Fifteen
Lelia
We got married on a Tuesday. I couldn’t imagine a less auspicious time of week on which to make a commitment, but my father’s birthday fell on that day, stopping me from choosing any other. I had always had a horrible, creeping suspicion that we would keep to our wedding plans in spite of all that was lying and terrible about us, and on June the twenty-sixth I married Richard Joseph Fearon in Marylebone Registry Office. I was, at least, a knowing fool.
Before leaving the flat that morning, I had glanced at Richard’s computer and nudged the mouse to clear the screen-saver. Something had been minimised, a trick I’d only recently been shown by a colleague. Curious, I clicked on the square in the corner, and an email from an unrecognisable address sprang up.
The creature has come. Its caul did not smother it; its cord failed to strangle it. Beneath its bonnet and binder I saw traces of wax and fur and blood, as though it had been spat out with a monstrous tearing: a plump little pupa pulsing beneath yellow skin. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, I thought, but its mother knew no sorrow. In a cloud of chloroform, she kissed and stroked that creature.
I unravelled the infant’s flannels and pilches when its nurse left the room. An echo of a male part protruded, like a circus freak’s, from its stomach. Below it coiled a true male part. If the creature had been more winged and filmy, I could have splintered it with a hiss, but fat filled out its casing, and it panted like a fish with vigorous pink muscles. The further it emerged from that webbed half-life in which it was curled, the more firmly its milk breaths would bloom. All that we had thought of seemed insufficient. I would, I knew, have to make myself still stronger.
The email filled me with a rage of curiosity even as it revolted me. It was slightly obscene. A kind of numb panic filled me. After I had minimised it again, I felt a twinge in my stomach, as though a period was about to tug through my body. I went to the loo. When I stood up, I thought that I saw the faintest pink smear on the paper. Sickness shot to my throat. I rubbed frantically again, twisting the paper and pushing it inside me. I held it to the light. It seemed to me to be the colour of the inside of a sea-shell. Tears sprang to my eyes. I began to howl, alone there in the sitting room. I rushed to the phone and picked it up, but Richard, who had gone to work for the morning, was not available. I went back and rubbed again, but this time the paper appeared a clear white. I didn’t dare to ring the hospital in case it was true. I would wait; I would beg; it would go away.
I was sick for the first time in three months, and then I felt better, and trembling and hungry. I set off to my mother’s alone: I wouldn’t see Richard until we arrived at the Registry Office. How strange that we, who so casually assume we are liberated from convention, find ourselves drifting towards it, having never paused long enough to invent an alternative. So I left our flat alone, the bride returning with her small case of clothes to her mother. On the Tube, my head nodding with tiredness, I felt as though I had left him, or he was a gentleman farmer who had ventured to the Colonies, and I would never see him again.
My mother was keen for me to dress at her house and to visit the hair-and-beauty salon she had favoured for the last thirty years, with its suburban North London ideas about bridal make-up. To please her, I arrived there shortly after ten in the morning, guilt washing over me as I stepped into the flouncy shade of her small house. My failure to take the easy journey up the Northern Line for some months made me feel prickly with excuses. My mother hugged me, giving off pride and disapproval in perfectly balanced measures even on this day.
I went to my bedroom, pausing to check for blood on loo paper first. There was nothing. My heart thumped as I pressed my forehead to my hands and wondered whether I should phone the hospital. I pushed the thought to one side. I was now six and a half months pregnant. I would not miscarry; I wouldn’t go into premature labour. Remnants of the queasiness that had followed that email still clung to the outside edges of my mind.
In my bedroom, I touched walls. The wallpaper was so familiar, it was almost unfamiliar: its pattern cruder and chalkier than in my memory. I avoided looking at the photograph of my father, and then kissed it. We had a silent moment of communication on this, my wedding day. I said I was sorry. My weight shifted my bed’s unstirred air. I lay back and gazed at the fake cornice, the metal window-frame and the faded Laura Ashley curtains, once saved for by me and hemmed on the school sewing machines. As I opened my wardrobe to find a hanger, I saw something. On a shelf, among my childhood collection of ceramic animals – Whimsies, they were called. Whimsies! – was a squirrel that was taller than the others, its glaze bearing a duller sheen. My eye rested on the dusty hollows of its mouldings, even its features reminiscent of a different era and a brief girlhood in France. Sophie-Hélène, knowing of my childish liking for these crude models, had kindly bought me a French mismatch in Briare before I left.
