Читать книгу Once in a Lifetime - Cathy Kelly - Страница 9

Learn how to say no. Practise. Say it at least once every day and you know what? You’ll get better at it.

Charlie sat down with a sigh and eased off her shoes. Blissful cool air enveloped her toes and she wriggled them. The Hatbox Café on Kenny’s second floor wasn’t too busy. The lunchtime rush was over and the afternoon tea people hadn’t yet started wandering in looking for the café’s speciality: pink fairycakes with quirky shoe designs in multi-coloured icing.

The Hatbox had retained its traditional appearance. Old Mr Kenny, who set the store up all those years ago, would have been right at home here. The fittings were still cherry wood and brass, the wallpaper a riot of bosomy Belle Époque girls spilling out of Grecian gowns, and the chairs were still upholstered in ruby velvet. But the staff no longer wore black and white with frilled caps, having long since moved into chic navy trousers and tops with waiter’s white aprons. The menu was similarly up-to-date.

Charlie’s lunch was a bottle of water and a brown bread sandwich. She’d brought a magazine she’d borrowed from the staff room. The magazine was cover. Once she realised nobody wanted to join her for lunch and that she’d have privacy, she took out her little notebook and pen and furtively began to write.

My mother’s a travel agent for guilt trips.

You think that’s a joke? Wrong.

She phoned me at ten to eight in the morning.

‘Charlie, I’m in bed with the flu. Can you pick up my dry cleaning on your way to work? I left my good jackets in, the tweed ones, and my baby-blue coat, and I need them.’

You wouldn’t think that two fake Chanel jackets and a baby-blue woollen coat circa 1963 could make a grown woman want to kill someone with their bare hands, but they can. Dry cleaning can be a powerful tool in the hands of a master.

‘I don’t really have the time. I’m leaving in a few minutes and I have to drop Mikey at school. Can’t you phone Iseult and ask her to do it?’

Pause. The phrase ‘red rag to a bull’ comes to mind. I knew I shouldn’t have said no, but I had to. I mean, I’m the supervisor of the Organic Belle department in Kenny’s, which is not the sort of place where you can be late. Plus, I have a thirteen-year-old son who views arriving a moment late to school with the horror of a Japanese train scheduler facing a leaf-on-the-line crisis, so we don’t have time for either morning phone calls or emergency dry-cleaning stops.

The pause ended abruptly.

‘No, that’s fine,’ snapped my mother. Think Lady Bracknell on crystal meth. ‘I’ll do it myself. I couldn’t sleep last night, you know. My cough’s worse. I don’t know if I’ll last the winter…’

This is where I think that if only she gave up her bloody thirty-a-day smoking habit, the cough wouldn’t get worse, but I don’t say it. There’s only so much reckless abandon I can manage of a morning.

‘I’ll pick up your dry cleaning,’ I say.

‘No, you’re too busy. I’ll do it–’

‘Really, I’ll fit it in.’

‘No, I can look after myself, thank you very much. Nobody needs to fit me into their life.’

Sound of phone slamming down. My mother has broken many phones in her life and refuses to have a portable one because there’s no satisfying slamming down involved.

Not having a portable means she often doesn’t get to the phone in time when I ring and I then panic, imagining her unconscious at the bottom of the stairs or falling asleep in the bath thanks to an enormous martini (triple measure of gin and the vermouth bottle sort of waved about in the vicinity), and I have to keep redialling until she answers with an inevitable growl: ‘What is it? Can’t a girl go to the bathroom in peace?’

My mother likes describing herself as a girl. She waxes lyrical about how she and her friends from the sixties and seventies fought the tyranny of State and Church to bring the Pill and women’s rights into Ireland, all the time referring to ‘this wonderful girl’ or ‘that darling girl’ who faced furious right wingers waving crucifixes. And that’s all wonderful, really. My mother was part of something incredibly important at a time when women couldn’t control their fertility and were prevented from achieving all that they should, and so on and so forth, but–I can’t believe I’m admitting this finally, even if it is only on paper–I find it insanely irritating. I HATE IT! Because ‘girl’ implies sweetness, innocence and a hint of gentleness. My mother is about as girlish as a Hell’s Angel.

