‘Which is all you ever want to do with me, isn’t it?’ she said, crossing her legs and wondering if the Brazilian had been a total waste of time, money and excruciating pain. ‘You don’t want to make a commitment to me, or …marry me. And don’t think that it’s not hard for me to say that word out loud. What girl wants to have to demand it?’
‘Come on, try the soup. It’s quite peppery. You’ll like it.’
‘I do not want to talk about soup, Will. I want to talk about us. And I want to know how it’s going to be. Do you want to be with me, permanently, or don’t you? That is all I want to know.’
‘Not now. Please?’
‘Yes. Now. I’ve decided.’
‘Well, I haven’t. Please. Just drop it, hey?’
‘No. I want to know. Are we going to do the whole thing? Or is this it? Is this the end?’
‘Trust me. Please? And drop it?’
‘This is not about trust. It’s about commitment.’
‘You know, you’re like a terrier sometimes. See something with fur or feathers and you just will not rest until you’ve got it between your teeth.’
‘I take it that it’s over, then?’
‘No, no, not at all. Not at all. I did not say that.’
‘So you
do
want to marry me?’
‘Can we drop this line of questioning?’
‘Oh God, how bloody hard is it? Yes, you want to marry me. Or no, you don’t.’
‘How about at nine o’clock? And we just relax and have a good time until then.’
‘What difference is forty-five minutes going to make to you? If you don’t know by now, you’re not going to get hit by a lightning bolt in the next three-quarters of an hour, are you?’
‘Please just drop this.’
‘What is it about men that makes them go spastic when a woman — even a woman who lives with them, who cooks their dinners and irons their shirts and scrubs their disgusting skid-marks off the back of the toilet bowl — asks whether or not a relationship is going anywhere?’
‘I said “drop it”.’
‘Don’t use that tone with me. I’m not yours to tell what to do. I have things I want to do with my life and I don’t want to waste one more minute in a relationship with you if it’s not serious. I think that’s perfectly fair. Absolutely reasonable.’
‘Come on, Paula, shut up.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Please shut up. Darling, shut up. Sweetheart, shut up. Trust me, you do not want to have this conversation now.’
‘I don’t even know why I’m still sitting here, why I’m bashing my head against this brick wall when it’s clear that you just don’t know how to say it. If you don’t want to marry me, then what’s the bloody point of us sitting here, all dressed up pretending that there’s something to celebrate, when —’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Will shouted, standing up. ‘Here. Look here. See this? It contains an engagement ring. Happy? Are you happy now? Is this how you wanted to get engaged?’
Hush spread through the restaurant in a rapid, unfurling circumference from the epicentre of Paula and Will’s table. Other diners fell silent, cutlery suspended, mouths open. They stared at Paula’s stunned and silenced face, and at Will, who stood, looking defeated, with a black velvet cube in his fingertips. They watched the cube move away from his fingers, tumbling through the air, a die that landed numberless, with a splash, in Paula’s soup.
‘I … Will!’ she called after him as he threaded his way through tables and chairs to the exit. ‘Will! I will!’
But he was already through the glass doors, the thin fabric of his white shirt plastering to his shoulderblades in the breeze. And as the door closed behind him, the hush rolled itself right back up to Paula’s feet, allowing her to hear a snicker ricochet from table to table in its wake. There was nowhere for her to look but down at the table, where the splatter-pattern of beef consommé on white linen clearly spelled out just how badly she’d fucked up, and where the mounded shape of the velvet ring-box was resting, like an already-looted treasure chest, in the shallows of her soup.
C
locks in international airports do not tell the time. Or not, at least, in the usual way. Gathered together within their auspices are refugees from all quarters of the day: some dazed by the earliness of the morning and others faintly excited to be staying up so late at night. These clocks point their hands at numbers not to signify a particular time of day, but rather to reassure you that the seconds are still being measured, somewhere out there, by the great universal tick-tock. The hour is quite arbitrary, and yet I managed to arrive at precisely the wrong time.
