“He was being provocative. I was merely responding as any man would.”
Perhaps it was unwise for me to start texting Julian after the post-rehearsal dust up at the other Airbnb, but I needed some clarification on our supposed “deal.” What exactly, I messaged Jules once I was back at homebase in the vicarage, was my silence about his relationship with Fenn buying if he could goad Alex so freely? It was highly hypocritical, I argued, for him to push Alex’s hottest buttons — Minty and me — as hard as he did, but I was the one who got the stern warning about being careful about crossing lines when I’d mentioned in passing Julian’s “girlfriend in LA.”
He didn’t reply right away, which really was for the best. Having been turfed out of the other house (quite rightly, probably), none of us felt particularly ready for bed on our return to homebase. Nobody felt like messing with lighting another fire so late at night, so the six of us gathered around the farmhouse kitchen table, taking in the low, ambient heat of the Aga stove. Alex made himself useful, handing down tumblers from the top shelf of the cabinet over the sink to Miranda, who then topped them each up in turn with a few fingers of the 16 year old Aberlour Will had scared up at a local off licence. (Honestly, I was completely brandied out at this point, so I was grateful for an adjustment to the spirits.)
With Sasha, I fixed a makeshift cheeseboard — some cheddar and Bath Olivers, a few handfuls of smoked almonds, and the jar of potted beef paste which Will had purchased as a gag for Charlie, some in-joke for which only the men present knew the context. (Alex had also thought it hysterical earlier that morning, but none of them would explain, no matter how much Miranda snipped and pleaded in equal portions.)
After a rather sombre cheers, Miranda sneezed across from me and broke the uncomfortable silence that briefly followed. “Sorry,” she breezed, blowing her nose on a pink handkerchief Will fished out of the pocket of his rust-colored corduroys and passed over. “Pink, Will?” Peering a little closer at the hem, she tapped her finger on the embroidery there, what looked to me like a forget-me-not and an initial. “Who is ‘K’?”
“Nobody important,” he grunted, and made to swipe for the scrap of cloth before appearing to remember it was now filled with Miranda’s snot. “You can keep it.”
“Gosh,” Sasha whispered, leaning across the table towards Will, who was daubing beef paste on a Bath Oliver. “Ran, I think our William let someone in his heart for once. Our baby is a big boy at last.”
Will echoed his earlier grunt with another. “Biggest mistake I’ve made in a while,” he said through a mouthful of cracker and beef. Reaching for the almonds, he stopped himself. “Gotten a bit too porky, I mustn’t.”
“Who told you that?” Miranda asked. “‘K’? And when did you stop telling me about your conquests?”
“Never said she was one.” Pushing back his chair, Will rose from the table and yawned ostentatiously. “Best be off to bed. Shoulder’s killing me from this morning. Mel, you on breakfast duty again?”
I started to speak but Alex cut me off. “She’s not. She’ll be staying in bed and you all can bloody well fend for yourselves.” I hadn’t been paying attention to Al — I’d been keeping an eye on my phone for a response from Julian — but he’d peeled the label off the empty wine bottle (who’d had that today?) on the table and had torn it into jagged little pieces he was pushing around the rough wood of the tabletop with a fork.
“No need for the menace, old man. I know Jules wound you up, but steady on. Just a question.” Will grabbed his glass and pushed through the kitchen door; we heard his heavy tread tromp up each of the fifteen steps to the floor above.
In his wake, there wasn’t the usual easy flow of conversation between us all. Sasha should have been needling Charlie about his non-existent love life. Miranda and Alex should have been scrolling through pictures Ran had taken of Lucy in Dorset playing on the beach the weekend before. I should have been watching them all, taking in the pleasure of just being with some of the people I love the most, yet see the least. Instead, Alex and Miranda sat side by side, pointedly ignoring each other in favor of their phones. With some professional distance, Charlie finished inspecting the moles on Sasha’s back (nothing that looked bad, but he recommended a check with her own GP back in Kensington). And when I wasn’t staring at my own phone, my eyes were closed as the pathetic scene from earlier that evening played before me again and again.
