You Had Me at Hello (38 page)

‘I want to tell the truth. Clean slate. I always thought you'd guessed, or someone had said something,' Rhys continues. ‘We had that barney over your party. Then you were different after uni. More distant. More into making the rules. And I think everything changed between us from then on. It was never quite the same again.'

‘Wasn't it?'

‘No. You wanted to move back to Manchester. Get away from the Sheffield circle.'

‘Do you think I'm so unassertive I'd never have said anything if I'd suspected?'

‘I don't know what you're thinking half the time, Rachel. “Let's have a DJ for the wedding. No, actually, let's break up” being a case in point.'

‘I never knew,' I say. In retrospect, my only clue was Marie being slow to serve me at the bar, and that didn't distinguish me much from the other customers.

‘I didn't tell you to hurt you, Rach, honestly. I didn't even know if it would, after all this time and with all that's happened. I want to be completely honest and hold my hands up and say, I've been crap. Cards on table. I know you don't think I can do that and so I'm saying, totally, I could've done a lot better. And you've been better than me.'

Now I wrestle with my conscience. Rhys might have been unfaithful, but there's not as much to choose between us as I'd like. Does it make it better or worse that he felt less for the other person? One thing's for sure, I don't owe him blissful ignorance any more.

‘I slept with Ben at the end of uni,' I say, baldly.

Under the designer stubble, Rhys changes colour. ‘Ben?'

‘On my course. You know. We saw him the other day.'

‘What – that bloke in town?'

‘Yes.'

‘When?'

‘When we were split up. The night before the graduation ball.'

I see Rhys add a few things up and come to the swift conclusion that he can't push the table over and call me a faithless slag-bag.

‘
Ben
,' he spits, as if it's in inverted commas, as if he might've lied about his name. ‘Two-faced wanker. Nutless chimp.'

He plays with a square beer mat, knocking each of its sides against the table in turn. ‘The once?'

I nod.

‘That's not like you.'

‘Yeah.' I feel the discomfort of Rhys's incredulous stare. ‘I don't know what got into me.'

‘Do you want me to draw you a diagram?'

I flinch.

‘Can't have been much of a shag if you came straight back to me,' Rhys says. ‘You did it to prove something?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘Why, then? I know you. You're not the one-night-stand sort.'

‘Is a one-off worse than months?'

‘I took it because it was on a plate. You would've had a reason.'

‘I liked him.'

‘That was why you finished with me? The first time?'

I shake my head. He tries for a laugh that comes out leaden.

‘Really? Bit of a coincidence. Bye bye Rhys, hello Ben, bye bye clothes.'

‘No.'

‘Here I was thinking we had problems because I was playing away and it was because
you
were.'

‘I didn't play away as such. We'd split up.'

‘Ah, come on. I'm not for a second saying what I did was OK but we're both in our thirties so how about we act like it, eh? You sleeping with someone else within hours of ending it isn't exactly total devastation. You'd obviously worked up to it while you were with me.'

He has a point.

‘You've been in touch with him again?' Rhys asks, frowning.

When I decided to come clean about this, I hadn't thought any steps ahead.

‘Kind of. Bumped into him, that's all.'

‘You're not seeing him again?'

‘No. He's married.'

Heavy pause.

‘Yet you're trying to get back into his Dior Homme trunks, are you?'

I bristle with shame. ‘Of course not. I thought you didn't remember Ben.'

‘Something about finding out he fumbled with my girl has brought it all flooding back. Sneaky southern
twat
.'

I notice the lack of ‘ex' prefixing ‘girl'. Possibly Rhys does too.

‘Alright,' he says, getting himself under control. ‘Alright. I might mind the thought of you two together like I'd mind a brain haemorrhage but I didn't ask you here to kick off.'

‘Why did you ask me here?'

‘To ask you for the last time. Let's stop this and stay together. If I was slick I'd have cued up Al Green. But I'm not, and I don't know how to work the set up in the DJ booth.'

And if I'd really thought about it, I would've known this was what it was about. Rhys wouldn't suggest an occasion like this to make either of us feel better. Not because he's nasty but because he's not one for gestures. What you see is what you get. Except when you don't see him for a while and a woman with peroxide hair, cobweb crochet and oxblood Doc Martens gets him instead. Do I want to go back? I have to ask myself all over again.

‘I do love you,' Rhys adds, with evident effort, not being one for declarations either.

I think about what Caroline said, about me playing at this separation, merely being bored. It gives me a pain like the world's worst Boxing Day heartburn.

I think about how lost that date with Simon made me feel. Caroline's bleak situation. Ivor and Mindy mucking about with people they don't respect. Perhaps what Rhys and I had is as good as it gets, for most people.
We're not all lucky enough to be with our soul mates
, Ben said. How we've swapped places.

‘I love you too,' I say, and I do. I always will. If I didn't, leaving Rhys would be much easier. We might've been low on fun sometimes, but he's a constant. Reliable. As Caroline said, he wants me and that's not going to change.

Rhys nods. ‘Let's go on holiday. I'll even sit on a beach and get sand in my arse crack if you want to. Then we'll look at the wedding again. Maybe we should do something smaller. I always thought that reception was too big.'

‘You'd want the wedding back on?'

‘Yeah, of course. Why not?'

‘That's more than I can promise, right now.'

Rhys hisses through clamped teeth, like he's torn a puncture. ‘Either you're in or you're out. I won't be pissed about.'

I think about Rhys sat on a packing box a decade ago, making me an offer that I didn't think I had a strong enough reason to refuse. I'm about to make the same mistake again, for the same cowardly reasons. I realise it doesn't matter that I still care about Rhys, or that there's no one else out there for me, or what Caroline thinks. This isn't a sum to be added up or a least-worst option. Rhys deserves better. I deserve better.