She is tough–had to be tough. So stop with the ‘girls’ thing, please. Let everyone else see the gritty person underneath and stop saving it just for me.

She can do the girlish thing, all right. This involves smiling at people (mainly men) and fluttering her eyelashes–she was never one of the bra-burning feminists. She’s the more modern variety, the kind who want red lipstick and push-up bosoms to go with their financial equality in the workplace.

With me, Number Two Daughter, she gives the smiling and fluttering a miss. I get instructions on where I’m going wrong in life: not wearing my hair the correct way, having middle-aged spread (‘So ageing, Charlotte,’ she murmurs), and doing what she considers a menial job are chief on the list. Ideally, I should be ruthlessly running my own company instead of standing at a counter in a department store selling hope in pretty bottles to women. The ideal me would also credit my mother with all my success, along the lines of ‘She taught me everything I know.’

Iseult, my older sister and Number One Daughter, who is beautiful, clever and successful, does not get instructions on where she’s going wrong. She gets compliments and her newspaper clippings kept. Iseult is a playwright. She’s written three plays, two of which were wonderfully received, and there’s talk of one of them going to Broadway. Iseult’s plays are her work-in-progress. My mother considers Iseult to be her best work and has a folder of Iseult’s triumphs since her first play was performed: her favourite is the article in a Galway paper where a famous person and their mother talk about their relationship and Iseult said, along with the obligatory ‘my mother taught me everything I know’, that our mother was always so glamorous that our boyfriends fancied her more than either of us.

I can’t quite remember this myself, but my mother has taken the story and run with it. Not only was she personally responsible for female emancipation in our historically embattled country, she sees herself as a dead ringer for Mrs Robinson in The Graduate.

Now that sounds like carping. It’s not poor Iseult’s fault, don’t get me wrong, God, no. It’s just the way things are in our family, and families are weird, aren’t they? Ours is no weirder than anybody else’s probably: I’m just bad at dealing with it all. I should know better at my age. I’m nearly forty, have a wonderful son, wonderful husband, can’t complain about any of that. It’s just my mother: she drives me nuts. And that’s not normal, is it?

Charlie had never kept a diary before, she’d simply never had the inclination. Iseult was the writer in the family and Charlie liked keeping her own thoughts to herself. But a gratitude journal: now that was a different proposition. She’d heard a woman on the radio talking about a gratitude journal, where you wrote down all the things you were grateful for. Eventually, some alchemy was supposed to take place and the act of writing about being grateful somehow made you actually grateful. That’s how she’d started out at Christmas.

I’m grateful for today when I watched Mikey at football practice and he was so happy, joyful…

…Brendan took me to dinner last night in the Chinese place on the hill and it was wonderful. There was no special occasion; he just thought it would be nice to do something on the spur of the moment. It was. It’s silly how something that simple makes me happy, but it does.

…Sales are up and David Kenny, the big boss, came down to congratulate us and we had champagne–Laurent Perrier, no cheap muck for David–and a bit of a party. Shotsy and I sat in a corner and decided the bonuses would be up, too, which is brilliant because Brendan and I are still paying for the garage conversion and Shotsy has her eye on a little red MG.

Two days before Christmas and a week into pure gratitude, the day came when she was so irritated with her mother that attempting gratitude was a waste of time.

Mother is NOT coming to us for Christmas, even though it was our year to have her and we’d had to say no to going to Wales with Brendan’s family. No, she’s just blithely told me she’s going to Biarritz with Iseult, and who cares if I’ve spent a week getting the place ready for her to stay and buying her favourite food! We can’t go to Wales because Brendan’s sister is now going and there won’t be room for us. And we’d love to have gone, loved it. I am so angry I could scream.

