The Importance of Being Married: A Novel Read online

  And so a little stalemate situation developed. When Grace asked me about my love life, I’d tell her about a project at work. When she asked me if my boss was still single, I brought up the coffee machine Helen and I had splurged on in an attempt to save money on lattes (for the record, don’t try it—they’re expensive and we still ended up buying coffee every morning). One visit I managed to spend nearly the entire two hours telling Grace about a campaign I was working on, and after all that, she fixed me with those twinkling eyes of hers and said, “So, Jess, how’s the husband hunting going? Has that golden boy of the advertising world noticed you yet?”

  I kept thinking that eventually she’d get bored, that she’d give up, that she’d accept that she was fighting a losing battle, but not a bit. Instead she just upped the ante, asking me about every single man I worked with, analyzing them as potential husband material.

  And then, finally, after months of avoidance, months of subject changes, incredulous eyebrow raises, and determined shrugs, I did something I’m not proud of. I invented a boyfriend.

  Okay, I know how bad that sounds. Inventing boyfriends is what you do when you’re thirteen. But you have to believe me when I say I didn’t have a choice. Or, if I did have a choice, it wasn’t really apparent to me at the time.

  Fine, so most people probably would have thought of something else. But someone else probably would have had a boyfriend, too, so that isn’t exactly relevant.

  But back to the story. It was a really warm, sunny day, and I arrived at Sunnymead Retirement Home a bit earlier than usual. There were doctors in the room, so I waited outside because, well, doctors freak me out a bit, frankly, with their tubes and their serious faces. So there I was, standing outside in the corridor, and I heard one of the doctors say, “I’m afraid, Grace, that it’s not looking good. The situation is worsening.”

  And I didn’t know which situation was worsening, or what exactly didn’t look good, but when doctors use words like that the details don’t tend to be too important, do they? I shrank back and found myself getting all breathless and panicky because I didn’t want anything to happen to Grace, couldn’t bear it, and then the doctors left, and I forced myself to calm down and put a big smile on my face, because I figured she was going to need cheering up after news like that, and she looked so pleased to see me, and I wanted that cheery look to stay on her face and not to be replaced by fear, or despondency, or anything else bad.

  The first thing Grace said was: “So, Jess, how are you? Any exciting news? Any nice men asked you out recently?”

  And I was about to say, No, of course not, when I saw the little glimmer of hope in her eyes and knew suddenly that I couldn’t disappoint her again. Not now.

  So instead what I said was: “Yes, actually! Guess what? I’ve got a date!”

  You should have seen her face. It lit up like a beacon—her eyes were shining, her mouth was smiling, and even through my guilt I couldn’t help but feel pleased with myself for making her so happy.

  “Who with?” she asked. Immediately I started to rack my brain for a name, any name, but I’ve never been that great under pressure and my mind just went blank, so I just smiled, awkwardly, and Grace gave me a mischievous grin and said, “It isn’t with your handsome boss, is it? Anthony? Oh, tell me it’s Anthony Milton, please!”

  In retrospect it would have been really easy to say no. When, later, I replayed this scene to myself, I realized there were a million and one things I could have said that would have been infinitely better than my actual answer. But I panicked. I’d just made up a date—I didn’t have the imagination to come up with any new information. “Anthony Milton?” I found myself saying. “Um…Yes, that’s right. That’s who my date’s with.”

  I should probably mention at this point that me going on a date with Anthony Milton was about as likely as me going on a date with Prince William. Or Justin Timberlake. Or James Bond. Anthony Milton was the proprietor and chief executive of Milton Advertising. He was tall, blond, handsome, successful, and everyone loved him. A week didn’t go by when he wasn’t photographed in Advertising Weekly, a year didn’t go by when he wasn’t nominated for some award or other—mainly because his presence at an awards ceremony would guarantee that everyone in the advertising world would want to be there, too. Also, a day didn’t go by when he wasn’t fawned over by every woman in a four-mile radius.

