Other People's Marriages

by Kerry Fisher

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Steph has spent decades building a family with her husband Mal and putting their family first. She is the glue that holds them all together and she has convinced herself that she’s been happy … most of the time. But as she stands at her birthday party watching her husband talking about a wonderful marriage she doesn’t fully recognise, the doubts that she has been pushing down for so long begin to grow … After the party, as Steph tries to gather her courage to leave Mal, she receives a letter from her old friend Evie. Steph hasn’t spoken to Evie since a sunny weekend on a holiday beach 20 years earlier, when the two friends said things to each other that could never be unsaid. And now, Evie is seeking a reunion and a way to repair the friendship. But this reunion threatens to reveal a secret that could destroy two families.

Release date: July 16, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

There’s a special sort of melancholy that comes with big milestone birthdays. All that was, could have been and might now never be. The crippling clarity that if there’s something you want to do, you’d better crack on because the sand is pouring through the egg timer at an alarming rate and now is still possible, but never is infinitely more likely.

And at my sixtieth birthday party with my husband of thirty-seven years, making a speech to a large gathering of my nearest and dearest, I could no longer silence the thought that had started as a low-level hum five years ago and was now reaching swarming bee proportions. If I said it out loud, the men in the room would clear their throats and mutter about needing a top-up. The women would fall into two categories: those for whom the big wide yonder without a husband bankrolling their handbags would be a wild west of peril and those who’d cheer and hop into the back of the pick-up truck in search of one final escapade.

I glanced at my closest friend, Teresa, who was standing next to me holding hands with her husband, Paul. They were both apparently fascinated by Mal’s five hundred and fiftieth retelling of how his ‘feisty’ wife had come to his attention on New Year’s Eve in Trafalgar Square in 1978. ‘It has to be said that Steph’s chat-up line was quite original: “Can you give me a leg-up so I can climb up here and take a photo?” I didn’t realise that woman clinging to a monument, drunkenly waving her Kodak camera, would eventually become my wife.’

I remembered it clearly, despite the excess consumption of Oranjeboom lager that night. Mal had helped me up amidst much giggling and I’d hung on with one arm, snapping pictures of the Christmas trees and the crowds. He kept shouting at me to hold on tightly, but I’d felt invincible, daring and free, twenty years old, with life stretching ahead of me like a conveyor belt of adventures to choose from.

Thank God I hadn’t known that forty years later, New Year’s Eve would be a negotiation about who was bringing the cheeseboard and whether a cab at 12.30 a.m. was too late.

I imagined blurting out what I was thinking. Paul would furrow his brow as he often did when he wasn’t sure whether I was joking. Teresa would most likely tell me I needed a good night’s sleep or that it was the champagne talking and things would look different in the morning. Even after all these years of friendship, holding each other’s heads above the surface through the rip tide of motherhood, I wasn’t sure Teresa understood my inability to settle, to accept the status quo. Restlessness still stalked me and made me both reckless and brave. She’d just think my expectations were unreasonable, that I hadn’t grown up.

Evie might have understood, despite her own baffling decisions. She’d be sixty next Thursday too. Evie. My gorgeous, glamorous friend. I still missed her.

I pulled my attention back to Mal, who was now making an overstretched analogy between my love of gardening and my alter ego as a Venus flytrap, snapping at anything that got too close.

Teresa nudged me. ‘Aren’t you making a speech?’

‘Nah. I don’t think people want loads of speeches, do they? More interested in eating and drinking.’

‘They might not want them from anyone else, but the ones you make are hilarious. Highlight of my night.’

I loved Teresa for always finding me funny. Because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made my family laugh. I’d wanted to say a few words. I’d never bought into the idea that speeches were the domain of men, that brides should sit nicely with rosebuds woven into their hair while dads and husbands poked gentle fun at their ability to take out a lamp post while reversing. And for the last few decades I’d been resolute about it, had never questioned my right to stand up when and where I wanted, convinced that anything I had to say was just as valid as the blokes around me.

