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.
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.
‘You’re 52,’ I say, ‘and he’s what age?’
‘He’s 58.’
‘You’ve been engaged how long?’
‘For 35 years.’
Three and a half decades of an engagement. Fair enough, we all like to test out a product before buying it, but this is taking it a bit far, surely? Betty laughs. All round the house are photos of her family which she shows me with pride. She’s open and friendly, and happy to go into the story of what must be one of the longest engagements in Ireland.
The story starts in 1982 when Betty and her partner first got engaged. She was 17 and her fiancé asked her father if they could get married. ‘My father chased him and said get out of it. You’re too old. She’s too young,’ Betty explains. ‘You see, my sister had got married the year before and so my father was after a big wedding, and