Married By Christmas (17 page)

Miles kept staring upwards as she talked. He was unable to look at her, Anna guessed. Now that he knew everything, he would probably never talk to her like he had before or make jokes. He’d be careful, and, from now on, politely distant, because no one wanted to get to know someone so damaged, in case it somehow rubbed off on them. Saddened, she felt the loss of that one moment of lightness that they had shared together, that now would be impossible to feel again. And yet, now she had started her story, she knew she had to finish it.

‘On the fourth day,’ Anna said. ‘There was a loud banging at the door. Mum told me never to answer the door, and I never did usually, but this time I thought it might be her. It wasn’t. It was loan sharks after their money. I suppose that could have been the worst thing that happened to me, but it was actually the best. I got loan sharks with a heart, you see. One of them called the police, said they’d found an abandoned kid in a flat, and left the door on the latch before they left. A nice policewoman came, they took me to the station, they fed me, got me clothes, another social worker came, and I spent my first night in care. I got moved around a bit, and after almost a year I got moved to yet another school. That was the school Liv went to, and it was soon after meeting her that my life really began. I never heard from my mum again, and I realise now that that Christmas Day, that was her goodbye gift to me. One perfect day. It’s the only thing I really have of her.’

‘You never saw or heard from her again?’ Miles asked her, astounded. ‘They couldn’t find her?’

Anna shook her head. ‘They found her. About a year after I went to live with Liv and her family. In a bedsit in Bristol. She was dead. Overdose.’

‘And what about your father?’ Miles asked gently.

‘I never knew who he was – there’s nothing on my birth certificate. But ever since then I’ve had a list, a plan, a … map of where to go and how to be, and I know if I stick to it, to the letter, then I won’t lose control like she did. I won’t hurt the people I love.’

Anna turned to look at Miles, expecting him to be unable to look her in the eye any more, but instead he picked up her hand and smiled at her.

‘It’s nearly midnight,’ he told her. ‘Let’s go back to the room. I want to finish my song, you need to Google Erica Barnes and we need to make sure that tomorrow is the day that changes our lives for the better, OK?’

‘OK,’ Anna said, uncertainly, letting him pull her off the step.

‘Now, Annie, please will you sing to me again,’ Miles said with a smile. ‘The sound of your angelic voice is really all I want for Christmas.’

It took a moment for Anna to realise he was still making jokes. He was acting as if he hadn’t heard a single thing she’d said and, oddly, Anna knew he was behaving that way because he had not only heard her, he’d listened. And it was the strangest feeling in the world to know that she had finally met a man who understood her, and stranger still to realise that he wasn’t the one she was about to marry.

Anna smiled as she punched him lightly in the ribs, and the moon sailed above their heads, and somewhere a drunk with a far better voice than Anna’s sang ‘Silent Night’.

Chapter Eleven

Anna opened her eyes, and stared for a moment into the darkness, as she orientated herself. That’s right, she wasn’t at home, in her own bed, arranged neatly on the pillows like a princess, she was in New York on the verge of tracking down Tom’s surprise wife. That would be why, even in the dark, the world seemed a little upside down and back to front. And the reason her mouth was dry and there was this tiny but insistent pounding ache in her right temple was because she had taken it upon herself to drink six Cosmopolitan cocktails in the space of about ten minutes. And, even though they had left her system almost as quickly as they had entered it, they had left their legacy behind in the form of an elegant little hangover. That would explain why the roof of her mouth was as dry as bone, but not why she had a crick in her neck, or why her pillow, which she was sure was made of goose down yesterday, was now hard, and muscular, and rose and fell with a steady rhythm and, not to mention, appeared to have a heartbeat.

