You Had Me at Hello Read online

  ‘I do love you,’ Rhys adds, with evident effort, not being one for declarations either.

  I think about what Caroline said, about me playing at this separation, merely being bored. It gives me a pain like the world’s worst Boxing Day heartburn.

  I think about how lost that date with Simon made me feel. Caroline’s bleak situation. Ivor and Mindy mucking about with people they don’t respect. Perhaps what Rhys and I had is as good as it gets, for most people. We’re not all lucky enough to be with our soul mates, Ben said. How we’ve swapped places.

  ‘I love you too,’ I say, and I do. I always will. If I didn’t, leaving Rhys would be much easier. We might’ve been low on fun sometimes, but he’s a constant. Reliable. As Caroline said, he wants me and that’s not going to change.

  Rhys nods. ‘Let’s go on holiday. I’ll even sit on a beach and get sand in my arse crack if you want to. Then we’ll look at the wedding again. Maybe we should do something smaller. I always thought that reception was too big.’

  ‘You’d want the wedding back on?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Why not?’

  ‘That’s more than I can promise, right now.’

  Rhys hisses through clamped teeth, like he’s torn a puncture. ‘Either you’re in or you’re out. I won’t be pissed about.’

  I think about Rhys sat on a packing box a decade ago, making me an offer that I didn’t think I had a strong enough reason to refuse. I’m about to make the same mistake again, for the same cowardly reasons. I realise it doesn’t matter that I still care about Rhys, or that there’s no one else out there for me, or what Caroline thinks. This isn’t a sum to be added up or a least-worst option. Rhys deserves better. I deserve better.

  I find my voice. ‘Rhys, we’re not getting back together.’

  ‘You said you love me.’

  ‘I do. It doesn’t change the fact we’re better off apart. You know that. We haven’t talked like we have today for years. We might work for a while but sooner or later it’d be the same old. We love each other, we just don’t bring out the best in each other.’

  ‘You’re going to throw everything away, thirteen years, for what? It’s a waste.’

  ‘Just because we didn’t get married or stay together forever doesn’t mean it was a waste.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it means, Rachel. Wasted effort, wasted time. This Ben. Did you love him?’

  I hesitate.

  ‘Got ya. At least this explains why he looked like someone had goosed him, the other day.’

  Rhys looks down at the table, the lightly scored lines between his eyebrows deepening into a number-11-shaped groove as he frowns. I wonder what his wife’s going to be like, whether his kids will be boys or girls, what he’ll look like when he’s old. So much to give up. No one thinks I’m doing the right thing. I feel an intergalactic loneliness, spinning off into space and untethered from the Mother Ship, watching my oxygen supplies deplete.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Rhys says, though to my surprise, not angrily. ‘I don’t get it. I don’t get what changed.’

  ‘I did. I don’t know why. I’m sorry.’

  Another silence.

  Rhys leans back in his chair, produces my engagement ring from the depths of his jeans pocket and places it on the table in front of me.

  ‘Oh no, I can’t.’

  ‘Keep it. I’ve got no use for it.’

  Rhys stretches across the table and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Good luck, Rachel.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I say, but the words catch in my throat because it has grown so tight.

  Rhys sees tears on the way and stands up, making it clear our conversation is over. He ambles over to the stage area as I gather myself, head for the exit. As I turn to leave, Rhys is fiddling with the microphone stand, adjusting the height, muttering: ‘One two, one two’ into the bulb of the mike.

  I pull the door open.

  Rhys’s amplified voice comes booming out: ‘Pawn it and you might be able to scrape another few months at Casa Cackhole.’

  61

  I’d forgotten about my childhood friend Samantha’s wedding and I was able to forget it longer than I might have as my invite was sent to my parents’ address. My mum was obviously uncharacteristically reluctant to remind me.

  When she gets in touch to arrange a pick up for Saturday lunchtime, I face my unpreparedness, both literally and psychologically, to sit through someone else’s special day. I’m going to have to bear a twelve-hour-long reminder that mine is no longer happening, alongside my parents, who will be thinking the same thing. It seems unusually cruel.

  ‘Have you seen Rhys?’ my mum says, eyeballing me in the rear view mirror while she applies another coat of mascara. We’re hurtling along roads banked by lush hedgerows, heading deep into loaded footballer country.

