Читать книгу The Personals - Brian O’Connell - Страница 9

Beautiful wedding and engagement ring for sale. €3,000 or nearest offer. DoneDeal, June 2018

Weeds are growing up through the barriers at the edge of the estate I’m driving through, as Google Maps and I have one of our many disagreements and I circle round at least half a dozen times.

The gravel-filled fields beyond those barriers were once called ‘Phase 2’ on a glossy Celtic Tiger era brochure, probably launched in a penthouse with a rugby player and canapés. Now the scabby site adjacent remains a stubborn scar on the landscape, a reminder that we lost control and that this estate was over-hyped and over-extended until the building came to an abrupt end.

I’m in one of the attractive, three-bedroomed, semi-detached houses which could easily have been the show house. Large candles are lit around the fireplace and there’s one of those evocative black and white coastal prints on the wall. Despite the welcome, it has been made clear to me that I will have to grant anonymity to the seller, because the events which led to the rings being put up for sale were relatively recent and raw. Apart from that precondition, she really wanted to tell her story and had seemed warm and friendly on the phone.

She is a fortysomething woman, and in her sitting room there are clues that she is well travelled – an African mask here, an Asian figurine there. I’m not sure that it’s a house that has seen many four a.m. Christy Moore singalongs; everything seems particularly placed, and because we meet just as she’s come in from work, I assume that the house always looks this gleaming and wasn’t scrubbed for my sake. I also guess that no small children live here – the lighted candles and open bowls of potpourri give this away.

We take a seat on the couch and I can see she’s a little nervous, but also quite open, and in her hand, she flips the lid of a ring box open and closed while we make small talk and I compliment her on the interior. I watch as each flick open reveals glistening stones, while each movement shut smothers the sparkly diamonds in darkness. She tells me that her rings have been in this box since last year and pauses, presumably waiting for me to ask what happened. I hold off as I often do in these encounters. Sometimes the longer you hold off talking about the elephant in the room the louder the elephant will demand to be heard. Also, we’re having tea and the biscuits are really nice.

By way of easing into the story, I ask her to describe the rings to me, which saves me the embarrassment of discussing something I know zilch about. ‘The engagement ring is a solitaire ring and it has encrusted diamonds halfway on each shoulder,’ she explains, thinking about, and then resisting the urge, to put it on her finger. ‘The wedding ring would have the same type of encrusted diamonds. So, this is a band of diamonds and they have the same set on the side. They are stunning rings. I think in total it’s one carat. I initially picked the diamonds and I got them in Dubai and the company that were making them for me called me up to say they had sourced a nicer-quality diamond, and they were looking for permission to put it in. So, it was crafted with great care and consideration and there’s no inscription on them.’

The rings, the box, the inlay cards and the lack of inscription all make it look as if they’ve just come off the shelf from a high-street jeweller. Have they ever actually been on her finger, I ask? ‘Yes, they went on my finger in December 2015 and they came off in September 2017. So just under two years. Do you want to know the story?’

As we continued to chat over tea and Club Milks, it became clear that while parts of this story were about lost love (or perhaps false love), another part was about the pressure to conform. More accurately, it’s about the social anxiety that builds when you get to your late thirties, see your friends marry and partner up one by one, and feel that part of society has its sights fixed on you and that some judge you by your singleness. In reality of course, those who have partnered up and are dealing with early morning Peppa Pig breakfasts are probably so preoccupied with lack of sleep and reducing their mortgage repayments that they barely notice anything except their expanding midriffs and greying hairs.

That insight into single life will come later; for now I ask my host if she would like to tell me how she fell in love. ‘Well, I married a non-EU national, someone from the Middle East, in Lebanon in December 2015,’ she explains, in a voice that’s not so much bitter as rueful. ‘We had known each other a year and a half at that stage. What attracted me to him was his drive and his commitment to working with young people. I share the same values. He proposed to me and of course I said yes to this handsome man.’

And for the first time the nerves are gone and she’s smiling as she recounts their early courtship. Had she any hesitation at the time, I ask? ‘In my naivety, no,’ she says. ‘I had considered motivations briefly; why he would ask someone to marry so quickly, but I would have thought maybe he loved me. I didn’t really question that. I should have.’

After they married, she returned home in late 2015, and after Christmas that year applied for his spousal visa so he could come to Ireland. This application turned into a lengthy and intrusive process during which their relationship needed to be verified, requiring testimony from family and friends that it was a legitimate marriage.

All her family were happy to give their testimony, and all were convinced this relationship was for real. In total, the process cost €4,000. This should have been the starting point for a wonderful life together in Ireland. Instead, it became the point at which their short marriage came unstuck and she felt the gaze of partnered society even more acutely. ‘His visa was refused in August 2017,’ she says. ‘And the day after I told him it had been refused, he told me he was marrying someone else. Just like that.’

Her voice fills with emotion as she tells me this, as when someone recalls a recent bereavement. Two weeks after that phone call she was devastated when it was confirmed that her husband had in fact married someone else. While their relationship had been long distance, he had been to Ireland for a visit, and she had been to his country several times, and they spoke on the phone every day. But a fortnight after she had told him of the visa refusal, her husband’s new wife sent her a screenshot of their marriage certificate. Talk about moving on quickly ...

