Prior Engagements

by Sarah Goodwin

  The rush of endorphins that overcame me was almost intense enough to be classed as illegal. More importantly, I managed to put Will to the back of my mind for at least four minutes, which was long enough for Dorian to arrive at the hotel and come upstairs.

  The knock at the door made me jump, but I got up and let him in. He looked exhausted, pale and ruffled and shadowy, but he smiled when he saw me.

  “I’ll show you Prince Phillip,” he said nonsensically, and kissed me.

  I kissed Dorian back with all the desire I could muster, he really was an excellent kisser, which helped. But still, I couldn’t help feeling the tiniest bit bad. I knew I was going to feel guilty for a while, possibly for a very long time indeed. It was only natural. But this was my husband, and from here on in, my future was going to be all about the two of us.

  Dorian got a taxi to take us from the Chalet de Les Kippers to my flat. The whole way there I leant against his side and he stroked his fingers over my wrist and hand. He was warm and solid, and smelt like a combination of hand sanitizer and orangey aftershave. He’d pulled an oatmeal coloured jumper on over his white shirt, and it was scratchy against my cheek. All in all, that taxi ride was probably the most comforting experience of my entire life. It reminded me of why I was doing what I was doing. It reassured me, and I think it reassured Dorian too.

  When we got to the flat, I let us in, sat Dorian down on my old purple sofa, and made us cups of tea in my favourite mugs (Yes, I have favourite mugs, and anyone who says that’s sad, and that they don’t have a favourite mug, is 1.Lying, and 2. Trying to score a point over a really minor aspect of human behaviour – and probably also claims to be intolerant to wheat). They were large without being awkward, pretty without looking cheap, and most importantly, they held the exactly right ratio of tea to milk (OK, yes, I’m sad. But, you know what they say – little things please little minds).

  The purple corduroy of my sofa was liberally covered in green and lilac glitter, thanks to an exploding freebie make-up kit which had been tacked to the front cover of a magazine. Dorian eyed it gingerly but said nothing.

  “I’m heading back to the states tomorrow,” he told me, as I picked a packet of fig rolls up off of the floor and offered him one (my home was looking rather skanky, even after all the cleaning – somehow I just produced mess).

  “So, would you like me to pack everything here and sort myself out before...” Dorian was shaking his head.

  “I’d like you to come with me.”

  “Tomorrow? You must be mad – it’d take me that long to go through my underwear draw. I can’t move tomorrow.”

  Dorian set his tea to one side and took my hand (which had a fig roll clasped in it).

  “The longest you can stay in the US without a visa is six months, so, before we start applying for your citizenship and panicking about how to transport your magazine collection...maybe we could have a trial period?”

  “Sensible,” I said, “are you the man I married?”

  Dorian laughed. “I don’t have as many hang ups about cohabitation as I do about marriage,” he pointed out, “besides, it only seems fair...there are a few things you don’t know about me, that you’re going to find out about soon enough.”

  “Let me guess, you’re a vampire?”

  “No.”

  “Bondage fiend?”

  “Again, no.”

  “Closet Beiber fan?”

  “Who?”

  I patted him on the arm sympathetically. “You’re better off not knowing. Tell me this secret then.”

  “It’s not a secret, really, but it is...sensitive.”

  I was intrigued, and not a little worried. I’d only heard two big secrets in my entire life, the second being Stephen’s weird fantasy about having a three-way with me and Cher, all dressed as snake people (The first secret belongs to Lara Martin from Year Three at St. Christopher’s, and even though I was only seven at the time, I will stand by my promise to take it to my grave. On pain of Cher).

  “The books I illustrate for Georgio Casablancas...they’re, not strictly just comics,” Dorian looked at me through his eyelashes, embarrassment painting his cheeks pink, “they’re erotic books.”

  I waited for the rest of it, but Dorian stayed expectantly silent.

  “Oh,” I said, disappointed, then, “oh!” because he looked so crestfallen.

  “You’re not shocked at all are you?” he asked hesitantly.

  “I am. I really am...because you don’t look like the type to- not that you look boring,” I added quickly, “but you look...polite?” I floundered.

