Always and Forever. Cathy Kelly

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       CHAPTER ONE

      January, a year and a half later.

      Mel Redmond dumped her fake Italian leather briefcase onto the cubicle floor, pushed the loo seat down with a loud clang, sat on it and began trying to rip the cellophane from the packet of ten-denier barely blacks. Haste made her clumsy. Damn packet. Was everything childproof?

      Finally, the packet yielded and the tights unfolded in a long, expensively silky skein. The convenience store beside Lorimar Health Insurance was out of black and barely black sheers – ridiculous really, given that the store was bang in the centre of Dublin’s office-land – so Mel had had to rush to the upmarket boutique beside the bank and shell out a whopping €16 for a pair. She would get a ladder in her tights on a day when the firm’s chief executive was addressing the troops.

      Years in public relations had taught Mel one of the central tenets of the working woman: look great and people notice you; look sloppy and they notice the sloppy part, whether it was smudged eyeliner, chipped nail polish or omigod, look at her roots!

      Anyway, Hilary, head of Lorimar’s publicity and marketing departments and Mel’s boss, would probably turn chalk white under her Elizabeth Arden foundation if Mel committed the crime of turning up at the meeting with ripped tights.

      Mel joked that Hilary was the person she wanted to be when she grew up: always organised, as opposed to doing her best to look organised, and with an emergency supply of headache tablets, tights and perfume in her briefcase, which was real Italian leather.

      Mel’s fake one contained her own emergency supplies of half a chocolate bar, a tampon with the plastic ripped off, one fluffy paracetamol, several uncapped pens and a tiny toddler box of raisins so desiccated they now resembled something from Tutankhamen’s tomb. Raisins were great for snacks, according to the toddler-feeding bibles, but Mel had discovered that chocolate buttons were far better for warding off tantrums in the supermarket at home in Carrickwell.

      ‘Score another black mark for being a terrible mother,’ Mel liked to joke to her colleague in marketing, Vanessa. They joked a lot about being bad mothers although they’d have killed anyone who’d actually called them such.

      When you were a working mum, you had to joke about the very thing you were afraid of, Mel said. Her life was dedicated to making sure that two-and-a-half-year-old Carrie and four-year-old Sarah didn’t suffer because she went out to work. If she could possibly help it, nobody would ever be able to describe Mel Redmond as lacking in anything she did.

      She loved her job at Lorimar, was highly focused and had once vowed to be one of the company’s publicity directors by the time she was forty.

      Two children had changed all of that. Or perhaps Mel had changed as a result of having two children. Like the chicken and the egg, she was never quite sure which had come first.

      The upshot was that she was now forty, the publicity directorship was a goal that had moved further away instead of closer, and she was struggling to keep all the balls in the air. As motherhood made her boobs drop, it made her ambition slide as well.

      ‘When I grow up, I want to be a business lady with an office and a briefcase,’ the eleven-year-old Mel had written in a school essay.

      ‘Aren’t you the clever girl?’ her dad had said when she came home with the essay prize. ‘Look at this,’ he told the rest of his family proudly at the next big get-together, holding up the copy book filled with Mel’s neat, sloping writing. ‘She’s a chip off the old block, our little Melanie. Brains to burn.’

      Mel’s dad would have gone to university except that there hadn’t been enough money. It was a great joy to him to see his daughter’s potential.

      ‘Don’t you want to get married at all?’ asked Mel’s grandmother in surprise. ‘If you get married you can have a lovely home, with babies, and be very happy.’

      Mel, who liked the parts of history lessons where girls got to fight instead of stay home and mind the house, simply asked: ‘Why?’

      Her father still thought it was hilarious, and regularly recounted the story of how his Melanie, even as a child, had her heart set on a career.

      Mel loved him for being so proud of her, but she’d grown to hate that story. As a kid, she’d assumed that being smart meant you could have it all. She knew better now.

      These days she had two jobs, motherhood and career, and even if everyone else thought she was coping, she felt as if she wasn’t doing either of them right. Mel’s standards – for herself – were staggeringly high.

      The third part of the trinity, marriage, wasn’t something she had time to work on. It was just freewheeling along with its own momentum.

      ‘How does a working mother know when her partner has had an orgasm?’ went a recent email from an old college pal. ‘He phones home to tell her.’

      It was the funniest thing Mel had heard for a long time, funny in an hysterical, life-raft-with-a-hole-in-it sort of way. But she couldn’t share the joke with anyone, especially her husband, Adrian, in case he remarked how accurate it was.

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