by Cathy Kelly
‘You’re beautiful,’ he said in a deep voice.
‘Don’t forget funny,’ she murmured into his mouth.
‘Funny. Delicious.’ The kiss hardened.
‘Deliciously weird?’ she said.
‘Just delicious,’ he said and he pulled away, slowly.
‘If I don’t go now I won’t be able to leave,’ he said. ‘So I will bid you adieu and call you tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’ said Cari, leaning against her door.
‘Tomorrow.’
He waited until she was inside and then kissed his fingers and waved them gently at her.
She grinned and pretended to catch the kiss.
‘Where do you want me to put it?’ she teased, expecting him to say something sexy.
‘In your heart,’ he said and he was gone.
In her apartment, Cari danced around for a moment and wished she had someone she could phone to tell them about this glorious date, but the person she’d have liked to have phoned was Jojo, and she couldn’t tell her any of this. When you were in the depths of despair, other people’s happiness hurt even more.
The next morning, Conal phoned at twenty to eight.
‘Just going into a meeting,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to talk to you first.’
‘Remind me never to be a scientist,’ Cari said, smiling as she stood at her car, ready to get into it for the commute to work. ‘I’m just leaving home.’
‘What are you up to this evening?’
‘I thought I might wash the kitchen floor or my hair – hard decision to make,’ teased Cari.
‘How about you leave them both in a state of unwashness and come see a movie with me?’
Cari mentally booked a lunchtime appointment with the hairdressers near the office. The kitchen floor could go hang, not that she’d planned to wash it anyway.
‘I’d love it.’
Seventeen
SECRETS OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE #5
He should know what you’re thinking, right? Really know … and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t love you … Sob! Remember, your beloved is not psychic. Take the guesswork out and tell him what you are thinking.
Bess knew that Edward’s seventieth was going to be a fabulous party. Catering, flowers, rooms, a band who could cover a repertoire from Glenn Miller to Elvis Presley: everything was organised.
Except for her and Edward. They were in chaos: organised chaos in that they spoke civilly at the breakfast table each day and discussed the events of said days over dinner in the evening. But the spark, the love, had vanished from their marriage. It was as if, Bess thought, Edward had decided that he had to make a choice between her and Jojo. He could only love one of them and he had chosen Jojo.
‘What’s your day like today?’ he’d ask as they sat at the breakfast table, him reading the paper, Bess scanning her diary.
‘The usual,’ she’d say and she’d long for those early days in their marriage when he’d wonder if she could have lunch with him? If she could skip home early? If they could go to see a film and have dinner?
On those days, he’d have woken her with gentle kisses: Edward always woke before she did.
‘Morning sleepyhead,’ he’d murmur, feathering kisses along her neck and then kissing her properly, before they’d reluctantly agree that they had to get up for work.
Sometimes they showered together, making love before returning to the mundanity of getting dressed.
‘You’ll kill me, Mrs Brannigan.’ Edward would grin at her, towel wrapped around his waist.
‘You’ll kill me first, Mr Brannigan,’ she’d say, swatting his behind and going to get dressed, knowing she had that flush of lovemaking burnished across her face.
None of that ever happened now. No. They were like people married alive, only worse. Because they had so much unspoken between them.
Bess was scared to say anything because she – she who was supposed to be tough as steel – was afraid he’d send her away and then this marvellous love would be over. And she was still hoping.
She went about her days in a haze of pain. Who knew love could hurt this much?
How could she last until the party was over? Because she wouldn’t walk out now but when it was over, afterwards, she would quietly disappear from Edward’s life.
It would kill her to do it but she had some self-respect left.
She still had her own apartment. She wouldn’t take much, although she wanted her crazy painting of the jungle and the tiger. She’d come to love it: it symbolised the new Bess in some way. A woman who’d thought love didn’t exist.
It existed all right, she knew that now. But it couldn’t last. Hadn’t lasted. Jojo would get her father all to herself.
Bess had taken another trip to Lisowen to finalise thse last-minute details and now she walked round the ballroom in Lisowen listening to the hotel’s banqueting manager reassuring her that everything would be wonderful.
To get here, she’d got up extra early and taken the first flight to Farranfore airport. It was the fourth day trip she’d taken and she felt bone-tired. At the start, she’d had such plans about this party. It was to be a showcase of her love for Edward and now … Now it felt like a coda to a marriage.
‘With the candles glittering off the crystal and the dark red roses, the room will look so beautiful,’ the catering manager was saying.
Bess wanted to cry as she admired the beautiful ballroom with its high ceilings and huge mullioned windows, which must have given some poor window cleaner nightmares. Years ago, Edward had looked from the outside in, the poor local kid from a tiny farm staring in, nose metaphorically pressed up against the window as he imagined the great life of the people living within.
Bess knew the Villiers family had been broke for many years before they’d finally sold the property and that scandal had dogged the lives of the last generation of Villiers, one of whom had died on the French Riviera in murky circumstances, something to do with a young girl and an enraged father.
She’d learned all of this from the various people in the castle, many of whom were not originally from the area but who knew of the castle’s original owners.