  He’d interviewed me for my job at Milton Advertising—he and Max, his deputy, who fired questions at me while Anthony smiled winningly as he told me how great the company was, making me lose my train of thought several times. Then, when I got up to go, I caught Max’s eye and he grinned at me, and the next thing I knew I’d walked into a glass wall. When I say walked into, I mean it literally: bang slap, sore head, the whole works. Luckily Anthony had seen the funny side and still offered me a job; Helen helpfully pointed out that he’d probably been worried that I was going to sue him for dangerously placed glass walls and my physical and emotional distress after walking into one.

  Of course, news spread about my interview, and by the time I actually started at Milton Advertising I was known as the girl-who-walked-into-walls. But that didn’t bother me—after several years working in data processing (Grandma had told me regularly I was lucky to have a job, and that it was very selfish of me to complain when some people hadn’t had half the chances I’d had in life), I finally had a job with prospects, one that might earn me a decent wage. Anthony had given me a chance, and I was going to grab it with both hands, even if I started out a bit of a laughingstock.

  But I digress. The point was, Anthony wasn’t just out of my league, he was in a different stratosphere. Even if I was interested. Which I patently wasn’t.

  “Anthony Milton?” she twinkled. “I knew it! I knew it the moment you told me you walked into his glass wall.”

  So that’s how it all started. Just a date, just a little story to cheer Grace up. I never meant it to snowball. I never meant for it to go any further than that at all. But somehow, it did. Somehow it all got just a little bit out of hand, bit by bit, layer by layer, until there just wasn’t any going back.

  Not that there was ever the possibility of going back. I mean, I couldn’t come in the following week and say the date had been canceled. It would have broken her heart, or she’d probably have had a relapse, and I would have been responsible. So instead I told her about our date. Actually, I told her about my flatmate Helen’s date with a director of a record company, substituting my and Anthony’s names in their place, except it didn’t end up with us having sex in his office but with us sharing a chaste kiss at my door. Anthony, it turned out, was honorable, interesting, and, most importantly, crazy about me. And I know it sounds stupid, I know it’s humiliating to admit it, particularly since I looked down on people who spent their time obsessing about getting boyfriends, but I quite enjoyed telling Grace all about it. Free from the constraints of reality, it was the best date I’d never been on. So good, in fact, that I wouldn’t have been able to bear it if he hadn’t called afterward. So he did call. Two days later, in fact—just like the music executive. Only while Helen let her date leave message after anguished message, I agreed to a second date. Figuratively speaking.

  If I had any doubts back then, I managed to bury them, convincing myself that it was all just a bit of harmless fun. Just some silly stories to feed Grace’s desire for romance. And if I’m being honest, I quite enjoyed it, too. I mean, sure, I knew it was ridiculous; the logical, sensible side of me knew that it was no more realistic than “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” or “Cinderella.” But that’s the thing with fairy tales—they’re warm and fuzzy and full of happy endings, and even if you know life isn’t like that, it’s still nice to suspend your disbelief, just for a little while.

  Grace, meanwhile, could not have been more excited. She had a good feeling about it, she kept saying. So good that she could barely wait for my visits for each installment of the story. It was keeping her going, she to
ld me.

  Keeping her going. I mean, how could I tell her that it wasn’t true?

  Every time I visited I would steel myself, would be determined to tell her the truth, to admit it was all made up. But every time her eyes lit up as I walked into her room and she’d say, “So? Tell me! Tell me everything,” and I’d bottle it, would tell myself that the truth could wait, that now wasn’t a good time, that the truth didn’t matter if my stories were making Grace happy.

  And when I told Grace that we were going on holiday together (I was actually going on a week’s course on “Boosting Your Profile at Work and Getting the Promotion You Deserve”), she looked at me, her eyes shining, and she said, “You know what he’s planning, don’t you?” And I frowned, and said no, and then she smiled and said, “He’s going to ask you to marry him.”

  Sure, I froze slightly. Sure, I did think to myself then and there that maybe things were getting a bit out of hand. The idea of getting married, even in imaginary fairy tale land, brought me out in a cold sweat. But I’d never seen Grace look so excited. She was almost trembling with anticipation.

