Prior Engagements

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Will?” I asked.

  He kissed the side of my neck to let me know he was listening.

  “What do you want to do? Seriously I mean, about us.”

  Will pulled back and looked me in the eye, his hand stealing up to cup my face. “I want to start up another café, together. So that we can dodge debt collectors and live in a tiny, damp-riddled flat full of all your crap furniture and my awful taste in interiors.”

  I reached down, and slowly eased the wedding ring off of my finger.

  “That sounds...perfect,” I said, “but just so you know, I don’t think I’m going to want another one of these,” I held up the ring, “it just never seems worth the trouble.”

  Will pulled me into his lap and kissed me, murmuring, “you just try getting rid of me. We’re going to be like your scones.”

  “Nutty?”

  “Un-bloody-breakable.”

  Although going to see Dorian alone would probably have been the kinder thing to do, I’d seen too many of those tragic films (think Cruel Intentions – the bit with the t*** that r*** o*** S******* - screw it, it’s an old film, a taxi runs over Sebastian. It’s very sad, mostly because I’d hoped it would nail Reese Witherspoon) to risk leaving Will at the mercies of New York, and finding out later that he’d been beaten into amnesia. So we got into a taxi together, and I gave the driver Dorian’s address.

  It seemed such a long time since I’d entered the building with Dorian at my side, and yet it had only been that afternoon. Now it was night, and the street was lit with streetlamps, and mostly deserted, save for a few people who were clearly off out for the evening, tottering on high heels and sharing a bottle of wine as they walked.

  I let us into the building, and we went up to the apartment in sombre silence. When I opened the front door, Dorian wasn’t in the living room, so I called out for him, and after a few seconds, he came running out of his study.

  “Annie? Oh my God I thought you’d lost your way or had some kind of...” he caught sight of Will and stopped, literally just stopped, right in the middle of crossing the room.

  “Dorian, this is Will, my friend from the café in Bath?” I looked at Will, confirming his existence before I continued, “I met him while I was out and...” I couldn’t think of a way to put it, couldn’t even begin to explain what I was doing, so I just said, “I’m really sorry,” and left it at that.

  Dorian looked at me, and then at Will, then me again.

  “Oh.”

  We all stood there, completely silent for about a minute and a half.

  In case a good old fashioned rumble was about to kick off, I said. “Dorian, I never wanted to do this to you, I really wanted to make this work but...as wonderful as you’ve been...it’s just not the same as what I had with Will...it’s not what I want, and I was too stupid to see it.”

  (Hallmark could probably put this on a card in the ‘oops I did it again – I made a mistake, but I’m a scatty woman, so forgive me...please?’ section.)

  Dorian sat down on the sofa and looked up at me.

  “I know,” he admitted.

  I was stunned. “What do you mean, you know?”

  “You’ve been miserable since we got here. I mean, I’ve tried to make things better but...” Dorian waved his hands hopelessly, “nothing’s worked...we’re just, crap, together.”

  True, but no less hurtful for being so.

  “So, you’re not angry?”

  “I’ve been expecting one of us to snap for a while,” Dorian said, “and, at the party, when you started talking about Will, I knew our days were numbered. That you were missing something more than proper tea and black taxis.”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said again.

  “I’m happy if you’re happy and, from the looks of things, Will makes you more than happy.”

  I blushed like an erupting volcano and wished I’d brushed my hair before coming back to the apartment.

  “And, I have something to tell you,” Dorian continued, “something that I’ve been wrestling with since the party. I was actually going to tell you today...”

  “Tell me what?”

  “At the party...when I rescued your friend from my parent’s fountain...I found her to be, quite stunningly alluring.”

  I blinked in surprise.

  “When I took her to one of the guest rooms, I was so drunk, as was she, and you’ll have to forgive me for not saying so...but, we kissed,” he looked up at me, “we kissed and...I realised that she was everything I wanted, free and strong and bracing.”

  (Well, Yvonne was bracing. I had to give him that. She was also in a heap of shit, how could she not tell me?)

