Wedding Puzzle

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright © 2019 Sallie Muirden

  First published 2019

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: Valentino Sani/Trevillion Images

  Author image: www.kipscottphoto.com

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  The extract from the poem ‘The Conjuror’ written by Diane Wakoski first published in The Magellanic Clouds, (Black Sparrow Press, 1969),is used with permission.

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A pre-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-24-8

  For my childhood friends

  ‘People certainy do curious things.’

  Frankie’s words in The Member of the Wedding

  by Carson McCullers

  PART

  ONE

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  On the morning of my wedding I drove down the peninsula to Portsea bay beach. When I arrived at the hotel I turned into the car park and sat listening to the end of a love song on the radio.

  Leaving the city the weather was fine, but as I descended the hill to Safety Beach, a burly little cloud trawling vapour from the sea fogged up my windows and made me slow down. The cloud hugged me all the way down the bay, beside the bathing boxes of Dromana, and along the shopping ruin of Rosebud. When I pulled over in Rye for petrol, thunder cracked overhead and big drops of rain slid down my arms. I got back in the car and navigated the tea-tree-strewn foreshore, changing into first gear to climb the Sorrento cliffs. On Saturdays the main boulevard was bumper-to-bumper. Turning into Darling Road I came to rest outside the pristine Victorian cottage I grew up in. This was it. I sat chewing on my thoughts and gum while staring at my old home. The front door opened and a smartly dressed woman almost challenged me to quit prying on her pretty abode. She gave me a bit of a scare, that territorial stranger. So I did a quick U-turn and continued on to my wedding.

  The town centre in Portsea is still small and sedate. No fast-food outlets, no post office. Not even a mini supermarket with inflated prices. The Portsea Hotel is the nexus of the town as it’s the only public place where people can wine and dine. The mock-Tudor building has those part-timbered walls that make it look like a ski chalet. The building is close to the road; in fact, the yard is just a concrete driveway. There’s a strip of soil at the base of the building, enough to have sustained three hardy bushes and a lone scabby tree.

  The moment I arrived at the hotel my limpet cloud let loose and rain began pelting down the windscreen. A washout! A total washout. Talk about a bride’s worst nightmare. I was going to freeze to death in my silk and lace. I emerged from the car, all humped over, with a beach towel shielding my blow-waved hair. Lugging my suitcase, I dashed through the splashing torrents to the porch.

  When Jordan and I stopped here two months ago it was a warm spring day. As we entered the premises I glanced at the wedding reception poster in the window: Together we will create the moments that matter. Maybe Jordan got his idea from that poster because once we were inside he made straight for the woman standing at the reception desk. ‘We’re kind of thinking of getting married down here.’

  It was my fantasy to marry Jordan, but I would never have suggested it myself. My eyes were big and round, and I backed his dare, feeling like a kid at a fete who’s cleaned up at the end of the day when they’re giving everything away for free.

  ‘Do you have a date in mind?’ the woman inquired.

  ‘Oh, perhaps in a couple of months,’ Jordan casually remarked.

  ‘That soon?’ Looking at her bookings, the woman at the desk ummed and ahhed. ‘You’ll be getting pretty close to Christmas then. Most couples avoid December.’

  Nevertheless we were invited to sit down and look at a huge album of wedding photographs.

  I was glad the couch was leather, so our wet bums wouldn’t leave a water stain. Having come straight from the back-beach surf, we had simply pulled our clothes on over our togs. I reached into Jordan’s tousled hair and untangled a spike of dried seaweed. As we leant over the album, a drop of blood, splinter-small, slid off his chin. I swiped the page clean then read aloud: ‘The present hotel was built in the 1930s, but there’s been a hotel here since 1860.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jordan encouraged me, sliding his hand between my shorts-clad legs, ‘be schoolmarm for me.’

  It was true that I was about to become a primary school teacher. I had accepted a position in Springvale, but I already sensed teaching wasn’t my vocation. It would simply have to do for now.

