Willow and Tom join us soon after, and Mum sips her champagne as she looks around, surveying the dancing and the people and the pinkness of it all.
‘This is very beautiful,’ she announces finally. ‘You could almost reach out and touch the happiness, couldn’t you? What a nice wedding to be invited to.’
Something in the tone of her voice implies she’s not quite sure whose wedding it is, or why she’s been invited, but she also sounds calm and mellow and relaxed, which means that we can be all of those things as well.
I feel Finn’s hand resting on my thigh, and place mine over it. I’m feeling like I could reach out and touch happiness myself, but I settle for his fingers twining into mine. Pretty much the same thing.
Willow is looking at me with her eyes narrowed in suspicion, and I glance around, wondering what’s going on.
‘What are you looking at?’ I ask, possibly a bit belligerently. She is my little sister after all – can’t have her thinking I’ve gone all soft, can I?
‘I’m looking at you,’ she says, pointing one long finger at me accusingly. ‘You look … really, really happy! And you’re not smoking, and not messing with your hair, and not biting your nails, and not fidgeting. What’s going on?’
I feel everyone’s eyes on me and Finn, and realise she’s right. I am still and calm and almost normal.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ I reply, smiling pleasantly to freak her out, ‘I’m just … in a good place right now.’
She snorts and laughs and answers: ‘In a good place? You look like you’re in some kind of nirvana …’
I wink at her, and Finn puts his arm around my shoulder, and Mum chips in: ‘She’s in love, Willow. Can’t you see it?’
Willow blinks a couple of times, and stares at me some more, and nods.
‘As a matter of fact, I can. No wonder she looks weird …’
While I am enjoying confounding Willow and her expectations of me, I’m not especially enjoying being the centre of attention – so I stand up, drag Finn to his feet, and head off to the impromptu dance floor at the front of the garden.
There are a lot of people up and dancing now, all dressed in pink, and I can only imagine how weird it must look. A passing drone taking spy footage would be extremely confused at this heaving mass of colour.
I give Laura a hug of encouragement as she’s shuffling from side to side among the dancers, and tell her she looks gorgeous.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ she says, slightly out of puff, ‘but I’m glad you’re here. You know, just in case my waters break!’
I try to keep the look of horror off my face – that would be unprofessional – and hope she’s kidding. She’s provisionally got a C-section booked nearer her due date, which I know she’s desperate to avoid. She has a thing about hospitals, absolutely hates the places, and I have a sneaking suspicion that she’s hoping to go into labour at home and have some kind of miraculously easy birth where she ends up pain-free and tucked up in bed with twins and a cuppa after an hour of delicate pushing.
She knows, of course, that in the real world, at her age and so long since her last baby, that twins are unlikely to make it so easy for her – but a girl can hope.
‘Never fear,’ I reply, gripping her hand in reassurance, ‘Auburn’s here! We didn’t cover home births on my course, but I’m sure Matt could help out …’
She grins, and does a little spin, and then adds: ‘I think Matt’s already helped out quite enough, thank you. But Cal could. He delivered Becca’s baby when Little Edie arrived in the café. He was brilliant, loads better than a doctor …’
I glance over at Cal, who is wearing a pink cowboy hat to go with his suit. He’s busily leaping up and down with the teenagers, like people do to that ‘Jump Around’ song, and I’m guessing he’s already well on his way to hammered.
‘Yeah, it’d be fine,’ I say to Laura, adding a silent prayer that it doesn’t come to that.
She finally gives up on the dancing, and heads back to the café for a ‘little sit-down’. Matt, of course, follows her immediately – he’s not the kind of man who would stay on a dance floor of his own free will.
Ponk has moved on to ‘What About Us?’ now, and everyone is singing along. Finn is with Sam, both of them doing very passable man-dancing, busting out some impressive spins and in Sam’s case a high kick as well. Surfer dudes, having fun.
