It hadn’t quite worked out as Grace had hoped. Andrew’s flight was due in at about 8pm and she had planned to take a half day and have a relaxing bath, maybe pick up a new perfume or earrings and then cook a nice dinner-cum-supper. She had bought a Japanese cookbook at Christmas that she had yet to try, and was toying with the idea of making something in honour of their planned honeymoon trip to Kyoto, arriving in the middle of the blossom season. They had booked a week there and had a further two weeks off, which they would just plan as they went. It had been busy in the run-up to the wedding and most of all she just wanted time off with Andrew all to herself. They had both been working hard for months and keeping three weeks off for the wedding meant taking very little time off during the rest of the year. Apart from a few days at Christmas and two long weekends—which were eaten up by friends’ weddings—they hadn’t really been off together except for Saturdays and Sundays. With Andrew’s travelling schedule—short in/out visits to Europe’s financial centres to give and receive PowerPoint presentations—the weekends were often a time to catch up and recover. He would sleep in most Saturday mornings, his body jumbled by moving one time zone east, then another time zone west, leaving Grace to enjoy solitary breakfasts or to go for a run. They would start synchronising at around lunchtime on Saturdays and build their weekend from there.
As she prepared for Andrew’s return from his last pre-wedding trip—an occasion which officially marked their entry onto the runway of married life—things started going wrong at work, as they usually did whenever she planned to leave early. There had been some misunderstanding that the numbers on an order had gone awry, which made the logistics people in the States freak out, so Grace had to wait for the time difference to catch up so that she could un-freak them, and explain that the numbers were cumulative, which is how they were supposed to be done, even if it didn’t look right. The conference call to sort it out took longer than expected as everyone agreed that they had some thinking to do. The people who made the decisions were not on the call, so Grace had to rescue everyone’s wasted time by saying that she would do numbers in both formats for now until a decision was made on the bigger picture. The conference call ended with her thanking ‘you guys’ who could now ‘get back to your breakfast,’ as she realised that the call had killed her plans for a bath, which she had been promising herself ever since she insisted that they get one in the house, and not just a shower room. Eventually she left work at that awkward mid-afternoon period, costing her a precious half day from her holidays, while still looking like she was breezing off early as others stayed behind working.
She was disappointed about her plans getting unpicked, and not just for Andrew’s sake. The idea had been to make a fuss and to inject some energy into the strangely anticlimactic preparations for the wedding. After a busy few weeks, she was hoping that a nice evening would make her feel in love and dreamy and excited about the imminence of the whole thing. Instead she was just tired and so, so sick of the organising. All she wanted was to get to the wedding day so she could start being a bride and stop being an event manager.
Grace’s whole job, her whole career, involved sorting things out and putting people straight, but that was easy by comparison. In work she had complete detachment. No matter how well-planned her projects were she always expected road bumps, and had said many times that if there were no crises she would have nothing to do. It was important to her to be good at her job, good enough to be above the need for praise. But when it came to the wedding arrangements, she found herself
overreacting and becoming agitated about the smallest things. She was frustrated by the flakiness of invite printers, cake makers and other one-person wedding suppliers, and blamed herself for falling for their earnest promises and cutesy services. Then there were the blatant price increases she faced from caterers, hotels, bands and DJs, all milking the happy couple’s wish for a special day. Most of all, she missed the buying power and corporate muscle that she had at the company; the threat of commercial force that stood behind her workplace successes. If she was honest, she was also frustrated and hurt that Andrew had left most of the arrangements, in fact nearly all of them, to her. Yes, she had told him she wanted to do it, and yes, she had very definite ideas about how she wanted things to be done, and she certainly didn’t want him to invent opinions he didn’t truly have just for her sake. But she would have liked, appreciated, him fighting for some role in organising the wedding, as a sign that the details were as special to him as they were to her. Instead, it felt like he was coming to her wedding.
Grace had promised herself not to start thinking about this stuff when she was tired. It just made her negative, and her negativity would seek out a target and, if she wasn’t careful, she would meet Andrew from the plane and passive-aggressive the life out of the evening.