It was a huge, gleaming chrome kind of airport, somewhere in Asia. I forget where exactly. The floor was a lake of marble with reflected lights shining just beneath its surface. There were kilometres of duty-free shops and cafés and bars — all closed, because I was in transit during those few hours of local time when the airport shut itself down and went to sleep. I was not alone, of course. There were enough travellers to fill three or four jumbos and we straggled the length of a concourse in a listless and fragmented queue. Those first to arrive had grabbed one of the padded, backless benches that were spaced at intervals down the corridor, while the rest of us sat on the floor or stood leaning against a colossal frosted-glass wall. There was nothing to do. The hours we had to kill would die slow, painful deaths. Surely, I thought, the expression ‘terminal boredom’ was used for the first time in an airport closed down for the night.
For quite some time, I waited. I did all the things that I imagined would be done by a young woman travelling alone on a holiday she had paid for all by herself, with savings from her first proper job. I creaked open my travel diary to the first, virgin page. And then shut it again. I stared for a while at the type on the pages of the too-literary book that I had been sure would be perfect for the plane.
And then, just for something to do, I went to the Ladies. I sat on the toilet conducting a good close reading of the sanitary napkin advertisement on the back of the door, but remained unconvinced by its wafting, fresh-breeze promises. Still, the advertisement did inspire me to treat myself to the pair of clean knickers in my carry-on bag and to squirt some deodorant around various of my body’s moving parts. I had done all that I could think of to do, and so I prepared myself to return to the concourse and resume my boredom. But when I emerged from the cubicle, I saw something I did not expect to see. Standing at one of the marbled basins was a woman in a wedding dress.
‘Bugger,’ she said, in the way only English women can.
It was not a simple dress. There was sufficient white satin in the skirts and train for Christo to wrap the best part of a one-storey building. There was a mosquito net’s worth of tulle tucked into the warp and weft of her hairdo.
‘Bugger, bugger, bugger, shit,’ said the woman, ferreting in her make-up bag.
‘Forgotten something?’ I asked.
‘Must have left it in the bathroom on the plane. My lipstick. I mean I’ve got others, but they’re all too dark or too bright. It was a really nice peachy colour. Fuck!’
‘I’ve got some pale pink,’ I said, holding out a sparkling tube of something called Baby Doll. It had come in one of those gift packs that enable cosmetic firms to offload their most atrocious shades. ‘You can have it if you want.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t.’
‘It’s all right. I mean I have used it, but I don’t have cold sores or anything.’
‘That’s not what I meant. God. Sorry.’
‘Here.’
‘Oh, look, could I? This is the closest thing I’ve got and it’s just far too red to wear with white. I’d look like a bloody geisha. I’ll only borrow, though.’
‘Honestly. Have it. I hardly ever wear lipstick and I suspect your need is greater than mine.’
‘It
is
my wedding day,’ she said. Then, looking at her watch, ‘At least I think it still is.’
She applied the lipstick thickly, and smiled her approval at herself in the mirror.
‘Angela,’ she said, turning to me and pressing a hand to her heart.
‘Rosie.’
And so it was that I met Angela Cuthbert (nee Wootton) and began the conversation — reflected in the mirror of the Ladies’ loo — in which I discovered that the reason she had come to be waiting around in her wedding dress in a closed-for-the-night international airport somewhere in Asia was because she had had a vision.
Angela Wootton had seen herself emerging from the silver chrysalis of an aeroplane like a magnificent white butterfly, stepping out onto the staircase and appearing to unfurl as her skirts and veil billowed suddenly in the mild breeze. Against the backdrop of aeroplane and clear sky, she would be a bedizenment of blinding whiteness, the satin of her gown catching the brilliance of the sun. Her new and as-yet-unmet in-laws would watch from the terminal building as she paused at the top of the staircase to wave. And instantly,
instantly
, they would love her.
It was a vision that came to Angela only gradually, as if from a great distance, moving slowly into the centre of her mind. Once it had settled there, though, she moved it just slightly to one side where she could look upon it whenever she wasn’t busy. In quiet moments at work (she was a dental nurse at an inner-city London practice, but wouldn’t have to be for too much longer) she would work on the details, deepening the famous blue of the Australian sky and chiselling the handsome features of the flight attendant whose face was just visible over her right shoulder as she turned to wave. For a time, she enjoyed her vision purely as mental celluloid. But on the day that she went to buy her bridal underwear it turned from a vision into a plan.
