Forty-eight years earlier…
They arrived together, Douglas and Nancy. Nancy looked different, the same, but transformed from when she’d left the flat earlier. She was radiant, glowing, suddenly grown-up, in a way that Tess couldn’t put her finger on. Tess was standing at the kitchen sink doing her vocal exercises, trying to reach to the bottom of her diaphragm, but her voice just wouldn’t behave. The exercises were meant to help, but really, the stress was knotting her from deep within. She hadn’t sung properly in months, just limped through the Christmas assessments. The all-important end of year examinations were only days away and Tess was drowning beneath it all.
‘Douglas,’ she breathed when she turned around. He was standing with the light at his back, it feathered about him, as though he was a silver saint. When she looked at him now, he reminded her of one of those superheroes from the TV – a Simon Templar with a slightly taciturn glint when you fell into his bad books. His hair, golden and heavy, flopped roguishly across his left eye and, as always, she wanted to reach out and push it to the side. She was delighted to see him. What had she thought? That Nancy brought him back for her. A little gift to make everything right? ‘What are you doing here?’ And then she noticed their hands. Interlaced in a way that couldn’t be easily pulled apart.
‘Nancy said it would be better coming from both of us.’ Douglas had the grace to keep his voice empty, even if his words were loaded.
‘We’re in love,’ Nancy whispered in her tinny tiny voice. ‘Douglas and I are going to…’
‘You can’t be in love with Douglas, Nancy. That’s ridiculous. You know how I’ve felt. You’ve seen, these last few weeks, you’ve known all along, and even if I didn’t say anything you knew that this can’t be…’ It was a bad dream, surely Tess would wake up now, laugh about it later.
‘Tess, we’re in love. Douglas has asked Father if he can marry me. We…’ She held out her left hand, a narrow gold band sat on her third finger. Tess saw the glint of a small diamond, a cluster of glassy sparkles. For a moment, she held her breath, how could something so small destroy so much? It was just gold and gemstones, after all. ‘We are getting married.’ It was a statement of fact; all agreed before there was anything that Tess could do about it. They must have spent months planning this. Months of meeting behind her back, talking, holding hands, falling in love. Oh, God, Tess thought the room was going to tilt over, maybe the whole world was capsizing around her. Had Douglas been in love with Nancy while Tess was throwing herself into his arms for all those nights on the way home from the Sunset Club? There was no fear of Nancy letting herself down like that.
‘But I loved you, Douglas…’ the words fell from her, the last bit of dignity draining from her now. ‘I thought…’
‘Whatever you thought, Tess. I told you, in the end, I couldn’t marry someone like you. I don’t love you…’ He looked then at Nancy. His bride-to-be had always been the second-rate version of Tess. She couldn’t sing or entertain people with her lively wit, but she was ladylike, remote and it turned out, not quite so uncomplicated as Tess had always assumed. ‘I’ve never loved you.’ The words were cruel, not so much in what they meant, but more what she could see in his eyes. He despised her. She was little more than scum beneath his shoes even as she was turning herself inside out for him.
‘You’ll meet someone else, Tess. You’ll meet some nice boy and fall madly in love with him and you’ll look back on this day and laugh about how silly this whole mix-up was,’ Nancy said. A small encouraging smile quivered on her lips, as though all would be well, if they just called it a mix-up. What did Nancy know of love, Tess wondered for a moment, what did she know of falling in love, was she capable of the kind of passion Tess had within her?
‘This will never be right, Nancy. You knew how I felt about Douglas.’
‘You never put it into words, Tess. You never said,’ Nancy answered as quick as a flash.
‘Honestly, have I ever needed to? You knew, after the Christmas Ball, you knew my heart was broken. You knew and you…’ Tess thought, that this was the worst part of it all, worse than losing Douglas, ‘you betrayed me. You betrayed me, whereas Douglas just broke my heart.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake, there’s no need for this melodrama,’ Douglas said.
‘Maybe you should leave, Douglas,’ Tess rounded on him. It would be better if he left now, before she completely fell apart. Without him here, maybe she could talk to Nancy, explain why she couldn’t marry him. If she knew how Tess felt, or what had happened between them all those nights, maybe…
‘I think we should both leave,’ Nancy said, turning on her heels. ‘I’m going back to Ballycove, until the wedding. It’s in July, by the way, the sixteenth.’ And then, they were gone, pulling closed the door behind them.
Tess stood, rooted like a hundred-year-old oak tree, her feet planted in the ground, her heart gnarling at the betrayal. It was unthinkable. Oh, my God, it was devastating. For a moment she forgot to breathe and then gasped, but that only brought the whole horror of it into starker reality. Douglas was going to marry Nancy. Surely, she would wake up from a terrible nightmare at any moment now. She heard the tap trickle ruthlessly behind her and knew, in some deep part of her, that the terror choking the air from her lungs was real and it was something that she would have to live with every single day of her life.
She stood there, for a long time, waiting for the news to settle, trying to take it in. She had lost Douglas; worse, she had lost him to Nancy. Nancy, who never put a foot wrong; who had always been the plain Jane, goody two shoes of them both. Douglas had fallen for Nancy in spite of all of that, or maybe, he had fallen for Nancy because of all those things. Nancy was untouched, refined and, ultimately, wife material, whereas Tess apparently was not. Of course, there was no making sense of it, not there and then, not for a very long time afterwards.