the hospital with her coffee cup in her hand, she saw her aunt sitting on a bench in the small hospital garden to the right of the ambulance bay. Anneliese didn’t notice her: she looked as if she wouldn’t notice a meteorite unless it landed directly on top of her. The hospital was built high up on the east side of the town and looked out at the harbour. Anneliese was staring out to sea blankly.
Watching her, Izzie fought the desire to go into the hospital and not confront whatever was troubling Anneliese. She didn’t have the energy for someone else’s pain. But that was the coward’s way out.
‘Hello,’ she said, sitting down beside her aunt.
‘Hi, Izzie,’ said Anneliese dully, then turned back to the sea.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ Izzie continued. When in doubt, make small talk.
Anneliese nodded. ‘Beautiful,’ she repeated.
Izzie took a deep draught of her coffee for moral courage. She figured that there was some problem in Edward and Anneliese’s marriage. She hoped it wasn’t serious. At home in New York, marriages flew into turbulence every day and such a thing was quite normal. But here, it felt different. As if the ‘till death us do part’ vow simply couldn’t be broken.
‘What’s wrong, Anneliese?’ she asked softly. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
She’d expected Anneliese to pause and to tell her slowly. But no. Still looking out to sea and in a voice filled with emotion and anger, Anneliese said: ‘Edward left me for Nell. You remember Nell, my best friend?’
‘What!’ said Izzie. ‘I can’t believe it. When?’
‘Nearly a week ago,’ said Anneliese, matter of factly. ‘I would tell you exactly how many days and hours, but that sounds too much like a smoker working out how long it is since her last cigarette, so I won’t do that.’
‘He left you for Nell?’ repeated Izzie.
‘I came home from Mass and they were together; not in bed together, although they might have been. It’s funny,’ Anneliese added, almost thoughtfully, ‘that sleeping with someone else is seen as the ultimate betrayal. Fucking someone else is believed to be the worst thing, isn’t it?’
Izzie winced at hearing her gentle, elegant aunt use such harsh, crude language. In all her life, she had never heard Anneliese speak in such a way.
‘But you know, fucking isn’t the worst thing,’ Anneliese went on. ‘The intimacy, the closeness, the sharing thoughts: they’re the worst things, that’s what I keep thinking every moment of every day. I keep thinking about what they were doing. Did Edward phone her or text her at night, saying, “How are you, darling? I’m bored, wish I was with you.” And knowing it was all because he wasn’t interested enough in me, I wasn’t enough for him.’ She turned to face her niece. ‘Can you imagine what that feels like, Izzie?’
Izzie wondered if her face was red with the flush of guilt. She had no idea what to say to help ease Anneliese’s pain. There wasn’t a lot she could say. But she had no right to say anything. Somewhere in New York was a married woman just like Anneliese and her husband was cheating on her with Izzie. He might have insisted he was no longer with his wife, but his actions proved otherwise.
‘And what did Edward say?’ Izzie asked, wanting to help, but knowing she wasn’t the right person to do it.
‘He didn’t know what to say. I asked him to leave and then, when he left the room, bloody Nell insisted that I’d known about them all along. Because any fool would have known if their husband was in love with somebody else,’ she said bitterly. ‘And that’s the thing, Izzie: I didn’t know. I really didn’t. After thirty-seven years of marriage, you think you know somebody. Of course, that’s the other hard thing, one of many hard things.’ Anneliese almost laughed and she sounded a bit crazy, Izzie thought.
‘There are so many horrible things, it’s hard to pin down the worst, but certainly one of the startling bits of information out of this entire situation is the realisation that you really don’t know anybody. I thought he loved me. More fool me.’
Anneliese was quiet for a moment. ‘God, Izzie, I hope you’re never betrayed like this. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. I really thought Edward loved me. We’d been through quite a lot together and I thought we’d be together until the end. And now, it’s like everything wasn’t true, everything we did together was a big lie. I was looking at our lives one way and he was looking at it another way. Perhaps that’s where the expression rose-coloured glasses comes from,’ she said suddenly. ‘I had rose-coloured glasses on. I was looking at the truth and I simply didn’t see it. He must have been bored, fed up and hated me. Otherwise why would he want Nell?’
Izzie quickly scanned her mind for Nell. Nell was nowhere near as attractive as Anneliese. Her aunt had those huge blue eyes, a graceful face and the amazing silvery blonde hair that made her look like a fey, other-worldly figure. As if she might dance down the street and disappear like a mermaid into the water. Compared to her aunt, Nell was shockingly ordinary. What had Nell got that Uncle Edward wanted? None of it made any sense.
‘Did you tell Lily?’ said Izzie. She knew how close her grandmother was to Anneliese. Maybe that had shocked her grandmother so much it had contributed to her stroke. But Anneliese had clearly followed her train of thought.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I hadn’t. I was too ashamed and embarrassed and all the things you are, when your husband walks out on you for your best friend. Now, I’m sorry I hadn’t told her. That’s what I do every time I see her: sit down, hold her hand and tell her, because she has that warmth, that wisdom. You understand, Izzie: you know you can tell her anything. There can’t be too many nearly ninety-year-old women with her open-mindedness. I know Lily would have had no problem grasping the fact that myself and Edward had split up, and she’d have been there to tell me how to move on with my life. And I didn’t tell her because I was so ashamed, and now I may not ever be able to tell her.’
It was Izzie’s turn to be silent. The shame overwhelmed the guilt now. Guilt was too insubstantial an emotion for what she felt: it was pure shame.
All her life, she’d been against the idea of dating a married man, and yet Joe had got under her radar before she’d had time to put up the barriers, so that by the time she’d realised just how complicated it all was, before her moral compass cranked into action in her head, her heart was trapped.
Loving him was the only option.
Hearing Anneliese’s story was like having a magnifying mirror held up to the biggest blemishes on her face. She could see every giant pore and big spot. Anneliese’s story had magnified Izzie’s under the cruellest light.
Just as Anneliese had done, Joe’s wife might still think her husband loved her. That he was there for her, didn’t want anyone else to share his thoughts and dreams.
The only difference was that Edward had left Anneliese for Nell. He’d had the moral courage to walk away to be with the woman he apparently loved. But Joe hadn’t. There was a nice simple message for her in all of this – Joe hadn’t loved her enough. Whether he’d been lying or not when he said he and Elizabeth were no longer together was immaterial: he hadn’t wanted to be with Izzie when she needed him.
Despite the guilt and shame, she felt as if she might cry.
Anneliese gazed at her niece and felt incredibly guilty for having told
