by Cathy Kelly
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.
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.
10
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.
&nb
sp; 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.