Chapter 2
2
Justin and Susie are both personality types who, by and large, don’t do guilt. It would slow them down considerably. I drink guilt like a smoothie for breakfast, and much as I revel in our regular secret back channel comms about Hester, I know I shouldn’t.
As I once reasoned to a colleague, however: some people are intolerable, and life requires you to tolerate them, and there’s only two ways of releasing the pressure. One, letting loose at the individual winding you up, or two, bitching mercilessly behind their back.
Option two might not be assertive or noble but it has a lot less impact on the social contract.
None of us have ever really doubted that pushing back on Hester would badly damage our friendship with Ed. You don’t get a veto on your friends’ and relatives’ partners. Don’t I know it. Could’ve avoided my mum’s second husband disaster if I did.
When I return to the table, I can sense, at the pace we’re drinking, we’re beginning a messy descent from general knowl edge acuity. Leonard has wisely curled up and gone to sleep. There’s only Friday at work to struggle through tomorrow.
“You can tell you’re on half term,” Susie says to Ed. “Hey. Eve. Did you mention the other day that Mark has had a kid?”
“Oh yes,” I say, taking a hard swallow of my fresh Estrella. Ah, lovely numbing beer. “He posted the photos last week. Ezra. Cool name.”
Mark is my ex and my only serious boyfriend. He went off to be successful in journalism in London when we were twenty-nine and I didn’t move with him, we long-distanced. Pretty soon he decided my reluctance to relocate meant I wasn’t sufficiently committed—he was right—and finished it. He now works for Time Out in San Francisco, is married, an American citizen, and a father. Meanwhile, I got a cat.
Regrets, I might have a few. My gut said we were never quite right, but a nagging voice in my head says that it was as right as I’m going to get, and I was an idiot. Coincidentally my mum says that too.
“Weird to think he used to be in here with us so often, and now he’s over there, forever. You’re not bothered?” Susie says.
“Uhm, no. It feels very distant to me, you know? In every sense.”
“How did you find out?”
“He popped up following me on Instagram a few months ago and I followed him back.”
“Aha. He’s not entirely over you, then,” Ed says. “He wants you to see he’s moved on, and check what you’re doing. Which is a sure sign of his not having fully moved on.”
“Hah. I doubt it. The fashionable neighborhood of Lower Haight, five thousand miles away, is the very definition of moving on.”
(Yes, of course I know these things from 1:30 a.m. bleary tap-tap-scroll research.)
“I’m sure of it. Moving on has to happen here and here,” Ed says, pointing at head and chest. He looks at me levelly and I blink at him and a tiny, near-imperceptible moment passes between us, and I mentally put it in one of my specimen jars.
“... I bet he browses photos of you and Roger and thinks, hell, I miss that walking essay crisis with the Cleopatra eyes.”
“Crisis!” But I glow, a bit.
“Hey—that’s good. ‘Walking essay crisis with the Cleopatra eyes,’ that’s like a Lloyd Cole lyric or something.”
“It’s funny we use social media to spy on each other really, given everyone’s telling some degree of lie on there,” Justin says. “There was a photo of a hotel on Trivago doing the rounds because they’d cropped out the nuclear power station behind it. But don’t we all , in a sense, crop out our nuclear power stations?”
I laugh.
“Yeah, everyone presents their life like it’s a holiday destination,” I say. “I mean, where Mark’s living is a holiday destination.”
“I always think when an ex is super happy with someone else they should be thanking you for ending things,” Susie says. “Clearly you were right to split up. Why is it all ‘yeah suck it, in your face, I’m thriving!’ No shit, John, that is why I suggested we were both better off apart while you screamed at me that it was the end of your world. Perhaps in fact an apology is in order. Why do they think they’ve proved their point, not yours?”
I laugh, partly at how quintessential Susie Hart this is.
“Technically Mark dumped me, so he only has himself to congratulate,” I say.
“Yes, but only because you chose to stay here.”
“Who would leave all this?” I say, toasting the room, and then Leonard. And we laugh, but I know, as we hit our mid-thirties, it’s feeling just a trifle hollow.
We can feel ourselves, if not having already made irreversible mistakes, right on the verge of making them. Hester recently observed that we are mutually “idling in neutral gear.” And “having each other stops all of you lot looking for more. Co-dependency. You are each other’s other halves, so you don’t bother with relationships as well.”
Apart from Ed and herself, of course. God, she’s a joy.
The thing with Hester is, there’s a big whistling gap where her niceness is meant to be, but she’s absolutely everything else. Good-looking, energetic, high-earning, organized, confident, effortful, sociable, homemaking, birthday-remembering, smart. So I can see how it happened. You’d need to be paying attention.
And Ed’s very loyal. Sometimes naturally loyal people fail to spot when they shouldn’t be loyal.
“Speaking of disappearing acts. Why are we missing Hester?” Ed says, at her empty seat, and Justin mumbles, “We’re not,” just quietly enough that Susie and I hear but Ed doesn’t.
