How I came to be in England - Part 36

The Englishman and I set the date for my move to England for 25th February 1984.

I'd take the train through Europe, and then cross the Channel over to Harwich. This way I could send all my worldly possessions separately to my new home country, rather than be limited to carrying it all in suitcases onto a flight.

I bought the train ticket at Helsinki railway station on a cold windy day. Afterwards I picked up two large cardboard boxes from Valintatalo, the cheap food and clothes store opposite my bus stop. I struggled onto the bus, and occupied two seats, getting disapproving looks from the other commuters. The last thing they needed was to abandon a seat to a cardboard box. I ignored the other passengers and looked out of the window. It was just past three but already dark. The little snow that had fallen after the New Year had quickly disappeared, leaving Helsinki dull and rainy.

As I watched more passengers board the bus at the next stop, I thought about the items I'd take with me to England. The two large coffee cups and saucers my Mother had left me when she moved to Stockholm, the pestle and mortar my Grandfather made during the war when he worked at the ammunition factory in Tampere. All my books including the heavy, thick ones for the exams I was going to take at the Finnish Embassy in London, and all my LP's. The Englishman and I had discussed on the phone whether I'd need to take the ones we both owned by Earth Wind & Fire, Haircut One Hundred, Billy Joel or The Police. The Englishman thought I'd be crazy to pack them, but I wasn't sure. These LP's were like my friends, they'd kept me sane at night when lonely and desperately missing my Englishman in my Father's little house in Espoo.

The next day I went to pick up the wedding invitations. The Englishman and I had spent a long time on the telephone drawing up a list of guests. He'd come up with only ten, including his parents, Godmother, sister and brother with their spouses, and the friends who he shared the house in Southsea with. He said the flights were so expensive many of his friends couldn't afford to make the trip to Helsinki. The same conversation with my Father was fruitless. 'Oh, you must decide, how am I supposed to know who wants to come to your wedding?'

Then, after he'd been sitting in front of the TV for half an hour, he shouted, 'Oh my Mother and my step sisters. I guess they'll want to come now that old bastard is dead.'

I sighed. He would always have to put some-one down. Even if my Father was referring to his step-father who'd refused to feed and cloth him when his own Mother re-married. I'd heard the story so many times: how the man had promised my Grandmother that her son would be educated and even get his own room in the new home he'd built for his new bride. And then after only one week he said he would throw the new wife out too if the boy stayed. I'd often wondered what my Father had done during that week after his Mother's wedding to receive such treatment. Or was the new husband just as evil as my Father said he was. I'd never met him; my Father was reunited with his Mother only after the evil step father had died.

The conversation about guests was more enjoyable with my Mother. We made a list of over thirty people, including Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, my friends from school and university. As usual when I spoke on the phone with my Mother I'd made sure my Father was out. I couldn't bear the nasty things he would say about her afterwards, when he'd heard who was at the other end of the line. I had a long talk with my Mother about the wording of the invitations too. The Englishman had given me the words, but I wasn't sure whether the Finnish text should reflect the official tone of, 'Mrs and Mrs so-and-so have the pleasure in inviting you to the wedding of their daughter and Sub-Lieutenant Englishman, RN.' There was nothing similar in Finnish that wouldn't sound pompous and old-fashioned. Eventually we settled on a simple wording, in slightly more formal Finnish.

The printers were in Lauttasaari, in a small industrial park at the far end of the island. As I passed the street where my old flat stood, I felt a little sad. Life with my old boyfriend, fiance, was dull but it was safe. I wondered as I saw a light in my old window, and a new set of dark curtains, whether I was making a grave mistake. What if England turned out to be a difficult country to live in? What if people were unfriendly - even discriminating - against foreigners like me? What if I didn't get a job and ended up being a Navy house-wife like Lucinda in Scotland? What if the Englishman turned out to be equally possessive and jealous as my former fiance?

The man with ink-stained fingers pulled out a copy of the invitations for me to see. He left two dirty fingermarks in a corner of the card, embossed with the heavy, beautiful gold lettering. I re-read the text and blushed. Was this really for me? If only my family lived up to the fine wording and look of the invitation. Especially the 'Mr and Mrs have the pleasure in inviting you to the wedding of their daughter' struck me as false. I wasn't even sure my parents would be able to physically sit in the same room, and here they were portrayed as the most wholesome of happy couples inviting family and friends to their daughter's wedding. I turned the card over and put it down on the counter.

'They're good,' I said to the man. He handed me a plastic bag filled with the fifty heavy cards I'd ordered. I handed the money over and he wrote out a receipt.

When my Father came home from work that evening, I showed him the invitations. I knew he'd be glad the number of guests wouldn't exceed 50, that was at least 25 less than the maximum he was expecting. He sat heavily in one of the plush comfy chairs and perched his reading glasses at an angle on the end of his nose.

'What's this?' he said holding the card and looking at me over his glasses.

I was standing next to him, but now sat down. For some reason my heart started to beat a little faster, 'The wedding invitations.'

He looked down at the at the single card I'd handed him. Frozen to a spot, saying nothing.

'It's in English as well as in Finnish, because...' I started. I wondered if he was offended by the bi-lingual text. 'We speak Finnish in Finland,' he'd often say when my Swedish-speaking friends came to visit the house.

'What's this?' he said, pointing his fine long finger at the sentence, 'Mrs and Mrs X have the pleasure in inviting...'

'It's the English text. I thought since half, or in fact it's much less than a half, but all the same, they don't understand Finnish, so I thought, being that it is...'

'Not that!' he said, loudly. 'It's me who's inviting these people, not your Mother.'

