Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  She had been a different person once: happy, funny, able to laugh at herself and take joy in other people’s happiness. But the triad of pain over the past few years had hit her like a hurricane.

  Her mother’s illness and death, her own infertility, and now Bess, attempting to fill an altogether unfillable gap in all their lives, had all made Jojo into someone else, someone angry with the world, someone she didn’t like very much.

  The fun, passionate woman Hugh had fallen in love with had gone and Jojo mourned her too.

  ‘Mum is gone and I can’t talk to her about any of this,’ Jojo sobbed to her cousin Cari during that first hideous IVF treatment, when she hadn’t known what to expect and her hormones and mood had joined forces and gone to the depths of the Mariana Trench.

  Cari, who was clever, wise and the sort of friend who said the right thing and not what you wanted to hear, had delivered tough love: ‘Yes, Auntie Lottie is gone, Jojo, honey, but hating Bess will not bring her back. You can’t do two things at once – hate her and keep enough love in you to have a baby. This rage and anxiety is not the way to prepare to be pregnant. What’s the point of having soothing lavender baths and burning calming essential oils morning noon and night if you’re consumed with rage? I bet you never said any of this to the psychologist at the pre-treatment sessions.’

  ‘No,’ said Jojo. Blasted Cari, always hitting the nail on the head. ‘But that’s not the point—’

  ‘It is the point,’ insisted Cari. ‘You can’t control what your dad does, Jojo. Let it go. Let him be married and—’

  ‘Mum’s dead and he got married again to someone who is her complete opposite. He said he’d love Mum for ever! He was lying!’ Jojo raged.

  ‘People lie,’ Cari said flatly, thinking of Barney, and then amended it to: ‘Your father adored your mother, Jojo, and you know it. Adored her. But men move on. Life moves on. You need your life to move on. What do you want more – a baby or a sign on your headstone saying: “Childless but, wow, she sure made her stepmother’s life hell?”’

  Even Jojo had to laugh at that. ‘Have you ever considered psychiatric stand-up? You could make them laugh and diagnose all illnesses as well.’

  Cari grinned. ‘I have read a lot of self-help books in the past three years. Some of them are even quite good, except for the ones that suggest having one single square of dark chocolate if you need sugar. One square? Who can eat just one square? Anyway, I did not get over bloody Barney and Traci by raging mentally over them day and night. OK, I did at first,’ she admitted, ‘because I dreamed up scenarios about how I’d either kill them both or just kill Traci and have Barney all to myself. But then, I had to move on, Jojo, or I’d be sitting somewhere in a haze of booze and tranquillisers staring at the wall and saying “poor me”. Look, I know this is different – you adored your mother and she was taken too early. Add that to this desperation to have a baby, and then what you feel is your dad betraying you, and you will never get pregnant. Your body is under too much stress. All that cortisol and stuff, it wreaks havoc with your system.’

  ‘I know,’ agreed Jojo, anything to get Cari to stop with the truth and the honesty.

  So she’d tried to get over Bess, she really had, but then Bess had wanted to overhaul Tanglewood, Jojo and Paul’s old home, and all the rage had come back.

  She left the shop to meet her aunt, wishing she was able to tell dear Elaine about the infertility treatment because Elaine would have to be a blind, deaf mute not to notice how up and down her moods were, but then Elaine would drive her nuts every day asking about how she was, how the injections had gone, did she feel different? How about adoption, fostering, getting a dog?

  Elaine wasn’t in the slightest bit motherly and had no interest in children, although she did talk of getting a cat.

  ‘Something unusual so I wouldn’t look like a mad cat lady. One of those sweet hairless sphinxes, perhaps, so it could have clothes, poor little mite. They have pink mohair cat sweaters with hearts on the front in the pet shop, you know?’

  Nora was already sitting in the café at a window table when Jojo reached the other side of the road to the café. As she waited for the traffic to pass, she could see Nora clearly, the paper open at the crossword and a pot of tea, probably Earl Grey, in front of her. Seeing her there, short grey hair standing up like a brush, undoubtedly not a jot of make-up on her lined face, tiny glasses perched on the end of her nose and wearing what looked from a distance like some sort of misshapen and oft-washed sweater in an unattractive concrete colour, Jojo felt a passionate love for her aunt. Nora was family.

