‘Okay… Tell him I’ll come outside,’ I said.
I pulled on some plastic wellies. Mum made a fuss about my hair. I batted her hand away and stepped outside.
Jamie was standing behind the gate at the end of the drive, tall, lean and heart-stoppingly handsome in his wedding suit. He was still wearing his rose buttonhole with a spray of gypsophila, and the sun glinted off his chestnut hair. I walked towards him, my wellies sloshing through the mud.
‘What the hell Nat?’ he said when I approached the gate.
‘I know. I’m so sorry.’
‘That’s it? You’re sorry?’ He opened the gate and went to come in. I put my hand up and went through it joining him on the other side. I closed the gate behind me.
‘I’m not ready…’ I said.
‘How aren’t you ready? You put the dress on, you got in the car… You walked up the aisle?’
I just stared at him.
‘Do you know how humiliating it was? They kept playing the Wedding March over and over again, expecting you to come back… I’ve got cousins who’ve come over from Canada. They’ve spent a fortune on their plane tickets!’
‘When I said I wasn’t ready, I meant…’ I tried to explain, but Jamie went on.
‘My cousins go back in a week. My aunt is already asking if we can do it on another day…’
‘Do what on another day?’
‘Get married. Auntie Jean said she had wedding jitters before she married my Uncle Paul. She said she nearly did what you did, and bolted for it, but they’re still happily married after thirty-five years.’
I looked up at his handsome face. He wanted me to tell him it was just wedding jitters.
‘This is different,’ I said softly.
‘How?’
‘It wasn’t just jitters. I don’t want to get married. Well, I don’t want to get married right now.’
‘When do you want to get married?’ he asked.
‘It could be tomorrow, it could be next week, next month… I could be thirty-five, Jamie. But right now, I don’t want to get married.’
His face clouded over.
‘I thought we were in love,’ he said in a matter-of-fact way.
‘We are, but don’t you think it feels different now we’re not going to university together? We planned to leave home, get away from here and start a new life.’
‘We can retake our exams,’ he said. ‘Try again for university next year.’
‘The college where they do retakes is miles away. We’ve got no car, no money. What if I fall pregnant by accident?’
‘Would that be a bad thing?’
‘So we’d be jobless, homeless, with a baby too?’
‘We could live with my parents.’
‘What? In your bedroom with the beanbag and the Star Wars posters?’
‘Or your parents.’
‘I wouldn’t expose a newborn child to those nutters…’ I said.
Despite himself, Jamie laughed. A lock of his hair fell over his forehead and I reached up and tucked it behind his ear.
‘I just feel that if we got married now, we’d miss out on life. We were so stupid. We did no work for our exams. We just spent all our time…’
‘Shagging?’ grinned Jamie weakly.
‘We did other things too, like, the cinema, and we went for walks,’ I added.
‘And we did shag on several of those walks, and in the cinema. You seemed pretty happy,’ he grinned. He leant in and went to kiss me.
‘Jamie, please can you be mature about this. I’m trying to be serious…’
‘I’m immature am I?’ he said pulling back. ‘Why didn’t you open your gob about this before our families booked a whole bloody wedding?’
‘Everyone got so excited and carried away, and there never seemed a right time… until…’
‘Until you got to the altar?’ he finished. I reached out and grabbed his hand.
‘Don’t you worry about the future? How your life is going to end up?’ I asked.
He looked nonplussed.
‘Dunno, I don’t really think about it…’
‘Well, I have been thinking about it. I want a decent life, with a career and prospects!’
‘Oh, nice. So life with me isn’t good enough?’
‘It’s not just about you. I don’t want to be stuck here in bloody Sowerton! I don’t want to just be your wife, and get trapped here!’ I shouted, making a grey-haired lady wobble on her bike as she passed us on the road.
‘Natalie. You agreed to marry me,’ said Jamie losing his temper and gripping my arm. ‘You can’t do this! You can’t back out!’