Page 57 of Husband Material
Except then, somewhere at the back of my mind, a tiny glitter bomb of a boy in internet-friendly makeup said,It’s worth rolling the dice.
And so instead, what came out of my mouth was, “We should get married.”
I’D AGREED TO MEET JAMESRoyce-Royce—the other James Royce-Royce—during my lunch hour outside an embarrassingly middle-end jewellers in central London. He turned up exactly on time with Baby J strapped to his chest, making him look like the world’s most wholesome kidnapper.
“Do you two ever put him down?” I asked.
He blinked at me exactly once. “Yes. Just not in the middle of London.”
That was fair. The last thing you wanted to do was put your kid down for five minutes and then come back to find he’d been detonated by the bomb squad. “So how’s…” I found myself pointing at Baby J.
I didn’t know how to talk to or about children at the best of times, and mostly I got away with it because I usually encountered them as part of large groups of less crap people who did all the cooing for me. But today it was just me and Baby J. Worse, Baby J was a particularly difficult child to talk about because when the James Royce-Royces had first brought him home, he’d looked ever so slightly like something Jim Henson had built out of foam and ping-pong balls. And, needless to say, James Royce-Royce would keep saying things likeIsn’t he darling? Isn’t he the most darlingthing you’ve ever seen?And I would say things likeWell, he’s quite wet. Are they all this wet?
“He’s fine,” said James Royce-Royce who, where babies were concerned, was definitely my favourite of the James Royce-Royces.
I redirected my awkward glance from the child to the jewellers. “Um, thanks for coming.”
“No problem.”
It had been a little over a week since I’d, y’know, accidentally proposed to Oliver in a fit of whatever the hell that had been a fit of. Of course he’d said yes, correctly discerning that if he’d said no, I’d have changed my name, moved to Pluto, and joined the French Foreign Legion. Since then, we’d had one or two short conversations, mostly led by Oliver and mostly focused on what a sensible choice it was to get married because of next-of-kin benefits and mild tax breaks. Which was what happened when, instead of proposing on one knee at the Eiffel Tower, you did it in a kitchen while your partner had his head in a cupboard. And probably meant I owed Oliver…not a do-over exactly, I was never doing that again, but at least a decent ring.
Well. The decentish ring I could get on my budget.
The decentish ring I could get on my budget given about eighty percent of engagement rings were total shit.
“Shall we go in?” asked James Royce-Royce.
Yes. The answer was yes. I couldn’t get a ring if I didn’t go in. “Maybe?”
“If you don’t like this shop, there are three others within eight minutes’ walk, two of them within the same price range.”
“It’s not the shop. I’m just, I don’t know, nervous I think?”
“That’s because you’re a commitment-phobe.”
“With good reason.”
“Not with good reason,” James Royce-Royce told me firmly. “Dogs aren’t more likely to bite people who are scared of dogs.”
“What? I’m getting married, not a pet.”
He looked down at Baby J, who was currently distracted by all the sparkly things in the window. “You had a bad experience once, and you’re afraid it’ll happen again. But past performance is no guarantee of future results.”
I think that was meant to be reassuring. And if I’d been investing in a stock portfolio, it might have been. Or maybe I was unreassurable right now. After all, part of the reason I’d asked James Royce-Royce to come with me, instead of anyone else I could have asked, is that I knew I could rely on him to give me an opinion that wasn’t overbearingly romantic (like Bridget or James Royce-Royce) or crushingly cynical (like Priya or, well, me).
“Come on, then,” I said with about as much conviction as I could summon. “Let’s put a ring on it. By which I mean buy a ring that I can give to Oliver, which he can wear if he wants. Maybe. If it doesn’t need resizing, which it probably will.”
Pushing open the door, we stepped into that churchy hush that all jewellers seemed to cultivate, as if they were trying to instil a sense of inadequacy that could be dispelled only by spending more than you could afford.
I was instilled with a sense of inadequacy.
And my credit was nowhere near good enough to dispel it.
To quell my rising panic, I peered into one of the counters, as if I knew what the fuck I was doing. Except I didn’t. I wasn’t even looking at rings.
“Can I help you, sir?”
I looked up to see a slender, ashen-faced man in a three-piece suit who somehow looked like he had a pencil moustache, while also being completely clean-shaven. “Um,” I said. “Um.”
