Truth Hurts

by Rebecca Reid

  She typed the number in, one she’d called a hundred times before from the Hendersons’ ‘Nanny Phone’. Maybe: Gina Green, said the screen.

  ‘That’s weird,’ she called out to the terrace, wandering back towards Drew.

  ‘What’s weird?’

  ‘Your phone knows who Gina is,’ she said, turning the phone around to show him the screen. ‘How does it do that?’

  Drew laughed. ‘It’s terrifying, right? You call her a couple of times from my phone and it somehow knows who she is. The robots are coming for us!’ He laughed and picked up a book to read as she went inside.

  Gina answered on the third ring. ‘How’s it going?’ she exploded as soon as she realized it was Poppy. ‘Is he still perfect? How’s the sex? Can you please send me pictures of the house?’

  ‘He’s still perfect,’ Poppy said. She could hear the smile in her own voice. She couldn’t help revelling in the feeling of, for the first time in as long as she could remember, having something that someone else was even a little envious of. ‘And I think I have news.’

  Gina was quiet.

  ‘Gee?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Gina. ‘Mum wants me to come down to dinner.’

  ‘How is she?’ asked Poppy. Gina’s family lived in Crystal Palace, and she spent half her weekends there, allowing her mother to fawn all over her. Every time Poppy visited there seemed to be a new cousin or auntie whom she had never met, all squashed into the tiny terraced house. They were loud, funny, warm and kind. Sometimes Gina would invite her to spend the weekend, and spend the whole time apologizing for the mess and the noise, not realizing that was exactly why Poppy had come.

  ‘She’s being a right bitch today, keeps asking why I don’t have a boyfriend and why I haven’t had a pay rise for a while. What’s going on with you?’

  ‘I think he asked me to marry him,’ she said.

  Gina squealed. ‘Marry him! Are you joking?’

  Poppy sat down on the sofa, playing with the fringe on one of the cushions. ‘I know.’

  ‘So, what are you going to say?’

  ‘Say?’

  ‘About getting married.’

  Poppy paused, trying to work out whether she really didn’t know, or whether she felt like she had to pretend not to know. She decided it was the former. ‘I can’t say yes, can I?’ she asked.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Gina. ‘You’re into him, right?’

  Gina had once told Poppy off for being easy when she’d given a guy her phone number on a night out. She was the queen of game-playing. The ultimate commitment-phobe. Her enthusiasm was a surprise. ‘I think so,’ Poppy said, tangling her fingers in the fringe, ‘yes.’

  ‘And he’s good to you?’

  Good? He was better to her than anyone in the world ever had been. He listened when she spoke. Never talked over her or interrupted. He watched her, noticing her moods. If she was cold he got her a jumper. He said he liked the way she sounded when she sang. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s good to me.’

  ‘Then why the fuck not?’

  ‘Because I’ve known him less than a month? Because it’s mad? Because …’ She paused. ‘A month, Gina. You can’t marry people you’ve known for a month.’

  ‘Not a normal month, though. You’ve been together 24/7. That’s like months in dating time.’

  ‘I guess.’ Gina was right about that. Every single moment, waking and sleeping, they had been together. Talking about history and doing the crossword, or just sitting in oddly comfortable silence.

  ‘My auntie Jasmine married my uncle after a month.’

  ‘Didn’t she need a visa?’

  ‘It worked out great.’

  ‘They got divorced, didn’t they?’

  Gina laughed. ‘Yeah, but she got her visa.’

  ‘Well, I don’t need a visa, and I can’t marry him. Not after a month.’ Saying the words out loud didn’t help convince her.

  ‘You don’t want to?’

  Poppy didn’t answer. If things were less strange, if she wasn’t on the phone, hundreds of miles away from anywhere she had any right to call home, she might have laughed.

  Of course she wanted to. It had been a long time since she had wanted anything more.