After a couple of hours and four boutiques, Angela had narrowed the choice to two sets. Each of them had boned corsets in white lace that lashed in her waist and pushed her breasts right up. The difference between them was that while one had suspenders attached and went with high-cut lace knickers, the other finished in a scalloped edge at her hip bones and went with low-cut knickers that made her bum look great, but which would have to be worn with stay-up stockings (not always fabulous for the profile of one’s thighs). Now was not the time for a rash decision, Angela counselled herself, remembering hew New Year’s resolution to take shopping more seriously.
‘Look, I’m just too close to the issue to be objective,’ she told the shop girl, and went to have a coffee and list the pros and cons of each set on a napkin.
Inside the warm stone walls of the underground café, she toyed with the chocolatey froth of her cappuccino and wished, not for the first time, that Jeremy’s mother could see her in all her wedding finery. She had been leaning towards doing the first meeting with Jeremy’s parents in lime green three-quarter pants, strappy heels and a white sleeveless polo-neck top. But there in the café, with the turbulent sounds of the coffee machine in the background, a more dramatic idea began to take shape. She nibbled at an almond wafer and wondered if it really were such a silly idea. They were going straight from the reception to the airport anyway. It would be quite dramatic. One of those things you would never forget. She could do it, you know. She
would
do it. She would wear her gown all the way to Australia. She would step out of the plane, bouquet in hand, as if she had just that minute walked back down the aisle, ready to be sprinkled with confetti and kisses. She would glide across the tarmac to embrace her mother-in-law, who would say, ‘You look lovely, dear’. And Angela would smile, and blush just a little.
A Word from Rosie Little on:
Brides
I
t is not, of course, only women already predisposed to silliness who can be adversely affected by the distant, promising chimes of wedding bells. If ever a sensible woman is likely to become silly, then it will be in her bride period, which begins, naturally enough, with her engagement and concludes shortly after the wedding, when she emerges from a fog of tulle into the terrible clarity of a world where no-one makes comforting noises for an hour while you sob over the thoughtlessness of a grandmother who refuses to buy any of the gifts specified in the bridal registry; a world in which it suddenly seems conceivable that you might forgive the bridesmaid (bitch!) who got drunk at your hen’s night and stole your limelight by bursting messily into tears and declaring that no-one would ever love
her
enough to marry
her
; where the problem of seating Uncle Travis’s new young wife (younger than his youngest daughter, you know…) is no longer a valid cause for Camp David-scale diplomacy; a world, in short, suddenly and horribly devoid of the incantation ‘whatever you want, darling, it’s
your
day’.
I do not think that it is any accident that the croquembouche is a cake traditionally found at nuptial celebrations. I think it the most perfect of metaphors: all those profiteroles piled high on a plate like so many flaky little brides’ heads, and within each of them (in place of brains) a quantity of custard: thick and sweet.
‘Where do your in-laws live?’ I asked her as we left the Ladies and returned to the concourse.
‘Western Australia. About an hour’s flight out of Perth. Loads of Poms there, apparently. And you?’
‘Other side. Eastern states, as they say in the West.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Why couldn’t they make it to the wedding?’
‘You won’t believe it.’
‘I might.’
‘Spider.’
‘Spider?’
‘Jeremy’s father was getting his old lawnmower out of the shed. Going to donate it to some trash and treasure thing in the neighbourhood, yeah? Got bitten by a white-tailed spider and had to have his finger amputated. The finger you, you know, give someone the finger with.’
‘He couldn’t come to your wedding without this particular finger?’
‘Well, he was supposed to have knee surgery, you see. And the finger amputation put his knee surgery back and they couldn’t afford Business Class and, well, you know what it’s like on long flights, even without a dicky knee. So, we said we’d do a little re-enactment when we got there.’
We reached the place on the concourse where Angela and Jeremy had commandeered a pair of facing chaises. On one of them Jeremy was sleeping, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. On the other were Angela’s bags, which we moved, and an only slightly less than fresh bouquet of orchids and roses, which she placed tenderly in her lap.