by Wendy Holden
“Marriage,” Geri declared, “is like a tornado. It starts with a lot of blowing and sucking, then it ends up taking your house.”
“Did you make that up?” Anna looked at her admiringly.
“No, James Caan did, as it happens. Told me that at a dinner party once. So stick with Jamie and, whatever happens, you’ll get his house. Half of it, at least.”
“Hopefully the half with the roof and plumbing,” grinned Anna.
“Stop splitting hairs and go out there and get yourself one. An heir, I mean.”
Somehow implicit in her tones was the suggestion that if Anna didn’t, Geri would. It was this more than anything else—apart from the taxi hooting outside—that finally propelled Anna out of the lavender front door.
“Remember,” Geri called after her, “it’s all about tactics. Think Premier League. The manager gives the team a pep talk before the game, and again at halftime.” There was a sound of running footsteps and then something small and hard was slipped into Anna’s hand. “Take the mobile and call me from the loos before the pudding. Which, of course, you’ll have refused.”
***
Jamie was late. Anna shifted uncomfortably in Geri’s tight trousers, trying to relieve the pressure on her bladder. In twenty-five minutes, she’d got through almost the entire bottle of rosé provided by the kaftaned waiter. Her nerves now felt much better, but she was dying for the loo. Two things prevented her from going: the thought of missing Jamie when—if—he finally appeared through the carved front door; and, almost worse, the thought of everyone else in the restaurant scrutinising her too-tight clothes as she walked past their tables and descended the look-at-me staircase leading down past the petal-strewn fountain to the loos.
The girls at the next table, she knew, would be merciless in their criticism. There were about eight of them, strappy dresses flopping off their tanned shoulders, spindly, high-heeled ankles poking out in all directions from under the table, taking quick, nervous puffs on their cigarettes as their narrowed eyes flicked speculatively at each other and around the room. They had already cast her a few pitying, been-stood-up-have-you glances made worse by Anna’s surmising that, judging from what the ringleader, a naughty-looking blonde chignon with a dirty laugh, was saying, they were a bachelorette party. “Yah, and the worst thing is that so many people are buying off-list,” complained the chignon. “I mean, this morning I got sent some Italian millennium toasting flutes, for fuck’s sake.”
“Is that the same as toasting forks?” asked the very thin dark crop next to her.
“No it isn’t. And while we’re on the subject of Italy,” added the blonde, “I’m sick of people ringing me up and asking where it is. Unbelievable. I’d no idea my friends were so thick.”
Anna smiled to herself and reached for another piece of pickled carrot. Jamie was now half an hour late. The many scenarios she and Geri had rehearsed—what to say, how to sit, how to look (“Catch his eye, drop yours, and then, with a sweeping glance back upwards, look at him directly again and give him a slight, full-lipped smile,” Geri counselled. “It’s called The Flirt. Never fails.”)—had not included a complete no-show on his part. She’d give him another ten minutes, thought Anna, pouring the last of the rosé into her glass. Until then, she’d practise The Flirt in the mirror opposite the table and hope the girls didn’t think she was trying to pick them up.
The restaurant buzzed with laughter and conversation. Tiny alcoves were let into the walls, each containing a softly radiant oil lamp; from the ceiling above the stairs hung a collection of about twenty magnificent brass Moorish lanterns, all of different sizes and heights. Rugs were scattered over the wooden floors, providing a challenge for the waiters as they slid back and forth with huge brass trays of food. It was every bit as romantic as the glossy magazines she had consulted said it was, as well as being deliciously camp—Disney Moroccan—into the bargain. The only fly in the ointment was the food—for someone like Jamie, who had been barely able to cope with a choice of pizzas, Pasha’s suggestions of yoghurt chicken, seafood tagine, and prawn chermoula would probably be completely unnavigable. But that was a bridge she would cross when she came to it; at this rate, she wouldn’t have to bother.
A flurry of interest among the bachelorette party suddenly impressed itself on the daydreaming Anna (the rosé had been more potent than she had thought, the restaurant was deliciously warm, and she had finally found a way to sit that didn’t make her want to wet herself). Something tall and imposing was walking through the restaurant—and straight to her table.