I find my voice. ‘Rhys, we're not getting back together.'

‘You said you love me.'

‘I do. It doesn't change the fact we're better off apart. You know that. We haven't talked like we have today for years. We might work for a while but sooner or later it'd be the same old. We love each other, we just don't bring out the best in each other.'

‘You're going to throw everything away, thirteen years, for what? It's a waste.'

‘Just because we didn't get married or stay together forever doesn't mean it was a waste.'

‘That's exactly what it means, Rachel. Wasted effort, wasted time. This Ben. Did you love him?'

I hesitate.

‘Got ya. At least this explains why he looked like someone had goosed him, the other day.'

Rhys looks down at the table, the lightly scored lines between his eyebrows deepening into a number-11-shaped groove as he frowns. I wonder what his wife's going to be like, whether his kids will be boys or girls, what he'll look like when he's old. So much to give up. No one thinks I'm doing the right thing. I feel an intergalactic loneliness, spinning off into space and untethered from the Mother Ship, watching my oxygen supplies deplete.

‘I don't get it,' Rhys says, though to my surprise, not angrily. ‘I don't get it. I don't get what changed.'

‘I did. I don't know why. I'm sorry.'

Another silence.

Rhys leans back in his chair, produces my engagement ring from the depths of his jeans pocket and places it on the table in front of me.

‘Oh no, I can't.'

‘Keep it. I've got no use for it.'

Rhys stretches across the table and kisses me on the cheek. ‘Good luck, Rachel.'

‘Thank you,' I say, but the words catch in my throat because it has grown so tight.

Rhys sees tears on the way and stands up, making it clear our conversation is over. He ambles over to the stage area as I gather myself, head for the exit. As I turn to leave, Rhys is fiddling with the microphone stand, adjusting the height, muttering: ‘One two, one two' into the bulb of the mike.

I pull the door open.

Rhys's amplified voice comes booming out:
‘Pawn it and you might be able to scrape another few months at Casa Cackhole
.'

I'd forgotten about my childhood friend Samantha's wedding and I was able to forget it longer than I might have as my invite was sent to my parents' address. My mum was obviously uncharacteristically reluctant to remind me.

When she gets in touch to arrange a pick up for Saturday lunchtime, I face my unpreparedness, both literally and psychologically, to sit through someone else's special day. I'm going to have to bear a twelve-hour-long reminder that mine is no longer happening, alongside my parents, who will be thinking the same thing. It seems unusually cruel.

‘Have you seen Rhys?' my mum says, eyeballing me in the rear view mirror while she applies another coat of mascara. We're hurtling along roads banked by lush hedgerows, heading deep into loaded footballer country.

‘Yes. We met for a drink the other night,' I say. It might sound like I'm choked with emotion, in fact my trunk section is being strangled by the midnight-blue 1940s-style dress with matching bolero that Mindy forced me to buy. (‘You're single at this wedding, different rules now – you must bring it and it must
stay brung.
') The bodice is currently cutting off blood supply to my legs, which has the sole benefit of meaning I can't feel how high my heels are.

A pause while my mum chooses her words, discarding those so inflammatory they will start an immediate argument. Not discarding enough for my liking.

‘How was he?'

‘Good, actually. Looked really well. He was playing a gig.'

‘Probably putting a brave face on it.'

I grind my teeth, say nothing other than: ‘Dad, can you turn up the radio, I think one of my court cases might be on …'

‘On Capital?'

‘Try Five Live, then!'

Sam and Tom's nuptials are taking place in a village church in Cheshire, near where they live in high-achieving splendour, the reception in a marquee in the field next door. It seems quite ambitious to do a quasi-outdoor wedding at any time of year in Britain, yet they've fallen lucky with the early summertime weather: mild and balmy. I'm glad for the small mercy that it's a contrast to my city-based wedding-that-was-never-to-be.

When we park up, I discover getting out of the back seat of a Toyota Yaris in this dress is a challenge that ought to form part of some light entertainment clips show.

‘Thirty-one years of age,' my dad says, shaking his head, as I struggle like a beached beetle, legs cycling an invisible bicycle. He offers me his hand and hauls me up. We exchange a smile. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I feel a lot better. My mum is still awash with dismay but my dad's already getting over it, and some day, she'll get over it too. Who knows, I might even meet someone else they like, marry him instead. I admit it seems unlikely.

I pick my way along the gravel path through the churchyard, holding on to my dad for balance. The church is picture-postcard pretty, with weathered honey-coloured bricks and a slate spire, the athletic ushers standing outside in a tight gang of miserable solidarity at having to wear full morning dress with grey top hats, champagne-coloured cravats and striped trousers.

‘Dear oh dear,' my dad mutters. ‘Right Said Fred Astaire.'

‘They look lovely,' my mum says.

‘They look like wazzocks.'

My mum starts exclaiming with delight at seeing people she knows, buzzing over to them. I stand apart from it all, yet still close enough to overhear my name occasionally, followed by frantic shushing and hurried explanations that no, I'm not ‘next'.

‘This will stop happening at some point, won't it, Dad?' I say.

‘Yes, of course.' Pause. ‘Eventually you'll become a confirmed spinster. The same way your cousin Alan is a “confirmed bachelor”.'

‘Stand please to welcome the bride.'

I take a sharp breath and ignore the hubbub of my parents' pitying thoughts, behind me. I feel a tug of loss and longing, yet as I see Samantha glide past in Chantilly lace, I know that if it was me, I'd be at least part-pretending. Partly is too much.