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Faramir was already in the cafe when Disa bounced in. He got to his feet – Disa recalled Éowyn remarking on this when she’d first started seeing him. “It’s like he’s in a 1930s film or something. Impeccable manners. I feel like he ought to buy a hat just so he can raise it.”
Disa, being Disa, went straight in for the bear hug. For a moment she sensed a certain stiffness, then Faramir relaxed and hugged her back. Damn… those were some muscles, under that sweatshirt... Éowyn had mentioned as much, but feeling them was something else. Not as built as Durin, mind. Disa liked her men to have their assets on display, rather than going stealth. But she did begin to get an inkling of why Éowyn spent so much time with that fatuous grin on her face.
“Congratulations. So you’re an engaged man?”
“Thank you.” He beamed at her, looking adorably happy and almost slightly drunk.
“So…” She held him at arms length and looked him up and down. “How the fuck did you pull that one off?”
“I… err… asked her, and she said yes.”
“Yeah, I gather that’s how it went down. But how did you get the world’s most emotionally unavailable human being to agree to marriage? I mean, seriously, she’s like a skittish race horse as soon as feelings get mentioned.”
“Caught her unawares.”
“So not the big proposal over candlelit dinner, with the waiter primed to bring in a bouquet of roses with a ring hidden in the middle of them?”
Faramir snorted with laughter, then detached himself from Disa’s grasp and sat down. “No. Not a big romantic proposal. More of a spur of the moment thing.”
Disa sat down in the chair opposite.
“Where? When? Come on, spill the beans. All we know is Éowyn showed up at today’s rehearsal of Götterdammerung with a ring, and ever since the back of the second violins have been twittering like a murmuration of starlings. Or perhaps a murder of crows. Given that Jess on the back desk was desperate for the big set-piece proposal from her bloke and feels Éowyn's stolen her thunder. So… when did you pop the question.”
“After Die Walküre.”
“And where? Come on, set the scene for me. Tell me all the deets.”
Faramir laughed again, and said, with a slightly hang-dog expression, “Bradford bus station.”
“You are shitting me.”
“No. It just sort of slipped out.”
Disa grinned wolfishly. “Don’t change the subject. I’m asking about your proposal, not your bedroom antics.”
“You are incorrigible.”
“It’s my middle name.”
The interrogation was interrupted temporarily by the arrival of the waitress to take their order. Disa went for the sausage butty. Faramir contented himself with a BLT sandwich.
“So, anyhow,” said Disa, watching the waitress’s retreating back. “You said you wanted to meet up.”
“Yes. I have a favour to ask.”
“Go on. Not promising anything.”
“You’ll want to do this. You can’t resist a challenge.” Faramir paused for effect, then started to play an imaginary piano on the edge of the table.
DUM dum dum DUM dum dum DEE dum DEE dum DUM dum dum DUM dum dum DEE dum DEE dum... His right hand moved up an imaginary octave. DEEDLE dee…. DEEDLE dee… DEEDLE dee… DA DUM.
Disa started to whistle the film theme in time with his imaginary piano part. Faramir’s face took on a look of satisfaction at the thought that his musical clue had been so readily recognised.
“So,” said Disa. “What is my mission, should I choose to accept it?”
“Well, you know what Éowyn is like.”
“I do indeed. I take it this is to do with the aforementioned skittish race horse behaviour tendencies.”
“Got it in one. I was quite surprised she let me get her a ring. But she’s gone all ‘Let’s just go down the registry office, grab a couple of randoms off the street, and get the bit of paper.’ Which is fine if that’s what she really wants – and knowing Éowyn, that’s not beyond the bounds of possibility. But my hunch is that what she really wants…”
“What she really, really wants,” sang Disa.
“Shut up, will you? Anyway, I’m worried that she’s doing an Éowyn and thinking she’s not worth the fuss. Which is of course bollocks. Of course she is worth the fuss.”
“Ah. Yeah, I think I begin to see where you’re coming from.”
“Now, obviously, I’m not suggesting the full meringue and confetti. She would hate that. But I suspect that part of her maybe would like her friends coming along to celebrate. You see, I’m really not sure where we are on the spectrum from skittish race horse to secretly would quite like to be made a fuss of.”
“Why don’t you just ask her?”
“I intend to. But I’m also very aware that there’s a risk that she’ll tell me what she thinks I want to hear. Now, normally I can read her like an open book when she tries that stunt. But in this case…”
“In this case?”
“Well…” Faramir paused. “I may be too emotionally invested myself to know where what she wants begins and where my own wish fulfilment ends.”
“So what do you want, oh skittish stallion race horse?”
Faramir rolled his eyes at this epithet. “I want… Well, most of all I want what will make her happy. But yes, part of me does want her to be… Centre of attention sounds all wrong. But to know she’s the centre of my universe, and I want to say that not just to her, but to… Well… Friends, family, the whole world basically.”
