Lover, Husband, Father, Monster: Book 1, Her Story

By Elsie Johnstone

Elsie and Graeme Johnstone’s powerful two-part story traces the fragmentation of a well-intentioned marriage through to its irretrievable breakdown and a chilling finale that stays with the reader long after the final page is turned.
Set in Ireland and told in two voices – Her Story and His Story – it tells of Stuart and Jennifer, meeting at a time when they both feel marriage and parenthood has passed them by. He is a reliable insurance salesman lacking confidence with women. She is a bright, pretty lawyer, left emotionally scarred by her first boyfriend.
They have three children and appear to be a happy family. But things are not as they seem. Stuart appoints himself as the bullying ‘captain of the ship’ whose orders must always be obeyed. A scared, brow-beaten Jennifer finds comfort amongst her internet friends. An innocent Facebook contact with her first lover, Tommy, leads to cybersex, romance and infidelity.
Jennifer is to learn that breaking free from a controlling husband will be more painful than she could ever have imagined. Stuart determines to hurt his wife in a way she will never forget. And he does.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. & E. Johnstone
• Release date: Sep 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9780987189509

Book preview

Lover, Husband, Father, Monster

- Her Story

By Elsie Johnstone

Copyright © 2011 Elsie Johnstone

Published by G. & E. Johnstone Pty. Ltd.

Smashwords Edition

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Thank you for downloading this free eBook. Although ‘Lover, Husband, Father, Monster - Her Story’ is free, it remains the copyrighted property of the author. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Thank you for your support. If you enjoy this novel, you might wish to read the second book in the series, telling the story from the husband’s perspective:

Lover, Husband, Father, Monster – His Story, by Graeme Johnstone.

Available from smashwords.com

Lover, Husband, Father, Monster is also published in paperback by Book Pal, www.bookpal.com.au. Book Pal Edition, Copyright © 2010 Elsie Johnstone & Graeme Johnstone.

Books written by Elsie Johnstone and Graeme Johnstone can also be obtained through www.loverhusbandfathermonster.com, or through online and traditional book retailers.

Dedication

For children everywhere who suffer because of the choices their parents make.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

About The Author

Chapter 1

The photo jumped off the screen. The sparkling smile, his hair a little lighter than I remembered it and longer than most men his age would wear it. Sitting at a set of drums, he looked almost the same as that day a whole lifetime ago I flew out of Heathrow back home to Dublin, heartbroken and melancholy, to reassemble the shattered pieces of my fragile existence. He had used me, abused me and discarded me and now, all these years later, here he was having the temerity to ask me would I be his Facebook friend?

My stomach lurched. I thought I was well and truly over Tommy. And I was! I had a successful husband, a wonderful home and three beautiful children. Tommy could never have given me anything like that. He was still a drummer, for God’s sake!

‘Jennifer,’ I inwardly counselled, ‘do not go there. It was the hottest of loves but it had the coldest of ends, so just leave it where it is. It does no good to stir up ghosts from the past.’

‘Tea, darling?’ inquired Stuart, suddenly appearing at the doorway with cup and saucer in hand. ‘I’ll just be going up to the church. They have a meeting on about Heritage Week, but I don’t expect there’ll be many there. It’ll be just the Reverend John and me making all the decisions so I wouldn’t be thinking it will take too long.’

There he stood - my Stuart, the pillar of the Church, sturdy and reliable. My husband, the very successful insurance salesman. My man, tall, fifty three years old, with a defining shock of greying hair and a comfortable but not fat body, handsome in a very ordinary sort of way.

His clothes looked well on him because he took great care of himself and he was particular about what he wore - a conservative dresser with impeccable taste. His suits were personally tailored by Louis Copeland & Sons in Capel Street and his Italian leather shoes were always shone to a bright sheen. Shirts and casual gear were bought off the peg from either Copeland’s or the House of Fraser at Dundrum. He ran at six o’clock each morning before he began his day and worked out three times a week in the gym near his business.

My Stuart was a man who gave off an air that was affluent not flashy, stylish not trendy. He was calm and controlled, the reassuring type that people tend to trust. You cannot be successful in the field of insurance if you do not market yourself, and to do that you need to monitor every part of the process.

‘Buy insurance from me and you won’t need to worry,’ was his mantra. ‘Nothing bad will happen to you and even if it somehow does, my company will put it right. Just sign here and pay me, and I will take care of things for you. I provide solidity and certainty in an uncertain world.’