On the way home from work, Grace flitted around a couple of shops just to see if she could pick up a new top or a pair of jeans quickly, anything to reset her mood. But the wedding had made her Spartan and money conscious, stopping her from spontaneously splashing out on something nice just to make herself feel better. At one of her favourite boutiques she saw a beautifully-cut jacket that cost the same as the wedding cake and a bag that cost almost as much as her hair and make-up for the wedding day. Instead, she bought a magazine and a packet of popcorn to eat on the train on the way home.
Grace decided that she would go and meet Andrew at the airport, just like when she was at college and Helen and Peter would meet her off the plane after she came back from working away all summer. They would hold up some corny homemade sign with her name on it in bright colours. Then, when she arrived through the gates with her friends she would get so embarrassed, but still, she loved her parents to bits for doing it.
At home, she took a quick shower and she checked her phone to see if there were any messages from Andrew about delays. There was just a short text: just about to take off, see you soon, x.
They had met three years previously, at a badminton class. He was a beginner who had enrolled in an improver’s class, with the attitude of ‘How hard can it be?’ She had played as a teen and should have been in the advanced class, but she was rusty after years of not playing and decided to take it easy in the improver’s class. She thrashed him in a practice game during which he joked a lot, and then again in a game where he was clearly trying very hard. His grunting was no match for her technique. At one stage he overreached for a shot and farted through his shorts, which got them both back to bantering and the ulterior purpose behind the game. Inevitably, he asked her out and they stopped attending the badminton lessons, heading to the pub for drinks and flirtation instead.
Andrew had come from a good family, a good school, a good area and had a good job: the kind of things Grace was impressed by—maybe ‘reassured by’ was more accurate—in spite of herself. He wasn’t specifically materialistic, but he was definitely in that game of trying to be thought successful enough to be above materialism. Grace had been inclined to needle him, not always innocently, especially as he had grown up with two older sisters and was used to being fussed over rather than laughed at. Early in their relationship, Grace caught glandular fever and Andrew could well have found reasons not to stick around, but instead he bought her new pyjamas and read Inspector Morse books to her—back when Morse drove a Lancia—and ignored the texts from his friends about the nights out he was missing. By the time Grace had recovered from the illness, their relationship had matured into something intimate and real, and all from just sitting around and talking to each other.
Sometimes she wondered whether Andrew was just a bit too conventional for her. He had no real taste in music, he read sports biographies, he enjoyed pubs and rugby matches, and his opinions on politics all amounted to other people pulling up their socks just like he did. At heart, Grace was still a student communist and had a hidden rebellious side. She prided herself on having taste: experimental Laurie Anderson albums that were smarter than any music the boys made; those Lucien Freud portraits that looked like depressed character actors; long, slow Satyajit Ray movies that broke, then filled her heart; and travel choices that avoided the obvious. It had crossed her mind more than once that maybe Andrew was too much of a jock to be a long-term prospect, and at times during those early months she pushed him away, almost willing him to acknowledge that their divergent tastes were a warning sign. But, in spite of these reservations, Grace loved that Andrew didn’t need minding or looking after. He wasn’t complicated or troubled and didn’t have hang-ups or dependencies. He didn’t even depend on Grace. She knew that he would have been able to find happiness in his life no matter how things worked out between them, and that liberated her. It attracted her that she had no extra burdens in the relationship; that she could look after herself within it.
For Andrew, Grace was simply unlike any woman, any person, he had ever known. He had always gone for perfect girls, girls who looked and spoke as though life’s opportunities were just a matter of time. In Grace, he had met someone who saw through all of that. She was perspicacious without being judgemental; smart but doubting; consummate in whatever she turned her hand to, without ever being consumed by any of it. He liked that she read books, not to have opinions about them, but to find herself in them. There seemed to be a sense of urgency, a sense of mission, about the way she lived her life. Above all this, their love lasted because when it came to the important things, the deep stuff that actually sustains and propels a relationship, their values were inseparably braided. They both loved their parents and had happy, though not necessarily straightforward, childhoods. They both wanted to start a family. And they both prized their mutual understanding that it was perfectly fine to be intimately in love, while retaining some private, sacred space for themselves as individuals within the relationship. Grace didn’t realise how much she needed that until she found it with Andrew, and he was the same with her.
