I was at a wedding where somebody got absolutely plastered and spilled red wine on the flower girl in the white dress – just before the photos. And then they hid and tried to pretend they didn’t do it. Okay, it was me…
Michelle, Ipswich
The Hall in winter was exactly as Cleo had imagined it would be. As the first of the hired Bentleys swept through the gates and along in front of the old building, the pebbled drive popping and crackling under the tyres, Cleo’s immediate thought was that it had snowed when she hadn’t been paying attention. After a beat, she realised that it was just frost crisping the lawn and the sloping roof tiles, silver and shining. Already there was the bustle of activity, big white supplier vans with their doors flung open, industrious looking members of staff ferrying boxes, thick pillar candles and fussy, frothy bouquets of flowers through the stately entrance doors.
Beside her on the back seat, Cleo felt Nora craning to look around as the car glided smoothly to a stop. Cleo felt herself leaning forward a little too; the control freak in her wanted to leap from the car and begin coordinating, and it was hell to know that she couldn’t, that she had to leave it all to the events’ manager and her team. The groom’s party were due to arrive before too long, and Nora had to be closeted away in the honeymoon suite long before then. Nora might be an independent, modern, Destiny’s Child-bellowing female, but she was proving oddly traditional when it came to certain aspects of her wedding day, with her big, white dress and her something blue, and with Harry banned from laying eyes on her until she arrived aisle-side.
As Cleo exited the car she saw Bea doing the same from the second Bentley, staggering a little under the weight of Nora’s dress bag, Nora’s mother Eileen following at her heels, her hair already tightly in rollers. Nora’s teenaged sister Finola slunk from the back seats, her earbuds defiantly in place, trailing shocking pink wires from each side of her face and down into her phone, on which she was fixated, flicking at the touch screen lazily with one thumb. Daisy unfurled herself from the front seat of the first car, stretching her hands up towards the cold winter sky, and for a moment Cleo fancied she could see the new curves that were being laid down over her friend’s bones.
Nora approached her mother, tentative. “What do you think, Mammy?”
Eileen glanced around at the stately home, looking impressed despite herself. “Very grand,” she allowed. “It will do very well.”
The wedding coordinator met them at the doors, looking reassuringly corporate in a black dress suit and crisp white blouse, so on the ball that she must have been watching out for them. At an almost imperceptible signal from her, identically dressed minions appeared as if from nowhere to whisk the dress bag away from Bea’s clutches and begin to empty the hire cars’ boots of the girls’ own dresses, overnight bags and general luggage, spiriting everything up to the honeymoon suite. Feeling slightly redundant, Cleo went through the motions of “supervising”.
She remembered her trip out here back in the spring, how Gray had stepped up to offer up his Saturday and his driving services, how the trees on the estate had been fat with blossom and how the year ahead had felt unbelievably long and full of possibility, stretching out in front of them. Back when her growing crush on Gray had nested in only a small part of her heart, back before too many things had been unsaid.
Sarah wondered why Nora had even bothered to get dressed just to sit in a car from the doorway of her block of flats to the doorway of the wedding venue. Within three minutes of being ensconced in the honeymoon suite, she had whipped off her jeans and jumper and dived into a white fluffy dressing gown, the word ‘bride’ proudly picked out across the back in curling, baby-blue script. The staff glided in with mirrored silver trays loaded with glazed breakfast pastries, bottles of champagne and carafes of orange juice. A film-perfect fire crackled merrily in the grate inside an ancient-looking stone fireplace
It was all a far cry from Sarah’s registry office and gastropub jobbie a few years earlier, but, still, she looked at Nora’s colourless cheeks and nervous fingers moving against the slender stem of her champagne flute and recognised much of herself on her own wedding morning. She remembered how it had all been over in a flash – her mother had had to reassure her that, yes, all the legal formalities had been dealt with – they’d said “I do” at all the right moments and signed their signatures in the right place. She’d watched Cole’s profile instead of eating her roast lunch afterwards, too sick with happiness to contemplate a single bite. Cole Norris, her husband. My husband. Sarah Norris’ husband.
Nora was largely ignoring her glass of Buck’s Fizz, peering out of the windows at the expanse of grey skies beyond. “It’s saying it’s due to rain between four and six,” she said again, after consulting the weather app on her mobile phone. “But four and six isn’t too bad, because that’s when we’ll all be inside eating the wedding breakfast anyway, right?”
“Honey, stop driving yourself mad with that thing.” Daisy deftly confiscated the bride’s phone. “Not even you can stop it from raining.”
“My mammy said that rain on a wedding day symbolises the number of tears the bride will shed during the marriage,” Eileen droned from across the room. Nora glanced miserably out of the window again, before grabbing a pastry and commencing comfort-eating.
The unmistakeable crackle of tyres on the drive heralded the arrival of the menfolk.
“Stay back,” Bea ordered from the window, holding her arm out as if she would very literally hold Nora at arm’s length. “It’s Harry’s cars.”
“Does he look worried about the rain too?” Nora enquired, urgently. Bea, who had no idea what sort of expression someone who was worried about the rain might display, didn’t respond. (She also decided not to mention the – quite frankly alarming – amount of Carlsberg Export that seemed to be being unloaded from one of the boots.)
“Come here and check over the presents then,” Cleo urged Nora, with the teacher’s super-senses for the need for distraction. “Is everything here?” Nora and Harry had decided to exchange bags of small but sentimental gifts – and Nora had spent the last two weeks agonising about what to write in the card. Although she’d checked them twice the previous night, Nora removed each neatly wrapped parcel from the bag, counting them, checking that the sticky tape was still lying flat and fixed, holding each close to her heart for a moment.