But whisky has a marvellous way of unfurling me, loosening my joints and my tongue and my mind. Open mouth, apply liquid, let go. Before I thought too much about it, I asked. “So you all believed Julian? That I was cheating on him?” Another tot in the glass to top me up, why not?
“Sweetness,” Alex warned, glowering at me, not sounding sweet in the slightest. “No one thinks it now.” He pointed his fork at the other three in turn. “Do you? Sash? Charlie? Miranda?”
No one moved. Well, that’s a fib. Charlie sipped at his whisky, Miranda stared at her nails and Sasha squirmed in her seat and kept opening and closing her mouth, like she had something to say.
Alex pointed the fork again at her. “Well? What’s eating at you?”
“When we were in Suffolk — I mean, when most of us were in Suffolk — you two were pretty obviously in love with each other. I could tell, and Annabelle kept asking me about it.” Sasha twirled one of her honey blonde braids around her wrist before raising it to her mouth for a nibble. “You were pretty sloppy, you do realize, all those moony eyes and blushes across the living room. Everything was so… tense, and you seemed to be trailing her wherever she went. And then when Mel begged off birdwatching with her feeble little cold, and you went back to ‘make sure the heater was working’ I think we all knew.”
“She didn’t ask me to come back,” Alex retorted. “I just didn’t want to be cooped up in a bird hide with that cunt of husband of hers for three sodding hours.”
Charlie snorted. “Thanks for abandoning us, mate. He was a right shit to the rest of us instead. You should have heard the things he said to Annabelle about her lifestyle, just awful. If she wasn’t such a good sport about it, I might have coshed him myself.”
“Poor Annabelle,” Miranda and I moaned in unison. Like his mother, Julian is not a fan of Annabelle’s post-Bedales life out in the country, raising chickens and organic vegetables. Her father had agreed she could take a gap year before taking up a place at Merton College, Oxford, but she’d never gone up when the time came, opting instead to rusticate on various East Suffolk smallholdings since she was 19. Jocasta despairs of her — though Annabelle rides, she will not hunt and pointedly refuses to attend any event that required her to wear something fancier than a Shetland wool sweater and a pair of jodhpurs. I still don’t quite understand how she shares DNA with any of the other Cranfords and suspect she might actually be a changeling.
Sasha sniffed. “Poor Annabelle my arse. She’s happy as a lark in Theberton, far enough away from home and not on the route to London so her mum stays away.”
“The point,” Alex broke in, “is not whether you thought it. It didn’t happen. Not that morning, not the rest of the time we were there. But somehow you all thought the worst of us.”
We were all startled by Miranda honking into the mysterious Miss K’s hankie again. “But it wasn’t thinking the worst. We were all cheering for you.” Jealousy raked over me as she overlaid her hand on Al’s. “Annabelle came up with that scheme to have Jules take Sash to Saxmundham, you know.”
“Belle did?” Alex puzzled. “Now there’s a turn up for the books. Never thought she’d have gotten involved in any of our drama.” He plucked Miranda’s hand from his and placed it back on top of the pink handkerchief. “Try not to get me sick, Ran.”
Charlie cleared his throat. “The point of all of this is that even if we did believe it — and we all did, there’s no point in lying — we all thought it would be for the best. No one thought worse of you, either of you. And look at you now!”
“Mischief managed,” I whispered, then repeated myself a little louder. “Mischief managed. Charlie’s right, Alex. Julian’s just poking at you to see how high you’ll jump.”
Alex started to speak, but paused, dropping his head a little, tapping one long finger on the table, watching it tep-tep-tep on the wood. “I did jump pretty high tonight, didn’t I?” His curls hung low over his forehead; the uncertain, uneasy adolescent Al I once knew had returned, just for one moment. The same one who feared and loved and rejected and idolized Julian in ever-shifting measures. That Al who had always wanted to pin Jules against the wall and clobber him, see his eye swell purple and blue from a well-landed punch, feel a trickle of his best friend’s blood drip down his hand. And perhaps even still craved Julian’s love and respect and devotion, even now.
