‘Yes.’
I waited but he was giving nothing more away.
‘Have you finished your interrogation?’ A simple phrase which could have been spoken in a few different ways: teasing, funny. Serious. Even hostile.
‘I have …’
He stood up abruptly, straight as a soldier, crossed the room towards a small oak bureau and dropped the flap, taking out a small square box. He opened it and handed it to me. The name of a well-known jeweller’s in Hanley was inside, together with a ring, sapphire surrounded by tiny diamonds. These days they would call it pre-loved or pre-owned. Basically second-hand. In this case literally. ‘Put it on.’
I obeyed the order.
It was a bit big. ‘Like it?’
I nodded and he looked pleased, but I was aware that this had been a distraction and stuck with my line of questioning.
‘What about her family?’
He looked genuinely puzzled. ‘Whose family?’
Was one of us mad? ‘Margaret’s.’
‘I don’t see them.’ His tone was unmistakably dismissive, the irritation compounding.
There was an awkward silence before he stood up. ‘Time to take you home, Jennifer.’
At some point I would be living here, eating, sleeping with Steven. And yet he was still an enigma. A man who buried his emotions so deep they were irretrievable. If they existed at all. I’d never heard him mourn his dead wife or express regret even though, fairly obviously, so young, her death must have been tragic. He didn’t talk about her as a real person and that disturbed me. Maybe, I consoled myself, he was simply considering my feelings. Perhaps I had replaced her so completely that he no longer mourned. One day it would be my picture that would hang over the fireplace. Slightly more disconcerting was the thought that followed so closely it bumped into me, who would be looking at it? One day, would a case and boxes with my name arrive at some store? Jennifer 1, Jennifer 2. All the clothes I would never wear, labels still dangling from them? Would he shell out money to store my possessions?
They would fit in one small trunk.
I had a lot to learn about the man I was about to marry. Too much.
Once in the car I pursued my original line. ‘Had you thought when you would like the wedding to be?’ I didn’t dare broach the subject of who was going to pay for it.
‘January?’
‘Lovely.’
I pictured a winter wedding, fur-hooded cloak, sparkling frost.
‘A quiet wedding,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose your family will be coming, so just a couple of friends. Registry office.’
I lowered my expectations.
The evening ended with the usual peck on the cheek. But not without affection.
I let myself in as he drove off.
Jodi was watching a soap on catch-up TV. She didn’t turn around. ‘You’re always going out these days.’
I wasn’t the only one. There was no sign of Jason.
Soon it’ll be for good, I thought. You’ll have to find someone else to share your fucking mortgage. I went upstairs.
Two nights later we were going out. ‘To discuss our wedding plans,’ he’d said grandly, so I was actually excited. It was time for some passion.
‘I am so excited.’
‘I’ve booked the date,’ he said. ‘And somewhere for our honeymoon.’ He turned to look at me, an indulgent smile. ‘And don’t ask where.’
‘OK.’
‘We have a busy night ahead of us,’ he said and put the car into gear.
I didn’t ask where we were going.
I felt nervous entering The Quiet Woman. I found the inn sign of the woman with her mouth stopped by a scold’s bridle ominous. I stuck my tongue out at her and followed Steven inside. He went straight to the bar without asking me what I’d like to eat and returned with a glass of wine for me and a beer for himself.
He pulled out a notebook and flattened it on the table, then looked at me expectantly.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘First of all, the date. How does two o’clock on Saturday the eleventh of January sound?’
I drank some of my wine and nodded. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Sounds good. I would … I feel I should invite my parents. Though my mother won’t come,’ I added hastily.
‘OK,’ he said.
‘I suppose Jodi and Jason. But they won’t come either.’
‘Anyone else?’
‘Scarlet and Andy, Bethany and her new guy, Stella and Sonny. I’d like to ask Ruby Ngoma. She’s one of our customers,’ I said.
‘You aren’t thinking of inviting all your customers?’
‘No. Maybe Serena. She’s always done my hair for me.’
