Читать книгу All She Ever Wished For - Claudia Carroll - Страница 14

The present

Thursday night, dinner with the Pritchards. Did I tell you about my in-laws to be? Because not many people can say that they’re genuinely fond of the family they’re about to marry into, but I can. Deeply fond of them.

Honestly.

Bernard’s parents, Desmond and Beatrice, are Anglo-Irish and now live in Donnybrook, the posh end of Donnybrook that is, in a once beautiful but now slightly dilapidated Victorian redbrick, surrounded by copper trees and with a banged-up Honda Civic sitting in their driveway on four blocks of cement. Untaxed, uninsured and ignored, much like the house itself.

True, their home could be beautiful if the Pritchards only tidied it up a bit, hoovered and maybe ran a duster over the place every now and then, but then that’s all part and parcel of the Pritchard family charm. And we’ll just skate over the wilderness that’s their front garden, which right now is looking not unlike the set of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! In fact the one time my mother was here, her only comment was, ‘well, we may not live in a house that grand but still, I think I’d rather die of shame than invite guests into my house if it was that filthy. The Pritchards may well act like they’re posher than the Queen, but you’d want to see the state of their downstairs loo.’

You can tell everything you need to know about a person, according to Mum, by just a single glance at their bathroom. I tried in vain to convince her that she was missing the point, because that’s the whole thing about the Pritchards; they seem to live their whole lives in chaotic squalor and it doesn’t bother them in the slightest. It’s all part and parcel of their whole ‘take us as you find us’ vibe.

Beatrice and Desmond, you see, not unlike Bernard himself, could best be classed as ‘eccentric’. In an endearing way though, you can only admire them for all their warm-hearted, unaffected battiness. Desmond is a retired university professor (History of Art and Classics, just like Bernard himself). Meanwhile, his mum, Beatrice, used to work as a senior librarian and is now researching a non-fiction book, in her own words, ‘all about Oliver Cromwell, politics and religion in the English Civil War, 1642–1651. Not your thing at all, my darling’.

In fact, I’ve a recurring nightmare that she invites me to her book club to discuss it and I am only hoping against hope that she doesn’t give me an early copy to read then start grilling me on it.

I pull my car into the Pritchard’s driveway, narrowly avoiding the same pothole that’s been there ever since Bernard and I first started dating. There’s a gentle thud on the roof of my car and I realise that it’s Magic, the family’s jet-black tomcat and officially the unfriendliest animal in the world, who’s just jumped down from the branch of a tree to come and intimidate me.

‘Hi, Magic,’ I say, hopping out of the car and instinctively going to pet him, but he just squeals like I’ve actually done him physical harm and instead leaps up onto the bonnet of my car, tail pointing sharply upwards and hissing. Same as the big eejit does every single time he sees me.

‘Come on, Magic,’ I say soothingly, reaching out to placate him. ‘Can’t you and me be pals?’

He responds with a cross between a yell and a squawk that’s so loud, next thing Beatrice is at the front door, still in her dressing gown and with a towel wrapped around her head. Almost as though I’ve arrived hours early for dinner and caught her off-guard, whereas actually I’m bang on time.

‘What’s that God-awful racket? Oh it’s you, Tess dear, how lovely to see you. Now, Magic, shut up you silly puss, Tess is our guest and you’d better play nice.’ Then she kisses me lightly and gratefully takes the bottle of wine I hand over.

I think it’s worthy of note that it’s only half six and as she air-kisses me, I can’t help noticing that Beatrice already has a whiff of one G&T too many wafting from her. But then that’s the Pritchards for you. No exaggeration, but in this house they generally start Happy Hour at mid-afternoon and keep on drinking till it’s last man standing.

‘Oh and just ignore Magic; I know we all do. The idiotic animal actually thinks he’s a guard dog – do you know he’ll only eat Pedigree Chum? And he’ll only sleep outside in a little kennel that Bernard had to have made especially for him. Such a noodle.’

‘He’s … erm … certainly a little character alright,’ I smile.

‘And you’ve brought a little bottle of vino, how thoughtful of you. Come in and have an aperitif, Bernard’s already here ahead of you. He’s really so excited about the wedding now – as are we all. Not long to go now!’

I follow her inside to the gloom of their hallway, thinking that it’s probably just as well that the entire house seems to get next to no natural light whatsoever; at least this way you’re less likely to notice the thick layers of dust and cobwebs that coat just about every surface and square inch of the place.

