The New Mrs D (18 page)

‘Okay,’ I said, gulping down the second shot.

‘Do one thing a day that scares the bejesus out of you.’

I looked into Adonis’s smiley, optimistic face and − weirdly for me − I felt a rush of adrenaline. ‘Let’s do this!’

‘What do you want to sing?’ he asked me.

‘You choose.’ Whatever it was, it was going to sound terrible anyway. I was petrified, only this time more about singing than my state of undress.

‘Ah good. Krista!’ he yelled at the DJ behind me, and, eyeing my ample bosom said, ‘Islands In Thee Stream!’

Just great.
‘Hey, I’m naked. Think of a song.’

‘I’m thinking of Dolly Parton.’

When the song finally ended, Adonis kissed my hand and passed me the biggest cocktail I’d ever seen in my life, which I took gratefully. But instead of my being booed off, as I’d anticipated, I was amazed to hear cheers, clapping and shouts of ‘More, more!’
How much more could I possibly show?

‘That was wonderful,’ Adonis gushed. ‘Let us do another wan.’

‘No, no, please. I really couldn’t.’ I pushed my way off the stage, glass in hand and walked straight into David, throwing ice-cold alcohol and juice all over his chest.

‘Binnie, that was incredible!’ he said, looking flushed and oblivious to the ice-cold drink I’d just spilled down his shirt. ‘I didn’t know you could sing!’ he exclaimed.

I turned away from him, rushing over to get my things, and made my way to the car park, dressing as I went. ‘My name is Bernice. B-E-R-N-I-C-E. And I don’t want to talk to you, David!’ I shouted behind me.

He ran to keep up with me. ‘I knew you’d be here Binnie, do you know why?’

‘Yeah. You opened my envelope.’

‘Exactly,’ he said, reaching out to hold my arm and stop me getting away. ‘Did you open mine?’

‘What? Why would I?’

‘Did you? Tell me you did?’

Realising we were being watched by other people in the car park, I pulled away from his grasp, whispering sharply, ‘No, and I don’t intend to. Leave me alone!’

Saress and shoes now back on, I threw my stuff angrily into the basket on my moped, jumped on and began revving the engine.

David grabbed my arm again. ‘Binnie,’ he said.

‘Bernice,’ I corrected him.

‘Bernice. You were amazing up there, I’ve never been so proud. You sounded beautiful. You looked beautiful. I thought about what you said last night and you were right. I’m sorry I hurt you. I thought I was helping us. I’ve been such a weak idiot.’

‘Do you know why you had no idea I could sing, David? Because I only doubted myself when I was with you. And because I could never be myself when I was with you!’

‘Don’t say that. I love you.’

‘I have to go now, David.’

‘Binnie . . . I mean . . . Bernice, please don’t give up on us. You’re my wife. I haven’t slept for a week, I need you! Please let me just explain . . .’

I pushed his arm away and began turning the moped towards the road.

‘Okay, okay,’ he said, looking panicked now. ‘But just tell me one thing, why on earth did you think you couldn’t be yourself with me? I don’t understand. I thought we were happy.’

‘You were happy!’ I said scornfully. ‘Not me. Do you know something David? I don’t like The Stone Roses; I never have. You do. And I didn’t choose
Baby, Baby, Blue
for our first dance just because it was funny. The truth is I’ve been keeping my love of what you’d call “cheesy films” to myself, just to be the way I thought you wanted me to be. I kept my love for that silly, funny song buried on our wedding day, just to be bloody agreeable. Yes, maybe it’s silly and cheesy, but I bloody like it!’

He looked positively poleaxed. ‘Baby, Baby, Blue?’ he said, scratching his head. And I knew right there and then, he didn’t even remember the song.

I revved the moped again and held the brake to let him know I was leaving.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said quickly. ‘But I want to. Please, we need to talk. Just stop for a second so I can speak to you.’

‘I like old films. And I still adore Blondie no matter how old she is now! I love her; I think she’s sexier today than she ever was. I like dancing round the kitchen, singing along to Atomic with a wooden spoon for a microphone, still pretending I’m her like I did when I was ten. I’ve found me, right here in Greece! Not the sad, downtrodden, people-pleasing me − the funny, sassy, flirty girl I was before, back when I didn’t give a hoot who was watching. And I don’t want to speak to you!’

As I pulled out of the car park, his voice rang out
behind me.

‘Open the envelope Binnie!’ he shouted at my back. ‘Please, just open it!’

Chapter Twenty-Six

To err is human. To find water, divine.

I
t had been a long and difficult night. Firstly, because it was the second last night of my holiday and I’d spent it in my apartment alone and, secondly, because I’d cried pretty much the whole way through it. Yet still, I posted my silly, isn’t-it-great-being-on-honeymoon Facebook status. Keeping up the charade, knowing that very soon I’d have to reveal the truth to everyone.