It’s a difficult question, but I ask her whether she thinks his second marriage was prompted by the visa refusal. After a long pause, she looks at me with reddening eyes and says: ‘Yeah. I think it was just a matter of what will he do next to make life comfortable for himself? I think he was able to draw a line under it very quickly and move on to his next plan. He denied it for a while. His family confirmed he had got married again, and for a while I was bargaining with him, saying, “It is OK; you can remain married to her and remain married to me as well,” – he can have four wives after all, because of his culture.’

Our conversation was taking place 11 months after the break-up and while the wound is still not fully healed, she has moved on significantly. She shakes her head when she tells me about her attempts to bargain with him, and how she considered allowing her husband to have another wife in another country. She recognises this as a sign of her desperation to keep him and their marriage, whatever the cost. It’s totally understandable, I tell her – she’d told all her friends and family, had the big day, made life plans with someone and then, bang, it was all pulled from under her.

‘It was an enormous shock. I was definitely not able to eat for about three weeks,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t even talk about it, to be honest. There was a lot of shame because I should have known better. You read these things in magazines and you see these things on TV shows. And you are saying to yourself, that would never happen to me, how stupid could that person be? But, it’s not until you experience it and are drawn and pulled into it, in what appears to be a meaningful relationship. And then you have utter shame around falling for it. But it happens …’

‘Yes, it happens,’ I say reassuringly. Her vulnerability is clear, and while I can see she has thought long and hard about this whole episode, and has probably spent many nights looking at those log-sized candles flickering and filling the empty space on the couch beside her, the grief has not gone away; she has just learned to adapt to it most of the time.

What’s keeping her anchored to the sailed ship that was her marriage is the fact that she cannot legally divorce her husband, despite the fact that he is living with another woman in another country. ‘I’m not able to divorce him from here,’ she affirms. ‘I don’t want to go over there and get divorced. But I have made enquiries and the only choice I have is to hire a solicitor in his country to do the divorce or else go back to the mosque so he would have to grant it. I was advised not to go ...’

So, while she figures out how to remove herself from the marriage, she is faced with legal bills for the failed visa application, not to mention the costs associated with the wedding, most of which she has borne. The engagement and wedding rings were bought in Dubai. In total they cost €5,000, the majority of which she paid herself. She will sell them for €3,000. ‘They are stunning rings,’ she adds. ‘When they were on my hand, everyone would stop and pick them up and look at the weight of them and remark how stunning they were. You won’t get them on anyone else in Ireland.’

There’s obviously both an emotional and financial catharsis in getting rid of the rings as quickly as she can now. Anyone who has ever been in a failed relationship will tell you it has an impact long after the last tears have been shed. But in a situation like this, when there was no advance warning, and when one party feels they were duped into love, that impact is all the more magnified. ‘I am getting there now but immediately afterwards you do question what men say. You analyse them more now and I guess I’ve to be very careful I don’t bring this into a new relationship,’ she says candidly.

I tell her that her openness and insight and her inherent humanity (which she says is often interpreted as naivety) should not have to become a casualty of this. These are the things I tell her that will paradoxically give her the best chance of falling in love again. There is something likeable about my interviewee. She has warmth and oozes care, compassion and decency. I imagine she is the kind of person who sees a news bulletin about famine in Yemen or drought in Kenya and hits the donate button there and then. But I wonder how much the failed marriage has changed her; how much it has made her less receptive to love. ‘I would be more self-aware now,’ she says. ‘I know I was a little bit naive. But I would prefer this way than to be cynical. I would prefer to be able to fall in love than to always query and question. I think that’s a lonely life. I won’t be too cynical about it. I mean, there wasn’t ever a question of whether I loved him or not.’

Before I leave she carefully puts the rings back in their boxes, and as she’s doing so, I ask what is the biggest lesson she’s learned from the whole experience. ‘I think that it can happen anyone and I think, well, you can beat yourself up about it but I think you can in the future say to yourself, you need to step back from a situation and try to look at it from different perspectives. Some of my friends would have said, you know, are you sure about this? Without overtly coming out and saying I was being duped. I said, of course I’m sure; he loves me, he tells me it. Those same friends have never come back and said we told you so. If you’re hurt to that extent, then you have to reflect on what you have done, what would I have done differently – am I that vulnerable, naive and gullible? You ask yourself all those questions. You question yourself if a man says to you, “You look lovely.” I hate that it has changed me that way, but it’s to be expected, I suppose.’

Does she ever wear the rings now? ‘No. Not any more. They’re not mine now. I hope they go on someone’s finger that will have many years of happy marriage.’

We finish our tea. I tell her that I hope she’s talking to people about how she feels, and she says she has some very close friends and they share. She’s determined not to allow the whole experience to inhibit her or in any way reduce her chances of finding ‘the one’.

Somehow, I think she’s going to be OK and I leave thinking that selling the rings is the manifestation of a need to start again, of choosing deliberately to put what were once symbols of the future firmly into the past.