The Trouble with Henry and Zoe (2 page)

And isn’t that a thought.

Again, Henry turns the question over in his mind. Should you marry someone you like? A beautiful girl you’ve known since you were fourteen, someone who loves you . . . should you marry
that person when you know in the chambers of your heart and coils of your guts that you don’t
love
this girl? Not like they do in the movies, not like Rhett loved Scarlett or Rick
loved Ilsa. There is love, yes, but has it peaked? And is love an absolute? Can you love a little or a lot? And how far will a little take you – five years, ten?

Should you marry her anyway, because you have been together (more or less) for twelve years, because your fiancée is the next best thing to the daughter your mother never had, because she
cuts hair in your mother’s salon, because her father is building a house for you to grow old and die in? Should you smile and say ‘for better or worse’ when you suspect that of
the two options the latter is by far the more likely? Should you lift her veil, kiss your bride on her beautiful lips and whisper (loud enough, of course, for the congregation to hear) ‘I
love you so much’? Even though you don’t – not like Ben loved Elaine, Calvin loved Fran or Walter loved Hildy. Should you do this because you know everyone in this village and
they know you and the alternative is unthinkable?

And why now, Henry?
The last twelve months have been a blizzard of magazine cuttings, fabric samples and lists of lists. For the last three months April has not worn slippers, instead
watching TV and making cups of tea in a pair of ivory-white stilettos, the six-inch heels pockmarking her mother’s carpets as she breaks in the shoes ahead of a short walk and a night of
dancing. Henry almost laughs at the thought, but there is nothing funny about what he is contemplating.

Which is what, exactly? Knocking on her door after breakfast, asking how she slept and then: ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking . . .’

Unthinkable
, he thinks. He can’t, he cannot imagine a workable scenario that accommodates him telling his fiancée that actually, having slept on it, he thinks – in the
long run – they would both be happier if they called the whole thing off.

It is not the first time this black idea has occurred to him. It has been festering for months. Two weeks ago he was performing a root canal on Mrs Griffiths, and as she lay with her fingers
laced beneath her bosom, the overhead light had glinted off the stone in her engagement ring. And in that flash, he had thought,
This is not what I want.
And just as quickly – his
brain had run the scenario he was too afraid to consciously acknowledge. April would say
No
. He would tell her he was having second thoughts, and April would reject the idea. She would tell
him he was being silly; that it’s normal to have doubts; that they were made for each other. Or maybe she would receive his declaration with sobbing hysterical tears, waking her bridesmaids
and parents. Waking her father and semi-psychotic brother. And does Henry really think they would let him walk away from all this?

When he was at university, people would ask:
Where are you from?
Henry would sigh inwardly as he answered, and wait for the inevitable shake of the head. They know the area in the
broadest sense; have maybe even visited one of the hundreds of towns and villages that make up this stained green rug in the centre of England. But not the village where Henry went to school, had
his first fight, his first kiss. A village so small that everyone is, if not known, then known to someone known to you. In a community of fewer than two thousand people, no one gets divorced
without everyone else hearing about it. Your daughter sleeps around, your son’s into drugs, your dog shits on the pavement – everybody knows. Buy new shoes; someone will mention it to
someone else over supper that evening. Leave your fiancée at the altar . . .

Unthinkable.

Between eight and nine the bridal party will breakfast in the scullery, then at nine-thirty, and not a minute sooner, the groom and his will do the same. From there he will
have two hours to shave, fasten his cufflinks and get me to the church on time – a three-minute drive costing in the region of six hundred pounds in hired vintage automobiles. After the
service the wedding party will return to the castle for food, drink, speeches, dancing and happily ever after.
April and I will sleep together in a four-poster bed, make love and wake up as Mr
and Mrs Smith.
After breakfast April will sign the guest book with the signature (wide, left-leaning letters, the tail of the ‘S’ curling back, up and over the crossbar of the
‘A’) she has been refining for the last three weeks. A few final photographs; hugs, handshakes, tears; ‘look after my girl for me’ and off to the airport. Two weeks of
colourful cocktails and lazy days by the pool, perhaps a sightseeing trip and a night in a big-name club. A final bottle of champagne on the beach at sunset then back to the square brick house
built for them by Henry’s (now) father-in-law.

