Cooper Jilly: Emily

‘Oh, no,’ I protested. ‘Poor Cedric.’

I could hear him spluttering away on the other end of the telephone.

‘Well I’m afraid you’ve lost your deposit on this one,’ said Rory, and put down the receiver.

‘Cedric will be very, very angry,’ I said in awe.

Cedric wasn’t the only one who was angry. Annie Richmond was livid, too.

‘You can’t marry Rory, he’s never been faithful to anyone for more than five minutes. He’s immoral and dreadfully spoilt. He even used to cheat at conkers when he was a little boy!’

Nina was even more discouraging. Genuine concern for me combined — when she’d actually met Rory in the flesh — with overwhelming envy.

‘I know he’s lovely to look at, but he’s an absolute devil. You’re batting out of your league. Cedric was far more suitable.’

‘It was you in the first place,’ I said crossly, ‘who was so against Cedric, and hustled me off to Annie Richmond’s party.’

‘I never dreamed you’d go to these extremes. Where are you going to live?’

‘In the Highlands, on an island. It sounds too romantic for words.’

Nina sighed. ‘It is not romantic living on an island. What will you do, except talk to sheep and go mad while he slaps paint on canvases all day? You won’t hold him in a million years. You’ll be thoroughly miserable, and then come and snivel all over me. The only thing a whirlwind courtship does is blow dust in everyone’s eyes.’

I didn’t care. I was hanging from chandeliers, swinging round lamp-posts. I was so deranged with love I didn’t know what to do with myself. I felt I was drowning and I didn’t want anyone to save me.

Another aspect that delighted me was the being married part of the whole thing. I’d never been cut out for a career and the thought that I could chuck in my nine-to-five job and spend the rest of my life looking after Rory filled me with joy. I had fantasies of greeting him at the door, after a hard day at his studio, a beautiful child hanging on each hand.

Three days later, Rory and I were married at Chelsea Register Office. I had been to see the Renoirs at the Tate, and wore a Laura Ashley dress and a black breton on the back of my head. Even Nina admitted I looked good.

Rory was waiting when we arrived, smoking and gazing moodily at the road. It was the first time I’d seen him in a suit — pale grey velvet with a black shirt.

‘Isn’t he the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen!’ I said rapturously.

‘Yes,’ said Nina. ‘It isn’t too late to change your mind.’

He smiled when he saw us, then his narrowed eyes fixed coldly on my hat. Tearing it from my head, he threw it on the ground and kicked it into the Kings Road, where a milk van ran over it.

‘Don’t you ever dare wear a hat again,’ he said, ruffling my hair.

Then he took my hand and led me into the Register Office.

Afterwards we had a party and drank champagne, and flew to Paris for our honeymoon. When we arrived at our hotel — which was pretty, with shutters, vines and pink geraniums, overlooking the Seine — Rory ordered more champagne.

He was in a strange, wild mood. I wondered how much he’d drunk before he got to the Register Office. I very much wanted him to pounce on me and ravish me at once. I suddenly felt apprehensive, lost and very much alone.

I went off and had a bath. Isn’t that what all brides do? All my things were new — sponge bag, flannel, talcum powder, toothbrush. Even my name was new — Emily Balniel.

I said it over and over to myself as I lay in the bath, with the water not too hot so I wouldn’t emerge like a lobster.

I rubbed scented bath oil into every inch of my body and put on a new white negligée, fantastically expensive and pretty and virginal. I went into the bedroom, and waited for Rory’s gasp of approval. It never came. He was on the telephone, his face ashen.

‘Hullo,’ he was saying. ‘Hullo, yes, it’s me all right. I know it’s been a long time. Where am I? In Paris, at the Reconnaissance. Do you remember the Reconnaissance, darling? I just wanted to tell you that I got married this afternoon, so that makes us level again, doesn’t it?’ And, with a ghastly expression of triumph on his face, he dropped the telephone back in its cradle.

‘Who were you ringing?’ I asked.

He looked at me for a minute as though I were a stranger. There was the same sinister stillness, the lurking danger that I’d been so aware of the first night I met him.

‘Who was it?’ I asked again.

‘Mind your own business,’ he snarled. ‘Just because I’ve married you, it doesn’t give you the right to question all my movements.’

I felt as though he’d hit me. For a minute we stared at each other, bristling with hostility. Then he pulled himself together, apologized for jumping down my throat — and began to kiss me almost frenziedly.

When I woke up, in the middle of the night, I found him standing by the window, smoking a cigarette. He had his back to me but there was something infinitely despairing about the hunched set of his shoulders.

With a sick feeling of fear, I wondered why he had felt it necessary to ring up a woman on the first night of his honeymoon, and taunt her with the fact that he’d just got married.

Marriage, as I discovered on my honeymoon, may be a bed of roses, but there are plenty of thorns lying around.

Not that I found myself loving Rory any the less; rather the reverse, but he was not easy to live with. To begin with, I never knew what mood he was going to be in. There were the prolonged black glooms, followed by sudden firework bursts of affection, followed by an abstracted fit when he would sit for hours watching the sun on the plane trees outside our window. There were also the sudden, uncontrollable rages — in a smart French restaurant he had picked up a dish of potato purée, and hurled it at a passing fly!

I also had to get used to everyone looking at Rory rather than at me; and that was another thing about marriage. I couldn’t spend hours tarting myself up to compete with all those svelte French women. If Rory suddenly decided he wanted to go out, it was straight out of bed, into the shower and ‘what the hell do you want to bother with make-up for?’

I found being with him day in, day out, slightly claustrophobic. There wasn’t a moment to shave my armpits or touch up the roots of my hair. He did quite a lot of work. I was longing for him to sketch me, and kept sweeping my hair back for him to admire the beauty of my bone structure, but he was far more interested in drawing old men and women with wrinkled faces in cafés. The drawings were amazingly good.

We were sitting in bed one afternoon after one of those heavy French lunches, when suddenly there was a pounding on the door.

‘Who the hell’s that?’ I asked.

‘A chambermaid gone berserk and unable to contain herself,’ said Rory, and shouted something very impolite in French.

The pounding went on.

‘Perhaps it’s the flics,’ said Rory, getting out of bed and putting on his trousers. Through a haze of alcohol, I looked at his tousled black hair and broad brown shoulders.

Swearing, he unlocked the door. A beautiful woman stood there.

‘Chérie,’ she cried ecstatically. ‘Bébé, I knew you were ’ere. The man on the desk was so discreet. He refuse to admit it.’ And flinging her arms round Rory’s neck, she kissed him on both cheeks.

‘I think you are ver’ unkind,’ she went on reproachfully in a strong French accent, ‘sloping off and getting married without a word to anyone. I mean, think of the wedding presents you missed.’

Rory looked half exasperated, half amused.