Miss You

FIFTEEN Gus

A few weeks into our Foundation One, Lucy booked us a mini-break.

“I found this last-minute deal on the Internet. Four-star hotel in Brighton. We’ve got a sea view and everything,” she said, when I returned on Friday morning from an all-night shift.

“Wow!”

“We can have a proper dirty weekend,” she said.

“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

She laughed.

“So when are we going?” I asked.

“This evening, silly. It’s last-minute! Two nights for the price of one. We’ll arrive late, but we’ll have the whole day tomorrow and Sunday to do exactly what we like!”

She gave me a knowing look. The dirty-weekend idea was so unlike Lucy, I felt slightly panicky.

“What?” she asked, seeing the expression on my face.

“No, nothing,” I said. “Charlotte had tickets for the theatre, but she’ll find someone else.”

“Sure?” said Lucy. It was a rhetorical question.

I gave her a quick kiss before she went off to work.

Charlotte wasn’t answering her phone when I called, so I left a brief message, and when I pressed disconnect, felt a rush of relief. It was her birthday. She would not be pleased and that would be the end of it.

I’d decided to mention Charlotte to Lucy a few weeks after it happened, describing her as a friend of the family. To be honest, I may have made her sound rather a forlorn figure, someone who it was my duty, almost, to accompany to the occasional play or opera. If Lucy had met Charlotte, she might have been more suspicious, but, ironically, she actually welcomed the idea of my “opera buddy,” because I think she privately dreaded that I might suggest we go together.

I told myself I wasn’t really lying when I said Charlotte was “much older” than me, or that I thought she was quite a lonely person. Like cigarettes, taken up on the same day, Charlotte had become an addiction that was much harder to quit than I’d thought.

Lucy had been horrified when I ran out of excuses as to why I smelled like a pub.

“Since when?” she’d asked, when I’d confessed to smoking.

“Since 9/11,” I’d told her disingenuously. I’d become quite good at telling half-truths by then.

In the beginning, I couldn’t believe it was happening; as it continued, my rationalization went something like this: Charlotte could not be seriously contemplating a relationship with me. I was five years younger than her and, more to the point, the little brother of her former boyfriend. Compared to Ross, I was callow, inexperienced and weedy, so my role in her life must simply be as a temporary plaything until a real contender came along.

I’m not trying to deny my responsibility, but to a callow, inexperienced, weedy member of the male gender in his early twenties, the offer of sex with someone as out-of-your-league and up-for-it as your older brother’s stunningly beautiful girlfriend was impossible to turn down.

On several occasions I did try to stop, once managing to survive nearly two weeks by running twice a day, fast, around Regent’s Park. But when I bumped into Charlotte, also running, at six in the morning, the sight of her perfectly sculpted shoulders glistening with sweat was too much. We did it there, in the park, against the back of the coffee shed just near the formal gardens, her sweet stale morning breath in my ear, her long, smooth thighs clamped around mine, the silky wet readiness of her as I slid in, my forehead banging against splintery slats of wood that smelled of creosote.

I was absolutely sure that sooner or later she’d decide she’d had enough. I somehow convinced myself that in the meantime there was no more damage to my relationship with Lucy than had already happened, so my sin was more opportunism than treachery.

By the time Lucy and I arrived on the south coast, it was late. We took a cab from the station. Small extravagances were still a novelty after so many years on a student budget and I could feel the tingle of Lucy’s excitement across the fug of Christmas-tree air-freshener.

The hotel had a faded Victorian glamour. As we approached the reception desk, I whispered, “Are we supposed to check in as Mr. and Mrs.Smith?”

There was a flash of enquiry in Lucy’s eyes and a slightly awkward giggle. We’d been together for almost six years by then, and were on our way to earning decent salaries, but we were still skirting the question of marriage.

I threw open the French windows and stood on the balcony. The breeze was fresh and salty, the pier glittering with colored lights. Occasionally the wind carried a snatch of pop music or a distant scream from one of the rides over the soft crash of waves. I could feel the pressure of the city lifting from my shoulders.

“Do you have to smoke?” Lucy said as I lit up.

Her face was all frowny with concern for my health and made me think, as I did several times a day, how lucky I was to be with her, and what a shit I was. I stubbed out the cigarette decisively, grinding it into the concrete floor of the balcony, telling myself that was my last one, ever, but not promising out loud, because I’d done that so many times before, as Lucy would remind me, and then I’d feel like a failure and the whole cycle of need would start again.

