by Cathy Kelly
‘Please don’t be like that,’ Barney said.
It was all Cari could do not to throw her entire cup of boiling green tea at him.
‘I will be whatever way I feel like,’ she said, ‘I have earned that right, I think. You’ve got exactly five minutes to tell me whatever it is you feel you need to tell me and then I want you out of my life for ever, got it?’ She set the alarm on her phone and then folded her arms.
‘Fine.’ He looked down, discomfited.
Barney was normally confident, full of enthusiasm and energy. Yet beneath the façade of good health, she could actually see none of those things as she stared at him. He was diminished after all. Good.
There had to be a hopeless waster there, didn’t there? Because otherwise, she was an idiot.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t ring you immediately afterwards, I didn’t know what to say.’
‘Was Traci sitting outside the church in a car, a getaway car?’ Cari said. ‘Was that it?’
‘Almost,’ he said.
‘Did you come on to her or did she come on to you? I ask just for the sake of it, I’m not really interested,’ Cari went on. ‘It would be nice to be able to fill in the blanks. I knew there was something wrong for a few weeks before the wedding and you didn’t have the courage to tell me. Plus, the night before the wedding you knew the game was up and you didn’t have the courage to say it, you couldn’t say, “Let’s not go through with this.” No. You had to humiliate me in front of everyone I care about.’
For the first time, he looked anguished.
‘I wanted to say something but I didn’t know how. The morning of the wedding, she rang me, said she’d turn up at the ceremony and—’
‘She’s pregnant, right?’ interrupted Cari. ‘So this pregnancy didn’t just materialise two hours, or twenty-four hours for that matter, before our wedding, did it?’
‘No.’
’I thought not,’ snapped Cari.
‘You see, it’s Traci and I honestly thought she was just saying it. I didn’t believe she was really pregnant,’ Barney said.
Cari took that information in.
He had slept with Traci – obviously, this was apparent to everyone if Traci was pregnant but to hear him discuss her cousin’s pregnancy made the vision of him and Traci in bed trample through her brain. Barney had promised to love her for ever, not Traci.
How could you ever think you knew a person? Did everyone lie?
Barney was still talking: ‘… and then she had proof that she was and there was no going back, and I couldn’t do that to her, but I couldn’t do that to you by lying and getting married.’
‘So you couldn’t dump her but you thought you might just dump me in the most public manner possible,’ Cari said drily. ‘Thanks for that.’
‘It wasn’t like that, I was so confused,’ Barney said.
Cari stared at him, the man she had been going to marry. This man who had been so confused by getting another woman pregnant that he hadn’t been able to tell his fiancé what had happened. He hadn’t been able to end it all with the minimum of pain and agony and humiliation. In a way, the humiliation was almost the smallest part, the fact that she meant so little to him that he’d been able to leave her at the altar, that was the hardest part.
‘You’ve done me a favour,’ she said, getting to her feet, smiling a smile that was not one of happiness and owed a lot to teeth-grinding. Her alarm still hadn’t sounded but she’d had enough. Time was up.
‘You’ve shown me what guys are like. Thanks for that, Barney, I hope you and Traci will be very happy.’
‘Please don’t go. There’s so much I want to say to you,’ Barney said, and he reached out and grabbed her arm.
Cari pulled back as if she’d been burned.
‘Don’t ever touch me again,’ she said furiously. ‘Don’t ever contact me again, you are out of my life.’
And she walked off.
She was proud that after it all she wasn’t crying. She would never cry over a man again.
Twenty-One
SECRETS OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE #7
Never underestimate kindness. Being kind to the person you love is worth more than a hundred gifts. Kindness makes us feel loved, supported and appreciated.
It was over: Bess knew it.
Her marriage was over.
Nora’s notion of compromise had gone. She and Edward had managed a certain amount of compromise and trying to be nice to each other. They’d gone out to dinner instead of eating at home, and it had been almost like in the old days, almost.
