‘Give me that,’ Merry said, taking custody of the corn doll. ‘Ladies, the fifties dress with the defined waist like we talked about months ago. All those in favour, raise your right hands!’
Everyone’s right hand shot up, except Con’s because her hand was still in her hair and she was moaning like she was in pain. Verity sincerely hoped that she wasn’t so ineffective on the farm when it came to calving season or ordering animal feed.
Merry ignored her eldest sister’s inner torment. ‘If we carry on like this, we’ll be done in no time at all. Now we’ve eased ourselves in gently, let’s get these signature colours locked down once and for all.’
Just over an hour later, though Verity could scarcely believe it, the wedding planning was all but done. From bouquets to menus, invitations to order of service, all over bar the shouting. Mostly Con’s shouting. She’d got so into the spirit of quickfire decision making that she’d begun to shout out her preferences on everything from wedding cake ingredients to footwear for the bridesmaids before anyone else could venture an opinion.
The corn dolly was in shreds. It had been torn from limb to limb as the Love sisters wrestled it out of each other’s hands and Verity felt as if she were in shreds too. She sat on the sofa, a cat on either side of her and a cold compress clutched to her head.
‘Your eyes are glazed, Very,’ Merry told her, putting her face so close to Verity’s that their noses touched. ‘Are you completely overloaded?’
She was overloaded. Overstimulated. Just generally over. ‘No words,’ she managed to whimper. ‘No talking.’
The kitchen door opened and Our Vicar, Johnny and Poor Alan trooped in from the garden. ‘I said we’d give young Johnny a couple of jars of our finest honey,’ Mr Love said in what sounded to Verity like his most boomingest voice ever.
‘We should start making tracks if we want to get back to London at a reasonable hour,’ Johnny said and even his modulated tones were like a thousand violins screeching. His eyes narrowed as he took in the forlorn and droopy picture Verity made as she sat with eyes closed, finger and thumb pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘Have you got a headache? Nosebleed?’
‘Worse than that,’ Merry said in a whisper. ‘We’ve broken her.’
Mrs Love pulled Johnny to one side. ‘She just needs quiet. Merry, dear, you’re not capable of being quiet, are you? Why don’t you go back to Manchester with the twins and catch the train from there tomorrow?’
‘Don’t do that,’ Verity said, because doing that was a major faff especially on a Sunday afternoon when it was more than likely that part of Merry’s journey would involve a rail replacement bus. But even as she said it, she didn’t know how she was going to deal with Merry talking all the way back to London. Just the thought of Merry reading out every motorway sign they passed had Verity’s head hanging down so low that her chin was on her chest. Even the stereophonic purring of Picasso and Dali was making her nerves jangle. ‘I’m fine. Honestly. I’m just being a wet blanket.’
‘You wouldn’t be you if you weren’t a bit of a wet blanket,’ Con said fondly as she departed with Sue and Jenny.
‘Don’t get me wrong, your Very’s a lovely girl but she needs more iron in her diet,’ Verity heard Sue say before Constance slammed the door behind them, because none of her sisters, or her parents for that matter, were physically capable of closing a door quietly.
Verity winced, then struggled to her feet. She felt as wobbly as a newborn foal. ‘We should get going,’ she said to Johnny, who was now laden down with tin foil parcels from Mrs Love.
‘Just something for the journey,’ she insisted and Merry, who was deep in conversation with Chatty and Immy, rolled her eyes.
‘It’s a three-hour drive, tops. There’s enough food there to last them for days,’ she said.
‘Them?’ Johnny queried, with a glance at Verity, who was slowly gathering the last of her belongings together in the manner of someone recovering from major surgery. ‘You’re not coming with?’
‘I will go back to Manchester with Chats and Im. I’d booked tomorrow off before you kindly offered to give me a lift.’ Merry fluttered her eyelashes.
‘Oh, really? I offered, did I? That’s not quite how I remember it,’ Johnny said with a wry smile and at any other time Verity would have been impressed that he could stand up to one of her sisters. Lesser men had tried and failed. Adam had met Merry twice then begged off ever meeting her again, and Merry was a pussycat compared to Con or the dual onslaught of Chatty and Immy.
