Finally February arrived, and with it the rains. It rained for almost two weeks straight! By this stage I had lost all sense of rational perspective and fretted dreadfully, everything depended on my wedding day being sunny. For a time the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s long-range weather forecast became my Internet homepage and I cursed my stupidity for deciding on a wedding day in the most hot and humid month on the Sydney calendar. In the end it rained until the lunchtime of the day before my wedding, the Saturday morning of the big day dawning bright and sunny. I took this to be a glorious omen.
The service was held late in the afternoon, so I had a day of primping and pampering with my ladies-in-waiting beforehand. My dress was ivory duchess satin, strapless, and I remember stroking my hands down the folds of the skirt, enjoying the sensuous feel of the heavy fabric. I had a matching veil, pearl earrings and carried a simple bouquet of cream roses. The hairdresser and make-up artist performed their magic and, for the first time, on that day of days, when I looked in the mirror I really did think I was beautiful.
Mum, dressed in a blue floral print with matching navy shoes, fluttered around. Dad, in his best grey suit, was as proud as punch. ‘Darling you look fit to be a queen,’ he declared, his eyes watering a little.
By the end of the reception I was getting quite blasé about the compliments, although definitely the highlight was when my fourteen year old cousin, Toby, who hitherto had never expressed a word of approval about anything, declared that I looked ‘hot’.
Tony agreed. When I was walking down the aisle, arm in arm with my dad, he shared with me one of his special looks and mouthed the word ‘beautiful’. My recollection of our wedding vows is hazy; I was feeling too besotted with my handsome prince at that time.
We sipped champagne while the wedding photographs were being taken, with the glittering harbour, its bridge and the Opera House as our backdrops. Everyone is smiling and happy in those photos, except for my new mother-in-law who looks like she’s sucked on a lemon. And the food at the reception was declared to be excellent, and the speeches were proclaimed to be witty and not too long, and everyone had a jolly good time and got a wee bit tipsy and the whole day was just picture perfect.
And if this was a traditional fairytale we would leave our hero and heroine at this point and let them go off to live happily ever after, but, as you know, this is a modern fairytale and my life got more interesting after the wedding, and not necessarily in a good way.
4
The prince and princess find their dream castle
We honeymooned on Big Island in Hawaii, staying in a luxury bungalow with its own swimming pool and twenty-four hour butler. We explored the rainforest and volcanoes, sipped champagne in our private spa, ate too much, slept too late, and made love whenever we felt like it. For the first time I felt completely content in our togetherness, and indulged my new husband by allowing him to abandon me for two afternoons of golf, a growing passion of his. Everyone deserves a honeymoon at least once in their life, even if they dispense with the formality of the wedding preceding it.
Sadly all good things must come to an end. Work beckoned for both of us and we returned to our respective positions, me now with a new identity: Eleanor Cooper.
We also returned to the Neutral Bay flat for a time but it no longer seemed fitting for our married status and we started looking around to buy. The bridal magazines were unceremoniously tossed out and my new favourite reading material became the property section of the Sydney Morning Herald. I quickly became infected with that particularly Sydney contagion - an unhealthy obsession with real estate.
Every Saturday I would circle potential properties and head off with street directory in hand to visit open-for-inspections. When Tony was around he’d join me of course. Displaying an alarming inclination to recreate his childhood home, my husband was keen to buy a big period house we could renovate. The only trouble was a first officer’s salary wouldn’t quite stretch to cover a mortgage on a property near his parents’ home (an oil magnate’s salary would barely cover the cost of real estate in that suburb), so we had to lower our expectations and search less exclusive environs for our first family home. It remained Tony’s long-range plan to renovate our first property, make a killing and then move closer to his parents, but considering my relationship with his mother I was certainly in no hurry for the latter to eventuate - the further we lived away from her the better, as far as I was concerned.
After six months of disappointment, including missing out on some favoured properties at auction, we were eventually successful in securing our dream home, although I use the term loosely as it actually was a dump - an old four-bedroom pile in Annandale that had for some years been used as a boarding house and was in an appalling state of disrepair. However it was deemed to be structurally sound, as well as being located in a fashionable suburb close to the city and reasonably near to the airport (and Tony’s work). Annandale did have the disadvantage of being under the flight path but disadvantage is in the eye of the beholder: for Tony it meant he could gaze up on his first love at regular and all too frequent intervals.
There were few things I ever put my foot down about in my marriage, but I did refuse to move into that house until it had one decent bathroom (I was barely prepared to set foot in the existing mould-infested cesspit, let alone bathe in it) and a functional kitchen. That’s when Douglas came to the party and lent us some money. After rewiring the entire house, ripping up the carpet - impregnated with twenty years of cigarette smoke - and polishing the floorboards (which were in remarkably good nick), we ended up moving into a shambling pile with a bramble-infested garden which incongruously contained a single luxe bathroom and a glorious white and stainless-steel kitchen. I labelled them two glistening pearls in a barnacle-encrusted oyster.