“Anna, I’m so sorry.” Jamie. At last. “Got delayed, I’m afraid, and couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant. Just came back to me in the taxi—thank God.”
Aware that the bachelorette party—and a good many of the waiters—were staring at Jamie in open admiration, Anna levered herself halfway out of her chair to receive his kiss on both her cheeks. She was surprised to see that he, too, seemed to have made a considerable sartorial effort. His crisp white shirt set off his wide, dark eyes and Mediterranean tumble of thick black hair to perfection, despite the emphatic crease across the nipples and lower stomach revealing that he’d just got it out of the packet. A pair of Argyll check trousers fell in a long, graceful line the ten feet or so between the floor and Jamie’s waistline. There were other transformations too. Instead of sitting down, as expected, and glancing suspiciously at the menu, Jamie picked it up enthusiastically. He did not quite say, “Oh, chermoula, my favourite,” but he did make interested noises about the chicken. Anna, encouraged, and clenching her buttocks to strengthen her resolve, tried out The Flirt on him.
Jamie looked back at her. She felt her stomach tense and her lower bowels turn to liquid—which at the moment, was pretty much what they were anyway. Finally, after a long, sexy silence pregnant with possibility, Jamie, still gazing at her, spoke.
“Got something in your eye?” he asked.
Anna buried her face in the menu. Fortunately, the waiter chose that moment to mince up.
But that was the only wrong note of the evening, apart from when Anna, helping herself to the mixed mezes with more enthusiasm than skill, accidentally knocked her hand against his. As the usual electric shock shot deliciously up her arm, the spoon wobbled and a great dollop of aubergine and tomato splattered onto the glaringly white tablecloth. Anna blushed furiously and, in her confusion, promptly set a spoonful of tabbouleh scattering across the table as well. She felt like a four-year-old. Seb, she knew, would have left the splodge where it was and stared at it meaningfully all evening. Jamie, however, simply moved one of the many terracotta meze dishes over the mark, pressed it firmly down on top, and grinned at her.
As they talked—or, rather, as Anna listened to Jamie talking—it struck her that he seemed to be making an effort to charm similar to the pains he had taken to dress well. As Jamie, again neatly side-stepping the subject of himself directly, related a string of anecdotes about his ancestors, it seemed to Anna that never had someone talking about their relations seemed so sexy. Or amusing.
“Yes, Granny Angus was quite a character. She used to stick her teeth in with exactly the same mortar she used to mend the walls—you see, as a family we’ve always been patching up the old place.” Jamie paused and flashed her a gusset-immolating grin. “After she had her fifth heart attack, my father was at her bedside thinking she was about to peg it when she opened her eyes, looked straight at him, and demanded, ‘Fetch me my compact mirror.’”
Anna giggled. She had rarely felt so happy. More rosé was ordered, food arrived, and plates were taken away. Suffused with wine, glowing brass, and the soft light of oil lamps, she felt herself relaxing under Jamie’s barrage of charm. Enough even to go to the loo, at last.
There was something different about the table when she returned to it. Anna’s stomach did a double loop of nervous delight when she spotted, nestling against the knife blade ne
xt to her plate, a small, rather tatty blue box. Sitting down quickly before her knees gave way beneath her, she gazed from it to Jamie, her eyes wide with hope and fear.
“Well, aren’t you going to open it?”
Anna put out a trembling hand, hoping Jamie wouldn’t notice how bitten her nails were. Inside the box, nestling on a bed of rather moth-eaten cream satin, was a diamond of impressive dimensions. Anna gasped. Inside her, the mezes and the prawn chermoula attempted a pas de deux.
“It was my mother’s.”
“It’s lovely.” Never having been one to count her chickens, Anna could not yet be sure he hadn’t just brought it along as a Dampie curio to show her, rather as some people got out their holiday snaps.
“Aren’t you going to try it on?”
“Do you think I should?” Her heart beat a tattoo as she gazed unsteadily at him. His face was fading in and out of focus. Its strong, well-defined edges disappeared in places into a watery mass. As she bent her head, something wet and warm trickled down her cheek.
