Julie

Toby was wrong. Harry wasn’t back within the week. I let him stew for a whole month. It was like a test of my own willpower, but I knew I had to make a point.

In that month, I managed to alienate my whole family. I missed my mother’s birthday, sending down an expensive gift that couldn’t compensate for my absence. I texted Helen, too cowardly to phone. My sister, who hated confrontation, responded in the most hurtful way she could – by not texting back.

I was consumed with guilt but too full of self-pity and heartbreak to do anything about it.

I phoned Harry on a Monday morning, knowing he would be busy in work, and told him to come out to the house. He was there forty minutes later.

When he came in I was sitting at the breakfast table, glass of wine in hand. It wasn’t even 11 a.m., but I needed it.

He took one look and said, ‘I don’t suppose there’s another of those going?’

I shrugged, and he fetched himself a glass.

He sat down, took a large gulp, then reached for my hand.

I wouldn’t let him take it.

‘Julie. I’ve missed you so much. Baby, I am so sorry for what I put you through. But you have to believe me. I didn’t rape those women. I was stupid, and I got myself into two ridiculous situations. But rape? Women are going to say that because I’m loaded and they want money out of me. I’m not that sort of man, Julie. You know that, surely?’

‘I don’t believe you raped anybody,’

I said. His face flooded with relief.

‘Thank God,’ he said, as he tried to take my hand again.

I lifted the wine glass instead.

When I’d taken a sip, I had the courage to continue.

‘But I do think you slept with them. How many, Harry? How long have you been cheating on me?’

He reacted like he’d been slapped.

‘You slept with that Lily woman from the bank, didn’t you? Was she the first, or were there more?’

‘What are you talking about? I don’t cheat on you, Julie. Why would you say that?’

‘Don’t lie to me!’ I slapped my hand down on the table, making him jump.

‘I … I—’ Harry stuttered to a halt.

We looked each other in the eye.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t confess.

Did I even want him to? Really?

‘I’m not a cheater,’ he said, and stared down at the table.

He couldn’t meet my gaze.

‘How can I believe you?’ I snapped. ‘All that madness in Estonia is one thing, but you never told me about that Nina Carter girl. Why not, if you’d nothing to hide? I’m your wife!’

‘Maybe because I knew you’d react like this. Jesus, Julie. You haven’t a clue how stressful my job is. I have to be your big, strong husband all the time. You expect me to take care of you, but who’s taking care of me?’

‘Are you shitting me, Harry? I never said I expected you to take care of me. Any time I try to take care of myself, you’re in there with “You don’t need to work, Julie. Let me take care of everything, Julie.”’

‘I’m not talking about money, and stop being so fucking selfish!’ he shouted. ‘I’m talking about you drinking. I’m talking about us not getting pregnant. Other women take folic acid when they’re trying to have a baby, Julie, not a glass of fucking Pinot Noir. Have you ever thought the two might be connected? Did you notice that I cut back on the booze? To give us a chance, because I want a family. And if you really wanted to get pregnant, there are ways. You’ve never even mentioned IVF. Do you actually want to have a baby, or do you just want know that you can?’

I winced. It was my most private thought and he’d just spat it in my face.

‘And another thing. You never acknowledge how hard I work. You just take everything I give you for granted, turning up your nose at what you don’t want and grabbing what you do, like it’s fucking normal to be a millionaire and you can pick and choose your pleasures with good conscience. You drive into your job in a BMW, pretending you’re just one of the gang and nothing like your boring square of a husband.

‘All those years you spent flirting with that toad Toby and getting pissed every other night. I’ve never thrown any of that at you, and the minute I confess my worst moments to you, you throw me out of the house! You’re not perfect, and neither am I. But it’s not fair for you to think the worst of me because I make a mistake. I’m only human. I needed you to support me for once. I’ve done nothing wrong. And you turned on me.’

I couldn’t speak. I was so appalled, I wanted to disappear inside myself, to unhear everything he’d just said.

I knew what he was doing. The passive-aggressive nature of it, turning the situation around so, somehow, I was to blame.

I recognized it. It was the behaviour of an addict – somebody absolutely genius at deflecting attention from their own behaviour. I just wasn’t aware what his addiction was at that stage.

