32. Cat
CAT
We decide on three weeks, and the village takes it as a personal challenge.
"You cannot plan a wedding in three weeks," Nadia says.
She flew in from Chicago four days after we announced it, ostensibly to help, and has so far helped by working steadily through the cellar and providing commentary from a lounger.
"It isn't possible. There's an entire industry built on it not being possible. "
"We've got a field," Iris says.
"A field is not a venue."
"It's five hectares of lavender."
"It's a field, Iris."
Iris, who has been awake since five and is holding something laminated, regards her oldest friend with tremendous calm.
"Nadia," she says. "There's a spreadsheet."
Nadia goes quiet. She has seen the spreadsheets.
The trouble is that we never actually ask anybody for help. We mention it once, to Monique, and by Thursday the whole thing has been taken out of our hands.
Jacques arrives with a trailer of trestle tables nobody ordered.
Somebody's nephew turns up to "do the lights," does the lights, refuses money, and appears to have brought his own generator.
An old man I have never seen before in my life knocks on the door on Tuesday and explains at length that he tuned Marguerite's piano for thirty years and would like to tune it again for Saturday. He does not want paying. He will be back on Friday. I am not to touch the pedals.
We do not have a piano.
By Friday, we have a piano.
Mathilde, meanwhile, has declared war on my menu.
"You are not doing a fish course."
"It's my wedding, Mathilde."
"It's August."
"It's October—"
"It is my kitchen," she says, which is not a rebuttal, and which ends the argument, because it is.
The guest list is a catastrophe for roughly one afternoon, until Iris works out that we don't actually have one. The village has one. The village has had one for some time, and has simply been waiting, politely, for us to catch up.
"Monique says a hundred and ten," she reports, coming into the kitchen.
"We invited forty."
"Yes."
"Iris. We invited forty."
"I have raised this with Monique."
"And?"
Iris sits down. She looks tired. "She asked me which ones I was proposing to remove."
I think about it.
"Right," I say. "A hundred and ten."
Michel rings from Heathrow.
"I've brought a cushion," he says.
"You've brought a what?"
"A cushion. Small one. Velvet." A pause. "For the rings."
"Michel—"
"I've never been a ring bearer, Cat. Not once. Forty-one years old and nobody's ever asked."
"You're not a child—"
"I know how old I am. That's the whole point."
I pinch the bridge of my nose. "Fine. Bring the cushion."
"Great." A rustling sound. "I've also brought a basket."
"A what?"
"A basket. For petals. In case the ring thing doesn't work out." He clears his throat. "Never been a flower girl either."
"Michel. It's a lavender field."
"Yes."
"We're getting married in a field of lavender. What are you planning to throw?"
Long pause.
"Lavender," he says.
And hangs up on me.
Duval cries when we tell him. Properly cries, in his own office, then apologises at length in three languages, then agrees to be a witness, then cries again.
The dress is a problem I hadn't anticipated.
"You can't both wear white," Sophie says.
"I wasn't going to wear white."
"Good. Two brides in white, in a lavender field, in front of a hundred and ten French people — you'd be a meringue emergency."
"Sophie."
"What colour, then?"
I think about the fields. I think about the little unframed canvas above our bed, of two pairs of hands.
"Purple," I say.
She comes back two days later with it, and I don't say anything for quite a while — because it's deep lavender silk, and there are stalks embroidered along the hem in a thread one shade darker, and it is the loveliest thing I have ever put on my body.
"Well?" says Sophie.
"How much do I owe you."
"Nothing."
"Sophie—"
"Cat." She adjusts my shoulder seam with two brisk fingers and does not look at my face. "Don't be tiresome."
Iris's is ivory. Straight, plain, entirely unfussy. When she comes out of the fitting room in it, I have to sit down on a chair.
"That bad?" she says.
"Shut up," I tell her. "Shut up."
The package arrives three days before the wedding.
I'm in the kitchen arguing with Mathilde about the fish course again when Iris appears in the doorway wearing a face I have never seen on her.
"You need to come."
It's on the desk in the office. Large, flat, wrapped in brown paper, with a Chicago return address in handwriting we both recognise.
We stand and look at it.
"Do you want me to open it?" I ask.
"No." Iris doesn't move. "What if it's something horrible?"
"Then we burn it and never speak of it again."
She almost laughs. Then she reaches out and takes the paper off, very carefully, the way she does everything.
It's a painting.
Marguerite — young. Thirty, perhaps. Standing in the fields with the sun behind her, her face turned slightly away, looking at something outside the frame. And whatever she's looking at has done something to her face that I have never seen in a single photograph of her.
We both know exactly who was holding the brush.
There's a note taped to the back.
Iris—
Your grandmother sent me this in 1996, the year after I took you home. There was a letter with it. I never read the letter and I never opened the crate.
It has sat in a storage unit outside Chicago for twenty-nine years. I have paid the bill on it every month for twenty-nine years. I have never once been able to explain to myself why.
I opened it last week.
I am not coming to the wedding. I would rather be honest with you than kind: I am not ready, and I would come and spoil it, and I think we both know that I would.
But I am trying. I don't know how quickly I can do it. I don't know if it will be fast enough to be any use to you.
This belongs on a wall and not in a warehouse.
Be happy. I did want that. I only ever wanted it in the wrong shape.
Mom
Iris reads it twice.
Then she folds it in half, puts it in her pocket, and stands there with her hand pressed flat against the frame.
"She kept the letter," she says.
"Yeah."
"She never read it. Thirty years. But she kept it." Her voice does something complicated. "She kept it, Cat."
I don't say she's trying. I don't say it's a start, or give her time, or any of the other things that would be true and useless.
I just stand behind her and put my arms around her, and look at my grandmother — thirty years old and lit up like a window, gazing at something we can't see.
We hang it above the fireplace that afternoon.
The night before, neither of us can sleep.
"I've forgotten the vows," Iris says into the dark.
"You wrote them down."
"I've forgotten where I wrote them down."
"Kitchen drawer. With the string."
A pause.
"Why do you know that?"
"Because you say everything out loud when you believe you're thinking," I tell her, "and it is the single most useful thing about you."
She hits me with a pillow.
We lie there a while.
"Cat."
"Mm."
"A hundred and ten people are coming to a field to watch us do this."
"Yes."
"Some of them are bringing a piano."
"They've already brought the piano."
"Right." She's quiet a moment. "I don't know most of their names."
"Nor do I," I say. "One of them tuned an instrument we didn't own. I think at this stage we simply have to accept it."
Iris laughs — that startled, unguarded one — and rolls into me in the dark, and puts her freezing feet against my legs, which is still a war crime, and will remain a war crime for the rest of my life.
"Are you frightened?" she asks, much later.
I think about it seriously, because she deserves a serious answer, and because this is the last night I will ever be asked that question by a woman who isn't my wife.
The old thing is in there somewhere. It always will be. Twelve years old in the back of a car, watching a house get smaller.
But it's quiet. It's been quiet a good while now.
"No," I say.
And then, because it's true, and because she is the only person alive I would say it to:
"I'm hungry, though."
"It's two in the morning."
"I'm aware."
Iris sighs the sigh of a woman who has made her choices.
"Go on, then," she says.
So I get up, on the night before my wedding, and go along to my grandmother's kitchen in the dark, and make us both an omelette.