Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [0]
So she married her handsome prince
and they lived happily ever after
1. New place, new life
2. One enchanted evening
3. A fairytale wedding
4. The prince and princess find their dream castle
5. One sunny day in September
6. The joys of motherhood
7. Punch drunk
8. Counting my blessings
9. A lucky scrape
10. The mysterious stranger
11. A weekend by the seaside
12. Motive and opportunity
13. Stepping over
14. The rules of engagement
15. Madness and possession
16. A night at the Opera House
17. A fork in the road
18. Glass slippers and unlikely fairy godmothers
19. Discovering the Bay
20. The Year of the Fire Pig
21. The flight
22. House hunting
Epilogue
Real Epilogue
Reviews
About the author
Acknowledgements
To my wonderful boys: J, M, N and S.
So she married her handsome prince and they lived happily ever after.Ever noticed how many fairytales end with that line? Sort of unsatisfactory, really. All the interesting things that happen to our heroines - evil stepmothers, being locked in towers, coaches made from pumpkins - and then nothing? Well, nothing but dull and happy domesticity they’d lead us to believe. Was I the only young girl who wondered what happened after that: when the curtains fell, when the credits rolled? Did the princess have her own palace? How many children did she have? Did the handsome prince ascend to the throne and, if so, did our heroine turn out to be a wise and fair queen? Were there anxious times when the prince had to fight a fire-breathing dragon, go to battle, or perhaps almost succumb to the charms of a comely lady-in-waiting? These were the questions that occupied my impressionable mind.
Lately I’ve had cause to think back to these fairytales - or at least all the girlie ones - and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s only really ‘Cinderella’ that does it for me.
The one I really couldn’t get into was ‘Snow White’. That thing about her living with the seven dwarfs was a bit weird, I think. I don’t doubt the handsome prince was okay with this initially but what happened when they’d been married a few years and the first heady glow of romance had dimmed a bit? Did he ever wonder what Snow White and the dwarfs got up to on those long, cold, winter nights? I imagine that might have provoked some awkward conversations…Oh, and I never liked her hair. It may well have been as black as ebony but in my opinion she could certainly have done with the services of a better stylist.
While we’re on the topic of hair, what about poor old Rapunzel? Imagine the trouble she had to go through to keep hers shiny and bouncy and prince-snaringly good. ‘No time for sex this week dear, I’ve got to wash my hair again.’ Living under the sea, every day would have been a bad hair day for the Little Mermaid. Sleeping Beauty was better but even she had to wait a hundred years before her man came along. I’m all in favour of toy boys but I think that age difference may have told after a while. And let’s not get started on ‘The Princess and the Pea’ - I can only wonder what Hans Christian Andersen was smoking the day he thought that one up.
No, Cinderella was the only girl who ever appealed to me. For a start, she’s usually portrayed as a blonde, like myself. And she definitely gets to wear the best clothes - not unlike ‘Pretty Woman’ but without the tacky sex worker bit - designer ball gown and coordinated accessories all at the touch of a wand.
So okay, I’m being deliberately silly here. ‘Flippant’ is the word my mother would use: ‘Eleanor, you’re being flippant again’. She could present a convincing argument too. What follows is a serious story of love, loss and betrayal and I’ve chosen to introduce it with a series of tongue-in-cheek observations about the relative merits of our fairytale heroines.
Then again, I’m not sure that is so wrong. Isn’t everyone’s life like that: equal parts comedy and tragedy?
Anyway, there is a serious point to this. The difference between Cinderella and most of these other girls is that they were already princesses, so by marrying a handsome