Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (28 page)

I didn’t recognize my own voice, it came out in such a roar.

“You are both
in so much
trouble.”

I caught Dan giving Gerry a cheeky schoolboy wink and realized, for the first time since I came in, that they were both more than a little drunk. That sent me right over the edge. I can’t remember what I said next, but it was a boiling stream of consciousness that contained references to the fact that I was not his mother, that they were both like children, that I was a very important person who did not appreciate being dragged back up the coast for no good reason; and that I had always said that that bike was a death trap and he was never going out on it again. Never.
Ever.

Dan was nodding and trying to look contrite, but I saw his eyes flick across Gerry, who was standing behind me, and the beginnings of a smile form on his lips.

Hateful bastards. Laughing at me.

“Is that arm broken, Dan?”

I needed to assess the seriousness of his injury in order to calculate whether I could reasonably add to it.

“No it’s...”

“...fractured. Just hairline,” his partner in crime butted in.

Abbot and Costello.

I stood there, literally hopping from foot to foot, I was so mad. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I wanted to bang their two heads together.

Then I had an idea.

“Right,” I said, “that’s
it!”

They followed me out to the garage, where I picked up a hammer from Dan’s tool shelf and swung it in an arc at the side of the bike, tearing a huge lump down one side. There was a joint, horrified gasp from behind me.

I did not care. This was a revelation—violence felt good.

So I swung again. The two men shouted, “No!” and Dan grabbed the hammer, while Gerry threw himself at the wheels of his beloved Kawasaki and begged its forgiveness for having put it in the path of a madwoman.

I turned and accidentally belted Dan’s bad arm.

“Ow!” he yelped.

“I thought you were dead!”
I screamed, then I caught his eyes with my own collapsing, angry face. We stood for a moment, our eyes glued to the other’s in the shock of strong emotion. I was brought back to that first afternoon we slept together: my disbelief that this handsome stranger desired me, the unthinking, simple way that Dan fell instantly in love with me, and his solid willingness to follow through on it.

If you’d asked a girl like me,
What more could you ask for?
I would always think of something. But I didn’t want to lose him, and I hadn’t realized I cared so much. Neither had he.

Dan walked over and put his good arm around me. Even with one arm, he was strong.

“You can trust me, baby—I wouldn’t go dying on you. Not yet, anyway.”

I realized then that while I had virtually no trust in my
own
judgment, I had always, and could always, totally trust Dan.

I knew then that he was the only man in my life I would ever believe in that completely. My husband.

James died on a Tuesday. I remember it because I had been studying the weather, looking for hardship in rain clouds. The summer had been swinging between terrible slashing storms that would make you afraid to leave the house and glorious sunshine that made the humble hedgerows vigorous and colorful. This day was neither. It felt airless and flat, a plain day where everything looked like itself. No beauty, no pain—just as it is.

And I remember thinking nothing in particular, only what an ordinary day it was, and noting that no day could be more ordinary than a Tuesday, which falls neither at the beginning, middle, nor end of the week.

James looked so sleepy that morning that I decided to forego the day’s toilet routine and let him doze. I gave him his painkillers in the mid-morning and fussed around the room chatting about something stupid—the Munnellys’ vegetable-digging cat, I think it was. It was one of the new things I did when James got ill. I became chatty, pouring out a constant stream of pointless words to fill the space left by his weak silence. Sometimes he raised his hand to indicate I was annoying him. But this day, I could tell he was enjoying listening to me. Not to the words surely, but just to the sound of my voice.

For lunch I had mashed some potatoes through with bacon and cabbage. James was barely eating now, but I was determined, and every day, I prepared him proper food and worried and nagged when he didn’t eat it. I would not give in.

On this Tuesday, I did give in to him. He asked me to prepare warm milk and bread for his lunch. He said the single word, “pobs,” as a child would.

As I fed him, sitting on the chair next to his bed, I talked my tittle-tattle. My silly verbal nonsense balanced out his physical disability; as distraction from the humiliation of napkins and spoons and liquidized food, I would turn myself into a mindless gossip.

“So I said to Mary—start again and this time I want details. Tell me what did he say to you—then what did you say to him...”

I wiped James’s mouth, and as I did, he raised his hand and took my wrist.

I raised my eyes to heaven to indicate that I understood him telling me to stop the story before he lost his mind, and I half stood up.

James shook his head and tried to grip my wrist harder, failed, and it slid down my arm, but he did not let go. He wanted to speak, but seemed unable.

“What is it?” I said, then started to work down my list, “Apple jelly? Tea? The paper? Do you want me to read the paper? The television?”

James shook his head as if he could not speak, but his face was alive and I could tell there was energy in him. I got irritated.

“Speak up, you silly old fool. Tell me what you want.”

James rested his head back on the pillow, shut his eyes, and spoke. It was barely above a whisper, but I heard him clearly.

“Tell me you love me.”

I was stunned.

