A Groom With a View

by Sophie Ranald

  Erica was wrong – I’ve never regretted my decision, not for a second. But the sense of shame she left me with has never quite faded, and that’s why I’ve never told anyone else what I did. Not Mum, not Callie, not Nick. Especially not Nick. And now that it was over and we weren’t going to get married, I’d never tell him. At least Erica would be pleased about that.

  In my rush to unpack my suitcase, pack it again, say what I had to say to Nick and walk out of our life together, I’d somehow neglected to pack my mobile phone charger. I could picture where I’d left it, on the packing box that had been serving as our bedside table, next to the beautiful ring I’d never wear again. I stared at the steadily emptying battery icon on my phone’s screen. Seven missed calls and messages from Nick and five from Callie were taking their toll. But Callie’s concern and Nick’s recriminations would have to wait – I had important plans for the precious fifteen percent of battery life that remained.

  I called up my email and started a new message to erica@visionforliberia.org – although she wasn’t at work, I knew she’d still been using that address.

  “Dear Erica,” I wrote.

  So, you’ve got what you wanted. I’m not going to marry Nick, and you never need to see me again. More importantly, I need never see you. That feels pretty good right now. I hope you feel good, too.

  I looked at the words on the screen, bitter and untrue. Then I put my finger on the delete button and watched them disappear, first one letter at a time, then one word at a time, then all the rest of the message at once. I pressed the compose button again.

  Dear Erica

  I expect Nick has told you what’s happened, and you’re delighted with the news. I can’t change the way you feel about me, but there’s something I wanted to explain. I know you think I made the choice not to have a baby lightly and selfishly, but I didn’t. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. For a long time, I cried about it every day. Even now, I sometimes wonder whether I did the right thing.

  Nick always wanted to have children, but whenever I think about it, I feel as afraid as I did when I was eighteen. If I’d had someone to support me, someone I trusted, it might have been different. But we can’t change that now. I have to live with what I did, and so do you.

  I read it through, then deleted almost all of it, and tried again.

  Dear Erica

  I expect Nick has told you what’s happened. Please take care of him. I’m so worried about him, but I’m really glad you’re there.

  I’m sorry I made such a mess of things.

  Pippa

  This time I pressed send, quickly, before I could change my mind, and watched anxiously as the progress bar inched forward. I think it reached the end before my phone gave a final pathetic bleep and died. That was it – until I got hold of a new charger, all I could do was lie in my bed and hide myself in endless words about Venetian paperknives, lace handkerchiefs dropped on the library floor and sleepy villages rocked by murder most foul. As soon as I stopped reading, I’d find myself thinking of Nick again. What was he doing? Had he made all the calls and sent all the emails he’d need to, to call everything off? Was he missing me? Was Spanx? I was missing them, with a hunger that was almost physical.

  But, as I’d learned back when I was eighteen, you can only lie in bed and cry for so long. After a while, my bedroom began to feel more like a prison than a refuge. When I looked in the bathroom mirror I realised that my hair hadn’t been blow-dried since I left South Africa. My bed was becoming increasingly scratchy with toast crumbs. I needed to man the fuck up and face what I had done.

  So on the third day, so to speak, I rose again. I had a shower and dressed properly and even put on some makeup, and went downstairs to find Mum and Dad in the kitchen surrounded by seed catalogues.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Dad said, “Morning, Pippa. I was telling your mother that neon calendulas would be just the thing to brighten up that dark corner next to the weeping pear, but she insists that orange flowers are vulgar. What do you think?”

  Of course, I couldn’t care less about gardening, but I was grateful to spend a few minutes focussing on something that wasn’t Nick, my wedding, or whether the butler or the vicar had done it. So I joined in the debate, taking Dad’s side because if orange is a good colour for cats, it must surely be good for flowers too.

  After a bit Mum admitted defeat and said, “All right, order them then, Gerard, but if we get trounced by the Alcocks in the parish garden awards again, I shall blame you.

