Pete and I set about organising a wedding. The plan is to find a hotel in the vicinity where the civil ceremony can take place, go to Pete’s church for a blessing (he is a Christian, I am not) and then come back to the hotel for the reception.
We check out various venues, and the one that looks most promising is a hotel called The Manor, a long, rambling, two-storey building, set in pleasant grounds. Tall plane trees line the drive, their sturdy bases sunk in carpets of crocuses sticking out golden tongues to the early spring sun.
Inside, the hotel has rich brown panelling, a sage-green carpet, faded chintz upholstery and gold-framed paintings on the walls. It even has old-fashioned lighting—modest chandeliers and unpretentious sconces fitted, brilliantly, as far as I am concerned, with incandescent bulbs.
The whole effect is mellow and relaxing. It even smells right—no discordant notes of new furniture, or industrial detergent, or frying.
A friendly receptionist, soft and beige and rosy, shows us into a sunny sitting room, and we wait on flowery armchairs, on opposite sides of a low table with carved paw-like feet, smiling at each other, because we know we’ve found the place.
Then we meet Celia, the wedding co-ordinator.
Celia has jet-black hair that reaches midway down her back, a bony, angular body and black eyebrows drawn together in a semi-permanent scowl. She is wearing shiny black court shoes with finely pointed toes, and stands before us, arms crossed across a file, legs apart and spiky feet splayed outwards, like daggers. There is a patch of high colour on each of her cheeks.
We tell her we really like the hotel, and are thinking of getting married in September. “No,” she says. “You can’t do that. You’ll have to go later in the year. September’s gone.”
“But—we rang this morning and they told us the ninth is still free.”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t know—whoever I spoke to—the receptionist?”
Celia clicks her tongue and snorts. “Oh. Well, it might be, but if it is, it’ll be the only one.”
“And we were thinking of ninety guests for a sit-down meal.”
“You can’t have ninety,” Celia snaps. “You can have forty-five in the Oak Room, or seventy in the Garden Room. Or you can have a fork buffet for one hundred and ten.”
“Well …” I say, “supposing we used both rooms. There’s quite a wide connecting doorway. We could have close family and friends in the Oak Room, with us, and everyone else in the other one, and keep the doors open.”
Celia’s eyebrows surge downwards into a savage V, and her eyes flash. “There aren’t enough tables,” she counters. “They would have to be hired in.”
“But that would be possible, wouldn’t it? We’d pay the extra cost.”
Grudgingly she admits that tables can be hired, and makes a grim note in her file.
“Then, we’d like some dancing.”
It turns out that the hotel has a disco with a small dance floor, and it can be set up at one end of the Garden Room.
“Actually, we were thinking more of a barn dance or ceilidh, with a caller, and people sort of dancing up and down the whole length of the room—”
“You can’t do that,” says Celia. “There would be health and safety issues with the carpet.”
Extensive and subtle cross-questioning is required in order to establish that there will be no health and safety issues if we can track down and hire a dance floor that will cover the whole of the carpet in the Garden Room. Pete thinks such things are of modular construction and can be made bigger or smaller quite easily, to fit.
This evidence of lateral thinking makes Celia fume. Her pointed toes splay savagely and the spots on her cheeks turn purple.
Naively, I had assumed that when you entered upon the business of having a wedding, service providers would lay themselves out to meet your requirements, safe in the knowledge that you had clearly decided to spend some money, and that they could therefore charge you hefty fees to make it worth their while. But Celia does not operate on this principle. She believes in the relentless disciplining of dreams.
In the car afterwards, Pete and I look at each other. “Blimey,” he says, leaning back against the headrest and taking a deep breath.
“What an extraordinary person,” I say faintly.
But we persist, because the hotel is so nice, and the lighting is suitable, and everyone else we have dealings with there is lovely and amenable. Celia continues to be erratically obstructive and unpleasant, and proves impossible to get hold of on the phone. When I speak to the bar manager and agree some minor point about the drinks, Celia is furious. “You should not have made any arrangement with her,” she shouts. “She has no supervisory authority.” When we turn up at the hotel for a pre-arranged meeting, we find that Celia has gone home.
“She’s not really into customer service, is she?” says Pete.
“I think she’s in the wrong job. She doesn’t seem to like weddings much.”
“She doesn’t seem to like people much.”
Gradually we get the details sorted out, but I have disturbing premonitions about the day itself, a recurring vision of Celia striding down the hotel steps, black hair flying, palm upraised, shouting, “No! You can’t come in.”
IN THE END, the wedding does not happen, but for this, Celia is not to blame. Other, stranger forces wreck our plans; to that extent my premonitions prove correct.