The Vintage Summer Wedding (26 page)

‘You certainly did your research.’ She nodded as she took the small, chipped glass he proffered, then said, ‘I was as much to blame, you know, for the break-up. I was in a funny place.’

He paused as he was topping up his own glass. ‘You still there, do you think?’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. I hope not.’

Seb nodded and took a sip of the white wine misting up his tumbler. Anna did the same, it tasted of elderflower and summer days by the river.

When he pulled out an orange-and-brown flowered deck-chair for her, she sat down and waited a little nervously while he faffed about with the food. She felt self-conscious in her fluorescent jumper, worried that she might say something wrong and mess it up, but then he turned round from the stove, looked at her, his lip caught between his teeth, slight panic in his eyes, and said, ‘I made this soup thing and, to be honest, it tastes fucking awful. So I don’t know… Do you want to maybe…’ She wondered if maybe he was nervous, too. ‘Just eat crisps and drink wine?’

Anne hid her smile behind her hand as she nodded. ‘I really like crisps,’ she said.

He put his hand on his chest and said, ‘Me too!’ And she laughed. Then she felt her body relax, her shoulders drop, her muscles lose their tension. She pulled a cardboard box over and put her feet up on it.

As he shook out a couple of packets of Walkers Ready Salted, a packet of Quavers and then, to his delight, found some cheese and Jacobs crackers at the back of the shelf, Anna realised what his diet had mainly consisted of out here in the shed. Laying the various bowls on the table, Seb paused and said, ‘I’m sorry about the other day, when you asked me for dinner. I don’t know why I turned you down. I think I was still angry and really ashamed of myself.’

She swirled her wine round in her glass, watched the liquid slosh to the rim, and shrugged. ‘It was probably a good thing.’ She looked up at him and went on, ‘I don’t think it would have gone very well.’

‘Not like this.’ He winked, holding out a flower pot of crisps.

‘Nothing like this.’ She said, stuffing a couple into her mouth. ‘God, I’ve already had a Burger King today. What am I becoming?’

‘Yeah, good job you’re going to New York, you don’t want to get fat in the country,’ he said, and it was a joke but, as soon as he said it, they both paused, halted like startled animals.

‘I don’t know—’ she started.

‘No, wait.’ He waved his hand, ‘I’ve practised this, so let me say it. I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t need to be here, Anna. I don’t need to be anywhere. Christ, I don’t care where I am, but the thing is,’ he swallowed and said, ‘I really care who I’m with. And I like being with you. You’re a pain in the arse sometimes, but that’s why I chose you.’ He did a little laugh under his breath, like that was the favourite bit of his rehearsed speech. ‘I don’t want an easy life. I want an interesting life. And I want you to have the most interesting life you’ve dreamt of, so...if you would have me, I would very much like to come with you.’

‘You would?’ she asked, watching the way his mouth moved in the candlelight.

‘Of course I would.’

Anna nodded into the silence that followed. Then she reached forward and ran her finger up the edge of the candle, picking at the globs of dried wax that had dribbled and set down the side.

‘I suppose my main fear, Anna, is that I can never give you what you want.’ Seb paused, as if summoning the courage for what he wanted to say next. ‘That I’ll never be enough.’

She paused. Felt the dribbles of warm wax gather and stop, bulging out where her finger halted their progress. Then, her eyes fixed on the flame, she took a breath in through her nose and said, ‘I wasn’t too tall to be a dancer.’

‘I’m sorry, what?’ Seb said, confused, as if his great admission had been misunderstood.

‘I just said that I was. I made it up. It was the best excuse I could come up with for why I failed.’ She plucked off the belly of wax drips and squished them between her fingers. ‘But now I think I’ve finally realised that I was living someone else’s dream and I never gave myself the chance to put it down and pick it up again and make it my dream.’

She glanced up, reluctant to look at him. Seb had leant forward, his elbows on the table and was watching her. ‘I always thought you were about the same height as Darcey Bussell,’ he said with a laugh.

Anna felt her lips twitch. Then she told him about Lucinda Warren and their dance off and her mother and the roses and he sat back, his arms folded across his chest, holding in a remark about her mother that he knew would annoy her because whatever happened she would always defend her because she knew the depth of how unhappy she had been and how deep the wound inflicted by her father had been.

