Once in a Lifetime (28 page)

‘Well,’ he said cautiously. Then, he appeared to make up his mind and it was like watching someone leap over a cliff.

‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you, Ingrid, but the company is in financial trouble. It’s nothing that David was doing wrong.

It’s just that Kenny’s is a luxury department store, after all, and people have less money at the moment. We’re all being squeezed. No matter how many brilliant ideas we can come up with to market luxury goods to people, ultimately, they have to have the money to buy them in the first place.’

Ingrid managed not to gasp. Kenny’s in trouble. And David hadn’t breathed a word to her.

‘Right,’ she said, as if she’d known all along. ‘What was David’s plan? You know, the finer details of what he thought would work?’

She would not admit that she knew nothing about any of this.

‘I don’t know,’ Tom said. ‘To be frank, I didn’t know things were this bad, or how hard the banks were squeezing us, until David told me that he’d had lunch with Stanley DeVere. I knew that meant something.’

‘Right,’ said Ingrid again, trying not to betray her shock.

David had disliked Stanley DeVere and the whole DeVere ethos. In fact, dislike was too mild a word.

‘And did he tell you how that went?’ she asked. ‘From a business perspective.’

‘No,’ Tom said, ‘it was more of a “feeling their way”. You know how David was: he liked to keep his cards close to his chest.’

Ingrid bit back the word evidently.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’

She hadn’t known, but she was learning fast.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been up to coming into the store, Tom, and that I’m not up to speed on what’s happening, but what would you do in my shoes?’ she asked, letting her defences down for a moment.

‘Sell,’ he said bluntly. ‘Let’s face it, running Kenny’s is a massive full-time job. It was getting too much for David.’

‘But it was his baby,’ Ingrid said wistfully. ‘He loved the store. It was in his blood. He was like his father, for him there was a story attached to every part of it, every door, every window, every floor …’

‘But that’s being sentimental, Ingrid,’ Tom said, ‘and in the current economic climate, we can’t afford to be sentimental.

This is a very valuable business, if you sell it now. If you put your heart and soul into it over the next couple of years and still run it into the ground, it won’t be so viable. I’m sorry,’

he went on, seeing her stunned expression, ‘I know that’s probably the wrong thing to say to you, given the way you must be feeling, but I would be doing David a disservice if I

told you anything else. He was a brilliant sales man, a brilliant ideas man and it was hard even for him. Ingrid, this isn’t your forte, and I don’t think the children want to run the store either.’

‘True,’ she said.

Once he’d broached the tough news, Tom was all set to chat, but Ingrid gently got him to leave. Two visitors with bad news was more than she could cope with in one day.

Besides, she needed to be alone to think. If David had been contemplating selling his beloved department store and hadn’t told her, what did that say about them, their relationship?

That he was trying to protect her, or that he couldn’t share things with her? She didn’t know.

She let the dogs out for a final pee, pulled a coat on over her blood-transfusion sweatshirt, and left to drive to Ardagh. She didn’t want to go to Kenny’s and face it without David, but it had to be done.

‘Can I get you anything?’ Stacey hovered behind Ingrid. She’d been hovering ever since Ingrid arrived at Kenny’s. Ingrid felt sorry for her in a dispassionate sort of way. There was no etiquette for dealing with the first occasion your dead boss’s wife came to the office after his death.

‘No, I’m fine, thank you,’ said Ingrid, and then thought she was anything but fine. But somehow, despite all the parts of her that had been destroyed by David’s death, there was still some compulsion inside her saying, You must be nice to other people, not let them see your pain. They couldn’t see it anyway, even if you laid it out in front of them.

She remembered the neighbours who’d dropped into the house to give her Mass cards, funereal flowers and lasagnes, all saying sorry and that David was wonderful and wasn’t it tragic and awful and can we do anything? If she tried to talk to them about him, they backed off or changed the subject.

They simply couldn’t cope with it. The rituals of death were

a glorious part of tradition, but God forbid that anybody should have to engage with the actuality of death once the person was buried.

