Sorrow and Bliss(17)

Because he’d left a matter of inches between us, he clinked the rim of my glass by tilting his only a fraction and said, ‘I’m Jonathan Strong, but I’m much more interested in who you are.’

I surrendered to him a minute later. He had an extravagant energy that animated him and anaesthetised whoever he was talking to and was in on the joke of how beautiful he was. When I told him he had the brilliant eyes of a Victorian child who would die the same night of scarlet fever, he laughed excessively.

His reciprocal comment was so banal – my dress, apparently, made me look like a 1930s movie star – I assumed he was joking. Jonathan was never joking, but I did not realise that for a long time.

I was taking something then that, in its reaction to alcohol, made me a cheap date and I was drunk before I had finished Jonathan’s champagne. The distance between us had been diminishing all the time we had been talking, and once it became nothing, once he was whispering against my face, letting him kiss me felt like a continuation of our progress towards each other. Then, letting him take my phone number and the next day, letting him take me to dinner.

He took me to a sushi restaurant in Chelsea that he was, for a brief time, one hundred per cent in love with, before he decided that food going around and around on a little train was incredibly juvenile. I refreshed my commitment to hating him the moment we sat down and slept with him that night.

That was the root of the giant misunderstanding that was us getting married: the fact that he thought I was so uninhibited, fun, a skinny person interested in fashion, an attender of magazine parties, and I thought he didn’t take immense amounts of cocaine.

*

Part way into the dinner, Jonathan delivered a disquisition on mental illness and the people who choose to have it, that was unrelated to whatever we’d been talking about before.

The kind of people who clamoured to tell you they had some sort of psychological disorder were, in his experience, either boring and desperate to seem interesting, or unable to accept that they were fucked up in some ordinary way, probably by their own hand and not because of the childhood they were equally in a rush to tell you about.

I said nothing, distracted by the fact that while he was speaking, Jonathan lifted a dish of sashimi off the conveyer, removed the lid, ate half a slice off his chopsticks, grimaced and put the remainder back on the dish, replaced the lid and sent it on its way.

Jonathan went on, saying everyone was on meds of some kind now, but to what effect – the general populace seemed as miserable as ever.

I could not take my eyes off the dish as it continued around the circuit, passing in front of other diners. Remotely, I heard him say, ‘Perhaps instead of chomping on pharmaceuticals like bar nuts in the vague hope of getting better, people ought to think about toughening the fuck up.’

I took a sip of the saké that I had declined and he’d poured anyway, and saw, over his shoulder, a man further down the line take Jonathan’s plate of leftovers off the belt and give it to his wife. She picked up her chopsticks and reached for the half-slice. I was spared the horror of watching her eat it by Jonathan saying my name and then, ‘I’m right, no?’

I laughed and said, ‘You’re hilarious Jonathan.’ He grinned and refilled my saké glass. By the time he repeated his treatise on mental health a few weeks later, I was in love with him and still thought he was joking.

*

When I told Peregrine that I had started seeing Jonathan, he said he rather wished I’d let myself be talked into the awful painting instead of the sex.





7

INGRID MET HAMISH that same summer, on her way to a birthday party Winsome was throwing for her at Belgravia. As soon as she fell over on the footpath, Hamish abandoned his bins at the gate and ran out to see if she was alright. He helped her up and because my sister turned out to be bleeding from multiple sites, he offered to drive her to wherever she was going and said, according to Ingrid, ‘I am not a terrible murderer.’ She said if that meant he was a really good murderer, she would like a ride.

Arriving at the house, Hamish agreed to come inside for a drink because he had enjoyed being talked at by my sister, for most of the way, so much. I was already there and after Ingrid introduced us, Hamish asked me what I did. He said it must be exciting, working at a magazine, then told me he had a job in government that was too boring to go into. Ingrid said, just having heard it herself, she wouldn’t contest him on that point. Before the end of the party, I knew she was going to marry him because although he was beside her all night, he did not challenge her on a single point of any anecdote while she was telling it, even though my sister’s anecdotes are always a three-way combination of hyperbole, lies and factual inaccuracy.

They had been together for three years by the time he proposed, on a beach in Dorset that was deserted because it was January and, as she described it later, the wind was so ferocious, sand cut at them sideways and Hamish did the whole thing with his eyes shut.

*

Jonathan proposed when we had been together a matter of weeks, at a dinner he put on for that purpose. Except for a step-sister, he was estranged from his own family but he invited mine: my parents and Ingrid, who brought Hamish, Rowland, Winsome, Oliver, Jessamine and Patrick, who came in place of Nicholas – away, I was told, at a special farm in America.

He hadn’t met them before that night or known me long enough to know that I would feel the same about such an intimate thing occurring in public as I had felt at fourteen when I got my first period at an ice rink. I wanted it, but not in those circumstances. Later, I understood it was because Jonathan needed an audience.