It was raining. She was looking for her keys for a very long time in a very small bag.
“You all right?” I said.
And Sunny — who has known Delphi since they were eleven and who had been watching me for a fortnight — said:
“Have you asked her yet?”
“Asked her what?”
And she stopped looking in the bag.
It was not Delphi who told me. It was not my mother.
“The lunch at your mum and dad’s,” she said. “March.”
“Which lunch?”
And Sunny looked at me for about three seconds, standing in the rain between two cars with her keys finally in her hand.
Then she said, “Right.”
And got in, and shut the door, and sat there without starting the engine until I had walked away, because she did not want me to watch her cry about it.
Here is what happened in March. I have it from Sunny, from Breda, from my cousin Tam, and eventually from Delphi, and all four accounts match almost word for word, which they would, because it is the sort of thing people remember.
There was a lunch at my parents’ house for the engagement. The second Sunday in March. About twenty-five of us, which in my mother’s house means the long table and the little table in the conservatory for whoever she has decided is young.
It was a good afternoon. I remember that much. I remember the pork, and Tam’s boyfriend breaking a glass, and my father doing the thing he does with the carving knife where he explains it.
At some point the photographs came out.
Not a plan. Breda had brought a few in her bag the way people do, and they went round the table, and there was a lot of noise about my mother’s hair in 1988.
And Delphi put one down on the cloth.
A man of about thirty on a stone step outside a registry office. Dark hair. Grinning like a maniac. In a black suit that fitted him perfectly, with a dark tie, holding a woman’s hand just out of frame.
And Delphi said — and Sunny says she said it in the voice, the one she uses when she is testing water with her toe and pretending she is only paddling —
“Wouldn’t it be mad if I wore Dad’s suit.”
Tam said, “What, actually?”
And Delphi said, “Like actually.”
And there was about half a second in which it could have gone any way at all.
Then my mother reached across the table and picked the photograph up.
She looked at it for a moment. She has a way of holding a thing that makes it look like it is being assessed.
She put it face down by the bread board and smoothed it with two fingers.
And she said, to twenty-five people, in exactly the voice she uses for everything:
“Give me that before it gets wine on it, darling. Nobody’s walking down an aisle in a dead man’s suit. Sit down, we’re doing this properly.”
There was a laugh.
Not a cruel one. That is the thing. It was the warm kind — the noise a table makes when the matriarch has said something firm and everybody is relieved a decision has been taken.
My uncle Dennis laughed. Tam laughed. Breda did not.
And mine was in it.
I laughed.
At my own engagement lunch. At my fiancée’s dead father’s suit. In front of twenty-five people. Because my mother had made it sound like a joke, and because I have been going along with that woman’s framing of things since I was about seven years old.
And Delphi said, “I’m joking,” and reached over and took the photograph back off the bread board and put it in her bag.
And the pudding came out.
I have no memory of any of it.
None. Not a trace.
I have been told the date, the dish, where I was sitting, who was opposite me, and the fact that I was holding a glass in my left hand because Tam remembers me putting it down in order to laugh.
And there is nothing there. It is not that it is hazy. The tape is blank.
That is the part I have not got round, and I do not think I am going to.
It cost me nothing. It did not even go in. A woman I had been with for five years put the most important thing in her life on a table in front of my family in the only voice she could get it out in, and my entire contribution was a noise, and then I had a pudding, and then I drove us home and talked about something else for forty minutes.
I asked her, in the August, what we talked about in that car.
She said, “Decking.”
PART 3 — ARVID
I did not know very much about her father.
I knew the shape of it. Arvid Rowse, died January 2008, his heart, forty-four years old, Delphi fourteen. I knew there was a photograph of him in her flat when I met her and that it moved house with us twice. I knew she went quiet for about three days every January and that the third day was better than the first two.
I never asked beyond that. She did not invite it and I took that at face value, which is a thing I did a great deal in those five years and which I have stopped doing.
Breda told me in the June. In her kitchen, on a Tuesday, with the suit on the table between us in its bag, because it was going to the tailor’s that week.
“He left it three days,” she said.
“Left what three days?”
“The suit. We got married on the fourteenth of May and he walked into Linnet’s on the eleventh and said he needed a suit for Saturday.”
“For that Saturday.”
“Three days.” She was laughing at the table. “Hugo Linnet never let him forget it. Thirty years. Every time Arvid went in there, Hugo’d say, ‘Need it Thursday, do you.'”
