by Jenny Colgan
‘Of course,’ said Chris. ‘If that’s what you want.’
They limped on. Chris didn’t even want to go to the university ball after finals - he thought the whole idea of dressing up in tuxes and pretending to be posh was totally ridiculous. Posy couldn’t see the problem with getting dressed up for just one night, and decided to go with her single girlfriends. She was pleasantly surprised to find just how many people were happy to talk to her and dance with her, along with expressing surprise at seeing her out and about without being half of a couple. As she looked around, she wondered if she should have got out more during her three years, met more interesting people. She was surprised at how many faces she didn’t recognise. Had she and Chris really been guilty of what her mother thought, being too insular and homey; not taking enough advantage of the opportunities? She thought, too, as she saw everyone passing by in their borrowed finery, how grown up they all looked compared with the kids they must have been when they started. She was wearing a pale blue dress she’d found in a vintage shop, nipped in at the waist with a full skirt. It contrasted well with her eyes and she knew it suited her.
At midnight, as the toasts were made, she went out to the balcony of the Corn Exchange, where the ball was held, and leant against the columns, chillier now after the warm late-spring day but still with a hint of blossom in the air. Is this what it would be like, she wondered, facing the future alone?
Being without Chris . . . it would be like doing without one of her arms or legs. They were so used to one another. But did she need a crutch? She couldn’t deny that the thought of heading up to Yorkshire to shear sheep filled her with horror, whereas the idea of heading to London with Carla and a bunch of her friends to start temping and finding something to do in the City - that sounded like fun. Carla thought they should all get a flat together, go out, be like that new Sex and the City show that had started on TV.
But shouldn’t she love Chris enough, she thought, to want to do anything with him? To shear sheep, if that’s what it took?
She took a long sip from her glass of wine and sighed.
‘I didn’t recognise you,’ came the voice behind her. At first Posy didn’t realise it was directed at her, but she gradually became aware she was the only other person on the terrace - and she was cold.
‘Hello?’ she said, whipping round. It was Adam, from her party. He looked . . . well, there were no two ways about it. He was utterly gorgeous. Dark hair, long dark eyelashes over green eyes, high cheekbones. He was wearing a dinner jacket that clearly belonged to him and his tie was artlessly loosened. On purpose, Posy was sure, but the effect was still pretty devastating.
‘I miss the mirrors on the skirt,’ he said. ‘And you’re wearing shoes. Does it feel weird?’
‘What are you doing here, at Cow College?’ she asked him snidely. She hadn’t forgotten his rude comments from the last time they’d met. ‘Bit down at heel for high flyers like yourself, isn’t it?’
‘Carla sent me a ticket,’ he said. ‘Then her brother said if I made her sad he was going to duff me up.’
‘How charming.’
‘Aren’t you cold?’
Posy ignored the obvious goose pimples appearing along her chest and arms.
‘No!’
‘Here, let me give you my jacket.’
‘No, thank you.’
It was too late. Adam had already taken it off. Posy couldn’t help notice how well-defined his muscles were, and how tight and flat his waist. She had always been used to the burly, soft bulk of Chris, had never really known anyone else. Suddenly the thought flashed through her mind of what it might be like to be with someone like Adam - lean, dangerous, smooth.
He was looking at her curiously, holding out his coat. Over his shoulder, in the chandeliered lights of the ballroom, Posy suddenly caught sight of Carla, stumbling around slightly drunkenly and obviously looking for Adam. She felt out of her depth, and a little sick, suddenly, and all she wanted to do was go home.
‘No, thank you. I mean it. I have to go now.’
Chapter Five
Chris is cold.
Comment, Posy: Why are you cold?
Chris: Because it is January.
Direct message:
Hey Chris, That’s not a very helpful response.
Hey! How are you? I’m getting married!
Posy wasn’t sure that worked very well. Maybe a bit bouncy and in your face. It sounded like she’d dashed off to write to him the second she’d got engaged. Which . . . OK, it had been a week. Hmm. She stuck to Hey! How are you? But it did remind her. There was someone else she needed to speak to.
