Once in a Lifetime. Cathy Kelly

There were three women who worked in the Organic Belle department and Charlie was always the most popular both with newcomers to the range and with long-standing customers coming back for more. She had a kind of empathy that allowed her to understand how someone could feel nervous walking into an elegant department store and facing the beautifully made-up women behind the counters.

      Part of her attraction was that she didn’t fit the traditional vision of stunning beauty usually found manning the counters in cosmetics departments. Yes, her subtle make-up was beautifully applied, thanks to the courses she’d taken when she signed up with Organic Belle in the first place, but she chose never to look too glamorous or inaccessible.

      Charlie was petite with a curvy figure, shiny chestnut hair that she wore in a groomed ponytail, a round, smiling face with neat features, and slightly cat-shaped eyes inherited from her mother. However, she didn’t have her mother’s fine-boned face or the fabulous lips that Kitty Nelson painted various shades of red: pillar box, fire engine, crimson. And she’d missed out on the long, elegant legs her mother and sister liked to show off with their high heels, sheer stockings and lashings of attitude.

      What she did have was a friendliness that drew people to her.

      Her husband was constantly trying to make her understand how important that was, and how long legs, sultry lips and a hand-span waist couldn’t hold a candle to innate kindness.

      ‘You light up a room when you smile, do you know that?’ he would say to her.

      ‘Stop it, Brendan!’ Charlie would laugh, and kiss him. But she loved him saying it. She hadn’t known such kindness since her father left.

      Growing up with her mother and sister, two fiercely strong personalities, Charlie had often felt like a plump little mouse who’d snuck into the lions’ cage. The lions ensnared people with their glamour and ferocity, and nobody could quite believe that Charlie, who listened far more than she talked, could possibly be related to Kitty and Iseult.

      Her champion had been her father, who was just as capable of being the egotistical big cat as his wife and older daughter, but who adored his little Charlotte.

      And then one terrible day, when Charlie was fifteen and Iseult was eighteen, he’d packed his bags and left.

      ‘I’m not leaving you, Charlotte,’ Anthony Nelson told her, extracting tissue after tissue from the box to wipe away Charlie’s tears. ‘I love you, remember that.’

      ‘But you are leaving,’ Charlie had sobbed.

      ‘I can’t live with your mother any more, that’s all, Charlotte. I can’t. Lord knows, I’ve tried but she’s destroying me–’ He collected himself. ‘Grown-ups sometimes leave each other, but that doesn’t mean they leave their children. I love you and Iseult. That will never change.’

      ‘Can I come with you?’

      He looked shocked. ‘Kids don’t live with their fathers, Charlotte. They live with their mothers, you know that.’

      ‘Do they have to?’ she whispered. If her mother heard, she’d explode with anger. The volume of screaming in the house had already been dangerously high for the past hour. It was only quiet now because Kitty had slammed the door to the sitting room and was in there with ‘It’s Too Late’ playing over and over on the stereo, almost drowning out the clinking of the gin bottle. But if she’d crept out and was secretly listening to what Charlie had said, she’d be furious…

      ‘I will never say anything bad about your mother to you, Charlotte,’ her father said urgently, holding her hands in his. ‘She loves you both and, Lord knows, your mother has enough passion in her, so when she loves, she really loves. I hate men who try to discredit their wives when they split up. Your mother is an amazing woman; look at all she’s done, look at what she does for you.’

      Charlie thought of her friend Suzy, whose mum would sit on her bed at night and ask about her day, then she would tell Suzy how much she loved her and how proud she was of her. Charlie would have liked that, but it wasn’t the sort of thing Mum did. Plus, Mum despised Suzy’s mother.

      ‘The woman’s a nightmare! I don’t know why you have to pal up with Suzy. She’s such a milk-and-water child. Oh, I give in. Go to her house, if you must–but when I come to pick you up, be waiting at the gate for me. I refuse to be subjected to her drivel about how fabulous Suzy is and how they’re all going camping or something ghastly for their holidays. Who the hell goes camping? Well, we girls camped that time in Paris–but that was different. We were part of the Women and Power demo, and we were broke.’ There followed a litany of fun had at the time, including a night in Montmartre with a man who chain-smoked Gauloises and said he was going to sculpt her in his version of Marianne, because she was the Celtic Marianne. And oh, there was a fabulous dress shop in a backstreet in the Marais where Kitty had bought a second-hand Schiaparelli dress that everyone just adored. Men dropped like flies when they saw it. Simply dropped.

      ‘Your mother sacrificed a lot for you girls,’ Dad continued. ‘Don’t forget that. She’d be devastated if she didn’t have you. I wouldn’t dream of doing that to her.’

      He seemed lost in thought for a moment, and Charlie could tell he was thinking how ungrateful she was. He was right, her mother must be wonderful, really. Children didn’t leave their mothers. That was a sin. Being a mother was hard, and if a mother screamed sometimes, it was because she had kids who drove her to it. So Charlie was a bad person for even thinking of leaving her mother.

      She looked at her father and saw his eyes were wet. Just then, she felt a bit of her curl up and die. She’d revealed something bad to her darling dad and he was upset with her. She felt so ashamed.

      ‘I love you, Charlotte,’ he said as he left.

      Charlie had nodded and said nothing. She daren’t, in case she started to cry. Telling the truth couldn’t be good when what you felt inside was so bad.

      When she was twenty-four, she’d met Brendan and he’d changed everything. He’d made her feel treasured and special. From their first meeting, she’d known he was the love of her life. Accustomed to her mercurial home where tension ratcheted up and down at speed, spending time with Brendan made her see that people could be calm and kind to each other. Nobody in Brendan’s home screamed at anyone else because they were randomly in a bad mood.

      Six months after meeting, they moved in together. A year later, they were married.

      ‘You’re throwing yourself away,’ her mother had said furiously. ‘He’s only a bank clerk. He’ll never amount to anything.’

      But it’s not his job to amount to something on my behalf, Charlie had thought but never said. Surely that was the very tenet of her mother’s much-vaunted campaigning: there was no use pretending to be Cinderella and waiting for the prince to arrive. You had to be your own prince.

      She had a good job in the phone company. Together, she and Brendan had enough money to put a deposit on a house. Together they could do it. Now her mother was saying that together wasn’t the key: Brendan had to be able to support the pair of them all on his own for it to count.

      She’d given up work when Mikey was born, another bombshell.

      ‘You can’t give up work now! What’s wrong with using a crèche?’ demanded Kitty.

      ‘It’s expensive. I’d be going to work purely to pay for the crèche, and paying the crèche so I could work. It’s a vicious circle. We’ve decided that I’ll stay at home until Mikey goes to school, that’s all.’

      ‘Your career will be ruined! Have I taught you nothing!’

      As it turned out, Charlie’s career hadn’t been ruined, though when Mikey had started going to school, she’d looked for work with more than a little trepidation. After all, who would want to employ her? When the phone company told her they had no vacancies, it seemed her mother had been right. But Organic Belle, a fledgling company, was willing to take her on. It transpired that Charlie had