Once in a Lifetime (30 page)

Stacey would wonder what had happened if she saw the bin, the ruined paper opener, the drawer. There would be no hiding her presence in the store - Abel, the security man, would have to report anyone who’d come into the building.

Ingrid knew she had to handle this carefully. She emptied out the drawer and closed it neatly, then took the bin to the bathroom and washed it. When the place looked more or less as she’d found it, she wrote a note for Stacey:

Stacey, David had some letters of mine and I knew they were in his desk. I came to get them last night. They were so personal, I just wanted to have them. Ingrid.

Not a bad excuse, she thought grimly. Men may come and go but the ability to lie lasts forever.

She roamed the fifth floor until she found an empty cardboard box. As she piled in the evidence of David’s betrayal, she had a sudden thought. The only drawers she’d tried were in his desk. What if there was more for someone else to find?

She opened the elegant wooden cupboards that hid filing cabinets where he kept his personal records and tested the drawers.

Among all the innocently open ones, there was one that was locked.

‘More shit,’ she muttered as she wielded the letter opener again. This lock broke easily. There were more credit-card statements going back further. Ingrid scanned the first sheet, then scooped the whole lot out and into her box. She closed the drawer and pulled the door across. Hopefully, the note would satisfy Stacey’s curiosity. But then, perhaps she’d been in on it with David.

‘Tell my wife I’m in a meeting - I’ve got another secret date with my girlfriend,’ David might say, and Stacey would wink at him in time-honoured personal assistant style, knowing it was her job to keep everything a secret.

Or perhaps the other woman was Stacey. ‘Let’s lock the door, nobody will know …’

Damn David! She had to know who it was or else she’d go mad suspecting every woman in his life. But she had to be subtle about it. The media would love to hear that a television star like Ingrid had been betrayed by her supposedly loving husband. It would destroy the children if they were to learn of the affair. Ingrid would do everything she could to hide this other woman’s existence from Ethan and Molly. But first, she needed to find out who she was.

There was only one person she would trust with this pain and that was Marcella. Among her many talents, Marcella knew how to lock a secret into her mental strongbox and keep it there forever.

Marcella sat curled up on her couch picking hard skin off her feet and watching an episode of Sex and the City. She’d seen this particular episode many times before and owned the box set, but deciding to watch a show from your own DVD collection was somehow never as enjoyable as finding it randomly on television. In the ad break, she ran out to the kitchen and made herself another cup of decaf tea. She’d drunk pints of tea every waking hour of the day, until her acupuncturist told her that caffeine late at night was fatal

for sleep and, as someone with sleep issues, she needed all the help she could get.

The doorbell buzzed loudly.

Instinctively, Marcella looked at her watch. A quarter past eleven. Nobody called without warning at that hour. Either it was some emergency - surely they’d phone instead? - or it was a crazy person selling religion or junkies armed with syringes wanting to break into her house. They’d picked the wrong woman. She grabbed her alarm remote and her mobile phone, dialling in 999 just to be ready. Then, she peered out of the window beside the door and saw, to her utter astonishment, Ingrid standing there.

‘Ingrid!’ Marcella wrenched open the door and stared at her friend in alarm. Carrying a large cardboard box, and with her face a strange grey colour, Ingrid looked as if she hadn’t slept in a hundred years. ‘Come in. What’s wrong?’

Ingrid didn’t speak as she carried the box indoors and set it on the giant glass coffee table. Marcella noticed that all the scaly bits of dry skin she’d picked off her feet were on the table beside the box, waiting to be binned. Normally, that would have horrified someone as house-proud as she, but she simply swept it all on to the floor. From the look on Ingrid’s face, it was clear that bits of skin were hardly important in the grand scheme of things.

‘What’s wrong?’ she repeated.

‘This,’ said Ingrid in a monotone, gesturing to the box.

‘There were red roses on David’s grave earlier today and a locked drawer in his desk. I knew something was wrong.’

Marcella sank bonelessly on to one of her armchairs.

‘Roses?’

