Chapter 12
‘I’m all right,’ Ginny insisted for the fiftieth time. ‘It was just motion sickness. I’m taking it easy at the buffet just in case,’ she reassured Reshma.
‘I’m just glad Rhys was with you,’ Tita said emphatically, giving her shoulder a squeeze. ‘You looked very wobbly when you made it back to the car park.’
‘Did Rhys tell the entire world?’ Ginny muttered as her boss and colleague reluctantly left her to her meagre dinner.
She didn’t enjoy the reminder of the awkward stroll back through the forest to the car park either.
She’d spent half the time wondering whether she’d imagined his fingers smoothing her hair out of the way as she’d brought up the contents of her stomach, and the other half painfully reliving all of the embarrassing moments she’d shared with that man.
He hadn’t spoken to her for the rest of the day – not that he’d had any reason to, but it was fair enough if he wanted to avoid her. He obviously found her stressful and they’d have to survive several hours in each other’s company tomorrow. The prospect made her grimace into her rice.
After the strange day, she’d wanted to talk to Sophie, make sure the bride was holding up under the onslaught of bad-taste jokes and troubling wedding metaphors, but tonight didn’t seem like the right time, when Ginny was dead on her feet and still a little queasy.
The food perked her up somewhat and she took herself upstairs to her room as soon as she was done. She was a wedding planner, not a rep on a coach tour. The guests could fend for themselves for an evening.
Slipping on her favourite fluffy jumper with a cute Japanese character on it, she took a cup of tea out to the balcony and breathed in the glassy air playing with the billows of steam from her mug.
Leaning out over the side with the glimpse of the lake, she marvelled at the stillness and the heavy moisture.
The world seemed to have another dimension here, more depth. Or perhaps height. She imagined it felt like a playground to Andreas, who could climb the rocks and trek to the high places where no humans could live.
And Rhys, who photographed them.
She winced at the thought of Rhys. Verbal diarrhoea back in the pub in Weymouth and now actual vomit. And in between, she’d run over him like a steamroller so he’d agree to do this wedding, then she’d seen him naked and been insensitive about his face blindness.
‘Disaster’ was the right word for her and Rhys in the same room.
In the complete silence of the lake, Ginny slowly became aware of the distant burr of an engine.
She’d read that the mountain pass just beyond the lake usually closed at the first snow, which hadn’t fallen yet, but the chill overnight suggested it wouldn’t be long, especially up at the pass, which was at higher altitude.
Already, traffic in this back corner of Italy was minimal, and at night almost non-existent.
She listened as the noise grew closer, then not one, but two sets of headlights came around the corner, illuminating the pine boughs and cutting through the darkness.
When they pulled into the car park of the hotel and Andreas’s two friends, Lucas and Marco, got out, Ginny stifled a withering groan.
Two more men were with them, beers in hand.
Andreas’s parents emerged from the other car, his mother Petra’s indulgent smile visible from where Ginny stood.
The young men fetched something out of their car, alternately laughing and shushing each other, and after some playful shoving and a few final sips of beer, they began playing…
music? Ginny guessed it was music – or it was supposed to be.
Cymbals crashed and an accordion squeaked and sighed. The tin whistle sounded as though the young man were torturing it, rather than playing it, and Ginny wasn’t sure if there was any discernible melody or even rhythm to their cacophony. The percussion instrument was a saucepan with a wooden spoon.
Then they began to sing and even Andreas’s father grimaced. If Ginny’s stomach hadn’t already settled, she might have retched again.
Swearing, she retreated inside and shut the door, but the noise penetrated the glass. Setting her tea down with a sigh, Ginny grabbed her key card and made her way downstairs to find Sophie with her hands over her ears, along with a few other guests in various stages of suffering and distress.
‘I’m beginning to think I should have got more information out of Andreas about these wedding traditions before I agreed to anything!’ she called to Ginny.
‘I’ll get them to stop,’ Ginny yelled back, stomping to the door and pressing the button to open it.
The shriek of the accordion was ten times worse outside, lodging pins in her brain. Crossing her arms against the chill, she faced them and lifted her chin. ‘What’s going on? What do we have to do to make you stop?’
‘Andre-e-e-e-eas!’ Lucas called out, ignoring Ginny completely.
‘Please,’ she persisted.
‘I have to drink with them.’ Andreas appeared at her side, armed with a bottle of something strong and a stack of shot glasses. ‘Basta, Buaba,’ he called out over the noise.
Ginny knew ‘basta’ was Italian for ‘enough’, but combined with what she assumed was a German dialect word, it sounded like an entirely different language.
She wondered what Sophie thought of marrying into this little pocket of borderlands with three languages and countless dialects, where every valley was its own little society.
With a final wheeze, the accordion mercifully ceased as Andreas approached to hand out the glasses. When he thrust one into Ginny’s hands, she accepted it without thought. Only when he splashed some of the pungent clear liquid in did she consider the consequences.
‘Er, maybe this isn’t a good idea for my stomach.’ She assumed he’d also heard what had happened after the fly-line.
He just gave her a half-smile. ‘We call this “Katzenmusik”, making a big noise. It means cat music, but in our dialect we pronounce it “Kotznmusig”, which sounds a little like vomit music.’ With a wink, he lifted his glass and waited for her.
