by Marie Joseph
Fifteen
SHARON WAS TEN minutes late for the wedding. The guests fidgeted in their seats, and in the front pew Ricky’s neck turned a bright pink.
Emma, with Alan on one side and Joe on the other, tried to imagine what was going on in Litchfield Avenue, and closed her eyes in silent prayer.
If Sharon took over an hour to get ready to go disco dancing, what would getting ready for her own wedding involve? Emma glanced to the right and saw Ricky’s parents staring straight ahead, Mr Rostron fingering the flower in his buttonhole and Mrs Rostron pulling at the brim of her hat as if she wasn’t quite sure whether it was at the right angle.
Ricky turned round to shoot a brief worried glance towards the church door, and Emma though how unfamiliar he looked without his crash helmet. He caught her eye and winked.
Mrs Collins was riding to church with the bride and her father and the two bridesmaids from Woolworth’s, and when at last her top-heavy figure, resplendent in apricot tweed, pushed its way into the pew to sit beside Joe, Emma relaxed.
‘The young bugger! She’s had that head-dress on and off at least fifty times, and even now she’s not satisfied.’ Mrs Collins bent her head to hiss the words as if in reverent silent prayer. ‘An’ it doesn’t look no different now from the first time!’ She raised her head. ‘An’ your father wanted to wear his brown knitted waistcoat underneath his jacket! An’ if that’s chewing gum in your mouth, young Joe, take it out an’ no sticking it on the pew neither!’
Immediately Joe took the wodge of gum from his mouth and disposed of it Emma knew not where, for the organist went into a spirited version of ‘Here Comes the Bride’, and the congregation rose in relief to its feet.
Emma’s mouth turned upwards into a smile. It was Mam all over again. Brash and domineering. For the very first time she felt a warmth of affection for Mrs Collins. They would be okay. Alan might go his own way, but Joe and her father had got Mam back, and from now on their lives would run in grumbling acceptance of guidance from a stronger personality. It was true. God did move in a mysterious way. She turned and saw Sharon walking slowly up the aisle on her father’s arm and, ashamed of her lack of control, felt the warm tears flood her eyes.
It was all over. The ceremony, the endless photographs outside the church, the cars wending their way to the Roundhouse out on the Preston side, and the seating of the guests at the long tables set out in the big room that would be used for dancing later on.
Emma sat at the end of a table nearest to the top table, where she had a clear view of Sharon, radiant and smiling, her perfectly made-up little face aglow with happiness beneath the white veil. The virginal bride, ethereal and lovely, glorying in every moment of what was, for her, a day she would remember for the rest of her life.
Simon had been wrong. It was worth it; worth every penny lavished on the expensive meal and the constantly flowing wine. And tomorrow the happy couple would be flying off to Majorca for ten days, where Sharon would spend her time determinedly getting brown to show off her tan when she went back to work in her blue and white overall.
Emma heard the table behind explode into sudden laughter and, turning, saw Ben Bamford, with his head thrown back and the light catching the thick fair hair as his blue eyes crinkled with merriment. She turned back quickly and picked up her glass, surprised to find that her hand was not quite steady.
‘Did you not know I was coming?’ He came to her as the meal finished, before the cake was cut and the short awkward speeches made. ‘I couldn’t get off to go to the church, but Ricky’s a mate of a mate of mine, didn’t you know?’ He grinned. ‘What are you doing on your own then? Is this not quite big boss man’s scene or something?’
‘Simon is in London.’ Emma felt her cheeks grow pink. ‘He had a meeting he couldn’t put off. It had to be Saturday so the shareholders could be there. He wanted to come,’ she lied.
‘Oh, aye?’ Ben scuttled back to his place as John Sparrow got nervously to his feet amid loud bangings on the top table for silence. Emma’s stomach muscles tightened with worry for him as he started to read his speech from a slip of paper. Then, nudged fiercely by Mrs Collins, he removed the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, coughed and began again.
