The Other Side of Wonderful Read online

  She looked together. As if her life was in any way together! She half smirked at her reflection and her wonderfully pretty face lit up as her gleaming white teeth sparkled. Her skin was so brown people always remarked on the whiteness of her teeth. She had never had them bleached – it was just that the white stood out against her naturally dark skin colour. Her big brown eyes were always lined in soft brown kohl pencil, making them seem even darker and wider. Her life was so busy right now with all the extra hours she had taken on. Dealing with the guests, functions, the administration for the front desk and overseeing all reservations was hard enough, but now she had the added pressure of a failing marriage to worry about too.

  Well, she had always had to worry about Neil Darragh, she supposed. Worry was all she had seemed to do for the two and a half years since their wedding and she was well and truly fed up with worry. That’s why she treasured the swim so much. It gave her some headspace under the clear cool blue water, the early-morning chlorine unblocking her head. She could forget every worry for those precious minutes and enjoy the nothingness of the moment. As her arms powered through the water she threw each worry away.

  The Irish recession had hit them extremely badly. In fact it had punched them so hard in the face it was proving impossible to get back up. Neil had been out of work for over ten months now and it was a hard slog. He was slipping back to his old ways and she knew the warning signs only too well: the monosyllabic answers when his head was somewhere else; leaving the room when she came in; constantly checking his appearance in the hall mirror; the new hair products; washing and ironing his own clothes; the brand-new aftershave hidden behind logbooks and documents in the glove compartment of his van; all sorts of appointments and meeting with suppliers and builders in Dublin; the faraway look in his eyes. The unease of a man with a secret. “I’m thinking of taking up squash” or “Sorry, love, but this is dragging on – I think I’ll have to stay over.” Ding! Ding! Ding! He’d done it once before. The affair, that is. With Kelley, a girl from the US who was an au pair in Knocknoly last summer – a twenty-something LA blonde who, to be quite honest, had done nothing wrong. He had told her they’d been separated for six months. Sandra felt like she was privy to every moment of the affair as she had eventually read almost every text message between them.

  ***

  Everyone had warned Sandra about Neil Darragh. He was a player. When she used to return home for her weekends off work he would flirt madly with her – she, however, never took him too seriously. She knew him to see as he was a local too but they had never mixed in the same circles growing up. Neil was the owner at the time of a small business during the building boom – Darragh Electrics. He employed three local Knocknoly lads and was making quite a lot of money back then. He would praise her to the hilt every time he saw her. Throwing compliments at her like confetti. Everyone knew that Neil Darragh fancied the pants off Sandra Loughnane. He would look at her all night, catching her eye at every opportunity but as soon as new blood entered Hines, their local bar, his attention was gone. She used to laugh and even slag him. “Women are nuts if they believe any of your crap, Neil Darragh! I wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole! God help the woman who falls for your pathetic one-liners.” She always secretly thought he was attractive though and, although she tried hard not to be, she was flattered by his attention – what woman wouldn’t? She liked his devil-may-care attitude and lust for life. “If you’d have me, Sandra Loughnane, I would wear blinkers. I’d never leave the house again – or, as Twink says, I’d zip up my mickey!” She had laughed and flicked her hair and walked away from him, knowing full well he was checking out her ass. He said it was her I-don’t-care-what-you-say-you’ll-never-get-me attitude and the fact she never gave in to his advances that made him fall head over heels in love with her. Made him never give up. She was a challenge, he’d told her. She had started to really fancy him madly too. It very slowly crept up on her without her realising. She looked forward to the weekends she had off and got butterflies in her tummy as she pushed open the door of Hines to see him on his regular high-backed stool up at the bar, his soft black leather jacket hanging off the back of it. He always winked madly at her and it made her laugh it was so naff. She had loved his wild curly light-brown hair and the fact he was tall and strong. Neil had muscle in all the right places from good old-fashioned hard work rather than gym-bought muscles – and he was her type. She had been enjoying working at Aer Lingus and had loved the fact she was seeing the world, but there was something nagging in her head. The age issue was hanging over her. The dreaded age issue. So, slowly but surely she had given in to Neil’s charms, but on what she hoped were her terms.

