Countless times throughout the day, Verity would turn to Johnny to share a smile or a muttered aside or even an eye roll when Marie turned up with little Kayleigh in a pink princess outfit and ordered the child to walk down the aisle scattering petals. But each time Verity turned, Johnny wasn’t there, even though she was sure that the champagne, the card, had been A SIGN.
As the day wore on, Verity found herself muttering under her breath, ‘If he does not come to me, then I shall give him up for ever.’ It was a side of Elizabeth Bennet that Verity had never wanted to channel.
At last it was time for Con and Alex to spend their first night as a married couple in the executive suite of the only five-star hotel in Lincoln. They were being driven there by Alex’s teetotal uncle in his Ford Mondeo, with the obligatory ‘Just Married’ sign and tin cans tied to the back bumper.
Verity waved them off as exuberantly as the other guests, but when everyone else trooped back into the church hall to continue the celebrations, Verity headed for the vicarage. She fed the cats and Poor Alan but, opening the fridge to see a couple of bottles of champagne chilling in there, ordered by Johnny because he’d remembered the date, which meant in some small way that he was thinking of Verity, unleashed the tears that had been threatening all day. If only he’d followed up the champagne with a call, even a text message, something to let Verity know that he wasn’t just thinking of her but thinking of her kindly.
Curling up on the kitchen sofa, even though it was covered in a liberal coating of animal hair, with Poor Alan anxiously resting his head on her knee, Verity cried. Some of the tears were for Johnny because she loved him and he was going to waste his life, his whole life, loving a woman who didn’t want to be with him. But the majority of her tears were for herself because there’d been a moment during the reception when she’d had an epiphany. A whole wattage of lightbulbs suddenly pinging over her head.
Her sisters had been dancing with their respective boyfriends. Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife were sailing across the floor in a stately tango, even George, her father’s annoying curate, was slow-dancing with the equally annoying Marie, while little Kayleigh stuffed cocktail sausages into her mouth like they were Smarties.
Verity had been sitting by herself. Alone. And now, alone felt a lot like being lonely. For so long, Verity had been sure she couldn’t inflict her quirks, her quiet, on someone else, but now she realised it was the worst idea she’d ever had.
Her sisters would be the first to admit that they were aggravating and talked too much, but they’d never decided that that was an obstacle to finding true love. And what were the odds that Our Vicar and Our Vicar’s Wife with their love of musicals, whist drives and adding Tabasco sauce to everything would ever find each other? Yet they had.
Once, as a joke, Nina had pinned a postcard on their fridge, which showed at least a dozen cats peering through an open door with the caption, ‘Hello, we hear you are forty and not married.’ It was no longer an amusing gag about being a mad cat lady, but a frightening look into her future.
Verity cried a bit harder as she imagined being forty and a spinster of the parish. How her sisters would all be married to men who adored them and they’d have children and when Verity came to stay at Christmas and Easter and special occasions because she didn’t have a family of her own, her sisters would all say in uncharacteristically hushed tones, ‘Now remember to leave Auntie Very alone. She leads a very sheltered life and you know how crabby she gets when you don’t use your indoor voices.’
Johnny had been right when he accused Verity of being a coward. Love had seemed too hard, so she’d just given up at the first hurdle, whereas Adam, always so insecure and helpless, had sailed over that same hurdle with ease. He’d learned huge lessons from that life-changing morning in Amsterdam, had gone out into the world determined to be different, to be happy, to try again at love. And Verity? Verity had done none of those admirable things, but had withdrawn completely and pretended that being fairly content was the same thing as being happy. Well, it wasn’t.
It was a half life and not the one that Verity wanted to be living. The life she now wanted so desperately had a man in it who understood that she needed space but yet when she spent time with him, she never felt crowded. A man who was good with his hands, whether he was building houses from scratch or building a fire in Verity that still smouldered weeks later. A man who was just as lonely as her, but not of his own free will.
‘She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man.’
