People LIke Her(6)
The woman has taken down from one of the bookshelves a photograph from our wedding day—Emmy and me and her childhood friend and maid of honor, Polly, the three of us arm in arm and smiling. Poor old Polly; she obviously hated that dress. Emmy took our wedding day as an opportunity to give her best friend—a pretty enough girl, even if she does dress a bit like my mum—the makeover she had always politely but firmly refused. It was a public service for her single friend, Emmy said, before looking over the guest list and asking if I had invited anyone without a girlfriend, wife, or partner. Personally, I thought Polly’s dress looked great, but every time the camera was pointed in the other direction or Emmy wasn’t looking, I would catch her covering up her bare arms and shoulders with a bobbly cardigan or taking off a high-heeled shoe to rub the ball of one of her feet. To her credit, no matter how uncomfortable she felt, Polly kept a smile on her face the whole day long. Even if the eligible friend we sat next to her at dinner did spend the whole meal chatting up the girl on the other side of him.
“So I understand you write novels, Dan,” the woman from the Sunday Times says, with a faint smile, putting the picture back. She says it in the manner of someone who’s not even going to pretend that my name is familiar or that they might once have read something I’d written.
I sort of laugh and say something like, “I guess so,” and then I point out the hardback and paperback copies of my book on the shelf and the spine of the Hungarian edition next to that. She angles the hardback copy out a bit, examines the cover, and lets the book fall back into place on the shelf with a slight clunk.
“Hmm,” she says. “When did it come out?”
I tell her seven years ago, and as I’m saying it realize it was actually eight. Eight years. It’s hard to believe that. It certainly came as a shock to me when Emmy gently suggested that it was time for me to stop using the author’s photo from the back cover as my profile picture on Facebook. “It’s a nice photograph,” she told me reassuringly. “It just doesn’t really look like you.” Anymore being the unspoken word hanging in the air.
The photographer asks me what the book was about—that question authors always hate, with was providing the final twist of the scalpel. At one time I probably would have told him that if I could boil down what it’s about to a single sentence or two I would not have needed to write the thing. In another mood I might have joked that it was about two hundred and fifty pages, or ￡7.99. I am no longer quite that much of a twat, I hope. I tell him it is about a guy who marries a lobster. He laughs. I find myself warming to him.
It was pretty well received at the time, my novel. Generous cover blurb from Louis de Bernières. Book of the week in the Guardian. Reviewed with only mild condescension in the London Review of Books and with approval in the Times Literary Supplement. Film rights optioned. On the back flap, in my leather jacket, leaning against a brick wall in black and white, I smoke with the air of a man with a bright future in front of him.
It was a fortnight after the book came out that I met Emmy.
Seeing her for the first time across the room will always remain one of the defining moments of my life.
It was a Thursday night, the opening of a mutual friend’s bar on Kingsland Road, the height of the summer, an evening so hot that most people were standing outside on the pavement. There’d been free drinks at one point, but by the time I arrived there were just a load of buckets of melted ice with empty wine bottles in them. The crush at the bar was three deep. It had been a long day. I had things to do in the morning. I was just looking around for the mate whose bar it was to say hello and goodbye and apologize for not staying longer when I spotted her. She was standing at one of the tables by the window. She was wearing a low-cut jumpsuit. Back then, before it went an Instagram-friendly shade of cerise, Emmy’s hair—a little longer than it is now—was more or less its natural shade of blond. She was eating a chicken wing with her fingers. She was literally the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Emmy looked up. Our eyes met. She smiled at me, faintly quizzically, slightly frowning. I smiled back. I could not see a drink on the table. I made my way over and asked if she wanted one. The rest is history. That night she came back to my place. Three weeks later I asked her to move in with me. I asked her to marry me within the year.
It was only much later that I realized how little Emmy can see without her glasses when she doesn’t have her contact lenses in. Not for ages did she confess that they had been bothering her earlier—something to do with the high pollen count, perhaps—and she had taken them out, and her smile across the room that night had been at a vague pink shape she could just about sense was staring in her direction and assumed was a fashion PR. It was only later I found out she already had a boyfriend, called Giles, who was on a work secondment to Zurich, and was as surprised to learn they were no longer in an exclusive relationship as I was to learn of his existence. There was an awkward moment a fortnight into things when he called and I answered and told him to stop pestering Emmy, and he told me they’d been going out for three years.
She has always had a fairly complicated relationship with the truth, my wife.
I guess that business with Giles might have bothered some people. I guess some couples, starting out, might have felt it cast a bit of a pall over things. I genuinely can’t remember it troubling either of us very much at all. As I recall, by that weekend we were already telling it as a funny story, and very quickly after that it became the centerpiece of our repertoire of dinner party anecdotes, both of us with our agreed part to play in the telling of it, our allotted lines.