The New Mrs D (2 page)

‘Do you, David, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife? Do you promise to love, honour and cherish her daily until about ten thirty at night when BabeStation starts?’

Some people believe there is a silent witness to your life inside of you. This, they say, is the part of you that makes you able to recall what you dreamed about when your brain was asleep. It is the tiny, almost imperceptible voice in your head that tells you not to do something when you are about to make a huge and dangerous mistake. Well, mine is broken.

I shook my head in self-deprecation and peered up again to seek out Gerard Butler, who was now bobbing around in the water, having fallen off his skis. As the speedboat turned back and began to circle him, I watched as he flailed around, up to his neck in the rippling and heaving of its wake, struggling for breath, knowing exactly how he felt.

David and I had gone through hospital tests where
he’d been given a clean bill of sexual health, and months of therapy, only to reach the conclusion he had dulled his senses with porn and we decided together that the only answer was complete abstention from it. He’d agreed, led me home and just plain pretended to quit. For my part in this whole mess, I had believed him.

Why, why,
why
did I agree to marry him?

Sooner or later, I would have to go home, face up to what had happened and hear this question from everyone else. But, to admit my second marriage had begun to fail in its first week, all because of what many would consider ‘harmless porn browsing’ would take a lot of courage.

If I decided to call it a day, what would I say to my friends and family? ‘He left me’ or ‘I threw him out’. Which explanation would make me look less like the bad person? Of course, I shouldn’t care less, yet I hated the idea of being judged. I had already asked myself all the questions people were going to have for me.

‘You dumped your husband just for looking at porn? That’s what men do!’

‘How insecure is
she
?’

‘Why didn’t you just watch it with him?’

It was going to be hard telling people that porn was my sole reason for giving up on David. They didn’t know what I now suspected to be true: that any chance we had of a normal sex life had been wiped out by his ‘me time’ for six years. Who would go through with a wedding knowing all of this? How could I have been so foolish?

Idiot. It didn’t matter what anyone else thought of me at this moment, no-one could hate me more than I hated myself.

It was safe to assume, from the fact that no-one back home had guessed anything was wrong, that David had gone into hiding so no-one would suspect there was a problem. He’d probably taken a flight back to England and was now holed up in some hotel room to avoid being seen, with a laptop and a phone, wondering which one he fancied the most tonight.

I felt fat and dowdy − the opposite of the ideal, sexy woman men cannot seem to resist. My body was old, old, old.

Damn him. And damn Josephine the Nymphotast, with her beach ball tits and Barbie doll waist, who somehow experiences scream-out-loud pleasure three seconds before Shaved-Arsed, Utility Repairman enters her. (What the bloody hell was a ‘Nymphotast’ anyway?) Damn the ‘call me and cum’ Freeview television babes with their youthful, perfect bodies, who wiggle half-naked on our screens, post watershed, trying to shake free of their own arse cheeks. The same ones I’d caught David watching while I’d been waiting, willing and ready for him in our bed! Because sex sells! Pah! And men are buying as their wives carry on in ignorant bliss. Well, not this wife. Not anymore. If only hindsight was less ‘hind’ and more ‘sight’. Only now could I see how gullible I had been. Only now − after our wedding!

Damn him and damn my self-propelled roll-down bikini pants. (I pulled them back up again.) I had other choices. Who knew? And I choose to hold myself right now. I choose to stop feeling scared, gullible, stupid and afraid of being alone, even though, okay, technically I was on my own and in a foreign land. Is it ever too late to decide to get it right for once? Sod David Dando and sod his lies. I’m staying right here in Greece. I am strong, independent and . . . and . . . something else!
I wonder if they have any more of this wine?
Moreover, I am going ahead with every one of the fun-filled activities he and I had planned for the next ten days. (Except the scary scuba diving thingy. Bloody
Jaws
had ruined any enjoyment I’d ever had of swimming in the sea.)

What was I saying? Ah yes, I am
strong
. I am
fierce
. I am
woman
.

Who the hell needs a husband anyway? Even on your honeymoon.

Chapter Two

Please Binnie, I need to speak to you. The sex is a problem, I know. But I’ve changed for you just as I promised. I do desire you. I do!

A
fter blocking David’s number on my mobile after this fourteenth text had woken me up, a new message notification appeared on the home screen. I clicked it open and immediately wished I hadn’t. It was from Smother.

You’d think after having spent so much money on your daughter’s big day, she’d at least contact you to say how her honeymoon is going.

I felt myself shudder − not really knowing why − and deleted it. How I needed a mother right now, the kind I could call and cry to, admitting the wedding had been a terrible mistake and all of the reasons why. But I didn’t have one of those. I had a unique and rare kind of mum, the last person I wanted to go to in a crisis. The kind who
enjoyed
a drama − and none more so than one of mine.