Bizarrely, it had worked. Charlie, who hadn’t written an essay since she left college many years before, filled seven pages.

Instead of burning rage at the rant against her mother, she felt an unusual sense of calm when she was finished. The anger was no longer in her head: it was on paper. Writing words down had a magical quality. It was absolutely alchemy. Anger in her head throbbed relentlessly, but anger on paper was flat and had no power over her. The diary itself still made her feel guilty–treasonous, even. Writing down things that annoyed her was one thing, but the person who annoyed her constantly was her mother and that couldn’t be right. Everyone else adored her mother.

‘She’s fabulous, such a raconteur,’ everyone said.

‘She must have been so beautiful when she was younger.’ Charlie always hoped Kitty never heard that one: the implication was that the beauty was very much a thing of the past, and Kitty Nelson didn’t care to be an ex-beauty. She wanted to be a still-beautiful-for-her-age.

I wish I handled her better, she wrote now. That she didn’t make me so angry all the time. Or, like Brendan says, that I could learn not to get upset. But she has that knack of saying exactly the thing to upset me.

‘The reason your mother can push all your buttons is because she installed them,’ he says to me.

I think he read it on a postcard. Isn’t it annoying that postcards nowadays all come with the wisdom of Nietzsche?

‘Detach with love’ is what Shotsy says to me. If she explains what that means, I’d like to try it, but I have absolutely no idea…

‘Charlie?’

Charlie jumped and her pen leapt across the page with an inky scrawl and fell to the café floor. She actually felt guilty every time she took the notebook out of its hiding place in the ripped bit of lining of her black handbag. No matter how good it felt to write down her feelings, she’d die if anyone actually saw any of it.

‘You writing love letters?’ said a teasing voice.

Dolores, who’d worked in Kenny’s since she was in her teens and was now nearing retirement, plonked a tray on to the table beside Charlie’s untouched sandwich.

‘No,’ answered Charlie cheerily, closing the notebook and stuffing it into her handbag. ‘Lists, you know,’ she added vaguely.

She loved lists. The trick, according to the experts, was not to have too many items. Then, you could realistically achieve them.

‘I hate lists,’ Dolores said, stirring sugar into her coffee. ‘I found one the other day and it was years old, from my fortieth, and it was all the stuff I wanted in my life by the time I turned forty-one.’

‘Like what?’

‘A new car–not a second-hand one, but new. To have lost two stone. To have found the man of my dreams…’ She sighed and began unwrapping salad dressing. ‘None of it has happened: so much for bloody cosmic ordering.’

‘Does it work like that?’ Charlie was instantly terribly sorry she’d asked. Dolores’ ill-fated love life had taken up many a lunchtime among the Kenny’s staff, and while Charlie wished her love, happiness and a double portion of George Clooney with cream on top, she wasn’t emotionally up to another session about how There Were No Decent Men Left.

‘Clearly not,’ Delores said gloomily. ‘Unless it’s cumulative, like compound interest. If you do enough lists, eventually you get some of what you asked for. Perhaps the fact that you stuck at the whole thing counts for something.’

‘Stuck at what? Marriage? Life? Working here?’ Shotsy, birdlike, brown as a walnut and with a whirl of platinum-blonde hair, placed a cup on the table. Charlie didn’t have to look to see what was in it: a treble espresso. Shotsy ran the handbag and accessories department, lived for fashion, and was only ever seen putting two things in her mouth: strong cigarettes and black coffee.

‘Here’s not so bad,’ said Charlie, smiling at Shotsy.

‘Speak for yourself,’ muttered Dolores, going to get more milk for her coffee.

‘Have news for you,’ Shotsy said in a whisper to Charlie.

‘What?’ Charlie could tell from Shotsy’s frown that it wasn’t good news.

‘Later,’ mouthed Shotsy.

Shotsy waited until Dolores–not known for discretion–had gone before spilling the beans.

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Shotsy whispered, ‘but I’ve heard that David met Stanley DeVere last week.’

