Once in a Lifetime (51 page)

He could remember Ingrid’s outrage the first time she’d witnessed this.

It had been a Christmas drinks party at the family’s house outside Ardagh and several women in gleaming cocktail gowns were crowded round charismatic Andrew Kenny, as if poor Sarah, standing helplessly by with a tray of canapes, didn’t exist.

‘How dare they ignore her!’ Ingrid said, outraged. ‘What sort of female solidarity is that?’

David had been startled by her reaction. He’d never really thought about the way people treated his mother before. His mother was his mother and he loved her, even though he’d had to get used to her taking to her bed when the stress got too much for her. Something that seemed to happen a lot.

‘Well, you know, they’re friends of Mum and Dad, it’s harmless,’ David told Ingrid.

Ingrid had rounded on him: ‘It’s anything but harmless,’

she said. ‘There is nothing harmless about flirting with another man when his wife is right there beside him. How appalling is that?’

It wasn’t the first time David had seen this fiery side of Ingrid’s nature, but it was the first time it had been directed at him.

‘If you’re not going to do anything about it,’ Ingrid said furiously, ‘I will.’

She might have been only twenty-five, but she’d been vice president of the students’ union and her thesis was on ‘Female Equality’. Ingrid’s hair had been longer then, more blonde, and she’d swept over to where his father stood with two women. They were giggling girlishly, hanging on his every word. One kept touching his arm and he was clearly enjoying the attention. David followed at a safe distance, fascinated and slightly horrified at what was going to happen.

‘Mr Kenny,’ Ingrid said, in her most charming voice, ‘Mrs Kenny was just wondering if you’d speak to her a minute about the party?’

She stared pointedly at the other two women. ‘It’s such hard work organising a party like this, making sure everything runs smoothly.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Andrew Kenny, and moved off. If he was surprised that his meek wife required his presence, he didn’t show it. Ingrid turned to the two women, both much older than her, matrons, glittering with jewels.

‘We haven’t been introduced,’ she said coolly; ‘Ingrid Fitzgerald. I think I’ve met both of your husbands, though.

Have you finished with them, ladies? I’m assuming you must have, the way you’re talking to Mr Kenny.’ The women’s jaws dropped.

‘I should just tell you,’ Ingrid said, ‘I’m working on a paper on feminism and I’d love to interview people who are interested in demolishing the archaic values of monogamy. For instance, latching on to a new man while you’re still married someone else - it’s an absolutely fascinating notion. I didn’t think it would catch on in Irish society, but I see it has.’

Under their heavy layers of foundation, the women went pale.

‘Excuse me, I don’t know what you’re talking about,’

snapped one.

Ingrid stared her down. ‘I think you do,’ she said. ‘And if you think it’s good form to come into a woman’s house and flirt with her husband, I can assure you, it isn’t.’ And she looked them both up and down, then swept away to where David was watching, just as astonished as the two women.

‘Was it a bit too much?’ Ingrid murmured into his ear as they walked away.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I mean, their husbands are very good friends of Dad’s, and if they say anything …’

‘And you really think they’re going to go home and tell their husbands about this encounter, do you?’ demanded Ingrid. ‘God, David, I can see I have a lot to teach you about people!’ And she’d hugged him. ‘I couldn’t let those women hurt your poor mum.’

He’d loved her so much at that moment for her absolute fearlessness. There was nothing that would stop Ingrid fighting for something that she believed in. It was a heady feeling. It wasn’t so easy when her fearlessness was trained on you, though.

‘Your wife is on the line,’ said Stacey, dragging him back to the present.

Star’s tapestry was still on the table in his office. Lovely Star. For a moment, he felt irritated by Ingrid. For all she stood for: security, the right person, someone with ambition.

The sort of woman who made his father proud of him. He loved her absolutely, but she was the exact opposite to Star.

He picked up the phone and she didn’t say hello, just burst into conversation: ‘Sorry, David, but I’m delayed at work. An emergency. The Department of Health is having a press conference and I have to cover it in studio. I probably won’t make the dinner party, I’m really sorry.’

