by Jemma Wayne
“Vera.”
Vera looks up. She wonders how long she has been staring past Luke into the reflective surface of the balloon. They are hovering over a field in Hertfordshire a few miles from the house she grew up in. Luke is bent on one knee. There is a ring in his hand. “Yes,” she tells him.
It has been 365 days since Vera first met Luke at a fundraising ball where she was doing PR and he was speaking on behalf of the government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office. PR, Luke had joked, was worse even than the jobs of journalist scavengers because it wasn’t even hunting the truth but spewing out one-sided propaganda. Being a civil servant, she had replied, was a coward’s route into politics: all of the power, none of the accountability. “Ah, but we’re all accountable to Jesus,” he had answered, and there was something about the mirth in the corner of his mouth and the earnestness behind his eyes that had her hooked in those first few seconds and made Luke her newest addiction. A year on and he has replaced the rest of them.
It is after all now 602 days since Vera last took cocaine, 433 since she’s smoked anything heavier than a regular Camel Light – though Luke believes she’s given these up too – and exactly 366 days since she’s had sex. Charlie thinks the whole transformation is hilarious and won’t last. She still speaks to him sometimes, although she doesn’t tell Luke about it. It is something he asked of her early on, not to contact Charlie, and without much thought she’d agreed; but it is one habit she cannot give up. It is a kind of self-flagellation.
Vera leans forward and kisses Luke softly on the mouth. He smells of coffee beans. The fairtrade Abel and Cole ones he powders with his manual grinder.
He smells of coffee beans.
If Vera’s life were a film, there would be a lot of voiceovers. He smells of coffee beans. She wonders sometimes if she observes things that other people don’t. She notices everything she thinks. She thinks she notices everything. Does everybody’s mind have the time to rework a sentence five times in their head? She is paused, she ponders. Paused and in fast-forward. She watches herself from the outside. Her mind races. Do minutes pass? Has she scrunched up her nose again? Sometimes she feels as though she is still high. From his bent knee, Luke looks up and gazes at her as though she is some glittering trinket. As though she is brand new. Of course I’ll marry you.
“Of course I’ll marry you,” she whispers, then adds, “but are you sure? There’s no turning back once this baby’s on my finger!”
“Put it on you silly thing,” Luke laughs, standing up and slipping it onto her wedding finger. Out of superstition, it has never been adorned with a thing, not even a Hula Hoop crisp. Luke has chosen a brilliant diamond set on a rose gold band that catches the glint of the setting sun and shines beauty directly into Vera’s eyes, until she is blinded. Squinting slightly, she admires the costly sparkle. It is too big, but she makes a mental note to get the ring adjusted to fit. For the time being she clenches it into her fist. The ring rubs slightly against her skin but she doesn’t want to risk losing it. They are moving down now. There is a muddy field below them.
“I have something for you,” Luke announces once they are both seated, warming up inside the grand white limo he has arranged to transport them back to London.
“Oh good, ‘cos I thought a diamond ring was a bit on the cheap side.”
“That’s funny,” Luke laughs. Vera loves the way he pronounces his verdict on humour, as though physical reaction is somehow unreliable. Everything about him is definite, declared. She feels so safe wrapped up in his certainty. Vera is no longer certain herself if she is funny. People used to tell her that she was, and she used to work hard on telling a joke properly. It was an art form and she had wanted to master it, like her father. She tries now for Luke only and relies on his pronouncements to know.
Luke sits upright against the leather upholstery. He is out of place. Although he can afford better, he drives a second-hand Prius because it is saving the environment, and wears shirts that are years old or that his mother buys him, and carries a briefcase lettered with his father’s initials with a tear across the front pocket. The extravagance of the day is a testament to the extravagance of his feelings for her. She smiles, and reaches for his hand.
Luke slips it away and reaches instead into the driver’s section of the car. He seems nervous as he places a small, heavy object into her hands. “I thought, well I hoped you might like this,” he begins. “A new one of it I mean, a new… Well, read the card first.”