  She and Jojo’s mother had been the closest of friends, both married to brothers and at ease with the long history of the Brannigan family, which included tales of old Granny Brannigan, their grandmother (a tyrant) and Rose Brannigan (a saint), who’d adored her three sons and their families.

  At the great and frequent family parties, Nora and Lottie would tease Edward Brannigan about the days before Brannigan Engineering had become a big company, when he’d been thrown out of the small school in Lisowen with great force by the teacher one day for not bringing his sod of turf to heat the fire.

  ‘He was lucky the master didn’t kill him, he was a violent man,’ protested Nora’s husband, Mick. ‘It wasn’t funny. He scared the hell out of me.’

  ‘Edward would have turned and showed him how bullies are treated if he’d felt scared or if he’d ever really threatened you or Kit,’ said Lottie proudly, kissing her husband’s forehead. ‘He’s never been afraid of anyone, have you, love?’

  ‘Except for you, pet,’ Edward said, laughing.

  ‘Why did they call the teacher “master”?’ a young Jojo wanted to know.

  ‘Total control,’ Lottie would say. ‘They went in for that type of control in school in those days. God forbid you tried any independent thinking. School was for having facts beaten into you and independent thinking beaten out of you.’

  ‘Now, Fáinne was a great one for independent thinking,’ Mick said, and there was a silence, one of those ‘little pitchers have big ears’ silences.

  ‘Who’s Fáinne?’ asked Jojo, who knew it was the Irish word for ring but had never heard a person called such a name and had never heard any mention of a Fáinne before.

  ‘Oh, a girl from the past,’ Nora said easily, and somehow, the conversation would get wildly boring about how dreadful it had all been back then, and the cousins would stop listening because who wanted to hear long stories about polio and tuberculosis and emigration?

  But the name Fáinne had had a strange fascination for the young Jojo – this person from the past that she clearly wasn’t to know about. Why not?

  Yet, the talk would move on, an adult would put a stop to all questioning and games had to be played.

  Nora and Lottie would stare over their children’s heads at each other and think of Fáinne and how tragically it had all played out. How it would be different now but the chance was gone, long gone. Fáinne was just a memory in their lives, a place at the table in their hearts.

  Proof that a person could just disappear.

  Jojo and Cari – Nora and Mick’s elder daughter – were the oldest and they ruled the roost over the other four.

  There was Jojo’s little brother, Paul, two years younger than Cari and Jojo, who were exactly the same age. By promising introductions to all sorts of girls, they’d had fabulous power over poor Paul for most of their teenage years.

  ‘Claudia really likes you,’ they’d fib, watching poor Paul turn pink, then puce, then white at the thought of his current teenage crush actually returning his feelings.

  It was, Nora thought, a miracle Paul even spoke to his older sister and his cousin now, given the torture they’d put him through when he was a girl-obsessed teenager with acne and a tendency to lose the ability to speak when around any female other than his cousins.

  Maggie – Nora’s second daughter – and her partner in crime, Trina, who was Kit and Helen’s daught
er, were another kettle of fish altogether.

  Maggie was a total minx and tortured all around her, including her parents and her cousins.

  And Trina, who as daughter of the not-very-beloved Aunt Helen could have been left on the sidelines, was a Brannigan girl through and through, ready for all scrapes and escapades, not in the slightest bit afraid of her mother’s sharp tongue, and devoted to her cousins.

  Lottie and Nora had been kind to their other sister-in-law, Helen, but they’d both known closeness wasn’t possible with Helen, who was a woman caught in the deadly triad of jealousy, bitterness and mistrust. She was jealous at Edward Brannigan’s great success and full of bitterness that her husband, Kit, hadn’t managed so well. She was also jealous of Lottie’s beauty and entirely natural style, and subsequently, never wore the same dress twice to a family gathering. She mistrusted any attempts at closeness and eventually Lottie and Nora had left her alone.

