Happy Ever After Read online

  ‘Thank you,’ she said coolly. ‘My solicitor will be in touch.’

  She walked down the tiled stairs, half expecting him to come after her, but he didn’t. She heaved a sigh of relief. Her knees were trembling, and she felt sick, but she held her head high as she walked down the drive to the open gates. She knew he’d be looking out from their bedroom balcony, but she resolutely kept her eyes fixed ahead. She saw Karen’s car parked across the street, up a little to the right, and increased her speed. Connie got out and opened the back door. ‘You OK?’ she asked anxiously.

  Juliet nodded, unable to speak.

  ‘Get in,’ Connie said kindly, sliding in alongside her. Karen started the engine.

  ‘I told him I wanted a divorce.’ Juliet gripped Connie’s hand tightly.

  ‘Good woman yourself. Well done. Sometimes it’s the only route to go,’ Connie comforted.

  ‘How did he take it?’ Karen asked.

  ‘Badly.’ Juliet gave a shaky grin. ‘I know he doesn’t think I’ll go through with it but, if I don’t, I might as well give up now and go back to the villa.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Connie squeezed her hand.

  ‘As I told my soon-to-be-ex-husband, to go to the nudist beach and have Fun! Fun! Fun!’

  Karen laughed. ‘Juliet, if that’s what your little heart desires, we’re with you all the way. So will we go back to my place?’ She caught the other woman’s eye in her rear-view mirror.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Juliet said firmly. ‘Who says you need a man to live happy ever after? It’s my time now, and better late than never.’

  Ken walked slowly into the bedroom and loosened his tie. Juliet had not looked back as she walked out through the gates of the villa. He’d watched her, her shoulders straight and her head held high, stride purposefully away from him, and willed her to turn around, willed her to show some hesitation or uncertainty. She hadn’t. Not an ounce. Juliet seemed uncharacteristically sure of herself. He felt a shiver of apprehension. She wasn’t serious about wanting a divorce surely? Ken shook his head, and sat down on the bed, tie dangling from his hand.

  She’d said dreadful things to him. Called him a boor. Accused him of being arrogant, a bully. He looked around their tastefully furnished bedroom, all cool creams and pale blues. He’d provided all of this for her. Where was her gratitude? Her acknowledgement of his hard work? She knew better than anyone how stressful it was. Ken sighed and rubbed his hand across his stubbly jaw. Stress didn’t begin to describe it, these last few years. He was getting older; it was harder keeping up with new procedures, new technology. When he started off it was eyes and hands only. Now there were computers, lasers, keyhole this, pinhole that. The young bucks coming along in his wake were full of confidence, drive and ambition, just like he’d been thirty years ago.

  Once, he’d been a god on the wards, sweeping in to visit patients with a respectful entourage scurrying behind him. When the nuns ran the hospitals, the consultant had been elevated to lofty heights never again attained since the arrival of managers, and health ministers who had no respect, and the damn HSE, which was trying to turn them into lackeys.

  When the nuns ran hospitals there was no MRSA, there were no dirty wards or crowded, filthy A&Es, or cardiac patients being given cholesterol-laden, fat-dripping fry-ups for tea. He was a dinosaur now, living in the past, wishing for the past to return. He had had his day. Did Juliet not realize how difficult it was to keep up his air of invincibility? Patients needed the reassurance that they were in a safe pair of hands. His air of command and confidence reassured them. He needed it himself to keep going. It wasn’t about being a boor, he thought indignantly, it was about self-protection.

  He shouldn’t have launched off at her in front of those two women, he reflected guiltily. He’d embarrassed her. He should have held his fire, but patience had never been a strong point with him. She knew that.

  He got up and went downstairs, and poked in the fridge looking for a cool drink. He opened a can of tonic water and drank it thirstily. His wife had looked at him with scorn and derision in her eyes. That was hard to endure. Ken mooched out on to the terrace and sat at the table where they had been eating, the remnants of their meal still there.