Then the best man read the telegrams, three in all and two of them extremely rude. Sharon, with Ricky’s hand over her own, cut the bottom tier of the cake, and the rest was whisked away to be cut into slices by the kitchen staff. And later, much later, after the long tables had been split up and placed round the walls to leave a floor-space free for dancing, a tall boy with a thatch of bright red hair moved in with his equipment, setting up the lights and testing the microphones for sound.
More guests arrived, among them a crowd of Sharon’s friends from Woolworth’s, like vividly coloured birds in their tight trousers and overshirts. They carried their drinks over to a corner table and sat giggling and twittering, waiting for the fun to begin.
‘I thought you might have gone home to get changed. Somebody would have run you.’ Sharon’s eyes flicked up and down Emma’s jacket and skirt. ‘Ricky’s mum and dad have gone back for a breather.’ She was ablaze with excitement. ‘I’m stopping as I am. I might as well get my money’s worth out of this dress, I can’t see me wearing it again.’ She put up a hand to her veil and head-dress. ‘I hope me hair isn’t flattened when I take this off. It was murder getting it fixed on right.’
‘So Mrs Collins told me.’ Emma wrinkled her nose. ‘I bet you didn’t get much change out of her.’
‘She’s a shit,’ said Sharon from within the clouds of white tulle, then she turned to smile radiantly and sweetly at one of Ricky’s relations. ‘Are you having a good time, Auntie?’ She shouted the words, then in her normal voice told Emma that the elderly woman was as deaf as a post. ‘She’s come all the way from Bradford,’ she explained, before rushing away to greet more incoming guests. ‘Talk to her for a bit, our Emma.’
Emma could see Ben at the bar. He had a small crowd gathered round him and from the shouts of joy she concluded that he was half-way drunk already. She left the deaf auntie and moved to sit alone at one of the tables, pretending to watch the children sliding up and down on the polished floor, small girls in party dresses, and boys in unaccustomed suits. When the music blared out Emma shrank back in her chair as if she had been dealt a blow right between her eyes.
She was a newly-married woman, and yet she had come alone. She was pregnant, she had eaten too much, her head was aching, her skirt was too tight and she wanted to go home.
She was twenty years old, she reminded herself, and because Simon wasn’t there she wanted to go home. She was as old in her thinking as the older relatives gathered together in the far corner of the room. Yet she felt as she had the night Ben had taken her disco dancing. As if she wanted to move out there into the middle of the floor and shake her hair and forget herself in the pounding rhythm of the music.
But that was long ago. She started as Mrs Collins’s harsh voice broke into her thoughts.
‘Come and sit with us, love. There’s no cause for you to be sitting here on your own. Your dad sent me. Just look at him, three sheets in the wind already and the night hardly begun.’ She lowered her voice from a shout to a bellow. ‘He’s a bit disorientated. What with spending all that time shut away then coming to this.’
Four bitter lemons and four hours later Emma wondered if she could slip away and ‘phone for a taxi. The loud music was spreading in a pain up the back of her neck, and when a plate of fancy cakes and a pot of tea were put on the table she closed her eyes in horror.
‘You okay, kid?’
Ben was there, bending over her, blue eyes concerned in his flushed face. ‘You look like you’re ready to go over.’ He leaned forward to stub out his cigarette on the ashtray. ‘Would you like me to take you home?’
‘Oh, Ben, would you?’ Emma nodded. ‘But it doesn’t seem fair. They’ll be here till long past midnight. I can’t let you do that.’
; ‘I can come back.’ He laughed. ‘There’s a nice little bird over there I’m doing all right with. Just let me go and explain and we’ll go. Okay?’
He was still the same Ben. Kind and generous in spite of everything. Emma thanked him, said her goodbyes to Ricky’s parents and kissed her father on his cheek.
‘Tell Sharon I’ve gone,’ she whispered, and the last thing she saw as she walked from the room was the flash of her stepsister’s white dress as she gyrated opposite her new husband in the middle of the floor with a spotlight picking out the corn-gold of her shining hair.
‘Sure you are fit to drive?’ She felt just a momentary anxiety as Ben slid behind the wheel.
