Emma found Tom's card in the wallet where she kept business cards and emailed him to say that her engagement had been broken off, that she was feeling lonely, and would be glad to see him again. He responded immediately: “When? Where?” In a rapid exchange of emails it was agreed that he would come to Birmingham the next day and take her to dinner in one of the city's Michelin-starred restaurants. He told her he had booked a room for the night at the Hyatt hotel, but she changed the linen on her bed that morning in case an alternative scenario developed.
They met at the restaurant, and it was soon clear to her that the same thought was in his mind. When he asked her where she lived, and she explained that it was very near and that she could show him the flat after dinner, he wore the expression of someone for whom Christmas had come very early, and scarcely attended to the waiter's conscientious recitation of the ingredients in the exiguous starters he set before them. While they were waiting for the main course to be served. Tom commiserated with Emma on the breakup of her engagement. “It was a lucky escape,” she said dismissively. “He wasn't worthy of me. Did you ever think of getting married?” Tom wrinkled his brow. “Not really. I never met someone I felt I could live with for a lifetime.” “What about me?” Emma asked boldly. Tom looked startled, laughed, then seeing that the question was not intended as a joke, adjusted his countenance accordingly. “That was first love, Emma, for both of us,” he said solemnly. “We were very young - marriage was out of the question.” “But it isn't now,” Emma pointed out. “Er…no,” he said. Two waiters appeared at that moment with a pair of plates covered by chromium-plated domes, which were lifted off with synchronised precision under their noses. “But we're two different people, Emma,” he said, when they had gone. “We haven't met for years, apart from that reunion last summer. Perhaps we could start seeing each other again, occasionally - the rail service between London and here is really very good now…Who knows what might develop? This concoction looks interesting - how's your fish?” “The thing is,” she said, “There really isn't a lot of time, if we're to take advantage of the arrangements that have already been made.” She told him about them in some detail.
Emma had to go to the Ladies between the pre-dessert and the dessert, and when she returned to their table found Tom frowning at his iPhone. He pocketed it as she sat down. “I'm terribly sorry, Emma,” he said. “But there's a bit of an emergency in London I've got to attend to.” After he had gobbled his dessert (Emma left hers untouched) he escorted her to the lobby of her apartment building and kissed her chastely on the cheek before hastening off to catch a late train to London. “Let's keep in touch,” he said. Alone in the lift Emma screamed loudly all the way up to the seventh floor, and pounded the padded walls with her fists. There was a message on her landline from her mother to say that the wedding invitations had been printed and delivered, and would she like to come over some time and help to address the envelopes. And there was an email from Neville saying that he would have to stay on in Dubai for another week, and he thought they should not wait any longer to announce that the wedding was off. Emma took two Temazepam and went to bed.
The next day her mother phoned her at work about the invitations. “If you're too busy to come over, darling, I'll send them out myself.” “No, don't do that,” Emma said. “They might have to be changed.” “Changed?” Mrs Dobson repeated wonderingly. “Why?” “There might be a mistake in the wording,” Emma said. “I must check them myself.” “Well, don't leave it too long, darling,” Mrs Dobson said. “Time is running out.” “I know it is,” Emma said. “I'll come over as soon as I can.”
Her last resort was the internet. She found a website called The Hitching Post where singles could make contact with potential marriage partners without revealing their own identities and posted an enticing description of herself and a list of the attributes she desired in a husband which concluded, “Must be available for wedding on the last Saturday in June.” She got a number of replies with surprising speed, some apparently serious, some amused, some obscene. One sent her a photo of his erect penis. A man who described himself as a college lecturer aged thirty-five sounded possible, and as he lived near Birmingham she arranged to meet him in the tea shop of the Art Gallery & Museum. He said he would be wearing a red scarf for identification. She said she would be wearing a silver quilted ski-jacket. In fact she wore a beige raincoat, so that she could observe him covertly before introducing herself. She arrived early for the appointment, but he was already there, with a cup of tea before him, and a soiled red scarf round his neck, reading a newspaper. He was grey-haired, with a straggly beard, and looked as old as her father. As she watched, he picked his nose vigorously, examined the excavated mucus on his fingernail, and put it in his mouth. Emma went hurriedly to the Ladies and was sick.