He reached out and stroked it. ‘And she does a nice job. Anyone else?’
There was someone else, but I had no idea how to get hold of her. Homeless people have no address.
‘How about you?’
‘I think I’ll just stick to my best man and his wife.’
I was shocked. ‘Not your parents?’
He shook his head. ‘Remember, Jennifer, it’s my second marriage. I want it quiet.’
‘But …’
He put his finger to my lips and pressed so I could feel my teeth sharp against the inside of my mouth.
‘I’ve booked a hotel for a reception.’
I changed the subject. ‘So … our honeymoon?’
‘A secret.’
‘OK. Just tell me hot or cold.’
‘Cold,’ he said, ‘and wet.’
‘Wow. You have been busy.’
‘I have. There is something else.’
Money, I thought with a sinking heart.
‘Obviously I’ll pay for the wedding.’ He gave me that kind smile again. ‘I can’t see your parents coughing up.’ I’d given him a sanitized version of my relationship with my parents, and explained that we weren’t exactly close.
‘No.’ I felt slightly ashamed. ‘But I have enough for a wedding dress.’
‘Good.’ We clinked glasses.
I made a small decision. ‘Where do your parents live?’
He must have been off his guard. ‘Macclesfield,’ he said, without thinking.
Taverner is not a common name. I could track them down, I thought.
‘Brothers and sisters?’
But he’d twigged. His face was wary as he shook his head. I waited but that was it. He should have got a job with the Secret Service. They needn’t have bothered to get him to sign the Official Secrets Act.
The food arrived. Lasagne. I hate lasagne. Did he even know that? Had I ever told him? He picked up his knife and fork and started eating.
My mind was busy. I was not going to have Stella outdo me in terms of a wedding dress. Hers had been a-ma-zing. I dreamed on. But halfway through the evening at The Quiet Woman, something changed and I never quite worked out what it was. Steven stopped eating and regarded me. ‘You won’t regret this, Jennifer, I promise you. I will make you happy. And you will never leave me.’ It was romantic but little voices started pinging in my brain like incessant text messages.
And the sudden closeness tempted me into taking a bold step. ‘You’re still a bit of a mystery man to me.’ I softened the words with a smile but held my breath.
He was on his guard. ‘How so?’
‘I’m not sure I really know you.’ I’d softened the words with a smile, but nothing was going to dent his good humour.
He laughed quite openly. His face was different. ‘You soon will,’ he said. ‘We’re getting married. Remember? Of course you know me.’ He chucked me under the chin like a favourite uncle. ‘I’m Steven,’ he said, eyes wide open. ‘Your … Oh, God,’ he said, ‘soon-to-be husband.’
I could hear my granny’s voice taunting me. ‘Sell yourself cheap, my girl. Because that’s all you’re worth.’
Sometimes taunts are so cruel you can never really shed them. They stick to your skin like lizard scales; when you shed the top layer they are on the layer beneath. That is the
valuation which sticks. So you never quite lift yourself off the floor.
TWENTY-NINE
Right through Christmas we planned our wedding, and I was getting excited. Our guest list was small, mine consisting of my dad and Malee or her replacement (whatever he’d said, I doubted they’d come) and my mum (she wouldn’t come either). I wouldn’t waste a bloody stamp on my brother Josh and you could forget my grandmother, old sourpuss. But I could invite Stella and Sonny, Bethan and her new bloke, Scarlet and Andy and Serena and Ruby, and I felt I ought to ask Jodi and Jason too. When I handed Jodi their invitation, she looked at it as though it was poisoned. ‘So you’ll be leaving.’ Her voice was so acid I could hardly believe it was the same person who had welcomed me a few years before with open arms. But this is what happens, I suppose, when you live in close quarters with the wrong person. I found it hard to respond to my imminent departure without a certain amount of glee. The next day she made some excuse. I’d always known they wouldn’t want to come. They didn’t, and after I’d moved out I never saw them again. All I meant to them was the loss of £300 a month.
