A Winter Bride (3 page)

The car was, at first, disappointing. She’d been hoping for a Jaguar, but what she saw was a Morris Minor convertible. However, as they drove into town, roof down, she revised her thoughts. This was fun. People in the movies had soft-top cars. Also, this was right for now, while they were young. They’d get a Jaguar after they’d been married for a couple of years and had bought a big house with a drive.

They went to a small Italian restaurant not far from the university where Alistair studied. There was a wine bottle coated in dripping wax and a candle in the neck on every table, plastic flowers adorned the doorway and spread up the fake trellis on the wall. ‘This is lovely,’ Nell said. Alistair said he came here often. He ordered a bottle of Chianti. Nell thought it amazing – a bottle that was wrapped in a basket. She asked if she could take it home.

Alistair ordered for her. ‘When in Rome,’ he insisted and asked the waiter for two plates of spaghetti Bolognese. ‘You’ll love this,’ he told her. She did. At least she’d loved the small amount she’d actually managed to get into her mouth. She decided that this was why Italians were the way they were. They weren’t excitable. They were just hungry. Their food was hard to eat.

He asked her what her parents did. It was always a tricky question for Nell, and usually she lied when answering. She liked to give her mother and father a tragic past. Her father had fallen while painting the Forth Bridge and was lucky to be alive. Her mother, once a talented dressmaker, had gone blind due to the intricacy of her work. Or her father had been an important businessman in Warsaw; her mother had been an opera singer. They’d had a marvellous life – a beautiful house filled with music, wine and interesting witty friends. But when the Nazis invaded, they’d fled the country escaping with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. Her mother had never recovered from the horrors she’d seen and had lost her exquisite voice. Now they lived in a council house on the east side of Edinburgh. This story had been adapted from a magazine serial she’d read, but Nell could see it all as she told it.

Obviously, Nell couldn’t tell any of her stories to Alistair; a person couldn’t lie to her future husband. He’d meet her mum and dad at the wedding. So, she told the truth: her dad had been a coalman, but heaving heavy sacks from the lorry and lumbering to customers’ cellars to deliver his burden had done nasty things to his back. Now, he was retired and spent a deal of time lying flat on the sofa dealing with the pain. Her mother worked in a cake shop.

‘Good honest salt-of-the-earth people,’ he said. ‘No greed, no shady dealings, no back-stabbing.’

His comment surprised Nell, but she agreed. She sneaked a peek at her watch. Nine o’clock. The Locarno would be humming now. Fights and screams and dancing; booze flowing; boys and girls on the hunt, looking to grab a quick shot of love in doorways on the way home. God, she missed it, and was a little jealous of Carol, who’d gone there with Johnny.

Alistair suggested they go on to a folk concert after dinner.

‘Folk singing?’, said Nell. She didn’t think so. The only folk songs she knew were the ones she’d been forced to sing at school. She remembered with heavy heart the dreary rendition of ‘The Skye Boat Song’ her class had moaned out on Thursday afternoons when they’d suffered double music in Miss Penny’s overheated room.
Speeee ….… eeed bonny bo ….…. at like a burd on the wee … … eeeng … …

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’ll love it.’

It was in a tiny café in the High Street – wood panelled walls, wooden tables, wooden floor and no drink. Nell wasn’t sure about this. Alistair bought them Cokes. Nell looked round. The people here all seemed very sure of themselves despite their worn clothes, quite tatty, she thought. She felt out of place in her pink frilly blouse.

The band, wearing fishermen’s jumpers, was hearty. They played guitars, opened their throats and belted out rebel songs. They shouted. All this would have shocked Miss Penny. People stamped their feet, whistled and yelled for encores. Nell couldn’t stop her toes tapping.

Before she knew it, it was eleven o’clock and she had almost forgotten about the Locarno. There were songs about lonesome rides on trains, people sailing away to far-flung lands, the lure of whisky, drinking in empty bars and drinking in crowded bars. Her favourite was a woman with blonde hair that fell past her breasts who sang sad ballads about waiting for death or having lost her man at sea. Her voice was like crystal, so clear it reminded Nell of the loch near the village where she and her parents had taken the only holiday they’d ever gone on. It was all very surprising.