“So? You were marvellous.” Miranda rubbed his shoulder, long strokes, markers of an easy intimacy I found myself less willing to tolerate in person than in brief glimpses on Instagram or Facebook or a video call. What a hypocrite you are, Melissa, I thought. You used to touch him like that when he was Miranda’s, fill your greedy hands with his body like that. (No one would say that to me, so I might as well say it to myself.)
On my left, Charlie tutted. “Entirely too much drama for old codgers like us. And may I be honest, Al? You shouldn’t be pulling stunts like that in front of Minty. She might laugh it off now, but what if Julian catches her ear and convinces her that you can’t be trusted not to take your anger out on those you love the most?”
Alex scoffed and waved the thought aside dismissively. “She knows me too well. I never made her feel unsafe, even when –“
“Yes, I know. But it wasn’t so very long ago that she was convinced that you might be too unstable to be around Lucy. Now, most of that was her father’s doing, but you know Min. She’s… susceptible to influence.” (That was a very kind characterization by Charlie of Minty’s deep need to please all and sundry, to be compliant, a compulsion even stronger than my own.) “You’re about to take her daughter away for three days, the first time you’ve ever been allowed to do that. Don’t fuck that up out of some misguided hunger to put Jules in his place.”
In my hand, the buzz of a text vibrated — Julian blaming his conduct on Alex’s provocation, like a small boy bleating, “He started it!” As I’d left the other house, I’d turned around to wave goodbye to Minty, but Julian was blocking the doorway. Across his face had been smeared a broad grin of satisfaction, and he stood hands on hips, legs spread, chest thrust out, like a smug, bastardy Superman. I didn’t doubt he’d been waiting for months to lay his hands on Alex, or that their shoves were an amuse-bouche before a larger and more violent serving, should the occasion arise.
And Jules and Alex had an entire wedding ceremony and reception to bring out that course, tender, raw, salted with years of love and enmity. Dinner, I worried, was ready to be served.
***
After Charlie’s kitchen table warning to Alex to keep his cool, the five of us had peeled away, one by one, until only Alex and I were left at the table. Julian had sent me another text shortly before Sasha, the last straggler, had tidied up the remnants of our late-ish feast with some mild assistance from Al.
why don’t you make your excuses and come outside for some fresh air — I can be there in 10 and explain more clearly
How absurd — even if I could concoct some halfway-believable reason for pottering about the back garden for a while at midnight, it was lunacy to assume Al wouldn’t want to be with me.
Are you drunk??? I wrote back, keeping an eye on Alex, who I could tell was trying to impress me by loading the dishwasher with the plates Sasha was rinsing off in the porcelain farmhouse sink. I am NOT going outside and I am NOT talking to you tonight. Go be with Amanda. I am not available.
Sasha and Alex nattered amiably in their chores. From what I could hear, Sasha was worried about Miranda. “I know she’s had dinner with Bob recently. I asked her about it, and she didn’t exactly deny it. She just said she has dinner with lots of people, some of them more interesting than others.”
Alex bumped his head on the underside of the counter as he closed the dishwasher and let out a string of cuntcuntingfuckingfuckcuntowowOW. “Send me a message if you think Bob’s sniffing around again. Last thing any of us need is more Bob and his antics.”
Sasha polished a tumbler distractedly, polishing the same spot over and over with a white tea towel. “She’s restless, Al. Surely you can see it.” Two more texts pinged in as Sasha’s voice dropped low enough that I couldn’t hear.