We stood together, looking out to sea, her body fitting comfortably against mine, and I felt as fond of her as I had on the first day of our relationship, and almost as nervous about the prospect of having sex, which was the reason that we’d come here. How could I have thought that she wouldn’t notice the diminishing frequency of our lovemaking, or told myself that she probably preferred it that way?

In the morning, we walked along the slatted boards on the pier, hand in hand, with Lucy chatting about the rides she’d been on at amusement parks, and whether it would make her feel sick to go on one so soon after eating a full English breakfast, and just about anything to avoid the possibility of a silence in which the question of my impotence the previous night might acquire some greater significance than me just being tired.

My mobile phone vibrated repeatedly against my thigh as Charlotte called to remonstrate. I suddenly realized that we had stopped walking and Lucy had just asked me a question.

“Sorry?”

“Have you got any change for the token machine? Honestly, Gus, it’s like you disappear sometimes! Do you think you get enough oxygen up there?”

I exchanged ten pounds and we wandered around the various rides before deciding which to go on. The Booster was the most dangerous. With four seats at each end of a high rotating arm, it made the others look like kids’ stuff.

“Come on!” I grabbed Lucy’s hand and pulled her towards the kiosk. “The view from the top will be great.”

Lucy’s screams, a primal mix of fear and excitement, were a bit of a turn-on because her responses were usually so measured. As the ride went faster and faster, fear diminished and pleasure increased to a peak where all we could do was laugh with sheer exhilaration. When the ride began to slow, our hysteria calmed, and I realized that I hadn’t thought about Charlotte for at least five minutes.

We were lured into the amusement arcade by the air-hockey table, where Lucy won several times amid the clatter and jingle of fruit machines. Tennis was the only sport we really played together, and I had the advantage of height and speed, so even though she had much better technique, she only won if I let her. Her approach to air hockey was more about angles than my stabs at power, so she beat me fair and square. As the last puck shot into my goal and the glee spread across her face, I found myself overwhelmed with affection for her.

In The Lanes, every other shop was an antique jeweler’s. The windows sparkled with diamond rings. Even though Lucy said nothing, nor lingered longingly as I noticed several other women in couples doing, I suddenly wanted to make it up to her for the previous evening by going down on one knee and proposing. It sounds ludicrous to say it, but it was only a sense of honor that stopped me. I knew it wasn’t fair to ask Lucy to marry me until I had finished with Charlotte once and for all.

I bought Charlotte a Paul Smith silk scarf from Liberty for her birthday, which she thanked me for, but did not put on.

“I’ve got a present for you too,” she said.

I unfolded the tissue inside the Agent Provocateur box to find a shell-pink silk teddy, and a pair of extra-sheer ivory stockings. “This is for you, right?”

She shook her head. “It’s for you. I just wear it. Do you want me to put the stockings on, or would you like to tie me to the bed with them?”

Sometimes it crossed my mind that Charlotte should, or possibly did, have a sideline as a high-class call girl. Where did she learn this stuff?

If the sex was more mind-blowing than ever, it was because I knew it was the last time. Afterwards, I got up, showered and dressed, knowing I would feel too vulnerable trying to tell her while I was still naked.

“Here we go,” she said, as I stood by the door, rocking slightly from foot to foot.

“I know I’ve said it before, but this really has to be the last time,” I said.

“You haven’t gone and told the wife, have you?”

“Don’t call her that.”

“She’s not pregnant, is she?”

“Not that I’m aware,” I said, trying to be cool but sounding like a prat.

“That would be awkward...”

“Why?” I bristled. If Lucy was pregnant, it was nothing to do with Charlotte. It might even be rather nice, I thought, except Lucy was far too sensible to make a mistake.

“Because I am,” said Charlotte. “Pregnant.”

Then, after a long pause, “Can’t you look a bit happier than that?”

“How?”

“Darling, it’s basic biology, isn’t it?”

“I mean...” Surely she was using something?

“Polycystic ovaries. I never thought I’d conceive.”

“But you should’ve...”

“You never asked.”

How had that happened? I was a doctor, for God’s sake. Why had I abandoned all the rules? Because each time felt like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I could so easily mess up.

“How long?” My voice echoed in my head, as if someone else was asking the questions that had to be asked.

“I won’t bore you with my menstrual cycle, or lack of it, but in the absence of the normal indicators, I appear to be at least three months, possibly getting on for four.”

