Summer at 23 the Strand

by Linda Mitchelmore

  ‘No, it’s unlucky for the groom to see his bride’s dress before the big day. You said so yourself.’

  And there came that stomach-churning thought again – what if their relationship went wrong once they were married?

  ‘We don’t have to do this,’ Ed said. ‘If you’d rather not.’

  Margy flinched. What was Ed implying?

  ‘Are you saying you’d rather not?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. I thought all my birthdays and Christmases had come at once when you asked me to marry you!’

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’ Margy said.

  ‘And what did I say?’

  ‘You said “yes” so loudly I think they heard you three streets away.’

  ‘There then, that was your answer and it still is.’

  Ed got up and went to the bar, coming back with a glass of Prosecco for Margy and the menu.

  Margy took the glass from him and sipped cautiously. The bubbles always went up her nose and now was no different. It made her laugh as it always did.

  ‘That’s better,’ Ed said.

  ‘Yes, but I’ve been thinking. The trouble with lies is they’re self-perpetuating. You tell one little one and then you have to add a little bit to it, and then it becomes a bigger lie. You have to remember what you’ve said and what places and dates and things you gave to cover your traces.’ Margy took another sip.

  ‘And that’s why I’ve never bothered to have an affair,’ Ed said. He leaned over and kissed Margy on the cheek. ‘Not clever enough to keep up the subterfuge.’

  ‘Is that a backhanded compliment to me?’ Margy said. She picked up the menu.

  ‘No, it’s a compliment. What was it Paul Newman said? He didn’t go out for hotdogs when he had a decent roast dinner at home?’

  ‘It was going out for burgers because he had steak at home.’

  ‘Same thing,’ Ed said. ‘To me you’re the full Sunday lunch with all the trimmings.’

  ‘Oh, Ed,’ Margy laughed. ‘You say the nicest things!’

  ‘I’m still not sure we’re doing the right thing,’ Margy said when she and Ed were back at 23 The Strand.

  She’d bought the dress she’d admired in Susie’s, and with the nude heels it was perfect.

  ‘What? Eating fish and chips out of the wrappings?’

  Ed had suggested he run up Seaway Road to a fish and chip shop he’d noticed. It wouldn’t take him five minutes, he’d said. But it had taken a lot longer than that because there’d been a long queue when he got there.

  ‘Worth the wait though,’ Ed went on. ‘These are the best fish and chips south of Leeds.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the fish and chips,’ Margy said. ‘I mean this secret wedding thing.’

  ‘Yes, well, some secrets are best kept as just that – secrets.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Margy asked. Ed had a funny look about him, like his mind was squirming.

  ‘I’ve got one. A secret.’

  Oh gawd. Was he about to tell her he’d been married when they had their faux-wedding photo taken and that his wife was still alive? Margy had just put a chip in her mouth and was having trouble swallowing it. She reached for her glass of water.

  ‘Do I need to know?’

  ‘Probably not. But I need to tell.’

  Ed dipped a chip in the polystyrene pot of tomato ketchup that had come with the fish and chips and licked off the scarlet sauce, very slowly, as though he was buying himself time before divulging what he was going to. Margy knew him well enough to know he would do that.

  ‘You’d better tell then,’ Margy said, now she’d swallowed back the chip with half a glass of water.

  ‘When we first met, you and me, I was seeing someone. I kept on seeing her as well for a few weeks.’

  ‘Two-timing? Did you? You never said.’

  ‘’Course not. What bloke does? I was sort of hedging my bets.’

  ‘Thanks for the compliment, not!’ Margy said. She knew she would have little streaks of pink running up the sides of her neck – that always happened in an embarrassing situation and this one was up there with the biggest of them. ‘Who was going to be the better catch? Her or me? Is that what you’re saying?’ Margy felt a bit sick in the stomach now. ‘Do I know her?’

  ‘Did,’ Ed said. ‘Sally Stokes.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Margy said. ‘Excuse my French.’

