Once in a Lifetime (43 page)

The producers had taken a suite in the Merrion Hotel for the after-show party, but before the cast, director and playwright even got there, drink flowed in the stars’ dressing rooms.

Charlie hadn’t wanted to go to the dressing rooms, she was still reeling from what she’d seen on stage. Was that what Iseult and her mother had been hiding from her for all these years? Was that the simple, crude answer to why she had no loving relationship with her mother? Had Iseult’s father meant more to Kitty than Charlie’s had? When had Iseult found out and why hadn’t she shared it with Charlie? Charlie burned

with anger and impotent fury. To think of all the years she’d spent worrying about pleasing her mother, trying to be the perfect daughter, and it had all been in vain. There had been nothing she could have done to be Kitty’s favourite: that role had been assigned by the simple, unchangeable circumstances of their births.

‘I don’t feel well, I’ve got a headache. I’m going home,’ she told her mother as they left their box. She couldn’t face looking at Kitty for the rest of the night.

‘Nonsense!’ said Kitty, refusing to brook any opposition.

‘I’ve got some painkillers in my bag, you’ll be fine - come on,’ and she dragged Charlie along behind her, with Brendan following.

Charlie looked back at Brendan helplessly.

‘Are you all right?’ he said, looking worried. Charlie was so pale.

‘No,’ Charlie mouthed at him. ‘I’m not.’

She wanted to sit down and cry in the middle of the theatre, but there was no hope of that because Kitty had her in her grasp, a surprisingly strong grasp for somebody who not that long ago had been very frail. Kitty battled their path backstage where the triumphant sound of champagne corks popping mingled with shrieks of excited relief after a successful first night.

‘They loved it, loved it!’ roared somebody.

‘They loved us!’ echoed somebody else.

‘You were fabulous!’

‘No, you were fabulous!’

‘Was I really, darling?’

Charlie had never resented Iseult’s success for a moment.

Still didn’t. But tonight, she didn’t have the heart to cheer this particular play. She felt shocked because an important secret of her life had been revealed to her in front of hundreds of other people. If only Iseult had told her about it beforehand, if only Kitty had.

As soon as Kitty spotted Iseult’s tall figure, her blonde Valkyrie head visible above so many other people, she was off over to her, shrieking ‘Darling, it was breathtaking.’

And Charlie watched them embrace, feeling angry and excluded.

‘Mrs Nelson, you must be so proud,’ said a woman with a notebook in her hand and a photographer beside her. The notebook was pressed close to Kitty’s face, as if it was a microphone.

‘Yes,

I am,’ Kitty began. ‘It’s nights like this that you remember the hardship of bringing up a child alone.’

Even Iseult looked a bit stunned at this. Their mother had hardly reared them alone. Iseult had been eighteen when Anthony moved out. And why ‘child’ and not ‘children’? It was as though Charlie didn’t exist. She felt angry tears prickle.

‘I am so very, very proud of my daughter,’ Kitty went on, flicking back a bit of hair so she could elongate her neck for the photographer. It was too easy to look pudgy in close-up.

‘Proud of both your daughters, obviously,’ said the reporter smoothly, catching sight of Charlie.

Kitty blinked as the flash went off.

‘Well, yes, of course, both,’ she said, entirely wrong-footed.

She flicked a mascara-lidded gaze over at Charlie, who turned and stalked off.

‘Mother!’ hissed Iseult. Kitty kept a fixed smile glued on her face.

‘Yes, darling?’ she said.

Teeth only slightly gritted with the long practice of many years talking to journalists, Iseult managed to steer her mother out from under the newspaper woman’s nose. ‘Excuse us,’ she said, still smiling her glued-on smile.

‘Mother!’ Iseult said when they’d reached a nook where nobody could hear them. ‘What did you say that for? Look at poor Charlie; you know it must be hard for her when everyone is congratulating me. You can’t say that you’re proud

of me and talk as though you only have one daughter with her standing beside you!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Kitty said. ‘She didn’t mind.’ But she wasn’t so sure. Charlie had looked very upset.

Iseult suddenly saw someone she needed to talk to and moved off, leaving Kitty feeling something quite alien to her: guilt.

