‘You’ll be on a platter, dead, with an apple in your mouth if your mother realises you’ve forgotten what day it is,’ Lou had said, having to smother a laugh.
Ned’s mother adored him.
‘Her genius,’ she called him and told everyone he was a professor, ‘the first in the family!’
‘What day is it?’ asked the professor, bewildered. He scanned his phone calendar. ‘It’s Tuesday ...’
‘Fifty years ago today, your parents got married,’ Lou reminded him.
Ned has slumped against the wall.
‘Today. I forgot. She’ll kill me.’
Even Ned knew that no professorial conference would make up for Number One Son not being at the special Mass for the married couple, followed by a big family lunch in Whitehaven’s prestigious Old Court Hotel. He’d cancelled the conference, naturally, and his mother had loved the big lead crystal vase that Lou had bought for the golden wedding anniversary couple, fulsomely thanking Number One Son for his thoughtfulness.
Lou had said nothing. The background suited her.
‘I’ll make it up to you, birthday girl,’ Ned whispered now. ‘What time is the party?’
Lou snuggled into her husband’s shoulder.
‘Eight,’ she said. ‘You’re driving your mother and her friends from the church, so don’t forget.’
‘I value my life too much,’ said Ned, kissing her neck. ‘I hate to get up now, but I have to. Early tutorial. Till tonight, my fifty-year-old flower.’
He moved out of the bed and Lou would have thrown a pillow at him, but he’d vanished into the bathroom.
He might have the memory of a goldfish for certain things. But he loved her.
And she accepted him fully and understood that he wasn’t one of life’s great gift-buyers. Acceptance was the key to a happy marriage.
Yet ... the feelings she so rarely allowed to reach the surface popped up. She would have liked a gift from her husband on this special birthday. Even a card to say he loved her. How hard could that be?
It was 3.15 p.m. on Friday when Toni swiped her pass at the outer door to the studio and walked in with a smile bolted to her face. Normally, she loved filming her show: loved the buzz, the energy of knowing they’d a great line-up of guests, the meetings beforehand to nail everything down, the calm in the make-up chair when she allowed herself to settle perfectly into being Toni Cooper, interviewer. This afternoon, she was faking it all. Every smile, every upbeat conversation, was a lie.
Toni had no other choice. She could not tell anybody what had happened the night before. Nobody could know. She barely understood it herself. Her life was crumbling around her and Toni didn’t know how to fix it. But she had to. Lou wasn’t the only fixer in the family. Toni would figure out how to get everything back on track. She had no other choice.
‘Hi Toni, tonight’s your sister’s big night?’ said one of the production team as Toni stalked down the corridor.
‘Yes,’ said Toni brightly. ‘I won’t be around for the post-show drinks. Have to drive to Cork.’
She put her stuff in her dressing room, grabbed a speedy coffee and was ready for the pre-record meeting with the team with her game face on. When they tapedTonight with Toni Cooper, they taped ‘as live’. Which meant that if someone screwed up – even Toni herself – it still went out that night: unedited.
‘Keeps people on their toes,’ said Cormac Wolfe, the show’s executive producer, a tall, sinewy man whom Toni had long ago decided was ‘ethical, driven, steely’.
‘Steely?’ he’d asked when she’d told him – breaking her rule of keeping everyone’s three words to herself. Cormac could handle the truth. ‘You said I was driven and focused years ago.’
‘Once even ...’ he’d shot her a look, ‘I was hot.’
‘I was young and foolish when I called you hot,’ said Toni.
They’d been on the verge of a fling at the time – pre-Oliver, of course – but it had never happened. They’d both been ambitious and yet junior in their jobs, she in radio and him in TV. Toni knew that work affairs were so easy in their careers and that untangling professional relationships after said fling was a nightmare. Who knew if they’d work together in the future, she’d thought.
At least she’d got that right. They’d worked together for years now and a tricky relationship in the past would have made life difficult even for such professionals as she and Cormac Wolfe. His being steely worked in her current show’s favour, though. No matter how much of a car crash an interview was, Cormac never allowed anyone to retape.
Today, they were taping at five to allow Toni to leave the studio at six fifteen in order to drive to Whitehaven for her sister’s party. Toni was unusually quiet all afternoon, so much so that make-up’s newest member had asked if she had a headache.
‘No,’ said Toni, trying to smile. ‘I’m just a bit preoccupied, that’s all.’
