Cathy Kelly - Once in a Lifetime

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.