Vera does so carefully. Had she been alone, she would have dived first into the wrapping and torn it open like a child, but she feels Luke’s gaze upon her as she slips the card out of its red envelope and takes in the oil-painted depiction of a hot air balloon on the front. “Why a balloon? Bit random?” she grins, but the time for joking has passed and Luke says nothing. Inside, he has written just one line: A three stranded cord is not easily broken.
Vera thinks this must be from the bible. Somewhere. She has been going to church ever since they met. It was his thing, but it made sense to her immediately and she attends every week now. His church, with him. She even has a prayer that she says many times a day, like a mantra: Dear God, help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. Dear God, help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. Dear God…
Vera glances up at Luke before slowly inching off the paper. To be worthy. A book lays uncovered on her lap. A bible. The pages are beautifully bound in soft, black leather with gilt edges, the title embossed in gold leaf.
“For a new beginning, together,” Luke says. “I know how much you’ve been… I mean, I’ve been so impressed by… And, well I thought you might like it.” Luke looks to her for reaction. His eyes are earnest, fervent, hopeful. All of the things that first drew her to him. And his gift says everything that Vera has been too scared to ask him: he forgives her, he trusts her, he has faith in her despite her past. Despite the past.
Despite the past he knew of her…
She lifts her head. He is waiting. And slowly, with a sincerity Charlie would never recognise, Vera finds herself looking into Luke’s handsome, buoyant eyes and nodding.
“I love it Luke. And I love you.”
Outside, hazy fields drift by. More cars begin to appear on the road. A people-wagon, full of kids that peer out of misty windows to see who is inside the grand, white limousine. Luke puts his arm around Vera’s shoulders, with his other hand hooks his fingers through hers, and Vera breathes him in. She rests her head on his shoulder. Safe. Secure. Affirmed. And as she imprints the moment into her memory, she ignores the squelching of her shoes and the slight stench of cow dung that has somehow found its way into the car. The camera in her mind pans away, it was a day like no other, and Vera pretends not to notice that there is a small red spot forming on her finger, just underneath her ring where the too-big band has begun to rub.
Chapter
Three
Five weeks earlier had been Luke’s father’s birthday. He’d dropped in on his mother in the morning and they’d shared poached eggs with white bread and fried tomatoes, neither mentioning that this had been his father’s favourite, nor that through this ritual they were marking anything in particular. And he’d walked with her to the high street where she’d pretended she wasn’t going into the art shop to buy paints she never showed him, and he’d pretended he wasn’t going to weave back past the graveyard. But of course they both had. And it was that afternoon, by his father’s headstone, that Luke had imagined a good old chinwag with his long-deceased father who had never met Vera but would, he was almost sure, approve. Philip would have told him to buy the ring in secret. He would have urged him to be romantic. He would have asked him to make sure that Vera shared his passions and principles, which, it occurred to Luke, were the same thing.
He didn’t tell his father about Vera’s smile, or her tenderheartedness, or the heaviness in her eyes that sometimes made her seem so far away, so in need of rescue. Or the way that sometimes, when he was aro
und her, he felt immeasurably flushed with hope.
Luke bought the bible before the ring. He bought the card in which to write his message before designing his proposal, using it for inspiration. He imagined the children they would have before the kind of wedding. If they had a son, he would name him Philip.
Chapter
Four
Vera never used to be an early riser but has lately developed an uneasy relationship with sleep. The hotel room has thick, red curtains but there is a small gap between them and despite the early hour Vera is sitting up in bed, examining the colours refracted through her ring and onto the ceiling. All the hues of the rainbow dance over her in clustered dots she can manoeuvre with a slight turn of her finger and fill with promise. She feels the gold band as a promise. Not only to Luke but to herself. There is a folded piece of paper in her wallet that she will not open today. She hopes, she promises, to open it soon, one last time, and then to throw it away forever. She is happy, so almost happy. But first she must make amends. Vera crosses the chilly room for the new bible she’s left on the dresser and returns with it to bed where she props up the plump hotel pillows, takes a deep, fortifying breath and snuggles for warmth beneath the satin duvet. Randomly, she opens the book to Luke and smiles at the accident.
