Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘Don’t you just love the place?’ her father moved so that they were both facing the new house and all Jojo’s heartfelt longing was skewered. How could a man this intelligent be so dumb?

  New house, new wife – did he not think any of this might be hard for his children to take?

  ‘It’s certainly different,’ she said caustically. ‘I hardly recognise it.’

  He seemed oblivious to her tone.

  ‘Jojo, you’re going to love it. You should have brought Hugh. The architect – well, Bess found him. He’s a genius. He said why had we these beautiful views when we couldn’t see them with the puny little windows we had before.’

  Because Mum used to have picnics on the lawn with our teddy bears – that’s how we saw the views, Jojo wanted to cry out, but she knew Bess was inside waiting for her and she’d break down if she thought about her mother too much. She would not cry in front of Bess.

  In all of those fairytales about the wicked stepmother, they’d got it bang on, Jojo thought grimly.

  Bess stood in the small alcove off the hall, one of the few places in the front room that wasn’t visible from outside, and found that she was summoning up courage to go out and greet her stepdaughter.

  Bess loved the house, the very unexpectedness of it all in the middle of the pretty country-style garden.

  One wall in the huge front room was pure concrete, so modern when paired with that giant modern painting Edward loved.

  ‘Lottie hated this type of thing,’ he’d said the day they went to look at the giant canvas.

  Bess had put her head to one side, examining. She was not artistic: had not an arty bone in her body, they’d said at school. She could do colour for clothes but she wasn’t good at clothes, either. Her only colour leanings were in flowers, and she loved the wild vibrancy of richly pink orchids with extravagant darker spots dappling the petals even though the orchid purists only liked the white ones, it seemed.

  ‘I don’t know if I like it but I don’t dislike it,’ she said to Edward, gazing at the picture. ‘I think we should have it.’

  ‘Lottie would have never said that,’ Edward whispered quietly to her.

  Bess felt her teeth grind and the corresponding pain in her ear reminded her that she hadn’t worn her night-time retainer for a long time.

  Marrying a widow was like slipping into someone else’s clothes, wearing their slippers, sipping from their cups. It was hard to prove to a husband, long accustomed to one way, that a new wife, a new woman, saw things differently.

  ‘I am not Lottie, honey,’ she reminded him, determinedly light. ‘Let’s buy it. While I like—’ She looked around for something she fancied, spotted a picture of exotic flowers with a tiger hidden behind them, all in a wildly realistic style. Probably something so deeply unartistic that it was just a hair’s breath away from being painted on velvet. Lottie, who appeared to have had enough artistic sense for ten people, would undoubtedly have turned her nose up at it, and Jojo, who had gone to fashion college, would undoubtedly vomit if she ever saw it but Bess would not trouble herself with their views. ‘That. I would like that.’

  Once she’d started on this ironic, insane painting purchasing fit, Bess could barely stop. Some inner demon meant she was still looking for an oil of Elvis in his Hawaii comeback suit, and when she got it she was going to hang it up in the subtle old gold and beige granite of the cloakroom and let everyone think it was trailer park chic or whatever. She didn’t care.

  This was her home now, hers and Edward’s.

  Tanglewood was a different house from when Lottie had lived there. It was about time people realised this, Jojo in particular.

  Edward had apparently wanted to rip half of it down for years.

  ‘I hate bungalows but the views were so good and the kids were small. Plus we had no money to do it up and when we did have the money, Lottie didn’t want to: said she loved it all.’

  Bess found the easiest way was to reply as if she and Dennis had had such similar discussions, even though Dennis had been gone from her life for many years. It made her feel equal, as if she had lost a life-long love instead of got rid of the most hopeless husband ever many moons ago.

  ‘Dennis was like that too,’ she’d say idly, ‘keen on the status quo.’

  ‘Whereas we, my love, like change,’ Edward said, hugging her.

  Bess leaned in to him. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we do.’