The best bit, though, was when it was over. The audience poured into the night, songs pounding through them. It was September, and the first bite of autumn was in the air. People pulled their jackets round them, hauled up their collars, shivered and started their slow journeys home – on foot, walking, shanks’ pony. Nell and Alistair crossed the road and climbed into the car. Smirking, Nell thought, ha, ha, have that, confident tatty people. She couldn’t help but feel a little smug.

Driving Nell home, Alistair asked what she’d thought of the concert.

‘Great,’ she told him. ‘I wanted to stamp my feet and join in. Only it’s all old songs. The people that wrote them are dead and the things they’re singing about happened long ago. I still prefer the songs on the radio. They’re my songs. About getting out of school for the summer, or going to the hop, crying in the rain or falling in love with someone who doesn’t even know you exist. They’re about me.’

At the traffic lights, he gave her a long look and said that perhaps she was right, and then asked if she was in some unrequited affair.

‘No. I just hear a song like that and I know what it would feel like. And I feel sad. I like feeling sad.’ She thought about this. ‘Well, when it’s over and I don’t feel sad anymore, I look back and think I quite enjoyed it.’ She sighed. ‘Sometimes I imagine that the song’s about me. Someone’s in love with me and doesn’t tell me. A secret admirer. And I feel sad for the person who’s in love with me and feels too shy to tell me. And I feel sad for me having love I don’t know about.’

Alistair thought he might have to stop the car so he could lean back and sort out this onslaught of emotions. He was glad he wasn’t a woman. They seemed to have an awful lot to cope with. He liked to keep his life and thoughts as simple as possible. He agreed that he thought a secret admirer sounded good. ‘Someone who adores you from afar. Maybe someone does adore you from afar. Do you get loads of Valentine cards?’

She got two every year regular as clockwork. One was from her dad; the other she sent to herself. She only did this to keep up with Carol, who always got at least six cards. But Carol was pretty, a shiny person who stood out in crowds. Boys chased her. Often they’d befriend Nell just to get a little bit closer to Carol. It had been demeaning. Nell thought she was one of the shadow people who always walked a few paces behind the adored ones but she didn’t mention this to Alistair because who would want to marry a shadow person?

‘I usually get a couple of cards,’ she said, and then confessed that one was from her father. ‘Although I think my mum buys it.’

‘I never get any,’ said Alistair. ‘Unlike my brother, who gets piles of them. He was in the first rugby team at school, was head boy, always had the prettiest girlfriends and used to get loads then.’

Ah, Nell thought, you’re a shadow person, too. At last, I’ve found something we have in common.

So when he asked if she would like to see him again next Saturday she said she’d love to. She would have agreed anyway, since this was her chosen husband, but now she meant it.

The next morning, Nell went to Carol’s house to compare notes. ‘We went to a restaurant and ate spaghetti with wine. Then we went to a folk concert.’

‘Folk music?’ Carol sneered. ‘Yuk.’

‘It was great! People stamped and clapped and the songs were rowdy. Some of them were dirty. About sex.’

‘Maybe I’ll get Johnny to take me to a restaurant.’

Nell’s heart sank. She just knew that the restaurant Carol went to would be bigger, better and more expensive than the one she had visited with Alistair. ‘How was the Locarno?’ she asked.

‘It’s not the same going there with a boy. You have to dance with him all the time so you can’t eye up other boys or flirt and look around for someone you fancy. It’s not a place to go on a date. The Locarno’s where you go to find a date. It was rubbish.’

Nell’s heart leapt. For the first time in her life, she’d upped her friend.

On Saturday, Nell and Alistair went to a film. She had been hoping to see the latest Doris Day movie, but no. ‘This is in French,’ she said. ‘I won’t understand it.’

‘You can read the subtitles,’ Alistair told her. ‘This is a great film.’

In the end, she didn’t follow the dialogue. She stared at the clothes and the décor of the sets. It was the start of something: the long, slow sophisticating of Nell McClusky. Because in the end she didn’t change Alistair at all; he changed her.

She stopped wearing the pink swirling skirts that spun out revealing her knickers when she jived and started wearing tight jeans with long jumpers, or skimpy tops shaped to her body, all in dark colours. She moved from pink to black.

He insisted she read
Bonjour Tristesse, On the Road
and
Catcher in the Rye
. Much to her surprise, she enjoyed them. Though, as she told Alistair, she felt that Holden Caulfield needed a good slap. ‘A night at the Locarno would sort him out. He’d get drunk, get sneered at, have a fight or two and run about yelling his head off. It’d stop him thinking so much. That’s this guy’s problem – too much thinking, too much longing.’

