A Groom With a View

by Sophie Ranald

  I was half-heartedly pushing lettuce leaves around my plate and wondering whether I still possessed even a fraction of the skill of the seasoned chefs whose food I’d enjoyed and admired over the past few days, and whether Guido had entirely taken leave of his senses to even consider me for the job in Dubai, when a text message came through on my phone. It was from Erica.

  Dear Pippa, it’s Erica here. I am sorry to bother you.

  I imagined her sitting at our kitchen table with Spanx on her lap, the message written out in longhand next to her, painstakingly transcribing it on to her phone, using one finger to tap it out with agonising slowness. I rolled my eyes in annoyance, but, to my surprise, my exasperation was mixed with fondness.

  It’s about Spanx. He went out this morning and I haven’t seen him for a couple of hours. Nick is at a meeting. He (cat not Nick) is not usually allowed out, is he? I am a bit concerned. Am going out to look for him, but think you should know. Very best, Erica.

  The fondness evaporated as quickly as alcohol from flambéed brandy. What the hell was she thinking? She’d lived with us for weeks, she knew Spanx wasn’t allowed further than the balcony. And despite his good looks and charm, Spanx has always been a bit of a non-starter in the feline intelligence stakes. He once tried to get to some fillet steaks I’d left on the worktop by walking across the lit stove, and I’d only just rescued him before his tail caught fire. I always had to bath with the door closed, because he’d try and drink the water and fall in. He had all the instinct for self-preservation of a hard-boiled egg. And Erica had waited – what, an hour? Maybe even two or three, before letting me know he was missing. He’d get flattened by a 188 bus on Jamaica Road for sure, if he hadn’t already been.

  I rushed into the kitchen and thanked Serge, the chef, for my lunch, and said I was sorry, but I wouldn’t have time to try the lemon granita after all, because I was needed urgently back at the office. Then I legged it to the station and jumped on board a train just as it was about to leave, but forgot to check which one it was, and discovered too late that it was the slow one that was going to take me on a scenic tour of south-west London lasting almost an hour before arriving at Waterloo.

  I tried Erica’s number, but her phone just rang. I remembered that answering it generally involved hours of fumbling in her handbag and much muttering of, “Now, is it the green button or the red one? Where do I. . . Oh dear, it’s stopped. How do I see who was ringing? Nicky, could you possibly. . .?” and so on. In a crisis, she’d lose what little technological nous she had altogether. I sent a text anyway, telling her I’d be there as soon as I possibly could.

  Then I rang Nick. It was easy, I didn’t hesitate at all, and when his voicemail picked up straight away, I found the words spilling out of me as if they’d been waiting there all along.

  “It’s me. I’ve just had a text from your Mum, Spanx has gone AWOL. I’m on my way home. Hopefully it will all be okay. I really, really hope you’re okay too. If you can get away, maybe I’ll see you there. If you’re not, I’ll let you know what happens. I’m really sorry about everything, Nick. I hope we can talk later. I can’t imagine life without Spanx.”

  I felt myself choking up, and noticed the middle-aged man across the aisle looking at me nervously, as if he thought he’d been caught up in the beginning of some control-underwear promotional flashmob, and loads of scantily clad women were about to emerge from the toilets and chorus, “We can’t imagine life without Spanx!” So I ended the call and blew my nose surreptitiously.

  At last I emerged from the Tube station and dashed down our road as fast as my high-heeled boots would allow me, pausing only to look up into trees and under parked cars and go, “Spanx! Spanx!” like a woman possessed. There was no sign of him, but there was also no sign of a squashed ginger body in the road.

  I was starting to feel a bit more hopeful when I passed a sign on a lamp-post with a picture of a little white ferret. I paused to read it. ‘Please help us find Laurel. She has been missing since 24 January. She is a sweet, tame ferret but very shy. Our kids are heartbroken. If you see her, please call the number below or email findlaurel@gmail.com.’

  I thought about poor, lost Laurel and the children who loved her, and imagined setting up a ‘Find Spanx’ account and all the emails we’d get from nutters and perverts, and started to cry again.

