The car turned through the gates of Clarence House late that evening, and as the door closed behind them and the evening dissolved into the familiar, warm quiet of home, Camilla did something she had been doing for exactly two months now with the same vertiginous, slightly incredulous pleasure each time: she hung up her own jacket, in her own hallway, in the house where she lived.
She was still not entirely accustomed to the word. It arrived sometimes in the middle of perfectly ordinary moments – signing a letter, pouring a glass of water, watching him read – and landed with a small, private shock of delight that she suspected might never entirely diminish. Husband. Fifty-seven years old, and the word still felt like a present she had not yet finished unwrapping.
"Well," she said, turning to look at him.
He was standing in the middle of the hallway in his dinner jacket, his bow tie already undone and hanging loose around his collar, his hands in his pockets, looking at her with the expression she had come to think of as his best one. Not the formal, public expression, not the dutiful, engaged expression, not even the warm, social expression that he deployed so fluently in rooms full of people. This one. The private one. The one that was only ever for her.
"That was rather fun," she said.
"It was rather fun," he agreed again. He had a way, occasionally, of agreeing with her that managed to convey that he was not merely agreeing but was, in fact, delighted to agree, which was one of the many qualities she had come to find enormously endearing.
"India," she said, almost to herself, wandering through toward the drawing room, her heels clicking on the floor. "I had forgotten how extraordinary it is. All that colour."
"We should go," he said, following her. "Properly. I have always wanted to—"
"Darling, you have always wanted to go everywhere," she said affectionately. "Your bucket list would take four lifetimes."
"Then we had better get started," he said, and the ease with which he said we still made something warm move through her chest.
She crossed the drawing room to the small side table where the radio lived, a slightly battered thing that had migrated from room to room over the years and had ended up here by a process that neither of them could entirely account for. She switched it on, not looking for anything in particular, just wanting to fill the room with something, some sound to settle the pleasant, buzzing residue of the evening.
The radio crackled for a moment, cycling through static, and then landed with a decisive click on something bright and brassy and entirely unmistakeable.
"Ooh, we're stuck in a moment…"
She recognised it immediately, the opening of that ridiculous, brilliant, irresistibly cheerful song from the eighties, the one that had been everywhere one summer, the Huey Lewis song with the bassline you felt in your sternum and the chorus that demanded, on pain of social embarrassment, that you sing along.
She started laughing before she had consciously decided to.
She turned around. Charles was standing in the middle of the room with an expression of profound amusement. "Is that—"
"It absolutely is," she confirmed.
"I don't mind, stuck with you / In this fortunate time…"
She looked at him. He looked at her. The song bounced off the walls of the drawing room with the cheerful, infectious energy of something that had been released into the wild and could not be reasoned with.
"Don't you dare," she said, already laughing again.
"I wasn't going to do anything," he said, in the tone of a man who was absolutely going to do something.
He crossed the room towards her, his bow tie swinging loose, and took her hand with the confidence of a man who has decided, at some point this evening, that life is simply too short and too wonderful not to dance to Huey Lewis and the News in his own drawing room. He pulled her into a hold that was approximately forty percent ballroom and sixty percent improvised, and they began to move.
It was not, it had to be said, elegant. The song did not particularly invite elegance. It invited something else, something more like abandon, the arms-out, chin-up, entirely undignified joy of a person who has run out of reasons not to be happy. Camilla laughed, fully and without restraint, the real laugh, the one she had been giving him since the beginning, the loud and slightly improper one that she had never been able to moderate in his presence and had long since stopped trying to.
He was grinning. Not smiling, not his public smile, but grinning, the slightly boyish, unguarded expression that she had been seeing for more than thirty years in private and that still had the power to make her feel twenty-four years old and utterly reckless.
"It's no mistake, we're stuck together…"
"That is," she said, slightly breathlessly, as he turned her, "frankly a ridiculous song."
"It's an excellent song," he said, with dignity.
"It is absolutely not an excellent song."
"It is expressing a very legitimate sentiment," he said.
"It's expressing the sentiment that two people are trapped together as if that were a cause for celebration," she said.
"Which it is," he said. "Objectively."
She looked at him, at the loose bow tie and the grin and the complete, magnificent absence of anyone else in this room or this evening or this life. "Yes," she said, unable to argue with it. "I suppose it is."
They danced through the chorus, past the point of pretending it was anything other than what it was: two people in their late fifties, in their London home, dancing to an eighties pop song with the unself-conscious glee of people who have earned the right not to care how they look.
The song moved into its second verse and Charles executed a turn that was either very bold or slightly miscalculated, she could not entirely tell which, and she stumbled slightly against him, and they stopped moving and stood, her hands on his lapels, his hands at her waist, close enough that the bow tie was tickling her chin.
She straightened his bow tie, which was a complete waste of time given that it was already undone, but it gave her an excuse to keep her hands where they were, which was close to his face, which was looking at her with an expression that had moved, somewhere in the last thirty seconds, from grinning to something else. The something else was familiar and warm and made the room feel fractionally smaller in the best possible way.