Anna opened her sleepy eyes wide, her whole body tensing in an instant as she realised that she was not asleep in her bed in the suite, but must have in fact passed out sometime after she and Miles had got back last night, and had spent goodness only knew how many hours slumbering on his – thankfully clothed – chest. Terrified of moving even one eyelash, Anna assessed the situation as best she could from her prone position. Miles was fast asleep, his head propped up on the cushions, one arm and one leg trailing on the floor. She, much to her deep horror, was curled between his legs, her head resting on his chest. His other arm was draped loosely over her waist. She also was fully dressed, and thankfully her dehydration meant she hadn’t drooled on him, so technically nothing untoward had taken place. Except that if Tom had told her he’d fallen asleep in a hotel room in the arms of another woman she would tear him limb from limb and then mince him for good measure. Anna’s heart sank as she realised that, in essence, she had cheated on Tom, she had betrayed him. OK, she and Miles hadn’t done anything sexual, but as well as spending a really fun and interesting evening together, where they’d eaten, laughed, sung – very badly in her case – they’d talked about things that Anna had never wanted to talk to Tom about. It was an emotional betrayal. She and Miles had shared each other’s time with a kind of trust and willingness that Anna wasn’t sure she’d ever really had with Tom, not even when things were going brilliantly, not even just after they got together or just after he’d proposed, because … well, he hadn’t mentioned his showgirl wife and she’d never told him the real story of her childhood. She’d allowed herself to relax with Miles in a way she never had with Tom, and that had to be at least a kind of cheating.

Anna closed her eyes tightly shut again, wondering if it might be possible to transport herself to the bedroom using the power of telekinesis alone, and finding fairly quickly that it was not. This was no good, lying here listening to the beat of Miles’s heart. They’d crashed out on the sofa, that was all that had happened. And it wasn’t infidelity, not really. Besides, Anna thought, she’d started to feel warm towards Tom again, even almost ready to talk to him. She remembered that after they’d got back into the room, they’d found a large brown envelope waiting for her in the hallway, which she’d opened to find the annulment papers that Charisma needed to sign, and a note from Tom, written in his oversized loopy handwriting, a single sentence taking up a whole sheet: ‘Anna, I miss you, I love you and I can’t wait to see you again,
your
Tom.’

And he’d underlined the ‘your’ especially to emphasise that it was her his heart belonged to and not Charisma, or at least that was how Anna had chosen to interpret it last night in her tipsy state. She’d hugged the note to her chest and determined that tomorrow she would call Tom and that they would really talk, really sort things out and, with a fair wind and a bit of good luck, have their Christmas wedding after all.

She remembered also that Miles had Googled Erica Brown and jubilantly cried out that he’d found her. He’d discovered an advertisement for a play, called
The Long Dark Night of the Soul
, which featured, somewhere in the middle of the bill, ‘Erica Barnes.’

The website had said it was at a venue called City Centre – Stage II, West 55
^th
Street. The play sounded dire: it was a about a nun who was secretly in love with her adopted brother who was dying of cancer. She remembered Miles had made a joke then. ‘Interesting casting, I can’t quite see Charisma as a nun … well, not that kind of nun anyway.’

Anna had flopped down on to the sofa next to him, as he clicked through to a link that listed the actors’ biographies. And there it was, a photo of Charisma turned Erica. She was still unmistakable, with her long dark hair, falling in glossy waves over half of her face. Just as seductive in its way as the last photo, only now, instead of being mostly undressed, she was wearing a plain white shirt and little or no make-up, and was sporting a catlike smile that seemed to say she knew something that Anna didn’t.

‘We’ve found her, Anna,’ Miles had said. ‘We can go in the morning, get her to sign your papers and you can be on a plane home to sort your wedding out by tomorrow night.’ He’d smiled at her, although his expression hadn’t quite matched the enthusiasm of his tone.

‘It’s mad, isn’t it?’ Anna had replied, looking back at the photo and then at Miles. ‘I didn’t ever actually think this plan would work. But, anyway, I’ll go on my own. You’ve got to go to your audition.’

