guessing that she’s in her early forties and she’s of slim build and attractive, with a natural curiosity and an obvious intellect. She sits in the passenger seat of my car, remarking that this is all very strange and she doesn’t know quite what she’s doing here. On one level it is strange to sit in a car with someone you don’t know and tell them some of the more intimate details of your life. If I can’t meet people in their homes I tend to interview them in my car – sound-wise, it works well and there’s a nice informality to it. I sometimes ask interviewees to imagine that we’ve done the school run and met at the school gate and then they’ve sat in the car to shelter from the rain for a chat. Then off we go ....
The rings had been given to this woman by her former partner. The relationship ended a long time ago and in her own words, ‘Any emotional attachment is long gone.’ She says this in a way that’s definite, not as if she’s trying to convince herself of something, but stating it with certainty and with, to use that awful American phrase, a certain amount of ‘closure’.
She tells me that she was in a five-year relationship which produced two children, and as she begins to go into what happened, her hands clench tightly, perhaps mirroring the twist in her stomach, as she revisits what was an incredibly painful time.
She points to the entrance to the large shopping centre. One day, when her daughter was just one, this woman was walking through a clothing store. Another woman passed her and as she did so, she stared at her child. She could see that this passer-by was visibly taken aback. This woman said the child reminded her of her own toddler, who had died a few years previously. In fact, she said, ‘She is the spitting image of her.’ It was an odd encounter, but both parents chatted away and when the stranger asked her the child’s father’s name, things took an incredible turn.
‘I told her my partner’s name,’ she says. ‘And to my utter shock, she said that was the name of her partner and the father of her child also.’ I repeat this slowly so I can process it. ‘So out of the blue a woman walked up to you in the shopping centre opposite and said that your child reminded her of her own who had died?’ She nods, sharing my incredulity. ‘And then it turned out that the children shared a father and you knew nothing about this second family?’
She again nods her head in agreement at the unlikely coincidence. ‘I was dumbstruck,’ she tells me. ‘In that moment, I would possibly have overlooked the fact that he had had a previous relationship that he hadn’t told me about. But the fact that he had a child that died, and he didn’t tell me about it – that’s hugely traumatic.’
The second woman produced a photo of herself, her daughter who had died and the child’s father – all three of them together. ‘She was like my daughter’s twin sister,’ she tells me, before adding angrily, ‘How could he keep it a secret?’ When confronted, his excuse was that he had put his previous family to the back of his mind because of the trauma of losing his child. ‘It was something he wanted to forget about as if it didn’t happen,’ she says.
Some people choose to bury trauma and loss in this way and not share it with those closest to them. But by doing that, they run the risk of the trauma contaminating the good in their lives. While the person opposite me is humane, caring and compassionate, when she realised that her husband had had a previous family she knew nothing about, her first thoughts were not about how deeply his daughter’s death must have hurt him if he felt that he had to hide it; she was more concerned that he may have been keeping something else from her. ‘So, then I just said, no, let’s go our separate ways. This is too bizarre. I was heartbroken at the time, but I’m over it now. I think I dodged a bullet, to be honest.’
She’s reluctant to tell me much about her former partner. There is little contact between them now and the fallout from the revelation and the subsequent breakdown of her marriage have made her wary of people. She couldn’t contemplate continuing with the relationship once her trust had been broken so fundamentally. The rings, like her former marriage, mean very little to her now. The break-up of her marriage has had other implications, and finding things tough financially, she decided to put the rings up for sale. Any money she receives will be invested in her children’s future.
Despite the fact that she has been open about much of the detail, I have a sense that she is holding back large portions of her story. Perhaps this is a coping mechanism to prevent herself from being re-traumatised – and who could blame her?
Her phone flashes, signalling that her children are ready to be collected. I wish her well. Before she gets out of the car she turns to me: ‘See, I told you there was a story, didn’t I?’ she says, before opening the car door and running to embrace her younger child.
Stunning wedding dress for sale, size 12–14, never worn. DoneDeal, September 2016
‘This is the one for sale,’ Betty Hornibrook tells me, through the sound of crumpling plastic wrapping, as she removes a large dress from the wardrobe of the spare bedroom in her mid-terrace house.
The front door opens downstairs and she gestures to me to lower my voice while spreading the dress on the bed and flattening it. ‘It’s a halter neck, right,’ she says, in a strong Cork city north side whisper. Carefully, she removes the wrapping to reveal a white dress embellished with beautiful beading. ‘You can see the way it falls and the back can be adjusted,’ she adds. ‘I got it custom made to flatter my figure a bit. When I tried it on – I am 52 years old – I realised I was too old for it. I was like mutton dressed as lamb.’
We’re whispering because Betty’s partner doesn’t know she has a dress for sale. He doesn’t know she bought it, and he definitely doesn’t know that it’s a wedding dress, complete with shoes.
And so I make an educated guess that he probably doesn’t know about my microphone either, or the fact that I’m upstairs in his home looking at dresses with his life partner. Suddenly I have visions of a six-foot two-inch man, perhaps a former Ford or Dunlop worker, walking up the stairs and seeing his partner and me rummaging through her sock drawer while fumbling for an explanation. In fact, he keeps himself to himself, while I silently try to work out how many bones I’d be likely to break if I had to hurl myself out of the spare bedroom window in a hurry.
Long before we met, Betty had spent hours admiring the dress when it was hanging in her local bridal shop, before finally choosing it, getting it altered and then taking it home and concealing it in the wardrobe. Some time afterwards, when she was on her own in the house, Betty took it out and decided to try it on again. All her wedding dreams, which I later learned had built up over more than three decades, were ruined in that moment when she looked at herself in the mirror. She experienced a flash of clarity when she saw how she looked and made the distinction between reality and fantasy.
‘This is a wedding dress to go with an image I had in my head when I was 20 or 30 years old,’ she says, reflecting on that moment. ‘So I think I am stuck in a time warp and that the mind is not living in the present.’ Pointing to her head, she says: ‘Up here I’m 30. But the body is 52 and there’s no getting away from that. When they are measuring you in the bridal shop, you feel like a million dollars, but then when you get home and you look at yourself properly in the mirror, well, it wasn’t me – you know what I mean? It’s going to be gorgeous on someone else, but it just wasn’t me, like.’
And that really sums up ageing, putting on clothing in your fifties that you would have worn in your twenties, and expecting to look and feel the same but realising that you can’t or won’t. When Betty looked at herself in the mirror wearing her newly-bought wedding dress, she didn’t see herself looking back at her. She saw three decades, two children and three grandchildren in her reflection. Many of us