James had broken the understanding that had existed between us for over fifty years; our unspoken contract. He was my husband, but my heart had always belonged to another man. James knew that. The night his mother died, James told me he loved me. I had never said it back. It was understood from that day on that when I didn’t say it to comfort him then, I was never going to say it. Now he was dying, and it felt like a manipulation more than a request.

James’s eyes stayed closed as he repeated his request, quieter still, almost as if to himself. Beyond meek, beyond hopeful in the face of my silence: “Tell me you love me, my only Bernadine.”

I knew he was waiting for me. Of all of the things I had ever done for James, this was the only thing he had ever wanted. Perhaps because it was the one thing he knew he could never have. The alarm on the bedside cabinet went off to indicate it was time for his drugs. We both started, but before I stood up to busy myself, I had a sense that I should stay sitting for one moment longer, a feeling outside of myself, like I was being held in the chair.

I looked at this man I had known all of my life, this man I did not love, but with whom I had lived for longer than my mother, my father, my child. This man who I had married as a stranger, yet who had become my oldest friend. The person I had tried to keep myself hidden from, and yet who knew me better than anyone.

I did not go and fetch his tablets, but sat instead and noticed for the first time how frail and withered he was. James was barely in the room. The robust, elegant schoolteacher, soldier, father, husband was gone. All that was left was this barely breathing sliver of soul, asking for love. Not asking if I loved him, or had I ever loved him, but just to say the words, “I love you” to him.

Once. That once would be enough to set him free.

In that moment, what had been impossible all my life now seemed so simple. I did not have to love James to tell him I loved him.

I just had to say the words.

“I love you.”

Briefly James opened his eyes and his mouth closed around my name for the last time.

*

In the moment he was gone, there was a revelation.

As I had said the words “I love you” to my husband for the first time, I realized they were true.

I held him for one hour and I said the words “I love you, I love you, I love you” over and over into our empty room. And I imagined them carrying his soul in a stream of words out through the window and way up to heaven—how many words does it take to carry a soul to heaven? How many “I love you’s”?

It should have felt like I was saying it too late. But it didn’t, and that was the greatest revelation of all. James had been the love of my life. Not what I had wished for, not what I had dreamt of— but wishes and dreams don’t live in the real world. James had been my life. My reality.

Love can live in your mind and your heart, and it can be anything you want it to be. My love for Michael Tuffy, bar that first glorious summer, was a fantasy. What I shared with James truly belonged to me. Love that lives in the world, love that has to sacrifice, compromise, share, endure. Tangible, tough, tender love, this is the real thing. Love you can touch, that can comfort and hold and protect you, love that smells and tastes familiar, if not always sweet.

The legacy James left me was his trust. He never faulted me as a wife, a lover, or a mother—although I was lacking in all three. He had faith in my love for him, even though it remained unspoken for all of our life together. James saw love in my sense of duty towards him and although I would never dare admit it, he was right. I look at the shooting bag I had embroidered with his initials, the antimacassar I crocheted for his chair, now imprinted with the shape of his sleeping skull—and I think that each thing I made him, each scone I baked, each crust I cut, each lettuce I grew, contained perhaps no more than a pinprick of love. But it was enough.

James had gathered each gesture and banked it away so that in the end of his life I knew he felt loved by me. He just needed me to say it before he went. And I believe he knew that I needed to say it, too.

James had been the love of my life, because I had shared my life with him. It was no more mysterious than that. My husband had been my bread and butter, my sustenance. And Michael? Well, he was just jam.

*

They say there is no such thing as a perfect marriage, but there is. A perfect marriage is one where two people live together for most of their lives until death separates them. There is no such thing as an easy marriage. And when it comes to love, we have somehow come around to believing it should happen with ease.

The differences between men and women are what set our hearts alight, but the similarities are the fuel that keeps us going: warmth, companionship, bearing witness to another’s grief—the original joy and pain of being human. Married love is the gold at the center of the rubble after the fire has gone out. It can take years to find the hidden treasure, but the search is what is important, and when treasure is too easily found how can you be sure it isn’t fool’s gold?

What my marriage taught me is that real love is only what you give. That’s all. Love is not “out there,” waiting for you. It is in you. In your own heart, in what you are willing to give of it. We are all capable of love, but few of us have the courage to do it properly. You can take a person’s love and waste it. But you are the fool. When you give love, it grows and flowers inside you like a carefully pruned rose. Love is joy. Those who love, no matter what indignities, what burdens they carry, are always full of joy. James was happy in our marriage because he gave me his love. And in the end, despite myself, I
had
loved my husband. Reluctantly and never absolutely.

But what in life is ever absolute?

Except death.

You can make a commitment to love, but you cannot truly love without commitment.

Modern Irish Stew

This is not my grandmother’s recipe, but my own. Because sometimes, no matter how much pleasure you get from somebody else’s work, there is no replacement for a recipe that you have developed yourself

Serves 2

You will need

Rack of lamb (around 6 cutlets)