Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (67 page)

When Charlie eventually inherited Sindy, Barbie and their by-now tattered wardrobes, Iseult was only interested in her own wardrobe and what to wear to impress the boys in her class.

Whatever Iseult was doing took precedence over everything else. Iseult’s first State exams plunged the Nelson household into a quiver of anxiety. When Charlie was doing the same exams, her mother told her: ‘Exams aren’t everything, for heaven’s sake. You’re only fifteen, Charlotte. It hardly matters at this stage.’

Now they were adults and nothing had changed.

Iseult could be very entertaining, and she was at least interested in Charlie, Brendan and Mikey in a way that their mother never could be. Yet there was always a slight undercurrent that
her
life and
her
exploits were far more important. Charlie always felt that Iseult’s interest was a benign fascination with those less blessed than herself in both the brains and the success department.

There was no way Iseult could take their mother in; Charlie must do it–that was her role.

It was hard to hold in the anger and the hurt, but Charlie managed bravely. What was the point in fighting with either Iseult or her mother? They didn’t count her or her life as important. It would take an earthquake in their lives to change that.

Late that night, when everyone was asleep, Charlie sat up in bed and wrote some more in her gratitude diary.

I want it to matter to my mother and my sister that I have a husband I adore who adores me, and a son who lights up my world. That’s something precious and I need them to understand.

Charlie stopped writing. This stupid journal suddenly seemed so hopeless because nothing had changed since she’d started it.

Perhaps her mother and Iseult would never understand. Never, ever. It wasn’t as though Charlie could beat it into their heads. It was impossible to change what other people
thought. The only thing she could alter was herself and how she dealt with them. Forget about changing other people: you can’t. You can only change yourself.

My mother is right: I am stupid. I’ve spent years thinking I could change her, and I can’t. How dumb is that? I’m going to stop now. Stop writing and stop hoping. She is who she is. If she doesn’t like me–
even writing it felt strange, prickly–
then she doesn’t like me. I can’t do anything about that. There’s no law that says your mother has to love or even like you, is there?

Iseult’s the same. To her, the only important life is hers. That’s always been the way it is. How do I change forty-something years of conditioning? The answer is: I can’t.

There was something very freeing about writing this. As if giving up trying to fix the problem was the only answer. Let it go, as Shotsy might have said. Charlie decided to give it a try.

Live for now. Not for tomorrow or yesterday. Now. You don’t know what will happen tomorrow, and yesterday is gone, so all you have is this moment. Enjoy it.

Marcella hated Mondays: waking up early after luxuriating in bed at the weekend, having to rush through all the little pleasures like having her morning tea staring out at the sea from her top-floor apartment with its vast picture windows. The traffic on the way to work was always hell, full of men in slower cars who felt their masculinity threatened by a woman in a seal-like grey metallic BMW. They cut her off at the lights and glared at her with irritation. A motorbike courier gave her a two-fingered salute when she got stuck on a yellow traffic box and he had to manoeuvre illegally to get past her.

‘Right back at you, asshole,’ Marcella growled.

There was so much negative energy about Mondays. She was willing to bet that none of the world’s greatest minds had ever done anything brilliant on a Monday. Nobody ever mentioned when Einstein had put the finishing touches to his Theory of Relativity, or when Marie Curie discovered radium. But it definitely wasn’t on the first day of the week.

The mood didn’t improve in the offices of SD International.
When she opened the door of the normally immaculate foyer of the Georgian building, she saw a disaster zone. The soft blue rug–a murderously expensive hand-made thing with the company logo of a maple leaf–was crumpled up by the wall, dripping wet, and the wooden floor itself was a shallow pond with soggy newspapers floating like lilypads. Marcella absently hoped they weren’t today’s papers, then reality asserted itself.

Julie, the usually beautifully turned out receptionist, was on her Wolford-clad knees with a towel, fruitlessly trying to stem the deluge. The water was at least three inches deep. Julie’s stockings and the bottom half of her skirt were sopping wet.

‘What happened?’ asked Marcella, standing just outside the door to avoid the water.

‘Something burst–a pipe, I don’t know,’ wailed Julie, stopping her mopping. ‘I came in at eight as usual to find this. I don’t know where it’s coming from.’

‘Did you phone the maintenance company?’

‘Yes, they say they can’t be here until after eleven.’

More negative energy zoomed around the room. Marcella growled for the second time that day, rolled up her charcoal-grey trousers to mid-calf, removed her spindly heeled boots and socks, and walked into the wet. It reached her ankles and was like stepping into a freezing puddle.

Reaching the reception desk, she checked to see if the water had got as high as the plug sockets. It hadn’t. That was one blessing.

She found the directory, flicked through it to find the maintenance company’s number and got through in an instant.

The man at the other end of the phone didn’t sound too worried about it all.