Disa started to sing. Well, part sing, part declaim. Singing wasn’t her strength but she did her best. She launched into Mozart’s recitative in which the randy page boy, Cherubino, demands that Susanna proclaim his love not only for the countess (the classic crush on an older woman), but also for Barbarina (rather more age-appropriate but with a dragon of a father), Marcellina (desperation – surely an indication of how out-of control adolescent hormones can get), in fact, to all the women in the palace:
“Leggila alla padrona,
“leggila tu medesma;
“leggila a Barbarina, a Marcellina;
“leggila ad ogni donna del palazzo!”
She paused for breath and eyed Faramir, who nodded with a quietly amused look of recognition on his face.
“You’ve got the picture,” Faramir said. “Although in my case, it’s declaring my love for a single woman to anyone who will listen,” he added, wistfully.
“Yeah. You’re practising your ‘Mr. Faramir Earl’ signatures on the back of your school notebooks and drawing hearts round them.”
Faramir fixed her with an implacable look of annoyance. “Can I just say, from the bottom of my heart, and with profound sincerity, fuck off to the far side of fuck, and when you get there, fuck off some more?”
“Mwah, mwah, love you too.”
“Anyway, to get back to the point, I could do with a second opinion on whether Éowyn really wants to just get the piece of paper or whether she’d secretly like a fuss made of her.”
“Ha, you really are in a pickle over this, aren’t you? You’ve just split an infinitive.”
Disa bided her time for the next few days, waiting for her opening. It came in the form of a hastily organised lunch in central Leeds. The Bradford run of the Ring Cycle had finished (to rave reviews in the papers), so Disa was back to the day job and to trying to pick up snippets of free-lance work here and there. Éowyn's orchestra were now into rehearsals for a run of symphony performances (part of their separate existence from the opera company), a run which unfortunately only included staples of the orchestral repertoire with only four horn parts. No Mahler, no Bruckner, no Strauss (R), no extra free-lancers needed. Still, catching up with her friend in her lunch break was good.
There was an obvious downside to this plan – Éowyn was exploring the eateries of central Leeds and had got as far on her list as a trendy vegan place in the Thornton Arcade. No bacon butty. Disa felt bereft. As she stood in the doorway, she realised there were two downsides – Éowyn had been joined by some of her mates from the orchestra. So no chance to talk weddings. Actually, scrub that: Jess and Emily were among the group, so there would be plenty of chance to talk weddings, just entirely the wrong sort of weddings, the sort guaranteed to make the skittish race horse throw her rider and run loose in entirely the wrong direction.
She ordered a spicy burrito of some sort (surely the spices would go some way towards compensating for the absence of bacon – though on eyeing the girl at the counter with her blonde dreadlocks and nose ring, Disa wasn’t sure that the kitchen’s idea of spicy and hers would coincide), then went over to the table and sat down. Sure enough, Jess was in mid flow, and Éowyn looked like she wanted to see if the French foreign legion had a marching band she could join.
“Have you decided on colours? Bridesmaids’ dresses, and the flower theme, and table-toppers? And cake – traditional, or something innovative?”
Éowyn shrugged. “Registry office with a couple of witnesses. That’ll do me fine.”
“That’ll do…” Disa laughed. “Six months in Yorkshire and you’ve gone native.”
“When we get married,” said Jess (seemingly forgetting that the elaborate proposal of her dreams still hadn’t taken place), “Benedict’s going to wear a kilt. I do think men look lovely in kilts. Will Faramir wear one, do you think?”
“He’s from fucking London,” said Éowyn, shortly.
“Come to think of it,” said Disa (who was in a slightly combative mood due to the absence of bacon, and currently not above starting a fight), “Benedict’s not Scottish either, is he?”
“But his family roots are in Cornwall,” said Jess, defensively. “It’s all Celtic.”
Éowyn rolled her eyes.
The burrito arrived, accompanied by some weedy looking green leaves and yes – of course, it had to be – a dollop of anaemic potato salad. Disa took a bite. Spicy, my arse.
Fortunately, the conversation moved on to other subjects, and Disa womanfully soldiered through her lunch. Afterwards, she lingered in the doorway as the others started to head off towards the rehearsal rooms, holding Éowyn back.
“Got time for a walk?” She watched Jess and the others head up the arcade.
Éowyn nodded. “Twenty minutes. The rehearsal’s down to cover a string-only movement, I’m not needed back till half past. Be nice to manage a conversation that isn’t… slightly crazy.”
Once they were out of earshot, headed safely in the opposite direction, Disa said “Jess is okay really. She’s just gone a bit crazy over this whole wedding thing.”
