I noticed my mother was scrutinising me carefully during the service; every time I happened to glance in her direction she was looking at me. At lunch she sought me out and said, ‘Your friend Melanie called me yesterday. She is so worried about you that she actually looked up our number in the phone book. She said you’ve been really down the last couple of weeks. I thought going back to work was all you needed but seeing you today I’m worried you might have serious depression. You need to see someone about it and soon. You might need to take something.’
I think Mum was anticipating some resistance but there was none.
‘I will, I will…I know I need help. I think I will call my old counsellor up. I’ll see what she says about medication.’
‘Well if you don’t call I will.’
When everyone had left, Tony and I stayed to help clean up while Isabel, exhausted by the day’s activities, slept upstairs.
I was outside collecting glasses with Andrew, whom I always gravitate towards at these functions when given the chance. Sometimes I think he is the only member of the Cooper family who properly knows how to have fun. He’s a leaner build than Tony but otherwise the two could almost pass for twins and there have been long periods in recent years when I can honestly say I preferred him to his older brother. Not that there has ever been any of that sort of chemistry between us - he is almost certainly gay. He is now sharing a place in San Antonio, Texas, with a lovely Hispanic boy called Juan and I’m sure they are more than just roommates, but for whatever reason he has not revealed his sexuality to the family and it’s not my place to question why.
Like Mum he was observing me closely. ‘I see you’re not wearing your rings today.’
‘Oh yeah…I took them off to clean them and forgot to put them back on - silly me,’ I said, fabricating a limp smile.
‘You don’t have to pretend with me. I know.’
‘How do you know? I thought he wanted it all hushed up.’
‘Never mind - I just do. What are you planning to do? Does this taking off of rings signify anything?’
‘I honestly don’t know Andy. I’m still too numb.’
‘I would have thought you’d be more angry than this.’
‘I would have thought so too, but I mainly just feel hurt.’
‘Well I’m fucking angry with him. What was he thinking, the idiot?’
‘If it wasn’t for Isabel I would probably just walk but it’s not just us - we have a child to think of now. He says he wants to stay married and I suppose I’ve got to believe that. It’s not like he had to confess…What?’
‘What do you mean “What”?’
‘You looked like you were going to say something.’
‘No, no, go on…’
‘I’ve forgotten what I was going to say now…Anyway another part of me just wants to cut his balls off.’
‘If I hear about him doing it again I will personally cut his balls off for you. I don’t care if he is my brother.’
He put his arms around me and I sunk gratefully in. He even smelt like Tony and for a few stolen seconds I was able to pretend he was my husband, the one from the past who still cared about me.
***
Mum phoned me first thing the next morning and said, ‘Give me Claire’s number. I will make the appointment and I’m going to personally escort you there, too.’
Claire was wonderful in the beginning, so quiet and soothing and non-judgemental. She directed me to books and chat groups for victims of adultery and once again I found comfort amongst strangers. Many of their stories were remarkably similar to my own.
One reason why I was so floored by all of this was because, even allowing for his high risk profession, I’d never thought my husband would be the type to have an affair. I thought he was too much of a control freak for a start and he’d had an almost…well, not exactly prudish…but certainly conservative attitude to sex, to people who slept around a lot and all that. For Tony, sex was an important part of his life but not the most important, I think. I’m pretty certain that if he ever found himself in the unenviable position of having to choose between giving up sex and giving up flying he would choose to give up sex every single time. I’m not saying he would have liked that choice but I still think he would have made it.
Of course, when I read the experiences of other women guess what most of them said: ‘I didn’t think my husband would be the type to have an affair.’ Shows what I know.
Claire asked me one day, ‘What do you want, Ellie?’
‘I want my old life back. The one before this happened.’
‘You know that’s not possible.’
‘Then I want my old husband back.’
She looked at me patiently. ‘We can only work to improve the present and hopefully the future. How are you two getting on?’
‘We’re not even sleeping in the same room.’
‘What are you going to do about that?
‘I don’t know…but I know I’m not ready for any sort of intimacy with him. I can’t get the other woman out of my mind.’
‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘it’s clear to me that even though you’re hurting badly right now you do want to stay married. If you were planning to leave you would have done so by now.’
‘Mmm.’ I knew she was right. My prince’s armour might have been looking a little shop-worn but I didn’t want to give up on him just yet.
‘But there is only so much we can do unless Tony agrees to go to marriage counselling with you. You’ve asked him?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
I did so that night.
His response was predictable. ‘No. I don’t need counselling.’
‘It would be we - couples’ counselling.’
‘Even worse - airing our dirty laundry in public.’
I refrained from saying that he was the only one with dirty laundry as far as I could determine.
‘Anyway I know what would happen,’ he went on, ‘You two would gang up and blame me for everything. Anyone can tell that that Claire is a man hater from way back.’
‘We could find someone else.’
