These Days of Ours

by Juliet Ashton

  ‘And I swear never to chuck you.’ Arms around each other, they mooched out, loved-up Siamese twins.

  Kate leaned back against the Tampax machine and caught her breath. The powder room’s fussy blinds and gilt mirrors were a respite from the frenzy of the ballroom. The people who’d warned that her wedding day would fly by were wrong; it seemed to have been going on for half a century.

  The service had been overwhelming, a tsunami of emotion. Repeating her vows in the festive shadows of stained glass felt significant in a way that very little else ever had.

  Since then she’d shaken countless hands, eaten a vast meal without tasting a thing, smiled through speech after speech, taken the microphone to thank her parents, danced, drunk, eaten again, made nice with the youngest bridesmaids, and posed for snaps with relatives she’d assumed long-dead. All while wearing a veil.

  Spotting herself in the mirror she wondered who was that drag queen in white. Her lips were blood red. Her eyelids were three different shades of bronze. The make-up artist had said airily Lots of my brides ask for ‘natural’ but they’re glad I didn’t listen when they see the photographs. Although her dress was simpler by far than Becca’s corseted extravaganza, Kate felt as if the white satin was wearing her. The train stalked her, the headdress bit into her scalp, and the lacing crushed her ribs like a murderous lover. She wanted to tear everything off and flee through the cutesy latticed window in her undies.

  ‘Jesus!’ Becca appeared and backed against the door as if a lynch mob was after her. Her streaked hair high and wide, she gleamed and glinted, every inch of her tanned or glossed or studded with diamante. ‘I need a ciggie, Kate.’

  She clambered via a sink on to the high window ledge. It was a curiously un-bride-like thing to do but Kate had discovered that almost anything, apart from standing still and beaming angelically, looked inappropriate in a wedding dress. It was the least practical item of clothing she could imagine and that, she supposed, was its point.

  Puffing smoke out of the window, Becca gasped, ‘Granddad’s drunk. He’s doing the twist. At least I hope it’s the twist. Maybe he’s having a series of strokes. Mum’s desperately engaging Father Gerry in conversation so he doesn’t notice.’

  ‘Father Gerry,’ said Kate, ‘is drunker than Granddad. And Charlie’s mum is drunker than both of them put together.’ She’d tried to steer the elder Mrs Garland away from the bar but it was beyond her; Kate’s new mother-in-law had last been seen propositioning one of the best men.

  ‘Isn’t it time you told your mother and your . . . husband that you smoke?’

  They both pulled a face at ‘husband’, as if it was a forbidden phrase they suddenly had licence to use.

  ‘I don’t smoke. Not really.’ Becca blew a perfect ‘O’. ‘Just the odd one now and then.’ She flung the cigarette out into the dark and slithered down, shedding sequins. ‘God, you look stunning, cuz.’

  ‘It’s just expensive fancy dress.’

  ‘I never want to take mine off.’ Becca pirouetted, almost toppling over in her platform heels. The brief she’d given the designer had been precise: imagine Jennifer Aniston was a Spice Girl. ‘It’s past 1am. It’s nearly over. Isn’t it extra spesh,’ she said, taking Kate’s hands, ‘that we did this together?’

  ‘That was lovely, what you said in your speech.’

  ‘About you?’ Becca pouted in the mirror and checked out her cleavage. ‘I meant every word.’

  ‘I could tell.’ Kate knew it was heartfelt because Becca hadn’t cried.

  ‘And to think,’ said Becca, catching Kate’s eye in the glass, ‘you and Charlie always said you didn’t believe in marriage.’

  A knock at the door, and Kate’s dad peered sheepishly in. ‘Mum’s on her way,’ he said, unaware that his top hat had left a ridge in his greying curls. ‘She’s a bit upset, so . . .’ He darted out of the way as the womenfolk bowled in past him, jabbering.

  ‘She might be OK for all we know.’ Aunty Marjorie shredded a tissue between her fingers.

  ‘They said he’s dead.’ Mum wailed, ‘Dead, Marjorie!’, as if this was her sister’s fault.

  ‘Who?’ Kate and Becca straightened up, alert.

  ‘Di.’ Mum’s voice shook.

  ‘Di . . .?’ Kate couldn’t recall even a third cousin called Di.

  ‘Princess Di?’ Becca comprehended and her hands flew to her face.