I shimmy over to them, and we dance and laugh and smile and the world feels so free and full of potential, I feel like I might burst. Or even worse, start crying again.
I’m here with a man I love, surrounded by friends and family, on a glorious day full of celebration and community. Somehow, no matter what mistakes I’ve made in the past, I’ve fallen on my feet here – and I know exactly how lucky I am. Somewhere out there, there’s an alternative Auburn, in a parallel universe, drinking cheap sherry from a plastic bottle and living in a squat.
When I’m all danced out, I go back to the table and sit down with my mum and Willow. Edie is up and boogying with the best of them, her pink tights flashing as she defies her age and cuts a rug.
Mum seems happy enough, her fingers tapping away on the tabletop, smiling as she watches Katie and Van dancing together, Saul perched on his shoulders. I glance at Willow, and she grins: all is well in Longville world.
‘There’s an Angel of Darkness at the top of the steps,’ says Mum, completely out of the blue. Her voice is calm, and she’s gazing off in the direction of the head of the path.
Willow and I both frown in bafflement – she can be a bit on the random side, and in fact always was, even before the Alzheimer’s – and follow her line of sight.
I have a chicken drumstick halfway to my mouth when I see him. I drop it back down, and gulp in air, and stare so hard my face feels frozen in place.
Willow looks from him to me, concerned and confused, and raises her eyebrows.
I ignore her. I don’t have any breath to spare for talking right now, as I watch him, standing still at the edge of the crowd.
I notice a few other people staring at him as well, which isn’t surprising – he’s the only person here not dressed in pink. In fact he’s dressed all in black, as usual.
I stand up, and take a hesitant step in his direction. I’m kind of hoping he’ll disappear in a shimmer of sunlight, and it will all have been some kind of mirage, but as I walk towards him, he remains distressingly real.
His eyes meet mine as I put one foot determinedly in front of the other, and he smiles. It’s a good smile. He always had a good smile – it got him out of trouble way too many times.
His hair is shorter than I remember, but still flopping over his forehead. He’s bigger as well – he was always rail-thin, in a hard-living chic kind of way, but now he seems to have bulked out a bit. His eyes are exactly the same – a brilliant splash of hazel-green amid smooth olive skin.
After what feels like a three-hour moonwalk, wading through the mud of my own disbelief, I finally reach him.
‘Seb,’ I say, my voice wired and stretched, barely audible over the music and the ringing in my ears. ‘What are you doing here?’
Chapter 11
‘I happened to be passing,’ he says, grinning at me in that oh-so-familiar way. The way that used to make my heart melt into a puddle, and forgive him anything. This time, it just makes my heart melt in anxiety as I glance behind me to see if Finn’s spotted us.
This is not what I expected to be doing today, and I’m fresh out of witty repartee.
‘Come with me,’ I say firmly, striding off down the steps and assuming he’ll follow. I don’t know what he’s doing here, and I don’t know how I’m going to handle it, but I do know one thing: I can’t let him bring his Angel of Darkness drama to Laura’s wedding and spoil the whole day. There’s alcohol up there, and the Seb I knew would make short work of it.
The music fades the further away from the café we get, until, after what feels like an hour of climbing down steps, we reac
h the small car park by the bay. I see Laura’s pink stretch limo there, the driver looking at his phone as he waits to take Laura and Matt on their one-night honeymoon, and I feel a weird collision of worlds.
Today was supposed to be all about the pink pink, and now I’m standing here, with my black-shrouded estranged husband, feeling the sunshine but not feeling it; hearing the sounds of children playing on the beach but not hearing them.
I continue to ignore him, slip off my shoes, and walk out onto the sand. It’s busy down there, dogs and kids and picnics and ice creams, people skimming stones into the waves and hunting for fossils on the cliffsides, and I walk along for a few minutes until I find a quiet spot in the shade.
I whirl around, and find him way too close to me. So close I can see the changes in his face: lines where there were none; laughter creases around his eyes; a hint of something more mature. I realise that when I met him he was only a boy – and at some point between then and now, he’s turned into a man.
