The Stranger at the Wedding, page 24
Mother grows mournful. There is a note of regret in her voice, a tightening of the shoulder.
‘I believe this is the bit where I am supposed to offer some sort of advice to the newlyweds. Well … I’m not sure I’m the right person to offer advice of my own, but if I could say just one thing, it would be this …’
Mother pauses, looks down for a moment and fishes a scrap of paper from the inside of her bra, which she straightens out with the flat of her hand.
‘Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger. Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break. Believe the best rather than the worst. People have a way of living up or down to your opinion of them. Remember that true friendship is the basis for any lasting relationship. The person you choose to marry is deserving of the courtesies and kindnesses you bestow on your friends. Please hand this down to your children’s children. The more things change, the more they are the same.’
Mother thrusts her flute into the air, and leads the tent in a toast.
‘To the health and happiness of the happy couple, and to their very happy ending.’
In the past few months, Mother too seems to have found her happiness. I could chalk it up to her latest boyfriend or the menagerie of jewellery he has gifted her, or the house she won from Derek in the long-contested divorce settlement, but to do so would be to do her a great injustice; to do so would be to refuse to look beneath the surface. No, it’s something more profound than that, more real. I think she has drawn happiness from us, from me and K, from her girls, from our happiness with our partners and from the lives and foundations we have begun to build in earnest. Perhaps she realises, finally, that Dad, that Jessica, Grandma too, are all alive and well in us; that their passings were not ends but beginnings. None of us would be where we are now, or who we are now, without them. For better or worse. Perhaps she has finally accepted that, and found in that acceptance a release.
I think back to when Mother sat with me and shared a cigarette beside the pillbox on the day of Grandma’s funeral. How she said that she’d failed us, that motherhood fits some people like a comfy shoe but not her; how failure is just a prelude to trying again; how she wanted to be a better mother to us; how she wanted to try again. In the intervening years, she has not been the perfect mother – she could never be accused of that – but here she is, for the very first time since Dad’s death, trying. She has placed her foot inside the shoe, and found, at last, that the shoe fits.
*
When Mother said this was not your average wedding, she was right. But not for the reasons you might immediately assume. Looking around, as I stand a mere four metres from a Ferris wheel, it is almost as if K, shaped by that night at the funfair, intended to recreate it, down to the last detail, save that this time all eyes are on her.
In and among the undulating lavender fields that seem to stretch out to the horizon on all sides, there are tombolas, teacup rides, men in striped candy-cane jackets and straw boaters tending to hook-a-duck booths. There are hooplas and candyfloss machines and coconut shies, and what wedding isn’t complete without a mini-golf course with its very own revolving windmill. This is a wedding built not on convention and propriety, but on fun.
As I look up at Laura and Pete swinging precariously from the top of the Ferris wheel, a familiar hand finds its way around my waist.
‘Oh, K, you look so utterly beautiful.’ I stand back so I can take it all in.
‘It must run in the family,’ she says. ‘We Clarks make very good brides.’
‘You’re keeping the name then?’
‘Someone has to.’
Mark joins us, gives K a kiss on each cheek. ‘I was just chatting with Hannah, collecting my bet.’
‘Your bet?’
‘Sure. I bet her there was no chance of you wearing a dress.’
K laughs, looks down at her white suit. ‘Did you bet her I’d be in white too?’
‘I didn’t fancy the odds.’
‘Oh, fuck off,’ says K, as she slaps Mark playfully on the shoulder.
He looks across at Pete now alighting from the Ferris wheel. ‘Excuse me, ladies, but I have another bet to call in.’
My eyes follow Mark, follow his path to Pete, to Laura.
‘What happened with you two?’ says K.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You and Laura.’
‘Nothing happened, precisely. There was no great falling-out. We drifted.’
‘In the space of six months?’
Some friendships were never meant to last forever. Some friendships serve a purpose. They work until they don’t; they fit until you outgrow them. Laura was the person with whom I spent wild nights out and miserable, self-pitying nights in. She was the one who would come over with a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes when two tabs of diazepam just wouldn’t do. She was the one I would confide in when I didn’t know who else to tell. But it was a friendship of convenience – for her too. Laura enjoyed, perhaps revelled in, playing the role of consoler, and I enjoyed being consoled, but there existed little below the surface of this exchange, little to suggest that we meant more to each other. That morning in Capri when I picked up the phone to Laura and it became clear her priorities had realigned from me to Pete, I realised that it was time to move on, that she could no longer give me precisely what I needed. And that’s OK. We try to cling on to the things that once made us happy when the best we can do is let them go entirely.
Laura walks over to me as K disappears into the arms of her new wife and into a throng of well-wishers.
‘Hey,’ says Laura.
‘Hey,’ I say, by return, but it becomes painfully apparent that we have so very little left to say to one another. This is the first time we have spoken in four months.
‘I tried calling,’ she says, ‘but I, well …’
‘Oh. Yeah. I got a new number. I thought Mark would have …?’
‘No,’ she says flatly. ‘No, he didn’t.’
‘You look nice,’ I say.
