Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘Oh, Bess, I am so sorry. But he loves you, he will come round. You have to show him that it’s not worth wrecking your marriage over whether or not Jojo accepts you at this point, Bess. You make Edward happy. Jojo makes him happy. Perhaps you are both never going to be in the same room at the same time without sparks flying, but luckily, she’s a grown-up with her own life and not a four-year-old.’

  ‘One problem,’ said Bess grimly. ‘Edward’s not happy any more. Neither am I. Jojo’s magic has succeeded. The only way I can tell him what’s happening is to tell him his beloved little girl has ruined our marriage and that will go down really well. I can’t see us getting over this.’

  Nora looked crestfallen. ‘Please don’t say that,’ she said. ‘He loves you; he needs you and you love him.’

  ‘It’s not that easy, Nora. There’s so much stacked against us.’

  ‘Please try, give him a chance. He’s such a good man, Bess,’ begged Nora. ‘He’s not good at talking about feelings, Lottie—’ She stopped.

  ‘Lottie always said that, did she?’ asked Bess bitterly. ‘You can say Lottie’s name because Lottie is not the one between us. It’s Edward’s daughter, not Lottie, ironically enough. I thought the dead wife would be the one who’d scupper us but it isn’t.’

  ‘Give him a chance,’ said Nora, grabbing Bess’s hand.

  Tears filled Bess’s eyes. She couldn’t trust herself to speak. All she wanted was to give her husband a chance but he had to respond. Was that too much to ask?

  Helen was at the table done up to the nines and looked at Bess as if already assessing the cost of her outfit and jewellery, but Bess gave her a smile.

  ‘Hello, Helen,’ she said.

  She then sat down beside Edward and reached for his hand under the table.

  Surprised, he squeezed it back.

  Compromise just a little more, she thought. Understand that Edward wasn’t good at explaining his feelings. She wanted this marriage to work, so she’d keep trying. Give him time to see that he could love her and Jojo. And hope it would work.

  Eighteen

  SECRETS OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE #6

  Bleaching your upper lip – that’s the biggest secret in your marriage. Ask yourself, would it break your other half’s heart? If the answer is yes, the secret behaviour needs to stop.

  On Sunday morning, Hugh sat on the bathroom floor with Jojo and felt her sob in his arms.

  Not pregnant. For the third time, not pregnant.

  The stick lay on the floor and Hugh wondered if he jumped on it, would it signal his own rage and hopelessness at this exact moment.

  Jojo had woken at six, her eyes feverishly excited.

  ‘It’s day sixteen!’ she said, as if he didn’t know.

  Neither of them had slept much the night before but they’d lain there side by side, each trying to sleep, each pretending to sleep, he was sure, because they couldn’t bear to talk to the other.

  To talk might be to discuss the test and what would happen if Jojo wasn’t pregnant.

  He knew Jojo could not bear to imagine this. And neither could he.

  So they’d lain there in silence.

  ‘I can’t believe it, I was sure, this time,’ sobbed Jojo, her whole body vibrating with the intensity of her grief. ‘Third time lucky …’

  ‘Me too,’ he whispered.

  He could say nothing else, offer no hopeful ‘next time’ conversations because Hugh wasn’t sure if he could go through this again. In fact, he knew he couldn’t.

  Jojo would kill him if he didn’t agree to another cycle, he was pretty sure of that. She was obsessed.

  He leaned in to her hair, waiting for the moment when she’d move away from him.

  Jojo leaned against Hugh, wishing she was being comforted by her mother instead of him.

  Lottie had gone with love and grace and wisdom.

  ‘Live your life, please, my darling,’ Lottie had said to her before the drugs had really taken hold and she had become glazed before she died.

  Her mother had been ready. It was too soon but she had been ready.

  In the same way, the tiny embryos inside Jojo had not been ready to go and yet life hadn’t been breathed into them.

  She felt hollow with pain. So much that she didn’t know if she could bear it any more. Nobody understood. How could they?

  ‘Will you come downstairs with me and I’ll make us some tea,’ said Hugh helplessly. It was the most useless gesture in the world but he didn’t know what to say any longer. Everything had been said.