Had I thanked her when I wrote to her? I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember what I’d said or when, because I’d never heard from her again: she had simply declined to answer my letters. It had made me sad, and resigned, and then, somewhere in my heart at night, frantically worried, because I remembered the atmosphere when I’d left. I’d been bundled back to England without ceremony on the appointed morning by grave-faced adults. I was confused, and guilt-sick, and terrified that I was the source of their disapproval, but what really tore at my heart was that Mazarine had failed to meet me to say goodbye. When, eventually, I found the Clemenceau surgery’s number through Directory Enquiries and rang it, I was informed that the Belliere family had moved. So my incubus had left me, and her spirit only returned to me in nightmares.
My mother helped me with my clothes downstairs. I glanced at the tablecloth of a garden that had once appeared as a dancing expanse of green. A photograph of me with Richard smiled through the doilied gloom – why did she keep her curtains semi–drawn in the day? Why so unnaturally clean? – and I felt once again some menstrual gravity in my thighs. I tried to steady my breathing as my mother twitched my dress into shape. I could say nothing to her. Richard wouldn’t understand. I wanted Sylvie. At that moment, I knew that only Sylvie Lavigne would look after me.
Making excuses, I removed myself from my mother and checked again for blood. Then I phoned Sylvie and asked her to my wedding party. A confused Richard would scoff and tease, but she would disappear into the crowds, and perhaps he wouldn’t even notice her. She would look after me. On the way downstairs, I fleetingly remembered the baby in France. I threw up again in the loo. My stomach rumbled. My mother stared at me as I made a pile of toast. The smells that I had once associated with old ladies were creeping into her life – fire lighters, custard powder, Dettol, tinned salmon, hand-washing flakes. She had begun to leave things for too long in the fridge, to thaw meat from her ice box under dish-cloths through hot afternoons. She offered me some fizzy yoghurt.
Then I succumbed to the hairdresser’s will in pain and sulphur-scented heat, and quietly tamed the results every time my mother glanced out of the taxi window. And my mother looked so neatly tailored, but still poor, poor, that I wanted to pull her to me and break down all our old hurts and barriers and kiss her and mess up her white collar by sobbing on her neck. I wanted my father with us, so desperately, on that day. I think she did too.
Richard was waiting, looking beautiful in a suit, at the Registry Office. He was smiling, and gazing at his feet, and looking very solemn, and then turning to smile at me. I married him.
Sixteen
Richard
‘She’s here,’ MacDara hissed.
‘Who?’ I said. I grabbed his arm as he stumbled towards a table.
‘I don’t fucking believe it. How’s she got here?’
‘Who?’ I said. His eyes were wide, stubble already shadowing his face.
‘Who do you think? You fucking idiot.You imbecile. Who do you think?’
I shook my head.
‘Her.’
‘You mea
n – MW?’ I said at last.
MacDara widened his eyes further and gave me a series of big, drunken nods. ‘Her. What the fuck’s she doing here? You hardly bloody know her. What’s she doing at your fucking wedding, for Christ’s sake?’
‘I know her?’ I said, even more confused. ‘Where?’ I said, looking around. ‘Where is she?’
‘Over there,’ MacDara gestured sideways. ‘Behind me to the left.’
‘Steady. Where?’
‘I can’t look, idiot,’ hissed MacDara, his words now emerging in a flat stream of spit and air. ‘She was over there.
By the flowers. Whatever you call them. Food place. Talking to – that bloke you work with.’ He darted his head round. ‘She’s gone. Where is she?’
‘Mac,’ called Catrin, seeing him turn. She ignored me.
‘But who is she?’ I said as MacDara stumbled over to Catrin. ‘What’s her name?’
MacDara shrugged, half-turning his head and mouthing ‘Fuck’ at me. His back disappeared across the lawn.
Our wedding party started in the early evening after the private marriage ceremony. I had wanted a garden party, but since our garden was two square metres of asphalted roof, accessible through a skylight merely for cleaning purposes, Lelia had managed to secure us Gordon Square Gardens through the university at nominal cost, and we had hired a ridiculous marquee at considerably more expense. I felt crass and ordinary for resorting to a marquee, and somehow touched at the same time, as though the swaying striped cliche were a home to shelter us, Lelia and me. She was mine. I would deal with all the rest later, during our long marriage.
