Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [114]
Anyway, if you’re wondering if I was tempted to tell Tony about Alex to get back at him the answer is an emphatic no, not for a second. It is not out of the question that we will have a custody dispute about Isabel sometime in the future, once Tony reaches that angry and bitter stage when he realises I’m really not coming back. It will be important for me to appear the innocent party then, the one with the clean sheet. Utterly dishonourable I know, but then I’ve never claimed to be a saint. That’s the sort of thing you do when the custody of your child is at stake.
Not that I’m expecting gratitude from that corner anytime soon. Isabel is severely pissed off with me. Four year olds can be much more sophisticated than adults give them credit for and I’m getting the silent treatment when she remembers. Right now she has the headphones on and her eyes fixed to the latest in-flight children’s entertainment. How can I possibly explain what’s happened to such an innocent? All she understands is that I have taken her away from her darling daddy. The whole thing is heartbreaking.
She loved her neatly ordered and unrushed life in Discovery Bay, too. All those years I never knew that she found the hectic to- and froing of her Sydney lifestyle so stressful. Realising I needed to make some adjustments, I rang up Issy’s old preschool and begged the director, Mrs Walker, for our place back, ideally full-time.
‘Well I do have one vacancy left but I had promised it to another family,’ she said.
‘Please, Isabel is very distressed at present. I’ve split from her father and I think she really needs to be amongst her old friends.’
‘Oh, your marriage has broken up has it? I was wondering. I suppose that’s the risk you take marrying a man like that. He must have had so many women chasing him.’
That woman - how dare she make assumptions like that, even if they did happen to be true? I briefly contemplated telling her to eff-off but in the end swallowed my pride and got the place, five days a week as I’d wanted. Those are the sacrifices we make.
We are going to stay with Mum and Dad for a while, Is and I. We both need some stability. My parents were totally floored when I told them and for the first time I regretted keeping the past a secret. Right now they are beyond angry with Tony, angrier than I am because it’s all news to them. They called up David in a rage and then he called me: ‘God I’m so sorry. You know, I always thought you were wrong for each other. I almost said so at the time but Amrita told me it wasn’t my place to interfere and you’d only get the shits with me.’
‘Amrita was right. I wouldn’t have listened to you. Anyway,’ I said, feeling a touch defensive, ‘we were together twelve years in all and have a beautiful daughter. It wasn’t that big a flop.’ Older siblings never lose their capacity to make you feel permanently eight years old.
As I’m sitting here, it has just occurred to me that I have quite novel bookends to my marriage. The first evening of my engagement I spent several hours vomiting over a toilet bowl and the evening I found out the full extent of my husband’s deception I was doing much the same. It would almost be funny but I’m discovering there is nothing funny about a marriage breakup. I’d imagined it so many times when things were at their lowest ebb, but I never imagined it would feel like this. Why couldn’t we have broken up when he was being cruel or indifferent to me, when Isabel was too young to comprehend? Instead it happened at a time when I’d been granted a glimpse of what my life might have been like if we hadn’t lost our dear little William that sad Olympic September over six years ago now.
Yeah, I’m feeling embarrassed and a little angry but mostly I’m just feeling sad.
‘Surely not so sad?’ I feel some of you are saying. What about Alex? Isn’t this my escape route, my get out of jail free card? I can go back to Sydney with my reputation intact and reclaim the man I have secretly been in love with all these months, the man behind the abduction of my heart. That’s what he asked