  Every word of pity and sympathy and pain had been ground out.

  Jojo shook her head and pushed him away.

  ‘No, you go. Leave me alone.’

  Hugh was shocked.

  ‘Jojo?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, her eyes blurred with tears. ‘I’m better on my own.’

  In the days following, Hugh felt as if he’d lost Jojo. She looked thinner, if that was possible, and yet he watched her eat and fed her fruit smoothies laced with protein in the morning to keep her strength up. It was like taking care of someone who was convalescing.

  Emotionally, she was there – but not quite there.

  Over a year ago, pre-fertility treatment, he and Jojo would have sat down and talked out their worries.

  They might have taken a cheapie weekend away, hiked a bit up a mountain, which always brought the clarity Hugh liked. Then curled up in a cosy small hotel with nice food, drinks and good books, which cleared Jojo’s mind.

  How long was it since they’d done such simple things?

  That had been the best of their marriage – the simple stuff: the talking, the hugs over breakfast, reading the papers on a Sunday morning, lying in bed at night when they were both too tired to talk and just drifting off to sleep, spooned against each other.

  That was what had made their marriage perfect. Now those simple pleasures were gone.

  Jojo had changed. Her mother’s death, her failure to get pregnant and then her father marrying again: it had all pushed her over the edge.

  Hugh had changed too out of worry. He simply wasn’t sure they could ever recapture the early days.

  He knew marriages went through different stages, from the honeymoon of not wanting to be out of each other’s sight for more than a working day to the normality of arguing over who took out the bins, but this … this ennui was different.

  They’d heard all that talk about the physical side-effects of infertility treatment but it looked as if Jojo was falling apart emotionally. There were no special injections for that, no emergency treatment for fixing a shattered psyche.

  He knew that Jojo would literally kill him if he rang the fertility psychologist to ask if this was normal. That might ruin their chances of another cycle and without the hope of a baby, their marriage would be over. He knew that now.

  He just didn’t want Jojo lost in this half-world she seemed to be in. Grief had made her float away from him on a bubble of pain. She showed no sign of caring if she ever floated back again.

  He needed to talk to Nora, but he didn’t know how to begin. Nora was the closest person to his wife other than Maggie, Cari and her father. Edward was clearly out of the picture now … and he couldn’t talk to Edward because of the Bess situation.

  He had to talk to Cari.

  He phoned, said he needed her help and heard Cari breathe shakily.

  ‘Oh, Hugh, I haven’t known what to do!’ she said, sounding absolutely nothing like his normally self-assured cousin-in-law. ‘I was in Belfast yesterday at a conference and I phoned her on a whim and she sounded terrible. I said could we meet up but she said no, she couldn’t see anyone.’

  ‘She never told me,’ he said dully, ‘but then she doesn’t talk to me either.’

  ‘Hugh, I’ve been backing off because infertility treatment is such a couples thing, but I’ve been so worried. This past week, she’s barely spoken to me.’

  ‘We were in the final stage, waiting for the pregn
ancy test,’ said Hugh. ‘She can’t cope with anyone knowing any more. We took the test on Sunday morning – it was negative. She’s falling apart and pushing me away.’

  ‘Oh, Hugh,’ repeated Cari miserably.

  They met at a small café in town in the morning – Hugh had managed to grab a few moments from work and Cari had managed a quick trip out of the office to meet an author.

  ‘We’re having one of our girls’ nights in at the weekend, you know that?’ Cari said. ‘I was sort of hoping to get a feel for how she was, because I haven’t seen her for ages: she keeps putting me off, saying she can’t meet me at weekends. She keeps saying you guys are doing stuff at the weekends.’

  ‘We’re not doing anything,’ said Hugh glumly. ‘She’s either in the shop or she’s sitting at home in front of the television as early as she can, not really watching anything, to be honest. Since Sunday, she goes to work without speaking and if she does speak, she snaps at me, like it’s my fault.’

  ‘She wouldn’t tell me the date of the test,’ said Cari. ‘She told me the first time.’

