Authors: Kate Eberlen
Another few minutes of both of us pretending to get to sleep.
‘Your heart’s beating really fast,’ Lucy said. ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘No! I’m not!’ I cried.
Suddenly I couldn’t contain my panic.
I sat up. So did she. She reached to turn the light on, but I didn’t know if I could say what I had to say with her looking at me.
‘Don’t!’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I’m fine. No, I’m not. I’m a shit!’
‘Gus, calm down. It’s OK. You’ve had a big shock. Honestly, Gus. You’re having a panic attack. Just breathe. I’ll get you some water.’
‘I DON’T NEED WATER!’
I’d never shouted at her before. Now, the silence was loaded with hurt.
‘Lucy. I’m sorry, but we’ve got to split up. I’ve been meaning to tell you all week, long before all this with my parents.’
‘Don’t be silly!’
‘I’m serious.’
I couldn’t see her face properly, but I could tell she still didn’t believe me, probably thought it was a temporary insanity brought about by shock.
‘I’ve been having an affair with somebody and I’m going to marry her.’
Coward to say it in the dark!
Now I didn’t stop her from switching the bedside light on, and when she did, she could see in my face that I wasn’t joking. She didn’t cry, not then, not as I’d
expected.
‘Why?’ she asked calmly.
What a good doctor she was going to make.
‘She’s pregnant,’ I sighed. ‘She wants to have the baby.’
‘But do you love her?’
Sounds strange, but that question hadn’t crossed my mind. I wondered if it had crossed Charlotte’s. Neither of us had mentioned love. She was too cool and I was trying to be.
‘Yes, I do.’
Unable to be near Lucy as I said it, I got out of bed, pulling an Arsenal dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door to hide my nakedness. It had been bought for me when I was about
twelve and only just did.
I went to sit down on the edge of the bed.
‘Don’t!’ Lucy cried, so I jumped up again, feeling exposed and stupid.
‘You haven’t been using precautions?’ The levers in Lucy’s brain were clicking into place and my crimes beginning to stack up.
‘I assumed—’
‘You’ve endangered me as well as deceiving me?’
The disease side of things hadn’t even crossed my mind.
‘I’m sure—’
‘Just like you were sure she was on the Pill? What’s her name, by the way?’
‘Charlotte.’
‘Not your opera buddy? Oh my God! What an imbecile I’ve been! I trusted you, Gus! I thought you were such a sweetie! It never crossed my mind not to trust you!’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Does Charlotte know about me?’
‘We don’t really talk about—’
‘You just screw? Or do you actually go to the opera? Jesus, Gus! Have you gone mad?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You live with me! You can’t know what it’s like to live with her. This is crazy! It’s crazy, Gus!’
I felt as if I’d frozen. There were no excuses. There was no explanation.
Suddenly Lucy launched herself at me, thumping my chest with her fists.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ she screamed at me. ‘What’s wrong with you, Gus? It’s like you’re in some kind of trance!’
Getting no reaction, she sank to her knees, her mouth contorted in a silent howl of pain, before collapsing in a noisy flood of sobs.
I hated seeing her so upset and out of control, my blameless friend, my companion. She was the person who’d made me feel normal and I’d repaid her by behaving so badly, there was
nothing I could say or do to comfort her.
Eventually, she took an extraordinarily long intake of breath and pulled herself together again.
‘It’s because of Ross, isn’t it?’ she said.
I thought she was talking about my attraction to Charlotte. How clever she was to see that.
An image of Charlotte in her white bikini, the day Ross brought her home to try out our hot tub, flashed across my mind. But even though she’d remarked on her beauty when she saw the photo
downstairs, Lucy didn’t know that Ross’s girlfriend was Charlotte, I realized, and I’d never revealed the connection.
‘Once you lie about something, you lose respect for the other person you’re lying to,’ Lucy continued, thinking out loud. ‘You thought less of me because you hadn’t
told me that, so it made all the other lies easier, I suppose.’
That was very perceptive too.
‘I should have listened to Helen,’ Lucy said with a sigh of resignation. ‘She never trusted all your dreamy shit.’
She looked up at me hovering impotently in my ridiculously too-small dressing gown. ‘Just leave me alone, Gus.’