He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Well, of course it’s up to you, but it might be an idea as I’m asking you to marry me.”
Anna stared at him. She was conscious of feeling nothing beyond being perfectly stunned and immobile. Opposite her, Jamie, as if in slow motion, smiled, gestured, and, finally, picked the ring out of its box and slid it on to her hand. In the watery world of utter shock she now inhabited, Anna was dimly aware of the cold metal sliding up her finger, of the bachelorette party at the next table turning to stare in unadulterated envy.
“…know it seems sudden…thought you would be perfect,” Jamie was saying in a slow, gloopy, surreal voice that didn’t sound like him at all. She tuned out again in panic. “…share all the same interests, love of old buildings, the countryside…” he was mouthing at her as she picked up his voice again. She felt her head, heavy as a rock, moving slowly up and down in assent. “…saw no point in waiting for years to ask you…one just knows, doesn’t one…important to have a wife who shares one’s interests…very happy,” Jamie was adding, a hint of concern now creeping into his wide eyes at her lack of response. “Thought you could come back to Dampie with me…going up in a couple of days…sooner you move in the better…can plan the wedding from there…chapel in the castle grounds…are you all right?”
There was a crash. Waiters rushed to the scene as Anna fled in the opposite direction, leaving a trail of the glasses she had swept from the table as she leapt up. She was conscious both of Jamie’s concerned stare and the laser hatred of the bachelorette party as she rushed headlong down the tiled staircase beneath the lanterns, past the fountain, and into the sheltering space of the lavatory cubicle. Hanging over the shining enamel hole, she realised she didn’t want to be sick after all. It was exultation rushing up her throat, not half-digested couscous.
Suddenly, the mobile in her pocket buzzed. “Half-time team talk,” hissed Geri. “Decided whether you’re going to shag him or not?”
“I’m not sure,” Anna said slowly, “that I’m going to have to bother. Yet, at any rate.”
***
The next day was Sunday, yet Anna and an unusually grumpy Geri were drinking coffee together as usual. Operabugs, the junior appreciation society designed to ensure St. Midas’s pupils shone in the corporate Covent Garden boxes of the future, had been moved to Sundays, there no longer being space on the weekday timetables to give it the attention it was felt it deserved. Puccini was currently under the microscope, and “One Fine Day” was pouring out of the St. Midas’s windows into Cassandra’s rain-spattered minivan, where Geri and Anna sat like a couple of Bank Holiday coach drivers awaiting their cargo of pensioners. Their usual café being closed, they cradled plastic cups of distinctly inferior coffee from a fourth-rate builders’ café round the corner and watched the rain run down the windscreen.
“Geri,” said Anna after another silence had elapsed, “how long do I have to hold my cup like this before…”
“Omigod!” Geri, beside her, shot upright on the seat, her eyeballs large, rigid with excitement and clamped, mesmerised and unwavering, on the vast and glittering gem on Anna’s finger. “Christ. It’s colossal. That’s incredible. I mean, from what you said when I called you, that you weren’t going to sleep with him, I thought the whole thing was off. Was quite cross, actually.” Geri suddenly grinned at her. “After all the advice I gave you and everything…”
So that explained the grump. Anna pressed her hand. “Well, I couldn’t have done it without you. You were brilliant.”
“So, can I be bridesmaid?”
Anna smiled at her nervously. “Course you can. But the wedding date’s not set yet—I’m supposed to be moving up to Scotland with him and sorting it out from there.”
“When are you going?” Geri’s face suddenly fell. “I’ll miss you.”
“And I you.” Anna squeezed her hand.
“So what happens next?” asked Geri, her eyes darting back and forth in wonderment from Anna’s face to her finger.
Anna felt a tremor of fear course through her intestines. The wedding, certainly, was an intimidating prospect. In the back of her mind was the worry that she had not done the right thing by accepting, that she had allowed herself to be carried along on a tide of reckless romance at the expense of common sense. But it wasn’t this that had caused the tremor. Geri, Anna knew, would shoot down her doubts in a few emphatic and eloquent sentences. The fear was caused by something else altogether.
