Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (66 page)

‘Kitty, my love!’ Gwen threw herself and her belongings on to the narrow hospital bed and had it not been for Charlie making a grab for the bottle, it would have smashed into pieces on the floor. ‘Look at you! What have they done with you?’

Gwen had been on the 1970s contraception marches, at a few French riots, and had even lived in a commune in West Cork for a few years until someone nearly died of listeria from home-made cheese and an absence of refrigeration, and social services had become involved. Gwen was fond of crumpled linen clothes, henna in her hair and perfume that managed to combine the scents of a Moroccan souk with full-strength YSL Poison.

‘I hope they’re giving you decent drugs.’ Gwen poked around on the small side table looking for jars with skulls and cross bones on them.

‘Nothing decent at all,’ said Kitty. ‘Painkillers that wouldn’t knock out a mouse. Now come and sit on the bed, Fiona,’ she said to the quieter lady. ‘Charlotte will get us coffee or tea.’

Not
Please could you get us coffee or tea.

‘Of course,’ Charlie said automatically. She felt a brief stab of pain at being pushed to the sidelines again. If Iseult were here, her mother would have embarked on the litany of Iseult’s latest triumphs. Charlie was ordered about like a waitress.

She spent ages getting drinks and when she came back, her mother was telling Gwen and Fiona a dirty joke.

‘And then he said, “Madam, that’s not where I was going to put the thermometer!”’

The three women cackled. Together, they were like the witches in
Macbeth,
only scarier.

When Kitty came home from hospital, things had got worse. At least in hospital, Charlie had been able to leave the premises. Not so any more. She was a prisoner with a very bad-tempered jailer. As there was no need for Kitty to put on make-up in the morning and nobody to be bright and chatty with, she lapsed into irritation twenty-four seven. Charlie, who’d taken leave from work to look after her, bore the brunt of it.

Without her make-up, Kitty looked her age and then some. The fall hadn’t shocked her, but being confined to bed and being unable to get around had. Charlie realised how accustomed she was to seeing her mother in full war paint.

Six weeks on, Kitty was supposed to be much more mobile, but she wasn’t improving as quickly as she should be–partly because she hated physiotherapy and often refused to go.

‘Charlotte,’ she roared now, breaking into Charlie’s precious early-morning me time.

Charlie sighed and got to her feet. Hello day.

‘I want my tablets,’ Kitty said when Charlie entered her bedroom. ‘Then I need my hair washed. It’s dreadful. In fact, I need it set. That place on Shop Street
might
be capable of doing it,’ she added.

Kitty hated Ardagh. She said it was a provincial town with pretentions just because it had a department store like Kenny’s there.

The city, now that’s where it was at. People could be themselves in a city, could live wild, vibrant lives and not be shackled by other people’s perceptions.

Since when were you shackled by other people’s perceptions?
Charlie would have liked to ask, but didn’t. She couldn’t face the inevitable fall-out.

‘Chloë’s, that’s the hair place on Shop Street,’ Charlie said.
She loved Chloë’s. It wasn’t as elegant as the tiny salon on the third floor of Kenny’s, but it was great fun. The owner was a fabulous man named Gordon, whom people thought was gay because he wore a brooch and made camp hand movements. Gordon had told Charlie he was heterosexual but women preferred gay hairdressers. ‘The business took off when I changed the name and put the picture of the kitten with eyelashes and a feather boa on the sign,’ he said. ‘Camp is comforting, and that’s what beauty’s all about, isn’t it? Comfort.’

Charlie still wasn’t entirely convinced. Gordon was so
good
at being camp. There was no sense he was putting it on, just a feeling that he was totally at home wearing vintage brooches in the shape of salamanders, with a red spotted scarf sticking out from under the collar of his shirt.

‘Chloë’s–yes, that’s it. Stupid name for a hairdresser’s. I suppose I don’t need an appointment?’ Kitty assumed that any establishment catering to the yokels of Ardagh would hardly require advance booking.

Charlie had half a mind to let her mother trail in only to be sent packing, but then she knew that would only mean she’d have to trek downtown again when they’d made an actual appointment. ‘You have to book,’ she said evenly. ‘I’ll phone later.’

‘Phone now,’ demanded her mother.

Charlie counted to ten. ‘It’s half six, Mother,’ she said. ‘I’ll phone at nine.’

Chloë’s had an appointment available at ten that morning and at twenty to, Charlie duly drove her mother to the door.