I clicked the television on, hoping to find any non-romantic or funny programme to take my mind off things, and settled for the three and three-quarter hours epic that is
Ben Hur
. Sorry, Smother, the guilt will have to go on hold for a while. Just for once, I need to look no further than taking care of me.

As Judah Ben Hur fought off the desire to start a mass slave rebellion, I rubbed my soggy, swollen eyes and pondered the more ambiguous question of what dress to wear for a solo expedition to the honeymoon hotel restaurant and how to get the ‘tears of my doom’ swelling round my eyes to go down. Marching into the bathroom, I splashed water on my face before drying it with a towel that smelled of David. Then sunk to my knees and cried my heart out, right there on the floor.

In the background, the television was still blaring.

‘Your eyes are full of hate, 41. That’s good. Hate keeps a man alive, it gives him strength.’

Pulling myself up I looked at my eyes in the bathroom mirror, still bloodshot from bawling. All I could do to get through this evening was to stop thinking about how much I loved David and keep reminding myself how angry I was.

‘Are you going to jump in the pool with that bloody sarong on?’

I straightened my shoulders and flushed crimson. It was the first morning of our honeymoon and I was sitting on the edge of my sunbed next to the busy hotel pool, with a towel around my shoulders and the sarong hiding my midriff from view. I could feel people around us watching me.

‘Come on, woman,’ David carried on, waving me into the water beside him. ‘Just get up off your fat arse and get in. Nobody’s looking at you, you daft moo.’

I recoiled at the word ‘fat’ and bit my lip, my eyes welling up. It was our honeymoon and he’d called me ‘fat’. I was The New Mrs Fat. ‘Telephone call for Mrs Fat.’ ‘Hey, how’s married life, Mrs Fat?’ ‘Has anyone seen Mrs Fat today?’

‘Oh, don’t upset yourself,’ he laughed. ‘I’m only joking, you know that. Come on, my beautiful, new wife. Get in.’

A nimble young woman strode past between us, in nothing but a tiny pair of sea green bikini briefs and a pair of flip flops. I watched as David followed her with his eyes, doubting whether he could tell me the colour of her bikini briefs. I felt a familiar lump in my throat.
It’s normal, it’s normal. We’re married, not dead.

‘I think I’ll just go get another cocktail,’ I told him. ‘Back in a mo.’

It was half past eight by the time I picked myself up to get ready and pulled on a forgiving, floaty dress I’d treated myself to on the first day of the holiday. Squaring up to my reflection in the mirror, I said aloud, ‘Not bad at all, Mrs Robinson,’ before telling myself ‘That bastard isn’t having my fidelity a moment longer − any more than I had his.’ I was impervious; Ben Hur . . . in a little black dress.

With my blonde, wavy locks dried and three coats of blotch-camouflaging make-up applied, I swallowed my angst and made for the lift, speeding up past Suck-Face couple’s door. God help me if I bumped into them and they saw it was me who had been doing all of the shouting and screaming during The David Eviction.

Feeling reprieved at getting past room 718 without incident and, seeing its doors about to close, I dived into the lift. Which is where I joined Mr and Mrs Holdy-Hands. That was all I needed now, to witness someone else’s marital bliss in an enclosed space. Just great!

‘Hi,’ I said, almost unable to bear the stab of pain their happy togetherness brought me. As they both nodded a reply, I shook it off, repeating in my head,
‘I am strong’ ‘I am confident’ ‘I look amazing in my beautiful, new dress.’
I had to get through this one night. All I had to do to begin was put one foot in front of the other.

Stepping out to the moonlit, open-air restaurant, I breathed in, brushed my fringe from my eyes and strode into the middle of the busy restaurant to find a seat. It was then I realised I was surrounded. There was a reason David and I had chosen to stay here and not with the rest of the adventure tour group we’d booked with. This was a romantic, honeymoon hotel.

Everywhere couples were gazing into each other’s eyes, clinking glasses and toasting their successful, loving relationships, almost as if they knew mine was in the toilet.
Could this evening get any harder, God?

Yes, it could.

Just as I was beginning to refocus on finding a table, a man moved a chair for his wife just in front of me, kissing her shoulder as she passed him to sit down. I turned in another direction, swallowing hard as I took in the scene before me − this hotel was a lovers’ paradise. Everyone was still going about their normal, happy lives and most likely looking forward to having rampant, holiday sex tonight – even with each other! This place had no tables for one, or an uneven three. I was all alone, in honeymoon central.