‘What are you so engrossed in?’ Matt came up behind her and nuzzled her neck. She was hoping they’d go out to dinner tonight - she hadn’t had the chance to get anything in - but already he had that yawny look he often got by six o’clock, plus he was wearing his favourite pair of old tracksuit trousers, which had been worn down practically smooth by devoted use. The fact that Matt wore nothing - nothing at all - but sports clothes had slightly confused her at first. He didn’t own a tie, or an overcoat. Or an iron. Or a belt.
‘What about when you have to look smart?’ she’d asked him.
‘Well, then I wear Shred Head,’ he said.
‘That stuff that’s all ripped up?’
‘It’s cool. It’s surf stuff.’
‘So what if you had to . . . I don’t know, meet the Queen?’
‘Oh, the Queen likes me naked.’
‘I do, too,’ Posy had said. ‘Still, though, your wardrobe . . .’
Matt had raised his eyebrows and Posy had dropped her point. It didn’t matter.
Now she closed the computer guiltily. ‘Oh, just messing about on Facebook. Do you want to go out for supper?’
Matt winced. ‘I was helping Mindy McAndrew through army fitness at six-thirty a.m. Must we?’
Posy shook her head. ‘No, sweetie, of course not. What would you like?’
Matt squinted. ‘Can I have four eggs, two chicken breasts, some spinach and a pint of milk?’
When she was fourteen, Posy had taught herself to cook. Her mother was horrified. It was the most rebellious move she could have made.
‘Don’t you realise how long women have been subjugated by the frying pan?’ she had insisted. ‘There’s nothing wrong with crackers and tinned soup.’
Posy had ignored her, concentrating hard on a charity shop copy of Delia Smith. And slowly, surely, she had worked her way up, through omelettes to pies, lasagne, everything comforting and nice to come home to. Her mother usually skipped meals, but she and Fleur ate lamb chops, shepherd’s pie, bolognese and steak and kidney, until they started to fill out and look a little less pinched (their mother called this ‘puppy fat’). She took the habit to university, too, where she fed Chris up on a student diet of chilli, beans, chick peas and sidelined into cakes and pies. It was little wonder they were popular on campus.
Food was home. Matt’s insistence on great pieces of lean protein - days of only fruit or huge steaks - she found slightly confusing and off-putting, as well as impossible to eat.
‘When we’re married,’ she found herself asking shyly as she followed him into the kitchen, ‘do you think we’ll eat normally? As a family?’
Matt glanced at her over the juicer.
‘This is normal, sweetie,’ he said. ‘For, you know, optimum bodily fitness. I wish you’d do it.’
‘If I ate nine eggs and a pint of milk a day you’d have to winch me out of the house,’ she said. ‘It’s all right if you’re doing nine hours of physical exercise. It’s just a bit dull to cook, that’s all.’
‘Darling, I’m not marrying you for your cooking.’
‘Yes, but you should! I worked really hard at it.’
‘OK, well, I’ll make myself some chicken and you whip yourself up something delicious.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Posy.
‘And also . . . my parents want to come down. Well, actually, they
were wondering . . .’
‘What?’
‘If we were going to have an engagement party.’
‘Oh,’ said Posy.
‘Are we?’
‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’
‘Too ashamed to show me off?’
‘No! I was just thinking, though. I’ll probably have to . . .’
‘Tell your mum.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you’re going to tell her at some stage, aren’t you? We’re not going to elope, are we?’
‘Could we?’
‘And break my nice, totally normal mother’s heart?’
Posy sighed. It was telling her mother - and her father, she assumed. Her heart dropped. It was all so complicated. Plus it seemed a little odd. Not that she didn’t love Matt, of course she did. But to announce it to the world, to put up with all the obvious questions about You Know Who and was she sure and was he really a P.E. teacher . . . She didn’t really want a party, to be honest.
‘OK, a party then,’ she said unenthusiastically.
Matt looked perturbed. ‘Is that the sound of you doubting a party?’