  So by the time I got upstairs to the flat, I was a bit of a mess. My mascara had run and was stinging my eyes, and it took me three tries to get my key in the lock. At last I opened the door and called, “Hello?”

  There was silence, but there hadn’t been the moment I opened the door. I could have sworn I had heard a familiar sound, like very, very distant firecrackers on bonfire night. A sound like many threads breaking at the same time. The sound Spanx’s claws made when he scratched the sofa. Then I heard another, even more familiar noise. “Bwaaarp?”

  Spanx strolled nonchalantly into the hallway, then clocked me and went, “Bwaaarp!” and trotted over and started rubbing himself avidly against my boots. He looked just the same – possibly a bit fatter. He didn’t look like a cat that had survived a dangerous adventure in the outside world. I picked him up and pressed him against my face.

  “What’s going on, Spanx? Where have you been? Why have you been hiding from Auntie Erica and driving me demented with worry, you naughty cat?”

  Spanx fixed me with a steady gaze. It was like looking into a pair of orange traffic lights. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he seemed to be saying. “I’ve been here, sleeping on my cat tree.” Then he squirmed out of my arms and thudded to the floor. “Bwaaarp?” he said again, and walked purposefully through to the living room, glancing back over his furry shoulder as he went. It was a summons, and I followed.

  If our cat was attempting to expose Nick’s sloppy housekeeping, I didn’t get it. Everything looked just the same as when I’d left for South Africa three weeks before. Not exactly immaculate, but certainly not a hovel either. There was a cobweb hanging between the ceiling and the curtain rail that could do with Erica’s high-level dusting strategy – I’d noticed that for all her talk, she was as lax with the feather-duster as I was. The cushions on the sofa were squashed in the place where Nick liked to sit, just as usual. Spanx wandered over to the door that led to Nick’s studio, which stood ajar as it always did.

  “Bwaaarp!” he said.

  I pushed open the door. All the wedding things – the little zinc tubs that Erica had ordered to plant the snowdrops in, the easel that had held the seating plan, the piles of silver-bordered RSVP cards – were gone. But hanging from the wardrobe door was an unfamiliar white fabric garment bag, which bore the unmistakeable marks of Spanx’s claws. He walked determinedly over to it.

  “No! Just because you haven’t been squashed by a bus, doesn’t mean you can scratch people’s things,” I said. “That might belong to Erica, or Suze. Paws off!”

  Spanx jumped on to Nick’s office chair, tucked his tail around his chest and regarded me balefully.

  “What is this, anyway?” I unhooked the hanger and pulled down the zip on the bag, and actually gasped. It was my wedding dress. The dress I’d left behind on the train in Johannesburg and given up for lost. It was every bit as beautiful as I remembered. I was holding it at arm’s length, bemused, when I heard the front door open and the familiar sound of Nick throwing his bag down in the hallway.

  Still holding the dress, I walked hesitantly through to find him.

  He was wearing a navy blue suit, but it was covered in white fur, and there was a long scratch on his cheek, beaded with blood.

  “I came as quickly as I could, Pip,” he said, “but I got delayed. You see, I found this ferret. . .”

  I started to cry.

  Twenty minutes later, Nick had made tea for himself and found a can of Diet Coke in the fridge for me, and we were sitting on the sofa with Spanx between us. He was sitting upright, like an Egyptian statue of a cat, and looking distinctly smug.

&nbs
p; “He wasn’t missing, was he?” I said. “Your bloody. . . your mother made it up.”

  “I expect Suze put her up to it,” Nick said. “She said she was going to the V&A today with her and the girls. I’m sorry, Pip, it was a stupid thing of her to do.”

  I shook my head. “She meant well. It’s just a bit awkward, isn’t it?”

  Nick looked down at his hands, and the dimple in his cheek appeared. “We had to talk sometime. And I wasn’t going to call you, and you weren’t going to call me, so. . .”

  “I tried! I tried to call you loads of times, but then. . .”

