The traffic on the way to work was always hell, full of men in slower cars who felt their masculinity threatened by a woman in a seal-like grey metallic BMW. They cut her off at the lights and glared at her with irritation. A motorbike courier gave her a two-fingered salute when she got stuck on a yellow traffic box and he had to manoeuvre illegally to get past her.

‘Right back at you, asshole,’ Marcella growled.

There was so much negative energy about Mondays. She was willing to bet that none of the world’s greatest minds had ever done anything brilliant on a Monday. Nobody ever mentioned when Einstein had put the finishing touches to his Theory of Relativity, or when Marie Curie discovered radium.

But it definitely wasn’t on the first day of the week.

The mood didn’t improve in the offices of SD International.

When she opened the door of the normally immaculate foyer of the Georgian building, she saw a disaster zone. The soft blue rug - a murderously expensive handmade thing with the company logo of a maple leaf - was crumpled up by the wall, dripping wet, and the wooden floor itself was a shallow pond with soggy newspapers floating like lilypads. Marcella absently hoped they weren’t today’s papers, then reality asserted itself.

Julie, the usually beautifully turned out receptionist, was on her Wolford-clad knees with a towel, fruitlessly trying to stem the deluge. The water was at least three inches deep. Julie’s stockings and the bottom half of her skirt were sopping wet.

‘What happened?’ asked Marcella, standing just outside the door to avoid the water.

‘Something burst - a pipe, I don’t know,’ wailed Julie, stopping her mopping. ‘I came in at eight as usual to find this. I don’t know where it’s coming from.’

‘Did you phone the maintenance company?’

‘Yes, they say they can’t be here until after eleven.’

More negative energy zoomed around the room. Marcella growled for the second time that day, rolled up her charcoal grey trousers to mid-calf, removed her spindly heeled boots and socks, and walked into the wet. It reached her ankles and was like stepping into a freezing puddle.

Reaching the reception desk, she checked to see if the water had got as high as the plug sockets. It hadn’t. That was one blessing.

She found the directory, flicked through it to find the maintenance company’s number and got through in an instant.

The man at the other end of the phone didn’t sound too worried about it all.

‘Arra sure, we’ll be there at eleven and we’ll have it sorted out. It’s the age of the building, you see. Old pipes and whatnot. You’d have had to rip it all out and start from scratch to make sure this type of thing didn’t happen.’

Marcella had a mental vision of him sitting back in a chair, scratching his belly, enjoying giving the usual lecture on old buildings and plumbing that he reserved for female callers. She wouldn’t have been surprised if part of it included the phrase: ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, love.’

‘We did rip it out and start from scratch,’ said Marcella in an icy-cold voice. ‘Three years ago. I know, because I wrote the cheque. I write the cheques for your company too, the retainer that says you get someone here immediately in an emergency situation. The water will reach the electricity sockets soon and when somebody is electrocuted, I’ll be the one suing your company for failing to respond as per your contract. What do you think the insurance company will pay out for a dead person?’

‘.. . er, well…’

‘It’s eight thirty. I expect someone here within the hour,’ ‘ Marcella finished, and hung up.

‘You’ll have to teach me how to do that,’ Julie said from the floor.

‘That wasn’t a very good demonstration,’ Marcella sighed.

‘I slightly lost my temper, and you lose any moral high ground if you do that.’

‘But still -‘ said Julie. ‘I’m sending my boyfriend over to you later so you can tell him that survey about how working women still do all the housework.’

‘Can’t use the vacuum cleaner?’ Marcella said, making her way to the stairs.

‘I’m not sure he knows we have one.’

‘Two options, Julie …’ Marcella sat on the third step and began putting back on her boots. ‘You can tell him to pack his bags, but it’s better to work with him on the issue of cleaning the house and sharing it a bit more. Explain that it’s important to you and reach some sort of compromise.’

‘You mean I shouldn’t sit him down and give him the

ultimatum?’ Julie looked surprised. Her favourite magazines were very keen on dumping the wrong guy instead of wasting time on him. Dump Mr Wrong and find Mr Right.

‘Ultimatums never work. Compromise does.’ Marcella zipped up her second boot. ‘If you love him and he loves you, you’ll work it out. But you may have to live with it. I don’t know if you can really change anybody. You have to decide whether it’s worth it to stay with them and their faults, or to be without them.’

As she made it to the sanctity of her office, she wished that someone had said that to her when she was Julie’s age.

Compromise was a dirty word back then. Arguments were all about standing up for your rights and reading the riot act to any man who dared to argue. Poor Harry, her ex-husband, had felt the brunt of her Alexis Colby impersonation many times. Her life might have been different if a wise older woman had explained the true facts of life to her years ago. It was too late for her now.

She sat down at her desk and made her daily phone call to Ingrid.

‘Hello, what are you up to?’ she said cheerily, much as she did every day.

She’d learned early on that the cliched ‘How are you feeling?’ was a disaster; after all, how could Ingrid be feeling?

‘I feel terrible!’ Ingrid had shrieked at her one day and Marcella didn’t know what was the more shocking: to hear her friend cry out in such obvious pain or the fact that Ingrid hadn’t managed the careful bereaved person’s lie: ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ She wanted Ingrid to be honest with her and yet it was still hard to hear such honesty.

‘What am I up to? Not much,’ said Ingrid dully.

Nobody hearing her on the phone would recognise her as the country’s bright, intelligent top broadcaster any more.

‘Tom, David’s second-in-command, is coming over,’ she added. ‘I can’t bear to have to deal with it, but I’ve got to.’

‘OK,’ said Marcella, stuck for words, an almost unheard of occurrence, as Harry would say.

‘Would you like me to come by later?’

‘No.’ Ingrid’s tones were still lifeless. ‘I’m fine. Better off on my own. Besides, if I’m up to it, I’m going into the store in the afternoon, and then and Sigrid insists on taking myself and the kids out tonight before Ethan goes away, which I’m not really in the mood for, so I’d be no company, to be frank.’

Marcella hung up, feeling a powerful relief that she’d never loved anybody the way Ingrid had loved David. To witness such naked grief was like standing beside someone with their skin blistering and burning, and yet feeling no pain apart from mild heat at being close by. If that was love for you, then it was better that she was on her own. Better that it was too late for her to fall in love.

On Sky News that morning, there had been footage of a storm in the Pacific. Shots of exotic trees bent double by the wind, and houses tumbled into debris. Those poor people, Ingrid said out loud, and then realised she’d said it automatically.

She didn’t feel it. She didn’t really feel sorry for them because she was too numb from her own sorrow.

And still, life was going on for other people. They got up every morning, laughed as they listened to the radio, kissed their loved ones goodbye, bought chocolate at lunch and said to hell with the diet, went out with friends, talked loudly, drank red wine, curled up safely in their beds.

While Ingrid’s life had stopped with a crash as if she’d hit a brick wall.

Just as the human mind struggled to assimilate the notion of infinity, Ingrid knew she couldn’t cope with the idea of a world without David. His absence was too huge.

What would she do for the rest of her life without him?

It would have been different if the children were still small: then, she’d have had a reason for getting up every day.

Mothering, being the lioness guarding her cubs, she could have done that.

Being the mother of adult children was different. Her children were able to get on with their own lives and come to terms with their grief on their own. Ethan had dealt with it the way he’d dealt with all emotional crises since he was a child - he rushed into the rest of his life to fill up the space where his father used to be.