Chapter Twenty-One #2
“I’m tightening up the ship,” he said. “Getting rid of the deadwood.” Then he gave me a very strange look.
“But they were our wedding guests!” I said.
When James and I were ready to send out wedding invitations, we found that between us we had no friends and very little in the way of family to invite, but the church seated more than four hundred and the reception venue—Langley Hall—had room for significantly more.
So, James took out his BlackBerry and opened up his emails. “This is how you fill a church,” he said and typed “save the date” in the subject line. Then he wrote:
You are all warmly invited to the wedding of James William Dixon and Daisy “Daydream” Langley on Saturday, 17 May 2003, at 2 p.m., St. Anne’s Church, Upper Iffley and to the reception and evening event afterward at Langley Hall.
Overtime will be payable to each attendee from 1.
30 p.m. until the free bar opens at 7 p.m. RSVP by 29 March 2003.
He pulled up contact groups from his address book, and invitations went out to the staff at James’s office and the contractors who carried out building maintenance.
Then we sent paper invitations, with the same offer, to Mrs. Dobson, who was my first primary school teacher, the Crawford family, whom I used to babysit for, and Mr. and Mrs. Billings. In that way we filled the church.
In the run-up to the wedding, James was too busy to get involved with the preparations, he just instructed me to make it the event of the year and kept topping up the account he’d opened for the expenses.
I went to all the dress fittings by myself, and I didn’t care.
James offered the services of his mother, Mrs. Dixon senior, to accompany me, but strangely, we couldn’t find a time that would suit, even though we both had all day every day.
Anyway, I could tell whether the dress looked nice or not without an audience.
I could have done with a bit of advice on whether to buy some kind of headwear or not—I was still new to unimaginable wealth and I didn’t know if it would be class or crass.
In the end, I judged by the prices, assumed they were class, and bought a diamond-studded diadem.
When I thought about it later, I realized nobody at the wedding was going to be able to naysay me. We were all pretty common.
I had a team to help me with everything else.
I had a florist, an interior designer, a hair stylist, a makeup artist, the cake company, the caterers, a photographer, and we all really hit it off.
In no time we were a little posse. We set up a messaging group, which was a new experience for me, called “Daisy’s Big Day,” and I found myself checking morning, noon, and night for their chatty little messages.
Your hair is going to look amazing, the stylist wrote. I can’t wait to see it with the dress and makeup.
I’m really excited for the photos, the photographer said. The house is such a great venue.
Are you going to take a pic of the cake? the baker asked her.
Of course!
Get the dress in the sunlight. I’m weaving silver thread through it, the dressmaker posted.
It will look magical, the photographer replied.
We were all getting on so well, I wondered if we might keep in touch afterward, but the replies to my messages stopped coming after the event.
On the day, we paraded out of the manor grounds in horse-drawn coaches.
We had issued fresh invitations to the evening do, and the free bar ensured a few people turned out into the street to see us on our way to the church.
It was like being royalty; they waved, a few of them clapped, and I sat up straight and graciously waved to one side, then the next, which really was embarrassing and I wondered what my mum would say if she could see me.
Probably: “Daisy, you don’t have the cleavage for a dress like that. ”
The rest of it was a bit of a blur. I remember saying “I do,” I remember the photographs, I remember being in the ballroom for what felt like a lifetime.
Everything sparkled: the chandeliers, the tableware, the diadem, my dress, the champagne.
It was quite hard on the eyes after a while; we should have had headache tablets out on the tables.
There were speeches from James’s dad, from his longest-standing employee, who was getting triple time to double as his best man. A speech from Mrs. Dobson about my first year at school. She might have had a very good memory, or she could have made it all up. I didn’t know any better.
The disco started with our first dance. James chose it.
It was his one contribution to the wedding, and he chose the twist. It was the most uncomfortable two minutes of my life, until a few more people came to join us and we were able to blend into the crowd and from there to make our way to the edges of the room.
The DJ moved on, song after song, everyone whirled by, everyone stopped to talk to me, as if they liked me.
I felt myself flagging, until finally, he announced the last song.
The bar closed, the music stopped, the lights came on, the DJ thanked everyone for coming and bid us a good night.
People began to make their way to the door and into prearranged minibuses waiting outside.
My wedding day was over, but I had a bright future with the husband of my dreams. The rest of my life was beginning.
I realized for the first time that in all the excitement, we hadn’t booked a honeymoon. We hadn’t even discussed one! In fact, our relationship had been such a whirlwind, we’d never even been on holiday together. Not so much as a weekend in the Lakes.
James finished saying good-bye to one of the contractors and turned to me, grinning.
“I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said, closing the front door on the guests.
Maybe he’d arranged a honeymoon and he was going to whisk me off somewhere?
But I hadn’t packed! I hoped he hadn’t done it for me and made a man’s job of it—I didn’t want to go on my dream holiday with just a week’s worth of underwear and a spare T-shirt.
And I hoped he knew I didn’t have a passport.
He took me by the hand and pulled me toward the entrance hall. “I left instructions to set it up while we were at the wedding.”
That didn’t sound like plane tickets, not unless they were to be displayed very elaborately.
I hurried after him, wondering what it could be.
He’d had to ask them to “set it up” so presumably not jewelry—and anyway, he’d given me the ring of a lifetime that morning.
Probably not flowers, that would be “arranging.” Something musical?
My ears were still ringing from the disco.
I was stumped. Something made from Lego, perhaps?
The wait was nearly over. We were in the hall, standing before what had been the family tree of the lords of the manor.
Gone was that beautiful, centuries-old piece of art.
In its place was a blank canvas, a brand-new family tree.
I stepped closer. The only names were right at the top, the founding couple, James and Daisy.
Below us a long, horizontal line, with short vertical lines protruding from it at intervals for the names and dates of children. I counted the tabs.
“Ten?” I said, turning to look at him. James was grinning like a maniac.
“There’s room to add more if we need it.”
“Ten?” I repeated. Maybe we should have discussed this before.
My eye was caught by a little doodle above our names: a shield shape, split into four, with red and yellow backgrounds, red then yellow in the top two, and yellow then red in the bottom. Each quarter had a little picture in it, but I couldn’t make them out at that size. “What’s that?”
“It’s our coat of arms,” he said.
“Since when did you have a coat of arms?”