She was always still alive, too, in those first few hazy seconds after I woke up, blinking and yawning and becoming increasingly aware that something big and awful had happened but not quite able to put my finger on it yet. And then I had to remember all over again, and sometimes the pain of remembering was so intense it was actually physical, bending my body at odd angles, or curling my hands into claws as I lay there crying silently into the mattress, trying not to wake Daphne.
She comes back in and stands in the doorway, looking at me. The shadows under her eyes are now hidden under a layer of foundation, but she doesn’t look any less miserable. ‘Simon will be here soon,’ she says quietly. ‘You should go and get changed.’
I stare down into the porridge. ‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ I hear myself say.
‘Oh, Ben …’ She sighs and runs a hand across her forehead. ‘I’m not sure I can either. But we have to.’
‘No, I just …’ I don’t know what to say. How can I explain it to her? How can I tell her that I just physically can’t go through this again? This day nearly broke me the first time. It will break me this time. I know it will. So why do I have to relive it? What the fuck is the point?
I suddenly want to see the watch-seller again. I want to demand an explanation for why this is happening, for what I could have done to deserve this.
I look down to see tears dropping steadily into my porridge bowl.
Daff rushes across to me and wraps me in her arms. ‘Ben, we can do this. We can get through this day together, I promise you we can.’
The tears are starting to roll down her cheeks too now, spoiling her fresh make-up. I didn’t even try to get through this day with her, originally. I barely took any notice of her grief because I was so caught up in my own. I just shut her out completely and retreated inwards; I didn’t even realise I was doing it.
Maybe this is why I’ve come back, then: so that we can go through this terrible day together, as a team. I have to relive these next few hours; I’ve got no other choice. The only thing I can do is to try and make them better than they were before.
I can already think of something I’ve always regretted about today. Something I was supposed to do but didn’t. My stomach twitches with nerves at the thought of it, but I suddenly know I have no choice but to do it.
I wipe my eyes on the sleeve of my T-shirt. Daff goes to kiss me again, on my forehead, but I lift my chin and kiss her on the lips. She smiles in surprise – an effortless reflex smile – and a surge of strength shoots through me. That’s what I need to do, I realise: I need to let her in. To lean on her, and let her lean on me. That’s the only way it will be OK.
‘You’re right,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll get through this together.’
She touches her lips to mine again, and then nods. ‘You’d better go and put your suit on.’
‘I will. But first, can you help me find something? You know that book of Walt Whitman poems …?’
Chapter Thirty-One
‘Are you sure about this, Ben?’ Uncle Simon gives me a concerned glance in the rear-view mirror. ‘You know you don’t have to do it. No one’s expecting you to. No one will think any less of you if you don’t.’
He looks back at the road as he guides the car onto the dual carriageway. I can understand why he’s dubious. Three days before the funeral, I pulled out of reading Mum’s favourite poem during the ceremony. I just completely lost my nerve, terrified that I would break down in front of everyone. The programmes even had to be reprinted to remove the mention of my reading. So the fact that I’ve just told Simon – at the very last minute – that I’ve changed my mind again, and I now want to do it, must seem more than a little disconcerting.
But it’s like that kiss in the kitchen cleared the fog inside my head. It not only gave me a weird sense of courage and confidence; it also made me see how ridiculous it was to have spent this day entirely wrapped up in myself. I bottled out of reading the poem because I was scared of looking stupid or pathetic if I started crying. But really, who cares how I look? The most important thing is making the effort. Trying my best to do Mum proud.
‘Don’t worry,’ I tell Simon, touching the dog-eared book in my jacket pocket. ‘I’ll be fine. I promise. I really want to do this.’
Simon glances back at me, and nods. In the passenger seat next to him, his wife, my aunt Chrissie, sits with the wreath of lilies perched carefully on her lap. And beside me in the back of the car, Daff reaches across and squeezes my hand, giving me a tearful smile. Our fingers interlock, and our wedding rings clink gently against one another. Mine has been missing from my finger over these past few days, since I was revisiting moments when Daff and I weren’t yet married. I never even noticed it was gone. It seems strange that I’ve only realised it now.
It’s even stranger to think that I’m here with her now, when only last night I was in Paris, in Alice’s flat. What would I have done, I wonder, if my time hadn’t run out? If the clock hadn’t reached one minute to midnight?
I honestly don’t know.
I stare out of the car window at the trees and houses whizzing by. It was on the Eurostar back from Paris that I decided I would ask Daphne to marry me. The thought popped into my head totally at random, and at first it seemed crass and embarrassing: a knee-jerk response to the guilt I felt over sleeping with Alice. An over-the-top way of making amends for what I’d done. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that it wasn’t any of those things. I was in love with Daff. That was the only fact in my life I was really sure of. The idea of losing her was genuinely terrifying; what had happened with Alice had only served to make me realise that.
It was as if all my worries about marriage and what it had done to my parents had suddenly dissolved, because I knew now for absolute certain that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Daphne. But to come to that realisation, I’d had to do something that could easily break us apart for good if she ever found out about it. So I quickly came to the conclusion that she never, ever would.
I’d slunk out of Alice’s flat early on Boxing Day morning, refusing her offer of breakfast with a few grunted monosyllables. I knew how shitty it was – how rude I was being – but I couldn’t help it. I felt like I was suffocating in there; I needed to get outside and clear my head.
Three days later, when I’d decided to go back to London early, I messaged Alice to tell her I was sorry; that I was heading home, and maybe I’d see her soon. She never replied.
Daff came back from New York in February 2015. Obviously, I didn’t propose to her straight away; we were still technically on a break, so immediately popping the question would have seemed at best optimistic and at worst utterly insane. All I told her was that I wanted to try again. To make it work between us. Luckily, she agreed – and for those next few months, it did work. We had fun again. I started pursuing boring but lucrative temp work as a copywriter, and gradually I pushed what had happened in Paris into a corner of my mind so remote that it only emerged very occasionally, creeping out in the middle of the night to remind me what might have been.
I finally proposed in summer 2015, during a holiday in Greece, and we were married a year later, on August 18th 2016, at Islington Town Hall. Nothing very fancy: Daff didn’t want some massive posh do, and neither did I. We just wanted our families and our best mates and a fun, memorable day. I was nervous, obviously, but only about the practical things: speeches and seating plans and whether Harv’s DJ set would contain anything at all for the elderly relatives to dance to (it very much didn’t). I certainly wasn’t nervous about the bigger, existential concerns I’d always imagined would rear their heads on my wedding day: all the scary is-this-really-what-I-want-type questions. As Daff walked up the aisle towards me, beaming from ear to ear, I knew for certain that this was exactly what I wanted.