Things I Want My Daughters to Know (49 page)

“Right.”

Amanda stuck out her tongue at them both.

“Where are the serious relationships, by the way? And the answer had better not be at the pub.”

“At the pub.”

“Really?”

“Really. Actually, the excuse for leaving was that they’ve gone to pick up the buttonholes. But since the florist is two shops down from The Lamb, I imagine a little Dutch courage might be on the agenda.”

“And they’ve taken Cee Cee on this little jaunt. . . .”

“No . . . Cee Cee is watching
Charlie and Lola
on a loop downstairs.”

“So it’s just the four of them? And no chaperone?!”

“Uncle Vince is with them.”

“Blimey. We’ve got no chance.”

“Chill out. The wedding isn’t for another . . . hour and a half. They’ll be back.”

“I’m sure they’ll be back—well, pretty sure they’ll be back—it’s the state of them when they get back that worries me.”

“Don’t be daft. They’re not a bunch of kids.”

“They’re men, though.”

“Basically big hairy kids allowed to purchase and consume alcohol.”

“Drink your champagne and stop worrying.”

Lisa wasn’t worrying. They’d be back. Andy would be back. And in about ninety minutes she’d be walking toward him in the weirdly slow, 364 e l i z a b e t h

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stilted gait the church and organist apparently required, on Mark’s arm, dressed in the prettiest, palest dress she’d ever owned, ready to say the most serious, permanent things she’d ever said out loud.

“Do my legs look orange to you?” Hannah was staring at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the door, suddenly worrying that the fake tan treatment she’d given herself two days ago hadn’t quite worked out.

“Dunno. They just look long and thin to me,” muttered Jennifer.

“Don’t know why you bother with that fake stuff, Hannah. Never looks real.”

“It’s all right for you, Mand. You’re always bloody brown.” The insinuation, and the subject of Amanda’s parentage, hung in the air for a nanosecond before they all ignored it. Not a subject for today. Today was too happy.

Lisa turned around and looked at Hannah. “You don’t look orange at all. Don’t listen to them. You look fabulously sunkissed.” She did, in fact, have a distinctly Tango hue, and her ankles and knees really didn’t bear close examination, but that was clearly an unhelpful observa-tion this late in the day. And it was a long dress she’d be wearing . . . so long as the color didn’t run in the heat. . . .

They were all—believers and devout atheists—grateful for the cool, still interior of the church. Outside, it was already in the high 80s by the time the enthusiastic organist began pounding on his keys, and guests were mopping their brows as they came in and sat down. Men ran their fingers inside their collars, and women wondered whether their makeup was streaking on their sugared-almond-colored dresses. The strapless dress had been a good choice: Lisa congratulated herself as she stood and waited for her cue. The dress was long and lean, ivory silk, with an overlay of fine, old lace. Not so weddingy that she felt ridiculous, nor so unweddingy that you could wear it again to parties.

She’d eschewed a veil, chortling that veils were for virgins, until Jenni-T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 365

fer and Hannah, ignoring her protestations, pushed the comb of a short one into her French pleat in the changing room of the bridal salon and made her cry sudden, unexpected tears. “I look like . . . a bride!” she had exclaimed, amazed. So there was a veil—filmy and long, and trimmed with crystals and seed pearls. Even Hannah had given her sartorial seal of approval. Jennifer had checked for the somethings old, new, borrowed, and blue. (Mum’s drop pearl earrings, which they knew to be a present from her parents on her first wedding day, almost forty years ago. These were a resolutely unemotional choice, since none of them could remember ever seeing their mother wearing them, her taste veering latterly toward the far more showy; the dress, which had been the first one she tried on in the shop; the Christian Louboutin—one conces-sion to designer fashion—sale shoes beneath, borrowed from Jennifer, who had bought them half a size too small, for £150, in the red mist of one shopping jag, because they were so very beautiful, and, presumably, because she believed it possible that her feet might one day shrink to the point where the shoes fit; and the ubiquitous baby blue polyester lace garter, purchased by Jennifer and Hannah in a pink-cheeked and giggling foray into Anne Summers one afternoon.) Amanda had been less anarchic and more sentimental than one might have expected. Seemed she was changing her views on quite a lot of things lately. . . .