Conversation is interrupted by a shrieking metallic noise, feedback from misfiring audio equipment, which makes everyone’s shoulders involuntarily hunch, and our mouths twist.
“Whoops! Let me fiddle with this. There we are. Hello! Before the quiz starts again, this young lady wants to use my kit for a moment. As it were, haha! Therefore I am handing over... to Esther? Hester , sorry.”
Our heads snap around and we frown in confusion to see Hester standing on the other side of the bar, wielding the microphone with a look of beatific anticipation, as if she’s about to belt out a karaoke “Total Eclipse of the Heart” or announce Sweden’s scores on Eurovision, as soon as the producer in her earpiece says, “Go.”
“Hi everyone,” she says, as the saloon bar falls silent. “I’d been wondering for a while about when best to do this, and I had a divine fit of inspiration. It’s his favorite place, there’s a mike.” She waggles it at her mouth like a lollipop she’s about to lick and I sense a few males in the room paying keen attention. Hester’s presence often has that effect. It’s like when you’re interested in a lot on eBay and it tells you that Four Other People Are Watching This.
“So... that man over there...”—she gestures at Ed, who’s looking embarrassed, vaguely gratified, but mostly perturbed—“is the love of my life.”
She pauses for the awwwww to ripple around the room and closes her eyes for a second and nods. My stomach flexes.
“I know, right. Even in that shirt!” Laughter. Hester’s giving it the full Gwyneth with her Oscar, in terms of regally commanding the room.
“Yep. We’ve been together for...” She pretends to remember, counting it off on her fingers. “... sixteen years! We are right about to age out of the ‘youth’ demographic, my dear. Thirty-four is the cut-off. I know this because I work in advertising.”
Another laugh. You work for a marketing agency. I’ve heard you tartly correct people calling it advertising.
“The autumn I met Ed, we’d only been going out a few months... he did something amazing.”
God, I am way too British not to find this excruciating. I can’t imagine Ed feels any different.
“... My sister was going through a serious illness and I wasn’t sure she’d pull through, for a while. Ed and I were very new. Most guys would’ve run a mile from the commitment I needed. Not Ed.” She looks at him, eyes shining, and the room holds its breath. “He came and stayed with my family that Christmas, he cooked the lunch for us, he took care of my parents, and promised me he’d always be there...”
Oh did he now. Well, it’s possible he didn’t, Hester’s a great self-mythologizer.
“... And I knew right then I had found someone very, very special.”
The room’s part-liquid.
“Now we’re thirty-four—what I’m wondering—Ed Cooper... after sixteen amazing years, of highs and lows, laughter and tears... is—will you marry me?”
A pause, and a roar of male expectation goes up from the steamily packed pub.
Susie, Justin, and I look at Ed in shock, and he momentarily returns it, and gazes at us, as if for our cue or permission. I literally see the thought pass across his face that he’s going to get into horrendous trouble if he spends more than a single second weighing this offer up.
“Yes!” Ed says. Then louder: “Yes, I will marry you!”
He stands up and belts over to the bar and leans over, and he and Hester have a quick kiss while the room cheers and claps.
Susie, Justin, and I all realize we should be doing the same, as we look around us, and join in, in mechanical fashion.
“What are you like...? What on earth?” I can hear Ed saying to Hester as she does a “oh you know me, what can I say” delighted both-palms-up gesture, and Justin, Susie, and I drink our drinks and say nothing in the din.
Ed and Hester continue whispering and Ed is clearly expressing his ongoing amazement at Hester’s romantic audacity. I tear myself away from the sight and look once more at my friends.
“I didn’t see that coming!” Justin says, with a pointedly upbeat, even tone. “At The Gladdy quiz, no less. Keep your gondolas in Venice or your sunsets in Marrakech, this is the way to do it. I will pencil mine in for when we’re next getting doners in Panko’s Fish Bar. What do you say, Leonard, fancy the job as ring bearer?” Leonard wakes up and stares at his owner and goes straight back to sleep, face down on tufted front paws. I think: Yep, hard same, Leonard .
Susie and I make polite murmurs of agreement and it’s fair to say, for once, we’re both speechless.
Ed and Hester are back at the table and we make nonspecific but emphatic noises of “Wow!” and “Congrats!” and “Oh my God!”
At times like this—OK, there haven’t been many times like this, but at times in general when we’re meant to show genuine and natural enthusiasm for Ed’s relationship—I marvel that someone as perceptive as Ed has tuned out the fact that we obviously aren’t that keen. Or maybe he knows full well, and sets it to one side.
Whenever the issue of their marrying arose, he used the fact they bought a “fixer-upper” of a house as a distraction. “We’ve got better ways to spend twenty grand than that, thanks to Crapston Villas.” I hoped against hope his reluctance was about more than the cost.
“Well then! Here we are!”
