He sighed again. ‘My father—I don’t know. Maybe it’s a triumph of hope over experience. But this will be his seventh marriage, and this time his fiancée is younger than I am.’
His father’s seventh marriage? Seeing that many relationships go wrong would make anyone wary of settling down, Isla thought. ‘Maybe,’ she said softly, ‘your father hasn’t found the right woman for him yet.’
‘So this will be seventh time lucky? That’d go down really well in my best man’s speech. Not.’ He blew out a breath. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude to you or take it out on you.’ He grimaced. ‘My father’s charming—that is, he can be when it suits him. He can be great company. But he has a seriously low boredom threshold. And I can’t understand why none of his wives has ever been able to see the pattern before she actually married him. Well, obviously not my mum, because she was the first. But every single one after that. Get married, have a baby, get bored, have an affair, move on. Nothing lasts for Dad for more than five years—well, his last one was almost seven years, but I think Julie was the one to end it instead of Dad. Or maybe he’s slowing down a bit now he’s in his mid-fifties.’ Harry sighed. ‘I really liked Fliss, his third wife. Considering she had to deal with me as a teenager …’ He shrugged. ‘She was really patient.’
‘Did you live with your dad when you were growing up?’ Isla asked.
Harry shook his head. ‘I stayed with him for the occasional weekends, plus a week or so in the long school holidays. I lived with my mum and my three half-sisters. My mum also has a marriage habit, though at least she’s kept husband number four.’ He paused. ‘Maybe that’s it. Dad only has sons—six of us. Maybe he’s hoping that his new wife is carrying his daughter.’
Isla added it up swiftly. Harry was one of nine children, soon about to be ten? And he’d said something about his mum being his father’s first wife. ‘I take it you’re the oldest?’
He nodded. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I like my brothers and sisters well enough, but there’s a whole generation between me and the littlest ones, so we have absolutely nothing in common. I feel more like an uncle than a brother.’ He gave her a thin smile. ‘And let’s just say the best contraception ever is to get a teenager babysitting for their younger siblings. I definitely don’t want kids of my own. Ever.’
‘Remind me to tell my brother Iain how lucky he is that he only had me and Mags tagging around after him,’ she said.
‘You’re the baby of the family?’ he asked.
‘Yes, and I’m thoroughly spoiled.’
He scoffed. ‘You’re far too sensible to be spoiled.’
‘Thank you. I think.’ She paused. ‘Right. So you don’t want to be the best man and you don’t want to go to the wedding. I’m assuming you’re trying not to hurt anyone’s feelings, so you could always say you can’t make the wedding due to pressure of work. That we’re really short-staffed and you just can’t get the time off.’
‘I’ve already tried that one,’ Harry said. ‘Dad says my annual leave is part of my contract—he’s a lawyer, by the way, so I can’t flannel him—and he says they can always find a locum or call in an agency worker to fill in for me. Plus he gave me enough notice that I should’ve been able to swap off-duty with someone months ago to make sure I could be there.’
‘How about a last-minute illness? Say we had norovirus on the ward and you came down with it?’ she suggested.
‘Norovirus in the middle of summer?’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Nope. That one’s not going to fly.’
‘You have other medics in your family, then?’ she asked.
‘One of my sisters is a trainee audiologist. But everyone knows that norovirus tends to be at its worst in the winter. All the newspapers make a big song and dance about emergency departments being on black alert at the peak of the winter vomiting virus season.’ He sighed. ‘I’ve thought about practically nothing else for weeks, and there just isn’t a nice way to let everyone down.’
‘So the kind approach isn’t going to work. Have you tried telling any of your brothers that you don’t want to go?’
He nodded. ‘Jack—he’s the next one down from me.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He thinks I should be there to support the old man. So does Fin—he’s the next one down from Jack.’
‘And how old are they?’
‘Dad’s kids are all spaced five years apart. So Jack and Fin are twenty-seven and twenty-two, respectively,’ he explained. ‘The odd one out will be the new baby, who’ll be seven years younger than Evan—he’s the youngest.’
‘OK. So you have to go to the wedding. But what about this best man business? Isn’t there anyone else who could do it? Does your dad have a best friend, a brother—or, hey, he could always be different and have a woman as his best man if he has a sister,’ she suggested.
To her relief, that actually made Harry crack a smile. ‘Best woman? I can’t see Auntie Val agreeing to that. She says Dad’s the male equivalent of a serial Bridezilla.’ He took another sip of Merlot. ‘Uncle Jeff—Dad’s brother—has done the duty twice, and so has Marty, his best friend.’
‘So if the three of you have all done it twice, what about your next brother down? Or the youngest one? Could it be their turn?’
‘I could suggest it.’ He paused. ‘But even if I can be just a normal wedding guest instead of the best man, it still means running the gauntlet of everyone asking me how come I’m not married yet, and saying how I ought to get a move on and settle down because I’m ten years older now than Dad was when he got married the first time, and that means I’m totally on the shelf.’
‘Apart from the fact that men are never described as being on the shelf, you would still’ve been a student medic at twenty-two,’ Isla pointed out. ‘And, with the crazy hours that junior doctors work, you wouldn’t have had the time to get married or even spend that much time with your new wife back then.’
‘But I’m not a student or a junior doctor now. In their view, I have no excuses not to settle down.’
‘Maybe you could take a date to the wedding?’ she suggested.
That would be Harry’s worst nightmare. Taking a date to a family wedding implied that you were serious about taking the relationship further; then, when it was clear you didn’t want to do that, someone would get hurt. But Isla clearly meant well. ‘I guess it would be a start—but it wouldn’t stop the questions for long. They’d want to know how we met, how long we’d been dating, how serious it was, when we were planning to get engaged …’ He rolled his eyes. ‘They never stop.’
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