Once in a Lifetime

‘Yes, he did,’ Ingrid sighed, the flare of anger gone. At least David understood why she did what she did. She couldn’t bear injustice. The idea that a government minister’s character reference could hinder the conviction of a rapist incensed her. David knew her so well, he understood her crusading spirit.

‘Just here is fine, beside those big gates,’ David said to the taxi driver.

They got out and Ingrid found her keys in her handbag while David paid the driver. She was delighted to be home on the early side. It wasn’t even twelve yet. With luck, she’d be asleep before one and get up late the following morning; maybe the two of them could sitting in the conservatory with some coffee, reading the Saturday papers. She had just keyed the security number into the side gate when David joined her.

‘Lie-in tomorrow?’ she said, as they walked up the path to the house.

‘Sorry, afraid not,’ he said. ‘I’m going to have to go into the office for a couple of hours. I’ve an absolute ton of work on.’

‘Oh, David,’ she said, ‘you live in the bloody place.’ The words were out before she could stop them. Ingrid hated sounding whingey. Her own job could be all-consuming at times and if anyone understood how work could claim a person, she did.

‘Just for a few hours,’ he said, ‘all right? I’ll be back by two; three at the latest.’

‘OK,’ she said and squeezed his hand. ‘Sunday morning lie-in?’

‘Promise,’ he replied.

‘I’m holding you to that. I have my needs, you know,’ she added in a teasing voice.

‘I know all your needs, Ingrid Kenny,’ he said, ‘and wouldn’t the public love to, too!’ His voice trailed off mischievously.

The dogs greeted them as they opened the front door. While David went to switch off the alarm, Ingrid got down on her knees to pet them. ‘Hello, darlings,’ she said, ‘sorry we were out, but we’re back now.’

Somewhere in the back of her mind was the awareness that David hadn’t reacted in the way he normally did to her flirtatious reference to needs: once, he’d have grabbed her by the hand and taken her upstairs to bed. Instead, he’d made a joke about it.

He was tired, she told herself. She was too. She was so used to reading nuance into every sentence for work: it wasn’t fair to do it to poor David.

The duty dinner done, the weekend stretched ahead of her. She had no work, no functions to attend, no charity events, it would be one long, glorious rest and she was looking forward to it. Molly, their daughter, was coming for lunch on Sunday, which would be wonderful. If only Ethan was coming too…Ingrid felt the magnetic pull of her laptop in the study. She could just nip in and see if Ethan had emailed her from Vietnam, which was where he and the gang were now. But if he hadn’t emailed, that would make it four days since his last contact, and Ingrid found that, after three days, she went into a kind of slow panic if she hadn’t heard anything. No, she’d go to bed. If he hadn’t emailed, she wouldn’t sleep for worrying. Though even if he hadn’t emailed, it didn’t mean anything bad had happened, did it?

Ingrid woke alone the following morning, star-fished in their huge bed. Her hands reached over to David’s pillow and found nothing. He must have gone to the store, she thought drowsily, and wriggled further under the covers to doze again. The sheets felt warm, the bed was soft. She felt in the bed, her limbs a part of it. If she kept her eyes closed and allowed her mind to drift, she’d be asleep again.

After about five minutes, she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Her mental database had started up. Ingrid often wished there was some system whereby she could plug a USB cable into her head and connect it directly to the computer, so that all the stuff that rattled around in her mind could be magically transferred to her laptop hard drive instead. She could compose entire emails in her head, write letters, draft speeches, imagine exactly what she’d say to the opposition health spokesperson on the programme that night, all while lying in bed at five o’clock in the morning. Some of her best work was done in that perfect stillness of the pre-dawn. She’d once been asked to take part in a feature for a magazine about career women’s hints for success. She’d said the normal stuff everyone else did: about making lists and trying to be organised, doing grocery shopping on-line, catching up on phone calls on her phone headset in traffic…She did all those things, but she’d never mentioned the early-morning mental download. It sounded too manic, as if she was constantly switched on. But then, she was–her mind racing, scanning ideas, deleting them, speeding on to the next one. Like now.

Fighting it never worked. It was better to go with the flow. She needed to take the cream dress with the caramel beading on it to the dry cleaners, because she was going to need it for the Domestic Abuse Association’s dinner at which she was the guest speaker on Thursday night. It was a good dress, always worked; it didn’t matter whether she had put on a few pounds or not. Which reminded her, she hadn’t been to the gym all week and she needed two workouts and a swim to keep that awful middle-aged spread at bay. Ethan might have emailed. She sent a silent prayer that he had. Please God, please keep him safe.

