The Wedding Day

by Catherine Alliott

  So Belgravia was his given patch; and whilst it might be more uplifting, soul-wise, to serve the poor, to be shoving his way through a jam-packed, bug-ridden waiting room full of terminal coughers to get to his broom cupboard of a surgery in Peckham, people were still taken ill in his part of the world, and he was no less conscientious or hardworking than his colleagues on the other side of the city. Yes, he had chi-chi premises, but he still did everything in his power to save his patients from undue pain. And it was here, near to his Sloane Street surgery, that he’d saved me, too. In so many ways.

  The first thing I’d noticed about David had been his eyes, huge with horror as he came towards me at a run, arms outstretched, ready to push me away.

  ‘Look out!’ he cried as a sheet of plate glass, the one in the window of Boots the Chemist, had been about to receive a mighty blow from a parcel of bricks swinging precariously from a rope as they were incompetently raised by distracted workmen to scaffolding on the roof above. As the bricks hovered, swayed, and then lurched perilously close to the window, David simultaneously launched himself at me and Flora – just as the glass smashed to smithereens. As we were flung across the pavement with David prone on top of us, he looked up and let loose a stream of abuse at the workmen, the first and last time I ever heard him swear.

  Thankfully the glass had fallen pretty much vertically and hadn’t injured us, but David wasn’t satisfied. As he picked himself up from the pavement and helped us to our feet, he took one look at the two tremulous females before him – who for various reasons hadn’t been in the best of health even before the glass had shattered – and insisted we accompany him back to his surgery so he could check us over. I protested, but he was adamant.

  ‘I promise you,’ he said, ‘you’re as white as a sheet.’ ‘No, really, I’m fine.’ ‘Then you won’t mind if I take your pulse?’ ‘No … but I think – oh God …’ I put a hesitant hand to my forehead.

  ‘You might be about to pass out?’

  I nodded and, as I crumpled, he helped me to sit in an un dignified heap on the kerb again, this time with my head between my knees in the gutter.

  He squatted beside me, one hand on my back, and made me stay like that for a good few minutes whilst making reassuring noises and reminding me to breathe. Flora, meanwhile, scratched her leg awkwardly and went very pink. An interested flow of people were rubber-necking past, and even as the nausea swelled within me I knew she was thinking: Oh, please God, please God don’t let there be anyone from my school.

  After that little bit of street theatre I didn’t really have a leg to stand on – literally or figuratively – so, with Flora trailing behind us, David helped me around the corner to his rooms on Sloane Street. They were through an arch-way, off the main road, and above a shady courtyard, and shaken as I was, I do remember thinking that the little Italianate piazza complete with fountain and exotic palm plants we skirted around before going up the stone entrance steps and through the heavy oak door was all pretty damned swanky. Once inside, in the hushed, marble hall, David nodded to the uniformed concierge before shepherding us into an old-fashioned lift which concertinaed shut behind us like a gilded cage. We purred up in silence. On the second floor, the smooth blonde receptionist instantly abandoned Nigel Dempster and was all tea and sympathy at the sight of us, which Flora and I – completely overwhelmed now by the opulence of our surroundings – meekly lapped up. As we trooped into David’s consulting room, the deep shine of the furniture, the pall of antiquity on the oils hanging from the panelling and the chesterfield sofa I was invited to sit upon all further contrived to render us mute and helpless. My daughter and I recognize social superiority when we see it.

  David shone a torch in my eyes, and then carefully looked at my face.

  ‘I’m checking for minuscule shards of glass …’ he murmured, really very close up now, peering disconcertingly around. I could feel my cheeks reddening.

  ‘But actually … you look … perfect.’

  I flushed to my roots at this and, for a split second, he caught my eye. And that’s where it all began, I think. In the eyes.

  He cleared his throat and moved swiftly across to examine Flora, who was perched on an identical sofa on the opposite side of the room. This not only gave me an opportunity to breathe, but also to look at him.