  Politely we leafed through the celebratory photos. I absorbed the bridal outfits with muted appreciation, for I could never see myself attaining such fashionable heights. Nor did I particularly want to. I was struck by the date of the final wedding in the album. February 1988. That was the month love had blossomed both-ways between Jordan and I. Both-ways, because I had always been in love with him. The couple that were married here in February looked radiantly happy. After cutting the wedding cake they raised the knife in a victory salute, both of them gripping the handle of the knife. The final photo was a close-up of a piece of cake sitting on a plate. The fruit looked rich and dark, and the red glacé cherries shone like traffic lights.

  Hatched on that visit to the hotel eight weeks ago, our wedding plans had proceeded without a glitch until last night when I opened the letter. And now I dallied on the porch, reconsidering. Do you really want to start the ball rolling, Beth? As soon as you step inside, your wedding begins in earnest.

  Undraping the towel from my head, I glimpsed my reflection in the modern glass portico. My eyes had a startled look to them, a cartoonish elongation that was far from normal. Perhaps the letter was still having an effect on me? The rest of me looked the same as usual. Dark blonde hair. Round forehead. Soft cheeks. No sharp points. My secondary school friends started calling me Prairie Mary when Little House on the Prairie was on the telly. Judy said I was a dead ringer for the actress who played Mary Ingalls. Prairie Mary was far more appealing than Chlorine Beth, my other nickname at school. Sadly, my years as a member of a swimming squad had given me round shoulders and a manly back. I learned in a bridal boutique that I didn’t have the right figure for the latest bridal attire.

  The salesperson tried to flatter me, saying, ‘You look gorgeous in that gown,’ as my heart sank.

  ‘You reckon?’

  Needless to say, the sort of strapless gown every bride wears these days looked completely dismal on me.

  At the Portsea Hotel I drew in a deep breath and made my way through the lobby to the reception desk, where a young woman greeted me with a wreath of smiles. My opening words, ‘I’m Beth –’, need not have been said. The receptionist guessed I was today’s bride, and she presented me with a box of bloodred roses from my grandmother in England.

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  Next she unlocked a drawer and handed me a wedding telegram, also from Dorset. My grandma never failed to send me a telegram on my birthday to make up for not having met me. Assuredly, my wedding day was another special day for Gran. I put the telegram in my satchel to read later.

  Here we go, I thought as I paid the balance on the room and began to split into two different girls. Patty Duke was running out the door in disarray. Should I abscond with her? But her identical cousin Cathy was staying well-mannered and responsible.
The receptionist didn’t know about Patty yet. She didn’t know there was a wilful, angry bride hiding beneath the demure one.

  ‘I’m Vanessa,’ the young woman told me. Then she led me up the freshly carpeted but creaky stairs to the Bayview Room, which Jordan and I had booked for our wedding night and honeymoon. Room number 31. ‘I hope you like the space,’ Vanessa enthused as we entered the living area. The hotel called it a room, but it was really a two-bedroom suite. In fact its best feature, apart from a view of the bay, was the huge modern bathroom that opened onto a private balcony. Jordan and I had sipped Passiona on that balcony two months ago as we watched the sun go down behind the trees. ‘You and I can get boozed on soft drink,’ Jordan said, Passiona dribbling down his sand-grazed chin.

  ‘Would you like to hang up your wedding gown?’ Vanessa asked, glancing at my suitcase.

  ‘Oh, that’s okay. Mum’s bringing it down later.’

  Vanessa began putting the long-stemmed roses in a vase.

  Last night I was at my mother’s place for the final fitting. My mother, Cherie, had whipped up the wedding dress at short notice after my hopes were dashed in the bridal boutique. The skirt felt ultra-feminine rubbing against my bare skin, and I began to anticipate my special day like any prospective bride might. It would be my turn to shine tomorrow, I mused. Jordan was sure going to love me in this heavenly dress.