She had to reply to the latest batch of emails from people looking for a start in the TV industry. She loved helping people, but sometimes she got so many emails that it was impossible to deal with them all. She liked to answer those ones herself, they weren’t something she could hand over to her personal assistant, Gloria. Gloria was wonderfully efficient, handled Ingrid’s diary and organised all the reams of research she needed for her job, but Ingrid preferred writing a lot of her letters herself. No journalist could let someone else write for them. Hell, that was another thing, she’d been asked to be a patron of a journalism course.

Ingrid had never attended a journalism course. She had come into the business by a rather circuitous route: after her politics degree she got her start in radio, working behind the scenes as a researcher, and then producing, before moving into television news and from there, taking the totally unexpected giant leap into presenting. She approved of journalism courses and approved of helping people, but there really wasn’t enough time. Her schedule was always hectic, too hectic for all the causes she wanted to support. And even though the children were grown up, she still needed to make time for her family.

Tomorrow, Molly was coming for Sunday dinner. As she lay in bed with her eyes closed, Ingrid smiled. Her darling daughter was the reason the beautiful cream dress needed a trip to the cleaners. Molly had borrowed it for a formal event two months before.

‘Mom, I’m really sorry, I meant to get it dry cleaned, only I knew I’d forget about it and it’d get left there, so I thought I better drop it back to you first and…’ she’d said.

‘It’s fine,’ Ingrid interrupted. ‘Honestly.’

And she meant it. Kind, wonderful Molly was twenty-three and hopeless at things like dry cleaning and having milk in the fridge, but she was a one-woman powerhouse when it came to campaigns to help other human beings. Molly’s ethical work made Ingrid feel like a capitalist pig. Molly was involved in so many causes that it was a miracle she found time to do anything. By day, she was press officer for Fight Poverty, an organisation that worked with disadvantaged children. At night and at weekends, she rattled tins for an animal shelter, and donated her services to a charity that funded a small school in Kenya and hoped to fund two more. She cared about her carbon footprint, cycled everywhere and owned two rescue cats. She didn’t care much about ironing her clothes or eating food before its best-before date. Her mother was endlessly grateful that Molly lived with Natalie, her best friend and a person with organisational skills to rival Madonna’s, otherwise both Molly and the cats would be in their respective hospitals with food poisoning.

If only Ethan, twenty-one and currently on a year-long trip around the world with a group of friends, had one person in his entourage to match Natalie, then Ingrid would sleep so much better at night.

Ethan was usually quite good at emailing home, although most of the time his missives were frustratingly short.

Hi Ma and Pa, having a brilliant time, weather not great but the people are. Don’t worry, we’re all fine. Love Ethan.

Ingrid, who looked at everything in the paper and had the news on practically twenty-four hours a day, could hardly bear to look at any story about twenty-something world travellers any more. When she came across stories about Vietnam and Thailand, she was terrified that she might see something that would spell impending disaster for Ethan. He was travelling with five friends, all big, strong lads, and clever with it, but that didn’t stop her worrying. At twenty-one, they were innocents abroad; a bunch of friendly Irishmen who thought the best of people, and had a smile for anyone. All it would take was for them to turn up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who knew what might happen. No matter how hard she had tried to teach her children a little of her own cynicism, it hadn’t worked. Ingrid could imagine Ethan smilingly helping some sweet girl get on the plane, holding her rucksack to be kind–and he’d be the one caught with whatever drugs she was trying to smuggle. Nobody would believe Ingrid if she told them that her son didn’t do drugs, that he was a good kid, that he’d clearly been duped. She’d be like every other mother who protested her son’s innocence. And they’d say: ‘Of course she believes him, but we know he’s guilty.’

She couldn’t bear it. She had to get up and stop thinking like this.

Even if David had been there, Ingrid wouldn’t have told him about the anxiety. David simply didn’t seem to understand it.

‘Ethan will be fine, you know,’ he’d say, when she let herself go with a stream-of-consciousness rant against what could happen to six hopelessly naïve young guys. No, even worse, what was it David had said the last time?

‘You have to let him go, Ingrid. He’s an adult, not a little boy.’

She felt the rip of rage inside her again, the combination of anger and helplessness at knowing that she couldn’t give her son a quick hug, just for five minutes. That’s all she wanted: to jump on a plane to see him, to touch him, for five minutes, then she’d get back on the plane happy, because she’d know he was OK.

‘I have let him go,’ she hissed at David. ‘But he’s my son, I love him and he’ll always be a part of me, so I’m frightened.’

Then the analytical Ingrid Fitzgerald had taken over, the woman who had interviewed thousands of spin doctors and psychologists over the years, who knew how to skewer an interviewee but who never normally brought her interviewing skills home. ‘Letting go is not what I’m talking about,’ she said coolly. ‘You can let somebody go and still worry about them. I need to be able to share that with you, because if I can’t…well, we shouldn’t be together, should we?’

