But it’s like that kiss in the kitchen cleared the fog inside my head. It not only gave me a weird sense of courage and confidence; it also made me see how ridiculous it was to have spent this day entirely wrapped up in myself. I bottled out of reading the poem because I was scared of looking stupid or pathetic if I started crying. But really, who cares how I look? The most important thing is making the effort. Trying my best to do Mum proud.
‘Don’t worry,’ I tell Simon, touching the dog-eared book in my jacket pocket. ‘I’ll be fine. I promise. I really want to do this.’
Simon glances back at me, and nods. In the passenger seat next to him, his wife, my aunt Chrissie, sits with the wreath of lilies perched carefully on her lap. And beside me in the back of the car, Daff reaches across and squeezes my hand, giving me a tearful smile. Our fingers interlock, and our wedding rings clink gently against one another. Mine has been missing from my finger over these past few days, since I was revisiting moments when Daff and I weren’t yet married. I never even noticed it was gone. It seems strange that I’ve only realised it now.
It’s even stranger to think that I’m here with her now, when only last night I was in Paris, in Alice’s flat. What would I have done, I wonder, if my time hadn’t run out? If the clock hadn’t reached one minute to midnight?
I honestly don’t know.
I stare out of the car window at the trees and houses whizzing by. It was on the Eurostar back from Paris that I decided I would ask Daphne to marry me. The thought popped into my head totally at random, and at first it seemed crass and embarrassing: a knee-jerk response to the guilt I felt over sleeping with Alice. An over-the-top way of making amends for what I’d done. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that it wasn’t any of those things. I was in love with Daff. That was the only fact in my life I was really sure of. The idea of losing her was genuinely terrifying; what had happened with Alice had only served to make me realise that.
It was as if all my worries about marriage and what it had done to my parents had suddenly dissolved, because I knew now for absolute certain that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Daphne. But to come to that realisation, I’d had to do something that could easily break us apart for good if she ever found out about it. So I quickly came to the conclusion that she never, ever would.
I’d slunk out of Alice’s flat early on Boxing Day morning, refusing her offer of breakfast with a few grunted monosyllables. I knew how shitty it was – how rude I was being – but I couldn’t help it. I felt like I was suffocating in there; I needed to get outside and clear my head.
Three days later, when I’d decided to go back to London early, I messaged Alice to tell her I was sorry; that I was heading home, and maybe I’d see her soon. She never replied.
Daff came back from New York in February 2015. Obviously, I didn’t propose to her straight away; we were still technically on a break, so immediately popping the question would have seemed at best optimistic and at worst utterly insane. All I told her was that I wanted to try again. To make it work between us. Luckily, she agreed – and for those next few months, it did work. We had fun again. I started pursuing boring but lucrative temp work as a copywriter, and gradually I pushed what had happened in Paris into a corner of my mind so remote that it only emerged very occasionally, creeping out in the middle of the night to remind me what might have been.
I finally proposed in summer 2015, during a holiday in Greece, and we were married a year later, on August 18th 2016, at Islington Town Hall. Nothing very fancy: Daff didn’t want some massive posh do, and neither did I. We just wanted our families and our best mates and a fun, memorable day. I was nervous, obviously, but only about the practical things: speeches and seating plans and whether Harv’s DJ set would contain anything at all for the elderly relatives to dance to (it very much didn’t). I certainly wasn’t nervous about the bigger, existential concerns I’d always imagined would rear their heads on my wedding day: all the scary is-this-really-what-I-want-type questions. As Daff walked up the aisle towards me, beaming from ear to ear, I knew for certain that this was exactly what I wanted.
I remember how happy Mum looked, too. She didn’t stop smiling all day – laughing and joking with friends of mine she hadn’t seen for years. At the end of the night, once Harv’s drum ’n’ bass onslaught was over, we danced together tipsily to one of her favourite songs – an old doo-wop track called ‘Life Could Be a Dream’ – and when it finished, she clasped me by the shoulders and told me, ‘I’m so proud of you, love.’ The memory bites so hard that I have to physically shake my head to remove it. I can’t let myself break down before I even get into the church.
We’re nearly there now: the car is purring slowly down the high street. Every single shop window is screaming with Christmas decorations: manic grinning elves and jolly potbellied Santas. I remember noticing this stuff first time around, too, and thinking how jarring it all seemed. It just didn’t make any sense to be surrounded by brightness and festivity on such a miserable, desperate
