Scissors, Paper, Stone (11 page)

‘Will you marry me?’ Charles had said, his face tilted upwards, his hand extended to take hers in his. He looked vaguely ridiculous in this chivalrous pose – it seemed so false, so anachronistic, somehow – and yet Anne never for one moment thought of saying anything other than ‘Yes’.

But once she had uttered the word, a curious silence fell between them, and she realised quickly that Charles was looking at her expectantly, as if he wanted her to say something that displayed rather more gratitude or emotion.

‘Yes, darling Charles,’ she said, pulling him up. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

He stood up beside her, his shoulders level with her nose and she could breathe in the burnt tang of tobacco mingled with a slight dampness, as if his clothes had not been left out to dry properly. She snuggled into his chest and he put his arms around her, kissing the top of her head as though it was a reward.

‘You’ll be a good wife,’ he said, and she thought fleetingly what a curiously belittling phrase it was to use, as if her wifeliness existed as a sort of separate entity from her womanliness.

‘I hope so,’ she giggled. And then he had taken the ring out of his inside jacket pocket and all at once she recognised a swell of excitement and was able to smile properly at last without the feeling of watching herself. It was the right decision. She thought to herself that she had never been so happy than standing here by the riverbank with Charles, a man who was desired and handsome, who was clever and self-assured, who was so physically broad that she felt protected by his sheer physicality, and a man who was now, indubitably, without question, hers.

On the walk back to Newnham, Anne convinced herself of how wonderful it all was. She had always imagined she would get married and now, here it was – the chance to tie things up neatly, to become a wife, a married woman, a person of status and maturity, to make a home, to sleep in a double bed, to be adult and calm and to gain wisdom through the years by the fireside, to settle down and have children, to grow old together, to tend to her garden just like her mother did, pruning roses with secateurs before emerging, pink-cheeked, to prepare a roast Sunday lunch that her father would always say was the best Sunday roast he’d ever tasted. It was, she thought to herself, all she had ever wanted.

So why was there this low murmur of uncertainty in her heart? Was it simply because the things one looked forward to so much always ended up being an anti-climax? Yes, she supposed, that’s exactly what it was. Everyone must feel a bit like this when they’ve just made such a life-altering decision. It was only natural for the logical side of one’s brain to question, to rein in the joyful emotions that otherwise might overwhelm her. Perhaps pure happiness always had to be diluted by common sense, she thought, in order to make it digestible. Reassured by her own explanation, Anne dismissed her caution. They should be celebrating.

She glanced sideways at Charles, his profile set against the low blue of the dusky sky.

‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, lightly.

‘Hmmm?’ He turned and looked at her vaguely.

‘What’s going on in that head of yours?’

‘I was just wondering how quickly we can get it done.’

‘What?’

‘The wedding.’

‘Oh,’ said Anne, momentarily taken aback. Then she thought, well, why wouldn’t he want to be married as soon as possible? There was no reason to wait around unnecessarily, was there? Not when they both knew what they wanted and how in love they were with each other. ‘Can’t you wait to be married to me?’ She smiled coquettishly.

He grinned at her, ruffling her hair. ‘No, that’s it exactly. I need my Anne by my side. I don’t want to hang around and watch you get scooped up by some other young reprobate.’

She laughed. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘You have no idea how easy it is for men to fall in love with you,’ he said. ‘You’re an unwitting flirt.’

‘And you make a very poor reprobate.’

The slight unease that had settled seemed quietly to drift away. He pulled her to him and kissed her, his arms so tightly clasped around her back that she could feel his muscle and the faint outline of his rib cage pressing into her breasts. He drew back.

‘But now no one else can have you.’ He tickled a finger beneath her chin. ‘Because you’re mine.’

‘Yes, Charles. Yes, I am.’