Her stomach was still flat. Was this some strange kind of joke? I must have looked bewildered.

“And yes, it is,” she said.

“What?”

“Yours.”

“And you’re going to...?” At that point, I was still thinking of it as something to do with her and no one else.

“I’ve given it a lot of thought. Obviously, it’s unexpected, but I’m thirty and with my ovaries it might not happen naturally again. The time I’ll lose from my career now is probably less than if I make surgeon then have to go throughIVF.”

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Aren’t you going to offer to make an honest woman out of me?”

Was she teasing?

“You want to marry me?”

“Is it so surprising? We have the best sex ever. You’re intelligent and cultured. I think you’ll probably make rather a good father.”

Everything she was saying was so strange to me, I felt as if I was hallucinating, as if she was some sort of surrealist installation, lying there in pale silk underwear, her lips and nipples dark from sex, and inside her tummy, a little human being who half-belonged to me. As I stared at her body, I felt I could now see the new roundness of her belly where the tiny fetus was curled up inside.

In one of Lucy’s obstetrics books, there was a chart of a baby’s development, with all the stages described in terms of items of food. At four months, the baby was well beyond a kidney bean, probably not quite a grapefruit yet.

When I didn’t say anything, Charlotte said, in a wistful tone I’d never heard before, “It might be fun... don’t you think?”

For a moment, she looked so vulnerable I wanted to hold her and reassure her that everything would be all right. And yet I still wasn’t sure whether this was some sort of elaborate game, and the only question I could think of asking to find out was, “Will you marry me, then?”

Occasionally, when we were having drinks in some theatre foyer, I’d allowed myself to fantasize that people might mistake us for a proper couple, but I’d never thought about how we might arrive at that status, and if I had, it wouldn’t have been like this.

“Oh, Angus, you’re so sweet!”

She knelt up on the bed, took my hand and said, solemnly, “I will,” before rewarding me with the most tender, sensual kiss I had ever received.

How do you tell your girlfriend of six years that you’ve unexpectedly got engaged to a woman you’ve unwittingly got pregnant? A woman who happens to be the former girlfriend of your older brother, whom you’ve never mentioned?

On my walk home from Charlotte Street, I took deep breaths, trying to compose a speech in my head, but the pyramid of lies I had constructed, which hadn’t felt like such a big deal incrementally, now seemed unscalably huge. It began to dawn on me, for the first time, that in revealing lies that I had thought were mine and mine alone, I would be demolishing Lucy’s life too. I didn’t know if I could do that. But I had to. There was a baby. There was Charlotte...

Lucy was out at the cinema with some girlfriends when I got back, and they went out to dinner afterwards. It was too late to start explaining when she came in, because I was already in bed, pretending to be fast asleep.

I should have told her the following day, but she’d had to inform a pregnant mother that her baby’s heart was no longer beating, and after she told me that, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.

I promised myself that I would do it that weekend, but on Thursday, my father rang to say that he and my mother had some news they wanted to give me in person.

“You’re not ill?”

“No, not that.”

But it sounded more serious than, say, a decision to retire or move.

“I’ve got to go and see my folks,” I told Lucy.

“Can I come?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

She’d never been to my parents’ house. Now didn’t seem like the best time for a visit.

“Why?”

When I couldn’t summon an immediate excuse, it occurred to me that it might actually present a way of encouraging Lucy to question our relationship before I broke my news.

My father was waiting for us at the station. “I’ll come straight out with it,” he announced as he started the car. “Your mother and I have decided to separate.”

“Your father’s been having an affair with his dental nurse,” was the version of events my mother offered almost as soon as we were through the front door.

“Perhaps you’d rather I...?” Lucy began, embarrassed because this kind of personal revelation clearly was not what she’d been expecting.

“No, you might as well hear what’s in store for you when you lose your looks and your libido,” my mother snapped.

It was such an uncharacteristically forthright statement, I wondered if she’d been drinking, or watching daytime television.

“Your mother and I haven’t been happy for some time—”

“How could we be after—?” asked my mother.

“—and now this chance has come along, I feel I have to try—”

“She’s thirty-seven,” said my mother.

Unable to think of a suitable comment, I made the mistake of looking at my father.

“Oh, I see.” My mother rounded on me. “You knew all along, did you?”

“Absolutely not!” I protested.

“He honestly didn’t,” Lucy chimed in.