Since just a few weeks into their relationship, it has been a resolution of Vera’s to read at least a small section of the bible every day. Luke, she knows, reads a passage or two every morning and it seems to set him up for the day, focus him somehow on goodness. It is more of a struggle for Vera. It is always Jesus this and Jesus that, and she cannot help but feel condemned by the passages, always the sinner Jesus is urging the rest to forgive. But she gets it. She gets the purpose. It is a set of rules, a set of principles, a way to live. Easier than painfully pondering each decision, or choosing, or making mistakes. And it is not difficult for Vera to cling to the teachings, as she sees Luke clinging. Or to wile hours away in buildings made of stone and dreariness. Or to: Dear God, help me to be better, to be worthy, make me clean. The words, like the bricks and mortar, are barriers against worse things. Against thinking about worse things. Against doing worse things. She gets it. She likes it. She is surprised she didn’t think of it herself, before.
Luke was thrilled by her ‘coming to faith’. She knows that had she not been a Christian he would not have proposed to her. For him, it is critical. But then he has been at it longer. There has been a lot of repetition. She is sure that by now the bible is ingrained into his soul. Vera has many more verses to read before this is the case for her, but she hopes that with enough practice, the light that shines from Luke’s eyes will shine from her own.
In her movie, there is suddenly a cut away to her, in the meantime, seeking out the brightness of a chandelier to stand under. To fool him?
She blinks as though in the glare. She has not yet begun reading. Luke is still un-begun. Have minutes passed yet?
She dares not look away from the light.
The verses will speak of forgiveness, of welcoming home the lost son and of turning from sin. Merciful words, but the memory of what happened the night before brings no such clemency with the morning air.
Phase two of Luke’s proposal had been a sumptuous dinner in the exclusive restaurant of the hotel at which he had also reserved two rooms. The place was a post-modernist creation far fancier than the places they usually go to, set within splendid Georgian architecture and decorated with every fabric and colour imaginable so that no two pieces of furniture matched. A uniformed member of staff had handed them each a glass of champagne as they’d entered the restaurant, though Luke subtly switched his for a non-alcoholic cocktail, and Vera had followed suit. Happily. She hadn’t needed champagne anyway, she was intoxicated enough by the enormity of what they were doing together. By the new life they were so close to. Luke had ordered for them both, smirking mischievously as he dropped in the phrase: “my fiancée will have,” and Vera had felt that the moment couldn’t have been more romantic. They’d linked hands across the table, and found it was impossible to talk of anything other than their future wedding, which they did with a delicious feeling of conspiracy. They retold the afternoon to each other, and stared deep into each other’s eyes. Finally, Luke had led her to her room, and then followed her inside.
She can remind him of that she supposes: he was the one who followed her in. It was he who had sat on her bed, his hand resting on her thigh, his tongue probing with unfeigned desire. She can remind him of these facts and lay them before him, like Humbert speaking of Lolita, dear Luke, dear reader. But Luke has always been a deceptively good kisser. The night they first kissed – on their second date, in a deserted street outside an independent cinema where they’d watched a film about a lost tribe in the Andes – Luke had kissed her, deeply, and then with just as much passion revealed to her that he was a Christian and a virgin, in that order, and that he wouldn’t have sex until he was married. She had laughed. Putting her foot in it, she’d punched him on the arm and made him promise over and over that he wasn’t joking. Until it reached the point that he was laughing too and unable to say it with a straight face, and she unable to believe that someone who kissed with such intensity was really a virgin.
But in hindsight, it had been barely a peck compared to the powerful sensuality that Luke had pressed against her lips a year later, during phase two, last night. Because now they were engaged, she’d figured, and this had blurred the boundaries of what he’d always ruled out before. And he loved her. And it had been a perfect day. His hand had moved up her back and into her hair. His strong, cycling legs had pressed firmly against hers. His tongue had searched hard for an answer. And she’d wanted to give it to him. The answer was yes. Yes, of course it was yes. Yes, she wanted to fuck him, to be his first. She could barely believe they’d waited so long! Sex, he would quickly learn, was just as useful a distraction as prayer.
