The tiny church nestled sleepily at the very end of what appeared to be little more than a potholed bridle path, and the wedding cars, bedecked with cream ribbon, were being manoeuvred very slowly down it. With much tutting and sucking of his remaining teeth, our ancient driver inched towards the parking area to the left of the church and pulled in with obvious relief. Trust Sylvia to put show before practicality. Apparently the whole of Surrey wanted its wedding here, and the church was booked up for years ahead. Judge Colin had obviously pulled a few strings to obtain this slot, but I supposed being a peer of the realm meant you could queue jump.
Kit and Lilian, each carrying a baby seat, walked past us to take their place in the church. Kit had been roped in to act as usher and had been instructed by Sylvia as to his role the previous evening. I wanted to make sure the babies were behaving and, leaving the girls in the car to await the bride’s arrival, I jumped out for a last minute check that everyone and everything was as it should be.
I hurried over to the ancient church porch – as much as anyone can hurry in four inch heels on muddy cobbles. Hell, these shoes were killers: how I was going to last the day in them was anyone’s guess. The twins gurgled nonsense when they saw me, blowing raspberries and apparently no worse for having been up all night. Party animals, the pair of them… obviously.
Kit turned his head away from me slightly as I reached up to kiss him. Just fifteen, he was now taller than me and seemingly not in the mood to have his mother straighten his tie or check his neck was clean. He winced slightly and pulled away again as I tried to do something with the fifties style quiff that, although all the rage, did render a rather Donald Duck effect to his appearance.
‘Kit, what is that?’ I looked in horror at the ear that he’d turned away from me. The cartilage at the top of his earlobe was red and inflamed, with the cause of the inflammation – a shiny stud – glinting cheerily from its midst.
Kit’s cheeks were suffused to the colour of his ear. ‘It’s fine, Mum. Leave it.’
‘Fine?’ I turned his face towards me. ‘Fine? Kit, that ear is infected. You know what Dad and I have said about piercings. Whenever did you get this done? Does it hurt? Can you get it out? You can’t show people to their seats with a suppurating ear like that.’
The twins looked on with interest as Kit’s voice wavered. ‘It really hurts, Mum. I’ve tried to get it out but it hurts too much.’
‘Right,’ I said, thinking on my – already aching – feet, ‘I’ll get the girls out of the car and leave Libby in charge. If you would take the twins in, Lilian, and get yourself settled, I’ll find a bathroom somewhere and see if I can get this stud out.’
Didn’t God worshippers of old need a pee? The church didn’t appear to have any sort of bathroom or restroom. I eventually found what amounted to a whitewashed cupboard housing a toilet and a tiny washbasin and hauled Kit in after me.
‘I don’t believe this, Kit. A stud in your lobe is bad enough, but through the cartilage is madness. You do know you can shatter the cartilage when you pierce it? I can’t imagine why I didn’t see it before.’
‘I was going to take it out before we left home, but she told me I had to leave it in or it would heal up.’
‘Who told you? Where did you have it done?’ I asked crossly as I rolled my sleeves up and washed my hands in the minuscule basin. There was no towel and I had to shake the water off my hands before manoeuvring myself around Kit and attempting the extraction of the silver coloured stud. Silver – I was guessing – it wasn’t. It was little wonder I’d not noticed it before. It was tiny, pocketed inside the area where his ear curled over, and Kit had obviously kept his hair over it to hide it from my and Nick’s eyes. I glanced at my watch. It was after eleven and the organ was revving up to welcome the bride. I didn’t know who was showing people to their seats, but it certainly wasn’t Kit. He drew back against the wall as I gently tried to manipulate the stud out. The ear was a mess, and I knew I really needed disinfectant and tweezers: I was frightened, too, of pushing it further into the cartilage.
‘Where did you get this done, Kit? They should be shot. I’m sure you should have had a sort of circular barbell thing put in rather than a stud.’
Kit had gone very pale and sweaty. Great. All I needed was for him to pass out on me. ‘I did it,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘I did it myself with a needle and cork. Granny Keturah told me she and her friends all pierced their ears themselves when they were my age with a needle and a cork. I did put the needle in hot water first.’
