‘… and my gran, God bless her, reads a romance novel a day, and still finds time to clean her house from top to bottom,’ Harry was saying and Verity was forced to turn her attention back to him. ‘Particularly loves a saga, she does.’
‘Oh, don’t we all? You should bring her to the shop,’ Verity said vaguely. ‘We have a tearoom too. Very good cake. Talking of which, I really need to take a picture of the cake for my sister. Will you excuse me?’
It wasn’t the most skilled of exits but Verity didn’t care. She did take a couple of shots of the cake, a pristine white, three-tiered creation adorned with some very tasteful, piped trailing vines, and then scurried outside to the little terrace where they’d had drinks before.
It was deserted now apart from a couple of defiant smokers. Verity sat down on a bench and took a couple of calming breaths. What would Elizabeth Bennet do? She would seek the advice of her sister, Jane. Obviously.
Oh, how Verity longed for the quiet counsel of a Jane Bennet but Merry would have to do.
Such was the severity of the situation that Merry listened mostly without comment as Verity hit her with the highlights. ‘Can I leave, do you think?’ she asked after she’d finished describing her epiphany about Johnny’s love life. ‘I took my bag out with me and I could just run through the park and be on the tube before anyone even noticed I was gone.’
‘Very, you absolutely can’t. You’re at a fancy London wedding. Your bum on a chair probably cost the bride and groom a hundred quid.’
‘I could PayPal them the money,’ Verity said a little desperately. ‘It’s just this whole situation is unbearable. I’m with a man who wants to be with another woman …’
‘Yeah, but you knew that was the deal with Johnny,’ Merry pointed out. She was being very calm and reasonable about Verity’s predicament, which wasn’t the comfort that it should have been. ‘Anyway, she sounds vile.’
‘Ugh! She is,’ Verity muttered. ‘If I stay for much longer then I won’t even like Johnny any more because how can I like someone who has such terrible taste when it comes to women?’
‘I’m very much enjoying you having mean thoughts like the rest of us,’ Merry said gleefully. Then she became more serious. ‘Well, if you really want my advice …’
‘I do!’
‘You’re just going to have to get drunk, Very.’ Merry’s tone was resolute. Also, it was her answer to everything. ‘Nobody could be expected to go through what you’re going through sober.’
So, Verity got drunk. Not drunk enough to lose her inhibitions because there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world for that to happen, but drunk enough that she allowed herself to be pulled into the little group of women who were dancing around their clutch bags to ‘Islands in the Stream’.
She tried to keep her back to the table where Marissa and Johnny were still deep in conversation. They were the last two left, everyone else having dispersed to dance or loiter purposefully near the cheese station that was being set up, seated close enough that their knees were almost touching, both of them leaning into each other.
Not that Verity was staring, but Wallis kept grabbing her hands and whirling her around so it was very hard not to see Johnny and Marissa’s little tête-à-tête from every angle.
It was actually a relief when the music changed to something a little slower and Harry tapped Verity on the shoulder. ‘Do you think Johnny will mind if I steal a dance?’ he asked.
‘I think I’m all danced out.’ Dancing amid a gaggle of women was one thing, dancing with one other person, a man, whom she hardly knew was like asking her if she fancied walking barefoot over hot coals. Verity tried to smile, but couldn’t quite pull it off. ‘Actually, I was going to get a drink. Dancing to Beyoncé is quite thirsty work.’
‘I know what you mean, I’m always parched after I’ve done the Single Ladies routine,’ Harry said with a grin and Verity was grinning too as she let Harry lead her off the dancefloor and towards the bar.
It probably wasn’t a good idea to keep guzzling champagne like it was fizzy pop, so Verity settled for a ginger ale with a lot of ice and she and Harry hoisted themselves up on a couple of stools, so they could survey the room.
All the usual suspects were in attendance. The dad dancers. The small children high on sugar, up way past their bedtime, running around and shrieking. Women easing off high heels as they caught up with old friends and then there was Johnny and Marissa.
