The Vintage Summer Wedding Page 8

  Do you have hunger, Anna? ‘I have hunger.’ Anna nodded.

  ‘That’s my girl.’ Kim winked, walking backwards and then turned and disappeared into the crowds of tourists.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Anna exhaled a breath, in a bit of daze. She walked on, with no particular direction in mind, and then paused, leaning up against the wall of the Nespresso shop. ‘Do I have hunger?’ she said to herself and then laughed. ‘Too right, I have hunger.’ She nodded, and stood up taller again, shoulders back. ‘I have bloody hunger and I’m going to go to New York and be amazing again.’ I’m going to be a star. If she went to New York, she wouldn’t come even close to being the Chanel bag. It would be real. It would be better. It would be who she wanted to be. ‘Nettleton, schmettleton.’ She laughed again. ‘Thank you, London,’ she said, looking up to the sky and blowing it a kiss. Then she tucked her bag under her arm and went to buy little pods of coffee.

  As the glass doors of the Nespresso shop slid open, her phone beeped in her bag. She paused, wondering if it would be Seb asking how the chat went. As she opened her clutch, she wondered what she could tell him. How she could spin it. She could persuade him. Seb was persuadable. Seb would do anything for her. Wouldn’t he? The thought went through her mind that once he would have done anything for her. Would he still now, now that the glamour was slipping?

  The text, however, was from a number she wasn’t expecting...

  I’m around the corner from you. Luke.

  She stared at the screen. Her mouth suddenly seemed dry.

  How do you know? She wrote back.

  I followed you on Instagram. I’m sitting outside Wholefoods. In fact, I can see you.

  Shit.

  Chapter Eight

  There he was, lounging on a green mesh chair like a young Tom Cruise. Large nose, eyes so blue that it was like they weren’t meant to be on a human face, wild black curls and a laughing smile, that all came together to be far more impressive than the sum of its parts. That had always been Luke Lloyd’s thing. Startling attractiveness that one couldn’t put one’s finger on.

  ‘Looking gorgeous, if I may say, Anna Banana.’ He sat forward lazily and pushed himself up so he could lean over the table, rest a hand on her shoulder and pull her towards him for a kiss too close to her lips. Falling back into his seat, he grinned around the gum he was chewing and her face burnt where his lips had touched her. ‘Christ.’ He nodded again as she stood, not quite sure what to do. ‘You’ve always been so damn good to look at. Take a seat.’

  As he bit his smiling bottom lip and watched her, she knew that the appropriate action was to shake her head and say, ‘I’d love to but I can’t, sorry. Gotta rush. Good to see you though.’ And he would say, as she walked away, ‘Hey, what were you doing on Tinder?’ And she would pause and smile over her shoulder, ‘Just messing about with Hermione.’ And wink and sashay away. In her mind she would remember what his gang were like at school. She would see the look in Seb’s eyes when he pretended to laugh about the stupid things they’d done to him. The silly things that really meant nothing at all. How they’d unpacked all his possessions on the geography field trip at school and laid his baggy white Y-fronts out on all the girls’ beds. How they had turned his desk upside down, locked his locker with ten different padlocks, thrown his books, one by one, out the window. And she would think of the worry on Seb’s face when they first started dating and he would say, ‘So you and Luke, you’ve definitely split up? Even if he hadn’t joined the army, you wouldn’t still be together? You don’t still have feelings for him?’

  But Anna didn’t walk away. She didn’t smile over her shoulder. She pulled out a matching green mesh chair and folded herself into it, laying her bag down on the table and when Luke smiled, stood up, rested a hand on her shoulder and said he’d go and get her a coffee, she did a little casual shrug, preening herself because of the illicit thrill that shot through her.

  When he came back out, she was on her phone, reading her emails and about to text Seb to let him know that she might be a bit late back.

  ‘Texting him indoors to let him know you’re out with the enemy?’ Luke laughed.

  ‘Not at all.’ She put her phone down on the table. ‘We don’t keep tabs on each other.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’ He narrowed his eyes and grinned.

