Model Annie:
Red shirtwaist dress (Perfect Dress, borrowed)
Control pants (Spanx)
Blue heels (L.K. Bennett)
Chunky gold and silver necklaces (Corazon Latino)
Total est. cost: £380
‘I don’t think that was just a little fuse…’
It was so dark in the church after the bang that at first no one could even see their own hands in front of their faces. But, slowly, their eyes adjusted to the gloom. ‘What just happened?’ Annie’s voice rang out in the darkness.
‘What have you done?’ came Svetlana’s sharper and more accusing question.
‘Les plombs ont sauté!’ was the angry response from DJ Paul in the corner of the room.
‘I don’t think that was just a little fuse…’ Annie said, speaking as a veteran of dodgy fuse boxes and blown plugs.
‘No,’ came Rich’s verdict out of the darkness over on the other side of the church pews. ‘I’ll try and find a torch, then I can maybe change the fuses on the lights. They probably come with spares. But that sounded a lot more serious than a little fuse. It sounded like we blew the whole bloomin’ box.’
DJ Paul let out a blast of angry-sounding French, which was initially met with silence as no one in charge knew what he meant.
‘Anoush?’ Annie asked, hoping she could provide a translation.
‘He say it sometimes happen,’ she began from her spot near the altar, ‘the courant in the building not enough for all his equipment, plus the lights.’
Then DJ Paul switched on a powerful torch, which proved that he was prepared for disasters like this and, with the beam in one hand, he began to pack up with the other.
He fired out some more sentences in rapid French, which Anoush began to translate with embarrassment: ‘He’s going to go now. Er, he’s not going to come back tomorrow. He thinks this problem will take too long to fix and it is too much trouble for him.’ It was time for Elena to let out her, by now familiar, howl of despair.
Eyes adjusting to the darkness, Annie could see that Elena’s face was in her hands. Even Svetlana’s proud posture seemed to have slumped. Svetlana was not used to problems; she was used to clicking her fingers or bringing out her credit card and making every little hitch that ever dared to get in her way disappear.
There was a baffled sense of shock in the church now; no one seemed quite ready to believe that after all this effort, a mere electrical problem was going to ruin everything. They had come so far in so few hours: they had found a new venue and reorganised all the guests; they had found models; they had made headdresses and veils; they’d had a DJ, even a borrowed lighting rig… and now it looked as if it was all going to be over again. Annie was desperate to suggest something. Anything. Her mind was racing. Couldn’t they bring in a thick power extension cable from the hall? ‘A CD player?’ she asked out loud. ‘With batteries?’
DJ Paul seemed to understand her suggestion and he just laughed out loud at it. ‘Pas moi,’ he told them with a shrug. Not me. If anyone was going to be standing in a church playing a battery-operated CD player, it wasn’t going to be DJ Paul. He had almost finished his dismantling work and Annie had a feeling that once he walked out of the door, it was going to be hopeless. Once one of them had given up hope, the feeling of doom and gloom would settle over the others, and they would all walk out on this show.
‘We have to think of something,’ Annie said out loud, as encouragingly as possible. ‘If we’ve got this far, we can solve this little problem. C’mon.’
For a few moments, everyone was totally silent. The DJ finished his packing by torchlight.
Once he was gone, Annie thought wildly, they wouldn’t even have torchlight. They would be totally in the dark. Then Grand-mère stood up.
‘My grandmother needs to go home,’ Celeste said, suddenly remembering.
‘Of course,’ Svetlana replied.
Celeste stood up too and prepared to follow Grand-mère. Grand-mère walked out of the pew, but then she turned, not towards the church vestibule and door, but instead in the direction of the altar. Once there, she made a left before disappearing through the small side door.
‘Where’s she going?’ Annie asked Celeste.
Celeste shrugged.
‘Is this her church?’ Annie wondered.
‘Yes,’ came Celeste’s reply, ‘she comes here all her life.’
Grand-mère shuffled out several moments later with two small cardboard boxes in one hand and a wrought-iron candle holder in the other.
The candle holder was one which had been designed to carry row after row of little votive candles.
Grand-mère set the items down in front of the altar, then she went back into the room and came out with another three candle holders in her hands.
‘Voila, la lumière,’ she said. Celeste was about to translate, but Elena was the one who said in English: ‘Here is our light.’
Then Grand-mère walked calmly before the altar, pausing to make a little genuflection in the centre, and disappeared through the second tiny door on the other side of the church.
For a moment there was silence, then a terrifying blast of organ music reverberated round the church, shocking everyone back to their senses.
‘The organ!’ Annie exclaimed.
Grand-mère appeared once again and said simply: ‘Voila, la musique.’
Celeste gave a little clap and began to speak to her grandmother in French. Then she turned back to the others and asked: ‘What you think? She say she have friend who could play organ music here tomorrow.’
Elena and Svetlana appeared to be too surprised to be able to speak. They were looking at each other in the very dim light.
‘Will the candles be enough? For taking pictures?’ Annie asked Rich.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘it’s a very dark church, even in the daytime. It’ll be very moody, but you know, the photographers will use flash and as for me, I’ll just put the camera on the night-time setting and… hey, it’ll be something different.’
Suddenly Elena seemed to be galvanised once again. Springing up from her hard wooden seat, she exclaimed: ‘Come on, we light up all the candles we can find and we see how it look.’
‘Candles...’ Annie wasn’t too sure, ‘Look away Health and Safety... look away.’