Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  The facts are horrible, my darling: your beloved mother is dead, and I am so sorry; our much-wanted baby is not on the way; plus your father has married someone else. It’s a triad of pain. But you still have me. Is that not enough?

  It didn’t appear to be.

  ‘Yeah, a pint sounds great, Rob,’ he said, grabbing his things.

  Waiting in the hallway for the lift were a few people, clearly ready for some fun after a hard day.

  Elizabeth, Hugh’s old college pal and the family law expert, was there too.

  ‘Just one drink,’ she was saying. ‘I have a big case tomorrow and need to prep.’

  Rob, who was a good-looking guy and not yet married, gravitated in the direction of one of the newer hires, Clio, a young girl who was blonde, clever and apparently destined for great things.

  She reminded him slightly of Jojo: she had that same willowy build and fabulous blonde hair, although Jojo seemed very thin these days because she forgot to eat.

  Clio was wearing a classic lawyer’s grey suit, which was far more formal than the fashiony stuff that Jojo wore.

  She gave him a half-smile and Hugh responded with a smile of his own.

  She looked young and happy and he tried to remember when he’d felt the same, when Jojo had smiled at him happily.

  Somehow, the few pints were dragged out and Hugh found he didn’t want the evening to end. The others all had homes to go to, or other more exciting events and then it was, astonishingly, just himself and Elizabeth sitting at opposite sides of the round table in the bar.

  ‘I should go,’ said Hugh, not making a move.

  ‘Me too,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I have to prep for tomorrow.’

  But still they sat there.

  ‘Oh what the heck, let’s have a quick dinner. Jojo won’t mind, will she? And though Wolfie’s back from Berlin, he’ll undoubtedly be in the studio sculpting and not know whether I’m there or not.’

  Elizabeth’s second husband was an artist and Hugh was never sure if Elizabeth had chosen him simply because he was the precise opposite of her first husband, a control freak of the highest order.

  He phoned Jojo while Elizabeth went off to the loo.

  ‘Hello, darling, myself and a few of the guys are going to dinner, I know it’s an impromptu thing.’

  It was an impromptu thing, but it wasn’t a few of the guys. It was going to be just himself and Elizabeth.

  After lying on the phone to his wife, which Hugh still couldn’t quite explain, he and Elizabeth walked around the corner to a local restaurant many of their colleagues went to. This was the wisest move, they seemed to agree without any words being exchanged: nobody seeing two colleagues there could ever imagine anything salacious in their having dinner together. Surely if one wanted a torrid affair, one went somewhere one wouldn’t be seen, Hugh reasoned. Plus, he and Elizabeth had been friends for years: fifteen years, at least.

  There had never been even the slightest spark between them – they were too alike, both unswervingly professional.

  Elizabeth was beautifully put together and very corporate, the way an intelligent solicitor like herself needed to be. She dressed in lovely, but very businesslike suits with her shoulder-length dark hair never straying onto her face thanks to plenty of hairspray, and wore what had to be family pearls around her neck. Nobody was going to get the wrong impression about her, although Hugh was sure that with her looks and cool intelligence, she featured in other men’s fantasies.

  But for him, there was simply something very nice about talking to his old friend, something calming and relaxing. There were no other agendas. No subjects that had to be delicately skirted around like there were with Jojo now.

  He felt that hint of guilt thinking about Jojo, but by now he’d had several beers and felt a little bit anaesthetised from his feelings. All he knew was that this nice intelligent woman was sitting with him, being a friend and he did not have to fix her or make it better. Right now, he could simply be himself.

  ‘I don’t normally do this,’ Elizabeth said when their bottle of wine had arrived and they put in an order for something to soak up the couple of beers he’d had and the two gin and tonics she’d had.

  ‘Do what?’ Hugh said, startled. ‘Go out to dinner with a colleague?’

  She looked at him levelly. ‘Go out the night before a big case, Hugh, you dodo.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said and took a large gulp of wine.

