I wrote my name confidently in the parish register of Saint Mary Abbots, at the bottom of Kensington Church Street, and gave my bouquet of pink hothouse roses to Hazel, who was my bridesmaid. We stepped outside into the watery sunshine. The robins sang from the blossoming trees, and the daffodils thrust up from the earth. Simon stopped me on the church steps and turned me about for a long and somewhat indecent kiss. Everyone applauded. “Mrs. Fitzwilliam at last,” he said, when he lifted his face from mine, and he smiled and tucked my arm into his elbow. Hazel, delighted, brought out a Brownie from her pocketbook and took a photograph, which she gave to me later.
We held our wedding breakfast—such as it was—at the Savoy. Corporal Pritchard was there, and Hazel, and a few of Simon’s medical corps friends, boisterous and respectful. Of Simon’s family there was no sign. Not even an arrangement of congratulatory flowers. Never mind. We went through four bottles of champagne, toast after toast, and when the last man staggered away at half past four, Simon bore me upstairs to a hotel suite bursting with new spring flowers. The sky was still light and blue, but we made love anyway, swift and voracious, for the first time since June, when Europe was still at war.
Afterward, Simon rose to open another bottle of champagne and light himself a cigarette, while I lay on the bed, too happy to move, and watched him tread naked about the room in an utterly unselfconscious way, attending first to the cigarette and then to the bottle of Pol Roger in its silver bucket. This is marriage, I thought, when you have the right to each other’s bare skin and humble errands. I admired the squint of one eye and the patient play of muscle in his forearms as he worked the cork from the stem, while the cigarette dangled from the corner of his mouth. A soft pop, a gentle fizzle of air. He set the fat cork next to the ashtray.
“What an expert,” I said.
“Every gentleman should know how to open a champagne bottle properly.” He poured a glass for me and then for himself and carried them both to the bed. “To my beautiful new bride.”
“To my gallant husband.”
“What? Not handsome?”
“Handsome, of course. And charming. Invincibly charming.”
“Faithful. Devoted.” He kissed my lips. “A trifle zozzled at the moment, I admit, but that’s to be expected. I say, is it too soon to make love to you again? I don’t believe I’m much use for anything else at the moment.”
“I didn’t know there were any rules like that about making love. If there are, we’ve already broken most of them.”
Simon glanced at the window. “Twice before sunset might be tempting fate, but then we’re married now. Surely the gods will forgive us.”
“Yes. After all, we’ve already done our penance, haven’t we? Both of us. We’ve suffered enough.”
He smiled, stubbed out the cigarette, slugged down the champagne, and reached for my hips.
“My thoughts exactly.”
I think we both must have fallen asleep after that. When I woke up, the sky was dark and a gentle spring rain caressed the window glass. Simon lay on his stomach, one arm flung across my breasts, one leg straddling mine. His sweet, drunken breath dampened the air. The bedside lamp was still on, and I could see the vivid, irregular scars on my left forearm, where both radius and ulna, snapped in two, had torn through my skin seven months earlier. I wriggled my fingers. A miracle, really, that they still existed, that my hand still existed and sprang whole from my wrist. A miracle wrought by the man now sleeping beside me.
My head throbbed a little from all the wedding champagne. My mouth was dry and sticky. Seized by restlessness, I slipped myself out from under my bridegroom and rose from the bed to pour a glass of water.
I drank and poured again and drank. The hotel creaked lazily around me. The clock on the mantel, slender-armed and gilded, claimed five minutes to eleven o’clock. Not so late, then. I emptied the ashtray and turned out the light. Simon didn’t stir. For a minute or two—I really can’t say how long, only that it seemed like ages—I hung there, like the phantom he called me, until my legs failed and I sat on the edge of the bed and gazed opulently at him, my new husband, murky and shadowed among the tangled bedclothes, only just visible in the midnight glow of the city outside our window. Without quite touching him, I traced the outline of his long, trim limbs, the angle of his shoulder. The line of his jaw, glittering with peppery stubble.
I thought, I will know him always, he will father my children, we will grow old side by side. We will make love ten thousand times and plant fifty gardens in the springtime, and when winter comes we will lie together and keep each other warm, until the sunshine returns.
We slept through the night, and at dawn I woke to Simon’s kisses.
I remember how I wrapped my arms around his neck and inhaled the warm, sleepy scent of my husband’s skin. I remember thinking How luxurious. How luxurious that we could take our time, now that the first urgency was satisfied and a lifetime stretched out before us. We moved from the bed to the armchair to the floor to the wall, enthralled and perspiring, mating in a kind of exotic, primal waltz, and at one point, near the end, while the rain drummed against the window and we drove desperately toward resolution, Simon wrapped his long fingers around my jaw and the back of my head and said, “I am so sick of death. I am so sick of watching men die. I want to make you pregnant this second. I want to deliver our child with my own hands.”
So I dug my passionate young heels into the backs of his legs and prayed, too, prayed for a baby with Simon, prayed with all my strength that he would start a baby inside me on this tender April dawn: not because I had ever craved children, or imagined myself as a mother, but because I trusted my husband so profoundly. I believed his words. I believed that Simon, after four years of battling death, needed desperately to create life.
I don’t know if God was listening, or whether He still heeded the prayers of mortal men, or whether He gave and withheld His gifts for His own capricious reasons. From what I had seen of the hospitals and battlefields of France, He had probably abandoned humanity altogether.
But you will observe that the following December I gave birth to Evelyn, so I suppose it is quite possible—though by no means certain—that our wish that morning was granted.
Later that day, after we had bathed and had breakfast, we drove down to Cornwall to meet Simon’s family.
We hadn’t discussed them at all. Every time I’d raised the subject, during Simon’s visits to the small hospital in Hampstead, he had laid his finger on my lips and said I wasn’t to worry, he would take care of everything, they would accept me and love me once we were married. Once the whole affair was an accomplished fact. Once they knew me.
A week earlier, I had asked about the wedding, and whether any of the Fitzwilliams would attend.