  Where was Juliet getting all this psychobabble? Enabling . . . where had she heard that? He grimaced. Too much bloody Dr Phil. That’s what was wrong with her and half the women in the country. They had too much time to sit and watch silly so-called self-help rubbish. He stretched out and raised his face to the sky. Dusk had tamed the blistering sun, and the shadows were lengthening over the lawn as the cicadas chirruped and the sea sang its lullaby to the shore. It was peaceful, and he was tired – tired and worried. He’d never seen Juliet like this. She seemed adamant about wanting a divorce. She was mad. It couldn’t be a worse time to divorce, with a recession threatening and all.

  Would she want the house sold? They could lose up to three hundred thousand, or more, if they put it on the market now. They wouldn’t be able to give away the villa. All he’d seen on his journey from the airport were ‘Se Vende’ signs. She’d want half his pensions, his investments. A colleague of his had recently been divorced and was now living, alone, in a two-bedroom apartment in Glasnevin, when he’d once lived in a detached five-bedroomed house in Howth. The ex-wife was living in an apartment in Clontarf and playing golf every day, with not a worry in the world.

  Was that where he’d end up – alone in some glasshouse apartment, having to suffer the indignity of communal living and management-committee meetings? Ken shuddered. It couldn’t come to that. Someone would have to talk sense to her.

  Ken sat for a long time in the cool of the Mediterranean evening, pondering his life, weary to his bones. There was one thing he was certain of: if Juliet left him, he didn’t know what he’d do. For the first time in all their married life, he was beginning to realize just what a sterling wife she’d been. He might have been the provider, but she’d been his bedrock. He’d ring Aimee in the morning. Juliet had a high regard for their daughter. Perhaps she’d listen to her. It was imperative that Aimee talk sense to her mother, he decided, as he made his lonely way to bed, full of self-pity, wondering could anyone be quite as miserable as he was this moonlit, star-filled night.

  ‘It couldn’t be that much!’ Bryan stared at Debbie aghast. ‘It just couldn’t be.’

  ‘It is, Bryan. Fifty-five thousand euro more or less, and that’s not counting our mortgage. If you go there, we’re three hundred and fifty thousand in debt. We’ve got to cut back and start making inroads on the payments, or we’re in serious trouble,’ she insisted. ‘We’ve got to get rid of the car and get something less expensive—’

  ‘Oh come on, Debbs, it’s our only little luxury. What do you expect me to drive around in – a Mini?’ he protested sulkily.

  ‘There you go, you see – you won’t even face up to our problems. So what if we have to drive around in a smaller car? At least we’ll be reducing our debt,’ Debbie said heatedly. They were sitting at their small dining table, and each of them had a spreadsheet detailing the amount they owed.

  ‘This is crazy,’ Bryan muttered. ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘Believe it,’ Debbie said grimly. ‘For starters, the car’s going. I’m not going on that hen weekend, and we’re not staying overnight if we go to that wedding. You can hire a monkey suit; I’ll wear something I’ve worn before. No more meals out or drink and drug binges with Kevin Devlin—’

  ‘You see? You were the one who wanted to buy a house and get married – we could have waited, Debbie. Could have rented an apartment and lived together without all this hassle,’ Bryan exploded. ‘This isn’t what I wanted, it’s what you wanted. We should never have got married. We haven’t had a minute’s peace since we bought this house and started planning for the wedding. And now I’m the one suffering. It’s just not on. I’m going to bed.’ He stalked out of the room and pounded up the stairs, leaving Debbie staring after him in frustration
.

  There was no answer to his accusations. It was just as she had feared: Bryan was putting all the blame on her. Her lip wobbled, and she buried her head in her hands and burst into tears.

  Bryan yanked the tie from around his neck, rolled it in a ball and flung it across the bedroom. He was furious with Debbie. He’d come back from his mother’s in great form. Brona had cooked him a scrumptious dinner, made a huge fuss over him and, when he’d confided that he was skint, she’d told him that she’d give him 3,000 euro towards paying off his credit card – the credit card that Debbie knew nothing about, and which she’d not included in their outstanding debt calculations.

  He’d come home and felt he’d been ambushed when she’d insisted that they sit down at their dining table and given him that damn spreadsheet. Looking at the figures in black and white had been a sobering moment. They might as well be paupers. Their house was no longer an asset. They were in negative equity with it as it was, so selling wasn’t an option. There was nothing they could do except cut down on expenses and start paying off their loans.

