Once in a Lifetime (41 page)

Race memory?’ said Des.

‘Or some older and wiser instinct?’ suggested Star. ‘Your mother and I talked about alcoholism being in the blood, but she could never allow herself that, felt it was a cop-out. She said if anyone should not want to drink, it should have been her.’

‘But there’s a genetic link, for sure,’ Natalie said. ‘My flatmate, Molly, told me to go online to investigate what I should do or say to Lizzie, and it’s a genetic disease. Everyone in Lizzie’s house drinks like fishes.’

‘I hope it’s passed you by,’ Des said gravely. ‘You’ve no idea how closely Bess and I watched you when you were a teenager, Natalie, in case you went out with your pals and

got terribly drunk. It’s a dreadful legacy. That was partly what your mother wanted to protect you from.’

‘But what about my granddad and my uncle?’

Again, Des and Star caught each other’s eyes.

‘Your uncle lives in Australia. Greg is a lovely man. Leaving Ireland was a bit of an escape for him too,’ Des said. ‘I’m sure he’d love to meet you one day and introduce you to your cousins. Your granddad is dead, I think.’

‘You know, Natalie, Dara grew up without a mother, and that was a tremendous loss in her life. She wanted more for you and she thought that Des would marry again, make a new life and you’d have a mother.’

‘I love Bess, but she wasn’t my real mother, I always knew that,’ Natalie said, grabbing her father’s hand and squeezing it to show she meant no offence to Bess.

‘You were nearly five when Bess came along,’ Des said.

‘You knew she wasn’t your real mother.’

‘I have a lot of Dara’s things in the attic,’ Star said, ‘all waiting for you.’

‘Mum’s things,’ breathed Natalie.

‘There’s a lot of stuff up there, Natalie,’ Star warned. ‘Lots of people have given me secrets to keep. It will take me time to find your mum’s, I can’t do it tonight.’

‘OK,’ said Natalie, downcast. Now that she was here, she wanted to know it all right away.

‘Let’s sit and talk about Dara,’ Star suggested. There was another reason she was in no rush to show Natalie all the things Dara had given her: Natalie needed time for the information to sink in. Better to learn it all gently and slowly.

‘I love your house,’ Natalie said, looking around. ‘It’s so beautiful. I feel at home here.’

‘You were nearly born on this floor,’ Des said, smiling.

‘Let me tell you all about that,’ Star said, and she began to recount the story.

Fourteen

Trust your instincts. I didn’t trust any part of me, so I discounted my instincts too. But when I thought about it, nine times out of ten, my original instinct had been right. I just hadn’t paid attention to it.

Grief took many paths. Ingrid had flicked through a book that told her about the Kubler-Ross method of defining loss.

This tracked various stages of suffering, including anger, and ending up, hopefully, with acceptance.

Abra, the kind psychologist Ingrid had gone to, explained that there was no set time-frame for this.

‘Grief is a journey through a changing landscape and it takes everybody a different amount of time to travel,’ Abra explained. She was older than Ingrid, the perfect Woody Allen vision of a shrink, with serious glasses, a wise face with shrewd dark eyes, and a wardrobe of simple but unremarkable clothes that said she was at home with her internal vision of herself and didn’t need the fashion industry to define who she was.

They’d started out with Ingrid sitting in a chair opposite her and then, one day, Abra had mentioned that Ingrid might like to try lying on the couch with Abra seated behind her.

And Ingrid, who’d been used to people looking at her all

her professional life, found it very freeing to lie and stare out the window and talk, knowing she was being heard but not having to make eye contact.

It was a relief not to have to look at Abra the day she told her about David’s infidelity. She trusted Abra and her wisdom, but it was almost more than she could bear to have to let another person hear this awful story. Marcella was different, almost like a sister. She took Ingrid’s battles as her own. In fact, Ingrid hadn’t even told her real sisters, Flora or Sigrid.

She wasn’t sure why. Perhaps she couldn’t face the pity, or perhaps she couldn’t face them hating David.

She wanted to understand how she felt about him before she told anyone else. If she told anyone else.

‘I can’t mourn him properly because I’m so angry,’ she explained to Abra. ‘He lied to me about everything, because to live another life like that, you have to lie about everything.

