We followed the path which led to the field at the bottom of Steeple House and went through the gate into the garden, which had been magically transformed into a land of wonder. A huge white marquee stood on the lawn, bedecked with flowers and garlands, shading lots of round tables on which glass sparkled and shimmered. A long table greeted us, loaded with popping bottles of champagne and fizzing glasses. I was handed one as I walked by and sipped straight at it, even though my head already felt addled and my stomach was as empty as a cave.
Emptiness is such a familiar yet terrifying sensation for me, scorched on to my physical memory so deep it drags me backwards through time to when it wasn’t in my power to feed myself. A time when I had no money to buy myself even a loaf of bread. A time when I was always alone, even when my mother was with me. A time in which I couldn’t make myself lovable and I didn’t know how to love. A time when it had seemed as if I was never going to fill the deep, all-encompassing void in my soul.
Luckily at the reception there were lots of young girls dressed in black and white holding laden trays of food. Except the food on offer was all one bite and I knew I couldn’t take a handful like I wanted to. I drifted to the edge of the party, pretending to admire Suzi’s flower beds, really wishing I could snip the heads off the flowers one by one, leaving them dead or dying in the border.
Everyone else had splintered off into groups and the noise they were all making was too loud and close. I circled the outside of the party, looking for V, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. It was possible, I supposed, that she and Angus were continuing their argument elsewhere. Or maybe she had broken down and admitted everything to him; maybe seeing me during the ceremony had been too much. I took another glass of champagne as a tray passed me, even though the bubbles were hurtling themselves around my empty stomach, pressing the void higher and higher, squeezing my heart and blocking my throat.
A queue was forming in front of the marquee, so I went to join it, standing between people who were still chatting, as if everyone had so much to say. It took me a minute to realise that V and Angus were standing just by the entrance to the marquee, smiling and shaking hands, kissing cheeks and sometimes exclaiming and hugging. I wiped my palms against my trousers, but they slicked again immediately. I was five people away from them and the line was inching ever closer.
The short, fat woman in front of me kissed Angus dramatically and then held V’s face in both her hands and kissed her lips, exclaiming as she did so at her beauty. Angus turned to me, his cheeks high with colour and his mouth already smiling. He reached out and shook my hand with a tight grip. ‘Hello, thanks for coming. Sorry, you are?’ Up close his skin was lined and he was definitely older than us, my early forties estimation had been correct.
V was still being mauled by the fat lady but I could feel her straining towards me. ‘Mike,’ I said.
His eyes widened for a moment and his glance flicked my length. ‘Oh, Mike.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hello, Mike,’ V said, now free.
I turned to her. ‘You look amazing.’
She blushed, but I stepped towards her, leaving Angus to deal with the next person. ‘Thank you.’
‘Did you get my present?’
She laughed lightly. ‘Yes, we did. It’s very beautiful. Thank you.’
‘I mean every picture,’ I said, my eyes refusing to leave her face.
She glanced over at Angus, but he hadn’t heard. ‘Oh, well.’
‘Where are you going on honeymoon?’
She hesitated. ‘South Africa.’ She turned towards Angus again and I realised Angus and the woman he was with had stopped talking and there was almost the feeling of a surge from the line, as if I was holding everyone up.
‘You’re on table fourteen, I think,’ V said, her smile back on her face. ‘The plan is just over there.’
I walked over to the seating plan, but my eyes had lost focus and it took me ages to find my name and then my table, which was in a far corner, under the slope of the marquee. I was the last person to my place and I had to fit myself in next to a mousy-looking woman and an older man.
The mousy woman turned out to be a cousin of Angus’s, although she hadn’t seen him for three years, and the older man was a family friend of V’s parents. I spoke first to the mousy woman, who was interesting only in that she was able to impart some facts about Angus. She didn’t appear to like him much. She called him ‘the family star’ and said she wasn’t surprised he’d ended up with someone as fabulous as Verity and didn’t I think they’d have beautiful children, a thought so disgusting it made me want to gag. She was keen to tell me how fabulously wealthy he was and what a success he’d made of his company, which he’d started from scratch, although I thought Angus’s scratch was probably a lot nicer than mine. She also confirmed he was older than V, thirty-eight to be precise, a bit younger than my estimation, which meant he hadn’t weathered well.
I moved on to the man towards the end of the main course. He said he knew who I was, although we’d never met, which seemed strange, but also made me think that I had obviously featured strongly in all their lives over the years. He had been in the army, he told me, and asked if it was a career I had ever considered. Banking is a hiding to nothing, he said, playing around with numbers and pretending things were important which were not. It was, he continued, why the country was in the mess it was in, this inability we had to grasp what really mattered.
But my brain felt suffocated by the fact that V was going to South Africa and I was finding it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. South Africa had been where we had always wanted to go and the thought that she would be seeing it for the first time with that repulsive upstart Angus was almost too much. I couldn’t help looking over at him throughout the meal. He was sitting at the long table which ran across the top of the marquee between V and Suzi. His arm was running along the back of V’s chair, but he was saying something to Suzi which was making her laugh. V was chatting to an older man on her other side who could only have been Angus’s father. I wondered what V thought, looking at him, ruining the surprise of what her future would hold in store were her marriage real.
And all at once I was struck by the thought that when we got married I would have two blank spaces where my parents were supposed to be. In fact, I would have blank spaces everywhere. I wouldn’t have cousins to sit next to ex-girlfriends. I wouldn’t have ex-girlfriends. I wouldn’t have friends, or even acquaintances. I thought stupidly of Kaitlyn and her washed-out face, perhaps the only person I knew whom I could legitimately invite, apart from Elaine and Barry of course.
I put down my knife and fork as the salmon defeated me and thought I might have to get up and excuse myself, when it came to me. I realised suddenly what V was doing with this marriage, almost as if she’d written it on to a piece of paper and given it to me. This was not the marriage she wanted. This was the marriage Suzi wanted. V was not this traditional bride, this doting daughter, this white virgin. V in fact was the complete opposite of this. V was dark and musty and throbbing. V craved. V craved me.
I lied when I said the Crave in that nightclub in Piccadilly Circus was our last. Our last Crave actually happened in America, the first summer I was living there. And it wasn’t even a proper Crave, although now I realise it was the moment when V knew that the rules could change and how much fun that could be.
V came out for two weeks and we flew south, picking up an old Chevy in which we drove routes we’d heard about in songs. We slept in hokey motels which looked like sets of horror films and ate in diners where the waitresses were all too old and sad. We swam naked in rivers and drank beer on the side of the road, sleeping it off in the car.
‘I feel like a Crave,’ V said one evening. We were lying in bed in a cheap motel in Dakota with the neon lights from the sign leaking in through the window on to our naked bodies. The motel was on the edge of an even cheaper town, where we had seen people dressed in cowboy boots and Stetsons.
‘They’d probably shoot us out here,’ I said, kissing the top of her head.
‘No, I was thinking something different,’ she said, her voice slightly muffled against my chest.