  She and Sally Stokes had been through junior school together and then through secondary school. They’d been in the same group of friends although never best friends. Margy’s brain was peeling back the years now. When had she and Sally stopped being in the same space at the same time? About the time she’d met Ed, she was sure of that now.

  ‘I’d only been seeing her for about a month when I met you. Once I’d met you I needed to let her down slowly.’

  ‘And that excuses any two-timing, does it?’

  Margy wrapped what was left of her fish and chips in the paper and threw them in the wastepaper bin. Her appetite had well and truly gone now. There were questions she badly needed to ask. Except she didn’t know she wanted the answers.

  ‘I was young. We were young. We knew nothing, did we, even though we thought we did?’

  Ed carried on eating his fish and chips as though all he’d said was what a lovely day it was and did Margy fancy a stroll on the beach later. It was all off his chest at last and he felt better now.

  Margy had other ideas.

  ‘One question,’ Margy said. ‘Did you “marry me” – in inverted commas – because you got me in the family way?’

  ‘You daft apeth. What a question!’

  ‘That hardly answers it but I’ve got another one – did you get Sally Stokes in the family way as well? I heard she’d had a baby. Not married. Went for adoption.’

  ‘So she might have done,’ Ed said, ‘but she didn’t get it from me. We never got past the holding hands and kissing in the back row of the Roxy stage. And besides, I never felt for her like I did for you. We slept together on our second date, didn’t we, you and me?’

  ‘Third,’ Margy said.

  ‘Third then. Not that Sally didn’t try and persuade me otherwise, but I knew she wasn’t who I wanted to be with long-term. Sleeping with someone before marriage wasn’t so easy to organise back then.’

  ‘Not that we got any sleep on that third date,’ Margy said. She’d taken in everything Ed had said, and the thought that she’d been the one he’d wanted to be with long-term was barely sustaining her now she’d been knocked off an even keel a bit with his revelation. Right at that moment she didn’t mind if she never heard the name Sally Stokes ever again. ‘And talking of sleep, I’m off to bed. It’s been a long day. I’ve spent a lot of money on clothes, and shoes, and a bag, and I’m not sure I’ll be getting any use out of any of them now. Sally Stokes! I mean, it’s fine you were seeing her before you met me, but to carry on…’

  ‘Shut up, love, and give us a kiss,’ Ed said.

  Ed always said that if they had a minor spat about something and it always made her laugh and sometimes she gave him a kiss and sometimes she didn’t, saying ‘Oh, you!’ as they let the argument drop. But this was hardly minor, was it? She had to know he really wanted to marry her, and not just because he was righting a wrong from the past.

  ‘Not right at the moment. Goodnight.’

  Margy slept fitfully. She pretended to be asleep when Ed came to bed and when he put an arm across her back as he always did before going to sleep she rolled over and away from him. She lay there for a long time after he’d gone to sleep listening to the tenor of his breathing and the little snuffles he made. It had been a shock hearing he’d two-timed her with Sally Stokes. She liked that he’d been totally honest about his motives, in a way, and she believed him when he said he and Sally had never had sex, but there was still that niggle in the back of her mind now that he’d, perhaps, been trapped by her own pregnancy. Their pregnancy. Didn’t everyone these days say, ‘We’re having a
baby, and not I’m having a baby?’ Had they been living a lie, the both of them, for years?

  Margy eventually went to sleep just as the sky began to lighten.

  ‘Wakey wakey, sleepy-head.’ Ed’s voice penetrated the fug in Margy’s brain. ‘Coffee just the way you like it, strong with hot milk and one sugar. Toast just the way you like it, white bread an inch thick with lashings of butter and a scraping of marmalade.’

  Margy hauled herself to a sitting position as Ed placed a tray with her breakfast on it on the bed beside her.

  Ed was always cheerful in the mornings – sometimes irritatingly so, as now. It was as though the awkwardness of the previous evening had never been. For him that was. He’d got all that off his chest and now he was fine. Well, Margy wasn’t.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, picking up the tray and placing it on her lap.

  ‘Anything for…’

  ‘I’ve got another question. In relation to last night’s conversation.’

  ‘I thought you might have,’ Ed said, but he said it with a grin.

