by Meg Mason
1. red Winh 20
2. wite winhs 20
3. mixcher of all the wihns, 10.
In the message, Ingrid said she had ordered a large number three, because it’s basic home economics.
*
It was Peregrine who pointed Jonathan out at the summer party and, as he said a year later while begging my forgiveness for it, ‘unwittingly choreographed your devastating pas de deux’.
Jonathan was standing in the middle of the room talking to three blonde women dressed in iterations of the same outfit. Peregrine said they were all in trouble, at risk of being seduced or sold a horrible landscape, and apologised for having to leave me alone because he had to go and say hello to someone tedious.
I passed Jonathan on my way to the terrace and sensed him turn and watch me to the door. When I came back inside and returned to where I’d been standing with Peregrine, Jonathan stepped away from his group. I committed to hating him while he was cutting his swathe towards me because his hair looked wet even though it wasn’t and, passing a waiter, he lifted two glasses of champagne off his tray without acknowledging him. He put one in my hand and, as he did so, the sleeve of his dinner jacket shifted to reveal a wristwatch the size of a wall clock.
Because he’d left a matter of inches between us, he clinked the rim of my glass by tilting his only a fraction and said, ‘I’m Jonathan Strong, but I’m much more interested in who you are.’
I surrendered to him a minute later. He had an extravagant energy that animated him and anaesthetised whoever he was talking to and was in on the joke of how beautiful he was. When I told him he had the brilliant eyes of a Victorian child who would die the same night of scarlet fever, he laughed excessively.
His reciprocal comment was so banal – my dress, apparently, made me look like a 1930s movie star – I assumed he was joking. Jonathan was never joking, but I did not realise that for a long time.
I was taking something then that, in its reaction to alcohol, made me a cheap date and I was drunk before I had finished Jonathan’s champagne. The distance between us had been diminishing all the time we had been talking, and once it became nothing, once he was whispering against my face, letting him kiss me felt like a continuation of our progress towards each other. Then, letting him take my phone number and the next day, letting him take me to dinner.
He took me to a sushi restaurant in Chelsea that he was, for a brief time, one hundred per cent in love with, before he decided that food going around and around on a little train was incredibly juvenile. I refreshed my commitment to hating him the moment we sat down and slept with him that night.
That was the root of the giant misunderstanding that was us getting married: the fact that he thought I was so uninhibited, fun, a skinny person interested in fashion, an attender of magazine parties, and I thought he didn’t take immense amounts of cocaine.
*
Part way into the dinner, Jonathan delivered a disquisition on mental illness and the people who choose to have it, that was unrelated to whatever we’d been talking about before.
The kind of people who clamoured to tell you they had some sort of psychological disorder were, in his experience, either boring and desperate to seem interesting, or unable to accept that they were fucked up in some ordinary way, probably by their own hand and not because of the childhood they were equally in a rush to tell you about.
I said nothing, distracted by the fact that while he was speaking, Jonathan lifted a dish of sashimi off the conveyer, removed the lid, ate half a slice off his chopsticks, grimaced and put the remainder back on the dish, replaced the lid and sent it on its way.
Jonathan went on, saying everyone was on meds of some kind now, but to what effect – the general populace seemed as miserable as ever.
I could not take my eyes off the dish as it continued around the circuit, passing in front of other diners. Remotely, I heard him say, ‘Perhaps instead of chomping on pharmaceuticals like bar nuts in the vague hope of getting better, people ought to think about toughening the fuck up.’
I took a sip of the saké that I had declined and he’d poured anyway, and saw, over his shoulder, a man further down the line take Jonathan’s plate of leftovers off the belt and give it to his wife. She picked up her chopsticks and reached for the half-slice. I was spared the horror of watching her eat it by Jonathan saying my name and then, ‘I’m right, no?’
I laughed and said, ‘You’re hilarious Jonathan.’ He grinned and refilled my saké glass. By the time he repeated his treatise on mental health a few weeks later, I was in love with him and still thought he was joking.
*
When I told Peregrine that I had started seeing Jonathan, he said he rather wished I’d let myself be talked into the awful painting instead of the sex.
7
INGRID MET HAMISH that same summer, on her way to a birthday party Winsome was throwing for her at Belgravia. As soon as she fell over on the footpath, Hamish abandoned his bins at the gate and ran out to see if she was alright. He helped her up and because my sister turned out to be bleeding from multiple sites, he offered to drive her to wherever she was going and said, according to Ingrid, ‘I am not a terrible murderer.’ She said if that meant he was a really good murderer, she would like a ride.
Arriving at the house, Hamish agreed to come inside for a drink because he had enjoyed being talked at by my sister, for most of the way, so much. I was already there and after Ingrid introduced us, Hamish asked me what I did. He said it must be exciting, working at a magazine, then told me he had a job in government that was too boring to go into. Ingrid said, just having heard it herself, she wouldn’t contest him on that point. Before the end of the party, I knew she was going to marry him because although he was beside her all night, he did not challenge her on a single point of any anecdote while she was telling it, even though my sister’s anecdotes are always a three-way combination of hyperbole, lies and factual inaccuracy.