Charlie gasped out loud. ‘You sure?’ she said.

DeVere’s was the country’s premier department store, a high-end chain with branches in five Irish cities and three of the biggest shopping centres. They stood for money. Big money. Stanley DeVere was the complete opposite of David Kenny: a wearer of loud stripey suits, he thought that waving an unlit cigar around somehow enhanced his image as a bon viveur. Charlie had only ever seen him on television and she’d disliked him on sight. It was no secret that DeVere’s would love another store on the high-density east coast of the country, and buying out Kenny’s, with its fabulous location and its reputation as the country’s only bijou department store, would be a real coup for them. It was also no secret that David disliked Stanley DeVere and had vowed that he would never sell Kenny’s.

Meeting Stanley undermined that vow.

‘Why? I thought Kenny’s was doing well?’ Charlie said.

‘Margins, I expect,’ said Shotsy sadly. ‘It’s all about margins. We can’t compete with the likes of DeVere’s on price. They’re buying ten times as much stock as we are, so they get much better deals from retailers. And the supermarkets, the big chemist chains and home-furnishing outlets are hurting us too. We can’t match anyone on price any more. Our saving grace is that we’re a niche store. Take Organic Belle, for example. They’re after exclusivity, it helps them with their brand, but one day some huge conglomerate like L’Oréal will buy them out, and then they’ll go global–world domination in every store. When that happens, we’re in trouble. So, we’re not doing well and the global turndown hasn’t helped. Who has money for luxury nowadays?’

‘This is awful,’ said Charlie.

‘At least we heard about it. Forewarned is forearmed,’ Shotsy said grimly. ‘DeVere’s have their own handbag buyers and they won’t want to hire me. Too many cooks and all that.’

‘You’re brilliant at what you do, Shotsy,’ protested Charlie.

‘Brilliant means nothing. This is hostile takeover time and no matter what sort of flannel they’ll give us about merging the two companies and how the staff will join up seamlessly, it won’t happen, not when DeVere’s and Kenny’s have such different cultures. People like me will be made redundant. End of story, kaput. I wish we could still smoke inside.’

Charlie stood up, got two empty take-away cups and put one in front of Shotsy. ‘Decant your coffee and come out on to the roof. You can smoke and we can talk.’

‘Thought your mother had put you off nicotine for life?’ said Shotsy, pouring her espresso into the take-away cup.

Shotsy was one of the few people who seemed to understand that Charlie’s mother wasn’t quite the loveable revolutionary glamourpuss she pretended to be.

‘Tough growing up with a mother like that,’ she’d said shrewdly on their first meeting, an event in the shop. ‘She has very strong opinions on everything, your mother.’

Charlie sent her a grateful look. Shotsy wasn’t a member of the Kitty Nelson fan club, won over by the purred ‘dahling’s and the war cry that she’d let her daughters live their lives their own way because it was wrong to inflict archaic moral codes upon them.

‘I can’t stand the smell of smoke,’ said Charlie now, ‘but I need to hear everything and you need cigarettes to get your brain working.’

The roof terrace was far less glamorous than it sounded–a flat area of the store’s roof, surrounded on all sides by slanting mountains of tile. To get there, the women had to climb the back stairs that led past accounts and credit control.

Finally, Charlie pushed the old metal door open and they emerged, panting, into the cool February sunlight. Charlie shivered without a jacket but still waited until Shotsy had a couple of decent drags on her cigarette inside her before asking: ‘What do we do?’

‘Keep our eyes and ears open, and wait,’ said Shotsy.

‘That’s it: wait?’

‘Nothing else we can do. We’re just the worker bees.’

Charlie wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold. ‘If DeVere’s buy us, they mightn’t make radical changes,’ she said hopefully. ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right?’ She thought how much she loved her job; and she was good at it, too. Shotsy was brilliant as an accessories buyer; she understood that women who could never afford to dress head-to-toe in designer clothes still loved having the designer glamour that went with an expensive handbag or a pair of designer sunglasses. How could DeVere’s belittle what the Kenny’s staff had to offer?