  Hugh grimaced. ‘Incredibly stupidly, we were both too convinced it was going to work the first time – like every lottery ticket purchaser, I guess. I don’t know why, but we had this idea because we were young and healthy and we had all these amazing people working with us – we assumed that it was going to happen, we were going to be the one in five or whatever statistic you look at, and we were going to be pregnant.’

  He stirred his coffee. He had gone off the taste of coffee, gone off the taste of so much food. Hunger was important, Hugh realised, and when you felt broken-hearted and weary, you had no appetite. ‘Then we did the first test and discovered she was not pregnant.’

  Cari watched him, waiting. Hugh looked older, tireder. Gone was the jokey friend who could say anything to her and teased her about books she’d published recently, or praised her for one he loved.

  ‘The second time it didn’t work, it killed us both. It does something to you, just pulls the rug out from under your feet. Everyone can get pregnant. People who really, really don’t want to manage to have babies and you, who do, can’t manage it. I don’t care what religion you are, or what you believe in, you begin to think it’s punishment and that it will never happen, that with each negative result, you’re getting another karmic slap on the wrist.’

  ‘You sound like Lottie,’ said Cari.

  ‘I wish she was here,’ Hugh sighed. ‘She could have helped Jojo, could have made sense of it all. I certainly can’t. Jojo might say, “It’s us going through this” but inside her, it’s her battle to be a mother. Her biological imperative, her fierce drive to have a baby, perhaps to make up for that fierce love she had for her own mother. I don’t know,’ he added wearily. ‘My feelings sort of fade into the background, and that’s hard too. Like I don’t matter.’ He laughed without humour. ‘Just as well I’m not in the divorce law section,’ he said. ‘I’d really be a hit with my current mood.’

  ‘It’s not at that point?’ said Cari carefully. Hugh and Jojo had one of the best marriages she knew.

  Hugh shrugged. ‘Jojo barely talks to me any more. She wouldn’t let me tell anyone about this – it had to be a secret and that wasn’t fair. I know—’ He held his hands up. ‘Wildly ironic: a lawyer saying something is unfair, but I needed someone to confide in and Jojo insisted no. I couldn’t tell my brothers, anyone.

  ‘The secrecy gets to you. At first, I was so sure it would work out but now, I’ve begun to see us as part of the other group, the group who try and try and plough all their savings into it and never end up with a baby. And split up.’

  Cari put a hand on his.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, ‘that’s not going to happen to you, I have never seen people more in love.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said bitterly, ‘but this rips through love, this is a scalpel slicing through love, ripping it to bits. Having a baby is supposed to the most natural thing in the world and if it’s not the most natural thing in the world, it tears everything up. You know I wanted to stop? I said it to her before we went in for this third cycle. I said we should take a break, because it had affected her so badly, but she insisted. She made me go in. I had to pretend she was fine to the clinic’s psychologist when I knew she wasn’t, so this is my fault.’

  Cari interrupted him. ‘It’s not your fault, you were just trying to do the right thing.’

  Hugh ran a hand through hair that looked too long and messy, another very un-Hugh-like thing. Normally he was so neat, so professional-looking. ‘I don’t know what the right thing is any more. I need to get her help but I don’t know how. This fight between her father, Bess and the whole seventieth birthday disaster in Lisowen isn’t helping.’

  ‘Do you think,’ Cari said, ‘we should wait until after that and then see how Jojo is, because once that’s over, it might help her turn a corner.’

  They both looked at each other hopefully.

  ‘My mum would be a great person to talk to about this,’ Cari added.

  ‘I know,’ said Hugh, ‘but Jojo was so adamant that nobody else knew.’

  Her mum and Uncle Ed could help but if Uncle Ed knew, then Bess would know and Jojo would rather rip off her own leg than let Bess know.

  ‘It’s terrible that Jojo hates Bess so much. I know Bess is spiky, and a million miles away from Lottie, but Uncle Ed deserves happiness.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Hugh, ‘but I dare not ever say that to Jojo or she would totally divorce me.’

  ‘After the seventieth, which is soon. Let’s see how she is and make a call then, right?’ said Cari.

  ‘OK,’ said Hugh, ‘till then.’

