Chapter Thirteen
When Luke dropped me back at the house, it was past midnight, and Flint had gone to bed, which was just as well. My asymmetric dress was now far more asymmetric than it had been when I left, more creased and crumpled, too. My knickers were in my bag and one of the pink heels was decidedly wonky. But it had, all in all, been a very satisfactory experience.
As I turned to push the door closed behind me my foot slipped across the doormat and I sprawled untidily into an attack of the splits. Hauling myself to my feet, I found that I had stepped onto an envelope, the resulting lack of friction being the cause of my skid.
It was plain brown, no name or address, the sort of envelope pushed through unwary letterboxes by door-to-door double-glazing hitmen, or those selling unspecified insurance, although those missives were usually unsealed and addressed to The Householder. The absence of any identifying name made me wonder, so I slid a finger under the flap and tore it open.
‘You can’t have everything you want.’
That was all the sheet of paper said, the words written in large, curly letters, like the handwriting of a fifteen-year-old girl who has only recently stopped dotting her i’s with little love-hearts and forming the lower loops of g’s and y’s into spirals.
Paranoia bit deep. What couldn’t I have? Yeah, I’d got the money, but that was properly mine. The only other thing I had was my job, but not even the very bitterest of disillusioned hacks would hold that against me. Managing ads for the local free press is a bit like pole-dancing, but without the healthy exercise.
My hand shook. I felt a kind of shame at receiving such an obvious and tangible form of someone’s hatred, and I had the urge to tear the paper into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet. Then, as I became numb to fear, it was replaced by a curious elation. Why, exactly, did I assume this note was for me? But then, that begged the question, who was it for? Had Flint’s sudden urge to throw up his extremely lucrative Beijing post and replace it with skulking under a skylight and playing The Smiths been the result of a misplaced love affair? The script looked feminine, but that didn’t really mean much, and some of Ash’s scorned exes had been given to snidey little notes like this. A little voice in my head whispered that I’d never seen Cal’s handwriting, although I couldn’t imagine anyone less the type to send anonymous letters than Cal. He’d just be weird at you until you took out a restraining order.
No, I decided. No one could be harmed by a note they hadn’t even seen and I became surer by the second that it wasn’t aimed at me. In fact, I thought as I lurched up to bed in my one-and-a-half stilettos, maybe it wasn’t even aimed at this house. Neither we, nor next door, where three young science teachers lived in a hotbed of physics intrigue, had conspicuous numbers. By the time I’d showered and fallen into bed, I was absolutely convinced that the whole thing was a complete mistake.
Having been spark out at one a.m., I was a bit confused to find myself wide awake and sweating at three.
I was getting married? How the hell had that happened? My treacherously anti-sleep brain replayed the proposal moment over and over again, with added close-ups. And I’d said yes! Did I even want to get married? My parents had never bothered, drilling into us that ‘marriage was a symptom of the patriarchal oppression of women’ – because of their views Bree and Paddy had married secretly in the Caribbean. I’d been grateful about that, it had spared me the ordeal of being the dumpy bridesmaid among their tall, elegant friends. Were my fantasies – closely guarded since I’d entered my teens – of a big wedding and a future brood of children playing outdoors in a sort of Blytonesque 1950’s style, really just my way of rebelling? It had been quite hard to rebel against Iain and Sophie’s permissive parenting, maybe Bree and I had chosen the same path? Now my reading material was made up of articles on outdoor catering and big pictures of spot-free women wearing whipped cream and curtains. It wasn’t natural.
I turned onto a cool patch of sheet.
We’d only been dating for, well, since we only usually met in the evenings, but factoring in the weekend in the Lakes, hours. But he said he knew, said he’d known from the moment he set eyes on me again in the Grape and Sprout, that I was The One. And how could he not be The One for me when he’d been my obsession throughout my twenties?
My heart was steadying now. After all, it wasn’t some nobody from the back of beyond. It was Luke Fry asking me to marry him. He of the violet black eyes and the sexiest little bottom this side of a Strictly Come Dancing professional. How could we fail? He loved me with, let’s face it, quite a lot of passion. And I loved him with … did I? Oh, yes, I loved him. How could I not? Of course I did, with a ten-year back-catalogue of longing. The sex was great, we laughed, when we did laugh, at more-or-less the same things, we both wanted our lives to be a success – compatibility was assured.
With this thought comforting my mind, I turned onto my side and floated off into fluffy dreams of white dresses and rose petals and Luke inexplicably taking close-up photographs of me.