Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘I have to,’ said Cari. ‘I’m not the sort of friend who tells you what you want to hear. I tell you what you need to hear. Hugh’s hurting too, Jojo. This is not just your pain.’

  ‘He talked to you?’

  ‘He’s worried.’

  ‘It’s not his place to phone you,’ snapped back Jojo.

  ‘What? He needs a document signed in triplicate before he can phone me? We talked because he loves you,’ said Cari, an expert in tough love. ‘I think he’s wondering if he should drag a psychiatrist round here to look at you because he’s terrified you’re having a breakdown. Are you?’ she asked suddenly, in a softer voice.

  ‘Are you supposed to know if you’re having a breakdown?’ Jojo said. ‘Surely you just collapse.’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ said Cari patiently. ‘It can be a slow descent where the person feels helpless and hopeless and—’

  ‘Don’t tell me – you edited a book on it once?’ said Jojo, stung at the thought of being discussed by Hugh and her cousin, her best friend, as if she was falling apart.

  ‘I nearly fell apart after Barney,’ said Cari evenly, ‘but I didn’t. This is worse, Jojo. Worse for both of you.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what it’s like,’ hissed Jojo. ‘You don’t know. And Hugh doesn’t know, either. It’s my body that’s being bashed with chemicals, not his. Women have the need for children, not men.’

  ‘You edit a book on that once?’ bit back Cari.

  ‘I’m living it!’ said Jojo.

  Cari stilled her breathing. She couldn’t mess this up.

  ‘Jojo, you know I love you and Hugh loves you, so don’t push everyone away. Jojo, we don’t always get what we want in life. I haven’t.’

  ‘Neither have I!’ said Jojo fiercely.

  ‘Well, deal with it! Because that’s what I have to do!’ snapped back Cari and collecting her things, entirely surprising Trina and Maggie, who were discussing blond men versus dark-haired men, she left.

  Twenty

  ‘New beginnings are often

  disguised as painful endings.’

  Lao Tzu

  Cari went towards Jeff’s office with the whole of Amy’s manuscript. She’d read it three times now and she loved it more each time. Amy was a genius.

  The door was closed but Cari peeked in the glass partition and it looked as if Jeff was having a nap because he was slumped back in his seat with his head back and his eyes closed.

  Paternity leave should last longer, Cari thought, like maybe a year or something.

  Knocking loudly to give him a chance to wake up, she opened the door to find Jeff still asleep and Conal lounging on the small office couch, flicking through a novel.

  ‘Oh.’ She stopped dead, manuscript in hand.

  ‘Oh yourself,’ said Conal, sitting up. ‘I’ve been calling you for a week.’

  ‘Why?’ said Cari lightly. ‘Have you a book you want edited as well as the indoctrination back in the cooler places in the country?’

  ‘I don’t think I could write a book,’ Conal said.

  Weirdly, as if she was hypnotised, Cari found herself moving towards him. She didn’t sit on the couch but on the small chair beside it. She didn’t quite trust herself beside Conal. All the testosterone that came off him in waves made him dangerous. She was done with him – so why was she even staying in the room. She could come back and talk to Jeff when Conal had gone.

  ‘Everyone and their lawyer thinks they can write a book,’ she remarked.

  ‘Jeff says that,’ Conal replied agreeably. ‘Don’t know why.’

  ‘Because it’s putting words together and people think they can do that.’

  ‘Singing is making sounds come out of your mouth and everyone doesn’t think they can do that,’ said Conal.

  ‘Bad example,’ Cari said. ‘Have you see some of the TV shows around? If everyone thinks they can write a book, even more people think they can sing.’

  ‘Listen, Cari, I want to apologise. I should have told you everything. I saw the call from Beatrice—’

  Cari held a hand up.

  ‘Enough!’ she yelled, frightening herself with her intensity. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

  Conal stood up and she had to take a step back.

  ‘Why are you running away from me, Cari,’ he said, looking genuinely lost for the first time. ‘I can explain.’

