to Fergie, it left him with the same inability to communicate with women that had afflicted his father, which is why he still regards himself as being rescued the day that new art teacher Cass Gordon turned up in the staff room of the local comprehensive where he was already teaching science.
‘No sooner looked than they loved … no sooner loved than they were screwing like bunnies.’
‘Yes, thank you, Archie.’ This from my sister, Cass.
‘Such a charming sentiment and written in such large letters, as I recall, on the wedding card Fergie’s mother opened.’
True too. Fergie and Cass moved in together a bare few months after they met, a radical thing in our Land That Time Forgot back in the early seventies. A year later the major-general died so that Fergie was able to put down a deposit on a rambling cottage in Haviatt, a small village several miles to the west of our loony tune town, all of this occurring while I was out of the country on my travels.
They were married a year later in their local parish church, St Michael’s where, thirty years on (God, can it be that long?) Fergie is now Tower Captain. On practice nights during the summer I sometimes bike out, and sit on the wall beneath the shadow of the church to listen to the bells and watch the evening fall on the mellow mustard-coloured stonework. Afterwards Fergie and I walk across the fields to the pub where the talk will be of the mystery of sallies and bobs and touches, bell-ringing being a foreign language to those who don’t speak it.
From this you may deduce that I delight in the company of my brother-in-law, that I love him close on as much as I love my sister. I could call him a big cheese in his home village of Haviatt, only this would be a terrible pun on account of the fact that the place is famous for its prizewinning Cheddar. A parish councillor, Fergie also runs the pub skittle team and its folk club. This last I refuse to attend on account of a congenital dislike of beards and sandals, but, more importantly, miserable one-hundred-and-eight-verse ballads where women no better than they should be get rolled in the hay, and pregnant and/or dead afterwards. (Fergie says it’s not like this any longer but I’m not willing to take a chance on it.)
It was a lovely wedding at St Michael’s, I’ll say this – although weddings are definitely my least favourite ceremonies – a balmy late September day with a first fine twinge of autumn about it.
I liked Fergie from the first; not so Archie.
We met at the rehearsal the night before. His first words, having been told of my travels, were; ‘So, Bangkok,’ this with a distinctly lecherous look in his eye. ‘Was it like Emmanuelle, then?’
Scarcely have a best man and a bridesmaid had so little to say to each other at a reception. Forced eventually on to the dance floor with him, I said – rather cleverly, I thought – ‘Fergie’s such a nice guy. How come you ended up friends?’
He just grinned, refusing to be insulted. ‘Cut and thrust of the rugger field, darling,’ he said. ‘All that male bonding in the showers.’
Archie was delighted to learn this was my seventh outing as a bridesmaid. Flapping his hands and faintly bending his knees in what passed for dancing in the period, he said, ‘It’s a curse.’
‘Really?’
‘Absolutely. Only one way to get rid of it.’
‘Surprise me.’
‘Violent sexual congress with the best man at the immediate conclusion of the reception.’
As Fergie revved up his battered old Ford Capri in the fond but as it turned out faint hope that it would actually carry them as far as Scotland, Cass hurled her posy in the traditional devil-may-care manner back over her shoulder. Archie, towering above the rest of the crowd of well-wishers, caught it, neatly deflecting it into my accidentally upraised hands. In a moment my mother was upon me cooing.
‘Oh, darling … oh, darling …’
‘Oh, darling … what?’ I tossed the posy over to her like it was radioactive.
It was the early hours of the morning and I was collecting my coat from the hotel cloakroom when Archie finally caught me.
‘So?’
‘So … what …?’
‘Are you going to bed with me or not?’
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On whether the alternative is having my toenails pulled out one by one without the benefit of anaesthetic.’
My mother took the wedding posy home, put it on the kitchen windowsill in a vase where it withered and wilted and fell apart in the manner of Miss Havisham’s on that bridal table. The mortal remains she pressed and put in her favourite photograph album.
Some people take the sight of a primrose as the first sign of spring, others the cool clear sound of the cuckoo. For me it will always be the moment each year when, regular as clockwork, my mother reaches up to the sideboard for that album. Opening it up, she pulls out those crumbling remnants, holds them up to the light.
‘Oh, you,’ she will say in tones of irritation, which have grown more intense with each passing year, and which, faced with the horrible truth of Archie’s financial elevation, now threaten to overwhelm her.
‘Oh, you …’
‘Oh, me … what?’
‘You … you … you could have married Archie.’
* Discovering the derivation of this old saying, ‘Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride’ has proved surprisingly difficult, in particular why or how the figure of three came to be established as the one at which all hope should be abandoned. Listerine, the US mouthwash company, used ‘Often a bridesmaid but never a bride’ for its adverts in the 1920s, this itself an adaptation of the old British music-hall song ‘Why Am I Always the Bridesmaid?’ made famous by Lily Morris a few years earlier.
Why am I always the bridesmaid
And never the blushing bride?
The very question this volume seeks to answer.
* In fairness it should be pointed that at the time (see D for Divorce) she was in dire need of a husband.
* A nice touch, this, from a woman who not that long hence would prove to be so much happier being single.
It was Danny who gave me the idea to reclaim the word ‘spinster’.
‘Why not? I mean, you reclaimed queer, after all.’
Which is true.
Queer.
