Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  Later, Amy had overheard someone say that Clive was ‘dangerous – a real ladykiller’, but they just didn’t know him the way she did.

  His marriage was a phoney.

  ‘Suzanne is a lovely woman but we never should have got married,’ he’d told her, his face sad, his eyes weary at what all this pain meant for the woman he respected and their beloved children. ‘We both know it now but finances’ – he shrugged, as if embarrassed to be having this conversation – ‘mean we must live together until we have enough money to sell the house and buy two separate places. It’s economic necessity that keeps us together. But,’ he’d added, ‘she is truly a wonderful woman who deserves happiness in her future.’

  Amy loved that he had such respect for his wife. She would have not been able to be with him if he’d said dreadful things about Suzanne, but this, this liking and respect, made it bearable.

  ‘We’re too similar. She’s a career woman through and through. You’d think that company would fall apart if she wasn’t in it.’

  What Clive wanted, he told Amy that first time was ‘someone gentle, kind, loving. Like – like you, Amy.’

  He’d touched her face and said he was sorry.

  ‘I can’t promise you anything but love right now, my darling,’ he’d said, playing with her hair, marvelling at its auburn and strawberry highlights and the way it turned a rich burnished copper under certain lights. ‘Never cut your hair.’

  She would never have gone to bed with him that first time if he hadn’t seemed so torn about it: ‘This damn situation! I love you, Amy … this is heartbreaking …’

  ‘We don’t have to,’ said Amy, knowing he was right and hating that he was married, even when he’d explained it all to her. ‘We can wait until you and Suzanne live separately, that would work. I can wait, darling?’

  ‘You’re right, we should … but when I see you like this …’

  One large hand had touched the buttons on her long, flowy shirt, because Amy never wore tight-fitting things because they showed off her figure, the breasts she tried so hard to hide.

  Then his hands were on her breasts and she knew that he and she were beyond conversation now.

  He loved her breasts, and she thought of all the years her mother had forced her into too-small bras, and now, here was this man adoring those same heavy breasts and her creamy shoulders. She had a waist now too, although she was hopeless at showing it off. Clive had told her what she should do, his hands spanning its width, his voice hoarse.

  ‘Wear clingy little sweaters and fifties skirts: that would suit you, my darling,’ he’d said, ‘and stockings, like girls from the fifties – just not at work or I’d never be able to stop myself pouncing on you!’

  Amy, longing for love and not able to imagine anyone ever wanting to pounce on her, had flushed at the very notion of Clive thinking about her at work.

  Of course, she couldn’t tell anyone. Not Nola, who would kill her for being with a man who lived with his wife, no matter what the circumstances. Not Tiana via email or Skype, who would say she was nuts, it was going nowhere because he was married, and she ought to dump him sharpish. They didn’t know Clive, they didn’t see how much he meant all the things he said, they didn’t understand how it pained him waiting for the day until they could be together.

  And certainly not her mother, who could easily march round to Clive’s house and ask to speak to Suzanne to verify it all.

  So it was Amy’s secret. Everyone was entitled to them, weren’t they?

  Bess almost didn’t recognise the woman standing in the expensive lingerie shop changing room. This woman was all curves and sensuality, all highlighted by a dusky rose-pink silk bra and French knickers, with a matching wrap.

  ‘Pale pink will wash you out,’ the sales lady, an imposing woman with an equally imposing bosom and a tape measure round her neck, had explained from the start.

  She’d sent Bess into the room, measured her briskly, then arrived back with a few armfuls of silks and lace. ‘Us older ladies need structure but you don’t have to look like you’re going in for the shotput in the Olympics, either,’ she’d said, with a brief glance at Bess’s plain bra, white as snow, just as pure, and with a bra strap at least three-quarters of an inch in width.

  Bess, who knew her way round most situations, felt entirely out of her depth here. She’d bought what she thought was ‘good’ lingerie for her wedding. Good meant sensible, lasting a long time. Bess had never had enough money for frivolity when it came to undergarments, and besides, in her previous incarnation, Before Edward, who was going to see them?

  She’d never held with that ‘wear your red knickers and matching bra to work on a difficult day’ shenanigans. Her strength in work came from her head, not from the colour of her bra.

