The Stranger at the Wedding, page 9
But we both knew: it was Jessica’s. Dad had bought it for her second birthday, a birthday that was to be her last.
‘It’s so pretty. Can I keep it?’
‘No, K. You need to put it back where you found it.’
‘But I’ll look after it.’
‘I’m sure you would but it doesn’t belong to you.’
‘But –’
‘No buts. Put it back.’
Grudgingly, K replaced the jumper, along with the rest of the drawer’s contents, and slid it home into the gaping hole in the table.
‘Come on, let’s get out of here before Mum finds us.’
‘Do you think Dad is with Jessica now?’ K’s eyes were full of spirit, full of hope.
I smiled – not because I wished to encourage the thought, but simply because I didn’t know the answer.
15
That first date seemed to come and go as though it hadn’t come at all. For a few days after, he didn’t contact me and I didn’t contact him.
I’ve always found it odd, this dance people do. We are each in search of the one who just might be the answer we never knew we needed, who just might complete us, who just might make this whole sorry affair bearable, and we spend that search, the first tentative moments, feigning abject indifference for fear the other might just get an inkling that yes, we like them too. And yet dance we do, dance we must; that way we might never get hurt, we might never reveal too much of ourselves until we absolutely have to. And by that point, it’s too late, the ship will be sinking, and we’ll be going down together, Jack and Rose, in a sea of mutual feeling. At least, that’s the hope.
‘You’re allowed to call him, you know,’ said K, as we made our way to lunch with Mother.
‘I know.’
‘So what’s stopping you?’
‘I’ll give it to the end of the week. If he hasn’t called me then, I’ll—’
‘Ignore him some more?’ K rolled her eyes at me.
‘But what if he’s not interested? What if he’s had second thoughts?’ Self-doubt had infiltrated not just my thinking, but my voice too; it quavered.
K softened. ‘Then he’s had second thoughts. He’s allowed to.’
‘I guess.’
‘You guess nothing. Call him tonight.’
We drove on through the narrow, single-track country lanes. Every now and then, I stared out the passenger window and watched as a strong breeze, the first stirrings of a storm, flattened the beds of long grass that lined the edges of the unmarked roads, revealing, as though in boast, a world hidden among the overgrowth. As we rounded one corner at speed, I spied a lone rabbit darting into the hawthorn. I don’t think K saw.
‘Enough about me. How’s Hannah?’
Karen fell silent.
‘Oh, dear,’ I said.
‘Oh, dear, indeed. She moved out last week.’
‘I’m sorry, K. I didn’t know things were that bad.’
K sighed. ‘Neither did I. I think it’s temporary – at least I hope it is.’
‘Have you told Mother?’
‘You kidding?’ K momentarily took her eyes off the road and looked at me. ‘She’ll be over the moon. I could do without that right now. And not a word from you either.’
‘Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.’
*
We met Mother in a small gastropub on the outskirts of the village.
‘Is this really the hill you want to die on?’ I had to hand it to her: it was a hell of an opener. ‘It’s my birthday and you choose here of all places?’
‘We thought you might prefer something a little more low-key this year,’ said Karen, ever the stateswoman.
‘Well, you thought wrong, darling. Very wrong.’ Mother softened, seemed to briefly stand outside herself and realise how ridiculous, how ungrateful she was being. ‘Still, I guess we’re here now. Might as well make the most of it.’ She went to sit down at a table. ‘But next year –’
She wasn’t always like this; before Dad died, she was loving. She was firm, but she was loving. Every now and again we still catch glimpses of that woman. She might appear in an unscripted gesture or tender phrase, an artless laugh or kindly smile. But she doesn’t seem to visit as often as she once did. As the years go by, as Mother falls deeper and deeper into this adopted persona – a defence mechanism, I suppose, erected in the wake of great trauma – I fear that good woman we once knew, who loved in her own special way and we loved in turn, may be lost to us forever.
‘Yes, Mum,’ said K. ‘Next year. Whatever you like.’