It was raining when Emma left the Art Gallery. She pulled the hood of her raincoat over her head, thrust her hands into its pockets, and wandered aimlessly along the canal towpaths. Finally, she accepted defeat. She could not persist any longer in denial that the wedding was a lost cause. She began to admit to herself that her recent behaviour had been irrational - irrational and dangerous - driven by a desire not to be married, but to impose her will on a stubbornly resistant reality. What a fool she had been to imagine, when Neville let her down, that she could find another man to replace him in a matter of weeks. She came to a halt, and stared down at the black waters of the canal.
“Excuse me, but are you all right?”
She turned to find a young man in anorak and jeans standing a few yards away. He had his hood up too, but as if conscious that this might seem threatening he pulled it back, revealing a round freckled face and a mop of fair curly hair which had quite the opposite effect.
“I don't want to intrude,” he said. “But…”
“You were afraid I was going to throw myself in?”
“It crossed my mind,” he said. “You had that look about you.”
“It wouldn't be any use,” she said. “I can swim. Rather well actually.”
“Yes, I can believe that,” he said. “So you're all right?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“OK.” He walked on a few paces, and then turned back. “D'you feel like a drink, by any chance? There's a nice little pub along here.”
“All right,” Emma said.
“Excellent.” He extended his hand. “I'm Oscar.”
She shook his hand. “Emma.”
“So what do you do, Emma?” he asked her, when he brought their drinks from the bar - a vodka and tonic for her and a beer for himself - and sat down opposite her at a small table.
“I work in a bank,” she said. Usually she answered this question by saying “I'm a banker”, because it sounded more important, but she guessed that for Oscar the word would have ugly associations with unscrupulous men earning huge bonuses for gambling recklessly with other people's money and causing the credit crisis. “What about you?” she asked.
“I'm a conceptual poet,” he said.
“What's conceptual poetry?” she asked.
“It can be anything in words that you present as poetry. You don't have to make it up. You just find it.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. Weather forecasts, small ads, football results… The more ordinary it is, the better. I'm working on a long narrative poem at the moment which is a transcription of the satnav instructions for a journey from Land's End to John O'Groats. It's called
Turn Around When Possible
.”
Emma laughed. The sound surprised her and she realised that she hadn't laughed for a long time. “You mean you just copy out the directions? That doesn't seem very original.”
“Originality is an ego-trip. Conceptual poetry humbles itself before the miracle of language itself. You don't impose your will on it.”
“That's interesting,” Emma said.
“Of course, with
Turn Around When Possible
I had to choose the journey, and drive the route, so the poem is original in that sense.”
“Can you recite some of it?”
“Sure.” He fixed her gaze with his bright blue eyes, which seemed to her like the eyes of an angel, and intoned in a lilting, melodious voice: “
Cross the roundabout, second exit, then cross the roundabout, third exit…bear right, then keep to the left…keep to the left…in two hundred yards, take the exit and join the motorway…exit ahead! …in eight hundred hundred yards take the exit…take the exit…cross the roundabout, second exit...turn around when possible...
”
“That's lovely,” Emma said, entranced by the sublime purposeless of the exercise.
Several days later Emma arrived at her parents' house, summoned by an angry message from her father left on her voicemail. “What's going on, Emma? He demanded, as soon as he had closed the front door behind her. “Neville's parents phoned us this morning. He's sent them an email from Dubai, saying you'd broken off the engagement and the wedding is cancelled. They seemed to think we knew. I didn't know what to say.”
“It's true,” Emma said. Her mother, who came into the front hall in time to hear this, burst into tears. “Oh Emma!” she wailed. “Why?”
“He cheated on me,” Emma said. “I was prepared to forgive him but he had changed his mind about getting married.” She gave a brief account of the episode.
“What a bastard,” Mr Dobson said, softening his tone, and putting a comforting hand on Emma's shoulder. “I wish I could sue him for the cost of cancelling the wedding.”
