As Stevie’s negligent mother, I
know
that Jez has gone for Stevie for all the right reasons. I never taught her to cook, sew, or clean. She is fabulously domestically incapable!”
Stevie laughed. This was a long-running joke. She turned to ex- change glances with Jez and was a little surprised to see a flicker of concern migrate across his forehead.
“She’s her mother’s daughter. She won’t put up with any sloppy behavior, dirty socks, or demands. I fully expect her to be waited upon, adored, and pampered!”
High-pitched whoops, cheers of “Go Patti!” and napkin waving. “We all know marriage can be trying, at times.” A fleeting acid look at her husband felled his smile. “So it’s important to get it
right. Stevie could have got married years ago . . .” Could I? thought Stevie. Who on earth
to
?
“But no compromises for my Stev. She held out for someone who valued her as a person, as a creative,
sensual
woman . . .”
Oh, God. Stevie felt her head incline toward her plate.
“And that’s you, Jez.” Patti paused dramatically. “Well, I hope so! If it’s not, you’ll have
me
to deal with.”
Jez laughed in short sharp spasms. Chris raised his eyebrows, knowing it wasn’t an empty threat. Rita’s eyes drilled into her frozen foot. The rest of the guests fell about laughing.
“I’m not going to bang on all night as The Soft Pebbles are ready . . .” Patti beamed and nodded to a group of pony-tailed gray-bearded musicians shaped like pints of Guinness, who were tuning their guitars and smoking roll-ups in the corner of the tent. “But I’d like you to raise your glasses for one last toast to Jez’s late father, Colin, who we all miss
dreadfully
.” Patti smiled at Rita a lit- tle apologetically. She could never get the tone quite right. “And, of course, a toast to my wonderful daughter and her lucky, lucky
husband, Jez. Here’s to their marriage and, of course, the sound of pattering feet!”
The guests stood up, drunken arms extended in public salute. Then a stormy eruption of noise and clapping. As the noise got louder and louder, Stevie slid down her chair, blushing, laughing, embarrassed. Beneath the table, she twisted her wedding ring round and round her finger, noticing, for the first time, that it didn’t quite fit.
FIFTEEN
Æ
the first dance—dolly parton’s “islands in the
stream,” Stevie’s choice—went too quickly. The crowd cheered. Her mother sobbed. Lara whooped. Jez, clumsy with drunken ki- netic energy, stepped on her toes twice. But none of this mattered. All that mattered was that for about three and a half minutes, soaked in the familiar homey smell of Jez’s arms, Stevie lost herself. This was what a wedding is all about, she thought. This was a
good
omen.
Then the record jumped, skidded, and stopped.
The DJ—a lanky unemployed friend of Neil’s—looked up from the decks and fumbled with its buttons, as casually as he could while breaking out in a sweat. Balancing a new disc on his shaky finger, he lowered it to the decks. The tempo changed and Dolly Parton and the last dance and that ecstatic bridal moment evapo- rated into the sweaty pulse of a crowd booty-shaking to Fatboy Slim. The DJ punched the air. Stevie’s smile flatlined.
“Relax,” Jez shouted into her ear. “You’re married now.”
She laughed the comment away, noticing as she did that one of
her plastic heel insole pads—as recommended by Lara, to avoid “stiletto-ache”—had shunted out of the sandal and was lapping at the floor like a tongue. She bent down to adjust it. Jez used the op- portunity to swivel thirty degrees, away from her, to accommodate Meg, who was shaking the shiny lengths of her otterlike body, spilling champagne from her glass. And as Stevie’s spirits had soared a few moments ago, now they hurtled downward.
“Whoa! Go Stevie!” Her drunken father, all lanky limbs and flapping gray hair and index fingers cocked like pistols, thrust her back into a bridal this-is-the-best-day-of-my-life mode with a grab and a twirl, pulling her back and forth, making her dress fly up. His spectacles clouding like glasses of Pernod, he began to whoop drunkenly as if the song had tossed him back thirty years to the Trinity College ball. (Stevie made a mental note to embarrass her father about it at a later date.) Chris flipped his daughter to Patti, who moved semi-erotically—the only way she knew how—arms in a sixties weave above her head, bosoms thrusting against the confines of her dress’s neckline, while her father clapped along, watching.
