‘Get here!’ Anna mouthed at her, gesturing at her watch, as Liv reluctantly joined her at her side, her hands in her pockets. ‘It’s five to two, they’ll be arriving at any moment. If we stand behind this column, we can get a good look at them, before they see us.’
Obediently, Liv stood behind Anna as she peered out behind the column, scanning the mass of faces that crammed the street for the one face that belonged to her, or that at least she had thought belonged to her. Racked with an increasingly familiar anguish, she waited for that glimpse of Tom’s reddish-blond hair that always rose above a crowd like a beacon, that particular gait he had, one of total self-ease, the confident roll of the shoulders that had always made Anna feel so reassured. That she, Anna Carter, could be loved by someone so normal, so established and at ease in the world, made her feel much better about herself, and gave her hope that after ten or twenty years of marriage a little of Tom’s normal would rub off on her.
‘Maybe we should just go,’ Liv said, her chin resting on Anna’s shoulder, as the pair watched the thickening mass of people. ‘Maybe Tom’s changed his plans, his mind even, and anyway I’m pretty sue that you and me hiding round the corner in wait to catch him up isn’t going to help matters when …’
‘When what?’ Tom said, appearing behind them. Ever so slowly Anna and Liv turned around to meet his gaze. It had never occurred to either of them that he might approach from the other direction.
‘Tom!’ Anna said, whipping off her glasses. ‘What a lovely surprise! What you doing here?’
‘I think you mean what are you doing here?’ Tom said, frowning uncertainly. ‘What are you two doing lurking behind pillars outside the place where I am meeting …’ Tom trailed off as if he’d only just remembered that he was the one with the secret.
‘We’re checking up on you,’ Anna said unhappily, because there didn’t seem to be any point in lying any more. ‘We here to find out what you are up to, Tom, because we both know it’s something, something big, that’s giving you second thoughts about going through with the wedding.’ When Tom tried to speak Anna held up her gloved hand. ‘No, don’t deny it. I’ve tried asking you what’s wrong, but you won’t tell me. So I had no other choice but to try and find out myself.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Tom ran his fingers through his hair as he tried to take in what was going on. ‘How did you find out about this? Did you steal my diary? Anna, have you been spying on me?’
‘You left it lying around,’ Anna said, defensively. ‘I was updating your wedding section when I came across this meeting.’
‘I left it “lying around” in my backpack, behind my bike under the stairs!’ Tom exclaimed, but perhaps not as crossly as a man who had nothing to hide might have.
‘What choice do I have when you refuse to talk to me?’ Anna asked him. ‘Answer me that!’
‘To trust me?’ Tom exclaimed, looking hurt, and putting both Anna and Liv to shame in one easy move. ‘You are about to marry me, Anna, and yet you don’t trust me?’
‘It’s not that I don’t trust you,’ Anna said, unhappily.
‘It’s just that something’s different, you are different and I need to know what’s happened, because … I still don’t quite believe that someone like you could really, really want someone like me. There, I’ve said it, and now you’ve made me sound all needy and insecure.’
Before Tom could reply a tall bright-red-headed woman, about Anna’s age, dressed in a full-length faux-fur leopard-print coat, appeared out of the grey crowd of shoppers, glowing like a beacon in the dull city afternoon, and flung her arm around Tom’s neck, kissing him firmly on the cheek and leaving an orange outline of her full lips, utterly unaware that at that moment the strange women watching her were thinking exactly the same two things at exactly the same time: yes, you can get a slutty Martha after all, and yes, it would be possible to turn that coat and its contents into roadkill with one judiciously applied shove under that oncoming bus.
‘So sorry I’m late, darling,’ Slutty Martha gushed, pulling a face, oblivious to her audience. ‘You know what it’s like getting a cab at this time of year and, darling, I couldn’t do the tube, not even for you.’
‘Martha,’ Tom said awkwardly. ‘Um, this is my friend Liv, and this is Anna … my fiancée.’ The redhead’s plucked brows soared into her hairline at the news, but nevertheless she smiled as pleasantly as someone who’s face had clearly been paralysed with Botox was able to, and held out a hand to Anna to shake, which Anna eyed as if she were considering biting it off.