  ‘Yes. We met for a drink the other night,’ I say. It might sound like I’m choked with emotion, in fact my trunk section is being strangled by the midnight-blue 1940s-style dress with matching bolero that Mindy forced me to buy. (‘You’re single at this wedding, different rules now – you must bring it and it must stay brung.’) The bodice is currently cutting off blood supply to my legs, which has the sole benefit of meaning I can’t feel how high my heels are.

  A pause while my mum chooses her words, discarding those so inflammatory they will start an immediate argument. Not discarding enough for my liking.

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Good, actually. Looked really well. He was playing a gig.’

  ‘Probably putting a brave face on it.’

  I grind my teeth, say nothing other than: ‘Dad, can you turn up the radio, I think one of my court cases might be on …’

  ‘On Capital?’

  ‘Try Five Live, then!’

  Sam and Tom’s nuptials are taking place in a village church in Cheshire, near where they live in high-achieving splendour, the reception in a marquee in the field next door. It seems quite ambitious to do a quasi-outdoor wedding at any time of year in Britain, yet they’ve fallen lucky with the early summertime weather: mild and balmy. I’m glad for the small mercy that it’s a contrast to my city-based wedding-that-was-never-to-be.

  When we park up, I discover getting out of the back seat of a Toyota Yaris in this dress is a challenge that ought to form part of some light entertainment clips show.

  ‘Thirty-one years of age,’ my dad says, shaking his head, as I struggle like a beached beetle, legs cycling an invisible bicycle. He offers me his hand and hauls me up. We exchange a smile. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I feel a lot better. My mum is still awash with dismay but my dad’s already getting over it, and some day, she’ll get over it too. Who knows, I might even meet someone else they like, marry him instead. I admit it seems unlikely.

  I pick my way along the gravel path through the churchyard, holding on to my dad for balance. The church is picture-postcard pretty, with weathered honey-coloured bricks and a slate spire, the athletic ushers standing outside in a tight gang of miserable solidarity at having to wear full morning dress with grey top hats, champagne-coloured cravats and striped trousers.

  ‘Dear oh dear,’ my dad mutters. ‘Right Said Fred Astaire.’

  ‘They look lovely,’ my mum says.

  ‘They look like wazzocks.’

  My mum starts exclaiming with delight at seeing people she knows, buzzing over to them. I stand apart from it all, yet still close enough to overhear my name occasionally, followed by frantic shushing and hurried explanations that no, I’m not ‘next’.

  ‘This will stop happening at some point, won’t it, Dad?’ I say.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Pause. ‘Eventually you’ll become a confirmed spinster. The same way your cousin Alan is a “confirmed bachelor”.’

  ‘Stand please to welcome the bride.’

  I take a sharp breath and ignore the hubbub of my parents’ pitying thoughts, behind me. I feel a tug of loss and longing, yet as I see Samantha glide past in Chantilly lace, I know that if it was me
, I’d be at least part-pretending. Partly is too much.

  As I’m hem-hawing my way through the hymns, I wonder if I’m drifting towards a situation where I might need to Talk To Someone. A nicely-put-together man a few rows ahead glances to the side, and catching his features I think – Ben? Oh dear, woman. Chalk that one up to wedding fever.

  We sit down for the vows. Through glimpses between bouffy teased hairdos and a forest of candy-coloured fascinators, I eyeball the handsome man a bit more, thinking, all right, I am a sad monomaniac, but it’s still a freaky resemblance from the rear. Especially as replicant Ben is with a blonde woman with a haircut exactly like Olivia’s …

  Wait. Shit me, my life is a black comedy … is that Simon? This time there’s no mistaking the Roman profile and air of arse. It’s so surreal I half expect the vicar to throw off his cassock to reveal sequin pasties and a G-string, before I wake up in Rupa’s bed, alarm beeping.

  I fiddle with the order of service in my trembling hands and try to figure out how on earth this can be. While the well-spoken, bespectacled best man reads the Bible passage about love not vaunting itself and being puffed up, I desperately mine my memory banks for a clue. Samantha isn’t a lawyer … maybe they know Tom? No, that can’t be it, they’ve been seated on the bride’s side of the church, same as us. The ushers are running this show like a military campaign, no doubt in an attempt to claw back some masculine dignity.