‘Oh God, Elizabeth Bennet, will you just shut up?’ Verity said out loud, because lately, rather than having Miss Eliza Bennet as her go-to guru on all matters, that lady had become the doubting voice in Verity’s head.
Instead of asking herself ‘What Would Elizabeth Bennet Do?’ it was time for a different way of looking at the world. A different question.
What Would Verity Love Do? And would she do it soon?
28
‘Nothing remains for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the violence of my affection.’
It was late Sunday afternoon when Merry and Dougie dropped Verity off at the corner of Rochester Street.
An hour later, after yet another attempt to wash the smell of hog roast out of her hair, Verity was ready. Well, not ready. She didn’t feel as if she’d ever be ready, but she was going to do this. She had to do this.
‘Look, Gervaise, if you need to explore your sexuality then that’s fine, but I don’t see why I have to have a threesome with you and your German friend, Helga,’ Nina was hissing down the phone as Verity left. She waved and rolled her eyes. ‘Now, if it were your German friend, Hans, then that might be a different story.’
Verity rolled her own eyes and shook her head as she walked through the shop, ran her hand along the spines of the books on one of the Classics shelves for good luck.
It wasn’t even seven thirty but already the sky was dusky. A bite to the air that foretold of autumn; crisp leaves being crunched underfoot, the smell of bonfires, hurrying home to draw the curtains and snuggle on the sofa. Not that Verity was the snuggling sort, but then there were lots of things that Verity hadn’t thought she was the sort for and it had turned out that she was wrong about them. Who knew what else she was wrong about?
The central London streets were quiet at this time on a Sunday evening and it was easy enough for Verity to see the city’s secrets: the ornate keystones and datestones, mouldings and carvings, the plaques and nameplates on the buildings, because Johnny had taught her how to look up, to see beauty lurking everywhere.
When Verity reached Canonbury, she was back to looking down again. Staring at her feet as they carried her towards the reckoning, though they really didn’t want to finish the job and climb the five steps that led to the front door. Then her hands really didn’t want anything to do with ringing the bell but Verity was the boss of them and then there was nothing to do but wait, ears straining for the sound of footsteps.
Perhaps he’d gone out. He’d once told Verity that he hated Sunday evenings, how they always gave him ‘a back to school feeling’. So maybe he was in the pub, or out with friends, or, God help him, with Marissa.
But he wasn’t because the door opened and there he was. Johnny. He didn’t look especially pleased to see Verity and gave her a suspicious, wary glance as if she were about to try and sell him double glazing.
‘Hello,’ he said tiredly, because each time Verity steeled herself to brave a look at him from under her lashes she was struck by his air of exhaustion.
He was still beautiful, but now it was a terrible kind of beauty. Standing there in jeans and a faded grey shirt, Verity could tell that he’d lost weight. The angles of his face, his cheekbones, stood out in stark relief. Even his eyes seemed to have lost their lustre.
Johnny looked like Verity felt. As if, though the world continued to turn, it had stopped turning for him. The days stretching on and on, with nothin
g to look forward to.
Harry must have stayed true to his word when he issued Marissa with that ultimatum; him or Johnny, and she’d made her choice and that was why Johnny looked so utterly wretched.
‘Are you just going to stand there and gawp?’ Johnny asked sharply and Verity realised that she’d been doing just that; staring at him with her mouth hanging open. Though his expression and his tone weren’t welcoming, she’d come too far to lose her nerve and turn back now.
‘Hello,’ she said shyly and she waited for Johnny to ask her in but he folded his arms. ‘I came to thank you for the champagne though Con’s going to write you a note, though knowing Con, you’ll probably get it some time just after Christmas. I actually brought you a couple of bottles because it’s very nice champagne but there was no way we could drink it all when we already had crates of Cava chilling in ice in the bathtub. I also brought you some wedding cake.’ Verity heaved up the heavy tote bag she’d been lugging around, but Johnny was motionless and didn’t take the bag from her. ‘It’s a honey cake,’ she persisted, even as her heart gave up the ghost. ‘Muv got the recipe from her best friend Sylvia, who’s a rabbi’s wife. Con got married on Rosh Hashanah you see, the Jewish New Year, and it’s Jewish tradition to have honey cake to symbolise a sweet new year and what with Our Vicar’s bees, well, a honey cake was the way to go.’