  Now Tanglewood was a sleek modern home, and Jojo would hate it. Not for any architectural reasons but because it was different. This was her first trip to her old family home since she’d gone there months ago to beg Edward not to marry Bess. Edward had, unwisely, phoned Bess afterwards and spilled out each word.

  ‘She was so angry.’ He was almost unable to speak, so upset, so close to the verge of tears. ‘The names she called you, honey, I can’t bear this. Why can’t it be simple – why?’ His voice had become croaky and Bess knew he was crying and, just as unwisely, had been unable to stop herself saying, ‘What did she say about me?’

  ‘She said you were a slut, after my money and I said, Jojo, it’s not like that, Bess has her own business, her own money. But she cried and said how could I, with her mum just a couple of years dead.’

  There was a gap while he searched for his pocket handkerchief. Bess knew the sound, loved a man who used a genuine handkerchief. ‘I loved Lottie, Bess, you know I did, but a man has to live, life has to go on.’

  Flattening down her rage against Jojo and determined to comfort Edward, who deserved better, Bess had hopped into her car that night – a little runaround because she could never see the point of spending money on cars – and had driven up to Edward’s and spent the night.

  Beforehand, Edward had been too anxious in case the kids – Jojo mainly, as Paul, his son, lived in New York – turned up out of the blue.

  But now, Bess thought with grim rage, now that ‘the slut’ was official, she might as well complete her slutdom and move in.

  The renovations had been quick because Edward had moved into Bess’s apartment while they were being done. They would move into the renovated house together after the wedding.

  Bess had never seen such work completed so quickly – her new fiancé was a hard taskmaster – and the luxury: marble on bathroom floors, granite on the kitchen surfaces, underfloor heating, glass panels that turned opaque at the touch of a switch, wallpapers that cost three figures a roll, handmade couches.

  She’d grown up in a three-bedrooms-and-a-boxroom redbrick off the North Circular Road where her mother collected good china, like Belleek, and lovingly admired it in the front room, a room Bess and her father were only allowed into when there were guests.

  ‘She thinks we’re like bulls in a china shop – will wreck all her folderols,’ Dad would laugh.

  ‘When I grow up, I am going to have no things just for good, just things we can use all the time,’ Bess insisted. The family drank juice out of old marmalade jars that could be used as glasses and every tea cup in the kitchen was cracked and needed scrubbing with bread soda paste to get the stain of tannin from the bottom, while glasses of crystal and gleaming plates sat in state in the good room, pristine and unused.

  Dad never fought with her mother about things like the ‘good room’ or even about her ruling the roost with a rod of iron. Bess supposed nobody had ever fought with Maura Sharkey, although as she went through her teenage years, she fought back.

  Poor Dad had never had a hope. He was funny, gentle, the opposite of the alpha male. Dead of a heart attack at forty-eight, leaving Maura forever locked in Greek tragedy. With her husband dead, Maura had gone back to work in a lesser job than her pre-marriage one in the civil service, a job she’d had to leave when she was married due to an archaic Irish system known as ‘the marriage bar’, which meant that as soon as they got married, women had to leave civil service jobs in order to leave them open to men.

  Bess had feminism running through her veins at a young age hearing her
mother railing against this ‘bar’.

  ‘Men have it all and they shouldn’t,’ Maura would say, leaving nobody in any doubt as to which sex she considered the stronger.

  Bess heard her husband and his daughter walking on the gravel, coming towards the house.

  Stronger? She wasn’t sure she felt strong right now. Irritated, yes. Anxious, for sure. She’d picked that damn hotel for one reason and one reason alone: because Edward loved it.

  Lisowen Castle had been the ravaged home of the gentry when he and his brothers, part of the peasant class, had grown up in the town and to be able to return to the now luxury hotel as a famous, wealthy son of the place – it was his dream. It was undoubtedly why Lottie – sometimes Bess felt like wincing at her name because Lottie hung over everything she did like a ghost – had arranged for the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary party to be held there. It was why Bess, who’d have preferred anywhere else, had arranged for the same thing.