On my wedding day, my mother-in-law, Janet, had muttered about ‘matrimonial tradition’, but Mal had batted her off with ‘Steph isn’t your average wife, Mum’. That fact alone had led to her fascinator quivering with disapproval throughout the whole proceedings.

On my fortieth, I’d got quite carried away with my moment in the spotlight and started telling anecdotes about at least half of the people in the room. I’d still registered Evie’s absence keenly, despite telling myself that I had so many other friends it didn’t matter. But it did. I’d continued to nurture a hope that it wasn’t too late, that we’d find our way back to each other somehow. I recalled surveying the room, all those faces turned towards me, with the realisation seeping in that some friends were great company, some were wonderful listeners but very few were friends of the deep heart, the ones whose lives you didn’t just hear about but felt along with them. Evie was one of those. And as everyone clapped and did three cheers for me, I’d forced back the tears stinging my eyes.

Mal remarking on how quickly the last ten years had gone jolted me back to the present. Everyone laughed as he pointed to his lack of hair and said, ‘The difference a decade makes.’

Teresa whispered, ‘What you said at your fiftieth is even truer now. Look round the room.’

I smiled as I remembered making a joke that didn’t go down too well about how my fortieth had been the kiss of death for at least half the couples at my party judging by all the new partners.

Mal told me the next morning that I’d been ‘on the edge of rude’. I’d laughed. ‘Can’t wait to be sixty so I can fly over the clifftop of rude.’ Honestly, if people couldn’t take a joke, I’d save my Twiglets for someone who could.

Now, here I was, at my sixtieth, letting Mal do the talking for me. When I’d said I’d make a speech, he’d pulled a face. ‘I don’t think people want to listen to a lot of chat, do they? And you know what you’re like when you’ve had a few drinks – a bit unwilling, shall we say, to relinquish the microphone…’

He’d turned to our son, Ben, for support, who’d said, ‘Are speeches even necessary at a birthday party? People just want to get on with dancing and drinking, don’t they? No offence, Mum, but they’ve probably heard all your stories before anyway.’

‘No offence’ was code for ‘big bus of insulting observation coming through’ disguised as gentle joshing in my family, but they managed to make me feel as though there’d be a collective eyeroll if I pinged my spoon on a glass. So I’d nodded and said, ‘You’re probably right, you thank everyone for coming then, Mal,’ as though they’d relieved me of an onerous duty.

I tuned back in to Mal’s words.

‘I’d like to raise a toast to Steph, health – essential, of course…’

Teresa squeezed my hand and I felt the urge to cry.

‘Wealth – not so much of that now Steph’s retired and I’m the only breadwinner. Make the most of the champagne, everyone, we’ll probably be bankrupt by the time she’s seventy. I don’t think the adjustment to being a kept woman is going to be as much of a challenge as I’d hoped.’

I felt the surge of fury that Mal was portraying me as a woman who’d piddled about for years contributing pin money to the family coffers and was now running amok with his credit card buying scented diffusers for the loo and witty little signs about my terrible cooking to hang around the kitchen. I had no doubt that all my guests would be surprised to know that over the years we’d kept entirely separate bank accounts and contributed equally to cover all our costs. Which hadn’t changed since my retirement. If we really wanted to split hairs, it was my earning that had provided the lump sum for a deposit on a little flat we rented out in Redhill, which gave us a steady extra income.

I glanced around. If anyone else was outraged that Mal was claiming to be a long-suffering provider of fripperies for a lady who spent her time hoovering up chai almond lattes, they were disguising it well.

‘And lastly, happiness – to us all!’

To the murmur of ‘good health’, I battled with my desire to spoil the evening by setting the record straight about our finances. Instead I pinned a smile on my face and sighed at the thought of how Mal’s speech would inevitably form the basis of a huge row one day soon.

My daughter-in-law, Gemma, came up and interrupted that toxic train of thought. ‘Are you having a good time?’ she asked.

‘Loving it.’

She clinked her glass against mine. ‘To you. I can’t believe how many friends you’ve got.’

‘They’re only here for the wine.’

‘They love you. We all do.’