No, best to move on, find a new life and some peace: that was the trick they expected of the bereaved. Ingrid didn’t know how to make a new life for herself. She’d been happy with the life she had.

‘I could get a cappuccino from the cafe or tea or maybe water?’ went on Stacey.

‘Thank you, Stacey,’ said Ingrid, ‘I’m fine, really. Just give me a few minutes here.’

‘Of course,’ said Stacey quickly and scurried back to her desk.

Ingrid stood in the doorway of David’s office and looked around. It was odd to be here without him; she felt she was an interloper in his private space. It was all so unchanged.

Exactly the same as he’d left it. How? How could it remain the same when the person who created it all was dead and buried? There should be a scientific disintegration of people’s things when they were dead, a physical manifestation that mirrored the loss of the person. Their papers should crumble at the edges, their special cup develop deep cracks. It was wrong that physical things remained intact when the people who loved the dead person were falling apart inside.

The desk still shone and the faint scent of polish was in the air. The old-fashioned blotter he liked still sat perfectly square on the desk, his mouse mat to the left of it, the computer sleekly white beside it.

There was nothing for it. Ingrid walked into David’s office and shut the door behind her. This was his space, where he’d spent so much of his time when he wasn’t at home with her.

There were pictures of her, Molly and Ethan in beautiful wooden frames, paintings and a couple of old framed maps.

He loved those old maps when the boundaries of countries had been so different. The sort of maps great explorers had

used to trek to the Poles. David had always fancied himself as part of an expedition with sleighs and huskies and clothes that could withstand Polar temperatures. ‘I’m too old now,’

he’d said, the last time he’d dreamed about it. ‘No you’re not,’ said Ingrid. ‘You’re never too old; age is in people’s heads.’ She smiled now at the thought of it. Then the smile disappeared. Age might be in people’s heads, but bodies, they gave in when they aged. Your mind might be twenty, but your heart, now that could be old.

Most of the filing cabinets were in Stacey’s office, but David had kept some beautiful walnut cabinets in his. They had been locked, Stacey said, but she had the keys to most of them and today she’d left them open. Ingrid pulled out the drawers one by one, thinking of the last person who had opened them.

David. She slammed them shut and went to sit on the chair, where he’d died. She wouldn’t cry, this wasn’t what his life was about, this chair. He wouldn’t have had time to realise, her GP had said. With such a massive heart attack, it would have been very quick. No sitting in the chair, thinking of everything he was going to lose, thinking in pain of her and the children.

She sat back and closed her eyes, wishing to be close to him; but there was nothing. That hurt, feeling the emptiness where he used to be. The priest had talked about another world and God and love, and yet she sat here in this room where David had spent so much time, where he’d died, and there was nothing. She would never see him again; he was gone from her for ever.

Her sister Flora had such great faith and had come many times over the past weeks, sitting quietly with Ingrid, listening to her talk, hugging her while she cried, and telling her it would get better. She often held Ingrid’s hand, occasionally patting it gently. Ingrid wanted to feel comforted, but she couldn’t. Nothing comforted her now.

‘You have to have faith,’ Flora would say. ‘We don’t know

God’s will or what He wants from us. This is a way of testing your faith, Ingrid ‘

Ingrid couldn’t listen to any more. She removed her hand.

‘I know you’re trying to help, Flora,’ she said, ‘but it’s not helping. How am I supposed to have faith now? I’m not like you; I wish I was. If something happened to Brid, you’d be able to cope with it and make sense of it all. You’d see her in heaven - what did they say at the funeral about God’s house having many rooms? Well, that’d work for you, but it doesn’t for me. I don’t have your belief. Having faith in God when your husband has been snatched away doesn’t make sense to me.’

In her grief, Ingrid thought about God and His plans all the time. The priest at David’s funeral had talked about how believing in God would take her through this and how David was with God.

But David wouldn’t want to be with God: he’d want to be with them.

After the funeral, when the mourning party had retired to a hotel in Ardagh for coffee and sandwiches, the priest came round again and sat beside her on a stool, almost like a schoolboy ready for a grilling from a teacher, Ingrid thought.