‘There was something bad in the last of them,’ the reservations lady had told Bess when they’d been discussing the rooms everyone in the family would have. ‘If your husband’s from round here, he must know about it,’ she’d said.
‘No,’ said Bess. ‘They all moved away long ago.’
‘Well, it’ll be lovely to come back here and see the place as it was once,’ the lady said cheerfully.
Bess had nodded. It would be lovely for Edward but not for her. If something didn’t change soon, she would be gone from his life.
Lottie would be the one he thought of when he came here again, not her.
Lena was happy they were flying home to Ireland for the birthday party.
‘I can’t wait,’ she kept saying to Paul, dashing round the apartment as she made lists of what she needed to pack and what they’d need for Heidi on the plane. Little Heidi was wonderful on planes: well, she had been on the previous two trips to Ireland, and Lena had been dreading the first one when Heidi was four months old.
Then, hours of internet surfing had left her miserably telling Paul that four-month-old babies and their parents really needed to be secreted in a separate part of the plane to all the other passengers because mothers’ message boards were full of dark tales of small babies who wailed non-stop on long flights; of people who’d come up to mothers and screamed at them to keep their child quiet; of those rare parents without babies who sent sympathetic glances in the crying baby’s parents’ direction.
‘My sisters say she’s too young for an antihistamine: they make them drowsy,’ Lena reported before that first trip home.
‘Drug her?’ said Paul, shocked.
Lena’s two older sisters had big families, four and five children each, and one had practically given birth to her latest child near the soft drinks section of Aldi. They wer
e all wildly laid-back about parenting at this stage, and he realised that mention of something to calm the baby’s nerves was probably normal to them.
‘Not drug her but there’s this stuff and it’s for itching and it makes them tired …’ said Lena, looking as if she might cry herself. ‘I’m just a hopeless mother: I don’t know all this stuff …’
Paul put his arm around her and kept a wary ear out for Heidi because it was evening, just around the time when the colic kicked in. Nothing appeared to fix colic and to see Heidi crying killed him. He wasn’t sure how he’d cope on a plane if Heidi sobbed all the way. The other passengers could go hang: Paul had enough of his father’s strength not to care too much about what other people thought.
‘You’re a wonderful mother,’ Paul said, kissing his wife, and wishing as he so often did that his own mother had been alive to see his baby daughter coming home to Ireland for that first time.
If you’re watching, Mum, thank you for everything, he thought silently.
Lottie, with her great emotional intelligence and gentleness, had made him able to understand a little of what Lena was going through.
On that first trip, four-month-old Heidi had not cried non-stop. She had been the model of the perfect child and as they’d disembarked in Dublin, one harassed mother with a toddler who’d treated the back aisles as an Olympic track training field carried him off as he slept, worn out with his efforts, and she shot Paul with a sideways glance.
‘Antihistamine medicine?’ she said.
Now, for this third trip, Heidi would be a seasoned traveller, although Paul fully expected her to use her new-found moving skills to belt up and down the aisles the whole time.
‘I’m so glad you’re coming, son,’ Edward said to Paul on the phone.
‘As if I’d miss it,’ said Paul, who was trying to feed an increasingly naughty Heidi her breakfast.
Lena was getting ready for work and they’d already had a fraught shouting match about who was responsible for the main burden of the childcare.
Paul thought he did pretty well but Lena said no, she was doing far more.
Heidi, who had a throwing arm like a quarterback, grabbed her juice beaker and flung it at the wall where the lid banged off and juice splattered all over the recently painted wall.
Paul tuned out of what his father was saying for a moment, something about Jojo and Bess.
It had cost a fortune to get the apartment repainted and Lena had been irritable with him because she felt he should have done it himself. But the office was mental and he’d never been brilliant at home improvements.
‘Yeah, Dad, gotta go,’ he said. ‘See you in a week. Can’t wait.’
Edward met his brothers for a round of golf on Saturday morning. Kit loved golf and had once been a single-figure handicapper. Mick was mainly a pitch and putt man, but he loved the chance to whack the ball down the fairway at Edward’s exclusive golfclub. He didn’t care if he didn’t win but when he did, he loved taking the fiver off Edward.
The three men and their wives were then going to dinner that night in the clubhouse. Edward, who’d arranged it weeks ago, was regretting it all.
Not the notion of dinner with Nora – no, he always had all the time in the world for Nora. But the thought of having to be nice to Helen when he was feeling so anxious, and he was sure she’d be watching Bess like a hawk just for the sake of it.
If anyone was going to spot a hiccup in the new marriage, it was Nora. But if anyone was going to loudly comment upon the hiccup, it was Helen.
And right now, his and Bess’s marriage was one long hiccup.
He was trying his best to be a good husband, trying to recapture some of the easiness of the early days of their marriage, but it had just vanished. They were like people in a play, pretending to be married.
He knew he had to take responsibility for some of this but it was all so difficult – he wished they’d never planned this damned party in the first place. Perhaps then, eventually, Jojo would have come round to the idea of Bess being his wife and perhaps then, he’d have been able to enjoy simply loving Bess.
But it was too late to back out now. The damage was done.