  So I rolled my eyes and said, “Oh, I doubt it.”

  “I don’t,” she said wistfully. She sighed, brushed a tear from her eye, and took my hand in hers. “Jess, I want you to promise me something.”

  “Really?” I asked tentatively. “What is it?”

  “I want you to promise me if and when someone offers you everything they have, you’ll take it,” she said.

  “What?” I raised my eyebrows. “What do you mean? I don’t want everything Anthony has.”

  Grace smiled sadly. “Jess, I know you’re very strong and very independent. But don’t turn someone down who wants to help just because you don’t think you need it. We all need help, we all need love, we all need…Just promise me, won’t you?”

  I frowned. “Okay, sure,” I said.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “This is serious, Jess. I want you to promise.”

  I looked at her uncertainly. “Promise?”

  “Promise.” Grace nodded. “Promise that you won’t run away. That you won’t reject it out of hand.”

  “Reject what?” I asked, perplexed. “I don’t know what you’re asking me to promise here.”

  “You will,” Grace said, a little smile on her face. “You will.”

  “Fine,” I relented, figuring that it didn’t matter, since what I was promising related to something that didn’t actually exist. “Then I promise.”

  “Wonderful,” Grace said. “And let’s see what happens on your holiday, shall we?”

  He proposed. Of course he did. Grace was so excited, she borrowed a nurse’s mobile phone to text me while I was away and to find out “how things were going.” If I’d come back without a proposal I think her heart would have broken. And an imaginary fiancé wasn’t such a great leap from an imaginary boyfriend. He proposed on the beach. Which is, I know, a total cliché, but I couldn’t think of anything else. He had the ring already—a perfect square-cut diamond, beautiful and delicate (that’s when I bought a paste ring. Sure, it felt pretty depressing, buying my own fake engagement ring, but I did it online so I didn’t have to think about it too much or face a real-life salesperson. And Grace thought it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen). The moon was full and bright and he had suggested a walk after a lovely dinner. He’d started saying how he couldn’t believe how lucky he was to have met me. I’d obviously told him that no, I was the lucky one, and then he’d gotten down on one knee and asked me to be his wife, and I’d just nodded because I couldn’t speak, I was choking up. In truth, I got the whole story from a cheap magazine I’d picked up at the dentist, and I did wonder at one point whether I was going too far, whether Grace could possibly believe such a load of old tosh, but she did. She even started crying. She said that it wasn’t just me who was the happiest person in the world. She said that she’d been hoping and praying for this moment ever since she met me, that it was everything I deserved and more, and that she wished me—us—as much happiness as she’d had over the years. And yes, I felt uncomfortable. Yes, my stomach twisted in knots slightly. But I kept telling myself I was doing the right thing, even if it didn’t always feel like it.

  In the event, we eloped. It just seemed like the easiest solution. Grace was upset, of course—she’d wanted to come to the wedding—but not when I told her that it had been Anthony’s idea to forgo a big wedding so we could give the money to charity instead, and that our little register office affair had been exactly what we’d both wanted—intimate, low-key, private.

  The next week I went back online and bought myself a wedding ring (silver, twenty-five pounds), and every week when I went to see Grace I’d put it and my engagement ring on, and would make up stories about my married life to my own Prince Charming.

  And now she was gone. Now it was all gone.

  Chapter 3

  IT WAS GRACE’S LAWYER who told me she had died. He turned up unannounced to give me the news. It was the one Sunday I hadn’t been able to visit because of a work deadline. He told me that she’d died in the morning, and so I wouldn’t have gotten there in time anyway, but it didn’t help much.

  I’d arrived home that day at 6 PM to find Helen in the sitting room, watching Deal or No Deal. As I poked my head around the sitting room door, she held up her hand to stop me talking. “No deal!” she shouted at the television. “No deal!”