Even her sisters at their most rambliest had never rambled this much. This wasn’t why Verity had come – to talk about Judeo-Christian customs and any other random thing that came to mind.
She raised timid eyes to Johnny’s face. She was sure that she saw something in his eyes, something that looked a little like hope, before he blinked and was back to standing there as cold and remote as if he were carved from granite. How could she chip away the wall that he’d built around himself? Each brick cemented into place by Marissa because if she couldn’t have him, then no other woman was going to have him either.
‘I appreciate the gesture, but I don’t need either champagne or cake,’ Johnny said brusquely. ‘Was that all you wanted to say?’
Verity knew what she wanted to say, if she could ever find the courage to say it when all the odds were stacked against her, but the words remained just out of reach.
What would Elizabeth Bennet do?
She didn’t feel like Elizabeth Bennet any more. In fact, Verity felt more kinship with Darcy at this moment. He knew what it meant to open his heart, to speak his truth, even though he was sure that it was a hiding to nothing.
What would Darcy do then?
And as soon as she asked herself that question, those elusive words found her.
‘Johnny,’ Verity said haltingly. ‘Johnny, in vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed …’
Even though she now knew what to say, Verity swallowed hard, unsure how she could finish her speech because, even though she’d read these words so many times, speaking them, giving voice to their true meaning, was a task so enormous, so life or death, that she faltered.
She met his eyes, which were now fixed unwaveringly on her face, but still it was impossible to know what he was thinking. Was he prepared to give her a fair hearing or was he about to banish her from his sight forever more, leaving her to wander the world alone, unloved?
If these were her last moments with him then she had to make them count. ‘My … my feelings will not be repressed,’ Verity said again, her voice squeakier with each word until she couldn’t even form sounds any more.
She gazed up at Johnny imploringly. His eyes had never looked so blue, so soft, so … tender? Did she dare to hope?
‘Johnny … my feelings …’ Oh God, she’d already done that bit twice. ‘I … you … you …’
‘Verity, you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you,’ Johnny said as he took the words right out of Verity’s mouth and took her hands in his.
‘You’ve read Pride and Prejudice?’ she asked incredulously as Johnny pulled her, unprotesting, into the house, into his arms.
‘I asked Dad to dig out my mother’s old copy and then I read it from cover to cover,’ Johnny said, as he relieved Verity of her very heavy tote bag so that he could wrap his arms around her unhindered and bury his face in her hair so that his next words were muffled. ‘It was the only thing I had left of you. You do remember that you were the one who left?’
‘How could I have stayed? You said you hated me!’ Verity reminded him and the memory of it made it hurt with a hot piercing ache all over again. She struggled in his arms, until Johnny calmed her by smoothing the hair back from her face so he could press kisses to her forehead, her eyelids, which fluttered closed, her cheeks. If Johnny hadn’t been holding her up, Verity’s knees would have crumpled. Then he drew back.
‘I’ve wanted to come to you so many times, even walked halfway to Bloomsbury once, but then I’d remember you telling me you hated me, the contempt on your face as you said it, and all hope was gone,’ Johnny said softly. He brushed Verity’s cheek with the back of his hand. ‘But now I’m suddenly full of hope, even though I’ve had so many years of rejection, Very, and I’m not strong enough to take even five minutes more of it.’
And just like that, Marissa was coming between them, as she always did.
‘Marissa.’ Even saying her name made Verity shiver and start to move away from him. ‘It, this, us, is impossible.’
