Once in a Lifetime (27 page)

He went to parties, gigs, out to clubs with friends. He spent hours on the computer in his room or playing with his Wii, with only the rumble of music from his bedroom as a sign that he was there.

For a while Molly had moved back into her old room at home, leaving Natalie minding the cats. She’d kept order in the house because Ingrid was no longer able to.

When Ingrid couldn’t sleep at night, a common occurrence, she sat up and watched Sky News and CNN, searching for worse and worse stories because only then could she rationalise her own suffering.

Other people lost loved ones, in bombs or storms or famines. They had to cope, so she must too.

Only when dawn crept into the sky was Ingrid finally able to sleep, which meant she didn’t come downstairs till noon, bleary-eyed and exhausted.

Molly had taken compassionate leave, and when that was over, she used some of her holidays so she wasn’t at work all the time.

‘I’m going in for half a day,’ she’d said one day at noon, when Ingrid was standing in the kitchen in her dressing gown, stuck halfway between the coffee maker and the fridge, wondering what she needed to do next. Even making coffee presented too much choice.

‘Is Ethan about?’ Ingrid asked. She’d heard the deep rumble of his voice in the kitchen, just before she came downstairs.

But now there was no sign of him.

‘He’s gone out,.’ Molly said quickly.

Ethan was avoiding her, Ingrid realised.

‘He’s keeping out of my way,’ she said tearfully on the phone to her sister, Flora. ‘It’s as if he thinks it’s my fault somehow, that I should have looked after David better, or realised he was ill…’

‘Ethan loves you, Ingrid,’ said Flora gently. ‘He doesn’t blame you in the slightest, I know that. You know that really.

I think the problem is that he can only cope with his pain and not yours too.’

Ingrid had been stunned. It was true, she realised. Her grief was so overwhelming, people backed off from it. Only the staunchest friends were able to go the distance, and Ethan simply wasn’t experienced enough to do it.

That was when she realised why Molly had moved home: not for comfort from her mother, but so she could give comfort to her mother.

The ultimate role reversal.

Despite being grateful for dear Molly’s love, Ingrid felt another weight settle painfully on her shoulders. She wasn’t the feisty mother lioness any more, she’d become a burden to her cubs, needing their protection.

She told Ethan and Molly she wanted to talk to them over dinner one night, and roused herself enough to cook properly instead of heating yet another microwave dinner and leaving it half-eaten.

She made roast chicken, stuffing and roast potatoes, and when she cried as she was making it, she turned the news on loudly so she could dose herself with more there-are-otherpeople-worse-off therapy.

She opened a bottle of wine, put out her favourite red napkins, and rearranged the position of the table in the kitchen, pushing one end against the wall, so that the empty space where David used to sit was not so obvious. This is our new family unit, she was trying to say without using

words. She didn’t accept it herself, but it was time to do a little mothering and help her children believe it.

‘You need to go back to your apartment,’ she told her daughter firmly. ‘We have to move on, Molly.’

Ingrid hated it when people said that to her - move on.

Like David’s dying was a little blip in her life instead of the biggest agony she’d ever lived through. Move on from the man she’d loved for over half her life? What an insult.

But those words could be useful. ‘I’m fine, Molly - well, as fine as I can be,’ Ingrid amended.

‘I like being here, Mum,’ Molly protested.

‘I like having you here, my love, but you’ve put your life on hold and you know Dad, he’d have hated that. He was so proud of you in every way and he’d want you to go on living, not staying here trying to keep me on the straight and narrow.’

Molly half laughed, half cried. She nodded.

‘And Ethan, I think you should go back to your travelling.

The rest of the gang are in Australia now and, if you leave soon, you’ll still have at least three months with them.’

Ethan fiddled with his fork. ‘I’d love to, but it seems wrong …’

‘It’s not wrong,’ said his mother briskly. ‘You can’t give up your dreams for me. Dad would have been so upset. You know how he used to tease me for worrying about you, wishing you’d email more often.’

