‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It could last a lifetime. It does sometimes happen.’
Franny gave her short bark of a laugh. Her breasts wobbled and one nipple poked over the top of her dress and stayed there.
‘A lifetime! Two years, tops. Maybe a bit more if Nicola pops a sprog.’ She leered at me. ‘But he’ll be back in the cottages within a year, I say.’
I smiled and said that I could see Jess calling me from the other side of the room.
On my way across the room, I was caught by Isabella. She was older now, her age was beginning to be unconcealable, her bosom in her sequinned dress was growing crêpey and she herself was strangely vacant. I wondered if she’d taken a tranquillizer to get through the day, as Mark said had often been her habit.
‘James!’ she said. ‘Do you remember me?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Congratulations. You must be very happy.’
She nodded complacently. ‘It is what I always wished for him.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Nicola’s a lovely girl.’
‘After his terrible trouble,’ she said, and looked at me intently, beetling her brows.
‘Mmmm.’ I was only half paying attention.
‘There was one time,’ she said, plucking at my sleeve, ‘I thought he would surely kill me! Or worse! We consulted an exorcist, you know, in case there was a demon in him. But it was long ago now.’
‘Really?’ I said, suddenly intrigued.
‘He is safe now,’ she said, ‘safe from all of that.’ And she would not be drawn further on the subject.
I found Emmanuella sitting at a table, calm and smiling, an undrunk glass of champagne by her elbow and her hand resting on the knee of her dark-skinned, blond-haired boyfriend. She smiled when she saw me, tipping her head to one side and allowing a curtain of hair to fall like water.
‘Ola, James,’ she said. ‘Have you met Alfonso?’
The boyfriend stood up smartly — almost, but not quite, clicking his heels together — and shook my hand. So this was His Excellency Alfonso Urdangarín y de Borbón — a name Jess and I had sniggered at when we spotted it on the table plan.
‘Charming,’ said Alfonso. ‘Tell me, is this the house where Mark and Nicola intend to live when they are married?’
I laughed. This was a country house rented for the occasion by Mark because Nicola had wanted the wedding to be near her family and he had wanted it to be far away from his.
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘People often rent houses for the day for their wedding.’
Alfonso frowned. ‘But I thought …’ He turned to Emmanuella and they exchanged a few short sentences in Spanish. He turned back to me and bowed gravely. ‘I apologize, you are entirely correct.’
I wondered what would happen if I refused to accept his apology. Rapiers at dawn did not seem out of the question.
‘No problem,’ I said. And then, because I could not think of anything else, I said, ‘So … what do you do?’
He frowned at me and said, ‘Do?’
‘Ah,’ I nodded. ‘Right, yes, OK.’
I made my excuses and moved on.
I found Jess again, talking to Simon. Or standing next to Simon while he watched the dance floor balefully. I slipped beside her and took her hand. Simon said, ‘Hi,’ and went back to staring at his sister, who was now dancing a vigorous jive with Mark.
Simon had not brought a girl to the wedding. Instead he was flanked by two tall broad-shouldered farming men, friends from schooldays with dark tans from outdoor work.
‘Hello,’ said one, ‘I’m Dick.’
‘I’m Richard,’ said the other.
We shook hands.
‘I’ll get the beers in,’ said Richard. Or it might have been Dick.
‘Top man,’ said Simon, ‘I’m too bloody sober.’
Mark and Nicola had taken swing lessons. They were dancing together, eyes wide, mouths open with excitement, feet kicking out to the sides. Mark pulled at Nicola’s hand and spun her energetically three, four, five times.
Simon said, low and several times, ‘Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.’
I nodded, unsure what to respond.
Dick, or it might have been Richard, said, ‘Too true, mate, too true,’ and the other came back with the beers.
They were all three leaning back in their chairs, tilting as far as they could without falling over. They began to talk while tilting, taking swigs of beer, like commentators at a cricket match.
‘I see Amanda is on the pull tonight,’ said one, nodding at a blonde woman in her thirties wearing a short purple dress and matching heels.
‘She’ll be after you if you don’t mind,’ said another, and they laughed — deep, humourless laughs.
My final memory of Mark from that day is of the minutes before their going-away, when he came racing up to me, conspiratorial, pulling on my hand to bring me close to his lips as he whispered, ‘Did you hear? Franny’s thrown up all down the front steps!’
I looked at him. He was very close to me — so close that I could smell the sharp scent of his cologne and the musky scent of his sweat. His face was that of an excited schoolboy, flushed and delighted. He raised his eyebrows, grinned, and raced off again.
Jess had to go then, to see to Franny, to help her wash her face, to find a place for her to rest, to get a cab to take her to the hotel. I tried to help too, but Franny was sobbing and swearing, and Jess shook her head at me and mouthed, ‘I’ll come and find you.’
I thought of her saying, ‘What a painful person Mark must be to love,’ and I nodded and walked away.
In the main marquee, several teenage couples were kissing each other hungrily on the dance floor, hands under clothes, inside dresses and dress shirts. On the tables, brandy-snap baskets of ice cream were melting into puddles of sticky, milky foam. I took my jacket from the back of my chair, pulled it on and walked out into the cool night air.
The night was cloudless, the moon paper-bright and high in the sky. The walkways all around were lit by flaming torches. Couples were talking, flirting, snogging. Friends were drinking or sharing a joint. I walked around the lake at the bottom of the hill, where the torches showed a path. After a few hundred yards I passed a clump of bushes where a couple were unmistakably fucking. The branches of the bushes were shaking rhythmically and I could hear the ‘hn, hn, hn’ grunting of the man, the woman’s half-excited, half-pained ‘ah, ah, ah’. I walked past as quietly as I could and if they heard me they gave no sign of it.
The lake was fed by a thunderously tumbling weir. An overhanging branch trailed across my face and I remembered that it was in a similar spot, far from people, by a river, that I had injured myself so severely that I had never quite risen again. As I walked, the loud crashing water soon blotted out the noise of the party.
On a wall covered in a soggy sponge of moss, I sat down, stretching my legs in front of me. I found I could not help thinking of Mark. I hadn’t seen a great deal of him in the past months. But when I had seen him I’d felt glad to be his friend. Yes, that was it. Glad to hear the little woes and triumphs of the business of the wedding. A wedding is bound to make the bride and groom seem glamorous. Mark and Nicola had been like movie stars today; one could not help wanting to be close to them. That was it, too.
But this thinking could not hold. I began, almost without willing it, to observe my own thoughts. And I laughed. I could not help it. I sat in the roaring silence of the weir and laughed like a madman. What a pathetic thing to realize. What a stupid thing to want. How typical of myself I always was. For it had become suddenly clear to me, horrifically and hilariously clear, that I was in love with Mark.