I tried not to dwell on the fact that the thing I loved most about my son was his wife. I’d decided long ago that whoever he married I was going to adore, but the daughter-in-law gods had not only smiled on me, but poured pots of molten gold in my direction. Gemma was smart, funny and, most importantly, skilled at handling my son. Despite thirty-six years of training with a mother who struggled to keep a thought to herself, Ben acted as though anything beyond a superficial exchange of which animals he’d treated at work was an intrusion. Even trying to pin him down to a family dinner was like trying to negotiate a date for the release of a hostage. Except, of course, when he needed childcare, then he had a lightning-fast memory for his diary.

Gemma put her head on one side. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Fine, just a bit hot.’

Burning hot, in fact, with the thought I’d been trying to deny for five years, to talk myself out of. As ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ came on and everyone got up to dance, I had an image of all those heads swivelling, the eyebrows shooting up, the mouths dropping open. ‘We were only at her sixtieth last week. Mal made a lovely toast to her. And now she’s gone and left him!’

But leave him I would. If I lived for one more year or another thirty, it wasn’t going to be to a backdrop of how the house insurance had gone up by nineteen pounds seventy and how he’d never really liked mushrooms every time I made a beef bourguignon. I wanted to feel like I was inhaling life in all its many colours, not sucking in just enough air through a Vicks-impregnated tissue. However I made it happen, my life would be totally different by the time my next birthday rolled around.

In a roomful of people, there’s always one that everyone is drawn to. I never understood why, probably because I was never that person. My best guess was that the more someone bowled through life with a low-level challenge of ‘like me, or don’t like me, it’s all the same as far as I’m concerned’, the more those present were desperate for approval. I knew as soon as she walked into the fusty church hall for the mother and toddler coffee morning that all the other women would be dying to be her friend. She strode in, her long dark hair flying, swearing as the buggy wheels caught in the doorway. ‘Morning! I’m Steph,’ she said, waving to the circle of women. She nodded to the boy who was straining at the straps for release. ‘This is Ben.’

As soon as he was freed, Ben immediately ran away from her to the toy garage, grabbing a couple of cars from the boy already there to a howl of protest. He lay with his cheek on the floor and started making loud revving noises. Steph glanced over briefly, shrugged and headed for the spare chair next to me. Despite the disapproving huff from the mother whose child had been dispossessed, she didn’t feel obliged to referee over a toy Mini.

‘What is it about having a baby that means you’re stuck on hard plastic chairs for the rest of your life? Giving birth should be a free pass to sitting in goose down forever.’ She turned to me and held out her hand. ‘Steph.’

‘I’m Teresa. Nice to meet you.’

‘So how does it work here? Do the kids all disappear off and play while we drink coffee and moan about our husbands? Please tell me we don’t have to take it in turns to play shops and pretend to eat plastic biscuits.’

I laughed. ‘No, they have free play and we just chat. I think most of us use it as a way of getting out of the house on a rainy day, especially this time of the year.’

‘So which one’s your little one?’

‘Ross, over there with the fuzzy-felt. He’s just turned two.’ I’d secretly hoped that bringing him here would equip him with an ease for making friends that I’d never mastered, but he showed no sign of wanting to join in with the other children, content in his own little world.

‘Well done you for producing a child who can sit quietly and amuse himself. Ben was put on this earth to produce mayhem. Either that or I’m just a bad mother.’

‘I should think every mother here thinks that at one time or another. I do, especially on the days I’m at work.’

Steph’s eyes lit up. ‘Oh thank goodness I’m not the only one who works. I always feel like a right old fraud at these things. This is the moment when I should say I’m here for all the benefits for Ben, but mainly it’s to stop me going mad from being cooped up at home for the day. I’ve only come because I’ve got the next six Fridays off to use up my holiday from last year. What do you do?’

And with that, we launched into a discussion about my three days a week as a physiotherapist – ‘Lucky you, bet you had all the tips of the trade to stop you wetting yourself for months after giving birth’ – and her job working in the travel industry negotiating contracts with hotels abroad, which sounded unbelievably glamorous.