  ‘There’s been a car crash in Paris.’ Dad looked at his wife as if she was a suspicious package which might blow up at any moment. ‘Princess Diana’s in hospital and her young man was killed.’

  ‘She’s cursed, John!’ Like all Irish women of her vintage, Mum both loved and feared a curse. ‘I was only thirty when she married that auld two-timer Charles, and you girls have grown up with her, and now . . .’

  ‘There’s hope, Mum,’ said Kate. It would be easy to mock the middle-aged suburban woman’s devotion to an aristocrat but Mum had aped every flicky hairstyle, every cumbersome hat, every patent court shoe her beloved princess wore.

  ‘Who,’ keened Mum, ‘will look after the Aids patients if my Di goes?’

  ‘Princess Di can’t die.’ Becca was brisk, no-nonsense. ‘She just can’t.’

  ‘She can.’ Aunty Marjorie was fatalistic.

  ‘Let’s say a prayer and trust in Him upstairs.’ Kate knew her mum’s bunions were suffering in her new satin shoes and, judging by the older woman’s face, her control tights were misbehaving. ‘Our Father, who art—’

  A loud banging on the door interrupted the pious scene. ‘Open up!’ shouted a deep voice.

  ‘No way!’ Becca ran to the door, surprisingly fleet for a woman whose dress weighed the same as a small car. ‘Grooms aren’t allowed, Julian! Brides only!’

  ‘Too many bloody brides at this wedding,’ laughed Julian from the other side of the door. ‘Charlie, mate,’ he shouted. ‘Give me a hand here.’

  Squealing, enjoying herself, Becca tried to hold the door against the intruders but she gave in and the grooms half fell into the powder room, both miraculously holding aloft an unspilled tumbler of whisky.

  ‘So, wifey,’ said Julian, straightening up, his cheeks a little red, his blond hair a little tousled, ‘how does it feel to be the new Mrs Ames?’

  ‘It feels great.’ Kate bent backwards as Julian threw an arm about her waist and pulled her to him, kissing her hard. ‘Whisky breath.’ She crinkled her nose.

  ‘You love it,’ he said.

  ‘I do.’ Julian was manly in all the textbook ways and Kate was constantly surprised by how much it turned her on. Throughout her teens she’d mooned over fey boys, boys who read poetry and looked into the middle distance thinking big thoughts. Boys like, well, Charlie, who was now submitting to having his cravat straightened by his new wife. Julian’s swagger, his hunger for life and his blithe expectation that things would go his way were an exotic cocktail after a lifetime of tea drinking.

  ‘Ow.’ Even though, at times, he could go a little far. ‘You’re squeezing my whalebones,’ complained Kate, feeling small against Julian’s expanse of waistcoated chest.

  ‘Sorry. You smell bloody divine.’ Julian kissed her hair, her immovable hair which Kate couldn’t wait to comb out.

  Standing back to survey her cravat handiwork, Becca seemed satisfied. ‘God, Charlie, I fancy you in tails.’

  ‘I look like an idiot.’ Charlie had been anti-top hat, anti-cravat, anti-fuss throughout the wedding planning tornado.

  ‘No, you look nice,’ said Kate shyly, as if they’d just been introduced. The road back to something akin to friendship was long and full of potholes; much of what they said to each other came out awkwardly.

  ‘It’s not a wedding without top hats,’ said Becca, a variation on a theme. It’s not a wedding without a floral arch/a harpist/an eight tier cake. To avoid tantrums, the others had, separately and collectively, given in. Even so, the mistake on the invitations – only noticed after all one hundred and fifty had been mailed – s
parked a fit. It looks as if I’m marrying Julian and Kate’s marrying Charlie! Becca had raged. As if we’ve all gone back in time!

  As if they’d gone back two years, to be precise, to the fatal row that hindsight pinpointed as the moment when the music changed.

  The argument that ended the Kate and Charlie show had seemed trivial, little more than a tiff. During one of their long, meandering phone calls, Kate had prodded her boyfriend about his decision not to come home that weekend from Keele University.

  Like most arguments, that wasn’t what they were really fighting about.

  ‘I have to catch up. I’m really behind.’

  Kate pictured Charlie’s digs on campus, a rectangular box made cosy with Pulp posters and collages of photographs. She imagined him lying on his ethnic bedcover, surrounded by books and stained mugs and CDs as he said, with patience that was somehow patronising, ‘Staffordshire’s a long way from London, darling. I come home a lot, you know. This weekend I have to buckle down.’