The party was nearly upon them and Bess was praying that Jojo would come, and that the presence of Nora and Hugh and everyone else would act like a balm upon her and it would be like the wedding: Jojo could be civil to Bess and accepting of her father’s new marriage because she’d done so at the actual wedding. This was just one event.
Bess was sure things were improving: Nora must have spoken to Jojo. That had to be it.
And then Jojo had phoned Edward, late one night.
‘Hi, Jojo, honey. I thought you had your girls’ night in tonight,’ Bess heard him say and she felt the ache of loving and not being loved in return.
It was the warm, loving way he spoke to Jojo, the way he once used to speak to Bess, too, as if she was one of the most important people in his life. But he didn’t speak to her like that now.
The tone he used with her was cool, businesslike.
As if aware of this, Edward took his mobile into his study and shut the door.
Jealousy and then pain shafted Bess and she almost went upstairs and packed a bag then and there.
It was over – she knew that now. She couldn’t stay with a man who spoke to her like someone selling him insurance, and spoke to his daughter with love and affection. She hadn’t signed on for this. She had signed on for actual love. Togetherness. Respect.
She began to climb the stairs, thinking of what she could take but something stopped her. Fine. Her marriage was over.
She would do this with dignity. She would go to the big seventieth birthday she’d arranged so lovingly for her husband. She would let everyone see the love and care she’d put into it, and then, when she got back to Dublin, she’d take her belongings and move out.
There would be gossip but then, no matter what you did, people gossiped. There was no point in living your life on the principle of whether your actions would cause gossip or not.
‘Daddy,’ said Jojo and she was crying.
‘What is it, my darling?’ said Edward, and he wished they weren’t on the phone and he was with her.
‘I just needed to talk to you. Hugh’s out and I had a fight with Cari.’
‘A fight with Cari?’
Edward was astounded. Jojo and Cari never fought. They had the odd squabble but they were such wonderful friends.
‘Over what?’ said Edward, feeling an ache in his chest. He couldn’t take much more of this stress. It was truly killing him.
‘Over my infertility treatment. Oh, Daddy, we’ve tried three times and it hasn’t worked out.’
Now Edward felt as if he’d been punched in the chest.
‘Infertility treatment? Honey, why didn’t you tell me? I can’t believe you didn’t – I love you and I could have been there for you …’
‘But you’d have told Bess and I didn’t want her to know. Mum couldn’t know, you see.’
Edward sat down on his office chair, feeling the grief he’d felt when Lottie was ill. Everything then had been black too, black and collapsing all around him.
This was his fault. He’d failed his daughter all because of his selfishness.
‘My darling Jojo, why couldn’t you tell me? You can tell me anything. Where are you? I’ll come and meet you now.’
‘I’m home. Hugh’s out and Trina and Maggie have gone. It’s just me.’
‘I’ll be there in twenty minutes,’ said her father.
As Edward drove quickly down the drive, he didn’t
see Bess watching him from a front window.
Nor was he there to see her begin to pack up her clothes. She’d begin to move them back into her apartment. Just some of them. Better to get started now. That way it would be easier when the party was over. She could simply come back here, pack up her last few things and leave the Brannigans for ever.
‘You think I’m going? To an awards ceremony that plans to honour an author I no longer edit?’
Cari stood in Jeff’s office and glared at him, letting the cold blast of her anger towards Conal, Gavin and John Steele hit poor Jeff like a polar frost.
‘You have to,’ said Jeff, slumping back in his chair. ‘We all have to. Personally, I’d rather chew my own leg off because I hate these bloody award ceremonies but I, as MD, have to go. And you, as editor of Rock and A Hard Place, John Steele’s latest book, the one that is up for an award, by the way, have to go too.’
‘I don’t care,’ rapped out Cari.
Jeff blinked at her and then sighed.
‘Cari, I know this has all been hard for you personally with the John Steele thing and it’s been a hit for the office too because now he’s not ours, not the Irish team’s author any more, but this is a job: if we want to pay the bills, we work and we go to award ceremonies and we grit out teeth. Capisce?’