‘Not till the afternoon,’ Miles had said. ‘Honestly, I don’t mind coming with you. I sort of want to see it through, if you don’t mind and, actually, I was sort of hoping you might return the favour, come with me to my thing? It turns out I could do with a bit of moral support after all and having a hot blonde on my arm won’t hurt my image any.’ Anna had smiled, rolling her eyes, knowing Miles well enough now to know that he’d drop in a flippant comment to divert attention away from himself at every opportunity. Nevertheless, she had been touched that he’d asked her, and glad to have a reason to return the favour that he’d done her.

‘OK,’ she’d said. ‘You’re on, it seems only fair.’

‘How do you feel, about the prospect of coming face to face with your bloke’s first wife?’ Miles had asked her, as Anna dwelled on Charisma’s new photograph.

‘It’s funny,’ she’d said thoughtfully. ‘I thought I’d feel sick and scared and jealous and anxious and stupid. But right at this moment, I don’t really feel anything very much at all.’ She’d put the iPad down and turned to him. ‘Come on you, time to practise.’

Anna had sat on a cushion on the floor while Miles played to her, a selection of songs he’d written himself, although not the one he’d sung in the bar, which Anna was sort of grateful for, because it raised a whole lot of questions she hadn’t really wanted to dwell on. She’d clapped and cheered him, then, between them, they’d decided on his outfit for the audition, and then they’d settled down on the sofa at just before two to watch some rubbish TV. It must have been sometime during an ancient episode of
Cagney and Lacey
that Anna had fallen asleep, because that was the last thing she remembered.

Now, ever so quietly and slowly, Anna began to shift her body weight upwards, finding Miles’s grip tightening unconsciously on her waist as she attempted to move. Sighing, she paused, and lifted the dead weight of his arm off her and onto a cushion. Sitting up with some difficulty because she didn’t want to use any part of his body as leverage, Anna finally found herself perched on the edge of the sofa, her legs twisted to avoid touching Miles’s other leg that rested, still in its boot, on the floor. Anna paused to look down at him, sleeping serenely in the half-light of the early morning, the glow of the city through the heavy net curtains all that illuminated the bridge of his nose and his high cheekbones, and thought two things. Firstly, that he really was a very deep sleeper and, secondly, that she really had to break the habit of watching him sleep.

*

‘I’d kill for a coffee – a real one, not a plane coffee,’ Liv said as Tom took her bag from her, and they emerged blinking into the early daylight at JFK International Airport. It was freezing cold, snow whipped around in the wind, with an altogether more wintery feel than the damp, grey, unenthusiastic December they had left in London. It was just after 8 a.m. and the reality of where they were and what they were doing was only just hitting Liv after several warm hours cocooned in a metal cylinder suspended in mid-air where there was nothing she could do about anything. Tom had barely spoken to her for the whole journey, partly because when they’d booked their flights they had been unable to find two seats together, but also, Liv thought, as she watched him stare blankly at the TV screen from several rows behind, although he’d asked her to accompany him, and she had agreed almost at once, it wasn’t making conversation with or paying even polite attention to her that he was concerned about. Liv’s best guess was all he could think about was Anna and Charisma and how to make these two disjointed parts of his life work so that the one didn’t drag down the other. Somewhere over the Atlantic Liv had cursed herself for agreeing to come along on the trip so readily. What was she doing here, really, if not still following her doomed crush on him with the kind of insane doggedness that other people in similar situations found themselves on the wrong end of restraining order for? When, Liv had wondered bitterly, would she finally let her compulsion to do everything Tom asked her go, and start to live her own life again? Anna wouldn’t thank her, either, for turning up in New York, when strictly speaking she should be unboxing and hanging her dress, and overseeing the creation of the pre-service canapés, and all the other endless small tasks she’d been driven to delegate to Liv in her absence.

Without replying to her request for coffee, Tom grabbed the door of the nearest taxi and held it open for Liv, who climbed in, sliding across the plastic seat with a distinct sense of foreboding as the angry snow beat against the grimy window.