My mother stared at me. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say or what she wanted me to do. Should I remonstrate with my father, or try to stop him? Was that what Ross would have done? I was aware now that Lucy had spotted the pictures of my brother on the mantelpiece. Ross in a mortarboard holding his degree certificate was right next to mine, in exactly the same pose.

The silence seemed interminable.

“So, what’s going to happen?” I asked eventually.

“I’m not leaving this house,” said my mother, immediately. “I’ve put my whole life into it.”

“I’ll be moving out,” said my father.

“Don’t make it sound like a sacrifice!” she shouted at him.

“I’ve put a lot into it too,” he said, rather pathetically.

“And now you’ve destroyed it all!” said my mother, then rushed from the room.

I’d heard her crying so often, but this sound was different, like a wounded animal.

“Mum will be OK financially?” I asked, feeling that someone ought to represent her interests.

“Yes, yes!” he said impatiently. “Look, I think it’s probably better if I leave you to it. I’ll be in touch about the arrangements.”

“OK,” I said. And then, because I couldn’t think of anything else, I held out my hand, which he seemed surprised and grateful to grasp.

“She couldn’t let go,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically croaky with emotion. “She wouldn’t allow me even to want to.”

I’d seen them as a unit, bound together by grief, but we’d all been as alone as each other.

“I hope you’ll be happy,” was all I could think of to say.

I could see in his eyes that he thought I was being sarcastic, but it was somehow too late to explain.

“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Lucy said, after the automatic security gates had closed behind his Lexus. “You couldn’t really see your mother with a thirty-seven-year-old man, could you?”

She walked over to the mantelpiece to get a closer look at the photos: Ross with gaps where his baby teeth had been; Ross in his prep-school cap, blazer and shorts; Ross receiving the rugby cup; Ross with his eight, all of them holding the boat above their heads; Ross wearing mirror ski goggles with a snowy mountain behind him.

I took a deep breath.

“That’s my brother,” I said. “He was killed in a skiing accident the Christmas before I started uni. I didn’t want people to cast me as a grieving person and not know what to say to me, you know?”

“Oh, Gus, I’m so sorry!”

Lucy’s eyes were full of tears, which wasn’t part of the scene I had written in my head.

“It must have been terrible for you...”

“Well, yes. But now you’re doing that thing, you know?”

“Sorry.”

She wasn’t the one who was supposed to be sorry. She was supposed to be upset that I’d misled her.

“What happened?” she asked gently.

A question nobody had voiced since my parents, and then the search party, and then the police all those years ago. A question I tried to avoid thinking about.

“He was skiing off-piste and hit a tree. The brain damage was so severe they decided to switch off the life support.”

“Were you there?”

“When they switched it off? No. My parents were.”

Lucy didn’t say anything, but I knew that wasn’t what she’d been asking.

“I don’t suppose you can forgive me for not mentioning it?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew I’d mistimed it. I should have waited to let the implications sink in.

“But there’s nothing to forgive!” Lucy exclaimed. “I’m just so sorry I wasn’t there for you!”

She turned and tried to hug me, but I couldn’t put my arms around her. Her attempts to make it easy for me were making it much more difficult.

“He was very handsome,” she said, picking up the photo of him leaving with a backpack for his gap year.

“Yes. He was handsome and cool and good at everything. Everyone adored him.”

“And is this his girlfriend?”

With Freudian failure of eyesight or foresight, I hadn’t spotted the picture of Charlotte and Ross dressed as Morticia and Uncle Fester.

“Yes.”

“She’s very beautiful.”

“Yes.”

Lucy was very quiet for the rest of the day, although she put on a bright face when my mother came down and prepared supper for us. A chicken-and-leek pie. If my mother had been her normal self, she would have made up the guest room for Lucy, but she was so distracted she didn’t think of it, so we went to bed in my old room. At first, it felt sweetly poignant to rediscover our way of lying together with me curled around her back, just like the first time in Lucy’s single bed in Broadstairs, although neither of us was now in any mood for sex. After many minutes’ silence I realized that she was as unable to sleep as I was.

“Are you OK?” she asked in the darkness.

“I’ve had better days.”

“Sorry. Crass of me.”

“No. It’s fine. I’m sorry to involve you in all of this.”

“Don’t be sorry. I wish you had involved me. It feels so strange that you didn’t tell me about Ross. There’s this whole important part of your life I didn’t know anything about, and I thought I knew you so well.”

Another few minutes of both of us pretending to get to sleep.