‘I don’t want to see him again,’ yelled Cari, and in her heart, she wasn’t even speaking only about John Steele. She didn’t care about bloody Gavin either.
She was thinking of Conal, the bastard, who’d gone to bed with her because he had a vacant slot waiting for the whenever-ready Beatrice, who was now only too eager to clamber aboard Conal and his bloody Hard Place.
‘Is this about Conal?’ asked Jeff.
Cari made a noise that sounded like a growl.
‘Did you just growl?’ said Jeff, utterly astonished.
‘I might have,’ said Cari, startled out of her anger. ‘Didn’t know I could.’
Jeff got up, went to the other side of his desk and hugged her.
‘I know I’m not the one you want to hug and if you want to kick him in the nuts, don’t do it to me just because I’m here and he’s not, but Conal’s a good guy, Cari. I’d have never set you up with him if he was a bastard. I care for you. We’ve worked together for six years now; I’d like to think you trust me.’
‘I trust you,’ said Cari deliberately, ‘and I trust my father, my uncles, my cousin and my cousin-in-law, Hugh. That’s about it. Oh yeah,’ she added, as she spotted Declan moving past the office window. ‘I trust Declan.’
‘He’s bringing a date to the ceremony,’ Jeff remarked, looking at Declan.
‘Really? Is he mad?’
Jeff held up both hands. ‘He’s paying for the ticket – the company only pays for staff and if he wants to show his beloved the people he works with and the industry he works in, then the Stella Book Awards are the place to do it.’
‘You mean he wants to show someone us all muttering under our breath when people we dislike win and show them how trollied a bunch of publishers can be when one of their authors wins and free drink is ordered?’
‘Beats me,’ said Jeff. ‘So, you’re coming, right?’
‘Right,’ said Cari, resigned. ‘It’s the night before my uncle’s having this big party in Kerry for his seventieth birthday, so I won’t be staying late, OK? I’m driving to Kerry first thing the next morning.’
‘If I was a woman, I’d get an amazing dress, just to show to Edwin, John Steele, Gavin and everyone else how fabulous you are,’ said Jeff, pleased now.
‘What sort of fabulous dress …?’ enquired Cari.
‘Oh sparkly, and low cut and show off your legs and heels, yes heels! And lots of make-up.’
Cari laughed for what felt like the first time since that morning when she’d got the email about the fact that she hadn’t replied to her invitation to the awards ceremony.
‘Don’t ever become a transvestite, Jeff,’ she said. ‘You’d have the worst taste ever. It’s legs or boobs not both at the same time, and if it’s sparkly, it has to be classy or you’re going into money-for-sex territory.’
‘I’m just saying what I’d tell Anna if she had to go to something she hated,’ he said, a bit wounded.
‘Ah, but if she did,’ Cari said sadly, ‘she’d have you with her.’
Gavin Watson had never had a panic attack in his life – until today. He’d remembered editing a book about anxiety when he had been just a junior editor, not that he’d bothered too much with the editing because he knew non-fiction wasn’t where he wanted to work and it had been terminally boring, but he remembered the details: the feeling that his pulse was going to burst out of his body, the thumping heart, the gasping for breath, the feeling of impending doom.
It had all happened out of the blue: John Steele’s agent, Freddie North, had sent an anxiety-inducing email about his most important client.
‘John is really worried about this book. And the book tour. Between you and me, Gavin, I’m not sure this new system of editing is working out. John likes brainstorming plot details and talking it over. He’s not getting that from you. We need to discuss this urgently. Today. What time are you free?’
Gavin read and reread the email several times, which was where the panic attack had come on.
He was sitting in his office, a very nice corner one in Cambridge House in London, and he’d been thinking that all was pretty good with his world because he had some great books on his list, he had a big trip to New York planned soon, and a wildly attractive new agent at Curtis Brown had smiled at him at a launch the previous night, making him think that he might be in with a chance. Before his fabulous job success, Gavin had never had luck with women but now he felt powerful and on the up: this gave him a sense of confidence and women no longer looked at him as if he was a sleazy guy, which is what he had been called in college. Now, as a publisher and John Steele’s editor, they talked to him happily. It was heady this power stuff.