I went to Ross’s room and lay on his bed with his shelf of trophies glinting at me, listening to the muffled murmur of my girlfriend talking on her mobile phone all through the night.
Around seven o’clock in the morning, the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs and opened the door to Nicky. Lucy walked straight past me without speaking and sat in her mother’s car.
‘The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her!’ I faltered.
‘Oh, Gus,
really
?’ Nicky said, looking at me with such disappointment, I felt like I’d betrayed the whole family.
‘What’s happening?’ My mother was standing in her dressing gown on the stairs as I turned round from closing the front door.
‘I’ve split up with Lucy.’
‘Here? Why?’
‘I let her down, I’m afraid.’
‘Not like your father?’
I wanted to protest. No, not like that. But what was the difference? Silence betrayed my guilt.
‘Why?’ my mother suddenly shouted at the ceiling, her head thrown back in imprecation.
‘Ross was no angel, you know!’ I said, regretting the words as soon as they left my lips.
My mother’s empty stare was far more unsettling than her usual look of vague disappointment. It made me shiver with certainty that, at that moment, at least, she hated me.
‘I don’t know why you’re here,’ she said, with an impatient wave of her hand as she turned back up the stairs. ‘Can you just go, please?’
On the train back to London, I could no longer locate myself. I stared at the reflection of my face in the window. The person I was had been an illusion and I felt sick with
shame and self-loathing.
In our flat, I packed my clothes into a suitcase like an automaton, unsure whether it would cause more pain to leave items that had been given as gifts or take them with me, coming down on the
side of leaving them.
I walked around each room one last time, unable to compute that I’d never again wake up in that bed, never again cook Lucy breakfast on that stove, never again huddle next to her on that
sofa in winter, our ridiculous oversized slippers peeping out from under the duvet.
On impulse, I dialled her mobile number.
‘Are you OK?’
‘What do you think?’ She sighed wearily.
Silence.
‘Don’t worry, Gus, I’m not going to do anything stupid . . .’
‘I didn’t think . . .’
‘No.’
Another long silence.
‘Don’t call me again, Gus,’ she said, and hung up.
I posted my key through the letter box.
For once, the lift was working.
As I wheeled my suitcase along the busy road, a different anxiety began to take over. I was swapping stability for exhilaration, but what if it had all been a wind-up? Charlotte and I
hadn’t spoken since the beginning of the week. It seemed an age ago now. What if she laughed in my face? Where would I go? Nash would probably let me crash on her sofa, I thought, but not
before giving me a lecture about my treatment of women, and I didn’t think I could bear to disappoint anyone else.
Charlotte took a while to answer the entryphone, and when she did, her voice was frosty. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s Angus!’
She buzzed me in. I bumped the suitcase up the stairs. The door to her flat was open and she was lying on the bed in her rose lingerie.
‘I was beginning to think you didn’t have the balls!’ She patted the space beside her.
How amazingly quickly the brain adapts: one moment standing in the street, gloomily homeless; the next, climbing on top of my lover, swamped by the delirious disbelief I imagine a EuroMillions
winner feels.
People usually describe winning the Lottery as a fairy tale, forgetting that fairy tales have a dark side. For me, the frisson of foreboding was always there, like Hansel being offered candy he
knew he shouldn’t accept.
In the three weeks before we married, Charlotte and I discovered things about each other that you can’t know without living together. Charlotte couldn’t cook. I
rather regretted abandoning the shallow Le Creuset casserole which doubled as a frying pan that Nicky had given me for my last birthday. Charlotte was messy. The pristine state of her attic flat,
it turned out, was solely due to a cleaner who came twice a week. In the intervening days, Charlotte never hung up her clothes nor put her washing in the basket. Charlotte’s justification was
economic. If you could pay someone less to do the jobs than you could earn, why waste your time?
On that rationale, or because I’d worked as a waiter so long, I sometimes felt rather like a butler when I ironed Charlotte’s clothes or brought her breakfast in bed. Except that
butlers don’t generally walk around in boxer shorts, nor, when the lady of the house has finished breakfast, do they get kissed with shiny buttery lips, or lie with her writhing on top of
them, sandpapering their bare skin with toast crumbs.