They all smiled fondly, and Ingrid felt her heart ache. What she wouldn’t give to return to that time when they were still a family, when worrying about what might happen to Ethan was her main anxiety. She hadn’t appreciated that properly.

Why was happiness only obvious when it was gone?

‘You’ll have to email more, that’s my only stipulation,’

Ingrid went on, wondering where she was getting the strength to play this tough-but-happy-mother person.

‘I promise,’ said Ethan eagerly.

Ingrid made herself look at the storm on Sky News for a little longer and then she switched it off. When Molly phoned, she was looking into the wardrobe and thinking about getting dressed.

‘I can cancel going to the launch, Mum,’ Molly said. ‘If you’re going into the store for the first time today, you need someone with you. There’s no problem with me cancelling, they’ll understand ‘

‘No, don’t cancel anything,’ her mother replied. She’d picked today precisely because it was a hectic and unmissable day in Molly’s office: the delivery of an important report to the media. She wanted Molly to slip back into her own life and not feel that she had to be Ingrid’s shadow.

‘I’ll be fine, honestly. Besides, Tom is coming round early and we might go together.’

She didn’t say that it was unlikely she’d travel into the store with Tom. David’s old second-in-command was a sweet man, but without a shred of charisma. Tom had wanted to visit for ages now but she’d kept putting him off.

He said he’d understood if she preferred not to meet in Kenny’s: ‘too many reminders,’ as he’d put it.

But he was coming here today and there were just as many reminders, maybe more, in the house she’d shared with David.

Every little thing told her he was gone.

She’d cried the first night she’d remembered to put out the bins. That had been David’s job. There was nobody to read a bit out of the paper to, nobody to drink the second cup of coffee in the percolator. The unconscious things were almost worse.

She felt helpless at night when she didn’t know when to go to bed, when to switch off the TV and end the day. They’d done that together. Now it was her choice and hers alone.

She had just dressed when the doorbell rang at half past nine.

Ingrid thought it was Tom arriving early, but it was Carlos, her producer from work.

‘You’re not returning my calls, so I thought I’d surprise you,’ he said, giving her a hug.

‘Coffee?’ she asked, flustered at this intrusion into her den.

‘Yeah,’ he said, putting a patisserie bag with some cakes on the table.

As usual, Carlos got straight to the point.

‘Do you think you’d like to come back soon?’

He walked around the kitchen as he talked, the same way he used to do it in the office. Perpetual motion, that was Carlos. He’d walk around picking up pictures, looking at them, putting them down, sweeping a bit of dust off a shelf, craning his head to look at the spines of books he’d looked at just the other day. Some people found it disconcerting, but not Ingrid. She understood that high-energy thing. Today, his energy was jarring. It reminded her of the life she used to have. She wanted to avoid that reminder. The comparison was too painful.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, in answer to his question. ‘I don’t know if I’m able to come back yet.’ It was, Ingrid knew, the wrong answer. The right answer was, Yes, I’m desperate to leap back into the saddle again and be the current affairs queen of the flagship TV show, but her heart wasn’t in it.

She’d read the books on grief - well, she’d flicked through them and thrown them down on to the big pile of reading matter by her bed. But the bits she’d read said that getting back into the real world was an important part of recovering your life. Your beloved might have died but you’re still alive, was the general theme and Ingrid understood it perfectly - in theory. In reality it was different. She simply didn’t care.

Unbelievably, she didn’t watch the show she’d once lived and breathed for. She scanned the newspapers because they were still delivered to the house, but she looked at the headlines with little interest. Political scheming, by-elections disastrously lost, earthquakes, coups - she didn’t care. She didn’t even get the papers on Sunday, the one day they didn’t have

them delivered. It had been part of the routine, to go to the shop and get them, to pick up croissants for breakfast. Why bother? Ingrid had decided that, quite frankly, the world could carry on without her.

‘I just wanted you to know that they’re grooming Joan to take over,’ Carlos went on.