  Dorian smiled at my awkwardness.

  “What I mean is,” I started over, “it’s not that shocking, in and of itself. Sorry.”

  Dorian thought about this for a moment. “Perhaps you’re just desensitized to its shock value.”

  “Could be, I did watch every season of Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” I admitted, “go on then, what kind of stuff does Georgio write?”

  Dorian took out his Blackberry and messed around with the internet for a few seconds.

  “’Rear Door’, ‘Get Thee Behind Me’, ‘Steel Rims’, ‘Deep Into Texans’,” he read, completely straight facedly.

  “So, literary fiction?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Male on male erotica for females under thirty-five,” Dorian sighed, “I suppose it’s as good as any other illustrating contract. I’m very good at anatomy apparently, that’s why he chose me, from one of my university exhibitions.”

  “Did you paint a lot of nudes for it?” I asked, trying not gasp as Dorian showed me some of the cover images on his phone. They were...definitely putting the ‘graphic’ into graphic novel.

  “I painted a bowl of fruit, balanced on a ballet dancer named Frank,” Dorian told me, “he was a friend of mine.”

  “I think they’re very good,” I said, flicking through some of the tabs of art on the Blackberry. They were actually very stylish, sort of dark manga style with some gothic touches thrown in and some art nouveau in the background designs.

  “Thank you.” The tips of Dorian’s ears went pink with pleasure.

  “Any other lurking secrets?” I asked, “personally, I never wash up, I’ve been known to go weeks without eating anything green, if you don’t count beyond-ancient-bread, and I sometimes get very drunk, and try to watch whole seasons of CSI without a break.”

  Dorian grinned at me. “I never wear socks in the house, I leave half finished cups of coffee around and forget about them, so I make new ones and forget about them, and I ordered all my furniture from IKEA when my browser was so overloaded that I couldn’t see any pictures,” he reached over and took my hand, “no more secrets?”

  “No more secrets,” I said, trying to ignore the twist in my stomach as I did so.

  Because I didn’t want to pay any more rent on my crap-shack of a flat than necessary, I decided to call my landlord, claim I was dead (my fake French accent came in handy – as it had done when my creditors came a’smashing), and move everything I wasn’t taking to America into my mum’s house that afternoon.

  This had the unfortunate side effect of Dorian meeting my mother.

  I called her while we were packing (I say packing, it was more like ‘picking out what I wanted to take and scraping the rest into boxes stolen from the Spa supermarket down the road’).

  “Annie? What’s wrong?” she said as soon as she picked up, it was her standard greeting for unexpected phone calls.

  “Nothing Mum, and I could do without the police inspection so, just – calm down, OK?” I looked over to where Dorian was struggling to pack my typewriter and stuffed peacock into a cardboard box (yeah, I’d gone a little eBay crazy way back in university, though, the peacock had been a gift from Will’s parents). “Actually, the police might be able to help with some of the heavy lifting...”

  “Oh my God what happened? Did the ceiling fall in? I warned you about tower blocks, they’re very unsafe, I was watching thi
s thing on Channel Four-”

  Gods preserve us. If Mum moved on from the BBC to watching all those ‘body shock’ documentaries and mini-series about teenagers with knives for hands. I’d have to coax her out from under her bed with a plate of bourbons and a Catherine Cookson boxed set.

  “Mum, the roof is still over my head, I’m just moving out from under it.”

  “You’ve been evicted? Oh Annie. Was it that horrible landlord? Did he try to get sexual favours from you?”

  Chance would be a fine thing, Ratty-Reg, the owner of my block of flats, was gay as a horseradish.

  “No, I’m moving in with Dorian.”

  Silence.

  I waited for this to sink in.

  “In America?” she asked.

  “In New York.”

  “But...what if I have a fall?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Mother you are forty-nine. Not eighty.”

  “They wouldn’t find me for weeks, I could get eaten alive by sewer rats.”

  What had she been watching?

  “You’ll be fine, anyway, if there’s an emergency you could call one of your friends, or Dad...”

