Читать книгу William Walker’s First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story - Matt Rudd - Страница 40

Unless he’s a surfer or a scoundrel who tries to stall for time with a ‘friendship’ ring, the engagement ring is the first ring a man buys.

Two months’ salary is the rule: it’s fun watching flashy bankers with a penchant for ordering champagne in pubs work that one out. They go pale.

I am obviously not a banker but I didn’t have two months’ salary tucked under the mattress either the day I decided I would marry Isabel. I ransacked everything, from my Post Office account to my piggy bank, scrabbled for coins in the sofa, my old suit trousers and the hard-to-reach bit around the handbrake of my car. I had a princely £1,426.32.

‘How much would you like to spend?’ asked the man with the monocle.

‘Oh, two thousand. Maybe two thousand five hundred,’ I replied without hesitation. I think it was because I’d had to ring a doorbell to get into the shop. And then been shown in by a security guard. It intimidated me into making wildly inaccurate summations of wealth. The man with the monocle still looked unimpressed, scrabbled around in the dusty bit of the display and found some itty-bitty diamond rings.

There is a cruel diamond ratio you only learn when you have to buy one. A small high-quality one costs the same as a large low-quality one. Girls know the difference, which means you must ignore the size-is-everything rule, and go for quality. That was Johnson’s advice. (Andy suggested I write a poem and engrave it on the side of a silver tankard instead.)

So I brushed away the big sparkler that would have impressed my ignorant mates and went for the near-perfect, near-invisible solitaire.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she had lied when I’d got down on my knee, done my speech and opened the velvet box. Still, she’d already burst into tears and said yes by that point, which is what she was supposed to do.