Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (68 page)

‘I can cancel going to the launch, Mum,’ Molly said. ‘If you’re going into the store for the first time today, you need someone with you. There’s no problem with me cancelling, they’ll understand–’

‘No, don’t cancel anything,’ her mother replied. She’d picked today precisely because it was a hectic and unmissable day in Molly’s office: the delivery of an important report to the media. She wanted Molly to slip back into her own life and not feel that she had to be Ingrid’s shadow.

‘I’ll be fine, honestly. Besides, Tom is coming round early and we might go together.’

She didn’t say that it was unlikely she’d travel into the store with Tom. David’s old second-in-command was a sweet man, but without a shred of charisma. Tom had wanted to visit for ages now but she’d kept putting him off.

He said he’d understood if she preferred not to meet in Kenny’s: ‘too many reminders,’ as he’d put it.

But he was coming here today and there were just as many reminders, maybe more, in the house she’d shared with David. Every little thing told her he was gone.

She’d cried the first night she’d remembered to put out the bins. That had been David’s job. There was nobody to read a bit out of the paper to, nobody to drink the second cup of coffee in the percolator. The unconscious things were almost worse. She felt helpless at night when she didn’t know when to go to bed, when to switch off the TV and end the day. They’d done that together. Now it was her choice and hers alone.

She had just dressed when the doorbell rang at half past nine. Ingrid thought it was Tom arriving early, but it was Carlos, her producer from work.

‘You’re not returning my calls, so I thought I’d surprise you,’ he said, giving her a hug.

‘Coffee?’ she asked, flustered at this intrusion into her den.

‘Yeah,’ he said, putting a patisserie bag with some cakes on the table.

As usual, Carlos got straight to the point.

‘Do you think you’d like to come back soon?’

He walked around the kitchen as he talked, the same way he used to do it in the office. Perpetual motion, that was Carlos. He’d walk around picking up pictures, looking at them, putting them down, sweeping a bit of dust off a shelf, craning his head to look at the spines of books he’d looked at just the other day. Some people found it disconcerting, but not Ingrid. She understood that high-energy thing. Today, his energy was jarring. It reminded her of the life she used to have. She wanted to avoid that reminder. The comparison was too painful.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, in answer to his question. ‘I don’t know if I’m able to come back yet.’ It was, Ingrid knew, the wrong answer. The right answer was,
Yes, I’m desperate to leap back into the saddle again and be the current affairs queen of the flagship TV show,
but her heart wasn’t in it. She’d read the books on grief–well, she’d flicked through them and thrown them down on to the big pile of reading matter by her bed. But the bits she’d read said that getting back into the real world was an important part of recovering your life. Your beloved might have died but you’re still alive, was the general theme and Ingrid understood it perfectly–in theory. In reality it was different. She simply didn’t care.

Unbelievably, she didn’t watch the show she’d once lived and breathed for. She scanned the newspapers because they were still delivered to the house, but she looked at the headlines with little interest. Political scheming, by-elections disastrously lost, earthquakes, coups–she didn’t care. She didn’t even get the papers on Sunday, the one day they didn’t have
them delivered. It had been part of the routine, to go to the shop and get them, to pick up croissants for breakfast. Why bother? Ingrid had decided that, quite frankly, the world could carry on without her.

‘I just wanted you to know that they’re grooming Joan to take over,’ Carlos went on.

‘Oh,’ said Ingrid. ‘Joan…she probably won’t be bad at it. She needs to work on her ‘s’s though; too much sibilance when she talks.’

‘God, I know,’ he said. ‘Nobody’s that keen on Joan, and you know she’ll want a wardrobe allowance.’

Ingrid laughed, the sort of laugh she did now, a hollow one. She could count on one hand the number of times she had really laughed since David had died.

‘Wardrobe allowance? She should be so lucky,’ she said.

Ingrid had had a tiny wardrobe allowance. Even someone who had to appear on screen twice a week and look grave and intelligent and deliver major news stories had to pay for pretty much all her own clothes.

‘She’s thirty-seven,’ Carlos added.

Once, that would have been the clincher for Ingrid. Not any more.

‘Pretty, too,’ Ingrid commented. She wasn’t that keen on Joan herself. Not a team player; she appeared to have no understanding that the show came out twice a week because of the hard work of a lot of other people. Ingrid had always been aware that, while she was the public face of the show, there was a whole team behind it.

‘I thought you’d be more upset,’ Carlos said.