  ‘Then you didn’t think wrong. What I want to know, Ed,’ Margy said, ‘is had we got married back then, would you have told me at the time about Sally Stokes?’

  ‘A hypothetical question if ever there was one,’ Ed said, grinning some more. ‘We didn’t get married back then, did we?’

  ‘No. But I knew Sally Stokes had a baby round about the same time I had our Libby and if I’d known you’d been two-timing me with her, if only for a short while, I’d have asked questions. I mean, our girls might have another sibling out there.’

  ‘Margy, for goodness’ sake,’ Ed said. ‘I told you last night the wherewithal for having babies didn’t happen between me and Sally Stokes. You do believe me, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Margy was swift with her reply. She had to be. Ed had never given her reason to disbelieve anything he’d told her before, had he?

  ‘Good. So, unless you’ve had a baby you haven’t told me about, it’s just our three girls against the world.’

  ‘You know I haven’t.’

  ‘And I believe you. Without question.’

  ‘I still don’t know why you told me after all these years. I thought I knew absolutely everything about you.’

  Ed shrugged.

  ‘You do now. That was the last thing. There shouldn’t be any secrets between husband and wife, should there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There you are then. As we’re going to be husband and wife soon I thought it was time to clean the slate, as it were. That was my secret and it was gnawing away inside me, and I needed to tell you. I’m sorry it’s made you feel so bad.’

  ‘I wondered why Sally Stokes ignored me all of a sudden,’ Margy said. ‘I mean she even crossed the road when we almost bumped into one another outside Peter Jones’s one day so she wouldn’t have to speak to me.’ Even now Margy could see the coldness in Sally’s eyes when she’d noticed her coming along, before she’d flicked her gaze away and hurried on.

  ‘There’s nothing I can say to that that will make it any better,’ Ed said.

  ‘No. I think I might have reacted to your, er, um, confession a bit too strongly. Thinking about it now. Sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. Now eat that breakfast before it goes totally cold.’

  ‘And that’s another thing,’ Margy said, picking up a triangle of toast. ‘You don’t often bring me breakfast in bed. Unless I’m ill.’

  ‘Play your cards right,’ Ed said, ‘and you never know what might happen from now on. Once we’re married.’

  And then he winked at Margy and left the room.

  Once we’re married…

  But Margy couldn’t let go of the fact that she and Ed had deceived their girls – and now their grandchildren – all these years. All day she’d fretted and done her level best not to bring up the subject. But it hadn’t been easy. They’d taken the open-top bus to Babbacombe and gone down to Oddicombe Beach on the funicular railway, stopping there for a cream tea in the café on the beach before riding back up again.

  Now they were back in their chalet, a little pink in the cheeks from the sun.

  ‘It’s no good, Ed,’ Margy said. ‘I’ve got to say what’s on my mind.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve…’

  ‘Ed, let me finish. Don’t come chipping in with a funny remark like you usually do. Not that I don’t appreciate your funny remarks.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. You’ve never said.’

  ‘I’m saying now.’ And then before Ed could chip in again she held up a hand to stop him. ‘We should have told the girls when your dad died – he was the last to go, wasn’t he?’ Margy didn’t wait for an answer because none was needed really. ‘We should have got married then and they could all have been bridesmaids. Well, all except Libby who was married by then.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t. D’you remember how surprised Libby was when she told us she was expecting? I think she’d braced herself for the old Spanish Inquisition and “you’re ruining your life having a baby so young”, but we didn’t give her any of that, did we?’

  ‘That’s because we couldn’t. And I’m getting nervous now about what they are going to say. When they find out.’

  ‘Or it could be if they find out. We don’t have to tell them. They’ll be thinking we’re just having a holiday like we do every year. Their minds won’t be full of suspicion.’

  ‘They might be when they see my new frock. And the nude shoes.’