A man who I desperately wish wasn’t here.
‘Seb, I’m going to ask you again – why are you here?’
He frowns, and I see him examining me in the same way I did him. It’s been so long. So much has happened, undoubtedly to both of us.
‘You look good, Auburn,’ he says, reaching out to tuck a stray strand of hair behind my ear. It’s too familiar. Too close. Too much like the way we used to be.
I slap his hand away, and take a step back. I need some distance before he casts his spell over me.
‘Yeah, well, I feel good too – or at least I did until five minutes ago. Why, Seb? After all this time?’
I hear a hint of pleading in my voice, and hate myself for it. I hate the fact that he has this power over me – this ability to make me someone I don’t want to be.
‘I think you can probably figure out why,’ he replies, his eyes pinning me down. ‘Years go by, and I hear nothing from you. Then you ask for a divorce. I thought perhaps we should see each other, talk it over, before we take that final step.’
I laugh bitterly, and shake my head.
‘Final step? It’s just a technicality, Seb! Just a piece of paper. Everywhere that matters, we were divorced years ago. I’ve moved on. I’m sure you have, too. There’s … no need for this!’
He sees how upset I am, and looks … concerned. That’s a change of pace for him.Usually, if I got upset around him, he’d react with contempt, or annoyance, calling me a drama queen, frustrated at my humanity getting in the way of his good time. Resentful of anybody taking the attention away from his place at centre stage.
‘There might not have been any need for you, Auburn, but there was for me,’ he says, his tone level and not at all contemptuous. ‘And as for moving on … yes, of course. Both of us have. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about you. That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about you every single day since you left. Can you say honestly that you haven’t? We have unfinished business, and I needed to see you again, querida.’
‘Don’t call me that!’ I snap, feeling some angry tears spike behind my eyes. I haven’t cried angry tears in a long time, and the vast majority of them were reserved for the man standing in front of me.
I’m angry because he’s here. I’m angry because I’m not handling it well. Mainly, I’m angry because he’s right – I have thought about him every single day since I left. Not always in a complimentary fashion, but he’s always been there, at the back of my thoughts, a shadow in the corner of my mind’s eye.
It’s only very recently that I’ve started to evict the ghost of his memory from my mind – and now, just as I get to grips with that, the real bloody thing is standing here in front of me, on a beach in my home town, apparently expecting some kind of reunion.
I take a deep puff of fresh air and channel some of the breathing techniques Lynnie used as a painkiller when we were kids. Wasp sting? Deep breaths in and out. Splinter removal? Deep breaths in and out. Phantom husband back from the dead? Deep breaths in and out.
As ever, it works a bit better than I’d expect, and I manage to rally my thoughts enough to talk.
‘Seb, you’ve got to understand that this is a big shock to me. You’ve planned this, and presumably had the plane journey to think about it and how it might go. I haven’t.’
‘No, I understand that, Auburn. But I didn’t have much time to plan for you leaving me, either. Or for you asking for a divorce after all this time. Both of those things came as a big shock to me, too. Look, I didn’t come here to upset you, or hurt you, or break your life – I honestly didn’t.’
He sounds genuine, and I find myself staring into his eyes, looking for signs that he’s lying – that he’s convincing me again. Persuading me against my better judgement.I see nothing but sincerity, which is somehow even more alarming.
‘Then why did you come, Seb?’ I ask. ‘Because you’re doing all of those things, whether you intended to or not. I don’t understand what you’re hoping to achieve here. Is it some kind of misplaced machismo, refusing to accept that I got away? Are you going to hold me hostage over the divorce, refuse to sign the papers? Because I’m telling you now, that won’t work …’
‘Nothing so dramatic, my love,’ he replies, slipping in yet another term of endearment to entangle me. ‘I’d never do that. I understand why you left, and you did the right thing for both of us. And if, when we’ve had time to talk properly, you still want a divorce, then it’s yours.