She would have liked to sit at a mirror and have Gordon fuss over her, clucking at the state of her hair, ordering a treatment on the house, drinking latte with caramel syrup spirited over from Kool Koffee next door.

But having her mother beside her would take the gloss off the experience. It was bad enough to have Kitty in Chloë’s in
the first place, annoying people with her negative energy, peering down her nose at the place like a cardinal who’d been teleported into a whorehouse.

‘Mum’s a bit–miserable,’ she said tactfully to Gordon. ‘She broke her hip and, even though she’s mobile now, she’s in a lot of pain. Don’t mind her if she’s grumpy.’

‘Fine, love, no problem. We’ll look after her,’ Gordon said. He was wearing a spider brooch today, modelled on one the Duke of Windsor had purchased for the Duchess from Cartier. His fine-knit sweater was lemon yellow and his shoes looked suspiciously like ballet pumps, half-implying that he might pirouette across the salon at any moment. ‘Sure you don’t want to wait, have something done?’

Charlie smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t have a moment to myself, Gordon,’ she said. ‘This is the only chance I’ll get to run some errands.’

She did the grocery shopping, dropped off some dry cleaning, took one of her mother’s handbags to the repair shop, and paid a few bills in the post office, before racing back to Chloë’s with a fine sheen of sweat on her skin.

She was expecting her mother to be in the inevitable mood, but when she walked in, a newly happy Kitty beamed back at her.

‘Isn’t Gordon a marvel!’ she trilled, twisting her head to admire the Medusa curls that clustered delicately around her face, framing it. Gordon had applied colour, too: a softening chestnut with paler hints in it to flatter Kitty’s skin.

‘Lighter strands around your hairline, that’s the answer,’ Gordon was saying, tweaking a curl here and there.

Charlie was shocked at how angry she felt. How dare her mother come in and annex Gordon! She had no right, he was Charlie’s friend.

At home, Kitty went off to her room to admire herself and Charlie phoned work to see what was happening.

Since she’d had to take so much time off, Charlie felt she
was missing out on the events in Kenny’s. In the first weeks after David’s death, everything had continued as normal, apart from the fact that David himself wasn’t there. Everyone said that the systems he’d put in place operated seamlessly and the store ran itself. Tom, the store manager, had stepped into David’s shoes with Lena as his second-in-command.

‘It can’t last,’ Shotsy explained on the phone. ‘Sales are definitely down, like pretty much everywhere else in the luxury market. They’re going to have to sell, but Ingrid hasn’t been in to talk to anyone yet.’

Both women were silent at the thought. Ingrid had phoned Tom and Stacey, but she’d been too grief-stricken to actually venture in.

‘Tom’s going to see her, though, to talk.’

‘How horrible.’ Charlie shuddered. ‘Coping with your husband’s death and his business being in trouble at the same time…’

‘I hope we still have jobs at the end of it all,’ Shotsy added.

‘I know, but it seems awful to be thinking that way,’ Charlie said. ‘We can find other jobs, but Ingrid can’t find another David, can she?’

At lunchtime, Iseult arrived and Kitty’s mood improved even more.

‘Hello, girls,’ Iseult said, dumping a bag from the delicatessen on to the table, along with an orchid in a china pot, and a stack of magazines.

Nobody could ever call Iseult anything but generous.

She hugged Charlie warmly, before picking up the orchid and giving it to Kitty.

‘Flowers for a flower,’ she said, and Kitty smiled a smile that made her look lit up from the inside.

Charlie stared at her mother, wondering how on earth Iseult did that. Was it the things she said, or the way she said them? Or was it simply that Iseult had a better relationship with their mother than Charlie could ever achieve?

‘Your hair is fabulous, Mother,’ Iseult went on.

‘I know, it’s lovely,’ Kitty said, preening. ‘Had it done in a little place here. I can’t believe what a good job they did. From the outside, it looks like a bit of a dump, but they can do hair.’

Charlie stifled anger on behalf of both Chloë’s and Gordon.

‘You look marvellous, too, love,’ Kitty said to her elder daughter.

Iseult was tall, leggy and had long hair bleached to Scandinavian goddess standard. Tumbling blonde curls were her trademark, involving much time with heated rollers. She was also, like their mother under normal circumstances, heavily into grooming and never appeared without nail lacquer, mascara and shaped eyebrows tamed with a hint of wax.