But right then, nothing could impress Verity. She said her goodbyes, apologised a few more times for bringing the weekend to such an abrupt halt and, finally, she was strapped into the passenger seat of Johnny’s car and they were leaving the scene of Verity’s shame behind.
19
‘Till this moment I never knew myself.’
Thankfully, Johnny didn’t ask her if she was all right. He did shoot her a couple of anxious glances but mostly he kept his eyes on the road and Verity tried to ignore the maddening hum of the air conditioning and the purr of the engine, which she could hear over the roaring in her head. It was as if all of her was itching inside and out and although Johnny hadn’t said a word, being shut in a confined space with another person was as excruciating to her stripped nerves as standing in the middle of a noisy crowd of people.
Verity concentrated on breathing in and out for a count of five. She was so busy flexing her fingers and toes on the breath that it was some time before she realised that they weren’t moving. That Johnny had pulled into a layby.
‘We’ve got plenty of time to get back to London,’ he said. ‘So, if you wanted to be by yourself for a little while and go for a walk, there’s a sign to a public footpath over there.’
‘Yes.’ Verity nodded her agreement to this unexpected but very welcome plan. ‘Yes, please.’
Furnished with a bottle of water and one of Mrs Love’s ham and pickle sandwiches, Verity was on her way with barely a backward glance. She followed the signs to the public footpath, which was more of a roughly hewn trail through dense woodland. At any other time she might have been worried about the dangers of her lone walk, but homicidal axe-wielding maniacs lurking in the undergrowth or being bitten by horseflies – none of that was important at this moment.
What was important was that soon Verity came to a stream and next to it was a plush, luxurious patch of grass padded with clover, just waiting for her to take the weight off her feet. She lay back, starfished her arms and legs, shut her eyes and reclaimed herself. Starting at the top of her head and imagining that there was a spiritual squeegee scraping away all the stresses and strains and the static noise still clinging to her.
Verity didn’t stop until she reached her toes and it was only then that she felt clean, calm and back to her self. The counsellor she’d seen at university had always described it as something similar to recharging a phone with zero battery life. The quiet restored the calm and balance Verity needed to be a fully functioning member of society.
Verity had only started seeing a counsellor after being referred by her course tutor when she had managed to get through the first two terms of her first year without saying a single word in any of her lectures or seminars. She’d also been separately referred by the Residential Adviser on her floor of the halls of residence, a very annoying third-year Sports Science student that everyone called Banjo, except his mum and dad who called him Paul.
When Verity had arrived at Manchester University and seen her tiny cell-like room she had been overjoyed as, for the first time in her life, she had her own space. She was no longer sharing a room and every single one of her personal possessions with her sisters. She’d taken to the solitude the way most of the other students had taken to drinking their body weight in WKD in the student union bar. However, Banjo was a great one for fancy dress, communal drinking in the common room before ‘going out and getting slaughtered’ and everyone joining in. Three things that Verity had loathed with a
passion and when Banjo and Professor Rose had both referred her to the student health centre – the word ‘depression’ had been bandied around – Verity had loathed that too.
Counselling meant she had to talk about herself, which was another thing Verity wasn’t a big fan of, but she’d quickly become a big fan of her counsellor, a very gentle-mannered, softly spoken, liquid-eyed Spaniard called Manuel. Secretly, deep down, Verity had always wondered if there was something wrong with her that she wanted to be so quiet and alone. To shut down when the world, or more usually her sisters, were roaring at her. To always feel slightly wistful when Our Vicar talked about his very strict parents, who’d been big believers in children being seen and not heard and were adamant that after lunch on Sunday, silence was to reign supreme until Evensong.
Perhaps she really did have depression. Verity was used to being the odd one out of five already very odd sisters and perhaps that oddness had a clinical diagnosis.
‘It sounds to me as if you’re an introvert,’ Manuel said during their third session when Verity had finally, haltingly, explained that after too much time with other people, she felt like an overwound wind-up toy that refused to start up again. ‘Some people find life quite overwhelming, there’s nothing wrong with that.’
