Always and Forever. Cathy Kelly

another note to her list. ‘Zoo day for girls. Leave money out for Adrian.’

      Wednesday was Adrian’s morning for taking the girls to Little Tigers. Mel did the nursery run the other four mornings before getting the train from Carrickwell into the Lorimar offices in Dublin, but on Wednesdays there was a breakfast meeting of the marketing and publicity departments, so Mel had to be in work early. She remembered when getting up earlier on Wednesdays had been a total pain because she had to set her alarm clock for seven instead of half-past. That was before the children had come along, and before they’d moved to Carrickwell. Seven was a lie-in these days, now that Carrie woke up bright and breezy at six every morning.

      ‘Heyyo, Mummy,’ she’d lisp when Mel hurried into the darkened, Winnie-the-Pooh-papered bedroom, showered but sleepy. It was hard to be grumpy when that little smiling face shone up at her, eyes bright with anticipation of the day ahead and small, fat hands outspread to be scooped from the cot. Although she was two and a half, she still didn’t like to clamber out of the cot on her own, unlike her older sister, who’d been doing it from the age of two, but Mel knew it would happen any day now.

      Early morning was one of Mel’s favourite parts of the day. The pure unadulterated joy of being with her children, them kissing her hello, their childish pleasure at another day – it was what kept her going.

      No perfume in the world was as beautiful as the morning scent of baby skin, a magical smell of toddler biscuits, baby shampoo and pure little person. Carrie loved being cuddled and wanted at least five minutes of snuggling before she’d consent to being dressed. Mel was usually torn between wanting just as much cuddling but knowing that the clock was ticking on.

      Sarah was a morning person, all questions at breakfast.

      ‘Why is Barney purple?’ was her current favourite.

      It was Mel’s job to come up with funny reasons as she raced round the kitchen, sorting out breakfast for all of them.

      ‘He fell into some purple custard and he liked it so much he didn’t wash it off. Now he jumps into purple custard every day.’

      ‘Mommy, that’s silly!’ Sarah had giggled that morning.

      Carrie, slavishly adoring of her big sister, giggled too.

      At her desk in the tiny cubicle on Lorimar’s third floor, with its stunning views of Dublin’s docklands, Mel reached over and touched the shell photo frame with Adrian, Sarah and Carrie’s faces beaming at her. The three people she loved most in the whole world. The three people she did it all for.

      Mel spent two hours working on the website with the help of two coffees and a Twix bar. Lunch was for people who had time to make sandwiches before they left the house in the morning, or the money to buy the overpriced ones from the guy who came round the office every lunchtime.

      As she drank her second coffee, Mel looked at her list and idly circled the word ‘zoo’. She and Adrian had taken Sarah to the zoo for the first time when she was two. Showing your child real tigers and elephants after so long looking at them in picture books was one of those parental milestones. How many parents never got to do things like that any more? she wondered. How many mothers missed the actual trip and instead got to read the nursery school diary: ‘Carrie saw lions and seals, and piglets in the petting zoo. She had an ice cream and got upset when she saw the monkeys because of the noise. She was a good girl!’

      Lunch over, Mel went through the most recent pages for the website, scanning every line and photo like a hawk. The previous month, a huge error had occurred when a paragraph on new procedures for hip replacements had slipped into an article about erectile dysfunction. There had been much giggling in the office at the idea that ‘innovative keyhole surgery under local anaesthetic may do away with the need for painful replacement operations and would mean that patients will be back in action in just twenty-four hours’.

      ‘I’d say a lot of male customers vowed to keep away from the doctor when they read that bit,’ Otto from accounts had teased, as he’d delivered the expenses cheques. ‘Willy replacement isn’t exactly what every man wants to hear about when he’s having trouble in that department.’

      Mel’s boss, Hilary, had been less amused, and completely uninterested in Mel’s explanation that the error had surfaced mysteriously when the web designer was working on the page. Mel was responsible, end of story.

      ‘This is an appalling mistake,’ Hilary had said in that cold tone of disappointment that was far more scary than if she’d actually screamed at Mel. Hilary was Olympic standard at making people feel as if they’d failed. ‘Maybe someone in design did it as a juvenile joke, but you should have spotted it. I’d bet my bonus it’s going to be in all the Sunday papers’ quote of the week sections.’

      Hilary hadn’t said that Edmund, who noticed everything, would undoubtedly blame Mel and that this would not look good on her file. Mel knew that herself. And mistakes on the file of a working mother were multiplied by a factor of ten. Being a working mother was like being a marked woman in Lorimar. Once a woman had children, no matter what sort of ambitious powerhouse she’d been beforehand, she was living on borrowed time afterwards. One child was seen to be careless, two was asking for trouble.

      The fact that Hilary herself had three children was not a help. In all the years Mel had been working for Hilary, she’d never seen her boss either leave early over some child emergency or take a sick-baby day off.

      ‘How does she do it?’ Vanessa used to ask in September, when she was up to her eyeballs getting Conal sorted out with school books and uniform, desperately trying to take half-days here and there, while Hilary was at her desk at all times, mercilessly watching out for people skiving off.

      ‘They can’t be kids, they’re robots,’ Mel decided. ‘That’s the only answer.’

      ‘Or is it having a husband who works from home and a nanny who gets paid more than the chairman of Microsoft?’ asked Vanessa.

      ‘You could have something there,’ Mel agreed.

      By five, Mel had returned all her phone calls and was finishing a batch of letters. There was still a report on the month’s publicity activity to write for Hilary but she had to be out the door by five fifteen or she’d miss her train and be late to pick up the girls. She’d have to take the work and do it on the journey home.

      Twenty minutes later, Mel swapped her heels for her commuting flats, filled her travel Thermos with coffee, and raced off into the cold. With luck, she’d be home by seven.

      It was ten past seven before Mel parked the car in the drive and she helped Sarah and Carrie out and gathered up all their bags. It was a relief, as always, to be home.

      ‘Carrickwell is such a gorgeous, mellow place,’ their friends had all agreed when Mel and Adrian had given up their apartment in Christchurch to move to the country. Sarah was still a bump beneath Mel’s ‘Under Construction’ maternity T-shirt then. ‘Perfect for bringing up children. And the schools are great.’

      Mel and Adrian had agreed and, catching each other’s eye in the almost telepathic way of a couple who knew each other inside out, had said nothing about how they’d muddled their way to their decision.

      Both of them were city people, born and bred, so the idea of this country idyll wasn’t as appealing as everyone else seemed to think. There were other factors involved.

      Mel’s parents had moved out of the city ten years before to a small house halfway between Carrickwell and Dublin, which meant Mel’s mum would be nearby to help take care of the bump.

      In Dublin, they wouldn’t have been able to afford a four-bedroomed semi in such a pretty road. And both of them felt it would be good for the children to have the countryside on the doorstep, perfect for family picnics. Or that was the theory. In reality, all Mel saw of the countryside now was from the confines of the train to and from work.

      The clincher had been the local schools. However, they were now made to feel they had missed the boat there. Sarah and Carrie were down for all the best