William Walkers First Year of Marriage
First Year of
Marriage
To Harriet
‘Marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle,
and not a bed of roses.’R
OBERT
L
OUIS
S
TEVENSON
,
Virginibus Puerisque
(1881)
I never had a threesome.
I never had an orgy.
I never slept with anyone from Sweden. Or Norway.
I never slept with a Scandinavian full stop.
I never slept with anyone with tattoos or pink hair or non-facial piercings or a career in pornography.
I never slept with Mrs Robinson.
I never slept with any married woman, and no, last night doesn’t count because she was married to me.
Yesterday, I married Isabel, the girl of my dreams. Fantastic. I am married. Superb. I am a husband. Brilliant. I’ll never sleep with another woman again so long as we both shall live.
‘Hello, husband. I think I’m going to be sick.’ These were the first words she said when she woke. Isabel. My beautiful wife.
‘Morning, Mrs Walker.’
Despite the hangover, she starts trampolining around the four-poster, singing ‘I’ve go-ot married yes-t’day morning’ to the tune of ‘I’m getting married in the morning’, which doesn’t fit. She sings like someone being stabbed in a shower: all commitment, no tonal control. This is not because she’s singing and fighting back the urge to vomit. This is how she normally sings. It is one of her many endearing qualities.
‘Mrs Walker. I like that. So much better than Miss Brackett.’
‘This is why you married me? For my surname?’
‘Yes, that’s it. Couldn’t go another year as a Brackett.’
‘Well, now you’re a Walker. Any second thoughts?’
‘Yes. I wish I hadn’t drunk so much.’
‘No, about being, well, married.’
Until this morning, I’ve never had any second thoughts—well, not officially. Not so as to cause alarm. But from the moment I asked the woman I love to marry me, I’ve been expecting her to look dazed for a minute or two, blink a few times as if risen suddenly from a twelve-month coma, then look at me, look at the engagement ring and start screaming, ‘Marry you?! Are you mad?’ She could, I’m sure, even if I’m being objective, have had the pick of the field. A girl who looks even more beautiful in jeans and T-shirt than make-up and cocktail dress, an effortlessly glamorous head-turner, the sort of girl, honestly, you’d be quite chuffed to go on a date with. And I’ve got her to agree to spend the rest of her life with me. It’s ridiculous.
‘No, darling. No second thoughts. Even if you did knock the vicar out on my wedding day.’
If you ask Johnson, the world’s most pessimistic usher, he’ll tell you the wedding was a disaster. This is because he sees a friend getting married in the same way everyone else might see a friend being sent to prison. For life. He hasn’t enjoyed his decade of matrimonial bliss.
If you ask me, the wedding had gone pretty well. Compared to what I’d imagined. It had taken several Bishop’s Nipples the night before to convince the vicar I was not the infidel even though I only went to church once a year. After that, he’d been an absolute angel, until he’d fallen down the steps of his own church and come a cropper on the pew. I and a large part of the congregation had thought for several seconds that he had actually killed himself, but a glass of holy water brought him back from the brink. When he regained consciousness, he claimed I pushed him. I don’t think I did…I may have brushed past him as I helped Isabel and her dress turn, ready for the you-may-kiss-the-bride-and-get-out-of-here bit. Nothing he could do by then: we were already married.
And, despite Johnson’s grave warnings beforehand and rolling eyes during, everything else went okay.
My tailored suit (posted from Hong Kong because do you know how much tailored tails cost in London?) had, miraculously, fitted. The Corsa (89,452 miles) had started. And Isabel, despite her ‘best friend’ Alex and his ridiculous equine chauffeur service, had got to the church on time.
I had been forbidden to look her in the eye ‘emotionally’ or ‘with significance’ at any stage during the service for fear of opening her floodgates. ‘I don’t want to do an Alison,’ she had explained quite reasonably. Who could forget Alison’s wedding? It had taken hours, maybe days, for her to sob, squeak and warble her
way through the vows. By the time she reached ‘till…sob…death…sob, sob, sob…do us…sniff…part’, we all thought she was going to illustrate her point by collapsing on the spot. RIP Alison who died at her wedding from dehydration.