It was a chilled, sun-sharp June day that slanted slowly into night. A couple of outdoor heaters radiated wasteful warmth; headlights swung low through the dusk spaces in tree tangle; an occasional passer-by peered through the railings like an interesting spectre in the twilight, tempting me to call out rash invitations. The bleached faces in the blueness reminded me of Sylvie. By late-evening, guests ran wild and drunk through the garden, exploring its crannies, its pergola and bushes, and reappearing on lawns that were sown with the light-points of half-closed daisies. I loved my friends, I thought with a soar of affection as I watched them meander through the circular rose garden in the middle of the north lawn. Even Catrin (small nod of greeting, icy congratulations) I could no longer hate. The Georgian houses on either side of the square were dark, only four or five office workers still toiling in lit windows among anglepoises and unpleasant pot plants. An orange light high up in a roof sent brown-silhouetted images from weeks before quivering through me: I rocketed after her, crying out in MacDara’s loft as I came. I lingered mentally over the phrases in some of the letters and emails she had written to me since, during an inexplicable and deeply enraging absence in Edinburgh, putatively for study purposes. Though now wise to her excessive evasiveness, it never failed to outrage me. I stamped on her phrases. They drifted back. In my mind, I took out some Cook’s Extra Long matches, lit a fire, and burnt her letters. I saw the flames lick and singe the words. They were gone.
MacDara passed by, darted me a look, walked on.
I went to find Lelia, my wife. She was pale. She looked more beautiful than I had ever seen her. She was in some kind of a state.
‘Are you regretting marrying me, wife?’ I hissed in her ear.
She shook her head.
‘What then?’
‘Nothing,’ she said moodily, as I knew she would. I sighed.
‘You’re very agitated,’ I said. I kissed her.
I had a quick look round to ascertain the identity of MW. The only guests who fitted her vague description and were barely known to me were a couple of Lelia’s colleagues. I searched again for MacDara, but he was standing beside Catrin talking to another friend. Ren was nearby, the extreme politeness of his tones reaching me, other guests spilling wine and swearing, the occasional adult snog clearly imminent.
Lelia was nervous. She stroked her stomach. For a split second, I forgot again that she was pregnant. Then I remembered.
‘Hadn’t you better sit down?’ I said.
She shook her head. She smiled at me. ‘Happy wedding day,’ she said.
‘Happy wedding day, Mrs–’
‘Don’t you dare say it!’ she said. ‘Even as a joke. Mr Guha.’
‘OK, OK,’ I said. The voice of Pierre the night-time tiger came spontaneously into my head, and I whispered his words into her ear. I pinched her bum, she rammed her hip into my thigh, and I put my arm round her shoulder. ‘I want to make a speech about you. Right now,’ I said.
‘Oh, Richard. Bloody hell. I thought we said we wouldn’t.’
‘Yes, but we knew we would. Anyway, people will demand it. They know my skills as an orator. I want to declare to the world that you’re mine to fuck.’
‘Chance would be …’ she said.
‘What?’ I said sharply. ‘No muttering on your wedding day. Shall I start bashing a glass to get attention now? Should I shout? Let off an enormous fart? MacDara will lurch into a speech any minute if we’re not careful. Look at him.’ He was restless; his hair was wild, as though he had been fingering it. His stubble now darkened his chin apishly under the lamps strung around the marquee. I nearly burst into laughter, looking at him. He stood near one of Lelia’s colleagues, a skinny redhead who could possibly have been MW. He shot me a glance.
I raised one eyebrow at him.
I made my way through the cooling night towards the tent, where friends were helping themselves to food, shepherded by Lelia’s mother. I circulated happily. Evening-damp earth and traffic fumes merged in cool strands of air; jasmine scratched my face above gravel paths, where bluebells were listless and tree-shaded. What I had really wanted was a barn dance: a chokey cloud of straw, a yokel yelling do-si-dos into a microphone, and a general atmosphere of regressive hilarity. This was not, as Lelia had to remind me, possible in central London. Moreover, I was over-romanticising my teenage-hood, with its cheap cider, its boredom and dung-splattered motorbikes.