  ‘There’s always a rational explanation, isn’t there? Well, I’m not ready for any more life-shattering rational explanations,’ she shouted. ‘Keep away from me, Conal. It’s over. Finished. Done. Call me again and I phone the police. I have had enough explanations to last me a lifetime.’ And she left, slamming the door behind her.

  Three years earlier

  After the debacle in the church, Cari couldn’t bear to think about the wedding or the honeymoon.

  It wasn’t as if she had even known where she was going, was it?

  ‘You’ve got to find him and talk to him,’ Jojo had said a few days after the aborted ceremony, when Cari was still hiding out in Jojo’s spare bedroom, refusing to talk to anybody except for her parents, Maggie, Hugh and Jojo, obviously.

  Even then, she wasn’t really talking much: she was communicating in the odd sentence and then she’d burst into tears and of course, when you were like Cari, you didn’t want anyone to see you cry.

  What sort of a fool had she been, how would she not have known there was something else going on?

  The details were sketchy, despite CIA-level investigations going on as to what had happened with Barney and Traci and why Barney had broken off the engagement in such hideous style.

  Nora had wanted to go round to Barney’s house and rip him to shreds, but Mick, who wanted to rip him to shreds even more, had intervened and said that this was not going to be a good plan.

  ‘I have spoken to Owen on the phone,’ Mick said, ‘and he doesn’t know what’s going on either. Yvonne’s taken to her bed, so no surprise there. Owen says he’s sorry, so sorry because he and Yvonne love Cari and they had no idea Barney was doing anything with Traci and as for marrying her … they’re as shocked as us.’

  Everyone was quiet in the face of such oddness. Why would Barney, who had loved and adored Cari for so long, suddenly run off with her cousin?

  Discussions were limited on Traci. Nobody wanted to talk about her, out of respect for Cari, but Cari wanted to talk about her all right. Except the only person she could have any decent conversation with, any decent bitching with, was Jojo.

  Cari’s plan to let karma be her guide and never bitch too much about anyone had disintegrated along with her unused wedding bouquet.

  ‘She had buck teeth when we were growing up, they stuck out like Bugs bloody Bunny and she was a bag of bones, even then,’ Cari recalled with rage. ‘Remember when we got those training bras and she couldn’t fill one and she was so jealous because I had proper boobs when I was fourteen. She was always jealous of us. I never did understand her, she was never one of our friends. Do you think that was it? Do you think she wanted what I had, that she took Barney because he was mine?’

  Jojo had looked at her cousin sadly.

  ‘I don’t know.’ said Jojo again.

  Slowly, information dripped out from the other camp. Barney’s mother, Yvonne, and his sister Jacinta were overcome with mortification and upset and had come, waving the white flag, over to Mick and Nora’s house.

  ‘We had no idea, you have to believe us,’ Yvonne wailed. ‘We had absolutely no idea he was going to do that, we love Cari, you know that too.’

  ‘I don’t know who I want to kill most,’ Jacinta had said, ‘him or that stupid cow.’

  Nora knew that name calling was going to get nobody anywhere so she stuck with the facts.

  ‘Barney hasn’t been in touch with Cari since the wedding, nothing, not a text, not a phone call, nothing. We have tried ringing him but he won’t answer any of our phones: not mine, not Mick’s; why do you think he did it? It might help Car
i move on if we knew what had happened.’

  And Yvonne, who couldn’t tell a lie to save her life, had looked up at the woman she had expected to be related to only a few days before and said, ‘She’s pregnant.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Nora. ‘Seems like he was a busier bee than we’d all thought.’

  Yvonne spoke as if reading from a formal statement: ‘He just thinks this is the right thing to do, this is what he has to do.’

  ‘He didn’t have to wait until our daughter was standing at the altar in front of all her friends and family, did he?’ growled Mick.

  ‘No, he didn’t have to wait until that moment,’ agreed Jacinta. ‘I’m with you, Mick, I can’t believe he’d do that to Cari, but I could tell he wasn’t himself the last few days before the wedding, and it must have been this. I don’t trust Traci. If only we could get to the bottom of it, then maybe Traci would go off and everything would be back to normal and—’

  ‘I don’t think anything is going to be back the way it was before,’ said Nora, trying to be kind. ‘A baby’s on the way, for a start.