  “You chickened out. Me too.”

  “But, Nick, the dress. I don’t understand. How is it here?”

  “Pippa, you lack confidence in modern technology,” he said. “All I did was email the Gautrain lost property people. Phoning them clearly didn’t work when you tried it, but they responded to my email in a couple of days. Then I contacted your mate Valli on Facebook and asked him to go and collect it, which he did. And couriered it over here. All for less than a hundred quid, not counting the case of champagne I’m having delivered to his and Sanjay’s wedding, but don’t mention that to him, it’s a surprise. You see, when you told me you’d found a dress, I didn’t exactly believe you. I did at first, but then whenever Mum or I mentioned it, you got all evasive. So I thought I’d try and get this one back for you, just in case.”

  “Nick. And now our wedding’s not even happening. Oh, God. I’m so terribly sorry.”

  He laughed, but it didn’t sound quite right. “Yeah. I guess if I’d known, I could have avoided World War Three with Mum. I said I thought her idea of posting the wedding invitations in separate batches in case there was a terrorist attack and they blew up postboxes was brilliant, and then I made out that the cousins’ batch must have got lost in the post. It didn’t work, of course. I had to fess up and tell her we didn’t want them at the wedding, and then all hell broke loose.”

  I laughed shakily. Then I said, “All the stuff about the wedding. The tomato soup and all the rest. It didn’t matter that much. The trouble was, I wasn’t certain, once it all started seeming so real, about us. And because I wasn’t sure, I convinced myself you’d done a bad thing, a really bad thing, that something was going on with you and Bethany, and I thought that made it okay for me to do something much, much worse, because I needed to end it. But the thing is, it’s partly about when things really started to go wrong, and that was a long time ago.”

  Nick said, “Yes?”

  I said, “Is there any more Diet Coke?”

  He went and fetched me another can, and I waited for him to come back, stroking Spanx, thinking that I might not see either of them again for a long, long time. When Nick came back, I told him everything: about how I’d been pregnant with our baby and not told him, but told Erica. About the blog. About how I’d felt when the plans for our wedding seemed to be turning me into a person – a bride – I didn’t feel I could be. I told him how I’d used the fact of Bethany coming into his life again and my imaginings about what was going on between them to excuse the way I’d behaved with Gabriel. And I explained to him how relieved I felt when I found out that I hadn’t done what I thought I had, after all.

  By the time I’d finished, Spanx had gone to sleep, sprawled across both our laps, because we’d moved much closer together on the sofa.

  Nick said, “Okay. We should have listened to each other, about the wedding. I thought I was doing what you wanted, you didn’t tell me that you wanted something else. Or nothing. It was fucking stupid of both of us. That’s partly why I started the blog – I needed other people to talk to – to enable me, I guess, to carry on with what I was doing, because if I’d listened to you, properly listened, I’d have known you weren’t that keen on the whole massive wedding thing.”

  “Once we’d signed up to it, it got a bit tricky, though,” I said. “It’s kind of hard to say, ‘You know that dream wedding in a castle? How about we downgrade to a keg of beer in a field somewhere?’ Or, ‘Marriage, schmarriage. Let’s just tell everyone it’s off, and live in sin some more.’ It’s like, once you’re getting married, either you have the full-on wedding or you call everything off.”

  “And when Beff got in touch, I felt sorry for her. She’s back in London with no husband and no job, and she needed a mate to talk to, and so did I. I shouldn’t have let her get the wrong impression about how I felt, but I did, and I’m sorry.

  “But the other thing,” Nick said, “about whatisiname.” I could tell, just looking at him, that he knew exactly what Gabriel’s name was, and would remember for a long time. “That’s a tough one. I’m going to have to think about that some more. Like, a lot more. It makes a difference that you didn’t fuck him, I won’t lie about that. I’m glad you didn’t. But still, the intent was there, as they say.”

