You Had Me at Hello (39 page)

As I'm hem-hawing my way through the hymns, I wonder if I'm drifting towards a situation where I might need to Talk To Someone. A nicely-put-together man a few rows ahead glances to the side, and catching his features I think
– Ben?
Oh dear, woman. Chalk that one up to wedding fever.

We sit down for the vows. Through glimpses between bouffy teased hairdos and a forest of candy-coloured fascinators, I eyeball the handsome man a bit more, thinking, all right, I am a sad monomaniac, but it's still a freaky resemblance from the rear. Especially as replicant Ben is with a blonde woman with a haircut exactly like Olivia's …

Wait. Shit me, my life
is
a black comedy … is that
Simon
?
This time there's no mistaking the Roman profile and air of arse. It's so surreal I half expect the vicar to throw off his cassock to reveal sequin pasties and a G-string, before I wake up in Rupa's bed, alarm beeping.

I fiddle with the order of service in my trembling hands and try to figure out how on earth this can be. While the well-spoken, bespectacled best man reads the Bible passage about love not vaunting itself and being puffed up, I desperately mine my memory banks for a clue. Samantha isn't a lawyer … maybe they know Tom? No, that can't be it, they've been seated on the bride's side of the church, same as us. The ushers are running this show like a military campaign, no doubt in an attempt to claw back some masculine dignity.

We watch the new Mr and Mrs walk back down the aisle and I turn nearly 180 degrees in the hope of not meeting the eyes of any of their group. Their pews empty before ours and I pretend to be looking for something lost in the depths of my tiny clutch bag as they pass. A murmur of curious voices tells me I've been spotted.

After an agonising single file shuffle outside, my parents wander off to congratulate their opposite numbers and I wonder how best to arrange myself so I look like an enfranchised, confident solo individual living an efficacious life on my own terms.

Hmm, balls to that. I do a quick feasibility study. Is leaving after the service and before the reception a huge insult …? I could claim to have been overcome by sorrow. I could take the spikes from my feet and peg it through the village, trying to flag down a cab. Only the thought of what it would do to my parents stops me.

A tap on the shoulder, and a smiling, if faintly jittery-looking Ben is in front of me. He's in a slim cut, charcoal-coloured wool suit with white shirt and black tie. He looks like he should be on one of those
Vanity Fair
gatefold covers where next-big-thing young actors are draped over each other on stepladders.

‘I don't see you for ten years and suddenly you're everywhere?'

‘Oh my God,' I laugh, faking amazement for the second time in recent memory. ‘What on earth …?'

‘You know Sam? Or Tom?'

‘Samantha. Neighbours when we were kids. You?'

‘Liv went to Exeter with her.'

‘I didn't know Samantha did law?'

‘Only for the first year. Swapped to pure maths or some other Shun The Fun subject.' He pauses. ‘Simon went there too. He's here.'

‘Great!' I say, with enough sarcasm for him to give me a sympathetic smile.

A crocodile of guests are picking their way towards the marquee and I suspect Ben will be persona non grata if he waits for me.

‘Looks like we're all heading over for the next bit then?' he says. ‘See you there.'

‘Definitely,' I say, wishing the opposite was true.

As he departs I resist the urge to do a Basil Fawlty fist-shake at the place of worship we've exited
: thank you God, thank you so bloody much.
It's not enough I have to do this wedding, but I have to do it with Ben, Ben Wife and Sworn Enemy?

‘My goodness, that is absolutely is the limit,' my mum hisses, as she and my dad rejoin me, my dad wearing his
batten down the hatches
face.

‘What?'

‘Barbara's only in the same pheasant-tail headpiece I'd bought for your wedding. And for all her snoot, it's
from Debenhams
.'

The copycat millinery momentarily crystallises the difficulty of this day for all of us.

‘You know, who cares who's got what,' I say, hooking my arm through my mum's. ‘Let's go find the grog.'

The marquee for the reception is colossal, swallowing up most of the field. The white canvas has transparent panels in the shape of arched, leaded windows, perhaps in the hope that if you screw your eyes up you might think you're looking at a vast colonial Gatsby-esque Long Island mansion instead of a tent.