‘It mightn’t be broken,’ Shotsy said, stabbing out her cigarette, ‘but they’ll still want to fix it so that Kenny’s isn’t Kenny’s any more. It will become DeVere’s. Branding,’ she added in a low voice, ‘that’s what it’s all about now. People like me are part of the Kenny’s brand, and we just wouldn’t fit the DeVere’s brand. There’s no reason they won’t keep you, though, Charlie.’

‘Except for one thing,’ Charlie pointed out. A horrible idea had just occurred to her. ‘DeVere’s don’t stock Organic Belle. It’s like what you said a moment ago: Organic Belle wanted to keep their brand exclusive, so Kenny’s is the only stockist on the east coast. There’s us and Pathologie in Galway, and then the three Organic Belle shops in Cork and Kerry. And now Harrods. That’s it. I’m sure DeVere’s were furious they couldn’t get it. What if they decide not to stock it out of pique, just to make a point? Or if the Organic Belle people pulled out? What then? I’m out of a job.’

‘There’s making a point and there’s doing business,’ Shotsy said. ‘They’re not stupid.’

‘Getting rid of you would be stupid, but you’re sure they’d do it,’ Charlie retorted.

‘Let’s hold off worrying until we know what’s happening.’ Shotsy rearranged her platinum hair and opened the door to the fifth floor. ‘Just keep your eyes and ears peeled. After all, David’s a good man. He wouldn’t sell out without looking after all of us, would he?’

She didn’t say it with conviction, Charlie thought. David Kenny was a good man and he did look after his staff. But if he needed to sell the department store for some reason, perhaps he mightn’t be able to look after them quite as well as he had in the past.

The rest of the afternoon on the cosmetics floor was mercifully busy so Charlie didn’t have a moment to brood. There were three women who worked in the Organic Belle department and Charlie was always the most popular both with newcomers to the range and with long-standing customers coming back for more. She had a kind of empathy that allowed her to understand how someone could feel nervous walking into an elegant department store and facing the beautifully made-up women behind the counters.

Part of her attraction was that she didn’t fit the traditional vision of stunning beauty usually found manning the counters in cosmetics departments. Yes, her subtle make-up was beautifully applied, thanks to the courses she’d taken when she signed up with Organic Belle in the first place, but she chose never to look too glamorous or inaccessible.

Charlie was petite with a curvy figure, shiny chestnut hair that she wore in a groomed ponytail, a round, smiling face with neat features, and slightly cat-shaped eyes inherited from her mother. However, she didn’t have her mother’s fine-boned face or the fabulous lips that Kitty Nelson painted various shades of red: pillar box, fire engine, crimson. And she’d missed out on the long, elegant legs her mother and sister liked to show off with their high heels, sheer stockings and lashings of attitude.

What she did have was a friendliness that drew people to her.

Her husband was constantly trying to make her understand how important that was, and how long legs, sultry lips and a hand-span waist couldn’t hold a candle to innate kindness.

‘You light up a room when you smile, do you know that?’ he would say to her.

‘Stop it, Brendan!’ Charlie would laugh, and kiss him. But she loved him saying it. She hadn’t known such kindness since her father left.

Growing up with her mother and sister, two fiercely strong personalities, Charlie had often felt like a plump little mouse who’d snuck into the lions’ cage. The lions ensnared people with their glamour and ferocity, and nobody could quite believe that Charlie, who listened far more than she talked, could possibly be related to Kitty and Iseult.

Her champion had been her father, who was just as capable of being the egotistical big cat as his wife and older daughter, but who adored his little Charlotte.

And then one terrible day, when Charlie was fifteen and Iseult was eighteen, he’d packed his bags and left.

‘I’m not leaving you, Charlotte,’ Anthony Nelson told her, extracting tissue after tissue from the box to wipe away Charlie’s tears. ‘I love you, remember that.’

