The Best of Times (77 page)

“Oh, God,” she said, snatching her hand back. “I’m sorry. This is so, so stupid. Oh, Barney, Barney, but why are you here?”

“I’m here,” he said, “because Tamara told me to.”

“Tamara! Now I know I’m dreaming.”

“No,” he said, “you’re not.”

“You’ll have to explain.”

“All right.”

“Well …” She caught sight of herself again in the mirror. “I’m sorry I look so awful.”

“You don’t. You look beautiful to me. Absolutely beautiful.”

It was still all rather surreal.

And then they were standing inside her flat and he was still staring at her and looking very serious, and not touching her, and he said, “I can’t believe this is happening. I really can’t.”

“Nor can I.”

“I’ve tried so hard to get over you. I couldn’t.”

“Nor could I.”

“I … wanted to call you so much, find out what had happened. I just couldn’t.”

“Nor could I. Even after I knew you’d finished with Amanda.”

“I was so afraid you’d … you’d …”

“I know,” she said. “I know what you were afraid of. Same as me. That I was getting over it, had someone else.”

“And,” he said, moving towards her, reaching out, taking one strand of her hair, winding it just a little round his finger, beginning to smile now, “how stupid was that? How stupid.”

“Of both of us,” she said, “so, so stupid. As if that would have been possible.”

“As if indeed.”

“So … what happened?”

“Well … like I said. Tamara told me to ring you. So I did.”

“Since when did you do what Tamara says?”

“Since tonight. She’s my new very, very best friend. Yes, she really is.”

“Mary told me I should ring you. Only I wasn’t so sensible. I went on being too scared.”

“Who’s Mary, for heaven’s sake?”

“Oh, Barney. You know. The old lady who was in the crash. I told you, she was meeting her boyfriend from the war; it was so, so sweet.”

“Oh, the one you met in the restaurant. Yes.” He was staring at her, absolutely still, looking dazed. “I love you, Emma. I can’t bear it, I love you so much. What was so sweet? Did you say?”

“I love you too. I can’t believe it. So much. What was so sweet was she told me to call you to get in touch. It’s so sad; her Russell’s died now. She’s been widowed twice.”

“Poor Mary. Poor Russell.”

“I know.”

“Go on telling me what she said.”

“She said I should call you. And I said you’d probably have forgotten about me by now, it was such a long time. And she said you wouldn’t have. That Russell hadn’t forgotten her, not even after more than sixty years. How amazing is that?”

“Well, Emma King,” he said, “I’m not being beaten at love by anyone. I couldn’t forget you if I didn’t see you for … for seventy years. How’s that?”

“We’d have to be quite old,” she said, “for you to remember me for seventy years.”

“I’d hang on,” he said. “I’d just hang on if I thought I was going to see you again. One day. I’d wait.”

“Well … you don’t have to.”

“No, I don’t, thank God. I’ll have you with me. For all of seventy years, I hope. I love you, Emma. I never, ever want to spend another hour without you.”

“You might have to spend an hour. Here and there. While you’re banking and I’m doctoring. But after that …”

“After that, it’d be OK. So OK. And you know something, my darling, lovely Emma?”

“No. What?”

“You don’t look old enough to be a doctor.”

EPILOGUE

Abi woke to the sound of rain. Not just a light shower, but proper, torrential rain. Mud-making, wheel-sticking, tent-soaking, barbecue-quenching, spirit-sapping, off-putting rain. Well, she’d said it would. Only she’d kind of thought if she said it enough, allowed for it sufficiently, it wouldn’t happen. Wrong. It had happened.

Well, a little rain had never hurt Glastonbury But then, Glastonbury was … well, Glastonbury. People would go if it snowed. Just to say they’d been there. In Good Company wasn’t famous. This was its first year. Its only year, if Mrs. Grainger Senior had anything to do with it. Mrs. Grainger Junior had more ambitious plans for it.

There had been a Mrs. Grainger Junior for three months now. Three pretty good months. They had got married, very quietly really, on a brilliantly dappled April day, when the sun had shone one minute, and the clouds had regathered the next; when they had walked into the registry office leaving a doomily dark world behind them and come out an hour later into a radiantly blue-and-gold one. Which, as Georgia said, was an absolutely fitting portent.

They had agreed, William and she, that there was no point waiting for very long at all, since there was absolutely nothing to wait for. No complex family to worry about—none at all, in Abi’s case, and while William’s was worrying, it wasn’t complex—no one’s permission to be sought, no need to find somewhere to live. Abi had no desire, she said, for a big wedding; she didn’t want to walk down the aisle in a meringue; indeed she didn’t want to walk down any aisle in anything. She was a staunch atheist. The only thing she believed in, she said, was William, and how much she loved him … which she repeated in her wedding speech—she had insisted on making a speech—and which reduced almost everyone in the room—with a few notable and predictable exceptions—to misty-eyed and foolish laughter.

She said she’d quite like a good party, but not so big she couldn’t dance with everyone in the room; she and William had very few friends in common, and she didn’t want anyone there who didn’t understand what they were doing together.

So there had been about thirty altogether—for a late lunch and then dancing at the Royal Crescent Hotel in Bath, which Mr. Grainger insisted on paying for. Abi had wanted to pay for it herself, and not be any further beholden to the Graingers, but:

“Let him,” William said. “It’s his way of apologising for my mother’s behaviour.”

