Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [15]
Just be patient Ellie, I’d tell myself. I knew exactly what outcome the whining and demands had produced for the discarded Sarah and I was not going anywhere near there.
In the end I had Mimi to thank for finally giving Tony the push along. After many years of beating off fevered suitors, she surprised us all by falling madly and passionately in love with Matthew, a boy from the bush who happened to be in Sydney showing some prize head of cattle at the Royal Easter Show. After a whirlwind romance, they married and she is now installed happily as a wealthy grazier’s wife and mother-of-three in western New South Wales. I miss her dreadfully, but we email regularly and she does get down to the Big Smoke occasionally for dinner and the theatre, where we always make a point of catching up.
Anyway, her wedding was a slap-up, no expense spared affair for two hundred in a hired marquee and I was chief bridesmaid. And whilst Mimi looked as spectacularly gorgeous as universally predicted, I, as my favourite Aussie expression goes, didn’t scrub up so bad myself. I was wearing a silk sheath in the deepest burgundy colour, which was very slimming; my hair was up and my make-up professionally applied. I looked in the mirror and thought, woo hoo, not bad - not bad at all. Tony obviously agreed, as he kept trying to ravish me during the reception whenever he got the chance. I also suspect Mimi, who got a teensy bit tipsy on champagne, had a word in his ear too, because something definitely changed that night.
This is not to suggest he got down on bended knee there and then. Anyone who thought that didn’t know Tony very well. Rather it was that he started plotting his very carefully planned proposal.
I first smelled a rat when he organised a romantic week’s holiday on an island resort in Fiji. Tony was one of those guys who is tied with an umbilical cord to his old school friends and up until this time all our holidays had been as part of a large group: skiing in Thredbo (hated that one; I am not a good skier), a hired house up the coast, sailing in The Whitsundays, etc. etc. This time it was just the two of us…hmm.
We stayed in a luxury Fijian burre that was set apart from the other guests and had its own palm-fringed sandy beach. Our days were spent lazing by the pool or snorkelling amongst the tropical fish in the coral reef located just offshore. By night we drank fruit-laden cocktails and watched the Polynesian dancers strut their stuff. I discovered that Fijian men have a certain earthiness, a barely suppressed sexuality, which is apparent in their dance and their lazy loping walk, and found this all quite arousing, with Tony being the lucky beneficiary.
The setting could not have been more idyllic, but my nerves jangled. Just like in those early days I was on tenterhooks. When was he going to ask me? Or had I actually got it wrong and he was not going to ask me? I tried to tell myself to relax and enjoy the holiday for what it was. What did it really matter? A lot, actually, was the brutally honest reply.
On the third day, over breakfast, Tony announced he had hired a small runabout and someone to navigate and we were to be taken to a deserted island for a champagne picnic lunch. Well if he’s not going to propose today, I thought, he’s never going to.
Each day consists of exactly 1440 minutes, or 86 400 seconds if you like, but they are not all the same are they? You go to work for years, day in day out. You know you were there, conscious and contributing. You were definitely there - it’s on your employment record - but if asked for details on these individual workdays you’d be hard pressed to remember anything. Then there are the red-letter days, or sometimes longer periods, like when you’re travelling, where even if the events happened years and years ago it all seems like yesterday. It’s as if your body calls your senses to attention and says, ‘Okay: sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. Are you all present and accounted