The Golden Cage
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Romance
Swearwords: None.
Description: A trophy wife repays her debt of gratitude.
_____________________________________________________________________
I was a trophy wife – I still am come to that, but it seems a less appropriate title than it was twenty-two years ago when I exchanged vows with an older, more experienced and much richer man. I was twenty-four with a great figure and rich auburn hair; although my looks were more gamin than truly beautiful my mouth was my winning feature. When I smiled at anyone, especially a masculine anyone, resistance to me evaporated and I was given pretty much anything I wanted.
Henry was forty-eight when he started courting me, an unimaginably successful businessman who began with a market stall and built a chain of trendy clothing stores. He had just appeared in the Times Rich List for the first time when I discovered at first hand the ruthless single-minded drive that overcame all opposition in private life as much as in business. If courting raises images of Mr Darcy, forget it: being wooed by Henry was more like being in the spin cycle of a washing machine!
I had been courted before, in fact I had been engaged twice, but nothing prepared me for the force of nature that was Henry in pursuit of an objective. I was bombarded by gifts; his special skill as a suitor was to listen very carefully to what I said and then to buy things he knew I would adore. Some of the gifts were obscenely expensive, of course, but the most memorable ones often cost no more than a few pence. We once left a posh garden party to stroll along a windswept prom eating fish and chips from yesterday’s newspaper.
Nothing was too much trouble if it softened my resistance to marriage. He launched a charm offensive directed at my parents who became his most loyal advocates, not least because he was adamant that only a wedding would satisfy him. Looking back it is hard to blame my parents for wanting me to settle down.
Henry was a diamond in the rough, large and tough with little finesse in his speech or behaviour. My Dad was a successful builder in our little town who had sent me to a good, but modest, fee-paying school where I learned not only to talk properly, the main aim of the exercise, but surprised everyone by being clever. I was a star pupil until I discovered boys and booze and finished up with three A grades at A-level despite doing practically no work in the sixth form.
At that point I upset parents and teachers alike by turning down a university place and dropping out to ‘do my own thing’; that meant that I behaved badly, partying and drifting from one dead-end job to another. My smile kept me afloat for longer than I deserved but I was on an increasingly steep down slope when Henry walked into my life. One of my engagements had resulted in pregnancy and I was living with my two year old son in two rooms above the pub where I served behind the bar.
It is only in TV soaps that pubs are convivial centres of community life. The reality is that the majority of regulars are sad, lonely losers crying into their beer and going home more depressed than when they came into the bar. I listened and sympathised partly, I freely admit, because it improved my tips but I really did feel sorry for their hard-luck tales; if nothing else, it made me realise that my own life was not all that bad – probably better than I deserved!
Henry came in like a rainbow promising the end of my stormy times: he could not instantly turn losers into winners but his very presence was like a message of hope. He was the almost sober one in a party of pub-crawling stags who were avoiding places where they usually drank so they could be outrageous without word getting back to the bride and her cronies. They were all in their mid-forties and they looked more foolish than depraved but my heart sank when they roared in – service with a smile was the least of their requirements from a tasty barmaid!
Henry told me later that he had made up his mind that I would be his before he had walked the three or four steps from the door to the bar. He was personable and he kept his lustful friends away from me. The rest, as they say, is history.
Think of any romantic cliché and you can apply it to our courtship. I was swept off my feet, dressed in designer clothes and the ball just went on and on with midnight impossibly far off. The wedding made the society pages; an only slightly over-the-hill pop star serenaded us in front of five hundred guests. My side mustered twenty-three, including the landlord of the pub and the Saturday night relief barmaid.
Henry has fulfilled every promise he ever made me in the twenty or so years since then. He did not grow bored or inattentive and has always treated me as well as he did in the first days of his courtship. Everything I wanted I was given, always with unlooked for extras.
My Dad bought me a pony when I was about twelve. Henry bought me a mansion with stables attached and employed three grooms to care for eight riding horses, including two hunters that had been successful in point-to-point races. He also bought some promising yearlings that he placed with a top trainer in Newmarket; he even bought a steeplechaser that was entered in the Cheltenham Gold Cup on the eve of the race just so we would have something to cheer!
My part was to dress well, look good and smile disarmingly whether at the local hunt, awarding prizes to kids at the local gymkhana or socialising in the paddock at Ascot or Aintree. Henry and I both knew that I was very good at it.
