The Bride
“How much do you love me?” It was the question she always asked.
“How much do you love me?” It was the question she always asked.
It’s not her fault, he told himself as she stood at the end of the bed, swathed in white. Bloody parents. Not that he knew anything about her family. The subject was off limits, taboo. He had drawn his own conclusions.
“How much?” Neve had some see-through curtains wrapped around her naked body. Her face was veiled too. Plucking fresh flowers from the vase, she walked slowly towards him. “How much?” Her tone was less playful.
He caught hold of her hand and the flowers fell to the floor as he pulled her to the bed. “This much.”
There was no sound except for the clicking of teacups on saucers. When his father gulped down a mouthful, his mother shot him a look before turning to Neve.
“Church of Scotland is it?”
“I beg your pardon?” Neve was toying with a slice of Victoria sponge.
“You. Church of Scotland. Only, I asked the minister to call seeing as you’re here. That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“Well, as a matter of fact…” Neve began.
“Mother,” he interrupted hastily, “we were thinking of something less formal.”
“Less formal?” She fixed her gaze on him. “Well, you can have it as formal or informal as you like. As long as it’s done right,” she added. “In church. Here. In the village.”
Neve was silent as the two of them took some air in the back garden. His father waved to them from the kitchen window.
“What difference does it make where we get married?”
“I don’t want to marry in a church. I don’t want all these people around.” She turned away, looking towards the domed hill that rose up beyond the church.
“Look, I’m her only child. You can’t blame her for wanting to do things properly.”
She sighed, then turned, standing on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. She had a way of doing it that made his knees shake, something in the way she moved her tongue. He pushed her away abruptly when he realised his mother was watching.
Neve landed in the dirt. She looked up at him in disbelief.
“They were watching,” he explained. “I… Oh, hell, give me your hand. You’re a mess.” Her long, thin skirt clung to her in damp, muddy patches. He wondered how he could make it up to her.
“I can’t imagine your mother having sex,” she said, just as the woman came up behind them. “Much less fucking.”
He must have broken the speed limit all the way home. He seethed, jerking viciously on the gear stick every chance he got. She sat next to him, fast asleep, her face as peaceful and unlined as a child’s. She’d been on her best behaviour after the minister’s arrival.
“I suppose your own mother will want to be in on the arrangements,” the elderly minister had said jovially. “Her daughter’s big day and everything!”
“My parents won’t be attending,” Neve had said quietly.
“Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that,” the minister blustered. “Well, have you thought about where you’re going on your honeymoon?”
“We thought we’d leave the honeymoon until later. We might just go on a trip around the Western Isles.”
“Most young people seem dead set on going abroad.”
“I prefer this country,” Neve said.
“How did you meet, if I may ask?”
“At a life class,” she said.
“Still life.” His mother nodded. “He used to do pictures of fruit and flowers when he was at school. I’ve kept them. They’re in a box up in the attic.”
“Nudes,” Neve added.
“Nudes?”
“I was nude. He was clothed, obviously.” She bit into her digestive biscuit.
The first time at the life class, she had walked in wearing a long green coat, shaking her umbrella before going into a side room to change. When she reappeared, she wore an old dressing gown.
She looked bored, accepted a mug of coffee from the female tutor, listening to the woman’s chatter before everyone settled, and then she stripped off and took up the pose indicated to her. Not once during that session or the next did she so much as glance at him,
On the third evening, after class, he hung around in the corridor, trying to drum up the courage to ask her out. Everyone else had gone. The classroom appeared to be in darkness, yet he was sure she hadn’t left. Finally, he pushed open the door and looked in. There was a crack of light beneath the changing room door. He walked over, listening in case she had someone with her. He’d just raised his hand to knock when a voice came from behind.
“You took your time.”
He wondered if she knew who she was talking to. “Eh?”
A hand gripped his arm. “Why don’t we lie down on that couch over there?”
“But… but, you don’t even know who I am. I could be anyone,” he protested as his arm was released. Hands worked deftly at his belt
“Yes, you could, couldn’t you.” She sounded amused at the idea.
He reached out to steady himself, his fingers catching on the collar of her robe which slid from her shoulders. You could get in a lot of trouble if she’s mistaken you for someone else, he thought as a line of kisses were pressed across his cheek. But what she was doing with her tongue made him forget about the possible consequences.
When Neve could not provide any bridesmaids, his mother suggested two of his young cousins. On the day they were to go to choose fabric for the dresses, his mother called to say she was down with flu. Neve insisted she could do it alone.
She took the car to pick up the girls and he was left for the afternoon with nothing to do. Recently, his mother had taken to questioning him about his bride’s absent family and friends. “What does it look like that she’s got no one? Folk’ll wonder what sort of girl she is that no one wants to come and see her wed.”
“She’s not inviting anyone,” he had responded last time. “There’s a difference.”
