Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  After dialling John’s mobile number, she wondered if he would answer: after all, he knew the office’s Dublin phone number and was used to calls from them. It would not take a rocket scientist to figure out that an early morning call could be from her and he might easily let the call go to voicemail and check later.

  So she was surprised when he answered on the first ring, that gritty Sheffield accent undiminished despite twenty years in Ireland and marriage to an Irish woman.

  ‘Hello, John Steele.’

  ‘John.’

  ‘Cari. I wanted to phone you—’

  All the clever things Cari had been practising in her head all weekend just vanished. She was left with the dumb, deeply unclever: ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I chickened out.’

  This honesty removed the final bits of Cari’s sparkling repertoire.

  ‘If I was doing something wrong, you could have told me,’ she said, speaking as a wounded friend to another friend, instead of as a professional to someone who’d just skewered her. ‘Given me a chance, John. And to go to Gavin Watson—’ She snorted with disgust. ‘I hate him, you know that. I even told you all about the debacle when he took over Evelyn Walker’s editing job. He’s not a good editor, he’ll wreck your confidence—’

  She paused and berated herself mentally. Stupid cow – she’d let her mouth run off on her again. What had she been thinking?

  She was not the Cari of old talking to her dear friend, John, on the phone, laughing about their days and the people they’d met. That collegial relationship was over.

  He was an important author and she was his former editor.

  Who knew what damage she could do to her already damaged career now if she slagged off Gavin to his new author.

  ‘Forget I said that,’ she said crisply. ‘I wish you the best with Gavin, I’m sure it will be good for both of you. Just tell me one thing: why did you want to move? If I’m that bad an editor, I need to hear it from you because we worked well together, I thought I had helped your career, and if I’ve lost my editing mojo or something, I need to know. I still need this job, John.’

  Cari stopped before her voice broke.

  Damn. She wished she’d stolen some of Jeff’s cache of energy drinks. She could do with a blast of energetic heartbeating instead of the empty, betrayed feeling she was experiencing now.

  There was silence on the other end of the phone.

  John Steele was thoughtful, slow to answer things. It was why he’d never been keen on publicity and hated to do television shows. Pondering questions did not go down well on quick-fire TV slots where a seven-minute time slot was considered hugely long. Pondering an answer could take up valuable time, made for bad TV and meant the author was never booked again.

  Finally, John answered: ‘Freddie told me that working with Gavin would be good for my career. That I needed an editor in London, at the heart of things and Gavin is that.’

  ‘Oh.’ Cari swivelled in her chair so she could look out of the window.

  The Cambridge Ireland offices were on the edge of a modern industrial estate, sheets of glass and steel facing fields on one side, fields that would one day, no doubt, be populated with more gleaming office buildings. But for now, Cari could see a line of sycamore trees and a horse on the other side: piebald, the type the gypsies favoured, with a small grey donkey to keep him company. They were swishing their tails and contentedly looking over their field.

  Right now, she wished she was with the horse and the donkey – she might swap places with them. Her career couldn’t be any worse with a piebald horse doing her job.

  It all came down to location, location, location. Just when she’d been planning to move, too. Talk about fabulous timing.

  ‘Also—’

  Cari tuned in again.

  ‘I didn’t know how to tell you.’

  ‘You could have picked up the phone and said it,’ she replied. ‘How many things have we talked about over the past few years, John? Everything and anything.’

  Some things she shuddered to think of. She’d discussed her failed attempt at getting married and they’d managed to laugh about it, in his house, with his wife, Mags, laughing with them as they ate beautiful local West Cork cheeses, and drank fabulous red wine. That had been healing. Sharing her pain with friends. Now, it felt like an open sore again.

  They had not been friends. They had been workmates and she had made the fatal, career-shattering mistake of confusing the two.

  ‘I am godmother to your son, John. Did I not cut the mustard there either?’

  ‘I’m sorry. So sorry.’

