Her phone lay on her bedside table and she fumbled for it, pressing the button so that the screen lit up. With light, she managed to find her glasses and look at the time.
Two fifteen.
Oh hell, she thought. She had a hectic day ahead, she hadn’t been able to get to sleep for ages and now she was awake again.
Beside her, Seth was a long mound under the duvet, sleeping soundly, which was infinitely annoying. He didn’t have to get up in the morning.
Which wasn’t his fault, she reminded herself, as she did so often these days as a sort of guilty afterthought. He hadn’t joyfully decided to retire and let her continue working, he’d been made redundant three months ago and hated it. Yet, it felt like his fault that he could sleep late while she – now the major earner – had to haul herself out of bed come rain or shine.
Pushing back the duvet, she went into the horrible, poky bathroom she swore she would never get used to, shivering as the cool night air hit her soaked cotton pyjamas.
In the bathroom’s cold light, a tired, white-faced woman stared back at her from the mirror: dark hair plastered to her skull, face sheeny with damp, nightclothes sticking like a second skin.
She looked as if she’d been running through a rainforest for days. She looked – Frankie realized the correct word with misery – old.
Somehow, while she’d been busy trying to raise two children, run the Human Resources department of Dutton Insurance and be a wife to Seth Green, age had crept up on her. She’d been so busy working, doing school runs and making vast meals to freeze, checking homework diaries and worrying about exam results, mopping up teenage tears and making rare date nights with her husband, that the blur of her thirties had morphed into her forties and suddenly, here she was, forty-nine. Calcium, collagen, oestrogen – everything was leaching out of her. Soon all that would remain would be a dried-out husk and if she stood still long enough, she’d be stuffed in a museum as an example of tinder-dry womankind. Even her marriage felt dried out and empty. That was the worst thing and she couldn’t bear to think about it.
Is this all normal? she silently asked the mirror-image Frankie. If it was, nobody talked about it. Not her sister, not her friends. If only her mother was a bit normal, she might have asked her, but there was nothing normal about Madeleine. Her mother, pushing eighty and still fond of causing havoc, managed to be old in years without being old in any other way. Madeleine to most people, but plain old Mad to her two daughters, had never bothered with creams or unguents. In her forties, she’d lain in the back garden toasting herself under layers of coconut sun oil, happiest when she was nut brown. When hot pants were the ‘in’ clothes for teenagers, Madeleine had worn them herself, not caring that other mothers wore normal summer skirts and cardigans. If she passed a building site and somebody whistled, Madeleine would blow the builders a delighted kiss, while her teenage daughters, Frankie and Gabriella, would exchange horrified glances.
Why couldn’t Mother be more like other mothers?
As Frankie grew up, she began to appreciate her mother’s unconventional spirit but even so, she wondered at the secret of her parents’ long marriage. Eventually, Frankie decided that it worked because Dad was a placid person who managed by saying ‘that’s fine, dear,’ to whatever Madeleine wanted to do.
They still lived in a cottage in the fishing village of Kinsale, and when Madeleine went through her phase of ‘forgetting’ her costume when she went for her morning dip, Dad greeted people’s outraged comments by saying ‘Isn’t she a great woman for the swimming, all the same.’
Madeleine’s marriage guidance advice, if she offered it, would be to get married to a calm man in the first place, and then ignore him happily thereafter. Dad never seemed to get sad or tired. He was just Dad, content with his paper and the crossword, able to keep his spirits up no matter what happened, happy to let his wife be exactly who she wanted to be.
Beauty-wise, the sun had taken a cruel revenge on Frankie’s mother and now her face was more wrinkled than a very old crab apple. But in true Madeleine fashion, she didn’t mind in the slightest. She continued to wear bright-red lipstick and dye her grey hair a glossy dark brown and had no problem facing herself in the mirror.
Frankie’s mother was one of the happy people who liked what they saw when they spied their own reflection.
At Sunday lunches in Frankie and Seth’s house, Madeleine would happily discuss the way her hair was still silky and obedient, and say: ‘Frankie, I was thinking of getting a more angular bob in the hairdressers. Lionel says I’ve got the bones for it.’
Lionel was Madeleine’s hairdresser and, as far as Frankie was concerned, he clearly liked living on the edge, sending his older clientele out with styles their daughters wouldn’t dream of risking.
But maybe Lionel and his clients were right, Frankie thought gloomily. They didn’t worry about wrinkles – what was the point?
Frankie had been careful with the sun. She used serums and suncream. She read articles in magazines about the latest products, she never ventured out with anything less than a factor 25 moisturizer. And look at her now. She might write to all those serum and suncream people and tell them they should be fined for filling people’s heads with insane dreams. In the cold light of the basement bathroom, with bluish shadows under her dark eyes and a spiderweb of lines around them, she could have passed for eighty herself.
Maybe it was time she started visiting Lionel – the sort of deranged, angular haircut that Lady Gaga would baulk at might be the very thing. At least it would take people’s eyes away from her face.
Turning from the mirror, she stripped off her damp pyjamas and balled them up into the laundry basket. She dried off her hair and body, then, still using her phone for light because she didn’t want to wake Seth, found fresh nightclothes.
By the bed, she had lavender oil and she rubbed a bit on her wrists and temples. Nobody looked good when they woke in the middle of the night, she told herself, but at least she could smell good.
She was tired, that was all. But instead of going back to sleep, her mind began to race the way it so often did. The previous day at Dutton Insurance unfurled like a film reel, and she thought of all the things she ought to have done. Next, the following day’s meetings and potential problems began to roll out. The company employed nearly a thousand people, so as human resources director there was always something for Frankie to worry about.
Tomorrow – or rather today – she had to conduct five interviews for the position of deputy marketing director. Then there was a particularly tricky case of sexual harassment involving a woman in the motor insurance department and her boss. The claims department was in uproar over holiday policy, and the intervention of one of Frankie’s HR team had only succeeded in making matters worse, so that needed sorting out. And on top of that, one of the department heads wanted to take her to lunch to ‘pick her brains’ about something.
‘Lunch!’ she’d vented to Seth the previous evening as they sat at the kitchen table after dinner. Seth had cooked a very nice Thai curry and Frankie had eaten so much she’d had to open the button on her jeans. ‘I don’t have time for lunch! I’m supposed to run a team that isn’t actually big enough for the size of the company, recruit fabulous staff at high speed when required, and be free for lunch whenever some other executive wants to chat!’
‘You used to enjoy having lunches with the other executives,’ Seth said innocently.
‘That was when I had time for lunch. These days I barely have time to snatch a sandwich at my desk,’ she hissed. Did he understand anything?
‘There’s no need to snap,’ he said, with a hint of a snap in his own voice.
And of course, Frankie felt sorry for taking it out on him. But at the same time, she was angry. It seemed that she