Secrets of a Happy Marriage Read online

  Secrets of a

  Happy Marriage

  CATHY KELLY

  Dedication

  For Lucy,

  my incredible sister without whom I would be lost,

  and for Emma,

  who is like another sister to me.

  Love you both.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  Also by Cathy Kelly

  Copyright

  Prologue

  In the San Francisco February dawn, Faenia Lennox sat at an off-white chalk-painted desk facing the Bay with its familiar and beloved fog visible beyond the Japanese maples in her garden and typed at speed, the same speed she’d learned from Mrs Farmsworth’s classes in New York all those years ago. Over forty years ago, in fact.

  ‘Do not look at the keyboard, girls!’ Mrs Farmsworth had said in those commanding tones that made immigrants like Faenia wonder if she’d been a lady general in the war. Faenia, fingers quivering with tiredness and heart leaden with loneliness, had wondered if she’d ever have the strength of someone like Mrs Farmsworth, who stood ramrod straight and yet whose old eyes were kind beneath sharp-edged spectacles that edged off the end of her patrician nose.

  Faenia had grown strong, with time.

  Once a quivering skinny little thing in darned pantyhose given to her by her housemates in the narrow, creaking house in Brooklyn, Faenia Lennox had become a woman Mrs Farmsworth would be proud of.

  She was strong enough in her sixties to take time away from her life to reassess.

  It was a lesson she’d learned a long time ago but lessons sometimes needed to be relearned, returned to, particularly where love and marriage were concerned.

  Faenia looked down at slender tanned fingers, now manicured, with a ring on each ring finger – a Celtic Claddagh ring on her wedding finger and a gold and blue chrysoprase ring on the other hand – and a pretty stainless-steel Cartier tank watch on her wrist.

  In Lisowen, the tiny Kerry town where she’d grown up, nobody had jewellery like this. Or a house like this art deco one, perched on the hill like an adorable eyrie, full of exotic plants the likes of which the gardeners of Lisowen couldn’t imagine, and real art – not expensive – on the walls, and books filling up white bookcases so that when Faenia came home from work, she could slip off her work clothes, put on soft shoes and sink into a couch with a book, lamplight warming her home.

  And Nic’s home – if Nic wanted it. But Nic wasn’t brave enough to take the step, to walk out of the façade of a complicated life.

  ‘Dearest Isobel,’ wrote Faenia,

  ‘Thank you for news. I still can’t get my head around it all, to be honest. I knew it was coming and yet so much has been going on here at work and everything. But Eddie turning seventy – how did that happen? It seems like only yesterday we were kids playing round the back of Lady Margaret’s orchard in Lisowen, stealing crab apples and hoping nobody knew because Lady Margaret, for all that she let the crab apples rot on the avenue, would have had a fit if she knew we’d stolen them. I do feel sorry for her now: her whole world was changing. At the time, we hated her, remember? She was rich, we were poor: it was all so simple in our heads. When nothing’s simple, is it?

  I don’t know what I’d do without your telling me all the gossip – I’d know nothing. Although, it seems so distant to me now. Lisowen, Eddie, Mick, Kit and Nora. From another world and another life. Do you ever feel that?’

  Faenia broke off the email at that point, feeling stupid.

  Isobel, who’d been to the tiny, wooden-framed school with her in Lisowen all those years ago, would not feel the same at all. Isobel had stayed in Kerry and had married a man who’d gone on to be a police sergeant in Lisowen itself, which gave her an interesting view into the inner workings of a busy Kerry tourist spot.

  It also meant Isobel had had to remain on the outskirts of things. She could be involved but people didn’t always tell her things as she was considered an unpaid part of the police force.

  The person who asked how Isobel was feeling was her long-time friend so many thousands of miles away, the friend who’d reached out to her from New York all those years ago because Faenia knew Isobel would never tell anyone, that her secret would be safe.

  There was a comfort, Faenia knew, in telling someone you never saw so many personal things. An email to an old friend in another country was like therapy without the 170-dollar price tag – one could be straightforward and honest, knowing the person you were writing to would not meet the other parties described, knowing there would be no judgement. Just kindness, understanding and the odd comment of such clarity that it cut through hours of meaningless chatter from other people.

  And yet, Faenia could not say everything, not any more.

  Thirty years before, she’d told Isobel, via the flimsy paper of an airmail letter, that her marriage to Chuck had broken up and the hideous irony of why.

  Years later, when Isobel and Faenia herself had thought she was married to her job, she’d revealed how surprising and wonderful it had been to meet the much-older Marvin, and how they’d married in a civil ceremony that made it easier to meld Jewish and lapsed Catholic faiths. She’d written, when email had eventually taken over, about Marvin’s adult children and grandchildren and what a joy they were in her life.

  She’d written about Marvin’s inexorable decline into dementia, how that cruel disease made her feel like a widow for four years before she’d actually become one, how she’d cared for Marvin with such love, how her heart had broken when he’d had to go into full-time care.