  She took a sip of her latte and felt him assessing her. ‘So what’s the great Anna Whitehall up to? Taken over the world of dance yet? I imagined you, you know, dressed like this ‒ all power-suited up ‒astrutting into meetings and deciding the fate of little dancers everywhere.’

  Anna flicked her hair out of her eyes and said, ‘I’ve just been offered a job in New York, actually. I’ve just had the meeting.’

  He nodded, impressed, and she sat back, crossing her legs and felt herself getting into her role. ‘Yes, I’m not sure if I’ll take it or not. Want to keep my options open.’ The metal of the chair was hot against her back and she felt the sun beating down on her scalp. He seemed unruffled by the heat, probably all that time in the desert, but she felt her skin prickling, like a warning telling her she shouldn’t be sitting out.

  He stretched his arms up in a yawn and said, ‘Always the high-flyer.’ Then he took a sip of his coffee, glanced to one side, and said without looking at her, ‘But what about your fun, Anna? Who’s giving you that?’

  ‘I have fun,’ she retorted, trying out a laugh that came out annoyingly shrill.

  He looked back her way and said, ‘We used to have fun, didn’t we? I think I brought a hell of a lot of fun to your life.’ He nodded, as if he didn’t need an answer. ‘That was my gift to you. Loosened you up, undid some of the damage.’

  ‘Damage.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘You wish. It was me that brought the fun.’

  ‘That’s true, actually.’ He licked his lips. ‘You were like a wildfire when you came back, just intent on causing trouble.’

  ‘I wasn’t that bad.’

  Luke snorted into his coffee, ‘It was like this stunning whirlwind just whipped into town every holiday and blew the roof off every house in the place.’

  She laughed at the idea of it, shook her head.

  ‘Do you remember we’d go to that crappy club with my brother’s ID. What was it called? Ritzy’s, was it? Something like that. We’d drink that luminous-pink drink, do you remember?’ He sat back, hands locked behind his head. ‘We could move on that dance floor, baby.’ His eyes flashed and she had to laugh.

  ‘We did dance.’ She smiled.

  ‘Damn well.’ He leant forward, his grazed, scratched elbows resting on the table, a tattoo of a snake coiled round his right bicep. ‘How does Pleb dance?’

  It was a well-known fact that Seb did not dance. Never had, never would. He wouldn’t even sway. She had a sip of coffee in her mouth when he asked the question and found herself pausing a moment too long before she swallowed. Luke sat back and clapped his hands together delighted, ‘I knew it! Ha, so no more dancing for Anna Banana.’

  She shrugged, coughed over the coffee that felt like it had gone into her lungs by mistake, unfairly allowed all the blame for never dancing to be heaped on Seb. ‘I don’t really have time to dance any more. And where the hell would I dance? I hardly go clubbing any more. I’m not seventeen.’

  He raised a brow. ‘Excuses, excuses.’

  ‘Let’s change the subject.’

  ‘Whatever you want.’ He grinned. Then there was a pause where her mind went completely blank and all she could think about were the little victory ticks that Luke probably had bursting out of his brain right at that moment.

  In the end, it was Luke who spoke, ‘So I don’t know what game you were playing, but I’ve got to tell you I was pretty smug when I saw you’d Yes’d me.’ He ran a hand through his hair, making it stick up all on its own, and she noticed the rugged roughness of his hands, the scratches and scars and general army wear and tear. ‘I think about you sometimes, when I’m out there. I look up at the stars.’ He laughed ag
ain. ‘Do you know how many goddamn stars there are in the desert? More stars than sky. It can make a man think about his life.’ He unfolded the Wayfarers he had hooked onto the neck of his T-shirt and slipped them on, covering his eyes. ‘I have to admit that I think about you, quite a lot.’

  The unexpected confession startled her. He’d always been adamant about leaving and that he wanted to do it unencumbered. ‘I would imagine that’s just the effect of the stars,’ she laughed, trying to brush it off. ‘Running about the place with guns and all that macho-bonding, I doubt you give a second thought to what you gave up.’ She glanced over her shoulder after she said it, suddenly aware that someone might spot her, like Hilary and Roger popping up after a day’s sightseeing.