‘No, it’s just, it’s a lot to organise, and I’ve got loads on at work—’
‘You’ve got nothing on at work! Come on, I’ve met Gavin, you just sit about all day trying to get people to buy insurance then telling them you won’t clean their carpets after they’ve had a big flood.’
‘That isn’t . . . well . . .’
Matt picked up the phone. ‘Anyway. Don’t worry about the party just now. There’s one thing you really have to do.’
‘Don’t make me.’
‘She’ll find out.’
‘Maybe we could just pretend to be trendily living in sin . . . for, like, for ever?’
‘PHONE!’
‘Uh, Mum?’
‘Call me Jonquil, dear.’
Jonquil sounded distracted.
‘Is this a good time? I can call back later.’
Still behind the juicer, Matt raised his eyebrows at Posy.
‘No, dear, sorry. I’m just rescheduling the paranoid for after the passive-aggressive, but trying to do it in a way he doesn’t feel picked on, and I have a paper I’m delivering to the NPS Women’s Group, then I have that charity commission board I’m already totally late for . . .’
‘I’ll call you back,’ said Posy, flicking Matt the V.
‘Aha! Found it!’ said Jonquil. ‘Now, darling, how about lunch? Give me a chance to catch up on all your news.’
It would do that, Posy thought. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow?’
Her mother laughed. ‘I think I can do Thursday.’
‘Thursday,’ said Posy.
‘Thursday,’ said Matt. ‘And I’m going to speak to a mate about a party.’
‘Oh, you don’t have to . . .’
But he’d already grabbed the phone off her to stop her hogging it.
Chapter Six
Posy is checking she has ironed her blouse for MOTHER INSPECTION.
Comment, Fleur: I bet you don’t tell her.
Comment, Posy: Shut up, Fleur.
Comment, Matt: What Fleur said.
Posy had to admit, when they were out and about, it was quite impressive to see her mother in action. Never the homemaker, she was nonetheless a striking dresser and still looked slender and chic in her sixties, her dark hair a carefully styled helmet, with full make-up and a smart green suit on. She looked like she meant business and always wore heels. Posy felt like her very messy charge when they were out together. Funnily enough Fleur was the one more interested in her appearance than Posy, even if her style - Bohemian and relaxed - made their mother comment that she looked like a life-avoiding woman-child. Posy’s lack of interest in clothes and make-up were dismissed as hiding her psyche from the gaze of the world. A simple trip to Topshop when they were teenagers, Posy sometimes thought, would probably have been enough, but their mother didn’t do high street fashion and insisted on dressing them like miniature adults until they got their own Saturday jobs.
Jonquil still caused heads to turn as she marched into the small Italian trattoria across the road from Posy’s office.
‘So,’ said her mother, after she’d brusquely told the very friendly waiter that she would have a seafood salad, thank you, no dressing, and Posy had ordered linguine alla vongole, garlic bread on the side and a glass of red wine, just to watch her mother’s eyebrows raise. ‘To what do I owe this . . .’ She gestured for the right word.
Posy figured the best thing was just to spit it out. How odd, she mused. When she thought of her friends’ mothers, most of them were desperate to see their daughters married off; hungry for grandchildren with an appetite that bordered on the unseemly; trying not to go too far for fear of having their ears snapped off by their clever, liberated, late-settling offspring, but unable to hide their joy and relief on news of pregnancies, rings, churches and everything else that suggested on some universal scale that the children they had raised had ‘passed’.
Jonquil was not quite like that. In fact, from when she could remember, Posy had heard stories about the horrors and subjugation of marriage, not just Jonquil’s, but every dreadful story she heard from the chamber of horrors that was her mother’s consulting room in the attic. The wife beaters, the husband beaters. The emotional withholders, the compulsive confessors. The cleaners, the messers. The cheaters, the eaters and the just plain miserable. All of them were picked apart as the family of three ate toasted cheese and tomato soup for supper, books propped in front of them. And the cause for half the misery? ‘Never, ever ever make your happiness reliant on another person,’ Jonquil would lecture fiercely to her patients and her daughters. ‘Never. If you live your lives truly, as truly rounded people, that’s enough.’