Tony was determined to do all the rest himself. You’ll have probably guessed by now that he was not a ‘toss a bit of white paint on it and Bob’s your uncle’ kind of guy, but I found his whole approach to home renovation absolutely mesmerising. He was meticulous with everything: paint stripping, sanding, plastering, puttying, you name it. His mantra was ‘painting is ninety percent about preparation’. It took him months just to complete the first room - our bedroom. In fact, I don’t think I saw my husband at any time during those months when he was not covered with a thin film of paint and plaster.
When he proudly declared the bedroom finished, and brought me in to admire his handiwork, I said, ‘It’s magnificent, darling. And just think, when we die a premature and suffocating death from inhaling paint particles for twenty years, it’s comforting to know our last hours will be spent in very tasteful surrounds.’
‘Hardy ha, ha,’ he said, but he took my teasing good-naturedly. This was in the days when he still laughed at my jokes.
I foolishly thought that I might speed up the process by helping him out, but that idea didn’t last long. I am way too impatient for such painstaking work. After he’d witnessed my woefully inadequate efforts a few times, I was shooed out of the room, never to be invited back. He suggested I turn my hand to the garden, where he obviously felt I could do less harm.
So I did. I knew zero about gardening before I started, but I educated myself with the help of a couple of evening courses. The first step involved clearing out the ivy and bramble-festooned backyard, which, even with the help of Dad, took me many months. I still have the calluses on my hands. The garden was so overgrown I was worried I would find a serial killer’s burial plot underneath - and no, I’m not joking here, my imagination does run to these sort of things - but in the end I just found lots of old paint cans, a rusty wheelbarrow and an abandoned toilet. Ultimately, I discovered I quite liked gardening and spent many a happy Saturday afternoon visiting plant nurseries or studying the science of composting, courtesy of Gardening Australia repeats on TV.
My other favoured domain was the kitchen, where I could blot out the rest of th
e unfinished house and pretend I already had my dream home. Inspired by my new multi-function oven, I started buying a lot more recipe books and experimenting with different cuisines, a skill my meat-and-three-veg mum had ill prepared me for. I had a very appreciative client in my husband, who had always had a keen appetite just as long as I remembered not to lick the serving spoon in his presence.
Let me qualify that - I had an appreciative client when my husband was around.
After a while his absences began to pall. What made it worse was that Tony was now back flying the Boeing 747-400 on long haul international flights, which meant he went away less often but for much longer periods. In case you hadn’t noticed, Australia is a bloody long way from everywhere else. It was always Tony’s ambition from when he was a small boy to be a 747 captain and nothing in the ensuing years had made him change his mind. Personally I would have much preferred him to fly domestically but he’d made it clear to me that this point was strictly non-negotiable. I’d knowingly signed up for this life - wife of a long haul pilot - but it somehow seemed different now that I was living alone in a ramshackle house with no-one else for company.
One morning as I was watching him pack his bag in preparation for a trip of several days, I couldn’t help expressing a few petulant thoughts along this line.
I’ll never forget the look I got. ‘You knew what you were getting yourself in for when you married me,’ he said, with a slight hint of warning in his voice. ‘There is no point complaining about it now.’
‘I know. But while you’re off seeing the world and staying in luxury hotels I’m stuck here alone in The Munsters’ House. I can’t help getting the creeps sometimes.’
‘The hotels aren’t all that great. And it’s not as if I’m on holiday. I’m working bloody hard and earning the money to pay for the renovations.’
I slunk away chastened, like a small dog caught pooping in the wrong spot.
It was true he was working, but he was also living out a childhood dream and few of us are lucky enough to do that in our careers. I sometimes silently sulked that he never saw things from my point of view, especially when he missed both Christmas and my birthday during our first year of married life.
‘Why don’t we get a dog?’ he suggested when he returned from that trip. ‘We have enough room. It would be a good companion for you and extra security at night.’
Hmm, I wasn’t sure. I was working long hours and thought my absences would be a bit unfair on a poor pooch. And on a more selfish note my garden was finally taking some shape and I didn’t want it trashed by some unappreciative and bored canine. I decided to sleep on the idea for a while.
Even so, I started checking out pet shops hoping for inspiration. It came in an unlikely form. One day I spied a single ginger kitten in a cage, serene amongst the scatterbrained pups. I stuck my hand next to the cage netting and he rubbed up against it, licking my fingers with his sandpaper tongue. He’d been left all by his lonesome in that cage and I sensed a kindred spirit. That’s how I came to get Meggs the cat.
‘A kitten?’ said Tony when he arrived home to be greeted by a small orange fur ball. ‘What sort of protection is that going to provide? And I don’t even like cats.’
As he grew bigger and lost some of his kittenish charm, it became apparent that Meggs had also lost his copy of the instruction manual that tells cats that they are required to act cool and aloof. If there was a lap to be had he’d be sitting on it. He was (and still is) the friendliest, smoochiest cat in town.
And the greediest. Like the Catholic priest who develops a taste for expensive red wine, Meggs decided that if he was to be denied the sins of the flesh (having your balls cut off does rather cramp your style in that regard) he should be able to compensate with other sensory pleasures. He became a fat cat.
After a while even Tony had to agree that Meggs was okay for a cat, although he objected to the fact that I let him sleep on our bed.