  “She could have told me,” I said.

  “I asked her not to...she felt incredibly bad about it, but, we were both so confused. I suppose we needed time and...I have her phone number. I was wondering...”

  I understood confused. That was the thing. I’d been confused since my late teens, and apparently, my mum had been confused since she was fourteen, snogging some girl named Harriet.

  “Are you going to ask her out?”

  Dorian flushed. “It’s not really appropriate...”

  “Do it anyway,” I said, “after all, your sister is marrying my mum. Appropriate was never really an option.”

  Dorian looked so pleased, that I couldn’t help being pleased too. After all the trouble I’d caused, at least I could give him permission to wine, dine and bang my best friend (my best female friend, after all, if he slept with Will that would really complicate things).

  We all waited in awkward silence for a while, but it seemed that all the bombshells of that evening had been dropped, and it was now time to tend to the wounded and gather up what was left behind. Although...I didn’t feel like a survivor in the wreckage. I felt like I’d just shared a taxi with a very nice, but ultimately inconsequential stranger, and now I was home, stepping out of the taxi, back into my life. In the morning I’d have to get all my stuff together and take it over to Will’s, and we’d work on getting back to England. In the meantime,

  “Is anyone hungry?” I asked.

  “Starving,” said Will and Dorian simultaneously.

  “I’ll order us pizza, if that’s OK?” I said, looking to Dorian for approval.

  “By all means, as long as I can have garlic sticks as well,” he turned to Will, “while we’re waiting, would you like a drink?”

  “God yes,” Will said, “beer?”

  “Certainly.” Dorian went into the kitchen, and I called the take-out place and ordered our pizzas and sides.

  Will and I sat down on the sofa, and Dorian returned with three beers and a bowl of crisps on a tray.

  After a while, Dorian broke the silence by saying, “Awful weather we’re having isn’t it?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “Spatula, spatula, who’s got my fucking spatula?” Will shouted.

  I plucked it from the looped-round tie of his apron and put it into his waving hand. He turned, mind clearly whirling a mile a minute with cooking times and measurements, his face gleaming with stove-sweat. I pecked him on the cheek.

  “Calm down Gordon,” I told him, “no need for that kind of language in the kitchen, you ill mannered cunt-bag.”

  “Sorry...hey, who’s this Gordon character?” he looked wounded, “stepping out with qualified chefs behind my back already?”

  I stuck my tongue out. “Play your cards right, it might be a threesome.”

  “Only if he lets me call him Rammin’ Ramsey.”

  “Maybe not then,” I looked at the pan on the stove, “should it be doing that?”

  Will looked down. The pan was full of a mutinous looking black powder, half submerged in scorched syrup.

  “Urgh! No, no it should most definitely not,” he inspected the pots of ingredients on the counter, “why is my sugar cellar full of salt?”

  We exchanged long-suffering sighs.

  “Walter!” Will shouted.

  From
across the kitchen, by the huge pink, square sink, came a groan.

  “It wasn’t me!” Walter shouted back, “whatever it was, it wasn’t me wot did it.”

  “Wilma!” I shouted, and she stuck her head around the door to the café proper.

  “I ‘aven’t done nuffin,” she said, through a mouthful of pilfered carrot and apple muffin.

  Will and I exchanged glances again.

  “YVONNE!” we shouted, simultaneously.

  Yvonne came up from the basement, where she was busy cataloguing supplies (her dodgy connections had worked miracles on our range of goods, and we were getting everything so cheap that, the previous week, our vegetable guy had actually given me a tenner).

  “Salt in the sugar cellar,” Will said, the way the Queen of Hearts would shout ‘Off with their heads!’

  Yvonne made a ‘pish’ motion with her hand, “won’t happen again.”

  Despite the addition of two members of staff (or rather, one and a half, as the Walter/Wilma time share had simply been altered so that both of them had a separate job to do) the Raspberry B team was still an unoiled and rickety machine (powered by hamsters – and mangy ones at that). Of course, it was no longer the Raspberry B team. We had a new café, new debt collectors and a whole new menu.