‘Boiling, sterilised water?’ I asked grimly as I managed to filch out the tiny butterfly from the back of the top of his ear just as the whole of the church resonated to the triumphant opening notes of Wagner’s wedding march.
‘Hot water from the bathroom tap in a tooth mug,’ Kit admitted.
Now adrift from its butterfly mooring, I was terrified the minuscule stud would float off into the cartilage, and I was seriously considering whether I should get Kit to the nearest A & E. With one last desperate poke around in poor Kit’s ear, I managed – to my relief – to dislodge the stud. I found a tissue in my bag, washed the infected area as best I could and flushed the stud down the loo. I discovered a packet of paracetamol and gave two to Kit, which he washed down with water from a cupped hand.
‘The service has started, Kit. We’re going to have to sidle in and sit at the back.’
We exited the tiny toilet and I went in front of Kit along the narrow corridor towards the atrium of the church.
‘Mum,’ Kit hissed from behind me.
‘What?’
‘You’re covered in white powder, and your stockings are all laddered.’
Shit. I reached a hand behind me, glancing over my shoulder. My lovely new pink and navy suit and my navy hat were both covered in the whitewash from the toilet walls, and my tights had snagged and laddered, probably on a nail in the wooden door as I’d tussled with Kit’s ear. I turned Kit around and saw his new navy suit was just as bad. We attempted to dust each other down a bit, but only seemed to make it worse.
‘I could slap you, Kit, I really could,’ I whispered, but then caught sight of his face. He looked as if he were about to cry, and was obviously still in pain. I patted his arm. ‘When we get to the hotel we’ll find some antiseptic. Don’t worry, darling. You’ll live. Come on, let’s go in.’
The tiny wooden door creaked loudly and ominously as we entered the main body of the church, and heads turned. Kit and I slipped into the pew at the back where Lilian was sat with the twins. Thea, after her night on the tiles, was sleeping soundly – but Fin was over Lilian’s shoulder, his cheek as red as Kit’s ear. When he caught sight of me he let out a roar, which turned more heads. I hastily took him from Lilian’s arms and put him over my own shoulder, soothing him and whispering nonsense.
On the other side of the aisle, in an adjacent pew, an elderly man sat alone. He wasn’t dressed in the morning dress attire that Sylvia had requested from the main guests, but was wearing a pair of old corduroy trousers and tweed jacket. He was sitting forward, listening intently to the words of the service… and for a fleeting second I contemplated the idea that he was about to jump up and shout, ‘It should have been me,’ dash down the aisle towards Sylvia and claim her as his own.
That would have been fun.
I concentrated on soothing Fin before glancing over at the man once more. He was almost out of his seat, straining to hear – and then, just as the vicar asked Colin Fitzgerald for the ring to put on Sylvia’s finger, he bent down and fiddled with a huge box on the other side of him. Oh, God, surely he wasn’t a paid marksman and was going to take Judge Colin out for some untoward decision he’d made years ago in one of his courts? My mind was running riot. Maybe the man had just spent twenty years in prison, wrongly convicted, and was about to get his revenge. The old man reached into the wooden box and pulled out… an owl.
An owl, ruffling its feathers nonchalantly, while blinking its huge yellow eyes in my direction.
I seemed to be the only one who had noticed the man. Kit was slumped in his seat, his head nodding as the painkillers presumably worked their magic, and Lilian was intent on the service. The owl – a small white one, which my many years as a Brownie still failed to help me identify – suddenly launched itself into the air, flying down the aisle towards Sylvia and her beloved. A woman near the front screamed and a child began to cry. Stunned, I watched as Colin turned, quickly whipped out a white glove from his trouser pocket and held his hand up towards the bird. Two silken tassels could plainly be seen hanging from the bird’s leg and Colin, looking somewhat panicked, ducked as the bird circled and landed on his gloved hand.
