ELEVEN Gus
“Can someone get that?” Nicky called from upstairs.
I was waiting in the hall while the women got themselves ready, but I wasn’t sure if “someone” included me. There had been deliveries arriving all morning: ten large, round tables and eighty chairs; a bale of white tablecloths; the cake, heavy tiers in separate boxes that were now being stacked into a tower in the marquee; and flowers, so many flowers, all white and trailing ivy, pedestals of lilies, yards of garland that scented the air with jasmine, and shallow crates containing cushions of white roses for each table. I knew the drill, but it wasn’t my house, and as I hesitated, Helen came running down the stairs in a dressing gown, her hair in large rollers.
“Side gate and through to the back,” she instructed the people on the doorstep. “Our planner will meet you there.”
She closed the door and shouted, “DJ’s here, Pip!”
“What? Oh, thank God!” came a muffled cry from upstairs.
“Bit early, isn’t it?” I said to Helen.
“Better early than late,” she said, running up the stairs again.
I took the comment to be a reference to my arrival that morning instead of the previous evening, when I should have been there for the family dinner. Friday nights were the busiest in the restaurant and I’d had to work late in order to get Saturday off. By the time we’d finished polishing and setting up, it was one in the morning, and after that, though I hadn’t mentioned it to Lucy, I’d gone round to Nash’s because she’d just been dumped by an actor she’d met at the Edinburgh Fringe and needed a shoulder to cry on. It had taken most of the night to get her smiling again and I’d only managed to grab a couple of hours’ sleep on her sofa. I’d had to leg it to Moss Bros. that morning to pick up my suit before getting my train.
Despite this, I was now showered, shaved and dressed when none of them were ready. The service was due to start in forty minutes and there was a lot of walking around upstairs, but still no sign of the bride or bridesmaids. I felt a bit of an idiot standing idly in the hall, but I didn’t want to sit down and read the paper in the living room because I’d never worn a morning suit before and wasn’t sure what to do with the tails.
“Awright, mate?”
A stocky figure in a white T-shirt printed with the words The Music Man was standing in the door to the kitchen with a wheel of electric cable over his arm.
“Any idea where I plug in?” he said.
“I think there’s a wedding planner in the marquee?” I said, anxious not to cause a breach of protocol.
“No one there except florists, mate!”
“Hang on...”
I called Helen.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” she said, clattering down the stairs, in silk shoes the same pale blue as her dress. She hurried out through the kitchen with the man, returning a couple of minutes later.
“I don’t know why we even bothered with a planner if I have to do everything!”
“You’re brilliant at it,” I said. “That’s the problem.”
It was the kind of remark that would have worked if I’d said it to Lucy, but with Helen it just sounded ingratiating and priggish at the same time.
Helen peered through the small window in the front door.
“The bloody florists are going to have to move their vans before the cars arrive,” she said.
“Should I tell them?”
She gave me her GP’s stare.
“Aren’t you supposed to be an usher?”
“I think I am.”
“Shouldn’t you be at the church, then?”
“I assumed I’d be going with Lucy.”
“There’ll be no room for you in the car with the bridesmaids. And you can’t go in with Pippa. You should have gone with Dad and Granny Cee,” she said.
“I’ll walk then, shall I?”
“It’s quite a long way...”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her, not wanting to cause any more trouble, but realizing, when Pippa’s vintage Rolls drove past me, that I’d completely underestimated the distance.
It’s difficult not to draw attention to yourself when you’re six foot four sprinting along in a morning suit with a top hat in your hand, and when I finally arrived at the church, Lucy and Helen were glaring at me, but Pippa was laughing.
“Very thoughtful of you, Gus,” she said. “To give me something to worry about and take my mind off things!”
“I’m so sorry,” I stammered. “You look gorgeous, by the way.”
I wouldn’t normally have said “gorgeous” to Pippa, because it sounded a bit personal for the sister of your girlfriend, but I was so out of breath, I wasn’t really thinking. And it was true.
Inside the church, the dim coolness made me conscious of the beads of sweat trickling down my temples and I could feel my white shirt sticking to my back under my jacket. I spotted Nicky agitatedly beckoning me to the front, then the organ struck up “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” and I suddenly realized that Pippa and her father were poised behind me and I was in the way. With everyone in the congregation now staring at me, I dived into a pew at the rear.
As the procession passed by, Pippa looked fragile as she gripped her father’s arm very tightly; Lucy’s glance was more dismayed than amused; Helen wasn’t even prepared to look in my direction. In their high-waisted ice-blue dresses, with their father leading them, I thought they looked like a family of sisters from a Regency television drama. At the altar stood Greg and his twin brother Jeff, who had come over to be his best man. The two of them together were as wide as they were tall. For a moment, I wondered where there was going to be room for Pippa, but then Jeff stepped aside.