  My divorce from Dorian had been quick, painless, and ultimately, entirely amicable (Which had apparently upset both our lawyers, who seemed to have come prepared for war, rather than for tea, biscuits and the dissolution of an unwanted, but perfectly friendly relationship).

  Once Will had handed the café barge back to Fifi (now Fifi Foffaney-Bea – the wedding had been...unconventional, the brides even more so. Will had made their cake, which had been to die for. Overall, an event no-one would be forgetting anytime soon, mostly because several celebrities had turned up, and a Duchess had drunk a magnum of champagne and sung Happy Birthday to an ice sculpture of a unicorn) we’d moved back to damp old England, and set up shop in a brand new location.

  OK, so it wasn’t entirely brand new, more like ‘used and abused’ but it was slightly better than the site on which Raspberry Bs had stood. Which wasn’t saying much (persistent damp and asbestos were really things that Will should have looked out for in the halcyon days of ye olde university – but, hindsight is twenty-twenty, and Will’s foresight was like his foreskin – absent since just after his birth).

  Despite my scathing cynicism on the matter, it appeared the Neil had been right about the imminent store closures. BHS, proud bastion of the Bath high street, had closed down, and moved to Bristol, leaving a three floor building vacant (Neil was, incidentally, now working as a personal trainer at a small gym in Twerton, a position that I felt suited him well, at least he’d be paid expressly for being a total bell-end). Eventually (because nature, and capitalism, abhors a vacuum) the building had been taken over by M&S, and the empty Marks and Sparks building became a Topshop, the former Topshop became a Gamestation (much to the confusion of hipsters and anorexic teens alike)...and on and on down the line of commercial properties the ripples went, until a tiny building next to the Abbey opened up (at a slashed rate – thank you violated health codes and rare varieties of Scandinavian flesh eating beetle) and Will leapt for it.

  Once we’d stripped the cream paint off of the walls (and fumigated the shit out the basement of horrors that lurked underneath – seriously, those things could strip a leg of lamb in under a minute) Will and I had launched ourselves into redecorating on the cheap. Cheap implying that we had a budget over £6.27.

  Our furniture was from skips, a set of chairs, a wonky table and a sofa that I’d re-covered in old jeans (I wasn’t using them anyway – bloody muffin tops) and the rest was discounted inflatable armchairs and tables made out of old paperbacks pasted together into blocks. The walls we’d painted (with a lot of...ahem, distractions, leading to many painty handprints on places where turps should never be used) a bright cherry red on two walls, and marvellous coppery gold on the others. The counter was topped with red sequined oilcloth (painstakingly sewed by Yvonne and myself) and all the menus were upholstered in silver spangled purple fur). Our cups and glasses...well, we weren’t asking a lot of questions about the fixtures and fittings, as most of them had been procured by Yvonne and Fifi, who appeared to be running some sort of organised crime ring between England and America.

  Yvonne, having been blacklisted by most of the shops in Bath, (and have pulled the same shit at Ann Summers, twice) took up my offer of a waitressing/stock management position, and being fearless as she was, she told Dorian she was not going to move to New York. So, Dorian had relocated his mannequins to a study in a six bedroom Georgian house on the outskirts of Bath, and, as far as I knew, he was still hoarding (not that Yvonne minded, being something of a kleptomaniac hoarder herself).

  My mum and her new bride were now living stateside, in Dorian’s ex-apartment, redone to fit in with their romantic tastes. I received frequent gushy letters about visits to plays and operas and lesbian open-mic nights and God only knows what else. Mum was having a whale of a time. She’d even started to mention Dad as if he were still alive (though he had moved to Slough and opened a small gardening business, so I didn’t hear much from him, except the random packets of seeds he sent me in the post).

  But then, I’d given up all hope of having normal parents sometime around my second day out of the womb.