  And she’d written about the shock of his death, how she’d slowly come out of the ache of widowhood from a marriage that had for months been in name only with a man who would smile that familiar smile at her in the care home and say: ‘Who are you?’ when she’d visit. She went every day: it was only right. Marvin had cared for her and her last act of kindness to him had to be caring for him.

  In the same way, Isobel had written and later emailed about the goings-on of Lisowen, of her own family and why her daughter was still going out with that lout who ran the tour bus company.

  ‘I can’t say it to anyone else, Faenia, in case she finds out that I hate him but he won’t ever marry her, she’s stone mad about him and her fertile years have practically slipped away waiting for him.’

  Faenia, who worked in a chic downtown department store as the personal shopper to the rich women of San Francisco, had seen many of her staff and many of her clients caught in the same trap.

  All the arguing and convincing in the world could never convince these women that their man – the man they adored – might one day leave them for a younger woman when their chance of babies was gone.

  ‘He loves me. We need each other!’ they’d say to Faenia, starkly elegant in her work uniform of Marc Jacobs dark tailored pants – the
best for small, slender women – crisp white shirt, a cotton blend with stretch added for all the racing around the store she did all day, and a piece of giant costume jewellery like one of her Navajo silver and turquoise pieces.

  With her urchin-cut silver-white hair that clung to that fine-boned face, that air of wisdom, of having seen, Faenia was considered a guru on all things, not just which blouse would work with which jacket for which event or should couture be considered for a society wedding. Her clients told her things, asked her things.

  But even then, the lovely young women never listened. Neither did women of nearly forty, like Isobel’s daughter.

  She told Isobel this: ‘There is almost nothing you can do, Isobel. Except tell her how you feel, just once. And explain that you are there for her, always, no matter what.’

  Wisdom was so easy to pass on – much harder to practise.

  If only she could practise some wisdom about Nic.

  This was the love story she’d waited all her life for without actually knowing she was waiting or what she was waiting for. She’d met Nic when she was sixty and it had been like the clouds had parted and shone rays of divine sunlight upon this glorious late romance.

  Had shone. Past tense.

  If they couldn’t be together, then she didn’t want a half-hearted relationship. Faenia was too old to do anything half-hearted now.

  The eighteen-year-old child who’d come to America was long gone, her wide-eyed innocence a thing of the past. In her place was a sophisticated woman who would hardly be recognised in her hometown.

  ‘I have some time due to me at work,’ Faenia typed, which was an understatement, as she had weeks of holidays stored over the twenty years she’d worked at the store, a job for which she’d been headhunted from Bergdorf’s in New York.

  ‘It will be strange to come back to Ireland after so long. They’ll have cardiac arrests if they see me after so many years. I keep thinking the past is best left in the past and that Ed will have to be seventy without me. And how do I explain …?’

  She knew that Isobel would email back that explanations were useless, that people forgot about the past and only worried about themselves.

  Faenia stopped typing, thinking sadly of so many things lost in those years since she’d left Lisowen. She had lived far more of her life away from Lisowen than in it. She was American now, had a US passport, had completed the citizenship exam.

  Her accent no longer made people look at her strangely: she spoke with the cadences of a well-travelled American woman.

  But she could still see her birth home in her mind’s eye: the tiny town, with great swathes of green, shades of glorious trees bent by the Atlantic, rocky fields leading down to the darkening sea, and the stone monolith of the castle standing feudally over it all, the small farms scattered around like windfall apples dropped from a great tree.

  In another era, the castle had belonged to some powerful lord and not much had changed when Faenia had been a child apart from the powerful owner. This time, no warrior lord stood in the keep and looked over people who could die on his word: instead, the grand, if impoverished Villiers family owned the castle, both a part of and not a part of the small village.

  Faenia had been a different person growing up in the Kerry coast: innocent, stupid perhaps, and more trusting.

  Information was certainly power.

  Her life in America had helped her grow up and her whole life was here: her beloved stepchildren, Lola and Marc, and their families. The friends she’d made over the years, her friends from work, her work itself which she adored.

  She had built a life here and she was thinking of dropping out of it to visit a country that had not treated her well so long ago.

  But the fight with Nic – ‘I can’t do it, Faenia, I can’t move in. It would kill the kids if I left’ – had left her shattered.

  This from an adult with adult children who had their own lives. It was an excuse and Faenia had grown weary of excuses.

  The Claddagh ring Nic had given her sat in front of the keyboard because she’d taken it off to put cream on her hands. Funny how hands showed your age. Your skin could be discreetly firmed up on your face thanks to the gentle caress of dermal fillers but the hands so often gave it all away: liver spots, skin as crêpey as an old gown, veins like snakes. Faenia had tried to take care of her hands, but still they gave away her age like nothing else about her, the Irish skin coming to the fore with its paleness and tendency towards sun spots.

