Once in a Lifetime

‘What?’ Charlie could tell from Shotsy’s frown that it wasn’t good news.

‘Later,’ mouthed Shotsy.

Shotsy waited until Dolores–not known for discretion–had gone before spilling the beans.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Shotsy whispered, ‘but I’ve heard that David met Stanley DeVere last week.’

Charlie gasped out loud. ‘You sure?’ she said.

DeVere’s was the country’s premier department store, a high-end chain with branches in five Irish cities and three of the biggest shopping centres. They stood for money. Big money. Stanley DeVere was the complete opposite of David Kenny: a wearer of loud stripey suits, he thought that waving an unlit cigar around somehow enhanced his image as a bon viveur. Charlie had only ever seen him on television and she’d disliked him on sight. It was no secret that DeVere’s would love another store on the high-density east coast of the country, and buying out Kenny’s, with its fabulous location and its reputation as the country’s only bijou department store, would be a real coup for them. It was also no secret that David disliked Stanley DeVere and had vowed that he would never sell Kenny’s.

Meeting Stanley undermined that vow.

‘Why? I thought Kenny’s was doing well?’ Charlie said.

‘Margins, I expect,’ said Shotsy sadly. ‘It’s all about margins. We can’t compete with the likes of DeVere’s on price. They’re buying ten times as much stock as we are, so they get much better deals from retailers. And the supermarkets, the big chemist chains and home-furnishing outlets are hurting us too. We can’t match anyone on price any more. Our saving grace is that we’re a niche store. Take Organic Belle, for example. They’re after exclusivity, it helps them with their brand, but one day some huge conglomerate like L’Oréal will buy them out, and then they’ll go global–world domination in every store. When that happens, we’re in trouble. So, we’re not doing well and the global turndown hasn’t helped. Who has money for luxury nowadays?’

‘This is awful,’ said Charlie.

‘At least we heard about it. Forewarned is forearmed,’ Shotsy said grimly. ‘DeVere’s have their own handbag buyers and they won’t want to hire me. Too many cooks and all that.’

‘You’re brilliant at what you do, Shotsy,’ protested Charlie.

‘Brilliant means nothing. This is hostile takeover time and no matter what sort of flannel they’ll give us about merging the two companies and how the staff will join up seamlessly, it won’t happen, not when DeVere’s and Kenny’s have such different cultures. People like me will be made redundant. End of story, kaput. I wish we could still smoke inside.’

Charlie stood up, got two empty take-away cups and put one in front of Shotsy. ‘Decant your coffee and come out on to the roof. You can smoke and we can talk.’

‘Thought your mother had put you off nicotine for life?’ said Shotsy, pouring her espresso into the take-away cup.

Shotsy was one of the few people who seemed to understand that Charlie’s mother wasn’t quite the loveable revolutionary glamourpuss she pretended to be.

‘Tough growing up with a mother like that,’ she’d said shrewdly on their first meeting, an event in the shop. ‘She has very strong opinions on everything, your mother.’

Charlie sent her a grateful look. Shotsy wasn’t a member of the Kitty Nelson fan club, won over by the purred ‘dahling’s and the war cry that she’d let her daughters live their lives their own way because it was wrong to inflict archaic moral codes upon them.

‘I can’t stand the smell of smoke,’ said Charlie now, ‘but I need to hear everything and you need cigarettes to get your brain working.’

The roof terrace was far less glamorous than it sounded–a flat area of the store’s roof, surrounded on all sides by slanting mountains of tile. To get there, the women had to climb the back stairs that led past accounts and credit control.

Finally, Charlie pushed the old metal door open and they emerged, panting, into the cool February sunlight. Charlie shivered without a jacket but still waited until Shotsy had a couple of decent drags on her cigarette inside her before asking: ‘What do we do?’

‘Keep our eyes and ears open, and wait,’ said Shotsy.

‘That’s it: wait?’

‘Nothing else we can do. We’re just the worker bees.’

Charlie wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold. ‘If DeVere’s buy us, they mightn’t make radical changes,’ she said hopefully. ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right?’ She thought how much she loved her job; and she was good at it, too. Shotsy was brilliant as an accessories buyer; she understood that women who could never afford to dress head-to-toe in designer clothes still loved having the designer glamour that went with an expensive handbag or a pair of designer sunglasses. How could DeVere’s belittle what the Kenny’s staff had to offer?

‘It mightn’t be broken,’ Shotsy said, stabbing out her cigarette, ‘but they’ll still want to fix it so that Kenny’s isn’t Kenny’s any more. It will become DeVere’s. Branding,’ she added in a low voice, ‘that’s what it’s all about now. People like me are part of the Kenny’s brand, and we just wouldn’t fit the DeVere’s brand. There’s no reason they won’t keep you, though, Charlie.’

‘Except for one thing,’ Charlie pointed out. A horrible idea had just occurred to her. ‘DeVere’s don’t stock Organic Belle. It’s like what you said a moment ago: Organic Belle wanted to keep their brand exclusive, so Kenny’s is the only stockist on the east coast. There’s us and Pathologie in Galway, and then the three Organic Belle shops in Cork and Kerry. And now Harrods. That’s it. I’m sure DeVere’s were furious they couldn’t get it. What if they decide not to stock it out of pique, just to make a point? Or if the Organic Belle people pulled out? What then? I’m out of a job.’