I couldn’t ask Minnie Ha-Ha because I had no way of getting in touch. I would have liked to have invited Miss McCormick just to show I hadn’t made a complete mess of my life, but I didn’t have an address for her either – except, maybe, via the school, if she was still teaching there. I bottled out of that. I hadn’t fulfilled her dream for me – to study English at Oxford. She would look at me with disappointment.
On Steven’s side he had one friend called Colin Ripley, married to Kara. I assumed he was a workmate. Colin was to be his best man. Had he been his best man at his first wedding? I wondered. ‘No one else?’
When I asked him the question he said nothing. A little like the boxes locked away in the store, my husband-to-be was unfathomable.
I reassured myself with his qualities. He was generous, kind, honest, even-tempered, considerate, polite. I ticked them off on my fingers. It was enough.
Almost.
In the weeks leading up to the wedding I became obsessively curious about his previous marriage. So many unanswered questions. Like where was she buried? But it was no use talking to Steven. He closed like a clam and refused to say anything. So my frustration was compounded. Why was he so reluctant to tell me anything about her? He came occasionally to the store and usually emerged with another garment. And so one day, when he had given me a sweater, lovely, soft, pale blue, eye-watering price label still attached, I asked him outright.
‘Did you buy it for Margaret?’
He gaped; his mouth worked but he couldn’t seem to find the words. And he seemed distressed.
In the end he nodded adding, unnecessarily, ‘She never wore it.’
‘I know that, silly.’ And I held up the price label. Something in his face changed. He looked shifty, as though he’d just deceived me. However, it was a beautiful sweater, and when I slipped it on the colour was flattering. It was a perfect fit, my colour.
One man’s loss … or in this case woman’s.
We went back to Yr Arch twice, both times to start moving my meagre belongings over. The bungalow was larger than I’d first thought. All plainly decorated but obsessively clean now. The whole place smelt of bleach. The fusty smell had dissipated as I had been opening windows, vacuuming and cleaning ready to move in. And that was another odd thing. Apart from the picture which hung over the mantelpiece, nothing of Margaret remained. I had been through every single cupboard and drawer. There wasn’t a stitch of her clothes, not a photograph, no female clutter in the bathroom. Absolutely nothing of her except that rough sketch.
I mentioned this to Steven one evening when I was hanging some summer clothes in the built-in wardrobe. ‘You’ve done a good job,’ I said.
His smile was indulgent but curious. ‘Doing what?’
‘Clearing out her possessions.’
The look he gave me now was undeniably shifty. His smile looked false and his eyes wouldn’t meet mine. In fact, he looked troubled. At such an innocent comment?
What had I said?
Yr Arch had been built in the sixties; it was dated, but not without its charm. A long corridor led from the front door straight through to the kitchen. A corridor to the right led to its three bedrooms (all double) and a generous-sized bathroom. To the left was a long sitting room which had French windows overlooking the washing line and a sunken garden reached by four semi-circular steps. There was a dining area at the back of the room. The kitchen overlooked the garden too and had a side door reached through a utility room.
The garden at the back was also plain, a wide lawn bordered by a hedge, but the views were far-reaching along fields and, below, Endon, a small village, with Leek to its northeast and Stoke-on-Trent to its southwest. Snaking along the bottom of the valley was the Caldon Canal. As the green valley had provided my room with a view, so did Yr Arch.
The drive to the front was equally uninspiring, lawns bordering a tarmacked drive, at the end a small asbestos garage.
But to me it was paradise. A home of my own. My first. Correction. A home of our own. I still didn’t stay the night and our relationship remained curiously sterile.
Stella was very downbeat about our approaching wedding and she didn’t hide it.
