One Day (33 page)

‘Long drive tomorrow,’ she mumbles. ‘Let’s go to sleep.’

He continues to look at the back of her head, where the long fine hair falls away from the nape of her neck, revealing the darker whorls beneath. You could take a photograph of that, he thinks, it is so beautiful. Call it ‘Texture’. He wonders if he still might tell her that he loves her or, more tentatively, that he ‘thinks he might be in love with her’, which is both more touching and easier to back out of. But clearly this is not the time, not now with the plug of bloody tissue still on her bedside table.

He feels he ought to say something though. Inspired, he kisses her shoulder, and whispers. ‘Well you know what they say—’ He pauses for effect. ‘You always hurt the one you love!’

This is pretty clever, pretty adorable he thinks, and there’s a
silence while he waits, eyebrows raised expectantly, for the implication to sink in.

‘Let’s get some sleep, shall we?’ she says.

Defeated, he lies back and listens to the gentle hum of the A259. Somewhere in the house right now her parents are tearing him to pieces and he realises, appallingly, that he has a sudden desire to laugh. He starts to giggle, then laugh outright, struggling to maintain the silence as his body starts to shake, making the mattress shudder.

‘Are you
laughing?’
murmurs Sylvie into her pillow.

‘No!’ says Dexter, screwing his face tight to keep it in, but the laughter’s coming in waves now and he feels another surge of hysterics starting to build in his stomach. There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote, and he can see the potential for a story here. It’s the kind of story that he would like to tell Emma Morley. But he doesn’t know where Emma Morley is, or what she’s doing, hasn’t seen her for more than two years now.

He’ll just have to remember the story. Tell her some other day.

He starts to laugh again.

Somerset

They have started to arrive. An endless cascade of luxuriously quilted envelopes, thumping onto the doormat. The wedding invitations.

This wasn’t the first wave of weddings. Some of their contemporaries had even got married at University, but in that self-consciously wacky, rag-week way, a let’s-pretend parody of a wedding, like the jokey student ‘dinner parties’ where everyone wore evening dress to eat tuna pasta bake. Student wedding receptions were picnics in the local park, the guests in Oxfam suits and secondhand ballgowns, then onto the pub. In the wedding photos the bride and groom might be seen raising pint glasses to the camera, a fag dangling from the bride’s rouged mouth, and wedding gifts were modest: a really cool compilation tape; a clip-framed photo-montage; a box of candles. Getting married at University was an amusing stunt, an act of benign rebellion, like a tiny tattoo that no-one ever sees or shaving your head for charity.

The second wave, the mid-twenties weddings, still retained a little of that tongue-in-cheek, home-made quality. The receptions took place in community centres and parents’ gardens, vows were self-composed and rigorously secular, and someone always seemed to read that poem about the rain having such small hands. But a cold, hard edge of professionalism had started to creep in. The idea of the ‘wedding list’ had begun to rear its head.

At some point in the future a fourth wave is expected – the Second Marriages: bittersweet, faintly apologetic affairs that are over by 9.30 on account of all the kids. ‘It’s not a big deal,’ they will say, ‘just an excuse for a party.’ But for the moment this year is the year of the third wave, and it is the third wave that is proving the most powerful, the most spectacular, the most devastating. These are the weddings of people in their early-to-mid-thirties, and no-one is laughing anymore.

The third wave is unstoppable. Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.

In the motorway services Emma sat in her new car, her very first car, a fourth-hand Fiat Panda, and stared at the invite, knowing with absolute certainty that there would be men with cigars and someone English in a kilt.

‘Emma Morley and partner.’

Her road atlas was an ancient edition, with several major conurbations missing. She turned it through one hundred and eighty degrees, then back ninety, but it was like trying to navigate with a copy of the Domesday Book and she slapped it onto the empty passenger seat where her imaginary partner should have been sitting.

Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers. Frequent rest stops were required to stabilise her blood pressure and dab the perspiration from her top lip, and she reached for her handbag and checked her make-up in the mirror, trying to sneak up on herself to gauge the effect. The lipstick was redder and more sultry than she felt she could carry off, and the small amount of powder she had applied to her cheeks now looked garish and absurd, like something from a Restoration comedy. Why, she wondered, do I always look like a kid trying on her mother’s make-up? She had also made the elementary mistake of getting her hair cut, no,
styled
, just the day before, and it was still falling into an artful arrangement of layers and flicks; what her mum would have called a ‘do’.

In frustration she tugged hard at the hem of her dress, a Chinese-style affair of rich blue silk, or some silk substitute, which made her look like the plump unhappy waitress in the Golden Dragon Take-away. Sitting down it bulged and stretched, and the combination of something in the ‘silk’ and motorway jitters was making her perspire. The car’s air-conditioning had two settings, wind-tunnel and sauna, and all elegance had evaporated somewhere outside Maidenhead, to be replaced by two dark crescents of
sweat beneath her arms. She raised her elbows to her head, and peered down at the patches and wondered if she should turn around, go home and change? Or just turn around. Go home, stay home, do some work on the book. After all, it’s not as if she and Tilly Killick were still the best of pals. The dark days when Tilly had been her landlady in the tiny flat in Clapton had cast a long shadow, and they’d never quite settled the dispute over the non-return of the returnable deposit. It was hard to wish the newly-weds well when the bride still owed you five hundred quid.

On the other hand, old friends would be there. Sarah C, Carol, Sita, the Watson twins, Bob, Mari with the Big Hair, Stephanie Shaw from her publishers, Callum O’Neill the sandwich millionaire. Dexter would be there. Dexter and his girlfriend.

And it was at this exact moment, as she sat pointing her armpits at the air-conditioning vents and wondering what to do, that Dexter drove by unseen in his Mazda sports car, Sylvie Cope by his side.

