The Stranger at the Wedding, page 11
‘Hello?’ I said as I collapsed on my bed. My feet dangled off the end of the mattress.
‘Is that the London Owl Sanctuary for lost owls?’
I often joked that Mark looked like a little owl when he wore his reading glasses. They were large, round, steel-rimmed; his prescription made his eyes look ever so small, but no less sparkling.
‘At your service,’ I said.
‘Hoot hoot,’ he replied, to which the only reasonable response could be: Hoot hoot.
Far too many men take themselves far too seriously. They’re so desperate to embody power, dominance, learning, that they forget to be vulnerable. They’re so desperate to be men that they forget to be the boys they once were. I loved that Mark was playful. I loved that he wasn’t afraid to be vulnerable.
‘So what can I do for you?’
‘You can tell me where I might find a nice, kind, young lady to give me shelter from the storm.’ It was raining outside and a thin mist was starting to spread across the common.
‘I don’t know about kind, or nice – or even young, for that matter – but I can offer you shelter. What time will you be here?’
Mark broke character, a little abruptly. ‘Oh, shoot. I promised I’d go help Pete move a fireplace in the morning.’
‘A fireplace?’
‘I appreciate this sounds like a terrible excuse – so terrible it’s surely believable. He’s remodelling his flat and … yada yada … I won’t bore you with the details. Rain check?’
‘Rain check.’
‘What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?’
‘I’ll be in Kent.’
‘Why don’t I drive down? I’d love to see the place.’
It felt like a big step, and one I was excited to take. But it was also a scary step. Was it too soon? I worried Laura was right; maybe this was moving too fast.
‘I’d love to show it to you,’ I said evenly. If I was nervous at the prospect, Mark need never know.
‘Then it’s a date. Right, I better run; it’s starting to chuck it down now. This little owl will be drenched.’
‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.
‘Hoot hoot,’ he replied.
19
‘It’s beautiful,’ Mark said the next day as we emerged from our respective cars and stood side by side on the loose gravel path, the farmhouse before us and the fields rolling away beyond our shoulders.
‘Yeah?’ I said, secretly pleased that he was impressed by this.
‘Yeah,’ he said, turning to look at me. ‘It’s all yours?’
‘Well, mine and my sister’s. But I live here, for all intents and purposes.’
‘At weekends,’ Mark reminded me. He wanted to show me he had been listening.
‘At weekends,’ I agreed.
Mark turned and looked out over the fields, down past the pillbox to the creek where K and I played as kids.
‘When you said you grew up on a farm, I was picturing something altogether more—’
‘Ramshackle?’
‘I was going to say rustic.’
‘It’s a farm in name only. Although we did have some chickens.’
‘Had?’
‘A girl’s gotta eat.’
Mark laughed. ‘I’m not sure those chickens would agree with you.’
‘I didn’t know you’d suddenly turned vegetarian?’
‘Well, I woke up this morning, stuck my finger in the air and decided I needed a cause.’
‘And vegetarianism is it?’
‘For today, yes.’ Mark’s blue eyes twinkled.
‘And tomorrow?’
‘That depends. Do you have any immediate plans to frack gas in South Sudan?’
‘No immediate plans, per se.’
‘Then tomorrow remains undecided.’
I liked his silliness. I liked the way he brought me out of my shell. I liked the Annie I became around him. It was me, still me, but confident, brighter. He shone and I absorbed his light.
‘I’m curious. Why do you bother living in London, if you have all this here?’ he asked.
‘Sometimes I ask myself the same question.’
‘And the answer?’
‘That it would be terribly lonely here by myself.’
‘I’m sure you won’t be by yourself forever,’ he said, smiling. ‘Pretty girl like you.’
That was the first hint, the first suggestion that he saw us as something more than a fling; that he might just be in this for the long haul. I was anxious about bringing him here, worried that he too might feel it too much, too soon. But no, he surprised me with his good grace.
‘So, do I get the grand tour?’ he said, stepping up to the great oak door.
‘You will get the not-so-grand tour,’ I said, teasing.
‘Right, I suppose you reserve the red carpet treatment for the King.’
‘If then,’ I said, poking him in the back as I turned the iron handle.
His eyes lit up once more the moment we crossed the threshold. ‘It’s just so quaint,’ he said, half in awe, half in jest. ‘Little quaint Annie’s little quaint farmhouse.’ He was teasing me now.
‘I’m sorry, ladies and gentleman,’ I said. ‘This tour has come to an end.’
With that, Mark drew me to him, and kissed me full on the lips. A hotness spread up and down my body; his kiss the match that lit the flame. Then my pale skin must have blushed, for he pinched my right cheek.
‘You’re cute when you’re not even trying.’
‘And when I try?’
He kissed me again. ‘Unbearable.’
I led him through the house, room to room, hallway to hallway. He stopped every now and again to marvel at some trinket, or some photograph of me, of K, of the family that was. In the living room, Mark’s eyes fell upon a picture of Dad, dressed in a suit and tie, smiling out of the frame. Mother stood beside him in a billowy dress, which must have caught the wind at precisely the moment the picture was taken. She looked radiant. And they looked happy.