‘Anna, this is Martha Tyburn,’ Tom said, his cheeks blazing with colour. ‘We were at uni together.’
‘Anna,’ Martha said, finally grabbing Anna’s hand from where it languished at her side, and shaking it hard. ‘I had no idea you knew! Well, I must say you are being awfully calm about it. Well done you, if it was me I’d have him strung up by the testicles by now.’
‘Know what?’ Anna said, snatching her hand away and thrusting it deep in her pocket, exchanging a wary glance with Liv.
‘She doesn’t know,’ Tom mumbled, looking in the opposite direction, as if he were contemplating his chances of making a run for it. ‘I haven’t told her yet.’
‘Know what?’ Anna all but shouted, causing one or two of the passing shoppers to glance her way. ‘What don’t I know, Tom? Please tell me, because I can’t take it any more!’
‘Oh dear,’ Martha said, with obvious relish. ‘I’m afraid our darling Tom here has gotten himself into rather a pickle.’
‘What the hell have you done, Tom?’ Liv asked him, with more than a little menace in her tone.
‘I got married!’ Tom blurted out, almost shouted in the street, as the Christmas lights twinkled above their heads and the Salvation Army band started playing ‘Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer’. And yet all of that noise and bustle receded in an instant and all Anna could hear were those three little words hanging in the air.
‘No,’ she said, so quietly it was scarcely more than a whisper. ‘No, you mean you are getting married. To me. In a week’s time.’
‘Anna.’ Tom said her name softly, taking her arm and leading her away from Martha and Liv, into the relative privacy of a shop door.
‘I mean I got married almost eight years ago now.’ Seeing the expression of shock that was spreading over Anna’s face, Tom could only keep talking. ‘In America, in Vegas actually. It was in a lap-dancing club. I never ever thought it was actually legal; it was more just a joke than anything. But there it was nagging away in the back of my mind, so a couple of weeks ago I thought I’d get Martha to check it out for me – she’s a solicitor, does family law. I brought her the scrappy old bit of paper I signed afterwards to take a look at. It’s difficult to read because I knocked a pina colada all over it, but anyway Martha took one look at it and, well, it was bad news. She told me it was legally binding, even if it was officiated by the club’s barman. As far as the law is concerned I am still married.’
Anna stared blindly at Tom as he took her face between his freezing hands and delivered the final blow.
‘Anna, I’m so sorry but I already have a wife. She was a showgirl.’
‘But her name wasn’t Lola,’ Martha added helpfully. ‘No, Mrs Tom Collins is one Charisma Jones.’
‘Dough balls?’ the waiter asked. Anna looked at him blankly, her mind still reeling from the news that it simply could not compute. Ever since she was a little girl, Anna had always prepared herself for the worst. She had always lain awake every night, making list after list of every conceivable thing she could imagine that could go wrong, believing that if she thought of it first, somehow she would stop it happening. There had been only two things in Anna’s life that she had failed to see coming. Her mother disappearing and her fiancé already being married to a Vegas showgirl.
This was her fault, she told herself, she didn’t have a good enough imagination.
‘No, no thank you,’ Anna said blankly, looking at an equally shock
ed Liv, who was mutely holding her hand, her jaw set tight in an expression of repressed anger, seething to be free, most likely in the form of a swift steel-toe-capped-boot kick to Tom’s more vulnerable parts. Tom sat across from them both, on the opposite side of the table, his palms facing down as he studied the surface intently, struggling to know where to begin, while Martha sat back in her chair, sucking on the end of a biro, like Mae West brandishing one of those old-fashioned long cigarette holders.
