by Marina Ford
My knuckles showed white as I held the kitchen counter.
“I love you,” he said.
He didn’t look like a man in the mood for foolishness or comforting lies. I let go of the counter. Something that had been sitting on my chest for the past six months rose up with a skip. It was like I could breathe again.
“I don’t think I’ll ever stop,” Harry said. “I tried. It would have made my life so much easier if I could have just, for one goddamn minute, stopped thinking about how much better every single thing was when you were there.”
He cleared his throat, his voice growing thick over the tears. “I was the happiest I’ve ever been. With you. What happened that night had nothing to do with you or how I feel about you. It was all me. It was me trying to be rational and logical, and to do what I thought was the right and responsible thing to do. And I fucked up spectacularly.” He threw his hands out and then put them on his hips. “D’you know what the funny thing is, Joe? All the reasons why I couldn’t be with Kieran—the fact that he wouldn’t commit, that he didn’t want to buy a house together or get married—I wouldn’t give a damn if you didn’t want those things. I’d take you any way you’d want. I’d take you for a week or a fucking lifetime. I’d be the best bloody ‘compadre’ you ever had if that’s all you wanted.”
We stared at each other across the room.
“For the love of God, say something,” he said with a nervous laugh.
“You waited a whole bloody month?” I demanded. “All that time, and you—”
Then I was in his arms.
We walk down the stairs, hand in hand. Harry is in his sweaty shirt and stained jeans. I’m in burnt dress trousers and a urine-soaked dress shirt. I would have changed, but there is no time, and I’m more determined than ever that Harry and I are going to be married today. Come what may.
When we reach the ceremony room, all the guests turn to gape at us. My mother, Harry’s parents, Siobhan and Ollie, Chloe, and Frank all stand up. Frank toasts me. Chloe shakes her head and wipes a little tear off her cheek. Siobhan looks like a Jackson Pollock painting—her makeup is all over the place from crying. Ollie has his arm around her. There’s Maya beaming and waving excitedly. Bonnie and my mother are both in tears. Harry’s dad smiles at Harry—more, I suppose, because he was right about his son than about what his son is about to do, but I’ll take that over his previous attitude any day. Harry’s work colleagues stare dumbfounded at the state of him.
We hold hands as we approach the front of the crowd, where, under a floral awning, the impatient registrar is standing.
“This is absolutely bonkers,” Harry whispers to me.
It is the best day of my life.
The ceremony is blissfully short. I can barely hear the registrar for the blood rushing in my ears, and the awareness that this is happening after all. It’s like a dream.
I repeat the registrar’s words, and see Harry do the same, and all I’m thinking is, He came back to me. He will always come back to me. I knew he would. He’s here. We’re married. We’ll be married forever. I just know we will. I sign the marriage certificate. Harry does the same.
And then, suddenly, as though waking from a dream, it’s done. People are clapping. Harry is beaming. I beam back. He takes my face into his hands and kisses me. Siobhan is crying. My mother is crying. I realise I’m crying.
My vision is blurry from tears, but I discern Arabella at the other end of the room, waving at us. Amidst resounding applause (and has anybody deserved it more, I ask you?), we rush to a little anteroom. Arabella closes the door, and says, “There’s some water here,” she points at the table, stocked with a pitcher of ice water. “I will go and get you clothes. You stay here and chill for a minute. Okay?”
Then she leaves us. Harry and I are alone again.
“Oh my God,” Harry says, giddy with laughter. “I can’t believe we just did that. Look at the state of us.”
“I can’t believe it either.”
He kisses me again and again, until suddenly he stops and says, “Can you take that shirt off?”
I do that. The smell of it is starting to impinge on the magic of the moment. I toss the shirt in a convenient bin.
“Dare I ask why you’re covered in pee?” he says, amused.
“It’s Siobhan’s.”
“Ah, say no more.”
“No, really!” I laugh. “She took a pregnancy test in our bathroom and then we fell into each other and it just sort of happened. I don’t know why these things keep happening to me.”
“Hang on. Pregnancy test?”
“She’s pregnant. Hence the meltdown.”
“I thought that was about the wedding,” he says. “Did you say she’s pregnant? At last?”
I nod at the bin and say, “We have a urine sample of hers right here. Do you want me to test her again?”
We both laugh. How is it possible for a day that started so badly to end so well? I feel exhausted. Harry looks no less tired. I go to him and kiss him again, feeling so unspeakably glad to be able to do that.
“Do you know,” I say, leaning my forehead against his. “For a moment there, I did think you went back to Kieran, in Sweden.”
He pulls his head back, surprised.
“Kieran?” he asks, bemused.
I explain about Kieran—it turns out Harry had no idea Kieran was there. It was, after all, a crazy coincidence.
“The only reason I told you I was going there was because there was a flight to Malmö at around the same time my actual flight was leaving. I wanted to keep everything hush-hush. Like an idiot. It’s the last time I try to do anything behind your back, I swear. Besides, do you know why Kieran’s hopping around the globe so much these days?”
I shake my head.
“Because he’s courting a male steward. He started his own security agency, remember, he told us. It was so he could have more flexibility. So that he could follow him around everywhere, like a lovesick puppy.”
