The Altogether Unexpected Disappearance of Atticus Craftsman (37 page)

The invitations had been sent out in May, inside huge envelopes lined with rose-patterned tissue paper and accompanied by elegant cards giving details of the time, place, dress code, wedding list, local hotels, a map, and the announcement that there would be a special menu for vegetarians, celiacs, and those with lactose intolerance and nut allergies.

Of course, the dress code was none other than light-colored morning coats for the men and cocktail dresses with hats or fascinators for the women. There was a line indicating that the mother of the groom would be in lilac so that others wouldn't wear the same color and steal any thunder from the person whose big day it really was.

Because one thing was clear: Given Atticus's disastrous choice of wife, Moira had to take the reins and do what would have been
expected of a more respectable bride, however exhausting the job that had fallen to her proved to be.

First she had to choose the dress, either Alexander McQueen or Stella McCartney, of course, and have Grandmother Craftsman's diamond bracelet set in a silk tiara to be worn over the lace veil.

She ordered the shoes from Stuart Weitzman, even though she would have preferred something more traditional, but when she walked past the window, she saw a pair so scandalously delicate that she had to go in and try them. As luck would have it, her feet were the same size as Soleá's, so Moira could feel for herself how comfortable and soft they were and secretly planned to sneak into her daughter-in-law's room after the wedding and collect them, along with the tiara, the veil, and the dress, because she couldn't let Soleá shove those beautiful things into her grandmother's attic. No, Moira would keep them and, perhaps, if the time came, they could be used again, when Atticus came to his senses and remarried, this time to an elegant English girl, of course.

The wedding presents started arriving at the beginning of June. Since Atticus had been away for several months and the bride's address was off the map, everything was sent to the house in Kent, which allowed Moira to keep tabs on who gave what. This information came into its own when she made the table plan, because she was able to seat people according to the value of their gifts. The drawing room became a gallery with all manner of artworks, silver, porcelain, glass, and other fine objects on display.

In her black notebook Moira wrote a list of names followed by a description of the gift and an estimate of its price, as well as
a note on the effort each person had made depending on his or her economic situations. In other words, the silver jug from the Cromwells deserved less thanks than the tray from the Snowdons, given what a bad time of it they had been having since the property market crashed.

Victoria Bestman, as always, won the prize for generosity, because she sent a Cartier box with diamond earrings that had belonged to her mother, together with a note that said they were a hereditary gift and should pass directly to Atticus's daughters, bypassing Soleá, who wasn't really family after all.

Grandmother Craftsman, meanwhile, took the prize for lack of common sense. She turned up unannounced one Sunday at teatime, driving a convertible Bentley, with her chauffeur in the passenger seat, and shouted that she couldn't think of a better gift for her grandson than a two-seater racing car. She had driven from London, dicing with death on the narrow lanes, with Albinoni's
Adagio
at full volume and a cigarette in a holder between her fingers. They had tea in the library, the silence as thick as hummus after Grandmother Craftsman said in passing, “I didn't like you all that much to start with, either,” which Moira took personally despite Marlow's best efforts to convince her otherwise.

“How do you want me to take it, Marlow?”

“In the abstract, Moira, in the abstract.”

•  •  •

One of the biggest setbacks in the process of organizing the wedding was the church. The Craftsman family didn't often attend services at the church in Sevenoaks, even though they were generous benefactors and owned a mausoleum in the rear part of
the cemetery. However, they were respected by the community and had always maintained a good relationship with Reverend Fellow, so they invited him to dinner as soon as they had set the date for the wedding, to give him the news and ask him to take care of the ceremony.

“Impossible,” he said. “They've already been married by the Catholic Church.”

“Well, now they'll be married by ours,” replied Moira.

“The thing is, Mrs. Craftsman, as far as I know, your son Atticus was baptized and received the sacraments of the Catholic Church prior to his wedding. That is to say, he has changed religion.”

Moira had an almighty fit when the reverend revealed that unsavory news, then threw him out, cursing his lack of authority with regard to his flock. Then she started to weep inconsolably as she remembered her misfortune when it came to her sons' weddings: first, Holden, with a bride who was six months pregnant, and now Atticus, with a Spanish Roman Catholic.

There would be no church, what an embarrassment, but there would be an altar with flowers in the small chapel at their house, someone would recite a few verses by Keats, and a choir would sing. The bride would enter on Marlow's arm and the groom on her own lilac muslin-clad arm; Moira would walk solemnly, putting on a brave face, and the guests would believe that the tears she was holding back were of emotion and not of anger. She would spread out a red carpet from the living room, crossing the hall. Soleá would walk down the stairs and Atticus would come out from the library and meet her in the chapel. It would be a bit odd, but it would have to do.

They put up a white marquee in the garden, between the rose
garden and the lake; they hung eight chandeliers from the canvas roof and decorated the walls with family portraits brought out from the house. They planted real trees between the tables, and the centerpieces were ordered from a famous florist in London, the same one the Middletons chose for their daughter's wedding.

