‘I’m not rejecting you, stupid,’ said Nelson. ‘We were both a bit tipsy, that’s all. You really have to stop being so down on yourself. Or at least stay sober enough to remember what you’ve got up to.’
I pulled my shoulders back: I hadn’t been that drunk!
But Nelson held up his hand to stop me before I could start. ‘Listen, don’t,’ he said in an unbearably kind voice. ‘You were upset, I was a little bit drunk, maybe we were both curious . . .’ He stopped, coughed self-consciously, then began again. ‘Mel, I’m extremely flattered that you could have even a passing drunken interest in me. But let’s be realistic: you don’t really love me, and you’d get very bored listening to me talk about rigging and tax relief all the time.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ I protested. Irritatingly, Nelson had chosen that morning to get the tousled bed-head look exactly right, after three years of looking like Father Jack Hackett until ten o’clock.
He lifted an eyebrow at me, and something in me cracked. Now he was telling me he wasn’t interested, all my doubts about Nelson as a potential boyfriend abruptly vanished and I felt absolutely certain I’d just screwed up my once-in-a-lifetime, fairy-tale ‘But your handsome prince is right here!’ opportunity.
‘But, Nelson . . .’ I began, tearfully. ‘I love you!’
Was that all I did these days? Stumble from one screw-up to the next?
Nelson burped into his hand, which brought me back down to earth somewhat. ‘Scuse me,’ he said. ‘Look, Mel, I love you too – you’re the sister I thankfully don’t have. Of course we love each other.’ The toast popped up behind him; Nelson buttered both slices, and handed one to me. ‘But, much as it pains me to talk like one of your dreadful magazines, you’re in love with Jonathan Riley, international man of mortgages, and I think you’d be making a big mistake if you ignored that. He’s more the sort of man you need – high-powered, suit-wearing, you know . . . Anyway, it sounds like you’d be good for him. From the way Gabi talks about the work it sounds like he could do with someone to lighten him up a bit.’ He bit into his thickly buttered toast, then added, ‘And that’s the only time I’m ever going to offer you advice like that, so you’d better take it.’
I wondered if Nelson had missed a great chunk of last night’s conversation. Had he been listening to me at all?
‘But I told you, he’s not interested in me,’ I protested. ‘He just enjoys being with Honey.’
‘Oh, for the love of God . . . When are you going to get it into your thick skull that you are Honey?’ demanded Nelson. ‘Is someone hypnotising you before you go out?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Do you go into a trance state and start channelling Ava Gardner?’
‘No.’
‘So why on earth do you imagine that it isn’t you entertaining this legendary humour-free man?’
‘How do you know he’s humour-free?’ I asked, momentarily diverted.
‘Gabi told me. Apparently his latest nickname is Simon Cowell because no one’s ever seen him crack a smile.’
‘Oh.’ I couldn’t even be bothered to put him straight about Jonathan’s sense of humour. Jonathan didn’t want me. Nelson didn’t want me. I might as well just give up, buy a house, fill it with cats and spend the rest of my life writing complaining letters to the local paper about speedhumps.
‘Mel, you only get one chance at life,’ said Nelson, though his voice was gentler than his words. ‘You can’t go on hiding behind your persecution complex. I know your father is a shit and your mother has . . . her own problems, but you’re going to miss out on so much if you don’t start grasping the nettle a bit more. OK, so we could end up together, but you’d only be settling for me because I was safe and familiar. That’s not enough.’
‘Isn’t it?’ I said, my eyes filling up.
‘No. Not at our age. Maybe when we’re sixty and divorced and in need of a home for the Labradors. Oh no, please don’t start crying again. I’ve seen more iron self-control at the Oscars.’
‘I’m not sad,’ I said, trying to smile. I wasn’t sad actually. I was starting to feel quite purged. ‘But Jonathan’s honestly not interested. He more or less told me so at the fireworks. He said mixing business with pleasure was a terrible idea.’
Nelson looked more sympathetic. ‘Did he? Sorry, I didn’t realise. Maybe you should just give it time. Or tell him you can’t see him as much, and see if he still tries to book you for pointless trips around Tate Modern.’
