“What is it?” asked Belinda. “Who’s it from?”
“I don’t know,” said Gordon. “Someone who still owns a typewriter. It’s not signed.”
“Is it a letter?”
“Not exactly,” he said, and he scratched the side of his nose and read it again.
“Well,” she said, in an exasperated voice (but she was not really exasperated; she was happy. She would wake in the morning and check to see if she were still as happy as she had been when she went to sleep the night before, or when Gordon had woken her in the night by brushing up against her, or when she had woken him. And she was). “Well, what is it?”
“It appears to be a description of our wedding,” he said. “It’s very nicely written. Here,” and he passed it to her. She looked it over.
It was a crisp day in early October when Gordon Robert Johnson and Belinda Karen Abingdon swore that they would love each other, would support and honour each other as long as they both should live. The bride was radiant and lovely, the groom was nervous, but obviously proud and just as obviously pleased.
That was how it began. It went on to describe the service and the reception clearly, simply, and amusingly.
“How sweet,” she said. “What does it say on the envelope?”
“Gordon and Belinda’s Wedding,” he read.
“No name? Nothing to indicate who sent it?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Well, it’s very sweet, and it’s very thoughtful,” she said. “Whoever it’s from.”
She looked inside the envelope to see if there was something else in there that they had overlooked, a note from whichever one of her friends (or his, or theirs) had written it, but there wasn’t. So, vaguely relieved that there was one less thank you note to write, she placed the cream sheet of paper back in its envelope, which she placed in a box-file along with a copy of the Wedding Banquet menu, and the Invitations, and the contact sheets for the wedding photographs, and one white rose from the bridal bouquet.
Gordon was an architect, and Belinda was a vet. For each of them what they did was a vocation, not a job. They were in their early twenties. Neither of them had been married before, nor even seriously involved with anyone. They met when Gordon brought his thirteen-year-old Golden Retriever, Goldie, grey-muzzled and half-paralysed, to Belinda’s surgery to be put down. He had had the dog since he was a boy, and insisted on being with her at the end. Belinda held his hand as he cried, and then, suddenly and unprofessionally, she hugged him, tightly, as if she could squeeze away the pain and the loss and the grief. One of them asked the other if they could meet that evening in the local pub for a drink, and afterward neither of them was sure which of them had proposed it.
The most important thing to know about the first two years of their marriage was this: they were pretty happy. From time to time they would squabble, and every once in a while they would have a blazing row about nothing very much that would end in tearful reconciliations, and they would make love and kiss away the other’s tears, and whisper heartfelt apologies into each other’s ears. At the end of the second year, six months after she came off the pill, Belinda found herself pregnant.
Gordon bought her a bracelet studded with tiny rubies, and he turned the spare bedroom into a nursery, hanging the wallpaper himself. The design was covered with nursery rhyme characters, with Little Bo Peep, and Humpty Dumpty, and the Dish Running Away With the Spoon, over and over and over again.
Belinda came home from the hospital, with little Melanie in her carrycot, and Belinda’s mother came to stay with them for a week, sleeping on the sofa in the lounge.
It was on the third day that Belinda pulled out the box-folder, to show her wedding souvenirs to her mother, and to reminisce. Already their wedding seemed like such a long time ago. They smiled at the dried, brown thing that had once been a white rose, and clucked over the menu and the invitation. At the bottom of the box was a large brown envelope.
“Gordon and Belinda’s Marriage,” read Belinda’s mother.
“It’s a description of our wedding,” said Belinda. “It’s very sweet. It even has a bit in it about Daddy’s slide-show.”
Belinda opened the envelope and pulled out the sheet of cream paper. She read what was typed upon the paper, and made a face. Then she put it away, without saying anything.
“Can’t I see it, dear?” asked her mother.
“I think it’s Gordon playing a joke,” said Belinda. “Not in good taste, either.”
Belinda was sitting up in bed that night, breast-feeding Melanie, when she said to Gordon, who was staring at his wife and new daughter with a foolish smile upon his face, “Darling, why did you write those things?”
“What things?”
“In the letter. That wedding thing. You know.”
“I don’t know.”
“It wasn’t funny.”
He sighed. “What are you talking about?”
Belinda pointed to the box-file, which she had brought upstairs and placed upon her dressing-table. Gordon opened it, and took out the envelope. “Did it always say that on the envelope?” he asked. “I thought it said something about our wedding.” Then he took out and read the single sheet of ragged-edged paper, and his forehead creased. “I didn’t write this.” He turned the paper over, staring at the blank side as if expecting to see something else written there.
“You didn’t write it?” she asked. “Really you didn’t?” Gordon shook his head. Belinda wiped a dribble of milk from the baby’s chin. “I believe you,” she said. “I thought you wrote it, but you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Let me see that again,” she said. He passed the paper to her. “This is so weird. I mean, it’s not funny, and it’s not even true.”
Typed upon the paper was a brief description of the previous two years for Gordon and Belinda. It had not been a good two years, according the typed sheet. Six months after they were married Belinda had been bitten in the cheek by a Pekingese, so badly that the cheek needed to be stitched back together. It had left a nasty scar. Worse than that, nerves had been damaged, and she had begun to drink, perhaps to numb the pain. She suspected that Gordon was revolted by her face, while the new baby, it said, was a desperate attempt to glue the couple together.
“Why would they say this?” she asked.
“They?”
“Whoever wrote this horrid thing.” She ran a finger across her cheek: it was unblemished and unmarked. She was a very beautiful young woman, although she looked tired and fragile now.
“How do you know it’s a they?”
“I don’t know,” she said, transferring the baby to her left breast. “It seems a sort of they-ish thing to do. To write that and to swap it for the old one and to wait until one of us read it. Come on, little Melanie, there you go, that’s such a fine girl. ”
“Shall I throw it away?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I think. ” She stroked the baby’s forehead. “Hold onto it,” she said. “We might need it for evidence. I wonder if it was something Al organised.” Al was Gordon’s youngest brother.
Gordon put the paper back into the envelope, and he put the envelope back into the box file, which was pushed under the bed and, more or less, forgotten.
Neither of them got much sleep for the next few months, what with the nightly feeds and the continual crying, for Melanie was a colicky baby. The box-file stayed under the bed. And then Gordon was offered a job in Preston, several hundred miles north, and since Belinda was on leave from her job, and had no immediate plans to go back to work, she found the idea rather attractive. So they moved.