I hate weddings, especially this one, for which I had to pay. Why does the bride’s family have to shell out? Though we would have had to anyway, for Sam’s worthy parents didn’t have two beans to rub together. Though if they’d had them, they would have.
Give me a good funeral any day: some happy memories and encomia rather than fatuous hopes for a dodgy future. No drunken rowdies, no idiotic dancing till early morning, no ill-dressed maids of honour losing theirs with best men desperate to shuck their formal clothing and get on the job.
Lucy’s eyes drifted downwards again, and she selected a cream blouse, pressed it against her chest, looked into the mirror, put it back down. She tested another blouse, rejected it, frowning. Her displeasure was directed more at the activity than the various garments. There were only two days until the wedding, and (as Suzy insisted) choices have to be made.
Lucy had been suborned into compliance. Left to her own devices, she’d have put on a frock, gathered a couple of friends as witnesses – not her parents, nor Sam’s – trotted off to the local registry office, had a celebratory nosh-up with some pals, then gone back to work the next day, a wife.
‘Lucy? I’ve been thinking . . . Can I say something?’
She put down yet another blouse, and sat on the bed. ‘Sure. What?’
‘I just wanted to say, you know, while there’s still time . . .’
‘What?’
‘You don’t have to do this, you know.’
She nodded her head in agreement. ‘I know I don’t! But I got hassled into it by Mummy, and somehow once you agree to a proper wedding you end up with all sorts of stuff that you don’t need or want.’ She leant sideways and began to flick through various items of clothing.
I was determined to persevere, though I had nothing to fall back on emotionally. Suzy told me I needed to ‘work on my relationship’ with Lucy, but I never thought we had one, not quite, which was rather a relief. She was unaccountable to me, and I cannot recall many sustained personal conversations between us. I was rarely alone with her adult incarnation, and vaguely ill at ease when I was. She had made, it seemed to me, a set of uninspired choices, the consequences of which – work at a desk in some down-at-heel centre of worthiness – were no doubt admirable in some abstract way. Sam was another, and far more dangerous, example of her bad judgement.
‘No, love. I’m sorry. Do come over here and sit for a moment.’
Lucy looked up, puzzled by my request for enhanced proximity, and came to sit beside me in the twin armchairs in the alcove by the window, her body turned slightly away, as if shielding herself from unaccustomed intimacy. ‘What’s this all about?’
‘I just want to have a little chat, you know, before the day.’
‘Day? What day? You’re being awfully mysterious.’
‘I’m so sorry, I’m not very good at this. Your wedding day, of course. Saturday.’
She turned to face me squarely. ‘What about it?’
‘Well, I was wondering, perhaps you might be getting cold feet? You seem on edge. And I just wanted to say it isn’t too late if you want to reconsider. I – Mummy and I – would quite understand . . .’
‘Let me get this straight. Are you asking me if I have cold feet, or advising me to have them? Because if you are . . .’
I knew there was some risk involved, but was determined to pursue the thought. ‘It’s just that people often marry in spite of the fact that they have misgivings. They just get carried along with the flow, and are too timid to say “hold on a minute, I’m not sure I’m ready for this”.’
She stood up from her chair, until she was only a few feet away from where I was sitting, and I was looking up at her angry face.
‘How dare you! First Mummy hassling me about clothes and stupid fucking details, now my father is trying to call the whole thing off! That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you want!’
‘No, love, not at all. It’s just that – ’
‘You’ve never liked Sam. You never gave him a chance, did you? You never met him halfway, sat down and talked and tried to get to know him?’
That was true enough. From our first acquaintance, when he came to dinner to meet the parents, uncomfortable in a new jacket and tie, I’d spotted him as the sort of earnest working-class Northern boy who would have benefited from a decent education, had his sharp edges and broad vowels polished and regularised.
She was leaning down now, her face close to mine. ‘And you know what is sad? You don’t get it at all. Sam is his own man, and he has wonderful qualities, you just can’t see them.’
‘Tell me what you mean.’
‘It’s hardly worth bothering,’ she said, standing straight and backing away, making a curiously operatic gesture with her hands. ‘You’d find it hard to recognise his virtues.’
‘Oh yes? Tell me about them. I’m genuinely interested.’
‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘And integrity.’
‘I’m glad you feel that way.’
‘I do. I only wish you did too. And I do want to marry him with all my heart. It’s the only thing in this whole ghastly mess that I’m certain about.’
I stood up to comfort her, though reassuring cuddles are well outside my normal repertoire.
She turned away. ‘Let’s leave it,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘perhaps it was ham-fisted of me. But I meant well.’
‘Did you now?’ she said.
This always seems to happen when I try to be fatherly.
Lucy’s stare, as I perched on my plastic, was a rich amalgam of triumph and warning, and I turned away, unforgiven. I stifled myself, clenched my cheeks.
Suzy elbowed my ribs, then clasped my hand firmly in tacit reassurance. The sleeve of her silk blouse, that we’d bought in a market in Rajasthan fourteen months before, made a shocking contrast with the pallor of her wrist, where the veins traced their purple trails in a manner that should have felt ominous. The royal blue of the silk shimmered, startlingly lit by a tribe of crimson parrots, beaks slightly agape, dangerous and moronic, yearning to squawk or to nip.
She’d been uncertain, in that stifling market smelling of turmeric and petrol, cooking curries and cow dung, urine and the waft of human shit. I gagged with humid disgust. She held the blouse in the air to inspect it, then placed it across her chest.
‘Very nice lady! Very nice! Parrot most lucky bird. I give you good price!’
A tiny boy and his smaller sister, dressed in rags, had followed us around the market, importuning, holding onto Suzy’s skirt and attempting to grab hold of my trouser leg. A quick slap put paid to that. The little boy pointed to his slim but by no means distended stomach, and groaned piteously. The little
