Walking Back to Happiness (26 page)

The hot August days went by and the exhibition got nearer, and Juliet still wasn’t sure if it was actually a date or not. Or even if she wanted it to be. All the websites and books told her this was probably a disaster waiting to happen, but they were websites. What she wanted was some real advice, from someone who wouldn’t look horrified at the way she was letting Ben’s memory down.

Emer, luckily, didn’t wait for her to raise the topic, but waded straight in one afternoon when Minton and Juliet arrived back from the afternoon’s walks, shiny-faced and covered in burrs, in search of a cold drink.

Roisin solicitously provided Juliet with Diet Coke on the rocks with a side order of pretzels, having first let her into the VIP area of the kitchen, via a velvet rope across the door. (It was Studio 54 week, chez Kelly, Emer explained.)

‘Now then,’ said Emer, leaning forward conspiratorially once she’d sent the girls packing to the garden to supervise Spike. ‘Who’s your man with the spaniel?’

‘What?’

‘Your good-looking fella with the spaniel. I saw you having a coffee in the park with him the other day. I almost didn’t think it was you, you looked so cheerful, but then I saw Minton and Coco, so I knew it was you.’

‘When was that?’ Juliet hadn’t seen Emer, but then she wouldn’t have been totally surprised to hear that Emer had been monitoring it from the crystal ball in her bedroom.

‘God, I don’t know. Friday? What’s he called?’

‘It’s a she. Damson,’ said Juliet. ‘She’s a working cocker.’

‘No!’ Emer looked appalled. ‘Not the dog. The man! What’s his name?’

‘Oh! Mark. I think,’ Juliet added. She’d almost forgotten that detail; they never actually used names, just J and M on the notes. Or Damson and Minton.

‘You
think
?’

‘Yes, well, you don’t really do human names with dog-walkers,’ said Juliet. ‘It’s just one of those things. You use the dog’s name much more, and you never remember what the owner’s called.’

‘I think I’d remember what a hot man like that was called.’

Juliet blushed. ‘I do know. It’s Mark.’

‘And it’s just business,’ said Emer, in a tone that made it clear that that was
not
what she thought at all.

Juliet took a deep breath. ‘Well, he has asked me to an exhibition next week . . .’

‘Good for you!’

‘No, no!’ Juliet said. ‘I was going to say, I don’t know. That’s just it. I can’t work out whether it
is
something, and I’m just rubbish at picking up signals, or it’s not and I’m making a fool of myself. He might just be friendly.’

‘Do you meet him in the same place every time with the dogs?’ she asked shrewdly.

‘More or less.’ Juliet thought about it. ‘He’s usually coming down the hill and we’re coming up, and we sort of meet by the coffee stand and—’

‘Big place, that park,’ said Emer. ‘What a coincidence, eh?’ She patted Juliet’s hand. ‘It’s a date, I reckon. Oh, hang on. He’s not married, is he?’

‘Separated. Has a child, though. So I think that’s why he doesn’t want to rush into anything.’ Juliet felt her cheeks turning pink. ‘We haven’t really talked about it as such, but we’ve both joked about how much easier it is meeting new dogs than new people.’

‘So he knows about your husband?’

Juliet nodded.

‘How long is it now, since your husband died?’ Emer pushed the biscuits across the table and helped herself. ‘Forgive me for asking, I know I should know.’

‘Ten months,’ said Juliet, without having to think. ‘On the thirteenth.’

‘So long enough to be used to it, but not long enough to be healed,’ said Emer sympathetically. ‘Had you been together a long time?’

‘Since we were fifteen.’

‘And you were still together! Wow.’ Emer sipped her coffee. ‘If I were still with my boyfriend from school, I’d be either in prison or an institution.’ She tucked her chin into her neck in outrage. ‘I certainly wouldn’t still be playing tambourine in his fecking hopeless Pink Floyd tribute band. Not for free, anyway.’

Juliet smiled. There was something flattering about Emer’s honest chattiness, but it wasn’t a safe kind of familiarity. She had absolutely no idea what she might say next – but suspected that even Emer’s longstanding friends probably felt the same way.

‘How did you manage when you went away to college?’ Emer went on. ‘Come on. You can tell me. Didn’t you even have a secret university fling or two?’

‘We didn’t go away – I went to catering college here, and Ben did a year’s horticulture course in Birmingham. He commuted – it wasn’t that far, and some of it was practical.’