In retrospect, I was just like one of Stu’s satisfied clients. When I agreed to marry him I willingly gave over personal autonomy for a warm feeling of security. I exchanged me - with all my faults, foibles and slightly harum-scarum approach to life - for the safety and insurance of a well presented husband, a good home, a reliable income and a family that would never want for anything. Stuart was older and wiser than me and made enough money to pay the considerable mortgage, send the kids to good schools and take us all abroad on a family holiday each year.

They say every person has their price. That was the down payment on the price I was to pay.

‘Cheerio,’ he said, handing me the tea, exactly as I liked it – black, weak, half a teaspoon of sugar and just a smidgin of cold tap-water to cool it down. ‘I’ll take Molly with me for the walk. Is there anything I can pick up while I’m out?’

‘No thank you, Stu,’ I said, staring at the screen. ‘I’m just looking up a recipe for dinner. I’ll head up the road myself when I find out exactly what I need.’ This wasn’t entirely true but Stuart didn’t approve of me being on-line ‘living in that lah-lah world’, his description of social networking sites.

I smiled to myself as I turned around to watch him and Molly walk hand-in-hand out the door. ‘What a wonderful picture they make, father and daughter, and how lucky am I to have three beautiful children,’ I thought. After all, for a long time I had thought that the god that governs the universe had different plans altogether for me.

Then I turned back to look at the photo on the screen. ‘Hmm. I bet Tommy the drummer wouldn’t be making his little wifey a cup of tea before heading up the hill to see the vicar!’ Things had certainly changed and I had changed with them. Best to leave it at that.

I reached for the mouse, clicked it, and Tommy and his sparkling smile, his slightly long hair and his drums disappeared.

Chapter 2

My life was like a pond. Once there had been great excitement and activity, with different and wonderful and sometimes scary things happening down in the depths, up on the surface, along the banks and by the shores. Now things had settled. The mud had ceased its churning and lay on the bottom, vegetation had grown up to prevent too many ripples on the surface, and a rhythmic, seasonal and predictable pattern had evolved. I had reached that stage in my life where there were no surprises any more.

Here I was - Jennifer Mary Hoare, formerly O’Brien - forty eight years old, wife and mother, mellowed and stable, with everything nicely in place. Stuart Junior, our eldest, was fourteen years old and just wonderful, still very much a boy - and every mother knows just how beautiful they are. ‘What’s for dinner, Mam?’ he would call out as he came in the kitchen door, bouncing one form of sports ball or another in front of him. ‘Junior, wipe your feet and leave that outside please. You know how much it annoys your father when you bring a wet ball inside!’

‘Okay! Okay! Gotcha! What are we having for dinner, Mam?’

Life for Junior was simple - sport, food and school.

Richard, at twelve, was younger than Junior in years but seemed older in the head and more of a worrier. He was an astute people observer, in touch with what went on in the family, who said what, where did they go, what happened to whom? He listened to conversations rather than letting them go over his head and knew all the news and gossip. He was what you would call a people person. Rich was in tune with me and seemed to instinctively know if I was upset or unhappy. He loved to take his little sister Molly outside on the grass to play and always included her in his games. She in turn happily tagged along with him and his friends. ‘I love playing with Molly,’ he told me one day in confidence, ‘because she thinks I am really clever and I can teach her lots of things. But Junior, well, he always teases me and says I can’t do things properly.’

Rich possessed a high degree of emotional intelligence, something that Stu saw but didn’t like in him and so had made it his mission to make him a man. Poor Rich did his best to please, but a lot of the time he just didn’t shape up.

‘Let him be,’ I’d beg, ‘he’s only twelve. He’s just a little boy trying to keep up with his big brother and sometimes that is pretty difficult. He still needs a cuddle and so do I. Just allow him to be himself.’

‘He’s soft,’ Stu would say. ‘You’re making a sissy out of him. You’ll turn him into a homosexual. That’s what happens when a boy gets over-mothered. Get him out from under your petticoats.’

As for Molly, our beautiful little girl, Stu wanted her to be named Moira after his mother. ‘But Moira is such an old fashioned name,’ I begged. ‘She won’t thank us for it.’ I managed to hang out against him until I got my way, one of the few times in all our years together that I asserted myself. In retrospect, perhaps I should have stood up for myself more often. Maybe if I had done that in the beginning then things would have turned out very differently.

He treated Molly as if she was a precious porcelain doll. ‘She’s beautiful,’ he’d say, ‘but I feel as if I will break her.’ In some ways it was understandable; he’d had very little to do with girls, big or small.

