“There is that.”
“My mum says that we ought to put off the wedding for a few months as a mark of respect.”
“Your mum just wants us to put off the wedding, full stop.”
“Nonsense. She thinks you’re quite a catch.”
“Your mother wouldn’t describe a combination of Brad Pitt, Bill Gates, and Prince William as ‘quite a catch.’ There is nobody walking the earth good enough to be her son-in-law.”
“She likes you,” said Rosie, dutifully, and without conviction.
Rosie’s mother did not like Fat Charlie, and everybody knew it. Rosie’s mother was a high strung bundle of barely thought-through prejudices, worries, and feuds. She lived in a magnificent flat in Wimpole Street with nothing in the enormous fridge but bottles of vitaminized water and rye crackers. Wax fruit sat in the bowls on the antique sideboards and was dusted twice a week.
Fat Charlie had, on his first visit to Rosie’s mother’s place, taken a bite from one of the wax apples. He had been extremely nervous, nervous enough that he had picked up an apple—in his defense, an extremely realistic apple—and had bitten into it. Rosie had signed frantically. Fat Charlie spat out the lump of wax into his hand and thought about pretending that he liked wax fruit, or that he’d known all along and had just done it to be funny; however, Rosie’s mother had raised an eyebrow, walked over, taken the remains of the apple from him, explained shortly just how much real wax fruit cost these days, if you could find it, and then dropped the apple into the bin. He sat on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon with his mouth tasting like the inside of a candle, while Rosie’s mother stared at him to ensure that he did not try to take another bite out of her precious wax fruit or attempt to gnaw on the leg of a Chippendale chair.
There were large color photographs in silver frames on the sideboard of Rosie’s mother’s flat: photographs of Rosie as a girl and of Rosie’s mother and father, and Fat Charlie had studied them intently, looking for clues to the mystery that was Rosie. Her father, who had died when Rosie was fifteen, had been an enormous man. He had been first a cook, then a chef, then a restaurateur. He was perfectly turned-out in every photograph, as if dressed by a wardrobe department before each shot, rotund and smiling, his arm always crooked for Rosie’s mother to hold.
“He was an amazing cook,” Rosie said. In the photographs, Rosie’s mother had been curvaceous and smiling. Now, twelve years on, she resembled a skeletal Eartha Kitt, and Fat Charlie had never seen her smile.
“Does your mum ever cook?” Fat Charlie had asked, after that first time.
“I don’t know. I’ve never seen her cook anything.”
“What does she eat? I mean, she can’t live on crackers and water.”
Rosie said, “I think she sends out for things.”
Fat Charlie thought it highly likely that Rosie’s mum went out at night in bat form to suck the blood from sleeping innocents. He had mentioned this theory to Rosie once, but she had failed to see the humor in it.
Rosie’s mother had told Rosie that she was certain that Fat Charlie was marrying her for her money.
“What money?” asked Rosie.
Rosie’s mother gestured to the apartment, a gesture that took in the wax fruit, the antique furniture, the paintings on the walls, and pursed her lips.
“But this is all yours,” said Rosie, who lived on her wages working for a London charity—and her wages were not large, so to supplement them Rosie had dipped into the money her father had left her in his will. It had paid for a small flat, which Rosie shared with a succession of Australians and New Zealanders, and for a secondhand VW Golf.
“I won’t live forever,” sniffed her mother, in a way that implied that she had every intention of living forever, getting harder and thinner and more stonelike as she went, and eating less and less, until she would be able to live on nothing more than air and wax fruit and spite.
Rosie, driving Fat Charlie home from Heathrow, decided that the subject should be changed. She said, “The water’s gone off in my flat. It’s out in the whole building.”
“Why’s that then?”
“Mrs. Klinger downstairs. She said something sprung a leak.”
“Probably Mrs. Klinger.”
“Charlie. So, I was wondering—could I take a bath at your place tonight?”
“Do you need me to sponge you down?”
“Charlie.”
“Sure. Not a problem.”
Rosie stared at the back of the car in front of her, then she took her hand off the gear stick and reached out and squeezed Fat Charlie’s huge hand. “We’ll be married soon enough,” she said.
“I know,” said Fat Charlie.
“Well, I mean,” she said. “There’ll be plenty of time for all that, won’t there?”
“Plenty,” said Fat Charlie.
“You know what my mum once said?” said Rosie.
“Er. Was it something about bringing back hanging?”
“It was not. She said that if a just-married couple put a coin in a jar every time they make love in their first year, and take a coin out for every time that they make love in the years that follow, the jar will never be emptied.”
“And this means…?”
“Well,” she said. “It’s interesting, isn’t it? I’ll be over at eight tonight with my rubber duck. How are you for towels?”
“Um….”
“I’ll bring my own towel.”
Fat Charlie did not believe it would be the end of the world if an occasional coin went into the jar before they tied the knot and sliced the wedding cake, but Rosie had her own opinions on the matter, and there the matter ended. The jar remained perfectly empty.
THE PROBLEM, FAT CHARLIE REALIZED, ONCE HE GOT HOME, with arriving back in London after a brief trip away, is that if you arrive in the early morning, there is nothing much to do for the rest of the day.
Fat Charlie was a man who preferred to be working. He regarded lying on a sofa watching Countdown as a reminder of his interludes as a member of the unemployed. He decided that the sensible thing to do would be to go back to work a day early. In the Aldwych offices of the Grahame Coats Agency, up on the fifth and topmost floor, he would feel part of the swim of things. There would be interesting conversation with his fellow workers in the tearoom. The whole panoply of life would unfold before him, majestic in its tapestry, implacable and relentless in its industry. People would be pleased to see him.
“You’re not back until tomorrow,” said Annie the receptionist, when Fat Charlie walked in. “I told people you wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. When they phoned.” She was not amused.
“Couldn’t keep away,” said Fat Charlie.
“Obviously not,” she said, with a sniff. “You should phone Maeve Livingstone back. She’s been calling every day.”
“I thought she was one of Grahame Coats’s people.”
“Well, he wants you to talk to her. Hang on.” She picked up the phone.
Grahame Coats came with both names. Not Mister Coats. Never just Grahame. It was his agency, and it represented people, and took a percentage of what they earned for the right to have represented them.