Gasps of amazement rippled down the aisle and someone broke into spontaneous applause. Sylvia, who seemed to be as much in the dark with regards Colin’s surprise as the rest of us, looked horrified and then, as the bird perched somewhat precariously on her future husband’s arm, gave a pretty, rather affected, tinkle of laughter. Colin, who had obviously practised what to do next with Corduroy Man at the back, began to untie the matching wedding rings from the tassels on the owl’s leg at just the same moment as the lady organist, as mesmerised as the rest of us, leaned backward to get a better view and – finding herself overbalancing – grabbed furiously at the organ, hitting the keys in a cacophony of flats and sharps of dubious and mismatched notes.
It was immediately apparent that this blast of organ noise didn’t figure in the owl’s usual wedding ritual. A flurry of snow, the bird rose into the air and swooped silently back down the aisle, wide brimmed hats and over-the-top fascinators ducking in its wake. The bird flew over my head and, obviously shitting itself, dumped a copious amount of warm slime on to my newly whitewashed shoulder.
Great stuff.
Corduroy Man made some funny squeaking noise, which was probably owl speak for, ‘Wrong way, you daft bird – get back down there and do your stuff.’
It didn’t. Instead, obviously thoroughly pissed off, the owl circled the nave of the church several times, swooping dangerously low over bobbing guests before flying up to the rafters just above the vicar, Sylvia and Judge Colin. And that’s where it stayed, refusing to be coaxed back down even by the feast of dead mice that Corduroy Man held up for its attention.
The vicar, glancing at his watch, cleared his throat several times, whispered something in Colin’s ear and then spoke to the gathered congregation. ‘Dear friends, we have witnessed this morning one of God’s own creatures with a mind of its own.’ Here he paused, looking at the almost married couple, and I wasn’t sure if he was talking about Sylvia or the owl. Then he continued, ‘Could I call upon anyone to help the situation by the lending of a wedding ring?’ He looked up at the bird, which, after depositing more excreta over the back of several pews, was glaring beadily down at him like some Mafia hood. ‘I don’t think we can retrieve the intended rings just at the moment.’
Everyone’s glance turned from the owl to their own hands, and several of the guests went forward to the front. Nick was there first, however, pulling off the ring which, as far as I knew, he’d never removed since the day I’d put it on his finger eighteen years earlier.
Three minutes later Sylvia was Lady Colin Fitzgerald.
And Fin, whom I had moved down on to my lap from my right shoulder once the owl had deposited on my left, spectacularly vomited his breakfast down the front of my little jacket.
Lilian passed over the whole packet of baby wipes and took Fin from me as the organ leapt into life once more and the happy couple made their way back down the aisle. Sylvia’s eye caught my whitewashed, owl shit and baby vomit decorated facade and, turning towards me, winced in sympathy as I stood in the pew trying to clean myself up. So she didn’t notice at first the petite, immaculately dressed blonde woman standing in the shadows at the back of the church.
‘Darling, darling girl.’ Judge Colin suddenly stopped his progression of the red carpeted aisle and seemed unable to carry on.
‘Nick,’ the woman sighed, loudly enough for me to hear her. ‘Oh, Nick,’ and, running past her father and new stepmother, flung herself into my husband’s arms.
*
‘So do tell us, Harriet, what part of Yorkshire you hail from. It must be pretty spectacular if you’ve managed to keep Nick up there all these years.’
Sylvia had obviously decided, after Anna’s unexpected arrival, that a mother’s place was with her babies and nanny so, while the rest of my family – the bride’s son, bridesmaids and intended usher – were on the top table with the bride and groom, I had been demoted to the next table down and was now being interrogated by Anna Fitzgerald’s cousins. The way they had welcomed Nick back to the southern fold, as it were, made me realise how well they had known and loved him when he had been with Anna almost twenty years earlier. I’d removed my stinky jacket, but the hole in the dark, finely meshed stockings had grown, showing a wide expanse of white flesh. The look was not chic.
‘We’re in Midhope,’ I smiled, ‘between Leeds and Manchester.’
‘Oh, I believe I went there once. I didn’t stay.’ A large florid man, already several glasses of red wine down, poured himself another before offering me some. ‘Isn’t it full of dark, satanic mills and Luddites?’
