The Stranger at the Wedding, page 5
When we finally reach the car, my heart molten in my chest, Mark opens the door and looks up, expectantly. He is every bit the man from the train, every bit the man I imagined him to be. And just as I planted my flag in my room that first day at the farmhouse, just as I claimed that space for my own, I realise, as he looks at me through those shiny blue marbles, that I have planted my flag in him.
‘Wait,’ I say and run back towards the storm of light once more.
I look down at my bouquet, down at tradition, down at a set of rules. Part of me wants to keep it or else to throw it to the ground, but it’s too late; a group of women are running forward too, all hands, all hungry. But there is a face among them, just one, and I’m taken aback, for it looks just like her were she still with us, were her branch not cut short. I smile at the woman, at the likeness, at the vision, and she smiles back. The past has stepped into the present.
I throw the flowers into the air.
As the bouquet tosses and turns, a ballerina against the sparkler-lit darkness, and the sea of hopefuls edge ever forward to claim their prize, to claim their futures, I watch the once vibrant reds and purples and whites and greens start to fade. As the bouquet enters its downward arc, the petals come loose, the stems break up, and the whole begins to rot. It rots, and as it rots, it disintegrates as a rocket ship might, having re-entered the earth’s atmosphere at too steep an angle. But as it falls further, and the outstretched hands reach through dying embers, there’s nothing left to catch. The bouquet has turned to soil, and it is falling between their fingers, falling and falling and falling until it seems as though it might never land. But that brief eternity passes too and the soil rains down on to a box, in a pit, with scores of tumid, bereft faces looking down upon it, and handfuls of dirt raised against the blue sky.
Mark’s cousin Fran leaps into the air and catches the intact bouquet before landing clumsily amid a crush of bodies. She smiles out at me, delighted with her prize.
Laura’s hand on my shoulder ushers me towards the waiting car, where Mark stands. But he is not alone. There is a figure there.
Who, I cannot be sure, for the darkness clings to them like a cloak.
Their lips are pressed to Mark’s ear and their words seem to cast a pallor across his face. The redness flees his cheeks and the blueness his eyes. The figure recedes and disappears among the crowd as I draw near, and for a moment I wonder if there had been anyone there at all.
As soon as we step into that car, something changes in him, and I don’t know what. It’s as though for almost eighteen months, Mark has been looking at a painting, but he has been looking too close – at the detail, the brushstrokes, the gentle dimpling of paint amassed on the surface of a hand, the silken texture of a nose, the surprise of a single spot of black in a sea of white. Up close there was only beauty: terrifying, all-consuming beauty that made it very difficult to imagine anything else, to think that there might have been anything else beyond that single scene. But then, at some point, he must have stepped back and allowed himself a moment to consider the whole; he must have removed himself from the frame and seen at a clap that the painting was ugly. Not just in subject and form, but at its essence, in its belly.
To speak of it terrifies me, for I am forced to examine this event, the beginning of the end, in which it all starts to crumble – this edifice of mutual trust and adoration and affection that we have erected steadily. No matter how much I review the day, this day, I can’t identify the precise reason the music stopped, but this much I know: Mark waves from the window to Frank and then to Jean, who waves back with a single tear in her eye; I wave to Laura, to K, to the slip of faces that seem to press themselves as one.
As the car emerges at the end of the driveway into a stream of oncoming headlights, as the figures recede into the night and the waving stops, Mark and I turn to one another, alone at last, the past dead and buried, the future unfurling before us, dancing out into the distance with big, wide, open arms, and we find that we have nothing left to say. Not a word. The day has bound us together, and it has bound our lips too.
When the dark road is lit once more with orange and white lights from airplanes landing and taking off, when the car stops beside the terminal and our chauffeur circles behind to remove our luggage, Mark holds his head in his hands.
‘Annie,’ he says, as he draws his finger and thumb across his forehead.