‘So you’ve always lived here? You never wanted to move out? See the world a bit?’ Now Emer wasn’t even trying to disguise her surprise.

It reminded Juliet of Lorcan’s surprise when she’d said they hadn’t really gone travelling. It made her want to dig her heels in.

‘I had everything I wanted right here,’ she said. ‘My family have always been here – my mum and dad have been in the same house since they got married!’ But even as she said it, she felt the faintest flicker of an old emotion she’d managed to stamp down so hard it had almost disappeared. There had been a time when she’d quite fancied travelling.

Emer seemed impressed. ‘Well, fair play to you. You can’t put a price on family.’ She pushed herself away from the table and went over to the fridge to fan herself with the cold air. ‘It’s nice to know that perfect marriages like that really do exist, and not just in cheesy songs.’

‘I’m not saying it was
perfect
. . .’ Juliet began, and now, fanned by Emer’s reaction, the emotion was licking around her stomach, catching light on the dryness of many tightly packed thoughts.

‘You make it sound pretty perfect,’ said Emer.

‘It was,’ protested Juliet. ‘Most of the time. I mean, that’s what’s so scary about starting again with someone new. Ben knew me inside out. He knew me better than I knew myself. The thought of having to learn everything all over again with someone who can’t possibly know me that well and never wi—’ She stopped, mid-word, and clamped her mouth shut. Things were tumbling out that she hadn’t actually officially let herself think.

Emer took a Coke out of the crammed fridge, then a bowl of olives, and shut the door. She gave Juliet a long, considered look. With her tumbling brown and copper curls and strange kaftan tunic over her jeans, she looked like a Celtic fertility goddess, if the gods had started shopping in Monsoon.

‘Can I give you a word of advice?’ she said.

‘So long as it’s not “Time’s a great healer” or “Get a kitten,”’ said Juliet. She tried to make it sound light, but she heard her voice harden.

‘My mam died when I was fifteen,’ said Emer. ‘And overnight, it was like she’d been replaced by the Virgin Mary. My dad claimed they’d never had a cross word, never spent a night apart. She’d certainly never been one for the drink, and she’d
definitely
never caused the chip-pan fire that nearly wrecked our house. We missed Mammy, ’course we did, but seriously – after a year or two, we were gagging for him to remarry. He couldn’t even make a sandwich.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘I gave up the chance to go to Norway in a Transit with the best metal band Cork ever produced, because my daddy couldn’t be trusted to feed himself, let alone the dogs.’

‘Maybe he was still grieving,’ said Juliet. ‘You can’t put a deadline on grief.’

Which was stupid, because she had, hadn’t she? A year.

God, I’m as bad as the rest, she thought. Repeating grief catchphrases.

Emer pointed at her. ‘He wasn’t grieving. He was
guilty
. Guilty that he hadn’t been better to her when she was alive. It was only Father Nolan that kept those two together. And Daddy’s way of dealing with it was to make her this perfect woman in his head. No other woman ever got a look in from that day. Everyone was setting him up with the
loveliest
women, but they’d all come back looking shell-shocked, saying, “I had no idea Theresa made her own bread, and looked after Mrs Flynn while she had the cancer.”’

‘But Ben and I never fought!’ said Juliet. ‘Well, not really. Not about anything that we couldn’t make up.’ Her face felt hot. This wasn’t in the script. Emer was meant to be all sad about what a lovely marriage she’d lost. Instead, Juliet was getting distinct flashbacks to that conversation with Louise, where Louise had told her to stop whining about Ben and just get on with it. That if it came to a choice between a man who did budget spreadsheets and finished DIY projects, and a man who made her feel like she was made of sex and flowers, she knew which one she’d go for.

The conversation had headed into very dangerous waters after that.
Very
dangerous.

Emer was looking at her, taking in her flushed cheeks.

‘Never? Ever? Oh, come on. Not even about leaving the toilet seat up? Or shelves that never got fixed?’

‘No.’ Juliet felt stubborn. If
she
stopped believing in the lifebelt of the Perfect Marriage, then she was in real trouble.

‘Then he must have had you drugged,’ concluded Emer. ‘The better the love, the bigger the fights. And the longer the making up. If you never fight, then aren’t you just flatmates?’

