Once in a Lifetime

‘Your mother sacrificed a lot for you girls,’ Dad continued. ‘Don’t forget that. She’d be devastated if she didn’t have you. I wouldn’t dream of doing that to her.’

He seemed lost in thought for a moment, and Charlie could tell he was thinking how ungrateful she was. He was right, her mother must be wonderful, really. Children didn’t leave their mothers. That was a sin. Being a mother was hard, and if a mother screamed sometimes, it was because she had kids who drove her to it. So Charlie was a bad person for even thinking of leaving her mother.

She looked at her father and saw his eyes were wet. Just then, she felt a bit of her curl up and die. She’d revealed something bad to her darling dad and he was upset with her. She felt so ashamed.

‘I love you, Charlotte,’ he said as he left.

Charlie had nodded and said nothing. She daren’t, in case she started to cry. Telling the truth couldn’t be good when what you felt inside was so bad.

When she was twenty-four, she’d met Brendan and he’d changed everything. He’d made her feel treasured and special. From their first meeting, she’d known he was the love of her life. Accustomed to her mercurial home where tension ratcheted up and down at speed, spending time with Brendan made her see that people could be calm and kind to each other. Nobody in Brendan’s home screamed at anyone else because they were randomly in a bad mood.

Six months after meeting, they moved in together. A year later, they were married.

‘You’re throwing yourself away,’ her mother had said furiously. ‘He’s only a bank clerk. He’ll never amount to anything.’

But it’s not his job to amount to something on my behalf, Charlie had thought but never said. Surely that was the very tenet of her mother’s much-vaunted campaigning: there was no use pretending to be Cinderella and waiting for the prince to arrive. You had to be your own prince.

She had a good job in the phone company. Together, she and Brendan had enough money to put a deposit on a house. Together they could do it. Now her mother was saying that together wasn’t the key: Brendan had to be able to support the pair of them all on his own for it to count.

She’d given up work when Mikey was born, another bombshell.

‘You can’t give up work now! What’s wrong with using a crèche?’ demanded Kitty.

‘It’s expensive. I’d be going to work purely to pay for the crèche, and paying the crèche so I could work. It’s a vicious circle. We’ve decided that I’ll stay at home until Mikey goes to school, that’s all.’

‘Your career will be ruined! Have I taught you nothing!’

As it turned out, Charlie’s career hadn’t been ruined, though when Mikey had started going to school, she’d looked for work with more than a little trepidation. After all, who would want to employ her? When the phone company told her they had no vacancies, it seemed her mother had been right. But Organic Belle, a fledgling company, was willing to take her on. It transpired that Charlie had a gift when it came to selling cosmetics. She had done so well that a year ago they’d appointed her supervisor for the Organic Belle range, which meant more money and more responsibility. Charlie loved her new role.

Brendan, too, had moved up the promotion ladder, but the bank had yet to make him a manager, which was about the only job his mother-in-law would have respected.

Mikey was the centre of their lives. As he grew, Charlie grew too, realising that while she wasn’t precisely the high-performing career woman her mother desperately wanted her to be, she was the most special person in the world for one little boy and for his father, and actually, that was all that mattered.

Motherhood taught her to trust her instincts. And it taught her another lesson she’d quite like not to have learned: that there were many ways to be a mother and that letting children feel their mother had sacrificed her fabulous life for them was probably not top of the list. That thought simmered away in the recesses of her brain. A person could be wonderful at one thing, say campaigning for women’s rights, and yet be hopeless at another, like being a kind and caring mother.

There was no law to say a person had to be both. One was enough. But understanding one’s own abilities in these areas was a vital part of life. Charlie had been raised to the independent woman ideal but had found that parenting was the career that fulfilled her most. What hurt was having her mother treat this important part of Charlie’s life with such disdain.

When there was a lull in business, Charlie took a moment to ask Karen, the woman she was training, how she was getting on. Charlie enjoyed working with trainees: there was a buzz from being with someone learning about Organic Belle, particularly when they were doing as she’d done and rejoining the workforce after having children.

Karen was forty and still very anxious about her new job, even though she’d worked as a personal assistant to a high-powered businessman before she’d left to have children.

‘That was then, this is now,’ she said to Charlie. ‘Ten years is a long time to be out of the workforce. I feel like I’m masquerading as a person with a job. I half expect customers to tell me to get out from behind the counter and fetch a real salesperson to help them.’