  ‘I do, Anna. I look at the guys getting their letters and Skyping their wives and kids and I think, Christ, we could have had some good-looking kids.’

  She snorted into her coffee. ‘Steady on.’

  ‘No, I mean it,’ he said, his face serious for a second. ‘It’s not often a bloke can admit he was wrong.’ As he looked her way, she could see herself reflected in the dark lenses of his shades.

  She felt annoyingly uncomfortably and it wasn’t just the heat. It wasn’t the worry of being caught. It was the feeling of someone taking her life that was already a muddle and giving it a good hard shake. Like she was in her own personal snow globe.

  The tightness of his lips brought back the memory of lying next to him in the single bed in the crummy flatshare she had taken in London. When everything had ended and her mum had left in a fury to go back to Seville. When she had nothing. When she was working in a bar to pay her rent. Luke had said that life wasn’t fun any more. He wasn’t enjoying himself, and had decided that the army was the career for him. She had said that she could be more fun. But he had rolled towards her and said he’d applied and been accepted to Sandhurst. He had never asked her once about herself, about what had happened, and she had never felt more alone in her life. She pitied her old self now when she remembered sitting up in bed and looking down at him, with his hands behind his head, and saying, pleadingly, ‘What can I do to make you stay?’ And he had looked up at her with that same expression he was using now, and said, ‘Nothing.’

  Looking at him now, she suddenly realised that there was the same degree of something not quite right about his look now as there was then. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Like it was the expression of an actor acting serious rather than a look of genuine emotion.

  As if the atmosphere had got too intense for him, Luke’s face shifted back to its relaxed, mischievous grin, leaving Anna feeling one step behind, still caught in a memory. He whipped off his sunglasses and said, ‘So, tell me about Pleb, how’s he getting on? Tell me everything, I can’t bloody believe the two of you ended up together. No wonder you’re on bloody Tinder.’

  ‘Don’t call him that,’ she said, catching up to her present. ‘It’s Seb, as you know.’

  Luke crossed his arms in front of his chest and snorted a laugh, tipping his head back in delight. She shifted in her seat and altered the direction of the conversation towards his career and army life, which touched the right nerve and he proceeded to rhapsodise about the helicopters he’d jumped out of, the rapids he’d canoed, the sandstorms he’d battled, the times his parachute hadn’t opened or his rifle had jammed.

  Anna carried on with the conversation, but she was only half there. The other half of her had stood up and was wondering round the table observing, thinking, golly I was envious of him, of his adventure, of his excitement. He, too, was going away to be a star. He, too, was going away to make it.

  But as he talked, as the pedestrians strutted past him on their iPhones and a tourist interrupted them and asked him for directions that Luke couldn’t give, she realised that he was as lost as her. Outside the army, outside the regime, the excitement, what did he have? She understood then that he had the memory of a relationship that ended years ago.

  I’m his touchstone to reality, she thought.

  What is he to me?

  She crossed her arms and looked at him, watched his mouth move, watched his eyes crinkle as he chuckled at his own jokes.

  Just a damn good-looking memory, she thought, and the relief was palpable. Luke was a fantasy detached from all the shit that was currently bundled onto her relationship with Seb like barnacles on an oyster shell. Luke was devoid of her feelings of guilt over the wedding money. Her frustration over losing her job. Seb’s sweetness to her when she knew she may not have been so sweet to him had the situation been reversed. The niggling feeling that perhaps she would have punished him.

  For the first time, as she sat back in her chair and finished her now-cold coffee and felt the heat of the sun dip as it started to get dusky, she dreamed of Nettleton. Of getting out at the station and walking across the sun-warmed cobbles of the square and the dappled light of the lime trees sprinkling shadows that danced over the pigeons, the wooden benches and the fountain that turned off abruptly at nine o’clock every night. As Luke spoke and cracked more average jokes and she smiled along with him, she was back on the walk that Seb had made her take on one of their first Nettleton mornings to prove that it wasn’t so bad, when it had been too hot to sleep so they had strolled through the fields, ears of wheat drooping over and brushing their skin, poppies delicate and perfectly still in the misty early morning, the odd lazy bee bouncing off them and butterflies pausing in their path. They had sat on a stile and Seb had poured coffee from a flask and she had moaned that it wasn’t Starbucks and he had pushed her so she’d almost tipped backwards and struggled to keep her balance, and said, ‘Just drink your damned coffee, you spoilt brat.’ And she’d laughed and he had kissed her and put his arm around her and said, ‘Look, look at that,’ as the sun beamed down at them and the sky was so blue it was like the sea, and the view was old oak trees, thatched cottages and ears of wheat as far as the eye could see. ‘How could you not love that?’