I miss you sometimes you know, you should know
when I touched you today you still felt like you
It was as if Julian’s hand was on my bare shoulder, as it had been earlier that day, skin upon skin, the straight and lethal shot from his touch to my core. That ineffable it that stoked the desire for moreandmoreandmore that I’d struggled to tame since Josh Brookes had first tapped its power nearly 20 years before. “I never should have let you know,” Josh had told me the week before school started up again, at the end of that strangest, darkest summer. “You’re too greedy, Melissa. I have to teach you to control your hunger before it consumes us both.”
The texts on the screen scared me, not least because I might have written them myself. I deleted the chain immediately and turned off the screen. When I looked up, Sasha was waving over her shoulder, sloping off from the kitchen, leaving Al alone with me. Guilt for my texting with Julian washed over me as he folded up his tea towel and joined me at the table. Instead of sitting, he reached out a hand and pulled me into a pirouette, before folding me into his arms.
“Ah, my lovely. Alone at last.” He tilted my chin up with two fingers, then touched a kiss to my lips. “Shall I take you here or will you last until we reach the bedroom?” Another kiss, deeper, the raisiny taste of the whisky passing from his mouth to mine. “You’re so perfectly greedy, and I have what you want.”
As a member of the groom’s party, Al would have a much earlier start than the rest of us, but he never let a pre-dawn call stop him when it comes to a little carnal embrace. Alex’s worship of my body is a gift I rarely reject, but this evening I was — for the first time I could recall — perhaps a little fearful of him, of the high temper he’d been in earlier. Like a high-spirited cat batting a mouse about purely for the fun of it, he might accidentally stick me with a claw. And — though I did not want to think on it too much — his was not the only body I was thinking of.
I stifled a mostly-real yawn. “Too tired.” (I tipped a finger on his sweet pout.) “And you’ll have such a long day tomorrow, my love. Can I…” I trailed the finger down from his mouth to draw a lazy criss-cross upon his chest, drawing it back up with the rest of my hand to stroke the stubble on his cheek. “Can I have it twice tomorrow instead?”
I may call Alex a sex pest sometimes, but he will not push me when I have no appetite. He was witness to the joyless sex I engaged in with Julian (or at least he could hear it through the wall) in our fruitless quest for a child. In those last few months I lived with Julian, when my calls with Al had become less about his marriage than about my own, I told him about the sickening humiliation of having to be available for sex whenever my period tracker said I was likely to be fertile. Or when Julian believed I was likely to be fertile, which was several times a day, almost every day. I even flew with him to Miami once for four days and hung around in the hotel like an accused felon on house arrest, waiting for him to breeze in between business meetings to have the most dismal sex, simply because I was ovulating.
So instead of pressing his desire — and his desire was writ in a looping scrawl in his half-closed eyes — he touched his lips to my wrist, our private message to each other these days in recognition of the chance we lost that very first night to be and stay together. “If it’s twice,” he said, “then yes. But not three times. I am nearly 35 now, you know.” Scooping me up over his shoulder, he smacked my ass once, sharply. “I’m still young enough to do this, lass, so enjoy it while you can.”
“I’m not enjoying it,” I mumbled into his sweater. Which was partially true — that smack was meant in good cheer, but it smarted all the same. The sentiment was lost on him, as he carried me upstairs, humming “Roaming in the Gloaming” to himself, breaking full-throated into song at the top of the stairs as he reached the chorus.
Roamin’ in the gloamin’ on the bonnie banks o’ Clyde,
Roamin’ in the gloamin’ wi’ ma lassie by ma side,
When the sun has gone to rest,
That’s the time that we love best,
Oh, it’s lovely roamin’ in the gloamin’.
“Oh SHUT IT!” Miranda’s muffled shout passed through the door to our right. “You two are disgusting, naff off.”
Alex nudged open the door to our room with his stocking foot, and slowly let me down into the ugly chintz chair. He kneeled at my feet, and gently rolled his head onto my lap, letting me tangle my fingers in his tumble of curls.
“Big day tomorrow,” I murmured. “Do you ever think about yours?”
“You mean ours? All the time, gorgeous.” His cheek was warm through my thin leggings.