I know my mother would flush scarlet in the face if anyone saw our house in this state, but that’s the thing about the Pritchards, not only do they not care, I think they barely seem to even notice half the time.

Even if there are times when it does go just a tiny bit too far. On my very first visit here, Bernard and I were making small talk with the parents in the drawing room when Magic dragged in a dead mouse that he’d half-masticated and dumped it right at Beatrice’s feet. And her reaction? To ignore it like it never happened and pour herself another stiff G&T.

‘Tess, my sausage, is that you?’ says Bernard, coming out of the kitchen with a sherry in one hand and a carving knife in the other.

‘Hello, you,’ I smile up at him as he bends down to give me a peck on the cheek.

‘Had a good day?’ he asks. ‘Everything sorted about that dratted jury summons?’

‘No, but don’t worry, come Monday morning it will be,’ I tell him confidently.

‘Good, good, good,’ he says absently, steering me past a big mound of books scattered all over the hall and on into the kitchen, where Beatrice is cremating what looks like it once started out in life as a rabbit.

Did I tell you about Bernard? Because he’s just lovely and the total opposite of just about every eejit I’d dated right up till he and I met. With one messer in particular very much to the forefront of my mind at the minute, but we’ll just skate over him like he never existed. Mainly because that particular chapter of my life is now buried deep in the back of my mind, padlocked and labelled ‘Do not, on any account, enter’.

Trust me, you don’t want to know.

Anyway, back to Bernard who’s a big man, portly and greying, but with just the loveliest soft brown eyes. Gentle, kind eyes. He’s also a full fifteen years older than me. He just turned forty-three last year and before he and I met, he quite literally hadn’t dated since he was in college. And even that relationship petered out after just a few months.

In fact, half of me suspects that’s the primary reason why Desmond and Beatrice were so welcoming to me right from day one. Up until Bernard and I started dating, I think they’d pretty much written off their only son as being neither gay nor straight, but in that grey hinterland in between. You know, a confirmed bachelor. One of those asexual people, who’d just rather have a nice cup of tea than dip a toe into the dating pond, purely to avoid all the emotional messiness involved.

His fellow college professors had long ago written him off as a young fogey in the William Hague mode and all the students he lectures had jokingly nicknamed him Billy Bunter because of his size, when, to everyone’s astonishment, he suddenly started dating anew. True, he and I were a bit of an odd couple at the beginning, and attracted much head shaking and commenting behind our backs along the lines of, ‘it’ll never last’.

Even now, from the outside we look like a bit of a mismatch. There’s Bernard, in his Clark Kent glasses wearing a crumpled linen suit, dandruff all over the collar and his tie on a bit skew-ways. Whereas here’s me still in my work gear of a Lycra top, leggings, trainers and the warmest fleece I own – insurance against the cold of this house, which even in high summer never seems to get as much as a single ray of sunlight and is permanently freezing.

Even the way we met was a bit unusual and I’m only praying that his best man, a fellow professor, doesn’t raise the subject in his wedding speech. Smash Fitness, you see, the gym where I work as an instructor, is on Nassau Street, slap bang in the middle of town and just across the road from City College, where Bernard lectures.

Anyway, cut to January two years ago and Bernard decided that he was developing a bit of a middle-aged spare tyre (and I hate to use the politically incorrect term ‘porker’, but in his case it was only the truth). In the spirit of New Year’s resolutions, he decided that the only thing that would do him was to join a gym. And so gung-ho was he about his new fitness regime that he even booked a few full-on gut-burning sessions with a personal trainer.

Which is where I came in. But being brutally honest, this was no Hollywood ‘meet cute’. I never really had that whole love-at-first-sight thunderbolt when I gave Bernard his first fitness assessment at the gym. Instead I took one look at this greying, overweight older man and if anything felt pity for the poor sod as I put him through a one-to-one boot camp class.

Boot camp at Smash Fitness, by the way, involves your client doing a range of squats, lunges and press-ups, while the trainer yells all manner of motivational phrases in their face like, ‘faster, harder, higher! Gimme ten more! Come on, burn it off … work through the pain!’ We’re actively encouraged to err on the savage side with our clients, as my boss operates under the perverse notion that the tougher and more insulting you are to people, the more likely they are to keep coming back.

It’s not my way though. Personally, I prefer to encourage clients and cheerlead them towards their fitness goals, reminding them of how far they’ve come and how well they’re doing and that’s exactly the way I treated Bernard from the word go.

