June 1953
I’d known Bobby Rice for years. Grown up together.
And when I come back from Patchley and I still weren’t married and he still weren’t married, it got to be what you might call inevitable.
I liked him well enough, and he liked me well enough and all, and in them days there come a point where if you wasn’t married folks wanted to know why, especially for a girl.
Happiest day of your life is what they say, isn’t it?
Always struck me as funny, that did. Because if your wedding’s the happiest you ever get, then, well, don’t that mean it’s all downhill from there?
And maybe that’s how it is for some, but it weren’t like that for me.
I was all nerves that morning with my stomach going in knots like I’d ate a bad eel and my mum and aunties telling me it would all be okay and me not really believing them.
It was, of course, in the end. Most things are.
I don’t remember much of the service. We got married in church because everybody did, though I’m not sure if either of us believed in very much of anything, and we had pictures took outside.
I’ve still got them on my mantelpiece at home, and one of my granddaughters come to me a few years ago for a copy because she wanted to have a set going as far back as she could go. So I had some run up for her and all.
Most days I don’t notice they’re there, the pictures. But when I do see them, really see them, I get all caught up and stopped short and feeling like—well, like nothing, really. That’s what’s odd about it. I look at that picture and it’s like a girl I never was.
She looks happy, though, and I’m glad for her. And I know she’ll go on to have a good life.
I don’t want to—I’m making this sound like there was something wrong with Bobby, and there weren’t.
He was a good husband, a good dad, a good granddad.
He never got to see the great-grandkids, but if there is a heaven or whatever, I’m sure he’s looking down and proud of them.
Though if he’s looking down at me—at me right here right now talking to you—I don’t know what he’ll be thinking.
Because the thing is—the girl in them pictures—she feels like a different girl because she is a different girl. Not because of how long ago it was, least not just because of that. But because who I was with Bobby and who I am now, talking to you. Who I was with Emily back when. They’re different.
And thinking about it, I don’t know if I made that as clear as I should’ve.
’Cause the thing is, I’ve not ever said nothing about this.
Not to nobody. Especially not to my husband.
I mean, what would I say? That I’d never love him the way I loved her?
What’d be the point of that? It’d be cruel.
So if you’re listening, Bobby, if you are up there or out there or something, I’m sorry you had to hear it.
Least I saved it until after you was gone.
But I’m getting away from myself, ain’t I? I’m just trying to explain that this isn’t about Bobby, not at all really. He was a good man and we had a good life together and when I look back I’d have not chosen another but—well—I suppose that’s where we came in.
It was my wedding day, and I was all twists and fidgets and I’d come to think that I was losing my mind a bit or at least that my eyes was playing tricks on me, because I kept thinking I saw her.
Just on the street, in the crowd, on the telly sometimes if they was doing a bit about Ascot or one of them other things that the gentry likes to get in on.
And I don’t know if it’d been fear or hope or regret but as we got closer and closer to the moment, I kept wanting to see her so badly.
And then I did.
I was walking down the aisle, proper done up for the day, sixpence in my shoe and all, which were a bit uncomfortable, but tradition is tradition and I reckoned we’d need a bit of luck what with everything, and I caught a glimpse of her face out the corner of my eye.
Well, for the moment I figured it was just my imagination, like it had been every other time so far, but when I got back to the altar I looked again, really looked, glad the veil meant nobody could see my face.
It was her. I knew it was real because she didn’t look like I’d expected her to look. It’d only been a couple of years since I’d last seen her but that was the thing with Emily—there were worlds inside her. And you never knew what she was going to be next.
I think maybe, her being there, that might have been why I didn’t remember much about the ceremony.
The vicar said some things and Bobby said some things and I said some things and then we was outside getting our pictures done and all I could think of was her face.
How she’d been watching me like I was—it’s hard to describe—like I was letting her down somehow.
We had the reception in a pub down the end of the road.
It was back before everything was chains and my old man knew the landlord so we’d got a good rate on the whole do, and I was trying to just be happy, but now I’d seen her—and I knew I had, that it weren’t just my head like—I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
So there I was in my white dress, standing around while everybody said how lovely I looked and how happy I must be and everything folk say at weddings, and all as I really wanted to do was find her. ’Cept I didn’t know where to look, or even if she were still around.
A bit after sunset I slipped outside for a smoke—I know, I know, but it was 1953 and things was different—and she was there.
I remember it had been a hot day so the cool of the pub wall behind me was a welcome change and I was just leaning there trying to enjoy it when I saw her, standing a little way back and watching me with them bright-as-onyx eyes she had.
And she said, “Hello, nymph,” like nothing had happened and no time had passed.
Fool that I was I nodded and said, “Milady,” like that was still who we were to each other. Like she was still my mistress, or still my…my whatever she’d been.
Then she said—and you’ll forgive my language but it’s what she said and while I don’t remember much else I remember this part clear as day—“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“What do you mean?” I asked. And looking back I wish I’d asked all defiant-like, that I’d said it forceful and proud. But I didn’t. I talked like a servant.
“This,” she said, waving a hand at me and my dress and the pub as if it explained everything. “What are you doing with…all of this?”