‘No way - how disgusting. He smells and he’ll probably give us fleas.’
Meggs and I completely ignored this and when Tony was off working slept together all the time. Just as long as I was very careful to brush away the stray cat hairs Tony never noticed, proving my point that Meggs didn’t smell at all. I always felt Tony should have been more grateful that the only male I invited into our marital bed in his absence was an overweight redhead with no testicles.
Thus, bed battles notwithstanding, we settled down to be a fairly happy threesome for a time.
Quite early in our marriage, an opportunity arose at work. An internal advertisement came around on email from the marketing department. They were advertising for an Associate Product Manager for Lo-prez, the blood pressure medicine I had been overseeing the trial for; it was just about to go on the Australian market. I read the advertisement over several times, nowhere did it say that any experience in sales was required. I fished out my CV and called up a couple of the cardiologists I’d developed a rapport with to ask them to act as referees. I’d never hid my marketing ambitions from my colleagues in the clinical research department, and they were happy to support my application. Obviously someone must have been impressed because I got notice that I’d been granted an interview.
I arrived for the interview in my best suit but with very low expectations, as it’s customary that only those with sales experience are handed this sort of job. I therefore thought I had nothing to lose and was completely relaxed throughout. I don’t know what it was that swung the interview panel - my attitude, my excellent university grades, or my glowing references - but I was blown away later to find out I was the successful applicant. I would have cracked a champagne bottle with Tony that night, but he was away as usual and I had to be content with breaking the news to him by phone. My appointment caused some consternation, and not a little resentment, amongst a few of the more ambitious members of the sales force, but I didn’t care as I finally had my foothold into marketing.
I was fortunate that my immediate superior, Edward, was very benevolent and prepared to show me the ropes. He was a friendly looking, curly-haired fellow in his mid-thirties, who was carrying a few excess kilos. I could always imagine him playing the perfect Santa Claus thirty years hence. His wife also seemed to be permanently pregnant - they had produced three gorgeous, pink-faced little girls before Edward burst into my office one day to announce proudly that they were finally expecting a boy.
One of the first things I was required to do was go out on the road with a few of the sales representatives to see pharmaceutical sales in action. What a thankless task they perform. Essentially a pharmaceutical sales rep does the same job as any other salesperson, except his or her main clients are doctors and they are trying to get these doctors to prescribe their products rather than purchase them. Still, it’s probably more illustrative to think of reps as the professional equivalents of those well-meaning Christians who knock on your door, only with much better clothes and grooming. They are virtually never welcome, although occasionally tolerated, and lots of people are outright rude to them. Some doctors have actually been known to toy with our reps by saying they are too busy to see them, only to leave them sitting idle in the waiting room whilst they themselves hide in their consulting rooms playing Sudoku or watching videos on YouTube. And the doctors are usually the nice ones; first the reps have to get past the fearsome ogres at the front door, masquerading as doctors’ receptionists.
One way to get a foot in the establishment is by offering to do a presentation about your product over lunch, which means providing free food for all the medical practice staff. Even this is not without its pitfalls. Usually the staff is more interested in the type of food on offer rather than in the topic of the presentation and heaven help you if you make the wrong choice. ‘The guy last week brought sushi, not greasy pizza,’ they will complain. That might just be enough to drop your sales figures for the month. Anyway, Edward thought I needed to know all
this so that I wouldn’t think up any hare-brained, impractical promotional ideas and also to understand why our reps had such generous sales incentives. I certainly do now.
When it came to the marketing side, I had natural ability. With no false modesty, I feel I can say that I am a good strategic thinker and understand the psychology of persuasion better than most. I was also lucky to have a very generous and patient mentor who was ready to acknowledge my talents.
You know, I love the cut and thrust of my profession, but my idealist days in science labs have left an impression and ultimately I would like to follow a higher calling: working in marketing for a charitable foundation is my long-range plan. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I’m not appreciative of my former employers, and at the time I was pleased to be promoting a medicine that could prevent heart attacks and strokes - I don’t know if I could be as enthusiastic selling the benefits of ‘new wings’ on a sanitary pad or a cereal to keep you regular. Don’t tell that to my sister Emma, however; in her eyes I’ve been a long-term operative of an evil faceless corporation, trying its best to poison the unsuspecting masses.
Oh, I almost forgot the best thing about my new job: my secretary Melanie. She’d already established a reputation throughout the company because of her legendary buxomness and possession of a personality as in-your-face as her cleavage usually is. Melanie has a crop of dark curls (the bane of her existence - how she envies my dead-straight locks), permanently mascaraed blue eyes and a turned up nose. Her favourite form of self expression is through her fingernails: always talon-long and painted in an ever changing kaleidoscope of colours, complete with glitter and rhinestones when she’s in an adventurous mood. Until I started working with her I’d often wondered why the company put up with her, as she didn’t quite fit their sophisticated image. The reason, I discovered, was that she is the most efficient and intelligent secretary in the whole organisation, as well as being fun on a stick. She has a keen eye for the ridiculous and can spot a phoney at twenty paces, so I feel very honoured to be liked by her.
Happily Ever After? Page 5