She could see her sisters now, at the front of the church.

Thank God the new vicar was progressive and had agreed to marry divorcés. A register office wouldn’t have felt the same, and a blessing would have felt hypocritical to her. She wanted to be here, for the whole thing. Not because of God, of course. The last time they had all been in here, she had sat with them, and none of them had wanted to turn around, afraid of what they might see in the faces of those behind them, but now it was different. She was standing here, waiting to take Mark’s arm, and they were up there, straining and turning and waving and smiling.

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Now that she knew about Jennifer, she convinced herself she might have guessed. She was, not rounder, but softer at the edges, somehow.

The color in her cheeks was clearly natural. And, now that she really scrutinized, her boobs were enormous. Already. Blimey. That was going to play havoc with her sister’s penchant for Jackie O shift dresses.

Cee Cee—the unwilling bridesmaid, dressed the part but not planning to walk the aisle—had taken up proprietary residence between Jennifer and Stephen, thrilled with the baby news, and desperate, as she had pronounced last night, for a brother or sister of her own.

“Whoa, Nellie,” her dad had laughed. “Don’t scare the horses.”

“Am I ‘the horses’ in this scenario?” she had spluttered in mock incredulity.

“Damn right you are. It’s taken me long enough to get you here.

Don’t want you thinking about babies now. You’ll bolt.”

“I won’t, you know,” she had muttered into his mouth, kissing him in front of Cee Cee, and everyone else. “Think she might be onto something, as a matter of fact. . . .”

Still, with Cee Cee holding court between them, Stephen had his arm along the back of the pew, resting gently on Jennifer’s shoulder.

Jennifer had sounded tentative, alone with her in the bedroom. “I don’t know,” she had confessed. “It’s all a bit of a shock.”

“But you’re happy?”

“I don’t think I realized how happy until I saw his face when he first knew,” she answered. “It was like I’d forgotten how good it felt to see him happy, to make him happy, you know?”

“I know, more than you know,” Lisa had laughed.

“So, we’re all grown-up, then, are we? Finally mature. Finally sussed?”

“Mum would be proud of us!”

“She was, anyway.”

“I know. Now she’d be proud and relieved.”

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“Anyway, I wouldn’t say all grown-up. Or all sussed, for that matter.

Like I said, I’m bloody terrified.”

“Proves you’re alive, or something like that, doesn’t it?”

“Something like that. Maybe we’re supposed to be terrified.”

“Maybe we’re supposed to take risks.”

“Yeah.”

Lisa had put her hand on Jennifer’s tummy then.

“It’s way too soon to feel anything.”

“Who’s the expert, all of a sudden?”

“Stephen’s bought a book.” She rolled her eyes affectionately. “He read it out loud to me. We’ll feel the baby move in a couple of months.”

She hesitated. “If everything’s all right.”

“Everything’s going to be all right.”

Lisa wondered if anyone else remembered “Be Thou My Vision” from Mum’s funeral a year earlier. Mark made himself concentrate on keeping time with the notes. He needed, very badly, to keep himself in this moment, in this place, at this ceremony. Of course he recognized the song.

He just couldn’t think about it now.

Amanda was sat with Ed, tucked into the crook of his arm. Alarming hairstyle aside, Ed had that rare gift of just being able to fit in, straightaway. Last night had been the first time he’d met most of them. A pretty intimidating crowd, on a fairly high-pressure occasion. With jet lag. But it had felt a bit like he’d always been there. He was easy company. Lisa had watched him, standing between Stephen and Andy, drinking beer from a bottle and chatting easily, talking iPods with Hannah, stacking plates in the dishwasher after dinner; his eyes followed Amanda wherever she went in the room, just like he was going to follow her, once the wedding was over, wherever she decided to go next. Until September. In September he was going back to college, and he’d confessed to Lisa, he intended to make her stay put with him.

And Hannah was behind her. The bridesmaid, again. Dressed, this 368 e l i z a b e t h

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time, to please herself. She’d confessed to Jennifer, the previous night, how much she had hated the primrose yellow Thai silk dress she’d worn for her wedding a few years earlier.

“But you looked so beautiful, Hannah! Everyone said so.”