‘Thanks, sweetie. I’m parched,’ Iseult said, opening the fridge and looking inside. ‘I could kill a cup of tea. Or even a drink. Have you any wine open?’

‘In
this
house?’ Kitty was scathing. ‘Divil a bit. There’s a decent red in that cupboard by the back door.’

Which Brendan bought ages ago and which we were saving, Charlie thought with annoyance, but said nothing.

The wine was opened, tea was made, a packet of hand-made delicatessen cheese biscuits unwrapped, along with lots of delicious antipasti. And all the while, Iseult entertained them with stories about her new play.

The backers weren’t theatre people at all, but what was known as theatre angels–rich do-gooders, brought in to keep a production going. They hadn’t a clue what it was all about. They thought being involved in the theatre meant wall-to-wall fun and late nights at the Trocadero trading stories about great plays. In reality, it meant mixing with anxious, jumpy actors who worried over their lines, their roles and their direction, and needed lavish amounts of ego-boosting.

There was
some
fun, Iseult added, explaining how Edwin, the director, had a passion for the female lead’s understudy,
which was making the lead very cross. And then some screw-up with wardrobe resulted in five corseted gowns needing to be remade from scratch.

‘They’re raw silk, they cost a fortune, and they’re all tiny. None of them would fit a child, even with the laces fully extended. Jennifer, that’s the leading lady, tried hers on just to see, and of course her tits burst out over the top. Then, Iarlath, who plays her son in the play and who is a
nightmare
when it comes to women, says he’s going to rouge her nipples. He grabs a stick of greasepaint and goes for it. We all laughed like drains, but the costume woman’s new and she was white as a sheet watching Iarlath drooling as he tried to rub the greasepaint on, and all the stage hands crowded round like a shot, and someone had a camera phone, so Jennifer’s screeching that she turned down photoshoots in the lads’ magazines and she’s not going into them with red tits on some dodgy camera-phone picture. Leo, who’s playing her husband, and who can’t stand Jennifer, says the magazines would need to be paid to feature Jennifer’s tits, and then Edwin, the director, has to take her off to the pub to console her and tell her she’s fabulous, wonderful, etc, etc. And it all delayed rehearsals by another two hours.’

‘I wish I’d acted,’ sighed Kitty dreamily.

‘You’d have been great, Mother,’ Iseult obliged.

‘I’d have loved the costumes.’

‘And the red nipples,’ said Iseult, laughing.

‘God, yes!’ roared Kitty, and the pair of them were off, giggling with delight.

When lunch was over, Charlie tidied up around them and felt a certain relief when her mother went outside with her wine glass and an ashtray for a post-prandial cigarette.

Iseult patted the chair beside her and motioned for Charlie to sit down.

‘Are you doing OK?’ she asked gently.

‘Yes,’ Charlie fibbed. Then, ‘No, not well at all, actually.
Mother is not going to win any patient of the year awards and she’s–’

Iseult interrupted. She did it all the time, too eager to say her piece to let others finish theirs. ‘Yes, but she’s still in pain, Charlie, and think how hard it must be for her to have her routine broken. This is a vision of mortality, too, don’t forget that. Imagine falling and having bones break: the vision of the future it presents is simply terrifying.’ She drew breath, but before Charlie could intervene, she was off again. ‘It’s fascinating, don’t you think? It’s a story that has to be told, of old age and all it represents. I’m working on a screenplay on that precise subject. Well, it’s very rough right now, but the germ of the idea is there. Crash! Your life changes, you start to recognise the prospect of ageing, the familiar routines of your life are ripped asunder…’ Iseult was no longer seeing her sister. Her eyes were shining, focused on a distant point in her imagination.

‘Iseult,’ interrupted Charlie, ‘I know all that. I
am
being totally understanding, but my routines are being ripped asunder too. It’s hard for us all. It would be great if Mother could stay with you for a while. I can’t take any more time off work.’

‘Well, I certainly can’t. It’s out of the question. I’m so mani-cally busy,’ said Iseult. Suddenly, for Charlie, it was like being a child again.

Three years wasn’t a big difference when you were a grown-up, but to a child, it was for ever. Iseult had given up playing with baby dolls and dolly nappies and pretend feeding bottles by the time Charlie got into them.

‘That’s for kids,’ Iseult would sniff, wrapping a bit of a skirt around a svelte Sindy doll with long legs, a waspie waist and plastic breasts moulded like smooth mountain peaks.