‘I came here to do something much simpler, Auburn – I came here to apologise, and to ask for your forgiveness. It’s long overdue, and I’m only sorry I didn’t do it sooner, but … well, we were maybe both working on ourselves, yes?’
Working on ourselves. Right. Well, that’s one way to put it, I suppose. And I definitely have been – and definitely continue to. As for him … he looks better than ever. He looks well fed, and clear-eyed, and clean in all kinds of ways. He looks like a new and improved version of the man who broke my heart.
‘Okay,’ I say, biting my lip in frustration. ‘Apology accepted. You are forgiven. Now will you go away?’
He laughs out loud, and the sound of it whisks me back into a time machine: back to the days when he laughed all the time. When I laughed with him. When we were both so young, so arrogant, so sure of our place in the world.
‘Eventually,’ he says, sounding amused. ‘I promise. But I’m here for two weeks, and all I ask is that you spend some time with me. That’s all.’
That’s all? That’s everything, in my world. I don’t have a lot of spare time, and what I do have, I like to spend with Finn. My boyfriend. The man who told me he loved me today. The man who’s waiting up those steps, in a pink suit, probably wondering where the hell I am. I have no idea how I’m going to explain all of this to him.
‘How did you find me, anyway?’ I ask plaintively.
‘The address was on the divorce letter,’ he says, shrugging. ‘And this is a very small place. I’m staying in a cottage at a place called the Rockery, and when I asked in the village, everyone knew where you’d be. A wedding, yes? A pink wedding?’
I harrumph a little at the thought of him staying at the Rockery. Cherie’s holiday cottages are usually booked up way in advance, but of course Laura’s recently moved out of her cottage, Hyacinth, and into Matt’s, Black Rose – conveniently freeing up space for my hopefully soon-to-be-ex hubby.
‘Yes,’ I reply, gazing back up at the café, perched on the cliffside. ‘A wedding. A good friend’s wedding, where I was enjoying myself with my mother, and my brother and sister, and my boyfriend.’
I stare at him when I say that last word, maybe hoping that he’ll get the hint and announce that he’s leaving. Or act like a jerk about it, and make it easier for me to ask Cherie to kick him out.
Instead, he smiles tenderly and says: ‘I’m glad you’re with your family. I’m glad you’re happy. And if this is the man you’re meant to be with, then I’m even glad you have a boyfriend. I’m not
here to destroy your new life, please believe me.’
I give him a cynical look that tells him very clearly that I have my doubts on that front, and he adds: ‘I know. And I don’t blame you. The way I was, all those years ago … the lies and the games and the damage I caused. I gave you no reason to ever believe me again. But I see that you’ve changed, Auburn, and I accept that. Is it so hard for you to imagine that I have as well?’
He’s being so damn reasonable that I’m getting even more deflated. This whole thing would be easier if he acted like the monster I remember him as so capable of being. But in the same way that he looks the same but different, he’s behaving the same but different – still the flirtatious tone, still the verbal caresses, still the slightly accented but perfect English that used to drive me wild – but combined with a brand-new sense of honesty and openness that I’ve never seen before, and don’t know how to deal with.
Yes, he’s right. He’s definitely changed. But I don’t want it to be any of my business – I want this new and improved version of Seb to be far away, in another land, with another woman, living a life removed from mine.
I hear my phone beeping in my pocket, and know that it will be Finn, or Willow, looking for me and checking that I’m still alive. Or Laura, telling me that her waters have broken over the wedding cake and I need to deliver twins. Even that would be preferable to this.
I shake my head, and decide to take the only sensible course of action.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I say. ‘Back to the wedding. Back to my life. You stay here, do you understand? Do not follow me. Do not bring your whole Angel of Darkness aura into the pink paradise on the top of that hill. I’ll find you later, and we’ll talk, and then hopefully you can get on the next flight to Barcelona tomorrow. Understood?’
A Wedding at the Comfort Food Cafe Page 9