As a consequence of dating a landlord’s son, perhaps, April has a preference for old songs and classic tunes. When they were still too young to drink in the pub, Big Boots would give them
a handful of coins to feed the jukebox. April’s favourite song is ‘Sweet Home Alabama’, and if you sing it at a steady pace, giving due time to the air-guitar solos, then you can
get from the opening riff to the closing keys in the time it takes to walk from April’s parents’ house to the young couple’s new home. Five minutes, give or take.

It comes with two bedrooms and a nursery. ‘Or a study,’ Henry had said. ‘Study what?’ said April. ‘It’s a nursery. Don’t you want children?’
– ‘Yes, of course, but not necessarily straight away.’ – ‘We’ve been together twelve years. It’s a nursery.’ See, no argument. The kitchen is brand
new and unused, new beds, new tables, new chairs, new television. Everything sitting perfectly still and gathering dust.

April compiled the wedding list: bedding, pans, knives, his and hers dressing gowns. Henry wanted an old-fashioned record player – April chose a wireless speaker. He doesn’t mind
– he can’t pin his doubts on his fiancée’s need for domestic control. Nothing unusual in that. April is funny, athletic, beautiful. She visits her grandmother in the
nursing home every week, takes flowers, knows all the residents by name and listens to their looped stories without looking away. She paints her mother’s toenails every Sunday, and makes her
father a thermos full of coffee every weekday morning. She calls Henry’s dad by his old boxing handle and throws playful punches at his belly. April also works in Love & Die, his
mother’s hair salon, and the two women take the train into town together to shop for clothes at the retail park. She works occasional shifts in the pub, and is always first up when they do a
karaoke. April walks her next door neighbour’s dog. If you need someone to check on the fish while you’re on holiday, you ask the prettiest, sweetest, loveliest girl in the village. So
who cares if she wants monogrammed cushions. As an engagement present, April’s father gave them a house brick wrapped in a pink bow. It now sits on the mantelpiece of their two-bedroom,
one-nursery house.

Henry’s parents bought them crockery, twelve of everything, white with a blue trim.

‘He builds them a house, we give them plates,’ his mother had said, as if it were her husband’s fault.

‘What do you expect me to do about it?’

Sheila Smith laughed. ‘I don’t expect you to do anything.’

The cost of the wedding is common knowledge. Flowers, food, band, dress, cars and everything else besides, the day will cost seventeen thousand, six hundred and forty-six pounds. All paid for by
April’s father. The house is worth ten times as much.

Henry would have been happy with a toaster.
Happier
with a toaster.

‘We can buy our own house,’ Henry had said when the idea first came up. ‘I am a dentist, after all.’

‘And my dad’s a builder. Each to his own.’

No shouting, nothing thrown, no cruel words. And three weeks later they are looking at architect’s plans.

‘We could move out?’ Henry says.

April’s nose wrinkles when she frowns, as if at a bad smell. ‘Out? Where out?’

‘I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Chester, Liverpool, anywhere.’

‘Anywhere? Babes, why would we live
anywhere
? We already live in the nicest place in the world.’

The local mantra. But it strikes Henry that people who insist they live in the best place in the world tend not to have seen very much of it.

‘Or Manchester?’ he tries. ‘You would
love
the shops in Manchester. All on your doorstep.’

‘It rains in Manchester.’

‘It rains here.’

April kisses him, holds his face in her hands. ‘Hey,’ she says, ‘I thought you’d got all this out of your system.’

‘It’s just . . .’ He trails off, sighs.

‘It’s normal to be nervous,’ April says. ‘It’s a big step. We’ll be a family, have kids and we’ll bring them up in
the nicest place in the world
.
Dogs, walks, family.’ She kisses him again, longer than the first.

She is very beautiful.

‘There he is,’ says April. ‘There’s my handsome man.’ And she kisses him again.

In the hush of the castle, the clock ticks over to 3.00 a.m., and Henry swings his legs out from under the blanket. It’s cold, so he pulls on his socks, his jeans and a t-shirt. Just
because it’s cold.