“No, I mean your last one,” I corrected. “Your wedding day. It was beautiful, you know. You both were so radiant.” This was true. While Al’s happiness was born more from relief that he’d managed to satisfy his family by choosing a bride whom he also quite honestly enjoyed spending time with, Minty’s glow might have been slightly enhanced. Though none of us knew it then, Al had apparently knocked Minty up two nights before, by her reckoning. (“We were too tired to do it the night of, and the night after he was too hungover, and then it didn’t even happen again for another week because he had to go on a business trip to Amsterdam almost immediately.”) They’d lost this dream-baby before the 12-week scan. Minty still spoke from time to time about how Lucy should have had an older brother or sister, if she hadn’t been so selfish as to drink on her wedding day. (Patently absurd — Minty had four glasses of champagne the entire evening, but she needed to blame something.)
“She was so happy then. I was a cur, as always. Stood up there and vowed to love her, when I wasn’t in love with her yet. And honor her, which I never did.” Alex drew me up from the hideous chintz chair and led me to the too-high bed. “This bed really is absurd,” he mused, boosting me onto its surface. “Why do you ask?”
I didn’t want to be honest. I didn’t want to tell him I was thinking of my own wedding, how I’d felt like my dress was a winding sheet, how seeing him standing beside Julian as I said my own vows felt like the punishment I deserved. You see, Julian had had one last trick for us, for Al and me, one last dig at us both. Though he’d been paying Alex to be loathsome to me, to force any lingering trace of affection from my mind before the wedding, that wasn’t the end of the pain to be inflicted on us. Oh no. Alex was then to “make nice” with me for Julian’s sake — it wouldn’t do to have his wife and best friend at daggers drawn before the wedding and beyond.
Over emails and phone calls — as we would again some six years later — we drew closer again, missives and chats in which Al tried to explain away his about-face from love to contempt as mere jealousy. “I sometimes wish we had worked it out, Mel, and I was lashing out for being stupid enough to lose you again. You shouldn’t forgive me, but for Julian’s sake… let’s just try. I know my track record isn’t very good, but we both owe it to him.” I was very careful with him, and tried not to trust him or recall any of the reasons I had ever loved him — his humor and kindness, his tender concern for those he cared for, his bravery and intelligence.
But as cautious as I was with Al, he did not return the favor. I suspected that there was more to it than simply wanting to keep Julian happy. Alex is no fool — it wasn’t like he was flipping a switch, and going from the nasty little missives and 4 am calls to declaring his undying love. No, he approached it gently, five minute Skype chats and brief emails “just to show Jules we can be cordial.” As time went by our conversations became longer, and I shared some of my worries about being a good wife to Julian.
But I was wary this time of any criticism he might have of my husband-to-be — as Julian had pointed out, Alex was not my best friend and was an incorrigible flirt. I was not to encourage him as I had in the past. I would stay true to my dearest, sweetest love, my Julian, no matter how unerring and true Alex’s criticisms might be. After all, had Julian ever abandoned me? Alex had, twice. Had Julian ever humiliated me in front of friends? There had been that uncomfortable incident on the internet forum, but those were strangers. Alex had denounced me in front of our friends as a silly, slutty little girl whose seduction was effortless. No, I would keep Alex at arms’ length and never let him in again.
Not that it did much good. A month before the ceremony, the unruly truth came tumbling out of the box Alex had tried to keep it contained in. On an otherwise unremarkable Wednesday afternoon in Pasadena, two remarkable things happened. Dana, my office nemesis who normally kept close tabs on the amount of time I spent on the phone on wedding-related topics, was out of the office for a training session, leaving me alone in our two-person pod for a change. Second, Alex drank most of a fifth of vodka, and around 4 pm my time called me to confess to, well, just about everything. About why he’d not pursued me when I’d first chased after him. About the payments he’d sought from Julian to pay for Fenn’s stays at the Priory, and how the cruelty he’d dealt me was his payment in return for her care. About how debased and crooked and pathetic he felt, how trapped by the precariousness of his family’s circumstances, constantly perched on the blade’s edge of ruin. About how he’d loved me in Bristol, never stopped loving me, really. About how he thought we’d finally made it after that weekend in Seattle, only to find Julian had swooped in again and won me back. About how he’d vowed to spurn me at last, and how he’d taken some foul and dark pleasure in needling me about my unsuitability as a wife, about my fickle heart, about my own cruelty in stringing both him and Julian along for years.
