After You Left(13)
Discovered something before wedding . . . The words perform a combative tango in my head.
I run and get my computer and pour myself a new glass of water. I have to log in with a password that Aimee gave me. Moments later, I am staring at a collage of dozens of small photographs, endless images of my own happy day – a tiny, cropped hint of a wedding dress, the front of a tuxedo, pale pink peonies, laughing faces, a flute of twinkling champagne, the sea, the stunning sea . . .
We married at a small Catholic church on Holy Island. Justin always claimed he wasn’t religious because he said no God would have robbed a little boy of his father, but religion was an undeniable part of him. He still attended church at Christmas and Easter, and whenever he needed some time to step away from all the noise and just think. I accepted that about him, though to me, church meant very little. I had never gone as a child. I had no idea if my mother and father had married in a church because I never saw any wedding pictures of them; after he left, she destroyed everything with his face on it.
When I moved up here from Manchester, I was enchanted by the idea of an island that was cut off from the mainland twice a day by the tide. It was so magically different from Stockport, where I had grown up. I went over there on one of my first weekends, crossing early on a summer’s morning right as the three-mile causeway had just opened up to cars. There was something hauntingly evocative about the small land mass, with its green pastureland dotted with goats and sheep, its mudflats with upturned fishing boats and the tiny streets of honey-coloured houses with their terracotta roofs. I remember sitting all alone on a bench listening to the ghostly music of a light wind wrapping around the Cheviot Hills and the occasional bleat of sheep – and nothing else; no other sound. Lindisfarne Castle sat perched on a craggy outcrop, like something built from sand by children. A structure that, impossibly, you’d imagine could be washed away by a high tide, or trampled by somebody’s rambunctious dog, and yet it had survived stalwartly from the sixteenth century. I had read about its history, its many owners, one of whom was the founder of Country Life magazine. From up there on the castle walls, you could see out to the Farne Islands, while the wind whipped your hair and you inhaled salty air blown in from a steel-grey sea. If you were a writer or an artist, you could find no finer inspiration than here. If Wyeth had been British, he would have wound up on Holy Island, and found his Christina among the local girls, who were probably all just as captivating and inaccessible.
When I discovered that the castle could be booked for weddings, granted, it lost some of its mystique. Now it was just another national treasure that got pimped out to random brides with a big enough budget. Nevertheless, I wanted to be one of them. But Justin had wanted a Catholic church, so that’s what we did.
I click on the first photograph of myself. It’s bizarre; I can’t relate one iota to that person in the white dress. It’s like finally meeting the twin you never knew you had, and knowing you should be able to forge a connection, but you just can’t. I am not interested in whether my hair held up, or if my make-up was too heavy, or how my dress looked from behind. All I see is a woman I can’t identify with, on the arm of a man who must have been wondering what the hell he’d done.
‘I want a big wedding,’ he’d said. ‘I’m only going to be married once.’
‘What if I die early?’ I’d asked him.
‘Makes no difference. I only ever want one wife.’
It was so very Justin – not really the way anyone else thought. But he’d won me over with it; I was going to be that wife.
I come across one of him in close-up, cropped just below his deep cream buttonhole, semi-profile. His unfairly thick eyelashes. The unblemished, olive skin. Those eyes that are neither properly blue nor properly green – windows to the soul. But it strikes me that they’re the eyes of the man I can’t have truly known, who I lost so indistinctly. Was any of it real? A mute hysteria builds in the back of my throat. The need for answers is suddenly greater than my ability to handle them – perhaps I will just disappear into never knowing. Perhaps it’ll be easier. I take another drink of my water and click through the photos, hurrying past ones he isn’t in. Latching on to the ones of his face – staring at them until my eyes hurt – searching for any possible subtext in his expressions, in his body language, in the way he was holding a wine glass or scratching his cheek, looking for a moment of truth, something that will leap out and make me say, There it is! Justin, in the throes of realising he’s made a mistake! A forced smile that would belie some inner maelstrom of regret and despair. But there is nothing.
In every photo, he looks exactly as you would expect him to look.
Except for one.
When I see it, my stomach gives a small lift and fall. I enlarge it to its fullest size – not that this really helps, given it happens to be the only photograph in which you can’t see Justin’s face. He is with Rick, his best man.
Looking at it now, I realise exactly when it must have been taken. We had just been standing for photos alongside the upturned former fishing boats, once part of one of the largest herring fleets to sail off the east coast of England.
‘You were right, it’s so beautiful here,’ he had said. His voice had a woeful quality to it. His hand was both light and firm in the small of my back; I can almost still feel it. We were officially husband and wife. I had always wanted to be married. Friends were happy to live together. To me, that felt like keeping a door open – one of you clearly must be reluctant to make the ultimate commitment. I’d longed to meet a man who wanted that door firmly closed. That, to me, was the very definition of romance. Perhaps it was because I had never agreed with my mother not wanting to marry my stepfather, despite him asking regularly, despite his profound disappointment every time she said no. Because my real father had been a lying, philandering bastard, she vowed she would never tie herself to another man again. I’d thought that was so petulant and selfish – if he was good enough to live with for a lifetime, he was good enough to marry.