There seemed to be a great deal to do in the winding up of a business but none of it was difficult, it would just need method and organisation. I did all that was required in the next three weeks which I spent either in the office or with Jonathan.
I had met him, as arranged, for lunch on that first Wednesday and he had given the work hardly a glance. “Come on, I can look at that later, let’s have a drink.”
After lunch he did talk very briefly about the work. “It looks good, you’ve done a great job but I will need to look at it.” I didn’t correct his assumption that it was I who had done the work. “Can you come back tomorrow to pick up my changes?”
After that I had to meet him again to give him back the corrected sheets.
“Back to London for a day or two.” He answered when I asked what he was going to do at the weekend. “But I’ll be back next Tuesday. Lunch?”
I had been wondering why he only ever asked me to lunch and not after work in the evening.
“Sorry, Tuesday I’ve got appointments during the day.” I tried to manoeuvre an evening date. Linda and Ted had left for the north and I was left with Maureen who seemed to have changed since Ted’s visit. It was like living with my step-mother and I didn’t enjoy it. “How about after work? Are you still staying at that pub? I could come round and meet you there.”
“A bit risky isn’t it? My territory and that sort of thing? You never know what might happen.”
He was being very obvious, but then so, I suppose, was I.
Despite it being my second wedding Jonathan wanted to make it a really big event.
He drew up a guest list that seemed to comprise mostly his family and colleagues at work, none of whom I knew.
“I’m not sure they would enjoy the day.” He argued when I gave him a list of people I wanted to invite. “It certainly won’t be a suitable event for children.”
I had told him very early on in our relationship that I had children from my first marriage. ‘They don’t live with me.’ I had said, rather defensively. ‘Then we don’t need to worry about them do we?’ he had answered without looking up from reading his paper.
“It’s not an event it’s my wedding.” He ignored my objections. “What about other members of my family, my friends?”
“I don’t think so. You always said you had no friends and you don’t get on with your family do you? No? Then we won’t invite any of them.”
“But …”
“No buts Susannah.” He had decided ‘Susannah’ had more style than ‘Annie’.
“My side of the church is going to be very empty.”
He didn’t pick up on the doubt in my voice. “Richard and Nicholas are ushers, they’ll distribute people evenly, regardless of whether they’re ‘yours’ or ‘mine’.” He was adamant and there were times when he used a tone of voice I could just not argue with.
“There won’t be any of ‘mine’ will there?” I muttered under my breath.
All the arrangements for the ceremony were out of my hands. We had to have the marriage ceremony itself in a Register Office but Jonathan planned a big blessing ceremony in a fashionable central London church.
“I’m not having my family come half way round the world simply to stand in a dingy office for ten minutes.”
“Well they don’t have to come half way round the world do they?” I asked, perhaps unwisely.
He gave me a withering look. “Of course they’ll come to my wedding. It would look very odd if they didn’t”
“But no one in my family is invited.”
“That’s different.” I thought at the time he meant that my parents were dead but as the wedding approached and I saw what it was turning into I realised he saw it as his wedding. He was on view to his work colleagues and superiors. I was simply a necessary extra.
I took no part in the decision of venue for the reception. The wife of a friend of his was a barrister and had agreed to sponsor Jonathan to have his reception in Middle Temple. I had soon learned that there was never anything unostentatious or cheap about Jonathan.
“Just sort out some wonderful outfits and leave the rest to me.” He had said when I had asked what he was planning, who was going to pay for it and whether I would have any say at all in the arrangements for my wedding day. He did, after something of a discussion, allow me to choose which theatre we all went to on the evening after the Register Office ceremony.
He didn’t even let me in on the secret of where he was taking me for our honeymoon.
“You’ve got to tell me or I won’t know what to take with me.”
“OK it’ll be hot. You’ll need formal clothes and casual ones. A bit of everything really.”
“That’s no good! That tells me nothing at all.” I tried to get him to tell me where we were going but he was adamant.
“It’s a surprise. You’ll love it.”
It was when he said that the solution was for me to only bring underwear, he would organise everything else, that I began to feel I was losing control not only of my wedding but of my whole life.
There were times when I thought, perhaps, I had made a mistake when I had accepted Jonathan’s proposal.
It had all happened so fast. It was after only a couple of meetings that we were taking every opportunity to make love, on the office floor, in his car in pub car parks, and, as it grew warmer, on a blanket on the ground in the woods that surrounded the mill.
“Is that it then?” I had asked, trying not to sound too unhappy when, on the last Friday in March, he said he wasn’t coming back to Kent the next week and he had told me what I already knew, that I would have no reason to return to Sevenoaks anyway.
“Between us? It’s certainly the end of the beginning, not necessarily the beginning of the end.”
“You’re teasing me. I don’t like that.”
“Well, you could marry me?”
It had been as casual as that, and I had answered in the same tone “I could, couldn’t I?”
From then on it was out of my hands.
I had told Maureen the week after the proposal as I packed my bags to move out. Her reaction was ambiguous.
“If you’re sure this is the right thing to do then I’m happy for you but you hardly know the man. Bring him here for dinner. Let me meet him.”
“I’ll try.” I didn’t hold up much hope that Jonathan would want to spend an evening with Maureen.
“It shouldn’t be a question of having to ask him, Annie dear, you should be able to tell him that it is expected of him and he should want to know the people who are important to you.”
I did ask him and he was dismissive. ‘What on earth would we talk about?’ he had said ‘I don’t know her.’ When I countered that he expected me to talk to all his colleagues and friends, people I didn’t know, he just said that that was different.