  There was a noise at his end of the phone and Mags, his wife, came on.

  ‘Cari, oh Cari, I am so, so sorry.’ It sounded as if Mags was crying but Cari was getting sick of this ‘sorry, sorry’ chant.

  ‘I wanted to tell you, told Bozo here not to be a coward and to tell you but blasted Freddie insisted he’d handle it, said you’d understand, but I knew you wouldn’t and it’s for John’s career, and we have to think of the kids now that I’m pregnant again …’

  ‘It’s OK, Mags,’ said Cari gently. She had to cut this off, couldn’t take any more of it.

  What had she been doing, thinking John and Mags were her friends? She worked with him, for him really. She’d made the mistake of thinking that people she worked with were friends.

  In exactly the same way as she’d made the mistake of thinking that a man she loved had actually loved her in return.

  For a smart woman, she really was dumb.

  Was there a spectrum for that? A clever woman with zero emotional intelligence? Why was nobody doing research on that one? She might ask Jeff’s nerdy scientific brother that question.

  ‘Mags, I have to go. I’ve another call waiting,’ Cari lied. She hated using such a cheap ruse but she needed to get off the phone.

  She wouldn’t phone John’s agent, Freddie, either. What was the point?

  This all hurt too much.

  Monday morning’s post was late but when she got it and opened the invitation, Helen Brannigan inhaled deeply and put a shaky hand on the hall table, which rattled the pollen on the stargazer lilies she had in her hall at all times.

  She marched into her husband’s study with the invitation, with her mouth – already thin with its daily application of Elizabeth Arden Bold Red – in a very thin line.

  Kit’s study was the perfect microcosm of an old English study complete with panelled wooden walls and old books, and Kit himself looked like a perfect Wodehousian English gentleman except for the fact that he came from a smallholding in County Kerry like his brothers and there had been no study in the farmhouse in Lisowen where they’d grown up.

  A huge old black range where their mother cooked giant meals, yes.

  A sheepdog under the big kitchen table and a line of ancient workmen’s boots at the back door alongside tattered waterproof coats, also yes.

  Wooden panelling, no.

  Helen, who’d come from two miles down the road from a smaller farm with a father who put all their money into the pub or on the horses, in that order, didn’t even have the sheepdog. There was nothing for it to round up. Anything saleable, like a sheep, was always sold come race day so her father had a few pounds for the tote. But both Kit and Helen liked to forget their beginnings and, normally, they managed it.

  They’d called their home Green Lawns. Helen spoke as if Jane Austen had put the words in her mouth and had once gone so far as to discuss her dear father as if he’d been a country vicar instead of a man barred from every pub both sides of Killarney. Even when Trina – born when Helen was thirty-one, a very late baby indeed for the era, so late she’d been indulged too much – went off the rails and had to be rescued from some scrape, Helen carried on as if such larks were part and parcel of the gentry born.

  ‘Trina’s having so much fun!’ Helen would say happily to the relatives, as if fun was the aim of life and Trina might be heading off on a Grand Tour of Europ
e soon with a coming-out ball at the Crillion along with a line of exquisite Russian billionaire daughters and impoverished royalty instead of having just survived not getting arrested after a water charges protest.

  Helen had determinedly forgotten that not too many generations ago, their ancestors had written X on the census as a sign that they were alive: present but illiterate. Helen had no interest in celebrating the past – she wanted to wipe it clean away and rebrand the family as if they’d all come from a different mould.

  You could change your life, Helen had long ago decided: all it took was determination to forget the past utterly, to reinvent.

  ‘Yes, love,’ said Kit, looking up from his paper as he heard his wife approach. From the expression on Helen’s face, he could see trouble arriving and wondered if he could ward it off. All Kit wanted was an easy life – was that too much to ask?

  ‘Did you know about this?’ she demanded.

  ‘This’ was a piece of cream paper and Helen brandished it with the same revulsion as if it were a stapled centrefold from Playboy, a pneumatic girl who had hair extensions down to her bum and liked long hot bubble baths and water skiing.