  God, he was handsome. Crouched as he was at my daughter’s feet in his immaculate charcoal-grey suit – oblivious of the fact that he might be kneeing his trousers on the oriental carpet – he made an attractive spectacle. His hair was fair and soft and swept back in a rather up-market way, and his narrow intelligent face, lightly tanned from a recent holiday, was concentrated into a look of deep concern. Flora sat before him, quiet as a mouse.

  ‘You both look fine,’ he declared suddenly, springing athletically to his feet. He snapped the torch back into a nifty little leather holster and went to perch on the edge of his desk, arms folded, elegant long legs stretched out before him, crossed at the ankles. He regarded us kindly. ‘Though a little shaky. But if I were a betting man, I’d put your pallor down to exhaustion rather than the shock of that plate-glass window shattering. When did the pair of you last eat?’

  I cleared my throat and tentatively admitted that we’d missed breakfast. Oh yes, and lunch too, on account of Flora being unable to face a thing with her appalling tummy cramps and me being too tired to contemplate food having been up all night trying to write. He frowned.

  ‘I see. And you thought, having been up all night, that a little shopping spree in Knightsbridge might revive you?’

  I smiled at his irony and gave him some of mine. ‘Flora had set her heart on a pair of trousers. A crucial, must-have combat style that can’t be found locally. Without them, her life would not be complete. It had to be Knightsbridge.’ I wasn’t to know he wasn’t a parent and that this would be lost on him.

  He looked perplexed and said that he thought a decent breakfast a bit more important than a pair of trousers, and that since he’d been on his way to lunch when he’d literally bumped into us, why didn’t we accompany him to Starbucks for coffee and sandwiches?

  All of which, naturally, was above and beyond your average GP’s call of duty, but as he explained to me later – much later, in bed in Fulham – behind the shock and fragility I was exhibiting that day he’d glimpsed something else. Something that made me an A1 example of the sort of woman – pale, gamine, ethereal and with long dark tresses – that he wasn’t aware that he liked. And, whilst he didn’t normally succumb to fey charms of this kind, he was suitably intrigued, not just to check me out for scratches, but to follow up the consultation with sustenance.

  The hot chocolate and egg mayonnaise rolls in the window of the sunny café went down a treat and Flora and I guzzled greedily as dust motes gathered in shafts of light around us. Afterwards, equilibrium restored and swivelling restlessly on her high bar stool, my daughter announced that she was going down to Gap to secure the trousers. Promising to be no longer than twenty minutes, she disappeared, leaving the stage free for David to use those twenty minutes – impulsively I now realize, with the convenience of hindsight – to extract from me a promise to be allowed to restore my blood sugar levels further at a restaurant of his choice the following evening.

  That next night, after dinner, he’d taken me to bed. To my bed, in Fulham, becoming the only man to occupy the slot on the left-hand side of the Heal’s summer sale bargain since my ex-husband Adam had vacated it. All of which totally disproved a long-held theory of mine, which went that if I ever did meet someone I liked enough for that to happen, I’d let him dangle for months for fear of making the same mistake again. Yet after our very first date – only thirty-six hours after our very first encounter in fact – there he was beside me, and I knew it was no mistake. Sexual desire had been obvious – it had been clear and sudden for both of us, minutes after meeting – but as he’d taken my elbow outside the Italian restaurant that night and manoeuvred me across the rain-soaked street to
a taxi, threading his way expertly through the traffic, I’d been surprised to find myself, not only with all nerve endings tingling, but also precipitously in love with a man I hardly knew. Happily, he’d known it too, and a year later – almost to the day – here we were, on the brink of a wedding and a future together.

  David moved into my tiny, bijou Fulham house, full of folk art and scatter cushions and twee clutter and rickety pine furniture, and left behind his spacious, minimalist, double O seven flat in Islington. It made sense, practicably, Islington being too far for Flora to travel to school; but nevertheless, in my eyes, it was another expression of his love. The plan was to marry in the autumn, to sell both the properties and to buy in leafy Hurlingham, where, David predicted, the garden would soon play host to a pram, a paddling pool and, later, a tricycle or two.

  All of which, frankly, made me want to pinch myself. In fact, as I confided to my sister Clare a few weeks after the Sloane Street incident and the Italian dinner, and with David safely installed in my tiny Fulham house, it almost made me want to believe there was Someone Up There rooting for me after all. We were in her kitchen at the time, picking at a carrot cake she’d ostensibly made for the children.