Because my marriage was over. After only two weeks.

Linda had invited me to stay with her for the night but, knowing it was to be her last one with Eydis, who’d be catching the ferry with the boys around now, I’d said I couldn’t ask her to sacrifice her relationship time just because mine had sunk into oblivion. I envied her. Today she would be saying ‘see you later’ to someone she loved. I would be saying ‘goodbye’ to somebody I really, really loved.

In the days before his stroke, my father would say, ‘When you’re at rock bottom, strap on a different pair of boots and start climbing.’ I’d never known whether I ever made him proud, but he had certainly spent a lot of time pushing me to succeed when I was a girl.

Greta had called cancer one of life’s bastards, and ‘like aw bastards it has to be pushed awa’ fae yer windaes so the light can come in.’ In other words, don’t concentrate too much on the problem, see past it. I loved the way she saw things. It was Greta’s advice that seemed to ring truest to me. I was starting to believe that meeting her at this point in my life had been synchronicity in action. I had needed to realise life was passing me by; she was living proof that if I wasn’t careful, it would. When Greta and Hughie had arrived in Greece, she told me she had the taxi from the airport stop by the first beach they came to.

‘Ah stuck my toes in the Aegean,’ she’d said. ‘An’ ah dae that everywhere I go, just in case ah never get tae feel it again. Ye have to take every chance ye get to experience the things ye love, Bernice. Dinnae waste a second o’ it.’

She was right. How sad that it often took a brush with death for people to really open their eyes in life. The biggest hurdle I still had left to climb was telling everyone back home David and I were through. And give a reason for it.

‘You don’t have to tell anyone why,’ Linda had said. ‘Nobody needs to know the truth but you.’

‘So, these “other” women of David’s, you’re saying they’re not real? They live in the television, his laptop and mobile phone?’
Yes. Like Eydis did for Linda up until last week. Now there was an interesting parallel.

‘I promise to love and honour you, forsaking all others.’

Five days after saying this, David forgot about the forsaking bit. Little wonder my wedding song choice was
Baby, Baby, Blue
, I was now. A promise had been broken, and yet I supposed society would expect me to overlook it for the sanctity of marriage. Did a woman have to forget her pride, her dignity, her own feelings and her own self to become the complete property of her man? On the day of our wedding, I’d changed my name on Facebook to present the newly married me as Mrs David Dando. As if Bernice Anderson had dissolved and her identity was now morphed into his.

I had been asking myself where I’d gone. The answer was simple; I’d dug myself a huge hole called David and buried myself in it – and not just with the simple act of a name change. I’d married a man who had helped derail my already damaged self-confidence, who, like the rest of society, was busy being old but chasing youth – the perpetual caricature made from every media presentation of a woman. Rub out the lines, age spots, every wrinkle, give her a youthful tuck here and there, then add the glossy shine of a sixteen-year-old to her hair. David wasn’t the only one buying it, I was too. I had thought that inside of a marriage was the safest, neatest place for a forty-something woman like me to hide. Because I, Bernice Annabel Anderson, couldn’t be alone. I had bought the idea that real women past the age of forty were on the shelf. I thought we may as well do what Blondie had said in a song,
Die Young, Stay Pretty
. Disappear.
Tell ‘em you’re dead, and wither away.

I had done this to myself. And now it needed to be undone, without a care in the world for what anyone had to say about it. This is my life. If anybody wants to look in and offer a review, I’ll file it under ‘whatever’.

Taking David’s still-sealed envelope from my suitcase, I turned it over and over in my hands. Whatever it said, it didn’t matter now. My phone buzzed, interrupting my thoughts. It was a text from Linda.

Eydis just left. Could do with a friend right now.

Texting Linda back to arrange a meeting I bolted out of the door, tossing David’s envelope into my bag and leaving Chris a note pinned to the rail on his staircase:

Sorry about yesterday. Meet me tonight at the street party?

I scribbled my phone number underneath and headed to Linda’s apartment. She greeted me at the door. ‘Hi there,’ she said, beckoning me in. Her eyes were as ruddy and wet as mine. She’d been crying too.

‘Saying goodbye was a toughie, eh?’ I said, hugging her.

‘Yes,’ she sniffed. ‘And more permanent than we’d planned.’

‘Permanent?’

‘Yes. We’ve decided not to communicate anymore, it’s too tough. She travels all round the world and I kind of love making roots in a place. It just can’t work. Silly, really. We both should have known this all along. I love her Bernice, I really do. But I’m too old to live everywhere.’

‘But if you love each other?’

‘It could work, but only if everything else fell into place. I know if I made her stop travelling, she’d be unhappy. She knows if she made me traipse around the world with her, I’d be unhappy. No matter what Hollywood says, love doesn’t conquer all, Bernice. I need to be able to be myself.’