Despite this, I let what he said affect me. Especially as he’d touched on a raw nerve when he mentioned Toby.

I needed an out. I didn’t want my marriage to break up. I’d realized that the moment another man came on to me. If I could share some of the blame for Harry keeping things from me, then I could rationalize my decision to stay with him. I could shut the lid on Pandora’s box and sit on it.

I let him move back in, but for weeks afterwards, things remained awkward. He came home early from work Monday to Friday – early for him, anyway, just in time to make dinner. We stayed in, picked at dinner, watched television and moved around each other like we were the wrong ends of two magnets.

I couldn’t live with the pained silences.

Harry was pulling on his trainers for a walk one Saturday morning when I made the first move.

‘Can I come with you?’ I asked, standing at the door to the guest room.

He looked up, his face arranged in the permanent worried expression he wore those days.

‘Yes. Of course,’ he said.

We walked in the direction of Killiney Hill and climbed for a while, both concentrating on keeping our breathing steady as we negotiated the steep incline and slippery grass, me taking his proffered hand when I lost my footing.

‘Julie,’ he said, when he pulled me up to face him on level ground. It was the first time we’d touched in weeks.

‘No, Harry,’ I said. ‘I’ll speak.’

‘Okay.’

We walked again for a few minutes in silence, until we emerged on to the section of the hill that looked out over the sea. It was cold. Our breath formed clouds of steam, the two of us warm from the exertion. There was nobody around, most people having more sense than to be out on a chilly November morning shrouded in a light mist that threatened to turn to rain.

‘When we met, Harry, I hadn’t even had a serious boyfriend,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘I was only twenty-four when we got married.’

He nodded, his face set against the wind.

‘But I’m not a bloody innocent.’

He looked down at the ground beside his feet, scuffing at it with the toes of his trainers.

‘You’re rich, Harry. Filthy rich, and I don’t really understand how. You manage a bank – you’re not a bloody tycoon. You tell me your job is stressful, and I don’t know why. Who are these people you deal with? Are they kosher?

‘And I know I drink too much. I’m bored out of my wits. I should have stayed working full-time. You pressed me to go casual, but I’m not blaming you. I should have said no. I should have put my foot down.’

‘I know that’s my fault,’ he said, gracious now I’d claimed some of the responsibility for the fissure in our marriage. ‘I thought we could spend more time together and then I just started working more. I’m sorry.’

‘Thank you for saying that.’ I sighed. ‘But “sorry” is just a word. Here’s what we’re going to do. I told you when we met that I don’t give up easily. I am not going to let us fall apart. I’m not going to be a divorcee in my thirties. I love you, Harry. I’ve loved you from the moment I saw you.’

‘And me, too,’ he said. ‘I know things have been strained between us for a while, and I don’t know how or why. Something happened. I don’t know what, but you started to look at me differently.’

He was talking about Capri and he didn’t even realize it. That’s what had happened.

‘I want us to go back to where we were, Julie. What do I have to do?’

I looked out at the water, watching the distant ripples of white against the grey sea and the ferry sailing out from Dún Laoghaire harbour.

‘I just want you to be honest, Harry. That’s all. I’m not going to look away any more. I want you to always be truthful with me and I want you to show some cop-on and start seeing me as your partner, not just your wife. If you don’t want me teaching full-time, if you want me more involved in your life and your work, then I have to be involved. Where does the money come from? They say you’re one of the wealthiest men in Ireland. What sort of salary are you paying yourself ? Is all this going to last? And Harry, more important than any of that – you need to tell me if you’ve ever been unfaithful. Did you sleep with Nina Carter?’

I turned to look at him, and I could see him calculating – how much and how little I had to know to make this work, which card he was willing to play.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I … I kissed her back. I was drunk, Julie. I swear, it was just a stupid kiss. Nothing else.’

I closed my eyes, barely able to swallow the disappointment. With each little push, he gave up a bit more.

‘She ran off and straight into a colleague in the hall, bawling. She told him she thought if she had sex with me, it would help her career in the bank, but that she’d changed her mind and I’d raped her. He talked some sense into her. He told her he’d seen her flirting with me, how everybody had seen her follow me upstairs – how much danger her job could be in. She threatened me because I rejected her, Julie.’

‘Which colleague?’

‘What?’

‘Who did she run into?

