Read Online We Had It So Good by Linda Grant - Free Book Online Page A

and John Baines as witnesses. Grace wouldn’t attend. It was a point of principle, she said.
    Stephen thought Andrea looked very pretty in an orange silk maxi dress. They walked together along Little Clarendon Street, past the head shops, and he thought he had never seen her so happy. She means this, he understood. He would go along with the deception if it meant so much to her. Chicks, even liberated chicks, had ideas about marriage that were hard to overcome, they were always waiting for someone to come and rescue them, the person they called the One. He understood this was a marriage of convenience, an immigration wedding to keep him out of the army, and if she thought it was more than that, he would collude with her. Why should I hurt her? he thought. She’s just a kid, a sweet kid. She had saved him from a certain fate in Arlington National Cemetery.
    He hasn’t told me he loves me, Andrea thought. I suppose because he doesn’t. Yet he had bought her a ring, a gold one. “No point in not doing the thing right, kiddo,” he said. So it was not entirely a charade.
    He turned to look at her as they stood in front of the registrar. Christ, he thought. What am I doing? Where am I? Sweat ran down the back of his neck. And then the moment passed. The wedding party went to the Radcliffe Hotel. Ivan had snapped a rosebud from its stem in a passing garden on the way to the register office and given it to Andrea to hold.
    At the Radcliffe they ordered drinks. “And the flower would like a glass of water, please,” Ivan said.
    â€œWell,” said John Baines, who would go on to a full professorship at Cornell, according to a Google search thirty years later. “Next you need to learn all the words of ‘God Save the Queen.’”
    â€œNo way,” Stephen said. “I’m an American.”
    Grace turned up. She was dressed, mockingly, all in white.
    â€œHow are the lovebirds?” she said, sitting down.
    â€œVery happy,” Stephen said, to annoy her.
    â€œI’m sorting out somewhere for us all to live in London,” said Ivan. The undergraduates had finished finals and their Oxford years were drawing to an end.
    â€œNot me,” said Grace. “I’m going to Cuba.”
    â€œAre you now, babe?”
    â€œYou didn’t tell me,” said Andrea. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    Grace looked coldly past her through the window.
    Excellent, thought Stephen, we’ll never see her again.
    Grace and Andrea said good-bye at the railway station. Andrea held her, Grace stood stiff as a board, receiving this embrace. She was leaving everything behind, her trunks of clothes, her books, her pictures, Ivan promised he would look after them for her, but she said there was no need, she was never coming back. “Fuck this fucking country,” she said.
    Stephen envied her the palm trees and the flat blue skies and the waves slapping against the shores of the island. Cuba was hismother’s home, her native land, though she had come to America when she was fourteen years old and thought of herself proudly as an American. In front of the television she had sat in anguish through the Bay of Pigs fiasco. “Those poor dead boys,” she said. “Good-looking young men who are never going to open their eyes again.” And her blue eye shadow formed blue tears that dropped from her chin onto the spotless white collar of her dress.
    Of Castro she said, “That beard! A man with a beard has something to hide. A moustache is very nice, it gives you something to look at on a face, but a beard is just a nest for germs.” Stephen had not sent her any photos of himself with his beard.
    The train trudged along the track with Grace inside it. Ivan said, “Poor girl.”
    But Andrea replied, “Don’t be silly, Grace will do great things, that’s what she is made for.”
    Stephen took the drastic step of cabling California,