He goes over to the window, parting the heavy velvet curtains and looking out onto the castle grounds. The moon is heavy and low-slung tonight, casting enough light to pick out the shapes of
trees and the distant peaks. ‘Rolling’, people say of the hills, but to Henry they appear to shift and fidget, complaining but never moving.

Zoe thinks maybe she should get out of bed. The kitchen sink is full of dishes, the carpets need a hoover, the bathroom needs cleaning. But she is tired, warm and enjoying the
subsiding flush of an unexpected Saturday-morning fumble. Alex is a lark and Zoe an owl, and lately it seems that whenever one is in the mood the other is seven-eighths asleep. Besides this
morning, she wonders how long it has been since they last made love. They’ve been living together for nine months now, and she would be surprised if they had made the bedsprings creak much
more than half a dozen times in the last three. He had taken the initiative this morning, though, and when Zoe muttered something about being sleepy, he had kissed her ear and whispered, ‘You
can keep your eyes closed.’ That had made her smile; his breath had tickled her ear and his hand, sliding up inside her t-shirt, had activated her nerve endings a little lower down. It had
been nice.

He was a bit quick to the finish line, now that she thinks about it, but it was . . . it was nice. He had done that thing –
the grappler
, she called it – where he hooked his
arm under her left leg. Normally Zoe wasn’t keen on the manoeuvre (aside from feeling a bit silly, she wasn’t that flexible and it could get quite painful down her hamstring), but Alex
had been gentle this morning, and it felt somehow that . . . she’s not sure how to put it . . . like he
meant it
, she supposes. At least he hadn’t attempted
the lockdown
;
last time he’d done that she’d had to turn her face into the pillow to smother her laughter. No, this morning was nice, and then – after a respectable interval with cuddling and
nuzzling – he’d jumped out of bed and said he was going to the shops to get some ‘stuff’. ‘Go back to sleep,’ he’d said, ‘I’ll bring you
breakfast in bed.’ And who is she to argue with that?

Sex, she thinks. Tremendous fun, but it doesn’t bear overthinking. Because if you think about it, isn’t the whole thing a bit daft? She knows Al’s routine almost by heart, the
sequence of hands, lips, fingers across her body.
Like a pilot preparing for take-off . . .

A part of her knows that once you start to scrutinize a thing,
a person
, the tiny flaws can begin to occlude the larger picture.
Just like these walls
, she thinks.

There is enough light in the room that Zoe can just make out the messy patches of darker paint showing through two coats of Dawn Mist. Alex claims he can’t see the imperfections; says Zoe
is imagining them. He insists on this with such conviction that Zoe wonders if he isn’t right.
Focus on the positives
, she says to herself.

And the positives are what? Alex is cool, handsome, has a nice if somewhat softer than when they met body, and he’s good ( . . .
or is he just okay?
) in bed.

Zoe has slept with eleven men. Six boyfriends and a smattering of flings ranging from one to a few nights. She has never ranked these men and boys in terms of their bedroom prowess, but she
knows without hesitation who tops the list: Ken Coleman, a third-year Maths student she dated for two terms in her second year. ‘Ken Wood’ someone – Vicky, more than likely
– had nicknamed him. The worst, too, is a no brainer (Jacob Kentish, Philosophy, small penis, bad breath, funny noises), but the remaining nine are more difficult to order. As her mind begins
sorting these men of its own accord, Zoe shies away from the exercise –
what if Alex falls in the wrong half of the group?
If he does, she certainly doesn’t want to confirm the
fact. They share a mortgage now – the modern equivalent of marriage – so it doesn’t do to be making these schoolgirlish comparisons. Alex is a good lover: he is considerate most
of the time, clean most of the time, and she has a pleasant little orgasm most of the time. Not the bone-marrow boiling, eye-crossing, narcotic wobblers she had at the hands of Ken, granted, but
there’s only so much of that a girl can take.

Although – and this is a new thing – about a week before her period is due, she has found herself . . .
craving
is the best word she can think of . . .
craving
sex. Not
lovemaking, but primal, vigorous sex. Zoe wonders if her body clock is sending out its stalk on a spring. She won’t be thirty for another eleven months, so it seems early. Maybe it’s
because she and Alex have bought a house, set up a nest.
Who told my bloody ovaries
, she thinks.