‘Oh. Richard.’

‘It’s always Richard, isn’t it, Harry? He’s always there to smooth things over.’

His face hardened.

‘He’s my right-hand man, Julie. You know that. He’s always there because he’s always bloody there. It’s not a set-up.’

I pursed my lips, unhappy.

‘I want to be honest with you,’ he said, and turned me around to face him. ‘We’re grown-ups. I know it must hurt to hear that I kissed another woman, even drunkenly, but please, believe me, that was it. If you told me you kissed another bloke, I’d want to punch his lights out but I wouldn’t consider it cheating.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘I kissed Toby.’

‘What?’ His eyes grew dark, and he tightened his grip on my arm.

I laughed without feeling and shook my head.

‘See how that felt, Harry? Of course I didn’t kiss him. Are you still claiming I should be okay about this?’

‘I’m not. I have to make it up to you. But you have to believe you’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted. You’re my family. You’re all that matters. And I’ll prove it. I’m going to tell you things that will make you understand just how much I trust you, baby. I will show you how much you mean to me.’

And then he told me everything about the bank. Afterwards, he pulled me into his chest and I felt the comforting familiarity of his body beneath his fleece top. I inhaled his smell, mixed with the outdoors.

I thought I was a good person. I saw the world in black and white when it came to morality. But the world Harry moved in was differing shades.

As far as Harry’s business was concerned, that day he was completely and utterly honest with me.

In telling me, he made me cross the line with him. He made real what I’d always suspected, what I’d been happy to be blissfully ignorant about.

In later years, when the ceiling came crashing in, the executives at my husband’s bank and others would claim ignorance and stupidity to defend the actions that led to the financial crisis. But after billions were pumped into the banks by the State, with all that debt heaped on the taxpayers’ shoulders, the public bayed for blood. That’s when the Office of Corporate Law Enforcement decided to get involved and examine whether all the decisions made in the years leading up to the crash were as innocent as they seemed. Had the bankers been swept along by an acceptable and, at the time, legal tide of risky market ventures and overstretching? Or had they been criminally negligent in their businesses?

What Harry told me that day and in the years that followed meant I knew how calculated it had all been, the choices and the gambles that brought Harry’s bank to ruin and eventually put the whole economy in peril.

Much of it was over my head. Subprime and falsifying capital reserves were things few people had heard about back then, but the gist wasn’t lost on me.

Harry was playing a dangerous game, not just with our own finances but with those of many of our friends – his investors and bank shareholders – as well as his customers.

That’s what I should have been worrying about.

Not whether he was cheating on me.

Harry trusted me with all that information.

I wonder, when he was on the floor being beaten while I looked on, did he regret placing his faith in me?

That Christmas, I drove to Helen’s house on my own. I knocked on her door with two Dunnes Stores bags full of selection boxes and packets of jellies.

She opened the door, raised an eyebrow and put her hand on her hip.

‘Think you can buy your way back into my good graces with a few sweets, do you?’ she said.

‘I’ve a voucher for a luxury spa weekend and a bottle of champers in the boot, but I thought I’d try these first,’ I said. Then I started to cry.

‘You daft mare,’ she said, and pulled me into the house, wrapping her arms around me. She had tears in her own eyes. ‘You know I can’t stay angry at you. I was going to call up to Dublin at the weekend. Mam was coming too.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I sobbed. ‘It was awful. Harry and I split up and I thought we were finished.’ I felt her arms tense around me. ‘We’re okay now, but it’s been so hard.’

She held me away from her and looked at me properly.

‘Julie Ferguson. I swear, don’t you ever do that again. I know you love that man and he’s your husband, but we are your family. Do you understand? You tell us everything. What did he do? Was he with somebody else? Do I need to punch his lights out?’

I shook my head and gave her a watery smile.

‘It was nothing,’ I said. ‘Just a silly thing. It’s fixed now.’

Helen sucked in her cheeks and pursed her lips. She didn’t believe me. But she wouldn’t push it.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘That will do for me, pet. But Mam’s in the kitchen, so we’re going to have to come up with a story about a near-death experience in the next two minutes. All right?’

I nodded.

I was forgiven. I didn’t even deserve it.

Tell them everything? I couldn’t even begin to tell them the half of it.