"It feels longer," she said. "Not in a bad way. In the way that it feels like it was always this and everything before was just waiting."
He looked at her with the expression that still, after everything, had the power to stop her breath. "Yes," he said simply.
The song continued in the background, its relentless, cheerful rhythm entirely indifferent to the moment it was soundtracking.
It started as the unhurried, deeply familiar kiss of two people who have been kissing each other for decades and have long since moved beyond the need to perform passion, the kiss that is simply the most natural form of punctuation in their private language. But the evening was in it, and the drawing room, and the ridiculous song, and the two months of finally, legally, officially being exactly this, and the kiss deepened, became something more, became the physical distillation of all the things the song had been saying in its uncomplicated, unreserved way.
His hands moved from her waist, tracing the back of her dress. She felt the warmth of them through the fabric, the particular focused quality of his touch that she had known for so many years and which still, stubbornly and wonderfully, reduced her to something considerably less composed than she generally presented to the world.
"I should turn the radio off," she murmured against his mouth.
"Absolutely not," he said.
She laughed, which rather interrupted the kiss, but he didn't appear to mind. He was smiling against her lips, and she was smiling back, and it was possibly the least dignified they had ever been and absolutely the most themselves.
He reached past her and turned the lamp off instead.
The room was warmer in the half-dark, lit only by the light from the hallway, and the song moved into its final chorus. He took her hand and led her to the sofa, sitting down and pulling her close beside him, and she tucked herself against his side with the ease of something entirely habitual and never, at any point, unremarkable.
He undid the clasp at the back of her dress with the practiced ease of a man who had decided early on in their marriage that he was going to be useful in this specific respect and had applied himself to the task with characteristic thoroughness. The dress loosened. His hands moved over her bare back, warm and deliberate, tracing the length of her spine.
She worked on the remaining buttons of his shirt, her fingers unhurried. She had been undoing his shirts for decades, but there was something different about doing it here, married, on a Tuesday evening, with no clock to watch and no pretence of casualness and nowhere else to be. The difference was permanence. The difference was the complete and utter absence of goodbye.
He was looking at her in the half-dark with an expression she knew completely and loved entirely. She reached up and touched his face, her palm against his cheek, and he turned his head and pressed his lips to her palm, and the gesture was so familiar and so specific to him that it made her chest tighten with something too large for a single name.
"Come here," he said softly.
She moved into his arms, and they lay back against the sofa cushions, and his hands and mouth were warm and slow and entirely devoted, moving over her with the intimate expertise of a man who has spent thirty years learning one woman with complete and joyful thoroughness. He knew her. He knew every particular of her, every curve and hollow and the precise geography of her pleasure, and he applied this knowledge with a generous, unhurried attention that made her feel, as he had always made her feel, like the most interesting and most wanted person in any room.
She gave herself over to him with the absolute trust of someone who has nothing left to protect. It was the trust that she had learned slowly, over years, the kind that grew so gradually you barely noticed it until you looked up one day and found that the walls had come down entirely. With Andrew there had always been something held back, some reservation, some part of herself kept in reserve against the possibility of disappointment.
With Charles, the reservation was gone. There was nothing left to reserve against. He was her husband, and she was in her home, and the song was still playing in the background, and outside was London and inside was everything she had ever wanted.
His mouth moved over her breasts, her stomach, the soft skin of her inner thighs, with a devotion so thorough and so genuine that she closed her eyes and let the pleasure build with the patience of someone who no longer had any reason to hurry. He brought her to the edge and held her there with a focus and a precision that was, she had always thought, the most direct expression of the way he loved: completely, specifically, with total and undivided attention.
Her release was long and deep and moved through her in waves, and she said his name, not loudly, just his name, the way she had been saying it since she was twenty-four years old, the word that contained, in her mouth, everything.
He moved up to hold her, and she pulled him close, and their lovemaking was the slow, powerful, deeply familiar joining of two people who have nothing to prove and nowhere to be and all the time in the world. It was the love of two months of marriage and thirty-three years of history, of everything they had survived to reach this sofa in this room in this house that was theirs.
Afterwards, the radio was still playing, some other song now, something she didn't recognise. The room was very quiet except for the sound of their breathing and the distant, indifferent murmur of the city outside.
She was lying with her head on his chest, his hand moving slowly through her hair. The lamp was still off. The light from the hallway made a warm rectangle on the floor.
"Huey Lewis," she said, eventually.
"A man of considerable wisdom," he said.
She laughed, a low, soft sound, against his chest. She could feel the vibration of his answering laugh under her cheek.
"Stuck with you," she said.
"Stuck with you," he agreed, with the particular, private warmth that was only ever for her.
She smiled in the dark, her hand resting over his heart. Outside, London went about its business. Inside, the house was warm and still and entirely, perfectly theirs.
She thought about India, about the colours, about the premiere and the evening and the car journey home and the hallway and the radio and the song. She thought about the word husband and the way it still arrived like a gift. She thought about two months and many years and all the months and years still to come.
She thought: I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
Stuck with you, she thought, with enormous, uncomplicated happiness.
And I could not be more pleased about it.