“It’s got me wondering why the fuck I said yes. Living together would do fine.”
Disa stopped, and looked at her. “Do you really think that?” God, that was not the news she wanted to take back to Faramir.
Éowyn shook her head. “No. I do want to marry him. I really love the guy. It’s just… Well, I want to be married. Not necessarily get married. In fact, if I could be married without getting married that would be briliant.”
Which seemed a healthy enough attitude, as far as Disa was concerned. But then she remembered her mission. Fuck. How the fuck do you start this kind of conversation? Then it struck her that her initial instinct of ‘just ask’ was in fact the right one – it was simply that Faramir was also right that he couldn’t be the one to ‘just ask’. She, on the other hand, could.
“What do you really want? I mean, for you. Not ‘what I think Faramir might like’, or even worse ‘the most I think I deserve’ – ‘cos I do get the feeling that this ‘registry office and two witnesses and the piece of paper’ thing is coming from a place of ‘I don’t deserve more than that’.”
Éowyn went completely silent. They walked side-by-side for quite some time as the lunchtime crowds of shoppers and office workers on their lunch-breaks surged around them.
“I don’t know,” she said, eventually. “Not to be the centre of attention. None of this walking up the aisle in a fluffy white dress stuff. But…”
She went silent again. Disa took a sidelong glance. Fuck, it’s like drawing teeth.
“If I could just have a party with my favourite people. Once upon a time that would have been home, the farm. But not now. Not after…”
Disa reached out and patted her arm. They rounded the corner into Albion Place, part of a circuit neither of them had explicitly agreed to, but their feet seemed to have decided was just the right length to get Éowyn back to her rehearsal on time.
“Éomer went to a stag do recently. Well, it wasn’t really a stag do – more a both-of-the-couple pre-wedding do. They’d booked a youth hostel for the weekend so they could go for walks and hang out with their friends. I think I’d like that. Only for the actual wedding.”
Disa perked up, and turned her head to look directly at Éowyn, more or less for the first time since they’d left the cafe.
“No sit down meal with fancy table decorations. No strings of bridesmaids. Just hanging out with friends. They’d be there for the actual getting hitched bit, of course. So I suppose the hostel would have to be near somewhere licenced to do weddings. But mainly I think I’d like… Somewhere we could go for walks, play music, talk. No fancy meal, just order in pizza. Or curry. Can you have wedding curries?”
“Wedding curry sounds fucking brilliant to me. I think you can have whatever you bloody well want,” Disa said, firmly. Then added “Tell Faramir this…”
“He put you up to this, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. But with good intentions. He didn’t want to ask himself because he could see the two of you in some sort of downward spiral of ‘I think he wants… so I’ll say I want it too,’ and ‘I think she wants… so I’ll say I want it too,’ so you’d end up with some sort of compromise that neither of you actually wanted. The classic ‘horse designed by a committee’.”
“Oh…” Then… “Do you know what he wants?”
“Mainly a chance to say ‘This is the woman I love’ in front of all his family and friends. He wants – needs, I think – to tell everyone how much you mean to him. Beyond that, I don’t think he cares.” She grinned at Éowyn. “C’mon girl, you know what a daft soppy sod he is at heart. Heart as in that thing he wears on his sleeve.”
Éowyn broke into a smile that lit up her whole face. “He does, doesn’t he?”
“He thinks the sun shines out of your bloody arse.”
Faramir sat down at the table, and placed the ticket with the order number between them.
“Disa, you’re a bloody miracle worker.”
“Yeah well after I’d free-soloed the Burj Khalifa and swum round an underwater records centre with no scuba gear, asking Éowyn what she wanted for her wedding was a piece of cake.”
“Thank you, though.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“Well, we’ve got two weekends that are possibles – neither of us have concerts, hostel available. I just wanted to run them past you to check you and Durin could come, because you, Durin, Boromir – and I suppose Éomer – are who we need there, everyone else is a nice addition.”
“Thanks. Let’s see the dates.” Then she gave a slightly wicked grin. “You still haven’t quite forgiven Éomer for his whole ‘you’re not good enough for my sister’ shtick, have you?”
“Give it a couple of decades…”
Disa looked at the dates, then pulled out her phone and rang Durin. After a brief exchange she said “Either one is okay for us.”
“Great. Boromir and Éomer said the same.”
“So which one are you going for.”
Faramir beamed at her. “The first one, of course.”
Disa gave a chuckle. “Of course.”
~o~O~o~
This is what Faramir’s playing on the table top (of course).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLo9k8Gifb0
Cherubino’s recitative and aria where he’s explaining to Susanna that he’s written a song about being in lust with every woman he meets, but the countess in particular.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AWQgm_1VUA
(Sorry, recording quality is rather poor, but I wanted the recitative as well as the aria.)