‘I think most of them have been arrested and hanged by now,’ I said, ‘or will have moved into the rather swish apartments that the mills have become. There are some quite magnificent moors in the surrounding areas.’
‘Moors? Moors? Thought all Moors were in North Africa and Spain.’ The cousin tittered at his own joke before swallowing to hide a belch. ‘Joke, Hannah. Joke. I know my moors.’
But obviously not my name.
‘Midhope? Harold Wilson, the prime minister, was from around there, wasn’t he?’ One of Colin Fitzgerald’s brothers now spoke. ‘Labour chappie. Kept going head to head with Ted Heath in the seventies.’
‘Yes, but a bit before my time. My dad talks quite a lot about the early seventies, and how Ted Heath and his Tories imposed the three day week on the country.’ I knew I was on dangerous ground, surrounded – as I was – by Home County Conservatives, but knackered, covered in excreta and with a bloody great hole in my stockings, I was that way out. I was trying to keep an eye on the twins, who were being bounced about by various aged aunts, make sure India was all right on the top table, catch Kit’s eye to ask if he needed more painkillers and – more importantly – work out what the prodigal daughter was up to, arriving back and making such an entrance when she’d previously declined all invitations to the wedding.
Anna Fitzgerald wasn’t at all as I’d envisaged. I think my subconscious had imagined the girl Nick had thrown over for me along the same lines as Amanda Henderson – the most beautiful woman in the world. She wasn’t stunningly attractive, but she certainly was very striking in a blonde Audrey Hepburn sort of way. Her hair was short and layered – gamine, I suppose you would call it – and artfully cut, presumably by top Italian hairdressers, to show off her amazing cheekbones and large eyes. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall and Nick, sitting next to her in what presumably originally had been my seat at the top table, towered over her.
To my right, Nick’s Auntie Barbara, Sylvia’s much older sister, nudged me in the ribs at the same time as bouncing Thea on her lap. ‘Neat little thing, isn’t she? Always was, you know, Harriet. Sylvia took it very badly when she and Nicholas split up.’
‘Right.’
‘But all in the past of course now, dear,’ she added hastily. ‘Water under bridges and all that.’
‘Be careful, Barbara,’ I said, trying to change the subject. ‘Thea has just been fed. I’d hate it if she was sick over that lovely glittery top you’re wearing.’
‘It is rather lovely, isn’t it?’ she beamed, ignoring my advice about the now very giggly Thea. ‘I went up to London specially and found just what I was looking for in Selfridges on Oxford Street. I do like a nice bit of glittery Durex in a top, don’t you? Sets the rest of the outfit off, I always think.’
‘Makes a good thing inconceivably better, Barbara,’ I smiled, storing the anecdote up to relay to Grace next time I saw her. ‘Look, just put this cloth over your shoulder and then if Thea does throw up you won’t spoil your lovely blouse.’
I handed her a cloth from my cavernous baby bag and she laughed and tutted, ‘Oh, you modern mothers. Always have to have a bit of muslin on your shoulder, don’t you? Barbara draped the cloth across her shoulder and carried on bouncing Thea up and down.
I kept turning to see what Nick was up to with Anna: every time I looked they were deep in conversation. Obviously twenty years of catching up to do. I hadn’t even been introduced to her yet – she’d been whisked away by her father the minute she’d released Nick from her embrace – and then had been taken off by her only brother and his family before joining the main players on the top table. So where was the Italian count and the daughter?
As the wedding breakfast – confirmed proudly by Auntie Barbara as being the handiwork of Gordon Ramsay – came to an end, Nick (as best man) stood to speak, and Lilian gathered the babies, taking them to a quieter part of the hotel and out of the way.
Nick, not usually nervous about standing to speak, seemed hesitant and not his usual confident self. I was now turned fully towards the top table and was able to take an uninterrupted view of all that was going on. India, her headdress falling slightly to one side, was enjoying every minute of the occasion, lapping up the attention and compliments while overdosing on fizzy lemonade. From Kit’s flushed face I guessed he had overdosed on something a lot stronger, or was his high colour still as a result of his infected ear? He was smiling, somewhat lopsidedly, so I hoped it was the former. Liberty I couldn’t read. She was responsive to what was going on around her, talking politely, smiling when it was required – but she appeared wooden, acting out her role as bridesmaid under sufferance. She probably was.