Despite the threats, I had felt an overwhelming urge to burst into tears myself from the moment Isabel rounded the corner and began the walk. Quite hard not to, what with all your friends and family going ‘ooohh’ and ‘ahhh’, and seeing the dress for the first time. An amazing Sixties number, not at all like the explosion in a meringue factory you get normally. Then there’s the mysterious veil and the accompanying trumpet voluntary and your mum already blubbing away in her purple hat. Is this really not too much for any man to cope with? Did whoever invented weddings not add all this extra stuff to make it absolutely inevitable that the poor sap waiting up at the altar would weep deep tears of joy/run a thousand miles/pass out on the spot?
Isabel did what she always does when she’s trying not to cry: she laughed, hysterically. She walked the entire length of the church laughing and blinking back tears, her dress and variable bridesmaids flowing behind her. Only in the last few feet did her eyes meet mine. She smiled; I smiled back with as little significance as I could muster—a sort of thin-lipped, cold-eyed, non-bothered smirk, the kind you’d throw a kid on a bike when he calls you a fecker. She burst into tears anyway.
Still, I passed the four tests…
- The vows. Don’t shout them, don’t whimper them, don’t faint during them. Easy.
- The speech. Thank everyone—but mainly in-laws, look happy, declare love for new wife and make bridesmaids cry. Had to follow Isabel’s father, who did ten minutes on the traumas of her breech birth and made two members of the audience physically sick. Did fine, though, compared to Andy. I’d chosen him as best man over Johnson because he worked in the diplomatic corps and I’d remembered those Ferrero Rocher ads. As Isabel pointed out, he wasn’t actually an ambassador but doesn’t everyone in the diplomatic corps have tact? No, nerves destroyed his judgement and he never recovered from his choice of opener (‘What’s the difference between a bridegroom and a cucumber?’). His attempt to regain momentum involved raising all three topics he’d specifically been told not to (my scatological university tragedy, the vastly differing weights of the bridesmaids and my Hyde Park Corner fling with a floozy). It wasn’t pretty.
- The dance. Two lessons hadn’t been enough to master the foxtrot. Isabel’s toe crushed in the first verse of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and an elephantine triple-trampling in the second. I considered stopping in the third to summon a paramedic or podiatric specialist but she blinked away the tears, squeezed my shoulder very, very hard and whispered, ‘Keep going.’ I did, we finished with a twirl, great aunties sighed, friends said how beautiful we looked and I decided to take that at face value.
- The consummation. Bridesmaids always ask the bride if you did or you didn’t. If you didn’t, they tell their boyfriends and husbands. Who tell all their friends. Who all snigger. So, despite fatigue and room spin and a frankly terrifying corset, we did.
Now it’s Sunday and we can relax for the first time in six months.
Lunch was fun. No ribbons or corsages or speeches or Windsor knots or place mats or chauffeurs or confetti or wish-they-hadn’t-come extended family. Just thirty of us at a pizza restaurant in Highgate going over the post-nuptial-mortem.
One Boris Becker. Andy and a waitress—in a cloakroom, though, not a cupboard. He loves her. She loves him. He’s moving to Sydney when her work visa runs out next Thursday. Already started Googling for flats on Manly Beach this morning. It won’t happen.
One hospital admission. Not the vicar. He made a miraculous recovery. It was Johnson, emboldened by ‘It’s Raining Men’, who needed medical attention after he stage-dived into an adoring crowd. There was no adoring crowd. There wasn’t even a crowd. Witnesses say he scored a perfect belly flop, and in so doing broke his nose and his fifth metatarsal, and severely bruised his right testicle. Why not his left? Because it doesn’t hang as low as the right one. I wished I hadn’t asked.
One run-in with the law. My father showing love-sick Andy how to down a bottle of red wine, on the way back to the hotel at 2 a.m. ‘Evening, gentlemen, everything all right?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘On our way home are we, gentlemen?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘A long way, is it?’ ‘Just over there, officer.’ ‘Best be on our way then, hadn’t we, gentlemen?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘Will you be taking the bollard with you?’ ‘No, sir.’
One storming out. Surprise, surprise, Watzerface who is the girlfriend of Alex who is the best friend of my wife who clearly isn’t always a good judge of character.
Official reason from Alex, while sadly not choking on his goat’s-cheese pizza (amazing, he can even manage to find a pretentious flavour of pizza): ‘She wanted marriage, but it felt too soon. You can’t rush such an important decision, can you? Marriage should be for life, not a month or two. I’m so upset that she couldn’t give me more time.’ Misty-eyed nods from bridal group, eye-rolling from me, Andy and Johnson. He’s confusing marriage with rescue dogs, and the girls lap it up.