  ‘I just don’t understand why he wants to,’ she said, looking at herself in the mirror. Her eyes went straight to the trifecta of flaws she disliked in herself the most: the width of the bridge of her nose, the heavy smattering of freckles that covered her body and the curve of her stomach which appeared as soon as she ate anything. She wasn’t hideous, she knew that. But she wasn’t the kind of remarkable person who made someone drop everything. She wasn’t the type of woman whom people proposed to after a matter of weeks. She wasn’t special. ‘Why me?’ she said into the phone.

  ‘You’re looking for reasons not to be happy,’ Gina said, after letting the silence speak for her.

  ‘All right, Oprah.’

  ‘I’m serious. You sound happy when you’re with him.’

  ‘I am,’ she admitted.

  There was a sound of a baby crying from Gina’s end. ‘Look. He’s gorgeous. He’s rich. He’s kind to you. He’s good in bed and he wants to put a ring on it. Just enjoy it. You would be absolutely fucking mental to say no.’

  ‘OK,’ said Poppy, catching sight of her reflection in a framed painting on the wall. Her face layered over the painting. ‘OK.’

  ‘I have to go,’ said Gina as the volume of the crying escalated, and a woman’s voice shouted over it. ‘Speak soon? I want to hear everything. Go live your fairy tale, you lucky bitch. You deserve it.’

  ‘Do I, though?’ The words came out before she could stop them.

  ‘Yes,’ Gina said, her voice unusually gentle. ‘Yes. What happened … wasn’t your fault. And it was years ago. You slaved away for the Hendersons, you hardly had a day off in years. You’ve served your time. You deserve to be happy.’

  Poppy jabbed at the red circle on the phone and wandered back out to the terrace, her sandals clapping against the stone floor. She stood, one hand on the door frame, looking at Drew’s turned back a metre or so away from where she stood – the same way she had seen him for the first time at the bar on the side of the road. His shoulders were quarter of an inch higher than usual. A sign, she had noticed, that he was worrying. Perhaps he wasn’t as cool about this as he had seemed.

  She nodded, smiling and surprised by tears pricking in the corners of her eyes.

  Drew turned around, a smile breaking across his face like a sunrise. ‘Is that a yes?’ He pulled her into his arms, wrapping himself around her. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ repeated Poppy. ‘Yes.’

  She relaxed her torso into his, breathing him in. This was a fresh start, she repeated inside her head. A new beginning. Maybe it had been long enough.

  Maybe she had served her time.

  Maybe she did deserve this.

  CHAPTER 7

  The waiter poured the pale pink liquid into both glasses and Poppy watched. It looked like she felt. Fizzy. The stem of the glass was long and slender between her fingers. She’d never understood before what people meant when they said something felt like a dream. But sitting here, on the cobbled street, with a heavy linen napkin in her lap and her soon-to-be husband – that word still sounded like it belonged to someone else – she was terrified that at any moment it would all shatter away into nothingness. Would she roll over in a minute and find Damson Henderson crying because Rafe wouldn’t let her change the TV channel?

  ‘Are you nervous?’ asked Drew.

  She looked up. ‘No,’ she said, not entirely honestly. ‘I just can’t quite believe we’re going to do it.’

  ‘And you’re sure you don’t want your family here?’

  She looked down into her lap. Crumbs had settled in the napkin. There were people she wished were there to witness the wedding, but their presence was impossible. Her family, however, would only have ruined it.

  How was she suppose
d to explain this, to Drew of all people? Perfect, gilded Drew who was so good at everything and so easy with everyone, who made waiters laugh and always knew exactly which fork to use.

  Drew had offered to fly them out, he’d offered to wait and have the wedding in England so that they could be there. And if he had been shocked by Poppy’s refusal, he hadn’t shown it.

  How could she have told him that even if they had their wedding in England, the chances were her family still would have declined the invitation? Seeing Poppy happy wouldn’t sit well with any of them.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very sure.’