  ‘I mean honestly, Clare, considering.’ ‘Considering what?’ she’d retorted, spraying crumbs everywhere.

  ‘Well, considering there’ve been times over the last couple of years when I’d begun to wonder if my continued existence on this earth was to anyone’s advantage – let alone my own – to find myself feeling like a contender for the happiest girl in the world is surely little short of miraculous, isn’t it?’

  Clare had made her famous face: mouth turned down at the sides, neck muscles taut, head bobbing dubiously from side to side. But in the end she’d conceded that actually, given my provenance, it probably was. She snapped the lid smartly on the cake tin. Little short of miraculous.

  Chapter Two

  It was to Clare’s that I went now, having seen David and Flora off to work and school respectively, and having thrown the cereal bowls and spoons in the dishwasher. Admittedly I hadn’t made it upstairs to turn lights off, open curtains or flush loos, but there was plenty of time for all that later, I decided as I hurried round to my sister’s to share my news.

  Clare lived three streets away from me, in a much taller, more elegant, cream townhouse – three storeys and a basement with a leafy walled garden – and where she’d been a lot longer. When I’d finally left Adam I’d flown geographically to her side, buying a place literally round the corner, unashamedly clinging to the small but strong residue of family I had in her: my big sister, my rock, who, from the moment she’d set eyes on Adam all those years ago, had folded her arms and declared, ‘He’s a shit of the first order, Annabel. Have nothing to do with him.’

  Well, naturally I’d had everything to do with him and she’d had to moderate her tone.

  ‘Well, no, OK,’ she’d conceded warily, seeing me starry-eyed and with a heart-shaped locket containing his photo around my neck, for heaven’s sake. ‘He’s not a complete shit, and gorgeous, I grant you, but a boy, Annie, who looks and behaves like a red setter puppy. He’ll need regular meals and exercise, but the moment your back’s turned, he’ll go for a walk with anyone who jangles a lead.’

  And I’d been proud to prove her wrong. I’d been proud to go out with him for three, glorious, monogamous years, and have him propose to me on a Hawaiian beach, and get married there, barefoot and with flowers in my hair, three days later. I’d returned home the proud owner of a dashing up-and-coming-actor husband, a dear little ring set with tiny seed pearls, a rented flat in Chiswick and a Peter Jones charge card. I also had a baby on the way, and all this before my sister – four years older than me, mind – had even got off the starting blocks.

  Yet, as ever, her foresight had proved to be horribly accurate. He’d wavered when I was big with child, cast sheep’s eyes at waitresses in my ninth month, and flirted outrageously with the assistant in Mothercare as we bought the changing mat. He’d baulked at the breastfeeding and, having read an article which informed him he might be feeling excluded, instantly sought solace in candlelit restaurants with various supportive supporting actresses. He absented himself regularly on theatre tours during Flora’s toddlerhood, and finally flitted off to Lyons on her first day at school with a nubile cycling enthusiast called Sandra, who was keen to introduce him to the joys of the Tour de France. He returned a week later – breezing brazenly through the back door and flicking on the kettle as if he’d just been to the paper shop – and confided to me in breathless tones that during the race competitors didn’t stop to urinate, but peed in their spray-on shorts to avoid losing valuable seconds. Which pretty much summed him up, Clare and I decided later: can’t stop now, late already, might be a pretty girl around the corner, better pee my pants just in case.

  So what had attracted me to this man in the first place, you might wonder? Well, apart from fabulous dark good looks, Romany gypsy curls, and charm that would have the birds dive-bombing from the trees, there was also his strong gravitational pull. As if anything worth happening was happening around him. Charisma, I believe it’s called, and to a nineteen-year-old farmer’s daughter from Devon whose idea of a wild night out was a few drinks in the local with a group of friends I’d known all my life, his brand of London-based, theatre-world charisma was pretty irresistible.