In the coming weeks, as Anne arranged the church, the dress, the flowers and the finger buffet reception, people she knew would repeatedly remark on how ‘radiant’ she looked. With each new person she told, she gained an incremental measure of conviction. She noticed, with her single female friends, that a transient look of mild jealousy would pass across their faces as they congratulated her and she enjoyed the sense of superiority this gave her; the sense of living life on a level that they had not yet reached. Sometimes she would stare at her engagement ring for several long minutes until its shape warped in front of her eyes and it became watery and dark, the glistening red jewel leaving its imprint on the darkness of her eyelids when she blinked. She practised her married name, saying it out loud in the mornings in front of the basin mirror and writing her signature with a new flourish of pride. She was going to be Mrs Charles Redfern and she wanted nothing more.

Everyone expected her to be happy and so, because she was used to meeting expectations, she was. She did not allow herself to question this because, after all, cold feet were natural in the run-up to a wedding and it was normal for a bride-to-be to feel nervous, a little unsure of things. Normal. Usual. To be expected. It was what she wanted. It was how it was meant to happen. It existed and it was there to be got on with. She was lucky. Lucky and, as she told anyone who would listen, terribly, terribly happy.

It was Frieda who sounded the only false note. The two of them had grown apart over the last year. It had been an imperceptible distancing and one that Anne had never quite admitted. It was, she told herself, the usual story of a university friendship forged in freshers’ week: it had started out as a companionship of necessity and of mutual insecurity that, once they realised they had little in common beyond their newness in an unfamiliar place, drifted into a milder sort of acquaintance.

Charles had occasionally remarked that she didn’t seem to see much of Frieda any more. Anne would reply with a sort of airy nonchalance, as if she hadn’t noticed.

‘You two used to be thick as thieves,’ Charles said one day, sitting at his desk, which was covered with bits of paper and library books with bent, open spines. A mug of coffee had left a ring-mark on the dulled leather worktop. His battered tweed jacket was slung over the back of his chair, one shoulder sagging off the side, the arm trailing on the floor. A Roberts radio, encased in thick beige leather, was tuned into Radio 4. Although it was after 10, Anne was still in bed, her limbs stretched out with the indolence of a sunny Saturday morning.

‘Oh, not really,’ she said, yawning slightly. ‘We don’t have all that much in common.’

‘I thought you got on with her?’

‘Hmmm? Well, yes, I got on with her to an extent. You know, she was perfectly fine to go to parties with or to see around college, but . . .’ Anne drifted off.

‘But what?’

‘Don’t you think she’s just a bit . . . well . . . melodramatic?’ Anne made a face, deliberately trying to mimic Frieda, sucking in her cheeks, frowning and pouting slightly with an air of extreme seriousness.

Charles laughed, a low rumble that sounded like gravel and honey. Then Anne laughed too and went across to sit on his lap, her nightdress bunched up around her knees. Charles put his hand underneath the thin cotton material, laying it flat on the flank of her inner thigh. He stared down intently, looking at the movement of his hand shifting slowly upwards until the tips of his fingers reached the edge of her pubic hair. He bent his head and kissed her breasts through the nightdress, his fingers rubbing against her with an insistence that soon became monotone, almost repetitive.

‘Charles.’

‘Yes,’ he said, still staring at his own hand, at the pinkness of his flesh dimmed through the gauzy whiteness.

‘Not now. I’ve got to get up.’

He seemed not to have heard her and he carried on, prodding at her without looking her in the face, as if he were engaged in some scientific experiment that required exploring her insides. His finger slid in and out, in and out, in and out until she began to feel uncomfortable and she stood and walked to the other side of the room.

‘Let’s go out for a walk,’ she said brightly.

Charles turned back to his desk without answering and started to leaf through a book.

They didn’t go for a walk that day.

Although they were no longer close, Anne had made a point of telling Frieda her news. She did not acknowledge this to herself but, at some level, she knew that it was important to establish her ownership, to prove that Charles had chosen her above anyone else. She had always felt slightly insecure in Frieda’s presence because of her inscrutability. Anne was easy to read; Frieda seemed to delight in impenetrability. She was, as Anne said to her more straightforward female friends, ‘not a girl’s girl’.