  Helen and I had met at university where we’d found ourselves next-door neighbors in our first-year hall of residence. I’d never had a best friend before—I told myself I didn’t have time for one, but the truth was that Grandma had scuppered my chances at female bonding very early on by refusing to let me watch television, buying me only extremely unfashionable clothes, and imposing a strict curfew of 8 PM, all of which meant that I could only ever be an embarrassment to anyone who gamely attempted to befriend me for any length of time. She’d made a mistake with my mother, Grandma used to tell me constantly, giving her too much freedom, allowing her to become fixated by clothes, by makeup, by boys and television programs, and she wasn’t going to make the same mistake with me. By the time I got to university, I saw it as a good thing: it meant I had more time for work, more time to focus on getting straight A’s.

  But Helen, I soon discovered, wasn’t like other people. Wasn’t like me, either. In fact, she was the opposite of me in almost every way—she was beautiful, rich, impulsive, and sociable—but for some strange reason she didn’t dismiss me, or befriend me only to dump me a few weeks later. Instead she took to storming into my room on a regular basis to tell me about her latest conquest or agonize about an essay that was invariably several weeks overdue. She thought it was funny when I rolled my eyes and told her that I’d never heard of any of the bands she listened to; she made me spend the whole weekend watching Friends DVDs when I told her I’d never seen an episode, and didn’t even seem to mind when I sneaked away from parties early to catch up on my studies. We were an odd couple, but despite my best attempts to show her just how inappropriate I was as a friend, we were still close years later. Not just close—roommates.

  Helen worked in television as a researcher, which meant that she worked very intensively on a program for several weeks, then had a few weeks off “resting” before she got her new contract. Recently her “resting” period seemed to be extending rather longer than usual, which meant that the only income she had coming in was my rent (the flat had been a “gift” from her father. I’d have been jealous, only she invited me to move in with her and charged me far less than I’d pay elsewhere, so instead I was just hugely grateful), which nowhere near covered her living expenses. But whereas I fretted on her behalf, it didn’t seem to worry her too much. Instead, while she rested, she considered it her duty to watch as much television as possible so that when she finally got around to applying for a job she’d be clued up on whichever program she was potentially going to be working on.

  The contestant
said, “Deal,” and Helen threw her arms up in despair. “Idiot!” she yelled, then turned the television off. “Can’t bear it,” she said, shaking her head. “I just can’t watch these people. So, what’s up with you?”

  I didn’t get a chance to answer—at that moment the doorbell rang and I got up to answer it.

  “Jessica Milton?” a man’s voice asked over the intercom, and I jumped slightly.

  “Um, who is this?” I asked tentatively. I didn’t tend to get many visitors. Not male ones. Not on Sunday evenings. And certainly not ones who called me “Milton.”

  “It’s Mr. Taylor. I’m Grace Hampton’s solicitor. I have some bad news, I’m afraid. I wonder if I might have a word?”

  “Grace Hampton?” I said, curious, then reddened. She’d found out about Anthony, I thought with a thud. She’d found out it wasn’t true. Then I kicked myself. She’d hardly send her lawyer around, even if she did find out. “Um, come up.”

  As he came through the door, the credits were rolling for Deal or No Deal, and Helen evacuated the sitting room, telling me that she was going to make a chili for supper. I smiled gratefully and ushered Mr. Taylor in.

  “Sorry,” I said quickly. “Please, sit down.”

  The sofa and chair were strewn with Helen’s magazines and my work projects, so I hurriedly cleared some space for him, then sat down myself.

  “So, is there something wrong with Grace?” I asked tentatively.

  Mr. Taylor looked at me sadly. “I’m sorry to tell you that Mrs. Hampton has…passed away.”

  It took me nearly a minute to digest this information. “Passed away?” I gulped eventually, and my eyes widened.

  “Last night. In her sleep. I’m very sorry.”

  I stared at him openmouthed, then I felt myself stiffen. “I think you’ve made a mistake,” I said quickly. “Grace is fine. I saw her just last week.”

  He gave me a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry,” he said again.