  “Okay.” My mouth felt very dry, and I took another fizzy sip from my can of Diet Coke. “I can see why you need to think about that. I do too. It was awful, and stupid, and I wish I hadn’t done it. But I got a bit carried away, not with the idea of sleeping with someone else, but with being in another world. I loved doing work that excites me again. And there’s another thing. Guido’s asked me if I want to go and work in Dubai for a bit. Three years, maybe five. I’ve said I’ll think about it. It’s a great opportunity. I was sure I’d take it, but I wanted to talk to you first. And now I’m not sure at all.”

  Nick said, “Pippa, there’s no way I’m going to make that decision for you. We both need to think about this. Maybe for a couple of days, maybe for a couple of years. Maybe this is the end. I don’t know. But I’m not going to do a whole, ‘No! Don’t go!’ thing, and have you feel I’m trapping you again into something else you don’t want. So we should probably leave it like this for now.”

  “Okay.” I shoved Spanx gently over and picked up my bag. “Thanks for listening, I really do appreciate it. And I’m so glad you found that ferret. I was worried about her.”

  “She had a lethal set of claws,” Nick said, walking me to the door. Then he hesitated, his hand on the latch. “Pip? There’s another thing. Mum told me about you being pregnant. She told me after she got the email you sent her. She feels really shit about not supporting you, and letting you go through all that alone. I do, too. I wish I’d known, and been able to be there for you. If I had, I would have understood why you felt – why you feel – the way you do about having a baby.”

  “I could have told you,” I said, dry-mouthed. “But I never did. It felt like such a huge thing to have done, when you want to have children so much.” Right then, looking up at Nick’s sad, serious face, I felt the strangest sensation. My eyes were stinging at there was a massive lump in my throat, but at the same time I felt a lightness, a relief. A weight I’d been carrying alone for a long time was gone, or at least shared.

  Nick said, “Mum keeps saying how sorry she is about the way she behaved, Pip. She hopes one day she’ll have a chance to tell you herself. I guess that’s why she pulled this mad stunt today. I hope you’ll be able to be friends some time, anyway.”

  I said, “Me, too.” I made a move to hug him, and he made the same move towards me, but we both changed our minds together, and the door closed between us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  From: nick@digitaldrawingboard.com

  To: caroline.travis@khanclarkegardner.co.uk

  Subject: Saturday

  Hey Callie

  Just wanted to wish you and Phoebs a fantastic day on Saturday. I’m sorry I can’t be there. I just. . . can’t. It’s all a bit too soon. I’m sure you’ll understand. Let’s have a beer sometime soon.

  Love

  Nick

  Being a guest at your own wedding is a bit weird. I guess it’s one of those things like Marmite or harem trousers or Made in Chelsea – lots of people won’t even entertain the idea of trying it. But don’t knock it until you do – you might end up enjoying it as much as I did.

  I was w
oken up in one of the sumptuous suites at Brocklebury Manor – although not the ultra-swish tower bedroom, that was the brides’ – by brilliant winter sunshine streaming through the leaded windowpanes. I was brought breakfast by a charming waiter. I had a long, luxurious shower, straightened my hair and put on makeup and a new frock. It was quite like my own wedding morning would have been, except it wasn’t. I felt a mixture of happiness, sadness and excitement, but mostly happiness. So maybe it wasn’t all that much like Made in Chelsea, come to think of it.

  Once I was ready, I made my way up the spiral staircase to the bridal suite, and knocked on the door. Phoebe opened it, wearing a fluffy white dressing down, her wet hair hanging down her back.

  “Pippa! We thought you might be the hair and makeup lady. She’s ten minutes late and Callie’s starting to stress.”

  “No I’m not.” Callie appeared behind her, wrapped in a towel. “I’m perfectly calm. We’ve got loads of time to get ready. Come and see Phoebe’s dress, it’s stunning.”

  Phoebe held the dress up on its hanger. It was a calf-length prom dress in the palest primrose yellow, with a sweetheart neckline and a silvery-grey sash that exactly matched the colour of Callie’s simple satin shift.

  “That’s gorgeous,” I said. “Where did you get it?”