Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [61]
She opened the linen cupboard to put away her new towels, and observed, with irritation, that her neat piles had been disturbed. Stephen must have been in here, looking for something. Sighing, she pulled a whole shelf ’s worth out onto the floor and began refolding and restacking. Completely unnecessary, but, for her, always therapeutic. Some people thought while they ran—Jennifer thought best while she was tidying. She thought, for the first time in a long time, about how she and Stephen had met. She knew that if she’d been writing it down, instead of thinking it, it might have had that same tone, of exuberance, and thrill, and thrall. Not right away, maybe, but she had felt it, she had. Wasn’t there some statistic somewhere she’d read, about where most people meet their spouse, that claimed weddings were the third most popular place, after university and the workplace? She was sure that she had. Something to do with all that romantic optimism in the air, and too much good champagne, no doubt. This wedding, the one where she met Stephen, was nothing like that.
SHE’D GONE WITH JOHN. SENSIBLE, SOLID, RELIABLE JOHN. THE boyfriend she’d had since university. The boy she had always assumed she would spend the rest of her life with. They’d met early on, when they’d both still been terrified of the whole new experience. Discovering a mutual love of their subject, and vegetarian food, and a mutual antipathy toward some of the more normal student pursuits, they had clung to each other from the start, telling themselves they had found a soul mate. John was serious and studious and wore bookish round spectacles. Jennifer thought he made her be a better person. They worked in the library on Saturday evenings and cooked dahl. After university, when maybe they would have parted, they had a relationship renaissance based on how scary this next new world was and carried on clinging. Lately—well, more like the last three or four years—Jennifer knew her own grip had loosened, but she didn’t think John’s had. It had all started to feel a bit suffocating. There were things she wanted to do. And eat a bacon sandwich was just at the top of the list. She began to realize that the girl she had been at university was a phase. The John that John had been was the real thing. A few months earlier, a girlfriend had told her she was bound to fall for someone else, that this catalyst would finally release her from the promises she had made to herself and to John a million years ago, when she was a different person. And she had half believed her. She hadn’t wanted to go with him, to the wedding. By the time the invitation arrived, she had accepted that she and John were on their last legs, acting out the last pathetic steps in the dance of their relationship. A quiet, difficult, sad tragedy that would surely play out better, and faster, in private. But wasn’t that the problem? After these years together, so many of their friends all knew each other; you weren’t talking about extricating yourself from one relationship, you were talking about walking away from loads. And that made it so much harder. Just lately, though, she felt like the beggar in a Dickensian tale—all the windows she peered through seemed full of promise and excitement and adventure denied to her.
That John’s presence at this wedding was required at all seemed