God love him though, he got so sweaty and red in the face when I first put him up on a treadmill, I really thought the guy might have a heart attack.

After a meagre ten minutes of what he claimed was medieval torture, he begged for mercy.

‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ he panted, gulping for air, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve got pain in my hamstring muscles that haven’t been used in decades.’

Typical Bernard. Unfailingly polite even when on the brink of an aneurysm. So just to make sure he got value from the full hour he’d paid for, I offered to take a look at his diet, to see what improvements could be made there. It’s fairly standard practice at Smash Fitness to take clients off wheat, gluten, dairy, alcohol and sugar for a full six weeks and if clients can only stick to it, they’ll soon start to look and feel unbelievably fantastic when they see visible results. Of course, Bernard nearly baulked at this when he realised that all his much-loved teatime sherries were now well and truly out, but I held firm.

Anyway, our session was finished and he was about to go his way and I mine, when he suddenly stopped me in my tracks.

‘Tess,’ he panted, still red-faced, sweaty and out of breath. ‘I’m absolutely determined to do this correctly, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound and all that.’

‘Good for you, you won’t regret it,’ I smiled, thinking how posh the English accent made him seem. The guy actually sounded a bit like Stephen Fry.

‘The thing is, your website says that the gym offers an at-home service, where a trainer will call to your house with smoothies and then whisk you off for a brisk morning jog, isn’t that correct?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said, delighted and relieved that I hadn’t scared him off fitness for life. ‘We can call to your home or to your workplace any time that suits you.’

‘Then how’s tomorrow morning for you?’ he asked, taking off his specs and looking at me a little bit shyly.

‘Well, normally we have a rota of personal trainers and I’m afraid I’m not scheduled for tomorrow morning.’

‘Yes, that’s all well and good, but the thing is some of the other trainers are quite brutal, almost to the point of being sadistic here, I find. So if it’s quite alright, I think I’d really prefer it if it was you. In fact, I don’t want it to be anyone else except you,’ he added, the big brown eyes almost pleading with me.

What can I say? My heart went out to the poor guy and I found myself saying yes.

So the following morning I trooped around to his house at 7 a.m., with a kale, carrot and Brussels sprout smoothie, which, trust me, may look like a glass of mowed grass, but doesn’t taste nearly as revolting as it sounds. It turned out Bernard lived in exactly the sort of house I’d have pegged for him; no uber-cool penthouse bachelor pad for this guy. Instead his home was – and is still – a sturdy, well-built Victorian cottage right in the heart of Stoneybatter, otherwise known as the arty quarter of Dublin. With a crossbar bike in his hallway and piles of hardback books scattered all over every surface. The whole place was higgledy-piggledy, charmingly disorganised chaos, and it was only months afterwards when he took me to meet his parents, that I realised the apple hadn’t fallen too far from the tree.

‘Oh dear Lord, look at you,’ he smiled, opening up the front door, all set to go in his tracksuit and trainers. ‘You look so fit and fresh at this god-awful hour. How is that even possible? I’m afraid I’m one of those chaps who can barely string a coherent sentence together until I’m on my third pot of tea.’

‘Follow the programme and you’ll feel twenty years younger in no time,’ I said firmly, and to be fair to Bernard, stick with the programme he did.

So gradually over time, he and I began to fall into a sort of routine. Twice a week I’d call over to him with smoothies at the crack of dawn, before dragging him out for a jog through the quiet of the early-morning streets. After a while, we grew so comfortable with each other that we even started joking and messing; I’d hammer on his front door and he’d answer still in his dressing gown, then try to cajole me inside for rashers, eggs and croissants. And from there, the conversation would go thusly: ‘Are you having a laugh?’ I’d playfully chide him. ‘You’re paying me to get fit, and we’re going to do it right. So come on, trainers on and grab a warm, woolly fleece, we’ve a brisk two-mile jog ahead of us.’

‘Oh God, the exquisite torture,’ he’d mock-groan. ‘Are you sure I can’t tempt you with a lovely pot of Earl Grey tea? As a compromise, if I drink it with that wretched half-fat milk you insist on? And if I’m a good boy and cut out the blueberry muffin I always have whenever you’re not around to goad me into good behaviour?’

‘Bernard,’ I’d grin back at him, ‘what am I always telling you? Sugar is the Devil’s food. I’m trying to detox you and here’s you trying to put the equivalent of rat poison through your system!’