  Neil, rather sheepishly for a change, had stopped her one evening on the Knocknoly Bridge. She was heading to the Moritz for a drink with Louise, an older friend of hers who was the owner of Louise’s Loft, a tidy two-storey coffee shop in the village. He had quite awkwardly yet very politely asked her to be his guest at his brother Tom’s wedding in Clontarf in Dublin and she had agreed. She had gone up to Dublin the next day and bought a beautiful fitted full-length off-the-shoulder red satin dress in Coast. When the day came she pulled out all the stops. She had her make-up done by Tara at the Haven’s beauty salon and had her long black hair GHD-curled, sweeping her fringe to the side. Sipping a glass of champers she had slipped into the red dress and black stilettos.

  He had gawped as he picked her up in his dad’s car and had treated her like a princess all day long. The wedding itself wasn’t really her cup of tea. It was overly fancy and a little too posh for her liking. ‘Stuffy’ was the word she would use to describe it. But they’d had the most amazing time together and at the very end of the night, as the DJ played Elvis Costello’s version of “She”, Sandra had goose-bumps all over and reached up on her tippy toes and kissed him for the first time. She hadn’t really been expecting to do that and it was electric. She could hear him groan through their open mouths. He grabbed her close and she ran her hands through his curly hair. That was that. She went home with him the next night and never left: they were officially a couple.

  He’d said he was happier than Tom Cruise that time he leapt up and down on Oprah’s settee and that John Wayne would be spitting hay. She didn’t understand the John Wayne reference but let it go – she’d never really liked Western movies so the joke was lost on her.

  “About time you got serious with someone!” her married friends at Aer Lingus had said when she filled them in. She had been fielding the questions of her advancing age and her reproductive timing for a while now. She had turned thirty and had suddenly felt the hands on the clock were moving way faster than they had in her twenties. The music from Countdown, as the hand on the clock raced to ‘time up’ for the contestants, frequently played in her head. It was hard not to watch the clock with everyone reminding her all the time. If she heard the words “You’d want to get a move on!” from one more person she would scream. She was moving as bloody fast as she possibly could. “Well, if you only want one or two you might be okay but not if you want a proper family. Sure you have no idea if you’ll get pregnant straight away, that’s the problem,” was the usual age-related reproductive discussion in the galley when she used to say she was in no rush to tie the knot. Everyone was obsessed with age.

  She honestly was just content and happy at that time to be with Neil and move into a new area of her life. They both wanted children – she had asked him that at Tom’s wedding. “Sure I do,” he had answered open-mouthed as his lips came down heavy on hers again while they danced. Well, she was happy to be on the right track, where she was supposed to be at that stage and, although she didn’t verbalise it, really it was all a bit of a relief. She had wanted to find her true love. Apart from Neil being a great guy, she admitted rather coyly to herself that he had also ticked her three boxes: she wanted a marriage; she wanted children; she wanted to buy a house and raise her family in her beloved Knocknoly. It wasn’t as if a woman could find this
in her twenties any more anyway – find a guy who was willing to settle down in his twenties and she’d show you that face cream really stopped wrinkles. It just didn’t exist. Men were not ready to settle down until their late thirties as far as she could see. It was all right for them: they could reproduce into their seventies. She had been out with lots of guys but none of the short-lived romances had ever seemed like they could last forever. She was looking for something special but somehow deep down she’d known she wanted to marry a local lad.

