Nothing Sacred (20 page)

The hotel provides bathrobes of thick white towelling, and seeing myself in the full-length mirror, part of me cannot help feeling that I look as if I've broken into somebody's palatial home and am trying the bathrobe on for size before taking off with the jewellery.

Maria apparently agrees with me, says, ‘You know, you're not really the fluffy bathrobe type.'

She is lying back on the bed, stretching, twisting around like a cat on the white sheets and she has a crafty look on her face.

‘No?'

‘No.' She sits up, sniffs the air. ‘Are those bubbles you're putting in?'

‘I thought I'd try it.'

‘Daniel Connell in a bubble bath. Well I never.' She cocks her head, regards me with suspicion. ‘Are you going soft?'

‘I don't think so,' I say, and I cannot help but smile at Maria, at her pointless provocations.

‘I don't do soft,' she says, stretching out on her back again. ‘I like my men hard. And stupid,' she adds, kicking her legs at the high ceiling.

‘You can have it if you want,' I say. ‘The bath.'

‘Or,' she says, rolling onto her front and resting her chin on her hands, raising an eyebrow. ‘Why don't we hop in together?'

Maria can say things I would never dare, say them as if they are the most natural things in the world, and I am momentarily speechless, not trusting myself to answer. Maria rocks her head from side to side and sighs as if regarding a lost cause.

‘Tell you what, you dope. You get in, and I'll sneak in when you're not looking.'

I smile at Maria's rough kindness, the depths of her understanding and affection. I turn and go into the bathroom and my whole being feels limned by a charge of delicious possibility, all the better for it being so alien, so unexpected, and so good.

The weddings I have been to often bring two different worlds together, divided by class or religion or culture, playing out as miniature social experiments, though lubricated by drink and good wishes. Maria's friend Jade is pure Essex. Her guests are builders, taxi drivers and men with money and vague occupations, accompanied by dolled-up beauties in skimpy designer labels and outrageous heels. The groom, Rufus, on the other hand, is a City banker and old money: Harrow and Oxford and a seat kept warm around the boardroom table. His guests are groomed and dressed in understated suits and frocks that whisper of class and wealth. The reception is held in the Great Hall and half of the room are talking loudly, laughing heads thrown back, expansive hands gesturing and slopping Champagne over the parquet; the other half are looking on with faint puzzled smiles on their smooth faces, as if they are watching a difficult performance they do not quite understand.

‘Okay,' says Maria, snatching a glass of Champagne as it passes by. ‘Could be interesting.' She holds her glass up in front of her face. ‘Cheers.'

I knock my glass against hers, take a drink.

‘You seem better,' she says. ‘Less detached.'

I nod. ‘Getting there.'

‘Maybe you're just better when the sun comes out,' she says. ‘Like a lizard.'

‘A lizard?'

‘Cold-blooded,' she says. ‘Needs warming up.'

I shake my head. ‘Never been my problem,' I say.

Maria looks at me in amusement. ‘No. No, Daniel, I'll give you that.'

‘Just happy,' I say. ‘To be here. With you.' The words come out haltingly, but they come out nevertheless. Maria's face lifts, her eyes open wider, and I think of a time-lapse film of a flower blossoming.

‘Well,' she says, and doesn't say anything more. It is not often that Maria is lost for something to say. She drinks and looks about the room and smiles at what she sees: people talking, drinking, laughing, and a young man at a grand piano gently playing a tune that I cannot place but which I have heard before, have heard many times.

‘There she is,' says Maria, just before a tall, pretty woman in a sleek white wedding dress prances up in heels like a skittish pony, followed by a handsome, nervous-looking man who is glancing about him as if he expects to find a sniper in the crowd.

‘
Maria!
' Jade screams and hugs her, turns to me, hugs me as well. She has big white perfect teeth. I can see most of them. ‘You must be Daniel! You're so
big
!'

I do not know how to respond to her observation, smile and nod. Rufus puts out a hand and gives it a firm shake.

‘Enjoying yourself?' he asks.

‘Thanks, yes,' I say, and it is true. I don't ask him the same question; he looks as if he would rather be anywhere else.

