by Cathy Kelly
She refocused on the stiff card.
The words remained the same.
She was invited to her Uncle Ed’s seventieth birthday at an all-expenses paid weekend in Lisowen Castle in Lisowen, the small, blink-and-you’d-miss-it town where her mother, Nora, father, Mick, and uncles Edward and Kit had grown up. The invitation made it plain that this party was one where the entire extended Brannigan family could get together to celebrate the whole dynasty.
The concept of the word ‘extended’ was the one which made her feel ill.
Just the family and she could cope.
She’d seen most of them since her disastrous wedding morning. The immediate family of three brothers and their families had been at the few family events, most notably at Uncle Ed’s second wedding six months ago to Bess, whom her cousin Jojo called Bess the Impaler. Jojo’s mother and Edward’s wife, Lottie, had died horribly of cancer now more than three years before, and most of the family were astonished when he found a partner in Bess and then married her with what appeared to be unseemly haste.
However, Bess did not appear to be a touchy-feely sort of person and she had done a good impression of seeming utterly oblivious to the undercurrents of resentment coming from Jojo at the wedding. Cari had found herself feeling sorry for poor Amy, Bess’s grown-up daughter, because she had the air of a pound puppy who kept getting left behind while other, cuter puppies went home with for ever families. It couldn’t have been easy growing up with Bess as your mama and not being perfect.
Amy, all curves and falling over occasional tables and with a complete lack of small talk, was clearly not her mother’s idea of the perfect daughter.
It had been a very small wedding and in respect over Lottie’s recent death, all of the extended Brannigan family had not been invited. Luckily that meant no Traci, Cari’s second cousin, who was married to Barney – the same Barney who’d left Cari stranded on the altar more than three years before, almost fainting with the scents of peonies and shock, after he’d said in a low, guilty voice: ‘I’m so sorry, Cari, but I can’t. I’m going to marry Traci.’
And then he’d left.
Marched down the aisle with half the guests staring at him open-mouthed and the other half staring at Cari, equally opened-mouthed at the sight of the groom legging it out the church while the bride stood shakily at the altar, alone. In creamy, Celtic-maiden silk, as well as beautiful Jimmy Choo slingbacks in crystal and old gold that had cost a fortune and were a tad too small and hurt.
Jojo, maid of honour and saviour, had bustled Cari to the side and into the vestry, which the priest hadn’t liked, but before Jojo had a chance to say anything, her darling Mum had arrived with Lottie and between the two of them they’d conjured up black opaque tights from the bottom of someone’s handbag, as well as a man’s long, just-in-case-it-turns-cold sweater. The priest had been sent out and they’d unhooked Cari from the wedding dress and into these semi normal clothes in a flash. The sweater was long enough to look like a mini dress. Not at all bridal. Jojo grabbed the shoes and the dress, shoved both into a giant jute shopping bag with Vincent de Paul Give At Christmas written on it, then shoved it at her mother.
She whisked Cari out the back vestry door and into Paul’s car before the guests had begun streaming out of the church gossiping like mad. Jojo, still in full bridesmaid regalia, had driven to her and Hugh’s house, which was – thankfully – not done up like a bridal bower. While Cari had stared at the kettle, wondering how to turn it on because her faculties seemed to have abandoned her, Jojo had pulled off her matron of honour gown and wriggled into her jeans.
Nora and Cari’s sister, Maggie, rolled up fifteen minutes later with Cari’s handbag, which she had whisked from the second wedding car where Trina, another one of the bridesmaids, was supposed to be minding it.
All the time this flurry of activity was going on, Cari stared into space.
‘He’s going to marry Traci,’ she said to herself over and over, in a haze that two cups of strong coffee with sugar, and one laced with brandy, could not penetrate.
Now, three years later, she would have to see him and Traci once again at this blasted birthday party. Because from the look of the glossy invitation, it was clear that Bess was going to invite every last member of the extended family to this big event. She’d make up for the small wedding now.