Just three nights earlier, David had looked into my eyes across one of these very candlelit tables, telling me how much he couldn’t wait to get me back to our room. We were ecstatic newly-weds, giggling like teenagers as we rushed away early, having guzzled a bottle of champagne. And later, out on the balcony of our honeymoon suite, in the warm night air and under the romantic, Greek moonlight . . . I’d beat him twice at gin rummy. It was all I could do to keep my mind off all the sex we weren’t having.

‘Waitress?’

The Shoulder-Kisser was waving my way. I moved back, turning to let whoever he was calling past. There was no-one behind me.

‘Hello? Waitress?’ he shouted again, snapping his fingers.

‘Excuse me?’ I laughed, pointing to my chest in a ‘surely you don’t mean me’ way. Even though he wasn’t smiling, I threw him a quizzical smile and turned away – only to see a woman in an identical dress to mine weaving in and out of tables with a tray full of drinks. I looked around and spotted another identically-dressed woman. And another. Finally, a waitress brushed past to take the man’s order, but not before stopping to give me a sympathetic smile.

Maybe it was a congratulatory one. ‘Well done, Binnie,’ it said. ‘Your sexy, new dress is hotel waiting staff standard issue.’

Suddenly my head hurt again. What was I thinking, coming down here all by myself without David? What had I done?

I can’t do this. I can’t. I can’t.

Face flushed and heart racing, I grabbed hold of the waitress’s shoulder as she was rushing away to collect the man’s order and whispered, ‘Is it possible to get wine . . .er . . . lots of wine − and dinner − sent to my room?

Chapter Three

One of the local dishes is called Stifado. Tried not to stare at him too much whilst at dinner with Mr D.

I
posted my ‘everything-is-normal’ Facebook status, attached a picture of some nameless Greek hunk I could do with meeting right now, and sighed. By the looks of the newly pebble-dashed toilet in my hotel room, Mrs D had drunk this tiny island dry last night. Any thought of Greek beef stew made me feel like rushing back in for another round of vomiting. The absence of Mr D was something to be left out of my updates for now, so my family back home would believe everything was rosy, if only for Sally and Beth’s sake.

Despite my daughters’ approval of David, they had been unenthusiastic and, I sensed, a little embarrassed at the prospect of my getting married again.

‘Why bother at your age, Mum?’

It was all I could do to stop imagining the Grim Reaper at the end of my bed with a ‘Get It While You Can’ sign.

If this was all going tits up, telling them both the whole disastrous story of my sex life wasn’t an option. They just couldn’t bear to consider my sexuality in any way, shape or form. My thoughts wandered to a recent conversation with my own mother, just before the wedding, and I understood.

‘Binnie, can I please come to yours for a bath today? This walk-in shower is fine but I have terrible trouble with some weird swellings on my bits. The only thing that soothes me is a nice, long soak.’

I took her off the speakerphone so she couldn’t hear David’s screams in the background.

‘Nooooooo! Godddddddddd! Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeease!’

The final realisation that now, to my kids, I was my mother, had happened on the day of the wedding, whilst dashing naked from the bathroom to my bedroom and bumping into them somewhere in between.

Laughing, Sal had said, ‘Never mind, Mum. I’ve seen worse, you know.’

To which Beth quipped, ‘HOW exactly have you seen worse?’

That wonderful, quirky, Bethsome humour; I loved her for it.

As nausea overtook me, I stripped for my shower and glanced in the mirror at thick, dimpled thighs that couldn’t possibly have belonged to the former fastest 800 metre runner in my high school athletics team. David had seen me cry myself to sleep many times, wracked with feelings of inadequacy over my body after finding him ogling someone else’s. This morning I felt so sick, I knew it was time to stop abusing my body. It wasn’t going to help me feel better.

With most of our problems seeming so far away in the past, our wedding day had been the happiest day of my life. Within an hour of the ceremony, I had changed my Facebook username to ‘Mrs David Dando’, as if Facebook updates were all I lived to do, as necessary to life as breathing in and out. Why didn’t I just write:

I’m not saying I take my phone everywhere, but can I just ask one quick question? Do I take this man to be my lawfully wedded husband?

Although I was desperate to free myself from all the negative emotions swimming around in my head, I cursed my protruding belly as I showered. This hated body that belongs to the only one of two sisters who hadn’t got a belly button ring − in the knowledge that every time she sat down the damn thing would have disappeared, sucked into a ductile cave whilst simultaneously acting as a ‘Give Way’ sign for her knicker elastic. If only it were possible to scrub off all the lumpy parts that made David not want me. How could I make all these thoughts stop?