‘Longing?’ said Alistair. ‘What do you mean?’

‘He’s longing for something but he doesn’t know what. That’s why he’s so sneery. And if you want to sneer, the Locarno’s the place to do it. Everybody sneers there. It’s because they’re too young to be really young and not old enough to be grown up. Full of feelings that they don’t understand. They’re emotionally itchy.’

He asked if that was why she went. ‘Were you emotionally itchy?’

‘For God’s sake, no. I sneered because everyone else was sneering. I wanted to fit in. But I never screamed. I didn’t have the longing. That feeling of wanting something, only you didn’t know what. I’ve always known what I wanted. I went to the Locarno to watch the show. It was great.’

He was so taken with the notion of being emotionally itchy he didn’t ask Nell what it was she wanted.

Just as well, really, she thought, as she wouldn’t have told him. She wanted him; she was going to marry him. She knew not to mention this so early in their relationship. It might frighten him off. According to the rules that she’d picked up in magazine love stories, he had to ask her to be his wife but she had to put the notion into his head. And she wasn’t quite sure how to do that yet. In the meantime, she would cake her eyes with black eyeliner and paint her lips white and stop wearing her hair in a beehive.

At supper one night, her mother asked if she was a beatnik.

‘I am against convention,’ Nell said. ‘I am simply expressing my feelings of negativity about the bourgeoisie through my clothes, Mother.’

Her mother smacked her wrist. ‘Don’t you dare call me mother. That’s rude. I’m your mum.’

On nights out, Nell and Alistair went to the cinema to see foreign films, to poetry readings in a candlelit dive in the High Street or to folk concerts where men in fishermen’s jumpers sang lusty songs about battles and long roads to travel. Sometimes, they drove in his Morris convertible to Queensferry for a drink. They also drove to quiet spots where they’d have long deep kisses and exploratory fumblings that after a while got more and more intimate. The car windows got steamy.

Eventually, after six months of romance, they did it. Went all the way, as Nell put it. It wasn’t as wonderful as Nell supposed it would be. Stars didn’t sing in the sky. The earth, or in this case, the Morris Minor, didn’t move. But it was fine. The deed was done. And not only was it done in time with Nell’s losing-her-virginity schedule, it was also done with a man who had a car and wore Buddy Holly glasses.

With practise, as the weeks passed, it got better and Nell began to enjoy it. ‘We’re getting good at this,’ she said.

The Locarno was never mentioned again but Nell never forgot it. She promised herself she’d go back for one last look at the emotionally itchy.

The chance came when Alistair was sitting his Christmas exams. He needed to study. ‘I know it’s Saturday night,’ he said, ‘but when it’s all over I’ll take you somewhere special.’

Nell phoned Carol. ‘I’m free on Saturday. Fancy the Locarno?’

‘You bet,’ said Carol. She told Johnny she had ’flu, knowing he’d keep well away from her.

‘He can’t stand illness,’ Carol told Nell. ‘He’s not sympathetic like Alistair. He’s good-looking, though. Girls stare at him. So that’s all right. Good-looking, rich and a car … what more could you want in a bloke?’

On Saturday night, the girls took the bus into town, had a few drinks and hit the Locarno. They were both quivering with excitement at the prospect of revisiting the reckless abandoned nights of what they now considered to be their youth – this was going to be great. The Locarno was all it ever had been: the same frenzy, the drink, the fights, the yelling, boys stamping through the crowds, girls jiving on the balcony and the same old staid band taming Eddie Cochrane and Elvis.

Nell was wearing her pink dress, which was tight at the waist then flared out and her white stiletto heels. Her hair was piled on top of her head. It felt odd. ‘I don’t feel like me. I feel like an impostor,’ she said. ‘And, to be honest, I’m finding this a bit scary.’

‘You’ve got old,’ said Carol.

‘Nah,’ said Nell. ‘Everybody here has got young. All the girls look about sixteen.’

‘Christ,’ said Carol. ‘I’m eighteen and past it.’

They got a couple of drinks and stood at the edge of the dance floor looking disinterested. They revived the old sneer when a couple of passing boys gave them a dismissive glance and said, ‘Christ, it must be grannies’ night.’ They danced together, got jostled, couldn’t make themselves heard above the shouts and squeals, and felt horribly out of place. Eventually, they retired to a table on the balcony and sat looking critically down at the mayhem below.