She took the jacket out of the bag, turned it over on the table, and showed me the inside of the cuff with her thumb.
“That bit’s not Hugo’s. The name tape. I did that.”
“You sewed it in?”
“About 1994. He kept leaving it places.” She shook her head at a man who has been dead for seventeen years. “Left it in a pub in Harlow once. Left it at a christening. So I sewed his name in like he was going to infant school.”
She got up and put the kettle on and talked at me with her back turned, which I have noticed people do when they want to say a thing without being watched while they say it.
“He wore it to everything, Ike. Everything. Both christenings. His mother’s funeral. He wore it to a parents’ evening once and I told him he looked ridiculous and he said, you only get one suit, Breda, so it does the lot.”
“What else?”
And she stopped doing whatever she was doing with the teapot.
“Prize evening. 2007. The October.”
Delphi got a prize for geography when she was thirteen. One of those evenings in a school hall with four hundred plastic chairs and a visiting mayor who could not pronounce anybody’s name.
She has told me about it since, and so has Breda, and the two accounts differ in exactly one detail, which I think is the whole of it.
Breda says he wore the suit because he wore the suit to everything.
Delphi says he asked her first.
Two days before. She was thirteen. There was a girl in her year whose father turned up to things in a tracksuit and got talked about, and Delphi had spent that entire autumn in a state about the general question of being looked at.
And her father sat on the end of her bed and said: do you want me in the suit or not in the suit? Because I don’t mind either way. But you’ve got to tell me which.
And she said the suit.
And he wore it, and he sat in the fourth row, and when she came off that stage he did not stand up or whoop or do any of the things fathers do that make a thirteen-year-old want the floor to open.
He put his hand up about shoulder height, so she could see where he was.
Three months later he was dead.
The suit went into a box in the April of 2008 and has been in Breda’s loft ever since, and in seventeen years nobody has taken it out except to move the boxes when the roof was done in 2016.
PART 4 — NINE O’CLOCK
There was a dress.
I need to say that plainly, because about half the people who hear this assume there never was one — that the whole thing was built for months, that my wife is a person who stages things.
She is not. She is the least theatrical person I know. She once left a party because somebody started a round of Happy Birthday.
She bought it in the November. Ivory, plain, not cheap. Three fittings — her mother at the first, Sunny at the second, both of them at the third in the April.
It is in a bag in a wardrobe in our house. It has never been worn and we have not discussed what happens to it.
She did all of it properly, right up to about nine o’clock on the morning of the fifteenth of May.
This is her account, and I am going to give it the way she gave it to me, in the September, in a hotel room in Ardmore where we had gone for four days because neither of us could do it in our own kitchen.
She was in a bedroom at the farmhouse with her hair done and her face done, and the dress hanging on the back of the door in its bag.
Breda was in there with her. Sunny was downstairs dealing with a man about chairs.
Delphi unzipped the bag, got the dress out, and put it on the bed.
And then she stood there.
“How long?” I asked her.
“Mum says eleven minutes.”
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing. That’s the thing, Ike. I wasn’t crying. I wasn’t having a moment. I was standing up looking at it and I could not make my arms do it.”
She has used the word stuck every single time she has described it and she has never once used a different one.
Breda said nothing for the first part. She has told me that too. She sat on the end of that bed and watched her daughter stand in front of a dress for what she thought was about ten minutes, and did not open her mouth — because in that family you do not ask somebody what is wrong. You wait.
Then she got up and went out of the room.
Delphi says she assumed she had gone for Sunny.
Breda went out to the car.
She had put the suit in the boot at seven o’clock that morning.
She had got up at half past five, gone into the loft in her dressing gown with a torch, got the box down, taken the suit out, hung it in a bag, and put it in the boot under a blanket.
Then she had come down and done her hair and said nothing about it to anybody for three and a half hours.
I asked her why.
She said, “Because I’d been putting it in that car in my head since about January.”
“Why didn’t you just offer it to her?”
And Breda Rowse said: “Because if I’d offered it, she’d have said no. She’d have had to. You don’t get offered a thing like that at nine in the morning and say yes in front of your mother.”
So she did not offer it.
She carried it up those stairs and into that room and laid it over the back of a chair, and she said, “That’s there if you want it,” and then she went out and shut the door and stood on the landing for four minutes.
And when she went back in, Delphi had the trousers on and was rolling the waistband.
What I did not understand for a long time — and I am ashamed of how long — is that it was not a tribute.