  Although she’d ditched her pill and moved into Neil’s place straight after the wedding she hadn’t slept with him for six weeks. They were intimate in other ways but he was half crazy with desire to make love to her and that was her plan. She loved that she was making him wait as it was something Neil Darragh wasn’t used to and she hoped she could tame him. Nevertheless, no one had been more surprised than Sandra when, just six short months after they first slept together, he dropped to one knee the night of her thirty-first birthday and proposed, albeit fairly drunkenly. In fact there was an audible gasp around the entire pub. Dermot Murray had dropped his pint glass and it shattered all over the floor. In fairness to Neil he had bought the ring and everything so he was prepared. She had been over the moon and the sense of relief that washed over her was completely unexpected.

  Neil really didn’t want a big do so they married quietly in a registry office in Dublin on Grand Canal Street seven months later and had a big party back in Hines. It suited Sandra perfectly. It had been a lovely day if a little underwhelming but now she was Mrs Darragh and she could concentrate her energies on building her family in Knocknoly. They had been casually trying for a baby before the wedding and now she felt it was time to get serious about it. She hadn’t quite decided what to do about her job just yet.

  Neil had settled into married life really well and maybe, just maybe, if the baby had come along as planned they might still be okay? But it hadn’t and they had been through so much in such a short space of time. In fact, Sandra couldn’t remember the girl she was back then – she’d lost her. That fun-loving, life-loving, flirty, carefree side of her had been deeply buried and Sandra didn’t think she could ever dig her back up.

  They began the ‘serious’ trying for a baby straight after the wedding. When nothing happened she still wasn’t overly concerned and put it down to her job. Lots of girls had erratic periods because of the flying and she assumed it was to do with this. As the first year of marriage passed in the blink of an eye and her periods were still very irregular she decided to leave the job. It was so hard to use the ovulation sticks when her dates were all over the place. It was reducing the probability of becoming pregnant if she couldn’t monitor when she was ovulating.

  “That’s a bit drastic, isn’t it?” Neil had said as he picked her up one evening at Arrivals at Terminal 2 of Dublin Airport and she told him she was handing in her notice.

  She had just done two trips over and back to Rome and she was wiped out. She was becoming too old for the job, she realised. Her back ached, her ankles were swollen like balloons and her skin was dehydrated.

  “We want a family, don’t we? I’m not getting any younger, Neil!” she crossly answered him as she slammed shut the door of his red works van. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Well, yeah, I suppose we do want a family but it’s not the be-all and end-all, is it?” He indicated and airport security signalled him out. Neil raised his hand in thanks.

  She had glared at him. “What does that mean exactly?”

  He was staring straight ahead out the van window as the rain began to fall. He flicked on the wipers as he leaned in closer to the windscreen. “I’m just saying, Sandra, there’s more to life than having kids, that’s all.” He shifted gears and shrugged his shoulders as he turned up the volume on his favourite radio station, Sunshine 106.8, and whistled along, his fingers drumming gently on the steering wheel.

  She sat back and closed her eyes, her blue resignation form folded neatly in her bag on her lap. There wasn’t more to life, as far as she was concerned. Time was against her. She wanted children. That was the plan. That’s the way life was supposed to go.

  ***

  The phone rang at reception and Sandra jumped but the answer machine kicked in and she heard her own voice say: “Thank you for calling the Moritz Hotel. We are sorry there is no one available to take your call at the moment. Please leave a message with your name and contact number and a member of staff will return your call as soon as possible.” She hated the sound of her own voice. Did she really sound like that?

  She’d attend to the messages as soon as she’d checked all the emails.

  “Fuck you, Neil!” she mouthed now as she shook her head fiercely. Her fringe bounced and then fell immediately back into place. She knew he was up to something – she could feel it in her bones. Instinct. She didn’t know what to do. Her parents were of no help and she had no brothers or sisters to confide in. There wasn’t anyone she could call a real friend in Knocknoly any more, except Louise. All her old friends had left the village. Moved on. But Louise was older and more like a mother figure. Sandra loved Louise dearly and had confided in her lots in the past but she didn’t want to drain their friendship. Louise had heard it all before. To be honest she didn’t want any pity again. Sandra had had it up to her neck in pity. Pity could go shitty.