  Usually, Kate was understanding. She knew Charlie’s shambolic home life had given him a thirst to make his own way. If he studied hard he could expect a First, the key to unlock his literary ambitions. That evening, however, Kate was less concerned with his literary ambitions than she was with the collage on the cork pinboard above his head.

  Each time she visited a few more photographs had been added. Snap after snap of ‘mega’ nights out, of Charlie huddled over a bottle-strewn table with his new best friends all caught mid-guffaw by the camera’s flash. Kate was glad – sincerely glad – that the decision to study so far from home had worked out, that her boyfriend was making friends and having fun.

  But.

  As Charlie would ruefully say, ‘There’s always a but.’

  But . . . did all these new friends have to be girls? Girls with shampoo-advert swingy hair, an endless wardrobe of strappy tops and a complete ignorance of bras?

  The pinboard had been on Kate’s mind as she went in and out to work. Her desire to leave sixth form and find a job had astonished Charlie. He saw higher education as an opportunity it was rude to refuse but Kate was impatient to launch herself on what she thought of as the real world.

  Working in retail (‘You mean you’re a shop girl, pet,’ Mum would correct her) was frustrating and rewarding and hard graft. Kate, despite her family’s misgivings about ‘missing out’ on a degree, was playing a long game. She had a head for business: surely the best way to develop it was in a hands-on environment, learning something practical every day.

  The real world turned out to be banal. Early starts. Clocking on and clocking off. Naively, Kate had assumed that working in a party supplies shop would be ‘fun’ but retail was retail: it certainly didn’t merit a collage of party snaps, like Charlie’s work hard/play hard life on campus.

  ‘How’s the book coming along?’ She changed the subject.

  ‘Slowly.’

  ‘Maybe it’d go faster and you’d have time to come home if you didn’t party so much.’

  Charlie’s answering ‘OK, Grandma!’ would usually make Kate laugh but that night her insecurity called the shots. The thought of his lissom new friends with their girly names – each one an Emma or a Sophie – made her feel like a careworn character from a Victorian novel: Poor Kate, the Humble Shopgirl who dies of consumption in an attic.

  Instead of laughing, Kate banged down the phone.

  Dismayed at herself, and wishing she hadn’t done something so, well, Becca, Kate stared hard at the phone, then jumped when it rang.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, sweetly and full of trepidation, relieved that Charlie had diffused the situation.

  The relief vanished when her gentle, peaceable Charlie spat, ‘So, let me get this right. I do what I’m told, yeah?’

  ‘No, listen,’ began Kate. She closed her eyes as the curdled conversation slipped away from her. ‘I just—’

  ‘I’m not a poodle, Kate. I don’t come when you click your fingers.’

  ‘I know that!’ Kate took a deep breath. Slamming the phone down was what Charlie’s mother did when he called home to check she was all right. To check she was alive. She should have foreseen the traumatic connections it would spark. ‘I didn’t mean to—’ She stopped. ‘Hang on. Who’s there with you?’ she asked, as a female voice murmured in the background.

  ‘Nobody,’ said Charlie.

  Kate assumed she’d heard a stray snatch of radio until Charlie amended his answer to, ‘Well, just Ellie.’

  Just Ellie. Just a glossy haired, big eyed model-in-training. ‘And you think it’s OK to have a private conversation with just Ellie in the room? I’m talking to you, Charlie, not some silly tart I’ve never even met.’

  The silence was thick, like soup. ‘Actually,’ said Charlie, ‘you’re on speakerphone.’

  It was the girlish giggle that did it. Down went Kate’s phone for the second and final time. He let me embarrass myself. He aired our dirty linen in front of a stranger. He doesn’t care how I feel. A thought that had been gestating for a while rose up fully formed. Charlie’s changed since he went away.

  In the white heat of her annoyance, Kate felt like a glorious martyr, a latter day Joan of Arc. I’ve been supportive. I helped him move in to his digs. I never moan about how much I miss him.

  When he rang back, she’d let him have it right between the eyes. Or she’d cry. Kate folded her arms and waited; her Charlie wouldn’t hold out for long.

  Kate fell asleep with her bedroom door open so she could hear the phone in the hallway, and woke up to its sulky silence in the morning.

