He rolled on to his stomach and pulled a rug over himself. I stood up to leave, but he caught me by the cuff.
‘No,’ he said, ‘stay. Until I go to sleep. Like we used to do in Oxford.’
I couldn’t remember having done such a thing for him in Oxford. I wanted to remember it, though. He made me want to remember it.
I sat down.
I looked out of the window at the restaurant with its little busy lives. I looked at Mark, his fair hair fallen across his eyes like a schoolboy. I waited. When his breath became deep and regular, I put on my jacket. I pulled the blind down and lit one of the smaller electric lamps. It cast a slight orange glow across the room. I pulled the door closed quietly behind me and walked down the passage to the front door.
I felt something then, as I let myself out of his flat. I didn’t know what it was. I thought of him lying there asleep and how easy, how terribly easy that conversation had been. And his flat, the smell of cigarettes around the walls, the discarded clothes among the first editions. The squalor of it and yet the beauty. I stood with his front door open, staring at the green wallpaper of his hallway for a long time.
17
Mark and Nicola married in May, in an open-air ceremony in the grounds of a house near to the Wedmore family home. The day was sunny, the venue picturesque, the flowers eloquent in their simplicity. Nicola carried a bouquet of Michaelmas daisies, Mark wore a yolk-yellow tie, and the guests kept their doubts in check even at the moment of ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’.
I was an usher, but my duties were soon over. I had handed out Orders of Service and directed honoured relatives to front-row seats, but after the service began there was nothing for me to do other than listen to the words of God and hold Jess’s hand. The thing was stiff, it seemed to me. Formal and so strictly ordained that Mark and Nicola were like characters in a play and we the audience. Mass, a sermon and words from the Bible, Simon bravely working his way through ‘love is not jealous, it does not boast’ with seeming conviction, although half the people there knew that, even until the previous day, he had been suggesting with increasing force that the wedding should be postponed.
But Mark and Nicola had continued doggedly through all protestations and concerns. ‘Love is patient, love is kind.’ I would not have thought Mark had such persistence in him; he had never shown it before. ‘Love is not rude, it is not self-seeking.’ They had simply made their plans, booked the venue, talked to caterers, decided on colour schemes, while all around them shells of anxiety and anger burst and left them unscathed. ‘Love always trusts, always hopes, always per— severes.’ Was this love? Nicola, seventeen years old and shining-eyed, thought so. Mark, delivered from dilettantism, thought so. Franny said, ‘It won’t last a year,’ and even Jess said, ‘They do seem to be hurrying it rather.’
‘But where there are prophecies, they will cease. Where there are tongues, they will be stilled.’ They made telephone calls, they filed important papers in ring binders, they invited Mark’s mother with all due graciousness. They held each other’s hands throughout. And they came to their reward. This very moment: ‘What God has joined together, let no man put asunder,’ and an eruption of applause.
As we watched Nicola’s aunt apply powder to her bosom before the photographs were taken, Jess leaned in to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Promise me we’ll never have to do this.’
I said, ‘I promise.’
‘What are you two up to?’ said Franny from behind us. ‘Planning your own announcement?’
She was a little drunk already and of course it was a wedding, but I wondered when I had last seen her without a drink, or spent an evening with her which she had not ended tottering and staggering. I felt for her, though, remembering what had gone before.
I said, ‘You needn’t worry about us. We’ll never do it. Jess wants to be free to have affairs and ditch me at a moment’s notice, don’t you?’
And Jess smiled and said nothing.
There were speeches later; Mark was less entertaining than he could be, but irreverent and self-mocking. He said, ‘Now that I’ve found Nicola, I’m delighted to announce that no one can accuse me any more of having more money than sense,’ and raucous laughter and scattered applause followed. I was astonished; he had never joked about money before. He made his new bride a little presentation: a gift from his childhood. I knew what it was before she had the box open: the music box, glittering glass and gold, finally finding a suitable home. Nicola and Simon’s father, David, gave a rambling, slightly choked speech, remembering Nicola when she was a little girl and saying how quickly this day had come. I was almost certain I heard someone whisper, ‘A damn sight too quickly, if you ask me.’ Mark gave gifts to the little flower-girls, hoisting them up towards the tiered canopy in his arms, pretending to drop them as they screamed and giggled. He hugged them and planted kisses on their foreheads and Franny, sitting next to me, muttered, ‘Yeah, yeah, Mark, we get it.’
I had not realized how much of a wedding is show until I saw this one. No one ever wants to look beyond the trimmings on a wedding day, to see the doubts and the insecurities, the compromises and the fears that lie beneath. It is a parade, a theatrical performance in which all lines have been learned in advance. It is a necessary fiction; without our beguiling fictions how would we ever dream grandly or live boldly? We need the trappings as much as the substance.
I watched Mark’s face during his first dance with Nicola, looking for signs of discomfort or pleasure. There was nothing, though, but a smooth confidence which was so new that I could not help but stare at his face. And I saw as he flicked his eyes from the surrounding tables back to his bride — his wife, how astonishing — and turned the full power of his smile on her. And she, excited, smiled back and moved her head a little towards him, and he moved in towards her. And they kissed. I could not help watching; this was what we had all come to see, after all.
The dancing turned, soon enough, from sedate and ceremonial to fast and energetic. They played the Macarena and all Nicola’s friends charged forwards, with Mark at their head, to dance, clapping and shimmying and jumping and placing their hands on their hips and swaying. A few of the older relatives began to make their way home. This was not their time any more, after all. Jess knew better than to suggest I’d want to dance; my knee could not bear it. But I sat comfortably while she and Franny joined in with the jumping, staccato throng. Sweat gleamed on Mark’s forehead. Nicola rotated her hips and leapt.
A short while later, at our table, Franny became definitively drunk. She had found a man, one of Simon’s schoolfriends, and was engaging him in vehement, incomprehensible conversation until she noticed me. She wheeled around in her seat and said, ‘James! At last. I need … you are the one I need to talk to.’
She had a glass of whisky in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other, and fiddled with her hair so indiscriminately, not caring which hand she put up to it, that she was in constant danger of setting herself alight.
‘Oh yes?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said, and leaned towards me.
Her dress, a loose wrap of black silk which clung to the curves of her body, had fallen a little too low, so that when she leaned forward her nipples popped over the top. I tried not to look, but my eyes were drawn inexorably back down as they disappeared, reappeared.
‘So,’ she said, ‘honestly, honestly now, how long d’you think it’ll last?’
She gestured towards Mark and Nicola with her whisky glass, slopping a few heavy drops over the side. I looked at Mark and Nicola. They were exchanging goodbyes with Nicola’s grandparents: tears and hugs.