Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  Compared to Tanglewood, the family home on Longford Terrace was a humble place indeed. It was, however, pretty, clean and neat, with the scent of Nora’s lavender oil wafting into the air from the little aromatherapy burner she had placed on the window sill.

  Nora’s beloved cookbooks took up most of the bookshelves and the walls were covered in a wallpaper decorated with poppies and wild flowers. The garden was inside as well as out, Mick liked to joke.

  It was snug with its space for a couch and two armchairs, with the TV in a nook, where the family had always sat in the evenings. In winter, they lit the log stove and the dogs threw themselves in front of it with joy.

  ‘Do sit down, in that chair,’ Nora directed. ‘It’s the one the dogs are forbidden to get into.’

  And, as Prancer had clearly decided to get to know Bess better with his goosing, she ordered him back to his bed sharply.

  ‘It’s fine, I like dogs,’ said Bess, stroking the soft blond doggy head.

  ‘You do?’ Nora was utterly surprised. It shocked her that buttoned-up Bess like animals.

  ‘We were never able to have a dog when I was growing up,’ Bess said. ‘My mother wouldn’t have stood all that dog hair and when I was married, it seemed like another burden—’

  She paused, as if aware she’d said too much about the Dennis years.

  ‘Tea – builders’ or herbal?’

  Nora was not one for offering guests wine or strong drink. Tea and home-made fruit cake or biscuits when she hadn’t been baking were what they got in her house.

  ‘Builders’.’

  Nora made tea, quickly coming to the conclusion that this must be about Jojo – what else could have Bess Brannigan here in her house at eight at night, unannounced?

  ‘Home-made?’ said Bess, holding up a shortbread biscuit.

  ‘Shop bought, as we used to say when I was a child,’ Nora said, grinning. ‘Shop bought was both the height of luxury and excitement then. And now it’s the reverse.’

  ‘My mother bought everything,’ Bess said, adding a hint of milk to her tea. ‘Our Friday night treat was chips and smoked cod from the chipper down the street. She worked, you see – had no time for homemaking.’

  ‘I never knew that,’ said Nora, assessing her guest.

  This appeared to be confidante time but Nora was wary of giving too much away yet.

  ‘Tell me, what are you “screwing up” and what do you think I can help with?’

  ‘Joanne. She hates me,’ said Bess and laid down the biscuit perilously close to Prancer’s drooling face. ‘She came up to the house earlier, the first time she’s been there since the wedding.’

  Nora noticed that Bess didn’t say the word ‘home’, even though Tanglewood had been Jojo’s home since she was a baby.

  ‘She wouldn’t respond to the invitations for Eddie’s seventieth and I got Eddie to phone her, so she came up to see us and it didn’t go well.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Nora slowly, thinking of what it must be like for Jojo to go to Tanglewood for the first time in a long time.

  Bess looked into the middle distance and Pancer took advantage of her absentmindedness to use his long pink tongue to lean in and snaffle her biscuit. He munched happily and no jury would ever convinct him because he looked the picture of innocence. Nora said nothing. There was a time to discuss her dog’s bad behaviour and this wasn’t it.

  ‘She hates me,’ said Bess simply. ‘She just hates me and there is nothing I can do about it. She also hates that we are having the anniversary party in Lisowen Castle because it’s special to her parents but I simply arranged to have the party there because Edward wants it there. I just didn’t think it would cause so much trouble. All I do is cause trouble when I’m trying not to, when I’m trying to be her friend.’ Bess paused.

  Was she trying to be Jojo’s friend – was that an honest statement? There was something about Nora’s presence that made honesty a prerequisite.

  ‘At least, I’m not trying to be her mother. I’m not stupid.’

  Bess kept stroking Prancer’s head gently and Nora sipped her tea. It was strange, this, having Bess in her kitchen asking for her advice when Bess’s predecessor had been her best friend.

  Nora sent a prayer up to heaven where Lottie was certainly looking down on them, probably with great fascination. Lottie had always been interested in other people’s problems and this was certainly interesting. Her best friend and her husband’s new wife – you couldn’t get more thrilling than that.