It struck Stevie that her parents were not dancing with each other, but using her like a morris dancer’s baton so they could cir- cle around each other without touching. After a particular vigorous spin from her father, Stevie was propelled on a northwestern trajec- tory across the dance floor, bumping past Meg, then Lara, and finally flying into the seeping armpits of Uncle Harry, who, en- gorged with alcohol and wheezing loudly, appeared to be in danger of expiring any second. Indeed it was the midair collapse of Uncle Harry’s unexpected Scottish dance move—an extravagant calf- flick—and the subsequent flabby load he pressed upon her shoul- ders as he tried to right himself that caused one of her Jimmy Choos to curl beneath the other and slip on a puddle of Meg’s
spilled champagne. Arms outstretched, unable to save herself, Ste- vie skydived floorward and landed in a heap, like a binge drinker on a night out in a provincial town.
Floor, swallow me up, she thought, her knees stinging.
Sam spotted the accident faster than anyone else, rushed over, picked her up gently, and brushed down her dress. “Nothing bro- ken?”
“My shoe. Is my shoe okay?”
Sam squatted down to inspect Stevie’s shoe, his hands gently holding the neat turn of her ankle. “The Choo has survived,” he said solemnly. “No need for the last rites.”
Stevie smiled, rubbing her leg. “May I tempt you with a chair?”
“Thanks.” Stevie hooped one arm into the triangular gateway created by Sam’s, and pretended to laugh uproariously in order to reassure concerned guests and deflect interfering well-wishers. They sat down on two silver opera-style chairs. Her eyes zigzagged across the dance floor. She wondered where Jez was. She imagined that Sam was thinking the same thing. A bride did not want pity on her wedding day. She broke the spell. “Lara’s great, isn’t she?”
One side of Sam’s full mouth lifted and parted coyly, exposing white teeth. He fiddled with a cufflink. “Yeah, yeah. She’s cool.”
“You two going to meet up in New York?” Sam grinned. “Sure you want us to?”
Stevie blushed slightly, bristling at the possible insinuation. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
Sam picked up a party popper from the table and rotated its bar- rel over and over as if it were an object of great fascination. “Lara seems like a great girl.” He coughed and asked dutifully, “Has she got a boyfriend?”
“Recently sacked one.”
“Imagine she doesn’t suffer fools.” “Nope.”
He shrugged. “That counts me out, then.”
Stevie nudged him with her right elbow. “I think you’d be great together.”
Sam looked doubtful. “Really?”
“Never a dull moment with Lara. If I were a man . . . well, she’s clever, funny, feisty . . .” As the adjectives loosened from her tongue, Stevie got one of those insights it is possible to have about other people’s relationships (never her own): Men do not necessarily want clever, funny, and feisty. She tried to feminize the sale. “She’s a lot of fun and has such a big heart.”
Sam bent forward now, elbows on knees, square jaw resting on his hands. He studied Stevie intently. “Foxy, too.”
Stevie felt something drop inside. “Never short of admirers.”
Sam fixed her with amused eyes, black irises flashing blue in the disco lighting. “Problem is, you know me, Stevie. I always end up with the most dysfunctional one in the room.”
“Have I introduced you to Meg?” “Very funny.”
Stevie curled a foot around the chair leg. “I never met Camille, though. Nice?”
“Sweet, really sweet.”
“You make her sound like a petit four. Why did you split?” “Oh, you know, it wasn’t right. She wanted to get married, stay
in Paris. And, well, I realized that I couldn’t offer her that, so we split.” He rolled his eyes. “If I had to distill the relationship down to three sentences.”
“Oh. Don’t you want to get married?” She hadn’t yet got Sam
figured out. Despite the length of time they’d known one another, parts of him remained a mystery.
“Man . . .” Sam kicked his legs out in front of him, laughing. “You sound like Mum. Yes, of course,
one
day. I’d love a big family. But it has to be the right person.”
As a man, you’ll have more time to find that person, too, she al- most added, then thought better of it.
“I look around at my mates and wonder.” Sam exhaled loudly. “You know, they reach the age of thirty-three or whatever and start running down the aisle at breakneck speed, forgetting it’s about wanting to wake up with that same person forty years down the line.”
“Like Katy Norris?” The woman wasn’t far from her thoughts today for some reason.
Sam winced and took a sip from an unclaimed glass of cham- pagne. “What do you think?”
Stevie raised an eyebrow. “She wanted to ‘settle,’ a horrible word, pretty badly, didn’t she? I remember you telling me.” She studied Sam for his reaction. Pained, good.
“I think it was beginning to dawn on her that there was more to life than her career, that she wasn’t getting any younger.”