  “Pippa, Callie rang up again. She says she completely understands if you don’t feel like talking, but she’s at home all weekend, and she said do pop round if you’re able to. I think perhaps. . .”

  I realised it was Saturday. Two weeks to go until the wedding that wasn’t going to happen. “You’re right, Mum. Of course I’ll go and see her. Do you mind if I borrow the car?”

  Dad said, “I’ll drive you over, and you can ring if you need a lift back, or get a taxi. I know what you girls are like when you get together.”

  It was official. I was eighteen again. “Can we go to Carphone Warehouse on the way?” I said.

  Dad might treat me a bit like I’m still at school, but there’s no denying that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to Callie and me. She opened the door holding a cocktail shaker, and ten minutes later we were ensconced on her gold leather chesterfield with cosmopolitans and a massive bowl of popcorn.

  “You really should talk to Nick, Pip,” she said. “I know you don’t want to, but you’ll have to at some stage.”

  “I know,” I said, looking down at my newly charged phone. There were now twelve new voice messages on it, and five new texts. It felt like a grenade with the pin out. “I know I have to. Just not now. Have you spoken to him?”

  She nodded. “He’s okay. Not good, but okay. He says he’s leaving it a few days before he cancels everything, because it won’t make any difference to not getting the deposits back for stuff. But I think it just hasn’t sunk in properly yet. When I spoke to him he sounded like he was in shock.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut to keep the tears back. “He needn’t worry about the money. I’ll pay Erica back. I’ve got some savings and Guido’s giving me a fat bonus for the South Africa trip.”

  “He got savaged in the press at first, poor bloke,” Callie said, tactfully changing the subject. “But there’s been some really supportive stuff in the last few days. People love him, they reckon he’s won the PR war over that cow Florence. The Guardian had a piece yesterday comparing them to Nigella and Charles Saatchi. With Guido as Nigella, obviously.”

  “He’ll be pleased about that,” I said. “But God knows what we’ll do now the Thatchell’s thing isn’t happening any more. I’ve still got a job for now, but long-term, I don’t know. I think I’m going to have to start looking around for something else. Maybe go back to working in a restaurant, since I’m free and single again.” I swallowed hard, realising that I’d gone and changed the subject straight back.

  “Pippa, we don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Callie said. “But there are a few things I want to say, and after that I’ll shut up, I promise.”

  I knew if I tried to talk I’d just start to cry again, so I nodded mutely.

  “Nick loves you,” she said. “All this stuff with the wedding – I was there, remember. I saw him planning and deciding about everything. All the time, he was like, ‘Will Pippa like this? Is this what Pippa wants? Is this good enough for Pippa?’ He was doing what he thought was right. And it wasn’t, but that’s not really his fault, because you never told him.”

  “I thought it was what he wanted,” I said miserably. “I thought I could just go along with it and let him have his perfect day, even though it wasn’t mine. But it’s ended up exposing loads of other stuff that I don’t even want to think about. I thought we were great together, you know? I thought everything was fine and I didn’t need to worry, and we’
d just carry on as we were forever. But you can’t just stay in one place, can you? And the wedding made me realise that everything wasn’t perfect, and now I’ve fucked it all up completely, and there’s no going back.”

  Callie poured more of the pink drink into our glasses. “What happened in South Africa?” she asked.

  I told her about the messages between Nick and Bethany, how I’d felt, and what I’d done.

  “Yep, that’s bad,” she said. “I’m not going to say it isn’t. But it’s not unsalvageable, you know. And you don’t even know anything happened with Bethany. It was his stag night, you were both pissed, you were miles away from each other and missing each other. If you were to ask him to forgive you, you could move on from it. People do.”

  I thought of Iain and Katharine. “I know they do,” I said. “But I can’t do it. I don’t deserve him to forgive me, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life feeling like I have to make up for what I did.”

  Callie opened her mouth to say something else, but then we heard a key in the door and Phoebe burst in.