“Your heart’s beating really fast,” Lucy said. “Are you sure you’re OK?”

“No! I’m not!” I cried.

Suddenly I couldn’t contain my panic.

I sat up. So did she. She reached to turn the light on, but I didn’t know if I could say what I had to say with her looking at me.

“Don’t!”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m fine. No, I’m not. I’m a shit!”

“Gus, calm down. It’s OK. You’ve had a big shock. Honestly, Gus. You’re having a panic attack. Just breathe. I’ll get you some water.”

“I DON’T NEED WATER!”

I’d never shouted at her before. Now the silence was loaded with hurt.

“Lucy. I’m sorry, but we’ve got to split up. I’ve been meaning to tell you all week, long before all this with my parents.”

“Don’t be silly!”

“I’m serious.”

I couldn’t see her face properly, but I could tell she still didn’t believe me, probably thought it was a temporary insanity brought about by shock.

“I’ve been having an affair with somebody and I’m going to marry her.”

How cowardly to say it in the dark!

Now I didn’t stop her from switching the bedside light on, and when she did, she could see in my face that I wasn’t joking. She didn’t cry, not then, not as I’d expected.

“Why?” she asked calmly.

What a good doctor she was going to make.

“She’s pregnant.” I sighed. “She wants to have the baby.”

“But do you love her?”

Sounds strange, but that question hadn’t crossed my mind. I wondered if it had crossed Charlotte’s. Neither of us had mentioned love. She was too cool and I was trying to be.

“Yes, I do.”

Unable to be near Lucy as I said it, I got out of bed, pulling an Arsenal dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door to hide my nakedness. It had been bought for me when I was about twelve and only just did.

I went to sit down on the edge of the bed.

“Don’t!” Lucy cried, so I jumped up again, feeling exposed and stupid.

“You haven’t been using precautions?” The levers in Lucy’s brain were clicking into place and my crimes beginning to stack up.

“I assumed—”

“You’ve endangered me as well as deceiving me?”

The disease side of things hadn’t even crossed my mind.

“I’m sure—”

“Just like you were sure she was on the Pill? What’s her name, by the way?”

“Charlotte.”

“Not your opera buddy? Oh my God! What an imbecile I’ve been! I trusted you, Gus! I thought you were such a sweetie! It never crossed my mind not to trust you!”

“I know,” I said.

“Does Charlotte know about me?”

“We don’t really talk about—”

“You just screw? Or do you actually go to the opera? Jesus, Gus! Have you gone mad?”

“Maybe.”

“You live with me! You can’t know what it’s like to live with her. This is crazy! It’s crazy, Gus!”

I felt as if I’d frozen. There were no excuses. There was no explanation.

Suddenly Lucy launched herself at me, thumping my chest with her fists.

“What’s wrong with you?” she screamed at me. “What’s wrong with you, Gus? It’s like you’re in some kind of trance!”

Getting no reaction, she sank to her knees, her mouth contorted in a silent howl of pain, before collapsing in a noisy flood of sobs.

I hated seeing her so upset and out of control, my blameless friend, my companion. She was the person who’d made me feel normal and I’d repaid her by behaving so badly, there was nothing I could say or do to comfort her.

Eventually, she took an extraordinarily long intake of breath and pulled herself together again.

“It’s because of Ross, isn’t it?” she said.

I thought she was talking about my attraction to Charlotte. How clever she was to see that.

An image of Charlotte in her white bikini, the day Ross brought her home to try out our hot tub, flashed across my mind. But even though she’d remarked on her beauty when she saw the photo downstairs, Lucy didn’t know that Ross’s girlfriend was Charlotte, I realized, and I’d never revealed the connection.

“Once you lie about something, you lose respect for the other person you’re lying to,” Lucy continued, thinking out loud. “You thought less of me because you hadn’t told me that, so it made all the other lies easier, I suppose.”

That was very perceptive too.

“I should have listened to Helen,” Lucy said with a sigh of resignation. “She never trusted all your dreamy shit.”

She looked up at me hovering impotently in my ridiculously too-small dressing gown. “Just leave me alone, Gus.”

I went to Ross’s room and lay on his bed with his shelf of trophies glinting at me, listening to the muffled murmur of my girlfriend talking on her mobile phone all through the night.

Around seven o’clock in the morning, the doorbell rang. I ran downstairs and opened the door to Nicky. Lucy walked straight past me without speaking and sat in her mother’s car.