“Well,” Anna said slowly, “I suppose I’d better tell Cassandra.”
***
“Zak! ZA-AA-AAK!” Having scanned the envelope’s contents, Cassandra had bounded up the stairs two at a time, oblivious for once of the damage the Gucci spikes inflicted on the treads, and burst into his nursery to find her son slinging what looked like a dressing-gown cord over the hook on the back of the door. The vague, dreadful suspicion of what he might be up to—she, like all the other mothers, had read the reports of the Eton Strangling Game—stirred in Cassandra’s mind but there was no time for that now. Besides, everyone knew that dicing with death one way or another, be it sadistic prefects, capital punishment, or initiation rites involving everything from buggery to bogflushing, was an occupational hazard at public schools. It was part of what you paid for.
“What the hell is all this about?” she shrieked, waving the letter with the St. Midas’s crest at Zak whose spoilt face faded from pampered pink to haunted grey. He had never seen his mother so angry. He had never, for that matter, seen her angry at all.
“It says here,” Cassandra said in the low, dead voice of one forced to accept that their profoundest fears have become reality, “that you failed the mid-term exams. How has this happened?” Cassandra’s voice sank to the agonised whisper of Macbeth at the point it dawns on him that life’s but a walking shadow. “It says here that you failed at drawing. How could you? After all that work I put in. I spent weeks showing you how to do a triangle…” Tears rose in her eyes.
Zak nodded, his eyes slits beneath his thick blond-and-honey-striped fringe.
“So why the hell didn’t you draw a triangle?”
“Because,” Zak said contemptuously, “they wanted me to draw a circle in the exam.”
Cassandra howled, smacked her head with the base of her palm, and waved the letter again. “And apparently you were asked to draw a woman.”
Zak nodded. “I did.”
“But you drew one with one leg.”
Zak sniggered. Cassandra glared at him, torn between murderous fury and blind despair. Then, most unexpectedly, an idea occurred to her. Her fury with her son evaporated as she weighed up the worth of her inspiration. It really was a good one, Cassandra thought. Rather brilliant, actually. She tottered to the telephone and dialled the school’s number.
“But Mrs. Gosschalk, did Zak not tell you about my amputation…?
”
Five minutes later, Cassandra put the phone down, her face magenta with fury. Not only had Mrs. Gosschalk not believed her—Cassandra could tell from her tone of voice, despite the sympathetic noises, although, come to think of it, they had not been that sympathetic—but she had mentioned The Party. Cassandra had cherished the wild hope that Zak’s behaviour at Savannah and Siena’s birthday had been brushed under the sisal—after all, it had not been mentioned since. The reason for this, it now turned out, was because the school—which took a keen interest in its pupils’ behaviour both on and off the premises—had been deliberating on what action to take. It had, Mrs. Gosschalk had just informed Cassandra, decided to hold a kangaroo court on Zak’s future at St. Midas’s, at which the entire SMSPA (apart from Cassandra) would be present. She would, Gosschalk had said, be informed of the results of its deliberations in due course. Cassandra’s blood boiled. That bloody Fenella Greatorex would be sitting in judgement on her. A woman whose property was at best borderline where the St. Midas’s catchment area was concerned. Borderline in every other respect as well. The humiliation of it.
Things, Cassandra thought, could not get any worse this morning. But that was before Anna dropped her bombshell.
“What?” Only her spike heels, anchored firmly if ruinously in the kitchen floor, stopped Cassandra from collapsing. She glared at Anna with blazing loathing. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“Jamie says he doesn’t want to take you up on the dinner party. He just, um, wanted to make, um, a donation to St. Midas’s.” Anna, feeling the hatred burning into her like a laser, paused.
“No, not that,” Cassandra snapped. “The other thing you said.”
Anna swallowed. “And, um, he’s asked me to marry him.”
“Oh my God. I’ve got to sit down.” Cassandra collapsed dramatically into a chair and stared at the delta of thin blue veins in the heel of her hand. Should she end it all now?