  Why had he thought she meant anything else? He’d better stop drinking and eat. His mind was addled.

  He realised that this all looked bad – more so for Elizabeth than for him.

  Reputation was very important for women, far more so than for men. A woman who got a name for herself for going out for drinks with married male colleagues would be branded a certain type of woman – totally unfair and misogynistic it might be, but that was the truth. The rules were different for women.

  But he was fed up with things being different for women, fed up with feeling like a second-class citizen.

  His heart was broken over what he and Jojo were going through and though he knew that Jojo was the one being pumped full of hormones, he was living with the pain of infertility too. Yet was Jojo being kind to him? Was she worrying over him? Did she tiptoe around him delicately …?

  ‘ … I know I shouldn’t be moaning to you,’ Elizabeth was saying and Hugh tuned back in. ‘But it’s not working out, with me and Wolfie. He’s too different from me. I wanted someone different after Charles and I just fell down the rabbit hole.’

  ‘Oh, Liz,’ said Hugh, reverting to the name he used to call her in college before she got corporated up and went back to Elizabeth. He reached out and grabbed her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea.’

  She didn’t move her hand and her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Nobody bloody does. I work and work and come home to no dinner, no shopping done and Wolfie expecting me to leap into bed with him because his day went well, and he thinks what I do is boring. But I’m the one who’s earning, I’m the one who’s making the actual money, yet he still expects me to do the other stuff.’

  She wiped her eyes with her other hand and Hugh handed her his napkin and suddenly, Elizabeth was back and Liz – vulnerable Liz – was gone.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, sounding like a general hyping up the troops before a battle. The troops she was hyping up were her own. ‘Don’t know what came over me.’

  Hugh refused to let go of her hand. ‘Liz,’ he said, ‘I’m your friend, that means something so don’t shut me out if you need help.’

  She stared him in the eye. ‘If we’re friends, why don’t you tell me what’s going on with you and Jojo, and why you look like someone’s hit you first thing in the morning before you put your game face on?’

  Hugh slumped in his seat.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

  ‘Said everyone, everywhere,’ retorted Elizabeth.

  She moved so that there was more room on the banquette at their corner table, and rearranged the place settings so that he could sit kitty corner to her and rest on the banquette too.

  ‘Slide in here and talk to me,’ she said. ‘I’ll mop your eyes if you cry and you can mop mine.’

  And, knowing that this was not a good idea, Hugh moved to her side.

  Sixteen

  ‘Life is always either a tightrope or a

  feather bed. Give me the tightrope.’

  Edith Wharton

  Helen looked at the contents of her closet with displeasure. She had many things to wear to the grand seventieth but none of it was new. What if someone, anyone, looked at her outfit and realised this?

  ‘Oh, Helen, so good of you to get a second and third season out of things. Aren’t you clever!’

  She would die, literally die on the spot if such a thing happened. And imagine if Bess overheard?

  She might not mind Edward hearing – after all, he’d been married to Lottie and for all her beau
ty, Lottie treated clothes as if they didn’t matter. Which was all well and good if you were rich or beautiful. Nobody minded what rich or beautiful people wore. They could roll up at great galas in elderly silk dresses or something that looked as if the cat normally slept on it, fling on a few jewels and a slash of lipstick, and people said they were clever and stylish and meant it.

  But if someone like Helen – who had no money to speak of and was married to the Brannigan brother who had tried to make a fortune at all manner of things and failed – wore an old dress, people would laugh, no matter that she’d held on to her big diamond earrings despite the crash.

  Only the rich or the beautiful could get away with not caring.

  Everyone else had to care or face social death.

  She phoned her friend and neighbour, Marlene, to discuss it all.

  Marlene played tennis with Helen and the two couples socialised, but Marlene and Peter had no money to speak of, lived in a quite ordinary house on the same road – at least, Helen thought, White Gables was big, even if it hadn’t been redecorated since the year dot – and Marlene thought Helen was the last word in style. Marlene’s admiration was comforting in an ever-changing world.

