“You must be Mad?”
The girl looked up from her green-jacketed Virago modern classic, and smiled a plain, unembarrassed smile at him.
“I’m Peter Mysliwiec.”
He sat opposite her. They were at a table in Mildred’s in Greek Street. Everyone else in the small room was a woman. That didn’t bother him. Karen was always telling him how tolerant he was. A hostile waitress—almost spherical and with a U.S. Marines haircut—took his order, and brought him a small expresso. He bought Mad a coffee, too.
They had never met before, but next week they would be married.
In the last month, he’d been forced to readjust most of his life. This was hardly stranger than the discovery that not only was he not British, as he’d always been told by his deceased parents, but that he was two years older than he’d thought, born not in London in 1947 but Warsaw in 1945.
Mad was late twenties/early thirties, and pretty obviously butch. Peter mentally rebuked himself for stereotyping people, but he was a commercial artist and often traded in stereotypes. Mad wore dungarees over an off-pink sweatshirt, shoulder-straps fastened with badges for causes he didn’t recognize. Her hair was cropped not quite so close as the waitress’, and dyed an early-Bowie orange. She had a faint mustache, bright eyes, and the first hints of a chubbiness she’d have to exercise as rigorously as Karen to avoid in the next few years.
“Well,” she said, “isn’t this strange?”
Peter was worn ragged. Maybe his parents had been wrong to lie their son’s way into British nationality. After all the letters and interviews, it was hard to imagine Poland as any more of a police state than the United Kingdom.
“I’ve never been married before,” Peter admitted feebly.
“Me neither. Obviously.”
Mad was the ex-girlfriend of someone Karen knew at the agency. Peter knew almost nothing about her. Karen, inextricably still married to the Dreaded Stanley, was the kind of agent who could get anything given a week or so. A roll of discontinued wallpaper, a particular back issue of National Geographic, an aviation expert with photographs of a Sopwith Camel, a marriageable lesbian.
“What do you do?” Mad asked politely.
“I’m an artist. Book covers, mostly. Ads, sometimes. A movie poster, once in a blue moon. And you?”
“Different things. I’m sort of changeable.”
“Um.”
They didn’t really have much more to say, but he felt it important to meet the girl. He’d seen the Gerard Depardieu film about the couple in the arranged marriage who were persecuted by U.S. immigration agents, but Karen had ascertained that someone with his history of residence and skin coloring would be unlikely to suffer much. “Remember,” she had said, “you’re a white, middle-class, house-owning, male heterosexual. In the lottery of life, you’ve won already.”
Peter got his checkbook out.
“I suppose we should, um, do the business? We agreed on five hundred pounds?”
Mad’s face didn’t change.
“-leine or -line?”
“Madeleine, e before i and no c in sight.”
He asked her surname, and she told him. Peter wrote out a check to Madeleine Waters, and gave it to her.
“No one’s ever paid for me before,” she said. Peter wondered if she had something in her eye.
“Here are the details,” he said, giving her a sheet of paper on which Karen’s male secretary had typed the address of the Registry Office and the time of the wedding.
She pressed the check between the pages of her book and stuffed it into her shoulderbag. Then, she stood up to leave. She wore Doc Martens.
“See you in church,” she said, leaving him to finish his expresso.
A week later, Peter was outside the Registry Office in Camden. Karen was to be the witness, and Tony Weldon, his accountant, was the best man. He’d worn a suit, but there was no dress code for a sham wedding. Karen wore a suit, too, and was reminding him about the deadline for the Bloomsbury cover. She’d bought him a boutonniere, and fixed it to his lapel.
“Is this her?” Tony asked. Peter looked. A girl was walking down from the tube station, combat boots clunking, hands in the pockets of fatigue pants, green braces over a nondescript T-shirt. When she was close enough for them to make out her face, he knew it wasn’t Madeleine.
“I hope she won’t be late,” Karen clucked. “Jeannie said she wasn’t always reliable.”
“You’re talking about the woman Peter’s going to marry,” Tony said in mock outrage. Karen humphed elegantly at him.
She squeezed Peter’s arm, and got close to him. She’d been a pillar of the proverbial during the harassment.
“Nice day for a white wedding,” Tony hummed.
“Most important day of your life,” Karen said, unable to resist it.
“What was yours like?” Tony asked.
“Very romantic,” Karen deadpanned, “with the moonlight gleaming on the Dreaded Stanley’s brass knuckles.”
Peter grinned. He would get used to the jokes. Karen had already started calling him “adulterer” in bed.
“This must be her,” Tony said as a taxi stopped directly outside.
“Thank Christ for that,” Karen said. Then her jaw dropped.
The door opened and a flurry of white gauze blossomed out of the cab, with a girl inside it.
“Would someone pay the driver?” a voice said from under layers of veil. Astonished, Tony fished out the necessaries.
Madeleine wore a bridal gown, tight in the bodice and sleeves, vast and puffy below the waist, exploding into lacy flounces at the wrist. In her white gloves, she held a posy of white flowers. Under her veils, Peter could make out the rough lines of the face he remembered, but she was either wearing a wig or had had her hair extensively restyled because she seemed to have a Grace Kellyish blonde permanent.
“Jesus fuck,” breathed Karen.
Behind them, as Tony helped Madeleine negotiate her way to the curb, the Registry office doors opened, and an official poked out his head.
“Mysliwiec Waters?”
Madeleine took his arm, and guided him into the building. Karen, astonished, was left beyond the banging doors.
When the registrar told him he could kiss the bride, Peter lifted the veil and thought he had the wrong woman.
Then, he saw it was the same Madeleine. The planes of her face were subtly altered, but that could be because she was wearing makeup and the different hair gave her head a whole new shape. The eyes were the same. Just.
He kissed her mildly, and she responded with startling enthusiasm, warm tongue invading his mouth. Peter wondered how Karen would take this.
This, he supposed, was why her friends called Madeleine “Mad.”
They had arranged to go out for a meal at a pizza place afterward. Tony was supposed to be Madeleine’s date, but the new Mrs. Mysliwiec wasn’t to be separated from her husband.
Karen hadn’t recovered from the shock.
Madeleine was chattering inconsequentially, drinking the champagne Tony had arranged as a joke, and never letting go of his arm. In her white thunderstorm, the bride was attracting quite a lot of attention. Peter imagined this was how the young Miss Havisham must have looked.
The restaurant, bribed beforehand by Tony, was playing nothing but romance through their speakers. Frank’s “Wee Small Hours,” Bing’s “True Love,” Julie’s “Laura,” Dean’s “That’s Amore.”
Funnily enough, Peter did feel as if the moon had just hit his eye like a big pizza pie.
“It’s a shame we don’t have time for a honeymoon,” Madeleine said, “but we can catch up later. Paris, perhaps. Or Rome.”
Peter toyed with his garlic bread.
Peggy’s “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” the Crickets’ “Love is Strange,” Nat’s “Just You, Just Me,” Ella’s “The Tender Trap.”