  ‘The thing is,’ Bess said, ‘you knew Lottie and you know Joanne—’

  ‘Jojo,’ said Nora. ‘Her name is Jojo. First bit of advice: don’t call her Joanne. Nobody calls her Joanne.’

  ‘Sorry, Jojo. She hates me and she was always going to hate whoever took her mother’s place, but I wasn’t there when her mother was alive, I came along when her mother was gone, when her father needed somebody. Why can’t she be a grown-up and understand that?’

  ‘Because when it comes to your parents, it takes a long time to become a grown-up and I don’t think Jojo has fully grieved over her mother’s death yet,’ Nora said. ‘It probably wouldn’t matter who her father married, but it may make it harder that you are so different to her mother.’

  Bess looked at Nora wearily. ‘And would it have been easier if I had been one of your friends, someone who’d help comfort Edward when Lottie was dying or someone who’d stepped into the breach because he was the rich Brannigan brother? Would that have made it easier? Or else someone who was just like her mother, artistic, fey and beautiful? Would that have made it any easier?’ Bess asked. ‘No, it wouldn’t matter who I was or what I looked like or what I did, Jojo was going to hate me, and I have tried so hard and I love him …’

  Nora was astonished to see the tears begin to fall again down Bess’s face. It was strange, seeing this always-in-control woman sobbing again and she felt huge guilt for initially assuming that Bess had married Edward for his money or for convenience.

  Because she suddenly realised that sitting there in front of her, in her cosy kitchen, petting Prancer who was now practically sitting on top of Bess as he always tried to take care of people who were upset, was a woman who loved Edward Brannigan.

  Nora grabbed the small stool she kept beside the fire, pulled it over to Bess’s chair and sat on it. She understood that Bess wasn’t into affectionate gestures but she needed to be close to say this and she needed to grab Bess’s hands.

  ‘Go on, Prancer, get out of the way,’ she said, giving her big, beautiful dog an affectionate shove.

  Dismissed after all his helpfulness, Prancer stomped sulkily back to his bed where Copper nuzzled him as if he had been away for a week.

  ‘Now, listen,’ said Nora, holding on to Bess’s hands, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise how much you loved Edward.’

  ‘You thought I had married him for his money,’ said Bess bitterly. ‘That’s what everyone thinks. What is it about me that makes people think I’d be the sort of woman to marry into a big clan and take on all of this, stepchildren, brothers, sisters-in-law, you name it, for money. I have money. I have worked very bloody hard my whole life for my own damn money and I have enough, I didn’t need any of this. I didn’t need this hatred. Jojo hates me and that bloody Helen hates me too.’

  ‘Helen hates everyone,’ said Nora simply. ‘She’s got an inferiority complex due to a tricky childhood and it manifests itself in disliking everyone on the planet because she thinks everyone is looking down on her. Take her out of the equation. This is about you, Edward and Jojo. I’ll do my best to help, but it might help if Jojo understood that you are not having the party in Lisowen Castle just to spite her or just to make a point about her mother’s memory. It might help if she understood that you are doing it purely for her father’s sake, because it’s important for him to remember where he and Lottie grew up: where we all grew up.’

  Bess nodded but said nothing. She pulled one of her hands away from Nora
’s and ineffectually tried to wipe the tears off her face.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘First, let’s look at why it’s important to Edward to have the party there. When we grew up in Lisowen,’ began Nora, thinking back to those days, ‘nobody had a ha’penny. We were poor, there was no other word for it. Poor and with no prospects. There was nothing there for any of us but farming small bits of land, and none of the lads wanted to be farmers because it was backbreaking work and none of us had any sort of good land. The old history of the farms breaking up when sons married had been going on for so long, that if you got a bit of land, it was a few acres and what could you do with that?’ Nora explained.

  Bess nodded. She knew all this, more or less. Edward had told her but she also knew that Nora would give her a woman’s perspective on it, the more unvarnished truth with emotional detail, the way Edward couldn’t.

  ‘Lottie was there then but she was a lot younger than us and to be honest, Ed didn’t meet her until much later. There was a gang of us.’