‘Any plans for the day?’ Edward had said to Bess before he left that morning. For a long time, she’d been spending her Saturdays in the garden when he played golf.
‘I’ve never gardened before,’ she’d said that first day, when he arrived home to find her exhausted, smudged with dirt but delighted with herself because of the flower beds she’d weeded. ‘It’s very satisfying, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘You do a bit and it’s done – not like work in the office which seems never-ending.’
‘Weeds grow back,’ Edward had reminded her fondly, kissing her smudged cheek.
‘That’s another day’s work,’ said Bess, satisfied. ‘I need a bath. Do you want to share one?’ And she’d shot him that sensual, loving glance he simply couldn’t resist.
Gardening had been her way of putting down roots, making the home her own, he knew now.
However, she’d stopped the gardening. It was as if she was considering leaving and didn’t want to expend any more time on the place. Edward could sense this but he had no idea how to fix it.
‘Not sure,’ she said brightly, too brightly. Definitely like people in a play. ‘I might drop in to the office. I’ve been neglecting it lately.’
Edward had driven off in a very bad mood.
He’d told her to cut back on work – he’d loved the idea that his wife, who had always worked so hard, needed to work less and delegate work to her partner because she was now married to a rich man. Subtly, she was telling him that she had her own life, her own business. An independent woman could always leave.
He hated the thought of that.
‘How’s Bess? Up to ninety about the party? Only a couple of weeks to go,’ said Mick as he and Edward walked down the third fairway, Kit wandering off to the rough because he’d hooked his drive to the left.
‘Not really,’ sighed Edward. ‘She could organise it in her sleep. She’s upset, though because of Jojo and Jojo not wanting to come.’
‘Ah,’ said Mick, with the wisdom of a man who could see it all. ‘Not easy for you, Ed, to sort through it all. It’s hard for Jojo, for sure, but you deserve a bit of peace in your life now. Jojo’s young, got her life ahead of her.’
‘Yes!’ Edward wanted to say, ‘Yes, but it’s making me feel guilty and I can’t bear that and yet I love Bess and …’
‘Found my ball!’ roared Kit.
‘What would you do in my shoes?’ Edward asked quickly.
Mick gave him a sympathetic look. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘You won’t lose Jojo, she’ll come round eventually. But you might lose Bess.’
Then Kit took the shot, and came back out onto the fairway, waiting for his brothers to join him, and the chance for more conversation was gone.
Nora met Bess in the ladies’ room in the golf club that evening.
‘Edward told me you were in here,’ said Nora, hugging her sister-in-law. ‘Thought I’d say hello before we went to the table. Helen and Kit are here already.’
Bess groaned.
‘I nearly pulled out of this, Nora,’ she said. ‘I can’t face Helen. She looks at me as if she’s calculating the net worth of everything I own and she will just take one look at me and Edward and know it’s not all rosy in the garden. I can’t cope with an evening of her looking at me speculatively.’
‘We’ll cope together,’ said Nora, putting her arm through Bess’s companionably. ‘I’ll ask her opinion of what to wear to the party and you can pretend to be listening, fascinated.’
‘That seems unfair,’ said Bess.
‘Look, I’m not interested in clothes but she is, so I let her talk about what interests her,’ said Nora simply. ‘There’s no malice in it. It makes her happy. She loves her clothes and you know I don’t care about them. She isn’t interested in books or dogs or gardening or a new recipe
for bread or any of the things I like, so I make the effort for her and don’t let it get to me that it never occurs to her to make the effort for me. It’s compromise.’
‘I wish everything was as easy to fix with a bit of compromising,’ said Bess bitterly. ‘It hasn’t worked for me. Edward’s never going to have a showdown with Jojo. He can’t bear to look at me these days because he sees Jojo’s face and knows that his being with me is hurting her.’
‘And that’s destroying your marriage,’ said Nora flatly. ‘Compromise works for me and Mick. That’s how we’re happily married. Not that he’s an old shoe and I’m an old sock. We work at it. We compromise.’
‘You shouldn’t have to compromise on everything,’ said Bess.
‘In business, maybe, but in marriage …’ Nora laughed quietly. ‘Compromise and respect rule. When you stop respecting your spouse, when you look or talk to them with contempt, when you deliberately hurt them – those things destroy love and marriage.
‘Remember that your husband is not put on earth to make you happy, that’s your job. Respect them, understand that marriage isn’t easy and compromise is important and then – it can work. OK, lecture over. Let’s go and talk gowns …’
‘No, don’t go.’ Bess held on to Nora. ‘I understand what you’re saying but it’s not that easy. Jojo is literally the third person in our marriage. Edward had no idea how upset she was about me and the birthday party in Lisowen has underlined it for him. He’s never said a word but I can tell that it’s wrecking everything we have. This isn’t about me worrying about Jojo. It’s gone way beyond that now.’
Her voice had risen but Bess no longer worried if anyone heard them. ‘I honestly don’t care if Jojo comes to the party in Lisowen or not. I want my husband back but he’s so caught up in this that he thinks that if he loves me, he’s betraying his daughter. I don’t even think he knows it but that’s the truth. He has backed away from me in every sense and he doesn’t even realise it.’