Excusing herself for the bathroom she’d slipped away and Luke had smiled knowingly. It had been a year and a day since Vera had last had sex and in breathy excitement she’d shed the faded cotton underwear that, unprepared, she’d selected that morning. The engagement ring felt heavy against her nakedness. Her blonde hair tumbled over slim, bare shoulders, still freckled from the distant summer sun. The tail of his encouraging eyes made her shiver. Time was speeding past. Moments were happening. Her body had finally caught up with her mind. And both, in sync, were focused only on him. She’d taken one last look at herself in the bathroom mirror before, resisting the pulling of faces, quivering with anticipation and nervousness and a love more urgent than she’d ever known, she’d reappeared before him, an effigy of smooth, pale flesh, uninterrupted but for a band of rose-tinted gold.
She can still feel the texture of the disdain with which Luke had greeted her.
It was a pockmarked moment.
Luke’s eyes had narrowed at once into a hurt, harrowed, horrified expression, and then he’d come at her with one hand raised to shield his eyes and the duvet from the bed in the other, a weapon with which to conceal and tame her. “To protect,” he’d insisted, disallowing her from running mortified back to the bathroom and forcing her to sit. “From yourself. Sweetheart, I know we’re engaged, but engagement is preparation for marriage, it’s not marriage. Having sex now would be wrong, it would compromise our relationship, and our commitment to God.”
“What about your commitment to me?” she’d flailed in that first, hot moment. “How do you think I feel to be rejected by my own fiancé?”
“I’m not rejecting you, I’m rejecting sin.”
The bible truly was ingrained.
Some way down the corridor the lift had beeped. It seemed to punctuate their dialogue and they’d sat in heavy silence while Vera raced through the emotions of mortification, rejection, anger, bewilderment and shame. In her head she called back all the moments that had preceded this one: his touch, his look, his tongue. Surely he’d been giving her encouragement. But then she thought back fu
rther. Luke had told her from the very start he didn’t believe in sex before marriage, only that day he had given her a bible, thinking, or hoping, she was as dedicated as he… Did he realise now that she was only going through the motions? Wasn’t he? Wasn’t everyone? Weren’t they all papering over something?
Thoughts snaked like poison through her mind. Snaking. Snaking.
She was the serpent. Still. It was her sin after all. It was because of her and not him that she felt so rejected and small.
“Look, it’s no big deal,” she’d said finally, “I just… I’m still learning the Jesus rules I guess!”
“I’m sorry sweetheart. Please don’t feel bad,” Luke had reassured her. But he shook his head with minuscule movements she knew she wasn’t supposed to notice, but did; tiny disapproving gestures that scared her. She took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” she offered. “Forget about it Luke okay? Okay? Think of it as a preview. The main attraction’s yet to come.”
“Exactly. Exactly,” he had agreed eagerly, and just as eagerly she had pulled the duvet closer around her and leant her head onto his shoulder, where she could feel his frame slowly relax as the danger receded.
“Tell me something true,” she had asked him softly, and Luke had smiled and kissed the top of her head.
“Jesus is truth sweetheart.”
Charlie would have thrown her onto the bed, offered her some coke afterwards and left hurriedly, possibly for another date. She would have felt better, and worse.
Vera closes her pristine new bible. The hotel phone rings. It is Luke. They arrange to meet for breakfast. Over toast and jam and fresh black coffee, they decide it is time to share their news.
*****************
Luke’s mother lived by herself in a huge, rattling town house in St John’s Wood just three roads away from Luke. She changed the window planters every season, had the façade painted every third year and dusted the whole house on Tuesdays. On Saturdays, she got up early, dressed in trousers, flat shoes and one of her husband’s old shirts, unhooked her overall from its home in the pantry and made her way into the glass-topped extension at the back of the house where she remained until she lost the light, tenderly caressing canvases with a sable hairbrush. During the rest of the week, the door to this room was locked, and Lynn never showed anyone the vast landscapes and intricate portraits she created within, but she looked forward to Saturdays. So it was with some irritation that she told her son that of course he could pop in for tea, that she’d be delighted to see Vera.