But he had been wondering himself if there weren’t old school friends, cousins, neighbours, anyone Neve might have known who would come if invited.
Now she was out for the afternoon, he found himself surreptitiously looking in her underwear drawer where he knew she kept some of her paperwork. There was a bank book opened only months before he met her. He’d been hoping for an address book, but there was nothing. Even her birth certificate had disappeared. He searched her other drawers, to no avail.
When Neve returned she was in good spirits. She and “the girls” had stopped by the church and gone for a stroll around the old graves. His young cousins had indulged their favourite pastime, recounting morbid tales about the more notorious graveyard residents. She chatted away as he sank into a gloomy mood, brought on by guilt. When she went upstairs for a quick shower, he followed, steeled for the moment she would notice her things had been tampered with. But she opened a drawer and pulled out something soft and silky, and disappeared into the bathroom. He lay down on the bed. He realised it was starting to bother him that she wasn’t inviting anyone at all.
“What about the life class tutor?” he asked her later in the pub. “I thought you knew her.”
“No. I’d never met her before the class.” Neve seemed disinterested in the whole subject of wedding guests.
“And your old flatmate…”
“You can’t expect her to return from a backpacking trip she’s planned for years, just for me.”
At least she actually received postcards from this woman, he thought to himself.
She put down her drink and turned to him. “Why the sudden concern?”
“You’re not inviting anyone, Neve. It looks… odd.”
“Who cares how it looks?”
“I know you don’t like talking about your family. But surely there’s at least one you could invite?”
“Did your mother put you up to this? It’s time you cut the cord.”
“Stop trying to make out I’m some kind of mother’s boy. You know damn well I’m not!”
“Do I?” She went off to the loos. Fifteen minutes later, she still wasn’t back.
Damn his mother for putting ideas in his head. Then he remembered Neve had the car keys. He jumped to his feet and looked out the window. The car was still there. He left their half-finished drinks and walked up the shadowy hallway to the female toilets. Glancing around first in case he was seen, he knocked on the door. “Neve,” he hissed, “are you in there? Look, I’m sorry.” He waited. “Neve!”
A banging behind him made him jump. Turning, he saw the door to the beer garden opening and closing in the wind. He was about to go back to the bar when he saw her briefly as the door swung open again. She stood silently, staring at him. It closed. When it swung open again, she was gone.
He found her sitting in the rain, her coat drawn tightly around her. “Look,” he began again, “I’m sorry…”
She stood up and dropped her coat. She was naked underneath. He found himself wondering what she’d done with the rest of her clothes. “For god’s sake, you’ll catch your death out there!”
Neve turned and bent over a white plastic table, her palms flat against the wet surface.
“This is practically my local, what are you doing?” But his heart was beating wildly.
“Coward,” she taunted over her shoulder. “Mummy’s boy.” She arched her back.
“Right,” he said, furiously pushing a table behind the door of the pub to hold it shut. “You asked for it. But if we’re arrested, you can explain it to my…” He caught himself just in time. He heard her fingers drumming on the table as he fumbled to loosen his clothing.
Since Neve’s arrival in his life, his nights out with his dwindling collection of single male friends had just about ground to a halt. Now, with the wedding fast approaching, he made an extra special effort to meet up with them, though the sight of Neve sitting on the couch with nothing more than a book to keep her company raised a twinge of guilt.
“I like my own company,” she said.
He knew for a fact that she didn’t like his friends. And they, for their part, had doubts about her.
“Who is she? You don’t know anything about her, mate,” one of his colleagues from the planning office said one night. “Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
He refused to listen to such doubts. “I love her,” he always said. “That’s enough.”
Neve had taken to inviting the girls out for runs in the car and afternoon tea. Every Sunday, she walked out the door, jingling the car keys. He wasn’t invited. “Girls only,” she once explained with a laugh. She always came back with more of his cousin’s gruesome stories.
“Do you know,” she said one night as she kissed her way down his chest, “that after you’re dead, your stomach turns green and you start to swell with gas, and….”
“You’re not to play with those girls any more,” he said in mock horror. “They’re putting strange ideas in your head.”
Afterwards he woke in a sweat from a dream where he’d withdrawn from her body only to find he’d left his penis still buried inside her. She’d closed her thighs and refused to give it back. “It’s mine now,” she said. “All mine.”
“How much do you love me?” she asked him the next morning.
“I’m feeling a bit off today. I think I’ll call in sick.” He pulled the covers over his head.
She pulled them back off. “How much do you love me?” She shook him this time, demandingly, straddling his body.
He groaned. “Too much.”
Curious, head cocked to one side like a cat’s, she said, “How can it ever be too much?”
The dresses were all finished, the flowers ordered, the cars and the church booked, the reception sorted, the guests invited. Except for Neve’s. All she had was a card from the backpacking friend wishing her all the best.