  The girls I’d desperately wanted to be in my teens – Tracy, Binny, Pen and Mish, the lightweight runners from school – would never have dreamed that Chlorine Beth could snare a boy like Jordan. He, like those four girls, had been a member of the Mornington Grammar athletics team. They were all ace runners at school. Yet Binny, Pen and Mish had quickly accepted our wedding invitation as though it were the most natural thing in the world for a girl like me to be marrying a boy like Jordan. To my relief, none of them had rung Jordan and said to him in disbelief, ‘Hey, is she the same Beth Shaw we went to school with?’ When quizzed about this, Jordan chuckled. ‘Are you kidding? Those girls are tickled pink to be invited. They’ve been ringing around to see who’s missed out.’

  The fourth girl Tracy hadn’t bothered to decline. She wasn’t coming to the wedding. Tracy was the girl that Jordan and I knew best of all. She was some girl. It was Tracy I was thinking about last night as I stood in Cherie’s living room while she fiddled with the hem of my gown.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, in the serious tone that warned her I was going to make an announcement. ‘Did you know Tracy’s engaged to a theologian?’

  Cherie was kneeling on the floor at my feet. She looked up, her mouth full of pins. Then she removed the pins in one shot, single-handed, with the skill of a dentist.

  ‘Have you heard from Tracy?’ she asked expectantly.

  ‘No, I haven’t,’ I said stoutly. ‘It was Jordan who told me about the theologian.’

  ‘He’s not a minister, he’s only a trainee,’ she corrected me. ‘Tracy’s mum told me all about him.’

  ‘It’s an odd choice, don’t you think?’ I said, eager for Cherie to back my view that Tracy had nabbed a lesser guy than Jordan. To fit the bill as a future pastor he would have to be rigid and plain, if not downright ugly.

  ‘Quit swishing around,’ Cherie said. She grabbed my calf and held onto it as she slid the final pins in place.

  ‘That’s that,’ she said emphatically, getting up off her knees.

  ‘Who ever marries a trainee minister these days?’

  Cherie wasn’t going to let me belittle my old friend. ‘Maybe after what she’s been through?’

  ‘What are you implying?’

  Cherie rolled her eyes. ‘The countless heartbreaks with a certain person?’

  The certain person was presumably my fiancé. But as Tracy’s heartbreaks were confined to secondary school, and as she and Jordan always made up afterwards, I didn’t give my mother’s remark any credence. Cherie didn’t know the full story.

  The final minutes of our fitting were spent attending to the veil. Cherie had actually made the veil before the dress, and so I’d had a chance to go swanning around in it these last few weeks. When I put it on to show two-year-old Harriet, the kid I babysit, she jumped up to touch it, crying out: ‘Bethy’s got a tutu on her head.’ You bet, Harriet. This is the closest I’ve come to wearing a tutu in my adult life.

  Cherie told me she might attach some orange blossoms to make the cap part of the veil even prettier. She gave me a demo. ‘Going to be happy with that?’ she checked.

  I nodded. ‘Mum, you know I’ll like whatever you do.’

  My mother was a sucker for compliments, and seeing her soften I decided to butter her up some more, using the brash hoopla voice of my Patty Duke self. ‘Don’t you go and forget my veil tomorrow, Cherilee.’

  My mention of forgetting things must have given Cherie a nudge, for she tapped her forehead and went to fetch my mail. Our wedding invitations were RSVP to the mother of the bride, so for weeks Cherie had been handing me opened envelopes with wedding acceptances and the occasional decline in them. If only she had forgotten to pass on this one particular envelope I would have been none the wiser and much happier. But as it was addressed to me and not Mrs Shaw, mother of the bride, she’d never thought to open it. And as my mother never read the letter in advance she couldn’t spare me the heartache to come.

  When I got home and read it I actually started laughing. This was surely a practical joke. Who would dare?

  Dear Beth,

  You should know some things before it’s too late. Jordan asked me to marry him a few days before he proposed to you. If my answer had been yes, then you wouldn’t be the lucky girl. If he can exchange one for another so easily, then what are his feelings worth?

