Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (69 page)

Most of the filing cabinets were in Stacey’s office, but David had kept some beautiful walnut cabinets in his. They had been locked, Stacey said, but she had the keys to most of them and today she’d left them open. Ingrid pulled out the drawers one by one, thinking of the last person who had opened them. David. She slammed them shut and went to sit on the chair, where he’d died. She wouldn’t cry, this wasn’t what his life was about, this chair. He wouldn’t have had time to realise, her GP had said. With such a massive heart attack, it would have been very quick. No sitting in the chair, thinking of everything he was going to lose, thinking in pain of her and the children.

She sat back and closed her eyes, wishing to be close to him; but there was nothing. That hurt, feeling the emptiness where he used to be. The priest had talked about another world and God and love, and yet she sat here in this room where David had spent so much time, where he’d died, and there was nothing. She would never see him again; he was gone from her for ever.

Her sister Flora had such great faith and had come many times over the past weeks, sitting quietly with Ingrid, listening to her talk, hugging her while she cried, and telling her it would get better. She often held Ingrid’s hand, occasionally patting it gently. Ingrid wanted to feel comforted, but she couldn’t. Nothing comforted her now.

‘You have to have faith,’ Flora would say. ‘We don’t know
God’s will or what He wants from us. This is a way of testing your faith, Ingrid–’

Ingrid couldn’t listen to any more. She removed her hand.

‘I know you’re trying to help, Flora,’ she said, ‘but it’s
not
helping. How am I supposed to have faith now? I’m not like you; I wish I was. If something happened to Brid, you’d be able to cope with it and make sense of it all. You’d see her in heaven–what did they say at the funeral about God’s house having many rooms? Well, that’d work for you, but it doesn’t for me. I don’t have your belief. Having faith in God when your husband has been snatched away doesn’t make sense to me.’

In her grief, Ingrid thought about God and His plans all the time. The priest at David’s funeral had talked about how believing in God would take her through this and how David was with God.

But David wouldn’t want to be with God: he’d want to be with them.

After the funeral, when the mourning party had retired to a hotel in Ardagh for coffee and sandwiches, the priest came round again and sat beside her on a stool, almost like a schoolboy ready for a grilling from a teacher, Ingrid thought.

He was young, perhaps thirty, and at any other time, Ingrid would have liked him. Flora had whispered that he’d worked in South America for three years, and before he’d come to their parish he’d been employed in a maximum-security prison.

‘Do you know for sure that David’s happy?’ she said. ‘I can’t feel it. I can only feel that he’s gone from me, and that absence is huge, huge and total. He’s not coming back. I am never going to see him again.’ She put her hands over her face and took a deep breath. ‘You say I will, but how do you know?’

‘We don’t know, that’s what faith is: trust in the Almighty.’

‘How can I trust the person who took my husband from me?’ Ingrid demanded.

The priest was clearly used to this type of discussion post-funeral and took it in his stride. He talked of love, belief and the Holy Spirit guiding the bereaved.

He had no answers, either, Ingrid decided.

Now she pulled at the drawers on David’s desk, looking for something, something she could touch that would bring him back to her. The first two drawers contained stationery, but the third drawer was locked. Presumably Stacey hadn’t found the key. She dragged at it, it wouldn’t open. This was too much, too painful, she shouldn’t have come in today. She got up off the chair and left the office, shutting the door quietly behind her. She wasn’t going to cry, not in front of anyone.

‘Stacey, I feel a little weary, I think I’ll go home now,’ she said.

She slipped out of one of the side entrances. She didn’t want to walk through the administrative offices and talk to everyone, have them hold her hand a touch longer than normal, have them look at her with sad eyes, thinking,
Poor Ingrid, how is she coping?
That made it worse. Not the kindness–that was wonderful and people were so terribly kind. But the pity, people looking at her and seeing her empty life ahead of her; that hurt. She knew because she’d done it herself to men and women who’d had loved ones ripped away from them before their time; she’d looked at them with the same eyes, thinking,
Poor you, I’m glad it’s not me.
Ingrid wasn’t ready for that today.