Henry finished his formal education at sixteen but that was the start of his learning. He was very quick to master new ideas – his accountant once told me that despite his years of experience and letters after his name, Henry knew as much as he did about accountancy.
We both enjoyed pop music but I always played Mozart or Bach when I was driving. Previous boyfriends had been scathing of this idiosyncrasy but Henry wanted to discover what I enjoyed in the classics. Before long he knew more than me and had more eclectic taste: we even bought an apartment in Vienna so we could attend operas and concerts. Henry came to love opera but I just wished they would stop pratting around and get on with it: I was happier playing the arias on my cd player, cutting out all the tedious linking stuff.
Only the future matters to Henry. He never reproached me for my past and he took my son in without a qualm. He was sent to a good prep school then to a leading public school and had continuing support from his step-father at university and beyond. They got on well enough but their relationship was business-like and not at all loving. He was no closer to his own son and daughter from an earlier marriage; he provided for them handsomely but he hardly ever saw them. When he divorced his wife he used every legal device to beat her into the ground, then, when he had totally defeated her, he made generous voluntary provision for her. She slipped quietly into an alcoholic haze that ended in her early death.
He despised her for seeking a way out through the bottle; he was pleased that I was tougher – tough enough to take life’s knocks and bounce back, as he put it. He had no time for softness in himself or in anyone else. In his businesses he gave power and huge salaries to people who devoted themselves to him. One failure, however understandable, ended their employment instantly and totally.
He was just as hard on himself: when he suspected that he had emphysema he went to a specialist in Boston without telling a soul. When his fears were confirmed, he set about selling the companies before any rumours about his health could affect the share prices. His own body had betrayed him so he punished it as he would any other tool that had failed him.
In just six months he changed from an active man of seventy still on top after more than half a century at the unstable pinnacle of the retail clothing trade, to a breathless cripple relying on an oxygen cylinder to keep his sluggish blood oxygenated. He was typically ruthless: his sixty-a-day smoking habit stopped as he left the American clinic; his lunchtime and evening alcohol consumption was reduced to one small glass of wine with dinner.
Amid the social whirl of our early years together I was slow to appreciate that Henry was incapable of love. I might have spotted it sooner if I had loved him but I never did; I loved the man who fathered my child, but that is a boringly predictable tale of loving unwisely and too well. What Henry had instead of love in his heart was romance: he took real pleasure in giving people what they wanted. I have benefitted from his generosity for all the twenty-two years we have been married.
The problem was that he did not love himself any better than me and his children but where he could offer us compensation by repeatedly satisfying our wishes, he wanted nothing for himself. When his lungs failed there was simply no romantic gift, no grand gesture that would make him feel better. He gave up everything: he sold our mansion and all his horses; he sold all the apartments and houses we had all over the world, even the flat in Vienna was sold without a qualm of remorse.
In their place, we bought a roomy bungalow in Lincolnshire; fashionable living replaced by easy access, no stairs and room for a wheelchair!
Henry knew from the start that I did not love him; he presented himself as a business partner giving me everything my heart could desire in return for my presence in his bed and my social skills. I was good at being decoratively charming and I was a very good organiser with a gift for picking the right assistants so our parties were always wonderfully successful. The only demand he made was that I should be at his side when he wanted me and remain undemandingly invisible when he was wheeling and dealing.
We were faithful to each other, he because I fulfilled our contract in every particular: he knew that I was the best consort he could have picked. I quickly realised that infidelity would have ended things for me and I frankly admit that I liked my life but I was never tempted to stray since Henry was the most powerful man I had ever met: prospective suitors, and there were a few, were faded carbon copies of the original I already owned!
I was alone for much of the time when Henry was off on business but I had my horses and a personal trainer to keep me fit. When my Dad died, Mum moved into a wing of the mansion and she was my constant companion until her death. After she was gone I did begin to feel a bit lonely and restless. Shopping days had been fun in the early years but they seemed rather shallow as I got older. I still love clothes, of course, but I began to think about things I had missed out on in my youth.
I talked to Henry about it since he was the wisest person I knew. He encouraged me and I came to the brink of joining the Open University until Henry discovered that the course would require me to attend residential sessions from time to time. Regretfully but firmly, he insisted that being away for two or three weeks was incompatible with our contract. It was the first time that I had felt any restraint – I suddenly realised that I was confined in a golden cage.
