31. Iris
IRIS
My fiancée is up to something.
I've had eleven days to get used to that word — fiancée — and I have deployed it, out loud, at every conceivable opportunity, including twice to a man delivering fence posts who did not ask.
And for at least six of those eleven days, my fiancée has been lying to me.
Badly. That's the insulting part. Cat Aldridge can hold a kitchen together through a Saturday service two staff down and never break a sweat, and she cannot get off the phone when I walk into a room without physically dropping it.
There have been packages. Small ones. She spirits them away somewhere I'm clearly not meant to look. She believes I haven't noticed, which is frankly offensive, because I noticed on day one and I have been keeping a record.
"Should I be worried?" I ask Sophie, when I run into her at the market.
Sophie's grin is far too wide. "Absolutely not."
"You know something."
"I know many things. I'm a doctor."
"Sophie."
"You're going to be very pleased," she says, and buys a melon, and refuses to say another word.
On Saturday morning Cat appears in the kitchen doorway while I'm having my coffee and says, "Get dressed."
"Good morning to you too."
"We're going out."
"Where?"
"It's a surprise."
"I loathe surprises."
"You'll like this one." She's smiling, but there's something white and strained at the edges of it, and one of her hands is jammed into her pocket in a manner that is not remotely casual.
I look at the pocket.
I look at her face.
Oh.
"Something comfortable to walk in," Cat says, far too quickly, and leaves the room.
So I put on a sundress and flat sandals and follow my fiancée out into the fields with my heart going like a rabbit, and I do not say a single word about it, because I am a woman of extraordinary restraint.
I last about four minutes.
"Cat."
"Mm."
"Is there something in your pocket."
"No."
"Cat."
"It's a phone, Iris."
"You're holding your phone in your other hand."
"Then it's a second phone." She marches on ahead of me through the rows, ears absolutely scarlet. "Stop talking."
She takes me up a rise at the far edge of the property — a little lift in the land I have somehow never walked to, where the whole valley suddenly opens out below: the farmhouse, the church tower beyond it, the cut fields running away in every direction.
Cat stops. Turns around. And I watch her lose her nerve in real time.
"Right," she says.
"Right."
"So." She clears her throat. "Monique told me something."
"All right."
"About this spot." She looks out over the valley instead of at me, which is how I know how bad this is.
"Marguerite brought Hélène up here. Nineteen eighty-one.
Got down on one knee in a lavender field a good thirty-two years before it would have been worth anything legally, and asked her to spend her whole life with her anyway. "
The valley goes slightly out of focus.
"She said yes," Cat says. "Obviously. Then they went home and told absolutely nobody, and got on with it for thirty-five years."
"Cat—"
"I know you've already said yes." She turns round, and her eyes are red. "I know that. You said yes in a kitchen with pastry on your face and I have thought about it every hour since. But I asked you like a woman dropping a tray of glasses, Iris. And you deserved—"
She stops.
"You deserved the version I meant to do," she says. "So I'm doing it."
And then she takes a small stack of index cards out of her back pocket.
I make a noise.
"Don't," she warns.
"You wrote cue cards—"
"I get one attempt at this and my brain empties out every time you look at me, so yes, Iris, I wrote it down." She glares at the top card. "There are four. It isn't a lecture."
She looks at the first one.
Then she puts them all back in her pocket without reading a word.
"No," she says. "That's rubbish. I'll just say it."
She takes both my hands.
"I want to be very clear about something, because I think it matters, and I think you've got it slightly wrong." Her thumb moves over my knuckles. "You didn't fix me."
I open my mouth.
"You didn't," she says. "I want that on the record, because one day somebody is going to ask us how this happened, and I don't want either of us telling it wrong.
I fixed myself. I read my grandmother's letter, and I sat in a kitchen for three days being a coward, and then I walked down that hallway on my own two legs and knocked on a door. Nobody did that for me."
She's crying now, and appears entirely unbothered by it, which is new.
"But you were there," she says. "That's the whole of it.
Every single time I turned round — being difficult, and correcting my paperwork, and alphabetising things that do not want to be alphabetised, and not going anywhere.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped waiting to be left.
" She laughs, wetly. "I didn't even notice it happening.
That's how you did it. You simply refused to leave until it stopped being remarkable. "
"Cat."
"Nearly done." She reaches into her pocket. "I had a whole passage about the lavender. It was extremely moving. You'll never hear it."
And then she's on one knee — in a field my grandmother knelt in — holding up a ring. A thin gold band with a small violet stone that catches what's left of the light.
"Lavender amethyst," she says. "Sophie found it. She's been unbearable about it for a fortnight."
"Cat—"
"Iris Beaumont-Clark." Her voice finally goes.
"I'm not going anywhere. Not tonight. And not on a wet Tuesday in February when there's nothing on and the pump's broken and we've run out of things to say to each other.
" She swallows hard. "I want the boring years. I want all of them. Will you marry me?"
"You already have a yes," I tell her. "You got one eleven days ago. You got it with pastry."
"I'd like another."
"Greedy."
"Iris."
I get down into the dirt with her, because if she's going to ruin a decent pair of trousers then so am I.
"Yes," I say. "Yes. Obviously yes. Yes on the rise, and yes in the kitchen, and yes on the wet Tuesday in February when the pump's broken." I take her face in my hands. "Ask me every week for the rest of your life. The answer is not going to get any different."
She kisses me so hard we both go over sideways into the lavender.
The ring fits. Of course it fits.
When I ask how she got my size she says, "I have my methods." When I press her, she admits she measured my finger with a length of butcher's string while I was asleep — which is the single most alarming thing I have ever heard, and I fully intend to be furious about it at some later date.
We lie in the cut stalks until the light goes and the stars come out and it becomes genuinely, unpleasantly cold, and neither of us moves.
"We should go in," Cat says eventually.
"Probably."
Neither of us goes in.
Below us the farmhouse sits in the dark with one light burning in the kitchen — because I left it on, because I always leave it on now, because somebody taught me that you leave a light on for the person who's coming home.
"Cat."
"Mm."
"Can I read the index cards?"
"Absolutely not."
"You'll show me eventually."
"I'll show you in about forty years," she says, "when you're too old to laugh."
"That's a very long engagement."
"Yes," Cat says, and turns her face into my shoulder. "Isn't it just."