  But the other night, she and Edward had been lying on the couch, curled up like a couple of teenagers, and there had been a love scene in the film they were watching.

  The actress had been clad in silk: expensive stuff, Bess surmised, all frou frou and lace, the type of thing Bess knew cost a fortune. And yet Edward had turned to her, murmuring gently: ‘That would suit you, darling. Well, suit you long enough for me to rip it off.’

  And she’d felt that rippling of excitement low in her belly that this man desired her and said so.

  ‘If I paid for that, I’d kill you for ripping it!’ said Bess in her teasing voice, but when Edward laughed and said: ‘My darling sensible wife,’ she’d thought again. What if her ‘good’ things weren’t good enough? What if good really meant boring and unsexy, and Edward wanted to see her in silks and lace?

  She’d taken a long lunch break the next day and ended up in The Boudoir, where a quick glance at the price tag on a garter belt had nearly sent her out again, but she’d stayed.

  She had been buying sensible things for forty years now – that must be money in the bank saved up for this moment.

  ‘These suit you,’ said the sales lady, admiring a balconette bra in a honeyed gold that transformed Bess in a way her white sensible stuff never had. ‘You’ve been wearing the wrong size for years: mind you, everybody does. You simply wouldn’t credit the number of woman who come in here wearing the wrong-sized bra.’

  Bess thought with a pang of guilt of those years when Amy had needed a bigger bra and Bess had piously insisted it was just fat, and if only Amy was slimmer she’d be able to fit into her old bras.

  How insensitive had she been?

  It was repeating what she’d been taught, she knew: her own mother had not been the warm and fuzzy kind of parent. But that didn’t mean Bess had to go out and recreate the pattern. Just because she was trying to keep food on the table as a single mother didn’t mean she had to be so hard on her only daughter.

  She thought, too, of how much Edward loved his two children – even though one of those children was the source of great trauma to Bess – she loved that about him. She could never have been with a man who didn’t care about his kids. A man like Dennis, for example, who cared for neither Bess nor Amy.

  Bess had rung Amy earlier, asking if she’d come up to dinner with them that night but Amy was going out with her ‘gang’. Bess was suspicious of this. Amy had always been quite a shy girl and this gang stuff didn’t sound like her … But then if Amy was blossoming and spreading her wings, how wonderful. It eased Bess’s guilt a little.

  ‘Do you want to try anything else?’ said the saleswoman, who’d gone back out for more stuff, seeing as she had a willing customer in the dressing room.

  ‘What other colours do you have this in?’ Bess asked.

  Tonight, she would surprise Edward with this, she decided. She could never have envisaged a time in her life when she’d be this happy. It would work out, it had to. The alternative was too devastating.

  Seven

  SECRETS OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE #2

  Compromise saves marriages. The thing is, compromise works two ways. If one person is always making the compromises, the relationsh
ip is not in balance …

  Cari waited till the weekend was over before she phoned John Steele.

  ‘Don’t phone John Steele – he’s my author now,’ had been the brusque email from Gavin Watson that awaited her when she arrived in work on Monday morning. Jeff, lugubrious in his office and with his beard not shaved, gave her a glance which seemed to say the same thing.

  ‘Baby not sleeping or a late one?’ Cari said, putting her head round the door. Jeff had married a few years ago, and now had a small daughter, a three-month-old baby named Jasmine and a permanent look of total exhaustion on his face.

  ‘Yeah, wild party. Went on till four—’ said Jeff, taking a swig of the energy drink that gave Cari heart palpitations when she drank it. ‘No, of course it wasn’t a late one: the baby’s not sleeping. Babies do not appear to sleep. Why do people say, “I slept like a baby?” to imply otherwise? It just means you wake up crying every hour.’

  ‘Which is why I am childless,’ said Cari sweetly.

  Jeff did look like hell.

  ‘He’d be gorgeous if he smiled,’ had been Jojo’s summation of him after they’d met.

  ‘He does smile,’ Cari said. ‘I think you intimidate him, that’s all.’

  ‘And you don’t? With those five-inch heels?’