‘Arra sure, we’ll be there at eleven and we’ll have it sorted out. It’s the age of the building, you see. Old pipes and whatnot. You’d have had to rip it all out and start from scratch to make sure this type of thing didn’t happen.’

Marcella had a mental vision of him sitting back in a chair, scratching his belly, enjoying giving the usual lecture on old buildings and plumbing that he reserved for female callers. She wouldn’t have been surprised if part of it included the phrase: ‘Don’t worry your pretty little head about that, love.’

‘We did rip it out and start from scratch,’ said Marcella in an icy-cold voice. ‘Three years ago. I know, because I wrote the cheque. I write the cheques for your company too, the retainer that says you get someone here immediately in an emergency situation. The water will reach the electricity sockets soon and when somebody is electrocuted, I’ll be the one suing your company for failing to respond as per your contract. What do you think the insurance company will pay out for a dead person?’

‘…er, well…’

‘It’s eight thirty. I expect someone here within the hour,’ Marcella finished, and hung up.

‘You’ll have to teach me how to do that,’ Julie said from the floor.

‘That wasn’t a very good demonstration,’ Marcella sighed. ‘I slightly lost my temper, and you lose any moral high ground if you do that.’

‘But still–’ said Julie. ‘I’m sending my boyfriend over to you later so you can tell him that survey about how working women still do all the housework.’

‘Can’t use the vacuum cleaner?’ Marcella said, making her way to the stairs.

‘I’m not sure he knows we have one.’

‘Two options, Julie…’ Marcella sat on the third step and began putting back on her boots. ‘You can tell him to pack his bags, but it’s better to work with him on the issue of cleaning the house and sharing it a bit more. Explain that it’s important to you and reach some sort of compromise.’

‘You mean I shouldn’t sit him down and give him the
ultimatum?’ Julie looked surprised. Her favourite magazines were very keen on dumping the wrong guy instead of wasting time on him. Dump Mr Wrong and find Mr Right.

‘Ultimatums never work. Compromise does.’ Marcella zipped up her second boot. ‘If you love him and he loves you, you’ll work it out. But you may have to live with it. I don’t know if you can really change anybody. You have to decide whether it’s worth it to stay with them and their faults, or to be without them.’

As she made it to the sanctity of her office, she wished that someone had said that to her when she was Julie’s age. Compromise was a dirty word back then. Arguments were all about standing up for your rights and reading the riot act to any man who dared to argue. Poor Harry, her ex-husband, had felt the brunt of her Alexis Colby impersonation many times. Her life might have been different if a wise older woman had explained the true facts of life to her years ago. It was too late for her now.

She sat down at her desk and made her daily phone call to Ingrid.

‘Hello, what are you up to?’ she said cheerily, much as she did every day.

She’d learned early on that the clichéd ‘How are you feeling?’ was a disaster; after all, how could Ingrid be feeling?

‘I feel terrible!’ Ingrid had shrieked at her one day and Marcella didn’t know what was the more shocking: to hear her friend cry out in such obvious pain or the fact that Ingrid hadn’t managed the careful bereaved person’s lie: ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ She wanted Ingrid to be honest with her and yet it was still hard to hear such honesty.

‘What am I up to? Not much,’ said Ingrid dully.

Nobody hearing her on the phone would recognise her as the country’s bright, intelligent top broadcaster any more.

‘Tom, David’s second-in-command, is coming over,’ she added. ‘I can’t bear to have to deal with it, but I’ve got to.’

‘OK,’ said Marcella, stuck for words, an almost unheard-of occurrence, as Harry would say.

‘Would you like me to come by later?’

‘No.’ Ingrid’s tones were still lifeless. ‘I’m fine. Better off on my own. Besides, if I’m up to it, I’m going into the store in the afternoon, and then and Sigrid insists on taking myself and the kids out tonight before Ethan goes away, which I’m not really in the mood for, so I’d be no company, to be frank.’

Marcella hung up, feeling a powerful relief that she’d never loved anybody the way Ingrid had loved David. To witness such naked grief was like standing beside someone with their skin blistering and burning, and yet feeling no pain apart from mild heat at being close by. If that was love for you, then it was better that she was on her own. Better that it was too late for her to fall in love.

On Sky News that morning, there had been footage of a storm in the Pacific. Shots of exotic trees bent double by the wind, and houses tumbled into debris. Those poor people, Ingrid said out loud, and then realised she’d said it automatically. She didn’t
feel
it. She didn’t really feel sorry for them because she was too numb from her own sorrow.

And still, life was going on for other people. They got up every morning, laughed as they listened to the radio, kissed their loved ones goodbye, bought chocolate at lunch and said to hell with the diet, went out with friends, talked loudly, drank red wine, curled up safely in their beds.

While Ingrid’s life had stopped with a crash as if she’d hit a brick wall.

Just as the human mind struggled to assimilate the notion of infinity, Ingrid knew she couldn’t cope with the idea of a world without David. His absence was too huge.

What would she do for the rest of her life without him?

