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sight of a post-menopausal woman, and that would be it. Ingrid Fitzgerald’s television career would be summarily over, except for voice-overs on history compilations or an occasional documentary.
    She was far too shrewd not to know that one day this would happen.
    Still, there was nobody here to see her or her wrinkles today. God knew when David would be back. Off with his mistress, she thought, with a hint of bitterness: the store.
    Down below, the dogs began to howl. They weren’t allowed upstairs, but when they sensed someone was up and wasn’t rushing down to play with them, they began to whine pitifully.
    ‘Be
    down in a minute,’ roared Ingrid. It was nearly ten, so it had been a lie in after all.
    When she was ready, she hurried down and sat on the bottom step as the dogs nuzzled into her with frantic delight.
    ‘Don’t pretend that David didn’t let you out earlier, you little scamp,’ she said affectionately as Lucinda, a golden cocker spaniel, started her desperate-for-a-pee dance. Then Sybil, a black-and-white bitza they’d got from Molly’s dog shelter, began to do the dance too.
    Ingrid opened the kitchen’s double doors into the garden and both dogs barely made it out before they sank to their haunches in prolonged peeing sessions.
    Ingrid stared, puzzled. They clearly hadn’t been out. The only explanation was that David, up at the crack of dawn, had left without going into the kitchen for breakfast and the dogs hadn’t heard him. Occasionally, if Ingrid woke early, she
    found the dogs snoring peacefully in their baskets and had the pleasure of seeing them wake and sleepily wag their tails.
    They were both old and their hearing wasn’t as good as it had once been, rendering them pretty hopeless as guard dogs.
    What was David doing, racing off so early on a Saturday that he hadn’t even had time for a coffee or to let the dogs out?
    A flutter of disquiet beat in her heart. True, he’d always been obsessed with the store, even more so in the past five years since the expansion.
    ‘When you borrow that much money, you need to spend more time at work,’ David told her in the months after the store re-opened following its twelve-million-euro revamp, and he was there morning, noon and night. ‘Nobody else can do it but me, Ingrid. I have to be there. You know that.’
    Ingrid, who normally felt a certain relief that David was the main shareholder of Kenny’s because she knew of other family-run businesses where there were constant arguments over each mug bought out of petty cash, wished for the first time that he had brothers or sisters to help him.
    Money wasn’t the issue. She got a good salary; without a penny of David’s money, they’d have been able to live comfortably. Ingrid had no desire for massive wealth. Lord only knew, most of the people with vast sums of money seemed to have doubled their problems with every year. For every rich person donating money to AIDS research, there were fifty more with kids who refused to work and wanted to do nothing more energetic every day than take cocaine and wrap their Lamborghinis round lamp posts.
    Who needed huge wealth? They didn’t.
    Surely they were at the point in their life when they could slow down a little, take more time out. She was doing less work these days, why couldn’t David be the same?
    With the same disquiet, Ingrid let the dogs back in, fed them their breakfast and took out the coffee to make hers.
     
    She felt like phoning David and asking him what was so bloody important that he’d had to rush off at dawn. But that type of conversation never worked. Being a skilled interviewer had taught her that there was never going to be a civil answer to a question couched in such terms.
    ‘What do you mean, what was so bloody important…’
    he’d respond, and they’d be off arguing.
    No, far better to say nothing until later and remark kindly that he must be tired after getting up so early, and they could postpone their dinner