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Authors: Kate Saunders

BOOK: Bachelor Boys
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“No, don't you apologize—why would you be ashamed of working hard?”
“Pipe down, Len,” Joyce said. “You're meant to be resting.”
He smiled at me. “I was always saying that to our daughters. Be proud of working hard. Get yourself some real qualifications.”
I asked, “Did either of them want to follow you on to the stage?”
“No,” Len said. “They could see the other side. They could see that I wouldn't have done it if I'd been able to do anything better. I wore out this heart”—he pointed to his chest solemnly—“with years of late nights and cheap digs and too much booze. I wanted the girls to have a choice.”
Joyce handed me a cup of tea. “They've never wanted anything to do with the business. Joanne's a doctor, and Susan's a headmistress.”
There were photographs of Joanne and Susan and their children on every available surface, displayed at each stage of their lives, from birth, through Brownies and academic robes, to wedding dresses and prosperous matronhood.
Len looked hard at Fritz. “You had a choice,” he said. “So what the bloody hell are you doing?”
 
Fritz was very quiet on the drive home. I thought he had retreated into one of his moods. I was surprised when he parked his car outside my front door.
“Are you coming up?”
“I am,” he said. “I want to talk to you. I have something very important to say.” He locked his car. He used his own (stolen) key to let us into my flat. Kindly but firmly, he pushed me down on the sofa. “Please don't interrupt. There will be a question-and-answer session later.”
“What are you doing?”
“I said, don't interrupt. I want to marry you. Will you marry me?”
“Yes, of course I will.” (As the Americans say, “Duh!”) “Why are you being so serious?”
“Hang on, we're doing this all wrong. We're not being momentous enough.” Fritz went down on one knee beside me. “Cassandra, will you marry me?”
I was laughing. I could see, from the expression in his wondrous dark eyes, that he knew I adored him. “Oh, get up.”
“Don't say yes until you know what you're doing. You're agreeing to marry a very bad-tempered actor.”
“Your temper isn't that bad.”
Fritz took my hand—the one with the forget-me-not ring—in both of his. “You might not feel the same way about a bad-tempered junior doctor.”
A
t the very end of my wedding day (note how casually I slipped that in—
my wedding day
), when most of the guests had reeled off home, Fritz and Ben and Annabel and I were at the bottom of the garden, beside the climbing frame. Annabel sat on the edge of an upturned wheelbarrow, like an elegant Humpty-Dumpty in pale blue silk. I wore a glorious white dress and miles of filmy white veil, neither of which had come from a charity shop. Ben had found one last bottle of champagne, which he was opening. It was very good champagne. The house had been sold, and we were drinking the profits—this was why we got married in such a hurry. We wanted to throw Phoebe's house open one last time, for the greatest party of them all.
In the dark, chilly spring evening, we drank a toast to Phoebe. We had toasted her during the speeches, but this was private.
“She knows we'll be all right now,” Ben said, stretching one arm around Annabel's barrel of a stomach. “She found our wives for us.”
“God bless your memory, you interfering woman,” Fritz said. “Now we've done exactly as you wanted, and married the girls you picked out for us. So you can stop fussing and have a nice rest.”
“Oh no,” I said. “As long as there's the smallest pulse of Phoebe in the eternal mind, she'll never rest. She'll fuss over you two until the crack of doom.”
“And her two new grandsons,” Annabel said. We now knew that the twins were boys. “Isn't it sweet to think of Phoebe as a granny?”
Fritz patted her belly. “Dear me, two more north London males, beautiful and useless.”
I said I thought north London males were wonderful, when they finally got their acts together. Phoebe had shown me that there were some lovely qualities in our useless males. And they weren't really useless at all. Quite the opposite—the Darling boys were now so useful that Annabel and I couldn't live without them. I said, as I knew Phoebe would have said, that I thought we could do a lot worse.
The Marrying Game
BACHELOR BOYS. Copyright © 2004 by Kate Saunders. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
 
 
eISBN 9781429908573
First eBook Edition : April 2011
 
 

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