We decided to marry in Marylebone Register Office. If you were allowed to do these things immediately, we’d probably have asked a couple of strangers on the street to witness our union,
but you have to give notice for the bans to be read, and so we told our parents. Charlotte’s were long-divorced. She hadn’t seen her father for many years, and he lived in Scotland with
his new family, but he sent us a card and a cheque for a thousand pounds. Her mother, who had recently moved to the Balearics with Robbie, a childhood sweetheart she’d met on Friends
Reunited, insisted on flying over for the ceremony.
I decided not to invite either of my parents after their individual reactions to the news.
‘But Lucy is a lovely girl . . . !’ My father tried to puzzle out the sequence of events, and found it a step too far on the Lothario scale, even for him.
‘Surely you don’t mean Ross’s Charlotte?’ my mother said.
I rang Marcus, who was by then a contract lawyer for a big City firm, to ask if he’d be my best man.
‘I’d be honoured,’ he said. ‘Let me check my diary. We’re talking this year?’
‘Next Wednesday,’ I told him. ‘Spur-of-the-moment thing.’
‘Oh. Well. Congratulations! Better get working on my speech!’
‘Don’t worry, it’s just a quick ceremony, followed by lunch at Piattini. We’re flying to New York the same evening.’
‘Good for you!’ he said. ‘The number of weddings I’ve been to recently that must have cost as much as a house! I’m assuming no dress code then?’
‘No dress code.’
I bought a black suit from Marks & Spencer, the only off-the-peg one I could find with a thirty-five-inch inside leg. Charlotte bought herself a cream tuxedo-style jacket and a new little
black dress from Liberty, because, although the pregnancy was barely visible, she had put on a little weight around the tummy. The outfit hung from the curtain pole above the French doors.
‘Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck for me to see your dress?’ I asked, as we got into bed the night before the wedding.
‘Oh, I hate all that stuff. Grown women getting trussed up like virgins in order to be given away – in the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake!’
I thought of all the months of preparation there’d been for Pippa’s wedding and how I’d have had to go through the same palaver with Lucy, and how much more grown up it was
like this.
The following morning, I lay watching Charlotte dress in new black underwear and stockings, wondering if I’d ever get used to the thrill of seeing clothes slide over what was underneath, a
kind of reverse striptease that was almost as arousing as it was the other way round.
We took our small carry-on cases with us in the cab. We’d decided on New York for our honeymoon because it was new to both of us, and seemed like a suitably sexy place for a long weekend,
which was all the holiday I could get away with so soon after starting my Foundation One year.
Marcus was standing on the register-office steps as our taxi drew up. I saw his face when Charlotte stepped out because that was the effect her arrival had on men – you couldn’t
not
look at her – and then his surprise when I followed, and paid off the cab driver.
‘Marcus, this is Charlotte,’ I introduced them.
‘Pleasure to meet you.’ He shook her hand and smiled, more suave and composed than I’d ever seen him, but when he turned to me, he was unable to hide a boyish
how-on-earth-have-you-managed-this? look that made me feel like the winner of a competition I hadn’t even entered.
Charlotte’s mother presented her with a small hand-tied posy of the palest pink roses, which contrasted sharply with the garish display of fabric blooms on the registrar’s desk. We
emerged onto the busy street again in a shower of rice, also provided by Charlotte’s mother, which stuck to our hair and clothes and got in our mouths as we laughed. Then the four of us
hailed a cab to Piattini.
I’d served hundreds of meals there, and eaten many times in the kitchen, but I had never before dined in the restaurant. Stefania had prepared a wedding breakfast of perfect buttery
saffron risotto dressed with a sliver of gold leaf, followed by a
tagliata
of rare charred steak, accompanied by a rocket salad drizzled with treacly balsamic vinegar. For dessert, there was
a chocolate-and-hazelnut
semifreddo,
with sheets of caramel so fine they dissolved in the mouth after the first tiny crunch. We applauded her when she came up from the kitchen to offer us
her congratulations.
I noticed her slight double-take as I introduced her to Charlotte and they kissed on both cheeks in that strangely chaste way that Europeans do. Stefania and Salvatore weren’t my surrogate
parents, but it was a family business that I had been a part of for several years, so the relationship was closer than employee and boss. In a slight blur of Chianti, I clocked Stefania’s
surprise at my highly sophisticated wife. With Marcus, the same look had made me feel triumphantly validated; on Stefania’s face, it was slightly disconcerting.