  “I told them,” she said, and sank down on the floor and buried her head in Callie’s lap. Her shoulders were shaking and she was making high-pitched sort of squeaking sounds. I couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying.

  Callie stroked her hair, and we waited until she’d stopped.

  “Are those cosmopolitans?” Phoebe said. “Gimme.”

  Callie poured her a glassful. Phoebe necked about half in one gulp.

  “So you told your mum and dad?” I said, absolutely agog to hear the details, and relieved that we were talking about someone else’s problems.

  Phoebe nodded. “God, I could do with a fag,” she said.

  “Really?” said Callie. “I can go and get some if you want.”

  “No,” Phoebe said. “I needed all my lung capacity when he chased me down the street. I’m not risking not being able to get away if it happens again.”

  “He chased. . .” Callie and I said together.

  “Start at the beginning,” I said. “What happened?”

  Phoebe finished her drink and held her glass out for a refill.

  “I told Mum first,” she said. “She was cool. Bless her, she said if she was going to have a daughter-in-law, she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather have than you, Callie. And then she said we should tell Dad together. So we did. I sat down and did the whole thing, like, ‘Dad, I’m gay, and Callie and I are in love.’ And he jumped out of his chair like it was red hot, and started shouting at me. It was terrifying. I’ve never seen him so angry.”

  “Oh, Phoebs,” Callie put her arm round Phoebe’s shoulders and I passed her the box of tissues I’d been using.

  “And I was like, ‘Dad, stop shouting. I’m not going to be spoken to like that.’ I was shit-scared but I didn’t want him to know.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “And he goes, ‘You’ll be spoken to however I choose to speak to you, or you’ll get out of my house.’ So I said, fine, I’d go, and I started to leave, but he came after me. He chased me all the way to my car. He was like Usain fucking Bolt.” Phoebe started half-laughing, half-crying again.

  “And your Mum?” asked Callie.

  “She’s gone to my aunt Linda’s. Don’t you see, there’s no way he could have run like that if it was true about his back? He’s been waited on hand and foot by me and Mum all this time and there’s nothing wrong with him.”

  Callie and I looked at each other, and then we started to laugh too.

  “It’s not funny,” I said. “It’s not a bit funny. All those years. All the money he’s had in benefits. It’s awful, it’s fraud.”

  But we couldn’t stop laughing, even though we were crying as well.

  “We can tell everyone now,” Callie said. “We can get married.”

  I said, “You know what? I’ve got an idea.”

  The church hall at St Boniface’s was absolutely freezing, in spite of being packed to the rafters with the great and good of Westbourne parish. I could feel my toes going numb in my Uggs, and I was glad of my decision to leave my wristwarmers, woolly hat and Dad’s Barbour jacket on. I was perched on a narrow wooden chair that felt like the sort of thing that backchatting Victorian schoolchildren or nuns caught sneaking out of the convent for a burger on a Friday might have been ordered to sit on by way of punishment, and my arse was going numb too.

  I glanced at my watch. We were twenty-five minutes into the second half, and by my reckoning there was at least two hours of this torture still to be endured. In spite of my discomfort, I felt extremely sleepy. The elderly man sitting next to me had already succumbed to ennui and the warm Bristol Cream sherry we’d been served in the interval, and occasionally a guttural snore rent the air. Although most of Mum’s scenes were done, I needed to stay awake so I could think of nice things to say about Dad’s performance as the second gravedigger.

  What Mum had said about Dominic Baker’s talent was true – he was giving the performance his all, and not one line appeared to have been cut. Unfortunately he was only convincing in the role if you were able to suspend disbelief enough to accept a Prince of Denmark who was as thin on top as the Prince of Wales. The grey head of the man next to me slumped on to my shoulder and I gave him a gentle dig in the ribs. He started awake and said loudly, “Pass me my nine-iron!” before lapsing back into silence. I dug my nails into my palms to stay awake.