Mother clapped her hands together. ‘Wonderful. Now what are we all drinking? We’re celebrating, after all – and not just my birthday.’
K looked to me. I shrugged.
‘Oh, girls, come on now. All in good time.’
Mother ordered a bottle of champagne and hustled us into a toast.
‘So … Where were we … Glasses at the ready. I have a little announcement to make. Well, not quite a little announcement, a big one.’ Mother, never one to miss an opportunity to pause for dramatic effect, looked at us each in turn. ‘Derek and I are getting a divorce.’
Derek was Mother’s second husband, whom she met a year or two after Dad passed, and who can be credited, in part if not wholly, with kickstarting Mother’s regrettable transformation from grieving widow to a faded, jaded Holly Golightly.
At Grandma’s insistence to shake her out of her funk, Mother had joined a ramblers group, which would convene every Sunday atop the southernmost tip of the Sussex Downs before tracing the undulations of the hills direct to the foot of a pub. It was a struggle to get Mother there at first – she would come up with every excuse under the sun – but after a few months, a few late starts and curtains dragged open at dawn, not only was Mother going of her own free will, and leaving early to boot, she was returning with a silly smile plastered across her face.
Who is he? asked Grandma, to which Mother replied, Who? But Grandma could see through the thickest of fabrics. Oh, all right, said Mother, before spilling all. Derek was an older man, about twenty years her senior, and handsome in an understated way. He had made his money, a small fortune, in property, and since his wife had died and there lingered a question mark over his own mortal thread, he was looking for someone to help spend it – both his time and his money. Enter Mother. But years later, the money had started to dry up, and he hadn’t. That, fundamentally, was the problem.
‘Oh, Mum, I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Karen.
‘Why?’ said Mother. ‘I’m not. Finally free of the old ratbag. God knows that man caused me enough grief. We hadn’t had sex in two years. Two years. Do you have any idea what that does to a woman?’
I wanted to say, Well, yes, actually, I do. But I didn’t.
‘Of course, he’s keeping the villa in Antibes – I shall miss that place – but he’s leaving the rest. Whatever’s left, that is, after the debts are settled. Speaking of which – homes, not debts – how’s the farmhouse, Annie? Taking good care of it?’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘Good. But it’s a family place, deserving of a family.’
‘I’m working on it,’ I said, exasperation having got the better of me.
Mother raised an eyebrow and seemed to take an interest in what someone else had to say for the first time that afternoon.
‘Annie’s met someone,’ said K impulsively. I know she didn’t mean to drop me in it; she wouldn’t wish that inquisition on anyone.
Thanks a lot, I said in a look.
‘Do tell,’ said Mother.
‘Well, it’s very early days …’
‘That’s the best bit,’ said Mother. ‘So who is he?’
I told her he was a surgeon, emphasis on was.
‘What does he do now?’
‘He’s … taking some time for himself.’
‘Taking some time for himself. I see. What a luxury.’
The irony of this, coming from a woman who hadn’t worked in twenty years, seemed lost on her.
‘Come on, then, how did you meet? Tell me everything.’
I neglected to mention our meeting outside the Richmond Centre – that might have caused her to raise the other eyebrow. One eyebrow is intrigue; two eyebrows is a disaster. So I told her about our first date, its genesis, its romance. She had a lot of questions.
‘Who are his parents?’ ‘Where does he live?’ ‘When are you seeing him again?’
The last I couldn’t answer.
‘Oh, Annie darling,’ she said. ‘Your sister’s right: if you feel this way about him, then call. We regret the things in life we don’t do, the ones we didn’t run after. Don’t let another one slip through your fingers, for all our sakes.’
*
The truth of the matter is: I did call Mark later that evening, and I’m glad I did. For too long, I’d been relying on the man to take the lead, but there is no real reason why they should.
I was a bag of nerves as I dialled, but I needn’t have been. He picked up, breathless. I thought I heard another voice in the background, an interloper to our conversation, but he was alone, he insisted, recently up from a nap. He sounded tired.
He’d been meaning to call me, he said, but life had got in the way.
