Secrets of a Happy Marriage

by Cathy Kelly

  ‘We need to talk,’ she said.

  Barney often thought he’d compile a list of the most-hated phrases in the world and ‘We need to talk’ would come quite high up on it. ‘I have something to tell you,’ would feature highly too. Traci liked both of these phrases.

  ‘Talk about what?’ he said.

  He was at work: she knew he couldn’t chat at work, even on his mobile phone. Bentleys DB4 carried no passengers.

  ‘Edward Brannigan’s having a seventieth and we’re invited.’

  Barney couldn’t help himself. He drew a long deep breath in and exhaled for even longer. It calmed his heart a little. Breathing was good for you, or so he’d heard.

  ‘We’re invited?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘We can’t go. Obviously.’

  ‘Why not?’ Traci said, with a hint of petulance. ‘All my family are going. I’ve replied anyway. Said we were going.’

  Barney rubbed his eyes. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You go but I won’t.’

  ‘Oh, Barney, everyone’s over it now but you. Cari’s got on with her life. Nobody blames you, why can’t we just go?’

  Barney paused, not really knowing how to explain.

  ‘Traci, there’s another call coming in that I’ve got to take, sorry.’

  Barney lied and hung up on his wife, then watched as the leggy Saskia stalked past his office. She reminded him so much of Cari: the same fierce intelligence, the same spark in her eyes. A spark he’d put out that horrible day three years ago.

  How could Traci possibly think he’d want to go to a birthday party when Cari was there, when he’d ruined her life, publicly. Sometimes, Traci just didn’t think. Of course, sometimes she thought so much that she rang rings around him. As he’d learned to his cost.

  He wondered how Paul, his old pal, was doing in New York. Paul and he had been friends through work, which was how he’d come into the Brannigan family orbit, how he’d met up with and fallen in love with Cari, and then how he’d met Traci.

  One night at an award ceremony with Traci had been all it had taken to screw up his life spectacularly. If only he could do it all again, he’d do it differently. He’d be with Cari and not Traci, never Traci.

  Fifteen

  SECRETS OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE #4

  Long-time married love is different from first-few-dates love. Less adrenaline, less movie dates, more time on the couch discussing the children, the finances or should you get the bathroom retiled. But don’t lose that love from the beginning. It’s special.

  Hugh tried to take Jojo’s hand as they walked into the clinic.

  ‘Are you OK, honey?’

  She pulled away from him. She didn’t want to hold his hand: she didn’t want to hold anyone’s hand or touch anyone. It was as if she felt better in this little isolated chamber of just being Jojo.

  ‘Yes and no,’ she said with false brightness. ‘I’ll be fine, let’s get in, we don’t want to be late.’

  Their appointment was for ten, it was twenty to ten.

  There was no way they were going to be late, but Hugh didn’t say anything. He just smiled anxiously back at his wife, the way he had been smiling ever since they started this long journey of infertility.

  They checked in at the clinic front desk and sat and waited in the waiting room, while Hugh flicked through old copies of Time and National Geographic, and Jojo sat with copies of women’s magazines on her lap and stared at them, unseeing.

  How often had she sat here? How often had she waited for blood tests or scans, that horrible vaginal scanner that she hated, that poked around at her ovaries and found so many follicles dangling on the end like little jewels in a necklace all tangled up?

  Before tests, she felt nervous and there were so many tests during cycles. Tests to determine if the dosages were right, tests to determine the level of her follicle stimulating hormone. Once, Jojo had been nervous about having blood taken: now she just proferred an arm and barely flinched when the needle went in.

  Same as with the vaginal scanner. She went into the little scan room, happy that the waiting was over and slipped off the lower half of her clothes, lying on the bed at high speed with a towel covering her from waist to knee.

  Get it done, tell me the news – that was all she wanted. News, good news. No matter the pain from the scanner as it was angled painfully around inside her, no matter how gently the nurses worked. Pain didn’t touch her if the test results or the scan results were positive.