He was young, perhaps thirty, and at any other time, Ingrid would have liked him. Flora had whispered that he’d worked in South America for three years, and before he’d come to their parish he’d been employed in a maximum-security prison.

‘Do you know for sure that David’s happy?’ she said. ‘I can’t feel it. I can only feel that he’s gone from me, and that absence is huge, huge and total. He’s not coming back. I am never going to see him again.’ She put her hands over her face and took a deep breath. ‘You say I will, but how do you know?’

‘We don’t know, that’s what faith is: trust in the Almighty.’

‘How can I trust the person who took my husband from me?’ Ingrid demanded.

The priest was clearly used to this type of discussion post funeral and took it in his stride. He talked of love, belief and the Holy Spirit guiding the bereaved.

He had no answers, either, Ingrid decided.

Now she pulled at the drawers on David’s desk, looking for something, something she could touch that would bring him back to her. The first two drawers contained stationery, but the third drawer was locked. Presumably Stacey hadn’t found the key. She dragged at it, it wouldn’t open. This was too much, too painful, she shouldn’t have come in today. She got up off the chair and left the office, shutting the door quietly behind her. She wasn’t going to cry, not in front of anyone.

‘Stacey, I feel a little weary, I think I’ll go home now,’ she said.

She slipped out of one of the side entrances. She didn’t want to walk through the administrative offices and talk to everyone, have them hold her hand a touch longer than normal, have them look at her with sad eyes, thinking, Poor Ingrid, how is she coping? That made it worse. Not the kindness - that was wonderful and people were so terribly kind.

But the pity, people looking at her and seeing her empty life ahead of her; that hurt. She knew because she’d done it herself to men and women who’d had loved ones ripped away from them before their time; she’d looked at them with the same eyes, thinking, Poor you, I’m glad it’s not me. Ingrid wasn’t ready for that today.

On the main street of Ardagh she breathed in the cool, fresh air. It was a beautiful day, still cold, but the sun was shining. She walked down the street, past a glitzy hair salon called Chloe’s, where the nylon scent of hair spray filled the air, and into a small florist’s, where she bought a large bunch of freesias.

‘Are they a present?’ asked the girl in the shop, as she expertly wrapped them in cellophane.

‘Yes,’ Ingrid said. They were a present, they were for David.

On the headland, where the church and its graveyard were situated, it was still a beautiful day, but windy. She could hear the sea crashing against the dangerous rocky crags below, known as the Twelve Apostles, deadly to swimmers and boats alike. The church was called the Black Abbey by the local people because it was made of dark stones and looked as if it had been cut right out of the earth; the colour of wet slate, its thin, pointed spires reached up to the sky.

Discussing where they wanted to be buried hadn’t been high on Ingrid’s list of topics for enjoyable evening conversation, but they had talked about it once and David had said that this was the place for him. It wasn’t the church so much, he’d explained, it was the graveyard. It was beautiful, Ingrid had to admit, if any graveyard could be called beautiful.

Spread out along the hill as if the church was the centrepiece and the graveyard a cloak spread beneath it, it clung to the side of the hill. It contained many beautiful examples of Victorian memorials. There were stone angels with lichen clinging to their soaring wings and giant tombs that hadn’t been opened in a hundred years, all Gothic and beautiful and wild. Ingrid could see why David would want to be buried here and she would be too, she thought, with a shock. She’d bought a plot for two. One day, she’d lie here with him, and that was frightening because even though she wanted to be with him again, she didn’t want to He in this cold ground.

She pulled her camel-hair coat tighter around her and walked down to the grave. It still had the signs of new grief about it. Amid the remains of the funeral flowers and the big bunch of daffodils she’d brought the week before, there was a tiny arrangement of red roses, placed as if they were lying on David’s heart, if such a thing could be imagined. Ingrid stared at them. There was no card, nothing to say whom these flowers had come from, and she looked at them for a long time. Who had left red roses for David?