  ‘He knows me.’

  Jeff had come from sales to head the Cambridge Ireland company and had steered it through difficult times with skill. He was great with people, kind to all the (small) junior team and always encouraging the three sales reps as they trailed around the country in company cars, suffering with bad backs from so long behind the wheel and not getting overtime for rolling up at book events or launches.

  He threw a decent Christmas party every year, fought for their bonuses, and let the editorial team (Cari and her second-in-command, Declan) run with the books they knew would sell.

  Compared to bosses who bullied and fought with editors without ever having been one themselves, it was a joy.

  Now Cari shut the door of Jeff’s office quietly, because to slam it would have everyone in the small outer office looking up in astonishment, and threw herself into the chair in front of his desk. She was miserable on every level, not least because she’d bought the biggest Toblerone in the airport and had spent Friday night miserably eating it, before she’d gone out on Saturday after her father had left and bought fudge brownie ice cream, also now long gone. Her hair was greasy because she simply hadn’t the heart to wash it that morning at seven o’clock and her favourite trousers were too tight, so she was working the hair bobbin round the button to lengthen it. Life and everything else sucked.

  ‘How are you doing?’ asked Jeff, his face kind, sympathy in the brown eyes, and when he steepled his fingers and looked at Cari over the tips of his nails, Cari had to control the urge to say, ‘Really?’

  ‘I take it you heard,’ she said, instead. No point alienating all her superiors in the company.

  ‘They told me just before the meeting,’ he said. ‘Edwin expressly forbade me to warn you and I put it to him firmly that you would be humiliated by the whole thing, that you work on my team and you should have been told beforehand. Letting it happen in front of Gavin Watson was uncalled for. I don’t know why bloody John Steele’s agent couldn’t have told you. That would have been politic, kind, decent!’

  ‘Gavin Watson doesn’t do decent. He certainly couldn’t spell it!’ Cari said, picking up one of the many doodads that sat on Jeff’s desk and idly wondering did the Voodoo dolly thing work. Most of the doodads were mini sculptures by Jeff’s wife’s nephews and were of weird little creatures made with plasticine. Cari could make a wax dolly of Gavin and then she could stick pins in it. Someone was bound to have published a book on this – there were books on everything.

  ‘Now I want you to listen to me, Cari.’

  Something in her boss’s tone made Cari look at him instead of glumly at the desk. Jeff had never gone in for internet TED-style encouraging speeches before, but he looked as if he was gearing up for one now.

  ‘If you hadn’t hared off ahead of all of us to Heathrow, I’d have been able to say this to you in person, but I can now. Gavin Watson can’t edit. You know it and I do too. He made mincemeat out of that Evelyn Walker book he took over.’

  They both nodded. Gavin’s early attempts to do really hands-on editing had failed miserably with one of the imprint’s big names, a grande dame thriller writer who had a CBE, a high-three-figure IQ and a well-known lack of patience with fools.

  Three weeks of being edited by Gavin when her existing editor had fallen ill with pneumonia had sent her shrieking insults down the phone to all and sundry, including the company’s chairman – and necessitated a scrabble through ancient actual phonebooks for an old editor of hers she’d liked years ago, who’d had to be coaxed out of retirement to assist.

  ‘He will screw this up,’ Jeff continued. ‘I would bet money on it. Plus, you know he won’t stay long with Xenon. Edwin Miller is keeping Gavin close so he can keep an eye on him but you can bet your bottom dollar that our Gav gets shunted off to another imprint within the group in a couple of years where he can leap up another step of the ladder and make someone else’s life hell. He’ll still be under Edwin, essentially, but he’ll have another boss to annoy. In the meantime, you have to pretend you don’t care.’

  ‘You sound like Dr Phil,’ grumbled Cari.

  ‘Dr Phil is often right.’

  ‘Not in this case. I do care. I made John Steele. He had the raw talent but he had no self-belief, Jeff, remember?’ Cari begged. ‘He didn’t think he could do it but I made him believe in himself, I coaxed the edit of the first book out of him. I coaxed the second one out too.’

  The third and fourth had been easier because, by then, John Steele, resident of a small fishing village, a genius with a lathe, was world famous, if uncomfortable with this new-found fame. The money – not so uncomfortable with that.

