33. Iris
IRIS
I wake up alone, which is not how I went to sleep.
At some point in the small hours, Monique and Sophie let themselves into our bedroom — into our bedroom — and removed my fiancée from the bed like a piece of contraband.
"Tradition," Monique said, in the voice of a woman who has never lost an argument.
"We live together," Cat said, from somewhere inside the duvet. "We have lived together for months. She has watched me eat a pain au chocolat standing over the sink."
"Not on the wedding day."
"Monique, it is four in the morning—"
"Out," said Monique.
And out she went.
So I wake at eight, alone, in a house that has plainly been up for hours. Footsteps in the hallway. Shouting from the kitchen — Mathilde, furious about something. Someone dragging a table across the terrace with no regard whatsoever for the flagstones.
Nadia comes in with coffee and does not hand it to me.
"Not until you've eaten."
"Nadia—"
"You haven't eaten since yesterday lunchtime. Sophie warned me. Sit."
She's brought bread and apricot jam on a tray, and she stands over me while I eat it, arms folded, exactly the way she used to stand over me before client presentations.
"You're shaking," she observes.
"I'm aware."
"Nerves or joy?"
I think about it seriously.
"I don't know," I say. "I've never had both at the same time before."
Nadia's face does something. She turns away and busies herself with my dress and does not comment.
The painting is above the fireplace. I go and look at it in my dressing gown, with jam on my thumb.
Marguerite at thirty, lit up like a window, looking at something outside the frame.
My mother is not going to be in that field today. She told me plainly, and I have not spent one hour pretending otherwise.
But she paid a storage bill every month for twenty-nine years on a crate she couldn't bring herself to open. And standing here, I find I can hold two things at once now — that she is a woman who did something unforgivable to me, and a woman who could never quite let go of her own mother's face.
I don't cry. I'm not spending today crying about her.
I go and put my dress on.
There is no aisle. There's a gap between two blocks of chairs and a path somebody has trodden flat through the stalks, and it isn't straight, because nothing here is.
The whole village stands up when I come out of the house.
A hundred and ten people. Some of whom I have never met. All of whom, apparently, have opinions about my life.
And at the end of the path, under an arch Jacques built in two days out of olive wood while swearing continuously, is Cat.
Purple silk. Hair down. Already completely wrecked, and we haven't started.
The distance is about sixty metres. I cover it in roughly four steps and also about a year.
Michel goes ahead of me.
He is forty-one years old, six foot two, and wearing a suit that cost more than the still. He is carrying a small wicker basket.
And he is scattering lavender.
Into a lavender field.
He is doing it beautifully — slow, solemn, two-handed, the way you'd sow a field you loved. He is taking it with total seriousness. And behind him, a hundred and ten French villagers are watching an enormous Englishman throw lavender at a field of lavender with tears standing in his eyes.
Monique is openly weeping. I don't believe she has understood the joke.
I'm not certain there's a joke anymore.
By the time I reach Cat I am laughing and crying at once and I have entirely forgotten to be nervous — which I suspect is exactly what he intended.
"Hi," Cat whispers.
"Hi."
"You—" Her voice goes. She stops. Tries again. "No. I've got nothing. I had something."
"You had index cards."
"I have retired the index cards."
The officiant, a brisk woman from the mairie who has clearly done four of these this week, clears her throat.
Cat goes first.
She's shaking. I can feel it through her hands.
"Right," she says. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you that you saved me. I told you what I think about that in a field three weeks ago, and I meant it, and I'm not doing it again in front of Monique."
Low, warm laughter from the chairs.
"So instead I'll tell you what you actually get."
She takes a breath.
"You get fed," she says. "Every day. Whether you want it or not. Whether you've earned it or not. If you've had a bad day, I'll feed you. If we've had a row, I will feed you badly, out of spite — but I will feed you."
I make a noise that is not dignified.
"You get me in the kitchen at three in the morning when you can't sleep and you won't say why.
You get me not asking. You get an omelette.
