The Personals

Of course she worries about the future, and she worries too about how much longer she will be able to manage the situation. She’s done a lot of research into the condition and she believes that often it follows the personality and character of the person living with it. ‘In general terms, if the person is a quiet gentle partner and takes things in their stride and is easy-going, then often that is how it will be for them,’ she says. ‘My husband has always been active and forthright, like me, and he could lose his temper on certain things, so his illness is a manifestation of that.’

She’s aware that he’s in the early stages of the illness. The medication available can slow it down, and while it does have an impact, she wishes she had known about her husband’s diagnosis sooner. Maybe he forgot to tell her, or a letter from his consultant might have been mislaid. Either way, she feels huge guilt for having arguments with him about forgetting certain things, when all along he had been given the dementia diagnosis and she didn’t know about it.

‘He was the kind of man that if anything in the house needed mending, he was on top of it,’ she says. ‘Now, if a radiator leaks, he will say, “I will fix it” and often it will be leaking even more afterwards. If I say anything, he will blame me for it and tell me to do it myself. I’m telling you all this because it’s not easy and there are significant challenges, and it’s heart-breaking to see someone you love change so much.’

As he tidied up she watched and tried not to make it obvious that she was overseeing what he was doing. We moved to the sitting room, where she produced a velvet pouch and began taking out rings. She was very deliberate in how she handled them, having taken them from an old shoebox which also contained several letters and some other items of jewellery. To my surprise, it turns out that the rings didn’t belong to her. ‘They’re my late mother’s rings,’ she says. ‘And she never wore them.’

The box contained two rings. One was an engagement ring made of 18 carat white gold. To my untrained eye it looked more like yellow gold, but most people would describe it simply as a diamond cluster ring. The wedding ring was also 18 carats, again white gold, and it was more modest than the engagement ring. Both came with their certificates and valuation forms. While she’s connected to them emotionally, I don’t get the sense that they are treasured deeply. There’s something in the way she holds them in her hand – the casualness perhaps, or the fact that there’s a firm-handedness in her movements with the rings. When I suggest this, she corrects me. ‘They do mean an awful lot to me,’ she says, ‘but I can’t keep them because I think they are better off on somebody’s finger, rather than just shutting them away in a safe.’

When she told me that they had been her mother’s and never worn, of course I thought of all sorts of heart-breaking reasons why. But she tells me that her mother had gone ahead with the marriage. In fact, it had been her second marriage. And the reason she hadn’t worn the rings was fairly simple – she had still been in love with her first husband. How had her second husband responded to that? ‘He respected it. You see, my parents loved each other very much, but they couldn’t live together. The marriage was very difficult when they were living together but they became best of friends after they divorced.’

We’re talking here about the mid-1970s, when the seller’s mother had remarried. At that stage, she had been separated from her first husband for about six years. Sadly, she passed away some years ago in a nursing home in England, while the seller’s father moved to Eastern Europe, where he also remarried. While they were both alive, they had kept in touch. And the last time her mother and father actually met each other? ‘It was at my brother’s funeral,’ she tells me. ‘He had a heart attack and died suddenly. My father came home and he stayed alongside my mother at the funeral, sitting really close beside her. It was clear the connection was still there. I think they both had the same type of character and personality – the same type of short fuse.’

Telling me the story of her parents’ divorce and their subsequent friendliness towards each other, she says she doesn’t want to over-romanticise it. It’s not just the story of two people thrown together and then pulled apart and yet still there for each other at the end. Her parents had separated after a period of time when the arguments between them became worse as their children moved through their teenage years. She doesn’t want to go into it too much, but those years left their mark and did have an impact on her in later years. Luckily, when her mother remarried, her daughter always got on very well with her stepfather. She describes him as a fantastic man, and totally in love with her mother.

‘He was a gentleman. A small man. Very, very polite and very gentle,’ she says. ‘He loved my mother so much. He would do anything for her. When she started getting ill, he gave up his job and he waited on her hand and foot. He would buy her anything, take her wherever she wanted to go. And when she had to go to a nursing home, he gave up work and went and sat with her every single day. He absolutely idolised her.’

When the man had given her mother the engagement and wedding rings now on the table in front of me, what did she do with them if she didn’t wear them? ‘She had a chain,’ her daughter tells me, ‘which I have, and she put the two rings on a silver chain and put it around her neck. And she went through the rest of her life with no rings on her fingers. I also have her first wedding rings. These ones are too valuable to be just left in a safe. To me these two rings are beautiful but I don’t feel the same connection with them as her first wedding rings. I idolised my stepfather but he has also given me the right and the blessing to sell them.’

The rings are now for sale for €2,000. She would be thrilled to get €1,500 for them and to know that they have been given a new lease of life. I tell her I admire her for putting them up for sale. Her mother had made a defiant stance in not wearing them and she is now making another by selling them. Why be weighed down by the past? If she does succeed in selling them, the money is already accounted for, she tells me. ‘I will buy my mother a little plaque which has a mother’s verse on it and I want to put it on her grave from her children.’

So far she’s had a few offers but won’t let the rings go for much below the asking price. I ask her finally whether she’d ever talked to her parents about the years she lived with them when they were having difficulties in their marriage. ‘I did,’ she tells me, ‘I spoke to my father. I didn’t get a chance to speak to my mother. He always said he would keep a special place in his heart for my mother and he respected her and he said it was such a pity they could not live together. He is 86 years old now and lives in a different country, but he always advised me to never go to bed on a row.’