  ‘Cari’s had her heart broken and she has been publicly humiliated into the bargain. I don’t think there is any way of coming back from any of that. Add to that the fact that Barney hasn’t been in touch with her.’ She looked upstairs, as if she knew her daughter was sitting on the exact mid-way step of the stairs of the house in Longford Terrace, listening. ‘If only he’d come clean and said, “Traci’s pregnant and I have responsibilities towards her and towards my baby.” If he had said any of that then things would be different, but to do it to her at the altar.’

  They were all silent, there was nothing anyone could say.

  Finally Cari spoke from her position on the stairs. ‘He’s a coward, tell him I said that, Jacinta.’

  ‘I wish he’d ring me,’ Cari said to Jojo that evening. ‘And then I could tell him how much I hate him, because I spend all the time in this room alone telling him that – except he’s not here to hear the words. But I practise them over and over in my head: “Why didn’t you tell me, why couldn’t we have a conversation, why did you leave it until the very last minute?”’

  Jojo was at a loss for the answer. Barney had seemed to be in love with Cari, nobody could have faked that and they hadn’t all imagined it.

  Jojo had never liked Traci, who was skinny, predatory and who, when asked as a child which ice cream she’d wanted, would always answer ‘hers’.

  In this case, it seemed that Traci had wanted whatever Cari had and she’d got it.

  ‘I think, perhaps, that Barney was scared,’ suggested Jojo, because she was sure Traci had got her claws into Barney and that with the correct effort, the claws could be unhooked.

  Cari was not impressed: in fact, she was outraged.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she snapped. ‘Barney was never afraid in his whole life. I know Traci is a bitch in heels but Barney knew what she was like. He knew what he was getting into bed with—’

  And then Cari had to stop in case she had a heart attack at the thought of Barney leaving Traci’s bed and coming home to hers. If Cari had fallen in love with someone else, she’d have had the courage to tell Barney about it. She wouldn’t have left him at the altar. How could anyone do that?

  In the end Hugh brokered the peace deal.

  Barney contacted Hugh first.

  ‘What do you want?’ Hugh said coldly. After all, he was the one who’d had Cari living in his house on and off for the past three weeks, watching her get thin and white-faced, watching her face get pinched and sadder with every day. He kept waiting for the moment when she’d cheer up and somehow come out of it, reach that Beyoncé moment of female empowerment.

  But no, three weeks was clearly not enough time to get over a broken heart.

  Tests had proved it took at least six months actually, Jojo had told him, as they lay in bed together holding hands, listening to Cari in the other room crying herself to sleep.

  So when Barney contacted Hugh, Hugh was not really keen on having a conversation with a man he considered to be scum of the highest order.

  ‘I just need to explain to somebody, and I need to speak to Cari,’ Barney said.

  Hugh was at work when he had taken the call: that was partly why he had taken it. He’d looked at his mobile quickly, seen Barney’s number, and had clicked ‘accept’ almost automatically.

  ‘Why haven’t you tried to talk to Cari herself?’ Hugh asked. ‘I’m not the person you left standing at the altar in front of everyone, I’m not the person you let down or pretended to be in love with—’

  ‘I was in love with her, I—’

  For a moment Hugh thought that Barney was going to say, ‘I still am in love with her,’ but he must have been imagining it, because if you were in love with someone, then you married them or you explained things to them no matter what was going on in the rest of your life.

  ‘Why Traci?’ demanded Hugh. ‘I mean of all the people in all the world you could have cheated on Cari with, why do it with her second cousin?’

  ‘I can’t explain it,’ Barney said. ‘But I never meant it to happen.’

