Best of Friends. Cathy Kelly
simple soul who’d finally learned to tie her shoelaces. What they meant was ‘Isn’t it great that she isn’t riddled with bitterness and with a long-term Prozac habit since Myles left her?’ She had not been people-watching all her life for nothing. Her natural intuition told her what they were really thinking and she hated it. She knew that her friends and acquaintances had half expected her to slide into a decline when she and Myles had split up five years previously. But she had proved them wrong. She hadn’t buried her head in the sand and told people they were ‘taking time apart’, like one neighbour who’d kept blindly insisting that her dentist husband was merely working a long distance away when everyone and their lawyer knew he’d set up home with a curvaceous female colleague.
Prevaricating wasn’t Lizzie’s style. When Myles had moved out, she’d told people the truth. Well, most of the truth. ‘We’re getting a divorce. It’s over, I’m afraid,’ she’d said brightly. What she hadn’t said was how shocked and devastated she felt, how humiliated, at the abrupt end of their marriage.
Tellingly, nobody seemed surprised. Not her friends, not her family. They all seemed to have half expected it. Only Lizzie, who’d prided herself on being practical, hadn’t.
‘I know things haven’t been right for years,’ her elder sister, Gwen, said comfortingly. ‘It’s for the best.’
Lizzie, who was rarely speechless, was reduced to utter silence. Gwen had always been an old-fashioned advocate of marriage, and thought that women who didn’t get married had a screw loose and were to be pitied. What desperate lack of harmony had been so apparent in Myles and Lizzie’s marriage that even Gwen thought they were better off apart?
Unfortunately, in the months after Myles moved out, Lizzie had a lot of time to think about this.
It was their younger child, Debra, turning eighteen and moving to Dublin that had been the catalyst. Until then, all appeared well in the Shanahan household. They had a nice home in a small housing estate on one of the older, tree-lined roads in Dunmore: a red-brick semi with four bedrooms, a dining room that, admittedly, was used less and less, and a small garden in which Lizzie spent an increasing amount of time. She had her job, her friends, her garden, and Myles had his work in the planning department in the council and his pals in the squash club.
If life wasn’t exactly exciting, then Lizzie consoled herself that it would be once the children had both left home.
She and Myles were, or so she was led to believe, in the enviable position of having had their children early. Very early, she used to laugh, thinking of herself in maternity tights at the wedding. But that had its advantages. With twenty-one-year-old Joe in art college in London, and Debra starting nursing in Dublin, it was just Lizzie and Myles again. She could barely remember what life felt like without the kids.
But there was going to be no empty-nest syndrome in her house. No way, José. Not for her the resigned gaze at the empty places round the table. She adored the children, adored them, but they wouldn’t thank her for turning into a resentful old woman just because they’d moved on and grown up. Lizzie and Myles Shanahan were going to live life to the full.
In this new, zestful frame of mind, she’d wondered if they could install a conservatory, maybe, or go on the sort of dream holiday they’d always promised themselves but had never been able to afford because there were always things to be bought for the children. A safari, she thought, wistfully imagining dawn Jeep rides into the grassland like the ones on the holiday programmes.
Lizzie looked after herself too. No sliding into slatternly ways for her. When tendrils of grey began to sneak into her shaggy light brown curls, she got streaks put in at the hairdresser’s. Myles seemed pleased with all of this.
He hadn’t let himself grow old before his time either, Lizzie thought approvingly. They were both forty-four. Some people were only just getting married or dealing with young kids at that age, and they’d done it all!
She got brochures for the conservatory and one day, just for the fun of it, picked up some safari ones too.
That evening, Myles sat in his armchair in front of the fire and looked mutely at the brochures Lizzie had left with such excitement on the coffee table. Then, in a quiet voice, he told her that he wanted a divorce, that he was so sorry but hadn’t she realised? Didn’t she agree that it was the right thing to do?
Lizzie, who’d already checked her husband’s diary to see if he’d be able to take holidays during the best season for a safari, stood frozen beside the mantelpiece, one hand clutched around the china seal Joe had given her after a childhood trip to the zoo.
‘I thought you knew; I thought you agreed with me,’ pleaded Myles. ‘You were getting on with your life and I was getting on with mine. We were only together for the kids and now they’re gone, well…’ His voice trailed off.
With terrible clarity, Lizzie saw that he meant what he said.
‘We married too young, Lizzie,’ he added sadly. ‘We didn’t have time to think about the future or whether we were really suited. If you hadn’t been pregnant with Joe, we’d have never done it, would we?’
Lizzie gazed back at him. The shock of this made her remember another: the shock of discovering she was pregnant, standing in the loo of the restaurant where she was working and thinking that the test had to be wrong, it had to be. She’d only ever slept with Myles and she knew girls who’d slept with scores of men, so why did she have to be the one to get caught? The slender streak of independence that ran through her shrivelled at the prospect of coping with this momentous happening on her own. Her parents were good and kind people, but they were locked in the morality of the past. Their beloved daughter becoming pregnant – pregnant and single. This would shake their world.
Lizzie would never forget the relief when Myles had said, with a lump in his throat, that they’d get married and he could support her and the baby on his salary from the council.
Now Myles was earnest again as if he could convince her by the force of his argument.
‘Lizzie, I’m not saying I regret any of it but we had to get married. It seemed like the only option at the time. We did it and we’ve stuck together but we both knew it wasn’t what we’d wanted. Didn’t you always think there should have been more?’
She had never thought there should have been more. True, there were no violins playing in her head when Myles kissed her, but had there been violins in her parents’ heads during their marriage? Marriage wasn’t about that, surely? Did her happily bickering sister and brother-in-law share some secret hand-holding when they were out of the public gaze? No way. Violins were for soppy movies, not real life.
‘We’re still young enough to enjoy life,’ Myles said, desperately trying to make her understand. ‘We can make up for lost time.’
‘What’s her name?’ demanded Lizzie, suddenly finding her voice. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Oh, Lizzie…’ The look Myles gave her was full of pity. ‘There’s no one else. Dunmore is too small to hide a secret like that. I just want out before I’m too old, before I lose the confidence to do it.’
And that was the most painful thing of all. There was no one else. No other woman had made Myles decide to leave his wife. The only woman involved was Lizzie herself. The spur was the nature of their marriage.
For months after he’d gone, she asked herself how she, who thought she was in touch with the world, missed what was plainly obvious to everyone else – that there was a magic ingredient to marriage and that hers lacked it?
She replayed Myles’s words over and over again: ‘Is that what you want, Lizzie? Us here, stuck together by necessity and children, unable to live full lives together but never having had the courage to live apart?’
Debra had been devastated and had arrived home from nursing college shaking and crying. ‘How could you do this to us?’ she’d shrieked at her mother. ‘How could you?’
And