So one evening, at dinner in hall, Anne had taken her tray and sat down next to Frieda, the thin stainless steel cutlery rattling slightly as she did so. Frieda looked up.

‘Anne,’ she said, her face shuttered down, devoid of expression except for a wryness around the eyes. ‘What an unexpected pleasure.’

‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ said Anne, feeling oddly nervous and simultaneously annoyed with herself for the sensation of anxiety. She was, she had to remind herself, an almost married woman. She no longer needed to feel the fluttering uncertainties of youth. She was self-possessed and sure of her place in the world. But still . . . Something about Frieda’s straight-backed grace, the angular elegance that lent her every slight movement the fluency of a calligraphic brushstroke, seemed designed to intimidate. Frieda didn’t have to say anything. Her enigmatic demeanour spoke for her. It made her appear prickly, almost stand-offish to other women. The girls in college regarded her warily and tended to dismiss her because they couldn’t understand her. Gradually, through the three undergraduate years Anne had spent at Newnham, she noticed that the mere act of gently laughing at Frieda had forged an unspoken female solidarity among the others. It was never explicitly done. It was more a question of rolled eyes, raised eyebrows and a kind of humorous chiding – ‘That sounds like something Frieda might say’ was a sign that you were taking yourself too seriously; ‘That’s the sort of thing Frieda would wear’ was a warning that your dress was too studiedly over the top.

A bit of it was jealousy. She appeared effortlessly refined: while the other girls opted for tight, flared trousers and sparkling false eyelashes, Frieda defied the prevailing fashion and wore men’s jackets with vintage silk dresses. She read Simone de Beauvoir rather than Jacqueline Susann. And while Frieda might not have found it easy to attract close female friends, she had no trouble striking up intimate alliances with all sorts of men. Nor were they just any men – Frieda would seek out the most popular, most clever, most dashing, most creative, most sporty and most unusual men in Cambridge. Often, they were postgraduate students or tutors who were substantially older than her. Once, much to the astonished exhilaration of the Newnham third years, it had been a Jamaican immigrant who worked washing dishes in the Trinity kitchens.

Frieda would have afternoon coffee parties in her room, with fresh patisseries bought in from Fitzbillies cake shop, that seemed almost to be literary salons. The men would come in twos or threes, smoking and laughing, with rolled-up newspapers peeking out of their jacket pockets and carrying bunches of watery-stemmed flowers in blotted paper. They would rap their knuckles noisily on Frieda’s door and she would open it and there would be a haze of steam coming from the coffee pot and the vague scent of something heady and scented – bay leaves, maybe, or aromatic cinnamon – and the men would disappear to the sound of urgent conversation and Frieda’s knowing laughter. The women who shared Frieda’s corridor would pretend not to be interested and yet, often, they would catch each other out, peering round their doors, straining to hear what might be going on in the secret world that lay beyond the walls; a world of the unknown, the adult, the illicit and the impossibly sophisticated.

‘Of course I don’t mind,’ said Frieda, pushing her tray ever so slightly to one side to make room for her.

‘Thanks.’ Anne smiled, feeling calmer inside. ‘I went for the gammon – what did you have?’

‘Something entirely indistinguishable from what I had yesterday. I’m still not sure what it was.’ Frieda gestured with her hands as she spoke and Anne noticed that her tapered fingernails were painted in a garish red polish. The bone on one of her wrists stood out smoothly from her pale arm, a small, hard ball of flesh.

‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’ Frieda let the statement lie between them without elaboration.

‘Yes, I’ve been quite busy actually, so I haven’t really seen much of anyone,’ said Anne, and she immediately heard herself sounding apologetic. ‘I mean, I’ve mostly been with Charles.’

Frieda’s lips curled. ‘Ah yes. The charming Charles.’ She turned to look at Anne, her dark-grey eyes like pools of petrol. ‘How is Charles?’

‘He’s very well, thank you. Very well, actually.’ Then she blurted out: ‘We’re getting married.’