On the main street of Ardagh she breathed in the cool, fresh air. It was a beautiful day, still cold, but the sun was shining. She walked down the street, past a glitzy hair salon called Chloë’s, where the nylon scent of hair spray filled the air, and into a small florist’s, where she bought a large bunch of freesias.

‘Are they a present?’ asked the girl in the shop, as she expertly wrapped them in cellophane.

‘Yes,’ Ingrid said. They were a present, they were for David.

On the headland, where the church and its graveyard were situated, it was still a beautiful day, but windy. She could hear the sea crashing against the dangerous rocky crags below, known as the Twelve Apostles, deadly to swimmers and boats alike. The church was called the Black Abbey by the local people because it was made of dark stones and looked as if it had been cut right out of the earth; the colour of wet slate, its thin, pointed spires reached up to the sky.

Discussing where they wanted to be buried hadn’t been high on Ingrid’s list of topics for enjoyable evening conversation, but they had talked about it once and David had said that this was the place for him. It wasn’t the church so much, he’d explained, it was the graveyard. It was beautiful, Ingrid had to admit, if any graveyard could be called beautiful. Spread out along the hill as if the church was the centrepiece and the graveyard a cloak spread beneath it, it clung to the side of the hill. It contained many beautiful examples of Victorian memorials. There were stone angels with lichen clinging to their soaring wings and giant tombs that hadn’t been opened in a hundred years, all Gothic and beautiful and wild. Ingrid could see why David would want to be buried here and she would be too, she thought, with a shock. She’d bought a plot for two. One day, she’d lie here with him, and that was frightening because even though she wanted to be with him again, she didn’t want to lie in this cold ground.

She pulled her camel-hair coat tighter around her and walked down to the grave. It still had the signs of new grief about it. Amid the remains of the funeral flowers and the big bunch of daffodils she’d brought the week before, there was a tiny arrangement of red roses, placed as if they were lying on David’s heart, if such a thing could be imagined. Ingrid stared at them. There was no card, nothing to say whom these flowers had come from, and she looked at them for a long time. Who had left red roses for David?

She closed her eyes to pray but couldn’t concentrate. Abruptly, she picked up the red roses and hurled them far off over the cemetery wall where they could bounce down into the sea.
She
was the person who got to leave red roses for David, nobody else.

That evening at dinner in a small restaurant on the far side of Ardagh, Flora was talking about a programme she’d heard on the radio about bats. ‘Absolutely fascinating,’ she said. ‘It turns out they aren’t as blind as scientists originally thought.’

‘Really, Flora,’ said Sigrid, ‘we’re eating our dinner. I don’t want to think about bats.’

‘Well, I’m interested,’ said Flora.

Ingrid could almost hear David’s voice saying, ‘She is a bit bats, perhaps that’s why she likes them so much,’ and she had to try not to laugh.

‘I love this place,’ Molly said, looking around her. She gave her aunt a hug, diffusing the bat row. ‘Thanks, Aunt Flora.’

‘I decided we shouldn’t avoid places where we went with David,’ she said firmly. ‘We’re not going to do the “avoiding” thing, we’re going to do the “celebrating the life” thing.

‘Fine,’ said Ingrid; it was better not to argue with Flora when she was in that sort of mood.

‘I think Aunt Flora’s right, Mum,’ said Molly. ‘We should be celebrating Dad’s life in every way.’

‘Yes.’ Ingrid thought of her meeting with Tom and the discussion about selling Kenny’s. Her husband had had a meeting with the head of DeVere’s and he’d never told her. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘we should celebrate his life.’

She tried to smile at her family, patting Ethan’s hand where he sat beside her, smiling across the candles at Molly. They were all so good, but she felt too empty to enjoy it.

Ingrid couldn’t taste the food. It looked beautiful, even smelled nice. They were having Wicklow lamb with a herb crust and fresh vegetables, and it all tasted like cardboard animal
feed marinated in brackish water. She went through the motions of eating and trying to smile because she didn’t want to be the spectre at the feast. Everyone was trying so hard for her.

Ethan’s eyes had been suspiciously red when Flora had handed him the wine list and said ‘You choose, darling. Your dad taught you all about wine, go on, you pick.’

