by David Lodge
He seemed surprised, and rather disconcerted. “Aren't we quite happy as we are?” he said. “Yes, but we can't go on like this indefinitely,” she said. “I want to have children. That is, I don't positively want them at this moment,” she added scrupulously, “but I know I will eventually, and if you leave it too late there are all kinds of health risks.” “I take your point, Em,” Neville said, “but there's no immediate hurry, is there?” “It takes a long time to organize a wedding these days, especially the kind I want,” she said. “What kind is that?” he asked. “One to remember,” Emma said. “For instance, I want to have the reception at Longstaffe Hall and I happen to know they're booked up for at least a year ahead for summer Saturdays.” Longstaffe Hall was an eighteenth-century country house in the green belt just outside Solihull, converted into a hotel. Neville had dined there with the Dobsons to celebrate Mrs Dobson's birthday, and was conscious of its attractions as a venue. “Does it have to be a Saturday - or in summer?” he said, smiling his engaging smile. “Yes, it does,” Emma said, unsmiling. “In June, before everyone you want to invite starts going on holiday.”
Emma had always promised herself a really memorable wedding, a sumptuous, extravagant, classic wedding, to mark the end of her single state. It would be a kind of reward for all the disciplined hard work that had made her life a success so far, and also a foil to it. She was aware that other people, her family and friends, especially girlfriends, thought of her as too disciplined for her own good, lacking warmth, incapable of spontaneity, tone-deaf to romance. Well, her wedding would show them they were wrong, that she was not indifferent to imagination, emotion, and pleasure. But of course, being Emma, she brought to the preparation for this event the same methodical concentration, the same insistence on controlling every detail, which she had applied in other departments of her life. Outside business hours she made the planning of the wedding her mission, her passion, her all-consuming occupation.
Luckily, due to a cancellation, Longstaffe Hall was available on the last Saturday in June of the following year, a mere nine months away. Emma went with her parents to meet the hotel's Functions Manager and persuaded her father to book the entire place for their exclusive use for one day and night. She took home specimen menus and wine lists and made her choices with Neville, deferring to him only on the matter of drink. They drew up a guest list of a hundred and fifty people, not counting young children. When Frank Dobson made a rough calculation of the cost he was appalled. “This is going to cost a small fortune,” he said to his wife. “Well, she is our only daughter,” Mabel Dobson said, “and you can afford it.” She said “you” rather than “we” because Mr Dobson had been the sole bread-winner in the marriage, Mabel having retired permanently from her occupation as a dentist's receptionist shortly before giving birth to Emma, who was their only child. “To think our wedding only cost five hundred pounds, according to your Dad,” Frank mused. “Even allowing for inflation that's a fraction of what this little affair will run to.” When he proposed to economise by serving sparkling white wine instead of champagne at the beginning of the reception, Emma did something she hadn't done since childhood: she threw a tantrum fit - accused him of being bent on spoiling the most important day of her life by his incredible meanness, in a voice that rose in pitch until it was almost a shriek and dissolved into broken-hearted sobs. It was a performance so convincing and so frightening that Frank Dobson never dared to question any item of expenditure on the wedding from that time onwards.
Emma went on serenely planning the event according to her own standards of perfection, hiring a harpist to provide background music for the reception, and a band for dancing in the evening, retaining the services of a still photographer and a video film maker to record every moment of the day, instructing a florist about the button holes and table decorations that would be required, booking her favourite hairdresser to come to her parental home on the morning of the wedding to style her hair, choosing the design and composing the wording of the invitations, drawing up a list of desired presents to be filed with John Lewis for the convenience of donors, and of course ordering her wedding dress from a specialist shop. It was made of white satin and lace, inspired by Kate Middleton's wedding dress, and required several fittings. When Mrs Dobson saw her in the finished garment, she wept tears of pride and joy. Twin cousins of Emma's agreed to be bridesmaids, very happy to be dressed identically (which was not always the case) and the six-year old son of another relative was to be a page in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, holding up the train of the wedding dress as Emma processed down the aisle of the church. She had a low opinion of weddings in registry offices and other secular buildings. Only a church would provide a proper setting for her marriage, and though neither she nor Neville were actively religious, they had both been baptised into the Church of England. Solihull's fine medieval parish church was available, but there was no parking space anywhere near it and the guests would have to drive or be driven after the service to Longstaffe Hall. There was a little old church in the village of Longstaffe which would be perfect, and Emma persuaded its initially hesitant vicar to marry them there on the spurious grounds that she and Neville intended to look for a house in the area in due course. This was the item on her check list over which Emma had least control, and it was a great satisfaction to her when she placed a tick beside it. Everything was going according to plan.
All this time Neville was content to leave the preparations for the wedding to Emma, and she of course was happy to shoulder the responsibility. He gave his approval to the various decisions she reported to him - rather distractedly, because he was very busy at work and focussed on an imminent trip to Dubai where he had a complex audit to carry out. There was a little contretemps when he resisted her suggestion that he should wear morning dress for the wedding, but she managed to talk him into it. Their first serious disagreement was provoked by her proposal that they should abstain from sex until the honeymoon, which was to be a ten-day holiday in the Maldives.