  Mum made a loud, woeful sound.

  “Who is not dead,” I snapped.

  A sulky silence followed.

  “Mum, I’m moving in with my husband, which is pretty routine as far as life goes. I’ll still come and see you, and we’ll Skype all the time.”

  I waited to see what she’d make of that.

  “Will you get William to check on me?” she asked.

  To my mother, Will was always ‘William’, even though he had stopped being a William the moment he shaved his unappealing pudding basin into the Mohawk that had become his signature. I knew, almost instantly, that asking Will to go and check in on my barmy old mother was not something I’d be doing. Not given the way I’d left things with him. I’d have to beg (bribe) Yvonne to go and make sure Mum was taking her cod-liver oils and not watching Panorama.

  “I’ll have Yvonne come and see you.”

  Mum huffed. “If I wanted someone to eat all my biscuits and get mud on the furniture I’d get a dog.”

  I chose to say nothing, mostly because continuing down that line of conversation would only lead to matricide, and also, because to be fair – it was true, Yvonne was a biscuit snaffling, dirty booted fiend of a visitor.

  “Have you and William had a falling out?” Mum asked, striking a nerve cluster that I’d been hoping she’d be too Downton Abbey addled to discover.

  “We’re...not exactly speaking right now. I quit the café and...anyway, I’m not speaking to him. For his own good.”

  I purposefully didn’t look up at Dorian. The Will situation was private, mostly because I’d behaved in a way that made me feel deeply ashamed. Will and me, and that brief bic lighter flare that had sparked the friendship ending fire between us, were better left alone.

  “He doesn’t like you being married,” Mum said smartly, “I knew he wouldn’t. That boy only ever had eyes for you.”

  I had no more patience for people telling me that they’d always known what I was just coming to realise.

  “Life isn’t like bloody Pride and Prejudice, or sodding Jane Eyre, mother,” I said, “you of all people should know that.”

  As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Why shouldn’t Mum live in romance-novel-lala-land? OK, so in real life Jane Eyre would never have gone back to Rochester, and if I’d been Elizabeth Bennet I’d have knocked arsey Darcy out with a stuffed pheasant. Where was the harm in believing in love, especially when you were old enough to never have to date again?

  I sighed. “Mum, it was just one of those things. Too little, too late.”

  “Hmmm,” said Mum, “seems more like the ten o’clock news break if you ask me.”

  “What?”

  “The second half of the film hasn’t started yet,” Mum said, as if explaining particle physics to a chimp.

  Because I was about to ask her a favour, I didn’t push it.

  “Mum, could I put some stuff in your garage until I get visas and everything sorted out?”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “...All of it.”

  Another sigh. “I suppose so.”

  “Thanks Mum, we’ll be over later today. You can meet Dorian.”

  This seemed to perk her up a bit, and I winced internally at the thought of the two of them meeting. Poor Dorian would be like a vicar abandoned in the company of a crazily-earnest-WI-leader.

  “I’ll pop out and get a sponge then,” she said on cue.

  “That’d be nice.”

  “Or I could make one...”

  Oh Christ no. As much as Mum looked like one of the Nigella inspired WI women, she cooked like an ex-marine with no taste buds and no hands. She could make two things without cremating them – cake and stew. The former being dense and heavy as horse droppings, and the latter being as watery and unpleasant as ditch runoff.

  “We’ll bring something round, how about that?” I said.

  “Scones?”

  “Why not?”

  “OK, I’ll see you soon.”

  I put the phone down like an auctioneer tapping his gavel on a particularly difficult sale. “She’s willing to trade sacrificial scones for garage space.”

  “Is her garage the size of a separate house?” Dorian asked, looking around at the boxes he’d filled, and the mountains of stuff still left to pack.

  “Pretty much, it was always where Dad kept his things – tools, his car, woodwork, bicycle parts. When he left, Mum gave the whole lot away.”

  Dorian gave me a look of awkward pity, the kind of look I always got from people whose parents were still together. Except Will, my mind whispered, but I ignored it.