We enter the usual interlude while the happy couple has endless photos taken and there's some etiquette that we're not meant to go into the Big Top without them – I see Barbara near-fainting when a guest twitches at a door flap – so we mill on the grass with the bubbly. A med student once told me that champagne nobbles you due to the speed of its absorption into the small bowel. It's not working its magic fast enough for me: I'd like it intravenously, yellow mingling with red and turning my blood a nice Tabasco orange. There's an interestingly anachronistic waft of fags when the smokers notice we're in a field and they can do what they like.

Trays of canapés circulate, served by embarrassed-looking teenage catering students in black aprons, as is tradition. As they're fashionable canapés, they require formal introduction. ‘Here we have a quenelle of mackerel pate on gem lettuce … this is a blini with cods' roe …'

‘What are the little ones that look like jobbies?'

My dad always goes full Yorkshireman at formal events.

‘That's a Medjool date stuffed with Stilton, sir.'

‘To think I had a cheddar-pineapple hedgehog at my wedding!' my dad says to the seventeen-year-old waitress, who goes bright red, as if it might be a euphemism.

When she moves on my parents quietly grumble about the lack of opportunities to sit down. The kind of support I'm sorely lacking isn't for my behind, it's having friends here. They instinctively know how to form a Secret Service formation around you, in the presence of threats.
Blue Tit Is Moving, I Repeat …

Ben, Simon and Olivia are part of a glossy knot of haven't-we-done-well mates, a social ring of Saturn considerably nearer the planet of the bride and groom. Olivia's in what a man would call ‘a green dress' and Mindy would identify as a chartreuse bias-cut spaghetti strap satin slip that's almost certainly from Flannels and, despite flashing little flesh, totally unwearable unless you have Olivia's sylph-like figure. Tendrils of gold wire threaded with mother-of-pearl beads curve round her head, in an ultra-modern, deconstructed tiara.

I wave and Ben raises a palm in return and Olivia gives me a ‘
Oh Yeah, You
' cursory nod, with a flicker of lip movement that could be taken for a smile if you were desperate, goes back to her discussion with Simon. Simon's in stockbroker pinstripes and throws a ‘
Fuck You, Forget About You
' look in my direction. I see Ben seeing me see Simon see me. I give Ben one of those oh-well-what-you-gonna-do smiles and he returns it, apologetically.

I slip my jacket off in the sunshine and my mum gives a gasp.

‘When did wedding guest outfits get so vampy?'

‘You can't see anything,' I say, testily.

‘Ooh, you get the idea though. Have you got a strapless bra or some sort of corset on?' Mum fusses with me in the way mums think they have a right to.

‘Mum!'

My dad suddenly finds the view of some cows in the neighbouring field quite compelling.

If that weren't bad enough, to my abject horror, I see Ben approaching. He's already too near for me to sound the alarm without him hearing so I have to hiss ‘
Muuuuuum, stoppit!
' and try to wrestle away from her investigations without attracting more attention. When Ben's upon us, my mum's actually patting the underneath of my bust in some version of the panto dame boob-hoik manoeuvre that used to get a laugh for Les Dawson.

Our lines of sight lock and in a terrible moment of perfect telepathy, I mind-speak to Ben:
You Have Seen My Breasts
. In a feat of empathy I'd cherish if it were about anything else, startled Ben effortlessly, wordlessly conveys back:
Yes, I Have.
We stare at each other like roadkill caught in the headlights of a shared flashback.

‘Mum, Dad, err …' I stutter, turning away from Ben in a vain effort to break the psychic link. ‘This is Ben, he's …'
stroked, cupped and squeezed them …
‘married to Olivia, who went to Exeter with Sam. They both took law …'
and took my nipples in his mouth
… ‘Well, Sam took it for the first year. I know Ben too because he studied …'
them and said they were beautiful
… ‘with me at Manchester.'
Oh God, I said man, and chest
,
why didn't I just go to Norkfield and be done with it?
‘He was on English with me.'

And on me.
And in me. It was astounding.

I roll to a close and hope I got the Things Haltingly Spoken and Things Feverishly Thought distinction right. The fact my dad doesn't appear to be suffering a terminal cardiac event suggests I just about managed it.

