Toast

by Michelle Ryan.

Grace woke up to the soft fingers of February rain tapping on the roof, but she kept her eyes closed. She wasn’t ready for today. Maybe if she could pretend to be asleep for the next little while, she could get up and start the day in the flat’s hallowed quiet, once Wilf had left for work.

And then her parents rang.

“Happy birthday, Gracie-Gander!” She could hear the sea slapping against the hull of the yacht, the ice clanking in her mother’s glass.
“Thanks, Mum.” From the length of the delay, they must’ve been further East than last week.
“Where are you, Mum?”
“Whitsundays, dear, Barrier Reef. Here’s your father.”
“Why, hello darling. 25, my sainted socks! I was just saying to Julia this morning that it feels like yesterday that we caught Georgie trying to light a fire under your crib the day we brought you home from the hospital! What a laugh!” Sir John Dyer chuckled.

Grace heard him take a swig of his drink, and she imagined him and her mother and Wilf’s parents lounging on the deck of The Pacifico, full of camaraderie and gin and sunshine and complaints about the jellyfish.

“Laura and Philip send their love, to the pair of you. Brisbane tomorrow! Land-ho!”

 Grace had lost track of when her and Wilf’s parents’ round-the-world trip would end. Wilf and her own brother George were terribly cavalier about the whole thing, they didn’t seem to care where their parents were on the globe. Grace hated the thought of their relentless cheer let loose on the seas. When she’d expressed her fears to Wilf, he pulled her to him and stroked her hair and said ‘Oh, petal, you feel everything so deeply,’ and she’d hated how condescending it sounded, and especially that it was true.

She hung up just as Wilf came out of the shower. He smelled like Carolina Herrera 212 aftershave, which to Grace smelled like snobbery. He sang ‘happy birthday’ as he crept over the bed to her in his dressing gown.

He kissed her softly, once, twice, and a third time on her nose.
“Thanks, Wilfy.”
“Folks on the line?” He nuzzled into her neck.
“Yes. Slurring already.”
Wilf sat up and smirked. “Soused?”
“Smashed.”
“Pickled?”
“Hammered.”
“Potted?”
“Mangled.”
“Mangled?” he laughed, riffling through the suits in his section of the walk-in closet.
“Why don’t you ever wear the Davidoff I gave you for your birthday?” Cool Water, to Grace, smelled like exactly that. She knew that Wilf considered it too ‘economy’ to wear to work, so why bother asking? She was feeling particularly tetchy this morning, even though she didn’t have to work and had the whole day to herself.

Wilf pulled out the navy Hugo Boss and twinned it with a crisp steel-coloured linen shirt. He sighed and said “Petal” as if she were a petulant child, much more than just six years younger than he was.

“Sorry, Wilfy.” Nothing was going right, and she wasn’t even out of bed yet.
“Well, shake it off before tonight, love. Tonight’s going to be an extra special birthday for you. For us.” He looked at her out the corner of his eye as he flipped the knot into his tie, and winked. Grace lost her breath. It was just dinner-dancing at the Ritz, he’d taken her there for every birthday since her sixteenth. What was he going to do to make it ‘extra special’? She knew in the depths of her stomach, but she didn’t want to.

“Enjoy your day, petal,” he kissed her goodbye on her forehead, “enjoy being the love of one of the partner’s lives. All the other junior attorneys have to work on their birthdays, you know.”

“I do know.” She tried to smile. All the other junior attorneys also knew, and Grace had almost got used to the whispers of ‘nepotism’ and ‘sleeping with Wilfred Cohen’ and ‘family connections’ that followed her around the firm. ‘I didn’t choose this!’ she wanted to yell, ‘There’s no way out for me!’

But being a woman from the Dyer family meant she’d been fed demureness with her butternut-and-ginger puree (‘Old money shouldn’t draw attention to itself, Gracie-Gander,’ her mother often said. The Dyer money was eons older than any living Dyer, and meant no one else in her family had a day job. Every morning Grace buttoned her blazer to go to work, she felt the tattoo-thrill of rebellion). So absolutely no yelling allowed, especially not in public.

“Any exciting plans for today?” Wilf was on his way out, but couldn’t seem to leave for staring at her. You’d think seven years of seeing her face every morning would have leaked the smitten out of his smile, little by little.

“I’m going to visit Simone.” Thank god for Simone, or the idea of her, anyway.
“In Epsom? I’ll ask Jonny to drive you. You shouldn’t have to lift a finger on your special day, petal.”

She tried to protest, but he was already digging something out his briefcase, and it was physically impossible for him to listen to her and do anything else simultaneously.

“I almost forgot, love. Here’s your card.” He lay it on the pillow next to her head. “I looked everywhere for this photo. Georgie had it in some forgotten album, it turned out. It’s one of my favourites.” His expression was making her squirm. They weren’t teenaged romantics, for god sake, they never had been. She cringed inwardly.

