Cathy Kelly - Once in a Lifetime

‘Personal never works,’ Ingrid said. ‘You should know: you tell people that often enough. Anyway when did you bonk a much younger man? How did that slip past my radar?’

‘Nothing slips past your radar,’ Marcella retorted. ‘Oh, it was years ago. Technically, it probably doesn’t count as I was only thirty-seven and he was thirty-one, and the age issue only counts when you hit forty. Before forty, you have a permit to screw anything you like. After forty, it needs an act of parliament. Besides, it was before I knew you. Just after I divorced Harry.’

The big difference in their lives was personal: Marcella had been married twice in her youth and divorced. The first was rarely mentioned, but she was still friends with her second. Harry was often around: funny, kind, handsome in a rumpled professor sort of way. Ingrid adored him and was curious as to why he and her best friend had divorced, but because it had all happened before she’d met Marcella, it had never been discussed on a forensic level. Marcella merely talked about how she and Harry were too similar for comfortable living conditions. Clever, opinionated men who were used to being in control were great as friends but very annoying as actual husbands.

When Ingrid saw the two of them together at a party, arguing happily over everything from politics to the merits of the latest movies, she wondered if it would have been different if they’d had children together. Kids rubbed off rough edges very quickly. But that had never happened. After Harry, a suitable settling-down man had never come along. Marcella had looked for him, that was for sure. She’d gone to parties, met men at friends’ dinner parties, taken scuba-diving holidays with a lone-travellers group, trekked Peru and made fabulous friends with two men–a gay couple who ran a successful restaurant in Donegal. But the man of her dreams eluded her. Without him, there were no babies with Marcella’s laughing dark eyes and sallow skin. At forty-nine, Marcella fitted so seamlessly into the role of aunt-by-proxy that nobody would ever guess she’d longed for her own children.

Occasionally, the subject came up. Like the time a journalist phoned Marcella with a blithe request for an interview on a piece called ‘childless by choice’.

‘Childless by choice?’ Marcella had hissed that night when she sat in Ingrid’s kitchen and sank a glass of Stellenbosch red, even though it was a weeknight. ‘Who is childless by choice? Very-bloody-few people, that’s who. And if they are, good luck to them. Let them talk to journalists about their decision and how they prefer not to add to the world’s population or how they know parenting’s not for them and decided to be grown up about it. Good luck to them.’ She was hoarse with anger. ‘But most of us aren’t childless by choice. We’re childless by mistake, childless by never finding the right bloody man, and if we do, he’s leaving being a father till he’s made his money and he’s not interested now, honey, and let’s just have fun! Have you thought about Capri for a holiday?’

‘She’s totally insensitive, that reporter,’ Ingrid said, trying to lessen the blow. ‘When we were doing the general election programme, she did an interview with me and asked me was it depressing at my age to work in an industry where women in their fifties were sidelined because their looks had disappeared.’

David, who was cooking at the stove, exploded with laughter.

‘What did you tell her?’ he asked his wife.

‘I gave her my very intense interviewing stare,’ Ingrid replied with a grin, ‘and said it was sad that women were still judged on their appearance, and that the glory of being older and wiser was not worrying so much about the outward face but rather about the person inside.’

Marcella looked up miserably from her glass of wine. ‘So you didn’t tell her we spend ages discussing plastic surgery and that we’d be having facelifts like a shot if only we weren’t so photographed that people would instantly know we’d gone under the knife?’

David laughed uproariously again.

Ingrid joined in, then sighed. ‘I get so sad thinking that I have to have a facelift,’ she said. ‘Botox is one thing.’ Her hand stroked her smooth forehead. ‘But a facelift is so radical and yes, I know I work in television, but it goes against all the things we believe in, Marcella: that women are brilliant and a few lines on your face shouldn’t make you any less brilliant.’

‘I don’t know what I believe in any more,’ Marcella sighed. ‘I used to believe there was someone out there for me and there isn’t. Just me, my job and people asking me how it feels to be a sour old spinster who’s childless by choice.’

‘Believe in that wine,’ David said, refilling her glass.

‘You’re such a lovely man,’ Marcella said. ‘Why don’t you have a brother for me, David? Why didn’t I ever find someone as nice as you?’

Ingrid and David exchanged a worried look. Marcella didn’t get down very often, but when she did, her emotional elevator went down to the basement at warp speed.

‘I’m not as lovely as you think, Marcella,’ David said kindly. ‘I’d drive you mad, wouldn’t I, Ingrid?’

‘Stone mad,’ Ingrid had agreed.

Ingrid wondered now what Marcella would say if she blurted out her concerns about David, that he’d rushed off to work at first light on a Saturday morning leaving her with the feeling that something was wrong, that David was keeping something from her.

Marcella was lightning quick. ‘Is there trouble with the store?’ she’d ask, which was exactly the question rippling through Ingrid’s mind. She decided not to mention her anxiety to her friend. If there was something wrong, David would tell her. It was disloyal to mention her fears before she had anything concrete to be worried about. Perhaps tonight they’d have a chance to talk.

‘What are you up to today?’ Marcella asked.

‘I was about to ask you that,’ Ingrid replied lightly. ‘I’m here on my lonesome as David has rushed off to Kenny’s to make sure it doesn’t all blow up in his absence.’

‘Men, huh?’ Marcella laughed. ‘Can’t live with them, can’t run them over with a truck.’

Ingrid relaxed. Her lightness had worked. Normally, Marcella was so attuned to people’s tone of voice that she could gauge any mental state from a five-second conversation.

‘Do you want to have lunch with me?’ Ingrid asked. ‘I keep hearing about this new brasserie in Dun Laoghaire near the pier. Want to try it?’

‘Beside the fish place? Tonio’s or Tomasio’s or something? Count me in. Meet you in Dun Laoghaire at one?’ Marcella said.

‘Perfect.’

She dropped off the dry cleaning and arrived at the restaurant at exactly the same time as Marcella. Lunch was hugely enjoyable. They generally tried not to talk too much shop. It would have been wrong to discuss which client Marcella was working with because chances were, sooner or later, he or she would end up on one of the navy-blue leather chairs on Ingrid’s set with Ingrid as high inquisitor. They talked politics, policy, and about people.

It wasn’t gossip, Marcella always pointed out. Gossip implied a nastiness about the discussions and there was never nastiness in their talks. They were interested in human nature, that was all. And they met all human life in their work. In the middle of all the policy talks, business meetings and sound bites, were people who worked hard, got passionate about their jobs, made mistakes, made deals, fell in and out of love.

Marcella and Ingrid were fascinated by the people behind the public façades: who had to make a speech in the Dáil chamber after being up all night with a colicky baby but would never mention it, and who’d use every nugget from their personal life for their own gain while not really caring about their family at all. It was no surprise that they both loved The West Wing, but wonderfully, they also both loved Neil Diamond, dancing and clothes.