‘There’s making a point and there’s doing business,’ Shotsy said. ‘They’re not stupid.’

‘Getting rid of you would be stupid, but you’re sure they’d do it,’ Charlie retorted.

‘Let’s hold off worrying until we know what’s happening.’ Shotsy rearranged her platinum hair and opened the door to the fifth floor. ‘Just keep your eyes and ears peeled. After all, David’s a good man. He wouldn’t sell out without looking after all of us, would he?’

She didn’t say it with conviction, Charlie thought. David Kenny was a good man and he did look after his staff. But if he needed to sell the department store for some reason, perhaps he mightn’t be able to look after them quite as well as he had in the past.

The rest of the afternoon on the cosmetics floor was mercifully busy so Charlie didn’t have a moment to brood. There were three women who worked in the Organic Belle department and Charlie was always the most popular both with newcomers to the range and with long-standing customers coming back for more. She had a kind of empathy that allowed her to understand how someone could feel nervous walking into an elegant department store and facing the beautifully made-up women behind the counters.

Part of her attraction was that she didn’t fit the traditional vision of stunning beauty usually found manning the counters in cosmetics departments. Yes, her subtle make-up was beautifully applied, thanks to the courses she’d taken when she signed up with Organic Belle in the first place, but she chose never to look too glamorous or inaccessible.

Charlie was petite with a curvy figure, shiny chestnut hair that she wore in a groomed ponytail, a round, smiling face with neat features, and slightly cat-shaped eyes inherited from her mother. However, she didn’t have her mother’s fine-boned face or the fabulous lips that Kitty Nelson painted various shades of red: pillar box, fire engine, crimson. And she’d missed out on the long, elegant legs her mother and sister liked to show off with their high heels, sheer stockings and lashings of attitude.

What she did have was a friendliness that drew people to her.

Her husband was constantly trying to make her understand how important that was, and how long legs, sultry lips and a hand-span waist couldn’t hold a candle to innate kindness.

‘You light up a room when you smile, do you know that?’ he would say to her.

‘Stop it, Brendan!’ Charlie would laugh, and kiss him. But she loved him saying it. She hadn’t known such kindness since her father left.

Growing up with her mother and sister, two fiercely strong personalities, Charlie had often felt like a plump little mouse who’d snuck into the lions’ cage. The lions ensnared people with their glamour and ferocity, and nobody could quite believe that Charlie, who listened far more than she talked, could possibly be related to Kitty and Iseult.

Her champion had been her father, who was just as capable of being the egotistical big cat as his wife and older daughter, but who adored his little Charlotte.

And then one terrible day, when Charlie was fifteen and Iseult was eighteen, he’d packed his bags and left.

‘I’m not leaving you, Charlotte,’ Anthony Nelson told her, extracting tissue after tissue from the box to wipe away Charlie’s tears. ‘I love you, remember that.’

‘But you are leaving,’ Charlie had sobbed.

‘I can’t live with your mother any more, that’s all, Charlotte. I can’t. Lord knows, I’ve tried but she’s destroying me–’ He collected himself. ‘Grown-ups sometimes leave each other, but that doesn’t mean they leave their children. I love you and Iseult. That will never change.’

‘Can I come with you?’

He looked shocked. ‘Kids don’t live with their fathers, Charlotte. They live with their mothers, you know that.’

‘Do they have to?’ she whispered. If her mother heard, she’d explode with anger. The volume of screaming in the house had already been dangerously high for the past hour. It was only quiet now because Kitty had slammed the door to the sitting room and was in there with ‘It’s Too Late’ playing over and over on the stereo, almost drowning out the clinking of the gin bottle. But if she’d crept out and was secretly listening to what Charlie had said, she’d be furious…

‘I will never say anything bad about your mother to you, Charlotte,’ her father said urgently, holding her hands in his. ‘She loves you both and, Lord knows, your mother has enough passion in her, so when she loves, she really loves. I hate men who try to discredit their wives when they split up. Your mother is an amazing woman; look at all she’s done, look at what she does for you.’

Charlie thought of her friend Suzy, whose mum would sit on her bed at night and ask about her day, then she would tell Suzy how much she loved her and how proud she was of her. Charlie would have liked that, but it wasn’t the sort of thing Mum did. Plus, Mum despised Suzy’s mother.

‘The woman’s a nightmare! I don’t know why you have to pal up with Suzy. She’s such a milk-and-water child. Oh, I give in. Go to her house, if you must–but when I come to pick you up, be waiting at the gate for me. I refuse to be subjected to her drivel about how fabulous Suzy is and how they’re all going camping or something ghastly for their holidays. Who the hell goes camping? Well, we girls camped that time in Paris–but that was different. We were part of the Women and Power demo, and we were broke.’ There followed a litany of fun had at the time, including a night in Montmartre with a man who chain-smoked Gauloises and said he was going to sculpt her in his version of Marianne, because she was the Celtic Marianne. And oh, there was a fabulous dress shop in a backstreet in the Marais where Kitty had bought a second-hand Schiaparelli dress that everyone just adored. Men dropped like flies when they saw it. Simply dropped.