‘Well, I’m really sorry,’ I said. ‘But I do understand.’

‘You’ve been crying too?’ she asked.

‘Yes, well, for the record, I’m ending my honeymoon tomorrow and heading home to see about an annulment. Now that’s being different.’

‘Annulment? Really?’

I sighed. ‘David and I got married a fortnight ago. This was to be our adventure-laden honeymoon, for a marriage that was never consummated. And one of our first-time-for-everything honeymoon adventures turned out to be splitting up for good.’

Linda stared at me with her mouth agape. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she replied.

‘What is there to say?’ I said, sadly.

‘Don’t you love him?’

‘Of course I love him, that’s why I married him. But I can’t live with his deceit and, well, the lack of sex thing.’

She sat straightening the hem on her trousers, looking deep in thought.

Finally, she spoke. ‘Bernice, to be honest I felt a bit guilty the other day once I got speaking to the guy. He seemed an okay kind of fella and he really, really loves you. Are you sure this is what you want?’

‘He cheated on me. Alright, not in the complete sense of the word but he was getting off on other women and not me. What kind of marriage is that?’

‘You’re right, he shouldn’t look elsewhere for his kicks but at least it wasn’t a real woman he was with.’

‘How can you of all people say that? You said you loved Eydis, yet you’d never met her?’

She looked stung at the reference back to the source of her own pain and for a second I felt very guilty. ‘Oh, Linda I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .’

‘That’s okay,’ she assured me. ‘Yes, I loved Eydis. But that’s because we talked every night, exchanged emails, learned each other’s deepest, darkest secrets. We shared our hopes and dreams in regular conversations, getting to know each other just like on a date in person. We weren’t simply “getting off” on each other – we were two people sharing thoughts and real feelings. It’s not the same at all.’

‘That’s what this honeymoon was supposedly all about. Getting to know one another again, trying new experiences; a new start. All I found out, once and for all, is that he’s a snivelling, weak-willed pig of a man and I HATE him!’

‘Which, of course, is the universally recognised sign that you love him.’

‘Yes, I fucking love him, okay? But I don’t want to.’

‘I know! Fucking man!’

‘Fucking MEN!’

‘And fucking women!’ she yelled. Despite our misery we both laughed.

‘I wish we weren’t going home tomorrow,’ I sighed. ‘I am going to miss you and this place so much.’

‘I know, not to mention all this hot sunshine, wine and great food.’

‘The worst thing is – I know I won’t see Chris again.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘Because he’s David’s best friend. He’s not going to want to know me when I’ve gone home and everyone realises the marriage is through,’ I answered. ‘The sad thing is I really like Chris, even though he might be having an affair. We used to get on so well.’

‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Linda cut in. ‘He’s having a what?’

‘I think Ginger and Chris might be having an affair,’ I confessed.

‘What on earth makes you think that?’

‘I’m not sure . . . Ginger keeps taking off. Chris keeps meeting mystery women and won’t tell me who they are.’

‘Jeez, is that all you’ve got?’ Linda said. ‘Because I have to tell you, it’s a bit thin.’

‘She’s been at the villa at least twice since the painting class, you know. The first night I stayed with him, she turned up at ten o’clock at night,’ I continued. ‘And she clearly didn’t expect to find me there.’

‘No, she can’t be. That lovely man just lost his mother too!’ Linda shook her head gloomily.

‘He did?’ I asked, surprised.

‘Yes. He adored her,’ she explained. ‘He was telling me at the Greek night before you arrived. His father died when he was a boy and he was an only child. His momma was all he had. Golly, he even cried when he was telling me about it.’

‘That’s just awful,’ I agreed. Bloody hell, Ginger was a bigger cow than I’d given her credit for.

‘Okay look, enough of this,’ Linda said. ‘It’s the last day of my holiday and your honeymoon, what are we going to do?’

‘Do you know what I’m supposed to be doing today?’ I asked her.

‘No?’

Wriggling free from our hug I unzipped my handbag and took out the envelope David had given me on our first day in Greece. ‘This,’ I said.

Linda took it from me and turned it over. ‘Oh, it’s sealed. What’s in it?’

‘My adventure for today. The programme of events for our last night together.’

‘No! Aren’t you going to open it then?’ she asked.

‘What’s the point? It’s all over.’

‘It might be tickets? Deep sea diving,’ she gushed. ‘Or . . . oooh . . . sky diving.’

‘I don’t think so, David is afraid of heights. It was my idea to send us parascending.’

‘Don’t you want to see what it says?’

A part of me did wonder what it said. It would be easy just to throw it away but for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to.

‘What the hell. If it’s dinner for two at that posh restaurant in the hills we’ll go together before the party tonight,’ I told her, ripping open the envelope.