Tears flowed freely under the spray and I washed them away and hugged myself. ‘Bernice,’ I said, ‘it’s time to love yourself better.’ I held myself for a long time, feeling the dull, gnawing ache in my belly from yesterday’s excesses and finally sighed, before jumping out to get on with the day.

I can do this. I can!

I wrapped myself in a fluffy white towel and walked back into the bedroom, pausing to pick up my faux lonely hearts ad and toss it into the bin. I picked up the pen once more to make a new list. A list of commandments − from me to me. I needed something to work towards, to get me through the rest of the holiday and onwards for life. And I needed it now.

The ‘Five Daily Steps to a New Bernice’ Plan

1. Thou shalt do one thing a day that scares the crap out of you.

2. Thou shalt never again indulge in negative self-talk.

3. Thou shalt cease looking in magnified mirrors for evidence of beard. Please refer to previous point.

4. Thou shalt not neglect thy pelvic floor. Ten minutes a day AND NO LESS!

5. Thou shalt remember that God is all
around . . . And she doesn’t like swearing.

I heaved a heavy sigh and vowed not to let David sway me from my new path of righteousness again, before typing in a sixth.

6. When life throws shit at you, grow great, big, fuck off roses.

There goes the fifth commandment.

The girls − my wonderful, supportive girls − frequently told me I wasn’t as big as I thought.

No, ‘Hey Mum, you’re not fat’, but a teasing, ‘Okay, you’re a bit curvy but not in a needing-a-crane-to-go-out kind of way.’.

Smother would tell me I was overweight at any given opportunity and in such a way as to make me unsure whether I was being insulted or not. I thought of the last email she sent me:

Darling, I have this article for you to read and DON’T THINK I’M TELLING YOU YOU’RE FAT BECAUSE I’M NOT. It’s just these new pills that I’ve been on have made me shed a stone in a month! You must try them!

I loved how she used capitals to emphasise the point she was trying to make, knowing full well my brain would pick out the words ‘YOU’RE FAT’ all by itself.

My persistent queries to my friends of, ‘Do I look fat in this?’ were invariably met with ‘You’re lovely as you are.’ Didn’t they know
that
answer just plays a tape in a broken woman’s head that says, ‘I’m acceptable, normal and not at all extraordinary?’

And, dammit, I want to be extraordinary!

On reflection, it appeared that my ideal world would contain: a man who doesn’t lie and friends that occasionally will. Too much of my time had been wasted trying to work out what turns men on. Wasted − thanks to six years of living with someone who had no desire for me.

How would I ever break another failed marriage to my daughters? They themselves were just starting out in the world of relationships and needed me to be a motherly fountain of good advice. How could I face telling them I’d failed again? And as for my own mother? It just wasn’t worth contemplating.

‘Mum, there’s something I have to tell you.’

My mother stood aside to let me in her front door and frowned, brushing my hair down with her hand. ‘Jeez,’ she complained. ‘You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards. Where are the children?’

‘They’re at school, Mum, it’s Thursday. Look, something has happened . . .’

‘Have you been crying? Oh Christ, what have you and Michael been rowing about now? You do give that poor man a hard time.’

She bent down to straighten the front door mat which I had dislodged from its uniform state in my haste to get in out of the rain. I stood shivering behind her, drenched and with no coat on, having bolted over from my house, waiting to be hugged, or at least offered a towel.

‘Mum,’ I said, through chattering teeth. ‘I need to talk to you. I found this catalogue in the loft and inside there were these letters and anyway it turns out that . . .’

‘Ooh, talking of catalogues,’ she interrupted, straightening up again and peering through the narrow glass window of her now closed front door. ‘I need to go and speak to Jenny across the road. Do you know she owes me three week’s catalogue money? Damn cheek. Like I can afford to pay her debts! Why don’t you go in the kitchen and make us a cup of tea? I’ll be back in a jiffy.’

Reaching over to the coat hook for her jacket, she took off into the street I’d just come in from without looking back. As the door slammed shut behind her, I told it:

‘Michael’s been having an affair.’

After testing the hotel’s less than efficient plumbing system with at least one bottle of the previous night’s wine, I washed my face, brushed my teeth and stared bleary-eyed at the person in the mirror, wondering who the hell she was. Jeez, I had to cut back on the booze. But, however terrible I felt right now, I was determined to get on with the holiday programme. I had to.

David and I had planned a special honeymoon of firsts, choosing an adventure excursion company recommended by a lifelong friend of his, who had moved out to a tiny, not so commercial Greek island to work for them. A bachelor at forty-eight, several years ago Chris had begun spending six months in Greece teaching painting to tourists and six months back home in Nottinghamshire, where he had an art gallery. As David and I had sifted through the brochure, full of pictures of things neither of us had ever done before we’d agreed to have our very first class learning to paint with Chris. We’d both been looking forward to seeing him, especially because his being in Greece at this time of year meant he had missed the wedding.