“Sending you that picture of Julian snorting coke off of Amanda’s arse made me realize just how fucked up it all was, sweetest.” (Ah! I’d missed his funny little pet name for me, thought I’d never hear it again, and there it was, slurred and blurred and all for me.) “Did a line myself off her tits” (I did not need to hear that, but there it was) “and then grabbed that pic of your precious Julian in his truest form. I thought I’d enjoy it when I’d planned it out, but I just felt like shite. As vicious as Julian.”
I didn’t say anything for a while, just listened to confession after confession pour out: how he was sleeping with Amanda to know he was capable of feeling anything more than bitterness; how he resented his mother and sister their freedom, living in his beloved and broken-down home and pursuing their art, not working 12 hours a day, designing trading models which would only make someone else fabulously rich; how Julian even now was still his best and closest friend, capable of soft-hearted compassion and love; and how very, very much he regretted not clasping me tighter when he had me.
I gave him absolution, but I would not give him the love he sought from me, not even when he slushed his way through paeans to my essential goodness, as if I were some exemplary creature formed in crystalline perfection, and not my awkward and crabby self. Not even when he told me he loved me, had loved me, would love me, and to be Julian’s best man would be torture. “If it’s torture,” I ventured, “then you don’t have to be here. I mean, I’d love to have you celebrate with us, but not if it’s going to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you anymore, Alex.”
“Ah, sweetest. It’s not so simple, not so simple. I have to be there. I just want you to know…”
“Know what?” I already knew, but my gluttonous self wanted to hear it in his lovely, sozzled voice. I wanted to wrap his words around me and wear them as proof to the world that I was something more than Julian’s girl.
“That only one of us up there that day will ever love you as much as I do.”
And on that afternoon when I promised to love and honor and obey (obey! some good that promise did) Julian Charles Crispian Cranford, I did so knowing of Alex’s billowy misery hidden behind his placid mask of good cheer. When he passed the ring to Julian to slip on my finger, I pretended not to see the quaver of resistance in Al’s hand. It didn’t make me feel powerful, knowing that both these men desired me. I felt… guilty. That was Julian’s punishment to us both — misery for thinking anyone but him would win.
But I didn’t say any of this to Alex as we settled in that ludicrous bed, as I tangled my legs in his. “Oh,” I lied, “I was just thinking of how beautiful Minty looked that day. That’s all.” I burrowed deeper into his arms.
Silence in the blue bedroom, silence in the hallway of the vicarage, silence enough that all I heard was the steady tik-tik-tik of the Patek Philippe on the nightstand. It would be a big day tomorrow, with not enough silence.
***
Here of course, it is December, and not the events of two months past. I have been in Santa Monica since Sunday morning, after a painful family holiday party on Saturday in La Cañada Flintridge (my father’s incipient MAGAdom has spread to his two younger brothers, much to my aunts’ chagrin), which was only enlivened by the sheer number of margaritas I sank with my cousins Pearl and Finn. I’m here to buy furniture — a Sunday trip to HD Buttercup was fruitful — with Jenn, whom I’m staying with, and who forced me to watch not only A Christmas Prince but also A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding in a double feature. (I drew the line at having to watch the third film about a royal Christmas baby.)
And unknown to Jenn, and very sub rosa, I’m here to see Kayla, who sent me a text last week asking me, “What do you know about open marriages? Do they always end badly?”
I don’t really have an answer for her, but I have many, many questions.
meandering again 