Always and Forever. Cathy Kelly

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СКАЧАТЬ want the farm.’ Sarah’s damp head shook obstinately. ‘Want Mummy and zoo.’ She reverted to more babyish speech patterns when she was tired and fed up.

      Mel knew she should have come up with some better explanation as to why she wouldn’t be at the zoo but she just couldn’t. Her energy had drained away.

      ‘Sarah, I can’t go with you. Dawna is going and you love Dawna.’

      For a brief second, mother and daughter’s eyes met, the same candid blue with glints of darkest violet near the irises giving them remarkable depth. In that moment, Mel thought her daughter looked old and knowing, as if she could see the exhaustion and guilt in her mother’s eyes, and knew that Mel would have done anything to be in two places at the one time if it would make Sarah happy. Then it was gone, replaced by the childish incomprehension that Mummy was once again choosing work over Sarah’s world. Mel wondered why Adrian told the children she was a super mum. She was a crap mum.

      

      ‘You were a long time,’ Adrian remarked when she finally arrived downstairs at ten past eight, carrying dirty clothes, wet towels and a half-eaten baby rusk that she’d found squashed into the landing carpet.

      ‘Sarah didn’t want to go to sleep,’ muttered Mel. She dumped the laundry in the basket, which managed to look horribly full again, and headed for the fridge and a glass of wine. There was none. Hadn’t that been last week’s plan? No wine was to be opened during the week because then she had a glass every evening and surely it was bad for her. Bad, schmad. Where was the corkscrew?

      The booze was locked in a cupboard in the dining room. Mel took out a bottle of the expensive Chablis that Adrian loved. She handed him a glass, which he took without looking up from his books. A plate of half-finished beans on toast lay beside him. His exams were in May and he was studying hard.

      ‘Lovely wine,’ he muttered, head back in his coursework.

      ‘Mm,’ she said, taking a deep gulp. Better than the old screw-top bottles they used to drink before they both had good jobs. There had to be some compensations for work. A thought drifted into Mel’s mind: was that what her job was all about – making money? She went out to work and paid someone else to bring up her children so that she and Adrian could afford good wine?

      Mel had eaten her beans on toast and was half reading the paper and half waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle so she could put on another load, when Adrian said, ‘Oh, forgot to tell you but Caroline phoned when you were doing the baths to remind you that you’re all meeting up in Pedro’s Wine Bar at half-eight on Thursday night, and if you’re driving can you pick her up?’

      ‘Oh, damn,’ muttered Mel. ‘It’s the last thing I feel like this week. And she should know I don’t drive to work.’ Caroline was a very old friend who lived in Dublin’s suburbia, and the party was their delayed Christmas get-together with a group of other old friends – cancelled so many times that they’d finally decided to have it in January. Once, Caroline and Mel had shared an apartment and worked in the same company, going on wild nights out, comparing notes on unsuitable men and planning how they’d run the world when their time came. Now Caroline was a full-time mother of three and dedicated herself to the job.

      She was, as Mel and everyone else recognised, fabulous at it. Being a mother was her true vocation, and not drinking triple vodkas in shady clubs, as Mel loved to tease her.

      Mel knew that her friend’s three small sons had never eaten a single thing out of a jar when they were babies. If this had been anyone else but the tactful Caroline, Mel would have been made to feel hideously guilty. Her plans to mush up organic carrots had fallen by the wayside when she went back to work and discovered that huge organisation was involved in buying and mushing organic stuff, when it was easier to just buy cute baby jars with nice pictures on the outside. Anyway, the kids liked the jars more than they’d ever liked any of her painstakingly sieved mush.

      It was all down to choice, Caroline said serenely. She liked being at home with her children making fairy cakes and having other rampaging toddlers round for tea, but that wasn’t for everyone.

      ‘You’re out there talking the talk and walking the walk, Mel,’ she said. ‘One of us has to be a captain of industry, and since it isn’t going to be me, I’d like it to be you. Just don’t forget us humble old pals when you’re getting the Nobel Prize for Services to the Business Sector or whatever.’

      ‘Stop it,’ begged Mel. ‘You’re making me cry.’

      What she didn’t quite understand was why Caroline hadn’t gone back to work now that the boys were all in school. Not that she’d ever said that to Caroline, she thought as she tapped out her friend’s number.

      ‘Hi, Caroline, sorry I missed you. I was on bath duty.’

      ‘Mel, I know, I phoned at the wrong time. It’s just that I didn’t want to bother you at work. So, how are you?’

      Caroline sounded relaxed and happy, and for some reason this vexed Mel more than she could say. Caroline had given up her high-powered job to sit at home and watch the Disney Channel – she should be bored and irritable, not happy.

      ‘We’re all great,’ Mel lied. ‘Just great.’ She paused, hoping that a sudden change of plan meant that the night out on Thursday had been cancelled. She daren’t cancel again, although she longed to. How could she have agreed to a night out mid-week, such a horribly busy week at that? She’d have to go straight to the restaurant from work, then get the late train home, and she’d miss seeing Sarah and Carrie.

      ‘About Thursday night…?’

      ‘Val’s coming, and Lorna’s dying to get out,’ Caroline said. ‘You’d think she never left the house when I know for a fact that they were away for New Year. It’ll be fabulous. I think I’m going to wear my new pink shirt – you know, the one I told you about. It’s gorgeous, but it’s a bit silky, so I probably should wear a camisole under it because if I wear a normal bra, you could see it through the shirt. I’ve tried it on twice already today and I’m still not sure. Although I tried on that cream printed one I told you about, and that might do. It’s not as dressy but…I do love the pink one, though.’

      Briefly, Mel imagined what it must be like actually to have time to decide what to wear on a night out instead of having the usual, last-minute panic in the morning where she ran upstairs and hastily dragged something sparkly from the wardrobe to take into work so she could brighten up her office clothes later.

      ‘Would the pink be OK or will I be totally mutton dressed as lamb?’ Caroline was asking.

      Did other people ever want to kill their friends with their bare hands or was it just her? Mel thought. Had she turned into a fearsome old harpy now that she had all the things she’d said she’d ever wanted, like children and a good job?

      ‘What do you think? Pink might be the navy blue of India or whatever, but baby-pink silk on a woman of thirty-nine, is it asking too much?’

      ‘Pink sounds great,’ Mel said evenly.

      ‘OK, I’ll wear it. I’m really looking forward to it, I can tell you. Sometimes you do need to get out of the house and realise there’s a whole world out there, don’t you?’

      ‘Absolutely,’ said Mel, ‘absolutely.’

      ‘Any wine left?’ asked Adrian when she hung СКАЧАТЬ