They each had a history of serial monogamy, though neither had lived with any of their previous partners. While Grace had been through the pantomime of teenage romances, her first proper relationship was at college. David, she had always said, was the ‘funnest’ of her boyfriends. He made her laugh, he made her friends laugh, and was always impossibly up for things. He had rooms on campus and all that that implied. She didn’t really take him that seriously and they just had fun together, the way that young people are supposed to but seldom do. During the whole time that they were dating, she hardly even called him a boyfriend. They broke up when he went abroad on a year out. It was only when she stared into a long summer alone that she realised how much she missed him and how much she had been trying to mirror his easy-going outlook, hardly admitting to herself the earnestness of her feelings. Her competitive side hadn’t let her admit that she was the serious one in the relationship. Last she heard, he was travelling in India.
Jean-Michel was her other college boyfriend, a guy she went out with ostensibly to keep herself sane during her finals, but who ended up hanging around every bloody day and who kept asking her what she was thinking, which for her, was tantamount to ducking her head under water. She couldn’t bring herself to dump him, not least because she thought that he would become even clingier in the pursuit of closure, so she just decided to be cold towards him instead so that he would dump her. That only provoked him into calling around for more ‘chats’ as he tried to become her counsellor during a difficult time. In the end she became so disgusted at herself because of how creatively mean she could be, that she cheated on him drunkenly at a party with all their mutual friends there. The poor guy offered to forgive her and ‘work through it.’ There were several long letters from him afterwards about how he didn’t hate her and that he hoped she would be happy. It was a nice thing to say if he meant it, but Grace, who was at times a little ungenerous when it came to giving credit, saw it as a his way of holding out for a Hollywood ending. Last she heard, he was working in London and doing well for himself.
Geoff broke her heart good and proper. A clean knockout, no need to go to the judges’ scorecards. They went out together for over year in those anything-can-happen years in the mid-twenties, when they both started earning good money and had nothing to spend it on except themselves. They had epic weekend nights out, which were boozy and full of running to wherever the next thing was on. It was a stage in their lives where their social circle stretched like an empire. He had a real job doing something in telecoms, but was also involved in the underground music scene and seemed to know everyone. It was the first time Grace had been with someone who was in a different league socially. He was the guy with grass who knew how to roll proper joints. He had droopy eyelids and said ‘man’ without sounding ridiculous. He was creative and played guitar in half a dozen bands, who released their own music as part of a collective. They travelled together: city breaks to Rome and London; and the odd weekend in a rented house by the sea with a bunch of scenesters, discussing politics self-consciously. In the end the betrayal was purely sexual. He had been cheating unapologetically with several girls from the scene, saying something about it being ‘just a physical itch.’ The end was instant and definitive. Grace would have preferred it if she had just flipped and destroyed him in one devastating moment of denouement. Instead, she made a mousey, capitulating exit, dumbstruck by the blatantness of it all. And so she left the scene and the crowd and the energy and the whole period of her life behind her that one evening, as she took a heartbroken taxi ride home. His words chased her thoughts round and round in her head, as he had explained, with almost parental simplicity, that the love she was feeling, and which she thought would grow to take over the world, was just some silly puppet show that she alone had thought was real. She cried in every room in Parley View for over two months as Helen nursed her with the chicken soup of motherly comfort and Peter let her lie on his lap as he stroked her tense, ridged eyebrows. And every evening Hungry Paul—dear, dear Hungry Paul—accompanied her on epic Tess of the D’Urbervilles walks, taken in silence and at thinking speed.