They had been together for three years by the time he proposed, on a beach in Dorset that was deserted because it was January and, as she described it later, the wind was so ferocious, sand cut at them sideways and Hamish did the whole thing with his eyes shut.
*
Jonathan proposed when we had been together a matter of weeks, at a dinner he put on for that purpose. Except for a step-sister, he was estranged from his own family but he invited mine: my parents and Ingrid, who brought Hamish, Rowland, Winsome, Oliver, Jessamine and Patrick, who came in place of Nicholas – away, I was told, at a special farm in America.
He hadn’t met them before that night or known me long enough to know that I would feel the same about such an intimate thing occurring in public as I had felt at fourteen when I got my first period at an ice rink. I wanted it, but not in those circumstances. Later, I understood it was because Jonathan needed an audience.
His apartment was on a high floor of an aggressively conceptual glass tower in Southwark that had been the subject of vigorous community opposition in the planning stages. Every feature of its interior was concealed, recessed, disguised or cleverly obscured by something put there on purpose to draw the eye towards something else. Before I learned where everything was, I slid back a lot of panels and found something I wasn’t looking for, something I wasn’t supposed to see or nothing at all.
I was living at home when I met Jonathan because the salary of a chair describer was in the lowest possible five figures and still was at the time of the dinner because, although he had asked me to move in with him almost immediately, being so high up, in an apartment banked on all sides by vast, hermetic windows, made me feel like there wasn’t any air. I could not last for more than a few hours inside without having to take the silently plummeting lift to the ground floor and stand for some time on the footpath, breathing in and out in a way that was too fast to qualify as mindful. And so, I arrived that night with my parents and introduced them to Jonathan in the apartment’s low-lit vestibule. He was wearing a navy suit with an
open shirt and looked like a prestige estate agent, compared to my father who was wearing brown trousers and a brown jumper and looked, conversely, like he drove a mobile library.
They were equally aware of the contrast but Jonathan stepped forward, grasped my father’s hand and said, ‘The poet!’ in a way that was rescuing for both of them and desperately enamouring for me. Next he turned to my mother, swept her over and said, ‘Darling, what have you come as?’ She had come as a sculptor. Jonathan said he needed a moment so he could deconstruct her outfit, and although he was mocking her, my mother let herself be twirled.
The others arrived while we were still there and Jonathan repeated their names after me as though he was learning key words of a foreign language, while shaking their hands for what seemed like a second too long.
I introduced Patrick last and Jonathan said, ‘Right, right, the school friend,’ then went off to shepherd everyone into the apartment’s vast entertaining area, leaving us by ourselves.
He looked well – I looked well. We had not established a topic beyond that before Jonathan jogged back in and said, ‘You two, Patrick, come, come.’
*
Although she had not just commented on it, Jonathan explained to my sister during their only conversation that evening that people assumed he was naturally incredible with names, but in fact it was because whenever he met somebody for the first time he would make up a clever mnemonic that linked some aspect of their physical appearance to their name before he let go of their hand. That is why, for a long time, she called him Jonathan Fucking Annoying Face.
Ingrid hated Jonathan, theoretically before she met him and viscerally afterwards. She was the only person his powers didn’t work on and later she told me that seeing us fall in love had been like watching two opposing vehicles sliding towards the median strip and not being able to do anything except wait for the moment of impact and – that night – start a list on the back of a receipt called ‘Reasons Jonathan is a Total Weapon’.
*
I did not know that Jonathan was going to ask me to marry him at the dinner or that his doing so would come as the crescendo to a slideshow of photos charting our relationship to that point. By and large, they were individual shots, mine of him, his of me, taken with his amazing camera.
It was shown on a screen that descended from an invisible recess in the ceiling, and as it silently ascended again, Jonathan beckoned for me to come and stand next to him.
In the slowed-down moment of getting up, I looked at my weakly smiling father whose desire to help me had always exceeded his ability, at Ingrid who was still in the stage of sitting on Hamish’s lap, presently with her arms draped around his neck. I looked at my uncle and aunt and cousins in intimate conversation at the other end of the table, past Patrick who was only a place along but seemed on his own, to my mother who was splashing champagne into and nearly into her glass with her eyes fixed too adoringly on Jonathan who was, by then, standing with his arms out like he was about to take possession of a large object. I wanted to become someone else. I wanted to belong to anyone else. I wanted everything to be different. Before he actually asked me and so he wouldn’t get down on one knee in front of my family, I said yes.
There was a second of intense quiet before my father started clapping like a recent convert to classical music who is not sure if you are meant to between movements. The others began to join in except Ingrid who just glared back and forth between me and Jonathan, until my mother – beside her – shouted, ‘Whoop de doo, Martha’s pregnant’ over the gathering applause. Ingrid turned to her sharply and said, ‘What? No she isn’t,’ and then to me, ‘You’re not, are you?’
I said no and Ingrid reached for the neck of the bottle my mother was trying to open and wrested it from her. She made Hamish take it as she got off his lap, coming up to where Jonathan and I were standing and somehow compelling him to move so she could hug me without also acknowledging him.