“Alright, got to run, petal. See you at six. Wear something other than a black dress, all I can seem to remember you wearing anywhere lately is that black lace Dior creation you got in Milan.” And then he was gone, before she could tell him exactly how many black lace ‘creations’ she had on her side of the closet, because that’s all her shopper seemed to think she could wear this season.

She tore open the envelope. On the front of the card was a photo of her, Wilf, and George. There was a lot of sun in the picture and they were standing on a flat square of emerald lawn. Wilf had cricket pads on and George was holding a shiny cricket ball and shading his eyes from the sun with the same hand. Grace was standing next to Wilf, and his face was turned to her. She couldn’t have been more than ten, in her tiny green pleated skirt, and Grace today marvelled at yesterday’s Grace’s sleek brown ponytail, her long, slim legs, the coquettish angle of her head, the way her hand on her hip pushed out her non-existent chest, her lopsided grin and the easy confidence her pose implied.

What had happened to this girl? She was still what George unkindly called ‘scarecrowesque’, and still had no breasts to speak of, but Grace today hated photographs, especially if she was captured with Wilf. The ‘England’s Luckiest Lady’-type captions had multiplied when Philip Cohen bought a London football side, and then again when Wilf became a partner at one of Westminster’s most influential law firms. She always ended up looking scared or sullen in the tabloids, fittingly, which she usually felt when she accompanied Wilf to his Public Do’s. The picture made her feel even worse about today.

She opened the card to read it. Wilf had handmade her birthday card for years and years, a sweet gesture, she grudgingly admitted, showing he’d put a lot of thought into it, into her.

‘1994, Cannizaro Park. This was the summer I fell in love with you. I was sixteen. You’re still the only petal for me. Love, always, Wilfy.’

Grace propped the card up on her bedside table when her mobile rang again, and her heart recognised the number before her eyes did.

“Hey, baby. I’m waiting til you come over before I shower. No point if I’m just going to get dirty, right?”
She smiled for the first time on her 25th birthday. “Give me an hour.”
“Hurry up, yeah?”

It didn’t take much to convince Jonny to make the trip from Westminster to Putney instead of to Epsom. Grace settled into the squeaky leather of the front passenger seat (‘Dyers always sit in front in chauffeur-driven cars, Gracie-Gander, no need to make the class divide more obvious than it already is’) and checked her emails. 27 new messages, all birthday wishes from people who knew her through Wilf, including Kate, his new PA, and George, whom she felt she’d only known since he’d been Wilf’s right-hand man in his Prep school days.

She thought of what Wilf was planning to do tonight, and of the card, and then she imagined her life – past, present and future - without him. Desolate, echoing, empty: family, friends, her job - without Wilf, she had none of those things.

“You on the internet, there?” Jonny shot her a sidelong glance.
“Yes, I am.” She flashed the screen and a grin at him.
“Amazing thing, technology. I love that I can speak to my son in Bangladesh for free on Skype every night.”
“It is an incredible thing.” And dangerous. She was just waiting for the day that Wilf somehow hacked into her hotmail account and found all Patrick’s pervy messages, dripping with lust, and, worse, her shamefully pornographic replies. For the first time in months, she was seriously worried about how this situation would end, because it had to end, some or other how. Wilf was usually infuriatingly mild-mannered, but the one thing that made him really angry was the thought of someone messing about with his Things.

Patrick pulled her inside, his eyes hazel and bright, a smear of butter above his lip. She got a crumby tongue in her mouth as a hello.

“Just finishing brekkie, I can’t do you justice on an empty stomach.”
She removed her mulberry slicker and felt the throb in her chest that was partly vague maternal-type affection, partly lust, and partly pride as she watched him diminish the pile of toast on his plate. Patrick (Trick) was like something she’d pulled out of her sleeve. She had him all to herself.

In the kitchen of his shabby, rented terraced house, she realised that he ate the same way he cooked, and sculpted, and made love: fiercely and unselfconsciously, as if there was nothing more important in the world. Grace knew Trick fit the mould of the poor-little-rich-girl’s bohemian toy-boy perfectly: he was beautiful, barely twenty, single-mindedly horny, undemanding, artistic, and a secret. She ran a hand through his thick curls.

“It’s my birthday today.”
He grunted. “Congratulations.” Not even a smile. He swallowed. “How old are you then?”
“You don’t know how old I am?” She knew so much about him. The minute he’d walked into the firm with his arm in a sling and vengeance in the line between his eyebrows last year, she wanted to crawl in under his skin. She knew, from the court case that Wilf went on to win pro bono against South West Trains on Trick’s family’s behalf, that he was in a train accident with both his parents on a Sunday afternoon. He broke his arm in four places and had to forfeit a term of art school. His mum was crippled. His father was killed. He’d come across as tough and self-sufficient, but vulnerable, somehow. Grace still found this man/boy mix in him intoxicating.

Trick shrugged and got up to rinse his plate. “Seriously. How old are you? I was telling mum about you last night and she asked me and I didn’t know.”

“You didn’t tell her who I was though, did you?” She imagined his mum wheeling around the hippie commune in Brighton, shrilly thrilled with the juicy news.