‘You know where we’re going, right?’ Tom asked her, because until that moment Liv had kept her word to Anna and not told Tom where her friend was staying.

‘The Algonquin,’ Liv told the driver, wondering how Anna would react when she saw them.

‘I’m not even sure anyone will be there at this time.’ Miles was now awake and seemed oblivious to their slumbering tryst on the sofa, much to Anna’s relief and slight annoyance. After a refreshingly cold shower, Anna had felt a renewed sense of purpose and had collected the annulment papers and dragged Miles, now dressed in his audition outfit of a red checked shirt, new dark-blue jeans, new trimmed stubble and freshly washed hair, complete with his guitar, out of their hotel and into the freezing winter morning. ‘We could have coffee and breakfast and mosey on over there after that?’

‘I feel like I have to go now,’ Anna said, jiggling on her toes. ‘If we don’t go now, I’ll just spend the time thinking about what to say to her, how to act. I was up at six this morning worrying about everything. I’m ready to confront her.’ She stopped sticking her hand out in vain for a cab, and turned to Miles. ‘If I wait any longer I won’t be able to go through with it.’

‘OK,’ Miles said, and whistled a taxi to a standstill. ‘But if there’s no one around when we get there, coffee and pancakes in the nearest diner are on you.’

Miles was right, the venue was tightly closed when they arrived. As they stared at the closed shutters, he pulled his hoody up against the whipping snow that bowled down the street at a ferocious speed, and Anna wrapped her arms around her body, hugging herself against the cold. Looking around, it didn’t take them long to find a diner serving hot coffee and a very enticing selection of pancakes. Not that Anna could bring herself to eat hers: her stomach was still too thick with the anxiety of knowing that any minute now she’d come face to face with her nemesis. Others might have found that term a little overstated but when used in reference to one’s fiancé’s secret wife, Anna felt in her guts, along with the anxiety-induced acid reflux, it would turn out to be appropriate. Particularly as she had no evidence to suggest that Charisma would simply sign the papers, and that would be that.

‘You do look nice!’ Miles said, as Anna unwrapped her coat and shed a few layers of woollens. He’d said it with that tone of surprise that men use and don’t understand why women find it annoying, as if the idea of them looking nice could be so novel. Anna had indeed put in extra effort with her outfit that morning, casting aside her usual palette of muted colours in favour of a postbox red, lightly woven woollen pencil dress she’d picked up on her shopping trip to Saks with Miles. It wasn’t normally Anna’s policy to choose a dress because it enhanced and accentuated the fullness of her bust, even revealing a considerable amount, for her anyway, of cleavage, with its square-cut neckline. Or an outfit that made the most of her waist, hips and frankly her bottom, because Anna wasn’t the sort of girl who liked to draw attention to her figure, knowing well enough that her long blonde hair was usually enough for people to judge her. She didn’t like to give anyone any more ammunition to write her off as a bimbo, as if hair colour and bra size could somehow be a decent indication of your brain capacity anyway. On this occasion, however, she was making an exception, and pulling out, as Miles would say, the big guns. Charisma was a woman of glamour, even in her newly invented guise as the elegant angst-ridden nun-playing Erica Barnes, and she needed to see Anna as her equal, and not some naive little English rose who could be swept aside if she decided she wanted to entice back her estranged husband after all.

‘Are you not going to eat that?’ Miles asked, pointing at Anna’s virtually untouched stack of pancakes, which she slid towards him.

‘Here, knock yourself out,’ she said, taking another sip of black coffee.

‘You look really …’ Miles hesitated as his gaze roamed over her face, and frankly the parts of her that fell just south of that, for a few seconds. ‘No, there is no polite way of saying it, you look damn sexy, Anna. I mean, really hot. You’re not going to let Charisma outshine you, are you? I hope Tom knows what a very lucky man he is.’