‘But you are leaving,’ Charlie had sobbed.

‘I can’t live with your mother any more, that’s all, Charlotte. I can’t. Lord knows, I’ve tried but she’s destroying me–’ He collected himself. ‘Grown-ups sometimes leave each other, but that doesn’t mean they leave their children. I love you and Iseult. That will never change.’

‘Can I come with you?’

He looked shocked. ‘Kids don’t live with their fathers, Charlotte. They live with their mothers, you know that.’

‘Do they have to?’ she whispered. If her mother heard, she’d explode with anger. The volume of screaming in the house had already been dangerously high for the past hour. It was only quiet now because Kitty had slammed the door to the sitting room and was in there with ‘It’s Too Late’ playing over and over on the stereo, almost drowning out the clinking of the gin bottle. But if she’d crept out and was secretly listening to what Charlie had said, she’d be furious…

‘I will never say anything bad about your mother to you, Charlotte,’ her father said urgently, holding her hands in his. ‘She loves you both and, Lord knows, your mother has enough passion in her, so when she loves, she really loves. I hate men who try to discredit their wives when they split up. Your mother is an amazing woman; look at all she’s done, look at what she does for you.’

Charlie thought of her friend Suzy, whose mum would sit on her bed at night and ask about her day, then she would tell Suzy how much she loved her and how proud she was of her. Charlie would have liked that, but it wasn’t the sort of thing Mum did. Plus, Mum despised Suzy’s mother.

‘The woman’s a nightmare! I don’t know why you have to pal up with Suzy. She’s such a milk-and-water child. Oh, I give in. Go to her house, if you must–but when I come to pick you up, be waiting at the gate for me. I refuse to be subjected to her drivel about how fabulous Suzy is and how they’re all going camping or something ghastly for their holidays. Who the hell goes camping? Well, we girls camped that time in Paris–but that was different. We were part of the Women and Power demo, and we were broke.’ There followed a litany of fun had at the time, including a night in Montmartre with a man who chain-smoked Gauloises and said he was going to sculpt her in his version of Marianne, because she was the Celtic Marianne. And oh, there was a fabulous dress shop in a backstreet in the Marais where Kitty had bought a second-hand Schiaparelli dress that everyone just adored. Men dropped like flies when they saw it. Simply dropped.

‘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?’

‘Yes, just leaving.’

‘Drive carefully.’

Charlie hung up and then deleted the missed call symbol on her phone. Her mother had phoned twice. Once at five minutes to three and again half an hour later. Staff on the floor at Kenny’s weren’t supposed to have their mobile phones on their person during working hours unless there was a specific reason for it. So Charlie, along with most people, left hers in her locker with her bag. Brendan, Mikey, and Mikey’s school all had the direct line into the Organic Belle department, and could reach her in any emergency. The only person, therefore, who left urgent messages on her mobile was her mother.

‘I’m at the doctor’s surgery, in the waiting room. I felt faint and I got a taxi to take me. There’s a long queue, mind you. But I’m sure Dr Flannery will see me quickly. He knows my heart’s not good, and that’s more serious than what’s wrong with most of the people here. Call me when you have time. I may need a lift home.’

Charlie felt the familiar tightening of her temples that foretold a massive tension headache and wondered if she had any ibuprofen in her handbag. Only her mother could leave such a message, dismissing everyone else’s ailments as nothing compared to hers, with the entire surgery waiting room listening.

The second message was more succinct:

Dr Flannery wants to do cholesterol tests on me. He’s worried. So am I. I knew this morning that something wasn’t right. I’ll be at home if you can spare the time to phone.

Charlie clicked off, then switched the phone off totally. Was that what Shotsy meant when she said ‘detach with love’? Charlie wasn’t sure. Between the news about DeVere’s and her mother’s double volley at both ends of the day, Charlie felt wrung out. She wanted to go home, eat dinner with her darling family and not talk to anyone else. What she didn’t want was to be at the beck and call of her mother. Was that too much to ask?