  She was a California sixty, which was the same as fifty anywhere else, as long as you stayed out of the sun and took care of all the beautiful dermatology work that had cost a fortune.

  The ring Nic had given her gleamed at her. It was the prettiest Claddagh ring Faenia had ever seen: white gold, delicate and with a sheeny opal stone shining iridescently in place of the traditional heart.

  With a traditional Irish Claddagh ring, one wore it with the apex of the heart towards oneself if one was attached and away from oneself, and on the right hand, if one was not.

  A handy way for people long ago to tell who was affianced and who was not.

  It was time to wear it away from her heart, Faenia thought, wanting to cry and not letting herself.

  Or maybe she should not wear it at all any more. Maybe she should go home for the grand birthday party in Lisowen just to get away.

  She’d visited so much of the world over the years but had never gone back to Ireland. It had felt too painful. How could she tell them what had happened, about all the mistakes she’d made …?

  And yet with Nic gone from her life – and there was no doubt, Nic was gone – perhaps this was her chance to visit her homeland and make peace with the past.

  One

  ‘A diamond is a chunk of coal that

  did well under pressure.’

  Henry Kissinger

  In London, Cari Brannigan kicked the door of the empty office shut with one of her killer heels and went over to the window where she stared out at the imposing metropolitan skyline.

  Most of the time, the view from Cambridge Publishing, a whole building housing a veritable pantheon of imprints, made Cari feel proud to be part of such an organisation.

  Right now, she just wondered if the windows were plate glass or not and if there was a TV set anywhere on this floor full of books and conference rooms so she could fling the TV out, just to watch it ricochet fifteen floors down as if she were Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin or some wild rock band hellbent on 1970s-style destruction.

  Half an hour ago, she’d thought she had a good career, a brilliant career for a thirty-four-year-old woman on the verge of total breakthrough with the possibility of moving to London from the Irish division – a move she’d never considered possible three years before when everything about her life had fallen apart because of The Break Up.

  Cari called it The Break Up in her mind because Wedding Called Off at the Altar made her feel like such a loser, as if Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle would fight to the death to go through the grisly details on TV: ‘And you didn’t have a clue your fiancé was cheating on you till you were standing at the altar in your dress …?’

  ‘No!’ the TV Cari would have sobbed and then launched herself at Bastard/Barney and ripped his eyes or other important bits out with her gel nails – she’d need gel nails, right? – in front of a chanting audience telling her to ‘Get him, girl!’

  Post The Break Up, everything in her life had felt hellish, but she’d clambered her way out thanks to work, finding a fabulous author, the author who meant that career wise she was finally on top of the world.

  She’d won Editor of the Year at the prestigious trade industry awards. Her author was one of the company’s top three authors in terms of both earnings and prizes won.

  Next stop: Cari Brannigan moving to London to take a higher-up job as publisher which would mean leaving her family and her cousin Jojo, who was her best friend: the people who’d helped her through her pain. But there was a
position open in the company, and she was tipped to take over the job, desperate for it …

  And then, just twenty minutes ago, another man had tripped her career plans up as neatly as if he’d dumped her at the altar. Which was why the idea of throwing something or someone out of the glassy Cambridge building was so tempting.

  Cari had been sitting at the monthly sales and editorial meeting of the Xenon imprint along with lots of other editors and five of the Irish team who’d flown over from Dublin that morning on the red-eye. She should have been listening to the presentation about the heartbreaking new non-fiction title the rights department had bought from a Swedish agent – a tale of animal cruelty and how one scarred fighting dog had changed the lives of several hardened criminals.

  Instead, and this was weird because she loved dogs, she’d found herself thinking about what sort of apartment she’d get when she moved to London. Cool loft? Quirky mews. A houseboat, even? Or a swish apartment she could decorate in classic New York style with an all-white bathroom with those subway tiles? All rented, obviously: no way she could afford to buy anything. Her cousin Paul and his wife, Lena, had just such a New York-style apartment in Manhattan and Cari loved it.

  She was getting better, she decided. She was recovering, coming out of the last stage of grief – what was it: raging fury? Whatever. Cari had made up her own stages of grief, ones far more fun than the Kübler-Ross ones.

  Wanting to kill someone was first. Next up was buying shoes she couldn’t afford. She forgot what three was but four was misery-eating ice cream and promising never to touch a man again.

  Yes, she’d come through all those stages and had graduated with honours.

  A little twinkle of joy filled her. In London, she could shop for shoes all the time. Despite her coolly androgynous look – straight, mannish trousers, dark shirts to hide her D-cup breasts, minimal make-up and midnight-dark hair cut short and curving round a face emphasised with eyeliner and glossy nude lips – Cari Brannigan loved shoes. Soft leather. Teeny bows in surprising places, suede with narrow straps to wrap elegantly round her slender ankles, insane colours like from an artists’ palette: she loved them all. The higher the better.