It would have been different if the children were still small: then, she’d have had a reason for getting up every day.
Mothering, being the lioness guarding her cubs, she could have done that.

Being the mother of adult children was different. Her children were able to get on with their own lives and come to terms with their grief on their own. Ethan had dealt with it the way he’d dealt with all emotional crises since he was a child–he rushed into the rest of his life to fill up the space where his father used to be.

He went to parties, gigs, out to clubs with friends. He spent hours on the computer in his room or playing with his Wii, with only the rumble of music from his bedroom as a sign that he was there.

For a while Molly had moved back into her old room at home, leaving Natalie minding the cats. She’d kept order in the house because Ingrid was no longer able to.

When Ingrid couldn’t sleep at night, a common occurrence, she sat up and watched Sky News and CNN, searching for worse and worse stories because only then could she rationalise her own suffering.

Other people lost loved ones, in bombs or storms or famines. They had to cope, so she must too.

Only when dawn crept into the sky was Ingrid finally able to sleep, which meant she didn’t come downstairs till noon, bleary-eyed and exhausted.

Molly had taken compassionate leave, and when that was over, she used some of her holidays so she wasn’t at work all the time.

‘I’m going in for half a day,’ she’d said one day at noon, when Ingrid was standing in the kitchen in her dressing gown, stuck halfway between the coffee maker and the fridge, wondering what she needed to do next. Even making coffee presented too much choice.

‘Is Ethan about?’ Ingrid asked. She’d heard the deep rumble of his voice in the kitchen, just before she came downstairs. But now there was no sign of him.

‘He’s gone out,’ Molly said quickly.

Ethan was avoiding her, Ingrid realised.

‘He’s keeping out of my way,’ she said tearfully on the phone to her sister, Flora. ‘It’s as if he thinks it’s my fault somehow, that I should have looked after David better, or realised he was ill…’

‘Ethan loves you, Ingrid,’ said Flora gently. ‘He doesn’t blame you in the slightest, I know that.
You
know that really. I think the problem is that he can only cope with his pain and not yours too.’

Ingrid had been stunned. It was true, she realised. Her grief was so overwhelming, people backed off from it. Only the staunchest friends were able to go the distance, and Ethan simply wasn’t experienced enough to do it.

That was when she realised why Molly had moved home: not for comfort from her mother, but so she could give comfort to her mother.

The ultimate role reversal.

Despite being grateful for dear Molly’s love, Ingrid felt another weight settle painfully on her shoulders. She wasn’t the feisty mother lioness any more, she’d become a burden to her cubs, needing their protection.

She told Ethan and Molly she wanted to talk to them over dinner one night, and roused herself enough to cook properly instead of heating yet another microwave dinner and leaving it half-eaten.

She made roast chicken, stuffing and roast potatoes, and when she cried as she was making it, she turned the news on loudly so she could dose herself with more there-are-other-people-worse-off therapy.

She opened a bottle of wine, put out her favourite red napkins, and rearranged the position of the table in the kitchen, pushing one end against the wall, so that the empty space where David used to sit was not so obvious. This is our new family unit, she was trying to say without using
words. She didn’t accept it herself, but it was time to do a little mothering and help her children believe it.

‘You need to go back to your apartment,’ she told her daughter firmly. ‘We have to move on, Molly.’

Ingrid hated it when people said that to her–move on. Like David’s dying was a little blip in her life instead of the biggest agony she’d ever lived through. Move on from the man she’d loved for over half her life? What an insult.

But those words could be useful.

‘I’m fine, Molly–well, as fine as I can be,’ Ingrid amended.

‘I like being here, Mum,’ Molly protested.

‘I like having you here, my love, but you’ve put your life on hold and you know Dad, he’d have hated that. He was so proud of you in every way and he’d want you to go on living, not staying here trying to keep me on the straight and narrow.’

Molly half laughed, half cried. She nodded.

‘And Ethan, I think you should go back to your travelling. The rest of the gang are in Australia now and, if you leave soon, you’ll still have at least three months with them.’

Ethan fiddled with his fork. ‘I’d love to, but it seems wrong…’

‘It’s not wrong,’ said his mother briskly. ‘You can’t give up your dreams for me. Dad would have been so upset. You know how he used to tease me for worrying about you, wishing you’d email more often.’

They all smiled fondly, and Ingrid felt her heart ache. What she wouldn’t give to return to that time when they were still a family, when worrying about what
might
happen to Ethan was her main anxiety. She hadn’t appreciated that properly. Why was happiness only obvious when it was gone?

‘You’ll have to email more, that’s my only stipulation,’ Ingrid went on, wondering where she was getting the strength to play this tough-but-happy-mother person.

‘I promise,’ said Ethan eagerly.

Ingrid made herself look at the storm on Sky News for a little longer and then she switched it off. When Molly phoned, she was looking into the wardrobe and thinking about getting dressed.