As to the ceremony itself: his father would give her away, one of his friends would be best man, his mother would look on in disapproval, and the girls would flit about the wedding guests explaining the processes of decomposition and the likely fate of the neighbour who had been missing these past fifteen years. “Chopped up into little pieces,” they were often heard to say gleefully. “With a machete.”
“I can’t imagine where they get it from,” his mother said on the Sunday before the wedding. He and Neve had been attending services even though neither was a believer. His mother had Neve down as a heathen, which Neve played up on every chance she got. “Certainly not their parents. But her, she’s thick as thieves with them. They’re worse now than they ever were.”
He half expected her to be late, just to make a better entrance. But she was right on time. The church was decked out in flowers, and Neve wore a crown of blossoms over her veil. Her dress was long, tight-fitting, and, he thought for a panicked second, transparent. But then the sunlight pitching through the windows caused the fabric to shimmer, the suspicious shadows disappearing.
He breathed a sigh of relief. The guests, equally gathered on both sides of the church, perked up at the sight of her. There was no doubt about it, she looked beautiful. The organ played the Wedding March. His father escorted her down the aisle through a cloud of sunlight that obscured his vision for a moment. Then she was standing in front of him. He could see her face through the veil.
Who are you? he found himself thinking as he gazed on her. Where do you come from? Who are your people, your family?
The congregation had risen to their feet to sing a hymn. His lips moved, his eyes scanning the hymn sheet. When he looked up, the minister smiled reassuringly.
“I do,” he said mechanically when the time came. It seemed only brief moments before her veil was raised. The touch of her lips, ripe like fruit, brought him back to his senses. Who was she? She was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, that’s who. This was as much as he needed to know.
The reception was booked at a small hotel just along from the church. They walked the short distance as well-wishers threw confetti over them. Neve laughed, kicking up the front of her dress, the girls hurrying behind, carrying her long train. Guests congratulated his mother on her new daughter-in-law. He couldn’t hear her response.
Later, after the meal, he led Neve to the centre of the dance floor to the clapping of the guests. “There,” he whispered as they circled the floor, and the best man raised a glass to them. “The big church wedding wasn’t so bad after all, was it?”
A cloud seemed to pass over her face, just for a moment. Then it was gone. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t so bad.”
While his father waltzed Neve around the room, he decided to go out and get some air. Children ran about the graveyard, laughing. Then the girls appeared, dressed identically in raspberry satin. Like Neve, they had blossoms in their hair. They talked intensely to the other children. He decided to walk over. It seemed important to hear what Neve’s only friends in the world, other than the mysterious backpacker, were saying.
Perched on a low wall, they explained that the flat grave stones in the churchyard were there to keep the dead in the ground, otherwise they would scrape their way to the surface and escape. New graves never had flat stones, so those dead were always escaping. You could hear them at night, scrabbling to get out.
“And you should see what they look like when they do get out,” one of the girls said before popping a sweet in her mouth.
“They’re all rotten by then,” said the other, passing round a bag of crisps. “If the weather’s hot, they start to rot faster. When you die, they plug up all your holes so you don’t make a mess.”
“And that’s not all…”
“Your eyes turn to liquid and your hair and nails fall out.”
“Your face swells up. And so do men’s willies and…”
He was horrified. “Enough!” he shouted. He strode forward and grasped both of them by the arm. “Where did you hear such things? Well?”
They looked up at him calmly. “Neve told us,” one of them finally said. “She knows all about it.”
“Neve would never tell you such things.”
“She did. Ask her.”
He let them go. “Get back to the hotel. All of you.”
Some of the children were crying. They began to disperse. “I thought it was interesting,” one little girl said. Then she stuck her tongue out at him and skipped off.
At the hotel, Neve still danced with his father. He strode up to her, took her by the elbow, and walked her away. “What on earth have you been telling those girls?”
“What girls?”
“My cousins.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s the matter with you?”
Aware that the eyes of the assembly were on them, he suggested they go outside.
“What for?”
Through the window behind her, he saw the girls in the churchyard. “I’ll show you,” he muttered, marching her out the double doors of the reception room and through the foyer.
“In a bit of a hurry there, young fella,” shouted one of the male guests. “At least give the girl a chance to catch her breath.”
Outside, he dragged her across the grass that backed onto the graveyard. Cherry blossom trees, lush with leaves, lined the perimeter of the hotel grounds. The girls were again perched on the wall, the edges of their long satin dresses lifting in the wind.
“What have you been telling those girls? They’re only kids for Christ’s sake, and they’re talking about rotting corpses. And you were the one that told them all about it.”
Neve’s face changed from angry to dismissive. “Och, that? Is that what this is about? Kids like scary stuff. What’s the matter with you?”
“Sugar and spice and all things nice,” the girls sang in what seemed to him to be mocking tones.
