Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  She had no close female friends now: was that sad? Nobody to phone and sob her eyes out to. Bess wanted someone kind to talk to, someone, anyone.

  Her mother had had no female friends, either. Maura Sharkey had not been the sort of woman for coffee morning conferences or gentle discussions over garden walls. Somehow, by osmosis, Bess had picked up on this and she had been happy with it, content, until now.

  But no woman was an island – she could see it truly now. She needed help and she thought of the one person who could give it to her, the one person who might not turn her away with distaste.

  Jojo drove down the drive at speed, barely missing some of the beautifully placed stones along the edge of it.

  ‘Fucking stones,’ she swore as she swerved.

  There had been no stones in her mother’s day: Lottie had had railway sleepers, ancient things that had somehow fitted in with the garden and had been slippery to walk on and sometimes Lottie had said she was going to get them replaced. But she never had, they were part and parcel of the house. Like the Venus statue and the old Mini …

  Jojo could feel the tears clouding her eyes and she knew she shouldn’t really be driving, but she didn’t care. The urge to do something self-destructive was so powerful. How could her father have married that woman? How could her father have thought so little of her mother, that mere years after her mother’s death, he’d marry someone else, someone nothing like Lottie Brannigan? That was the nub of the question.

  Yes, Jojo knew that men often married sooner after being widowed than women did. Women lived longer and are able to survive on their own, while men needed someone else there. But two and a half years?

  That was nothing. It was an insult to Jojo’s mother’s memory. And Paul – what about Paul? She pulled in on the side of the road, not really the safest place to stop on that stretch of road, but she didn’t care. Let someone bang into her and let her father grieve over that.

  Would he go out and adopt a new daughter after two years? Probably.

  Knowing that her feelings were juvenile to say the least, she fought against them, but she couldn’t help it. She felt so angry, so hurt, so like … so like a child.

  Maybe that was why she couldn’t have a child – she still was one, she thought with bitterness. And for that bitch to say that if she had children of her own, she’d understand? That hurt most of all: a piece of barbed wire twisted in an open wound.

  When she’d first stopped, she had picked up her mobile phone to call her brother in New York, but she knew it was stupid. Paul would be at work and he wouldn’t be able to talk. Then if she waited until he was at home, he’d be talking to Lena or playing with Heidi. The beautiful baby, so beautiful it almost hurt Jojo to look at her.

  Jojo leaned her head against the steering wheel. What sort of a horrible person have I become, she thought. The image of my beautiful baby niece gives me pain, because she is proof that my brother and his wife have a baby and I can’t, what sort of horrible cow am I?

  She scrubbed her eyes dry and started the car again. She’d drive home to Hugh and maybe he’d be able to fix it, fix her.

  Hugh was at home, tidying out the fridge, which was partly for practical reasons and partly because he knew Jojo was up in Edward and Bess’s house and he knew she’d come home in a towering rage, so fridge-tidying gave him something to calm his mind.

  His mother was a real fan of men being able to do things around the house, and all of his previous girlfriends before Jojo had always been astonished at this, as if he were the veritable monkey typing out the works of Shakespeare on an old typewriter.

  ‘What’s so weird about a guy cleaning out a fridge?’ Hugh would say.

  ‘We’re not used to it,’ the various girlfriends had all said.

  ‘Proof of how fabulous the Hennessy men are,’ Hugh’s mother, Daphne, would say proudly.

  Her three sons were self-sufficient, all able to cook meals, wash clothes, iron clothes, put up shelves.

  Daphne was a very self-sufficient sort of woman and she wanted to send her kids out into the world with the same abilities. Sometimes, Hugh got the feeling that his mother was going off Jojo.

  It was very subtle, but over the past year, he’d sensed it: the feeling that Daphne had run out of patience for Jojo and her wild grief over her mother. If only he had been able to tell her about the infertility, but Jojo had been adamant that it was their battle and their battle alone.

  ‘Nobody else must know,’ she said fervently.