  ‘Says every guy, everywhere,’ Hugh snapped back. ‘I never meant it to happen, she just ended up on my lap with no clothes on, how did that happen?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Barney said. ‘I, I loved Cari so much and I can’t really explain what happened but I’m trying to do the honourable thing here and—’

  Hugh cut him off instantly. ‘There is nothing honourable in what has gone on, your behaviour has not been honourable and you’re not contacting Cari to explain. Not one single thing you’ve done has been honourable.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Barney, ‘I just need to talk to her, not on the phone, either. I’d like to meet her somewhere that doesn’t belong to either of us, not your house and I know she’s staying there, not our old place – by the way I have moved all my stuff out, she can go back there.’

  ‘And have you moved the wedding presents out?’ Hugh asked acidly.

  ‘I got my mum and Jacinta to do that, I wouldn’t ask Cari to do that.’

  ‘Great. Nice to hear you have got one decent bone in your body.’

  ‘Give me a break will you?’ Barney asked. ‘Just ten minutes with Cari, that’s all I’m asking, ten minutes.’

  Cari sat at a seat outside the café. It was April now, warmer, and people sat outside enjoying glasses of wine, cappuccinos and smoking cigarettes because they couldn’t smoke inside. There was a buzz in the air that came from being in the city centre, a buzz from it being early evening on a Thursday when people were going home from work, full of the joys of spring with just one more day of the week to go and then, yahoo, the weekend.

  Cari didn’t care about weekends any more. She could hardly remember what it had been like when she did. She didn’t care that she had got really thin and that her skinniest jeans were hanging off her.

  She did mildly care that she looked like a corpse microwaved up when she looked in the mirror and saw that she had big dark purple circles under her eyes, but she didn’t really care that much: who was going to be looking at her?

  She was damaged goods, the girl dumped at the altar.

  She was surprised it wasn’t on YouTube already.

  She stirred her green tea some more, just for something to do. She’d have liked a coffee but she was sleeping so badly that it was crazy to think of having caffeine at this hour of the day. She had chosen this place because she and Barney had never come here before. It was entirely unsuitable for her work, although it wasn’t too far from Barney’s, but she wasn’t working at the moment, she was still – laugh – supposed to be on her honeymoon, going back on Monday. Now that was going to be a complete riot. No matter how much she liked all the people in Cambridge Publishing, it was going to be horrible facing work after the last three weeks. Her colleagues had been there in the church: they’d witnessed it all.

  How did a person go back into work after t
hat?

  ‘Hi all, I had three lovely weeks off. Yes, I did lose weight! It’s the Dumped At The Altar diet. No, don’t try it – it’s a bit drastic. So, how are all of you?’

  No, that didn’t quite cut it.

  ‘Cari.’ He was beside her and she hadn’t heard him come up, she had been so busy thinking about the hideous past and her empty future.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, shocked and then irritated to see that he looked almost unchanged. Barney didn’t look as if he had been crying into his pillow every night, he didn’t look as if he had lost weight out of anxiety and a complete lack of appetite.

  He was still good-looking, still with a hint of the tan from when he’d gone skiing in January with some pals from work. She’d been too busy, hadn’t gone. And skiing was so expensive. But maybe he’d been off with Tricky Traci then.

  ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Of course,’ she snapped out.

  She moved her chair back away from the table, wanting to be as far from him as physically possible. And if she was too close to him, she might remember that she’d lain in bed with this man, had slept entwined with him for over a year, had promised to marry him and worn his ring on her finger. Had believed it when he said he loved her!

  What sort of a moron was she to have believed in him?

  No matter what excuse he came up with, it didn’t matter. She had made the biggest mistake of her life and she would never trust another man again. Clearly her judgement was appalling.

  Jojo thought this was going to be closure but Cari knew it wouldn’t be.

  Closure was a dumb notion made up by psychologists who justified people going to them for ever, the concept that one day you’d get over something and be able to say, ‘OK, that’s in the past, I’m better, I’ve moved on.’

  Bullshit.

  Cari would never move on, this would never be in her past. It would always be staring up at her, saying, ‘You made a phenomenal mistake, your judgement of character is hopeless.’

  She glared at the man who’d broken her heart.

  ‘I’ve only got five minutes,’ she snapped, sounding like the woman who did deals and talked to agents in a tough voice.