  At last the ordeal was over. For a Westbourne Thespians production it hadn’t gone too badly, apart from the bit where Dominic dropped Yorick’s skull and it rolled off the stage and into the lap of a lady in the front row who, judging by her startled yelp, had also nodded off. With much scraping of chairs, everyone stood up. I resisted the urge to rub my bum to restore circulation, and filed back through to the vestibule with the rest of the audience, all of whom fell upon the sherry, dry madeira cake and platters of egg sandwiches as if they hadn’t seen food for a week. I armed myself with a glass and went and stood in a corner waiting for Mum and Dad to appear, hoping that none of their friends would come over and talk to me and ask me how Nick was.

  But, inevitably, it wasn’t long before someone did. As I hovered in my corner, I could see a tall woman in a hijab approaching me, and felt rising panic. Not only was I going to have to deal with an awkward conversation about my relationship status, but I hadn’t got a clue who she was. I rooted desperately through my memory of Mum and Dad’s friends. She was too young to be one of their contemporaries. A former colleague from the university? A gardening person? Shit, I was going to have to make polite conversation with someone I didn’t know from a bar of soap.

  “Hello, Pippa! How lovely to see you here, and how unexpected. Are you visiting your parents?” She kissed me.

  “Er. . . hello,” I said. “Lovely to see you too. Yes, I came to support Mum and Dad in the play.”

  “Oooh, were they in the cast? You must be so proud. Let me see if I can guess who they were.” So, not a friend of Mum and Dad’s then. Who the hell was she? “The lady who was Gertrude, she looked just like you. That must have been your mum.”

  I smiled politely. “That’s right, yes, good spot. And Dad was the second gravedigger, I don’t look as much like him, especially not with the smears of mud all over his face.”

  “They were both excellent. Yes, I think I can see the resemblance to your dad too. Did you enjoy the performance?”

  If I’d known the woman, I could have had a long, enjoyable bitch about the freezing room and the hard chairs, but I couldn’t risk it.

  “Very much,” I said. “It was very comprehensive. Not too short.”

  She gave me what I thought might have been a wink. “No, it certainly wasn’t too short! But I would have thought that you’d be on honeymoon, getting away from this horrible weather. Oh, but I’ve messed up my dates, haven’t I? The wedding isn’t until February.”

  Okay, so whoever she was, she hadn’t been invited. So not one o
f the handful of Mum and Dad’s close friends who they’d said they wanted to be there, and who had now been informed that it was all off. I cursed myself for not fessing up in the beginning and saying I’d forgotten her name. That window of opportunity was now well and truly closed, and I was just going to have to brazen it out.

  But I really didn’t want to pour out my relationship woes to this stranger, so I said, “It’s next Saturday, actually.” Which was kind of true, in a sense.

  “How lovely! And how amazing that you could still manage to be here to support your parents, it’s such a busy time. We must arrange to get together afterwards, once you’re back from honeymoon.”

  Fuck. I gulped. “Yes, yes we must. We haven’t seen you for. . . um. . . ages.”

  “Not since our wedding,” she said. “I really do envy you and Nick, deciding to keep it small and not invite all and sundry. We did, and although it was a lovely day, I sometimes wish we’d limited it to close family, like you have, and not invited all the cousins and their little ones.”

  Finally, light dawned. Thank God. It was Nick’s cousin Alison, the one who’d recently converted to Islam. No wonder I hadn’t recognised her – I’d never seen her in a headscarf before. I felt dizzy with embarrassed relief.

  “But it was such a great day anyway,” I burbled, “so nice to get to meet all the family. Thanks for being so understanding about. . . you know. . .”

  “Don’t give it another thought! Nick explained why it wasn’t possible to invite us. But do give me a ring soon, Nick’s got my number. I must be off now, early start for salat al fajr tomorrow.” And she kissed me again and bustled off.

  My head was spinning, and it wasn’t from the warm sherry. What the hell was going on? Alison and Darren hadn’t been invited to our wedding. From what she’d said, none of the cousins had. But what about The Amazing Archibald and the halal chicken and the pile of invitations I’d seen? What had Nick done?