  Anna glossed over the fact that she’d then been bitten by a horsefly and they’d had to go home and Seb had driven to the pharmacy for some cream but it was shut, while she’d tried to have a bath and the water had run brown so, in the end, she’d sulked on the back porch with an ice pack on her massive bite, refusing to speak.

  Her overriding thought was that she had to get back. That the image of Seb and the stile and the view was getting further away, receding like the mouth of a tunnel. Fading as the dusk settled.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said suddenly, cutting off some story Luke was telling mid-flow.

  ‘You can’t go,’ he smirked. ‘We’re catching up. I thought we could go for a drink, maybe get some dinner. I’m not in town for long, Anna Banana.’ He pushed his sunglasses up into his wild hair and his grinning eyes creased at the corners.

  ‘No, really, I have to go. I’m sorry to leave you here, but I have to go home.’

  ‘Running back to Sebastian?’ He shook his head. ‘He’s got you under lock and key, hasn’t he, Anna?’

  ‘No, not at all, it’s just…’ She shook her head, trying to think of something to say. Seeing suddenly that the sum of the parts of his face didn’t always add up to better. That sometimes, like right now, they added up to looking a bit cruel. ‘I’m not feeling that well. I think it’s the sun. Look, it was really nice to catch up. I mean it. Enjoy your evening. Sorry. Bye.’ She picked her bag up and thrust it under her arm, taking a couple of steps backwards as he watched her through narrowed eyes, then raised a hand in a salute goodbye.

  ‘Bye,’ she said again, and turned to make a tottering dash for the tube. Barely pausing to look at Eros again, or the buses, or Regent Street, or to smell the air and absorb the heady bustle. But her eye caught one looming building, its gothic spire thrust up into the sky, the mullioned windows dark and lifeless, the big metal doors locked tight. The Waldegrave, in all its magnificent, bankrupt glory, now just a ghost of a former life.

  As she got to the stairs of the Undergroun
d, she started to jog, holding onto the banister to steady herself in her heels. The tourists were suddenly an annoyance, blocking the path, not getting out of her way, messing up their Oyster card transactions so she had to wait in line, tapping her foot.

  All she could think was, I have to get home. Whatever happens with the job, I have to go home. Seb cannot find out about Luke. It was a mistake to see him. Sitting across the table from him, as he talked about Tinder and her relationship, felt suddenly like the worst betrayal, one she wished she could suck back in.

  Sitting on the Tube, she counted the stops, it wasn’t moving quick enough. By the time she swapped to a train, she was tapping her fingers on her bag in her lap. She flicked through the free newspaper, but couldn’t concentrate so stared out the window willing it to move faster. Until finally, finally, they rattled into Nettleton Station. The familiar wooden-slatted station building with its intricate white cornicing, the closed ticket office with its blind pulled down, the little coffee stand ‒ an off-shoot of Rachel’s bakery ‒ locked up for the night, baskets of petunias, geraniums and pansies, carefully tended, hanging along the platform.

  Just get home, her mind was chanting. Her feet were raw now from the Jimmy Choos and crying out for her to stand still, but something was making her feel like she was running out of time.

  There was no taxi in the rank, just a phone on the wall that would connect her directly to the cab company.

  ‘Bruce is five minutes away, Anna. He’ll be right with you,’ said Pam from Pam’s Taxis. How she knew who Anna was, Anna had no clue.

  She took her shoes off and stood on the patch of grass in front of the station, waiting for Bruce who, when he pulled up, got out of the car to open the door for her.