Looking back, I could see how he had inadvertently isolated me from my friends over the years. Henry was generous to them; the relief barmaid who was at our wedding married a South African and Henry set them up in a business in his home town. He helped my pub landlord to fulfil his lifelong dream, buying him a beach-side bistro in Turkey. It was only after Mum died that I noticed that I had no friends within five hundred miles! There was not one girlfriend I could have called to go on a shopping bender. Not that I found these constraints particularly restrictive, but I was aware that they existed.
When we moved to the three bedroom bungalow in rural Lincolnshire, things were busy for me at first. Henry did not want people about the house so I had to rediscover housekeeping skills that I had not used for more than twenty years. I took pride in cooking although I had never found much pleasure in cleaning and I insisted that we had someone else do the ironing. I had never looked after a garden before but I found it immensely satisfying. We had a contractor to do the grass-cutting and rough digging but I pottered about with fingers pale but unmistakably green.
What with one thing and another it took about a year after our move to Lincolnshire for it to sink in that Henry had retired both of us when he dropped out of the rat race. It had not crossed my mind that he would ever retire even although he was seventy and I was surprised that he gave up so completely when his body let him down. The problem is that I am only forty-six.
In a sense I have been living like a retired person for more than twenty years since I married Henry. I have enjoyed it but only, I now realise, because he and I went together to social functions, attended and hosted parties and spent long vacations in some of the most beautiful places on the planet at the time that suited us without having to bother with school term times.
Henry could run his businesses from anywhere that had a telephone or, in more recent times, an internet connection. We were so fully occupied in doing nothing in particular that I did not notice that I was idle.
Henry built me a golden cage but I did not choose to see the bars. Then again, I have to acknowledge that I entered my contract with Henry with my eyes open – the only person who fooled me was myself. If I had been the one to become ill, Henry would have considered our contract terminated. He would have put me into an expensive nursing home and would have made sure that I got the best possible treatment but he would have instructed his personal assistant to send me presents for Christmas and birthdays while he got on with living.
I know that he would let me do the same to him without recriminations. The door of my golden cage is open and I can even make out a case that he will be better cared for by a professional nurse. Standing at the threshold I can look out on a new and exciting world but I still stay with him: call it honour or love or duty.
Whatever name you choose I have had the best of Henry and I could not live with myself if I flew away now when he needs me more than ever.
Swearwords: None.
Description: A trophy wife repays her debt of gratitude.
_____________________________________________________________________
I was a trophy wife – I still am come to that, but it seems a less appropriate title than it was twenty-two years ago when I exchanged vows with an older, more experienced and much richer man. I was twenty-four with a great figure and rich auburn hair; although my looks were more gamin than truly beautiful my mouth was my winning feature. When I smiled at anyone, especially a masculine anyone, resistance to me evaporated and I was given pretty much anything I wanted.
Henry was forty-eight when he started courting me, an unimaginably successful businessman who began with a market stall and built a chain of trendy clothing stores. He had just appeared in the Times Rich List for the first time when I discovered at first hand the ruthless single-minded drive that overcame all opposition in private life as much as in business. If courting raises images of Mr Darcy, forget it: being wooed by Henry was more like being in the spin cycle of a washing machine!
I had been courted before, in fact I had been engaged twice, but nothing prepared me for the force of nature that was Henry in pursuit of an objective. I was bombarded by gifts; his special skill as a suitor was to listen very carefully to what I said and then to buy things he knew I would adore. Some of the gifts were obscenely expensive, of course, but the most memorable ones often cost no more than a few pence. We once left a posh garden party to stroll along a windswept prom eating fish and chips from yesterday’s newspaper.
Nothing was too much trouble if it softened my resistance to marriage. He launched a charm offensive directed at my parents who became his most loyal advocates, not least because he was adamant that only a wedding would satisfy him. Looking back it is hard to blame my parents for wanting me to settle down.
Henry was a diamond in the rough, large and tough with little finesse in his speech or behaviour. My Dad was a successful builder in our little town who had sent me to a good, but modest, fee-paying school where I learned not only to talk properly, the main aim of the exercise, but surprised everyone by being clever. I was a star pupil until I discovered boys and booze and finished up with three A grades at A-level despite doing practically no work in the sixth form.
At that point I upset parents and teachers alike by turning down a university place and dropping out to ‘do my own thing’; that meant that I behaved badly, partying and drifting from one dead-end job to another. My smile kept me afloat for longer than I deserved but I was on an increasingly steep down slope when Henry walked into my life. One of my engagements had resulted in pregnancy and I was living with my two year old son in two rooms above the pub where I served behind the bar.