She didn’t do guilt. It was a complete waste of time. She and Mairead used to talk about it all the time, usually over Kitty’s favourite vodka martinis.

‘Why do guilt?’ Mairead would say, waggling her glass for a re-fill. ‘Only women are supposed to feel guilt.’

The reason they could talk about guilt so successfully was that they both rarely felt it.

But now Kitty did. Charlie had looked stricken. Kitty hadn’t meant that she was only proud of Iseult; of course she was proud of both of her daughters. But Iseult’s success was so much more obvious, people could see it. That did make it extra special, slightly more wonderful. Besides, Charlie was probably just going to get headache tablets and she’d be back in a moment to drive Kitty to the party. It would all be fine, Kitty knew it.

Charlie didn’t come back. Kitty had to hitch a ride with Iseult, who hadn’t brought her own car and was being ferried around with the producers in a big black limousine, that surprisingly barely had room for Kitty to squash in. She’d felt quite affronted, particularly as, just before they’d got into the car, the journalist she’d been talking to earlier had tried to corner her to talk about her feminist days, and Iseult had shuffled her along going, ‘Not now, Mother, you’ve done enough damage!’

‘What do you mean “damage”?’ Kitty demanded, when they were packed side by side in the big black limo.

‘That woman writes a gossip column and anything you say

will be twisted,’ Iseult snapped. ‘This evening is supposed to be about the play, not real-life warring families. It’s been bad enough you implying that you’re only proud of one daughter.’

‘Why didn’t you warn me about her?’ said Kitty crossly.

‘It’s not as if I haven’t talked to the press before, I know what to say.’

‘Oh, Mother,’ sighed Iseult. ‘The only time you talked to the press was when you were a cog in the feminist wheel.

You were hardly the President. That was then, this is now!’

At the party, Kitty felt adrift. It would have been nicer to have been there with Charlie. Brendan and Charlie wouldn’t have known anyone either, they were hardly fashionable people. But Kitty could have hung about with them and started conversations with people who caught her eye. It was always easier to join conversations when you were already with people; it looked lonely and sad if you arrived on your own.

In addition, she was disappointed because people didn’t seem to recognise her. They should know her, her face had been quite famous in the seventies. True, she hadn’t been one of the leaders of the feminist movement, but she’d been so glamorous and the papers had always liked to take her picture when they’d been doing features on women’s liberation. ‘You make a change from all the ugly auld women’s libbers who want to burn their bras,’ one photographer had said winningly.

She had been important, she was somebody. But no one here seemed to know it.

She looked around the party in disgust. Who did she know, apart from Iseult - who had long gone off chatting, smiling, flirting, doing all the sort of things Kitty herself would have done in the same position. For the first time in a long while, Kitty felt her age. No, she felt more than her age. She felt decrepit and unloved.

She made it over to the bar where one of the members of the cast was camping it up happily, doling out drinks and banter.

‘Vodka martini,’ snarled Kitty, leaning on the bar.

‘You’ll have to give me a kiss first,’ he growled.

Kitty glared at him. ‘Consider yourself kissed,’ she said.

‘No, change that. Consider yourself fucked. Now give me a bloody martini!’

He gulped. ‘Coming right up.’

Kitty stood at the bar and drank her martini. She wanted a cigarette, but smoking indoors was now forbidden by the health and safety fascists, and she felt too tired to go out on to the terrace. Why did she feel so tired all the time? It wasn’t fair. In her mind, she was still eighteen and raring to go, adept at throwing come-hither glances at any man who passed her way.

If someone had asked the eighteen-year-old Kitty what she’d be doing when she was in her sixties, she’d probably have shrieked with horror.

She’d be dead by then, she’d have said breezily. Forty was ancient, sixty-plus was a hideous thought. Sixty was ancient Aunt Tilda with her mothy old mink, the hint of thermal underwear visible from under her blouses and a reddened complexion from being outdoors in all weathers deadheading flowers and separating the irises.

Tilda was mouthy, bossy and to be avoided at all times.

The second martini - super strength because the idiot at the bar had finally copped on - made it all clearer to Kitty.