‘This your dad?’ Mark said, lifting the frame for a closer look.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘He looks smart.’
‘He was.’
‘And kind.’
‘He was that too.’
My gaze fell on the armchair in the corner of the room, his chair.
‘He used to sit here,’ I said. ‘It was his favourite. When he’d get up to make a sandwich or go to the loo, K and I would rush up and sit in it. The moment he was back, he’d pick us both up and plonk us right back down on the floor, by the fire.’
I looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece. Its ticking grew louder and louder and louder, until I felt I might burst, until the ticking became me and me it.
Mark gently repositioned the photo frame and placed a reassuring hand on the nape of my neck, just as Dad would do to Mother. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
I wiped an errant tear from the bridge of my nose. ‘You didn’t,’ I said softly. ‘It was a happy memory. I seem to recall less and less of them these days. I’m thankful for the ones I can.’
‘It’s hard,’ Mark said, almost absently, ‘living among the past. Every object, every room, every doorway a potential reminder.’
He was thinking about her: the woman who had quit his life so spectacularly. I wondered then if he’d ever stop thinking about her, or whether he might even want to. A lump formed in his throat, but he turned to me and smiled, as if in defiance of this emotion that threatened to rise up within him. But whether it was sadness, or regret, I could not be sure. Whatever it was passed from the room just as quickly as it entered.
‘You still have her things?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘I’m not sure what to do with them. Most have been boxed up, ready to go to charity, or to her friends, but I … I need a little push in the right direction.’
I took his hand with a rapidity that caused him to look at me, to really look at me. I felt like, in that moment, we were finally starting to understand one another; finally beginning to forge a connection that ran far deeper than any well. I was not pushing him, I was drawing him to me.
‘If you’re not ready,’ I said, ‘then that’s fine.’
‘It’s not that …’
‘Then what?’
‘When Hope went, I didn’t just lose my wife, I lost my best friend. And I lost my mind. I didn’t know who I was without her.’
‘And now?’
‘It’s got easier. But for a long period, I lost myself a little. In truth, perhaps I lost myself before I lost her.’
Mark pulled his hand from mine and paced distractedly through the living room. Whatever he was thinking about now, it wasn’t her. It was him.
‘Mark?’
He stopped and looked at me.
‘I think there’s something you should know … If this, if we’re …’ He scrambled for the words. ‘If this is going somewhere, and I hope it is. Because, Annie, you’ve made me the happiest I’ve been in a long time. If this is going somewhere then … there’s something I need to tell you …’
My chest tightened. Surely no good can ever come of those words.
‘Work got too much – long hours, patients I couldn’t help. I guess I withdrew. Stopped being the husband I should have been, the husband she needed. I started drinking. Just a little at first to erase the stresses of the day. But then that wasn’t enough; I drank to erase the day itself. I knew I had a problem, but my problem was also my solution. And before too long, my relationships started to suffer, and so did my job.’
‘What happened?’
‘I came to work one morning, scrubbed in, stood in theatre with three pairs of eyes on me, and my hand was shaking. A nurse passed me a scalpel but I couldn’t take it. I just kept shaking. Thankfully, a colleague sent me home before any real damage was done. But I hated myself for it, vowed to kick the drink. And I did, for a time, but I couldn’t go back to work. It scared me to lose control like that. But I’m not the me I once was. I’m in control now; the drink does not control me. And a large part of that is because of you, and how happy you make me.’
Such an admission should have raised red flags, but it didn’t; it’s the truth that isn’t spoken that should concern us most. The fact that he told me, that he opened up a darker part of his history, and that he trusted me with it, comforted me beyond measure.
‘And Hope?’
‘What about her?’
‘Do you think that’s why she left?’
Mark sighed heavily. ‘I wish I knew.’
‘Did you try to find her?’
He shook his head ruefully. ‘I did at first – drove to every place that I thought she might be holed up, rang everyone who might have seen her. Nothing. I didn’t sleep for weeks, stopped eating. At some point, my parents became concerned, checked me into a clinic where nurses monitored me, fed me, washed me.’ He looked at me then with mild embarrassment. ‘By the time I emerged, I realised it was hopeless. It was pretty clear she didn’t want to be found, and she certainly didn’t want me to follow her. So I gave up. For what she put up with, it’s the least she was due. A release.’
‘From you?’
‘From us.’
Mark looked at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece as it counted out our silence. Neither he nor I knew quite what to say. Just as I thought we were growing closer, that sharing might bring us a new understanding, we seemed further apart than ever.
‘I better go,’ he said finally, picking up his jacket from the sofa and gesturing towards the door.
I tried to rescue the moment. ‘But it’s only early; I thought we could grab some dinner later, perhaps go for a walk –’
‘No, really.’ The answer was firm. ‘I must get going. Thank you though, and thank you for the tour.’
He turned, kissed me coldly on the cheek and left. He seemed to take my heart with him but refused to leave me his. I wondered if I would ever see him again.