  Drew took a piece of bread from the silver basket in the middle of the table and tore it into pieces, taking butter from the little white dish and spreading it with his knife. The local courthouse had told them to arrive for 3.30 p.m. They had an hour and a half to sit here, drinking champagne and looking at each other before they went across the road to make the biggest commitment of their lives.

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Drew lightly, ‘I wanted to run something past you.’

  Poppy put her glass down on the table, trying not to look worried. ‘Oh?’

  Drew shifted in his seat, leaning forward and taking her hands between his. Poppy’s chest constricted.

  ‘We’ve had a pretty spectacular few weeks together, right?’

  Poppy nodded. ‘Getting married after a month levels of spectacular, yes.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what it is that’s made things so special between us.’

  Poppy smiled. ‘Lots of wine and food and sex?’

  Drew nodded. ‘Agreed. But I think there’s something else, too.’

  Poppy’s chest was thudding. Something about his calm voice or the way his thumb was stroking her hand frightened her. ‘What else?’ she asked.

  ‘I think it’s because since we’ve been together we’ve been focusing on the here and now.’

  Poppy’s heart quickened. Please don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind. ‘Right?’

  ‘In previous relationships, I’ve found that “the Past”’ – he said the words with a smile, drawing them out – ‘was something of an anchor, dragging us down. Creating arguments, drawing focus, that sort of thing. So I wondered if, given that we’ve been rather unconventional in all sorts of ways already, you might be open to trying something with me.’

  What the hell was he about to ask her to do?

  Drew went on: ‘An agreement that we don’t talk about the past.’

  Poppy tried to slow the thoughts down in her head so that she could catch one – any one – and process it properly. ‘At all?’ she asked eventually, because she had to say something.

  ‘At all,’ Drew replied. ‘The way I see it, everything that happened to you until I met you brought you to me. And vice versa. And we can both agree that us meeting was a pretty great thing. So as long as we don’t keep any secrets from each other going forward, I figure I don’t need to know every break-up and argument and fight you’ve ever had with an ex. In fact, I don’t want to know anything that you don’t want to tell me. Family, friends – anything. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not relevant. I don’t believe that total transparency is always the way towards happiness.’

  When Poppy was six she had found a twenty-pound note on the ground. She’d been out with her dad, doing the food shop, and it had fluttered along the street and landed on her shoe. All the rest of that week Poppy had carried the money around in her pocket, not quite able to believe that she was capable of such glorious, magical luck.

  She looked across the road to the courthouse where their wedding would happen in just over an hour. Drew noticed where she was looking. ‘Oh darling,’ he said, ‘I didn’t mean – of course we’re doing this, whatever happens. It was just a suggestion …’

  Poppy considered Drew. His long fingers, his olive skin, his straight white teeth. She’d worked for a ‘perfect’ family long enough to know that behind the Instagram posts and family holidays there were always cracks. Always mistresses or affairs or bored lonely housewives wishing they’d never had kids. The shinier something looked on the outside, the more rotten it usually was within.

  This wasn’t like the twenty-pound note. It wasn’t pure, one-sided good fortune. There would, of course, be a reason that Drew had suggested this agreement. Something significant, probably. An ex-wife. An ex-family? A current one, even. Or maybe something else. A white-collar crime, perhaps. Time in a cushy, gentle prison. Nothing violent, but embarrassing none the less.

  Something impossible to explain, even to herself, told her that what she would stand to gain from this arrangement was far greater than anything she might lose.

  ‘I like it,’ she said softly. It was as though someone had untwisted the knot inside her chest. She felt more than relief; she felt calm.

  Drew looked delighted. ‘Really?’

  For the first time in a long time, the white noise in the back of her head had quietened. This was her chance to leave it all behind. To never have to have the conversations she dreaded the most.

  ‘Yes. It feels so enlightened and European.’ She smiled. ‘Are you sure you’re not secretly French?’

  Drew laughed. ‘I draw the line at having to keep a mistress in the third arrondissement.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Poppy. ‘No mistresses.’

  ‘No mistresses. And no secrets. But everything that happened before we met isn’t important.’