The general view in the family was that Greg would be good for Pippa. She’d met him on her training semester in Banff. Ruddy and robust, he was the kind of man you could imagine wrestling a bear, I’d said to Lucy, after the engagement dinner a few months back. It was clear that Greg doted on Pippa, in a puppy-doggish kind of way, which seemed to charm her, although I suspected that if his ogling admiration had come from an equivalent Englishman, she would have thought him a bit of a wally. I assumed he must be great in the sack.
“Don’t you like him?” Lucy had asked me.
“He’s not really my type,” I replied, putting on a camp voice, which made her giggle.
Apparently, all Pippa’s previous boyfriends had been bastards—one of them had even been a drug addict—so there was huge relief that she’d ended up with someone reliable who would look after her. But as I heard her saying her vows with a slight laugh, as if the portentousness of the familiar words was a bit silly, I couldn’t help thinking that she was going to wake up the next morning next to the hulk and wonder what on earth she had done.
I managed to nip down the side aisle to join Lucy while the bride, groom, best man and both sets of parents went to sign the register.
“Wasn’t it beautiful?” Lucy whispered, her face morphing suddenly from dreamy to alarmed. “You haven’t got a buttonhole!”
The bells started ringing, the organ struck up Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” and the whole thing, which had taken months to plan and rehearse, was over. Except it wasn’t, because the photographs needed to be taken, a whole album’s worth of compulsory poses.
First, the bride’s family, which was slightly awkward for me because neither Lucy nor I knew whether I was included or not. Helen’s husband, James, was there with their daughters, obviously. After a few shots had been taken without me, Nicky called me in.
“Come on, Gus! Can someone please lend him a buttonhole?”
Next, the groom’s family, with the four of them taking up as much space on the church steps as the nine of us had; then the bridesmaids; the bride with bridesmaids; the bride with the grown-up bridesmaids with her dress hitched up to show her “something blue” garter; and finally, the ushers in morning suits, throwing their top hats into the air in a completely contrived act of spontaneity.
“Why?” I asked James, who gave me a lift back to the house.
“I suppose it’s a use for the top hat,” he said.
There was champagne on the front lawn while the bride and groom had their photographs taken with the cake.
I couldn’t help noticing that I was the object of interest for Lucy’s assembled relations, who appeared at regular intervals to size me up.
“So, this is Gus! Goodness, you’re tall, aren’t you?”
“Almost seven foot in a top hat!”
“And you’re a medical student too?”
“I am, yes.”
“How exciting!”
No one actually asked if we would be next, but I sensed calculations going on behind the appraising smiles.
In the marquee, we were seated at the top table. Glasses of white wine had been poured for us. I downed mine, then Lucy’s, before following her to the buffet table. I had that hungover kind of hunger that comes from alcohol on top of lack of sleep and I continued to slake my thirst with wine, when it probably would have been sensible to switch to water. By the time it came to the speeches, I was well on my way to being drunk.
Lucy’s father talked about Pippa being the least predictable of his daughters. If it was a warning to Greg, it seemed a bit late in the day. Greg’s speech was all about Canada, and how he was looking forward to showing his wife everything his country had to offer. Both he and his brother were wearing little maple-leaf pins on their lapels, a bit like American presidents wear a badge of the Star-Spangled Banner.
“Why do they do that?” I whispered to Lucy. “It’s not as if we’re going to forget where they’re from.”
“Sssh,” she said.
“Where I come from,” Greg was saying, “you can swim in the sea in the morning, and ski in the mountains in the afternoon.”
“It’s about the last place I’d want to go,” I murmured.
“I think it sounds nice,” Lucy countered irritably.
Jeff got up, his broad face only distinguishable from his brother’s by the helpful addition of a moustache.
“Are there two of them?” Granny Cynthia asked.
“Do you think Jeff grew the moustache for the occasion?” I asked Lucy.
“Stop it...”
He told a rambling anecdote about going fishing with Greg when they were boys. Apparently, Greg had tried every ruse to catch a fish but never got one. Now it looked like he’d landed the biggest catch of the season!
“Poor Pippa,” I whispered to Lucy in the enthusiastic applause after the toast to the bride and groom.
“Why do you say that?”
“Not only is she big, but she’s a fish. She’s a big fish!”
“He just meant she’s a catch,” said Lucy. “You’re getting a bit loud. They’ll hear you on the video if you don’t watch it.”
A cameraman was prowling the room. I’d noticed him earlier zooming in on the elaborate lacy pattern of mayonnaise on the poached salmon. Perhaps he would edit it into the fishing anecdote?
Greg’s mother, who was seated a couple of places down from Lucy, tinkled her fork against her glass, but when everyone in the room obediently looked in her direction, she became flustered.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a speech!” she said.
“That’s a relief!” I murmured.
“Could you please just zip it?” hissed Lucy.
“In North America, when you tinkle, the bride and groom have to find each other and kiss wherever they are in the tent!” Greg’s mother informed us.