“It’s difficult, Maureen, he works such long hours and he’s so busy.” I gave the only excuse I could think of when I telephoned.
“He would make the time if he wanted to.” She answered coldly.
“It isn’t like that.” I replied in rather feeble fashion.
“Well I hope you’ll be very happy.” She seemed doubtful but perhaps a little relieved that she had done her duty and I was off her hands.
I suppose he had swept me off my feet. He showed me a lifestyle I had never dreamed existed. Dinner parties, theatre, shopping on his credit card, all became quite normal. It took very little time for me to get very used to not having to worry about money or what to do in the evenings. Through the summer of 1983 as all the arrangements that had to be made were being made by other people my job was to be where and when Jonathan needed me to socialise with his colleagues, to have sex with and, very soon, to clean his flat and do his ironing. My promise to David, again, forgotten as I lived my busy life. In any case apart from Ramesh’s treatment of Linda I had heard of nothing that could possibly be considered a threat to anyone in the family.
The wedding date was set for my 37th birthday, the 1st September.
I thought back to some of my birthdays and could think of none that had been particularly happy. There had been my second birthday party when everyone had caught Whooping Cough and Max’s daughter had died. All the way through my childhood it had marked the end of summer and the beginning of school. Seven years earlier, my 30th birthday, had been full of the hope that Carl and I would be together and we would enjoy our family life in Cambridge but that hadn’t been the best thing I had ever done. Now I was marrying Jonathan. Was that going to be just as stupid an idea? I was beginning to think so but, again, I had painted myself into a corner. So many arrangements had been made, so many people were committed to long journeys, it would be impossible to pull out now. And anyway. I loved Jonathan. Didn’t I.
My job was to be Jonathan’s wife, my career was to support his.
On the frequent occasions he was away working in America or Newcastle or Blackpool one or other of his colleagues would come round every evening to take me out to dinner, or to the theatre. He said he didn’t want me to be lonely but I began to think he just wanted to know what I was doing at all times. I lost contact, again, with all the people who should have mattered in my life.
I spent the days shopping, whiling away the hours in a health club or at the hairdresser with the wives and girlfriends of Jonathan’s colleagues. I became one of those women I had always previously despised ‘a lady who lunched’.
If anything my doubts increased as the wedding approached, I couldn’t call it off this late, could I? His family’s tickets were booked, all the arrangements were in place.
There was only one place I could have run and that was to Maureen and I didn’t think I would have much of a welcome if I turned up with my tail between my legs saying I had made a dreadful mistake. Again.
Perhaps I should have done.
Somehow I got through the two wedding days, the Register Office on the last day of August and then the big ceremony the next day. I hated every minute of both days. They were not what I would have chosen if I had been given any say whatsoever
It was two days spent in taxis between airports and hotels, dressing for one event, rushing home to change for another. I felt as if I was a spectator or had somehow strayed into someone else’s life as I knew so few people who ate the food Jonathan had chosen and listened to the music he thought his bosses would enjoy.
It all felt so wrong.
Sitting alone at the top table after the meal inaccurately called the ‘wedding breakfast’, I watched Jonathan laughing and joking with his colleagues. They weren’t friends. We had no friends. I had soon realised that all the men and women who worked for that management consultancy firm would stab each other in the back as soon as talk to each other. Only a few of each year’s intake would be promoted and those who weren’t were unceremoniously told to find some other way of making a living. Every conversation they held, everything they did in their lives was geared to getting through to the next year, up one step of the career ladder that was everything to them. I also learned that promotion wasn’t so much about how good they were at their work as what sort of person they were. I watched Jonathan as he talked to his colleagues and their wives and I realised why he had married me. He had to have a wife to have a chance to make it to the next level, with the decision being made in late September the timing was perfect. This whole pantomime of a wedding was to establish him as Partner Material. I was simply a means to that end.
“You look a little lonely up here. Where’s your gorgeous husband?” I tried to focus on the woman, somewhat younger than me, who had sat down in Jonathan’s vacant seat. “Where are you going on your honeymoon? Susannah?” I just wanted her to go away yet I couldn’t make a scene. That wouldn’t do at all.
“I don’t know. It’s a surprise.”
“He hasn’t told you? How on earth did you know what clothes to pack?”
“I didn’t. He did it.”
She laughed in a rather forced manner “Jonny has always been a complete control freak.” I had never heard anyone call him Jonny. But then I had only known him six months. For all I knew he had lived for years with this woman who called him Jonny’ and who seemed to know him far better than I did.
“I bet I know where he’s taking you.” She carried on talking, oblivious to the absence of any encouragement. “It’ll either be Amsterdam, he loves Amsterdam, or India. Yes, I’d bet on India. It’ll be somewhere he can easily get hold of stuff. We all went to Amsterdam last year and were OK with the coffee shops and the cannabis bars but Jonny wanted more and he always found it. I’m sure he’ll tell you about it. We all had such a great time. Jonny was with Flic then, he’s told you about Felicity hasn’t he? No? Oh he will. They worked together and were very close, but she didn’t make the cut last year. I think she’s in Hong Kong now working for a bank or something. It doesn’t matter. He was never going to get serious with her. He needed someone from outside the firm. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes the honeymoon. I’d bet on India because there he’ll get everything he needs if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t like her false laughter or the tone of her voice and I had absolutely no idea what she meant.
She was right though, the honeymoon was in India.