  She nodded her head. ‘I won’t ask you, but you’ll tell me what I should know. Right?’

  Drew shifted in his chair and Poppy could imagine perfectly what he would look like in a business meeting. His back was straight, his hands folded neatly on the table and something about his voice changed. ‘All right. What should you know? Well. As you know, my family were killed in a car accident when I was eight. I went to boarding school and I spent the holidays with my grandparents who are also now dead. I went to university in America, I’ve lived in the City since I was twenty-eight, I’ve had a couple of long-term girlfriends but mostly I’ve been married to my job. That’s it.’

  The waiter arrived carrying huge white plates of food and made a fuss about arranging them on the table. She watched Drew as he stayed perfectly still, allowing the little performance to take place in front of him, not stammering ‘gracias’ every ten seconds like she did.

  ‘Your turn,’ he said, spearing a little potato on his fork. Would she ever stop finding the way he ate astonishing? It was like he was performing surgery, methodically putting together neat forkfuls of food, perfectly balanced with a piece of everything on the plate. His manners were beautiful, the kind of manners that she had been expected to coax out of unruly children so that they could sail through life, never having to worry about getting anything wrong.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I grew up in Kent; my mother and my sister still live there. Teresa’s younger than me, and she has a daughter. My dad left when I was eight. Mum never really got over it. She didn’t want me to see him any more, so I didn’t. Then she got very into church, and she was sort of different. She’d always been religious, but suddenly it was like everything that made us happy was a sin.’ Drew made a face and she returned it, relieved to see that he wasn’t harbouring similar tendencies. She had absolutely no idea what Drew thought about religion, let alone whether he believed in God.

  Next she would have to say the hard bit. She paused, picking up a stem of asparagus. She bit through the fresh green flesh, steadying herself for what would come next.

  ‘I went to Durham to study history and then I ended up working as a nanny.’

  There it was. Like jumping into a cold swimming pool, horrible for a moment and then like nothing at all.

  Drew reached over and took the bottle from the silver ice bucket, which Poppy knew would annoy the waiter. The bottle trailed drops of water on to the white tablecloth. It was so highly starched that the water beaded on it, unable to sink in.

  ‘People usually ask questions
at that point,’ Poppy said. ‘About why I ended up being a nanny. They think it’s weird, after Durham and everything.’

  ‘That wouldn’t adhere to our agreement.’

  ‘Adhere?’ Poppy laughed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You just talk like a grown-up. Not like anyone else I’ve ever dated.’

  Drew smiled, but said nothing and Poppy realized as the words reached him that she had made a mistake – conscious that she had stumbled over their new rule by mentioning something from the past. Was that allowed? ‘I like it,’ she added, feeling the back of her neck getting hot.

  ‘Good.’ Drew continued to smile, seemingly unconcerned by her cock-up.

  Poppy returned her focus to her plate, not sure how to fill the silence and smarting from her mistake. This must have been what it was like for newly-weds in the olden days, still strangers to each other, unsure exactly what to say next. Everything Poppy could think of to break the silence was a question which might violate their newly minted rule.

  ‘Now,’ said Drew, reaching inside his jacket. ‘I have a present for you.’

  ‘A present?’ she asked. How long had it been since she’d had a present which wasn’t a wonky handmade card from one of the children?

  ‘A wedding present,’ he said, sliding the envelope across the table.

  ‘But we’re not technically married yet.’

  ‘Does that mean you don’t want to open it?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ She slid her finger under the flap of the envelope and pulled out a sheaf of papers. The first page read, in bold capitals, ‘THURSDAY HOUSE’. It was some kind of legal document.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked Drew.

  ‘Keep going,’ he said.

  The second page was stiff photographic paper, and on it was a picture of a house. A perfect yellow stone house, square and symmetrical, with purple wisteria growing up the outside and a pale green front door. It sat in a wide gravel drive, surrounded by tall trees and green fields.

  ‘It’s a house?’

  ‘It’s our house,’ said Drew.