  ‘We can’t be friends with the whole world, Lottie,’ Nora had said. ‘Not everyone wants friends.’

  ‘But she’s lonely – you know she is,’ Lottie protested.

  Lottie had believed in peace, love, kindness and stopping by the side of the road if she saw a run-over animal. More than one injured creature had been carried to the vet on the passenger seat of Lottie’s old mini, bleeding everywhere and whimpering.

  Lottie would drive and pet the animal, crooning reassurance, strong in the face of disaster.

  She’d been so strong, Nora remembered. Even when she’d been diagnosed.

  ‘How could that first scan have said she was cancer-free when she wasn’t?’ raged Edward, when the mistake was discovered, three months after that first, mistaken all-clear.

  ‘These things happen,’ Lottie had said, endlessly, as Edward had raged in pain and bewilderment for a long time. Edward had wanted people fired, consequences for the misdiagnosis … Someone should pay.

  Lottie and Nora knew that there was no exact science in medicine and that fighting with the people who were trying to save you wasted time, and there was so little time left: ‘There’s no point crying over that – let’s see what we can do now, let’s move on.’

  There had been no moving on, though. Not much choice for stage four breast cancer apart from a last-ditch attempt at chemotherapy, which would only buy Lottie time: nauseated, weak, ill time at that, as drugs and cancer raged through her body.

  The doctors, kind and compassionate, were honest about how much extra time the drugs might give her but that it would not be easy. The decision was hers.

  ‘If the treatment would give me years, I’d take it in a flash,’ she’d told them all. ‘But it won’t. It will be a month or two at the most and I will be too sick with it to actually be present with all of you. Let’s enjoy what I have left and then, bring on the palliative drugs so I’m going into the next world in a haze of soft-focus meds and enough painkillers to kill an ox.’

  When the cancer reached her bones, the pain was agonising. An old friend, who’d once been addicted to and then miraculously escaped the clutches of heroin, had come to Nora sobbing: ‘Why don’t they just shoot her up with heroin. Numb the heck out of the bloody pain, stop making her suffer. We don’t do this to dogs, do we?’

  Nora hugged her: everyone had an opinion on how Lottie should die but it was Lottie’s choice, nobody else’s.

  Lottie was dead at sixty and the world was a sadder, less golden place without her.

  Nora wiped her eyes with her napkin and spotted her niece crossing the road.

  Blast.

  She dropped the napkin and pretended to be studying her crossword again.

  The café door slammed and Nora watched Jojo wend her way through the tightly packed tables. Jojo was too thin, had been since her mother’s illness, which had initially hit the family like a lightning bolt over three years ago.

  Life could throw so many terrible things into the world, Nora thought, remembering a time when their worries had been smaller.

  Nora could remember Cari and Jojo as teenagers, sitting in Cari’s bedroom painting their toenails and discussing did puppy fat go or did you need to actually do something about it?

  ‘I am giving up cheese,’ Jojo announced firmly. ‘Giving up cheese gives you cheekbones, you know. I read it in a magazine. Dairy is bad for you. I read that too.’

  ‘I could live forever without cheese,’ Cari replied sadly. ‘It’s chocolate with me. I love it and it loves me back. Although that’s dairy too, the fabulous side of dairy.’

  And great sighs would be heard and then, when lunch was ready and it was toasted cheese sandwiches with a home-made chocolate brownie for afters, everyone ate and nobody rushed off to the loo to vomit it up.

  Nora and Lottie would silently smile at each other. Their daughters were beautiful and were thankfully not caught up in any unhealthy relationships with food. No bulimia, no anorexia – they both blessed themselves at this – and no body dysmorphia. They had much to be grateful for.

  Their children had health, happiness and, so far, no sadness.

  It would all work out.

  And it had, Nora thought – until Cari’s disastrous wedding day, which had been catastrophe one, and until Lottie had been diagnosed, catastrophe two, which had shown Nora what a real catastrophe was, because at least Cari could recover, but Lottie wouldn’t.

  Life: forever throwing that curveball, Nora thought sadly. She wished with all her heart that she could make it all better but she couldn’t. Nobody could.