  An hour later, Marlene was installed at Helen’s lovely dining room table in White Gables – Helen never received guests in the kitchen. Kit was fatally obsessed with his childhood meal of bacon and cabbage and the cabbage scent tended to linger – drinking coffee from the Nespresso and eating biscotti.

  ‘I love these,’ said Marlene, dunking hers into the tiny Villeroy and Boch espresso cups.

  Helen could never remember if it was acceptable to dunk anything or not – she must check. It was one of those weird things about etiquette: the poshest people did things Helen had been sure were entirely wrong, like that time a grande dame at a hunt ball had got entirely plastered and had gleefully pinched a waiter’s bottom. Helen, never at a hunt ball or even on a horse before, had not known where to look.

  Therefore, she did not dunk, although the biscotti were hard on her dentures.

  Marlene looked to her for advice, after all. ‘What do you think you’ll wear? That pink dress you got for the races was lovely—’ said Marlene, with the faint envy of someone who longed to go to the races but never had the money for it.

  ‘But it’s short,’ sighed Helen, ‘you know the notion of not wearing short to an evening event …’

  There had not been much of a rule book in her home in Lisowen, apart from stay out of Daddy’s way when he came home out of his mind with drink, and if you had clothes, you wore them because if you didn’t someone else would take them. Still, somewhere on the planet, somewhere nice, the place where Helen really wanted to have grown up, there was a rule book, and Helen wished she knew all the intricacies of it.

  ‘You could wear it,’ said Marlene eagerly. ‘It’s the twenty-first century, the silly old rules don’t apply any more about evening things and you have great legs—’

  ‘Do you think …? Let’s take this upstairs, then.’

  They traipsed upstairs and Marlene, who was admitted to the sanctuary of Helen’s dressing room only rarely, first admired the orchids on the jardinière on the landing, and then the gleam of the mirrors in the dressing room.

  ‘You must never stop polishing,’ sighed Marlene, staring at the wall of mirrors.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Helen, who did polish but wanted to sound shocked at the thought. ‘Mrs P does it. I’m allergic to cleaning products, you know that.’

  ‘’Course,’ said Marlene, who was equally shocked at having forgotten about Mrs P, a sweet but slightly dim lady, to hear Helen describe her as a bit deaf too.

  Imagine having a cleaning lady. Marlene did her own cleaning.

  Marlene had never met Mrs P and there was a reason for that: Helen had trouble holding on to help because of her tendency to bitch at them, so Mrs P was the latest in a long line and it was not a marriage made in heaven. Mrs P, actually Paula Porter, came from the estate four blocks away from White Gables, had been raised with a cynical eye and took precisely none of Helen’s bitching.

  ‘I’ll clean but don’t hassle me, love, or I’ll be off,’ Paula had said on day one, looking her new employer up and down like a bookie evaluating the runners in the four o’clock at Leopardstown. ‘Let’s face it, you’ve gone through just about everyone else round here who does cleaning, so you keep out of my way when I’m working and I’ll keep out of yours or else I’m outta here.’

  Retelling this story would not elevate her in Marlene’s mind, so Helen had come up with the ruse of calling Paula Porter Mrs P and making her sound like a sweet lady who was thrilled to be admitted to the glory of White Gables, instead of a woman who swore like a docker and chain-smoked apart from the six hours a week she stood inside the Brannigans’ house.

  Neither did she reveal the information that Mrs P and Kit got on famously, and when he was there, Paula went into his study to polish and their laughs – Paula’s rough and too husky, Helen always thought with disapproval – could be heard all over the house.

  ‘This is the pink dress I wore to the races.’ Helen, who knew where all her clothes were because she spent a lot of time in her dressing room inspecting them, pulled out a hanger and held it up like a Dior saleslady holding a 4,000-euro jacket out for admiration.

  ‘Lovely,’ breathed Marlene.

  They both looked. The pink dress was short, flouncy, just to the knee, and although Helen was proud of her knees and felt she could have modelled, really, if only she’d had the chance, she wondered if it would be rude to wear something short to an evening event.