“There's no need to cancel it.” Emma said. “All we need to do is have new invitations printed.”
Mr Dobson removed his hand and Mrs Dobson gaped at her. “What?” they said simultaneously.
“There's no need to cancel the wedding, because I'm in love with another man who wants to marry me, and he's available on the last Saturday in June,” Emma said.
Her parents exchanged alarmed glances. “Who is he? What does he do? How long have you known him?” Mr Dobson demanded.
“He's called Oscar and he's a poet and I met him four days ago. On a canal towpath.”
“I told you, Mabel,” Mr Dobson said. “She's having a nervous breakdown. It's this wedding. It's all been too much for her. She needs help.”
“I don't blame you for thinking that,” Emma said. “I admit I have been a bit mad lately. But I've never felt more sane in my life than I do now.”
“Sane? You call it sane to marry a man you met four days ago? And a poet? There's no money in poetry.”
“Oscar has a private income, which I shall manage for him more sensibly that he does now.”
“How much?”
“I don't know exactly.”
“Of course you don't. The man's a confidence trickster, obviously. I know what it is - you've become obsessed with this wedding, and you'd marry anyone, I believe you'd marry the dustman, rather than cancel it. You'd make a laughing stock of us. Well, I'm not going to let you. I'm going to cancel the whole thing. And don't ask me to pay for another wedding one day.”
“All right,” Emma said equably. “We'll get married quietly in a register office.”
This made Mr Dobson pause for thought, since it suggested that Emma really did love this poet for his own sake. He became even better disposed when he discovered that she had met Oscar's parents, that his father was a High Court judge and his mother a well-known newspaper columnist, and that his private income was an annuity left him by his godmother, a Lady Somebody. By the end of the day Mr Dobson had come round to the idea of having Oscar fill the place of the despicable Neville. Mrs Dobson was pleased for Emma but still apprehensive about the likely reaction of their relatives and friends to the last-minute change of groom. “Let'em laugh up their sleeves, if they want to,” her husband said. “The main thing is that Emma will be happy.”
And she was. The last Saturday in June was breezy and cloudy, but the sun came out and shone on the bridal couple as they emerged from the Longstaffe parish church. Emma looked radiant. Oscar looked angelic. The reception went off perfectly. The best man made a speech alluding wittily to the revision of a minor detail in the original invitations which provoked much laughter. Emma knew that for this reason, if no other, everyone present would always remember her wedding.
M
ost novelists cut their teeth on the short story, for obvious reasons. Writing a novel, even a short novel, requires a daunting investment of time and effort, and causes a corresponding degree of disappointment if it is rejected or has to be abandoned. But you can usually bring a short story to some kind of conclusion, and if it fails to get published that's not a disaster. My fictional debut, published in the school magazine, was a short story about a young man who obtained a scholarship to go to drama school by impersonating the Devil at his interview so effectively that he scared the members of the board out of their wits. I had recently appeared before a similar board at the old London County Council in pursuit of a university maintenance grant, and my best friend at the time had ambitions to be an actor. My fictions often have some oblique connection like that with my own experience, but usually I find the basic idea needs to be developed in the more complex and expansive form of the novel. Occasionally, however, it seems suited to a short story, such as the three collected here. I see them as three verbal snapshots of British sexual manners and morals at three different periods of my lifetime.
“Where the Climate's Sultry”
, is set in the nineteen-fifties, when nice girls didn't have sex before marriage, and nice boys respected that code, but it was written in the nineteen-eighties, by which time the Permissive Society was well established. British travel agents were routinely advertising package holidays for the 18-30 age group promising potential customers unlimited opportunities for casual sex as well as sun, sand, sea and sangria, Wryly (and perhaps a little enviously) comparing, in middle age, the visions of guiltless youthful debauchery thus summoned up with memories of two holidays in Spain when I was a student, I composed this comic quadrille of sexual frustration among four well-brought-up young Brits, raised to fever pitch in a Mediterranean environment.