And Cari would have to face both Traci, fiancé-stealer, and Barney, ex-fiancé and total pig. Just great.
The Heathrow Express slid seamlessly into the airport. Cari ripped the invitation into very small pieces and, once off the train and in the steely caverns beneath Heathrow, threw the pieces into the first bin she saw.
That was one party she would not be attending.
She marched through the airport like a woman on a mission. She strode past the kind ladies wearily trying to flog perfume and through a hen party in stetsons and sparkles, with T-shirts announcing Little Devils Dublin Tour.
For a brief moment, Cari paused, wedge-booted Robert Clergerie’s (wickedly expensive but good for airport travel) resting as she considered informing the bride-to-be (pink, sparkle-encrusted T-shirt in the middle of many black T-shirts) that marriage was insane and it was a far better bet to find herself a lover. Or even a few lovers, instead of plumping for just one man.
Several lovers meant you could have a fabulous-looking commitment-phobe, a muscular guy who specialised in carrying you into the bedroom and a bespectacled professor who could talk in bed afterwards, depending on what mood you were in on a particular day. These men couldn’t meet, obviously. Or maybe they could? Just to keep them on their toes.
Why be stuck with just one man with all his faults, foibles and issues? When a man was one of three, he knew to leave his issues at the door to Cari’s apartment. Well, a girl could dream. She had a lovely bed but, in truth, it wasn’t getting much action these days. Her libido had died at that altar. No man had warmed her bed since Barney. She decided she had forgotten how to have sex and, actually, that was all right with her. Celibacy was the new …? The new something, she was sure.
‘Kerry, you look wonderful!’ squeaked one of the hen party and Cari noticed that they were running back and forth between the Clarins and the Charlotte Tilbury counters trying out all the make-up.
The bride now boasted sexily red lips and her eyes shone with both the brilliance of the latest palettes and a blusher that made her glow. Sheer happiness was written all over her face.
It was, Cari could see, too late.
She had been overtaken by the pod people.
Like Scrooge muttering ‘bah, humbug’, at Christmas, Cari stalked off, and made her way into a shoe shop.
Heels, unlike men, never let you down.
She dumped her leather briefcase beside a display shelf, took down a patent leather shoe with a heel like a rapier and checked the size. It was her size: thirty-eight. Perfect.
‘Can I help?’ said a sweet young salesman, hovering eagerly.
‘Does this look like it would rip through a man’s crotch if you stood on him?’ Cari said, holding up the shoe.
The young man gulped. He was new. His boyfriend had said he should go to the high street store. The airport was full of nutters: everyone knew that.
‘Depends,’ he said hesitantly.
‘On what?’
‘How hard you pushed?’ He was looking around for the Candid Camera people because it was a good job and he’d only just started, and perhaps this was some sort of hazing thing …
Cari ripped off one wedge, slipped her foot into the shoe and ground the heel into the hard shop floor. She thought of one face, one crotch, as she ground. Gavin’s. No, Barney’s. No, Gavin’s.
She thought of the stupid girl getting married and going round announcing the fact, all happiness, stetsons and feather boas. Why wasn’t there a warning with marriage? With life?
Everyone betrayed you in the end. Everyone except family.
‘I’ll try the other one,’ she said, s
itting down.
The assistant leapt off to the stockroom and returned quickly.
The woman looked normal: sleek business suit, dark coat, very masculine, a briefcase and a very nice Marc Jacobs handbag … But perhaps she was a dominatrix beneath it all? He’d seen male doms in the gay clubs but not many women ones. She didn’t need a whip to be scary, she just was plain old scary.
The woman tried both shoes on and stomped around, long coat whirling around her like a female Batman. If Batman wore high heels and red lippie, she’d be a dead ringer for him.
‘I’ll take them,’ she growled. ‘In fact, I’ll wear them.’
