Nobody's Wife

PROLOGUE

After the glasses had been emptied and discarded, lipstick smeared on their rims, after the polite chatter had stalled, and the well-worn stories had been told, the guests set off for home and just three remained. Emily sat with the two people she loved the most, trying not to choke on the silence, as night found its way into the room and kept falling.

She started to trace her way back through the past year, to pick through the broken promises and mistakes and betrayals. But it was more than she could bear, on that longest of days. She wanted to say she was sorry. She wanted to scream it. To Josephine, to Michael, and to Jack. But it wasn’t enough, and it was too late.

Because of the four of them, only three remained. And there was no going backwards from there.

1

Emily woke on the morning of her wedding with a voice in her head telling her not to do it. She was surprised, and she wasn’t. She’d felt anxious for weeks, but she couldn’t pin it down. Michael was never going to be the man who turned up outside her work with a passport and a packed bag and took her to Paris. He was never going to be the man who made her forget where and who she was when he kissed her. But he was the man she could trust with her life. The man who made her laugh, who understood and accepted her. While she was getting ready, her dress hung high on the wardrobe door and her shoes still in their box, she thought about telling her sister Josephine how she was feeling but found that she couldn’t say the words. It was nothing, she decided. It was nerves.

A few hours later, Emily peered into a room where everyone was still and silent, the rustlings and the whispered conversations hushed by an announcement of her arrival. A thick slice of light was falling through the high windows, brightening the faces of the people gathered there.

As she walked down the aisle towards Michael, she tried not to look at the front row where her mother should have been. If her mother had made the long journey to be here, would Emily have told her about the anxiety she’d swallowed down like a shameful secret? Perhaps. There was no way of knowing for sure. Her mother lived on the other side of the world, in Sydney. Quietly and without fuss, she’d removed herself from her daughters’ lives.

When she reached Michael and stood beside him, Emily felt calmer. He’d always had that effect on her. Soothing. He was as solid as she was flighty. She took his hand, felt its slight shake, and was surprised. This day was something Michael had wanted for a long time. She hadn’t expected him to be nervous.

Do you take Michael George Spencer? And do you take Emily Anne Johns? Do you promise to love? In sickness and in health? I do, I do. Emily tried to concentrate on the words, to really feel their meaning. She ignored the tight knot in her stomach, and she promised forever. When it was time for Michael to kiss her, she lifted her head to look at him and remembered seeing him for the first time. And she remembered how she had said yes, without pausing to think, when he had asked her to have dinner with him. And she felt amazed that his asking, and her saying yes – such small things – had led them to this.

After the ceremony, while the guests were drinking wine and catching up, Emily went outside to get some air and to find her sister away from the whirlwind of family and joy. Sometimes when happiness was concentrated like that, she found it almost frightening.

‘Can I have a cigarette?’ Emily asked.

She saw Josephine try to hide her surprise as she took two cigarettes from her bag, lit both, and handed one to Emily. It was something they’d done together years before, and Emily felt young and light as they repeated it.

‘So it’s done,’ Josephine said, and then she started to say something else but stopped abruptly and lowered her head.

‘What?’ Emily touched her sister’s arm, silently giving her permission to go on.

‘I just can’t believe Mum missed it.’

Emily shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’

They both knew that wasn’t true, but what Emily didn’t say was that the upside, for her, of their mother’s absence, was that it had drawn her and Josephine even closer. She wasn’t sure they would have come to rely on one another quite so much if Alice had stayed in London. And now, Emily was married and this beginning for her and Michael was an ending of sorts for her and Josephine.

They walked back inside arm in arm, and then there was Michael in front of them. He reached for Emily’s hand and turned to Josephine. ‘Can I take her?’

‘She’s all yours.’

It felt real, then, for Emily. More real than being pronounced man and wife, or the kiss, or the ring on the finger. Finally, after false starts and missed chances and long years, Michael was hers, and she was his. But she held her husband’s hand and said nothing.

