Once in a Lifetime

Finally, the meeting ended.

Ingrid had plenty of work to do, but she couldn’t imagine doing it while her mind was elsewhere.

She dumped her stuff on her desk and picked up her bag. ‘Gloria, I’m going to lunch early.’

‘With your sisters?’ Gloria had met Flora and Sigrid many times. They were nothing like Ingrid, of course: she was unique. But they were lovely women, with enough of the Fitzgerald eccentricity for Gloria to see where it had come from.

‘Yes, I might be late back.’ Ingrid had a plan: she’d drop into Kenny’s after lunch. There was nothing urgent she had to do, nothing that couldn’t wait till tomorrow, broadcast day. And this was…well, it felt like an emergency.

All the way down to Ardagh, Ingrid kept the radio turned up loud to a talk show because she couldn’t quite bear to be alone with her thoughts. But they invaded her mind anyway. It was that niggling feeling she’d had for weeks now that something was wrong with David.

Ingrid never acted on impulse: she was thoughtful, careful, considered. But not today.

She knew about Claudia. David never kept anything about Kenny’s from her. Claudia was second-in-command to the unflappable Lena, who ran the company development office. Lena’s job was to come up with new marketing strategies for the business and to protect their core brand. If anyone had an idea, they went to Lena and she made sure it passed the Kenny’s branding test.

Claudia had been hired to strengthen Lena’s team. Ingrid could recall the recruitment process, with David poring over CVs in their living room. Ingrid loved reading curriculum vitaes: to her, they were glorious pictures of people and their lives.

‘I didn’t know anyone still listed “hang-gliding” in their Interests section,’ she’d said, leafing through them, fascinated. There had been a time when everyone professed to like sky-diving, deep-sea diving and reading out-of-print French novels in the hope it would make them sound more interesting. But now the interests tended to be more realistic, and if someone put ‘travelling round India on a bike’, chances were, they’d actually done it. Unlike the mythical sky-diving.

‘Show me.’ David peered through his glasses at the CV in question. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t like him. Too cocky. Didn’t say thanks to Stacey when she brought in the coffee.’

Ingrid laughed. If only the guy had been trained by Marcella, he’d have known that how he treated the people who weren’t theoretically important was a very useful tool in grading candidates. Being rude to the person serving tea was fatal. She’d never hire someone like that.

‘Now she was good,’ David went on, finding another CV and passing it to Ingrid.

Claudia Mills was twenty-eight, with a masters in marketing and another in business development. She’d worked in the States for a year and was keen to move back home.

‘Pretty,’ Ingrid said, admiring a professional colour photograph of a dark-eyed girl with a knowing expression, a glossy brown bob and shiny lips. ‘Sexy too.’

‘You’d have to ask Lena that,’ David said without pausing. ‘She notices if they’re cute-looking, I just watch out for who can do the job.’

David had never cheated on her in his life. She’d never worried for even a moment on that score. But the notion that the newest member of staff had insisted that everyone, including the boss, send their wives flowers on Valentine’s Day, set Ingrid’s sensors on full alert. Only someone flirtatious or very sure of her position in the company would do such a thing. What’s more, it was a calculated insult to the women involved: like saying, ‘Your husband wouldn’t think of doing it himself, but I asked him to send flowers to you.’ A very subtle insult, but an insult all the same.

Ingrid’s sisters, Sigrid and Flora, were ten and twelve years older respectively. She’d been the baby of the family, an adored ‘accident’ who’d grown up feeling loved and surrounded by kindness.

Flora’s passion in life was music. She taught piano and lived in blissful happiness in a cottage in Wexford with Brid, a violin teacher. Flora had been married, had three grown-up children, and had stunned them all when she’d left her bemused husband, Paul, for Brid.

She was fifty-five then; now, on the final approach towards seventy, apart from a dodgy back, she said she’d never been happier. The children came to visit with their children, her grandchildren, Paul came round every Tuesday for dinner, and Brid and Flora were planning to accompany a group of adult music students to Rome in April. Life was good, she said.

‘We’re going to a special Mass in the Vatican, too,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait.’ Brid’s cousin, who was a priest at the Irish College in Rome, had organised it. Neither Flora nor Brid seemed to find it in any way odd that two women living very much outside the rules of the Church should visit the Holy See, for all its vehement disapproval of lesbian relationships.