  She had started to hunt for Neil’s mobile phone again when he was asleep and she hated herself for it. But she could never find it and when he was awake he never ever left it out of his hand, or if he did it was always powered off. It was also password-protected now – it hadn’t been before. It had been how she had found out about Kelley. That dread text message on that dread mobile phone. She had grabbed it off the glass table in Neil’s bungalow to check the time and as she did a text message beeped in. She clicked on it and opened it. It was the last thing she’d expected to see. In fact, she sometimes almost smiled at the irony of it all: she had been so sure he was planning a surprise birthday party for her and she wanted to suss it out. Boy, was she wrong!

  It read: I have heard from someone I trust in the village that you are not separated. I feel physically sick. I won’t see you again. K

  Sandra scrolled up to the previous messages, her heart fluttering.

  Meet me at back of stables – usual place usual time. Why aren’t you answering my calls? N

  Up again.

  Last night was incredible. Hope the horses don’t tell Dermot! I’m really falling for that Irish charm . . . and torso ;) LOL. Kxxx

  And: Wow! I still can’t walk properly. Can’t wait to see you again, you sexy little yank. I have it so bad for you. N

  There were dozens of them, thanks to the new iPhone all saved and sitting there for Sandra to read like a bad Jilly Cooper copy. Why she had been so surprised was anyone’s guess, but she had been. She had thrown up on the floor. Shocked to her very core. She couldn’t believe he could do this to her, to them. They had just been through so much together with the IVF. He had begun the affair the night they found out there was no pregnancy. How had she not copped? ‘The wives are always the last to know’ was a famous saying but she’d always thought those wives must be thick as planks.

  He had been a workaholic, no doubt about it, so he was rarely at home. He used to leave the house at six o’clock in the morning and return at eight o’clock at night and then back out for a few pints in Hines after his dinner. Sandra knew he was always on the flirt but was sure that was as far as it went and she really saw no harm in it. It wasn’t until she would join him later for a drink on occasions and other women in the bar would say to her “How do you put up with him?” or “If he was my husband I’d give him what for!”, as they laughed and blushed with delight at his obvious flirting with them, that it had begun to bother her. It had built up in her as the instances went by, bothering her more and more. She had told Neil on the walk home from the pub one evening how she felt but he just laughed and assured her
it was only a bit of gas and she was the only woman for him. He had pulled her in close and she had snuggled into the shoulder of his black leather jacket on Knocknoly Bridge. Secure. She honestly trusted him. That walk home seemed to her a lifetime ago now too.

  They really were struggling to pay the outrageous mortgage on their Knocknoly new build right now. They had bought it at a stupid time and for a stupid price and she blamed herself completely. She had been sucked in by Cherry Hill with its modern detached four-bedroomed redbricks that professionals from Dublin were buying to commute to busy Dublin-based jobs. Knocknoly was a small village but with the M50 nearby now the commute to Dublin took only just over an hour. Anyway, she had really wanted Neil to buy it and they had, despite indications of a recession looming. It was now a ghost estate. It was so unlike her – she just wasn’t one of those types of women who wanted fancy bricks and mortar but suddenly the house had become a must-have. She knew why really. After her first unsuccessful round of IVF and Neil’s affair with Kelley she wanted change. Distance. To start over again. She forgave the affair because he had filled her with such lies, saying that he had been traumatised over the fact they couldn’t have kids and that the IVF had been so hard on his masculinity. He said he needed to prove to himself that he was still a man. And he had cried and cried. He swore it meant nothing and it would never, ever happen again. He was on his knees begging her. He loved her. He said it had happened straight after they got the negative result from the doctor over the phone. They had gone to the pub on his request and there she was. Sandra had seen her there too. Kelley. She remembered her only too well. She was all big hair and smiles and happiness. Wildly fertile no doubt. Not a care in the world. He told Sandra he’d just wanted to be happy and had started to talk to Kelley to forget his troubles. He said he didn’t know why he told her he was separated but he had. They had begun a short but fierce love affair.