Hester plonks celebratory Cava down on top of the quiz sheet, Ed juggling five flute glasses, as we croon fake awe at recent events. He’s crimson-tinged with shock and glee and booze. Hester unpeels the foil and wrestles the cork out of the bottle and, as it snaps out with a phut , the fizz bubbles over, streams down the sides, and splatters our quiz sheet below.
“Whoops!” I move to rescue it, but Hester picks up the bottle and wipes the base with the sheet of paper, the spreading ink turning the writing into indecipherable Rorschach blots. Oh. I pick it up and it’s as limp as a tissue.
“I’ll put it over here to dry,” I say, draping it over the back of the seat.
“You’ll need translators from the British Library to decipher it,” Justin says, in that quick, light way that gets him away with murder.
I can’t help but glance at Susie, and she gives me a quick hard look of understanding and looks away.
We sip our fizz and clink glasses and say “Happy engagement!” as heartily as we can, and Hester says, “It wasn’t planned, you know?! I had one of my moments of inspiration. You know my thing is to follow them.”
I do know. I remember a story about Hester convincing her in-laws to skinny-dip with her on a family holiday to the Cornish coast that lives on in my nightmares. (“Never trust the physically uninhibited”—only solid piece of advice my dad gave me.)
“Next up, you’ve got to buy a ring,” Justin says. “You should spend a month’s wages, isn’t that right?”
Ed grimaces. “Luckily my monthly wages are two hundred quid and a bag of scratchings.”
“Hah, oh Edward. Best get saving! The one I like is Cartier!” Hester says.
Unplanned, was it.
“Jesus wept, how much are they?!” Ed fires up his phone and Googles. When he finds the relevant page, he mimes mopping his brow with his scarf. “H, the website doesn’t even have prices. I have to”—he makes a James Bond face—“ Contact a Cartier Ambassador to Request the Price .”
Hester’s gurgling with delight and I know Ed’s in the clear to joke as much as he wants for the rest of the evening. If not the rest of his life.
“If they won’t even admit the price upfront then surely it’s a real ‘going in hard with no lube’ situation?” Justin says. (I told you about Justin and good taste.) “Oof.”
“Yeah, they’ll start well north of five grand,” Susie says, someone who knows about posh things more than the rest of us. “Get that kidney ready for the black market, Eduardo!”
Ed mimes queasiness and Hester smooths her hair and lowers her eyes in a mock “Princess Diana” gesture. I feel queasy and it’s not even my savings. “I was thinking a spring wedding,” Hester says. “I hate long engagements, they’re so pointless. They’re for people who want time to change their mind, hahaha.”
“Or to save up,” I say, in a tight voice, my feelings about this finally breaking the surface.
“Eve.” Hester turns to me. “Susie.” She then turns to Susie.
Hester will make a stunning bride. Springtime. It’ll be all snowdrop flower crown, flowing backless satin like some medieval princess, tea lights in storm lanterns. “I have something to ask you both. By the time we tie the knot, my best friend back home will be about six months gone and, if her previous pregnancy is anything to go by, she’ll look like an egg.”
Wow.
“... And my sister says it’s a disgrace and embarrassment for anyone her age who’s still single to be a bridesmaid.”
A stagey pause, while I think I’m pretty sure her sister’s only two years older than us. “I was wondering. Would you two be my bridesmaids?”
A stunned beat before Susie bellows, “ Are you kidding oh my God of course we’d love to! ” and I echo her with as much force as I can muster.
We smash glasses together again and Ed says, “Wow, H, that is the loveliest thing. Two of my best mates, bridesmaids! That’s made my day.”
I’ve never seen Ed so uxorious. I admit I’ve been looking for micro-tells of his being pissed off at this ambush, but I can’t find any.
“It struck me as a really nice thing for you two to do, to make you feel part of it,” Hester says to me and Susie, as if we’re the ones on a school trip by grace of a special hardship fund.
I beam, with a fake banana-size grin. I am so glad to be drunk right now. Hats off, Hester, you’ve done well.
“And it goes without saying—this is my best man!” Ed says, and he and Justin hug. “The gang’s all here.”
Through the blurry talk of which venues have enough outdoor space to host the nuptials, I think about the fact I’ll have to go to dress fittings with Hester, with her bossing me in and out of boiled-sweet-colored gowns, free to pass comment on my appearance. I’m known for living in black, wearing my clompy boots, and, as Ed says, sticking to my ageing Goth makeup.
Instead of hiding at the back of this wedding, with a gin miniature, a Valium, and my crushed hopes in my black silk clutch, I will be front and center and required to grin my way through the official photos.
My Best Friend’s Wedding might’ve been a funny film but reliving its plot doesn’t feel funny in the slightest.
“... Question twelve. We asked you what Marcus Garvey, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, and Alice Cooper have in common? It involved a mistake. The answer is: they all read their own obituaries, which had been mistakenly published before they were dead.”
“Ah, that was the connection!” I say, but no one is listening.
The men in the packable anoraks win.