  But Maura Sharkey hadn’t reared a quitter.

  Bess stepped out of the front door and smiled, the best smile she could manage under the circumstances.

  ‘Joanne, hello,’ she said, thinking that ‘Welcome home’ might induce total rage.

  ‘Bess.’ Jojo spoke in a clipped tone. ‘The house is different—’

  Bess could see her stepdaughter was about to cry from the faint reddening around her eyes and she wanted to shout, ‘Oh grow up!’ She knew it was her mother speaking, the tough Maura who saw a tear and said, ‘Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about!’ but she couldn’t help it. What was it about her stepdaughter that turned her into this harpie?

  ‘But it’s lovely,’ Edward said, wheedling. ‘Wait till you see what we’ve done with it: and your room is always there for you.’

  That had been a battle royal during the renovations – ‘She’s married, in her thirties and has her own home: what does she want her own room in our house for?’ Bess had demanded during the meeting with the architect when Edward had insisted that his kids still have rooms in their old home.

  ‘So she has somewhere if she needs it …’

  ‘Did your mother keep a room in your house for you once you’d left?’ asked Bess, knowing this was madness but unable to stop herself.

  The architect shuffled his papers about, muttered something about going to get a cup of tea and scarpered. He was undoubtedly used to couples engaged in warfare over house design. There was probably a college module on it. ‘Leave; make tea. Don’t go back until the shrieking has stopped.’

  ‘We lived in a cottage, Bess,’ said Edward tiredly. ‘My bedroom was tiny and shared with Mick and Kit. They just had more space in the room when I left.’

  ‘And after?’ pressed Bess. ‘After you were all gone?’

  ‘No,’ admitted Edward. ‘My mother kept it as a guest room but there was so little space, she kept her old winter coats in there. Things that had been in the family since the year dot. It always smelled of damp and mothballs afterwards.’

  The old stone house in Kerry was just a wreck now: too far gone to be restored. Edward had taken Bess to see it early in their courtship so she could see where he’d come from, how proud he was of his humble roots.

  They’d stayed in the majestic and newly restored Lisowen Castle Hotel then – a glorious five-star establishment much favoured by wealthy tourists, people tracking down Irish roots and movie stars on honeymoon.

  ‘But that’s not the point, Bess. It was different then. The kids need that, I want it.’

  Bess had felt humbled then: of course he wanted it. How could she deny him that? Why was she being such a bitch?

  ‘Your old room is pretty much the way it always was,’ Bess said to Jojo, trying to be conciliatory. ‘A lot is different but not that. And Paul’s is the same. We kept the garden at the back the same way your mother had it—’

  She got no further before Jojo turned on her, eyes blazing.

  ‘But it’s all different out the front and where’s her statue, the old Venus? And the car? I wanted that car!’

  ‘It was a wreck,’ began Bess unwisely.

  ‘It was hers!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Bess formally and then instantly regretted having apologised. She was fed up with this. She was married to Edward, for God’s sake. Their marriage, their happiness could not depend on this young woman. At Jojo’s age, Bess was married, as good as divorced, and had a young daughter to take care of. What did this little madam have? A shop, no doubt paid for by Edward, though he said otherwise, and no sign of chick or child. Worse, she was poking her privileged little nose into Bess’s business.

  Like the deadly volcano Krakatoa in the sixth century, Bess blew.

  ‘It was a dangerous heap of rust, shouldn’t have been on the road, and if you wanted it that badly, you should have come to get it before now. This is my home now. Not yours, despite the bedroom. You’re a grown-up with a husband, start behaving like one. If you had children of your own, you’d understand that all you want is for your children to be happy, which is why your poor father keeps pandering to you.’

  ‘Bess, stop,’ said Eddie frantically.

  ‘No!’ Bess held up the hand that had stopped board meetings in their tracks and could silence her own daughter in an instant.

  ‘He wants you to be happy and because I love him – yes, I love him – I want that too. But you cannot think that you have the ultimate power over our lives.’

  She stopped suddenly. What had she done?

