Sorrow and Bliss(21)

I looked out at the street again. Patrick had given up and was walking away from us with his head bowed into the rain.

I had never consciously considered any mannerism or physical aspect of his, but everything about him – the width of his shoulders, the shape of his back, the way he walked with his hands pressed so deep into his pockets that his arms were straight and the insides of his elbows faced forwards – were as familiar to me in that moment as any known fact or person in my life.

At the end of the street, Patrick glanced over his shoulder and briefly waved. It was too dark by then to see his face properly, but for the split second before he went on, turning the corner and disappearing, it felt as if he was looking only at me. And I realised then that it was true – Patrick loved me – and, in the next instant, that I had known it for a long time. It wasn’t sympathy I had seen on his face, earlier, at the table, and that was why it was unbearable: someone conveying love while everyone else laughed at me.

Oliver said nothing, only lifted one eyebrow when I told him it didn’t matter either way since I was in love with Jonathan, then I ran through the rain and back upstairs.





9

MY WEDDING TO Jonathan cost ￡70,000. He paid for all of it. I let it be organised by his step-sister who described herself as in events and shared his gift for creating unstoppable momentum. In emails that did not contain any capitals, she told me that she had about a million strings she could pull at soho house, or any hotel in w1, meaning she could get us a date in a month. She said she knew the gatekeeper at mcqueen and had gone to school with most of the girls at chloé so, whichever I preferred, and she didn’t have to make an appointment with any of the florists on the list (attached below) like a pleb, she could one hundred per cent just walk in and get everything sorted in half an hour, even if i was thinking out of season.

I said she could choose. At Soho House, wearing Chloé, holding lily of the valley flown in from somewhere, I told Jonathan I was so happy I felt like I was on drugs. He told me he was positively ecstatic, and actually was on drugs.

*

Patrick accepted the invitation to my wedding. Peregrine, walking the Camino de Santiago with Jeremy, sent his deepest regrets and an antique oyster knife.

*

We had a honeymoon in Ibiza, which was short but in dog years, proportionate to our marriage. Jonathan said it was a crime he hadn’t already taken me to his favourite place in the world which was, he promised, nothing like its reputation. I said I would go as long as we stayed somewhere that was far away from everything.

In the members’ lounge, waiting for our flight, I told Jonathan I had changed my mind. He was sitting in a deep armchair reading the Weekend FT with his feet up on the low table in front of him.

‘Scratch too late, I’d say, darling. We’re boarding in twenty.’

I said no. ‘About having a baby.’

His campaign had been relentless over the six weeks since he first suggested it, and he seemed unsurprised to have broken me so quickly; he said in that case, I could look forward to being thoroughly knocked up by the time we got back to London, unaware that the effort he had invested in changing my mind had been wasted. I had flushed the pills that I told him were birth control, and the pills that really were, down the toilet, while he was on his way to the gym.

It was not my intention, but while the bath was running I looked in the mirror and remembered how I had appeared in it on the night of Jonathan’s dinner, the rictus expression on my face. I remembered the minutes after he proposed, standing in front of my family while they laughed and laughed at the idea of me being a mother. Jonathan did not think it was hilarious any more. He thought I would be a fucking ravishing mother. Standing over the toilet I pressed the pills out of the foil one by one. They were already dissolving in the water before I pushed its hidden flush.

Once Jonathan had gone back to his newspaper I looked around the airport lounge for a moment, then got up to get a drink. A woman in the next circle of chairs was so enormously pregnant she had balanced a small plate of sandwiches on the top of her stomach. As I passed her, I tucked my hair behind my ears, both sides at once to hide my face because I was smiling in a way that would make me seem mad.

Jonathan and I flew business class. We drank champagne from miniature beakers. I found out that my new husband owned an eye mask that he had bought in a shop, not retained from a previous flight. All the way there, I thought about my baby.

*

We got to the villa in the early afternoon. While I was unpacking, Jonathan suggested a swim followed by some pre-prandial fornicating. I told him I felt tired, that I would sleep while he swam and join him for the sex part. He had already changed into his floral trunks and did his famous impression of a sulking child on his way to the door – the bottom lip, the crossed arms, the stomping. I had a shower and got into bed.

The housekeeper woke me up, apologising that she needed to come in and close the shutters to keep the mosquitos out now that the sun was setting. She said the husband would be unhappy to come back and find she had let the beautiful wife get eaten to the death on the honeymoon. I asked if she knew where the husband was. He had gone in the taxi to the town and even though, she said, the husband had told her he would be back at eight, it was nearly nine and she did not know what to do with the dinner that had been ready for a long time.

I ate on the terrace, at a table that had been carefully set for two and was hastily reset for one while I stood waiting. Excessive sad-eyed smiling, and fussing with napkins and glasses, constant coming in and out to check if the lady likes what she is eating and if she would like more candle for the mosquito and compliments on her youth are the international signs for your marriage is bad.