‘So who’ll be there?’ asked Sylvie, turning down the stereo. Travis – her choice for a change. Sylvie didn’t much care for music, but made an exception for Travis.

‘Just a whole lot of people from University. Paul and Sam and Steve O’D, Peter and Sarah, the Watsons. And Callum.’

‘Callum. Good, I like Callum.’

‘… Mari with the Big Hair, Bob. God, people I haven’t seen for years. My old friend Emma.’

‘Another ex?’

‘No, not an ex …’

‘A fling.’

‘Not a fling, just an old, old friend.’

‘English teacher?’

‘Used to be an English teacher, writer now. You talked to her at Bob and Mari’s wedding, remember? In Cheshire.’

‘Vaguely. Quite attractive.’

‘I suppose so.’ Dexter shrugged hard. ‘We fell out for a while. I told you about it. Remember?’

‘They all melt into one.’ She turned to the window. ‘So did you have a thing with her?’

‘No I did
not
have a thing with her.’

‘What about the bride?’

‘Tilly? What about her?’

‘Did you ever have sex with the bride?’

December 1992, that horrible flat in Clapton that always smelt of fried onions. A foot massage that had spun wildly out of control while Emma was at Woolworths.

‘Of course not. What do you think I am?’

‘It seems like every week we go to some wedding with a coach-load of people you’ve slept with—’

‘That’s not true.’

‘—a marquee-f. Like a conference.’

‘Not true, not true—’

‘It is true.’

‘Hey, you’re the only one for me now.’ With one hand on the steering wheel, he reached across and placed the other on Sylvie’s stomach, still flat beneath the peach shot-satin of her short dress, then rested it on the top of her bare thigh.

‘Don’t leave me talking to strangers, will you?’ said Sylvie, and turned up the stereo.

It was mid-afternoon before Emma found herself, late and exhausted, at the security gates of the stately home, wondering if they would let her in. A vast estate in Somerset, shrewd investors had turned Morton Manor Park into a sort of all-in-one marriage compound, complete with its own chapel, banqueting hall, a privet maze, a spa, a selection of guest bedrooms with walk-through showers, all surrounded by a high wall topped with razor wire: a wedding camp. With follies and grottoes, ha-has and gazebos, a castle
and
a bouncy castle it was an upmarket marital Disneyland, available for whole weekends at breathtaking expense. It seemed an unusual venue for the wedding of a former member of the Socialist Workers’ Party,
and Emma drove along the sweeping gravel drive, bemused and disconcerted by it all.

In sight of the chapel, a man dressed in the powdered wig and frock coat of a footman lunged in front of her, waving her down with frilly cuffs and leaning in at the window.

‘Is there a problem?’ she asked. She wanted to say ‘officer’.

‘I need the keys, ma’am.’

‘The keys?’

‘To park the car.’

‘Oh God, really?’ she said, embarrassed by the moss growing round the window seals, the mulch of disintegrated A to Zs and empty plastic bottles that littered the floor. ‘Okay, well, the doors don’t lock, you’ve got to use this screwdriver to hold it closed and there’s no hand brake, so park it on the level or edged up against a tree or just leave it in gear, alright?’ The footman took the keys between his finger and thumb as if he’d been handed a dead mouse.

She had been driving barefoot and now found that she had to stamp her swollen feet into her shoes, like an ugly stepsister. The ceremony had already started. From the chapel she could hear ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ played by four, possibly five, gloved hands. She hobbled across the gravel towards the chapel, her arms raised to evaporate some of the perspiration, like a child pretending to be a plane, then with one last tug on the hem of her dress she slid discreetly through the large oak door and stood at the back of the packed congregation. An a capella group was performing now, clicking their fingers maniacally, singing ‘I’m into Something Good’ as the happy couple grinned toothily at each other, wet-eyed. This was Emma’s first sighting of the groom: a rugby player type, handsome in pale grey morning suit and razor burn, he moved his big face at Tilly, working though different variations on ‘my happiest moment’. Unusually, Emma noted, the bride had opted for a Marie-Antoinette theme – pink silk and lace, a hooped skirt, hair piled high, a beauty spot – causing Emma to wonder if Tilly’s degree in History and French had perhaps fallen short
of its mark. She looked very happy though, and he looked very happy, and the whole congregation looked very, very happy.

Song followed sketch followed song until the wedding began to resemble a Royal Variety Performance, and Dexter found his mind beginning to drift. Tilly’s ruddy-cheeked niece was reading a sonnet now, something about the marriage of two minds not admitting impediment, whatever the hell
that
meant. He tried hard to concentrate on the poem’s line of argument and to apply its romantic sentiment to his own feelings for Sylvie, then turned his attention back to how many of the congregation he had slept with. Not in a gloating way, not entirely, but with a sort of nostalgia. ‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks …’ read the bride’s niece, as Dexter made it five. Five ex-lovers in one small chapel. Was this some kind of record? Should there be extra points for the bride? No sign of Emma Morley yet. With Emma, five-and-a-half.

From the back of the church Emma watched Dexter counting off on his fingers, and wondered what he was doing. He wore a black suit with a skinny black tie; like all the boys these days, trying to look like a gangster. In profile, there was the beginning of a slight sagging under his jaw, but he still looked handsome. Stupidly handsome actually, and far less pasty and bloated than before he had met Sylvie. Since their falling out Emma had seen him three times, always at weddings. Each time he had thrown his arms around her and kissed her as if nothing had changed, and said ‘we must talk, we must talk’, but it had never happened, not really. He had always been with Sylvie, the pair of them busy looking beautiful. There she was now, a proprietary hand on his knee, her head and neck like some long-stemmed flower, craning to take it all in.