I know the feeling, I sympathised.
He made some silly joke about peacocks, I forget what, and intimated that he was very sorry to have left me that night.
Me too, I said.
Can he see me again? Soon?
I’d like that.
And in checking my pride at the door, there followed a procession of dates, trysts, adventures. With each one, I found myself falling for him, the real Mark. There was an easiness about him, a casualness to his manner, a spontaneity that appealed to the Type-B person locked inside me. Where I was methodical, regimented, order itself, he was unbidden, impulsive, chaos, pure chaos. He was the wild-growing hedge, the hawthorn, the bracken; I was the gardener bearing the clipper. I remember reading somewhere about the importance of order and disorder existing simultaneously, and how we should all embrace both; we should place one foot in order, and one in chaos. Yin and yang. Order is your rock, your anchor on the real world, your bond to structure, to precedent, to the known. Chaos is the thing from which new things grow. Chaos is not always danger – sometimes it is – but chaos is also where possibility lies in all its shimmering uncertainty. Mark was chaos, and it thrilled me.
On our second date, we met on the South Bank. The wind was whipping across the river and driving water into the foreshore. I stood there in front of the Tate Modern, gazing up and out towards the magnificent dome of St Paul’s. A teacher once told me that there are several points in London from which it is illegal to block the view of the cathedral. Standing there, in that moment, I wondered why anyone would ever wish to try. What a gift that building is to us all. Mark was late, but when he did arrive, he did so bearing gifts. Well, a gift – a candle, more specifically. We sat on a bench facing the gathering storm, and we talked, before getting up, walking some more, and talking some more. We ended up walking all the way to Battersea, where we just about made it into the park before the heavens opened. A jazz group continued to play on the bandstand in the centre of the park as the rest of us sought shelter under nearby trees. Mark pulled me to him and he kissed me. Finally, I had my movie moment.
After that, our meetings came thick and fast. We couldn’t get enough of one another. Each day we spent together, the sadness lifted ever more from his eyes. Soon, they were blue again, blistering blue. If this were a movie, a romantic comedy with some suave-yet-diffident lead (Mark) in hot pursuit of a liberated city girl with a small-town heart (me), this would undoubtedly be the part in the movie with the montage, for all good rom-coms must have a montage, and the boy must get the girl. This girl.
We went to London Zoo and the Aquarium, then a crazy-golf place where he let me win and I chided him for it. There was the palm reader he surprised me with in a townhouse in Pimlico; the bar at the top of a multistorey car park in Peckham; the flower market on Columbia Road; and the bao restaurant, where I managed to drink a whole bottle of sake and catch my heel in a drain on the way out. Mark, the all-conquering hero, bent down, clasped my foot between his hands and released me from my trap. I gave Mark a copy of Misery that day. I wanted him to know that I was his number one fan, drain or no drain.
Once, we stopped into the Royal Academy and found a gallery, desolate save for two dozen busts of famous and not-so-famous faces. Pink pads and pencils resting on benches at the perimeter encouraged visitors to sketch the figures, so we took up our pencils and we sketched. When we were finished, we had to guess which bust the other had drawn, or, perhaps more accurately, attempted to draw, as artistic talent did not reside in either of us. I guessed his subject immediately – mostly because I had been watching him as he faced, intently, a specific pocket of air. Mark was unable to guess mine, but then that was inevitable; I had cheated. I had been drawing him.
On our sixth date, he took me to see Annie Hall in a small independent cinema just off Shaftesbury Avenue. The other Annie in my life, he said, as we settled into our seats, the lights burning low and popcorn piled high. I confess that it was my first time seeing the film. Despite meeting the apparent love of her life, and falling in and out of love, Annie remained a fiercely independent spirit – in dress, in speech, in life, in love. I admired that about her; admired her willingness to put herself before all others, her courage to cut her own swath. She was, in every sense, a thoroughly modern woman making her own way in a thoroughly modern world. She didn’t depend on the affection or adoration of men. Men were not necessities; they were playthings, momentary distractions. She loved Alvy, I’m sure she did, but she didn’t need him; she didn’t need anybody. I turned to look at Mark, watched his eyes glisten at the final line, the parting shot, and I wondered then what he wanted from me. Did he want this Annie, or that one?