Normally, vodka didn’t make her maudlin, but tonight it did.

Kitty wondered if she had turned into Tilda. She wasn’t the sexy dame of her youth: she was the irritable woman who’d managed to upset both her daughters. Well, one far more than the other.

Bloody guilt. It wouldn’t go away. Kitty found her cigarettes and lit up inside. Let someone try throwing her out for smoking in the hotel. Anyone foolish enough to try clearly didn’t know Kitty Nelson very well.

Sixteen

The Past

When Kitty was young, men were said to be after only one thing. If you gave it to them, you were entirely ruined and only foolish women did so. Even in the slightly rarefied and unconventional atmosphere of Cardinal Martinez House, the boarding school which Kitty attended, everyone believed this to be the case. Go the whole way with a man at your peril.

Kitty was reasonably aware of how animals procreated.

After all, someone who came from a farm and had older brothers could hardly be ignorant of the fact. So she knew what this was all about. But what she couldn’t understand was the power the sexual act appeared to give men. They were in charge of it all, not women.

‘Why is it that men are always supposed to be looking for sex?’ she said to her friend, Dervla. ‘It’s like we’re cattle, stupid things who don’t know how to say no. Or …’ she paused because this was a very shocking idea to even consider, ‘is it all a ploy to stop women considering that we might enjoy it ourselves?’

Dervla and Kitty were friends partly because they were on the same wavelength, but also because they were considered by the school staff to be the biggest troublemakers in their class and therefore spent a lot of time together, sitting outside classroom doors, having broken some rule or another.

‘You never hear anything about anyone enjoying it,’ Dervla said thoughtfully.

‘That’s part of the conspiracy,’ Kitty said, with spirit. Dervla was on her side. ‘They tell us it’s supposed to be no fun at all, like they say about having a drink or a cigarette. No fun at all. But what if it’s great fun?’

Kitty knew of a girl from home who’d gone the whole way and actually had a baby. She’d never met the girl, because Kitty was the daughter of a wealthy farmer and the girl was from the cottages down by the railway where, Kitty’s mother remarked with disdain, ‘they breed like rabbits’. There didn’t seem to be much sign of anyone enjoying sex there, despite the obvious evidence of it going on. When Kitty went past the cottages, there was an air of squalor and poverty about many of them. Not like most of the rest of the town where people took pride in their homes and gardens.

Kitty saw the girl with her baby and, for one moment, she thought of going up to her and saying hello or ‘well done’.

Kitty couldn’t imagine the hell at home if she became pregnant.

But

the girl looked bone tired, with untidy fair hair and shabby clothes, and the baby was crying loudly, a noise that gave Kitty a headache. She gave a half-smile and walked away.

There was no sign from the girl that an important step for women had been made either in having sex or having a baby outside the marriage department. Kitty overheard a friend of her mother’s saying that the parish priest had been down at the girl’s door, hammering on it and demanding that her parents cast her out or else they’d be in on the sin. Incredibly, they’d refused. Kitty knew without a shadow of a doubt

that if the priest had hammered on her parents’ door, they’d have shoved her and her pregnant belly out the door like a shot.

When Kitty was nineteen, she got a job in the office typing pool of her father’s accountant in Dublin. There had been war when she said she wanted to leave home, particularly after the trouble she’d got into in France the year before. She’d visited Bordeaux on the exchange programme and had begun a lifelong love affair with all things French. A few girls from school had gone too, but it didn’t seem as if they had any fun at all; too prim and proper, they’d been. All determined to be indoors whenever Madame said they had to be.

Blind obedience to rules held no interest for Kitty. Rules were made to be broken.

Madame had thrown her out when she discovered that Kitty had seduced her ‘sweet and innocent’ seventeen-year-old son, Charles. Charles wasn’t the slightest bit sweet or innocent, but his mother thought he was, and that was what counted.

‘Out!’ she shrieked, shoving Kitty and all her belongings out the door. ‘You ‘ave to leave, we never want to see you again.’

Charles, the coward, had looked miserably out from an upstairs window as Kitty had trailed down the drive, carrying her suitcase. His papa was peering out another window, looking equally miserable.