“The last thing I wanted to do was hurt her!” I faltered.

“Oh, Gus, really?” Nicky said, looking at me with such disappointment, I felt like I’d betrayed the whole family.

“What’s happening?” My mother was standing in her dressing gown on the stairs as I turned around from closing the front door.

“I’ve split up with Lucy.”

“Here? Why?”

“I let her down, I’m afraid.”

“Not like your father?”

I wanted to protest. No, not like that. But what was the difference? Silence betrayed my guilt.

“Why?” my mother suddenly shouted at the ceiling, her head thrown back in imprecation.

“Ross was no angel, you know!” I said, regretting the words as soon as they left my lips.

My mother’s empty stare was far more unsettling than her usual look of vague disappointment. It made me shiver with certainty that, at that moment, at least, she hated me.

“I don’t know why you’re here,” she said, with an impatient wave of her hand as she turned back up the stairs. “Can you just go, please?”

On the train back to London, I could no longer locate myself. I stared at the reflection of my face in the window. The person I was had been an illusion and I felt sick with shame and self-loathing.

In our flat, I packed my clothes into a suitcase like an automaton, unsure whether it would cause more pain to leave items that had been given as gifts or take them with me, coming down on the side of leaving them.

I walked around each room one last time, unable to compute that I’d never again wake up in that bed, never again cook Lucy breakfast on that stove, never again huddle next to her on that sofa in winter, our ridiculous oversized slippers peeping out from under the duvet.

On impulse, I dialed her mobile number.

“Are you OK?”

“What do you think?” She sighed wearily.

Silence.

“Don’t worry, Gus, I’m not going to do anything stupid...”

“I didn’t think...”

“No.”

Another long silence.

“Don’t call me again, Gus,” she said, and hung up.

I posted my key through the letter box.

For once, the lift was working.

As I wheeled my suitcase along the busy road, a different anxiety began to take over. I was swapping stability for exhilaration, but what if she’d been teasing all along? Charlotte and I hadn’t spoken since the beginning of the week. It seemed an age ago now. What if she laughed in my face? Where would I go? Nash would probably let me crash on her sofa, I thought, but not before giving me a lecture about my treatment of women, and I didn’t think I could bear to disappoint anyone else.

Charlotte took a while to answer the entryphone, and when she did, her voice was frosty. “Yes?”

“It’s Angus!”

She buzzed me in. I bumped the suitcase up the stairs. The door to her flat was open and she was lying on the bed in her rose lingerie.

“I was beginning to think you didn’t have the balls!” She patted the space beside her.

How amazingly quickly the brain adapts: one moment standing in the street, gloomily homeless; the next, climbing on top of my lover, swamped by the delirious disbelief I imagine a EuroMillions winner feels.

People usually describe winning the lottery as a fairy tale, forgetting that fairy tales have a dark side. For me, the frisson of foreboding was always there, like Hansel being offered candy he knew he shouldn’t accept.

In the three weeks before we married, Charlotte and I discovered things about each other that you can’t know without living together. Charlotte couldn’t cook. I rather regretted abandoning the shallow Le Creuset casserole which doubled as a frying pan that Nicky had given me for my last birthday. Charlotte was messy. The pristine state of her attic flat, it turned out, was solely due to a cleaner who came twice a week. In the intervening days, Charlotte never hung up her clothes nor put her laundry in the basket. Charlotte’s justification was economic. If you could pay someone less to do the jobs than you could earn, why waste your time?

On that rationale, or because I’d worked as a waiter so long, I sometimes felt rather like a butler when I ironed Charlotte’s clothes or brought her breakfast in bed. Except that butlers don’t generally walk around in boxer shorts, nor, when the lady of the house has finished breakfast, do they get kissed with shiny buttery lips, or lie with her writhing on top of them, sandpapering their bare skin with toast crumbs.

We decided to marry in Marylebone Register Office. If you were allowed to do these things immediately, we’d probably have asked a couple of strangers on the street to witness our union, but the law doesn’t allow it to happen so fast, and so we told our parents. Charlotte’s were long-divorced. She hadn’t seen her father for many years, and he lived in Scotland with his new family, but he sent us a card and a check for a thousand pounds. Her mother, who had recently moved to Majorca with Robbie, a childhood sweetheart she’d met on Friends Reunited, insisted on flying over for the ceremony.

I decided not to invite either of my parents after their individual reactions to the news.