“Neve, they were talking about…” He lowered his voice. “Private parts.”
She made a face. “God, you sound like your mother.”
“You leave my mother out of this…”
“She’s never out of it,” she hissed. “She’s always there. Every minute of the day.”
“What are you talking about?” The singing was distracting him.
“There’s a noose loose aboot this hoose,” the girls chanted.
He turned on them. “Will you shut up! Just shut up!”
They fell silent, glowering.
“Leave them alone.” Neve broke away from him. “They’re not doing anything.”
“You put them up to this, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking about? They’re just kids.”
“We hardly ever see my mother,” he said, changing tack.
“We don’t need to. She’s there, in your head.” Her face seethed. “Even when we’re fucking!”
Without thinking, his hand lashed out and caught her cheek.
After a shocked moment, she turned and walked over to the wall that bordered the graveyard and climbed over, her train sliding after her like a long white tail.
“Wait, Neve…” He felt sick. He’d never hit anyone before, much less a woman.
She marched passed the girls who fell into step behind her, their little ringlets bouncing furiously. “She doesn’t want to speak to you,” one of them shot back over her raspberry satin shoulder. “Go away.”
It was the last straw. “Well, while we’re on the subject of mothers,” he shouted after Neve, “just where the hell is yours? This is your wedding day and your family aren’t here. Why aren’t they here, Neve?”
In that second, Neve spun round, mouth open, one foot catching in her dress. Her expression turned to irritation as she looked down. Then she seemed to topple over in slow motion. Later, it would always seem like he had had the time to catch her. The girls reached out their arms, but she fell past them, her head cracking on a flat gravestone. Her eyes looked up, unblinking.
His legs unfroze and he bolted forward, kneeling beside the grave.
“Neve,” he said quietly, giving her shoulder a gentle shake. “Neve.” He touched her face. His fingers came away bloodstained. She went on staring at him, her hair lifting in the breeze.
The girls refused to go for help. “We’re not leaving her,” they declared, eyes accusing. So he ran to the hotel himself. The receptionist called for an ambulance. Guests streamed out as he ran back to the graveyard. After leaping over the low wall, he came to a dead halt. On the ground, the white dress fluttered in the breeze. But Neve was gone.
She was alive.
He looked around the graveyard wildly. The girls sat on the wall, sucking sweets.
“Where is she?” his mother called. “I thought you said she fell and hit her head here.”
“Neve!” he called. “Neve!”
There was no answer.
He looked at his cousins. “Where did she go?”
“She said she was going home.”
“Home,” he said. And he ran to the car park.
Her clothes, documents, everything she owned, was gone from the house. It was as if she’d never lived there at all. The postcard from the backpacking friend was gone too.
The police only added to his confusion. “What can you tell us about your wife?” a constable asked, notebook open. “Where does she come from? Has she any family?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“How can you not know anything about her?” his mother asked. “How can you marry a woman you know nothing about?”
“I know I love her,” he said. “I know that.”
“She’s gone,” the girls said to him some days later when he visited the cemetery, the last place he’d seen her. “All gone.”
He grabbed their arms, ready to shake the truth out of them. “Tell me where she is!”
“You shouldn’t have hit her. You shouldn’t have asked her those questions.”
“Where is she?”
“Leave them alone,” a voice said.
His breath caught. He dropped the girl’s arms and turned. Neve stood a little distance away. He stepped towards her. “Neve! We’ve been searching everywhere. Where did you go? Are you hurt?”
She didn’t answer. Her gaze moved to the girls and she nodded. He heard their footfalls as they ran away from the graveyard.
“You’re still angry,” he said when they were alone. “You’ve every right to be. I hit you. My god, I hit you. But we can sort this out. It will never happen again. I promise.”
Still she was silent.
“Say something.”
“How much do you love me?” she said.
His heart leapt with hope. This was the old Neve. “More than anything,” he said. “More than anyone.”
“Not enough to take me without a past.”
“Neve, it’s perfectly reasonable to be curious about your bride’s family. You know all about me.”
“I never asked you to tell me those things.”
“I thought you wanted to know.”
Her hair lifted in the wind. There was no sign of a bruise on her face. But below her ankle-length dress, her feet were strangely bare.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
She took a deep breath, seeming to drink in the wind. Then she looked at him for a long moment. “Goodbye,” she said, and turned and walked away.
“Wait! What do you mean, goodbye?” He hurried to catch up. She was taking the path that led around the church grounds. “You’re my wife. We were married. Neve!”
She rounded the churchyard and the hill came into view, rising up like a dome.
He paused. “Neve! You can’t just run off again!”
But she stepped up to the hill and walked right through the grass which shimmered briefly like a curtain of transparent green. She walked through without a backward glance and was gone.
This story was originally published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Image by Fusion Dreams.
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