But then, Ingrid knew that nobody was likely to throw them out of the Vatican since they looked for all the world like two genteel music teachers whose idea of a good time was a bit of Mozart followed by a mug of cocoa.

She was careful not to say this in Flora’s hearing, for anyone who leapt to such conclusions would be told in no uncertain terms that Flora and Brid enjoyed a perfectly healthy sexual relationship, thank you very much: ‘Why do young people think that they invented sex?’ she once protested over dinner. ‘It’s like playing the piano, you get better with practice and though you mightn’t have as much stretch in your fingers as you get older, you’ve got the technique to make up for it.’

David had choked on his soup the night Flora had said that.

‘Do you think they’re still at it?’ he’d asked Ingrid later.

‘Why not?’ she replied. ‘We are, aren’t we?’

Sigrid had the family dodgy back too, but she refused Flora’s litany of fabulous new osteopaths and kept supple with yoga.

Yogalates was her latest fad, although she had to travel to Dublin once a week for classes and all that driving was playing havoc with her sacroiliac joint.

Sigrid’s only complaint was that TJ, her husband, had no interest in keeping supple and was going to fuse to his old armchair one day from sitting in it and listening to horse racing on the radio.

‘If I were to drop dead tomorrow, he’d have to look at the Racing Post to see what time he could bury me between races,’ she said, but it was a joke. Both Flora and Ingrid knew that if anything happened to Sigrid, TJ would follow her into the grave within the week. They might mutter and moan at each other, but they were practically joined at the hip.

The sisters sat in the Speckled Trout pub at a corner table beside a roaring fire, and looked at the menu in between catching up on the gossip of the past month.

‘Brid and I named stars after each other for Valentine’s Day,’ Flora said proudly, when the waiter had left.

‘How gorgeous!’ said Sigrid, delighted. ‘I should get TJ to name a horse for me! You can do that, you know, name horses–you just have to put up some money for the training. Not that we could, or anything, but still–’

‘That’s lovely, Flora,’ Ingrid said, conscious of that whiplash of anxiety again.

Her nearly-seventy-year-old sister was getting better Valentine’s Day gifts from her lesbian lover than she was, and the comparison was making her sad. But why? She had no time for Valentine’s Day commercialism. Never had. But thinking she’d been given something wildly romantic had stirred up the desire in her for such gifts. If David was going to send her flowers, he should have done it off his own bat.

When lunch was over, she drove to Kenny’s and parked in the store’s public car park instead of using the staff one. Without quite knowing why, she wanted to see David at work without him knowing she was coming.

She entered the shop through the front entrance and let the whole Kenny’s experience flow over her.

‘Red is gorgeous on you!’ she heard a woman in a flowery shirt sigh to her friend as they stood in front of one of the cosmetics counters. The friend was wearing a slash of shiny red on her lips and was looking aghast at her face in a small mirror.

‘No, it’s desperate!’ She began wiping it off at high speed.

‘Bright red is hard to wear,’ came the gentle voice of the woman behind the counter. ‘This beigey pink would be nice with your skin tones, and not so dramatic.’

Snippets of conversation floated around her.

‘Where’s the food hall?’

‘I’m looking for those suck-it-all-in knickers? What floor they are on?’

The scent of Kenyan coffee mingled with all kinds of perfume, and from every corner of the store, Ingrid could hear chatter, laughter and murmured thank yous as people were handed back their credit cards and the store’s subtle cream paper bags with the gold font that spelled Kenny’s in elegant Art Deco lettering.

She hadn’t been here for ages, she realised. It had become David’s work, the same way the television studios were her ‘work’. A place where they spent huge chunks of their lives separately. She felt guilty at that. No wonder he wasn’t talking to her about the store: she’d removed herself from it and he probably felt he couldn’t talk to her about it.

Quietly, she entered the back part of the store and made her way upstairs to David’s suite of offices.

The door to Stacey’s office was open, as was David’s. No sign of illicit meetings there.

‘Ingrid,’ said Stacey delightedly. ‘How lovely to see you. I was just making coffee for David, would you like some?’

‘No thanks,’ said Ingrid, smiling and walking into her husband’s office. He was at the big table where he sometimes had meetings and there were lots of papers spread out on the polished walnut.

‘Ingrid,’ he said, pleased, ‘what brings you here? Isn’t it your day for lunch with Flora and Sigrid?’