Sweet Sorrow(31)



‘No, on Friday I will give it some serious thought.’

‘And make a decision?’

‘Yes.’

‘Depending on what?’

‘The usual. How we get on …’

‘Whether I’m any good?’

‘No, ’course not. It’s not an audition.’

‘Well, not in that sense, maybe.’

‘Not that kind of audition.’

‘But it’s not definite? The coffee?’

‘At this stage of negotiations, that’s all I’m prepared to offer.’

‘You realise this is blackmail.’

‘It’s only blackmail if you do something you’re ashamed of.’

‘What, like Theatre Sports?’

‘It’s more of a bribe, really. Or an incentive.’ Once again, she held out the pages, and I took them and bundled them quickly into my rucksack.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said and placed my foot on the highest pedal to push off. ‘Bye.’

‘Bye then!’ she said, and here she quickly put her hand on my shoulder and as I turned, she leant in quickly, pressed her cheek against mine so that I could feel sweat on skin – hers or mine, I wasn’t sure – and whispered in my ear.

‘Sweet sorrow and all that.’

Then she was walking towards her friends, stopping to turn. ‘Monday!’ she said.

I cycled off to work, thinking ‘sweet sorrow’, that’s exactly right. ‘Sweet sorrow.’ It wasn’t until Monday morning that I discovered she’d taken it from the play.





Part Two


JULY




I’ve seen plays that were more exciting than this. Honest to God – plays!

Homer Simpson, The Simpsons





Wedding


We’d decided on a winter wedding, and to make a virtue of the fact. ‘Small and exclusive, but not because no one likes us.’ Niamh was my fiancée, though I’d learnt not to use the word. ‘It sounds so fancy,’ she’d said, ‘with that little accent and all those “e”s.’

‘It’s very you.’

‘Oh, you think?’

‘Even when we’re married, I’m still going to call you my fiancée.’

‘Yes, try that.’

In the ten years that we’d been together, we’d been to many weddings: an Italian olive grove at sunset, a picture-postcard English country church, on the roof of a New York skyscraper. Niamh was from Dublin, and we’d stood on an immense windblown Irish beach, the bride arriving on a white stallion from a vast distance away, like Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, too far by far, so that Niamh had to retreat into the dunes to hide her laughter. I found it impossible to imagine the two of us in any of these scenarios, and Niamh felt the same: ‘When I look in your eyes and think of what you mean to me,’ she said, ‘I just think “registry office”.’

‘Maybe not even that. Can we do it online?’

‘Or we could elope, just the two of us. Though we’d have to bring my parents. The four of us.’

‘Is it still eloping if you bring your parents?’

We’d met in a briefly fashionable east London restaurant during the messy and unwholesome years of my late twenties. I bartended, Niamh was the manager and before too long she had joined the list of two, perhaps three people who I can plausibly claim have saved my life. Our existence at that time was practically nocturnal and steeped in vodka, and the rate of attrition amongst our friends was high, but a few had gone on to run successful restaurants, and this was how we’d found the venue for our wedding, our very small wedding, in the top room of a pub. The scale would be a sign of our security and confidence. Only the insecure rode white horses, and we’d just mumble ‘I do’ out of the side of our mouths then see our friends. We would invite just ten people, later twenty, then thirty. If we set the tables in a square, we could make it forty, and surely this would be enough.

We looked at the list that night in bed. The numbers stood at thirty-eight.

‘But these are all my friends,’ said Niamh.

‘They’re my friends too.’

‘But aren’t there old school friends you want to invite?’

‘No, I’m okay.’

‘Or old girlfriends?’

‘Why would I want to do that? Why would you even want me to?’

‘I want to see whatshername.’

‘Who?’

‘You know …’

‘No.’

‘Shakespeare girl.’

‘Her name was Fran Fisher.’

‘I still can’t believe you were actually in a play.’

‘Here were the servants of your adversary and yours—’

‘Don’t do that.’

‘—close fighting ere I did approach—’

‘Stop please, I don’t like it.’

‘—I drew to part them. In the instant came the fiery Tybalt—’

‘I hope that wasn’t how you did it.’

‘More or less. And yet I never acted again.’

‘Theatre’s loss.’

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