Throughout Nick’s speech I studied Anna. Her eyes never left Nick. She appeared to have little interest in Nick’s children and, as far as I could tell, had not sought me out to have a good look. In her place, as the wronged woman, I’d have spent the whole meal having a good gawp at the opposition – me. But then, twenty years on, I probably wasn’t the opposition any more. We’d all moved on. She had a happy and, as far as I knew, fulfilling life as an Italian countess. So much so that she had never considered returning to this country.
As Nick sat down to polite applause, Judge Colin stood.
‘Marriage needs commitment,’ Colin began, taking a simpering Sylvia’s hand and pressing it to his lips.
‘So does insanity,’ shouted some wag from the back of the room, raising a laugh and applause from his table.
‘As I said,’ Colin went on, ‘marriage needs commitment. And I commit myself totally to this lovely lady – lady being the operative word, of course – even though I had to borrow her son’s wedding ring in order to do so.’ Everyone laughed. ‘But not only have I been made the happiest man in Surrey today by Sylvia actually turning up to marry me, I have been doubly blessed by my daughter, Anna’s, unexpected arrival at the church this morning. While I am very much saddened by the news that she and her husband have decided to part, it does mean that both Anna and Sophia, my beautiful granddaughter, will be returning to England to live after all these years – and in Surrey, too. I shall have three lovely ladies all to myself, and what more could an old man ask?’
How about asking Lady Sylvia that one, Judge? Sylvia may have been Anna’s greatest fan twenty years ago when she was hoping she would end up with Nick, but being faced with not one, but two others vying for Judge Colin’s attention was doing nothing for Sylvia’s composure. Looking like she’d swallowed a lemon, Sylvia rearranged her face in order to smile graciously at her new husband and stepdaughter.
‘So will the new Lady Sylvia join me on the dance floor for the first dance of our married life?’ Judge Colin reached once more for Sylvia’s hand, and she rose from her seat and followed him on to the dance floor.
My head ached, my feet ached and my stomach ached. If I’d had balls they would have surely ached, too: in fact this wedding was becoming one big ball ache. The rush of energy I’d got from champagne and Gordon Ramsay’s very delicious food was now dissipating and I felt hung over and more tired than I think I’ve ever felt before. My session in the woods with Alex Hamilton seemed a million years ago and almost dreamlike, while the thought of another three or four hours dancing, standing, talking and socialising in my ridiculous shoes was horrendous.
After the speeches there had been a general exodus to the Ladies and a queue had formed; I made my way back to reception and was told there were several more bathrooms on the next floor.
I was relieved to find the Ladies on the second floor totally free and I carried out the necessary ablutions, came out of the cubicle, kicked off my shoes and examined the hole in my tights, which was now the size of a grapefruit. I looked dreadful: knackered and pale, the only thing glowing was my spot, which seemed to have doubled in size since that morning.
The bathroom door opened just as I was looking at myself in the mirror and entertaining myself by making my reflection even worse by going cross-eyed and sticking my tongue out at myself.
‘You must be Nick’s wife.’ It was a statement rather than a question, and Anna Fitzgerald stared at me, refusing my hastily outstretched hand. ‘I would just like you to know that I have never, ever forgiven you for ruining my life. For taking the only man who ever meant anything to me. You stole Nick from me – stole him.’ She looked me up and down, taking in my ripped stockings, my pale face and stockinged feet. She carefully stepped over my abandoned shoes and went to the mirror where she retouched her already immaculate lipstick, all the time her eyes never leaving mine in the mirror. She shook her head, smiling in obvious disbelief. ‘And he left me for you? A northern nobody, who has done nothing except to saddle him with five – five, for God’s sake – brats.’
Anna carefully replaced the lipstick in her Louis Vuitton bag and turned to leave. ‘Unbelievable,’ she said as she opened the bathroom door. ‘Quite unbelievable.’