Stevie wondered if, in recent months, she had behaved a little like Katy Norris. The idea horrified her. And yet some kind of switch had clicked when she was thirty-two. And yes, she’d definitely tried harder to “work at her relationship” with Jez. In her mid-twenties, she’d probably have just caused a huge scene and got herself chucked, thus shrugging away responsibility for ending it. But with Jez, she’d put up with more than she had done when young. “I’m sure Katy will have frog-marched at least one man up the aisle by now and has a brood of children sired by a captain of industry.”
“Yeah.” Sam casually twiddled a curl with his left hand, leaning back into the chair. “She likes a few noughts on a payslip.” He put on a Jamaican accent. “Katy Norris didn’t want no poor, snapper husband. I got off lightly. Just got to act as stand-in for a couple of months while she planned her next move.”
Was it just sex, then? What had he seen in Katy? At least Sam didn’t seem at all bothered about being crossed off her list of po- tential husbands. After a few moments of awkward silence, Sam turned his face away from the dance floor to face her. She caught his eye and smiled. He looked away quickly. They simultaneously swung their gazes back toward the dance floor, now a little society unto itself, delineated by the speakers at one end and the stationary stand-still-and-wiggle dancers, mostly the older relatives, at the other. The exuberant, young, and female were the twirling nodes around which the male guests journeyed, shuffling between swing- ing hips and stamping long legs in high heels. While Jez’s over- dressed aunts from the Midlands stormed across the floor like vast sequined galleons, other members of the happy couple’s collective family were locked in stiff mock-polkas, as if to signal to everyone else on the floor (especially the more attractive nonfamily members) that their choice of dancing partner was purely sealed by familial duty. Susie from down the road was wrestling Stevie’s father into her thick, hungry arms while her mother glared on, increasingly territorial.
And Jez? Where was Jez? Oh, Jez was heading their way, lurch- ing toward them, his hair disheveled, tie missing, long stubs of ash from his glowing cigarette dropping to the parquet dance floor.
“Guys!” Jez drunkenly boomed, as if competing with a loud speaker. “
Whassup?
”
Stevie’s heart sunk. His face was covered in boozy red blotches. “I fell over . . .”
“Break a leg.” Jez laughed.
Stevie grimaced. Be charitable, she told herself. Jez was obvi- ously not in a good way. He was not coping with his father’s death. If only she could explain this to Sam. She hated the idea that Sam thought she was marrying a total idiot. “Sit down. Here . . .” She handed him a glass of water. “Drink.”
Jez collapsed into the seat next to Stevie, his legs stretched out into a wide V. He glugged down the water, which left him with a crescent of shimmering liquid on his upper lip.
He dropped his head onto Stevie’s shoulder. “That’s better,” he slurred. “I’m exhausted. Spent.”
Stevie squeezed his hand. “I know. It’s okay.”
“I miss Dad, Stevie. I want him to be here.” Jez’s eyes filled with tears.
Stevie kissed him. Poor Jez. God, she was a cow, not thinking, not being there enough. “I know, I know.” She kissed his sweaty forehead.
SIXTEEN
Æ
jez managed to keep the honeymoon location se-
cret until they arrived at Heathrow and he installed Stevie in a check-in line beneath the Thai Airways sign, then he stumbled off to find calories and caffeine to lift him from the living death of his hangover.
After a three-hour wait, they were both safely planted in their cramped mid-aisle seats. Better-tempered now that he had no re- quirement to hold his skeleton vertical, Jez slumped and exhaled a coffee-scented sigh of relief. He apologized to Stevie for being so crap and told her he’d be better company if he slept. Stevie agreed. Jez held her hand, his grip loosening as he swam into a deep, star- less sleep.
Many hours later, Stevie was still watching the sky, charting its impossible change from gray to smeared blood-orange red.
Stevie squirted her face with a mist of mineral water spray. As Jez slept, to kill time, she attempted to sketch the duvet of clouds beneath the plane with the greasily good charcoal pencils in the notebook Sam had given her. But she couldn’t do the sky justice.
Her mind was elsewhere. Would Lara be in New York now? Would Sam? No point in dwelling on the loss of the two friends to Amer- ica. Change the record, Stevie. She swigged her bottled water, felt its cool passage slick her hot, dry throat, and wondered if they were the only honeymooners on the flight. Unlikely. She wondered whether they were the only honeymooners who hadn’t consum- mated their marriage. Likely. Jez had been too wrecked, the check- in time too early.