My blood turns to ice.
I glance down at my left hand to see that my wedding ring has disappeared.
I am getting married to Alice. I am no longer married to Daphne and I am getting married to Alice.
The kitchen door swings opens and she comes back in, humming under her breath. ‘OK, presents are done … I need to ice the cake, and get the wine out. What are you going to wear, by the way, babe? Why don’t you wear that shirt I like …’
She tails off as she finally looks over at me.
‘Ben, what are you doing?’ she says sharply. ‘Why are you looking at the calendar?’
‘I just … I was … The wedding planner?’
I’ve been in the future for half an hour now, and I’m still yet to form a coherent sentence.
Alice’s face falls and she puts a hand to her forehead. ‘Ben, you are kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding. I told you about that appointment three days ago.’ She shakes her head irritably. ‘You probably just zoned out as usual, didn’t you? God, you’ve been so out of it lately. I feel like I’m doing everything myself. Which is fine, obviously, as I don’t think you’d be much use anyway.’ She laughs to herself at this, and then whirs back into activity, pulling tin foil out of the cupboard and a large cake out of the fridge.
I get the sense that I am not really needed in this conversation – that Alice probably spends a lot of time talking at me, rather than to me.
‘The wedding’s only four months away, Ben,’ she’s saying. ‘I really need you to engage a bit more, OK?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ I mumble.
Four months. In four months, I am marrying Alice.
She carries on. ‘So, like I told you, this appointment is to talk about the flowers and the readings. And also the string quartet.’
I stare at her. ‘The … string quartet?’
‘Yes, the string quartet. I did tell you about that, too.’ Her mouth curls up slightly at the side. ‘It’s funny, actually, Becks is going to be so pissed off that we’ve managed to book them. She wanted them for their wedding, but they couldn’t do that date. She’ll be fuming.’ There’s a gleeful snarkiness creeping into her voice: the same tone she used in Paris when she was slagging off her colleagues.
She glances at my bowl of cereal and sighs. ‘Ben, you haven’t even touched your breakfast. I know that stuff’s not very nice, but we did say we’d do this wedding diet thing together.’ She pushes the bowl across the table towards me. ‘I also think we should go easy on the alcohol today,’ she adds. ‘Just a glass or two of wine. I know it’s Christmas and everything, but if we’re going to start trying straight after the wedding, then we both need to be on it as early as possible, health wise. Becky was saying she and Phil went fully teetotal six months before they even started trying. And they got pregnant after, like, two weeks.’
‘Yeah … OK … Start trying?’ In four months, Alice and I are going to start trying for a baby. I press my fingers gently against my eyelids.
‘Babe, seriously, are you OK?’ she says.
Babe. I don’t remember Alice ever calling me that before. Daff and I used to cringe in unison whenever we heard couples call each other ‘babe’.
Where is she? What the hell happened?
‘Did you actually take those Nurofen?’ Alice says. ‘Because I really want you to be OK today.’ She leans across the table, frowning. ‘Oh, and while I’m thinking about it, maybe don’t say anything today about what you told me last week, OK?’
I shake my head. ‘What did I tell you last week?’
She rolls her eyes. ‘The thing about teaching. About wanting to quit Wyndham’s and retrain as a teacher.’
‘Retrain as a teacher?’ I try to process this statement, but my head is suddenly full of Mum. She always told me I’d make a good teacher. ‘You don’t fancy following in your mother’s footsteps?’ she used to joke. But I was too busy trying to follow in my father’s.
‘I just don’t want you to say anything about it in front of Becky and Phil and everyone,’ Alice says. ‘Not until we’ve talked about it a bit more. I told Becks you’d only leave Wyndham’s if you found something a bit more … you know, lucrative. I mean, teaching’s OK, but it’s not exactly up there on the wow factor, is it? It’s more something you do when you can’t do anything else.’
My throat tightens as I picture Mum: the passion with which she used to talk about her job. She’d come home at the end of every term laden down with bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates, stacks of cards from parents and pupils alike – Thank you so much! Best Teacher Ever! Couldn’t have done it without you!
The cards kept coming long after the pupils had left school – decades after, sometimes. More than one ended with the simple statement: You changed my life.
Alice is looking at me, concern stamped firmly across her face. ‘I just think you should hang on at Wyndham’s a little bit longer, babe,’ she says. ‘I know it’s boring at the moment, and I know management consultancy is not fully your thing, but Dad’s positive that a better position will open up in the next six months or so.’
I remember Alice telling me her dad was a management consultant. And now, apparently, I am one too.
I need to get out of this flat. My head is fizzing and my stomach is churning and the Nurofen has done precisely sod all. I need to be outside. I need to be alone. I need to think seriously about what the hell is happening here.
‘What time is everyone coming again?’ I say, standing up.
‘Half eleven,’ Alice says. ‘Why?’
‘I just wanted to …’ I rack my brain for an excuse, and feel my phone through my pocket. ‘I was just gonna call Harv quickly. To say happy Christmas and stuff.’
She flinches. ‘Harvey? What, why? You haven’t spoken to him in years.’
I squeeze the bridge of my nose tightly. ‘What?’
‘Well, unless you’ve spoken to him more recently but haven’t told me about it. Have you spoken to him?’
There’s no time to think about this right now. I just need to get outside. ‘No, I’ve just been … thinking lately about getting back in touch with him,’ I stammer. ‘So I thought I’d give him a call today.’
‘Ben, are you kidding?’ Alice snaps. ‘You know how weird he was about me and you getting together. He told you that you should try and get back with Daphne after you broke up, for Christ’s sake! I thought we agreed it was probably best if you didn’t see him any more.’
Did I really agree to that? I look back at the black-and-white photo and see my own stupid face grimacing back at me. What have I turned into? Am I really the sort of person who’ll ditch his best mate just because his fiancée tells him to?
‘You’re confusing me now, Ben,’ Alice says. ‘And this is really not a good day for it.’
‘I know, I’m sorry.’ I start towards the kitchen door. ‘I still don’t feel great, to be honest. I think I might just nip out for a walk around the block, just to get some air.’