Do You Remember the First Time?

squeezed her to him.
    ‘Well, it won’t be like this when we get back to Africa,’ she said.
    Is it my fate, I wonder, to always end up at the fountain at parties? I had slipped out the door as soon as I decently could, even though I could hear my mother asking people for me in the querulous tone she gets when she’s feeling upset. The twice-daily phonecalls were enough at the moment. I took my glass of champagne and wandered down the path. All wedding-focused country hotels have fountains. It comes with the brief.
    I dallied my hand in the water again, and tried to think. Why – why did I feel like this? I was practically shivering. I felt suddenly as if my head was full of shame and fear, and just misery, and I didn’t know why. What was the matter with me? I was having a near-violent reaction to something that happened every day. So I’d met someone who used to be special to me – it was sixteen years ago, for goodness’ sake. It was as long a time since I’d last seen him as it was from when I was born and the time we first went out. God, that was grim. That whole summer was a period of my life I tried not to think about.
    I certainly wasn’t thinking like an adult now, a sorted, happy person. I sipped my champagne and felt that dull ache you get at the bottom of your heart like when you’re a kid and you do something terribly, terribly wrong and you’re going to be in for it later. It’s hard to ignore your conscience. Sitting by that fountain, I knew. If I wasn’t going to endup like my father: dissatisfied, always looking for the main chance; if I wasn’t going to stultify myself, but, more importantly, if I wasn’t going to harm a good, decent kind man, who loved me, then—
    ‘Ah, there you are,’ said Olly. ‘I’ve been looking all over for you. I’m starving.’
    He sat down, brushing sesame seeds off his waistcoat, bought to cover up his creeping paunch.
    ‘Hi, there,’ I said, nervousness bubbling up in my throat. I could taste it. Oh God. How could this have happened so quickly? We’d gone from happy couple, living together, and now I was on the brink of …
    Well, we weren’t that happy, were we? Or rather, me, with my selfish, adolescent mind, and my desire to see the grass as always greener, and my dreaming my life away: Olly hadn’t a chance. God, I was a bitch.
    Olly unsteadily started to bend down.
    ‘What are you doing?’ I said awkwardly.
    It looked like – it couldn’t be. Tell me he wasn’t getting on one knee. TELL ME.
    I stared at him in shock for a moment, and he picked up my shock in his own eyes, which suddenly looked a bit panicked.
    ‘Look, I know we don’t always get on so well …’ he started (badly, I thought).
    ‘FLORA!’ screamed another voice.
    It is a witness testament to my immaturity and stupidity that for a second I thought it might be Clelland arriving, having realised as soon as he’d seen me that he’d been stupid,finally doing his last-minute dash to save me, save me from this life I had asked for but didn’t want.
    It wasn’t, of course. It was my mother. They don’t sound at all similar, but I was in a very highly strung emotional mood. Nevertheless, at that moment, I was glad to see her. She came down the hill, looking frail and confused. I wondered sometimes if she was getting early-onset Alzheimer’s.
    ‘Flora darling, where are you? We need you!’ Her tone was querulous. ‘They’re cutting the cake.’
    Olly stood up and pasted a big fake smile on his face.
    ‘Hi there, Mummy!’
    ‘Oh, hello, you two lovebirds. Wouldn’t think you’d want to miss this bit. Also, darling, you want to see the cake. I’m sure Tashy could tell you where she got it. You never know, could be useful …’
    And she linked her arm into both of ours as we exchanged glances – his rueful; mine, I suspect, terrified – and we marched back up the hill to the house.
    The cake was indeed a teetering, rose-encrusted thing of wonder. Tashy was grinning in that slightly terrified way again, and Max looked like he was getting quite frustrated with her as he was trying to get her to put her hand underneath his, rather than on top.
    I glanced over where Clelland and his lovely girlfriend were deep in smiling conversation. Of course they were. Probably planning the same thing. And only a spiteful person wouldn’t wish them well. Everyone looking so happy.
    I gulped. I was thirty-two years old. Suddenly it was as if I saw all round me people who