‘I think you’re making a big mistake.’ It was the first week of January and we were at a pub. She had a night off. For once, he was babysitting. Hoor – fuckin’ – ray! I felt like saying. So Daddy’s taking his turn, is he? About time too. Stella had hair that changed colour almost every week, amateurishly. She always missed a bit. Her bathroom was testimony to every single different colour she’d ever used. This week she was bottle-blonde with dark brown bits at the back. And it didn’t suit her. The hair colour plus the fact that she had a scar on her chin and one of her front teeth was chipped made her look rough, a bit worn out. She’d fallen off a swing when she was eight and that was what had chipped her tooth, but it could have been a fight and she’d made up the story. Stella was like that. She was someone who always wanted to put her good face to the fore. She was very conscious of the chipped tooth, running her tongue over it constantly – a habit, I guessed, that she was completely unconscious of, but it drew attention to the tiny irregularity. She was the same with her scars. Half the time when she spoke her hand would steal up to her face, and she would run her finger down the scar, frowning, subconsciously spiralling back into the fall off the swing – or whatever else had caused the imperfections. She was doing it now, her frown deepening, and then she dropped her hand back into her lap and gave me a hard look. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Call it off. You don’t know him,’ she said with some force. ‘You don’t know the first thing about him.’
I trotted out the usual – good job, widower et cetera, et cetera – which only stopped her for a moment.
‘You don’t really know him, Jen.’
The trouble was I knew there was more than a grain of truth in her words. I knew Steven was secretive. I sensed that he was hiding something. I just hoped it wasn’t something that would have a major impact on our married life.
‘Jen,’ she appealed, ‘what are you letting yourself in for?’
A house, security. A home, a living wage. A car. A family. A husband.
Two nights later I repeated a potted version of her words. That night, when he gave me my final kiss, his hand wandered towards my breast and he squeezed it. Not hard enough to make me cry out but the gesture was a warning.
As I climbed the steps to my front door, I still felt the pressure on my breast. Inside the house was silent. Tonight there was no telly, no lovemaking, no snoring or bed creaking. But I had seen Jason’s car outside so I knew they were in. Just lying low.
With nothing to distract me I tried to sleep, still wondering what was behind that squeeze. When I undressed, I could still see the imprint of his fingers.
But when I pulled the ring from my finger it was a visible sign. I now belonged to him. I looked at it and wond
ered how Margaret had felt when he had given it to her. I imagined her easing it from her finger too, night after night. Until she had died. Had she been wearing it when she had breathed her last? Had this been pulled from her dead finger? I shook that thought away quickly. But my next instinct was equally uncomfortable. It felt like a borrowed object. Like Steven. Temporary.
The next moment I was scolding myself. Steven wasn’t a borrowed person. He was mine. All mine. My love. My fiancé. Soon to be my husband.
Yours? I could hear scorn in her response.
Do objects retain something of their previous owners? I picked it up and searched it for some indication. Sapphires are not as hard as diamonds and I could see a tiny mark on the surface. I wondered how it had got there.
Like Stella, Scarlet was odd about my approaching nuptials. ‘Why get married?’ she said. It was exactly the response I’d anticipated from someone I’d marked as being Bohemian.
‘Me and Andy – we never tied the knot and we’re happy as larks. Getting married,’ she said, hand caressing my shoulder, ‘Jen – it’s so final. There’s only one way out of marriage and that’s divorce. Or death.’ She gave me a funny smile. ‘Like it says in the marriage service Till death … and so on.’
‘Steven isn’t like that,’ I said. ‘He’s conventional. He wants to get married.’
She gave me a funny look.
Her hand gripped my shoulder. ‘Spinning Jenny,’ she said, ‘you don’t know what you’re getting into.’
‘We love each other. That’s what I’m getting into. What’s wrong with that? Why can’t you be more pleased for me?’
‘I’m sorry.’
But I hadn’t finished. ‘Other women get married, have a home, a family. Up until now I’ve had no one, Scarlet. Not even a mum and dad who really care about me. I rent a room in a couple’s house and if they weren’t so hard up they’d have chucked me out a year ago. I’m not rich and I never will be. I don’t even care about that, but why shouldn’t I have something of my own? Understand?’
I could see nothing but doubt in her eyes. ‘But, Spinning Jenny, he’s so much older than you, and what do you really know about his past? His family?’
The Subsequent Wife Page 18