  Today was transfer day – the most important day in the whole schedule as far as Jojo was concerned, apart from that hideous day when she had to do a pregnancy test.

  Today might still not happen if the embryos were not of good enough quality, if the embryologists said they couldn’t go through with it, that a new cycle would be needed and it could only start after another three months.

  Jojo had read of people who’d been down this route for years. This was her third cycle of IVF but she felt so fragile, as if she didn’t have anything left in her for another go. Third time lucky?

  Today she was having two embryos transferred into her and she felt absolutely terrified, as if it was destined for failure from the very start. How could she say any of this to Hugh? You couldn’t say something like that. This was his life and these were his dreams and his hopes too. So she pretended to be happy despite all the churning emotions inside her.

  Their names were called and they went through the doors to the inner sanctum which was the theatre area, to the charming Dr Stevens who had accompanied them on the journey so often. Dr Stevens was smiling and talking and hopeful, everyone in the theatre was hopeful. They always were kind and gentle and … Jojo could hardly bear it. The kindness, their understanding of her pain and anxiety made her fragility come closer to the surface. She would not cry, not now.

  In the theatre she was helped onto the operating table: this was a surgical procedure. Her legs were put in the stirrups and she had to wait. She had been here before, her legs in stirrups while the follicles were collected and her legs in stirrups while embryos were put back in the first time. And every time she saw the stirrups, she wondered would there ever be a time when she’d be a woman in hospital with her legs in stirrups having a baby?

  Did all women who went through infertility treatment think this? Did they all wonder would it ever work out?

  Incredibly, the transfer didn’t hurt and the doctor played music while they did it.

  ‘What would you like to listen to?’ said Rosie, one of the nurses that Jojo had come to love.

  ‘Oh anything,’ said Jojo. ‘Anything.’

  Rosie fiddled around with a CD player that seemed weirdly old compared to the up-to-the-minute technology of the theatre. ‘Strauss? I think classical helps,’ said Rosie.

  Hugh stood at Jojo’s head, holding her hand tightly.

  I must always remember this moment, Jojo told herself. This could be the moment when my child first comes into my body. She listened to the rise and fall of the music, tried to identify the waltz.

  ‘Comfy?’ asked Dr Stevens.

  ‘Fine,’ said Jojo tightly.

  Dr Stevens talked to the people in the embryology lab as they checked, double-checked and triple-checked that the embryos that were being inserted into her body were indeed hers and Hugh’s.

  It was a lengthy procedure and she waited, legs aloft throughout, trying to smile despite feeling a deep ache in her heart. How could this ever work?

  She kept her eyes open, even when Dr Stevens came with the long needle to insert the embryos. There was a brief moment of discomfort but that was all.

  Stay and become babies, Jojo whispered in her heart. Please stay with me. Please.

  When it was over she and Hugh walked slowly from the clinic. She was supposed to go home and rest, and she kept thinking of all those stories of women who had got pregnant by lying up against walls with their legs straight up in the air after sex to ensure that the precious sperm swam into the ovum. Such thin
gs sounded like fairytales to her now. Fairytales didn’t really happen for people like her, a woman for whom the very concept of having babies was all about tubes, petri dishes, frozen cycles, down regulation and hoping. Massive amounts of hoping.

  Hugh kept holding her hand even as they drove home. By mutual consent, they had talk radio on so they didn’t have to actually speak to one another. He knew her so well she thought sadly, even though she could barely reach out to him because of her pain. He knew she was in that dark place.

  ‘I love you, you know that, no matter what happens,’ he said as they pulled into the drive.

  ‘I know,’ said Jojo quietly. It was the best she could do under the circumstances.

  Nora loved her morning walks with Copper and Prancer. She usually went out at half eight, come rain or shine, down Longford Terrace first, waving at various neighbours along the way and chatting to other dog owners as she did the loop that went past Delaney Gardens and down to the sea front.