‘I was twenty-two when it happened,’ Tom began eventually, feeling obliged to fill the leaden silence. ‘Just graduated from uni, full of all these big ideas of how I was going to change to world with my novel. Win the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Nobel.’ He attempted to meet Anna’s eye line and failed, as she continued to examine the tiniest details of the paper napkin that she was folding and refolding with her free hand. ‘You know, Anna. I’ve told you how I wanted to be a novelist, that I never really meant to get into journalism at all, it just sort of happened. Well, back then I was full of it, full of myself and my incredible talent and I knew that I was going to be the next big thing in the literary world, I knew it. Trouble was I didn’t really have much to write about, what with my growing up a vicar’s son in rural Buckinghamshire. The most exciting thing that had ever happened to me was getting so drunk one Saturday night that I fell off a windmill and broke two ribs.’ The briefest hint of a smile crossed Tom’s face before he remembered the exact level of the trouble he was in and continued his story. ‘So, anyway, I decided to have an adventure, strike out on my own, go and search out life and make it happen. I wanted to be crazy, and wild, like all the best writers. I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Brett Easton Ellis, you know. In my head I wasn’t a nice, middle-class Home Counties English boy, I was American and edgy. And so I saved up for a summer, worked in a pub, took out my savings and caught a plane to LA. My plan was to travel across America, take in the sights and sounds, live a little bit dangerously, become a man, I suppose.’ Tom sucked in his bottom lip. ‘To be honest I was a bit of a pretentious dickhead.’
‘He so was,’ Martha interjected, cheerfully, pointing her pen at Anna. ‘We went out together for a bit. It was like dating Kafka. All style over substance, darling.’
Anna opened her mouth and then closed it again. Nothing he was saying made any sense. It was as if she were listening to a completely different person talking from the one that she thought she knew. Tom had never even mentioned his trip to America, let alone his marriage, his showgirl bride. He had never said anything about it at all. There hadn’t been one single clue that could have flagged up the possibility that this might have happened. Not even when Anna had told him she was adding Barry Manilow’s ‘Copacabana’ to the DJ’s playlist. How was it possible that her laid-back, easy-going, happy-go-lucky boyfriend, who loved footy and kick-boxing, and Sunday afternoons in the pub, and very occasionally a spot of hang-gliding off the Chilterns, could have neglected to mention a wife. Until now? A mere week before their wedding.
Wedding, Anna thought to herself, gripping Liv’s hand even harder. There would be no wedding now. How could there be?
‘Anyway.’ Tom paused, steeling himself for the next part of the story. ‘I met up with some other travellers in LA and they were heading to Vegas, so I thought, well, I thought, why not? Vegas, prime Hunter S. Thompson territory, it’s a town made for me. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Las Vegas, but it is the world’s single most odd place. There’s a soundtrack playing all the time, wherever you go, music blasting out from everywhere, free drinks available in the casinos twenty-four hours a day, and if you can afford it anything, and I mean anything, you can think of that you might want is there for you to buy.’
‘So you bought a wife?’ Anna spoke for the first time, her voice sounding tight and strained, feeling very much like she was caught in some surreal delusion.
‘No, no.’ Tom shook his head firmly. ‘No, I did get a job though, as a barman in a cabaret bar, off the main strip. I’d never been anywhere like Vegas before in my life, it was like … Charlie wandering into the Chocolate Factory. Like you know, all you’ve ever had is Mars bars and then suddenly there’s this world of exotic tastes, and you want to try them all.’
‘Are you calling me a Mars bar?’ Martha asked, amused, earning herself a steely warning stare from Liv, who seemed keen to hit someone and wasn’t all that fussy who. That seemed to put Martha in her place for the time being at least.
‘So you worked in a strip club?’ Anna asked him, wrinkling up her nose in distaste. The very idea that women were willing to take their clothes off for men they didn’t know to ogle at horrified her, and the idea that Tom liked that kind of thing was even worse. Not her Tom. Not her wholesome boy-next-door Tom, who wore jogging bottoms to bed and hadn’t even tried to look at her naked in weeks, Anna thought, her mind reeling, thoughts pinging crazily round her head like the bells on a slot machine. No wonder Tom didn’t want to marry her. Whenever they made love, even at the beginning, the lights were always out.
‘No, it wasn’t a strip club,’ Tom reassured her. ‘It was a cabaret bar. Where the tourists with slightly less money would come for dinner and a show. There were regular artists, singers, magicians and a troupe of dancers, male and female. Dancers not strippers.’