  The good life was over. And, if this was marriage, he knew he wasn’t going to stick it out. Bryan got undressed and threw himself under the duvet. He’d fallen for Debbie because he thought she understood him; she’d always given him a lot of leeway, just like his mother. That was until he’d married her, he thought bitterly. Now he might as well be married to Connie, for all the bossing around he was getting:

  ‘We can’t do this.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Sell the car!’

  It wasn’t his fault there was a bloody recession. Why should he have to suffer? Bryan had never felt so trapped in his life. And, this time, not even his mother could get him out of the mess he was in.

  ‘When I married Ken, I married a replica of my father. He was authoritative, controlling, self-obsessed, just like my husband. And my mother behaved just as I did, putting all his needs first and fading into the background. Isn’t it amazing, when you actually stop to think about it, how we constantly repeat old patterns?’ Juliet remarked to Connie and Karen as they sat chatting in the balmy moonlight. It was well after midnight.

  ‘I understand that very well. Bryan is somewhat similar to what Barry was like when he was young – restless and not eager for responsibility. I did try to warn Debbie and suggest they postpone their wedding, but she didn’t want to hear what I was saying, and I think that she pushed him to get married,’ Connie confessed. ‘And that’s just what I did, so she’s repeating my pattern, if you look at it like that,’ she agreed ruefully. ‘I worry about them, to be honest. Their generation has had it so easy financially that I think there’re going to be a lot of troubled marriages now that the boom times are over and belts have to be tightened.’

  ‘Oh dear, I hope not,’ Juliet murmured.

  ‘Everyone has to learn from their own mistakes, unfortunately, and you’re right, scrimping and saving won’t come easy to the Celtic-tiger babes.’ Karen shrugged. ‘But at least the days of staying in a bad marriage are gone, even though it’s also true that a lot of young people give up at the first hurdle nowadays, and I suppose women are much more financially independent – they can get mortgages on their own, so that’s why it’s easier for them to walk away.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d get a mortgage at my age. I’ll have to pay cash for anything I buy and, although the mortgages are paid on our house and the villa here, we’ll lose out because of the slump in prices.’ Juliet looked troubled. Worry and anxiety had crept back into her face, folding back into the lines around her eyes and mouth. The carefree woman of a few hours previously had vanished.

  ‘I know it’s a bad time to be selling property, but the balance to it is that it’s a good time if you’re buying,’ Karen pointed out as she filled three glasses with wine and handed Connie and Juliet one each. They were sitting on her wide terracotta fifth-floor balcony overlooking the sea. An almost-full moon shone silver streamers of light on to the rippling pewter water that surged softly against the shore. A cruise ship on the horizon sailed along the coast of Africa, lights strung from its mast, like a floating Christmas tree.

  ‘It’s a great time to buy,’ Juliet agreed. ‘Ideally, I’d go for a small apartment or townhouse in Sandycove or Glasthule. I’d like to be on the Dart and near the sea. This is so peaceful, Karen,’ she remarked, sipping the chilled golden chardonnay gratefully.

  ‘That would be handy for you as well for visiting Aimee and the children,’ Karen observed, handing around a dish of mixed nuts. ‘I suppose you’ll want to be back home in Ireland when she has the baby.’

  ‘Children . . . the baby?’ Juliet looked puzzled.

  Karen’s jaw dropped, and she flashed a look of consternation at Connie. ‘Sorry, Juliet, I assumed you knew – um . . . Aimee’s expecting, but . . . but she probably didn’t want to say anything until the three months are up,’ she said sheepishly.

  ‘And how did you know?’ Juliet asked, bewildered. ‘You’d think she would have told her own mother.’ She couldn’t disguise the hurt that flickered in her eyes.

  ‘Melissa let it slip, and I told Karen,’ Connie explained hastily. ‘She only found out on Saturday, because that was the day I met Melissa in Dun Laoghaire, and Aimee had just taken the test, apparently; otherwise I’d never have known. Don’t feel bad about it, Juliet,’ she urged, conscious of the other woman’s injured feelings. ‘It really was due to a slip of the tongue that I found out. I’m sure Aimee will tell you in her own good time.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think she’d be too happy about being pregnant after all this time.’ Juliet frowned. ‘She told me she didn’t want any more children after Melissa was born. She’s going to be most put out, I’d say.’