Right now it seems absurd that I should ever have worried about Kieran at all. In fact, I feel a little proud of myself for not having cancelled the wedding. For having trusted in him.
“What are they like?” I ask. “My birth parents.” I didn’t forget where Harry went and what he did this past week. But it is only now that I’m able to let it sink in, believe it, think about it. In fact, I’m a little excited.
“You really want to know?”
I nod. He takes out his phone and shows me pictures. My birth mother is short, stout, with dark, curly hair and a skin tone like my own. My biological father is a tall, loose-limbed black man with a grey beard and soft, brown eyes. They look like mine.
“They’re friendly people,” Harry says.
“They knew who you were?”
“I told them,” he says. “Are you angry? I mean, I know I shouldn’t have done it without your permission, but can you forgive me?”
I nod quickly, my eyes fixed on the picture of those two strangers. Having spent so much time imagining these people, I’m not sure now how to feel about it, seeing what they’re really like. A part of me hoped childishly that they were special agents or some sort of royalty who had me illegitimately and thus had to give me up. It’s sobering to see that they are just two ordinary people with alternative lifestyles. They look like nice people. They are both smiling in the picture.
“You should have told me,” I say, staring at it. “I could have gone with you.”
“I know. It was a stupid thing to do from start to finish.”
“What did you tell them about me?”
“The truth,” he says, smiling. “That you’re a successful, award-winning artist; that you’re engaged to me; and that you look like this.” He shows me the picture of me he has on his phone. It’s a flattering one, which is a relief.
“I have this for you, if you’re interested.”
He swipes his phone until he finds a video. I give another nod, though my mouth has gone dry. He presse
s Play.
My birth parents are standing close together, in front of a wall covered in a climbing plant. It’s all green around them. My biological dad’s arm is around my birth mother’s. He says, “Hi, Joseph! How are you? Your boyfriend says that you will be getting married soon. We are so happy to hear you are doing well. So happy.” His accent is still British, with only a mild Australian twang. “He tells us you’re an artist! We would love to see your work one day.”
My biological mother chimes in, “We hope you can come down here one day to see us. It would be so wonderful to meet you!” She tears up. “I want you to know that I have been thinking about you every single—” She chokes up. I blink hard, and Harry’s arm snakes about my waist. “—every single day,” she finishes, her voice now raspy with emotion. “It is so wonderful to hear you found a good family who loves you, and a boyfriend who loves you so much. It makes me so happy.”
“Do come and visit,” my biological father insists. “We can show you some beautiful spots here: there’s great weather, wonderful nature, so much to do, you wouldn’t be bored, I promise!”
“Yes, do come!” my birth mother says, and then she kisses her hands at me and waves, and the video ends.
For a moment, I am just blown away.
“I’m really sorry,” Harry says, again, quietly. “I shouldn’t have done it. I thought it would be—”
“No,” I interrupt him. “No, I liked it. I’m sorry you had to go through so much trouble.”
“In the future you will stick to being spontaneous, and I’ll stick to the planning,” he says.
“Okay.”
He kisses my temple. Everything inside me goes calm.
The reception passes us by. Magically—perhaps because of Harry’s presence—nothing goes wrong. I mean, of course, the ketchup-lettuce-caviar wedding cake collapses before we manage to cut it; and Siobhan is inconsolable/ecstatic about the pregnancy and therefore looks like Batman’s Joker in all the pictures; and Harry’s dad gives a really short speech, in which he basically gives up and concedes defeat to me, which is a bit odd, but equally kind of touching. But Arabella has colluded with the caterers so there’s an extra cake for people to eat. And Siobhan doesn’t care at all what she looks like. We’re all happy for her and try to console her about all the alcohol she consumed while in France. Eventually, Chloe reminds her that in the history of the world, most people were drunk all the time, and bred like rabbits.
“It’s thanks to alcohol, if you ask me, you got pregnant in the first place!” she says. For some reason, this does help Siobhan get over it.
Harry and I have our first dance to Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” which the band kindly altered by exchanging all the girl in the lyrics to boy for us.
At some point late in the night, Harry falls asleep on my shoulder, and so I take him up to our room. He zombie-walks up the stairs while I support him on my arm. I deposit him on our fresh bed. The room’s been cleaned while we were downstairs. The bed looks soft, white, and inviting. New curtains are up, the iron’s been cleaned away. Suddenly I feel really bad about how I treated Arabella, because I’m pretty sure she’s made all this happen.
I strip Harry of his clothes and tuck him in. Then I undress myself and lie beside him. A wave of weariness washes over me, and while the sounds of the party penetrate from downstairs, I feel so tired, so soothed by Harry’s warm body next to me, that sleep takes me almost at once.
It’s three in the afternoon by the time we wake up, shower, go back to bed, fool around, shower again, and then take another nap. We wake up a second time, and we’re hungry. I order room service, while Harry stretches in bed, marvelling at how he doesn’t even feel guilty for not getting up.
“We should do this more often,” he says.
We have a three-course meal right there in bed. Harry is amazed that such a thing is even humanly possible. He can’t decide whether it’s really disgusting or bloody awesome. I convince him it’s the latter by eating my dessert off him.