Sylvie was there, of course, with a new boyfriend. He was called Alan Wallis and he worked in the men’s department of Marks & Spencer. When Abi first met him, she told Sylvie she must need her hormones examined, that he was bound to be gay, but Sylvie assured her he was most definitely not; he was brilliant at the business, and in fact so demanding that she was quite worn out by it all. Abi, in a spirit of pure mischief, made him go and ask Mrs. Grainger to dance, but in fact, Alan Wallis had the most beautiful formal manners and had done an advanced ballroom dancing course and steered Mrs. Grainger most expertly round the room, and she was later heard to tell William that he was rather a charming young man and that they had had a very interesting discussion about the rise and fall in the Marks & Spencer share price, and the reasons behind it.

Mr. Grainger was in his turn very taken with Sylvie. “Maybe they could set up a
maison à quatre
,” Abi remarked cheerfully to William. “That would solve an awful lot of problems.”

William’s brother and sister and their respective families came; Abi quite liked Martin, who was not unlike William to look at, but a lot smoother, but she thought his sister was frightful and was almost moved to feel pity for Mrs. Grainger when she saw her being snubbed repeatedly by her daughter and even more frequently by her son-in-law.

Georgia was there, of course, and so was Merlin; Georgia was interestingly and rather overtly impatient with Merlin, Abi noticed. He was at his most charming and kept paying everyone very lavish compliments; he told Abi she made his heart stop, she looked so lovely, and William that he was the luckiest man in the universe—that really annoyed Georgia—and Sylvie that she danced like the proverbial angel. In the end, Georgia actually snapped at him and told him to stop behaving as if he was in front of—or behind—the cameras. He looked quite hurt, and Sylvie, bored by now with Mr. Grainger, took it upon herself to comfort him, which made Georgia crosser still.

Emma was there with Barney; they were officially engaged now, and Emma had a rock quite as big as Abi’s on her finger. She told Abi privately that she would have given anything to have a quiet wedding too, but her mother had gone into overdrive over the whole thing, and her rating on the nightmare bride’s mother scale of nought to ten was about eleven and a half.

“It’s a bit like you, in a way: Barney and his family are so posh, and me and my family aren’t, and I just can see it all ending in tears.” Abi had told her to elope with Barney, or run away and get married on a beach somewhere, but Emma said she couldn’t possibly do that to her mother. She also, Abi suspected, wanted very much to walk down the aisle in a meringue.

William had invited a few of his farming friends, and their wives, jolly, horsey girls for the most part, who danced energetically long after everyone else had given up, and Abi invited a small number—three, to be precise—of her better-behaved girlfriends, who would be an adornment to the company and could be more or less relied upon not to get so drunk that they were sick or to bring any drugs onto the premises … and that was that.

“And you know what?” she said to William as they undressed late that night in their suite of the Radisson Edwardian hotel at Heathrow, prior to a six a.m. flight to Barbados, “it was exactly how I hoped: everyone seemed happy, most people got on with most people, and even your mother smiled quite a lot.”

William agreed, rather absently; he was goggle-eyed at the excesses of the hotel, with its vast atrium, its marble floors and pillars, its lush palm trees and gilded mirrors, never having seen anything like it in his life.

“I’ve only actually been away three times, twice with Nanny to Frinton and once with my dad fishing in Scotland.”

Abi told him she thought she could probably improve on that.

The honeymoon had been wonderful; they had stayed at the Glitter Bay Hotel, and done all the touristy things: parasailed, surfed, swum with dolphins, and danced to various wonderful bands night after night on various wonderful beaches. And then returned home to the reality of cottage number one.

Actually, Abi was very happy there. She was absorbed with starting her company, planning the festival, learning to ride—at which she proved rather adept: “We’ll have you out with the hounds soon … all two of them,” Mr. Grainger had said with his usual heavy wink—and struggling to cook. After a few weeks of overambitious failures, she gave up and simply served endless enormous roasts, which were easy and satisfied William’s awesome appetite. Mrs. Grainger left her alone for the most part, occasionally arriving at cottage number one with pies and puddings and chutneys and jams—“I know how busy you are; this might help a bit”—which Abi became swiftly grateful for. She knew Mrs. Grainger’s motives were not entirely good, being partly to contrast with her own efforts, but on the other hand it all tasted wonderful.

And here they were on the morning of the festival, with three thousand tickets sold. “Three thousand, I can’t believe it,” Georgia had said. “It’s amazing.”

Abi told her it wasn’t amazing enough—they needed twice that to make any real money; they were way overbudget on the bands. “But we should get loads more on the day … as long as it isn’t tipping down.”

“You said it would be tipping down,” said Georgia. “You can’t get out of it that easily.”

The best thing was that Barney’s bank, BKM, had agreed to sponsor it.

“Only a rather modest amount, I’m afraid,” Barney had told Abi. “Ten grand, piss in a pot to them, but it should help a bit. And they’ll want their pound of flesh or whatever, be credited on all the publicity and so on. They’re actually rather tickled by it. My boss said he’d bring a few friends if it’s a good day.”

Abi told him she didn’t see ten grand as either modest or a piss in a pot, and that she’d thank Barney’s boss personally in the best way she knew how.

“Best not,” said Barney, grinning at her. “He’s gay.”