‘You have to be joking, Em.’ Ben threw his cigarette away through the open window before winding it up. ‘I’ve only had a couple of lemonades.’
‘Ben Bamford!’ Emma joined in his laughter, and it was like the old times, with Ben stepping on the accelerator and the shabby car eating up the road as if they were on the last lap of the Monte Carlo rally.
‘How is Patty?’ Emma closed her eyes as they swept round a corner. ‘And little Tracy? Is she okay?’
‘Patty’s all right, but Tracy’s got a chesty cold. Her sort do get them a lot, I believe.’ Ben, to the sound of a blaring horn, overtook a huge container lorry. ‘And up yours!’ he shouted as the car gathered even more speed.
They were over a bridge and at the lights when it happened. Without waiting for the green, Ben shot forward just as a car coming towards them swung right, going too fast, smashing into them with a grinding metallic sound that Emma was to remember for ever.
Alone in his parents’ big house Simon put the telephone down and glanced at his watch. Almost half-past eleven. He pushed the pile of papers to one side and rubbed his eyes.
It would have been good to talk to Emma, to hear her light voice telling him about the wedding. She had the gift of being able to be funny without being vindictive. And he needed to laugh. God knew how much he needed to laugh after that meeting. At one point he had thought they were going to turn on him like a pack of wolves, and the unspoken implication that if his father had been in the chair things might have been different was as plain as the noses on their respective faces.
And now his father was on a cruise ship, probably half-way round the world, leaving his son to redress the wrongs, to reorganize, prune and try to steer the firm into calmer waters.
He dialled again. He remembered Emma telling him that the disco would go on maybe until the early hours of Sunday morning, but surely no one could stretch a wedding out to last that long? The very idea was mind-boggling; it was almost like a Roman orgy where guests feasted and drank for three days at a time. He drummed with his fingers on the table as he heard the ringing tone going on and on.
Well, at least she must be enjoying herself, whatever she was doing…. Simon walked over to Bernard Martin’s drinks cupboard and poured himself a drink. He was restless without knowing why. He should have been exhausted, but he was too tired for sleep, too high from the aftermath of the long drawn-out meeting to relax. His parents’ taste in music was not his. Simon lifted out one or two LPs and smiled to himself. Vera Lynn, Songs from the Shows, Jim Reeves, Mantovani. Putting them back he glanced at the telephone. His friends were Chloe’s friends, married couples in the main, and anyway it was much too late to ring them. More likely than not it would be a baby-sitter who answered the phone, or an au pair.
Restless beyond comprehension he dialled Emma’s number again, then slammed the receiver down with a gesture of frustration. What was she doing out at this time? He hoped she’d have the sense to call a taxi because from what he’d been told, a northern wedding reception did not stint itself as far as the booze went.
A cold shiver ran down his back. What the hell was the matter with him?
Suddenly, almost without volition, he rang Chloe’s number, and was both surprised and pleased when she answered.
‘Simon! Where are you? Lordy, you were the last person on earth I expected to hear.’
‘I’m a bit surprised too. What are you doing, may I ask?’
‘Baby-sitting. I’d nothing on this evening and they’ve gone out to dinner to some friends Stanmore way. Where are you? Is anything wrong?’
‘Has something to be wrong before I call you?’
Chloe chuckled. ‘Well, no, honey, but you sounded mightily relieved to hear my voice. Emma left you already?’
‘She’s gone to her stepsister’s wedding, and I’m down here. My parents have gone on a cruise, and I had to come down for a meeting today. A tricky one. I thought they were going to lynch me at one point.’
‘Poor Simon.’ He could see her, long legs curled up beneath her, cradling the receiver and making faces at him. ‘Why haven’t you driven back then?’
‘Because there’s another meeting first thing Monday, to report on today’s. I would hardly have got back before it was time to come down again.’
There was a small silence. ‘But you could have gotten back this evening.’
He frowned. ‘I suppose so. What is this? An inquisition?’
‘So Emma has gone to the wedding alone, and you are sitting there alone? You haven’t changed, honey. Have you?’