I turn to him, eyes wide, waiting for whatever terrible thing he has to say, waiting for him to dispel the magic of the day, to bring the fairy tale of us, of our whirlwind romance, to an inglorious end. And then he says it: sharp, brutal, a surgeon’s knife cutting deep and striking bone.
‘I think we need to talk.’
PART TWO
THE PROPOSAL
Six months earlier …
9
Cameron was not a morning person, had never been a morning person, would never be a morning person. And yet his wife would insist on his being awake before 7 a.m. to greet the day.
‘Caaaaaam.’
Yes, all right, he thought, as he turned on his pillow, his very soft and very warm pillow, to look at the world sideways, as though for the first time. Squinting, he could just discern the outline of a black sack on the roof of his neighbour’s shed. He’d have to have a word with Gary again. But the last time had been such a to-do that he dreaded the thought.
It had been a tough year. Not financially – business was booming and the glut of referrals he’d received in the wake of the Kellerson job would see him through to the New Year. Busy is as busy does. No, it had been a tough year for other reasons. Sophie had suffered her third miscarriage, and it had taken its toll on both of them.
Cameron righted himself with a strength that he did not know his abs still possessed, threw his legs over the edge of the bed – why did she choose such a bloody high mattress – and hopped into a soft pair of slippers, which he’d taken the trouble to arrange neatly the night before, side by side, exactly fifteen centimetres from the bed, with only the suggestion of a gap between them. Cameron was a man who liked – no, cherished – order. As far as he saw it, it was the one and only defence against the gathering forces of chaos. Order was power, order was control. And he liked to be in control – well, with one exception …
‘Caaaaaam!’
‘Yes, yes. I’m coming.’
‘You have a visitor.’
A visitor? Cameron never had visitors, not to his home, and not at this time of the morning. The last visitor he had was a care worker to inform him that his dad had passed away, and she too was a visitor he could have done without. No news given or received before 7 a.m. is good news.
As he pulled his faded blue dressing gown around him and fastened the belt at the waist, he was reminded of a film he had seen not a month before. A man – an insurance broker, he thinks, but he can’t be sure – opens his front door in the dead of night to be confronted with a masked assailant, who poses no questions that can’t be answered with his gun. The insurance guy never sees the morning.
Cameron turned the handle on the bedroom door, and gingerly poked his head over the bannister into the living room below, hoping beyond hope that the film hadn’t spilt over into real life. Don’t be silly, he reasoned. Cameron had always been troubled by a vivid imagination, he knew that. One of these days it was bound to get him into trouble, serious trouble, but hopefully today was not that day.
His head poked ever further over until a face that he dimly recognised, taut and weather-beaten and severely aged since he last laid eyes on it, beamed up at him. ‘Hello, Cam,’ it said. ‘Long time.’
And at a clap, Cameron found himself back in the changing rooms, back among the sweat and bravado, the adolescent braying and intimidatory schoolyard politics. Back in the thick of trauma, and back at the mercy of a predatory pack of prepubescents. Cameron hated school.
He was not a particularly fat child, not a thin one either; not too tall, not too short. His unremarkable stature, coupled with his distinctly average intellect, should have conferred upon him an unremarkable status. He should have been the boy nobody saw, the one who slipped under the radar, unnoticed by anyone other than his closest coterie of similarly unremarkable friends. And that might well have been the case, were it not for one incident.
A dreary day of rugby practice bled into a very long and very hot communal shower. He must have been dreaming, half dozing from the heat, for when he remembered himself and came to, a number of the other boys were standing around him, pointing.
Cameron’s got a boner, they chanted, as though part of a ritual – and ritual it was: ritual humiliation. Never mind that it was a perfectly natural, healthy even, bodily response, especially at that age; the boys were out for blood and they were going to get it. And who had been at the head of the pack? Who had raised the first pitchfork with that primitive cry? Who else: Frank.