And yet this, I thought, as the drunkenness and loudness and running between trees intensified, was the kind of wedding party I had hoped to have if barn dances were relegated to fantasy. The daisies radiated their whiteness over the night-stained lawns. People were sloping off to an incongruously rural garden shed which someone had discovered was unlocked. Laughter and sudden silences emanated from it. I had vaguely nurtured fantasies of well-dressed displays of sexual intercourse in bushes that would provide scandal to fuel days of gossip, and much general drunken bad behaviour, reliably stoked up by MacDara. A few work people and the odd surprise friend of Lelia’s were snorting in the loos. I was delighted that standards had degenerated so early. Only Lelia bothered me. Moody though she was, something was making her unhappy. I looked around for her. I couldn’t see her. In fact, I hadn’t seen her for some time. I searched again, widening my eyes to try to make her out in the dark. I felt frustrated. I asked Ren’s wife Vicky to find her.
The cold breath of petrol-tinged grass streamed from the ground. One of my sisters was apparently squabbling with my brother beneath a lime tree. My father loitered, the elected parental representative as a result of God-knows-what procedure, my warring progenitors too mutually antipathetic to attend the same event. I missed my mother more than I’d ever imagined I would. I wished very deeply that it had been her attending my wedding instead of my old man. Their divorce, the culmination of years of essential incompatibility, had been so vicious that we were forced into painful side-taking, and I had spent well over a decade trying to compensate my mother for the fact that her emotionally stunted husband had forced her to leave him because of his impossible behaviour. I wanted to protect her for ever from the slightest hurt. I stopped, and sent her a hasty wedding-day text.
Sylvie Lavigne crossed the lawn in front of me.
Pain shot through my chest. I thought I might have a heart attack. I stared at her for protracted seconds before my paralysed body started to move.<
br />
‘What the fuck?’ I said.
I moved towards her. I carried on walking past her, into the rose garden in the centre. She lingered behind a little, so I had to turn to speak to her. She stood several feet away from me, in a floaty dress.
‘I’m not going to denounce you, Jane Eyre-style,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘What the–’ I gazed at her. I softened my voice.
‘I knew you’d be surprised,’ she said.
‘How did you get here?’
‘Lelia invited me.’
‘Lelia?’ I said wonderingly.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘But she can’t–’
‘Ask her.’
‘Sylvie. Sylvie darling. You can’t be here,’ I said, my voice emerging gently, the faraway prickling sensation of tears coming to my eyes.
‘I knew. I know. But I can. There won’t be any trouble. I love you. I give you my blessing, beloved Richard,’ she said, and she smiled at me, a look of pain passing over her face, and walked away.
I stood very still and took huge gulps of air. A terrible writhing of conflicting emotions fermented in my brain with the wine. I burped, loudly, into the night. I caught a glimpse of Lelia again, near the marquee, strode across the grass, took her by the arm and said, ‘I want to talk about you. You.’
She smiled. Her hair looked different. ‘It’s fun, isn’t it?’ Her voice a lightness in the air among the lamp-lit laughter.
I clambered on to a table and bellowed. A crowd began to form, the outer chattering edges still straggling among the trees. There was Lelia, so utterly beautiful in a dark pink curving something, her bump much more visible to me for the first time. There was Sylvie, appearing from the row of lime trees on the other side of the garden. MacDara, standing nearby, looked at her. Then he looked away. He gazed steadily at the tent.
A thought plummeted through me and settled in my bowels. The sky froze: the orange-inky clouds were still; the film of the party juddered to a halt. I opened my mouth; I took a gulp of wine. Sylvie was standing near MacDara, holding a glass and looking about her with ease. MacDara, the world’s hammiest actor, his mouth tensed, averted his head from her as though his facial nerves were paralysed. My hand nearly compressed my wine glass into splinters. The fucking bastarding motherfucker of a cunt. My brain must have something wrong with it, I thought. Dementia. Chronic stupidity. That handwriting: tiny, irritating, self-conscious; she had even put a Shakespeherian fucking quote in MacDara’s diary, for Christ’s sake. I calculated the trajectory of a lobbed glass of wine towards his face, and decided the distance was too great. I began to extemporise – a reckless, kamikaze poem of a speech ignited and made brilliant by fury – then I climbed off the table, to the sound of shouts and cheers, with one vast, leg-collapsing step, grabbed MacDara’s arm, jostled him behind a tree, and drove my fist into his face.
Sleep with Me Page 17