Real reason: she’d had to find her own way to the church and reception because Alex, after much begging, had been given the job of chauffeuring. He’d been told ‘nothing flash’ then turned up with a white coach and six horses, none of which he could properly control. He had worn tailored tails and a waistcoat strikingly similar to mine except not from Hong Kong. He’d spent the whole service muttering gloomy imprecations, especially during the vows, which meant the vicar, sensing possibilities, had repeated the ‘Can anyone see any lawful impediment?’ question…twice.
Even before our first dance had finished, he’d tapped me on the shoulder, then refused to give Isabel to anyone else for the next three dances. And, once prised away, he’d marched up onto the stage, handed out sheet music to the band, declared how much he loved his best-friend-in-all-the-world Isabel, spat out how delighted he was she’d found the perfect man, then sang Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’. If I hadn’t been so busy vomiting, I would have stormed out too.
Home late to the flat. More lugging over the threshold on Isabel’s insistence, accompanied by what I took to be slightly sarcastic clapping from one of the idiots from the upstairs flat. India tomorrow. Tired, so tired.
‘Someone’s stolen my passport!’ I was completely sure of it.
‘No, they haven’t.’ But Isabel wasn’t.
‘Yes, they have.’
‘No, they haven’t.’
‘Yes, they have.’
‘No, they haven’t.’
It doesn’t take long for the matrimonial harmony to wear off, does it?
‘Yes, they have, I had it on the Tube and that bloke opposite looked shifty.’
‘So you were pickpocketed?’
‘Yes, he must have followed us.’
‘Thought you said you were like a coiled spring when you were travelling, a coiled anti-pickpocket spring.’
‘Yes, well…’
‘That if anyone tried it on with you, there’d be a blur, a flash and a whimper.’
‘I—’
‘That they’d be picking up their teeth with broken fingers.’
‘Shut up and help me look in these bags!’
‘Don’t snap at your wife.’
‘Yes, well, my wife is being incredibly unhelpful, the flight’s about to leave and someone’s run off with my passport.’
‘Is it at home?’
‘What?’
‘Have you left your passport at home?’
‘Of course I haven’t.’
‘You always leave something at home.’
‘Don’t.’ ‘Do.’ ‘Don’t!’ ‘Do.’ ‘Don’t!’
‘What about Paris?’
‘That wasn’t a passport. That was the tickets.’
‘Stop frowning. You always frown.’
‘Hardly a surprise with you nagging all the time.’
‘You’ll get wrinkles if you scrunch your face like that. You were doing that right through the whole wedding.’
‘I was nervous.’
‘You looked like you were about to be tortured.’
‘You told me not to look at you affectionately because you’d start blubbing.’
‘Yes, but not for the whole day.’
‘Well, I was nervous. It’s much easier for a bride.’
‘What?’
‘It’s easier. All you have to do is smile, look nice and walk up and down an aisle. I have four tests. I have to do the vows, I have to do a speech, I have to lead a dance, I have to have sex.’
‘Have sex? That’s difficult, is it?’
‘It is when all your bridesmaids are placing bets on it.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘You don’t be stupid.’
‘You don’t be stupid.’
‘You don’t be stupid.’
‘You don’t be stupid.’
‘You don’t be stupid.’
‘Last call for flight BA One-seven-eight to Delhi.’
‘You don’t be stupid.’
The passport was on the mantelpiece.
Still, another night at home recovering from the wedding was a blessing in disguise. At least, that’s what I suggested to Isabel, who didn’t seem to see it that way. Will make it up to her in India…
‘Darling, I’m sorry. I am an idiot. I will make it up to you in India.’
‘It’s okay, darling, I love that you forget things.’
‘I love that you love that I forget things.’
Ahhhh.
There was never really any question about it. Until Isabel, I had always assumed I would simply marry the girl I happened to be going out with when it was time to get married, i.e. thirty-two. That’s how it worked for Johnson and every other bloke I knew. You spend your twenties trying to extricate yourself from any relationship that looks like it’s getting too heavy (anything more than two years is dangerous), the first two years of your thirties bracing yourself, then the rest of your life as monogamous as possible.