‘Well,’ said Posy. ‘Matt and I . . .’ She reflected later that many mothers would have leapt out of their chairs the second they’d heard the words ‘Matt and I.’
‘Yes?’ prompted her mother impatiently.
‘Well, he’s asked me to marry him.’
Her mother didn’t say anything, just calmly raised her water glass.
‘And what did you say?’
‘Well, I said yes, of course.’ Posy looked up, hurt. ‘I do love him, Mum.’
‘Of course you do, darling,’ said her mother. ‘But must you marry him?’
Posy bit her lip. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I have a choice. That’s what makes it romantic and special. I am choosing to marry him.’
Her mother heaved a sigh. ‘Well, if you must.’
Their food came. As the waiter laid it out in front of them, Posy tried to swallow back her rising anger.
‘What do you mean, “If I must”? I know your views on marriage, OK? I heard them every night for fifteen years. But can’t you even pretend to be happy for me?’
Her mother blinked. ‘I gave you an honest reaction, darling. Would you expect anything less?’
‘I mean . . . Matt’s a really good man. Loads of women would be delighted to have him as a son-in-law. Loads of women would be really pleased to see their daughter happy.’
Posy realised she was choking up, and didn’t want to give her mother the satisfaction. She took a long slug of the rough red wine and concentrated on her huge bowl of pasta.
Her mother put her hand across the table in a gesture of reconciliation. ‘Posy, I’m sorry. Darling. Of course I want you to be happy. It’s just marriage seems such a complicated way of going about it—’
‘Lots of people like being married. Not everyone’s miserable like the sad acts you treat.’
‘I’ll ignore that,’ said her mother. ‘But, yes, of course Matt is a lovely chap. Not the brightest . . .’
‘Muuuum!’
‘But are you sure . . . the two of you. I mean, are you really compatible? Everything he wears is elasticated.’
‘Just because he doesn’t work in an office, everyone thinks he’s a thicko.’
&
nbsp; ‘Not at all, darling, I think offices are wildly overrated. I just mean . . .’
‘Well, spit it out.’
‘Well, it was terribly sudden after . . .’
Jonquil didn’t say his name. Posy was pleased.
‘I mean, it was quite soon, wasn’t it?’
Posy nodded sullenly.
‘And you haven’t been together for that long now.’
‘Nearly three years.’
‘Yes, well, marriage is a little longer than three years, dear.’
Posy bit her lip.
‘He may be - he is - terribly handsome, but are you sure he’s not just someone you rebounded on to? Who doesn’t ask too many questions, or make life feel too complicated for you?’ She went on. ‘I’ve always wanted to bring you up to soar, to see the world, to ask questions. Not to stay somewhere you don’t want to be in case you get hurt again.’
Posy was shocked. ‘It’s not like that at all.’
Jonquil raised an eyebrow, but Posy held her ground, even though, deep inside, what her mother had said had pierced her to the core. Was it true? Was it because none of her other relationships had gone right that she was clinging to this one, with an uncomplicated man?
‘You’re my eldest daughter, you know. I do love you heart and soul. And I know you, too.’ Her mother gazed at her with the sharp, critical eye Posy knew so well. ‘But if you think this will make you happy, and that you can make Matt happy, then of course, I’ll be delighted.’
‘It will.’
‘Excellent. Waiter! Two glasses of champagne por favor! Mia figlia se sposa!’
The waiters rushed over, delighted and full of congratulations and pleasure. Jonquil was smiling graciously, Posy boiling inside.
‘Mum! Stop showing off!’
‘Jonquil, darling, Jonquil.’
Matt was sorting out sports socks when she got home from work. He had about twenty pairs of white towelling socks. He liked to sort them out all together, matching them up with tiny similarities only he could see. Posy watched him as she opened the door. Was this his idea of a fun way to spend an evening?