Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [14]
‘Yeah well, she has put on a bit of weight since I last saw her but nothing’s as simple as you say. Tracey is overweight for lots of personal reasons that I’m not at liberty to divulge. Some things are not just a case of diet and exercise.’
‘But she has a pretty face. If she lost the pork she’d have a chance of meeting some guys.’
‘Tracey isn’t interested in meeting guys,’ I said.
‘Oh, that explains it.’
No, that didn’t explain anything. I shut up and sulked the rest of the way home.
***
Tracey was not the only one of my friends who didn’t make the cut with Tony. There was also my wild child, dope-smoking, nose-ring wearing friend Heidi. Fortunately I was not the sort of girl who cut herself off from her friends to please her boyfriend. I just sidelined them. After all Tony was away so much I could still see them, just not when he was around.
Did any of this cause me to reflect on the wisdom of marrying him? Absolutely not - I was in love. And it’s not like there weren’t upsides: he was completely reliable, he was rarely drunk or hung over and you certainly never had to nag him to replace the toilet roll. I hadn’t found he was addicted to alcohol or drugs or gambling, or discovered gay porn magazines under the bed or returned home from work one day to find him prancing around in my lacy knickers and suspenders. Compared with the things other women have to put up with, a few control issues seemed very small beer, and certainly not likely to be marriage-threatening.
Funny thing is I turned out to be wrong about that.
It wasn’t as if Tony didn’t know that things could go wrong - after all he’s spent hours of his life in the flight simulator practising procedures for when they do - but I think he thought you could always fix things, that ultimately we have control over our own destiny. Unfortunately that’s not true. Fate sometimes steps in, as we were only too painfully going to find out. If I was to identify a single factor that lay at the heart of all our subsequent marriage problems that would be it.
But that was all in the future, so let’s get back to the cheerier topic of weddings.
And weddings there were, several of them. One by one Tony’s friends started pairing off and making the big commitment. There was rarely a weekend, if Tony was in town, when we were not dispatched off to some historic stone church or a quaint chapel in the country to witness the nuptials of one of his school friends. I developed a close personal relationship with the lady at the David Jones wedding gift registry as a result. I loved all of this: the dressing up to the nines, the food and wine, the nights spent snuggling together in old double beds in country pubs and the fact that I was invariably on the arm of the best looking man in the room, but after a time I did start to get a bit restless. Was it ever going to be my turn?
Work was going well for me by then. I was still not in marketing but had been promoted, which meant I had to travel around Australia quite a bit myself, supervising a big trial of our new blood pressure lowering drug. I got to know a few cardiologists, which (although I didn’t know it at the time) was going to hold me in good stead later on, and even was able to check in regularly on David, who was back in Australia by this time and newly installed as a specialist in Adelaide. His wife Amrita had recently given birth to their first child, a spikey-haired tot called Thomas, whom I loved to bounce on my knee. So all in all, life was going swimmingly, if not for my little marital itch that wanted scratching.
And while I remained ringless, Pamela remained hopeful. She had no compunction about mentioning to Tony that she’d met so and so’s ‘very attractive’ daughter.
‘Yes Mum, but I already have a girlfriend in case you hadn’t noticed,’ he’d always say patiently.
Then one day she breathlessly announced - right in front of me, no less - that Sarah was back in town, and apparently ‘still single’.
‘So?’ said Tony, ‘Why should