Young women marrying money has a long tradition and in my neighbourhood has never appeared to go out of fashion, feminism never having gained a convincing toehold in Essex. To strike gold there were, broadly, two options: find a local up-and-coming self-made man, or get a PA diploma and head for the City, as Jade had done. Villains or bankers – in the final analysis, the money was equally grubby. It would still buy a mansion, furs, pay for summers in St Tropez, so really, who cared?

But perhaps I am being uncharitable. Jade seems happy and I am sure that Rufus will be as well, just as soon as the immediate threat of Jade's friends and relatives is removed, driven back to wherever they came from and out of his life.

I have been placed at a table at which sit relatives of the bride, along with a young man whose place name says Bellamy, although I cannot tell if that is his first or second name. Maria is at the top table. I can see her talking to Jade, laughing. A big man with cropped silver hair is talking to Bellamy and the rest of the table is listening; the big man is called Stan and has told me he is in the building trade. I saw him earlier helping his wife climb out of a year-old specced-up jet-black Range Rover. He must have been building a lot of houses.

‘So go on, what you driving, Bellamy?'

‘Oh, well,' says Bellamy modestly. Bellamy has told me that he trades in derivatives, that it is actually quite tedious, mostly just spreadsheets. He called me ‘chap' when he addressed me and has a lazy upper-class drawl and unruly hair and I disliked him immediately.

‘No, go on,' says Stan with a smile that tries at angelic but fails. His head is huge and his florid face is so dark it is almost purple, as if he has been holding his breath for too long or is being invisibly throttled.

‘A Ferrari,' says Bellamy, as if he is ashamed of it, which I am sure he isn't.

Stan smacks his hands together, looks around the table. ‘Fuck me, he don't look like he's started shaving.' He turns his attention back to Bellamy, who is looking uncomfortable. ‘Three five five?'

‘Three sixty Spider,' says Bellamy. ‘Black.' He cannot help but let the smugness creep into his tone. I dislike him more than ever.

‘Now then, you know what they say about young men in sports cars, dontcha?' says Stan. ‘Know what it means, driving a motor like that?' The whole table is almost reverentially following the exchange, a circular table with a rapt audience of sixteen people around it hanging on Stan's every word.

‘Yes, yes,' says Bellamy, a little testily. ‘I know what it is supposed to mean.'

‘Means,' says Stan, leaning closer in to the table. The rest of the table leans in too, all part of the conspiracy. Stan holds up a little finger, waggles it. ‘It means… You're an arsehole.'

Stan laughs with an abandon that is almost demented, smacks his hands together again, looks around in delight. Everybody apart from Bellamy and me obviously know Stan well and join in the laughter. I cannot help but smile too.

Bellamy, however, is a son of privilege, privately educated, working a six-figure job in the City: he is not used to this kind of rough ridicule, cannot help but take offence, is intrinsically unable to see it for what it is, normal wedding sport. I know he will react badly, misjudge the situation woefully.

‘Now steady on,' Bellamy says. ‘There's no need for that.' He sounds as prim as a Victorian vicar.

‘No, no,' says Stan, holding his hands up in apology. ‘No, you're right, Bellamy, son, that weren't on.' He nods seriously and the table waits for what comes next, a collective holding of breath. Stan points at Bellamy. ‘You're a rich arsehole.'

This time the laughter around the table is unrestrained and I watch Bellamy's face blush with impotent rage; I am willing to bet he has never been spoken to like this before in his entire charmed life.

He stands up abruptly, says, ‘Cigarette,' turns and leaves, walks stiffly to the exit of the function room. He will stew over this for a week.

Stan's wife, a tanned middle-aged lady with big hair, enormous diamond earrings and garish make-up, slaps Stan on the arm affectionately. ‘You are a cunt, Stan,' she says.

‘I am, ain't I?' Stan says, grinning proudly, taking his sweet time to make eye contact with everyone at the table. I cannot imagine him being more pleased if he had backed the winner of the National. ‘I really am.'

Stan runs a book on the length of the speeches, which is won by a lady two places down from me called Lisa who had guessed twenty-eight minutes, Stan handing over the £150 with comic unwillingness. He has also been disappointed by the lack of controversy and dirty jokes, has attempted to heckle the best man, but his wife put her foot down at that.

