Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [45]
‘Oh God,’ I groaned, ‘can’t Mum ever keep her mouth shut. I told her not to tell anyone.’ There are no secrets in my family where my mum is concerned.
‘Don’t get angry with her. She’s been very worried about you. And there’s no shame in having postnatal depression, you know. Amrita sees women with it all the time.’
According to the official family records of the time I was suffering from postnatal depression, but you all know what I really had was post-finding-out-your-husband-has-been-banging-another-woman depression. That was a secret Mum wasn’t in on and I decided then and there that she would never be told.
‘Anyway,’ I reassured him, ‘you don’t have to worry. I don’t drink much at all these days. It’s your fault for bringing the divine shiraz.’
The truth is I’d knocked back more than my usual share because I’d been sweating about Tony and David being in the same room together, in case the tension in my marriage became obvious, but Tony had turned on the charm all evening, reminiscing with his friend about their rugby days and such. ‘Life of the party Tony’ lasted right up until we got Isabel settled into the car and were preparing to drive off. Then he promptly clicked the ‘off’ switch. Silence.
It’s hard to explain why but his silences are actually intimidating. In the car I found myself temporarily mute. The spell was only broken when we arrived home and I ambushed him in the bathroom as he was brushing his teeth.
‘Would you prefer to be with her than me?’
‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, creasing his brow as he turned off his electric toothbrush.
‘Don’t act dumb - you heard me - your other woman of course.’
He stood there with his mouth shut. He was holding his toothbrush in a funny way, almost like it was a defensive weapon. It reminded me of something…a light sabre in fact. He was a brave Jedi knight, fighting off that most fearsome of enemies: the woman wanting to talk about ‘issues’.
I went on, ‘I mean I’m wondering if you are so keen to get the renovations done so we can sell the house and part company.’
‘No…I’m just sick of living in the house half-finished.’
‘It’s just that I’ve adjusted to the fact you no longer love me, but I’m beginning to feel you don’t even like me.’
‘I knew when you got stuck into the wine this was going to happen. When are you going to get over this? I’ve told you before that I am not planning to leave. We can talk about this again when you’re sober but I’m too tired to argue now.’
He must have been tired because he was already asleep when I climbed into bed a few minutes after him. Pretending to be someone you’re not for a whole evening is clearly exhausting. I tossed and turned most of that night, regretting that last glass of wine and trying not to think about the statements I’d left hanging in the air and whether his failure to respond to them had been deliberate or accidental.
***
We never did get around to having that conversation of course. I found myself as keen to avoid it as he was. With time I discovered that if I placed demands on him and wanted to talk about real issues he would become nasty and hypercritical but if I kept a low profile and restricted our conversations to domestic chitchat he was much easier to live with. The little grub in me much preferred the latter and thus I was complicit in us beginning to lead separate lives. Tony wasn’t around a lot, even when he was, and I found that if I was careful not to interfere with his plans and said yes to sex occasionally he stopped noticing me much at all.
The thing that hurt most was that his lack of interest extended to Isabel. A lot of men can be uninterested in babies as an abstract concept but once theirs comes along they’re in hook, line and sinker. That never happened with Tony. I think he loved her in a way but he never became the doting dad; you never saw him looking at her with eyes of the besotted, perplexed that others hadn’t acknowledged that his was the smartest, best-looking baby in the world. Superficially he appeared involved but I felt he was just doing what was expected