  ‘Bess,’ – the name was spat out – ‘is giving Edward a seventieth birthday party in Lisowen Castle in March. We are all invited, the whole clan, and on the Saturday night, it’s to be a spectacular gala evening, with guests. Black tie.’

  Kit knew what this meant: a new dress. An expensive new dress, something to ‘take Bess’s eye out …’

  When his older brother had married Bess, Helen’s clothes bill from a posh boutique on the other side of the city had made someone from the bank ring to check the credit card hadn’t been stolen.

  ‘No,’ Kit had said, only the faintest wobble to his voice. ‘More’s the pity.’

  ‘Pet,’ he said now, wheedling, ‘we can’t go over the top with clothes this time. The bank were onto me the other day about the overdraft—’

  He got a glare in return.

  Helen was a handsome woman of fifty-nine with fewer lines than other women her age, which was down to her facials, she told Kit. She had pencilled-in eyebrows above dark eyes that didn’t gleam with warmth and, today, glittered like agate.

  ‘If you think I’m turning up at a five-star hotel with anything less than a new, five-star wardrobe, then you’re mistaken, Christopher,’ hissed his wife, who only called him Christopher when she was vexed. Her accent had gone back to its Kerry roots too, which only happened when she was very angry or had too many glasses of wine, an event which almost never happened. As the daughter of a man who lost control every time he so much as set eyes on a bottle of hard liquor, Helen kept herself in firm check.

  ‘Just because Nora will roll up in some old black dress she’s had since Cari was in primary school doesn’t mean I’m going to! And Bess will be in something very exclusive, I’m sure! That wedding outfit she had came from the US, I know that for a fact!’

  Helen deposited the cream invitation on her husband’s lap and swept out of the room, expensive scent and bad humour trailing after her.

  Kit Brannigan picked up the invitation and looked at it in wonder. Seventy. His older brother would soon be seventy; he was just two years behind. Mick, the youngest brother, was sixty-six. And Fáinne, little Fáinne would be over sixty – but she had vanished off the face of the earth, a fact to which Kit had long since reconciled himself. Life was strange. You never knew where the twists and turns would take you next: he knew that better than anyone.

  But as he looked at the invitation he wondered, where had the years gone?

  One day, they’d been young lads on the farm talking about life, girls and cars, and the next, they were old men with wives, children, and a grandchild in Edward’s case. There was no sign of Trina producing anything other than crises, but then she’d been a late baby, when he and Helen had given up hope in that regard.

  Kit suspected his dear Trina viewed becoming a mother with the same horror as her own mother viewed turning up at a party in a previously seen dress. He laid the invitation down and went back to the paper.

  Eight

  ‘Fashion is the armour to survive

  the reality of everyday life.’

  Photographer Bill Cunningham

  It was ten to eight and the lights were only just going on all over the store as Faenia walked through the four fashion and shoe floors of Schiffer’s to get a feel for anything new that had come in and to see if there was anything different to add to the rails for her clients that she’d already set up in her office. She’d been doing it since she’d first started in retail thirty years ago.

  ‘Know ze clothes,’ said Beáta, the Hungarian chief personal shopper at Bloomberg’s, the Manhattan store where Faenia had made her start. ‘If you know what is on ze rails, zen you can master zis business. You have ze style – ze rest iz easy, apart from ze people, no?’

  As Faenia walked quickly in her Lanvin flats past a rail of boxy, short-bodied jackets that would tax all but a supermodel, she came upon a rail newly stocked with a cotton pique shirt that would suit her afternoon client, a tall woman who liked business-wear for work and a slightly more laid-back version of it for home.

  Slipping a couple of shirts over one arm, Faenia lingered by the sweaters for a moment, then headed up to the high-end of the store where she was hoping the new pants by Mizrahi had come in.

