Wedding ceremonies should only be performed at Lourdes, because it obviously takes a miracle to make a marriage work, reflected Shelly throughout the media reception at the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh—a massive architectural mausoleum resembling a moored Titanic on Princes Street. After the press call, they were ushered into a side room to change into their complimentary “going-away” outfits.
Shelly, who was experiencing jaw-ache from constantly beaming for the official photographs, just kept on beaming when she was presented with a Versace gold lamé mini dress of the sort she would never, ever wear. By the time she’d beamed her thanks for her plane ticket to Réunion Island for the following day, complete with a suitcase of size-10 sun frocks and erotic underwear for her tropical holiday trousseau plus a key to the Balmoral honeymoon suite, her cheeks had cramps from smile-lag. As she’d sobered up over the last few hours she’d developed the charisma of a crash dummy. And Kit Kinkade, she suspected, was the oncoming speeding vehicle.
Shelly turned her back on her husband to coax the white chiffon down over her hips where it slopped around her like spilt milk—that thing you don’t cry over, she thought, fighting despondency.
Kit refused his hotel room key, explaining that he was staying with friends. Handing over his hired tux, he next rejected the Armani designer suit offered to him by a PR flunky and wrenched some crushed clothing from a battered backpack—scruffy jeans with condom pack prominent in a torn pocket, frayed velvet shirt with shark fin lapels, switchblade…Switchblade?
“That’s your going-away outfit?” Shelly asked, perplexed.
“Uh-huh.”
“Where are you going to? An orgy? Why aren’t you staying here at the hotel? With me?”
“Married five minutes and you’re already tellin’ me what to wear! And askin’ where I’m goin’!” Kit wrenched the top hat from his head and pitched it towards the chandelier where it caught and dangled desolately. “Love may be blind, but marriage is a real friggin’ eye opener,” he stated bitterly.
“How…how do you know?” Shelly found her vocal cords again. “Your form stated that you’ve always been single.”
“What?” Kit evaded her eyes. An expression flitted across his face like weather—a stormy thought.
Why did she have the feeling that she’d just pulled the pin on a conversational grenade? Reflexively she stepped towards him, then stopped herself. “If you feel that way about marriage, then why did you enter the competition?” she blurted, bewildered.
“I’m American,” he improvised. “Compulsive behavior is compulsory.” He laughed, but there was no smoke-frayed, late-night joy in it. Sadness flowed down his face.
Shelly got the feeling that this man flew by the seat of his pants so often he should have earned frequent-flier pant points. She forlornly recollected the runners-up she’d met at the wedding reception. That nice, sane systems analyst from Ipswich. Though fluent in Geek speak (an alien language of hot swappable expansion bays), he was also a newspaper and plastics recycler. And that solicitor from Milton Keynes. Shelly doubted that he would have confessed to the world that he liked to yodel up the Love Canyon.
“So why did you?” Kit tugged off his shirt, revealing those rippling pectorals and looked at her with naked curiosity. “Go in for the competition, I mean?” There was a newfound wariness in his voice.
“I told you. My students entered me in the bloody thing.”
“Students?” Kit interrogated, gimlet-eyed. “You said friends had entered your name. You never said nuthin’ about no students.”
“My music students. I teach guitar at a London high school, rock guitar, if you can believe it.”
“Your CV said ‘classical musician.’”
“I didn’t write it. The kids did. And I am a classical musician. Only nobody ever hears me play anymore.” Shelly pressed her lips together, as if she’d just put on lipstick.
“Wait up. Don’t you, like, perform?”
Oh, thought Shelly. Let’s start with the easy questions first. When had she lost her nerve? Just after her mother’s body had been ransacked by rogue cells. Shelly had frozen in the middle of the Bach Prelude from the fourth Lute Suite. Pain and humiliation she thought long blunted, erupted hot. And there, once more, was that tension twisting tighter inside her. The silence of Wigmore Hall had roared at her even louder than the klaxons of terror trumpeting through her blood. And since that cataclysmic moment, this award-winning musician with the virtuosic flair and supple fingertips had vandalized her talent; reduced to the peripatetic teaching of heavy metal guitar techniques to sweaty teenage members of school bands called Stomach Contents, Bowel Scum and Jerk to Inflate.
“Stage fright,” she confessed quietly.
“So, really you’re just a…high-school teacher?” Her husband launched a halo of smoke heavenwards.
“You could have found that out in the car if you’d stopped talking about yourself for two seconds.”
“I thought you were an artist. You know what they say. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach,” he pronounced grimly, kicking off his trousers. “And those who can’t teach, teach music.”
If Kit’s curiosity had been the only naked thing about him, Shelly might have been able to respond, but not while he was standing there in skimpy Calvin Klein’s. This exquisite sight had turned her into a vegetative state. The only reaction he’d get out of her now would be photosynthesis. “Ummm.”
She dragged her eyes, under police escort, away from the comely body of her lithe groom so that she could relocate her power of retort. “Oh well, Mr. Kinkade, at least you don’t have to take off all your clothes to prove to people that you’re a natural blond.”
“Hey, dumb blonde jokes don’t get my nuts in a knot ’cause just like Dolly Parton I ain’t a) dumb or b) blonde.”
With that he wrenched at his hair, which, to Shelly’s astonishment, came off in his hands. He tossed the wig into the bin and fluffed out an electric mane of black curls.
She stared at him dumbfounded. Why the wig? Who the hell was this man? This man she’d just—Holy Mary Mother of God—married? Shelly began to reappraise the light in Kit Kinkade’s eyes. It was looking a bit like the rich glint of lunacy. What had she been thinking? How could she have married a man she’d just met? Shelly had things in her fridge that had been around longer than he had! How could she have been intimate with a strange man? Who the hell was she all of sudden? Blanche Du Bois?
She felt herself developing a distinct facial tic. Kit Kinkade, now all Heathcliff hair and vagabond eyes, yanked his tattered jeans up over his peachy posterior, shrugged on the black velvet shark fin–lapeled shirt and tucked the switchblade down the side of his Cuban-heeled boot before slapping her playfully across the cheek with the first installment of their prize money—a wad of £25,000. “See you on the honeymoon, cupcake. Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day.”
This didn’t look much like a truce. This looked like a first-strike offensive. She had only one thought, something tearful along the lines of “I want my mummy.”
As the door swung closed behind his sashaying ass, Shelly was left with a distinct feeling that marriage to Kit Kinkade would be a lot like having root canal surgery—only not as restful.