Once in a Lifetime. Cathy Kelly

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