‘Best you see to her until she grows up a bit. I’ll see to the boys,’ he’d add. So that is what happened.

I just knew my Molly would have a magnificent future and that she was going to grow into the best of Irish women - intelligent, capable, happy, optimistic and chatty, a great communicator. The world was her oyster and I was eager to enjoy the journey with her. She would be me, but ever so much better.

Chapter 3

Do we ever entirely forget our first love? It is like the first-ever taste of ice cream on a hot summer’s day. The mother runs her finger through the soft, sweet stuff and proffers it to her baby to suck. The little one has no idea of the treat that is in store until the icy sweetness tickles the tongue and the cooling, creamy flavour explodes onto the palate. There is no going back after that. The little one pleads for more; the tiny hands are held high, demanding. Eventually, mother relents, hands over the whole cone and baby gobbles it down. There will be other hot days with other ice creams, but they will never quite be the same.

As I sipped the tea that Stuart had given me, I wondered about Tommy’s life journey in the more than twenty years since he and I were lovers. Almost everything about me had changed, that was for sure. What about him? I hadn’t thought of him for such a long time but now my memory had been jolted and, seeing as the house was quiet, I allowed myself time to indulge in the guilty pleasure of reflecting on the past.

It had been a long, long time and many, many things had happened since my days of being a young, carefree Cambridge University student known as ‘Jobby’, an acronym from my initials, Jennifer O’Brien.

Jobby, the energetic redheaded, green-eyed, much loved daughter of Seamus and Mary and adored baby sister of the entire front row of a rugby scrum. Jobby, another girl in another era when I was in the prime of my youth and having the time of my life. Jobby, newly released from the restraints of her strict Irish Catholic upbringing in Dublin and with the world at her fingertips.

My father had come from Killarney in County Kerry. The saying goes, ‘Once a Kerry man, always a Kerry man,’ and it was back to his home county we would go for family celebrations and the like, affairs that were always loud and boisterous. As children, we spent most summers with family in the Kingdom. ‘God’s own country,’ Da would say as he stood gazing at the mountains, deeply breathing in the country air. ‘Sure, it’s good to be home where we all know each other and there’s no pretendin’ or puttin’ on airs. I thank the Good Lord for landing me on this glorious piece of earth.’ He said the same thing every time.

We knew our Kerry relations well as they always stayed over at our home when they came up to go to Croke Park for a GAA match or simply to do a bit of shopping, so I grew up feeling secure and connected.

‘Be careful of Uncle Brian’s legs, he’s a diabetic you know, and we don’t want to be causing him any trouble by knocking them,’ Mam would warn me before the Kerry onslaught. ‘And whatever you do, don’t go mentioning your cousin Liam to your Aunty Agnes, she’s very upset with him and we don’t want to make her cry. And Jennifer, make sure that Dermot gets some food in him before he pours himself a drink, it calms him down and we won’t be all sufferin’ later on.’ That was the way it was in my big extended family. We were all talkers and were all mad in one way or another. It was just in the genes. Life was for living and we had fun.

Then suddenly, school days at Dominican College were over and the simple predictability of the daily rules and rituals that had made my time there so happy and secure was a thing of the past. No more prayers before class, no more piano practice, no Angelus bells at noon, hockey matches or Irish dancing lessons. I need never speak my native Gaelic language if I chose not to. Old Sister Madeleine would never again shake her head as I chattered away in class, clucking her tongue in lament and declaring, ‘Ah, Jennifer O’Brien, will you not give it a rest then? I swear if you were left all on your own in an empty room, you’d be talking to the stones in the wall. Do you ever stop, girl?’

The friends from my childhood had all dispersed and gone their own ways. My uniform had been cleaned and pressed and passed on to young Maeve down the road and my old books had been bundled up and taken to a charity shop. School had been fun and I had enjoyed it, but it was a rite of passage and now it was done. My whole life spanned out in front of me.

I had been a diligent student who enjoyed learning and had passed my Leaving Certificate well enough to obtain a place at Cambridge, studying Law. ‘Jayzus, will you look at that?’ said Da. ‘Our little girl’s off to England to study!’

But his enthusiasm didn’t come without a warning. ‘Now don’t be bringing back an Englishman to marry,’ he added. ‘Remember, we have the best men in the world here on our little island. You can’t go past them!’

My mother and father willingly gave me the opportunity and support to study abroad and I was lucky that my brothers had paved the way for me, ironing out any wrinkles and sorting out any problems that my parents might have had. Each had left home to study, had succeeded in varying degrees and happily returned home to roost. Mam always