It is only in TV soaps that pubs are convivial centres of community life. The reality is that the majority of regulars are sad, lonely losers crying into their beer and going home more depressed than when they came into the bar. I listened and sympathised partly, I freely admit, because it improved my tips but I really did feel sorry for their hard-luck tales; if nothing else, it made me realise that my own life was not all that bad – probably better than I deserved!
Henry came in like a rainbow promising the end of my stormy times: he could not instantly turn losers into winners but his very presence was like a message of hope. He was the almost sober one in a party of pub-crawling stags who were avoiding places where they usually drank so they could be outrageous without word getting back to the bride and her cronies. They were all in their mid-forties and they looked more foolish than depraved but my heart sank when they roared in – service with a smile was the least of their requirements from a tasty barmaid!
Henry told me later that he had made up his mind that I would be his before he had walked the three or four steps from the door to the bar. He was personable and he kept his lustful friends away from me. The rest, as they say, is history.
Think of any romantic cliché and you can apply it to our courtship. I was swept off my feet, dressed in designer clothes and the ball just went on and on with midnight impossibly far off. The wedding made the society pages; an only slightly over-the-hill pop star serenaded us in front of five hundred guests. My side mustered twenty-three, including the landlord of the pub and the Saturday night relief barmaid.
Henry has fulfilled every promise he ever made me in the twenty or so years since then. He did not grow bored or inattentive and has always treated me as well as he did in the first days of his courtship. Everything I wanted I was given, always with unlooked for extras.
My Dad bought me a pony when I was about twelve. Henry bought me a mansion with stables attached and employed three grooms to care for eight riding horses, including two hunters that had been successful in point-to-point races. He also bought some promising yearlings that he placed with a top trainer in Newmarket; he even bought a steeplechaser that was entered in the Cheltenham Gold Cup on the eve of the race just so we would have something to cheer!
My part was to dress well, look good and smile disarmingly whether at the local hunt, awarding prizes to kids at the local gymkhana or socialising in the paddock at Ascot or Aintree. Henry and I both knew that I was very good at it.
Henry finished his formal education at sixteen but that was the start of his learning. He was very quick to master new ideas – his accountant once told me that despite his years of experience and letters after his name, Henry knew as much as he did about accountancy.
We both enjoyed pop music but I always played Mozart or Bach when I was driving. Previous boyfriends had been scathing of this idiosyncrasy but Henry wanted to discover what I enjoyed in the classics. Before long he knew more than me and had more eclectic taste: we even bought an apartment in Vienna so we could attend operas and concerts. Henry came to love opera but I just wished they would stop pratting around and get on with it: I was happier playing the arias on my cd player, cutting out all the tedious linking stuff.
Only the future matters to Henry. He never reproached me for my past and he took my son in without a qualm. He was sent to a good prep school then to a leading public school and had continuing support from his step-father at university and beyond. They got on well enough but their relationship was business-like and not at all loving. He was no closer to his own son and daughter from an earlier marriage; he provided for them handsomely but he hardly ever saw them. When he divorced his wife he used every legal device to beat her into the ground, then, when he had totally defeated her, he made generous voluntary provision for her. She slipped quietly into an alcoholic haze that ended in her early death.
He despised her for seeking a way out through the bottle; he was pleased that I was tougher – tough enough to take life’s knocks and bounce back, as he put it. He had no time for softness in himself or in anyone else. In his businesses he gave power and huge salaries to people who devoted themselves to him. One failure, however understandable, ended their employment instantly and totally.
He was just as hard on himself: when he suspected that he had emphysema he went to a specialist in Boston without telling a soul. When his fears were confirmed, he set about selling the companies before any rumours about his health could affect the share prices. His own body had betrayed him so he punished it as he would any other tool that had failed him.
In just six months he changed from an active man of seventy still on top after more than half a century at the unstable pinnacle of the retail clothing trade, to a breathless cripple relying on an oxygen cylinder to keep his sluggish blood oxygenated. He was typically ruthless: his sixty-a-day smoking habit stopped as he left the American clinic; his lunchtime and evening alcohol consumption was reduced to one small glass of wine with dinner.
Amid the social whirl of our early years together I was slow to appreciate that Henry was incapable of love. I might have spotted it sooner if I had loved him but I never did; I loved the man who fathered my child, but that is a boringly predictable tale of loving unwisely and too well. What Henry had instead of love in his heart was romance: he took real pleasure in giving people what they wanted. I have benefitted from his generosity for all the twenty-two years we have been married.