It was just the two of them, deep in conversation, with eyes only for each other, as if there was no one else in the room.
What a mess it was. Verity sighed at the exact same time that Harry sighed too. She turned to him in surprise. Did he know? Oh God, should she tell him? Although it was obvious to anyone with a working pair of eyes what was going on.
‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Harry suddenly said. He gestured at his wife and his best friend. ‘This always happens.’
‘Always?’ Verity asked helplessly, because she was in way over her head.
‘Yeah, ’fraid so. They both have a bit too much to drink and they moon over each other like Romeo and Juliet. It’s nothing. Honestly.’
What a lot of people seemed to forget was that Romeo and Juliet both ended up dead. Again, Verity was in an agony of indecision, not knowing how much Harry knew. For example, did he know about the phone calls, the endless text messages? ‘Is it really nothing, do you think?’
‘Nothing, but a lot of texting and hot air most of the time,’ Harry said, which answered some of Verity’s immediate concerns. ‘Don’t let this put you off Johnny. When he’s not pining over my wife, he’s a good guy. One of the best. So, if you two were getting serious … Is it serious?’ He sounded hopeful.
Verity hated to be the bearer of bad tidings. ‘We’re only friends. Friends who see each other.’ She pointed her index and middle fingers at her eyes and then at Johnny. She really had had quite a lot to drink. ‘Just seeing. That’s all.’
‘That’s a shame,’ Harry said heavily, as if he’d half hoped that Verity might be the answer to all his marital woes. ‘He really does deserve a woman who will make him happy.’ Once more, they both glanced over to the table where Johnny now looked as if he were pleading with Marissa. His hands were spread wide in supplication, he was talking urgently while she shook her head at what he was saying. ‘Whereas, those two wouldn’t make each other happy. Not for one single day. They never did, not even when they were dating.’
Harry shifted around so he no longer had to look at the source of his frustration. Verity was only too happy to shift with him; she also could hardly bear to look at Johnny and Marissa’s cosy huddle for a moment longer.
‘Why do you put up with it?’ she asked, because Harry didn’t seem at all like the sort of man who would tolerate the texting, the mooning, another man infatuated with his wife.
‘Because I love her,’ Harry said immediately as if he didn’t even have to think about it. ‘And believe it or not, she loves me too. Look, are you sure that you and Johnny couldn’t make a go of things?’
‘I already told you …’ Verity shook her head. ‘It’s not like that.’
‘How could it be when he’s so convinced that he’s still in love with Marissa?’ Harry shot a desperate look back at their table. ‘Not without encouragement either, poor sod. She loves the attention, the drama, I’m not really a big one for drama, so Rissa has to find it where she can, but more than that she feels guilty. I feel guilty too. I hated myself for what we did to Johnny. It’s why I haven’t shut it down. Shut him down …’
Verity clamped her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t need to hear this,’ she squeaked. ‘It’s none of my business.’ Then again, it kind of was her business a little bit. ‘When you say that you feel guilty …’ It was hard to think with so much champagne and emotion clouding her brain. What had Johnny said about his one true love’s husband? That he was the rebound guy. ‘Because you swooped in and … you … when they’d …’
‘I�
��m the bastard who stole his best friend’s girl, right after his mother had died too just to really pile on the hurt,’ Harry said. His lips twisted wryly. ‘It always sounds so awful when I have to say it out loud but, in my defence, it wasn’t quite like that.’
‘Although it was a lot like that,’ Johnny said from right behind Verity.
Verity jumped and she jumped again when Johnny’s hands came to rest on her waist when there was no need for a boyfriendly gesture at this particular moment.
‘You’d split up! And it wasn’t like all the other times that you’d split up. You left the country,’ Harry said without any heat but with a lot of weariness as if this was a well-trodden path that they’d both been down many times before.
‘Yes, because, as you’ve just pointed out, my mother had just died,’ Johnny said waspishly as if, unlike Harry, he still wasn’t over all the whys and wherefores of his best friend and his girlfriend getting married behind his back, even though it had been ten years ago. ‘I’m not going to apologise for daring to spend twenty minutes chatting with Rissa. We have a friendship, a relationship, that goes back years and is nothing to do with you, Harry. You don’t own her.’