“I’m getting married,” I told her. “I’ve just got married. You was there.”
“Just because I saw it”—she was smiling at me, the way she did when she thought I was being an idiot—“doesn’t mean I believed it. I know you, nymph. I know this isn’t what you want.”
The bitter thing was that she weren’t wrong. Because what I wanted—what I’d always wanted since I were a little girl—was her. But I couldn’t tell her that, so I lied and said, “It is.”
She stepped closer to me then, and even though I was only an hour and a bit out from my wedding, my whole body was screaming for her to touch me.
So I didn’t move when she reached up and started undoing my hair from how it’d been put up for the church.
“This,” she said as she smoothed it out over my shoulders, “this is you.”
I was trembling all over, wanting to go back in to my family and my husband, or wanting to run away and hide, or wanting to just take her and kiss her there and then, and not knowing which wanting to listen to.
“You just let me go,” I told her. And I think I sounded stronger, then, than I had.
Though maybe that’s just memory being kind to me.
And that did stop her, because—and I’m not proud of this—I didn’t often stand up to Emily, and when I did, she was, well, she didn’t always take it the same way. And the way she took it this time was to ask, “What choice did I have?”
“You could have said something. You could have told Sir Arthur that…I don’t know, that it was okay, that you wanted me to stay.”
“And how do you think that would have gone?” She had that you-bloody-idiot look again. “You think my father would have said, ‘Oh well then, you can carry on fucking my daughter’?”
“Don’t talk like that,” I said at once, but she only laughed.
“Does it not strike you as odd that talking is the one thing I do with my tongue that you object to?”
“Don’t be dirty.”
She raised an eyebrow. It was something she’d learned to do young—I reckon she’d seen it in movies. “I think you rather like it when I’m dirty.”
And now she was standing close to me again, and my heart was going like the clappers. “You ain’t being fair.”
“Fair is for small people, and you, my nymph, have never been a small person.”
It was getting hard to breathe now. In what I’d have thought once was a good way, would still have said was a good way if I’d not been in a wedding dress with my husband on the other side of a pub wall. “Small’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. You was the one wanted—”
“Everything?” There was something about the way she said it that made it sound…
well…like everything. Like a promise and a secret and a dream all wrapped up together.
“Come on, nymph, what sounds better to you, really? What’s in there”—she put her hand on the wall beside my head, which I took as her way of talking about Bobby and the reception and the life it all meant—“or what’s out here?
” And now her hand came down, brushed the side of my jaw, and turned my chin towards her, and she kissed me.
It must seem such a little thing to you, your generation being your generation and mine being mine, but you need to understand that them words—and she kissed me—they weren’t words I’d ever said until I met you, until you got me to talk about this.
It’s something I’ve not even wanted to think of most days.
How it was and what it meant. Looking back at it now, I feel like, you know, that poem about that bloke what’s getting old and there’s this girl he kissed he’s still thinking of and it’s this whole important thing for him? It’s like that.
“I’m married,” I said when I could manage to say anything.
“Most of the best lovers are.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
I felt her smiling against my lips. “Is it, or does it tempt you just a little?”
“Tempt me to do what?”
Her hand strayed to my waist. “Come with me.”
For an instant, I let her fill my head with possibilities. For a little bag of moments it was a fairy tale and she’d come to whisk me away on her white horse, or at least in a car that she stole from her dad. Except it weren’t, it were just me and her out back of a pub in Stepney. “I can’t.”
“You can. You can do anything you want.”
“I’m married,” I told her for what must have been the third time, though I wasn’t counting.
“Married people do things like this all the time, and if it really bothers you, that’s what annulments are for.
” She ran her fingers through my hair and I shivered.
“I’m rich, nymph. Honestly I’m quite disgustingly rich.
Which means I can do what I like, and it turns out I want to do it with you beside me. ”
It was wonderful to hear, and terrible, and a little tiny bit of me was angry. “Where was this two years ago?”
She looked—not sorry, not really, Emily never looked sorry, but regretful. “I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes.”
“Then what are you saying?” And I was challenging her now, more than I ever had.
“I’m saying that he can’t offer you anything.”
I’ll always stand up for them as I care about, and whatever Emily may have thought, I cared for Bobby. “He can offer me safety. He can offer me family. And he loves me.”
She kissed me again then, quick and soft, just a peck on the lips. “But do you love him?”
“I do,” I told her. It were the second time I’d said those words that day, but they meant more then, in a way.
Pressing herself closer against me, she dropped her voice almost to a whisper. “Does he make you feel the way I make you feel?”
I couldn’t get the words out, but I couldn’t lie neither, so I shook my head.
“Then come with me.”
My mouth was dry and my head was aching, and I could still taste Emily on my lips and my wedding dress felt like a prison all of a sudden. I felt myself nodding, heard my own voice—not much more than a breath—saying yes.
And then I heard myself say “If…”
And I heard her say, “Anything.”
And I said, “Tell me you love me.”
And she said—she said nothing.
So I had my answer.
There were tears in my eyes when I turned away from her. And when I ran back inside, Bobby asked me what was wrong, and I said I was afraid. And he said so was he.
I never loved him the way I did her, but I loved him for that.