In time, Grace recovered and relapsed and recovered and so on, until life resumed a more normal rhythm, but at a beginner’s level. Everything had to be relearned. She never saw or spoke to Geoff again, though she had scripted every possible future conversation between them, from magnanimous letting go to exacting, equalising character assault. It never came to anything. She learned of his death a couple of years after the event from a girl who had been in a band with him. He had been waiting at a bus stop when a drunk driver mounted the footpath after falling asleep at the wheel. He left behind a girlfriend and two boys.
It may well be that if you truly want to open a heart, you need to break it open. The deep hurt of her failure with Geoff had taught her what was at stake in relationships. Grace had made the error of giving him a surrendering type of love: devotional, adoring love that she had mistaken for the real thing. But now she knew and understood so much more. Even as she shrank down to her smallest, she could still feel the faint and plucky pulse of her devastated heart. It had continued to beat in the darkest part of her chest during her loneliest moments. Knowing that her heart was always, always alive, and did not simply come to life when she loved, gave her an invincibility. Her heart felt like a chapel that had survived a bombing blitz and took on a divine status afterwards.
In time Grace met other men and enjoyed a few dalliances, but held back from entering anything you might call a relationship. It wasn’t that she had been hurt or that she didn’t trust men—she had had a rough time, but didn’t buy into the idea of living out of her past—it was simply that she had learned that she was a pretty special person who had a pretty special and durable heart, and that she could go through dark times on her own and survive them. She became less interested in guys who hadn’t been similarly tested. Superficial men, who wanted to talk to her and blah blah blah all night now seemed like kids to her. And that’s how she connected with Mark.
Mark was not Grace’s type. He was nervous and awkward, and his style and sense of humour were all wrong. He was a computer guy: introverted and with a limited range of interests and friends. But he too was coming out of a life-defining break-up, where he had been loved and let down by a girl who was out of his league, and who had dumped him once she realised it. She was another cold-blooded killer, who was able to walk away from a happy relationship as if it never happened. Mark didn’t have a supportive family or the same deep reservoir of feeling that Grace had, so he simply self-medicated with alcohol and a massive credit card bill. He knew enough to stop all that before his life was irreversibly ruined, but not before he had amassed a repertoire of anecdotes and near-death experiences. He and Grace had amazing, therapeutic conversations into the small hours until they would fall asleep together, fully clothed and talked-out. Of course, they both knew that their relationship would not last. This was a practice relationship with the stabilisers on, underwritten by an unspoken agreement not to hurt each other. It ended amicably, when Mark was offered a research job in Rotterdam and Grace urged him not to pass it up. They parted, classically, at the airport with a hug and peck on the cheek that was more like a sister packing her brother off to boarding school than two lovers separating. Mark is the only one of her past loves that she still has occasional contact from, albeit intermittently. He is still single.
Andrew had always been a little coy about his past. He had said that what transpired between him and his past girlfriends needed a little privacy for their sakes, but Grace had known him long enough for the general picture to emerge in fragments, which she had been able to piece together for herself, though without verifying it with Andrew. She knew that he had a long-term girlfriend while at secondary school, someone called Rebecca who seemed like a female version of Andrew—they would probably have made Prom King and Queen had they lived in the States. They broke up when they went to different universities and discovered whole new worlds. He had a few girlfriends at college but most of them seemed to have been a case of having someone on his arm, or someone to stay over with. In his twenties he seemed to enjoy long periods of bachelorhood, although two names had come up a few times, and some details had been prised from him.
The first was Rachel, who seems to be the only girl he went out with that he really liked, or possibly loved. Rachel was an ex-girlfriend of a college friend of his. She and Andrew seemed to have gone out for over a year. Grace never got the full story about why they split but she had guessed that it had involved infidelity on his part, judging by the way he always spoke fondly of that period, but glossed over the details of how it ended. He would only say that he made some mistakes in that relationship and that it forced him to look at himself.
The other relationship was with Lucy, which was the only time he seemed to have dated someone from his job. Apparently it started at a Christmas party and continued as a drunken and lusty relationship. Grace had got the impression that they didn’t visit too many museums or meet each other’s parents, but that they both had plenty of practice at getting good at the one thing a woman doesn’t mind her future husband getting good at. The relationship burned out, and she left the company for a promotion elsewhere. Lucy was the one woman from Andrew’s past that Grace certainly did not want him to keep in contact with.
