Bart climbed out of the car and stretched his arms out, loosening the muscles in his neck and shoulders. Beautiful day. Really beautiful day. Good omen. He sniffed a few times and then crouched down to look in the car’s side mirror. He ran a finger over his moustache; a perfectly trim pencil moustache, newly grown, that Bettina would no doubt want to laugh at as she walked down the aisle towards him.
Imagine there really was a God?
He frowned into the mirror – a stern, paternal glare. ‘For perverting the holy sanctity of marriage,’ he told himself, ‘thou shalt burn forever in the fiery pits of hell.’
He widened his eyes. The stuff was dripping down the back of his throat like bitter phlegm. He licked his finger and smoothed down his eyebrows. He had very pleasing eyebrows. And eyebrows mattered. He stuck out his tongue and went cross-eyed. ‘I choose hell,’ he said. And laughed.
Jonathan fumbled the ring out of his pocket, dropped it, picked it up, dropped it again. It skittered across the stone tiles, coming to rest by Bettina’s pearl-white slipper. He bent down to pick it up, sniffing and bird-like, and bashed his head into Bettina’s knee, causing her to cry out and stumble backwards into their father’s arms. Jonathan gasped out an apology, sweat beading his nose, ears practically throbbing, and retrieved the ring. Bettina gave him a tight-lipped smile and the priest looked on with tranquil bloodshot eyes. Bart curled his lips in to suppress a laugh. How memorable this would be! Only dull people were satisfied with perfection.
Bart took the ring from the poor wretch and turned to face Bettina. Her lips were painted a vibrant, shocking red and she had a red rose clipped just below the neckline of her dress.
‘With this ring I thee wed…’
As he echoed the priest’s words in his clear, trained voice, Bettina stared up into his face, her gaze zipping from his eyes to his moustache and back again. She was dying to laugh too, he could tell.
Bart peeled the silk glove from her left hand, upsetting the coil of pearls which clattered around her wrist, and, with an air of great ceremony, he slipped the ring on her now-nude finger.
‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ said the priest.
A great roar of cheering and applause. Bettina, dazed and grinning, wrapped an arm around his neck and pressed her cheek to his. ‘Your finest performance yet,’ she whispered.
Chapter 11
September 1925, English Channel
Bettina was not a good water traveller and she did not like travelling with others. Bart, knowing this, went off to sit at the bar, sometimes coming back to check she was all right, and always preceding his queries with an incredulous, ‘Hello, wifey.’ ‘Hello, hubby,’ she croaked back, her cheek against the cabin window. She just wanted to fall on a bed and close her eyes. And think of Trude. She could barely think of anything else.
Trude was a blonde, bobbed wild thing, married but practically estranged from her ancient husband (he was fifty-eight and she thirty years his junior). She had one of those bodies seemingly designed to drive men crazy – large jiggling breasts, plump hips and a behind that looked like it was stuffed with pillows. Vogue was going potty over skinny waifs with boys’ hips, all the better to drape flimsy dresses over, and that was all well and good, but in the real world, thought Bettina, it still took a big arse and breasts to send men over the edge. And some women, clearly.
She’d be sitting opposite Trude in a tea shop and find herself tuning out, a slippery montage of sexually explicit scenarios shooting like ticker tape across her mind – legs spread apart, positively ripped apart like a land mass split by earthquake, hands kneading soft buttock fat, tongues… tongues… ‘Betts?’ Trude would say. ‘Bettina, darling, are you listening?’ and her eyes would unglaze and she’d blink guiltily at her new friend, knowing that when she next went to the toilet she’d find a wet viscosity, a drool – vile.
‘Are you sure you don’t have narcolepsy, darling?’
‘I wasn’t sleeping.’
‘What were you doing? Am I that boring that you must start day-dreaming whenever I open my mouth?’
There were times when Trude almost seemed to flirt with Bettina. Once they’d gone to an art exhibition in Mayfair and ambled arm in arm, swapping deadpan observations (‘When one says “quintessentially English”, what one invariably means is “bloody boring”’), and at one point, Trude gazed up at Bettina’s lips as she was talking and there was a hunger to it – yes, a definite hunger, she couldn’t be imagining it – and Trude visibly collected herself and said, ‘I bet Constable’s got a whopper on him.’
‘Would you like a drink or something, my dearest, darlingest wifeypoos?’ Bart. Leaning against the doorframe, eyes glassy with boozy bonhomie.
‘Anything I put in my body is coming back up again,’ she said.
‘You’ll feel better as soon as we’re on land. I’ll take you to Bras de Grenouilles for a slap-up meal.’
‘I don’t want to think of food right now.’
‘Oh, but it’ll be delicious,’ he said. ‘We’ll have prawns and quails’ eggs and oysters and more prawns – just imagine those pink, twitching, juicy prawns –and how could I forget about the snails? Slimy, succulent snails!’ He kissed the tips of his fingers. ‘Magnifique!’
‘You bastard.’
‘Correction, my love – I am your bastard husband.’ He blew her a kiss and strutted off. How long would it take before she began to hate him? Hopefully never – he was, after all, her favourite person. But hate was so easy.
At the hotel they had a bedroom each with a connecting door, a huge sitting room and a gothic-styled bathroom with a tub the size of a dining table. The light fixtures were dripping with fat crystals and all the soft furnishings and haberdashery were an opulent, silky gold. The beds were coated in red petals in a way that appeared random but which was probably artfully contrived – Bettina imagined the concierge deliberating over the placement of a particular petal, moving it around and standing at various angles with a finger at his pursed lips until he was satisfied.
She came into the sitting room to find Bart lying sultry-eyed on the chaise longue in one of her evening dresses, one hairy leg cocked up, cigarette held daintily. ‘If you’re after a woman, look no further,’ he purred.
She laughed, her hands on her knees, then held up a finger as if to say, ‘Wait a minute,’ and ran to his room. She stripped her clothes off and started to put on his, fumbling pink-faced and giggling with the buttons (so many buttons) and stopping every few seconds to fan herself with her hand. She looked in the mirror and grinned. Winked. She stuffed a ball of socks down the crotch of the underpants, then another, and moulded them into position. She walked in a wide-legged saunter to her husband, who, of course, burst into loud, reckless cackling, beating the cushion of the chaise longue.
‘What’s a lovely lady like you doing in a place like this?’ she asked, grabbing her sock-bulge and squeezing it. Bart was turning purple with laughter. She climbed on top of him, thrusting her hips up and down.
‘Stop – stop. I’m going to piss myself. Please – I can’t.’
She climbed off, slapping his behind. ‘Tease.’
Bettina knew all about Étienne. Bart sometimes read out bits of his letters, the especially romantic lines (‘My love for you is a crime for which I have been arrested,’ he once wrote, ‘and I pace this aching jail, a madman with bleeding feet.’) He talked about the man’s beauty (‘You could eat your pudding out of his dimples’) and his integrity, his ability to think for himself, which Bart valued above most other things. He lived a bohemian lifestyle but he wasn’t a bohemian – and thank God, said Bart, because bohemians were superficial idiots. And they honked, the lot of them.