David hadn’t really taught him all about wine, Ingrid knew. They weren’t big wine drinkers, definitely not wine snobs, and Ethan’s knowledge was about on a par with her own: pick something mid-range in the list and you couldn’t go too far wrong. She’d seen, though, how he was grateful to Flora for saying that, making him feel in some way his father’s successor.

At the beginning of the meal, Molly had been doing what she used to do as a small child when she was nervous, twirling her hair endlessly in her right hand, twirl, twirl, but as the evening wore on she stopped doing it. Everyone was able to relax except for Ingrid. What would they feel if she just got up to go and said, ‘I’m really sorry, this is kind of you, but I can’t do this. I’m not ready yet.’

There were flowers on the table, carnations. She hated carnations and their peppery scent. On the next table was a yellow orchid, much nicer, and further along at a big table for ten, there were red roses. Something sparked in her mind. Red roses…what was it? She remembered the red roses on David’s grave. Nobody else would leave red roses except somebody’s wife, somebody’s lover, and yet there they were, a little bouquet, beautifully tied.

‘I went to David’s grave today,’ she said, and they all looked up, sad at the image she conjured up. The widow with no life beyond her husband’s grave. ‘There were lovely red flowers there, but the card had blown away. Were they from you, Sigrid?’ she asked.

‘No, sorry,’ Sigrid said. ‘I’ve some plants I thought we could put at the head of the grave, but I haven’t brought them yet.’

‘Not me,’ said Molly.

‘Sorry,’ said Ethan guiltily. ‘I meant to buy something today. Can we go to the grave before I fly off?’

Nobody here, none of the people closest to him, had left roses for David.

He’d had secrets from her: she’d found that out this morning from Tom. And there was a locked drawer in his office desk for which Stacey didn’t have the key. Something was being hidden from her.

Ingrid thought she might be sick. She shoved her chair back from the table. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and she moved off, napkin spilling on the floor, everyone looking at her. ‘Headache.’

‘I’ll come with you, Mum,’ said Molly, leaping to her feet.

Ingrid controlled herself long enough to say, ‘No, love, you stay here. Please.’

Somehow, she managed to get out of the restaurant and into her car. It would take five minutes to drive to the store, that was all.

The Kenny’s security man, Abel, clearly thought she was under the influence of something.

‘There is nobody in, Mrs Kenny,’ he kept saying gently, as though he were speaking to a small child.

‘I know,’ Ingrid hissed, doing her best to maintain her calm public persona. ‘There’s something I need to check.’

‘They’ll all be here in the morning–’ he said.

‘Now–I want to check it now,’ Ingrid snapped.

‘Of course, madam.’ Abel’s professional mask went up. He was polite, a tall, immaculately turned out man from Sierra Leone. David used to say he had the intelligence and gravitas of a judge. What might he have done with his life if circumstances hadn’t brought him and his large family to Ardagh where he had to work the shifts that nobody else wanted? She wondered whether David had come here late at night and had Abel been accustomed to letting him in with someone else clinging to his coat, laughing at their daring…No, she wasn’t going to think that way. Not until she was sure.

Her mobile phone rang as she was inserting the key in David’s suite of offices. Probably Flora, checking she’d got home all right. Flora was unlikely to be comforted by a message that read:
Not home yet, decided to go to dead husband’s office to see if my instinct that he was hiding something from me was correct.

It would probably be padded-cell-and-soft-focus-drug-time if Flora got
that
message.

She checked her phone.

The text was from Molly, seeing if she was all right. Whatever was going on, Ingrid didn’t want Molly involved.

Nearly home, sorry for rushing, headache bad, talk in morning. Love Mum.
She sent the text.

Lying was actually an OK thing to do when your husband had just died. If you told people the truth about how you felt, they’d have you locked up.

Ingrid flicked on all the lights, swept through Stacey’s office, then found the correct key for David’s. The Lucite lamp on his desk lit up jewel-green when she pressed the switches on the wall. Clever. Like everything David did, it was all perfectly organised: no fiddling around with desk-lamp buttons. Just flick two switches and everything worked. Attention to detail was David’s trademark.

Which was why the red roses on his grave and the locked drawer sounded a duff note in Ingrid’s head.

The drawer was still locked. Ingrid pulled it again to make doubly sure. No, still firm. She looked around the office for something to pry it open, but there was nothing obvious lying around.