I had it in my head as a gesture. A lovely thing. The sort of thing that makes a photograph.
It was not. It was eleven minutes of a woman who could not put a dress on, and nobody in that house knowing why, including her.
She has told me since what it actually was.
She said: I was about to walk up an aisle in front of a hundred people and have every single one of them look at me, and I have not been able to stand being looked at since I was fourteen, and the one person who ever asked me first was not going to be at the end of it.
That is the whole of it. There is nothing cleverer than that underneath.
And in March, in a room with twenty-five people in it, she had tried to say a version of that out loud.
And twenty-five people laughed. And one of them was me.
PART 5 — THE JACKET CAME OFF AT NINE
We got married. I put that in early because people genuinely ask.
I stood there and read a name tape, and after that I was not embarrassed about anything ever again, and the ninety seconds before it is a thing I will be apologising for in my own head at odd moments for the rest of my life.
I said one thing before the registrar started. I leaned in and said, “Can I see it again after?”
And Delphi laughed — out loud, in front of a hundred people — which broke whatever that orchard was doing, and about half of them laughed with her without knowing what at.
The registrar did her bit. We did ours. Delphi’s voice went at one point and mine went at a different point, which Row says is the only fair way to do it.
The afternoon was better than the wedding I had planned.
That is a thing I did not expect and have had to make my peace with.
People came up to her all day. Not awkwardly — properly. Including my uncle Dennis, who turned out to have known Arvid Rowse slightly in about 1996, and who told a story at the top table that nobody had ever heard and that made Breda put her napkin over her face.
There are four hundred and eleven photographs and my wife is in a dead man’s suit in every single one of them.
In about six of them you can see the name tape, because she had the cuff turned back from the altar onward and never turned it down again all day.
The jacket came off at about nine. She danced in the shirt and the tie with the sleeves rolled, and somebody got a shot from behind of her and Breda in the middle of that floor which is the best photograph I own and which is not going on the internet.
My mother apologised in the August.
It took her that long and it was not a good apology. There was a lot of I had no idea in it, and some well, you can see how it sounded, and one attempt at you did say you were joking, which Delphi let past without a flicker.
But she came. She drove over on a Tuesday, on her own, which she has done perhaps four times in six years. She sat in our kitchen and said the word sorry twice, and she meant both of them.
They are not close and I do not think they ever will be, and that is survivable.
She has not apologised to me and does not need to. My part was not hers.
I laughed. That is the whole of my part and it is entirely sufficient.
We did about eleven months of being extremely careful with each other, and out of it came one rule, which Delphi wrote on the back of an envelope in October and which is on our fridge.
If she floats a thing, he doesn’t wait to see how the room takes it.
That is it. That is the entire marital philosophy and it has not needed adding to.
Because the problem was never the suit, and it was never my mother, who is exactly who she has always been and who will be at Christmas.
The problem is that my wife put the most important thing she owns on a table in front of twenty-five people, in the only voice she could manage it in, and the man she was marrying waited half a second to see what the room thought before deciding what he thought.
Half a second was all it took. The room got there first.
And then there was nothing left for her to do but say I’m joking, and put her father back in her handbag.
The suit went to a tailor in the November.
Not to be altered. Breda would not have it, and neither would Delphi, and by then neither would I.
It was cleaned, and the lining under the right arm was repaired, and a man of about seventy who took over Linnet’s in 2011 looked at the inside of that cuff for a while and then said he recognised the hand that had sewn the name tape in — which cannot possibly be true, and which was a very kind thing to say to a widow standing in his shop.
It is back in its box. The box is in our loft now, not Breda’s.
And on the morning after the wedding, before anybody else was up, I went down to the room where it was hanging over a chair, and I folded that cuff back and looked at it for a while on my own.
The eleventh of May, 1991.
He left it three days.
May you like
- Our Church Ended Mom’s Free Wednesday Supper After 34 Years So I Set Up Six Tables on My Lawn Across the Street
- The Lingering Memory of a Discontinued Diet Soda That Sparked a Marriage Debate
- A little girl stopped me inside my own mansion and asked, You promised my mom she’d be paid today
- My Daughter Wanted $800 a Month and Four Days of Babysitting for Her Basement So I Rented My Own Little House for $550
- I Was Furious When My Brother Showed Up to Dad’s Funeral in a Red Suit
His daughter left it eleven minutes.
THE END
See more on the next page