  ‘I’m going to see her later today – drop into the shop. Pretend we haven’t talked?’

  ‘Pretend whatever you like,’ said Hugh, ‘if you can make her smile, bring her back to me.’

  Jojo was folding little T-shirts that just refused to lie flat. The seams were crooked and no matter how she squashed them on the counter and moulded them around the little folding board, they emerged at angles with creases in the wrong places.

  ‘These are useless!’ she yelled at Elaine, who had spent the afternoon redoing the window, which was normally Jojo’s job.

  ‘But they sell,’ said Elaine, who was seeing a new man and who found that if she thought about him, she could cope with whatever was making Jojo so very … un-Jojo-like.

  ‘Still crap,’ said Jojo, hurling the whole lot to the floor.

  ‘OK,’ said Elaine, adjusting the angle of a necklace on the mannequin in the window and deciding that it all looked fabulous. ‘Spill. Are we bankrupt, the shop has to close and you don’t know how to break it to me? Because it has to be something big.’

  ‘I could live without the shop,’ said Jojo, sitting on the stool behind the counter.

  Elaine was rattled out of her sangfroid for once.

  ‘What is it?’ she demanded. ‘This is your dream, your baby—’

  At that word, Jojo simply crumpled. She leaned over herself as if she had a knife in her stomach and tears flooded down her face.

  Elaine was by her side in an instant, proferring some scrunched-up loo roll as a tissue and putting her arms around her friend.

  ‘Jojo, honey, what’s wrong? Is it Hugh? Your dad?’

  ‘I’m not pregnant, Elaine, and this is the third time, the third time!’

  ‘The third time you thought you were pregnant?’ asked Elaine.

  Jojo looked up, eyes red and distraught. ‘The third time we’ve had IVF and it failed,’ she croaked.

  ‘Oh hell,’ said Elaine, and got to her feet and quickly flipped the shop sign to ‘closed’ and locked the door.

  By the time Cari reached the shop and banged loudly on the door to be let in, Jojo and Elaine were on their second cup of coffee laced with whisky in the back office, sitting on cushions on the foor and Elaine was explaining the benefits of having a puppy.

  ‘Juan has one. A schnauzer,’
she said. ‘They have to be groomed, which is really the only expense.’

  ‘Apart from the food – and the vets’ bills,’ said Cari, who had taken care of her mother’s dogs on more than one occasion. If there was something weird and sickening in the dead rodent department on their walk, Prancer would eat it and have to have all sorts of injections to sort his intestines out. Not to mention going through a lot of kitchen rolls and making Cari want to gag because whatever went into Prancer inevitably came out.

  ‘Yes,’ said Elaine, waggling her cup in agreement. ‘I never thought of that. Juan hasn’t mentioned it.’

  Jojo giggled and Cari hugged her tightly. Thank heavens for Elaine, Juan and whoever had left the bottle of whisky in the office. Jojo was not a spirits kind of girl but seeing her this relaxed, albeit with alcohol inside her, was something to rejoice about. Jojo was wound so tightly, she was like a coiled spring. A little uncoiling had to be a good thing.

  ‘How long have you been seeing Juan?’ Cari asked, saying no to the whisky bottle Elaine was proferring. She would have to drive them home afterwards and she was more of a pinot grigio girl herself.

  ‘Two weeks,’ explained Jojo, who now knew the whole story. ‘She thinks it could be marriage, the whole thing.’

  ‘Marriage, definitely,’ sighed Elaine. ‘He’s perfect.’

  ‘So far,’ said Cari, the voice of reason.

  And then she thought that she hadn’t known Conal for much longer than that, when it came down to it, but she felt wonderfully sure about him all the same. She was not going to rain on Elaine’s parade.

  ‘Cari doesn’t date,’ said Jojo to Elaine, who knew damn well that Cari didn’t date and Cari felt a tinge of sorrow that she hadn’t been able to tell her closest friend about Conal and how she felt about him.

  Later, she decided. Just because Jojo was tipsy now and the spring had uncoiled didn’t mean Jojo had gone back to normal. It would take more than a couple of whisky-laced coffees for that. Her news about the delectable Conal could wait.