Emer’s grey eyes were kind, but they were also perceptive. The effect of her gaze, and also her undivided, unbiased attention, started to unpick Juliet’s defences.

‘Well, it wasn’t always sweetness and light,’ she admitted. ‘We’d been hoping to start a family and things weren’t happening, which was a bit . . .’ She hunted for the right word. The looks. The doubts. The silences, where there never used to be any. ‘. . . depressing. And we were both self-employed, and things were tight with the new mortgage, and the recession.’ Good. The recession was much safer ground. That was nobody’s fault.

Emer said nothing, and Juliet heard herself filling in the silence with more honesty. ‘I sometimes get a bit uptight about money, and Ben was always more
que sera sera
than me, which is fine when you’re in your twenties.’ She looked away, at the collages on the pinboard, at the huge Rolling Stones posters on the walls, anything except Emer’s face.

They
had
had rows. Just in that last year, though, little skirmishes where once they’d have agreed to disagree. Small rows about big things, then big rows about small, stupid things.

Two days before Ben died, they’d had their first, truly bitter row, sparked by something really silly – him not telling her about renewing the van tax, so she’d bought it too and gone overdrawn. It had turned nuclear, though – after an initial round of ‘Why don’t you ever tell me things?’ on both sides, Ben had yelled that he didn’t want to sign up for IVF, even though Juliet hadn’t even mentioned it, and she’d yelled at him, through her stress headache brought on by dealing with the bank, that maybe it was better if they didn’t have kids, if he was going to behave like one for the rest of his life.

The ferocity of the argument had scared Juliet, because as they were yelling at each other, her anger brought all kinds of unwelcome thoughts floating to the surface in its wake. Had she suddenly grown up into a boring adult, or had Ben
never
wanted to travel anywhere you couldn’t get a McDonald’s? Was he really going to do the work on the house, or was she going to have to arrange it and pay for it all? And could you actually start to dislike someone you loved deep down?

Stupidly she’d decided to confide in Louise, going over there in the hope that she’d tell her that all married couples had rows, that she and Peter had tried for months before Toby was conceived, and had squabbled badly in the months before.

She hadn’t. Louise had just looked shocked, and that had made her feel even worse.

Oh God, thought Juliet now with searing clarity. Why can’t I go back and take a Nurofen before he walked into the room that night? Why can’t I just rewind the clock and not say some of those things? Would that change what happened? I’d give anything. Half my own life to share another half of his.

Emer was speaking, wandering round her family kitchen as she went, probably not even noticing the lovely homeliness of it.

‘I’m not saying you were being kept together by the parish priest,’ she went on, ‘but don’t do what Daddy did. Don’t make it all so perfect in your head that no one else’ll ever be able to come close. It’s not what he’d want. Ben would want you to be happy now. And your man’s a dog owner! It’s like Minton’s brought you together – now doesn’t that sound like interference from a higher place to you?’

Juliet said nothing, but her shoulders were shaking with the effort of keeping in the tension bursting up through her chest. It was as if someone had a remote control that could turn her emotions up to ten, without her even being asked.

Before she could do anything else, Emer was by her side, her arm around her, and her ample bosom pressing into her face like a pillow.

‘Jeez, I’m sorry. I wasn’t meaning any disrespect to your marriage, honestly.’

‘It’s not that,’ hiccupped Juliet.

‘What is it, then?’

‘I just feel so . . .’ Juliet probed around the dark feeling, trying to identify it ‘. . . guilty.’

‘Why?’

‘Because everyone always used to think Ben and I were perfect, and I let them because it was our
thing
. We were the childhood sweetheart story, like my mum and dad. Then the one time I even mentioned to Louise that things weren’t right . . .’ She struggled to keep herself together.

‘Is this your sister who’s the hot-shot lawyer with the perfect baby and the husband with his own business?’

Juliet nodded.

‘Well? What happened? Did she confess she’d been having an affair with him?’

‘No! He died the next day. And the last thing she remembers about Ben is me saying he wouldn’t listen to me about starting a family, and her telling me I didn’t know what I had, and that I should go to counselling before our marriage hit the rocks.’

Emer squeezed her. ‘Juliet, you know it’s daft to think he died because you said that, don’t you? I mean, I don’t have to tell you that?’

In her bleakest, most irrational hours, that was exactly what Juliet thought – that her confession had broken some kind of cosmic luck spell – but she didn’t want to admit it to Emer.