It was 1996. My mother and I had spent a long day trying to choose me a wedding dress. It was a day that had started with hope. Shopping and marriage were a great combination. To everyone’s relief a husband had been found.
By late afternoon we were in the bridal department at Liberty, which was then situated on the top floor. The last dress I’d had on was a Jasper Conran, with a £2,500 price tag. It was the dress Mum wanted – huge amounts of tulle, and extremely white. Maybe I’d had too many cups of coffee, maybe I had PMT, or maybe I just wanted her to back off. This was her dream, I was beginning to realise. Not mine.
Whatever the reason, I felt an overwhelming urge to kill her. To nudge her over the atrium banister in Liberty and watch her tumble head first into the accessories department, and those endless bins of peacock-printed scarves.
Throughout my childhood, marriage, even ironically for my mother, was The Panacea. In our home, it had always been clear that a woman’s place was on her back. On one occasion I rang Dad to ask his advice on pensions, and he told me to ‘marry one’. There seemed to be no Plan B. Yet when I produced Matthias at a family weekend, he stared over Matt’s shoulder, as if by not acknowledging him, he could make his replacement disappear.
Clearly, none of the women on either side of the family had made good decisions with regard to marriage. And given that it was the only career decision that they were in a position to make, these were choices that became difficult to live with.
Granny, having ended up as Mrs Ian Paterson, complained copiously about everyone else’s choices, often with good cause. The bad decision-making had continued with my mother. I have a letter from Dad dated June 1985, which reads: ‘Mum and I had a terrible lunch yesterday with your Gran! The lunch was okay but she was awful – reminding me in particular that in her opinion, and her late husband’s, I was not a fit person to marry their daughter.’
As the only girl, it was made clear to me that someone finally needed to get it right. Granny wrote in 1987, the year before I left school: ‘Here goes wishing you all the best in the world and a tall handsome and wealthy husband (later).’ In another letter Granny told my mother not to worry. She’d been ‘man daft’ too.
I see now that rather than being ‘man daft’, I was focused. Everyone had given me a clear career path. I needed a husband, and I needed one fast.
That afternoon at Liberty’s, I don’t think my mother’s own tricky marriage was the reason I wanted to tip her over the banister. Maybe I had smelt her overwhelming levels of desperation and self-deceit and couldn’t quite imagine how she thought it a good idea to sell me down the same river. Was that all I was good for – dresses and divorce?
Or perhaps what enraged me was simply the enormous price tag. Not that I remember being particularly moral in that regard. If it had suited me to wear a huge dress costing the equivalent of a lifetime of antiretroviral therapy for two children, then I’m sure I would have gone for the dress.
I didn’t. I went with a dressmaker who designed something simple. The material wasn’t as white as Jasper Conran’s, but a gunmetal organza, and to my mother’s eye, when she received the material sample, grey.
Twelve weeks before the wedding, and after a good many prayers, she rang and asked me if I’d had a look at the organza.
‘No. Why?’
‘Go get it and have a look.’
‘Why?’
‘Just go and get it out the bag.’ She sounded excited. ‘My bit’s discoloured.’
‘Discoloured?’
‘It’s rusty. Maybe?’
‘Maybe because you’ve been keeping it on the bathroom windowsill?’
‘No. Actually, Miranda, I kept it in my sewing box. Well, are you going to go get it?’
‘No. I can’t,’ I lied. ‘It’s already with the dressmaker.’
‘Well, if I were you, I’d ring her up ASAP. Make sure it’s not happened to your bit too.’
I reassured her that while her sample had come from a shop on Berwick Street, the material for the dress was purchased from her faithful and favourite John Lewis.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said.
But it wasn’t. When I dragged the bag out from beneath the bed, the organza looked as though a cat had pissed all over it, the stain leaking through its folded layers in a huge round rusted mark. The lady at John Lewis said she’d never seen anything like it.
In the end, like Mum wanted, I wore white.
