Good Husband Material. Trisha Ashley

‘So tall and slender, and the hair like sun-warmed apricots. But very young, Fergal – maybe only sixteen or seventeen. The mamma is right to be careful.’

      She was only seventeen, and I was her first love, but I was twenty-two and should have known that, for her, it wouldn’t last for ever.

      I suppose I was lucky it lasted a year.

       Chapter 1: A Dream of a Man

      November 1998

      Last night I dreamed I was back in Fergal’s arms.

      Nothing new there, then.

      I often dream about the current heroes of the romantic novels I write, who all bear a definite (physical) resemblance to Fergal. The sort of dreams that make you wake up and feel guilty when you look at your husband.

      They certainly add some oomph to my love scenes, though unfortunately only the ones in my novels. I’ve come to the conclusion it would take a lot more than that to add any oomph to James.

      This time the dream was of a different genre, more like a rerun of my last encounter with my first untrue love. Maybe my subconscious thought I didn’t suffer enough at the time and decided to run it past me again.

      Anyway, there we were entwined like Laocoön in Fergal’s beloved second-hand Frog-eyed Sprite sports car (thoroughly cleaned inside and out with anti-bacterial cleanser by myself when he bought it, of course – after all, who knew where it had been?). Birds were singing, the sun was shining and there was a heady smell of engine oil, old leather and disinfectant … and the equally heady feel of his arms around me as he said confidently in my ear, ‘Goneril are going to make it big this time!’

      Goneril was (and still is) the name of the rock band he’d formed together with his brother Carlo and a motley assortment of other art students. Why they had to choose a name that sounds like a venereal disease, I don’t know.

      In the year I’d been going out with Fergal the band had gone from being a casual thing they did for fun and to earn some money, to the point of taking over more and more of their lives and time. And now they’d just been asked at the last minute to go on tour as support to a well-known group, the original support band having pulled out.

      It meant leaving for the USA almost immediately: make-or-break time.

      I looked up into his amazing green eyes and said adoringly, ‘Oh, Fergal, of course you’ll make it! But – I’ll miss you while you’re abroad.’

      He pulled away slightly at this, his straight black brows drawn together in a frown. ‘Why should you miss me?’

      ‘Of course I’ll miss you. You’ll be away for months!’

      ‘But – you’re coming with me, Tish! I want you with me.’

      Gobsmacked wasn’t in it. ‘M-me?’ I stammered. ‘Go on tour with you? But I can’t do that, Fergal – my university course starts in September. Besides, Mother would have a fit if I trailed around after you like a groupie. And, by the way, you never asked me!’

      Fergal’s always volatile temper got the better of him at this point and he gave me a little shake. ‘You are my girl, not a groupie, and I want you with me. And why go to college? What does it matter?’

      ‘What does it matter when you’ve got me?’ was what he really meant, and it made me see red.

      ‘Of course it matters! I’m looking forward to the course.’

      Well, I had been until then.

      Fergal had just finished his MA in Fine Art at the RCA, and the plan was that he should make a name for himself with his painting while I got my degree, so that one day we could live in the country together. He would paint and I would write poetry …

      Daydreams – but anything seemed possible when I was with Fergal. And of course I hadn’t then realised that although I was a poet, I was not a good poet.

      The fine distinction between turning out reams of seamless drivel like a miniature stream-of-consciousness novel and writing real poetry is sometimes hard for a teenager to grasp. My literary skills, I later discovered, lay elsewhere.

      But at the time I was all set to study Modern English Literature in pursuit of this, and I thought he should understand, since he seemed just as dedicated to painting until Goneril started to take off.

      ‘Well – have a year out, then,’ he suggested impatiently. ‘Isn’t it about time you left home and experienced some real life?’

      That would look good on my gap-year CV: ‘What did you do in your gap year, Miss Norwood?’ ‘Oh, I just screwed my rock-singer boyfriend over an entire continent. Nothing interesting.’ ‘And was that with the VSO, Miss Norwood?’ etc.

      As to experiencing real life, I’d packed more of that into that year with Fergal than I had in all the previous seventeen.

      I looked at him in exasperation … and my heart softened a bit. He was absolutely gorgeous, and I loved him so much. But when I remembered how casually he’d assumed I’d just follow him like a little dog at the asking – or the telling – I got angry all over again.

      ‘Look, Fergal, I’ll be waiting here for you when you come back: it’s not even as if I’m going away to college.’ (And that was solely to be near him. Otherwise I would have applied for something as far away from Mother as possible – the University of Outer Mongolia Scholarship in Non-Rhyming Glottal Stops, say.)

      He held me at arm’s length from him, his fingers biting into me. ‘Come with me or that’s it – finish!’

      His eyes were as hard and cold as emeralds in his dark face.

      Then I lost my temper and in a state of hurt fury said a few cutting things about how easy he’d found it to abandon his art for Filthy Lucre (well, I was only eighteen and a bit idealistic) and then we had our worst row ever. It wasn’t followed by the sort of making-up that healed such spats either, since he took me straight home and dropped me at the gate without another word.

      Even then I didn’t think he meant it – he was inclined to say that sort of thing in the heat of the moment – but by next day, when he hadn’t phoned to apologise, I started to get worried and even seriously contemplated abandoning my pride and ambitions and going with him after all. So maybe it wouldn’t last for ever, but wouldn’t it be better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all?

      Who knows what might have happened if poor Grandpa hadn’t had his heart attack that day, so that instead of chewing my fingernails by the telephone I was travelling to Granny’s?

      In the end I was there for the whole summer: through the struggle that Grandpa fought and lost, and that of my down-to-earth and stoical grandmother to come to terms with her bereavement.

      Mother was entirely useless, of course. She produced one excuse after another as to why she couldn’t come up to lend her support, and then crowned it all by being ‘too prostrate with grief’ to attend the funeral.

      ‘The woman’s got the backbone of a wet lettuce,’ commented Granny when I told her, and I was glad to see some slight return of her spirits.

      Although Mother always disliked Fergal I had extracted a promise from her before I left to tell him where I was if he should ring, and to send on all my mail. But, as she almost gleefully reported, there was nothing to send on: he never contacted me again.

      He’d meant what he said after all.

      The coup de grâce was a picture cut from a gossip magazine and helpfully forwarded by Mother showing Fergal coming out of some American nightclub with a well-known and beautiful model draped all over him like clingfilm.

      I was so devastated I prayed nightly that she would stab him to death in bed with her hipbones, but nothing happened, except that Mother kept sending