On arrival in the single room allotted for single Jamie, I sat on the bed. Perhaps the comment about me being old had been a joke? Some people had that kind of humour, like Dan and Jamie when they bantered. Yes, if she did say that, it’s all it was – banter.
I watched her move elegantly around the room while Joy fussed with the bags.
‘I’m literally Italian,’ she was saying. ‘My father was Italian – Sorrento, born and bred – it’s in my blood.’
‘Oh, Sorrento’s just down the road,’ Joy replied, like she was referring to the nearest convenience store, when Sorrento was at least ten miles from where we were staying. ‘Do you speak any Italian?’ Joy asked hopefully.
‘A little,’ Ella said, lifting wisps of white lace underwear from one of her shopping bags and laying them out on the bed. I looked away. It felt like a rather intimate thing to do in front of your new husband’s family.
‘I’d love you to teach me some Italian,’ Joy said, always eager to impress, and a whole Italian sentence taught by her new daughter-in-law would certainly impress ‘the girls’ (all in their seventies) back home.
I was smiling to myself at this when Dan appeared in the doorway. He too saw the underwear, and I instantly wondered if he wished she was wearing it for him? It was an unwanted, irrational thought, and I pushed it to the back of my mind as he beckoned me with his head to go to him outside the room, as though if he walked over the threshold he might be cursed.
I reluctantly stood up and followed him out of the room and down the hall. ‘What, Dan?’ I said, slightly irritated, like Violet when she was told it was time to come off her tablet.
‘I feel bad that they’re on their honeymoon and they’re sharing a single bed,’ he said in an earnest whisper.
‘Jamie said they were fine,’ I responded.
‘Yes, but I don’t think she will be – imagine if you’d been told we’d be crammed into a tiny bed on our honeymoon?’ he added.
‘It’s not the same. There was no chance we’d be crammed in a single bed because we planned our holiday, like normal people do,’ I said, unable to risk a dig at the spontaneous lovebirds now in our midst. I’ll admit I was also a little disappointed; I’d hoped Jamie would spend time with me and Dan on the holiday. Now Jamie was going to be working with Dan I’d assumed we would get back to being the three musketeers, playing cards and drinking too much together. As Joy had offered to watch the kids while we were there, I’d looked forward to us all venturing out one evening. But now Jamie was married, it seemed like things had changed already.
‘I just think…’ Dan was saying, then took a breath. ‘I just think that perhaps we might offer them our room?’
‘That’d be a nice gesture, Dan, but where would we sleep?’
‘I thought… perhaps we could sleep in the single room? Or one of us could sleep with the kids, and the other could sleep in the single room?’
I couldn’t believe what he was suggesting. ‘But we don’t get any time as it is to relax together at home, this is our holiday, our marriage… What about us healing, Dan?’
‘We can still have our holiday, spend time together, but I just feel like we should be the grown-ups, and offer them the double room.’
At that point, Joy popped her head out of the bedroom doorway. ‘You two okay?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, yeah, we’re fine,’ Dan said, uncertainly, which Joy must have picked up on.
But by now I could feel myself tearing up: it wasn’t just about a room, it was about the way Dan always put everything before me, before us. Jamie had just turned up and announced he was married and now Dan was suggesting we vacate our lovely room for them, like it was too late for us, we were a lost cause. I was hurt that he could dismiss us like this. Giving our room away to his brother was giving away our only chance to reconnect.
I turned and walked quickly down the hall to our room leaving Dan and his mother in the hallway. I didn’t want Joy to see me upset, she’d want to know why and then she’d try to fix it. But for once I wanted Dan to understand how important this was to me and not leave it to Joy to sort out our problems.
I lay on the bed for some time, hoping he might come in and we could at least talk about it, on our own, but I could hear Dan’s voice as he headed downstairs. He was laughing about something and clearly had no intention of coming to see me, and I wondered, not for the first time, how much he really cared. A few minutes later, I heard Violet asking where Mummy was. She was just outside the room, and I was about to get up and open the door, but Joy’s soothing voice coerced her away with the promise of a swim and a story.
‘Mummy’s tired, darling,’ she said.
I wanted to go to Violet, but my face was puffy from crying, so I didn’t call out. I continued to lie on the king-sized bed with the beautiful cool bed linen where Dan and I had cautiously begun to rebuild a marriage which needed intensive care. How could he even suggest we give up the loveliness of the big white bed to sleep in a single bed or even separate rooms?
It was Jamie and Ella’s honeymoon, and it was kind of Dan to think of them, I just wished he’d think of me sometimes. Like Ella, I’d always wanted a honeymoon in Italy. I remember discussing it excitedly with Dan and leaving the travel agents with a clutch of Italian brochures. We’d found a wonderful hotel among the primrose yellow and terracotta buildings stacked high on the hillside above Positano. A sea of bright buildings, rampant purple bougainvillea and that view – I could imagine the two of us on a balcony sipping wine, planning our future. We took the brochures back to Dan’s parents’ house, me fully expecting Joy to clap her hands and join in with the excitement, but she’d been slightly subdued, said it seemed expensive, and perhaps we should stay in the UK? I later teased Dan, saying that ‘Mummy didn’t want her little boy to go on honeymoon’.
Now, looking back, I don’t think I was too far wrong. I know, in the first few years, Joy found it hard to accept Dan had another woman in his life apart from her. I guess it was to be expected. Until I came along, she’d been used to having her two sons to herself.
Anyway, our Italian honeymoon wasn’t meant to be, because just before we were due to book it, one of Joy’s friends offered us her cottage in Devon for a week, as a wedding gift. As Joy pointed out, it would be rude to say no, and the money we’d have spent on Italy could buy us a lovely three-piece sofa. Dan agreed, and promised we’d go to Italy another year, so I accepted the kind offer from Joy’s friend graciously, while hiding my disappointment. As Dan’s parents had paid for our wedding at the golf club, I was grateful and didn’t want Joy to think I was behaving like a brat. The wedding was lovely –200 guests, a three-course meal, flowers from floor to ceiling and a dress to die for. I’d wanted a smaller, less expensive, more intimate occasion, but, as Joy said, ‘You only get married once, Clare – and we have a big family and a lot of friends, we want to do this for you.’
They even helped with the deposit on our first house, not too far from theirs – Joy liked to keep her boys close, and I think Dan being nearby paid for Jamie being away so much. We paid the price in a different way with regular, impromptu visits at the weekend or evenings, which rather curtailed those stolen moments of intimacy in the early years of marriage. Having Joy peer through the glass squares of the front door saying to Bob loudly, ‘I know they’re in,’ as we lay on the sofa together was enough to stop anyone mid-passion. ‘We just stopped by, we were going to the supermarket and wondered if you needed anything,’ she’d usually say as we opened the door. I think Joy needed the company, Bob was never really enough for her, so we would invite them in and make a cup of tea and talk to them. I did this out of politeness, but mostly to keep Joy happy – because that’s what we all liked to do.