‘That wasn’t pointless. He wanted a fresh eye on modern art.’
‘I suppose your guilelessness is one of the things he finds most attractive about you,’ Nelson observed, putting more toast in the toaster. ‘You’ve got to make him divide business from pleasure, and if he won’t, you’ve got your answer, haven’t you?’
I pushed my chair away from the table. ‘Well, speaking of guilelessness, I’ve got to go home to sort out the invitations for Emery. Apart from anything else, I want a word with her about those bloody bonbonnières.’
‘Are you going to take the rest home for her to do?’
We both looked at the box by the coffee table, overflowing with circles of net and ribbon. I tried to imagine my mother snipping and knotting, and failed.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll just keep them here. Do a few every night while I’m watching television.’
‘Right,’ said Nelson.
‘No, really.’ I sighed. ‘It’ll be easier in the long run. Honestly.’
He wagged a finger. ‘Responsibility never killed anyone.’
‘I know. But choking drunkenly on sugared almonds might. Besides you’re so good at them.’ My mind skimmed to the thought of Nelson’s fingers, quick and neat and dextrous . . .
A crimson blush spread all up my neck and swamped my face.
‘Comes from tying fishing flies,’ said Nelson calmly. ‘Amongst other things. Don’t worry, I’ll hide it all if Gabi comes back. And don’t worry about that either,’ he added, as my mouth opened to speak, ‘I’ll have a word with her. And I won’t mention last night.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, full of sudden, heartfelt gratitude. I was so lucky to have a friend like Nelson. I told myself that I should take better care of our friendship.
I grabbed my bag and Emery’s wedding folder from my room, and headed for the door.
‘See you later then,’ I said, trying to sound as normal as possible. ‘I’ll bring a takeaway back if I’m home in time for supper.’
‘Um, Mel.’ Nelson caught my arm as I passed by.
‘What?’
He looked up at me and I realised he might not be quite as unfazed by it all as he made out. ‘Look, it happened, but let’s not regret it. I don’t.’ He smiled his most disarming smile, and scratched his stubble wistfully. ‘It was rather . . . nice.’
A funny little shiver rippled through my stomach, as if I’d swallowed a bee.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
His face turned serious. ‘But we won’t ever speak of this again until we’re sixty and divorced and in need, OK?’
‘OK,’ I promised, and dropped a kiss on his damp hair.
Then I left the house and set off for my parents’, feeling almost like Honey.
In a new spirit of positivity, I called Emery and made her come and pick me up from the station, instead of spending money on a taxi.
I deliberately told her the train would be arriving thirty minutes before it did, and she still managed to drift into the car park a good ten minutes late.
‘How does William cope with you being so appallingly vague?’ I demanded, shoving aside a pile of papers and parking tickets on the passenger seat.
‘He doesn’t notice,’ she replied, narrowly missing the car-park sign as she swung left onto the main road. ‘He says he’s used to repeating everything nineteen times. He’s a lawyer.’
‘Well, he gets paid by the hour, doesn’t he, Em? I don’t,’ I said, trying to be firm. ‘I cannot leave today without having the
final, final details for the invitations, or else they won’t be ready in time. Then no one will be able to come to your wedding. Emery? Are you listening to me?’
‘I love this song!’ exclaimed Emery, turning up the radio. ‘Don’t you? It makes me think of oranges!’
I decided to leave it until we were home.
When Daddy wasn’t in residence, my mother was more like the mother I remembered from the happier bits of my childhood. She didn’t smoke, mutter or wander around in a state of vague panic as she did when he lurked around the house, popping up sporadically to bark instructions at her. Neither was she the immaculately dressed, perma-smiling MP’s wife who accompanied him in public. Instead, the woman who greeted us at the door seemed pretty compos mentis, and pleased to see us.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said, giving me a one-armed hug.
I didn’t squeeze: this was the hug she adopted after she’d undergone some kind of light physical cosmetic improvement.
‘No Daddy?’ I asked, hopefully.