‘Thanks.’ She smiles.
Silence. Someone should say something, anything.
A dull ache fills the pit of my stomach.
‘I gather you’ve taken up yoga?’ Laura says finally. ‘How did that happen? You always said that was for spoilt rich kids and people with too much time on their hands.’
I shrug lightly. ‘I guess some things change.’
‘And I guess some things don’t,’ she says pointedly. ‘Anyway, it’s getting late. Pete and I should make a move.’
‘Well, it was good to see you,’ I say, but Laura doesn’t repay the kindness. She takes Pete by the hand and walks off with the very last of our friendship.
Mark spots me alone, returns, gives me an enormous hug.
‘Are you OK?’ he says.
I wipe away an errant tear. ‘I will be.’
I’m not mourning our lost friendship. I’m mourning the person I used to be.
‘They’re leaving,’ calls a voice suddenly. Hannah’s sister, I think, but I can’t be sure. ‘Quickly, everyone. To the front.’
K didn’t want a big send-off. No bouquet, no expensive car, no sparklers, no frills. She was never one for goodbyes; she’d much rather slip out of a party unannounced than exchange valedictions with every single guest. I supposed it was the finality of the gesture: every goodbye could well prove a final farewell. If you never say goodbye, then there remains always the possibility of picking up right where you left off.
We gather around at the gates as K, candyfloss in one hand, Hannah in the other, climbs into the taxi. She smiles at me from the back seat as we stand and we cheer and we clap. I think I see a very small sadness wash over her. Is she thinking of Dad? Of Grandma? Of Jessica? Was it the wedding she had imagined all those years ago on our lawn, in her little white dress with the red ribbon around the waist, surrounded by her careworn stuffed toys, and with Dad toasting the happy couple: Karen and noble Sir Kenneth Carson? How happy she was then, and, that momentary sadness having passed, how happy she is now. She glows once more, and this time it is all for real.
But before I can finish the thought, a searing pain ripples through my abdomen, and into my back, reveals itself in my contorted features. I grimace, bite back the throbbing heat inside and look down to see a small patch of red spotting the front of my cream summer dress. The patch spreads slowly, becomes a gaping ravine, and for a split second I am at the farm again, my feet dangling precariously into the dyke, a great chasm that has swallowed everything, with a lure so strong that even the light cannot escape. My future is in there still, somewhere, but it’s not the one I’d envisioned.
I rummage in my bag, find a starched napkin from the wedding breakfast, blistered white in the dying light of the sun, and bend down to wipe the wetness from my legs. As I do, a child, clinging to her mother’s thighs, her eyes and her eyes alone drawn away from the spectacle, watches me silently.
My eyes are drawn back up again, to K in her smart white suit, sat beside her partner, her wife, and I swallow down the hurt and the racking pain, hold back the disappointment I feel at myself, cauterise the anger. For K must not see my suffering. No, she must hear my clapping, hear the concert of clapping as we wish her well on a brand-new adventure. She will get her happily-ever-after, even if I have lost mine.
44
Once upon a time, or so the story goes, there were three sisters, long before there were two, when soon there would be one.
45
I look over at the man I love – the man who vowed to love me to my last – and I see a great void. His blue eyes, which I once declared little marbles in his head, don’t look at me in the same way any more. There’s affection, sure, but it’s dimmed or else hiding. And there’s a stillness in his arms that he can’t seem to shake. He lifts the fork to his mouth as we sit here in this unforgivably chichi restaurant that I didn’t pick, in the name of our first anniversary; and yet his arms are perfectly still. The fork moves, but he’s motionless.
The band strikes up and the waiters seem to waltz to its rhythms – stumbling and pirouetting around us in an eddy of colour. I think on all the things they must have overheard at diners’ tables. The proposals, promotions, infidelities, redundancies, births, deaths and marriages. The anniversaries.
The decay.
And that’s when I see it, a flicker so slight as to be imperceptible to anyone other than his wife: a sadness creeps into the corner of Mark’s mouth. His perfect mouth. I tell myself that the steak is overdone or that the wine must be corked, but I know neither to be true.
It dawns on me that one day he’ll look at me and that dimness in his eyes will be a sea of black. I shall look at him, but there will be black – as though, all at once, the lights in New York City have gone out.
‘Everything OK, darling?’
Mark smiles, but it is forced. There is a world behind that smile.
‘Perfectly,’ he says, and he says it almost perfectly. Had I not known him, had we met for the first time this evening, a first date, two intimate strangers sharing a meal and a bottle of wine, I might never have guessed he was acting.
‘You sure?’
Mark drops his fork to the plate with a clatter that rings out through the room. An elderly couple at the table beside us turn and look.
‘Must you ruin this, too?’ he says angrily.
‘You’re right,’ I say quietly. ‘I’m sorry. Let’s enjoy the meal.’
Mark picks up his fork, and the eyes of the couple occupying the table beside us consider each other once again. A relief; I hate public arguments, and Mark knows this only too well.
‘Let’s play a game,’ I say.
‘What kind of game?’
‘Truth or lie. Remember?’
‘I do.’