‘I loved it.’ Anna sighed, ‘I loved the ballet but, after that moment, those flowers all over the floor and the look on her face, I just completely severed it. I left.’ She crossed her hands in front of her as if that was it. ‘Left it completely. And now I find that Lucinda was fucking the bloody judge.’ She snorted a laugh through her nose. ‘I think that I have been trying to be better all this time, to be the best and I never really realised that good was good enough.’ She looked up at him and smiled, plucked her leopard-print jumper away from her chest, ‘That’s something to thank Razzmatazz for!’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘A bunch of bloody misfits teach me what I’ve been legging it from all my life.’ He snorted a laugh. ‘I think though…’ she said, going to fiddle with the candle again but he reached over and caught her hand, held it in his, ‘I think I’ve finally caught up with myself.’

She looked at his hand over hers, his neatly trimmed fingernails, the smattering of hairs, the tan-line of where his watch usually was, the familiarity of the warmth of his palm.

‘I’m glad to hear that,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ she said, ‘I think maybe I’ve been blaming the wrong things for my own unhappiness. And I’m not saying that we won’t have any problems again in our lives but they won’t come from the same place as they have before, for me anyway. And maybe I’ll go to New York for a bit, or we can go or you could come out in the holidays, but I’ll always come back, and maybe I’ll start something completely new ‒ a design arm of Vintage Treasure. God knows. But I feel like I can stop for a minute, and get my breath back.’ Anna glanced up and looked at him, the warm chocolate-brown of his eyes sparkling in the candlelight. The corners of his mouth tipping into the start of a smile which she mirrored, feeling that shyness from earlier creep back in.

Then he pulled his hand away and she sat up straighter, startled, like maybe she’d said something wrong, that he’d processed what she’d said and it wasn’t enough for him. She watched silently as he stood up and went over to the shelf with the books and the cactus and fumbled around at the back of it.

Then he turned back with a tatty brown leather book in his hands. ‘I saved you this,’ he said, holding her long-lost scrapbook out for her.

‘You did…’ she said quietly, unable to quite believe the sight of it, taking it from him with trembling hands. The feel of it between her fingers was like the touch of silk, like a familiarity of unpacking boxes from your childhood and only remembering what the things were once you saw them. Synapses flickering with recognition. The scratch across the front, the frayed pages, the smell of leather and glue. Leafing through all the glamorous shots of Cindy Crawford’s Mexican holiday home, Maria Carey’s walk-in wardrobe and Ivana Trump’s swimming pool and she saw herself with her scissors and Pritt Stick, sitting on the edge of the bed dreaming of a future sparkling with glitter and riches and ambition. She laughed as she turned the pages. ‘It’s horrendous really, isn’t it?’

Seb shrugged. ‘I quite like it. I’d like my initials mosaic-ed in the bottom of my swimming pool.’ He leant across the table to look at some of the gaudy images and then went over to the bucket on the floor to pull out another bottle of wine, ice and water clinking in the make-shift cooler.

As he searched for the corkscrew, Anna flicked back to the beginning of the book and saw where she’d printed her name and phone number so someone could get in touch with her if she lost it, the address of the poky London flat written neatly in fountain pen. She found the first two pages after that were stuck together, the glue melted and crisp, and as she prised them apart they unstuck with a crack.

There, before her, was the first picture she’d stuck in, right at the beginning, right at the start, from the first
Hello!
in the stack. It wasn’t of ballrooms dripping with chandeliers nor was it of diamond-encrusted dresses and pearls as big as robin’s eggs, it was a torn-out image of a patio, trimmed with olive groves and a setting Tuscan sun. Across the terracotta tiles were rows of trestle tables draped in white cloth and laid with mismatched crockery, lanterns strung up in the trees and wild flowers scattered in old oil cans. Along the centre of the table fairy cakes were tumbling in stacks of multi-coloured pastels, tiered on towering stands, and in the background was a band, the instruments leant up waiting for dancing under a sky twinkling with stars.

She traced the outline of the image with her finger and then closed the book and looked up at Seb.

‘I would put you in my Yeses,’ she said.

He paused mid-pulling of the cork, his mouth quirking up at the sides and his eyes crinkling as he tipped his head and said, ‘I would put you in
my
Yeses.’