The sweet young man grabbed her own shoes and had them in the spike heels’ box in a flash. He processed her credit card faster than he ever had in his life and then she was gone, stomping off.
He sighed with relief. He was definitely moving to the high street store.
Two
‘A second marriage is a triumph
of hope over experience.’
Samuel Johnson
A glorious year lay ahead, with it a new life, and it was definitely time for new traditions. Parties as husband and wife, holidays, family time …
These were the thoughts running through Bess Brannigan’s head as she sat at her computer at Tanglewood House that evening on that Thursday in late February and did what she’d been doing ever since she’d written it three months before: looking, almost furtively, at her Christmas letter. Edward was at a work event, so she had the place to herself.
He wouldn’t understand how much she’d loved that letter, how much it had meant to her to send it.
Her joyous missive had long since gone, but the birthday invitations for Edward’s seventieth had been posted two days before and, wondering if anyone would have replied just yet via email, she allowed herself another dip into her and Edward’s Christmas letter before she checked her email.
She felt a giddy freedom that she, Bess Brannigan, neé Reynolds, a woman known for her iron resolve in business, had been able to send the Christmas letter of her dreams and kept returning to it just for the sheer joy of seeing how wonderfully life had turned out, despite everything.
Bess was not given to self-pity but others might say she had not had an easy life.
During those years as a single, working mother – with her own mother, Maura, performing a bitchy Greek chorus in the background, the main refrain being ‘I told you so!’ – Bess would not have dreamed of sending out a Christmas letter with her cards.
She’d seen plenty of them and to be frank, had scoffed.
‘Stevie has broken up with Fleur but we still see her and baby Rhianna all the time – we’re just one big happy family!’
Imagine that Christmas dinner.
Or ‘Anthony is delighted that he took early redundancy because he has so much time for his garden now …’ which meant Anthony was banished to the shed in a vain attempt to keep him out of the pub, why he’d been pushed towards early redundancy in the first place.
‘Clarissa has finished her degree in fine art and is looking for a new job, although it’s hard out there now!!!! She’s back in her old bedroom and is available for babysitting – until a fabulous opportunity comes up, of course!’
Fine arts indeed.
Bess had no time for such degrees, which had limited ways of being monetised. A chartered accountant – now that was a qualification. She’d been a C.A. when she was twenty-nine, at a time when women were something of a rarity in the job and when men in suits had tried to pat her behind and intimidate her in some way.
Not a mistake any of them had made twice.
Being older was easier. Nearly thirty years on Bess had a reputation for taking no prisoners; this along with her once brunette, now faintly greying, hair cut in a sculptural bob and a steely glare from her large dark eyes soon put manners on them.
Only men with a death wish would pat her behind and try to intimidate her now.
Funny that Edward could pat her behind fondly and she’d turn and smile at him, filled with love for this man who’d become her husband at this late stage, a time when she thought love had long since passed her by.
Love: it was a magic ingredient like no other.
‘It’s been a hectic year in the Brannigan household,’ she had written in her first ever Christmas letter, sent with the vast number of Christmas cards she and Edward had dispatched.
‘Yes, folks, to all of you who’ve known me as Bess Reynolds for so long, I am officially Bess Brannigan since June and I love it.
Edward and I have renovated Tanglewood on the North Dublin coast, I’m attaching photos, and it’s now open plan with picture windows so you can see the bay. We have dolphins come to swim in the cove and Edward swears he saw a basking shark one day but I’m not sure. I know I’ve bored you all with the photos of our safari honeymoon but here are some more anyway!
To anyone who said they thought lions wouldn’t eat me out of professional courtesy, well, ha!! Edward’s a fabulous photographer and he got lovely photos of lions, all the big five, in fact. It was marvellous.’
Until she’d met Edward, Bess thought that women who married again must have been stark raving mad. At fifty-eight, she lived happily on her own, could sit at her own dinner table in her pyjamas if she felt like it and eat a salad while watching whatever she wanted on the box. The soaps, a soppy film, a documentary on cake making, whatever. Who needed someone else to cook and clean for?
