The Vintage Summer Wedding by Jenny Oliver Page A

him, of his adventure, of his excitement. He, too, was going away to be a star. He, too, was going away to make it.
    But as he talked, as the pedestrians strutted past him on their iPhones and a tourist interrupted them and asked him for directions that Luke couldn’t give, she realised that he was as lost as her. Outside the army, outside the regime, the excitement, what did he have? She understood then that he had the memory of a relationship that ended years ago.
    I’m his touchstone to reality, she thought.
    What is he to me?
    She crossed her arms and looked at him, watched his mouth move, watched his eyes crinkle as he chuckled at his own jokes.
    Just a damn good-looking memory, she thought, and the relief was palpable. Luke was a fantasy detached from all the shit that was currently bundled onto her relationship with Seb like barnacles on an oyster shell. Luke was devoid of her feelings of guilt over the wedding money. Her frustration over losing her job. Seb’s sweetness to her when she knew she may not have been so sweet to him had the situation been reversed. The niggling feeling that perhaps she would have punished him.
    For the first time, as she sat back in her chair and finished her now-cold coffee and felt the heat of the sun dip as it started to get dusky, she dreamed of Nettleton. Of getting out at the station and walking across the sun-warmed cobbles of the square and the dappled light of the lime trees sprinkling shadows that danced over the pigeons, the wooden benches and the fountain that turned off abruptly at nine o’clock every night. As Luke spoke and cracked more average jokes and she smiled along with him, she was back on the walk that Seb had made her take on one of their first Nettleton mornings to prove that it wasn’t so bad, when it had been too hot to sleep so they had strolled through the fields, ears of wheat drooping over and brushing their skin, poppies delicate and perfectly still in the misty early morning, the odd lazy bee bouncing off them and butterflies pausing in their path. They had sat on a stile and Seb had poured coffee from a flask and she had moaned that it wasn’t Starbucks and he had pushed her so she’d almost tipped backwards and struggled to keep her balance, and said,
‘Just drink your damned coffee, you spoilt brat.’
And she’d laughed and he had kissed her and put his arm around her and said,
‘Look, look at that,’
as the sun beamed down at them and the sky was so blue it was like the sea, and the view was old oak trees, thatched cottages and ears of wheat as far as the eye could see. ‘
How could you not love that?’
    Anna glossed over the fact that she’d then been bitten by a horsefly and they’d had to go home and Seb had driven to the pharmacy for some cream but it was shut, while she’d tried to have a bath and the water had run brown so, in the end, she’d sulked on the back porch with an ice pack on her massive bite, refusing to speak.
    Her overriding thought was that she had to get back. That the image of Seb and the stile and the view was getting further away, receding like the mouth of a tunnel. Fading as the dusk settled.
    ‘I have to go,’ she said suddenly, cutting off some story Luke was telling mid-flow.
    ‘You can’t go,’ he smirked. ‘We’re catching up. I thought we could go for a drink, maybe get some dinner. I’m not in town for long, Anna Banana.’ He pushed his sunglasses up into his wild hair and his grinning eyes creased at the corners.
    ‘No, really, I have to go. I’m sorry to leave you here, but I have to go home.’
    ‘Running back to Sebastian?’ He shook his head. ‘He’s got you under lock and key, hasn’t he, Anna?’
    ‘No, not at all, it’s just…’ She shook her head, trying to think of something to say. Seeing suddenly that the sum of the parts of his face didn’t always add up to better. That sometimes, like right now, they added up to looking a bit cruel. ‘I’m not feeling that well. I