With a withering sigh, she clinked hers against his and they all took a sip. The liquor was sweet and fresh on the tongue, but it exploded in her throat. She nearly dropped the rest as she spluttered and coughed, making Andreas’s friends roar with laughter.
She felt, rather than heard, the muted click and turned with a finely brewed glare for Rhys, standing by the doors with his camera to his eye.
‘Why don’t we all come inside?’ Sophie suggested with a wry tone. ‘As long as you promise to leave the tin whistle alone.’
Petra approached and squeezed Sophie’s arm as they made their way into the lobby. ‘I did suggest they skip this particular tradition, but you can imagine what an occasion it is for all of us that Andreas is getting married.’
‘You don’t need to explain that to me,’ Sophie replied. ‘After all his years of insisting he didn’t see the point in marriage, I understand they have a right to say, “I told you so.”’
‘At least we convinced them that eight in the evening was better than two in the morning!’ Petra said. ‘And now we have the accordion here, so we can practise the waltz, like we talked about.’
‘Wait, what waltz?’ Ginny asked, hurrying to catch up to them.
Sophie grimaced. ‘We have to waltz,’ she mumbled.
‘This isn’t on the programme for the reception!’ Ginny said in alarm. ‘Surely with the baby, you don’t have to—’
‘The waltz goes without saying,’ Petra explained. ‘The DJ will know what to do and I already discussed this with Sophie. This is why I’m here.’
Petra gestured urgently to the accordion player and then clapped her hands sharply. ‘Good evening, everyone! We all have something very important to prepare for the wedding reception on Saturday.’
Ginny had the feeling of the wedding unravelling, but she was standing here in her cute, fluffy top and slippers and she didn’t have a clue how to get things back under control.
‘If you don’t already know the steps, we need to learn the waltz!’ Petra declared with a smile that Ginny did not share. ‘Of course, we don’t want Sophie and Andreas to be uncomfortable, alone on the dance floor, so we will all dance the Viennese Waltz together. How special!’
‘Special’ was one way to put it. Ginny ran her tongue nervously over the back of her piercing.
She was a terrible dancer. She could just about manage the macarena, but anything more complicated and she’d leave a trail of broken toes behind her.
She’d sit this one out. There would be some excuse on the day, something for her to check on.
With a prickle of discomfort she realised the more fundamental problem: she had no partner.
‘We start learning the steps in a line,’ Petra called out, waving at her husband to stand next to her.
Ginny found herself caught in the middle of a row as they practised stepping from side to side, copying Petra and Oswald at the front. Petra counted the beat with words Ginny couldn’t understand, although she caught the occasional, ‘Eins, zwei, drei,’ as the rhythm of the waltz echoed in the room.
Her slippers didn’t have the best grip on the tiles, but she comforted herself with the thought that at least she hadn’t changed into her duck-print pyjamas.
‘Now, we add forward and back. Forward with the right foot, back with the left,’ Petra instructed.
That took Ginny a few tries to master, studying Petra’s feet and colliding with Toni who was giggling through the steps next to her.
Kira was participating without even a smirk of disdain, but no one could stand next to Mattia with his opera posture and slouch.
It was surely past the children’s bedtime, but Tash’s two and Cillian were swaying along with everyone else too.
The only people conspicuously not participating were Andreas’s raucous friends – and Laurie, who was also nursing a drink. Rhys had a good excuse; he was standing on a chair in one corner taking shots like a sniper.
Ginny caught sight of Sophie sharing a smile with Andreas and she lost the steps for a moment. Despite the banging and crashing and the weird day, Sophie was smiling. Relief doused the crackling flames of her worries for a moment. The bride was happy. It was all Ginny could wish for.
Well, that and a dance partner.
Petra clapped her hands together. ‘Wonderful! Now, we are ready to take a partner.’
Ginny’s heart sank. She was the only single woman in this room and she had no idea how to salvage her pride. Perhaps she could just slip away quietly.
‘Oh, you don’t have a partner?’
Darn, Petra was too observant and the opportunity to escape passed too quickly.
Ginny shook her head, her gaze darting around as she waited for inspiration to strike.
Maybe Cillian would dance with her. No, he’d given up and was studying the accordion, asking questions.
She found Laurie at the bar, but they both quickly looked away from each other again.
Nope. She wouldn’t dance with him if he asked and he wouldn’t ask anyway. Not good for her poor pride.
‘Oswald,’ Petra said, calling her husband, ‘why don’t you dance with Ginny?’
No, no, no-o-o. How did one politely decline to dance with the father of the groom?
If she were wearing a flirty cocktail dress and bright lipstick on the dance floor at the reception, she might have pulled it off, but in her slippers in the hotel lobby, accepting a pity dance in front of the entire wedding party—
She didn’t want to cry on top of everything.
The sound of someone clearing their throat made her turn without thinking and she froze, blinking rapidly to find Rhys standing there.
Was he about to photograph this latest indignity?
He could hold an exhibition of all the photos he’d taken of her: Misadventures in Pride and Lost Hope. He might win another award.
But he wasn’t holding his camera. She noticed it on the reception desk behind him. Apparently he wasn’t approaching for his latest arty portrait of her disgrace. Instead, he held one hand out.
Ginny stared at it for long enough that they drew the attention of every other wedding guest. Her mouth was dry and her lungs suddenly clogged.
‘Do you… need a partner?’