  Despite her confidence in him, a day passed.

  Then two.

  Foolishly, Kate allowed herself to believe that Charlie had a cheeky plan to show up at the weekend. For forty-eight hours she watched the front door like an abandoned dog. Becca, an expert in Kate behaviour, guessed something was up, but her ‘all men are pigs’ rants made Kate feel worse.

  Not all men were pigs. Charlie in particular was lovely. After the first rush of fury, Kate beatified him: St Charlie, patron saint of Good Boyfriends. He was kind, he was thoughtful, he was easy-going. But was he still hers?

  The silence set, like concrete. Kate didn’t call because Charlie didn’t call. Possibly, up in Staffordshire, Charlie didn’t call because Kate didn’t call. Shock set in that Charlie could turn on her so thoroughly, over something so petty.

  Becca was airily certain it would all come good. ‘You can’t split up,’ she said. ‘You’re KateandCharlie! All one word!’

  ‘I think we’re separate words now,’ said Kate, changing TV channels willy nilly, unable to settle.

  ‘Fight for him,’ advised Becca. ‘Before some Emmy or Lucy nabs him.’

  ‘We’re not like that,’ said Kate, miserably aware that the ‘we’ might be past its sell-by date. She needed Charlie to prove to her that the one hundred and sixty miles separating them didn’t matter. Am I part of Charlie’s present or his past? Kate worried that she was fast becoming a dot on the horizon in Charlie’s rear-view mirror.

  ‘Glam yourself up,’ said Becca. ‘Jump on a train. Shag your romance back to life.’

  ‘Has that worked with Julian?’

  Kate felt cruel when Becca’s eyes flickered. She picked up the remote and they sank into the sofa for another consoling episode of Pride and Prejudice. Her cousin had been fragile since Julian bowed out of her life, saying, ‘The magic’s gone.’

  ‘The magic’s gone?’ squawked Becca out of the blue over one of Darcy’s speeches. ‘What does that even bloody mean?’ She did that a lot, suddenly referencing the break-up halfway through a conversation about something quite different. Kate had come to realise that Becca scrolled constantly through those last heartbreaking conversations with Julian.

  Kate could have recited the dying weeks of Becca’s engagement along with her. She knew all the quotes by heart, all the barbs Becca and Julian had slung at each other, knee deep in the wreckage of their relationship.
It had finally foundered on the night Julian, backed into a corner, had shouted Ever since we got engaged I’ve felt as if there’s a noose around my neck.

  ‘I was the best thing that ever happened to him,’ said Becca.

  ‘By quite some way,’ agreed Kate, muting Pride and Prejudice. This was the only possible response, but the truth was that Kate had grown fond of Julian. She’d seen the breach coming, clocked his fading interest in the prospect of a wedding. He’d surprised Kate by confiding in her, exposing a depth to him she’d never suspected. Guiltily, she’d realised that she’d always treated Julian as some sort of shop mannequin; well dressed but lacking feelings. To make up for her lack of empathy, Kate had tuned into him, trying hard to repair the holes that had appeared in his relationship with Becca. It had done no good, and now that he was gone she felt as if she’d lost a friend. ‘You could nab another bloke just like that.’ Kate clicked her fingers and Becca’s face drooped. ‘Sorry.’ Kate put her hand over Becca’s. ‘I know you only want Julian.’

  ‘But he doesn’t want me,’ said Becca. ‘The bastard.’

  Kate envied Becca’s organic approach to man trouble. She did whatever occurred to her, whether it be wallowing in candlelit baths sobbing along to ‘their’ songs or blitzing Julian’s answerphone with messages alternately demonising him and begging him to take her back.

  With no skills in this area – new to heartbreak, Kate had never experienced anything half as painful as Charlie’s loaded silence – her unhappiness made her a better employee. First in, last out, Kate was diligent, welcoming every tedious task as a respite from the spin-dryer of morbid thoughts in her head. The shop was immaculate, the rudest of customers treated with exquisite courtesy; Kate appreciated the distractions of the working day.

  The phone on the counter at Party Games received the same treatment as the phone in her parents’ hall. Kate stared at it, jumped whenever it rang, drooping when she realised the caller wasn’t Him. Twice a day she held the receiver to her ear to check it was working. In the right mood, Kate laughed at this behaviour, but that mood was increasingly elusive.