  It turned out that John, once a socialist to his toenails, loved filthy lucre and had lost his head so far as to buy a Ferrari – a vehicle entirely unsuitable for narrow country roads with grass ridges in the middle, given that the Ferrari’s racing chassis was about seven inches off the ground.

  Still, Cari hadn’t cared. The book sales were stratospheric, she’d received a huge bonus for both finding and nurturing him, she’d won Editor of the Year at the prestigious Bookseller Awards and she had become the company’s golden girl for it all. A move to London to inhabit a corner office with a view could only be months away – and now this.

  ‘Find another John Steele!’ said Jeff, and sat back, looking satisfied.

  ‘Is that it? The pep talk? There aren’t many of them out there, Jeff, in case you hadn’t noticed: people who can tell a story so that you can barely turn the pages fast enough.’

  ‘Anna asked me if you wanted to come to dinner to us at the weekend, Friday?’ Jeff added, with the rapid change of subject she was used to.

  The TED talk was over, they were moving on. ‘It’s a sort of cheer-you-up type of thing. My brother, Conal, is home from Paris. He’s finally moved back.’

  Cari had heard all about this brother, a year or two younger than Jeff, who was a scientist, something medical, sounded equally decent, kind and probably equally hangdoggy. He’d worked in some part of the charity industry, she thought, which probably meant he wore awful clothes and had no conversation apart from how wasteful the western world was. She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to launch said brother back into Irish society or if he was to be her date on the grounds that she was in the depths of misery. Either way, she didn’t need the pity or the blind date with Father Teresa.

  ‘Say a huge thanks to Anna for me, Jeff,’ she said, ‘but I have a family thing on Friday.’

  She didn’t but she’d come up with an imaginary one.

  ‘No you don’t,’ said Jeff. ‘Just one dinner. You’d like my brother. He used to be a bit of a nerd but Paris has loosened him up. Unless you h
ave really filled that apartment full of cats and have to stay at home to change litter trays.’

  ‘What’s wrong with cats?’ demanded Cari, forgetting that she’d dissed felines to her father the other day. ‘Cats are cool and cuddly and don’t rip up the house when you’re gone, like my mother’s old dog, Frantic, who ate cushions like his life depended on it.’

  Jeff laughed. ‘Does that mean that if your porn name is based on your first pet’s name, you’re Frantic …?’

  ‘You. Are. Sick,’ Cari said. ‘I am an employee and that’s sexual harassment.’

  Jeff raised his arms in apology and Cari got a blast of unwashed armpits. ‘I apologise. Margins are tight, we can’t afford an inquiry.’

  ‘Don’t do it again, moron,’ she said. ‘What if I was a junior.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it to a junior,’ said Jeff, horrified. ‘You’re, you know – unshockable, spiky. That’s part of your charm.’

  ‘That and my brains,’ said Cari smartly.

  ‘We all know you have brains to burn, Cari, just use them when it comes to dealing with John Steele and Gavin-the-author-stealer from now on.’

  She left the office where the scent of exhausted, unshaved man lingered unpleasantly. It was nearly nine and Jeff had a sales meeting this morning, she remembered. Unshaven, smelly boss, even one with a small baby, was not a good message for the troops.

  She stuck her head back into Jeff’s office. ‘Stick on some aftershave, will you? You smell like a polecat,’ she said, one friend to another.

  ‘I thought I was sexually harassing you?’ said Jeff.

  ‘You couldn’t sexually harass a hamster,’ she snapped back fondly.

  ‘Don’t call John Steele,’ repeated Jeff, in the same friendship vein. ‘Call Freddie and rip him a new one if you really want to, but not John. He wants to stay out of it. You know the drill: do not upset the author at all costs. Pissing off agents isn’t a good idea either but I know you want to kill something …’

  Cari waited till the sales meeting was under way with half the office closeted with Jeff, then shut her office door, pulled down her rarely used office blinds and phoned John Steele. Yes, she could have phoned his agent and, oh boy, she would, but first she had to speak to the man she’d honestly considered a friend for the past four years.