  ‘It’s tough if that’s the case,’ Connie said diplomatically.

  ‘The Davenport women are having a hard time of it, it seems,’ Juliet said glumly. ‘But at least Aimee is happy in her marriage. Barry is a very supportive husband.’

  Connie refrained from comment. ‘Happy’ was not the adjective she would use to describe her ex’s marriage, or his state of mind. Karen offered around the nuts again.

  ‘Oh . . . that was a bit thoughtless. I’m sorry, Connie,’ Juliet said contritely, realizing to whom she was talking.

  ‘Nothing to be sorry about at all,’ Connie assured her kindly. ‘Barry and I are water under the bridge for a long time now.’

  ‘But it must have been hard on you, all the same,’ Juliet murmured, mortified at her faux pas.

  ‘It was at the time but, honestly, Juliet, it all worked out very well, and it’s wonderful that Melissa and Debbie are becoming close. That’s the best thing to come out of it all.’

  ‘You’re a good person, Connie.’ Juliet smiled at her.

  ‘Right back at ya!’ Connie raised her glass.

  ‘I suppose no one knows better than you what a big step divorce is. Am I mad, I wonder?’

  ‘One thing I will say, Juliet, is that divorce is easier on the person who initiates it, especially if it’s against the other person’s wishes. But, having said that, and it was Barry who left me, looking back, he was the one who had the courage to recognize that we weren’t working. I would have endured the misery for a lot longer, I think. There’s always light at the end of every tunnel, and being on your own is far preferable to being stuck in a miserable marriage – that’s what I’ve learned from it all. It also brought out strengths I didn’t know I possessed. I’m the woman I am now because of my divorce. And I’m happy with myself.’

  ‘Well, Connie, you should be proud of yourself. I stayed because it was easier, and I lost my self-respect, and that’s an awful place to be.’

  ‘Might he change his ways now that you’ve given him something to think about?’ Karen asked.

  ‘That might take a miracle.’ Juliet gave a wry smile. ‘And I’m not sure I believe in them.’ She yawned discreetly behind her hand. ‘I think I’ll go to bed, if you don’t m
ind. It’s been a long day.’

  ‘Sleep well, Juliet,’ Connie said warmly.

  ‘Thanks for everything. I’m sure neither of you came on holidays to get sucked into my marital woes.’

  ‘Don’t give it a second thought. Glad to be of help,’ Karen said as she led the way into the apartment and down to the cool air-conditioned bedroom where Juliet had already left her bag and nightdress. ‘Make yourself at home, Juliet, and sleep well.’ Karen pulled the pale lilac curtains across the French doors and turned down the matching bedspread. ‘If you want to make tea at any time, go right ahead.’

  ‘I will. Goodnight, Karen, and thanks again for your hospitality.’

  Juliet sank wearily on to the side of the bed as the other woman shut the door quietly behind her. Her head was beginning to ache, and she searched her handbag for a packet of Nurofen.

  What a day, she reflected as she undressed and pulled her cotton nightdress over her head. One thing was sure, she decided as she slid between the cool, crisp sheets, she was leaving Ken. If he didn’t want a divorce, she’d agree to a legal separation. She wouldn’t be marrying again and, she felt pretty sure, neither would he. Women wouldn’t put up with his type any more.

  Her children would be surprised, she thought with a wry smile as she switched out the light and lay in the blessed comfort of darkness, Aimee more than any of them. Her thoughts turned to her daughter. It had been a shock to learn that she was pregnant. Knowing her as well as she did, Juliet knew that Aimee must be utterly dismayed at the prospect of having to look after a new baby. It would tie her down enormously. How ironic that, while she was looking forward to a future of liberation and becoming her own woman, her daughter would be tightly bound by motherhood and all it entailed. Juliet drifted off to sleep, comforted by the fact that she had reclaimed her self-respect and her dignity, and made two good friends in the process.

  ‘That was a day and a half,’ Karen murmured as she came back out on to the balcony and sat down on the lounger beside Connie. ‘Trust me to open my big mouth about the baby. I wasn’t thinking. Sorry about that,’ she apologized.