Ingrid faced him and he thought how dreadful she looked, almost unrecognisable as the famous Ingrid Fitzgerald he’d loved working with for all those years. It wasn’t just that she was thinner, her face verging on gaunt; more a deadness in her eyes, a lack of expression. There was no spark of animation about Ingrid now.

‘So did I,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Carlos.’

‘They’re going to make a decision by the end of next week. So, if you still want the job, you need to come back. You need to phone in, talk to someone, talk to the Director-General,’ Carlos said. ‘I hate seeing you like this, Ingrid.’

‘Yeah, me too,’ she said bitterly. ‘Thanks, you’re a good friend. Shut the door on your way out, will you?’

Next to ring the bell was Tom from Kenny’s, who arrived about half an hour after Carlos had left. On the way to open the door, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. Not a good look, she thought, realising, although not caring, why Carlos had seemed so shocked at her appearance.

Her hair was sort of brushed, but she hadn’t been to the hairdressers since before David had died and her roots were that streaky silvery brown that suited nobody, certainly not herself. She wore no make-up and her face gleamed with the excess moisturiser she’d slathered on in an attempt to make her skin feel less taut. Ingrid couldn’t be bothered with dressing well either. Today, she wore black track-suit bottoms and a sweatshirt of the sort of pale pink Marcella called ‘nursing-home chic’.

‘Throw it out,’ Marcella had said one day, a long time ago, when she’d seen Ingrid wearing it.

‘I like it, it’s comfortable,’ Ingrid had said.

‘It makes you look like you’re on your way to get a blood transfusion,’ Marcella had replied. ‘Throw it out!’

Perversely, Ingrid had kept it, and today it seemed like the right thing to wear. She might not need a blood transfusion, but if they could give her a life transfusion, a David transfusion, then maybe she’d be OK.

Tim was all business and clearly had absolutely no idea what to say to her.

‘Ingrid, my dear.’ He tried a brief hug, which felt extremely strange because Tim wasn’t a hugger.

He refused tea or coffee and sat at the dining-room table
opposite her. Ingrid steeled herself to cope with it. All mention of the business reminded her too much of David; she’d had to force herself to visit the solicitor’s office to talk about David’s will, and only went through with it because she was the executor.

The company auditors were desperately keen to talk to her, but she couldn’t face them yet. Perhaps when probate was sorted out, she thought miserably. Then she could look at the company and consider how she was to run it, given that David’s will had give her the controlling interest.

Tom started off with pages of figures about where the company stood in the quarterly report and Ingrid, who had always had a good head for numbers, found that she couldn’t concentrate on any of it. The numbers looked bad, though. Surely that couldn’t be right? Kenny’s was doing well, that’s what David had told her. Was that why the auditors had been phoning so often, to give her this appalling news? She didn’t want Tom beside her telling her bad news, she wanted David saying it was all going to be fine.

Finally, she’d had enough. ‘I can’t concentrate today, Tom,’ she said. ‘What’s the bottom line?’

‘Well,’ he said cautiously. Then, he appeared to make up his mind and it was like watching someone leap over a cliff.

‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you, Ingrid, but the company is in financial trouble. It’s nothing that David was doing wrong. It’s just that Kenny’s is a luxury department store, after all, and people have less money at the moment. We’re all being squeezed. No matter how many brilliant ideas we can come up with to market luxury goods to people, ultimately, they have to have the money to buy them in the first place.’

Ingrid managed not to gasp. Kenny’s in trouble. And David hadn’t breathed a word to her.

‘Right,’ she said, as if she’d known all along. ‘What was David’s plan? You know, the finer details of what he thought would work?’

She would not admit that she knew nothing about any of this.

‘I don’t know,’ Tom said. ‘To be frank, I didn’t know things were this bad, or how hard the banks were squeezing us, until David told me that he’d had lunch with Stanley DeVere. I knew that meant something.’

‘Right,’ said Ingrid again, trying not to betray her shock. David had disliked Stanley DeVere and the whole DeVere ethos. In fact, dislike was too mild a word.

‘And did he tell you how that went?’ she asked. ‘From a business perspective.’

‘No,’ Tom said, ‘it was more of a “feeling their way”. You know how David was: he liked to keep his cards close to his chest.’

Ingrid bit back the word
evidently.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’

She hadn’t known, but she was learning fast.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been up to coming into the store, Tom, and that I’m not up to speed on what’s happening, but what would you do in my shoes?’ she asked, letting her defences down for a moment.