The feeling of her smile then went from the top of her head right down to her toes. She left the book on the table, pulled her sleeves down over her hands and sat back with her feet up on the box and watched him as he poured more white and watched her back.

And then they ate crisps and drank wine and talked about everything and anything and as the evening dipped into a blanket of darkness and all the birds fell silent, and they peered out to look at the glistening cherry tree and watch the last of the tea-lights flicker and fade, she said, ‘This is the most fun I’ve ever had and I’m in the shed.’

He put his arm round her and turned her towards him as he leant back against the old work-bench, and said, ‘Do you think you might want to marry me?’

‘Steady on, I’ve only known you one evening.’ She laughed, liking the feeling of his hands linked behind her waist.

He paused for a moment and then said, ‘Well how about just sex, then? I’ve heard you’ve got some kinky new gold leggings.’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t have sex with you without knowing your intentions are honourable.’

‘There you go,’ he said, his hands held out wide as if his point was proved. ‘It’s a win-win situation.’

Chapter Twenty-Two

Anna woke up early to the sound of birds and maybe the distant rumble of a tractor, but it could have been a lorry on the M3. Her skin felt cooler than it had in months, the sheet that she usually kicked off just the right weight for the morning breeze. It felt though like something was missing, something wasn’t quite as normal. She looked over at the pillow next to her and saw Seb, face relaxed with sleep, his hair all messy and skewiff, his arm flung out over the sheet and she let her hand rest on his wrist while she thought back to the night before, to the day before, and then she reached down and grabbed a big cushion from the floor and snuggled her shoulders back into it and sat, propped up, staring out the window at the bright-blue sky, the birds that she still had no clue what type they were swooping and hovering, at the butterflies and the wisps of morning cloud like streaks of paint, and she realised that in that moment, the only thing that was wrong was that she had the unfamiliar feeling of having nothing to worry about. Her mind, usually as frantic and cluttered as that hideous mess that once stood tangled at the back of Mrs Beedle’s shop, was empty and calm like a big balloon. A wide, cavernous space of nothing except the moment of sitting up in bed, the slow pulse of Seb’s heart under her fingertips, and the disappearing clouds out the window.

The bakery was just opening when Anna arrived in the square, Rachel had just unrolled the awning and laid out the tables and chairs. Anna walked over and followed her back into the shop as she piled hot chocolate croissants and pastries into wooden trays and bowls laid out over the counter.

‘Blimey, you’re here early.’ Rachel said, shocked. ‘Give me a sec to just get the rest of the croissants out the oven.’

Anna pulled up a stool on the edge of the counter and looked around as she waited. It was like walking into heaven. Cool and dark in contrast to the warm summer breeze just picking up outside. The glass counter to her right seemed to sparkle like the casings at Tiffany’s. Blueberries burst out of erratically shaped muffins like ink, glazed apricots sat like half suns on sticky Danish pastries, swirling cinnamon buns were stacked precariously high with a dusting of snowy icing sugar, and raspberries just peeked out of the crisp dough on the drop scones. The shelf below bowed under the weight of jewel coloured candid fruits, sugared almonds, tiers of strawberry creams and white chocolate thins. And then below that held what Anna was looking for, cakes with icing so thick it was like the froth on waves as they crashed. Slices were cut to reveal layer upon layer of sponge, multi-coloured or speckled with walnuts and shavings of carrot. There were dense chocolate gateaux as black as coal and then, her personal favourite, the Victoria Sandwich, two simple buttery tiers that oozed with jam and cream and, on the top, stencil patterns created in the coating of sugar. Her mouth watered at the very sight of it.

‘What can I get you, then?’ Rachel asked, heaping the last of the almond croissants, their centres plump to bursting like little fat bellies, onto a wooden tray.

‘I’ll have an espresso and…’ Anna paused, glancing back to the glass counter, ‘It’s probably too early for cake, isn’t it?’

‘Anna…’ Rachel rested her elbows on the counter, ‘It’s never too early for cake.’

Anna scrunched up her nose, thought about it, ummed and ahhed and then said, ‘OK, go on then, the Victoria Sponge.’

‘An excellent choice,’ Rachel laughed as she banged about with the coffee machine behind her and then went to cut a great wedge of cake.