Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (11 page)

“Oh really? There was no sugar in it, actually.”

And of all smart answers, I find that lies work the best.

“Well, you must have used really cheap honey then.”

“Actually it was Wild Flower Organic Honey.”

“The label was, maybe, but that honey was not wild.”

“And you know this because...?”

Dan had left me sitting talking to a stream of dull relations for almost two hours. I was tired and bored and I wanted to go home. Actually, I was quietly seething. Dan had made out like this day was going to be really hard for him to do alone, then abandoned me almost as soon as we got here. He seemed to be having a marvelous time, coping perfectly well without his loyal wife to protect him from whatever abuses he had blackmailed me into believing might befall him. He didn’t look awkward or uncomfortable; from where I was sitting he looked like he was partying like a freshman. I felt a little conned. All right—a lot conned. And Uncle Patrick was an easy target.

Except he wasn’t.

“I have been keeping honeybees for more than thirty years, and I am telling you that is not good honey in that cake.”

Then he got up from his chair, disappeared upstairs and came back down two minutes later with a small brown paper package, which he thrust at me with an aggressive “There!
That’s
wild honey—if you know the difference.”

The jar was sticky, and as I prised open the jammed lid part of a comb came with it. The scent of it passed through me and the satin of unexpected memories brushed across my skin. Granddad, in the swell of summer, bringing in the first batch of honey; the drama and fear of seeing my first swarm; how he called my grandmother “honey girl” and kissed the wrinkled tissue of her aged hand. A vision of marriage that you don’t know you’ve absorbed until you are married yourself, and looking for answers to questions you are not supposed to ask.

“I know the difference,” I said.

Uncle Patrick was delighted.

“Eileen doesn’t care for it. She says she’d prefer honey from the shop. She knows where it’s from.”

I said nothing about that, but we both knew the other was horrified.

“How much have you got?”

“Six jars.”

“I’ll buy them all.”

Patrick laughed.

“Tell you what, lady. Have these ones on the house and next time I’m over, then we’ll talk.”

“You’ve been here before?”

He looked at me quizzically and said, “I come maybe once or twice a year.”

Great. Not only is my husband manipulative, but he’s a liar, too. Manipulative liar. Nice. A lifetime of joy and happiness right there. In a funny way, I approved.

*

The night was drawing in, and I thought we would never get out of there. One of the kids had turned on the stereo and there was some terrible CD of disco hits banging away in the background. I had this horrible feeling that the party was just beginning while I’d already had enough.

Dan was talking animatedly to some cousin or other. I walked across and took his hand and he continued talking, interlocking my fingers with his to let me know he knew I was there. Then this seventies love song came on and, without explanation or introduction, Dan grabbed me and started to dance.

I would take the stars out of the sky for you

Stop the rain from falling if you asked me to

I was really embarrassed, but Dan held me tight in his amateur sway as if we were the only ones there.

I’d do anything for you

Your wish is my command

I could move a mountain

If your hand was in my hand

“Thanks for coming today, baby.”

He whispered it with the solemnity of a wedding vow, like it really had made all the difference to him.

And then I got it. Dan didn’t need me to bake cakes, or entertain his uncle, or dress up, or field his mother’s expectations, or make his sisters feel important, or chit-chat nicely to his relations. He just needed me to be there. Because when I was with him, it made it easier for him to be with his family. To be able to point across a room and say, “She’s with me,” to his Uncle Patrick, his mother, his cousins, but most important, to himself.

My being in his life—sitting, walking, breathing, talking in the background of his day—made it better. Made him look and feel like he was a better man.

Dan had lied to get me there that day because he believed that was what he needed to do to secure my presence. Only I knew that all he had to do was ask me straight, and I would have said yes.

It felt good, and in that moment I knew I had taken one step closer to being Dan’s wife.

There is love in watching other people love.

Children’s Fairy Cakes

The recipe makes just over a dozen.

Cream 4oz margarine with 4oz sugar then add 2 eggs. If you beat them gently first, it lessens the risk of curdling. Mix in 8 heaped tablespoons flour (about l0oz) and a half teaspoon baking soda. (This is your basic recipe, but it’s fun to let children mix in things at this stage for themselves. Your mother loved raisins, but I seem to remember one ten-year-old girl who made me mash in a banana! Imagine my surprise when it worked!)

Grease your bun tin generously, and cook in a medium/hot oven for up to 45 minutes. Leave to cool in the tin before turning out and leaving to cool on a rack. (Although if the little ones are around, they won’t last that long!)

No change ever happened in me more absolutely or more immediately than that of motherhood.

I was crotchety and complaining all through the pregnancy. I dreaded the birth, the hardship and humiliation of it, with a horror I could barely name. Pregnancy did nothing to warm me to the idea. I did not like the feeling of my body being inhabited in that way. It felt intrusive and uncomfortable and, despite what everyone kept saying, completely unnatural.