Ben recovers admirably for nice-to-meet-yous and shakes my dad's hand, doing the same with my mum and adding a gentlemanly peck on the cheek that makes my mum light up.

‘Beautiful wedding, isn't it? Haven't they been lucky with the weather? I wanted to let you know that the champagne's on the wane so get it while the going's good.'

Vintage Ben. The Ben who hopped over the desks and started helping out on the day I met him. Given the amount of pride and dollar the parents-of-the-bride invested in this day, I doubt the Laurent Perrier's running dry. He's giving us an excuse to circulate.

‘Or actually, we could bring some over?' he says to me. ‘Want to give me a hand, Rachel?'

‘That's very kind,' my mum says, and I hope to high hell we won't be having any
why-can't-you-see-if-he-has-any-friends
talks.

I follow Ben across the lawn. He turns to speak over his shoulder, conspiratorial.

‘I wanted to promise you that Simon won't be giving you hassle,' he says, as we home in on a tray together. ‘We've agreed a wide berth policy. If he does give you any shit, give me a shout, OK?'

There's a swell in my heart and alcohol in my small bowel. ‘I think you might be the nicest person I've ever met.'

‘Honestly?' Ben says, grinning and lifting two glasses. ‘Christ. I suppose you do spend all day with murderers and rapists.'

The tables have been given names on the theme of New York landmarks, which is where Tom proposed. The top table is Grand Central, followed by Empire State, Queens and Rockefeller. I notice that Ben, Olivia and Simon are on Chrysler. Shiny, slender and glamorous.
Spiky.
With some sense of satire, the collection I've been grouped with is titled Staten Island.

‘Might as well call it Rikers Island,' I say, pointing at the italicised place-card to Albrikt from Stockholm, who works with Tom and speaks very little English.

He nods politely and says: ‘Absolute.' He has said that in response to my last three remarks. I felt for his bemusement during the best man's lengthy, PowerPoint-aided speech. Not sure how much ‘children wearing colanders as hats in the 1980s' photos mean without the Metal Mickey anecdote.

To my left is a dour cousin called Ellen with allergies who I come to think of as Allergen. She scowls at the bread rolls like they're grenades giving off deadly wheat-gas and complains about every aspect of the arrangements until I decide practising the level of Swedish I learned from the chefs on
The Muppets
is preferable.

After the speeches and during the dancing, I go to talk to my parents on Central Park (‘Because we're all out to pasture' – my dad) and stay there when the table is deserted for the dessert trolley queue. I'm alone with the post-prandial carnage of pink tablecloth stains, ice buckets full of water and rumpled napkins. This is far enough from the dance floor that no one will think I'm hoping to be asked, and near enough I don't look churlish. I concentrate on my phone and think: the mobile is a godsend to the self-conscious single. A text arrives from Mindy.

Caroline here, making me watch shitty film with Kevin Spacy [sic] Not any of the good ones where he's a syco [sic] something boaring [sic] with boats. The Boat Spotter. How is wedding? Does everyone love your dress?

I'm interrupted as I'm sending my reply (‘
Not everyone … guess what
…') by Ben, both hands on the back of a gold banqueting hire chair. His jacket's off, tie loosened.

‘May I have this dance?'

‘Oh, no, I'm alright …'

‘Ah, on your feet. I'm not being blown out by someone sitting there texting like a sulky teenager.'

I bristle. ‘Sorry I'm not being sociable enough for you. It doesn't mean I need your pity.'

Ben screws his face up, affronted. Too late I see that he wasn't trying to ridicule me and has no idea how crappy I feel.

‘What does that mean? Why would it be pity?'

I can't answer this without looking even more foolish.

‘C'mon,' he says, wheedling.

I smile, grudgingly, and he grins broadly as I get to my feet. The forty-something singer in the wedding band is like a gone-to-seed Robert Palmer with a grey-blonde, pomaded pompadour. He's belting his way confidently and tunefully through The Beatles' back catalogue as a multi-coloured lighting rig casts twisting shafts of purple, green and blue on the chequered flooring, a pin-prick starlight canopy twinkling above our heads. Nope, Rhys would not have signed this off.