  We watch the new Mr and Mrs walk back down the aisle and I turn nearly 180 degrees in the hope of not meeting the eyes of any of their group. Their pews empty before ours and I pretend to be looking for something lost in the depths of my tiny clutch bag as they pass. A murmur of curious voices tells me I’ve been spotted.

  After an agonising single file shuffle outside, my parents wander off to congratulate their opposite numbers and I wonder how best to arrange myself so I look like an enfranchised, confident solo individual living an efficacious life on my own terms.

  Hmm, balls to that. I do a quick feasibility study. Is leaving after the service and before the reception a huge insult …? I could claim to have been overcome by sorrow. I could take the spikes from my feet and peg it through the village, trying to flag down a cab. Only the thought of what it would do to my parents stops me.

  A tap on the shoulder, and a smiling, if faintly jittery-looking Ben is in front of me. He’s in a slim cut, charcoal-coloured wool suit with white shirt and black tie. He looks like he should be on one of those Vanity Fair gatefold covers where next-big-thing young actors are draped over each other on stepladders.

  ‘I don’t see you for ten years and suddenly you’re everywhere?’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I laugh, faking amazement for the second time in recent memory. ‘What on earth …?’

  ‘You know Sam? Or Tom?’

  ‘Samantha. Neighbours when we were kids. You?’

  ‘Liv went to Exeter with her.’

  ‘I didn’t know Samantha did law?’

  ‘Only for the first year. Swapped to pure maths or some other Shun The Fun subject.’ He pauses. ‘Simon went there too. He’s here.’

  ‘Great!’ I say, with enough sarcasm for him to give me a sympathetic smile.

  A crocodile of guests are picking their way towards the marquee and I suspect Ben will be persona non grata if he waits for me.

  ‘Looks like we’re all heading over for the next bit then?’ he says. ‘See you there.’

  ‘Definitely,’ I say, wishing the opposite was true.

  As he departs I resist the urge to do a Basil Fawlty fist-shake at the place of worship we’ve exited: thank you God, thank you so bloody much. It’s not enough I have to do this wedding, but I have to do it with Ben, Ben Wife and Sworn Enemy?

  ‘My goodness, that is absolutely is the limit,’ my mum hisses, as she and my dad rejoin me, my dad wearing his batten down the hatches face.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Barbara’s only in the same pheasant-tail headpiece I’d bought for your wedding. And for all her snoot, it’s from Debenhams.’

  The copycat millinery momentarily crystallises the difficulty of this day for all of us.

  ‘You know, who cares who’s got what,’ I say, hooking my arm through my mum’s. ‘Let’s go find the grog.’

  62

  The marquee for the reception is colossal, swallowing up most of the field. The white canvas has transparent panels in the shape of arched, leaded windows, perhaps in the hope that if you screw your eyes up you might think you’re looking at a vast colonial Gatsby-esque Long Island mansion instead of a tent.

  We enter the usual interlude while the happy couple has endless photos taken and there’s some etiquette that we’re not meant to go into the Big Top without them – I see Barbara near-fainting when a guest twitches at a door flap – so we mill on the grass with the bubbly. A med student once told me that champagne nobbles you due to the speed of its absorption into the small bowel. It’s not working its magic fast enough for me: I’d like it intravenously, yellow mingling with red and turning my blood a nice Tabasco orange. There’s an interestingly anachronistic waft of fags when the smokers notice we’re in a field and they can do what they like.

  Trays of canapés circulate, served by embarrassed-looking teenage catering students in black aprons, as is tradition. As they’re fashionable canapés, they require formal introduction. ‘Here we have a quenelle of mackerel pate on gem lettuce … this is a blini with cods’ roe …’

  ‘What are the little ones that look like jobbies?’

  My dad always goes full Yorkshireman at formal events.

  ‘That’s a Medjool date stuffed with Stilton, sir.’

  ‘To think I had a cheddar-pineapple hedgehog at my wedding!’ my dad says to the seventeen-year-old waitress, who goes bright red, as if it might be a euphemism.