  She couldn’t fix that cold, hard place that had grown in Cari’s heart since the wedding day and she couldn’t fix the pain she saw on Jojo’s face since both her mother’s death and her father’s subsequent remarriage.

  ‘Nora.’

  Jojo leaned in for a hug with her aunt, then sat and looked at the menu, although Nora knew she’d order what she always did: plain black coffee, no milk or sugar.

  ‘Hello, Jojo, like the dress,’ said Nora, and they both laughed because Jojo was wearing an asymmetric navy felted wool dress with an orange perspex necklace, and Nora was well known for caring absolutely nothing about clothes except as things to keep her warm.

  ‘It would totally suit you, Nora,’ Jojo teased. ‘I have it in winter white too, perfect for your colouring.’

  ‘I’d look like I’d just escaped from some maximum security home,’ Nora said, ‘and you know it.

  A waitress came by and to Nora’s utter astonishment, her niece ordered tea and a muffin.

  ‘What?’ said Jojo, going slightly pink under Nora’s scrutiny. ‘I felt hungry.’ The injections were making her ravenous. Who knew that being menopausal meant constant eating?

  ‘Make that two muffins,’ said Nora, delighted.

  They chatted idly about this and that as they waited for the food. Cari had been in London the day before for an editorial meeting of the publishing company, Cambridge, where she worked as a senior editor.

  Just a day trip, Nora said. Cari was hoping for a big promotion and possibly a move to London, which would break her parents’ hearts but it might help her. It was long since time to move on from Barney. Nora was pretty sure that although Cari had had a few dates since her wedding, she had never been even vaguely serious about any of them.

  Nora doubted if any of the said dates had even got as far as kissing Cari, much less got to put a foot inside her apartment. The wedding disaster had broken something inside her and Cari was hiding it with toughness.

  Of course, Cari would be equally shattered by the information Nora was about to impart about Edward’s birthday party because, odds on, Barney and Traci would be there, but one shattered girl at a time, she decided: she’d deal with that whenever Cari phoned, which she would. Cari wouldn’t open the envelope. She’d assume it was a wedding invitation and she had, understandably, sworn off weddings for life. Nora, dear Lord, would have to break the news to her.

  A Brannigan family affair would include all of the family, including the distant cou
sins and possibly – because Bess would hardly have a clue not to put him on the list – the one-time love of Cari’s life.

  Nora, who never baulked at a challenge, hated the thought of hurting her daughter by having to tell her about it all.

  He would be there, source of catastrophe number one, along with Traci, a daughter of a distant Brannigan cousin, and a total bitch.

  Nora looked at the women at the next table who were gossiping happily after some party they’d been at where the hostess had had a raging fight with her husband in the kitchen, while most of the guests listened.

  ‘I always thought they were so happy,’ said the first woman.

  ‘Ah, they’ve always been like that,’ said the second woman. ‘It’s called passionate arguing. It’s very good for relationships, you know: I read that in a magazine. If you don’t argue like cats and dogs, now then you’re in trouble. And the sex—’ The woman lowered her voice. ‘Supposed to be amazing, making-up sex after a passionate row.’

  Nora hid a grin and then it vanished, Lottie too close to her mind. She and Lottie used to love listening in to other people when they met up. Now, Nora had nobody to share such simple pleasures with.

  ‘Take care of Jojo and Paul for me, will you, Nora?’ Lottie had said at the end, before the ‘making her comfortable’ morphine had really kicked in and she could barely speak.

  ‘Edward is strong, he will survive, and Paul has Lena. But Jojo is so fragile. I know nobody else sees it, but you and I do. Please …’

  Nora had often wondered why Lena, Lottie’s daughter-in-law, was seen as strong enough to take care of the soon-to-be-bereaved Paul when Hugh, Jojo’s husband was not.

  Something she didn’t know? Or just Lottie’s feeling that women had such inner strength, a lioness protecting whomever she had to protect. Lena could do that. Hugh, sweet and kind though he was, could not. At least, Nora hoped that’s all it was.

  She waited until Jojo had actually eaten a good portion of her orange and chocolate muffin before attacking the subject.