Manuel was adamant that introversion wasn’t a problem to be fixed but instead recommended that Verity look into ways of establishing boundaries with the noisy world. And slowly, once she realised she had somewhere to come back to that was quiet and calm, Verity left her little room. She found friends, though they tended to like going to the cinema or for long walks rather than downing three for £2 shots in the union bar. She started attending a yoga class and learned a whole arsenal of meditation techniques, which always restored Verity back to her factory settings – in much the same way as they had now.
Verity opened her eyes to see that Johnny was slowly walking towards her. He stopped and shrugged as if to ask whether his presence was unwelcome. Verity waved him nearer.
‘Do we need to be getting on our way?’ she asked him.
‘We’re OK for a little while,’ he said, coming to sit down on the grass next to her. ‘All good?’
‘All good,’ Verity confirmed and she didn’t feel like saying any more than that, though she should probably apologise a few more times, but Johnny stretched out so he was flat on his back and after a while Verity lay back down too.
Neither of them spoke, they certainly didn’t touch though their hands were only centimetres apart. Instead, they watched the clouds roll by in an impossibly blue sky, listened to the happy chirp of birdsong and the bubbling brook and Verity couldn’t remember the last time she’d been with someone whom she could be so comfortably quiet with.
A person like that was a rare breed. She’d thought that Adam was someone she could share companionable silences with but she’d never been more wrong about anything or anyone.
Verity tried not to think about Adam (there be dragons) but lately she was thinking about Adam a lot. After all, he was the reason Verity had taken a vow of singledom and it was only natural that, now that she had a fake boyfriend, her thoughts would turn, again and again, to her last real boyfriend.
So, later when they were back in the car and heading towards the motorway, Verity heard herself say, ‘Now you’ve seen what I’m like at my very worst.’
Johnny shot her a lazy smile. ‘Believe me, your worst is nothing compared to other people’s worsts.’
His phone was in the well in front of the gear lever. He must have put it on silent, for which Verity was eternally grateful, but it flashed every minute or so with incoming text messages. It was safe to assume that some of them had to be from Marissa. What were Marissa’s ‘worsts’ like? Maybe Marissa at the wedding, wrongfooted by Johnny turning up with another woman, was the worst Marissa there was. Maybe she was absolutely splendid the rest of the time.
Still, Verity could only worry about her own worst. ‘But you can see now why I’ve decided that relationships, boyfriends, they just aren’t for me. When I was with Adam … it was a disaster. I ended up treating him really badly.’
‘You? Verity Love?’ Johnny scoffed at the very notion. ‘I’ve known you a few weeks now and I can’t imagine you treating anyone badly.’
‘Well, I have. I did. The thing is, I thought he was like me. Quiet. Introverted. But it turned out that actually Adam was shy and once he was comfortable around me, he never stopped talking. Not like my sisters, who don’t require any audience participation.’
‘I had noticed that,’ Johnny remarked. ‘Merry’s thirty-minute monologue on Coldplay—’
‘And she doesn’t even like Coldplay!’
‘—on the way up here was proof of that.’ Verity and Johnny shared an exasperated look in the windscreen mirror.
‘But Adam wanted my opinion on everything. And because he was shy, he needed constant reassurance too. Hourly progress reports on the state of our relationship.’ Verity shook her head to remember it. How Adam always wanted to know what she was thinking when a lot of the time she was thinking of very mundane things like what she was going to have for tea that night or if she had enough dirty clothes to do a dark wash.
‘We’re all right, aren’t we?’ Adam would frequently ask. He’d always wanted to hold her hand too and pat bits of her and nuzzle. Always with the nuzzling and Verity had felt as if it would be churlish and rude to constantly remind Adam that she wasn’t a toucher. He’d always take offence as if there was something deeply wrong with their relationship if they weren’t in skin-to-skin contact at all times.