'Yes, I know that...' I was puzzled, what did he mean 'not your Mother'?

'It's me who's paying for it.' His pale blue eyes, over the wonky glasses, were on me. His lips turned downwards. His hand, holding the card was trembling.

'What?' A chill ran down my spine. Even before I heard him say it, I had a premonition about what he was going to say.

'I don't want that Bitch on the invitation.'

I said nothing. My throat felt dry, I felt faint.

'And I don't want her anywhere near the wedding.'

There was a long silence. I struggled to find any words. I felt tears well up in my eyes. 'You mean my own Mother can't come to my wedding?' I said with a trembling voice. I willed it to sound normal, or firm, but I had no breath left in me.

He said nothing for a while. Then there was a dry final comment, 'I'm paying for everything. Not your Mother. Me. And I don't want to see that Bitch there.'

I ran out of the room, clutching the plastic bag of invitations, tears running down my face. The hate I felt for my Father at that moment was even greater than the love I felt for the Englishman.

I thought I might kill him.

How I came to be in England - Part 25

The Englishman and I drove up to Scotland on Boxing Day after a lovely, jolly Christmas with his parents in Wiltshire. The journey took a whole day. The Englishman had bought new tapes for the trip, ABC's Lexicon of Love, Night and Day by Joe Jackson and East Side Story by Squeeze. We sang along to the tracks and I tried not to think how apt the lyrics of Tempted were to us. We stopped for lunch - scampi in a basket - in a pub somewhere near the Lake District, in the shadow of an imposingly dark mountain. The sun never made an appearance that day in December and we arrived in Edinburgh in the dim light of a Scottish winter afternoon. It was raining, but the warm welcome the Englishman's friends gave us made up for the bad weather outside.

Lucinda was the first naval wife I'd ever met properly. Her husband, a balding man with a constant smile on his face, Richard, immediately went to 'mix the drinks'. Then he took our bags upstairs. I was ashamed for the amount of luggage I carried. I wanted to explain that I'd taken heavy text books with me, but Richard just smiled and said, 'Don't worry your pretty little head about it.' He winked at my Englishman. 'You've done well there.' I was glad Richard had turned towards the stairs and didn't see me blush.

Lucinda was heavily pregnant. 'I'm at the waddling stage,' she said the next morning when she poured hot tea into two brown glass mugs from a flower patterned tea pot. I smiled at her and looked down at the steaming milky stuff in front of me. I turned my face away from the smell. How to tell Lucinda I didn't drink tea?

The 'boys' as she called the men had left early for work at the Rosyth base. I'd not seen my Englishman in uniform since I'd met him at the British Embassy cocktail party in Helsinki two years before. He looked even taller than usual in his black trousers and a navy jumper with golden lapels. His eyes appeared darker. When he kissed me goodbye, I got a smell of diesel from the scratchy wool. 'You girls can natter to your hearts' content,' Richard smiled. My Englishman winked at me and placed the white cap on his head.

Trying to drink my tea, I looked over to the central garden between the semi-detached houses that made up the naval quarters. The grass was lush and green, but the grey concrete of the houses opposite and the steely skies above made the space look oppressive. I glanced at my watch. It was only nine o'clock, eight hours till I'd see my Englishman again.

'It's laundry day today,' Lucinda said and sighed, heavily lifting herself up from the chair. 'I like to have a daily routine. Makes time pass quicker.'

I looked at her. She had a pretty face, with large pale blue eyes and a luminous complexion. Her long hair, which she kept in an old-fashioned loose bun, was very fair, almost grey. Her vast tummy had spread around her hips and to her backside. The middle of her body looked out of place with her slender wrists and small ankles. I wanted to ask how long she'd been married, if she'd had a career. Or what she'd done before dealing with washing and ironing, dusting and tidying. But Lucinda liked to talk, not to answer questions. She wanted to show how I too could become an efficient housewife. I promised myself never, ever to sink as low as Lucinda had, and never, ever have children.

We stayed two nights with Lucinda and Richard at their naval quarter, until a room in a flat became available on the day before New Year's Eve 1982.

The Englishman and I drove to a part of Edinburgh called Leith in the dark. 'It's an old tenement building,' the Englishman said, but I didn't know what that meant. He parked the car on a narrow street, and hauled our luggage out of the boot. All I could think was that we'd have our own place for five weeks. We could come and go as we pleased, we could stay in bed all weekend if we wished.

The vast hallway had a wide, stone staircase. There was a strong smell of disinfectant. On the second floor landing the Englishman stopped in front of a door, one of many that looked exactly the same, and rang the bell. A slim dark-haired girl appeared, and immediately flung herself onto the Englishman. He kissed her cheek, and freeing himself from her embrace, pulled me to his side. 'This is my girlfriend.'

'Hi,' the girl said and took my hand. Her slim fingers felt bony and cold.

The flat had high ceilings and smelled musty. Our room was the largest, overlooking the street. There was a mattress on the floor, an electric fire and a comfy chair covered in dark green velveteen fabric. Heavy brown curtains were drawn across a large bay window.

'This is great,' the Englishman said.

'How do you know her? ' I asked as casually as I could after the dark-haired girl had left us alone in the massive room. The Squeeze lyrics rang in my ears, 'Tempted by the fruit of another, Tempted but the truth is discovered'. Was this slim girl with the cold fingers the Englishman's 'mistake'? Would he really bring me under the same roof as 'the girl'?

'Oh, she's the sister of a friend.' The Englishman took me into his arms and kissed my neck. I closed my eyes and decided not to think about anything else but the sensation of his body against mine.