“What on earth for?” he said, staring.
“Well, I've been thinking,” she said. “I've been thinking it would make the whole thing more meaningful - and more exciting. I mean a honeymoon must feel like just another foreign holiday if you've been having sex as usual right up to the wedding day. If we gave it up now, from now till our wedding night -”
“That's nearly three months off!” Neville exclaimed.
“But imagine how much we'd be looking forward to it, as the time approached,” Emma urged. “Dreaming of it, longing for it. It would be a real honeymoon.”
“What am I supposed to do in the meantime - wank?”
“Don't be disgusting,” Emma said.
“It's all very well for you,” he grumbled. “But a man needs physical relief, especially after working hard all day - or all week. Weekends wouldn't be the same without sex.”
“Just make an effort to do without for a while, pet, for my sake. You won't regret it.” She gave him a look suggestive of unbridled licence to come if he agreed. There were certain variations of the sexual act which Emma had so far declined to perform when Neville proposed them, and she could see he was intrigued by the implied bargain.
“Well, I'll see,” he said. “I'll see how it goes.”
Two weeks later, just before Neville was due to go to Dubai, Emma was sent on a weekend course at a hotel in the country near Bristol, convening on Friday and ending on Monday, but on Saturday morning a fire broke out in the kitchen, which was so badly damaged that the course was cancelled, and they dispersed at midday. On the way back to Birmingham she tried to call Neville, but his mobile was switched off. She let herself into the flat and called out “Neville! It's me,” but there was no answer. When she entered the living room the first things that caught her eye were a blouse and brassiere, not her own, on the floor beside the sofa. She stood stock still and stared at them, hyperventilating.
Neville, wearing a bathrobe, appeared at the door which led to the bedroom
and closed it behind him. “Hallo, Em,” he said, with a sickly attempt at his famous smile. “What happened to the course?”
“You've got a woman in there,” she said.
He sighed and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Yes.”
“Get her out.”
“She's dressing.”
“She'll need those, won't she?” Emma nodded contemptuously at the discarded blouse and brassiere.
At this point the door opened again and a young woman with tousled shoulder-length hair entered the room. She wore jeans and had covered her buxom torso with a jacket. “Hallo,” she said to Emma. “This is embarrassing isn't it?”
“Get out of my house,” Emma said.
“Absolutely,” said the woman, as she scooped her clothes from the floor. “I would feel the same.” Emma had to admit to herself later that the slag showed considerable poise in the circumstances.
“Who is she?” Emma asked when the woman had gone.
“Someone from work.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“It hasn't been going on. This was the first time. We had a bit of a snog at the staff Christmas party, but nothing else. We bumped into each other this morning at Starbucks….got talking and moved on to Strada for lunch, and a bottle of wine. She said she'd like to see the flat because she was thinking of getting one in this area herself, so I asked her up. One thing led to another…”
“I can't believe you could do such a thing,” Emma said furiously. “Just ten weeks before we were supposed to get married.”
“But that's just it, Em,” he said. “If you hadn't concocted that stupid ban on sex before the wedding, this would never have happened.” He registered belatedly the phrasing of her last remark. “What d'you mean, 'were supposed to get married.'?”
“You don't think I would marry you now, do you?”
“What, just because of a single shag?”
“But in my own flat! In my own bed! How could you?”
“I'm sorry, Em,” he said, and moved towards her with his arms wide.
She shrank back. “Don't touch me! Go away. Leave me alone. I have to think.”
Neville put on some clothes and slunk out of the flat, and Emma sat down to think. Neville's infidelity was a great shock. He had fallen irrecoverably from grace in her regard, and she would never be able to trust him again. How could she possibly go through with the wedding? But then, she reflected, how could she not? How could she bring herself to tell her parents, her relatives and friends, that the wedding was cancelled, the engagement was broken, and for the most sordid and humiliating of reasons. Her parents would be aghast, her wider family shocked and scandalised, her friends and colleagues variously pitying, excited, amused and in some cases, which she could name, secretly gleeful when they heard the news. Going to work would be a daily ordeal instead of the pleasure it had always been. Then the arrangements for the wedding were so advanced, due to her own diligence, that it would be fiendishly difficult and hideously expensive to dismantle them. Her father had already paid a substantial non-returnable deposit on the cost of the reception and -- it came back to her with a pang - she had laughed aside the idea of insuring against cancellation when the Functions Manager suggested it. The wedding dress could not be cancelled, and must be paid for, but she would never wear it, for one thing was certain: if she abandoned this wedding, she would never have another one like it. If she were to marry someone else at some time in the future, it would have to be a quiet, unostentatious affair that would not revive memories of this nuptial debacle or require another lavish outlay of cash by her father.
Perhaps, Emma thought, she could find it in her heart to forgive Neville.