The problem was that he did not love himself any better than me and his children but where he could offer us compensation by repeatedly satisfying our wishes, he wanted nothing for himself. When his lungs failed there was simply no romantic gift, no grand gesture that would make him feel better. He gave up everything: he sold our mansion and all his horses; he sold all the apartments and houses we had all over the world, even the flat in Vienna was sold without a qualm of remorse.
In their place, we bought a roomy bungalow in Lincolnshire; fashionable living replaced by easy access, no stairs and room for a wheelchair!
Henry knew from the start that I did not love him; he presented himself as a business partner giving me everything my heart could desire in return for my presence in his bed and my social skills. I was good at being decoratively charming and I was a very good organiser with a gift for picking the right assistants so our parties were always wonderfully successful. The only demand he made was that I should be at his side when he wanted me and remain undemandingly invisible when he was wheeling and dealing.
We were faithful to each other, he because I fulfilled our contract in every particular: he knew that I was the best consort he could have picked. I quickly realised that infidelity would have ended things for me and I frankly admit that I liked my life but I was never tempted to stray since Henry was the most powerful man I had ever met: prospective suitors, and there were a few, were faded carbon copies of the original I already owned!
I was alone for much of the time when Henry was off on business but I had my horses and a personal trainer to keep me fit. When my Dad died, Mum moved into a wing of the mansion and she was my constant companion until her death. After she was gone I did begin to feel a bit lonely and restless. Shopping days had been fun in the early years but they seemed rather shallow as I got older. I still love clothes, of course, but I began to think about things I had missed out on in my youth.
I talked to Henry about it since he was the wisest person I knew. He encouraged me and I came to the brink of joining the Open University until Henry discovered that the course would require me to attend residential sessions from time to time. Regretfully but firmly, he insisted that being away for two or three weeks was incompatible with our contract. It was the first time that I had felt any restraint – I suddenly realised that I was confined in a golden cage.
Looking back, I could see how he had inadvertently isolated me from my friends over the years. Henry was generous to them; the relief barmaid who was at our wedding married a South African and Henry set them up in a business in his home town. He helped my pub landlord to fulfil his lifelong dream, buying him a beach-side bistro in Turkey. It was only after Mum died that I noticed that I had no friends within five hundred miles! There was not one girlfriend I could have called to go on a shopping bender. Not that I found these constraints particularly restrictive, but I was aware that they existed.
When we moved to the three bedroom bungalow in rural Lincolnshire, things were busy for me at first. Henry did not want people about the house so I had to rediscover housekeeping skills that I had not used for more than twenty years. I took pride in cooking although I had never found much pleasure in cleaning and I insisted that we had someone else do the ironing. I had never looked after a garden before but I found it immensely satisfying. We had a contractor to do the grass-cutting and rough digging but I pottered about with fingers pale but unmistakably green.
What with one thing and another it took about a year after our move to Lincolnshire for it to sink in that Henry had retired both of us when he dropped out of the rat race. It had not crossed my mind that he would ever retire even although he was seventy and I was surprised that he gave up so completely when his body let him down. The problem is that I am only forty-six.
In a sense I have been living like a retired person for more than twenty years since I married Henry. I have enjoyed it but only, I now realise, because he and I went together to social functions, attended and hosted parties and spent long vacations in some of the most beautiful places on the planet at the time that suited us without having to bother with school term times.
Henry could run his businesses from anywhere that had a telephone or, in more recent times, an internet connection. We were so fully occupied in doing nothing in particular that I did not notice that I was idle.
Henry built me a golden cage but I did not choose to see the bars. Then again, I have to acknowledge that I entered my contract with Henry with my eyes open – the only person who fooled me was myself. If I had been the one to become ill, Henry would have considered our contract terminated. He would have put me into an expensive nursing home and would have made sure that I got the best possible treatment but he would have instructed his personal assistant to send me presents for Christmas and birthdays while he got on with living.
I know that he would let me do the same to him without recriminations. The door of my golden cage is open and I can even make out a case that he will be better cared for by a professional nurse. Standing at the threshold I can look out on a new and exciting world but I still stay with him: call it honour or love or duty.
Whatever name you choose I have had the best of Henry and I could not live with myself if I flew away now when he needs me more than ever.
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned four novels and is now trying his hand at short stories. His latest novel, The Island, is a McStorytellers publication.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned four novels and is now trying his hand at short stories. His latest novel, The Island, is a McStorytellers publication.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.