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Good luck, I’ll see you later,’ and hung up.

She was always too busy. Busy and fearless. Sometimes he got tired of it.

A few days after Star had come circuitously back into his life, Ingrid had to go to a ceremony to receive an award. The Irish Tatler Inspiring Woman of the Year. She’d had quite a few awards over the years, but she was very excited about this one.

‘I’ve never seen you like this before,’ David remarked as he lay in bed on Saturday morning watching Ingrid trawl through her wardrobe looking for a suitable evening dress for the event.

‘What do you mean?’ she said crossly.

Bloody menopause, he thought.

She hadn’t gone for HRT tablets, had ventured down the alternative route instead, using supplements like Black Cohosh and Q10. David, too, had been made to take supplements every day, until he rattled. He didn’t mind really, though he used to tease her about it in front of Marcella.

‘She’s trying to turn me into a young fellow, Marcella,’ he’d say plaintively, and Marcella would laugh.

‘Too late,’ she would say. ‘You’re too far gone for that.’

‘You don’t normally get this het-up about award ceremonies, that’s all,’ David said mildly and Ingrid murmured, ‘Don’t I?’ and went back to her trawling.

‘This is a big one,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve been feeling a little off the last week.’ Nobody was better than Ingrid when it came to saying sorry. She readily admitted her faults. ‘I tried on that red beaded dress I love and it’s too tight. I’m not eating any more than usual, I’m still going to the gym, but despite all that, I still look like I’ve got a big wad of packing around my middle. It’s so depressing,’ she added, more to herself than to him. ‘I’m just fed up with the feeling that I’m falling apart.

When I deal with one problem, another bit of me falls apart.’

Her joints were giving her trouble, he knew that, and her neck was sometimes painful because of a displaced cervical disc. That had been bad lately, which always made her cranky.

‘Everything bulges,’ she said gloomily, and he saw her put her hand up to her neck. ‘And why is it that, without anything I’ve done, the muscles in my neck are taut and the muscles in my belly are flabby? I have a six pack in my neck where I don’t want it. Why can’t you decide where you want the taut bits and have them all nice and loose in your neck and taut in your belly?’

David laughed then. ‘Ingrid, stop,’ he said. ‘You’re beautiful.’

She shot him a look filled with a regret that he’d never seen on her face before.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I never thought I was beautiful. I thought I was OK, ordinary; but when I look back at old pictures of me now I see maybe I was a bit beautiful, and I didn’t appreciate it. I had no idea of my beauty or its importance, and now, when its gone, I recognise that I was beautiful, after all, but I was too busy worrying about my looks to appreciate them.’

‘Yeah,’ he said with a sigh, and got out of bed. There was no point trying to rest now.

Putting on his dressing gown he went downstairs and turned on the sports channel. Moaning about bad backs was one thing, but moaning about getting old was something he hated.

He feared ageing. Marcella used to joke that men didn’t get older, they aged well, like fine wine, but she was wrong. Men got old too, and they hated it just as much as women did. If Ingrid, solid, reliable, loyal, wonderful Ingrid, thought she was getting old, then he was too. He didn’t want to get old, there was so much he wanted to do, so much.

That night, Ingrid didn’t wear the red dress, she wore a silvery one, some sort of silk taffeta thing with a bit of a fishtail that made her look mermaidy. Her hair was all curled tenderly around her neck. She looked as lovely as ever, he thought.

The awards ceremony was being held in the Mansion House and a car arrived to drive them there.

‘Hello, Mrs Fitzgerald,’ said the driver politely to Ingrid.

‘And Mr Fitzgerald.’

David felt his jaw tighten. He wasn’t Fitzgerald, he was Kenny - Mr Kenny. He wasn’t some appendage of Ingrid’s.

‘Relax.’ In the car, he felt Ingrid’s soft hand take his and she whispered to him, ‘Relax, Mr Fitzgerald.’

She thought it was funny? He stared out the window moodily and wished he wasn’t going.