Planning the menu required masterful diplomacy. Back in 1979, before his sons were even born, Marlow had promised his great friend the Count of Bradford that his restaurant, Porters, would provide catering for each and every celebration at his house. And so it had been, however much Moira cursed her luck. She preferred French cuisine to traditional English food, and would have given her life to serve soufflé and sole meunière instead of the overly familiar roast tomato and basil soup, terrine of smoked salmon, and beef Wellington with mushrooms and brandy sauce, but when she suggested a change to her husband, he went on about a gentleman's word and its resistance to the passing of time, the principle of loyalty, the value of honor, and the British people's inevitable, inherited, and deep-seated hatred of the French. Then he slammed his fist down on the table, convincing Moira that her efforts were utterly useless. In the end, her only victory was to swap the dessert and have crème caramel instead of jelly with cranberries, and she comforted herself with being able to offer menus adapted to meet the special dietary requirements of certain guests. In this way, hiding behind allergies, intolerances, religious prohibitions, orthorexia, vegetarianism, or difficulties with chewing, she was able to devise a parallel and almost clandestine menu that she quietly recommended to every single one of her guests.

The final straw came at the last moment when she discovered that on top of the wedding cake there was an edible miniature of
Atticus and Soleá astride each other in a rowing scull; the detail had been added by Holden, who had decorated his own wedding cake with a figure of his pregnant bride dragging him toward the altar.

And so, victory by victory, failure by failure, Moira just about managed to survive until the first Saturday of September and appear elegant and smiling before the guests, none of whom wanted to miss the intriguing wedding of the heir and the Gypsy girl.

CHAPTER 57

W
hat happened that day in the old house in Kent had no more scientific basis than elves or witchcraft. How else to explain the sun bursting through the gray clouds, or the thousands of migratory birds that flew over the garden all at once, or the mesmerizing blue of Soleá's Hemingway eyes as she came downstairs, or the irresistible power of her enchantment, the same one that had made Atticus fall in love, which made the men cling tightly to their wives so they didn't lose their heads and made all the women happy to anchor them to reality.

Soleá, looking like a vestal virgin with long black hair like a runaway thoroughbred's mane, came down the stairs like a dream from an ancient Roman temple and walked down the hallway toward Atticus, floating on the cloud of her silk dress, not touching the floor, not looking at anyone, because for her no one else existed but the blond soldier waiting for her at the altar with open arms.

No one listened to the music or the poems during the ceremony. The only thing that anyone heard all day, as clearly as broken silence, was the persistent, rhythmical beating of two racing hearts. No one tasted the delicacies that arrived at their tables, or
listened to the speeches, or appreciated the quality of the champagne or the sweetness of the meringue, because all their senses were fixed upon Soleá and Atticus; a gravitational force of supernatural proportions, a bona fide electrical charge that at around midnight was finally liberated as an explosive orthogenesis, an earthquake measuring nine on the Richter scale, a terrifying tsunami that inexplicably affected everyone there.

The only person who did know exactly what had happened was Moira, but, for all the ups and downs of the years to come, she managed to keep the secret until the day she died and feign ignorance when anyone asked her (in private, of course) what she had put in the food to make everyone experience the same orgasm at the same time. It had been particularly shocking in the case of couples who hadn't slept in the same bed for years.

“It must've been a collective hallucination,” she would reply, flustered, while trying to erase from her mind what she had seen by chance and could never get over, for all the intensive therapy sessions she went to. At midnight, bored of champagne and dancing, Atticus and Soleá had slipped away from the party under the cover of darkness and taken refuge in the library. Because they had arrived barely in time that morning, disheveled and sweaty in the car given to them by Grandmother Craftsman, they hadn't had a chance to fully explore the house. Moira had been nervously waiting for them in the circular gallery with the hairdresser, the stylist, the interior decorator, the photographer, little Oliver dressed as a tin soldier, the hostesses dressed as nineteenth-century maids, and in such a tizzy that no forced smile could hide her annoyance. She whisked Soleá away as soon as she got out of the car and marched her up to Atticus's room, on the first floor, where the white dress was hanging from the ceiling
lamp so that it didn't get crumpled, her shoes, her tiara, and even her fancy underwear, bought in a well-known shop on Regent Street, awaited her. At first, Moira objected to the bride wearing the awful gold crucifix that for some reason she refused to take off, but when Soleá threatened to run away barefoot across the fields behind the house, she had to give in to the only condition imposed by the otherwise docile, resigned young woman.

“Today is proof of my love for you, Tico,” Soleá had told her husband when they were driving under the chestnut trees that lined the drive. “I'll do anything your mother asks me, I'll be like a passive little lamb, but promise me that we'll go back to where we've come from as soon as we can, before I go crazy.”

“I promise,” Atticus replied. “I swear by these,” he added, kissing the tips of his fingers as he had seen the Gypsies do in El Albaicín.

So the literary heart of the house—the library containing eight thousand books, with its open fire, velvet sofa, and the armchair where Atticus recovered from his rowing injury, the same chair where he learned to love Duras, Lawrence, Miller, Nabokov, and Sade—had remained closed, fascinatingly dark until that moment.