  Packing my entire flat took three hours. Only about thirty minutes of that was spent packing for New York, and the rest was like episodes of Bargain Hunt and How Clean Is Your House? all rolled into one.

  “Is this...a head?” Dorian asked worriedly, his voice slightly muffled from being under my bed. A black shape rolled out from under the bed frame, and I picked it up. It was indeed a head, one of those black velvet covered model heads used to display hats and things. I couldn’t remember buying it.

  “I think it used to have a pillbox hat on it,” I said, digging through my memory for clues.

  A manky cube of fabric covered cardboard whizzed out from under the bed, trailing netting and a long piece of ribbon. Dorian wriggled out after it, giving me a strange look.

  “What? I took a module in textiles at uni,” I shrugged.

  Dorian picked up the hat and scrutinized it. A piece of plastic bedazzling fell to the floor with a clunk.

  “And you didn’t pursue a career in the fashion houses of Paris? Shocking,” he said.

  I threw a handful of antique lace hankies (which had been stuffed inside a vinyl handbag I’d found in a tree several years previously) at him.

  Dorian just chuckled and put the head and the hat into a box, along with several pairs of Mary Jane shoes and three Co-Op bags full of tacky jewellery.

  “You and Fifi have similar tastes,” he told me.

  “I thought Fifi was into the minimalist Enid Blyton look?”

  “She is, but she’s always dragging home these odd things that were ‘an absolute steal’ at car boot sales. That, or things she found at the side of the road.”

  “Like furniture?”

  Dorian raised an eyebrow. “Like rabbits. She brought home a brace of road kill and got the cook to prepare it. Mother nearly had a fit.”

  I struggled not to laugh, but Dorian grinned. “I thought it was a great joke, but our parents were less than amused.”

  “She seems like a lot of fun, your sister.”

  “She is...I just wish she wasn’t so one-in-a-million,” Dorian frowned.

  I smiled, but felt a twinge of sadness. Poor Fifi.

  We heaped all my boxes into a hastily booked removals van, and followed it in a taxi (making
a brief stop at the supermarket for scones, jam and cream).

  My mother, despite her preoccupation with the wealthy and dramatic, lived in Twerton, an area knows to every single inhabitant of Bath, regardless of where they lived in the city, or indeed how long they’d been living there. First year students with fresher’s week vomit still clinging to their New Look shoes would nod darkly and mutter ‘Twerton’ to signify their knowledge of the place.

  It was a bizarre crap hole, the Slough of Bath, with two dingy pubs, a funeral parlour, betting shop, take-away and a chip shop with a placard proclaiming – ‘Chips. All the goodness of potatoes’. It was mostly inhabited by normal, if scruffy people, poor students, old men and women who shopped exclusively at Iceland, and scary alcoholics.

  Yvonne had a lot of Twerton stories, as she frequently woke up there, in the arms of some student or other. My favourite was the tale of how she’d personally seen a man with a hook for a hand foil a mugging, being perpetrated by thirty-year-old men on heelies, all bombed on Special Brew (tipple of the liver-hating man).

  My mum lived in an ancient pre-fab house with aluminium siding, cheap roof tiles and a two door garage that my dad had built himself. The houses in her area were all prefabricated, and together they had the look of one of those old American films set in the back of beyond, near a bayou and a burnt out school bus. The effect was intensified by the fact that Mum had stuck those tacky plastic butterflies all over the front of the house, hung a wooden beaded curtain in front of her front door, and perched a family of plastic squirrels on her wonky porch roof.

  Sometimes I wondered if she needed some kind of counselling. Sales of Betterware would probably take a sharp decline if she ever got the help she clearly needed.

  When the taxi pulled up, Dorian looked out of the window, struck dumb for a moment by the sight of my mother’s exterior decorating skills.

  “I know. I should bring Fifi out here. Poverty in action, she’d love it,” I said.

  “She would,” Dorian squinted at the squirrels, “but only because it’s cheerful...she loves things like this.”

  I smiled, looking at Mum’s house again. I couldn’t deny it, it was cheerful. Like those flowers you see growing in the gutters on top of council buildings.