When the sun goes down, we’re like John Lennon and Yoko. We spent the whole day in bed, and Harry decides that he likes it after all.
“It’s so . . . decadent,” he says. He’s flushed and breathing hard, but the smile on his face shows complete satisfaction.
I crack a window. We’ve misted it up. Then I fall back onto my pillow and breathe in the fresh air now mingling with that of our sweat and exertion.
“Are you tired?” He rolls onto his side to face me.
I laugh. “Give me a minute.”
“Do you know,” he says with a wistful smile, “yesterday, I came here from the airport straight away?”
“What, you didn’t stop at our flat first?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“For the same reason, I imagine, that you didn’t cancel the wedding.”
“I don’t know if I deserve credit for that,” I say, putting my hands behind my head. “I had the worst week imaginable, and was paralysed with panic.”
I tell him everything. About his mother’s insane wedding cake (he barely registered it at the reception), his sister’s disappearance in France, and about my gym visits with Frank. I even tell him about my conversation with Kieran just before Harry turned up. I can’t keep secrets from my husband, after all.
Then I remember how I bumped into Gabriella, and I tell him about the inscrutable conversation I had with her—how she claimed to love Frank but still thought it necessary to leave the continent and never see him again. Unlike me, though, Harry doesn’t seem mystified by her words at all.
“Can you really not imagine what her problem was?” he asks, half-amused, half-astonished at my incomprehension.
“No,” I say, indignant. “I warned her, before she married him, that Frank was as he was, and if this wore on her with time, then why not just say so? I mean, I get it, he can be a bit much, but it’s not like she didn’t know that. In fact, when I spoke to her before her wedding, she was gushing over how dreamy he was, and how flattered she was that someone like he should choose someone like her!”
“I don’t think this is about Frank, love.”
“What else, then?”
He sighs and puts his hand on my stomach.
“I only spoke to her about it once or twice,” he says. “Far be it for me to speculate on her motivations on the basis of that. But I had the impression, when they were still together, that she wasn’t being entirely honest with Frank.”
“What do you mean? Did she cheat on him?”
“No, I think she was pretending to be wilder and more, you know, like Frank, in order to appeal to him. In reality, I think she’s a calm, placid soul. At least that’s how she struck me when Frank wasn’t around. When he was around, she was straining to be what she probably thought Frank wanted. Wild and spontaneous.”
“That’s ridiculous!” I sit up, indignant. “Nobody would do that!”
“I’m just saying what I thought I saw,” he says, leaning back. “I might be wrong. Probably I am.”
I stew over this for a minute. Her words come back to me. She said she couldn’t go on pretending. That it was frightening and tiring. I turn to Harry.
“She wouldn’t, would she?” I ask, less certain now.
He shrugs. “I can tell you this much. You and Frank can be quite intimidating.”
“What?”
“I’m just saying.” He laughs. “You have this wild, artistic set of friends. Your anecdotes are full of incredible adventures. Like that time Frank lost his leg rescuing a guy from a burning car. Or that time you and he initiated a whole New Year’s Eve street party that ended up in national newspapers. Or that time you flashed a whole pub as part of a card trick? Or in Dublin, when—”
“Okay, okay, thank you, I get it.”
“Every time you go out, something weird happens. When you’re just a boring old suit like me, or a grey little church mouse like Gabriella, it can be a little overwhelming.”
“
Hang on; you don’t want to tell me that you feel that way?”
“I did for a time.”
I can’t believe him.
He lifts himself up onto his elbows. “When I first met you, you were this . . . this charismatic, charming pirate, and I—”
“Pirate!” I burst out. “What the— What do you mean, pirate?”
He reddens and laughs. “Well, with your long hair and your rings and earrings and bracelets, and your tanned skin tone, I liked to think of you as a little bit pirate-like. In a sexy way.”
“And I’m finding this out now?”
“So it was intimidating,” he continues despite my outrage, “and I felt like such a dweeb in comparison.”
“Hang on,” I say, because this really is too much. “I don’t get it. Why then are you and I married now, and she’s going to Brazil to teach the Bible in the jungle? This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Well, our stories are different,” he says. “You and I didn’t get married immediately.”
I sink my head into my hands again. None of this is making any sense to me. “What are you saying?”
“As much as you’ll hate to hear this, we did have Kieran to force us to confront what we felt.” He puts his hand to my cheek. “They had no obstacles at all.”
“I’m not thanking Kieran for anything.”
He thinks this is funny. “You do realise that if it hadn’t been for him, I might never have had the guts to go to you?”
I frown. “What?”
“After he and I split up that second time, and I was absolutely miserable, he was the one who encouraged me to go find you. I wanted to, but I thought you’d be too angry to look at me. I thought I’d messed up everything. You stopped responding to the invitations. I thought you were done with me.”
I don’t like thinking back to that time. It still makes my heart contract with pain.
“Pf,” I say. “I’m not that fickle! Besides, you kept sending all these people to me, with offers of work and awards and what not. How could I possibly forget you? You didn’t give me the chance to!”