  And he knew that was because her own mother hadn’t known, therefore it felt like a betrayal from Jojo’s point of view that anyone else would know. But Lottie Brannigan was dead, she was never going to know that they were trying desperately for a baby, never going to know about the pain and the grief and the trauma, the sense of failure, the pain every time Hugh looked at another colleague with a swelling baby belly or a father on his way to the park with a couple of kids.

  Sometimes he wondered if Jojo thought it only affected her, because it didn’t, it affected both of them. He knew it would feel like a betrayal of Jojo to do it, but he wanted to tell his mum, wanted to tell his brothers, wanted to have people on his side that he could discuss this with. Because infertility was always seen as the woman’s issue. No matter whose ‘fault’ it was that a baby was not being gifted to a couple, the main person to receive sympathy always seemed to be the woman, as if only women longed for children, as if men had no biological clock, no desire to hold their own baby in their arms.

  Hugh carefully put the last cartons of milk back in the fridge, their bottoms carefully wiped. It was sparkling now. Not that Jojo would notice, she wasn’t noticing much of anything at the moment. He’d give it another week and then he’d talk to his mum, one of his brothers, someone: he needed to tell someone, just not to feel so alone.

  Jojo shut the door carefully when she came in. She didn’t want to storm into the house. She would try to be grown-up, try to be with her husband and accept his loving and kindness.

  Hugh was in the kitchen, wearing an apron.

  ‘Hello,’ he said warily, as if he expected a full-on explosion.

  Jojo couldn’t take her eyes off the apron. Hugh had known she was going to visit Bess and her father and in some childish part of her brain, she wanted him to be waiting for her, medieval torture implement in hand, ready to go up to Tanglewood and slay some dragons (Bess) for her.

  Instead, he was wearing a red and white gingham apron, holding a cloth and looked mildly anxious at her return.

  ‘How did you get on?’ he asked.

  Jojo did not know why, and she cursed herself as soon as she’d said them, but the first words out of her mouth were bitchy: ‘All tickety-boo. You’re really rocking that Martha Stewart look,’ she said.

  Hugh flushed and ripped the apron off.

  ‘Someone has to clean the fridge,’ he snapped.

  ‘Lucky I’ve got a house husband to do it,’ Jojo snapped back.

  Hugh considered this for a moment. ‘Lucky you’ve got a husband at all,’ he said quietly and he left the room, brushing past her. ‘I’m going for a run. Don’t wait up.’

  Alone in the kitchen, Jojo began to cry. Why had she picked on poor Hugh? What was wrong with her? She was falling to pieces and taking the people she loved with her.

  Ten

  ‘Kind words will unlock

  an iron door.’

  Turkish proverb

  Tuesday was Mick’s traditional night out with the lads. It was more of a two-pints-in-the pub than an actual night out because all the lads were in their sixties now, and the days of long sessions with someone taking out a bodhrán or a fiddle to play traditional Irish music were no more, but still, it was his night out. Nora went to things on Wednesday night – it used to be her keep-fit classes, then step aerobics, now she and Sherry from across the road did Bums and Tums in the church hall on a Monday at seven, and every few Wednesdays a gang of women would pick a film.

  The
criteria for the film was trickier.

  Sherry only wanted films where nice men got their shirts off.

  ‘We just need a loop of Magic Mike for you, Sherry,’ everyone teased her.

  Millicent had always had a fondness for anything foreign language, especially French, which had been her subject at university and which she’d taught in secondary school for thirty years.

  Clare couldn’t bear anything with violence in it, and since Agatha had got divorced, she refused to see anything love story-ish.

  ‘That leaves us with French non-violent thrillers with attractive men who undress occasionally, and with a jaundiced view of love where nobody ends up happily ever after,’ Nora said, in summation. ‘Is that a genre?’

  ‘Astonishingly, not yet,’ Millicent joked.

  Compromise had been reached and tomorrow night, they were going to see a Greek comedy about a big family wedding.

  ‘Bound to have all that palaver about how true love changes everything in it,’ Agatha said miserably.