Greg and Pippa, who were at that point still sitting next to each other, obliged.
Everyone clapped.
It was time for the cutting of the cake. Bride and groom got themselves into position with a big silver knife for some more photos. Greg’s father tinkled his fork against his glass, so they had to kiss. Then the bottom tier of virgin cake was ceremonially pierced before being whisked away by catering staff to be portioned up into tiny cubes.
As guests returned to the buffet table to help themselves to dessert, Greg and Pippa circulated around the room, greeting their friends and family individually. The tinkling-glass thing was quite fun if you waited until they were at opposite ends of the marquee, but the third time I did it, I over-hit my glass, causing it to smash instead of tinkle. Fortunately, the only person who noticed was a tall girl with a ponytail dressed in a white shirt and black trousers. Her face broke into a wonderfully mischievous, almost conspiratorial smile.
“Do you think you could get me another glass?” I asked.
“I’m not a waitress,” she said.
“I am a waiter,” I told her nonsensically.
“You’ll know where to find a glass then,” she said, smiling again.
For a moment, our eyes held each other’s, our expressions puzzled. Did I know her from somewhere?
“Who are you?” I heard myself asking.
And then Lucy was standing next to me with a dustpan.
So people had noticed.
“I think I need some air,” I said.
“Very good idea,” Lucy said crisply.
It was already dark outside and the cool evening air was heady with the scent of tobacco plants. With “Livin’ la Vida Loca” bouncing around the dark, empty garden, I was dimly aware that my grasp on time and space had become tenuous. I found myself sitting on the swing seat, which creaked gently as I rocked. Across the lawn, the glowing tent and thump of bass seemed far away.
When I woke up, my head was throbbing and my face was cold against the striped cushion. The clue that hours had passed was in the music. Robbie Williams was singing “Angels.” I could see the shadows of slow-dancing couples on the sides of the marquee.
A flap of tent opened, throwing a triangle of light over the lawn. I recognized the tall silhouette of the waitress who wasn’t a waitress. The triangle of light closed behind her. In the dark stillness, I could just about see her shadowy outline and I could tell, somehow, that she was thinking about something sad.
A shaft of light fell across the lawn again as a man came out of the tent.
“You awright?” he asked.
“I am,” she said.
“Couldn’t have done this without you,” he said.
“I didn’t do anything,” she told him.
He took a step closer to her.
“You’re not like other women,” I heard him say.
“How do you work that out, then?”
“You’ve got this brilliant smile, but there’s all this stuff going on in your head.”
“Now you’re making me sound a bit mad!”
“Mad enough to be my girlfriend?”
A long moment of silence.
“Lot of stars, aren’t there?” he said, placing a tentative hand on her shoulder.
Then she turned towards him and he kissed her, and I stayed very still, praying that someone wouldn’t turn on a light in the house and reveal me there witnessing their moment.
“Where on earth have you been?” Lucy asked as I let myself into the living room through the French doors.
“Fell asleep in the garden.”
“Honestly!”
“Have I missed much?”
“You missed Jeff teaching me to salsa. Pip’s about to go away. Jeff and I have tied all the silver balloons to the car.”
“You and Jeff, eh?”
“You know what they say about the best man and the chief bridesmaid?”
“Wasn’t Helen the chief bridesmaid?”
“We both were!”
“Jeff got lucky!”
Lucy gave me a playful slap on the arm.
“Should I be worried?” I gave her neck a quick nuzzle.
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging me away. “Should you?”
“Probably not with the moustache,” I said.
Another slightly less playful slap, then Pippa was standing at the top of the stairs, wearing a flimsy summer dress with a jeans jacket over it. Greg followed close behind in pressed chinos and a polo shirt. His hair was wet from showering. They looked as if they’d just had vigorous sex.
On the drive, a white Jaguar was waiting to take them to the airport hotel. As Pippa was about to get into the car, Helen rushed up to her with the small posy of white roses Pippa had carried into the church. I saw Pippa glance at Lucy, who shook her head imperceptibly, so instead Pippa threw the bouquet over her head in the direction of her best friend from school, who shrieked as she caught it.
“What was that all about?” I asked Lucy, as we waved the car away.
“The person who catches the wedding bouquet is the next one who’s going to get married,” she said.
I wasn’t stupid enough not to know that. I’d meant the silent little exchange between the sisters, which Lucy clearly thought I’d missed. Had I pissed her off so much she was losing interest in me? I’d never quite understood what she saw in me in the first place.
“We haven’t had a dance,” I said, leading her back into the marquee.
Westlife’s “Flying without Wings” was playing. At first, Lucy was a little stiff in my arms, but as I drew her closer in, she relaxed against my chest and I felt I’d been forgiven.
“I love you,” I heard myself whisper into her hair.
She took a step back from me to look at my face.
“Do you?”
She looked so delighted, I thought perhaps I did.