  Even this, even with her legs …

  Marlene, giddy with getting her hands on the closet, pulled out a long silver dress, all lace and curlicues, and with a high collar.

  ‘This is beautiful,’ she said, almost squeaking with delight.

  ‘A bit out of date,’ said Helen, who didn’t want to say that it had been cheap as chips and made her look old.

  She wasn’t old. Sixty-four was young these days. Sixty was the new fifty, really, and nobody said she looked her age. Not like Nora, God help her, who looked older because she hadn’t a clue about night creams or using retinol or anything. Who knew what sort of outfit Nora would wear to the party? Some old black thing covered in dog hair probably. That thought, at least, cheered her up.

  Not to be foxed by the rejection of her first choice, Marlene put the silver dress back and pulled out a black crêpe. It was like being a stylist, she thought happily.

  ‘Too black.’

  The long Schiaparelli pink that Trina said reminded her of a Barbie dress wasn’t right, nor was the lilac lamé that Helen couldn’t bear to throw out because once she’d had shoulders that could do the halterneck look. Their coffee was cold by the time they’d gone through it all and Helen had sunk into a state of depression.

  Not even Marlene’s joy at finding treasures like Helen’s actual Chanel jacket, which had nearly given Kit palpitations when he discovered how much it had cost, nor the pleated old-gold dress she had bought on a shopping expedition in Browns in London once upon a time, which had been another palpitation event, could cheer her up.

  ‘I suppose they all remind you of wonderful evenings out with Lottie,’ said Marlene, putting a comforting hand on Helen’s. ‘It must be so dreadful to have lost your dear sister-in-law.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Helen, wondering if she dare ask Paula Porter to vacuum inside the wardrobes because, honestly, the amount of dust in there. ‘Dreadfully sad.’

  ‘I think you deserve something new, something fabulous to make up for the pain,’ said Marlene.

  Marlene never got anything thrilling to make up for anything and she would never have expected it. Her husband worked in insurance, she ran the house and the PTA, and any money left over went into taking care of their three children. But she had listened to poor dear Helen’s sadness over her beloved sister-in-law and knew how difficult it must be to go to a party with
Edward Brannigan’s new wife.

  Helen was loyal to her brother-in-law, of course, but it would be hard.

  ‘You definitely need something new.’

  Helen thought of how Bess Brannigan would have made another trip to somewhere exotic to buy her party outfits. New York perhaps. Paris. Milan! Her eyes narrowed at the thought.

  It was one thing to get away with beauty and lovely legs when you were young, but when you were older, you needed serious clothes and serious jewellery. Kit couldn’t possibly have been honest about them cutting back financially. He was only saying that, she was sure of it.

  A little shopping trip was just what Helen needed.

  ‘You know, Marlene, pet, I think you’re right. It’ll be in memory of dear Lottie. My way of saying: “I haven’t forgotten you!”’

  John Steele looked at the tour prospectus. It was his worst nightmare. What looked like every American city he had ever heard of was in there, with early morning flights, late night flights and more hotel names than he could imagine ever seeing on TripAdvisor. Worse were the lists of interviews, only some of which he was to do when he was actually in the States.

  ‘You’ll do an enormous amount over the phone beforehand,’ Gavin had said in that self-assured tone of his on the phone the previous day. ‘And then there are the Q&A-style interviews and blog tours, that sort of thing.’

  ‘What’s a blog tour?’ said John, wondering if he’d died and woken up in some alternate universe where the language was different. It was like those dreams of waking up in exam halls naked, without a pen and with absolutely no exam information in his head.

  ‘You don’t know what a blog tour is?’ said Gavin in astonishment. ‘Bloggers are hugely important in the business these days, and you go on their blogs and answer their questions.’

  ‘What sort of questions?’ asked John, feeling the sense of unreality grow.

  ‘You know,’ said Gavin, ‘where you get your ideas from, advice for other people on how to write books, that sort of thing.’