“Are you okay to deliver these?” Nora asked Bea. Bea had already been informed that the bride/groom present swap was going to be one of her morning duties and had accepted with pleasure.
“Sure. I’ll let Eli know it’s time to head to the drop point,” Bea teased, grabbing up her phone and shoving her feet into a nearby pair of fluffy slippers.
* * *
One of the things that Nora had most loved about Withysteeple was the beautiful staircase, which wound down from a wide, airy mezzanine to the great hall below, and would – no doubt – serve as a sufficiently dramatic entrance for any bride. Bea ran her fingertips lightly over the dark, oiled wood of the banister as she made her way and, not for the first time that morning, thought on how Nora (damnit) had definitely made the right venue choice.
Eli was waiting at the far end of the big landing, his elbows on the balustrade and face unreadable as he stared out across the open space, so clearly in a world of his own. Bea slowed as she approached him. He’d obviously been part way through getting dressed when the call to present-courier had arrived. He was still wearing his jeans, twist-style, loose on his hips and comfortable-looking, and his feet were bare, the toes peeking out oddly intimate. On top he wore a crisp white dress shirt, hurriedly fastened, still open at the neck, navel and cuffs. Bea felt her pulse in odd points of her body. It was inappropriately sexy. She felt the recent cruel-to-be-kind words of Nora and her mother scraping over the surface of her bones.
She’d been dating one of the more loserish entries in her parade of loser ex-boyfriends around the time her best friends returned home from their undergraduate adventures. He’d had a pimped-up car and called Bea “baby”, and at twenty-one it had been an odd tightrope between feeling pleasingly adult and horribly cringey. Back then, non-student Bea was of course the only one of them not living with the parentals, so they’d spent an awful lot of time crammed into her studio flat, a space so meagre one corner of the kitchen worktop worked as both coffee table and bedside table, depending on the need.
Bea had been complaining, as was standard. “He’s driving me mad,” she confessed, as she handed Eli a beer. She remembered, he’d been sitting on her kitchen side, denim-ed legs trailing down the front of the cabinets, towering over her and making her feel agreeably dainty.
“You don’t need him now we’re back,” Nora had laughed, before turning back to the others and leaving Eli and Bea on their own.
“True.” With her little day bed/sofa already full, Bea had leaned up next to Eli; he’d clinked the necks of their bottles together.
“To new chapters,” was all he’d said.
“For you guys, maybe,” Bea had said ruefully. “I imagine my life will go on much as it was before. But what’s next for you? Job Centre on Monday?” Her entire class had just graduated into the worst of the recession and a non-existent job market, the only thing that made Bea feel like not going to university had been the better decision.
Eli had shaken his head. “Meeting at the bank. I’m going to try and get that Career Development Loan.” Bea stood up straighter. Eli had been mentioning on and off that he’d like to do a Masters, train as an architect.
“Wow, big stuff! So, back to Cardiff?” He’d been the furthest away the last three years, and Bea had felt a surprisingly strong pang at the thought of him leaving again.
Eli had shrugged. “A lot of places offer good Architecture courses. I’m keeping my options open.”
“Oh! So you could stay round London?” Bea had been delighted.
“Look, are you going to actually break up with this guy?” Eli had suddenly and wildly changed the subject.
“Um. I dunno? What’s it to you?”
“What’s it to me?” Eli had echoed, in disbelief. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe, Bea, it matters to me because we’ve been friends forever, and I’d like you to be happy? Is that so mad?”
“No.” Bea had felt that burning flush of discomfort she always felt whenever anyone was overly-nice to her.
“How about this one then. How about: it matters to me because I’ve been thinking lately that we would be good together. You and I,” he had clarified, finally, as if Bea would somehow mistake what he meant by ‘we’.
They’d been skirting around this for years. There had been awkward teenaged crushes – but never at the same time; there had been unfinished sentences and over-long looks. But Bea had never actually thought they’d tip over that knife-edge. The silence stretched out between them, a judgmental observer to the conversation they weren’t having, urging her to say something, say something. She needed time to think. She needed for Nora and Cole and Harry to not be mere feet away. And, as was always her way, Bea just groped for the status quo.
“Don’t be daft.” She had said it firmly but not unkindly. “You’re like my best mate.”
And Eli, bless him, had given it just one more try.
“Okay, so, to be clear here, you’re friend-zoning me?” He’d mirrored her tone, faux-normal, but his eyes were dark. Bea had felt the panic pinching harder.
“Let’s not do this,” she’d ground out.
And, somehow, without perceptively moving at all, Eli had turned away from her.
“Okay,” he’d said, still with that harshly pleasant inflection. “We won’t do this.”
Bea still remembered the sickly, hoppy smell from the necks of their beer bottles, and on their breath, and how Eli had been wearing a white-and-navy raglan tee. She’d rehashed that almost-conversation at least a hundred times over the past decade or so, during idle moments, insomniac in the dead of night, or when she was feeling particularly low and lonely – but less often as the years went past. But she was reminded of it now. Maybe she and Eli could have been that ‘we’, had their own wedding day with their own grand staircase. She shook her head, amused and despairing at the same time; the motion caught Eli’s attention finally. His blank face stretched into a wide smile.
Bea stepped forward and gave her old friend a spontaneous hug, pulling him so close that she saw his pulse jumping in his throat.
“What was that for?” he smiled as they parted.
Bea shrugged. “I’m just feeling sentimental today.”