The Wedding Diaries (12 page)

Eve: Oh, it’s good to see you.

Me: How’s it been so far?

Eve: Five exes have sent flowers, one sent a gold bracelet—

Me: Wow, that’s pretty seventies.

Eve: And Luc brought me in breakfast from the Wolseley. I didn’t even know they did takeaways.

Me: Happy birthday?

Eve: I think I just wanted someone to give me the bumps. When did that stop being OK?

Me: It’s so hard to get in an envelope.

Eve: So is a destroyed faith in humanity, but Louis managed it last year.

Me: Goose! This isn’t a time for Louis. This is a time for me to buy you a
drink
.

We stayed by the bar chatting over our Bands on the Run for a while, but both Eve and I were distracted by watching Thom getting more and more drunk. He’s not normally a sloppy drinker, but he was keeping one firm arm around Jim at the bar and talking fairly seriously to him with plenty of finger-wagging.

Close to midnight, chatting to Thom’s best friend Rich – we’d amalgamated all our friends years ago into one big group – I felt I’d stayed long enough. Between Carol’s mid-life crisis and the relentless negativity of Luc’s warm-up act to my evening, I was done. Thom must have sunk his body weight in whisky by now, so I knew I had to fish him out of whichever booth he was nodding off in to get him home. But I couldn’t find him at any of the tables, or at the bar. Going back to Rich at the bar, I asked him to look for Thom in the toilets but when he pointed to the dance floor with a weird apologetic look on his face I suddenly got a horrible feeling in my stomach and turned in a sick slow motion. The crowd parted for a moment to reveal a slow-dancing couple in the centre of the floor: Eve’s arms wrapped around Thom, stroking his back while he rested his cheek on the top of her head. I couldn’t see for a moment, then was aware of leaving, unable to breathe, getting in a taxi waiting outside and telling the man to
drive
. Before he could pull away, Rich came rushing out of the bar. He said: ‘Kiki! You know Thom’s really wasted, don’t you? You know he’s asleep on that dance floor, right? Kiki?’ I told the driver to GO and then I was home.

Happy bloody birthday, Eve.

January 8th

I rolled over in bed this morning, smiling without opening my eyes because today was a Saturday, and it was still early. My head wasn’t that sore but something was nagging at me. Thom reached over and hugged me into him, and I shuffled closer. Then I remembered. I pulled away and got out of bed, into the bathroom and into the shower. Thom had gone when I got out: working again.

I know nothing happened. I don’t expect Thom to leave me for Eve, and I don’t think that he’s about to start besieging her with messages of adoration. Nothing happened, I do believe that, and Thom has done nothing really that we haven’t all done a bit when we’re grimly drunk once in that horrible blue moon. But … still … it was
Eve
. I would rather catch him slow-dancing with my mum than her. I would even rather catch him slow-dancing with
his
mum, come to think of it. More than anyone, he knows my history with Eve, and the mucky self-hating and historical sentimentality which somehow coils its way around me to keep us friends. He’s always said to me that she’s like a snake, but he’s always been one goat I’ve managed to keep out of her unhingeable jaws. And on top of all our bickering! Oh, Thom. Bother you.

January 10th

Conversations in the Polka Dot office today:

Alice: I hope that dimwit friend of yours grows up soon, or she’s going to find she’s awfully alone in a cold, cruel world.

Norman: [shaking his head incredulously across the office] What a silly billy.

I love my colleagues.

Thom and I haven’t spoken much since Eve’s party. One of us is always up at the crack of sparrow’s and out of the house. It’s not so much that I didn’t want to talk to him: I wasn’t angry, but just so hugely sad. Whenever my mind unfocuses from whatever I’m doing, I see them again together on the dance floor, and I
know
what Eve would have been thinking (old-style villainous music would probably cover it) and I think about pre-Eve-and-Thom-dancing days, and I consider them golden. Oh,
bloody hell
, Thom. I am 100% banning alcohol from the cold and loveless marriage I will hold you to.

January 12th

One of our most successful authors for the last few years has been Monica Warner, a women’s fiction writer who has written the same book eight times (ah, but with a differently named heroine and hero each time, you see). She still sells, bafflingly, but her glowing, beautiful authoress persona hides the rancid evil dwelling beneath her Crème de la Mer-ed skin. She likes to come into the office and say things to ruin our days, but we like collecting and comparing them in a long-running game of Warner Poison Top Trumps. Our top five:

1. (To Norman, 58, Head of Accounts) I’ll have a coffee, black with a teaspoon of honey. Do you need me to write it down?
   
2. (To me) Have you lost weight? You really are too skinny to make that dress look good.
   
3. (To Carol) Do you need a dermatologist, dear? I’ve heard that after the menopause it’s the only way to keep your skin even half decent-looking.
   
4. (To Tony) I saw a tie like yours in
   GQ
   this month. My father would have said that you looked like a spiv.
   
5. (To me) Marrying? You? [peals of laughter]
   

She’s never, ever rude to Alice, because Alice Knows People, people who (even after she married that Millionaire MP) aren’t quite as close to Monica as she’d like. Alice is the real deal, goddaughter and cousin and classmate and niece of these folk, while Monica clawed her way up from civilian life and stands at the spiked turret with a crossbow, determined to take down anyone who may attempt to follow her.

I was in a crummy mood yesterday, still smarting from Eve’s antics, so when Monica came into the office to talk about the marketing plans for her ‘new’ book and made some comment about my shoes (specifically, how some people need to be really careful that their shoe is in proportion with their leg, otherwise a heel can actually
shorten
the limb) I
may
have done some muttering under my breath. And that muttering
may
have contained both the words ‘mutton’ and, indeed, ‘lamb’. And she
may
have heard. She looked at me for a little while, then when Tony came out of the office to greet her, took his arm warmly, in a manner which suggested that she was delighted to report that his blood sacrifice had been postponed for today, because someone else had stepped up instead. Curious but unconcerned, I answered with an unnecessary surliness when she appeared at my desk an hour later and asked:

Monica: Are you still getting married?