‘No. The problem is over. We just need to move on. No actually - you need to move on. You need to let me move back into our bedroom and start being a proper wife again.’
‘You don’t understand…I’m not ready for that.’
‘Well you could start by cooking dinner occasionally.’
I reported this back to Claire.
‘It’s not a good sign. We can work on your own self-esteem issues but unless he’s prepared to come to the party there’s only so much we can do.’
‘But he hates talking about these things.’
‘You’re making excuses for him, Ellie. He has damaged your trust and your marriage and unless he’s prepared to acknowledge the wrong he’s done I don’t see how we can go forward.’
I didn’t want to hear any of this.
Claire thought it would be a good idea for me to have a trial of antidepressants, so I went to my GP for a prescription. The tablets did succeed in numbing the pain and helped to put me on a more even keel, enough at least to allow me to function at work and as a mother. But whilst altering the levels of the ‘happy hormones’ in the brain is one thing, it did nothing to alleviate the central problem.
Tony needn’t have worried. I never did get around to telling my family his shameful secret. I couldn’t bear the thought of Mum and Dad knowing and judging him. And David - how bad would he have felt if he’d known what his friend had done to me? I wanted them all to still think well of my husband. But who was I protecting from their disapproving looks - Tony or myself?
For weeks Melanie had been lobbying me to go for drinks with her after work. I eventually relented just to shut her up and one Friday while Tony was away I arranged with my mum to pick up Issy a bit later
than usual.
We went to a pub near work. Melanie appeared at the table with two glasses of wine, ‘So what’s going on between you and Tony?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s just that you used to talk about him all the time and now you never do - well not in a nice way, anyway.’
Melanie’s husband, Bruce, is a train driver. She is definitely the brains of the operation, but he’s a devoted husband and loving dad to their two little boys and she could certainly have done a lot worse. In the early days we used to think it was a coincidence that both our husbands were in transportation, but whilst she had continued to talk with affection about her husband, I must have unconsciously clammed up about mine.
‘Was it that obvious?’ I asked.
‘Well to me, ’cause I know you pretty well.’
‘He had an affair, Mel.’
‘The bastard!’
That one glass of wine turned into several and I rang Mum to ask if my daughter and I could sleep over that night.
Why did I tell Melanie and no-one else? I’m not sure, but I can tell you it was a blessed relief. A blessed relief to have a confidante who was prepared to listen to my mealy-mouthed justifications and say the things I wanted to hear: ‘I’m sure he still loves you. If you hang in there he will come around.’ She provided hope; Claire provided grim reality.
Over the following months I reassumed the role of wife. I let Tony back into our bedroom and started cooking meals again and appeared in public as his devoted other half and the mother of his child. There was one area, however, where things proved more resistant: sex.
Claire kept telling me to be kind to myself, to ‘love and nurture’ myself and to only agree to it when I was ready. In her view Tony was the cause of my problems so his needs were secondary. On the few occasions he had made a move I’d frozen up and been unable to proceed. My chest had felt all tight and constricted and my heart had raced and I’d ended up saying, ‘No sorry, I just can’t’ or something along that line. I was reminded of my high school days, when any girl who didn’t put out was labelled ‘frigid’ by the local boys. I was gaining a reputation for being frigid and was fearful my husband was beginning to lose patience with me.
This had been going on several months when I confessed to Melanie over a late night drink. She advised sagely, ‘Guys can go only so long without it, you know, and you’re going to have to push through - pardon the pun - otherwise he’s definitely going to go off and shag someone else.’
I don’t know that Claire would have approved of my secretary’s counselling methods but they did the trick. The next time Tony was home I let him know it would be worth trying again and loosened myself up with several glasses of wine. It was horrible. I couldn’t get that bitch out of my mind. She was there in the bed with us, a faceless creature in her immaculate uniform, complete with dark stockings and shiny court shoes. I was terrified he was imagining doing it with her, comparing me (unfavourably - there was no other way as far as I could see it) with her.
But I managed to ‘push through’ and it became easier with each successive time - easier but not a whole lot more enjoyable. The other woman remained in the bed with us for a long while after that.
By this time Claire had started to give me the shits with her insistence that Tony was sabotaging my recovery so I started lying to her about the efforts he was making, thus rendering the whole exercise pointless. I canned our sessions, claiming I was now ‘okay’ (I’ll leave you to guess Claire’s opinion on that), and started having regular drinks with Melanie after work. I used the money I saved on Claire to pay for a cleaner, as Tony had by this time started criticising my housekeeping efforts again. The post-baby amnesty was well and truly over - apparently no allowances were to be made for the fact I had a small child and a demanding, almost full-time professional job. I thought we were living amongst the normal clutter of baby gear but in his eyes it was absolute squalor.
In the end he never showed genuine remorse for his actions. He never tried to beg for my forgiveness and say he was sorry for the hurt he caused. And I let him get away with it, in the fear that if I pushed him he would up and leave. I thought if I appeared to forgive him things might return to the way they were.