‘That’s right,’ Harry agreed, but his weariness was gone and his temper was simmering now. Verity could see it in the flash of his eyes, the tightening of his jaw. ‘She’s a free woman. She can do what she likes and yet after all this time the one thing she doesn’t want to do is you, mate. Funny that, isn’t it?’
Verity felt like a pallid slice of luncheon meat trapped between two slices of dense bread.
‘Trust you to reduce things down to their lowest common denominator.’ Verity had never heard that sniping tone from Johnny before and she didn’t much like it. ‘Not everything is about se—’
‘Enough!’ she said sharply. ‘That’s quite enough from both of you. You,’ she pointed at Harry. ‘Go and find your wife and you,’ she wriggled to get Johnny’s hands off her, then wriggled again so she could swivel round on the stool to glare face-on at a flushed Johnny. ‘You’re staying here with me.’
Harry gave her a mock salute and strutted off and Johnny, at least, had the grace to look thoroughly discomfited.
‘You can’t even begin to understand the complexities of it all,’ Johnny said dully. ‘So there’s no point in lecturing me about the errors of my ways. There’s nothing you can say that I haven’t already heard before, usually from the voice of my conscience.’
‘No lectures,’ Verity promised, because really? Where to even start? ‘But I’d like to understand. Please.’
Johnny gave Verity a long, hard stare and she must have passed muster because then he nodded.
‘All right then,’ he said and sat down on the stool that Harry had just vacated. ‘If you’re sitting comfortably, then I’ll begin.’
Once upon a time, some seventeen years ago, Johnny had met Marissa on his first day at Cambridge. Laden down with boxes, he’d been coming up a narrow twisty flight of stairs in one of the colleges as Marissa had run down them. They’d collided. Johnny’s boxes and their contents had gone flying and, as they both bent to retrieve a copy of A World History of Architecture, they’d banged their heads and seen stars.
Fell in love at first sight, Johnny said, just like his father and mother had on their very first day at Cambridge, though to Verity it sounded a lot like Johnny and Marissa hadn’t so much fallen in love as experienced a mild concussion.
The next three years at Cambridge had been a giddy, loved-up montage of punting on the Cam, riding bicycles everywhere together, a tiny flat that overlooked the river, weekends in London with Johnny’s parents who had both adored Marissa, and also regular ferocious rows that led to them breaking up, realising that they couldn’t live without each other and promptly getting back together.
‘Because love isn’t neat and tidy. It’s messy, painful, real,’ Johnny said and actually he and Nina had far more in common than Verity had imagined because she was also a big fan of china-smashing fights and subsequent declarations of love.
After they’d graduated from Cambridge, Johnny still had another four years of study before he qualified as an architect. He and Marissa moved into another tiny flat, this time in Ladbroke Grove, and continued being giddy and loved-up, interspersed with the rowing and the parting and the getting back togethering.
In all this time, Harry was there too. Happy to be a third wheel or, if he was dating too, to make up a foursome. Not that any of his girlfriends lasted long and when Johnny and Marissa were on a break, he’d tell Johnny that he was being a bloody fool and that if he didn’t come to his senses quickly some other man would come along and snap Marissa up.
And then in the final year of his postgraduate study Johnny’s mother, Lucinda, had been diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, which had progressed to stage four faster than anyone thought possible. Johnny had been all ready to drop everything; his work, his exams, but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Marissa was an angel,’ Johnny remembered, his voice hoarse like it still hurt to talk about it. ‘She’d often sit with my mother as she had her chemotherapy and later, when she’d stopped treatment and was at home, Marissa would drop by of an evening. My mother, my father too, they liked that Marissa and I had fallen in love just like they had, in the same place too.’
‘It is romantic, the similarities …’ Verity murmured, because it was.
