34. Cat
CAT
I wake up married, and the first thing I become aware of is that somebody is going to have to deal with the terrace.
Iris is face-down beside me, one arm flung across my ribs, still wearing an earring. There is lavender in the bed. There is, on further investigation, lavender in places that lavender has absolutely no business being.
It is twenty past nine.
Mathilde arrives at nine.
"Iris."
Nothing.
"Iris. Mathilde's here."
"No," says my wife, into the pillow.
My wife.
I lie there a moment and let it do what it does to me.
And then, from directly below the window, comes the sound of a woman discovering a crime scene.
"Catherine!"
So the first morning of my married life is spent on my knees on a stone terrace at half past nine — hungover, in yesterday's dress — being comprehensively told off in French by a sixty-nine-year-old woman with a bad hip.
Iris comes out ten minutes later with two coffees, no shoes, and hair like a haystack. Mathilde takes one look at her and softens by precisely nothing.
"You also," she says, and points at a broom.
Iris looks at me.
"She isn't joking," I tell her.
"I'm a bride."
"You were a bride yesterday," says Mathilde, without turning round. "Today you are a woman with two hundred glasses in a field."
It takes us until one in the afternoon.
We find things. Somebody's shoe, which we never identify. Michel's basket, upended beneath a chair, entirely empty. A single index card, face down in the lavender, which I reach before Iris does and eat.
"You did not just—"
"I did what had to be done."
Four unopened bottles of wine under a table, which we accept as a gift from God. One dancing shoe belonging to Monique, who will deny it.
And at the very bottom of the last bin bag, the little velvet cushion with the ring-ribbons still tied to it — which Michel has left behind deliberately, so that he can come back for it and be given lunch.
By two o'clock the terrace is clear, Mathilde has gone home, and Iris and I are sitting on the low wall in the sun with our feet in the gravel — filthy, wrung out, holding hands.
"That was our first day of marriage," Iris says.
"Yes."
"We cleaned up a field."
"We did."
"We were shouted at by a caterer."
"We were." I take the water she hands me. "How do you feel?"
Iris considers it seriously, the way she considers everything.
"Fine," she says. And then, sounding faintly surprised at herself: "Actually fine. Not — not radiant. Not transformed. Just fine. Just... this."
And she glances at me, slightly alarmed, as though she thinks she's given the wrong answer.
But that's it. That's the whole thing. That's the one I promised her in that field, in front of everybody, with my hands shaking.
Anybody can do the wedding.
"Good," I tell her. "That's the bit that lasts."
We go in at three and sleep for four hours in our clothes, and wake up starving in the dark, and there is nothing in the house, because a hundred and ten people ate all of it.
So I make an omelette.
Of course I do.
We eat it standing at the counter, out of the pan, with two forks, on our first night as a married couple. And Iris — who has been eating my food for six months and has never once said a word about it — puts her head on my shoulder while she chews.
"Cat."
"Mm."
"Every day?"
"Every day," I say.
And that's Sunday.