Grace left for the airport, leaving it a little bit late and driving with a heavy right foot. She blasted music from the car stereo—Sparks’ Propaganda—and opened the driver’s window, the incoming rush of air like a leaf blower on her overstimulated brain. Even though it was rush hour, she got lucky with the traffic, which was all headed in the opposite direction.
She waited for Andrew in the arrivals hall and held up an A4 sheet on which she had written ROBERT DOWNEY JUNIOR in lipstick, as a fake airport pick-up sign; an in-joke about her No. 1 movie star crush who looked nothing like Andrew. Grace was early and stood leaning against a superfluous crush barrier, people-watching. The airport was quiet, with men in red polo shirts pushing empty wheelchairs and regular travellers getting a squirt of perfume or aftershave in the duty free area. A guy was sitting on one of the elevated thrones having his shoes buffed at the shoeshine station, a public shoeshine, she thought, being a luxury that could only ever be enjoyed by creeps. A sleepy shop assistant was sending texts at the luggage shop, possibly the most bored person at the airport; Grace wondered how many people arrived at an airport with an armful of clothes, looking to buy luggage.
Grace always felt anaesthetised by airports and was glad of some dead time to allow the day’s agitated momentum to settle and subside. In her pocket was a phone that was displaying a series of missed calls and incoming emails, symbols of the fake urgency of impatience. She caught herself reaching for it, her hands habitually unused to idleness, but then checked herself and decided not to puncture the bubble of calm she was starting to ease into. Eventually, Andrew stepped through the arrival doors in his crumpled suit, looking tired but handsome and in need of a shave. Grace gave a little wolf whistle and collapsed into giggles. His face broke into an open smile of surprise at seeing her. Before saying anything they took a moment to have their first kiss in ages.
‘Good to see you, wine breath,’ she said.
‘You too. I just had one mini bottle on the flight to help me sleep, by the way. The guy behind me had his knees against my seat the whole way. Thanks for picking me up—it’s a lovely surprise. You spelt my name wrong, though,’ he said, noticing the pick-up sign.
‘Lucky you got here first. Had Robert Downey Junior not been delayed buying snow globes in duty free you might have missed your chance.’
‘How have you been? I was dying to see you. God, it’s so great to have all this business travel out of the way. I don’t want to see any more bullet points until the afterlife. It’s nice to think that my next flight is to Kyoto, with my wife!’
‘If you’re lucky—I haven’t signed anything yet.’
They went to find the car, full of a couple’s silly talk and holding hands the way Grace would have liked them to do more often. They pulled out of the car park and got a bit lost with the new road layout, eventually cheating their way to the exit by using a bus lane, and getting a reprimanding beep from a bendy bus for doing so.
They stopped off at Sakura, a Japanese takeaway, and ordered cha han, udon noodles, fish and vegetable tempura, and some sashimi; over-ordering on an empty stomach. They grabbed some wine and Pringles at the off-licence, and planned an evening on the couch.
‘We went to this restaurant in Amsterdam after one of the long meetings, just to unwind and pick over how it went,’ said Andrew, as they ate on the couch. ‘They were doing road works near the canal and there was a mouse scuttling around the restaurant in plain sight. When I mentioned it to the waitress she just said: “Oh, they always do that” and then waved her hand in a sort of forgeddaboudid way and walked off. I couldn’t believe it! The others didn’t care. I was the only one freaked out by it and spent the evening with my trouser legs tucked into my socks. I mean, imagine what the kitchen was like?’
‘Oh, you’re giving me the creeps. I just couldn’t do it. You should give them a stinky review online,’ said Grace, fishing around the end of the noodle box with chopsticks and then switching to a fork.
‘No point. If they don’t care about mice, they won’t care about reviews.’
‘How was the cheese museum by the way? Did you pick me up anything?’