David had sat up straight then. He’d been lolling on the couch with an after-dinner brandy, idling through one of the many newspapers they had delivered to the house every morning. The sharpness of her words had hit him hard. Something flickered in his eyes: fear, Ingrid thought and she was glad she’d hurt him, glad she’d given him a kick to remind him that he had to work at this relationship too. Then, she’d done something she almost never did: she walked out of the room, because she didn’t want to talk to him any more. She loved David, absolutely. After thirty years of marriage, she still loved him, but she adored her kids. Children were the third point in the eternal love triangle. It’s a pity David didn’t understand that.

He’d apologised and she’d forgiven him, almost. Ingrid didn’t believe in nursing grievances or in letting old arguments take root, but it had been very hard to accept David’s apology without screaming at him that he didn’t understand her at all.

Molly and Ethan might be grown up, but they would always be her children, and when it came to protecting them she would kill with her bare hands if it came to that.

She turned the shower off, wrapped herself in a towel and faced herself in the mirror. She looked tired today, every inch of her fifty-seven years. It took longer in the make-up chair at the studio now to make her look like Ingrid Fitzgerald, longer to make those shrewd grey eyes appear open and alert, especially with that drooping skin above her eyelids. She’d had her skin lasered to reduce fine lines but the next step was an eye lift, something she was putting off. She’d seen too many women who were preternaturally young, and while photographic retouching could make surgery look good in photographs of movie stars, in real life, women could appear strangely wrong, as though their faces were denying the wisdom of the lines they’d earned. Only the best surgeons were able to make people look like themselves but better. Ingrid knew such a surgeon, but she was still scared. Regular Botox was an occupational hazard. She was fundamentally opposed to the very notion of that, too. But she was also a realist who liked her job. Youth had such power. She was lucky–and yes, she knew there was some luck in there–that current affairs was a medium where age was less important than in other television arenas. If her job had been presenting a chat show, she’d have been fired when she turned forty-three. But in her field, age and gravitas were valued among men and women. Yet who knew when that might change? Ingrid accepted the fact that one day, her face would be judged too old for television. All it would take was some focus group led by a twenty-one-year-old hot-shot pronouncing that young viewers switched off in droves at the sight of a post-menopausal woman, and that would be it. Ingrid Fitzgerald’s television career would be summarily over, except for voice-overs on history compilations or an occasional documentary. She was far too shrewd not to know that one day this would happen.

Still, there was nobody here to see her or her wrinkles today. God knew when David would be back. Off with his mistress, she thought, with a hint of bitterness: the store.

Down below, the dogs began to howl. They weren’t allowed upstairs, but when they sensed someone was up and wasn’t rushing down to play with them, they began to whine pitifully.

‘Be down in a minute,’ roared Ingrid. It was nearly ten, so it had been a lie in after all.

When she was ready, she hurried down and sat on the bottom step as the dogs nuzzled into her with frantic delight. ‘Don’t pretend that David didn’t let you out earlier, you little scamp,’ she said affectionately as Lucinda, a golden cocker spaniel, started her desperate-for-a-pee dance. Then Sybil, a black-and-white bitza they’d got from Molly’s dog shelter, began to do the dance too.

Ingrid opened the kitchen’s double doors into the garden and both dogs barely made it out before they sank to their haunches in prolonged peeing sessions.

Ingrid stared, puzzled. They clearly hadn’t been out. The only explanation was that David, up at the crack of dawn, had left without going into the kitchen for breakfast and the dogs hadn’t heard him. Occasionally, if Ingrid woke early, she found the dogs snoring peacefully in their baskets and had the pleasure of seeing them wake and sleepily wag their tails. They were both old and their hearing wasn’t as good as it had once been, rendering them pretty hopeless as guard dogs.

What was David doing, racing off so early on a Saturday that he hadn’t even had time for a coffee or to let the dogs out?

A flutter of disquiet beat in her heart. True, he’d always been obsessed with the store, even more so in the past five years since the expansion.

‘When you borrow that much money, you need to spend more time at work,’ David told her in the months after the store re-opened following its twelve-million-euro revamp, and he was there morning, noon and night. ‘Nobody else can do it but me, Ingrid. I have to be there. You know that.’

Ingrid, who normally felt a certain relief that David was the main shareholder of Kenny’s because she knew of other family-run businesses where there were constant arguments over each mug bought out of petty cash, wished for the first time that he had brothers or sisters to help him.

Money wasn’t the issue. She got a good salary; without a penny of David’s money, they’d have been able to live comfortably. Ingrid had no desire for massive wealth. Lord only knew, most of the people with vast sums of money seemed to have doubled their problems with every year. For every rich person donating money to AIDS research, there were fifty more with kids who refused to work and wanted to do nothing more energetic every day than take cocaine and wrap their Lamborghinis round lamp posts.