They’d met at university but hadn’t got together until they both moved down to London and bumped into each other browsing the tables of the sprawling bookstalls outside the BFI cinema on the South Bank. Early on in the first fumbling months of their relationship, they’d considered themselves to be kindred spirits but as the months became a year, Verity realised that they’d been at cross-purposes. For just as Verity had mistaken Adam’s shyness for a quiet soul, Adam mistook her quiet nature for shyness. Imagined that she’d spent a lifetime being lonely like he had and, no matter how many times Verity had tried to explain that wanting to be alone and being lonely were two very different things, Adam hadn’t understood.
‘As far as he was concerned, we were two people who never had to be lonely again because now we could spend every waking moment together,’ she told Johnny. ‘I had counselling when I was at university so I could learn to deal with the stresses of modern life better. But Adam’s neediness was no match for the techniques I’d learnt to establish boundaries.’
‘So, you were spectacularly incompatible. It happens,’ Johnny said, as he changed lanes. ‘It happens a hell of a lot. Can’t let one bad relationship sour you for ever more.’
‘No, you don’t understand. I was horrible to him.’ Verity shuddered to think about it. ‘All he ever tried to do was make me happy. For my twenty-fifth birthday, he surprised me with a minibreak to Amsterdam. And when I saw the tickets tucked into my birthday card … well, any normal person would have been delighted.’
‘If you weren’t delighted then I’m sure it was only because you don’t like surprises, that’s hardly a crime,’ Johnny said carefully, but Verity shook her head.
‘No, it wasn’t that,’ Verity said, her heart plummeting in much the same way it had when she’d seen those plane tickets. ‘I tried to pretend that I was pleased but actually I was horrified at the thought of spending forty-eight hours with Adam, with nowhere to be alone, apart from occasional loo breaks. Forty-eight hours with Adam was like spending two weeks with anyone else.’
Verity had tried her hardest to simply live in the moment for the first day of the minibreak. She did the hand-holding and answered, ‘I’m great. This is great. Thank you so much,’ every time Adam asked her how she was and if she was happy and if she liked her birthday present so far.
Verity lasted a whole twenty-six hours. Then the next morning Adam had insisted on n
uzzling her as she brushed her teeth and holding her hand as she tried to make her selection from the breakfast buffet but when he asked her three times in the space of twenty minutes, ‘So, are you happy with your birthday present then?’ something inside of Verity gave. Like she had a gigantic rubber band wrapped tight around the nagging, throbbing mess inside of her that was making her jaw lock and her head pound and her skin feel as if it were crawling with millions and millions of microscopic ants. Adam had pinged that elastic band so many times that it was no surprise when it finally snapped under the strain.
‘No! I am not happy! You are absolutely doing my head in with your incessant questions and touching me all the bloody time,’ she’d shrieked. ‘I can’t stand being touched and I don’t ever want to hear a single word coming out of your mouth ever again because I HAVE HEARD ALL THE WORDS! THERE ARE NO MORE WORDS I EVER WANT TO HEAR! God, I can’t breathe when you’re around.’
‘It didn’t feel good to get it off my chest,’ Verity explained to Johnny, who’d said nothing during her shameful confession but every now and again he’d caught her eye and given her a small, sympathetic smile. ‘It felt awful. The words were wrenched out of me under extreme duress so they were very unkind words. And anyway my duress shouldn’t have been that extreme. Adam wasn’t doing anything awful. He’d taken me away for the weekend to celebrate my birthday.’
‘I know you said that you were in love with him but you haven’t mentioned the L word at all,’ Johnny said idly. ‘Was it a case that you loved him at the beginning and then it just faded away?’
‘I don’t know why you keep asking me if I’ve been in love. Of course, I was in love,’ Verity said defensively. ‘I wouldn’t have tried so hard to make it work otherwise.’ Adam had declared his love a few weeks in and Verity had declared it back – it would have been rude not to – and at the start of their relationship, she had been happy. She’d thought, in those heady, early days, that she might even have found her soulmate. But when doubt crept in, she refused to give it houseroom. If she couldn’t love Adam who shared so many of the same interests as her and was as kind and gentle as Charles Bingley, then Verity feared that there was something very wrong with her.
True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 21