Up until Freddie North’s email, life had looked pretty damn amazing and now this.
Quickly, he dialled the agent’s private number. Freddie had barely got his name out before Gavin launched into him. Attack is the best form of defence, Gavin found, despite the fact that older, wiser editors had told him a calm head was a great asset in publishing, as indeed in any industry.
‘What the hell is going on, Freddie?’ he asked.
‘Good morning, Gavin,’ said Freddie coolly. ‘I’ll tell you what’s going on: John and I are worried that this isn’t working out. He’s incredibly anxious about this book in a way he hasn’t been since his first novel – now that’s not good, for any of us.’ Freddie paused. ‘He hasn’t said as much, but I feel it would be better if he had Cari Brannigan back as his editor. She keeps him calm, gets the books out on time and has a brilliant relationship with him. I know you don’t want to hear this but I have to think of my client—’
‘Well, he can’t have her, can he?’ screeched Gavin, interrupting. ‘I’m his editor, we agreed. It was part of the plan. Like touring – is he pulling out of that as well?’
There was silence on the other end of the line and Gavin had a sinking feeling, knew that touring was no longer on the John Steele agenda.
‘We paid him a lot of money and he can’t renege on the deal,’ he said slowly, trying to put menace in there.
But this wasn’t Freddie North’s first rodeo and the younger man’s attempt at menace meant absolutely nothing to him. Freddie had agented books about the IRA, about Russian dissidents, about arms dealers. Gavin Watson throwing a hissy fit was hardly going to faze him.
‘Do you want me to talk to someone else,’ Freddie asked, still calm. ‘I wanted to go to you first to tell you what’s going on but I can talk to Edwin just as easily.’
The managing director, the one man who could pluck John Steele from Gavin’s list just as easily as he had plucked Steele from Cari Brannigan’s list.
‘But John and I get on br
illiantly,’ Gavin found himself saying, realising it was what Cari had said several months ago.
‘I don’t see much evidence of actual editing,’ said Freddie caustically, ‘and he’s not happy. John is the talent and it’s got to be our aim to keep the talent happy.’
‘And sell books,’ added Gavin nastily.
‘The two are not mutually exclusive,’ said Freddie, ‘and as someone who has been an agent for thirty years, I find that happy authors tend to work better. John might write books about a hero who can gut a man with four swipes of a blade, but personally he’s an emotional man and he needs to trust you. He also needs to be happy with how you handle his book, happy with the publicity, happy with the marketing, happy with the sales, happy with you, Gavin. Because if you mess that up, when his contract is up, he’ll move. It’s that simple. And publishers will be queuing up to sign him. You’ll be the man who lost John Steele from Cambridge, which will put a dent in your swift climb to the top.’
Gavin felt the panic overwhelm him again. It could all fall apart so easily. He thought of the chummy way he and Freddie had discussed removing John Steele from Cari Brannigan in the first place.
It had been his idea, naturally. John Steele was too valuable to let someone like bloody Brannigan get away with him. He, Gavin Watson, should be the editor of a successful writer like John Steele. One of the company’s most successful writers.
Freddie had been amenable to having someone in London looking after John’s career, rather than Cari, stuck in the Irish office, away from the cut and thrust of the main company.
Suddenly it looked like it was all falling apart. He had to rescue it, had to sort it out.
‘I’ll fly down to Cork, see him, talk to him, sort this out,’ said Gavin, flattening down all the fear.
‘OK,’ said Freddie, ‘you do that. But we need this fixed within the next few days. I don’t want him upset.’
Freddie hung up without another word, and Gavin felt the panic attack recede to be replaced by something more in the line of rage.
He bet that bitch Cari Brannigan had got in touch with John Steele: he knew it! She was the one who was messing this up. It couldn’t be him, everyone said he was brilliant. Look at how far he had come in a couple of years. Yes, it was her, meddling, trying to woo his client. Cow.