  ‘You can put your hands over your eyes for any kissing, swearing of eternal love or marriage vows where they intend to keep them,’ Nora said. ‘Just don’t boo at the romantic bits.’

  ‘There’s definitely romantic bits in it, then?’ Agatha asked.

  ‘Listen,’ said Nora, ‘it’s a wedding comedy: there will be a mix-up at the hen night, some divorced parents will meet up and decide they don’t want to be divorced any more but love each other and need to dump their new spouses, and at least one hopelessly uncoordinated cousin will discover she can dance if it’s with the right person when she meets up with her childhood friend who has always been in love with her, right? So yes, there will be some romance. But it will be funny. Humour will take away the pain of the lovey-dovey bits.’

  ‘As long as I’m prepared,’ Agatha said.

  ‘As long as there’s tanned male skin, preferably muscular,’ added Sherry.

  Clare laughed and Millicent patted Sherry’s knee. ‘Girls,’ she said, ‘it’s set in Greece. In summer. Someone with the body of a Greek god is bound to have his shirt off.’

  Nora was taking advantage of Mick’s absence to catch up on the ironing and watch her soaps, smiling while thinking about herself and the girls’ nights out. None of them were girls any more, of course, all of them were at least in their sixties, except for Sherry, who was fifty-nine and dreading being sixty, and over the years of living in Silver Bay, they’d been friends through all sorts of crises. She didn’t know what she’d have done without the girls over the years – when Lottie had been sick, they’d been there and listened to her sobbing when she knew she couldn’t sob in front of her beloved sister-in-law. When Cari had been stood up at the altar by – Nora paused because she didn’t swear often but she had only one name for him – that bastard – they’d been there to talk her out of going round to his house and stabbing him with her garden shears.

  ‘You don’t mean it,’ they’d said. ‘Cari needs you here, not in prison without bail, which is what will happen if you get at him with the shears.’

  ‘Besides, Cari’s better off knowing,’ said Millicent, always wise. ‘What would be the point of marrying someone who doesn’t really love you.’

  ‘Better to find out now that he’s a cheating son of a bitch than later,’ Agatha had pointed out darkly, because she knew what she was talking about.

  The men didn’t talk with the same depth when they had their nights out, the girls had often surmised. They discussed football, politics and the price of the pint, Millicent thought. Not worry over grown-up kids or breast lumps or if their husbands were depressed and how to get a depressed husband to the doctor to ask for help.

  Nora didn’t care what the men talked about: all she knew was that friendship for men worked in the same basic way it did for women: made people feel part of something bigger, less alone. So men couldn’t talk about feelings or anxieties, but having each other seemed to be enough.

  Nora finished ironing another one of Mick’s shirts and hung it up.

  The kitchen was cosy. The dogs were conked out in their bed, worn out after a big walk that morning. Being retired was wonderful, Nora often thought. She got up early and walked the two dogs along the strand on Silver Bay itself. In the early mornings, there were plenty of people taking advantage of the tides in the giant curve that was Dublin Bay. The dogs loved it and were well behaved – well, Copper, a nervy brindle greyhound who shied away from everyone, was well behaved. Prancer, a bouncing golden retriever, was less well behaved, despite the training classes. Prancer had never met another dog whose bottom he didn’t want to sniff energetically. He often did it to people, which shocked the non-dog-owning people running.

  Prancer’s snores fought with the sound of the TV, and Nora smiled as she ironed. She loved those two daft dogs. Loved how Copper shivered a long anxious nose into her mistress’s hand and loved how Prancer poked his under her elbow when she had her breakfast, a combination of ‘Hurry up, I want to walk’ and ‘Can I have some of your food, I’ve finished mine and astonishingly I’m still hungry?’

  At that precise moment, the doorbell rang.