“I felt like a dork.”

“You did not. You spent the whole day lisping to everyone about how much you felt like a princess!”

“Okay, then, I looked like a dork.”

“You looked like an angel. Mum’s favorite picture of you—the one she had as a screen saver on her computer—that was taken on my wedding day!”

“I know. Talk about embarrassing!”

“Oh, shut up. At least this time it’s one of your cool sisters getting married.”

“Too right.”

Hannah was indeed delighted. She’d chosen her own dress, from a proper shop, and not some namby bridal salon, and her own shoes, with a two-inch heel, and she hadn’t had to have her hair painfully teased into King Charles spaniel ringlets. And today, there was definitely mascara.

Three whole coats.

At the back of the church, Dad had pretty much stared at her, and when he finally spoke, he had said, “Blimey, Hannah, you look about twenty-one years old!”

“In a good way?”

“There
is
no good way for a man’s sixteen-year-old daughter to look like a twenty-one-year-old!”

She’d stuck out her tongue at him, in a reassuringly childish way.

“But you look gorgeous!”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Dad had looked from one to the other of them, and for a horrible moment, Hannah thought he might start to cry and set them both off.

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But he didn’t. He looked all proud and coughed a bit, shook himself a little, and started to concentrate hard on the music.

So, Lisa thought, as she neared the end of her journey toward Andy, here we all are. And here I am. I never thought I’d be here, but here I am. And thank God I am.

Mark saved his first glass of wine for after his speech. He held it in his hand, to help keep him steady, as he stood up to deliver his toast. He’d jotted a few things down—even Googled “father of the bride speeches” on the computer, but he’d decided to be brief and off the cuff.

Now he wasn’t so sure that had been the sane approach, and he rather longed for some cue cards. He didn’t do this often, and when he did, he had a model or some drawings in front of him as prompts and never had to say anything that might at any moment make him cry, so this was new territory. He felt his neck redden, as he began to speak, the first few words sounding, to him, shaky and uncertain.

“It’s always a bit of a relief to be the first speaker. I daresay I should be funny, but I think I’m going to go with sincere, and I hope first that you’ll indulge me in that, and second, that the groom and his best man have a lot of jokes up their sleeves to make up for me and my sobriety.

“Stepfather of the bride is a rather special position to be in. Stepfather to a teenage girl was another story altogether, and perhaps not one for this speech! We’ve had our moments, me and Lisa. You don’t love your stepchildren, when you get them. You want to, because you love their mother and she loves them, but you can’t, of course. In fact, they rather get in the way, in some situations you might imagine!” Everyone laughed. “You sort of have to fall in love with them—you grow on each other, gradually. Sometimes like roses, sometimes like mold. And then one day, whoof, you find that you love them, and that you’re a part of this weird, wonderful blended family—isn’t that what they’re calling us these days? And I wouldn’t change it. Nor would Lisa want to change 370 e l i z a b e t h

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hers, her new one, I know. I might not normally have expected to get to walk my stepdaughter down the aisle, but I did today, and I want to thank her for that privilege. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful, and radiant, and she did a far better job than me of keeping step with the music. That was a little jaunty for me—I’d practiced doing it to “The Wedding March”—altogether more sedate! Nor might I ordinarily have expected to get to speak. That, I also do by default, and that, I have to tell you, I wish were otherwise. Your mum would have given anything she had to be here with all of us today, with you today, Lisa. I hope she sort of is, somehow. She would have been making this speech, if she had been, and she would have been a thousand times more eloquent than me, because she always was. She’d have been funnier, too, of course. She was always that, too. I see so much of her in you, Lisa. And in all of your sisters.”

Mark’s voice broke on the last sentence, and he paused, looking down at the tablecloth. Hannah saw her dad’s knuckles whiten, his fists clenched by his side, and felt a shiver of pure pain pass through her. But he recovered and raised his gaze again to the crowd.

“So . . . this is what I think she would have said, if she’d been here. I think she would have said that she adored you, Lisa. That you’d made her proud every day of your life. That she had a million memories of you stored away and that the pair of you were laughing in nearly every one of them. I think she would have said that she was so, so glad you were marrying Andy. Some of you”—and he glanced from Jennifer to Lisa—