But they didn’t. I had lost respect for myself in the process and I think as a consequence he lost respect for me and started to treat me almost as badly as his mother did. I had been naïve to think that his judgementalism, his worship of perfection, would not turn on me one day. I had lost my looks, and I had lost his son and if he thought like that he could continue to justify what he had done.
During this time we were invited to dinner by Mark, Tony’s old flatmate. He’d given up his womanising ways, settled down and married Janelle, who turned out to be lean, tanned and elegant, with long brown hair. I wasn’t surprised to find that Mark had married a beauty but thought it might have been a bonus if she’d also had a personality. She cooked up the most amazing Indian spread, preparing everything - including the mango chutney and samosas - from scratch (I mean, who has time to do that?), but she spent the entire time dashing in and out of the kitchen and hardly contributed anything to the conversation at all. Janelle and Mark had also recently become parents of a baby daughter so when she kept still long enough I engaged her in chitchat about baby stuff.
It was the best night I’d had in a long time. Mark and I got on like a house on fire, as we always had, and it was the banter between the two of us that made the evening so lively. I was consciously hoping that Tony, seeing how much Mark enjoyed my company, might begin to look at me with more appreciative eyes again.
‘What a great night. We should invite them over for dinner at our place soon,’ I said on the way home.
‘No - it would be better to just go to a restaurant. There’s no way we can compete.’
‘What do you mean compete? The renovations mightn’t be finished but our house is still nice.’
‘But theirs is better and the meal that Janelle cooked up - amazing. You know I used to think his serial dating looked like far too much effort but maybe that’s the only way to be sure you’ve found the right woman. I sometimes regret not doing that myself. It’s not like I didn’t have lots of offers.’
The little grub clammed up and returned to its hole. Unfortunately he hadn’t finished yet.
‘And their baby is younger than Isabel yet you’d never know she’d just given birth. It just goes to show that if women care enough about their husbands they will make the effort.’
The evening had started so promisingly too.
Guess what Janelle did before she gave up work to have the baby? She was a flight attendant.
8
Counting my blessings
A marriage that had begun with a glittering reception by the harbour had descended to this: my husband telling me he wished he’d never handed me that ring. Why didn’t he leave me then? I can only assume he was staying for Isabel’s sake. Why didn’t I leave him? Good question. The only satisfactory explanation I can offer is that the act of leaving requires energy and courage and determination, and when your confidence has deserted you, you have none. It wasn’t easy to stay, but it was easier than actually doing anything. Oh, and I was still in love with him, or at least I think I was.
Anyway, although I didn’t know it at the time, the night of Mark and Janelle’s dinner party did turn out to be the low point. My husband was never again cruel enough to say to my face he regretted marrying me, although what he was thinking to himself over those years is another matter altogether.
One of the gifts my parents bestowed upon me, one I never properly appreciated until recently, was a happy childhood. I think it has given me an essentially optimistic outlook on life, one that has helped me to bounce back from adversity that might have felled a less resilient soul. With time I found I adjusted to my new reality: living in an unhappy marriage
where the parties were only staying together ‘for the sake of the kid’. The statistics suggested we were hardly alone.
A few events helped to hasten the adjustment process.
First, a welcome side effect of my hectic, working lifestyle was that I finally started shifting the kilos that so offended my husband. My baby weight had way overstayed its welcome and when it finally decided to wave ‘bye, bye’ I couldn’t shove it out the door fast enough.
Yes, yes, I know a woman’s sense of worth shouldn’t be linked to her attractiveness and maybe I will reach that conclusion myself someday when I’ve evolved further, but at present there remains a clear correlation between my weight and sense of wellbeing.
And by way of partial explanation, here is an interesting graph I’ve collated over the years:
This is not to imply I’m some crazed sex-addict (although there have been times). For a while I thought I would never recover my enjoyment after Tony’s affair; it’s hard to abandon yourself to the moment when you keep getting a crick in your neck looking over your shoulder for the other woman. It’s just that it was the only sort of positive attention I was getting from my husband at this time, and like a flea-bitten stray which has been handed a stringy old ham bone at Christmas time, I was taking what I could get. And while there were no guarantees, if he was coming to me I thought it less likely he was shopping around elsewhere for his kicks.
Poor old barren Auntie Margaret then provided a helpful circuit breaker by following her husband to the grave and leaving her not insubstantial inheritance to her nieces and nephews, including Tony. It was enough money to complete the second bathroom and open up the back of the house with bi-fold doors to a landscaped barbeque and entertainment area. More valuable to me was that it provided a shared interest: something my husband and I could talk about. It’s amazing how much time people can spend talking about the unimportant if they truly put their minds to it. We visited tile showrooms together and compared hundreds of paint swatches and agonised for days over the design of our custom-made vanity, all the while avoiding the big questions like whether we should even be together anymore.
Happily Ever After? Page 10