  Longford Terrace was a friendly place and Nora was used to people coming to and fro during the day, but not so much in the evening. She checked her watch. Nearly eight. Either charity collectors or, neighbour-wise, it could be Jen next door looking for some emergency item – Jen worked, had three children and was a firm believer in home-cooked meals. Nora was never sure how she managed it but those kids ate home-made everything. The last time Jen had arrived, she’d been full of apologies but had run out of yeast to make home-made pizza dough and did Nora have any?

  At the time, Nora had found herself comparing Jen with her own daughter, Cari, and thinking sadly that they were the same age, thirty-three, and there was no sign of Cari ever needing yeast to make pizza dough for her kids. If Cari wanted pizza, she called out to the pizza place down the road. If she wanted kids – well, she was hiding it very well.

  The dogs followed Nora to the door and Prancer, doing his only bit of vaguely good behaviour, stood back when she told him to so she could open it.

  For the first time ever, her new sister-in-law stood on the doorstep, dressed as if for the office in a grey skirt suit, cream silk shirt, with pearl earrings and her dark hair beautifully styled around those handsome dark eyes.

  Nora was so surprised at the sight of Bess that she couldn’t speak momentarily.

  ‘I know, I’m sorry for dropping in unannounced but I needed to speak to someone now, not next week. I totally understand if you’re busy—’ said Bess hesitantly.

  Nora found the hesitancy even more startling than Bess turning up in the first place. In the times she’d met her new sister-in-law, there had never before been any sense that Bess wasn’t entirely sure of what she wanted or where she was going in life. Earlier, Nora had been stunned at Bess’s phone call asking for a coffee. And now here she stood at Nora’s door, looking devastated, asking for help.

  It was a watershed moment.

  But Bess was beyond feeling such things. All the emotions she’d clamped down for years had been freeing themselves gleefully since she’d met Edward and a deeply unhappy bunch coalesced in her head, turning on the rarely-before-felt waterfall of tears. Unable to stop them, Bess let them out, a flood of emotion streaming down her face.

  ‘I feel as if I’m screwing everything up,’ Bess sobbed.

  Tears were Nora’s speciality, Lottie used to say.

  ‘You could calm people after an earthquake,’ she’d remark kindly, when Nora had soothed everyone’s ruffled feathers and the argument or bitter, never-to-be-forgotten fight was over.

  Nora felt that tears needed a hug. There were few things in life that couldn’t be helped a little with a hug, even the desperate things like terminal cancer. She’d hugged Lottie so many times those last months, gently as time went on, as Lottie got thinner and the cancer reached her poor bones, but Lottie had still sm
iled afterwards. Hugs didn’t cure cancer but they had helped Lottie.

  Even though she’d only ever shaken Bess’s hand and given her a peck on the cheek on the day of Bess and Edward’s wedding, Nora now pulled Bess into the small house and held her.

  ‘You’ve come to the right place,’ she said. ‘I have a special offer on sorting things out – twenty per cent off.’

  Somehow, Bess managed to laugh and she unattached herself from Nora, as if embarrassed to be held in an embrace in the first place.

  ‘You must think I’m stupid but I have nobody else to talk to and—’

  ‘Let’s forget about explanations for a moment and have some tea,’ Nora said.

  As she led Bess past the hall with wallpaper Mick had been meaning to replace for a few years and down into the cosy but undeniably shabby kitchen, she reflected that her home was nothing like the elegantly refurbished Tanglewood, which had been transformed and where Bess and Edward had held a small dinner party not that long ago.

  The guest list had consisted of just the brothers and their wives, and Helen had been spitting with rage and envy at the sight of the newly decorated and architect-designed house, which had made Nora feel sadder than ever because she could imagine herself and Lottie exchanging glances throughout the meal, the way they used to when Helen was in one of her moods.

  They’d have tried to cheer her up, remind her that her own home was lovely and ask her about her new dress, which was always a tried and trusted method for making Helen happier.

  But of course, Lottie was gone and this new woman, the one responsible for all this grandeur and now standing in Nora’s modest home, was her replacement.

  There had been moments, though, at that dinner, when she’d seen Bess’s eyes on her, twinkling in a way that implied she understood Helen’s jealousy.