And so for the rest of his school career, and indeed several years beyond, he was known as BBC: Boner Boy Cameron. It followed him around, weighed him down; a great, big, invisible albatross about his neck, the likes of which the Ancient Mariner had never seen.
Cameron knew then, more than anyone, how a single event had the potential to irrevocably shape the course of one’s life. To a degree – though he had done well to break free of that past, to slip that skin – he had lived a life that had been authored for him. Until he met Sophie – sweet, beautiful Sophie. She’s too young for you, his friends had said at first, it’ll never last. But some fifteen years later, here they were, and he’d never looked back.
At the foot of the stairs, Cameron found an outstretched hand waiting for him, which he shook. There’s no point balling up the past and allowing it to rot and tangle within, he told himself. Who does that help? He’d been through enough in his own life to know that everyone deserved a second chance, even Frank. And from the cut of his clothes and the precision telegraphed in his movements, Cam wagered that Frank was, or had been, a military man. And the military changes a person, one way or the other. It will make you, or it will break you.
‘How have you been, Cam?’ Frank removed his green tweed cap to reveal a gleaming monk’s tonsure. His baldness secretly delighted Cam.
‘Really well. Thank you. How long’s it been?’
‘Forty years.’
‘Forty years …’ Cameron became distant and a vast silence opened up in the room. Coming to, he remembered his manners. ‘Forgive me – you’ve met my wife, Sophie.’
The two exchanged an awkward how-do-you-do, which did little to puncture the quiet.
‘Well,’ said Sophie finally. ‘You must have a great deal to catch up on, so I’ll leave you both to it. Let me know what you want to do about breakfast, honey, OK?’ With that, she pulled her jacket on, slipped out and peeled off in her red Audi. Cameron had hoped for their usual morning kiss, but Sophie had never been a fan of public displays of affection.
Frank was the first to speak. ‘You’ve done well for yourself, Cam.’
‘She’s great, isn’t she?’
‘No, I meant all this –’ He gestured around the house, which was not especially big, or flashy, but was, as the most fastidious of interior decorators would have to concede, beautifully appointed.
‘Oh.’
‘But Sophie’s great too.’ Frank broadcast an unsettling grin, and then slapped Cameron playfully on the shoulder, which sent him back to that shower, if only for a moment. Frank’s grin dissipated; first the arches of the lips, and then the teeth. ‘May we?’ This time Frank’s gesture was to the sofas.
‘Please.’
The two men sat opposite one another. Cameron noted that Frank had still to remove his jacket; he clearly didn’t intend to stay long.
‘I haven’t come here for a catch-up. But you probably guessed that.’
‘You want something.’
Frank fiddled with his tweed cap, feeding it through his palms as one might a steering wheel. Cameron amused himself with the image of Frank, quite literally, cap in hand.
‘I need to find someone. We need to find someone.’
‘Ah.’
‘Ah indeed.’
‘Look, Frank. I’m very grateful to you for coming but I haven’t done that kind of work in years. I don’t know who told you—’
‘I bumped into Max. He mentioned you’d dabbled in a sideline, as he put it. He gave me this.’
Frank waved a little scrap of paper marked with Cameron’s address.
‘He shouldn’t have done that.’
‘Perhaps not, but he meant well.’
Cameron stood up abruptly, and for the first time ever in the company of Frank, he felt in control. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip, but I’m afraid I really can’t help.’
Frank looked up with the helpless eyes of a child.
‘Please. It’s my son …’ Frank trailed off, and his emotion got the better of him. His guard slipped, his steel veneer shattered, and the military man became a civilian.
Cameron stood there uneasily. He feared the next four words to leave Frank’s mouth would be Do you have kids? But he reminded himself, for the second time this morning, that this was not the movies. And yet he couldn’t dismiss the tragedy in Frank’s eyes. This man was hurting – for his son or on behalf of his son, he couldn’t be sure. But Cameron’s father had not taught him to turn his back on suffering. And here was suffering.