So this Tweedledum and Tweedledee carry-on went on for weeks; me using a combination of nagging and cheerleading to try to wean him off complex carbs, starch and sugar; him only ever willing to jog all the way to the Queen of Tarts café in Temple Bar, so he could collapse through the door and order one of their famous chocolate pecan pies.

Then after I dropped him back at his house after one early-morning jog, to my utter astonishment, Bernard, still all sweaty and panting, asked me out. To go and see – get this – a screening of a French art house documentary about the Napoleonic Wars that was showing at the Lighthouse Cinema that weekend.

‘You mean … on an actual date?’ I blurted out, flabbergasted. In a million years not seeing that one coming.

‘Well … erm … it’s just my way of saying thank you really,’ he said, and I remember thinking how endearingly flustered he looked, whipping off his specs and absent-mindedly wiping them on his tracksuit top, the way he does whenever he’s embarrassed. ‘Thanks to you, Tess, I’ve lost a full two pounds this week, so I thought I’d celebrate with a large bucket of non-fat popcorn with absolutely no hint of butter on it whatsoever. If you’d care to join me, that is?’

A date. An actual date. My first one since … well, since all of that. Initial reaction? To feel nervous and scared, with a tummy full of butterflies, the whole works. But then I thought: am I really going to let my past define my future? Isn’t it time to let go and take a chance? And with who better than a gentleman like Bernard, who I knew in a million years would never dream of putting me through what I’d just come out of?

So to the movies I went.

The movie itself turned out to be a subtitled documentary all about the Napoleonic victory against the Prussians at the Battle of Jena, 1806. Bernard of course adored it and while I kind of wished Bradley Cooper or Matthew McConaughey would pop up on the scene to liven things up a bit, all in all, we’d a pleasant, relaxed, easy time together.

And so slowly, over the next few weeks, he and I morphed into a couple, in spite of a plethora of objections from both sets of our friends and from my family in particular. ‘He’s way too old for you,’ they all chimed. ‘A professor of Art History? Who likes to go on walking tours of the Alps and whose overriding passions in life are art, the history of art and absolutely anything to do with Napoleon? What the hell can the two of you possibly have in common?’

Most stinging of all came from my sister Gracie, who, the first time she met Bernard, immediately wrote him off as the most boring man on the planet and had absolutely no problem in telling me so.

‘He’s a rebound guy for you,’ she told me out straight, ‘and nothing more. He’s the total antithesis of Paul; he’s like the anti-Paul. That’s the only reason you’re bouncing straight into this, you know. As long as you remember that, you won’t get into trouble.’ Nor has she changed her mind since, but then that’s a whole other story.

And true, Bernard’s core group of colleagues – mostly all confirmed bachelors working in academia – did intimidate me a bit at first, with all their shop talk about Kierkegaard’s Theory of the Excluded Middle, and seventeenth-century Dutch art, but by then Bernard had really started to grow on me, so of course I soon started to see everything connected with his life through love goggles.

‘You keep me young,’ he’d often say to me, after a night out in a restaurant with my pals, or an evening at the multiplex seeing one of the slightly more commercial movies that would be a bit more to my taste. And for my part, I really fell for the fact he’s so cultured and intelligent and passionate about what he does. I never went to college, and suddenly this man came along and opened my eyes up to a whole new world of opera, theatre and art exhibitions that I’d ordinarily never have gone within six feet of.

He’s good to me, I’d tell all my family and pals. And after the emotional wringer I’ve just been through, I deserve someone like him. He’s the equivalent of snuggling into a comfy pair of slippers after years spent in excruciating high heels that only ever made my feet bleed, if you’ll pardon the tortured shoe metaphor. He’s a man who calls when he says he will and who buys me flowers for no reason. Non-garage flowers too. And he’s kind and polite and always gives money to homeless people when he sees them in the street.

OK, so maybe these aren’t the sexiest qualities you look for in a life-partner, but in the long term, they work. Bernard and I work.

Besides, I’ve done the whole ‘madly in love, this is Mr Right for the rest of both our lives’ thing and where did that land me? Having to crawl back home at the grand old age of twenty-eight with my tail between my legs, that’s where. Back to my old bedroom under Mum and Dad’s roof, with Gracie in the room next door banging on the walls and yelling at me to turn the TV down. Back to months of humiliation and heartbreak and pain so searing it should nearly come with a safe word. That’s where ‘The One’ landed me.

Long story and, I’m sorry, I’m not even going to go there.

So no matter what anyone else says or thinks, come what may, four weeks tomorrow, Bernard and I are getting married.

And jury service can just feck right off with itself.