‘You think I should have gone straight back? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
It had been a bad day for Chloe. First the flat she had thought was all lined up had been taken off the market, then the trouser suit she had bought had looked an entirely different colour away from the shaded lights in the big Regent Street store. Plus the fact that the man she had been seeing for the past three weeks had said he must spend the entire weekend with his family. And now the sound of Simon’s voice was making her heart do strange things, just when she had thought she was getting over him.
‘I can’t tell you anything, honey. But it’s still Simon Martin first, second and last, isn’t it? Why have you rung me, then? To ask me round for a bit of extra-marital hoo-hah? Because there’s nothing doing. Okay?’
Simon gripped the receiver hard. ‘I rang you because I wanted to talk to you, that’s all. Because Emma isn’t back yet, if you must know, and because I am a bit anxious about her. It’s not like her to be out this late.’
Chloe had only seen Emma once. Just that one time in the hospital, but she had never forgotten her. She could see her now: small and vulnerable, where as Chloe knew herself to be big and totally self-sufficient; holding Simon, as she had failed to do; having his baby when she, Chloe, had got rid of hers. She couldn’t help feeling that somehow the deck had been stacked unfairly against her. Guilt about what she had done did not help either, because guilt could be comforting and wipe out its own source if dwelled on for long enough. And now she realized that Simon, even in his own selfish way, had shown her what love could be.
‘You are a traditionalist, did you know that?’ She had only one weapon left now, and that was to hurt, to hit hard and punish him for what he had done. ‘All you want really is a house filled with kids, and a nine-to-five job, and when your job or whatever goes the wrong way you sulk.’ Chloe felt the tears spring to her eyes. ‘That’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it? Sulking because you’ve had a bad day, and because your little wife isn’t there, waiting by the telephone to hear all about it. You needed a sounding-board, so you rang me.’
‘It seems I made a mistake,’ Simon said quietly, his voice etched with hurt.
‘You’ll get over it,’ Chloe said, equally quietly, then later, when she had replaced the receiver, she buried her face in her hands.
‘Slut. Cow. Whore. Stupid, sloppy, silly dried-up spinster!’ She mouthed the words, but when she opened her mouth to yell, no sound came. Then, staring straight ahead at the peg-board on the wall, with her friend’s children’s drawings pinned in rows, she forced herself to accept the fact that she would never see or hear from Simon again.
‘But there’s no man going to spoil my rotten life!’ She got up and walked slowly upst
airs, the tears now streaming down her face.
Simon had dialled Emma’s number again before Chloe had snatched her nightgown from beneath her pillow and gone into the bathroom. When there was still no answer, he rubbed the back of his neck and came to a swift decision.
Okay, okay, he wasn’t going because of anything Chloe had said. He was going to drive back north and creep into bed beside Emma. Then tomorrow night – no, tonight – he would drive down again. It could be done. With a fast car and the motorway straight before him, it was nothing. And when her arms wound themselves round his neck and he felt her soft body pressed up against him, this restless feeling would be gone. She was peace. Emma Sparrow was peace. She was his wife, soon to be the mother of his child, and what else was there? What else in this rushing, crazy world was there?
He was backing the car out of the drive as the telephone rang in the quiet, darkened house, and with no one to answer it, it went on ringing. Then all was silent.
Sixteen
THERE WAS PAIN and soothing voices, more pain, a prick in her arm and sleep. But Emma did not want to sleep. She fought it with all her strength, and when the pain increased and she felt the warm wetness between her legs she screamed. At least she thought she screamed, but what came was a whisper, a pleading wail as her head turned from side to side on the pillow.
‘My baby! Oh, please, please, save my baby!’
The young doctor turned to the waiting nurse by the side of the high hospital bed. ‘Try to get it through to her that she is lucky to be alive. And call me if you need to.’ He walked away, white coat flying, bleeped away to yet another Saturday night accident case. And before he had gone through the door Emma opened her eyes wide.
Immediately the nurse moved to take her hand. ‘It’s all right, love. You had a bit of a smash-up in a car, but there’s nothing broken.’ She patted Emma’s hand. ‘You’re going to be okay. Right?’