I immediately felt under pressure to make the slow process of easing life back into broken and injured limbs sound far more thrilling than it was, but she seemed genuinely interested: ‘You must get to hear all sorts of stories from people while you’re putting them through their paces. I suppose you can’t tell me though. What a fascinating job.’

I nodded enigmatically but I’d never been any good at chit-chat, unlike some of my colleagues who knew everything about their patients except how to fix their torn rotator cuff. I preferred to work in silence, imagining in my mind’s eye every ligament, every bit of cartilage under the skin. This woman with her leather trousers, bright orange blouse and serious shoulder pads would be my nightmare patient, diverting my energy to conversation. But before I could think of any amusing anecdotes, she leapt to her feet and said, ‘I’ll go and get us some coffee.’

I thanked her and watched her stride over to charm and chat to the helper who was guarding the refreshments as though some sleep-deprived mother might make off with more than her one allotted Club biscuit. Another woman joined her and soon they were laughing together and Steph put the coffees back down to gesticulate, hands flying about, both women a rapt audience. I’d given myself a pat on the back for managing a quick exchange of pleasantries with a couple of the quieter women after six weeks of coming here. Unlike Paul, I bet Steph’s husband didn’t pause on the threshold on his way to work, saying, ‘Have a good time, you know you’ll enjoy it when you get there. And Ross needs to get used to other children before he goes to school.’

The people I’d known at college like Steph, with a similar joie de vivre and sense of self, had inevitably drifted out of my reach, not lingering long enough to get to know me or for me to become confident enough to entertain them. It was incredible that I’d ever found a husband. Thankfully, a game of badminton and my expertise when Paul had twisted his ankle on court meant he’d seen some quality in me I’d yet to appreciate in myself.

Steph came whirling back over with her new friend. The other woman was tall with the sort of trousers that my mother would have said ‘hung well’ and a blouse that was just open enough to give a glimpse of a lacy black bra and the curve of decent-sized breasts. Breastfeeding had done for mine. Not much stuffing to begin with and now as desiccated as a dried-up riverbed in an August heatwave.

I dragged my attention away from her chest, briefly wondering if Paul also compared other women’s breasts to my burst balloons.

‘Teresa, this is Evie. She’s one of those wonderful mothers who doesn’t escape to work and puts me to shame. That’s her little boy, Isaac, on the tractor.’

From anyone else, the comment could have sounded barbed or facetious, but Steph delivered it in a way that Evie just rolled her eyes and said, ‘Wonderful? I don’t think so. You probably enjoy your job more than I enjoyed mine in the underwear department of John Lewis. There’s only so many times you can find an angle on lingerie for Valentine’s Day that doesn’t involve red knickers. And my husband doesn’t want me to work so…’ She pulled a face as though she was admitting an embarrassing truth.

Steph smiled. ‘Your husband doesn’t want you to work? And what do you want?’

My stomach tightened. I loved straight talking and straight asking in theory but found witnessing them excruciating. But Evie didn’t snag herself on Steph’s spikes. She shrugged good-naturedly. ‘I haven’t really given it much thought. I never really expected to go back to my job and I like being at home with Isaac.’

Steph shook her head. ‘Hats off to you. I’m embarrassed by how liberated I feel when I have to go away on a work trip. In the office, they’re all, “Do you want us to send someone else to Italy this time?” and I’m practically ordering the taxi to the airport before they’ve finished speaking.’

I was caught between admiration for Steph that she didn’t worry about us judging her, feeling a bit sorry for Ben if she wasn’t exaggerating and a weird sense of awkwardness, as though she was breaking the motherhood omertà by admitting what every mother must feel sometimes. At least I hoped they did. I didn’t long to disappear to Italy for days on end, but there was no doubt that I loved sitting in the park over the road from work at lunchtime and having five minutes in my own head without having to answer ‘Why?’ or read about the truck that fell off the bridge again. I’d pretended to Paul I was fine about it, but every time I saw my colleague, Roger, lording it about in the senior physio position that I’d turned down because there was no option of working part-time, I felt a rush of jealousy. I’d inherited several of his patients, who told me that they had regained more function in a limb with me in four weeks than they had with him in months, which just rubbed salt in the wound.