  Her morning client was a new one and that always meant a tough day because new clients came in with more than just shopping in their heads: they wanted a whole new look, a whole new them. With a new person, even when Faenia had their sizing details in her book, she didn’t know what sort of six or eight or twelve they were: curvy, straight, long-bodied, short-bodied, with hips, without, with big breasts or nothing that a Calvin Klein bralette couldn’t cope with, if they liked heels or walked fast, if they wanted a look for a life they didn’t have, if they thought their body was hideous and desperately wanted to tent it.

  A good personal shopper was half fashion stylist, half psychologist and sometimes Faenia felt too old for this job. Like today, when yesterday had gone by without a word from Nic and she felt the sadness ripple through her. She would not let it destroy her, though.

  Instead, she had bought expensive out-of-season gardenias at the flower shop at the bottom of her street and let the intense, heady scent of the beautiful white flowers waft through the house, and had played Etta James’s honeyed voice loudly so that as she walked around, she could smell gardenia and hear Etta’s delicious growl telling her she’d get over it. Because you did, Faenia knew that. She’d also taken off the Claddagh ring and had put it in her jewellery box, the old tiny walnut one she’d brought from home which held the few treasures she’d owned then: a gilded bird brooch with flaking blue wings; a tiny cat on a slender chain reaching for a pearlescent ball and a little St Christopher’s medal that she used to wear all the time.

  The Claddagh ring was in the past too, apparently. She would not revisit it.

  But Ireland … perhaps she might revisit that.

  Her new client was in at half nine, delivered to the door by a limo and greeted by Faenia.

  The woman was tiny, perhaps forty, wearing head-to-toe Chanel like armour, as if she needed protection. Her hair was shoulder length, blonde and no doubt blown out by a stylist at eight in her home, the same stylist who’d probably fixed her make-up which was a little old for her.

  Faenia wanted to hug her, feed her hot chocolate and get her out of the Chanel and into something that would make her no longer look like a wealthy San Francisco matron twenty years older than she really was.

  ‘Blair Winston,’ said the blonde, putting forward a small hand with an enormous princess-cut diamond on it.

  ‘Faenia Lennox,’ said Faenia, smiling at the doorman, Theo, as he held open the vast metallic door and taking little Blair into her kingdom.

  After half an hour of walking the store, Faenia had loosened her new client up, found that she had married
into money, did a lot for charity, had two little girls at school, and was scared of elegant clothes so worked on the same principle as with a bottle of wine: if it was expensive and people recognised the name, it must be good. This was not a good principle on which to base dressing.

  In Faenia’s suite of dressing rooms where her office was located, she’d made green tea for them both and extracted the Chanel jacket from Blair. It was a thing of great beauty, exquisitely made, but the wrong shape for Blair, the wrong colour for her, the wrong everything.

  ‘I choose wine depending on how pretty the picture on the label is,’ confided Faenia, which always made people laugh. ‘Really. Doesn’t always work but I think it’s probably as good a way of working out as the price rating.’

  ‘My husband has a wine collection,’ said Blair.

  I bet he does, thought Faenia, then chided herself. Marvin had loved wine, while Chuck had been a beer man. She wondered how he was. She must phone him and Denise, catch up, see how their grandkids were doing.

  She turned to her new client.

  ‘With clothes, it isn’t about what they cost or what the label is. For sure, a pair of pants beautifully designed and perfectly crafted by a brilliant pattern cutter will fit better than a mass market cheap pair for fifteen dollars, but spending money doesn’t always guarantee anything. We could dress you with cashmeres and simple knits that cost a fortune, and find that simple Gap jeans are the best for your shape. Better than anything more expensive because you are slim and don’t need any new technology to hold in your thighs. The Gap ones will always look best on you and you’ll feel your best in them. That’s what we’re going to find out. What works for you. What your ideal wardrobe should look like. It’s not about racking up zeroes on your credit card. It’s about finding out what you like and what looks good on you.’