Every thought, every feeling. Every time we made love, it was a lie.’

The idea of David making love to her and to another woman didn’t hurt as much as it had that first night. It wasn’t the thought of sexual cheating that pained her, it was all the other sorts of cheating. The subtle lies about where he was, how he felt: those lies that fuelled their day-to-day lives; that was pure agony.

Why hadn’t he just told her about the other woman? Why keep on living with her, yet deny her a chance to face this threat to their marriage? Was he in love with her or with the other woman? Was indecision the reason he’d never made a clean breast of it?

Now she would never know.

‘I might write a book to follow the Kubler-Ross ones,’

Ingrid told Abra. ‘When Grief Isn’t Enough - When Only Screaming Will Do. It could be a unique reference book, when someone doesn’t fit the standard grief model.’

Abra didn’t smile much. But she was smiling now, Ingrid

could tell from her voice: ‘Yes, that sounds like a good idea.

You’re certainly doing the master’s course in it.’

Ingrid felt a sense of pleasure at making a joke. Was she getting better? She hoped so.

She’d made progress in other areas of her life, too. She’d met the auditors to talk about the store, had been to a board meeting where she and the two other directors discussed interim plans to run Kenny’s until probate had been issued when Ingrid, Molly and Ethan, who’d also inherited shares, would be able to plan what to do in the future.

It was a bleak future from the store’s point of view. Kenny’s was just about profitable.

‘If it goes on like this, we won’t be trading next year,’ Tim said gloomily.

Ingrid had felt a little of the old fire in her belly. ‘Kenny’s isn’t finished yet,’ she said.

Ingrid and the two dogs waited for a break in the traffic. It was the last leg of their four-mile walk and they were all tired.

It was also the part of the walk that she liked the least, because they had to cross a couple of busy roads and she preferred walking along nice quiet suburban streets.

Today, she was too tired to hurry across the road.

A girl with long legs, a mini skirt worn over black tights and a cute black knitted hat perched jauntily on top of her blonde hair stood a few yards away, also waiting to cross. Despite the cool of the morning, she didn’t wear a coat. She was maybe Molly’s age, an age Ingrid thought when girls were impervious to cold and went out at night to parties wearing teeny little dresses and no jackets. This girl looked so happy, so young and fresh, her skin glistening in the morning sunshine, and Ingrid noticed that the cars slowed down a minuscule amount to look at her until, finally, a lorry flashed its lights, urging the girl to go. She gave a grateful wave and skipped across, leaving Ingrid and the dogs standing there, watching her.

Invisible, Ingrid decided: that was what she had become.

She had some hope when her hair was fluffed up and her make-up was done and she was wearing her good work clothes, but now, her face grey and bare of make-up and her hair a tousled mess, she almost didn’t exist. To the lorry drivers and the motorists she was just some crazy old lady walking her dogs, possibly going back home to sit in front of a fire and grumble bitterly about the world and young people in particular. That’s what people thought of her now. She’d crossed a line that made her invisible.

When she got home, she slammed the front door behind her and the dogs jumped with shock.

‘Sorry, doggies,’ she said. ‘Didn’t mean to frighten you, but I’ve got to do something.’

She phoned Marcella.

‘I want to go back to work,’ she said as soon as Marcella answered.

‘Hallelujah When?’

‘Tomorrow?’

There was a pause. ‘You’ll need your hair done. Beg your hairdresser to fit you in today. And I’ll get a make-up artist to the house in the morning. You need to look amazing.’

‘Does she do surgery too?’ quipped Ingrid.

‘Good point,’ Marcella said. ‘How are the lines? Do you need Botox?’

Ingrid could quite happily have lived the rest of her life without ever getting another syringe in her forehead, but she understood where Marcella was coming from.

‘I’m still fine,’ she said. ‘My forehead’s smooth, it’s the rest of me that looks crap.’

‘See you at nine,’ Marcella said. ‘Ingrid,’ her friend paused, ‘I am so pleased you’re doing this.’

‘I know,’ murmured Ingrid.