  She liked to stop on the way home at Mrs Glynn’s house and say hello, because Mrs Glynn was an elderly widow with no family left and Nora felt that if the neighbours didn’t make an effort, poor Mrs Glynn would wither away inside her pretty, old-fashioned little house where she still had the antimacassars on the armchairs. But that was on the way home – Prancer would never stand for any chatting at the start of his walk: he was an adventuring dog and eager to get on with it, the careful investigation of each pillar, close examination of bins and joyful reunions with his doggy friends as if he hadn’t seen them for years instead of, possibly, the day before.

  All the dog walkers knew each other although they mightn’t always know each other’s names. They were ‘the lady with the poodle’ or ‘the man with the two collies’. But they always knew the name of their dogs.

  ‘Hello, Flora, hello, Lollipop,’ said Nora when she came upon a harassed young mother with a pushchair, a small child, and a straining terrier who wanted to be set free now, and was fed up with this on-the-lead business. ‘How are you, Jen?’ she said to the young mother.

  ‘Fine,’ said Jen, then remembered she was talking to Nora, with whom honesty was perfectly fine, and amended it to: ‘Worn out. Flora’s teething, aren’t you, honey?’ she said to the red-cheeked little poppet in the pushchair who glared at Nora as if she’d never set eyes on her before and was consigning her features to memory for Crimewatch.

  ‘Oh, you don’t look like a happy bunny, do you?’ said Nora, getting down to Flora’s level.

  Flora decided she did remember Nora after all, and made a great gulping sob of misery, huge blue eyes filling instantly with tears.

  Nora leaned in and stroked the red cheeks tenderly. The little girl snuffled and rested her face on Nora’s hand.

  ‘She loves you,’ said Jen.

  ‘And I love her,’ crooned Nora. ‘Poor little darling: teething’s so hard for them.’

  ‘Not so much fun for me,’ sniffled Jen, who looked as if she might cry too.

  ‘Why don’t you drop in to me after the walk and you can sit down and have tea, and I’ll amuse Her Ladyship.’

  ‘Ah, no,’ said Jen.

  ‘Honestly, I’d love it,’ said Nora. ‘She loves my place and we can stick the dogs in the garden and let them dig up things, while Flora rolls around on the floor. It’s bad enough being in pain but at least we can amuse her.’

  Jen grabbed the opportunity with both hands.

  ‘Thank you, Nora,’ she said fervently.

  ‘I’ll be back by half ten and I’ll have the kettle boiling,’ Nora said, and, with one last stroke of poor Flora’s soft cheeks, she headed off, wishing she didn’t feel this big gap of a grandchild inside her.

  Maggie was too young still but Cari …

  She didn’t know if Barney and Traci were idiotic and thoughtless enough to come to Ed’s seventieth birthday party but she sincerely hoped they wouldn’t. Nora was a great fan of forgiving people for things but when she thought of her darling Cari, trying so hard to get on with her life after being dumped, and when she thought of the old family crib up in the attic, she wanted to slap both Barney and Traci very hard across the face.

  Cari couldn’t help it – all she could think about was Conal. She was even dreaming about him: dreaming about having sex with him in his car. In the dream, they were somewhere in the American Southern states, somewhere with a lake and trees where all the local teenagers parked to have sex, which was utterly unlike where people went in Silver Bay when they were teenagers because nobody had cars and they were all terrified to have sex in case they got pregnant.

  She’d woken up the morning after meeting him, and she’d had this hot dream for the first time and she felt both exhilarated and scared.

  Exhilarated because she felt that she was finally over Barney – and scared because she had no idea how to have a relationship any more. She hadn’t done the ‘crazy get him out of my system’ dating when Barney had gone. Instead, she’d isolated herself into becoming a cool career girl. A girl with a career in trouble.

  Conal had phoned the morning after: she’d known it was his number because she didn’t recognise it, but she felt too anxious to answer it.

  She’d made all those stupid comments about mummy porn and he’d think she was nothing but a hot tamale who had a headboard like an antique Medici carving with all the conquest notches in it. So she didn’t answer it or reply to his text message: ‘Would you like lunch?’ which was probably code for ‘Come round to my place and tell me more about the whips and the handcuffs.’