Now the formalities are over and Maria comes to save me from Stan, takes me by the arm. As I leave the table, I hear Stan call after me, ‘You drive a Ferrari 'n'all?'

‘Having a good time?' says Maria.

‘Yes,' I say.

Her face is glowing with happiness and drink. She kisses me and then whispers, ‘Let's explore.'

She takes my hand and leads me out of the dining room, down a vaulted corridor, into what might once have been a library. I have the feeling I had as a boy, sneaking off with a girl for an illicit make-out session. Maria must feel the same because there is nobody in the library and she immediately kisses me again, this time long and hard, and after some moments I feel her body melt against my hand around her back.

‘Can't beat a good wedding,' she says afterwards. ‘Let's not stay too late. Get back to our room.'

I smile once again at her unashamed frankness, can only nod dumbly. She steps back, looks at me, looks around her. The room we are in is large and panelled, lined with mounted heads of different animals: deer, elk, boar, a wolf, a tiger.

‘Poor beasts,' says Maria. ‘Reminds me, there was a crow in my bedroom yesterday. Dead. How weird's that?'

‘What?' I say. The noise of the wedding is gone. I am aware only of the humming contours and limits of my body, of the heaviness of my hand; of Maria's face, white and blurred and indistinct.

‘Nearly stepped on it. Think it got down the chimney?'

‘In your room?' I say.

‘Beak open, wings spread. Freaky deaky. Let's get something to drink.'

Maria moves away, heads back towards the wedding party. I do not move. At the doorway she stops, turns. She seems ethereal, barely there. ‘Daniel? Daniel? Hey. Daniel?'

There is dancing and drinking, laughter, a woman in tears followed out of the room by a gesticulating boyfriend or husband in a kilt, more laughter, the evening underpinned by the unconditional goodwill people bring to weddings along with their best suits and dresses. But throughout the evening my anger grows and grows until a deep well of rage fills my body. I am so tense that people watching me standing rigidly at the margins may believe that I am undergoing some kind of seizure.

Somebody put a dead bird in Maria's bedroom. While she slept. What else did they do to her? I want to find the people who did it, make them pay, cause them to suffer. I can think of nothing else.

‘Dance?' Maria asks me. She has picked up on my mood and there is a forced enthusiasm in her voice like a mother cajoling a recalcitrant child.

‘No thanks.'

‘Come on, Daniel. Show me what you've got.'

‘No.'

Something in the way I refuse, an irritable jerk of my head, stops Maria, freezes the teasing smile she has tried on.

‘What's up?'

‘Nothing.'

‘So dance.'

‘Yeah, listen. I don't fancy it.'

‘Okay. Understood.' Maria searches my face, comes up with nothing. She is a little drunk and infuriated by me, and is not going to let me hijack her fun. ‘Just have to find somebody who does.'

At some point I head upstairs to our room. It is still in the state of disorder that Maria left it in: scattered make-up bottles, discarded tights, towels and an abandoned pair of heels in a corner where they were disdainfully flung. This was the room that so recently had seemed to serve as a validation of our status as couple; we were like everybody else, as entitled to happiness as they were. Now it just seems to mock me. What had I been thinking?

Maria comes in much later. I can hear her say goodnight to somebody outside the door. The other person laughs and stumbles away down the corridor. She closes the door and turns on the lights, sits down on the bed, ignores my pretence at sleep. She shakes my shoulder gently, folds herself over me so that our cheeks are together, hers on top of mine. She smells of Champagne.

‘Is it me?' she says softly. ‘Have I done something?'

I do not reply. She lifts her head and looks at me with eyes that are fearful and confused. I cannot meet her eye. I shake my head, do not trust myself to speak.

‘Maybe the wedding freaked you out. It's okay, it's not like I expect—'

‘It wasn't that.' God, I have not even thought of it. Maria, marriage. Never considered it.

She is silent, makes patterns on the bedspread with a fingernail. ‘You can tell me,' she says at last. ‘Whatever it is, you can tell me. Daniel?'

But I cannot. Of course I cannot tell Maria that there are men out there who are putting dead birds in her room while she sleeps, the same men who injure children in their beds and burn down homes; that I attract the threat of violence like a magnet attracts iron and I may be putting her in danger.