‘Dancers that kept their clothes on?’ Anna asked him, insistently.
Tom sighed, heavily. ‘Topless showgirls in Vegas are as common as … a roulette wheel. After a while you stop even noticing they’ve got their … breasts on show.’
Anna’s eyes filled with silent tears, and she discovered she couldn’t look at Tom any more. It wasn’t the fact that he’d ever looked at other women, or even been to bed with them, that hurt. She’d known when she’d met Tom that there was no way she could be the first woman in his life. It was just discovering where she was on the scale of glamour and excitement that Tom had been used to. Between scantily clad dancers and Martha in her fur coat and quite possibly no knickers, Anna was fairly certain she came far down on the list in terms of allure and excitement. Anna had many virtues – lovely skin, great hair, what she had been reliably informed by impartial sources was an impressive body, and her personal hygiene standards were exceptional. But even so, she wasn’t the kind of girl who set pulses racing, she didn’t have … sex appeal.
‘So this … dancer, this woman that you … married. It was just a drunken one-night stand then? A stupid bender that ended in “I do”?’ Anna asked him, uncertain of which answer would be worse.
‘No,’ Tom said heavily. ‘It wasn’t a one-night stand, she was my girlfriend. I thought I loved her.’ He paused, reaching across the table to touch Anna, who in turn backed further into her chair, withdrawing both her hands and folding them in her lap. ‘Like Martha said, her name was Charisma, Charisma Jones. But the Real McCoy was her nickname because she didn’t need implants … Anyway, she was a solo dancer in the troupe, and you’ve got to understand, even if I thought I was Johnny Depp, I was still just this kid from Buckinghamshire. I’d never seen anything like her, tall and tanned, with this long black hair and an amazing body that …’ Tom stopped himself just in time. ‘I thought she was stunning, like the sort of girl you only see in magazines. And she thought I was this funny English kid with a cute accent. I made her laugh. It’s not like we dived into bed together the second we set eyes on each other. I was working there for weeks, before … well, before anything happened. And when it did … I’m sorry, Anna, I know this is going to hurt you, but I fell for her. Or at least I thought I had. I had never, ever felt that way about a girl before. She consumed me.’
Anna closed her eyes, as she thought about the way Tom was with her. So sweet, so attentive, so gentle, so kind and understanding, but she was almost one hundred per cent certain that she had never ‘consumed him’ in the way this mysterious figure from his past had. Anna had never had that kind of power, that raw magnetism. ‘After a couple of weeks, I moved into her condo and, wel
l, I forgot about everything else – my book, my career, my family, my friends, all my dreams and ambitions. My whole life became about working in the bar, watching Charisma dance, knowing that at the end of the day she would be taking me home.’
Anna turned her face away from him so she didn’t have to see the faint smile of the memory in his eyes as he thought about this ‘Charisma’ person.
‘Tom,’ Liv said, her expression tightly shut off, in her bid to protect her friend without betraying her own feelings. ‘I really think Anna could do with less of the details.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m just trying to explain how I got caught up in this fantasy. It wasn’t real, it was never going to last, I know that now,’ Tom said, attempting and failing to get Anna to look at him. ‘I was just a kid back then. I had no idea what life and love was really about. What Charisma and I had, well, I thought it was love. But it had a lot more to do with passion and lust.’
‘The things that we don’t have?’ Anna asked tightly, prompting Martha to snort coffee through her nose and almost choke to death.
‘We have both those things,’ Tom said. ‘In buckets, and more important things besides, like friendship and trust and … things in common.’
‘Trust? Oh yes, that’s right, I’m supposed to trust you. Silly, insecure, needy me following you around when you have nothing to hide but a … what was it? Oh yes, a wife,’ Anna said, forcing herself to look at him, to look at the person that up until this morning she had believed she knew inside out. ‘So was it a romantic proposal? I suppose it had to be more glamorous than kneeling in sheep poo on the top of a hill in the freezing cold. I suppose that was magical and fantastical too.’
Married By Christmas Page 4