In retrospect, Bess realised she’d never been even vaguely in love with her first husband, the charming, handsome and wandering Dennis. They’d been too young and his hands were more likely to be found on other women’s derrières than on hers.
Neither had Dennis been much of a man for work. Or savings, come to that. After a few years of marriage, Bess had come to the conclusion that banknotes sang to him and if he had any number of them in his pocket, he had a wild urge to release their plaintive song into the world.
They were such opposites, they were almost different species, but Dennis had provided her with a daughter, Amy.
Amy was the return for her investment in Dennis.
It hadn’t been hard to send him off to London to live so they could get divorced, divorce not being a possibility in Ireland in those days unless one of the parties lived abroad.
‘No bother, lovie,’ Dennis had said, still cheerful, despite the end of their five-year marriage.
His relentless cheerfulness drove Bess mad. They might have been discussing changing the wallpaper in the dining room instead of splitting up. ‘You will pay the money into my account, like you promised, won’t you?’ he added.
Bess thought of how Dennis had never got up for a night feed with baby Amy; how he’d promise to put on a wash but would inevitably forget; how he’d always been late to pick Amy up from crèche on the days he was supposed to be doing it – even on those many days when he hadn’t a job. She thought of herself hauling shopping bags and Amy’s carry seat into their small starter home, and how Dennis would wait until she had finished putting it all away before noticing she’d returned in the first place.
If he was gone, if he divorced her, then he could never come back. He could skip from job to job and she would not have to worry about whose skirt his hand was sliding up or if he was going to embarrass her in front of the neighbours by sliding said hand up the wrong skirt.
‘I’ll pay,’ she’d said.
At the age of thirty-two, Bess Reynolds had been paying maintenance to her former husband, had been the single mother of a quiet little girl called Amy, had a fabulous reputation as a brilliant accountant, and had the life of a plain clothes nun.
‘I told you that Dennis was a waster,’ Bess’s mother, Maura, snapped with the regularity of the speaking clock. ‘You lost your mind when you married him, had your head turned by his looks. Good-looking men are all useless. I did tell you—’
At least the speaking clock varied what it said.
Little Amy, w
ith her strawberry-blonde hair, big blue eyes and a thumb that was always in her mouth despite all Bess’s efforts, was afraid of her grandmother and Bess could see why. Only a person raised by her would not fear Maura, a woman for whom the expression ‘tough as old boots’ might have been invented.
Her mother, Bess often thought, had missed her calling: she’d have been a fabulous politician or else the perfect woman in charge of some last-chance-saloon addiction clinic/jail where people with denial issues went when all else had failed. Fear of failure when Maura was in charge would have ripped any desire to use/drink/reoffend right out of the patients. Both governments and addicts would have quailed before her.
The years after Dennis had been hard for Bess, both financially and personally, so there would never have been Christmas letters unless she had a taste for airing her dismally dirty laundry in public:
‘Dennis wants to marry again and still wants his maintenance money. He knows that if he marries, it stops. He says we never had a binding legal agreement that would stand up in Ireland anyway and he wants custody, which is just a ploy to frighten me. His new fiancée is a dancer.’
‘Stripper,’ her mother rasped when she heard the news, in a voice hardened by a lifetime’s fondness for untipped cigarettes which she smoked out of the side of her mouth as she talked. ‘Ballerinas only marry other ballerinas and what other sort of dancer would look at Dennis apart from a stripper?’
‘Amy is not doing well at school,’ Bess might have written in her putative Christmas letter, but would not, because it was as bad as her mother claiming Dennis’s new love was a stripper.
‘The head nun told me Amy cried today because she says she’s the only girl in school without a father. We don’t need one, I’ve told her, and I’m certainly not looking, but hilariously, all the other women think I’m after their half-bald men so I never get invited to the parents’ nights out.