Me: Yeah.

Monica: And are you yet to sort out your little wedding cake?

Me: [slightly baffled, still a bit surly] … Yes.

Monica: Well, then you must let me recommend somewhere. Do you know Maison Edith on Thread Lane?

Me: Know it? It’s
impossible
to get a cake there unless you’re Kate Moss. Or the Queen.

Monica: Or me. Listen, you’ve helped so much over the years – why don’t you let me put in a call for you? I used to go to school with the girl in charge of wedding cakes there. Leave it with me.

Me: I … that’s …

Monica: Thank you?

Me: Yes. Thank you.

Monica gave me a wink and swirled out of the office, and everyone turned to stare at Tony, standing in his doorway watching the conversation. Alice squinted at him, and said, ‘What did you
do
to her in there?’

I was sceptical that anything was going to come of it, but this morning, like strange magical clockwork, I got a call from Maison Edith asking if I’d like to come in at the end of the month to discuss my wedding cake. Holy smokes. Then Thom came home with a beautiful bunch of scarlet carnations. He said, ‘Kiki, I’m sorry that party was so awful. And I’m sorry a lot of that – urk! –
was my fault
.
Please can we be friends again
?’ I’d wrestled him onto the sofa, and was sitting on his stomach while he pretended to flail for freedom beneath me. I said he had to swear that he would make me the happiest woman in the world. Gasping for breath, Thom wheezed out, ‘Kiki, I look forward to our wedding so much. I … love …
you
.’

What a good day!

TO DO:

Look at some ready-made invitations

Makeup – anyone we know to do makeup on the day?

Accessories for bridesmaids – posies, jewellery, shoes

Hen night? Stag?

January 14th

My first treat from the diary: ice skating tickets, late night at Kew Gardens. The gardens themselves were beautiful: dark and mysterious, trees lit here and there, sparkling with frost, and gloomy hedgerows spooking everyone on their way to the rink. We swapped our shoes for skates, and hobbled across the meltwater-logged Astroturf to the ice. Thom and I clung to one another for a moment, dizzy from the kids skating past at top speed, twirling and whooping and near-missing one another, then we both pushed off and took little icy sliding steps, small at first but becoming swoops and glides soon enough. I couldn’t stop with any real grace (I waited until I got close to one of the sides, then steered that way until I
thumped
into it) but was happy to just go round and round, ruddy-cheeked and woollen-hatted, sometimes holding hands with Thom and sometimes doing laps on my own. Then we skated slowly together for a while, watching the other people in the rink: the teenagers showing off; the parents with their children, allowed to stay up late for this treat; the old couple holding hands and going slowly around the rink edge.

Me: Will we be like them one day?

Thom: Despite what the adverts tell you, yes, we will age.

Me: Will we be as happy as they are?

Thom: How do you know they’re happy?

Me: Because everyone knows that the family who skates together, stays together.

Thom: That’s not how the phrase goes.

Me: But they do look happy, don’t they? When was the last time you saw your mum and dad hold hands?

Thom: Kiki, they’re in Australia. I can’t even tell you if they’ve still got teeth, let alone if they hold hands.

Me: Fine. I just hope that … in ten and twenty and fifty years’ time, we’re still best friends. I love you.

Thom: I love you too, Keeks. But do you know what you might love even more?

Me: Nothing in the whole world.

Thom: Mulled wine from the bar.

Me: Wow. You
do
know me well.

January 20th

It turns out that I hadn’t fully grasped that wedding invitations are the MOST EXPENSIVE THING IN THE WORLD. Everything in the market is either wildly pricey and absolutely exquisite (two colour letterpress, £370 for 100 – not including envelopes, naturally) or horribly grim and completely affordable (like someone swallowed a wedding then threw it up on a notepad). Just don’t know what we’ll do.

Mum’s birthday today, too. I went to drop round a card and present before Thom got back from work, but they’d gone out for the night. Lucky them.

January 25th

A tough day with Clifton Black. He’s our author of men’s war books, which sadly don’t sell as well as they ought because they’re fiction — much like Clifton’s hints of his own military career — and the market only seems to be interested in war books that have come from men who have definitely actually killed another man themselves. Clifton is only ever seen in his army gear: he comes into the office (thankfully forgoing smudges of camouflage stick on his face) in heavy army boots and a clanking rucksack, filled with God knows what. He talks in a barking military snap that I can only assume he’s picked up from films, and addresses us all variously as ‘Officer’, ‘Private’, ‘Captain’, etc. It’s pretty unbearable. But as far as we know, he’s never actually been in active service, or even a member of the Territorials. One of his army boots is slightly built up, suggesting a leg not suitable for action, so I’m imagining his life – focused always on serving Her Majesty – has instead been lived through his books, with titles like
To Hell and Back
and
A Gun for Life
and
Bullets and Bravery
(yes, actually that). It’s a terrible dance we do with him, where we know he’s a fraud, and he must know we know, and dread us bringing it up (thank God our publicity department found out via a hurried call from his wife, rather than asking him outright) but we must always have this armed and dangerous elephant in the room even as we discuss the latest conflict he’s ‘covering’, and ask whether he can think of anyone to give us a quote for his new book.

He was in today to talk about
Guns on the Run
, a look at the Gulf conflict through the eyes of his six-book (and counting) hero Grant Carter. We’d been talking for a while about the book jacket when he noticed my engagement ring.