  No, she needed to concentrate on her career. She wasn’t ready for this – she was scared. A woman who’d been left at the altar was obviously hopeless at relationships and making emotional choices, so the best bet was to choose nothing at all.

  Jojo was her closest friend but she couldn’t talk about any of this with Jojo, not now. Besides, Jojo’s problems made her own recede. Worrying about whether to date a man or not after so long an enforced celibacy was not a real worry at all compared to Jojo’s problems.

  Cari would concentrate on the rest of her life instead.

  Her beloved cousin was in the depths of misery – it had been plainly obvious to Cari for ages but she didn’t know who she should say anything to. She could hardly tell Hugh because he was going through the same thing. But who? Nobody else knew about the infertility treatment at all …

  This secret-keeping business was unhealthy, Cari thought. She knew about the infertility treatment although nobody else did, not anyone from Hugh’s family, which seemed unfair on him.

  Hugh was a complex man, not the sort who only needed a beer and the footie to solve his emotional needs. He cared about things, he adored Jojo, he was suffering through this the same as Jojo, just in a slightly different way.

  Sure, he wasn’t the one being pumped full of hormones, which meant he had to watch her undergoing treatment, and see her pain, and yet – on Jojo’s instructions – not talk to anyone about it.

  The couple had just had their latest IVF transfer and they were in the waiting period to find out if Jojo was pregnant, although Jojo wasn’t saying when the date for the pregnancy test should be.

  ‘I don’t want to build it up to a big thing, like last time,’ Jojo had said on the phone. ‘That backfired on me last time,’ she added, with a little laugh that wasn’t a laugh at all.

  ‘Fine,’ said Cari easily, as if she was happy with whatever Jojo decided.

  It should be an exciting although nerve-racking time for both of them and yet Jojo’s mood was strangely dark, as if she could already see a negative test, and Cari was worried about what this instinctive negativity in her cousin meant.

  She toyed with the idea of talking it over with her mum. Nora had hinted a long time ago that Lottie, Jojo’s mum, had suffered from depression. Was this it? Was this what it was like? This slow sadness that seemed to shift across Jojo’s face when they were talking face to face.

  Infertility was a nightmare, Cari knew t
hat. Marriages split up over it.

  But maybe there was something more going on than just the trauma of being treated for infertility, maybe there was something sadder affecting her cousin.

  Cari hadn’t even been able to ask about the waiting period, which was what she had done the last time, saying things like ‘only four more days, only three more days, promise you’ll phone me whatever happens’, hoping she was being helpful and hoping she wasn’t being the most annoying person on the planet.

  But she had been one of the few people who had actually known, apart from the doctors and nurses in the clinic, so she’d had to say something.

  Cari fretted. Should she talk to Hugh? Should she talk to her mother for advice?

  Cari, so efficient and in control in work, just didn’t know. This wasn’t her secret to tell but she was worried.

  Hugh had got out of the habit of going for drinks after work. In the office, there were always a few hardy (younger) souls ready to drown their sorrows after a bad day with a few beers or some wine, but Hugh had long since stopped being one of them.

  Today, though, when one of his long-time mates, Rob, stuck his head over the top of Hugh’s computer and said, ‘Fancy a pint?’ Hugh decided that he did absolutely fancy a pint.

  Just to delay going home to where Jojo would be sitting, waiting – oh yes, she might be pretending to watch TV or cooking but she was still waiting, the seconds ticking away till The Day.

  Hugh was fed up with waiting for The Day.

  He wanted a baby too, loved being an uncle, wanted to be a father.

  But he hadn’t known what that would mean – how it would change his wife. He couldn’t cope with the new Jojo, the one who’d sprung up since the triple pain in their lives: her mother dying, their infertility and her father marrying Bess.

  In the midst of all of this, he found himself asking one question in his head again and again: why am I not enough for you any more, Jojo?