The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [124]
Minutes ticked by as Noel fidgeted and Norval drank. “OK, so don’t tell me the story,” said Noel. “Whatever happened, I’m sure you behaved like a bastard—an unromantic, unsentimental, unthoughtful bastard.”
Norval’s head was bowed, uncharacteristically. He was on to his fourth double Irish. “Dead on.”
“Were you in love with Terry? Did she leave you? Is that why you were in love with her? Because nobody else has ever dumped you, ever broken your heart?”
Norval swirled the dregs of his Connemara. “I am not my father. I decamped, point final. I thought about what I was doing, then boarded the first plane to Canada.”
“But why? I mean if you—”
“I was at an age—not that I’ve outgrown it—when I couldn’t deal with being in … never mind.”
“Being in what? In love? Is that what you were going to say?”
“It’s like measles—I had it once and now I’m immune.”
I knew it! Noel exclaimed, to himself. “But is it … too late? Can’t you go back and—”
“It’s too late.”
“Why? Is she married? Did she die? Tell me the story.”
“No.” He glared at Noel with drunken hostility. “You’ll never hear it.” He rose from the table unsteadily. From his back pocket he extracted a crumpled note of massive denomination and flung it on the table. “At least not from me.”
Norval stayed two months at Mrs. Pettybone’s B & B. The proprietor assigned him the finest room in the house, which happened to be across the hall from her daughter’s. Gally had also been assigned a room, on the ground floor, next to Mrs. Pettybone. But Gally stayed longer than Norval; in fact, he never left. A week after installing the skylight and telescope he proposed to Mrs. Pettybone, for the second time in twenty-two years, and this time was accepted. The wedding was to be held in the spring, a civil wedding at The Orangery at Newstead Abbey.
A double wedding? thought Norval. The idea was so preposterous, so antithetical to everything that he—the very symbol of bachelorhood— believed in that he suggested it to Teresa. It had the right touch of the absurd, the anachronistic, the harebrained. She hasn’t long to live, a few years maybe (and who knows how long I’ve got?), so why not seize the Christly day, do something shockingly, uncharacteristically unselfish? But that’s not even the right word, he thought. It is selfish—I want to spend every last second with her. And maybe they’ll find a cure …
Teresa, after realising Norval wasn’t kidding about the proposal, said no. “Don’t be mad. It’s just … not done anymore.”
“Must I arrange it with your mother? A forced union? And what if you’re pregnant? Gally will come after me with a shotgun. Or putty knife.”
Teresa laughed. “A marriage would make my mother happy, deliriously happy. But a double wedding? Not in a million years. I wouldn’t want to steal her thunder, and I don’t want to deal with old relatives and friends. But … if you’re absolutely sure about this, Norval, if you’re not doing it out of some Florence Nightingale motive or to obtain a Boy Scout badge, then I will elope. Anywhere you like, any time.”
For Norval, it was the first time he’d been happy since the age of nine. He was in his first relationship that lasted more than a week, a place he never thought he’d be. He could scarcely believe what was happening— he was falling in love, for Christ’s sake, something he thought was impossible, an emotional state he had ridiculed his entire life. But that was pre-Teresa ...
They arranged to marry in London, in Camden, partly because Norval had to be there to reshoot the ending of Rimbaud in London. The two left on the train together but Teresa, who had been feeling ill all morning, complained of double vision. Norval had noticed that one of her eyes wandered, and that she seemed to be tilting her head to the right. So she got off the train to see her doctor in Nottingham, insisting that Norval ride on without her. They would meet up the next day, she promised, on the steps of the Camden Town Hall.
The following day, an hour before they