  With the lunch rush now only a half-hour away, Will started to measure out ingredients again and put them into a fresh pan. He was making our signature dish – a raspberry (Will wasn’t so averse to nipple-fruit now – and no, we’re not going into that, let me have some secrets, please) torte with a blown sugar ‘bomb’, a round thing like a bauble that was made of rose flavoured sugar caramel. I’d picked up an experimental cookbook and instantly loved the idea of using some of my old skills to perk up the café. Pasties and pies were almost like vases (only yummy) and blowing sugar was dangerous and delicious, which was why I loved it.

  “If one more thing goes wrong,” Will muttered darkly, “I swear I’ll boil my head in this.”

  I squeezed his bum comfortingly. “No you won’t, you’ll boil Walter and Wilma before that happens.”

  “Very true,” he slid three hangover specials from under the grill and piled them onto plates, “order for table five.”

  I picked up the plates and made for the kitchen door, flushing as Will’s rubber spatula smacked my bum.

  He was so going to pay for that later (not on the kitchen counter again though, he’d had a bit of Catholic guilt about that one and spent hours cleaning it with the Mr Muscle).

  I plunked the sandwiches down in front of the hipsters at table five (swaddled in desert scarves up to their designer shades, stuffed into grunge coloured skinny jeans and dingy knitwear) and swept back to the kitchen, where Will was waving a broken mug at Walter and looking thunderous.

  “These do not grow on trees!” he shouted, “that is not what is meant by a ‘mug tree’.”

  “You nicked ‘em anyway!” Walter shouted back.

  Will looked like one of his eyes was going to pop out. “That’s not the point!”

  The pan of bubbling rose sugar suddenly burst into flames, and Yvonne, who had been redoing her lipstick by the shiny chrome toaster, screamed like a banshee. Will swore like a colonel at the Somme, and I dowsed the stove top with the extinguisher, leaving him and Yvonne spattered in foam.

  There was a short, terrible silence.

  Then Will started to laugh, a snort of amusement that spiralled into a full on guffaw. He grabbed me, covering me in extinguisher foam, and rubbed more off it from his face onto mine.

  Yvonne threw foam at us both, and Walter said something about wanting a pay rise, which Will ignored.

  Instead of throttling Walter, he kissed me, his hands sliding over the wet cotton skirt that now clung to my thighs. We were going to have to shut the café for another half hour (maybe more, if I got my way) or else Yvonne would have to take over f
or a while.

  Will picked me up and carried me towards the back of the building, where steps lead up to our tiny bedsit (decorated student style with a futon, a mini fridge, and an Xbox 360). Underneath our one and only window, the café’s name, Prior Engagement, was lit up in cerise, curlicue neon.

  Outside, the sounds of retching hipsters and salmon-Tabasco vomit splashing the gutter made passersby shout in shock and disgust.

  Will rolled me onto my back and started to open the buttons of my shirt.

  “Aprons on,” I said.

  “Kinky.”

  “There isn’t time, man!”

  He kissed my neck, nibbled the space between my throat and shoulder, hands pushing our aprons aside (he was going to have to boil them in bleach before he’d sleep tonight, I just knew it) and I pulled him close and pressed against him, letting my head fall back as he rested between my legs and kissed between the sides of my open shirt.

  That’s when I saw it, in shiny gold letters on the ceiling.

  “What the fuck?”

  Will sat up sharply. “Not the response I was hoping for.”

  On the ceiling, he’d painted ‘Annie Bea, will you marry me?’ Dangling from the question mark was a red ribbon, with a ring on the end. A tiny, steel ring, with a mini plate and a bagel moulded in china on the top.

  “So,” Will said, “how about it?”

  Annie’s Glossary For The Non-English and Curious (namely Mags).

  BHS

  British Home Stores, a department store selling clothes, bedding, kitchenware, home decor, appliances, gym equipment, and, depending on the season, Christmas decorations, Easter eggs or live goats (sacrificed during the British celebration of the advent of Morris dancing). Middle of the range prices make this an affordable shop, with classic style options, and fashion inspired ranges.