Niamh was born in the early hours of a Monday morning, after my waters had broken during Mass. It was an ordeal, from the embarrassment of stumbling with wet legs out of the church to the excruciating pain and the midwife’s cruel pragmatism as she urged at me to “Push, push,” and told me to offer my pain up for the souls in Purgatory. I thought it would never end.

Then Niamh was here, and in the split second that I heard her cry, everything changed. I had carried her for nine months, and yet she was a complete surprise. I could never have expected something so pure and so magnificent as this child. Immediately that I held her, a sob rose up through me, grief that I had left this joy so long to experience. She was tiny and frail, like a petal, yet as complex as nature itself. The earth, sun, moon, stars—all the continents of America and Africa and the galaxies beyond—could not contain the love I felt. I wept, but with a joyful abandon. I wept in gratitude to God for her breath on my breast, and I wept because although I had made her, already I knew she did not belong to me and that one day I would have to let her go.

James must have been standing with his ear to the door because I heard him call out. The midwife told him that it was a girl and that we were not ready to see him, and I shocked myself by raising up from the bed and hollering at her to stop fussing around with her cleaning and let him in.

It was the first time I felt love in looking at James’s face. Not pity, or concern, or grudging respect—but a passionate belonging. In the years we had been together, I had always felt apart from him. I knew now that as long as this child lived, we could not be parted. And in that moment I wanted to draw him to me. For the two of us to wrap ourselves around this new life to cherish, nourish, and guide her. James looked from my face to the swaddled cocoon in my lap and his eyes shone with a symphony of emotion I had never seen before: terror, wonderment, and a tender, tender love.

*

Watching something you love grow is both pleasure and pain. Each new phase—crawling, walking, talking—brings shouts of pride, but with each also is the mourning of the phase gone past. Never again the cluck of her chin as she fed on my breast; never again small enough to carry in one arm while I stirred soup or carried turf with the other; never again an infant lying in a muslin-covered basket in the top fields while we worked. The soft down of her scalp, fingers the size of beads, the mysterious whispers before words come, behind the joy of each new talent, I regretted the passing of the last. I had a secret longing to keep her small and precious, and a part of me. As miserable as I had been during pregnancy I now often dreamt that she was back inside my body and that the two of us were floating like that forever, clinging to the other for soft comfort in some eternal womb.

Time is impatient to take your child from you. So you learn that each moment is precious, and that life is an inevitable clock. The pleasure of rearing a child is just a prelude to the pain of letting it go, and I anticipated that with an ache every day of her small life. I thought it would make it easier when she finally reached adulthood. But it didn’t.

No matter what wisdoms or tricks for happiness you learn, a mother worries every day of her life for her child. A wise one will pretend to let them go to keep them, but it’s just a sensible lie. Motherhood is a sweet, sweet suffering; a joy today is marked by fear for tomorrow and a craving for yesterday.

James was a wonderful father. In those early years of our parenthood, I had the pleasure of feeling close to my husband. Often we would both lie down on our iron bed and hum our child to sleep at the tail end of a playful afternoon. Sunshine dappled across our lazy bodies, hypnotizing us, and I would see what an extraordinary man he was to lullaby his wife and child on a summer’s afternoon, when other men might be gathered in the pub to drink themselves daft. Perhaps it was because he was a teacher, but he seemed to have a natural, easy way with Niamh that mystified me. How could you love somebody as completely and absolutely as we loved her and maintain such a detached fairness? I guess he was a more natural father than I was a mother. I had been surprised by my love for her but as Niamh’s personality developed, my relationship with her became fraught. She was feisty—like myself—and we were both willful and petulant. James became arbiter and confidant to us both.

When she was a small child, Niamh and I often squabbled in the kitchen, as I instructed her in making her favorite fairy cakes. Flour and butter would be everywhere; eggs dropped lethally on the polished flagstones. I would get frustrated when I realized that she was too young for instruction, but she was having too much fun for me to stop the lesson. James stood for a moment at the door watching me frantically wipe debris off the table, the floor, my face. And in his quietly observing me, I would see myself as he saw me: in my everyday apron, dark hair wound to the back, a swirl of flour dashed across my cheek. I knew that I was more beautiful to him then, as mother to his child, than I had ever been in the beguiling days of my youth.

I knew also that James was loving us both as he just stood there. That in his teaching, his digging for potatoes, his tending the cattle, his reading, in everything James did, was hidden a eulogy to his two “girls.” And I knew that I was a lucky woman to be able to take his protection and provision and paternal patronage for granted, and a blessed one for the luxury of all the little ways he found to love me.