Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [19]
Sadly all good things must come to an end. Work beckoned for both of us and we returned to our respective positions, me now with a new identity: Eleanor Cooper.
We also returned to the Neutral Bay flat for a time but it no longer seemed fitting for our married status and we started looking around to buy. The bridal magazines were unceremoniously tossed out and my new favourite reading material became the property section of the Sydney Morning Herald. I quickly became infected with that particularly Sydney contagion - an unhealthy obsession with real estate.
Every Saturday I would circle potential properties and head off with street directory in hand to visit open-for-inspections. When Tony was around he’d join me of course. Displaying an alarming inclination to recreate his childhood home, my husband was keen to buy a big period house we could renovate. The only trouble was a first officer’s salary wouldn’t quite stretch to cover a mortgage on a property near his parents’ home (an oil magnate’s salary would barely cover the cost of real estate in that suburb), so we had to lower our expectations and search less exclusive environs for our first family home. It remained Tony’s long-range plan to renovate our first property, make a killing and then move closer to his parents, but considering my relationship with his mother I was certainly in no hurry for the latter to eventuate - the further we lived away from her the better, as far as I was concerned.
After six months of disappointment, including missing out on some favoured properties at auction, we were eventually successful in securing our dream home, although I use the term loosely as it actually was a dump - an old four-bedroom pile in Annandale that had for some years been used as a boarding house and was in an appalling state of disrepair. However it was deemed to be structurally sound, as well as being located in a fashionable suburb close to the city and reasonably near to the airport (and Tony’s work). Annandale did have the disadvantage of being under the flight path but disadvantage is in the eye of the beholder: for Tony it meant he could gaze up on his first love at regular and all too frequent intervals.
There were few things I ever put my foot down about in my marriage, but I did refuse to move into that house until it had one decent bathroom (I was barely prepared to set foot in the existing mould-infested cesspit, let alone bathe in it) and a functional kitchen. That’s when Douglas came to the party and lent us some money. After rewiring the entire house, ripping up the carpet - impregnated with twenty years of cigarette smoke - and polishing the floorboards (which were in remarkably good nick), we ended up moving into a shambling pile with a bramble-infested garden which incongruously contained a single luxe bathroom and a glorious white and stainless-steel kitchen. I labelled them two glistening pearls in a barnacle-encrusted oyster.
Tony was determined to do all the rest himself. You’ll have probably guessed by now that he was not a ‘toss a bit of white paint on it and Bob’s your uncle’ kind of guy, but I found his whole approach to home renovation absolutely mesmerising. He was meticulous with everything: paint stripping, sanding, plastering, puttying, you name it. His mantra was ‘painting is ninety percent about preparation’. It took him months just to complete the first room - our bedroom. In fact, I don’t think I saw my husband at any time during those months when he was not covered with a thin film of paint and plaster.
When he proudly declared the bedroom finished, and brought me in to admire his handiwork, I said, ‘It’s magnificent, darling. And just think, when we die a premature and suffocating death from inhaling paint particles for twenty years, it’s comforting to know our last hours will be spent in very tasteful surrounds.’
‘Hardy ha, ha,’ he said, but he took my teasing good-naturedly. This was in the days when he still laughed