“But Lucy is a lovely girl...!” My father tried to puzzle out the sequence of events, and found it a step too far on the Lothario scale, even for him.

“Surely you don’t mean Ross’s Charlotte?” my mother said.

I rang Marcus, who was by then a contract lawyer for a big City firm, to ask if he’d be my best man.

“I’d be honored,” he said. “Let me check my diary. We’re talking this year?”

“Next Wednesday,” I told him. “Spur-of-the-moment thing.”

“Oh. Well. Congratulations! Better get working on my speech!”

“Don’t worry, it’s just a quick ceremony, followed by lunch at Piattini. We’re flying to New York the same evening.”

“Good for you!” he said. “The number of weddings I’ve been to recently that must have cost as much as a house! I’m assuming no dress code, then?”

“No dress code.”

I bought a black suit from Marks Spencer, the only off-the-rack one I could find with a thirty-five-inch inside leg. Charlotte bought herself a cream tuxedo-style jacket and a new little black dress from Liberty, because, although the pregnancy was barely visible, she had put on a little weight around the tummy. The outfit hung from the curtain pole above the French doors.

“Isn’t it supposed to be bad luck for me to see your dress?” I asked, as we got into bed the night before the wedding.

“Oh, I hate all that stuff. Grown women getting trussed up like virgins in order to be given away—in the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake!”

I thought of all the months of preparation there’d been for Pippa’s wedding and how I’d have had to go through the same palaver with Lucy, and how much more grown up it was like this.

The following morning, I lay watching Charlotte dress in new black underwear and stockings, wondering if I’d ever get used to the thrill of seeing clothes slide over what was underneath, a kind of reverse striptease that was almost as arousing as it was the other way round.

We took our small carry-on cases with us in the cab. We’d decided on New York for our honeymoon because it was new to both of us, and seemed like a suitably sexy place for a long weekend, which was all the holiday I could get away with so soon after starting my Foundation One year.

Marcus was standing on the register-office steps as our taxi drew up. I saw his face when Charlotte stepped out because that was the effect her arrival had on men—you couldn’t not look at her—and then his surprise when I followed, and paid off the cab driver.

“Marcus, this is Charlotte,” I introduced them.

“Pleasure to meet you.” He shook her hand and smiled, more suave and composed than I’d ever seen him, but when he turned to me, he was unable to hide a boyish how-on-earth-have-you-managed-this? look that made me feel like the winner of a competition I hadn’t even entered.

Charlotte’s mother presented her with a small hand-tied bunch of the palest pink roses, which contrasted sharply with the garish display of fabric blooms on the registrar’s desk. We emerged onto the busy street again in a shower of rice, also provided by Charlotte’s mother, which stuck to our hair and clothes and got in our mouths as we laughed. Then the four of us hailed a cab to Piattini.

I’d served hundreds of meals there, and eaten many times in the kitchen, but I had never before dined in the restaurant. Stefania had prepared a wedding breakfast of perfect buttery saffron risotto dressed with a sliver of gold leaf, followed by a tagliata of rare charred steak, accompanied by a rocket salad drizzled with treacly balsamic vinegar. For dessert, there was a chocolate-and-hazelnut semifreddo, with sheets of caramel so fine they dissolved in the mouth after the first tiny crunch. We applauded her when she came up from the kitchen to offer us her congratulations.

I noticed her slight double-take as I introduced her to Charlotte and they kissed on both cheeks in that strangely chaste way that Europeans do. Stefania and Salvatore weren’t my surrogate parents, but it was a family business that I had been a part of for several years, so the relationship was closer than employee and boss. In a slight blur of Chianti, I noted Stefania’s surprise at my highly sophisticated wife. With Marcus, the same look had made me feel triumphantly validated; on Stefania’s face, it was slightly disconcerting.

Charlotte had spent her father’s gift on booking us into business class so there was plenty of space for me to stretch my legs. I’d already had a lot more to drink than she had because of the baby, and now there was a constant supply of champagne.

“I could get used to this,” I said drowsily, as the cabin lights were dimmed and the stewardess handed us pillows with clean cotton cases.

“Just as well,” Charlotte replied. In the darkness, I was aware of her hand seeking mine.

I’d been talking about the luxury; she was talking about us.

The simple act of holding hands felt like the most intimate thing we’d ever done.

“Come on,” she whispered against my neck.

I followed her to the toilet cubicle and we consummated our marriage at thirty thousand feet, with grains of rice skittering from our clothes.