by Lisa Jewell
‘What for?’ he laughs.
‘For thinking that there might be something better for me in this world than you. For not being big enough to make that final commitment to you. For leaving you there in front of your family, in front of our children. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘And Jem, I’m sorry too. I’m sorry that I let our relationship get so bad, that I dug such a deep hole for you to climb out of. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you after Blake was born and sorry for running off to California and leaving you when you really needed me. I don’t blame you for feeling so disappointed in me.’
‘Oh, Ralph, I am not disappointed in you. How could I be?’
‘You could be. And you were. I got back from California a new man and just expected you to be all right about everything. I should have known it would take time for you to trust me.’ He smiles his lazy smile again and he holds her face by the chin. ‘Neither of us has really done anything wrong, you know that, don’t you?’
She nods. She has known it for days. All the resentment, all the ambivalence, it has just disappeared. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘It’s just, you know …’
‘Life,’ says Ralph. ‘Timing. All that shit. But I’d forgotten. Forgotten what this was all about. What we were all about. And then I remembered, and it was so simple: we are about us. Just … us. And that used to mean one thing, and now it means something completely different. Us means our children and our careers. Us means accepting that we’re not always going to be the same and that sometimes we’ll be happy and sometimes we won’t, and that you can’t look at a year in isolation because one day when we look back on the whole vast, glittering expanse of our relationship, a year will look like such a very tiny little speck of nothing and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. And the religion thing: I know it freaks you out, but really, it’s nothing to fear …’
‘I know, I know. I know that now …’
‘Yeah. It’s just something I need to do, something to control my creativity, something to keep me positive and focused on the important stuff. And that doesn’t mean that I expect you to focus on the same things as me. We can be together and still be …’
‘Different.’
‘Yes.’ He takes her face in his hands and looks into her eyes. ‘Yes, we can be different.’
‘And together?’
‘Yes. And together. All four of us. Because I love you, Jem. I love you more now than I’ve ever loved you before. And if you choose to be with me now, after what we’ve been through for the past twelve months, I’ll know, we’ll both know, that this is more than just a romantic dream. That this is destiny. And I mean that in the purest, realest, least romantic sense of the word.’
‘You mean we’re stuck with each other, no matter what?’
Ralph smiled. ‘That’s exactly what I mean.’
Jem puts down her champagne glass and covers Ralph’s hands with her own. She looks into his eyes and she sees it there, the same tortured young man who painted peonies for her twelve years ago, laying himself open, showing himself raw, asking her to love him. And she does. She really does.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘Thank God.’
And then she kisses him.
Epilogue
Jem walks into the hall and she grips her father’s hand. She is wearing a beautiful Vivienne Westwood dress, ruched and pinned in all the right places, decorated with snapdragons and peacocks, and pinned against his décolletage is a single white orchid. She’d felt a shiver of the past as she’d pulled the dress from the back of the wardrobe this morning, taken it from its hanger, smelled the scent of a sad and awful day still lingering in its folds.
‘I Want to Stay with You’ by Gallagher and Lyle plays through four large speakers, one in each corner of the room. It is a bright, playful song, about long-term love. About wholly unromantic destiny. The song makes her smile. It makes her feel hopeful. That’s why they chose it.
It’s 5 March, a year since Ralph went missing and thirteen years since their first kiss on a blue sofa in a basement flat in Battersea. Outside it is raining. Jem’s red silk shoes are splashed with brown water and the sleeve of her father’s jacket is wet. But it doesn’t matter. Today is a happy day. Today, at last, Jem is marrying Ralph. And not in a dry room in a registry office this time, not with just the bare bones of family to watch them do it, not with the wrong dress on, not with a hangover and not with a sick dread in the pit of her belly. Today she fits her dress, she is daisy fresh and she knows that she is doing exactly the right thing.
She smiles as she passes the people lining the walkway. There’s Karl, big and handsome in a white suit that somehow only Karl could carry off. He gives her the thumbs up and she returns it. He is no longer her client. He took the five thousand pounds to do his redemptive TV interview, redeemed himself, and then retired from the public eye. He does a late-night slot on London Radio now and keeps his face off the telly. He is sitting next to Smith, who arrived on an overnight flight this morning and looks tanned but shell-shocked. Stella, Jarvis and Philippe sit in front of them, Stella’s face almost inside out with excitement. Jem waves at her sisters, at her nephews, at her mother, and then at her little boy who is sitting on her mother’s lap. Philippe is here with a very beautiful young woman who looks like she has been carved out of fine marble. There is Gil, tall and fine-looking in a brown suit, and Sarah, wearing a feathered adornment on her head that Jem believes is known as a fascinator. She is with her very tiny husband and another couple from the prayer group, whom Jem doesn’t recognise. But they look very nice. Jem has accepted that this group and these people are now a part of Ralph’s life and she knows that they are good people. Ralph’s dad stands at the front, just behind Ralph. He is the best man and somewhere in his jacket pocket sits a box containing two plain white gold bands. He smiles shyly at Jem and moves so that she can make her way next to his son. The hall is decorated with orchids, white ones.
Ralph had expected Jem to want peonies, but peonies were too fleeting, too showy, too yesterday. The old orchid on the windowsill in their new kitchen is in full bloom again today, she checked it this morning, eight fat blooms. That orchid would never die, because it wanted to live.
At the end of the hall, Jem stops and turns to kiss her daughter, who is wearing last year’s bridesmaid dress, a little shorter in the leg, a little tighter around the armholes, but still the only dress she’d had any interest in wearing today. ‘But I have to wear that dress,’ she said, ‘it’s the dress for your wedding.’
Scarlett slides on to a chair next to Jem’s mother and her little brother and then Jem reaches the side of her husband-to-be. Ralph looks beautiful. He is in his Dolce & Gabbana suit, the suit he’d bought for his party in Philippe’s gallery thirteen years ago today. It still fits him and if anything, it fits him better. He holds his hand out for her. She looks at him. He looks at her. She wants to cry. She takes his hand. The song comes to an end and silence falls across the room.
The wedding begins.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Part One: One Year Earlier
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Five: Two Weeks Later
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Epilogue