Seeing us like that, everyone seated would have assumed it to be a congratulatory embrace between two sisters. Not the effort of one to comfort the other, speaking quietly into her ear, saying, ‘Don’t worry, she’s drunk, she’s an idiot,’ the effort of the other to stay where she was and not run out of the room because her humiliation was so profound. But the source of it was not my mother. There was no way to tell Ingrid just then that it was Jonathan who had responded to my mother’s pronouncement with mock horror then turned to my father and said, ‘She better not be!’ through gritted teeth. When my father didn’t laugh, Jonathan repeated himself to Rowland who did, and from there it spread along the table.
It was only a half moment, but I did not know where to look as the laughter rose so I kept looking at Jonathan, who was also laughing, although real sweat had formed on his brow.
He did not want children. He told me at the sushi restaurant. I told him I didn’t either and he picked up his glass and said, ‘Wow, the perfect woman.’ It felt decided from the beginning, there had been no need to revisit it. And I was glad, but not happy. The idea of being pregnant was not funny but people were laughing. I did not want to be a mother but the thought that I might, or the image of me becoming one shortly, they appeared to find hilarious.
Except for Patrick, solemn in his place. While the laughter went on, I had met his eye and he smiled, sympathetically – for which bit, I didn’t know – but my mortification was complete. The school friend felt sorry for me.
Before Ingrid and I separated, I said thank you, ‘I love you,’ and lifted my face, a brilliant smile already on it for anyone who might be looking at me.
They were all up from the table. Jonathan and I were brought back together, enveloped in their congratulations. He said, ‘Thanks guys. Full disclosure, I don’t think I’ve been happier in my life. Look at her for God’s sake.’ He picked up my hand and kissed it.
I went into Jonathan’s en suite as soon as I could and was shocked by the unfamiliar version of myself in the mirror. Huge-eyed, with a smile on my face that looked like it had been there when I died and had been hardened by rigor mortis. I put my hands on my cheeks and opened and closed my mouth until it went away. By the time I went back out, Ingrid had gone home.
*
Late that night I took a taxi back to Goldhawk Road. Jonathan apologised for having to go to bed instead of helping me clean up. He hadn’t expected a grand romantic gesture to be so knackering.
As I was being driven over Vauxhall Bridge, Ingrid called and told me to please listen to the reasons she didn’t think I should marry him. ‘This isn’t even all of them, but he never says yes. Always a hundred per cent. Listed among his chief likes, coffee and music. Always says full disclosure before revealing information about himself – usually boring, e.g. I love coffee. Most shots in that slideshow were just of him. Asked you – you of all people – to marry him, in public.’
I said that was enough.
‘He does not know you.’
I asked her to please stop.
‘You do not love him – deep down. You are just a bit lost.’
I said, ‘Ingrid, shut up. I know what I’m doing and anyway, Oliver beat you to it. I don’t need your reasons as well.’
‘But the baby thing, him saying ha ha ha, she better not be.’
I said he was being funny. ‘That’s just what he is like. Underneath he’s incredibly loving. Did you hear what he said immediately afterwards, for God’s sake look at her?’
That one charming thing said or done by Jonathan was sufficient for me to forgive him, Ingrid said, was incredible.
‘I know.’ I hung up, choosing to believe that by incredible, she meant amazing.
That every time I had to dispense forgiveness in the following weeks, I loved him more afterwards and not less, was also incredible to her and eventually to me.
*
If my daughter thinks he’s good enough, then so do I, was all my father said when I asked him if he liked Jonathan, the morning after the dinner. My mother said he
absolutely wasn’t the kind of man she had imagined I’d choose and consequently, she adored him. I told her I couldn’t tell, especially not from the way she had flung her arms around Jonathan’s neck and tried to initiate some sort of dance in the foyer as we were all standing around saying goodbye, or the fact that she’d laughed so hysterically when he’d leaned in to kiss her cheek and by some wrong angling of their heads, they had caught the corner of each other’s mouths.
I moved in with him the following weekend.
*
Because Ingrid’s children look like her, they look like me. People in the street – older ladies who stop me and say you have got your hands full or, alternatively, he is too big for a pram – do not believe me when I say I am not their mother, so I keep walking and let them think that I am.
*
There were two en suites attached to Jonathan’s bedroom and he came into mine on Sunday morning as I was pressing a pill out of the sheet into my hand, saying he was bored and had started missing me the second I got up.
Before, we’d been lying in bed; Jonathan drinking a tiny espresso produced by the expensive coffee machine he’d bought himself as an engagement present the previous day, while I studied the engagement ring he’d chosen on the way home and just given me, sliding it onto my finger with ease because it was too big.
Now, in the bathroom, he picked something of mine off the sink, then seeing the pill in my hand, asked me what it was. I said birth control and told him to please go out. Jonathan pretended to look wounded but left. I swallowed the pill and put the packet back in my make-up bag, a hidden pocket.
I came out and saw him back in bed, propped up against his European pillows, apparently in the throes of an epiphany. He patted the space beside him. Before I was all the way there, he grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the bed.
‘Do you know what Martha? Fuck the birth control. Let’s have a baby.’