‘Sell,’ he said bluntly. ‘Let’s face it, running Kenny’s is a massive full-time job. It was getting too much for David.’

‘But it was his baby,’ Ingrid said wistfully. ‘He loved the store. It was in his blood. He was like his father, for him there was a story attached to every part of it, every door, every window, every floor…’

‘But that’s being sentimental, Ingrid,’ Tom said, ‘and in the current economic climate, we can’t afford to be sentimental. This is a very valuable business, if you sell it now. If you put your heart and soul into it over the next couple of years and still run it into the ground, it won’t be so viable. I’m sorry,’ he went on, seeing her stunned expression, ‘I know that’s probably the wrong thing to say to you, given the way you must be feeling, but I would be doing David a disservice if I
told you anything else. He was a brilliant sales man, a brilliant ideas man and it was hard even for him. Ingrid, this isn’t your forte, and I don’t think the children want to run the store either.’

‘True,’ she said.

Once he’d broached the tough news, Tom was all set to chat, but Ingrid gently got him to leave. Two visitors with bad news was more than she could cope with in one day. Besides, she needed to be alone to think. If David had been contemplating selling his beloved department store and hadn’t told her, what did that say about them, their relationship? That he was trying to protect her, or that he couldn’t share things with her? She didn’t know.

She let the dogs out for a final pee, pulled a coat on over her blood-transfusion sweatshirt, and left to drive to Ardagh. She didn’t want to go to Kenny’s and face it without David, but it had to be done.

‘Can I get you anything?’ Stacey hovered behind Ingrid. She’d been hovering ever since Ingrid arrived at Kenny’s. Ingrid felt sorry for her in a dispassionate sort of way. There was no etiquette for dealing with the first occasion your dead boss’s wife came to the office after his death.

‘No, I’m fine, thank you,’ said Ingrid, and then thought she was anything but fine. But somehow, despite all the parts of her that had been destroyed by David’s death, there was still some compulsion inside her saying,
You must be nice to other people, not let them see your pain.
They couldn’t see it anyway, even if you laid it out in front of them.

She remembered the neighbours who’d dropped into the house to give her Mass cards, funereal flowers and lasagnes, all saying sorry and that David was wonderful and wasn’t it tragic and awful and
can we do anything?
If she tried to talk to them about him, they backed off or changed the subject. They simply couldn’t cope with it. The rituals of death were
a glorious part of tradition, but God forbid that anybody should have to engage with the actuality of death once the person was buried.

No, best to move on, find a new life and some peace: that was the trick they expected of the bereaved. Ingrid didn’t know how to make a new life for herself. She’d been happy with the life she had.

‘I could get a cappuccino from the café or tea or maybe water?’ went on Stacey.

‘Thank you, Stacey,’ said Ingrid, ‘I’m fine, really. Just give me a few minutes here.’

‘Of course,’ said Stacey quickly and scurried back to her desk.

Ingrid stood in the doorway of David’s office and looked around. It was odd to be here without him; she felt she was an interloper in his private space. It was all so unchanged. Exactly the same as he’d left it. How? How could it remain the same when the person who created it all was dead and buried? There should be a scientific disintegration of people’s things when they were dead, a physical manifestation that mirrored the loss of the person. Their papers should crumble at the edges, their special cup develop deep cracks. It was wrong that physical things remained intact when the people who loved the dead person were falling apart inside.

The desk still shone and the faint scent of polish was in the air. The old-fashioned blotter he liked still sat perfectly square on the desk, his mouse mat to the left of it, the computer sleekly white beside it.

There was nothing for it. Ingrid walked into David’s office and shut the door behind her. This was his space, where he’d spent so much of his time when he wasn’t at home with her. There were pictures of her, Molly and Ethan in beautiful wooden frames, paintings and a couple of old framed maps. He loved those old maps when the boundaries of countries had been so different. The sort of maps great explorers had
used to trek to the Poles. David had always fancied himself as part of an expedition with sleighs and huskies and clothes that could withstand Polar temperatures. ‘I’m too old now,’ he’d said, the last time he’d dreamed about it. ‘No you’re not,’ said Ingrid. ‘You’re never too old; age is in people’s heads.’ She smiled now at the thought of it. Then the smile disappeared. Age might be in people’s heads, but bodies, they gave in when they aged. Your mind might be twenty, but your heart, now that could be old.