  Jojo was white in the face: not just pale but a deathly colour as if some unseen force had exsanguinated all her blood.

  ‘I understand,’ she whispered. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Jojo!’

  Edward reached for her but Jojo slipped from his grasp, ran out of the iceberg hall and to her car.

  They stood and listened to the screeching of tyres as she roared down the drive.

  ‘You shouldn’t have said those things,’ said Edward in a tone of voice that made Bess feel frightened. What if she had gone too far? She had no filter, her mother always said, which was rich coming from Maura, whose tactlessness was known far and wide.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her but we—’

  ‘We don’t want anyone with ultimate power over our lives,’ Edward dully repeated his wife’s words. ‘I know, Bess. I agree. I married you when I knew Jojo didn’t want me to but there was no need for the things you said. No need at all. She’s my daughter and I love her. We knew it would take time. I lost my little sister a long time ago, I can’t lose my daughter now.’

  Bess bit her lip. Edward had told her of Fáinne, the little sister who’d vanished because she was pregnant.

  He’d seen the note in her lovely handwriting, the language eloquent because the nuns had always said Fáinne would go far.

  She had gone because she didn’t want to be a problem, a scandal. Edward had never forgiven himself for not being there for her because nothing would have stopped him caring for Fáinne, pregnancy or not. His darling Jojo had eyes just like his sister’s; she reminded him so much of Fáinne: a sensitive person who loved too deeply. He was afraid that if he lost Jojo now, he would never have her again. Love was so fragile, like Fáinne had been fragile and Jojo, too. He could see his daughter crumbling in front of his eyes and Bess was making it all worse.

  He turned, grabbed his car keys from the console table in the hall.

  ‘Are you going after her?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s any point. I’m going back to the office.’ Edward looked at her straight on. ‘People there listen to me. I don’t know how you could be so cruel to Jojo, so callous. I didn’t know you had that in you. It’s like—’ He seemed to be casting about wildly for the words. ‘It’s like there’s another person in you, one you’ve hidden up till now, someone vicious.’

  Bess watched him leave, thinking how could a marriage survive when there were so many people in it, all clamouring for love? How could it survive when one p
arty had seen the other give full vent to their rage? She should not be battling Edward’s daughter for his love and yet that’s just what she had done, time after time. This time, worst of all.

  When he’d driven away, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. She’d never been much of a drinker but Edward had such a great cellar and there was always some nice white wine in the fridge. When Amy had been young, there hadn’t been money for luxuries like wine. Bess had been too scared of losing control that way, of numbing any pain or loneliness via the bottle. Who would look after Amy then?

  It had been tough: she had had to be tough. Amy had suffered, no doubt about it.

  In this lovely kitchen with wine inside her and the pain unquenched, Bess could admit it. She had been a tough-love mother to her daughter, in much the same way as her own mother had practised tough love on her.

  She’d hated it as a child, having a tough mother, and yet she’d still repeated the pattern with Amy.

  There had been no other way, she’d told herself. She was alone, husbandless, living just within her means. It had been frightening and that fear had made her hard.

  Alone in her gleaming new kitchen with its hand-painted wooden doors and a black granite worktop, with every mod con available, Bess let the tears fall, finished the first glass of wine and poured another.

  And then she thought of her mother’s cautionary tales all those years ago, when she’d first thrown Dennis out.

  ‘Don’t turn into a drunk,’ Maura had advised briskly, as if she was advising on a hat to wear at the races. ‘I’m not raising Amy for you. I have my own life. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it and not with a bottle of gin.’

  Bess shoved the glass of wine away from her and it fell on the table, the fine glass shattering and wine slopping everywhere. The old marmalade glasses wouldn’t have broken, she thought.

  If only her dad was still around: she’d loved him, had felt close to him. Until Edward had come along, there had been nobody on earth Bess had ever felt closer to. Not even Amy, the small voice in her head taunted her. Because she’d been so busy making sure Amy had a roof over her head and had a future, that the love part had been secondary.