  When she moves on my parents quietly grumble about the lack of opportunities to sit down. The kind of support I’m sorely lacking isn’t for my behind, it’s having friends here. They instinctively know how to form a Secret Service formation around you, in the presence of threats. Blue Tit Is Moving, I Repeat …

  Ben, Simon and Olivia are part of a glossy knot of haven’t-we-done-well mates, a social ring of Saturn considerably nearer the planet of the bride and groom. Olivia’s in what a man would call ‘a green dress’ and Mindy would identify as a chartreuse bias-cut spaghetti strap satin slip that’s almost certainly from Flannels and, despite flashing little flesh, totally unwearable unless you have Olivia’s sylph-like figure. Tendrils of gold wire threaded with mother-of-pearl beads curve round her head, in an ultra-modern, deconstructed tiara.

  I wave and Ben raises a palm in return and Olivia gives me a ‘Oh Yeah, You’ cursory nod, with a flicker of lip movement that could be taken for a smile if you were desperate, goes back to her discussion with Simon. Simon’s in stockbroker pinstripes and throws a ‘Fuck You, Forget About You’ look in my direction. I see Ben seeing me see Simon see me. I give Ben one of those oh-well-what-you-gonna-do smiles and he returns it, apologetically.

  I slip my jacket off in the sunshine and my mum gives a gasp.

  ‘When did wedding guest outfits get so vampy?’

  ‘You can’t see anything,’ I say, testily.

  ‘Ooh, you get the idea though. Have you got a strapless bra or some sort of corset on?’ Mum fusses with me in the way mums think they have a right to.

  ‘Mum!’

  My dad suddenly finds the view of some cows in the neighbouring field quite compelling.

  If that weren’t bad enough, to my abject horror, I see Ben approaching. He’s already too near for me to sound the alarm without him hearing so I have to hiss ‘Muuuuuum, stoppit!’ and try to wrestle away from her investigations without attracting more attention. When Ben’s upon us, my mum’s actually patting the underneath of my bust in some version of the panto dame boob-hoik manoeuvre that used to get a laugh for Les Dawson.

  Our lines of sight lock and in a terrible moment of perfect
telepathy, I mind-speak to Ben: You Have Seen My Breasts. In a feat of empathy I’d cherish if it were about anything else, startled Ben effortlessly, wordlessly conveys back: Yes, I Have. We stare at each other like roadkill caught in the headlights of a shared flashback.

  ‘Mum, Dad, err …’ I stutter, turning away from Ben in a vain effort to break the psychic link. ‘This is Ben, he’s …’ stroked, cupped and squeezed them … ‘married to Olivia, who went to Exeter with Sam. They both took law …’ and took my nipples in his mouth … ‘Well, Sam took it for the first year. I know Ben too because he studied …’ them and said they were beautiful … ‘with me at Manchester.’ Oh God, I said man, and chest, why didn’t I just go to Norkfield and be done with it? ‘He was on English with me.’

  And on me. And in me. It was astounding.

  I roll to a close and hope I got the Things Haltingly Spoken and Things Feverishly Thought distinction right. The fact my dad doesn’t appear to be suffering a terminal cardiac event suggests I just about managed it.

  Ben recovers admirably for nice-to-meet-yous and shakes my dad’s hand, doing the same with my mum and adding a gentlemanly peck on the cheek that makes my mum light up.

  ‘Beautiful wedding, isn’t it? Haven’t they been lucky with the weather? I wanted to let you know that the champagne’s on the wane so get it while the going’s good.’

  Vintage Ben. The Ben who hopped over the desks and started helping out on the day I met him. Given the amount of pride and dollar the parents-of-the-bride invested in this day, I doubt the Laurent Perrier’s running dry. He’s giving us an excuse to circulate.

  ‘Or actually, we could bring some over?’ he says to me. ‘Want to give me a hand, Rachel?’

  ‘That’s very kind,’ my mum says, and I hope to high hell we won’t be having any why-can’t-you-see-if-he-has-any-friends talks.

  I follow Ben across the lawn. He turns to speak over his shoulder, conspiratorial.

  ‘I wanted to promise you that Simon won’t be giving you hassle,’ he says, as we home in on a tray together. ‘We’ve agreed a wide berth policy. If he does give you any shit, give me a shout, OK?’