‘I didn’t, I’m afraid—it’s strangely difficult to pick out cheese for a woman, as it turns out. I would have liked to look around to see a bit of Amsterdam actually, but the crowd I was with just wanted to go drinking. I never feel in holiday mode on these trips.’
‘Yeah, right. Men always talk up the difficulty and hardship of business travel.’
‘I’m practically monastic on the road, but I know what you mean. Some guys act like they are on shore leave. Especially the older ones. It’s great to think I have practically a full month ahead with no meetings though. Just fun stuff. How are your folks by the way?’ he asked.
‘Good, good, good. I’m trying to encourage them to plan a holiday. Not just a city break with museums and stuff, but something epic. Dad still has his retirement lump sum, so he should use it to whisk Mam away. Go somewhere far flung while their health is good and they can enjoy it. They just keep resisting it. I think they’re worried about my brother coping on his own, but he’s a grown-up.’
‘What if he stayed with us? I mean just for a few nights while they’re away?’ Andrew suggested, picking through the tempura vegetables for clumps of batter without the accompanying veg.
‘But we’re going away ourselves and even if we weren’t, we have to stop babying him. We need to take him out of his comfort zone for his own sake. Who knows what the future holds? He needs to be able to cope by himself eventually. He’s stuck on this little merry-go-round of a life: his job only keeps him busy about two days a month, he has no concept of money or responsibility and, worst of all, he keeps Mam and Dad frozen in time. They’ve done their bit as parents and are entitled to enjoy their retirement, without having him to fuss over.’
‘Are you not being a bit harsh? He’s not doing any harm to anybody, and your parents seem okay with the arrangement,’ said Andrew.
‘What happens when my folks get older and need help?’ asked Grace. ‘We’re getting to the stage where, in a few years’ time, it will be our turn to look after them. So, who will all that fall to? Saint Grace, that’s who. You too, in fact. My brother will be no help and, if anything, we’ll end up taking responsibility for him too. We should be planning our future together, building a new life, all that sort of stuff, but I know exactly how it’s going to turn out. All the family trouble, along with its luggage, will present itself at our door. That’s why we need to do something about this now. Otherwise the future is going to look very much like the past. By the way, they have invited us over for dinner on Sunday and I said yes without asking you because I know you love me and would do anything to make me happy.’
Grace paused with her chopsticks poised over the noodles.
‘Sorry for dumping on you. I think when you’re away this stuff goes around and around in my head. Don’t mind me. I feel a bit better just saying all this instead of thinking it.’
‘It’s fine,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s good training for when I’m your husband and I’m legally required to listen to you. And of course I’m on for dinner on Sunday. I haven’t seen your folks in ages. I was thinking I must get your dad a ticket to come with us the next time we’re going to a match.’
‘Good idea. He needs to expand his social circle. He’s got a couple of friends that he still meets from work, and he does a bit of volunteering here and there, but he has no regular outlet. He needs to join something so that he can meet some new people. You need to keep reinventing yourself in life, churning your friends, but he has just settled in to pottering about all day,’ said Grace.
‘Maybe I’ll see if there’s something I could do with him, but my Dad’s the same. A bit of golf and a bit of helping out at the credit union, but really he is terrible for falling out of touch with people. My mother is much better. She volunteers at the church, helps out with the residents’ association, all that stuff. It’s funny, she stayed at home all those years, but she’s much more businesslike than he is. I think he got used to having staff that did everything for him and that made him look more organised than he was.’
They chatted away and finished off the food. They should have got a second bottle of wine, but then maybe not: it was still a school night after all. They brought everything into the kitchen, tip-toeing over the cold tiles and just stacking the dirty dishes by the sink to be dealt with tomorrow, along with the unpacking and the missed calls.
Grace did the short version of her evening bathroom routine and hopped into bed beside Andrew, who was already dangerously close to sleep. She cuddled into his warm body—his high body temperature being one of his unique selling points when they first got together—and continued chatting with her cheek on his chest. While she did have to confess that one or two things from the next day’s to-do list floated into her mind, she quickly let them go and settled into a cosy, sleepy state of contentment, zipped-up from the inside.