She keeps this in mind, even with the added difficulty of caring for her husband during his illness. The years ahead will be uncertain, so now feels the right time to break with the past, and move on. She’s hoping for the right buyer and will be slow to let the rings go to a dealer or speculator. ‘Even though my mother never wore these rings, there is a lot of happiness in them,’ she tells me. ‘They just need to find a home now.’

A Dress for the (Middle) Ages (#litres_trial_promo)

For sale: beautiful medieval-style wedding dress. Never worn. Evening Echo, 2014

Jane lives in a small two-up, two-down in Cork city with her husband and two cats. She studied history at university but a series of illnesses meant that she had to give up her work as a part-time tutor. Two days a week she now works from home – a job, coincidentally, that she found through the classifieds. Jane always wanted a traditional church wedding, but her fiancé wanted something less conventional and more ‘out there’. They compromised and decided on a medieval-themed wedding in a church. Jane ordered her dress, a medieval satin designer gown, from a designer in the United States.

So far so good, but as the day of the wedding grew nearer, the pressure of getting married got to the couple. Ireland was still clawing its way out of recession and the lack of credit on offer from their bank meant they were worried about getting into more debt. Her fiancé had to travel long distances for work so they spent more and more time apart. After weeks of discussion the wedding was postponed.

As you can imagine, the couple and both their families were devastated. ‘My dress was made of cream velvet with large bell sleeves and a criss-cross design in the front and back,’ Jane explains. ‘We had it all planned and everything and for one reason and another it didn’t take place and we put off the wedding for a while.’

Thankfully, this story does have a happy ending and the couple ended up having a medieval blessing on Cape Clear Island in summer 2013. Jane wore a more casual medieval dress for the occasion and her husband dressed as a knight. He wore four patches of colours and a long gown and both arrived at the ceremony carrying large swords. The blessing came from an old Viking text and two ‘druids’ performed the ceremony using ancient stones. ‘We even have an official medieval certificate,’ says Jane. And even though they are both medieval enthusiasts, and her original wedding dress is now up for sale, she says she hasn’t given up hope of a more traditional church wedding at some point in the future. Maybe without the swords.

A Chance Encounter of a Shocking Kind (#litres_trial_promo)

White gold band valued at €4,950. Will sell for €1,000. Also, 18-carat cluster diamond ring. Brand new, barely worn. Valued at €7,000. I will sell for €1,000. Evening Echo

Was €12,000 worth of jewellery for sale for €2,000? It seemed almost too good to be true. ‘I need the money because my son needs orthodontic treatment,’ the somewhat hesitant voice at the other end of the phone tells me. ‘So I thought, time to sell the rings.’

Even though reductions in value are expected in the classifieds, this seemed an extraordinary bargain. I was curious about the price drop, but also the fact that the ad had been placed in the Evening Echo and not online. Putting an ad like this online means adding pictures, while a print ad allows greater anonymity and a discreet sale. The words ‘brand new’ and ‘barely worn’ coupled with the low price gave me a strong feeling that there was a story to be told. Initially the seller wasn’t sure if she’d feel comfortable meeting me, but a few days after I made contact we did agree to meet.

The interview took place in the car park of a shopping centre and had taken half a dozen phone calls to arrange, including one from a friend of hers checking me out, before it was agreed. I’d given her my car description. When I got there, I scanned the faces exiting the shopping centre to see if I could pick her out from the crowd. Although I’m hopeless at this sort of thing, I find it a useful exercise to try to acknowledge any stereotypes or prejudices I may have before an encounter – even those I’m not conscious of holding.

The seller is a very private person, and it turns out that she has been through a lot in a short space of time. Her experiences have meant that her trust in people she doesn’t know, and even in people she does know, has been eroded and is pretty much shattered.

I’m 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.

A Long Engagement (#litres_trial_promo)

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 never get that insight, but Betty, who worked hard all her life, left school young and has only ever had one real boyfriend and partner, got all that insight in a split second. The problem was, that insight came at a cost – and a non-refundable one at that.

As with a lot of wedding dresses, because it was custom made, Betty can’t return the frock. When we met in late 2016, the wedding was planned for February 2017. The original price of the dress had been €1,600, but it had been reduced to €800 when Betty bought it, and now, weeks after taking it home, she was selling it for €250 or, as she said, ‘The best offer I can get.’ As I said, insight costs.

Have you had many calls I asked her? ‘You’re the first call I’ve got,’ she says. I’m not sure I have the hips for it, I joke, and Betty seems somewhat resigned to the fact that she’s stuck with this wedding dress she no longer wants.

There is a second part to this story, as there often is with unworn wedding dresses for sale. Betty did buy another dress, and it’s one that she feels more comfortable in. She dives into another wardrobe to retrieve it, like a heron on the Lee seizing its lunch, and she takes it out and shows it to me. Now, I’m no Vera Wang, but to my eye it did look more streamlined – classier, I would say – and although I’m really stretching my wedding attire knowledge to the limit here, not so typically bridal.

In terms of the backstory, you might be forgiven for thinking that at 52 perhaps Betty is on her second marriage, or maybe she just never found the right partner, or perhaps she is a widow. But her reason for getting married in her fifties is more complex. We’re still whispering as Betty continues to speak passionately about the dress on her bed. So much so, wide hips or no wide hips, I’m really coming round to the idea of buying it myself, I tell her. We both laugh and then she hushes me. We have to call a halt to the whispering, I tell her. I mean, what’s the big deal – surely her partner knows all by now?

‘No, he doesn’t even know I have two dresses, right? He. Doesn’t. Even. Know. I. Have. Two. Dresses,’ she says, emphasising each word the second time round.