  Nora’s voice trailed off, thinking of one other person in the gang who was no longer with them, but she recovered. ‘There was a gang of us,’ she began again, ‘and we hung around together, went to dances, helped out with haymaking, stood beside each other in the church, all the while talking about the time when we’d be out of Lisowen, because when you grew up in one of those small towns in those days, you did want to be out of it. We never thought of riches: we wanted to survive and the boys not to have to tip their caps to the gentry. The people who owned Lisowen Castle, they were the gentry, make no mistake about it. We might have been a republic, but the class system was there, Bess. We didn’t want to be them, no. Apart from Ed. He used to say, “Why can’t we be like them?”’

  Bess could imagine her strong, fierce husband looking at people who’d had land and prosperity thrust upon them through inheritance and thinking he could achieve their wealth too.

  ‘For the rest of us, it was like reaching for the moon. Not for Ed,’ sighed Nora. ‘That’s why Lisowen Castle has always meant so much to him. It signified everything he hadn’t been born with, and I don’t mean that he was obsessed with the people who owned it, or that he wanted to be like them, no. It’s just that when the family lost it and it became a hotel, you could see something in his eyes, some dream of going back there now that he was the big man. Having the party there for his and Lottie’s anniversary meant so much to him and going back there for his seventieth would mean something to him again. And—’

  Nora paused. ‘It’s tied up with Fáinne too. She just vanished, left a note but not a mention of where she was going. Sent a letter when their mother died, said she couldn’t come back now to bring them more scandal. Edward searched for her but it was like she disappeared into thin air. All that family and love and loss are connected with Lisowen, along with it fuelling his dreams, and it’s why it’s so important to him.’

  ‘But why doesn’t he say any of that to Jojo?’ Bess said.

  ‘Because it doesn’t occur to him that he has to say it to her. Because he thinks that she knows that he came from poverty and that he’s so proud that he achieved all he has in his life. That’s what’s important and Lottie is mixed up with that too.’

  ‘If he told Jojo all this, would she be able to like me?’ asked Bess finally.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nora sighed. ‘Second marriages are never going to be easy. The children, whether they’re young or grown-up, are always going to feel they have to side with one parent or the other, and when one is dead – well, you can see that Jojo idolised her mother and can’t bear the thought of anyone replacing her.

  ‘Helen had these dinner parties for Edward when Lottie died: ostensibly to keep him from being lonely, but she kept dragging along eligible women and I can tell you, Jojo went mad about it. I did too, to be honest. He was grieving, he wasn’t ready to be exchanging bon mots with women over the pudding. But you know Helen, hasn’t a clue.’

  Bess nodded. She felt included now in the analysis of Helen: she understood her new sister-in-law better.

  ‘Jojo was very close to Lottie—’

  ‘I never say her name, you know,’ interrupted Bess. ‘Lottie. Like it’s an evil talisman. Is that horrible of me?’

  ‘Just jealous,’ said Nora, ‘which is, let’s face it, entirely normal.’

  Bess nodded. Just jealous.

  ‘She was amazing, my best friend and I miss her so much but I’m happy to see Edward happy now. She wouldn’t have wanted him to be alone,’ went on Nora. ‘If Helen dropped dead tomorrow, she’d want Kit to grieve for ever and wear black until he died, but not Lottie. She wanted the people in her life to move on.’

  ‘So why can’t they?’ said Bess, petting Prancer, who had returned sneakily.

  ‘Knowing what you should do and being able to do it are entirely different things.’

  ‘I have never tried to fill Lottie’s shoes,’ said Bess fiercely. ‘I am too old for that. I tried to be me and let people know I loved Edward. And now I’m going crazy with grief and misery – well, maybe I haven’t gone totally to Crazyland but I can certainly see it from here.’

  Nora laughed, a deep throaty laugh.

  ‘You’re funny,’ she said. ‘Lottie was funny too. If I tell you something, don’t be freaked out by it but you would have liked Lottie and she would have liked you. You think she was this perfect woman but everyone is perfect when they die. All our faults are forgiven. She wasn’t perfect but she was special, wonderful, loving, kind. A brilliant mother when Ed was off out empire-building. And my best friend.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can go if you like,’ said Bess, feeling stupid at all she’d said to Lottie’s best friend. Why had she come here?