With a sigh, Cam lowered himself back on to the sofa opposite, acutely aware of a stiffness gathering in his left leg. He grabbed a notebook and pen from the coffee table before him.
‘When you’re ready …’ Cameron clicked his pen.
‘My son’s wife, my daughter-in-law, has gone missing.’
Cameron’s pen hovered over the page. He thought for a moment, for a good long moment, and then closed his notebook.
‘This is really a job for the police.’
‘You don’t understand – this was eighteen months ago.’
‘Eighteen months?’
‘The police have given up the ghost – perhaps justifiably. You see, there’s evidence to suggest she may have … vanished herself.’
‘Evidence?’
‘A note, written in her own hand.’
‘But you doubt that?’
‘In it she doesn’t just suggest that she’s leaving Mark; she suggests she’s leaving all of us.’
Cameron noted Frank’s use of the present tense. She was clearly very much still alive to him.
‘Suicide?’
‘Yes. Well, no.’ Frank cast around for coherency. ‘The implication was subtle, throwaway. But I just don’t buy it. It’s not the woman I knew.’
‘I guess no one ever truly knows quite what someone’s going through.’
Frank sighed heavily now.
‘It just doesn’t add up. Eight years of marriage, a happy marriage, and she just walks out one day – or worse – without so much as a thanks for the memories.’ He leant in as though to whisper, but sat back again, bolt upright. ‘There’s more to it.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Mark’s a good kid but—’ Frank stopped as though unsure of how to proceed, or else fearful of revealing anything incriminating. ‘He’s a good kid. Let’s leave it at that.’
‘You mean your son? Frank, I’m going to need all the facts if I’m to take the job, even if those facts are … unpalatable.’
Frank rubbed his palm nervously across his lips and then once through his fringe of hair.
‘Mark has had his fair share of troubles, sure. What boy doesn’t, growing up?’
At this, the two shared an awkward look. Rather than acknowledge the elephant of their shared history, they concealed it, wallpapering over the beast.
‘Any history of strange behaviour?’
‘Strange?’
‘Odd. Out of the ordinary.’
‘He quit his job. Before she disappeared. He had a steady gig, a surgeon. Very good money, solid career progression, top of his field, and he just upped and left. I guess that’s something the marriage shared.’ Frank managed a wry smile.
‘Anything else?’
‘Mark’s always been a thinker. Introspective, you might call it. But before she disappeared … Mark became removed.’
‘As in not returning your calls, removed?’
‘As in you could be talking to him but nothing would register, removed. He was somewhere else.’
‘Maybe he was unhappy in the marriage, but didn’t know how to tell you.’
‘Yes … Jean thinks the same thing.’ Frank freed himself momentarily from his train of thought. ‘Sorry – Jean’s my wife.’
‘I see.’ Cameron wrote Mother/Jean on his pad and underlined it twice.
‘A part of me,’ Frank ventured, ‘small though it is, wonders whether Mark knows a little more than he’s letting on.’
Cameron hated to ask, but it was the other elephant in the room, and there was no concealing this one.
‘Do you think he killed her?’
In his agitation, Frank accidentally knocked his hand into the Anglepoise lamp stood beside the sofa. ‘God, no. What a thing to say.’
‘We must consider all lines of enquiry.’
‘Yes, but not him. Mark wouldn’t—’
‘But you’ve entertained the possibility that she may no longer be with us?’
Frank seemed not to hear, or want to hear, the question. Instead, he fished for a photograph in his jacket, which he then pushed across the coffee table to Cameron, who looked but did not touch – to touch would have been to commit, and he couldn’t be sure this was a part of his life that he wished to revisit.
‘This her?’
Frank nodded.
‘She’s pretty.’
The photograph showed a blonde woman sitting on a park bench, her head partially thrown back in laughter. She seemed to be looking at something far beyond the camera. Was there a hint of fear in her eyes?
‘You can keep that copy, if you like,’ said Frank.