  Adam had originally arrived in our West Country market town in a production of The Tempest. He’d blown me away with his Ferdinand, his smouldering brown eyes, his declaiming speeches, his strutting on and off stage and his terribly tight doublet and hose. ‘O brave new world,’ I’d boggled with Miranda, ‘that has such people in it.’ After the performance I’d left my seat in a daze, hands sore from applauding, determined to go backstage to see him.

  ‘You’re going backstage?’ Clare and my best friend Rosie had exclaimed, regarding me in horror. ‘This isn’t Drury Lane, you know. It’s only a rep production in Tavistock, for God’s sake. He’ll think you’re barking!’

  Barking or not, I went, and they waited for me in the car, appalled at my lack of restraint, and giggling behind their hands as they watched me approach the stage door. But they hadn’t accounted for Adam’s ego, which was as big as the Ritz. He’d been neither derisive nor embarrassed by my stammering compliments, but merely taken them as his due as the next Olivier. I seem to remember him flushing initially with pleasure, then adjusting his tights and inviting me into the tiny dressing room. It was jam-packed with other actors, but he introduced me to them all in a grand sweeping gesture, then without further ado, backed me into a corner, and flashed a look of unequivocal desire at me. As I basked in it, feeling his eyes literally frazzling my eyelashes, he’d swiftly followed through with a murmured invitation in my ear to join him for dinner that evening.

  ‘But you don’t know him!’ Clare had gawped at me as she hurriedly wound down the fugged-up driver’s window when I’d belted back to the car park to report. ‘He could be anyone!’

  ‘But he’s not anyone, we know that. He’s a brilliant young actor on his way to the top and –’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’ she demanded. ‘Well, yes. And anyway, we’re only going round the corner to La Cassata,’ I added casually.

  ‘La Cassata!’ they shrieked in unison. Rosie’s eyes over Clare’s shoulder were huge and I could tell she was impressed. It was the only restaurant in town that had tablecloths.

  ‘What’ll I say to Mum?’ hissed Clare. ‘Tell her I was invited out, but don’t tell her I picked him up,’ I added quickly. ‘Just say … Oh, say he spied me in the audience and – and sent me a note. Something like that.’

  ‘Give me strength.’ Clare rolled her eyes. ‘He spotted her in the stalls and their eyes met over the conductor’s baton.’ She brusquely shifted the gears in our ancient Escort and lurched off down the road. ‘You’ve seen too many films!’ she yelled back.

  I had, and Adam had too, particularly the one
in which the leading man wines and dines his adoring fan and then she, heady with love, gives up her place at the local technical college and trails around the country with him, sitting in cold repertory theatres smoking Gitanes in black roll-neck jumpers and helping him learn his lines. There I’d be during every performance, always in the front row, always word perfect, and then, during the day, when I wasn’t needed for prompting at rehearsals, waiting for him in some seedy bedsit, writing short stories to pass the time. One or two were taken by Woman’s Realm, which helped to pay the rent, and very occasionally I reached the dizzy heights of Woman’s Own.

  I suppose, in retrospect, that that was the one productive thing to come out of our union together, besides Flora. Those early years were conducive to writing, and I spent most of my time lying on candlewick bedspreads in chilly bedrooms in seaside towns, penning my stories.

  Despite my family’s horror – my mother, alone at the farm now that Dad had died, felt she’d let me drift and that Dad wouldn’t have – I truly believed, and still do believe, that Adam loved me. And Flora too. It was just that he was constitutionally unsuited for marriage. He simply couldn’t help falling in love with other women.

  Our coming unstuck was a gradual process. There was the first phase in our marriage when I knew about the infidelity and was heartbroken, but loved him so much I couldn’t do anything about it. Then there was the second phase, when I confronted him, he broke down and said it would never happen again and I believed him. The next impasse we reached was when I knew it wouldn’t stop, but was still too much in love to pack my bags. Finally though – and I’m talking an embarrassing number of years here – I mustered the strength to take Flora away and live elsewhere. I put down a deposit on the little house in Fulham with some money Dad had left me, and told Adam it was for ever. He didn’t believe me, but I waited until he’d gone to rehearsals, then dragged the suitcases downstairs and, blinded by tears, sobbed my way to the car, with Flora trailing miserably behind me.