They made their way to the hotel’s restaurant, with its slightly shabby white-painted furniture and enormous windows. And there was something about all that light and the looks on the faces of the people she loved that made Emily catch her breath. She gripped Michael’s hand a little tighter as they made their way to the front of the room.

As she took her seat, Michael’s brother leaned across the table and touched Emily’s hand. ‘Welcome to the family,’ he said. His smile was warm, genuine. Emily thought about what he’d said as the waiters darted between the tightly packed tables, serving the first course. Thought about belonging to a new family. She’d never known her father, and had lost her mother to a new man and a new life in Australia a handful of years earlier, so for a time there had only been her and Josephine. And Michael, of course. But Michael still had both parents, and a brother, and his brother’s wife. A complete set that Emily was now, somehow, a part of. They were near strangers to her, and yet they had been welcoming, accepting. Would they become important to her, in time? Not a replacement for her own parents, but something significant nonetheless. It was an aspect of the marriage that she hadn’t considered.

With all the food they had carefully chosen placed in front of her, one course after another, Emily found that she couldn’t eat. She pushed things around her plate, knowing that Michael would notice, yet still hoping he wouldn’t.

And then he took her hand under the table. ‘Are you okay?’ he whispered.

What was the answer to that? I love you, but something about this day doesn’t quite feel right?

‘Yes. I’m just not hungry.’

Michael smiled and kissed her cheek. ‘Me neither.’

Emily looked at his plate and saw that he had barely touched his food, and she hoped it didn’t mean anything – that neither of them wanted this first meal together as a married couple. And then one of the waiters came to take their plates and she was relieved, as though she had escaped the discovery of a secret.

Once the champagne glasses were filled and fizzing, Ben stood up and tapped his spoon against his glass, calling for quiet. Having no father, Emily had asked Ben to walk her down the aisle and to make a speech. She didn’t want there to be a cavernous silence where everyone expected the father-of-the-bride’s speech to be.

Ben was a year younger than Emily, and two years older than Josephine, and Josephine couldn’t remember his arrival in their lives, but Emily could, just about. She could still feel her mother’s hand gripping hers as they stood on their new neighbours’ doorstep, ready to welcome them. She could see the flash of Ben’s sandy hair as he dashed behind his mother’s legs when the door was opened. According to her mother, Emily and Ben had looked at one another solemnly for a moment before Ben had emerged from behind his mother and reached out to touch Emily’s face, trying to wipe away her freckles. She didn’t remember that part.

‘I’m Ben,’ he said. ‘And I’ve known Emily since she was four years old, when my parents and I moved into the house next door to her family. I haven’t known Michael quite as long, but I’ve grown very fond of him over the last few years. Of course, when Emily first introduced us, I was ready to tell her he wasn’t good enough.’

Emily didn’t know how much truth there was in this. Despite being younger than her, Ben had always acted like a protective older brother to both her and Josephine, and he’d scared away a few of their early boyfriends with folded arms and a firmly set jaw. But by the time Michael came along, it had been different. The first time Emily introduced the two men, Ben had taken her to one side and told her he liked Michael, that he trusted him.

‘But the truth is, much as I once wanted to break the two of them up and keep Emily all to myself, I couldn’t do it because they’re simply too good together. So I’d like to propose a toast to the happiest and most suited couple I know: Emily and Michael.’

The guests stood and raised their glasses. Emily took a sip of champagne and felt the bubbles rush on her tongue. She sought out Ben’s eyes and mouthed her thanks, and there were tears in her eyes, and she wasn’t sure whether it was the champagne or the speech or the emotion of the day catching up with her. She sat down and blinked them away. And then Michael stood and she looked up at him, waiting.

Michael rose, and the buzz of conversation that always starts up between speeches slowly dulled to a murmur and then silence in that high-ceilinged room. He hadn’t written a speech. He didn’t want his head to be filled with words that day. There wasn’t space. So when he stood up and listened to the hush descend on the room, he didn’t know exactly what he was going to say.

