Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [9]
His job meant he was away a lot but that mostly suited me fine; it gave me more time to study for my degree and made his homecomings all the sweeter. I also loved telling people my boyfriend was a pilot. It spoke to me of a spirit of rugged adventurism, my brave and gallant explorer of the skies. Okay, so I was romanticising a wee bit, but that was my tendency in those days. Besides, Tony looked extremely hot in his uniform.
All that first year I expected Tony to wake up and realise he was going out with little ol’ me. It is pathetic to say this now but back then I even thought he could have done better. My husband is a strong, silent type (Mr Darcy come on down) - not a great one for unnecessary talk at the best of times and certainly not someone who is comfortable talking about personal issues. Knowing what I know now, I’d say the romance writers have got it wrong and this is an overrated stereotype. Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say, and it seems I have wasted years of my life filling in the void created by his silences with my fruitless thoughts and pointless speculations. So in those days whenever he was a bit quiet, or a bit cranky, or a bit distracted, I’d think, okay this is it, he’s met someone else and he’s going to dump me, but of course he never did.
The fact he never did became all the more remarkable to me when I got to know his mother, Pamela, well. And she definitely is a ‘Pamela’ (pronounced in short, breathy syllables), not a ‘Pam’ - no-one ever makes that mistake twice. Pamela is tall, blonde and elegant and both boys have inherited her good looks. Unfortunately she also holds copyright on the ‘mother-in-law from hell’ title.
I’m certainly no angel (a fact that will become obvious the further you read) but I do at least give each person I meet the benefit of the doubt and am inclined to like them until given good reason to do otherwise. However, the very first time I met Pamela she was hostile to me and nothing’s changed since. It’s not as if I ever gave her cause to be in those early days: I was too intimidated to say anything to Tony’s parents, let alone anything offensive (although she probably interpreted this as surliness on my part). I’m not sure she would have thought any woman truly worthy of her beloved eldest, but she made no attempt to disguise the fact she would have preferred a girl from their social circle, not some middle-class upstart with ideas above her station. No doubt she tried her damnedest to break us up back then.
I brought this up with David around this time, when he came back to Australia for his wedding to Amrita, but he claimed that Pamela had always been fine with him.
‘She probably thinks it’s okay to mix with the lower classes, just as long as we don’t interbreed,’ I grumbled.
‘Oh come on she can’t be that bad.’
‘I tell you she is.’
‘Well if it’s really that bad you may want to think about whether it’s worth it. Don’t get me wrong. Tony’s a good guy. But I’m not sure he’s the right guy for you.’
I was pretty annoyed with David about that. Never seek advice unless you want to hear the answer. Although it turned out he was right about at least one thing - and I’m embarrassed to admit it took me a long time to realise this - it was less about snobbery