He returned late in the evening, looking, she was glad to note, suitably chastened, even grim, and sat down facing her. She made a prepared speech about how much he had hurt her, but perhaps the experience could be turned into something positive. It was better that something like this should happen before marriage rather than after, because it had brought into the open the issue of fidelity, which was for her absolutely essential. She knew he believed men had different needs and urges from women, but he was wrong. At this point she made a personal confession. “You remember that alumni reunion at Bath I went to last summer? I met Tom, a fella I used to go out with in my second year, in fact he was the first boy I slept with. He was doing computer science. We were very close, but then I did my year abroad in France and after a while he wrote to say he was seeing someone else. When I came back for my final year he'd graduated and left the uni. Well at the reunion we caught sight of each other at the drinks reception at the same moment, it was like a scene in a film, you know, across a crowded room, we were transfixed, spent the whole evening together, sat in a corner of the bar, and hardly spoke to anyone else. Tom was still single, just getting over a relationship that didn't work out, he told me, and I could see he was hoping to get it on with me that night, joking that the beds in the student accommodation we'd been given were much more comfortable than in our day, and as for me, I fancied him rotten, but at the end of the evening I just gave him a kiss and a hug and went to my room. Because of us.”
Neville received this anecdote impassively. Slightly disappointed, Emma wound up her speech: having thought about yesterday's episode very carefully she had decided that if he promised that nothing like it would ever happen again, she would forgive him, and go ahead with the wedding.
Neville took some time to reply. Then he cleared his throat and said. “Well, I've been thinking too, Em, and I've decided it won't work.”
“What won't work?”
“Our getting married.”
“What do you mean?” A qualm of uncomprehending dismay coursed through her. “Why did you ask me to marry you, then?”
“I didn't,” he said. “You told me that we were going to get married, and I agreed. And that's what's wrong with our relationship in a nutshell.”
A long argument followed. Emma tried to frighten him, as she had frightened herself, by listing the consequences of cancelling the wedding, but failed. There would be a fuss, he said, but it would soon be over. “Of course it doesn't matter so much to you as it does to me,” she said bitterly, “nor would it cost your family a penny.” “Better a broken engagement than a broken marriage,” he said sententiously. She changed to a conciliatory tack, admitted that she was over-assertive and promised to be more relaxed and accommodating in future; she recalled good times they had enjoyed together which showed how admirably suited to each other they were; she tried tears. Neville remained unmoved. He slept on the sofa that night, while Emma sought oblivion in the bedroom with Temazepam.
The atmosphere in the flat on Sunday morning was frigid. Neville was due to fly to Dubai next day, and would be away for a week. “I won't be able to move my stuff out until I get back,” he said. “Don't say anything about this to your parents, or anybody else, until then,” Emma said. “I'm not going to change my mind while I'm away, Em,” he said, “if that's what you're hoping.” “I'm not,” she said. “I wouldn't marry you now if you got down on your knees and begged me. But there's going to be a hell of a row and I'm damned if I'm going to face it on my own.” “Fair enough,” he said, and began packing a suitcase.
Emma in fact had another motive for requesting his silence. As she lay awake in the early morning after the effect of the Temazepam had worn off, brooding on the imminent implosion of her perfect wedding, a wild and outrageous idea had occurred to her. So she wasn't going to marry Neville in June - good riddance to him, now she had seen how little he valued her qualities - but suppose she married someone else? Suppose she married Tom?
She hadn't been entirely candid in relating the story of her reunion with Tom. As they shared a bottle of wine in a corner of the bar after dinner, he had told her how wonderful she looked, how often he thought of her and the times they had together as students, what a pity it was that her year abroad had separated them when he was too young and immat
ure to realise that she was exceptional, a girl worth waiting for and keeping faith with. “There've been other women in my life since then, Emma, but no-one like you,” he said. When she told him she was engaged to be married he looked genuinely disconsolate. “Well, he's a lucky man,” he said with a sigh. As for herself, the meeting revived all the personal charm and intense physical attraction Tom had possessed for her in youth, and the evening ended not with a single kiss and a hug, but a prolonged snog on the bed in his room, to which he invited her for a nightcap from a flask of whisky he had there. She managed to part from him with honour technically intact, but with disordered clothing and emotions, and woke next morning somewhat shocked in retrospect by her own behaviour but relieved that nothing more serious had happened. When they said a restrained public goodbye after breakfast in the refectory he slipped a business card into her hand. “Thomas Radcliffe, B.Sc., M.Sc., Systems Consultant,” it stated, with a London address and other contact details, and on the reverse side there was a handwritten message: “Let me know if there's ever anything I can do for you. Tom.” Well, now there was something he could do for her.
Emma found Tom's card in the wallet where she kept business cards and emailed him to say that her engagement had been broken off, that she was feeling lonely, and would be glad to see him again. He responded immediately: “When? Where?” In a rapid exchange of emails it was agreed that he would come to Birmingham the next day and take her to dinner in one of the city's Michelin-starred restaurants. He told her he had booked a room for the night at the Hyatt hotel, but she changed the linen on her bed that morning in case an alternative scenario developed.