‘Oh,’ said Ingrid. ‘Joan … she probably won’t be bad at it. She needs to work on her ‘s’s though; too much sibilance when she talks.’

‘God, I know,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s that keen on Joan, and you know she’ll want a wardrobe allowance.’

Ingrid laughed, the sort of laugh she did now, a hollow one. She could count on one hand the number of times she had really laughed since David had died.

‘Wardrobe allowance? She should be so lucky,’ she said.

Ingrid had had a tiny wardrobe allowance. Even someone who had to appear on screen twice a week and look grave and intelligent and deliver major news stories had to pay for pretty much all her own clothes.

‘She’s thirty-seven,’ Carlos added.

Once, that would have been the clincher for Ingrid. Not any more.

‘Pretty, too,’ Ingrid commented. She wasn’t that keen on Joan herself. Not a team player; she appeared to have no understanding that the show came out twice a week because of the hard work of a lot of other people. Ingrid had always been aware that, while she was the public face of the show, there was a whole team behind it.

‘I thought you’d be more upset,’ Carlos said.

Ingrid faced him and he thought how dreadful she looked, almost unrecognisable as the famous Ingrid Fitzgerald he’d loved working with for all those years. It wasn’t just that she was thinner, her face verging on gaunt; more a deadness in her eyes, a lack of expression. There was no spark of animation about Ingrid now.

‘So did I,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Carlos.’

‘They’re going to make a decision by the end of next week.

So, if you still want the job, you need to come back. You need to phone in, talk to someone, talk to the Director General,’ Carlos said. ‘I hate seeing you like this, Ingrid.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ she said bitterly. ‘Thanks, you’re a good friend. Shut the door on your way out, will you?’

Next to ring the bell was Tom from Kenny’s, who arrived about half an hour after Carlos had left. On the way to open the door, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. Not a good look, she thought, realising, although not caring, why Carlos had seemed so shocked at her appearance.

Her hair was sort of brushed, but she hadn’t been to the hairdressers since before David had died and her roots were that streaky silvery brown that suited nobody, certainly not herself. She wore no make-up and her face gleamed with the excess moisturiser she’d slathered on in an attempt to make her skin feel less taut. Ingrid couldn’t be bothered with dressing well either. Today, she wore black track-suit bottoms and a sweatshirt of the sort of pale pink Marcella called ‘nursing home chic’.

‘Throw it out,’ Marcella had said one day, a long time ago, when she’d seen Ingrid wearing it.

‘I like it, it’s comfortable,’ Ingrid had said.

‘It makes you look like you’re on your way to get a blood transfusion,’ Marcella had replied. ‘Throw it out!’

Perversely, Ingrid had kept it, and today it seemed like the right thing to wear. She might not need a blood transfusion, but if they could give her a life transfusion, a David transfusion, then maybe she’d be OK.

Tim was all business and clearly had absolutely no idea what to say to her.

‘Ingrid, my dear.’ He tried a brief hug, which felt extremely strange because Tim wasn’t a hugger.

He refused tea or coffee and sat at the dining-room table

opposite her. Ingrid steeled herself to cope with it. All mention of the business reminded her too much of David; she’d had to force herself to visit the solicitor’s office to talk about David’s will, and only went through with it because she was the executor.

The company auditors were desperately keen to talk to her, but she couldn’t face them yet. Perhaps when probate was sorted out, she thought miserably. Then she could look at the company and consider how she was to run it, given that David’s will had give her the controlling interest.

Tom started off with pages of figures about where the company stood in the quarterly report and Ingrid, who had always had a good head for numbers, found that she couldn’t concentrate on any of it. The numbers looked bad, though.

Surely that couldn’t be right? Kenny’s was doing well, that’s what David had told her. Was that why the auditors had been phoning so often, to give her this appalling news? She didn’t want Tom beside her telling her bad news, she wanted David saying it was all going to be fine.

Finally, she’d had enough. ‘I can’t concentrate today, Tom,’

she said. ‘What’s the bottom line?’