‘I asked her to marry me, you know,’ Johnny said, his arms braced, his head back as if he was confessing to the fibre-optic stars twinkling above them on a black velvet background. ‘She said yes so at least my mother knew before she died that she didn’t have to worry on that score. I’d found someone who I loved, who loved me. At least she had that.’
‘I am sorry,’ Verity whispered, reaching out to curl her fingers around Johnny’s rigid wrist. It was a paltry attempt at comfort but she didn’t know what else to do, what else to say.
‘It’s not your fault, Very.’ Johnny glanced over at her with a small, sad smile. ‘What happened next was entirely my fault. Marissa wanted to get married straight away, said that it was what my mother would have wanted, but it was too soon. My dad was devastated, in so much pain, and it didn’t seem right to snatch at happiness and to skip over the sadness we all felt.
‘We had a fight. It was what Marissa and I did. Fought. Made up. But the loss of her on top of everything and being in London …’ He shook his head. ‘Memories of my mother everywhere and Dad and I needed to take some time out, some time away. It was a year or so after Hurricane Katrina and we decided to go to New Orleans, offer our services for people who really had lost everything. To build houses and make something good happen and while I was gone …’ He shook his head again. ‘Well, you can fill in the blanks yourself.’
Verity really couldn’t. Because Harry would have it that he and Marissa hadn’t been able to help themselves when they’d fallen madly in love. Whereas Johnny believed that Marissa had married Harry in a fit of pique and that her love for Johnny hadn’t changed, was still absolute. The truth was probably somewhere in the middle and might only be found by sitting down with the person right in the centre of it all, Marissa, and asking what her hot take on it was. Which was never going to happen, not in this lifetime. Besides, even though she’d only known Marissa a couple of hours, Verity felt sure the other woman was an unreliable witness.
Though perhaps she’d got Marissa wrong. Perhaps she really was a wonderful person and had no idea that Verity was a fake girlfriend. If the man who’d been in love with you for the last seventeen years suddenly rocked up with a new girl in tow, then that was bound to be a shock. Johnny had been in love with Marissa for so long that it had to be for a good reason and that reason couldn’t be that Marissa was a humungous bitch.
‘I’m sorry,’ Verity said again. Those two words were all she could say.
‘I have tried not to be in love with Marissa,’ Johnny offered. ‘I was seeing a woman a few years ago, another architect, I w
as even starting to think that we could be something but I was just fooling myself. When my father fell in love with my mother, that was it. His heart was taken. He hasn’t looked at another woman in the ten years since she’s been gone. Wouldn’t want to because nobody could measure up. And I am my father’s son; I fell in love with Marissa all those years ago and no other woman can take her place.’
There was so much Verity wanted to say but as a fake girlfriend, a casual observer, it wasn’t her place. So she simply said, ‘It looks like they’re about to cut the cake.’
As she followed Johnny back to their table, his shoulders slumped, his head down, all Verity could think was what a terrible waste of such a good man.
15
‘There are very few who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.’
It was midway through July and the first week of the school holidays. Verity had predicted that both shop and tearoom would be heaving with mothers and grandmothers and godmothers on a hard-earned break from dragging youngsters around the British Museum, but she’d been very wrong.
Instead, the heavens had decided to open, the rain poured down and, apart from the most dedicated of romance readers, the shop stayed largely empty.
‘As long as it doesn’t rain for ever and ever, this is actually quite nice,’ Posy admitted as she, Verity, Nina and Tom stretched out on the three sofas in the main room to have their mid-morning tea break. ‘Just like old times, isn’t it?’
‘Ah yes, those old times when we had no customers,’ Tom said, hands behind his head, legs stretched out in front of him. ‘Now I’m expected to work all day. Not that I mind,’ he added hastily.
‘I like it when it’s busy, the day goes so much quicker,’ Nina said, as she snagged another piece of shortbread from the plate Mattie had brought in with their tea and coffee. She’d forbidden them from ever again opening a jar of instant coffee or box of teabags in her presence. ‘Although we hardly ever get any men coming into the shop these days.’
True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 15