" Her mouth wobbles. "And you get me on the wet Tuesdays, Iris.
February. The pump's broken. Nobody's clapping.
Nothing about it is romantic in the slightest. That's the one I'm actually promising. Anybody can do today."
She looks at me, streaming, and her voice comes out perfectly steady.
"I'm going to want to run," she says. "One day. Probably more than once. And I'm going to tell you when I do — and then I'm going to stay anyway. That's it. That's the vow. That's everything I've got."
I have written mine down. I have copies with Nadia, in the kitchen drawer, and in two other places.
I don't look at any of them.
"You didn't fix me," I say.
Cat's breath catches.
"I want that said out loud, in front of everybody, because I know you, and you'll try to take the credit, and you don't get to.
" I hold her hands hard. "I fixed myself.
With your help — but I did it. I stood on that terrace and told my mother the truth, and I did it on my own two feet, and I want it on the record. "
Somewhere behind me Sophie says "yes" a great deal too loudly.
"But you were the first person who ever made me want to." My voice goes. "Thirty-two years, Cat. Nobody had ever looked at me like there was something underneath worth digging for. You did. On day two. While being extraordinarily rude about my shoes."
"They were terrible shoes," Cat says.
"They were excellent shoes." I laugh, wetly.
"So. I promise to see you — not the version who cooks beautifully and never flinches.
The one who burns the toast and talks to the plants and gets frightened and goes quiet.
" I lift our joined hands. "You have been leaving rooms your whole life, Cat Aldridge. I promise to still be in this one."
Michel produces the cushion.
He has, I think, been waiting for this moment since roughly 2009.
The rings are plain gold, matching, engraved on the inside where nobody will ever see them.
choose love
"With this ring, I marry you," Cat says — and her hand is shaking so badly I have to help her.
"With this ring, I marry you."
"By the powers vested in me," says the woman from the mairie, "I declare you married."
She pauses.
"You may—" she begins.
She does not finish, because Cat has already got me.
A hundred and ten people make a noise I will hear for the rest of my life.
Somebody wolf-whistles. It's Nadia. I feel it's beneath her.
And the piano starts — the piano we did not own on Monday, played by a man whose name I still don't know, who tuned it for my grandmother for thirty years and has come to tune it one last time.
Cat's mouth is at my ear.
"Wife," she says.
I have to hold on to her arms.
"Say it again."
"Wife."
The party goes until four in the morning, and I remember it in pieces.
Mathilde, weeping openly, serving a fish course.
Duval dancing with Monique with the terrible correctness of a man who learned how in 1961.
Michel, who has drunk a very great deal, explaining the basket at length to a table of French farmers who speak no English. He is using his hands. They are nodding. One of them appears to be genuinely moved.
Jacques teaching me a dance I do not understand and will never be able to do again.
Sophie and Nadia, heads together at the end of a table, plotting something. I do not want to know.
An old woman I have never seen before in my life taking my face in both her hands and telling me something in French far too fast to follow — something that makes her cry, and then makes me cry. I still don't know what she said. I never will. I've decided it doesn't matter.
And Cat. Everywhere. Across the terrace, in a doorway, laughing with her head thrown back, feeding somebody.
Always, at some point in every minute, looking for me.
It's nearly light when the last of them goes.
We stand in the wreckage of the terrace. Glasses everywhere. A chair on its side. A hundred and ten people's worth of crumbs. Somebody's shoe.
"We should clear up," Cat says.
"Absolutely not."
"Mathilde will be back at nine."
"Then Mathilde can be appalled at nine."
Cat laughs. She has her shoes in one hand, her hair is a catastrophe, and there's lavender in it — and there's lavender in mine, and there is going to be lavender in this house for approximately the next fifteen years.
She takes my hand.
We go in. The kitchen light is on, because I left it on, because I always do now.
And she fills the kettle — at half past five in the morning, on her wedding night, still in her dress — because she is exactly who she is.
"Tea?" she says.
"Please," says my wife.