Always and Forever - Cathy Kelly

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to consider getting her tonsils out,’ Mel’s mother had reported on the phone that morning, as an anxious Mel stood outside the health forum conference that she just hadn’t been able to miss. ‘He says he needs to see you if you have the time.’

      Mel bridled at the tone. If she had the time. Who’d sat up with Carrie all Friday night? Who’d driven to the emergency surgery and sat in anxiety, singing Bob the Builder tunes for two solid hours on Saturday until they saw a doctor?

      ‘How dare he?’ she snarled. ‘I bet he never thinks how he can go out to work because he has a wife at home doing everything for him.’

      ‘Mel, love, he didn’t say it that way.’ Her mother was defensive. ‘You’re a great mum; we all know it.’

      Do we? thought Mel. And who’s ‘we’?

      ‘He just meant that you should have a chat about the possibility of getting Carrie’s tonsils out while she’s still so young. Now that she’s over two, they can do it and you wouldn’t want to leave it too long. The older they are, the harder the recovery is.’ Her mother knew everything. Where does this maternal wisdom come from? thought Mel. And when was she going to get it?

      ‘That’s a lovely picture, Sarah,’ Mel said evenly. ‘Will we pin it up on the fridge?’

      Sarah nodded happily and Adrian smiled up at his wife.

      Another difficult moment over, Mel thought. Everyone thought she was managing everything so well. What would they say if she revealed that sometimes she felt she barely coped?

      The bathtime routine took for ever that evening. Carrie loved her bath and always played with her plastic duck as if she’d never set eyes on it before, gleefully pouring water into the head so that it poured out of the bottom, making the plastic wings flap.

      ‘Mama!’ she squealed delightedly as the wings worked faster and faster. ‘Mama!’

      Mel laughed too, feeling some of the tension of the day subside. How wonderful toddlers were – always excited, always ready to be happy. In contrast, Sarah was miserable and sat amid the lavender-scented bubbles looking like an abandoned child, her big blue eyes filled with sorrow.

      ‘Will you come to the zoo tomorrow, Mummy?’ she asked as Carrie splashed in frantic excitement.

      Mel felt her heart constrict. Poor Sarah.

      ‘You know I can’t,’ said Mel brightly. ‘Mummy has to work but she wishes she could be at the zoo with you.’

      ‘I want you to come.’ Sarah aimed one of Carrie’s floating fish at the duck and threw it. The fish missed the duck but landed on Sarah’s foot, making her squeak with surprise and hurt. Her bottom lip wobbled precariously.

      ‘Would you like to go to the farm with Mummy and Daddy at the weekend?’ wheedled Mel, in desperation. The farm, complete with goats, sheep and a couple of Shetland ponies you could pet and feed, was a few miles away on the slopes of Mount Carraig, and both children loved it. Needless to say, going to the farm wasn’t part of Mel’s plan for the weekend, but they could manage it if she did the grocery shopping late on Friday instead of Saturday.

      ‘Don’t 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

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