We went back together for the first time that evening, to his place. We fell into one another as he fumbled for the keys in his pocket. Inside, he pushed me up against the unlit fireplace in the darkness of the sitting room. His hands pinned mine to the wall while his mouth, his warm breath, traced delicate patterns on my neck.
How many others have there been?
‘Let’s go up,’ he said, slipping a hand down the waistband of my jeans.
Is this what I want? Am I the Annie he wants? I bit my lip.
He led me upstairs and pushed me back on the bed. My jeans came off, my top too, and before I knew it his head was buried between my legs, his tongue tracing the curvature of my inner thigh. It had been a while since I’d felt like that, some time since any man had caused me to feel. In that moment, I panicked slightly. I told myself I didn’t deserve to feel that way.
‘Stop,’ I said.
‘What’s wrong?’
I grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up level with me, face to face with all his sculptural perfection. I removed the remainder of his clothes, piece by piece, thinking as I did that his billowy shirts had betrayed the body beneath for far too long. I put my hand around his neck, squeezed a little, not too much, feeling with my clawed fingers his quickening pulse and tightening my grip on the desire that ran through us both.
‘You first,’ I said, before flipping him on to his back, at which those little marbles of his rolled firmly into his head. And there they stayed.
*
I awoke in Mark’s house in the dead of night, my heart racing, with that feeling you get upon coming to in an unfamiliar place. I lay there, staring at the ceiling in the dark, haunted by the prospect of work the next day. Another lecture on another senator that no student was interested in. Sometimes it felt like a futile battle, a thankless task; I was Sisyphus, pushing that boulder up the hill, only for life to kick it back to the bottom again. Tomorrow would be a new climb.
My mouth was dry, so I peeled back the duvet, careful not to rouse the sleeping mass beside me, wrestled on my jeans and felt my way downstairs to the kitchen. Groping my way around the walls, I found a switch, which, once flicked, cast out a blinding ball of light. I ran the tap a little longer to get the really cold stuff, and filled a glass, emptying it just as quickly.
As I went to turn out the light, something caught my eye in the living room. Perched on a sideboard was a photograph of a bride and groom in front of a church, bridesmaids to either side and a page boy kneeling mischievously in the foreground. I drew closer and lifted the frame to the light. At the centre, smiling, happiness itself, was Mark and his wife. I had been right: she was pretty, but in the moment, I didn’t wish to concede that. This was their perfect day, and here it was, the photograph a trophy on the mantelpiece. I’m not sure what I felt then. I want to say jealousy, but anger seems more appropriate. I wanted to know why it was still there – why it was still proudly on display for all to see, for him to look at in times of despair.
Something overtook me then, a wretched impulse that started as a whisper and rose to a chorus. I began pulling out the drawers in the sideboard in a frenzy, in a sleep-starved rage. I don’t know what I was looking for, I don’t know what I was hoping to find. Maybe I was hoping that photograph was all that remained, that he had buried her for good, discarded her along with the eight years of marriage; perhaps I was looking for proof that he had moved on, that he had chosen me, that the photograph was just a blip, a mistake. But instead I found the touchpaper that would light a thousand questions and burn a thousand answers, for there, in the second drawer down, hidden under a patchwork of unfinished knitting, was a diary, her diary. I opened it and began to flick through, and as I did so, a piece of paper, folded several times, drifted slowly to the floor. Lined paper, blue ink.
Writing this is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but the alternative, to not speak my truth, to stay in this paralysis, is harder. I hurt, Mark. I’ve been hurting for some time, and I just can’t keep pretending any more. I want the pain to stop. I still love you, but it is all too much.
The handwriting was shaky, and there was a tear stain at the bottom right – his or hers, I couldn’t be sure. Why has he kept this? I thought.