The rest of our planned experiences were nothing too insane, just a series of mini-adventures and experiences for us to pick from. We had cut out the ones that appealed, then folded and thrown them into a fez. The same one I’d sported while wearing a pair of see-through knickers and not a lot else to perform the Zorba dance on the day the honeymoon travel tickets had arrived. Classy. Really, really classy.

‘Oh, you can kiss me on a Monday, a Monday, a Monday is very, very, good!’ I belted out.

‘I can’t kiss you on any day if you’re in Turkey – where they actually wear the fez – and I’m in Greece.’

‘Oh,’ I sulked. ‘How am I to know the fez has nothing to do with Greece? Call the Geographical Hats Society!’

‘You plonker,’ he’d laughed, knocking it off my head, but (sigh) leaving my knickers on.

Then we played the honeymoon raffle, taking turns to draw out a full itinerary of adventures for our trip. It was all my idea, another of life’s new adventures. Maybe it was my approaching middle age, maybe the prospect of getting married again, but in the past few years I’d developed a desire to really find myself and cram just about as much life into whatever time I had left. Turning forty did that to you. One day you feel a world away from old age and the next you are realising that, if you’re lucky, you’ve reached the fifty percent of your life mark. I looked back over the fifty percent behind me, and saw nothing, except the incredible experience of the birth and raising of two wonderful girls, for me to feel proud about. Not one thing. And right then I knew nothing I’d done so far in my professional life had ever seemed to fit. So, I took to the vast library of self-help books out there and began to devour everything and share it with a less-than-enamoured David. He agreed to the new experiences, but begged me to stop reading ‘you either get it or you don’t’ paragraphs from Dr Phil aloud. This honeymoon was meant to have been to be a fun, romantic start to our life together for David and, unbeknown to him, the beginning of a secret quest I’d set myself to unpick my life’s defining moments - the things that had happened along the way to change me forever. Funny that the honeymoon itself should turn out to be one of them.

‘Can we at least open the envelopes?’

David’s last plea popped into my head uninvited. A secret, ‘let’s do this together’ suggestion written in private, sealed inside envelopes then exchanged with each other, to be opened on the penultimate day of the honeymoon. My envelope from David was still in my suitcase and was, not without a dab of irony, tucked under my sexy, now-redundant honeymoon negligee. No doubt, his suggestion was to watch
Debbie Does Dallas
together. Or maybe – just maybe – he had opened his heart in a way I hadn’t seen him do before. But why open it now? What was the point? I couldn’t – wouldn’t – let myself read it. I had to focus and pull myself together for the painting lesson.

I had been facing the prospect of seeing Chris again with some trepidation, mainly because I feared looking a prat − neither myself nor David could draw for toffee; a fact proven time and again on games nights at home when the girls had destroyed us at Pictionary. Painting lessons with David, I imagined, would be as funny as trying to guess
An American Werewolf in London
from his hysterical, child-like sketches.

‘
The Muppets Take Manhattan
?’

‘No, no!’ (He had drawn something resembling Animal holding the US flag next to a clock tower.)

‘Once Upon a Time in America with the Muppets?’ Beth would always join in on our turn.

‘Aaaarrrgggghhh!’

‘Aaaarrrgggghhh? Is that the first letter of the first or the second word?’

Now, there was another reason for my apprehension about seeing Chris again. How could I explain appearing there, on my honeymoon, without David?

I had no idea how was he going to be with me, yet I really wanted to see a friendly face. He was now the only person I knew on the island and I felt sure David would have been way too embarrassed and proud to have turned up there. I liked Chris; and I wanted to take his art class as planned.

All I had to do now was work out how to get to his villa. For years I’d been unable to get back behind the wheel but now I wanted . . . no, I needed that independence.

‘Can I help you, Mrs Dando?’

The receptionist using my new married name gave me another unwelcome jolt of pain. As newly-weds, you go to any lengths to hear and use your new name. Except when you decide to call time on your marriage four days later.

‘I love you, Mrs Dando.’

And I love you, Mr Dando.

‘Would you pass me the salt, please, Mrs Dando?’

Why are someone else’s squirty-cream covered boobs looking at me from the browser on your mobile, Mr Dando?

‘Mrs Dando?’

‘Mrs Dando!’

The receptionist’s voice snapped me back to the present. Right. Time for me to try something new that wasn’t on the itinerary; taking to the open road, alone, for the first time in years.