He shook his curls. “I just told her you were in a relationship, a serious one. She said if you break my heart, she’ll fucking kill you. She asked me to tell you that.”

Trick leaned forward for another kiss and his hand scrunched her cotton shirt urgently. She thought of his naked sinew and his calloused hands, and leaned towards him before snapping away.

“But I’m really nice to you! That’s all she said?” Trick’s mum could have been more generous. Grace had always treated Trick with kindness, certainly with more kindness than she ever showed Wilf – she’d never had to seduce Wilf, after all, he’d been a sure thing all her life. She put up with Trick when he was sick and grumpy, given him as much of her body as he wanted, even let him film her giving him head once because he sulked when she tried to refuse. And she bought him loads of things, not that the money mattered, but the gifts were thoughtful. She hadn’t bought Wilf anything herself since the Davidoff Cool Water argument, and she enjoyed imagining Trick’s reaction when he opened the gifts she chose, and paid for, herself. She’d felt like she was giving him bits of her.

He was nibbling on her neck when the truth came to Grace, clear and pure and reassuring in its finality. She ducked away and he glowered at her.

“Wilf’s going to propose tonight.”
“Yeah?” He put a hand in his pants to shift his erection.
“Yes. He loves me. We have a future together. He actually loves me, Trick.”
“And so?” His eyes flashed, and she could see he knew what she was going to say, but that he was going to make both of them suffer through her saying it.
“We don’t have anything, you and I. It’s just about sex for you.”
“For both of us. I never forced you.”
She sighed, sadly, resignedly. Slipping her arms into the cool sleeves of her slicker, she ended it. “I can’t do this anymore, Trick.”
Grace waited for him to say something cutting, but instead, he picked up a chair, howled like an injured wolf, and threw it across the kitchen in her direction.

Not wanting Jonny to see her staunching her tears with her lavender-scented handkerchief (‘only trashy women carry tissues, Gracie-Gander’), she phoned a cab to take her back to Westminster. She’d backed out of Trick’s front door in a hurry, and hated the thought that he’d go on to resent her, that he’d tell his mother ‘you know, mum, that bitch ended up breaking my heart after all’. The thought of people not liking her upset her deeply.

By the time Grace twisted the doorknob of the flat, she had caught her breath, but felt like crawling into bed and crying the afternoon away. She’d still have time to get to the spa for her mani-pedi if she got a good bawl in straight away, she thought, a nanosecond before she heard the sound of Wilf moving around in the study.

“GRACE!”

Instead of catching fright at the sound of his rage – she’d walked from one onslaught of masculine wrath into another, and they felt interchangeable - she stopped to appreciate the sound of her real name in Wilf’s voice.
“Get the fuck in here!”

His bellowed curse (as rare as the use of her real name) had her hurrying into the room where he sat hunched over the laptop. He turned to face her. His lips were starched, pulled thin over his teeth.

“I just rushed here from work. Kate told me to go home. To read this email she opened for me. It contained a youtube link. It was from that fellow we sued the trains for last year. I’ve just opened the link. The video’s called Grace Dyer Goes Down.”

His staccato sentences built into a crescendo and bashed into her one by one. She heard a phone ring somewhere in the distance.

“That’ll be the press. Don’t even try to deny it. Your beauty spot’s very obvious. Have you seen it?”

She blinked and the world tilted forward, but she had nothing handy to steady herself on.

“HAVE YOU?”
“Yes.” The memory flickered into her head, of poor lighting and muffled moans and the graininess of the close-up.
“I was going to bloody well propose, you stupid little girl! I wanted to marry you!”
“Wilfy - ”
“You’re finished. We’re finished, you’re finished. Leave. Please.” He looked so tired, Wilf. Through her grief and shame and self-hatred and dismay at Patrick’s swift melodramatics, she pitied him. She didn’t remember him ever being really hurt before. His tenacious lacquer had rubbed off in just a few moments.

George was unsympathetic on the phone.
 “No, you can’t stay with me! You’re revolting! I can’t believe you! Absolutely not. Go to the Somerset farm, go hide out with the grounds-man. Stay away from me, and Wilf.”

So Grace left her little black dresses in the wardrobe, her law journals in the study, her Ovid collection in the library, the keys to her Peugeot in her handbag, and her beloved potted roses in the courtyard. She left the man and the possessions that had filled her life and walked out of the apartment empty-handed, empty-hearted. Jonny drove her to Paddington station where she got on the noon train to Taunton. She accepted the complimentary Brut champagne (from Champagne) in the first class carriage that she had all to herself, in a mood that was almost festive.

She wasn’t dreading the onslaught from the families and the media that would come tomorrow, and she wasn’t dwelling on the mistakes she’d made today, and yesterday, and the day before that. For today, she was enjoying the hallowed quiet. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been totally alone. It was, she decided a beautiful luxury, to be drinking champagne on a train, all by herself, bound for peace and oak trees. Finally, she felt ready for today. As the bubbles fizzed up the flute and the rain threaded down the window, Grace smiled and lifted her glass, to herself.