‘You’re great at this,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re good with people too. I felt the same when I started; I was just as nervous.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Charlie, but you’re only saying that,’ said Karen, still anxious. ‘There’s no way you were nervous. Look at you: you’re so calm and professional about this. I’ll never be like you.’

‘Trust me,’ Charlie said, ‘I was just as nervous. If you don’t believe yourself, Karen, believe me, and I’m telling you that you’re well able to do this.’

When Karen had gone to serve a customer, it struck Charlie as strange that the people who worked with her thought she was calm and professional, while her mother thought she was dithery and unambitious. It was the family box syndrome: your family put you in a certain compartment when you were small and, once you were in it, you weren’t supposed to leave–not in their minds, anyhow.

Charlie had been stuck in the quiet, will never make anything of herself box, and that’s where she was supposed to stay.

Well, now she’d decided she wasn’t staying in any box, for anyone.

Today was her late shift at work, which meant Brendan would pick Mikey up from his friend’s house at six and together they’d make dinner. Brendan was teaching Mikey to cook and they were slowly working their way through a Jamie Oliver book. In fact, Mikey showed great flair for cooking and was improving at such speed, he’d soon be better than his dad.

‘Dad, like this–’ Mikey had said the night before, taking one of the sharp knives and cutting a courgette slowly but expertly. ‘You do them all sideways. They’re supposed to be straight, all the same.’ Mikey was dark like his father, with big hazel eyes and spiky hair that fell over his forehead as he worked. His tongue stuck out a little as he concentrated on slicing the courgettes, and that, combined with the intensity on his young freckled face, made Charlie’s heart contract. He was growing up so fast.

‘When you get your restaurant, we’ll go there every night,’ Brendan said proudly.

‘If you do,’ replied Mikey, still busy chopping, ‘you’ll have to pay like everyone else. I have to make money!’

‘Right then, we’ll join the huge queues waiting to get in,’ Charlie suggested.

Mikey considered this. ‘No, it’s all right, you can skip the queue.’

‘Why?’ demanded Charlie, ruffling his hair. ‘Because we’ll be too old and wrinkly and will ruin the look of the place?’

Mikey giggled, a big smile creasing up his face and making his eyes dance. ‘No. OK, you can eat for free.’

‘Same deal as here, then,’ his mother laughed. ‘Everyone eats for free.’

They were making a beef stew tonight and Charlie was looking forward to it. To add to the whole thing, she’d bought some apple struedel in the food hall and there was cream in the fridge. No matter how enormous the main course, Brendan and Mikey were always like wolves for dessert. Mikey had shot up in the past year, was nearly as tall as his father, and could eat to Olympic standard and still remain lanky.

It was after seven when she reached her car, a battered Citroën she was passionately attached to despite its decrepitude. Throwing her bag in, she switched on the heater to take the February chill from the air, and then phoned home.

‘Hi, love,’ she said as Brendan answered. ‘How was your day?’

‘Hello, Charlie. Oh, you know: the usual. It’s over, that’s the thing. How was yours?’

Charlie thought of the news Shotsy had imparted. She usually told Brendan everything–well, almost everything. She lied by omission sometimes when it came to her mother because Brendan wouldn’t stand for some of the things Kitty said. But tonight, she didn’t want to ruin their evening telling him about DeVere’s. She’d tell him tomorrow or at the weekend, perhaps. ‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘Has Chef started?’

‘Braising beef as we speak.’

‘He’s amazing,’ she said in wonder. She knew so many people with teenage sons who talked about them as if they were juvenile delinquents-in-waiting, and here she and Brendan had this wonderful son who cooked them dinner once a week. Sure, he grumbled sometimes, and left smelly socks and cycling kit all over his room and was totally deaf when he was at his PlayStation, but he never shouted that nobody understood him or told his parents he hated them, which was apparently the norm. Charlie felt so lucky when she thought about her beloved Mikey. ‘I didn’t know how to braise beef when I was thirteen,’ Brendan said.

‘Nor me,’ Charlie agreed. Hardly a surprise, she thought, given that cooking wasn’t at a premium in the Nelson household. ‘And I may never have to again, now that Mikey’s doing it all the time.’

‘He’s better at cooking than both of us,’ Brendan added ruefully. ‘Did you get anything for dessert?’

‘You only love me because I work beside Kenny’s food hall,’ Charlie teased.

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Yes, greedy guts. I love you.’

‘Love you too. You’re on your way?’