At the ceremony, a beautiful girl from the magazine welcomed them and led them to their table. There were place names and they hadn’t been put beside each other.

The woman to his left was the wife of a famous actor, as famous for his amours as he was for his films. But the wife, who had pretty, slightly glazed eyes, didn’t seem to care. She watched her stunning husband, who was sitting beside Ingrid, flirt with other women at the table and yet seemed content.

Perhaps she didn’t mind sharing him, didn’t mind being expected to walk three steps behind. David wouldn’t really have wanted Ingrid to be like that, but the idea was still somehow appealing.

She perked up, mildly, when she heard that David owned Kenny’s. ‘Oh, I love that place,’ she said. ‘The organic night cream is fabulous. I love it. I’m truly into organic stuff. I was thinking of starting my own line.’

‘Really,’ said David absently, watching Ingrid talking to the famous actor as his equal, which was more than the actor’s wife set herself up to be.

The placement of the people around the table said so much.

The guests of stellar importance were seated beside each other, because they were part of a special club. Even if they didn’t know each other, they shared the experiences of being famous.

The same problems - having complete strangers come up to them as if they knew them, having fans think they owned them.

Of course, the famous actor faced this all over the world, while Ingrid was only known in Ireland, but still, it was similar. David

and the actor’s wife, however, were demoted to the appendage or consort department. Suddenly it rankled so badly that he wanted to walk out, just to prove the point. He was an important person in his own right, not Ingrid’s significant other.

David had been to many events over the years with Ingrid and he’d never felt like this before. Was this part of getting old, too, this dissatisfaction with everything, knowing that when he was gone all that would be left would be Kenny’s?

When Ingrid was gone, her name would be on this award, her face would be in photographs on the television station’s wall and all the places where she had made her mark. Her job meant that she could leave some other sort of legacy, whereas his name would more quickly be forgotten.

Ingrid smiled at him many times across the table, giving him the Are you all right, darling, I’m so sorry we’re sitting apart from each other look he recognised after so many years together. But he was angry with her. He knew it wasn’t her fault, that it was unreasonable, but he was still angry.

When she went up to accept her award, she spoke strongly about women who had inspired her and talked about her belief in the importance of women being kind to other women, and mentoring them.

Then do it very successfully. So should we,’ she said.

Everyone laughed and cheered, and then at the end, she thanked her family and David, without whom none of this would be possible.

And David, who should have felt happy and proud, still felt bitterly angry. He wished she’d left him out of the speech by mistake. He wanted to be angry with her for something.

He didn’t know why, but everything felt wrong and he had no idea what would make it right.

The following Monday morning, a girl on the perfume counter smiled flirtatiously at David as he walked past. He smiled back. It was a reflex; he smiled at all the staff. But there was

something about this girl, Rosemary. She didn’t look like a Rosemary, which seemed to him a gentle, old-fashioned type of name. This girl was anything but old-fashioned. Hot stuff, as his father might have said.

Andrew Kenny had liked hot stuff, the sort of girls who were the opposite of his own wife. There had been a Brazilian lady once, wife of a Latin American business associate. Chiara, she was called. Up to then, David hadn’t thought of married women having affairs with their husband’s tacit approval, but Chiara changed that. She was free, easy, and her husband must have known what she was doing.

David found this incredible. He had no point of reference for it. His mother had never given his father a moment’s doubt, it wasn’t the sort of thing she did. When he thought about it, and that wasn’t often, David was almost surprised he’d been born. He couldn’t imagine his mother in the throes of passion.

Ingrid had certainly never given him a moment’s doubt, for all that she was beautiful and much admired. But Ingrid’s looks weren’t the hot, flirtatious type that would lead a man on. Besides, Ingrid was a deeply moral woman and utterly loyal. She would die rather than be with another man, die rather than betray their family.

It was different for women, David reasoned, most women were driven by straightforward rules of trying to keep their mate and protect their family. But men were driven by more complex evolutionary needs, and those didn’t have to interfere with the family or the job of protecting the people they loved, did they?