  Tracy

  But hang on, Beth. What if the letter was for real? It sounded genuine enough. And Tracy had written it. She doesn’t muck around. But how had she summoned the guts to sign her name at the bottom of those brutal words?

  Once I’d recognized that there was an element of truth in the letter’s words, they took seed inside me and began to grow. I was marrying someone who didn’t love me. Even as the shock was turning me pale, I began to distance myself by thinking about how to make amends in the future in a life without Jordan. That was how I got over things – by assuming a role of detachment and carelessness. He didn’t mean anything to me anyway. I could surmount this disaster. For starters, my wedding outfit need not go to waste. I’m only twenty-four so there might come another chance. Or Cherie might do some alterations and wear the dress herself if she happened to meet a suitable bloke. Though at her age, he needn’t be that suitable. ‘Any man without a hump would do me,’ she’d joked, but she didn’t really mean it. She was just being self-deprecating. Oh yes, Cherie had taught me to laugh in the face of adversity, and it was true that laughing felt a whole lot better than moping around saying, ‘Why me?’

  In the Portsea Hotel Vanessa was lavishing the royal bride treatment on me. She had placed the roses on a small table by the window. She had tied back the nylon curtains so I could appreciate the spectacle of the bay. The windows were spattered with raindrops, yet a pearly white horizon invited meteorological speculation. The city forecast of ‘scattered showers clearing’ could mean anything down here. Having grown up on the peninsula I knew the climate south of Arthurs Seat kept its own counsel.

  While I stood at the window watching rain swamp the fake grass matting in the beer garden, Vanessa picked up a leatherbound guest manual from the coffee table. And cleared her throat. She was going to tell me something about the hotel services. I was being rude, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn around and listen. Some idiot had gone and neglected the beer garden down below. The sugar canisters were sitting outside in the rain. I imagined water seeping down the metal spouts and turning the sugar inside rock hard. Our wedding guests would find that no amount of shaking would dislodge the sugar from those metal spouts. Or squeeze sugar through their compressed, malformed hearts. They would be wasting th
eir time.

  I remained at the window having one of my stoppages – that’s what Cherie called them. Not being able to respond because I was mulling over what to do. ‘Hurry up and get in the car, Beth, before I leave you behind.’ I could move nowhere for the moment; I could do nothing but absorb and absorb the meaning, the intent, the contentious truth of Tracy’s letter as if my heart were blotting paper pressing again and again at a pool of spilt ink.

  A dull force behind my eyes was spreading to my ears and I sensed a migraine coming on. I had only had one of these before, years ago, towards the end of primary school when I was anxious about moving on. I remember the migraine starting this way and quickly developing into vomiting and blurred vision.

  My fingertips touched the windowpane and the cold went through my hands and up my arms and into my chest and made me shiver. Then I heard the voice. It wasn’t Vanessa, holding the room service menu out for my inspection. It wasn’t Jordan, his affectionate prattle coming upon me unawares. Nor was it my well-spoken mother, having – in her eagerness– arrived in Portsea way too early. The voice was possibly my own mental pulse radiating out through my skull, sounding strange and oracle-like because of the throbbing in my ears. What I heard was an admonitory riddle, the voice saying with some authority: Beth, you’ll be sleeping in the wedding hotel tonight, with the man you thought was Jordan.

  Oh, oh, no. So Jordan was different from the man I had always assumed him to be? There was a sweetie-pie Jordan, and there was a fork-tongued guy who’d been leading me on. But the message was quite ambiguous. It could also mean that Jordan was exactly the soft-hearted man he had always seemed. And in that case I should go back to believing in him; I should push all doubts aside. Whoever Jordan was, the wedding would proceed – the voice was damn sure about that. We would be sleeping in the master bedroom tonight as we’d done two months ago. The wedding was a fait accompli, for better or worse, for richer or poorer. No, Beth, you need not anticipate making a shameful last-minute departure from the hotel. Goodbye, guests, goodbye! Let some other woman make a premature exit. It would not be me. I would not be her. The letter could not possibly be true.