‘Red roses; not from me, and without any card saying who’d sent them,’ Ingrid said, opening the folds of the box with great calmness. She began taking sheaves of paper out and placing them in neat piles on the table. ‘I was out at dinner tonight with my sisters and the kids,’ she went on, ‘and the

memory of those red roses kept coming into my head. That and the locked drawer I discovered when I went to David’s office today.’

Marcella reached forward to put a comforting hand on her friend’s arm, knowing how hard it must have been, and how Ingrid had been putting off the visit to Kenny’s.

Ingrid flicked her a brief, wry smile. ‘I thought I was being brave too,’ she said. ‘I went in today because I knew Molly couldn’t come and I didn’t want her to have to be with me when I went through his things. I didn’t want to make her into a little handmaiden of death, to be with me all the time, worrying about me. Her father died, that’s enough to deal with. She shouldn’t have to deal with my feelings too. Do you understand?’

Marcella nodded, although she didn’t understand. She had imagined that having children would help Ingrid get over David’s death, because there would always be three of them who’d lost him. But she still couldn’t quite touch what that would feel like, being a mother. She stuffed that ache away in her mind.

‘I’m glad Molly wasn’t with me,’ Ingrid went on, and resumed emptying the box. ”She’d have noticed a locked drawer.’

‘Where was the key?’

‘I didn’t have the key,’ Ingrid replied. ‘Stacey hadn’t found it. The whole thing kept nagging at me through dinner. I decided I had to know for sure. I drove to Kenny’s and broke open the damn drawer with a letter opener. Every office should have one,’ she added with fake brightness. ‘This is what I found ‘

‘In one drawer?’ Marcella looked at her coffee table, which was now obscured by papers.

‘There was a drawer in a locked filing cabinet too. I haven’t gone through the stuff I found in there.’ For the first time, Ingrid’s brittleness appeared to crack. ‘I read one letter from

his desk drawer. He was away in America and she missed him. There’s a date on it, last June.’

‘They might be someone else’s letters,’ said Marcella, clutching at straws. She looked through the piles for the handwritten stuff.

‘David was in the US last June,’ Ingrid said flatly. ‘And why would he hide someone else’s letters? No, they’re his.’

She sank back into the couch and stared at the television.

She liked this show, it was fun and thoughtful. Samantha, Charlotte, Carrie and Miranda were having brunch in their Sunday-morning restaurant. Whatever panic they were going through, it was over. It had been made up. Ingrid felt a bit made up herself. Her life hadn’t been real at all. What she thought was real wasn’t.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Marcella said, searching. She found the letters and held them carefully in her lap, Exhibit A, Your Honour.

The flowers you gave me are nearly dead. I’m not going to throw them out until the very end. It was such a lovely weekend, wasn’t it? When I’m with you, I feel safe and protected.

When I was little, I used to press flowers and I’m going to press the roses …

‘What’s this rubbish?’ Marcella said, furious. ‘All this little girl stuff: “I used to press flowers.” I used to have a bloody Barbie, I don’t go on about it now.’

‘I told you, I only read a bit of one of them,’ Ingrid said.

‘I brought them here so you could do it for me.’

Marcella took a deep breath. ‘Red wine?’

‘If I drink anything at all, I’ll cry, and I don’t want to cry, not yet.’

‘Good point.’

Marcella left the room and returned five minutes later with

a pot of coffee and biscuits. ‘We’re going to be up all night anyway, so we may as well imbibe.’

She put on some music: Tina Turner, because no woman could fall to pieces with Tina singing ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It’ in the background, and began looking through the letters. It was a mammoth task: the unravelling of the myth of David and Ingrid. Like a fairy story in reverse. Like Sleeping Beauty. Except, in this case, the prince hadn’t woken Ingrid from a hundred-year-sleep - he’d made her age one hundred years in a moment.

Ingrid poured herself a coffee, sat back on the couch and let her mind roam.

She thought back to all the times she’d smiled indulgently at David at parties when women flirted with him. They might have thought they were being discreet: smiling, twirling their hair, touching him when they spoke, but she saw it all. And smiled at it. She trusted him. Believed he’d never betray her, that it was their private joke: all the women in the world could throw themselves at him and he’d do nothing, because he loved Ingrid and true love beat all other comers.