Paul had hugged me and said, ‘Your time will come when Ross is at school. It’s not forever.’ But sometimes when Roger was delegating the easy cases to me, rather than the ones that required an inventiveness, an experimental approach, I found myself wishing Ross’s childhood away.

Before I could find the words to tread a neutral line between Steph’s love of work and Evie’s contentment at home, Linda, who ran the coffee morning, clapped her hands.

‘Right, everyone ready for a little sing-song?’

Steph snorted. ‘My singing should get all the babies screaming.’

Linda fluttered her hand dismissively. ‘It’s all about the joy of music. It’s good for the soul. Right, if you’d like to call your children over, we’ll give out some instruments.’

Ben wasn’t having any of it. ‘No. Not singing. Cars.’

Steph went over with a drum to tempt him, but he threw it on the floor and went back to hooking trailers onto lorries. She picked it up and sat back in her chair.

Linda stared at her expectantly. ‘Steph, if you’d like to get – Ben, is it? – to sit down, we’ll start with “Old Macdonald had a Farm”.’

‘He’ll just start crying if I try to get between him and his lorries. Let’s crack on without him,’ she said, ignoring Linda’s passive-aggressive raising of eyebrows. I already wanted to be Steph’s new best friend. Perhaps her not giving a hoot about the opinions of an entire roomful of people would rub off on me. Maybe I’d stop jack-in-a-boxing Ross’s jumper on and off twenty times a day in case anyone thought I was the sort of mother who didn’t know how warm her son needed to be not to catch a cold.

Linda made sure everyone – without exception – had an instrument. ‘No reason why the mummies shouldn’t have some fun too.’

Next to me, I could feel Steph’s eyes flickering with amusement. She whispered, ‘If ever there was a good reason for going out to work…’

I ignored her but secretly I applauded her. Just yesterday I’d been justifying to my in-laws why I wanted to carry on with my physio work three days a week when Ross sneezed. The whole conversation stopped while my mother-in-law repeated ‘Atishoo!’ over and over again until I wanted to scream, ‘The reason I like my job is because I have proper conversations with people who don’t stop listening the second Ross sneezes or wets himself!’

‘Come on, everyone, let’s make some noise!’ Linda shouted. ‘Wonderful. Let’s try “The Quartermaster’s Store” next.’ She was still trying to encourage Ben over.

Steph was growling away. ‘For God’s sake, there’s plenty of time in life to toe the line. I mean, do you really have to start when you’re two?’

She obviously hadn’t grown up with a mother whose catchphrase was, ‘What will that lady over there think when she sees you doing that?’ I had though, so at twenty-nine, I was still worrying what ‘that lady over there’ might think, unlike Steph, who was belting out the song and hammering on the drum with such gusto that everyone in the room looked over. I stifled a giggle as Linda hovered between irritation that Steph wasn’t taking it seriously and nodding approval that someone was prepared to join in properly.

I looked over to Evie, who had Isaac on her lap and was helping him hit the triangle with real pleasure on her face. I tried to hold on to the fact that socialising with other toddlers and thumping xylophones must be good for Ross’s development, but a far greater part of me was wincing every time he put his fingers in his mouth. I kept surreptitiously wiping his hands with the wet flannel I kept in my bag in between singing ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ at a volume only someone with bionic hearing could pick up.

Thankfully, Linda drew the session to a close and said, ‘Same time next week. If you could just give me a hand to tidy up the toys before you go…’

Evie and I immediately started picking things up and carrying them over to Linda, while Steph gingerly threw some building blocks into a crate. ‘If you don’t see me next week, it’s because I’ve caught dysentery off the Stickle Bricks.’

We all walked out together and she nodded towards town. ‘I live about five minutes down there. Do you fancy coming for a coffee at mine? And washing your hands? I reckon we’ll have the antibod. . .