By ten the next morning, she looked a lot more like her old self. First, the blonde was back in her hair. Newly streaked

and blown out with a tonne of volumiser on it, she decided she looked like an American television anchor.

Marcella had convinced her to wear her charcoal-grey Armani skirt suit. It was now too big for her because she’d lost weight, but Armani cleverly hid this.

The make-up artist that Marcella had sent to the house had managed the impossible. Ingrid’s face looked dewy, shiny and alert, like she’d had some magic potion to drink.

‘God, you’re brilliant,’ Ingrid told the young woman when she’d seen herself in the mirror. ‘You’re a miracle worker.’

‘I can be when I have a lovely canvas to work on,’ the woman said.

Ingrid had been about to make another joke about the wrinkles in the canvas, but she decided against it. There was self-deprecating and there was self-destructive.

Driving through the gates of the television studios, Ingrid felt anxious and shaky, that same jittery feeling she’d had when she’d gone back to work after the children were born.

It was the same she supposed: death, birth, they were all linked. Great events that rocked your world and left it changed utterly. She wasn’t sure if she had the mental strength to go in and say ‘hello’ to everyone cheerily, as if she’d just been away on a two-week holiday instead of for three awful months. Yet it was important that she did just that. If Ingrid was going to come back, everyone needed to know. As Marcella had told her - although Ingrid knew it damn well herself - perception was everything in their business.

Three months off with Joan filling in for her, strictly on a temporary basis, was just about reasonable. Any longer, and it might be considered career suicide.

The office even smelled the same, she realised, as she quietly walked in. It smelled of coffee, croissants, a myriad of perfumes, and that elusive but unmistakable scent of people rushing around. Not sweat but energy. She’d missed it.

‘Oh my God, Ingrid!’

There were screams of delight, and then people’s voices dropped a little, as if they were remembering why she hadn’t been there.

‘Oh, Ingrid,’ people said sadly.

‘We missed you,’ said Jeri, the production assistant, and hugged her.

Ingrid thought of Jeri receiving all those red roses on Valentine’s Day, the last day of Ingrid’s old life. She hoped the romance was still working, for Jeri’s sake.

‘Great to see you back,’ said Martin. She wondered how his difficult divorce was going.

‘You too, Martin.’

She went around desks, talking, smiling, and not lying when people said, ‘How are you doing?’

There was no point beaming and saying, ‘Oh wonderful,’

which was what some people certainly seemed to expect after three months’ grieving.

Instead, she said, ‘I’m doing OK,’ and all the while she thought, If only they knew …

And then standing in front of her was Gloria, who was in on her plan.

‘Ingrid, wonderful to have you back at last. We missed you,’ said Gloria, and everyone nodded in agreement.

‘It’s wonderful to be back,’ Ingrid said, and walked into her office as if she had never been away.

‘I mean it, it really is terrific to have you back,’ Gloria said when the door was shut. ‘The place was half-dead without you.’

Ingrid’s office looked different. It had been painted and the desk had been moved; it now faced in a different direction.

‘I hope you don’t mind, but I thought it would be difficult to come back and see everything exactly the same as you’d left it,’ Gloria began. ‘It would be like it had been before ‘

It looked almost like a different office. A new place for a fresh start. Ingrid loved it.

‘Thank you.’ She grabbed Gloria’s hand in thanks. ‘It’s wonderful.’

‘Phew, I wasn’t sure,’ Gloria said. ‘We could put it all back the way it was before, it would only take an hour …’ ‘I don’t want it the way it was before,’ Ingrid said quickly.

Nothing would ever be the same.

‘Ingrid, how wonderful to see you!’

Jack, the head of current affairs, got to his feet and came around from behind his desk to shake her hand gravely. Ingrid turned her star quality on full blast and gave him her most glittering professional smile. ‘It’s lovely to see you, Jack.’

‘You look fabulous,’ he said.

Ingrid was aware that the look she presented was more artifice than anything else, but she was happy with that. She wanted a little piece of her life back, just a sliver. Most of it was gone; it had died with David and his locked drawers, but there was still one part that she could access and pretend that nothing had happened, in a way she couldn’t with Ethan and Molly. Here, in the television studios, she could pretend it was all the same and for now that would have to be enough.