  ‘They don’t have to see any of that either, do they? You could offload it all to a charity shop before we go home or something.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ Margy said. ‘I don’t think I’ll wear a hat. The lady in the dress shop said my hair is too lovely a shade of silver to hide under a hat and had I ever thought of having it much shorter with a few lowlights put in. So I think I will. And I’ve decided to carry just one flower – a deep-pink rose. With the thorns cut off. And maybe a bit of ribbon wound round the stem.’

  ‘So, it’s on then? This wedding?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Phew!’ Ed brushed his forehead with the back of a hand. But he was looking serious.

  ‘What is it, Ed?’ Margy asked. ‘I’ve known you long enough to know there’s something you want to say but don’t know how.’

  ‘Do you now, Watson?’ Ed quipped.

  ‘Elementary,’ Margy quipped back. They were both huge Sherlock Holmes fans. ‘So what’s troubling you?’

  ‘It’s not exactly troubling me,’ Ed said. ‘But now I’ve got it in my head we’re getting married after all these years I think it’s the right thing to be doing and we should have done it years ago.’

  ‘You never asked me,’ Margy said.

  ‘That’s not to say I didn’t think about asking you a million times. You know, when I go a bit quiet like I’m thinking and then you say, “What? Is there something you want to tell me, Ed?”, and I always say no. Well, then.’

  ‘Oh,’ Margy said. So there was the reason for all those little troubled looks over the years.

  ‘I’ve often worried that, should I get some terrible illness or get run over by the number twenty-seven bus or something, no one would fetch you to hold my hand when I’m dying because you’re not my next of kin. What a terrible way that would be for the girls to find out.’

  ‘Well, that’s not going to happen now, is it?’ Margy set about clearing up the plates and crockery from their supper of bread and cheese and pickles. And then a terrible thought struck her, like the onslaught of flu times a million. ‘You haven’t got some terrible illness you haven’t told me about, have you?’

  ‘Do I look like a sick man?’

  ‘No. Thank goodness. Another cup of tea?’

  ‘No, thanks. I fancy an early night though.’ Ed put a little stress on the word ‘early’. Barely there, like the way a butterfly might touch your face as it flies past.

  ‘Early night? It’s not nine o’clock yet. There’s st
ill a bit of daylight left out there.’

  ‘I didn’t mean any old sort of early night. I meant an early night. A nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of early night. Remember those?’

  ‘Fondly,’ Margy said.

  Goodness, it must be all the sea air, she thought, as she reached for Ed’s hand and led him to the bedroom.

  ‘How many texts is that you’ve sent now?’ Margy asked.

  They were into their second week – Margy able to see it as a holiday now, seeing as she had the essentials for their wedding sorted. Well, all except the witnesses, but that could wait. Ed had been receiving and sending texts almost nonstop for almost a few days now. The girls. First Laura, then Libby, and then Louise had texted. And the grandchildren. Marco often texted rather than use voice or say anything when he was at Margy and Ed’s, even when he was in one room and they were in the other. And he had been known to text them when they were all in the same room sometimes. Even Marco could see the funny side of that.

  ‘I dunno. Lost count a bit.’

  Secretly, Margy was hoping Ed had told the girls what they were up to and that they were planning a ‘surprise’ visit for Saturday. Of course she’d look suitably surprised and delighted. She wouldn’t ask Ed if that was what all the texts were about though. It would spoil it.

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘This and that. Louise wants me to build a chicken run when we get back.’

  ‘Chickens? She’s going to keep chickens?’

  ‘Well, I imagine so. I don’t think she’s thinking of keeping a panther in there or anything. Oh…’ Ed put a hand to his ear, making a sort of ear-trumpet shape of it. ‘I can hear motorbikes. Old British ones. Coming down over the hill.’

  ‘Well, there’s a marvel,’ Margy said, laughing. ‘You go deaf as a post when I ask you to put the rubbish out, or clear all your sudokus away, but you can hear British bikes a mile off.’

  And you’re throwing me off the scent about all those texts by changing the subject, aren’t you?

  ‘Vaccinated with a speedo needle, that’s why,’ Ed said. ‘Fancy a walk along the front? Walk off all the fish and chips we’ve been eating since we’ve been here. I mean, you want to get into that dress, don’t you?’