20
There comes a time in any fledgling courtship when the balance of power shifts. The texts, which once came in great floods, slow to a trickle. The rhythm sways, alters and finds a new equilibrium. A wide, cavernous space opens, and into that space steps paranoia and doubt.
At such times, reasonable people come to do unreasonable things, as they are forced to contend with a wellspring of emotion underpinned by the thought that all that has been built could be undone in an instant; that just as quickly as they came to fall for you, they could right themselves and pretend they’d never fallen in the first place. And it is a thought not without foundation. In the blink of an eye, they have the power to erase those feelings, erase everything you had, erase the whirlwind dates and sweaty nights, erase all traces of your touch from their body, erase their ever having met you. They could cut you off as a chef discards gristle and never think of you again.
To an extent, it was ever thus. But this new age, this modern age, where you are only ever a swipe away from the next best thing, has dispensed with the old adage: the grass isn’t always greener. And yet, maybe, just maybe, the adage is wrong. Maybe it is time we reappraised it, threw out the old rulebook. For, as much as we may try to convince ourselves otherwise, sometimes the grass is greener on the other side. Sometimes there is a better match for us. A ring can seem to fit the finger perfectly, but it’s only when you try on a different size that you realise the ring had been too tight all along, too constrictive, and that those marks left on the finger, those indents and impressions, were the aggregation of your inexperience. But switch out the ring and those marks will fade in time. The wrong choices, too, will be lost to us.
Mark fell silent after nearly nine months together. The good morning and goodnight texts came to an end; he no longer called me, no longer took my calls. I wondered if it had something to do with Hope – whether she was holding him back in some way, whether he felt that he couldn’t truly give himself to another while she was still out there, wherever there was. Maybe as things got more and more serious between us, as his feelings for me grew, he panicked. Maybe he thought the same might happen with us; that I might leave him one day and tear apart the life he’d only just rebuilt. Maybe he was scared.
For all my speculation, I knew the real reason, of course, deep down: he’d lost interest. Our short romance had come to an end, and he hadn’t even had the decency to let me know. I was hurt, I was upset, but most of all, I was angry. I was grieving for a relationship that had never been given the chance to take flight. I was grieving for a future that was never mine.
I had resigned myself to this fact, with not a little heaviness in my heart, when – several weeks later, as I was delivering a lecture on Empire to a group of bored students – unnoticed by everyone but me, a small figure slipped into the back of the hall. I had to squint, to really focus my attention on the back, but sure enough, there he was: it was Mark, smiling at me. He was happy.
‘Lord Elgin’s imprimatur from Sultan Selim III to begin excavation of the Parthenon frieze has been called into question by a great number of prominent individuals and organisations. Invariably, the issue, at heart, is inextricably bound with questions of empire, power and legitimacy. Who has the right to rule?’
A bell sounded to signal the end of the lecture and the hall exploded into sound.
‘OK, everyone. Enjoy your weekends and see you next week. Oh, and don’t forget your reading.’
The place emptied, save for Mark, who, once the last student had left, stood up and made his slow descent down the steps towards me with a bouquet of flowers in hand. There was an excited, boyish look in his eyes.
‘I know it’s terribly conventional of me,’ he said, as he planted a lingering kiss on my lips and handed me the flowers.
‘There is absolutely nothing conventional about you.’ I smile.
After all, who else would ghost someone and then ask what he was about to ask me.
‘You ready?’ he said.
‘For what?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, would it?’
‘But where are we—’
Mark placed a finger to my lips. ‘Suitcase packed, car out front. Everything’s taken care of. All that’s missing is you.’
*
Nine months after the funeral, Mother moved out, leaving K and me in the care of Grandma, and the farmhouse in the care of us, deeds and all. But I wasn’t ready for that kind of responsibility, surface or otherwise; I was just a kid.
Grandma said Mother left because the farmhouse reminded her too much of him, of the man who encouraged our move there in the first place, but that wasn’t it at all. Mother left because we reminded her too much of him. Each time she looked at her own children, she saw loss, and love became an impossibility.
‘Annie, grab your things. We’re going,’ called a voice from the drive.
At that time, as my difficult teenage years took root, I’d taken to hiding away around the back of the pillbox in the neighbouring field. There, in the wild peace and quiet, looking out towards the weir, I could think and dream undisturbed; I could read and imagine all the places I would and would not see in my lifetime; I could plan the wars I would wage against mythical tyrants and great injustices; and I could plot the course of my own life like a badly written novel. But most of all, in that suspension of time and place, I could smoke, and Grandma would be none the wiser.
‘Annie, I will count. You know I will.’
I stubbed out my cigarette on the heel of my shoe, pulled my jumper over my head and shook it into the wind so as to dispel the scent of scorched tobacco. By the time I reached the drive, Grandma was at the wheel of her car, straw boater pulled low on her forehead, and giant sunglasses perched at the tip of her nose. She looked over the lenses at me.
‘You can stay here if you’d rather. Karen and I are chasing the sun. Isn’t that right, K?’
‘You betcha.’ K was sat in the passenger seat, looking like a doll propped up in a dining chair.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Then stop dilly-dallying and get in. If we leave now, we can be at Camber by midday. The tides wait for no man.’