‘I’d like to say a few words,’ he said, stalling.

He remembered that at every wedding he’d ever attended, the groom had thanked the guests for coming. ‘Thank you for being here for a day that has been a collection of the happiest moments I’ve known.’

Michael paused and closed his eyes, trying to picture the moment she’d appeared at the end of the aisle. When he’d turned and seen her, he’d had to catch his breath. The girl he’d loved and longed for… There she was, walking towards him in an ivory dress she’d kept hidden from him for months. There she was, her red hair loose and long, her gait confident and sure. She looked no more and no less beautiful than she did when she woke up and turned to kiss him in the morning. But that day, he thought, at long last, she looked like a bride. And then he remembered hearing something he hadn’t noticed at the time.

‘Thank you for that quiet intake of breath you all took when my wife appeared in the room this morning.’

He looked down at Emily and saw that she was looking back up at him, her eyes wide and bright with tears. ‘And thank you to Emily for saying “I do” – she may never know how much those two words meant to me, but I’ll spend every single day trying to show her.’

As he raised his glass for the toast, Michael looked at Emily again, but her eyes were on Josephine’s. For a moment, he felt frustrated. He’d accepted a long time ago that he’d always have to share Emily with her sister, but he hadn’t expected to share her on their wedding day.

Michael drank from his glass and took his place beside Emily. Josephine leaned across the table towards him, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes too.

‘That was beautiful,’ she said.

And with that, his anger was gone, drowned in the love he felt for Josephine at that moment. She’d been there at every stage of their relationship: introduced on their third date, sharing roast dinners at the flat, leaving out books she’d enjoyed for them to pick up, taking Emily shopping for her wedding dress. It had always been the three of them.

Even at this late stage in the day, Michael could hardly believe it had really happened. They were five years into their relationship, and Michael had known he wanted to marry Emily after their second date. He was older than her, and he knew how to read the signs, how to tell whether something was going to be good and lasting. Or, rather, how to tell if it wasn’t. But Emily was new to it all back then, just twenty-four when they met. He had tried to give her all the time she needed, tried not to rush her. He hoped he had got that right.

When he’d finally proposed, a part of him thought that if she wasn’t ready then, she never would be, and that he’d have to move on, move out. And a part of him thought that he’d wait for her as long as it took, that he’d ask her to be his wife every day for the rest of his life if he had to.

Michael’s father approached him at the end of the dinner. He shook Michael’s hand firmly. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘You know we’ve always been proud of you, your mum and me.’

‘I know,’ Michael said. This wasn’t the kind of talk they usually had.

‘Seeing you today, with Emily, you just look so happy.’

‘I am, Dad.’

‘Well, good. I’m pleased. So pleased.’ He went back to his seat, sat down heavily.

The last few times Michael had seen his parents, he’d noticed old age creeping over them like a shadow. He wished then that he had made more time in his life for his parents in recent years, shown them more of the man he was now, and of Emily. They lived in Yorkshire, and it was too easy to stay in London and call them to catch up rather than make the trip.

When it was time for the dancing, Josephine made her way to the grand piano and began to play, and Michael took Emily in his arms and let his chin rest gently on the top of her head. He hadn’t really wanted to do this – to have all the eyes in the room on them once again while they danced as husband and wife for the first time. But at the strangest times, the traditionalist in Emily shone through, and despite the low-key venue, she had wanted speeches and cake-cutting and a first dance.

Just before the guests joined them on the dancefloor, he leaned to whisper in her ear. ‘Happy?’

She tilted her head upwards and nodded. He wished she’d spoken but felt he couldn’t ask again.

If only he could go back to those early days when they’d first met and she was so unsure and he was so convinced, and he had tried so hard not to call her too often, not to scare her away. He wished he could go back and tell himself that this day would come. Be patient, he would have said. She’ll be yours.