The Accidental Husband
The Accidental Husband by Jane Green describes itself as ‘women’s fiction’ or a ‘family drama’. I picked it up in the fabulous secondhand book room at Ushaw I mentioned a few weeks ago.
In essence it tells the story of two women – Sylvie in the UK, Maggie in California, USA – both living in stunning homes, with beautiful children, and a handsome, devoted and wealthy husband. The envy of their friends. Maggie lives in a world of Porsches and massive houses and expensive jewellery; a glamourous and controlling perfectionist. Sylvie is used to living frugally but her many talents have created a lovely home and life for them all. Then one day a secret is revealed that shakes both women to their very foundations.
WARNING: THE REST OF THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS
Sylvie’s daughter Eve is on a short holiday to New York with her best friend when she meets up with Maggie’s daughter, Grace. Grace invites her to the family home in Connecticut where Eve sees a picture of the whole family and recognises Grace’s father. Her step-father!
At the same time, back in England debt collectors arrive at Sylvie’s house and remove her husband’s Harley-Davidson. When she protests that they must have the wrong Mark Hathaway, they show her the paperwork which lists two addresses for him, and a wife called Maggie. A Google search confirms that he has indeed got another family in California.
For Sylvie the timing of this couldn’t be worse; she already has a teenage daughter with serious eating problems and a mother lying in a medically induced coma, possibly on her deathbed. The revelation for Maggie drops publicly in front of all the women she is seeking to impress. And Mark? Well, suddenly he is now unavailable to both; his phone switched off.
The shock of discovery and the implications for their families brings these two very different women together: Sylvie, wife of 11 years, laid-back, hard-working, responsible; Maggie, wife of 22 years, self-centred, controlling, ultra-organised, obsessed about perfection. Now united in the blurred world of bigamy.
And gradually they uncover a tissue of lies and deceit, financial problems on a collossal scale. There is a warrant out for Mark’s arrest: not just for bigamy, but fraud, embezzlement, grand larceny. How could he have got away with this for so long? Suddenly both women are the object of pity and humiliation, they and their homes beseiged by reporters and camera men. Money dries up, social contacts dwindle, and they’re forced to examine their own values and priorities and friendship circles. Both struggle to deal with the fall-out for their children too, their daughters in particular reacting powerfully. The only person who truly understands the depths to which they have sunk is their co-wife.
The errant husband is eventually arrested on a beach in Santa Monica for being drunk and disorderly. For their daughter Eve’s sake, Sylvie borrows the money to bail him out of prison and lets him stay in her guest room. She wants nothing from him, no explanations, no apologies, only the possibility of helping Eve. But Eve is in the grip of her anorexia, blaming Sylvie for everything, and she runs to the USA where her condition nose-dives resulting in two cardiac arrests.
This extreme situation throws the two mothers together and gradually the whole family begin to claw back their lives and establish new boundaries, new relationships.
Though there are literary aspects which niggled for me, overall I was sufficiently interested in the many issues Green tackles – volatile parenting, pathological anxiety, food disorders, body dysphoria, empty nest syndrome, family dynamics – to stick with it.
And the moral of the tale?
It’s summed up best by Maggie’s youngest, Buck:
… blaming doesn’t get you anywhere. It keeps you stuck. Blaming stops you from moving on with your life.
If at first you don’t succeed … Finding freedom