  Nora waved a hand dismissively. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. There are no high horses here, Bess, so don’t try to climb onto one. Listen, and this is important, Lottie wanted Edward to be happy again,’ she continued. ‘She was the most practical woman I know, despite her arty ways. She was a realist. She should have said as much to Jojo but she did to Edward: “Find someone else, don’t be lonely,” she said. I know because she told me. If only she’d told Jojo. To be honest, I thought she was going to but she was too sick and she mustn’t have.’

  ‘Lottie told Edward to find someone else?’ Bess stared at Nora. ‘He never told me, never. Why hasn’t he told Jojo? Could you tell her now?’ begged Bess, and Nora looked at her sorrowfully.

  ‘No, I think her father has to do that and he’s not good at the emotional stuff. You can’t do it and I can’t either. You love him, she’ll see that, eventually.’

  ‘Eventually.’ Bess sounded bitter. ‘At one of our funerals, perhaps, when we are dead and have become perfect in the way the dead are? I can’t wait that long.’

  ‘This is a long game,’ Nora advised, ‘and you know more than you did earlier. You have to wait it out, take the hits, there is no other way. Plus—’ she paused. ‘There is something else going on with Jojo and I wish I knew what it was, grief, sorrow, her marriage, I don’t know. I met her for coffee the other day and she looked haunted, and it’s not just over her mother—’

  She stopped, already feeling guilty that she had said too much about her niece. Jojo deserved her privacy.

  And then she thought of one more thing she had to talk about, Traci and Barney and what their coming to the great party would mean to her own daughter.

  ‘This is another matter entirely, but are Traci O’ Reilly and her husband Barney on the seventieth party guest list? It’s a long story, but first, are they coming?’

  Bess put her head to one side and thought.

  Nora could see how Edward would fall in love with someone like Bess: she was so clever. Watching her mentally scanning her guest list was like watching Edward thinking about something. Lottie hadn’t been anything like that. She was bright all right: bright as hell. But she didn’t have that business brain the way Bess and Edward did, the analytical one always running down
the numbers or the angles.

  ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘Edward wanted to invite people who hadn’t come to the wedding because we kept it so small, and his cousin Owen was on the list, and Traci’s Owen’s daughter. I am almost sure they’re all coming. Why?’

  Nora sighed. ‘You couldn’t be expected to know and it would be difficult for Edward not to invite them, but Barney was engaged to my daughter, Cari.’

  Bess breathed in. ‘This is ringing some bells in my head,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Bells of doom,’ said Nora grimly. ‘They weren’t just engaged: they were ready to be married, as in Cari was at the altar when Barney suddenly turned to her and said sorry, that he couldn’t do it. And he left with Traci.’

  ‘Oh good Lord,’ said Bess before she could stop herself. ‘That’s just terrible. I mean, why? Not why did he break it off with her – people fall out of love, but why then? Why not even the day before, anything to save her that humiliation?’

  Nora absently patted Prancer’s soft head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  Eleven

  ‘When people show you who they are,

  believe them the first time.’

  Maya Angelou

  Three years before

  Nora stared at the flowers as the Appassionata people delivered them: Cari had wanted unweddingy flowers – pretty tumbling posies of peonies, tightly budded, not yet full bodied, and also trails of meadow flowers added in as if this wedding had happened a thousand years ago when the Irish wild flowers would have decorated the wedding maiden. There were tiny white wood anemones, the elegant blue of periwinkles, the velvety white stems of lady’s tresses, and lesser celandines, as well as delicate cornflowers with their shocking amethyst centres. She had stems of rosemary and lavender for their heady scent, and a bough of rowan for the luck of the Lady. The bouquet, a mass of colours and greenery, was all held together with silken ribbons plaited as if for a Celtic maiden handfasting her vows in the rowan groves …

  Barney’s poor mother was dealing with the stress of the wedding badly, Nora thought. Yvonne was a ditherer and a worrier of Olympian standards. Nora didn’t entirely agree with medicating worry because she’d found that two hours in the garden was a great way to calm one’s nerves, yet she felt that poor Yvonne would benefit greatly from the help of some sort of relaxing pharmaceutical. Unless she was already on a relaxing pharmaceutical, in which case, God help her, because it wasn’t working or else her dosage needed to be upped.