‘It’s not. We’re not,’ Johnny insisted, his hands on her again – pulling her close, stroking her hair, her face, as if he couldn’t bear not to be touching her. He ran his hands down her arms to link his fingers with hers, and she allowed him to lead her into the front room. The shutters were closed, it was lit softly by lamps, though she hardly took in her surroundings when she only had eyes for Johnny as he gently pulled her down next to him on the sofa, their fingers still entwined.
‘Marissa?’ Verity said again, a little desperately because Marissa made it all wrong.
‘She never made me happy. My happiness was not her endgame,’ Johnny admitted wearily as if he’d spent long sleepless nights puzzling this out. ‘And yet I was unhappy without her. Then I met you and you did make me happy and without you these last few weeks, I haven’t been just unhappy. I’ve been miserable. Desperate. Utterly bereft. You get the general idea?’
‘I think so,’ Verity said but she daren’t believe that Johnny meant what he said. He might believe it at this moment but the spell Marissa had cast on Johnny was unbreakable. ‘But you love Marissa. You’ve loved her half your life.’
‘I loved the fantasy of what I thought Marissa and I were. What I thought we could be. And then you came along and I began to suspect that I didn’t want a woman that I’d put on a pedestal but someone who would stand by my side, someone who I could laugh with …’
‘You never laughed with Marissa?’ Verity asked sceptically.
Johnny shook his head. ‘There weren’t that many laughs with Marissa. There wasn’t any laughing either when I asked her and Harry to meet me for dinner last week so I could apologise to Harry for all the grief I’ve put him through, and tell Marissa that she’d married a man who brought out the best in her, while we only brought out the worst in each other. I’m not going to be the third person in their marriage any more.’
‘Goodness,’ Verity breathed, barely able to process what Johnny was saying. ‘That must have been hard.’
‘Actually, weirdly, it wasn’t that hard. In fact, once it was done, it was a relief but it still counts as one of the most hideous experiences of my life. And when I thought about it, what Marissa and I had was nothing more than tortured longing and a lot of drama.’ He sighed. ‘You can’t build a real relationship with someone based on nothing but drama. It would burn itself out in no time.’
‘So what should you build a relationship on?’ Verity wanted to know in a raspy voice that sounded as if she’d just had her tonsils removed.
Johnny lifted Verity’s hand to his mouth so he could press
a kiss to her tense, white knuckles and she was in a torment to know what his answer would be.
‘You build a relationship on laughing together, discovering new things you never even imagined you might like, Pride and Prejudice for example, and being welcomed into the heart of each other’s families. And, say, you find a prickly sort of woman who likes quiet and won’t hold your hand and doesn’t believe in love … well, when she finally lets you hold her hand, you’ll do anything, anything, to persuade her that love can actually be rather wonderful.’
Verity could have sworn she was all cried out, but now she was blinking back tears again. ‘Oh. Oh my,’ she said weakly, and as well as tears her nose was running because she wasn’t a pretty crier. She fished for a tissue and blew her nose. ‘I’ve got through three boxes of tissues since that weekend in Cornwall.’
Johnny brightened anew. ‘You cried over me?’
‘I did, though there was just as much snot as there were tears. It turns out that when I’m racked with grief, my nose just won’t stop running,’ Verity confessed, though Johnny didn’t look too repulsed. Instead he leaned over to kiss the tip of the nose in question. ‘The thing is, I’m terrible at relationships. I don’t have the first idea about them.’
‘I was about to say exactly the same thing.’ Johnny shrugged. ‘We can figure it out together. Look at Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy, if those two crazy kids can make it work, then I’m sure we can too.’
‘It was only meant to be for one summer,’ Verity said and Johnny smiled. His mouth. Lips. Now Verity was remembering what they felt like on hers.
‘I was so busy warning you not to fall in love with me—’
‘Yes, I did notice,’ Verity said very dryly for someone who still had tears running down her cheeks.
‘But I forgot to tell myself not to fall in love with you. But now that I have I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. I don’t love in a half-hearted fashion. It’s all or nothing with me,’ Johnny said, and Verity felt a thrill run through her at his words.
True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 31