‘Well?’
‘Don’t we already know all there is to know about one another?’ His chin juts out at a slight incline. It’s a question that does not require an answer. He has all the answers he needs.
‘I’m sure there are things, small things, that we may have overlooked. Come on, it’ll be fun.’
Mark dabs his mouth with the corner of his napkin and then pulls it away to reveal a perfect impression of his lips. His perfect lips.
‘Very well,’ he says. ‘I’ll go first.’
His fingers interlock and his brows furrow in concentration. What is he thinking?
‘When I was a boy, I had a recurring nightmare. I’m in a pond, soaked through, and I’m calling for my dad, but a lifeguard keeps telling me they can’t get a message through to his base. I keep calling and calling, and eventually he appears, but his face is just camouflage. No mouth, no nose, no features. Just camouflage.’
‘Creepy. Slightly concerned that’ll turn out to be the lie now. OK, and two?’
‘I used to have a catchphrase.’
I almost spit my wine out.
‘A catchphrase?’
‘I thought it made me memorable.’
‘What was it?’
‘Life’s a beach and then you marry one.’
There’s a spot of mischief glistening from within; he’s yearning to smile.
‘I guess I walked straight into that,’ I say.
‘I guess you did.’
‘The first one is the truth.’
‘Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. Now you.’
‘OK. At university, I once covered every inch of my housemate’s dorm in tin foil. I was very drunk and very sorry the next morning. Alas, she didn’t see the funny side and reported me to the student welfare officer. I had to move halls.’
‘Childish. I like it. The second?’
I look at him long and hard, my handsome, dependable Mark, and think on all that we have been through, all that may still lie before us.
‘I have only ever loved one person.’
He smiles, a real, genuine smile that seems to wash out the old and birth the new. A smile born of love, real, genuine love. He softens. And for the first time in a long while, we discuss our hopes, our dreams, our desires. Mark listens in a way that he hasn’t since he proposed, or, if we wish to travel a little further: since our first date that day in Holland Park, besieged by charging peacocks and recalcitrant kids.
We relive the highlights of our relationship in an endless procession of remember-the-time-when … I always remember; he rarely does, not that it matters, for those moments come alive again in their retelling. Our love comes alive again, and we hold it up for the entire room to see. We tell stories to reassure ourselves that we’re right, that there is precedent, antecedent, that what we have done is just, that where we are going is real.
‘Do you ever picture us growing old?’ I ask.
‘No,’ he says calmly.
‘You don’t?’
He goes to speak but it’s stifled by dessert arriving in a hail of sparklers: a slice of cake – the cake from our wedding – and a message inked in chocolate around the edge of the plate:
M + A. Happy to the Last.
We each pick up a fork and joust for the corner with a glut of icing.
‘I used to do nothing but think about the future,’ Mark continues, ‘until I realised just how unhealthy it is to place so much stock in what might be. I wasted so much time dreaming when I could have been living in the here and now, taking in every detail. And life never pans out the way you intend anyway.’
I’m not sure if he means that as a barb, but it stings. Is he disappointed with his future? Is he disappointed with me?
Mark senses his error, backtracks.
‘What I mean is, can’t we just appreciate what we have without wondering where we’ll be tonight, tomorrow, next week?’
He places his hand on mine, turns the wedding band around and around on my finger.
‘Do you picture us old?’ he says.
‘I try, but I can’t. Do I imagine a future? Yes. Do I imagine us together? Yes. But do I imagine us old? No. In my thoughts, we are forever this age.’
Mark smiles tenderly. ‘Do you picture me with abs?’
I close my eyes. ‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Skimpy bathing shorts, lounging by a Tuscan pool?’
‘I wouldn’t have it any other way.’
‘Am I always well behaved?’
I open my eyes again, bite my lip a little at the thought. ‘You certainly know your way around that swimming pool.’
Mark laughs and then pulls from beneath the table a package wrapped in red-spotted wrapping paper and finished precisely with a cream-coloured bow. A present.
‘For me?’ I say.
‘No, for the waiter,’ he jokes.
I go to reach for the gift, but he jerks it just out of my grasp.
‘Not yet,’ he says, as he signals for the bill. ‘I have another surprise for you first.’
‘There’s more?’
‘There’s always more.’
*
We sit in the car outside as night closes in. The engine hums low and a quiet heat works its way up and into the opening of my dress. I’m with my father suddenly, dozing on the sofa in front of the fire, a blanket placed over me, a gentle kiss on the forehead, a goodnight, love.
‘Do you trust me?’ Mark says.
I swallow hard, but I hope that it doesn’t show. ‘Always,’ I answer.
He removes a length of dense black silk from the glove compartment and twists in his seat to wrap it around my head, over my eyes, so that all I can see is black. Its tightness unnerves me.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask, excitement and nerves colliding within.
‘If I told you that, it wouldn’t be much of a surprise. Hold tight.’
The car peels off and I can feel the soft warmth of Mark’s hand working its way up my inner thigh, which he grips firmly, just to let me know that I’m still his, that I would always be his, just as he will always be mine.
