Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [43]
But I managed to ‘push through’ and it became easier with each successive time - easier but not a whole lot more enjoyable. The other woman remained in the bed with us for a long while after that.
By this time Claire had started to give me the shits with her insistence that Tony was sabotaging my recovery so I started lying to her about the efforts he was making, thus rendering the whole exercise pointless. I canned our sessions, claiming I was now ‘okay’ (I’ll leave you to guess Claire’s opinion on that), and started having regular drinks with Melanie after work. I used the money I saved on Claire to pay for a cleaner, as Tony had by this time started criticising my housekeeping efforts again. The post-baby amnesty was well and truly over - apparently no allowances were to be made for the fact I had a small child and a demanding, almost full-time professional job. I thought we were living amongst the normal clutter of baby gear but in his eyes it was absolute squalor.
In the end he never showed genuine remorse for his actions. He never tried to beg for my forgiveness and say he was sorry for the hurt he caused. And I let him get away with it, in the fear that if I pushed him he would up and leave. I thought if I appeared to forgive him things might return to the way they were.
But they didn’t. I had lost respect for myself in the process and I think as a consequence he lost respect for me and started to treat me almost as badly as his mother did. I had been naïve to think that his judgementalism, his worship of perfection, would not turn on me one day. I had lost my looks, and I had lost his son and if he thought like that he could continue to justify what he had done.
During this time we were invited to dinner by Mark, Tony’s old flatmate. He’d given up his womanising ways, settled down and married Janelle, who turned out to be lean, tanned and elegant, with long brown hair. I wasn’t surprised to find that Mark had married a beauty but thought it might have been a bonus if she’d also had a personality. She cooked up the most amazing Indian spread, preparing everything - including the mango chutney and samosas - from scratch (I mean, who has time to do that?), but she spent the entire time dashing in and out of the kitchen and hardly contributed anything to the conversation at all. Janelle and Mark had also recently become parents of a baby daughter so when she kept still long enough I engaged her in chitchat about baby stuff.
It was the best night I’d had in a long time. Mark and I got on like a house on fire, as we always had, and it was the banter between the two of us that made the evening so lively. I was consciously hoping that Tony, seeing how much Mark enjoyed my company, might begin to look at me with more appreciative eyes again.
‘What a great night. We should invite them over for dinner at our place soon,’ I said on the way home.
‘No - it would be better to just go to a restaurant. There’s no way we can compete.’
‘What do you mean compete? The renovations mightn’t be finished but our house is still nice.’
‘But theirs is better and the meal that Janelle cooked up - amazing. You know I used to think his serial dating looked like far too much effort but maybe that’s the only way to be sure you’ve found the right woman. I sometimes regret not doing that myself. It’s not like I didn’t have lots of offers.’
The little grub clammed up and returned to its hole. Unfortunately he hadn’t finished yet.
‘And their baby is younger than Isabel yet you’d never know she’d just given birth. It just goes to show that if women care enough about their husbands they will make the effort.’
The evening had started so promisingly too.
Guess what Janelle did before she gave up work to have the baby? She was a flight attendant.
8
Counting my blessings
A marriage that had begun with a glittering reception by the harbour had descended to this: my husband telling me he wished he’d never handed me that ring. Why didn’t he leave me then? I can only assume he was staying for Isabel