And all the time this.

She felt bleak, there was no other word for it. As if all the light had been leached out of her life, out of her. All the time she’d thought it would be her career that would fall out of love with her when she got old. Not her husband.

As Marcella read, Ingrid’s exhausted mind drifted back to an episode from a year ago.

Television was cruel, people said. David himself said it.

The first time a woman she knew had been subtly moved sideways in a television show, she’d been shocked, even though she’d seen it coming.

Grace Reynolds was a forty-something former model, who’d moved into television and charmed people with her sense of fun and intelligence. She’d co-hosted the breakfast programme

for five years, patting the hands of reality TV victims who’d come on to present their side of the story, smiling comfortingly at people raising funds to fight diseases that had killed their loved ones. She’d mothered people and viewers had loved it. Except the show’s producer felt the need for younger blood, a child-bride co-presenter for the male host - the craggy Jeff - who was at least fifteen years older than Grace.

The new presenter he found was twenty-three, fresh out of college with the looks of a Victoria’s Secrets model, all honey blonde skin and honey-blonde hair with a flawless complexion and glossed bee-stung lips that some in the TV station uncharitably suggested had already been clamped around certain parts of the producer’s anatomy. She started immediately and Grace, displaying the same characteristics as her name, bowed out, obediently following the script: She was tired of the early mornings and wanted to spend more time with her children and her husband.

That had infuriated Ingrid more than anything else: like making a hit-and-run victim admit that it was all their own fault, that they’d wanted to be smashed by a car, honestly.

‘You should leave,’ David had said furiously when he’d heard. ‘They’ll do the same to you, Ingrid, and you can’t give them the satisfaction.’

She’d felt a rush of love for him, her man, who didn’t want her hurt. It was true that she feared the axe falling and the shame of being shunted into the background for a crime that was pinned only on the female of the species, but she didn’t want David to know her fear. He’d worry more and she didn’t want that.

He had enough to worry about as it was, running the store.

‘Darling, I’m a lot stronger than Grace, it wouldn’t be so easy to get rid of me,’ she said. ‘Besides, I’ve made my peace with it all. I don’t want to go on working forever. I’ve got all those book ideas to work on, like the one about the cult of feminism in pre-Christian Ireland. I can’t do it now, not with

the show, but when the time comes and they decide they don’t need me and are ready to pay me a stonking great disappearance fee, well, I’ll be gone like a flash. No point hanging around telling the world I didn’t like working nights any more. I refuse to get pushed out of the way like poor darling Grace did.’

‘You sure?’ He still looked worried and Ingrid burned with anger at the idea of anybody in TV-land having the power to make her family sad or worried. They would NOT fire her the way they’d fired Grace, by the stealthy guerrilla attack.

That only worked on employees compliant enough to smile bravely and go quietly. Ingrid wouldn’t go quietly, and the powers in the organisation damn well knew it.

“Course I’m sure. TV’s a young person’s game. If I retired, we could travel more. Perhaps do that tour of Australia we’ve always talked about.’

It worked, David relaxed.

‘You’re some woman,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I thought you’d be angry over it all.’

‘I’m furious - for Grace. But not worried, love. It won’t be like that for me, promise.’

But, ‘What if it is like that for me?’ she asked Marcella on the phone later. ‘What if they force me out and bring in some kid to do my job?’

‘They won’t do that to you,’ Marcella counselled. ‘Grace is a sweetheart, far too nice for television, to be honest. She should have come to me and I’d have shown her how to handle it.

‘Does that mean I’m not nice?’ Ingrid laughed.

‘You’re a total bitch - didn’t you read the editorial the Irish Times ran on the subject?’

They both laughed this time.

‘No, you’re a professional, that’s all. Grace wasn’t. She was a lovely, gifted amateur, and you cannot get on in this job and be an amateur. You need the armadillo-plating of a professional.’

‘She wasn’t fired for being an amateur,’ Ingrid reminded her friend. ‘She was fired for committing the cardinal sin of getting older. And remember, she didn’t even age like a normal person. She aged like a model. You could grate cheese on her beautiful high cheekbones and her skin is fabulous.’