‘No, darling, he’s on a trip somewhere,’ she said happily. ‘Taking some constituents on his annual trip to London, I think.’
To be fair to him too, Daddy was a popular local MP. He was extraordinarily charming to everyone outside his immediate family, brilliant at talking to all manner of people, and ever ready to offer tickets to view the Houses of Parliament. His views pretty much mirrored those of everyone in the area – yes to the pound, cricket pitches and local businesses, no to huge supermarkets, vegetarians and anything ‘Un-British’ – and he was happy to hold forth for hours at any local meeting going. I had to admire the courage of his convictions, even if I didn’t always agree with everything he said.
Of course, it didn’t always do to enquire which constituents he was showing round the Houses of Parliament, so for the sake of Mummy’s nerves, I didn’t.
I wandered into the kitchen, and was surprised to see that the table was covered with pots of jam and a couple of Victoria sponge cakes.
‘Have you been baking?’ I asked in some surprise.
‘What? That? Oh no, village bring and buy,’ she replied. ‘I lost my head a little. Still, all in a good cause.’
‘I lost my head a little’ was my-mother-speak for ‘I went berserk and bought everything in sight.’ Bond Street, the Boden catalogue, the village fete – she shopped as some women did yoga. For inner calm.
‘Cake, darling?’ she said, searching for some plates. ‘We’d better eat the evidence before your father gets home.’
‘Mel says she’s going to get tough with us,’ Emery announced, appearing at the door with one of the dogs in her arms. ‘Brace yourself, Mummy.’
I put my file on the table. ‘Sorry, but I am. How am I meant to organise invitations when you won’t tell me who’s invited?’
‘It’s so hard, darling.’ My mother sighed. ‘Your father keeps inviting people, then uninviting people in a fit of pique, and William can’t make up his mind whether it would be infra dig to invite his children, so we thought we’d just wait until the last minute and take it from there.’
‘You weren’t so casual about Allegra’s wedding,’ I reminded her. ‘That was like a military operation.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But Emery is a much more . . . relaxed person altogether than Allegra. And I did nearly have a breakdown after that, if you remember.’
I did remember. The report in the Daily Mail had certainly brightened up everyone’s day in the office I was working in at the time.
‘Anyway, listen, Mel, I sent out “save the day” cards,’ protested Emery proudly, carving herself a transparent sliver of sponge cake. ‘Aaaages ago.’
‘Did you?’ I perked up. Maybe disaster could be averted after all. I started going through the file. ‘Well done, Em! So is the list in here?’
Silence. I looked up and met their guilt-ridden gazes. ‘Please don’t tell me you’ve lost the list.’
Emery gazed intently into the middle distance, and Mummy’s calm expression started to slip a bit.
‘Emery!’ I snapped. ‘Who have you invited?’
Mummy’s hand twitched on the table, searching for a phantom packet of cigarettes. ‘Mummy, you must be able to remember,’ I said, turning to her.
‘Oh God, Melissa, you sound just like your father,’ she murmured.
A fresh horror struck me. What with William’s busy schedule, Daddy’s commitments, and Emery’s inability to decide anything, the date of the wedding had moved several times in the last month alone. The vicar was barely taking my calls any more.
I fixed Emery with a basilisk stare. ‘Tell me you told them to save the date you’re actually getting married on now?’
More silence. I got up from the table, walked round, then sat down again. I didn’t know why I was getting so wound up; it wasn’t even my wedding.
‘OK,’ I said, very firmly. ‘OK. So several hundred people may or may not have marked your wedding day in their diary. We’ll just have to hope that the ones who don’t now get invitations won’t take it too personally. Go and get your address books. Now!’
Mummy and Emery exchanged fearful glances then scuttled out. I cut myself a large piece of cake.
After a couple of agonising hours, we finally had a list compiled. All we had to do was to whittle it down from five hundred and forty-three to something nearer two hundred and fifty. I phoned Nelson to let him know I’d be staying overnight.
Armed with my wedding file – the pictures of people actually getting married were necessary to convince Emery of the need for things like placement cards and table cameras – I began to make some progress on the arrangements, and by teatime, definite black ink had started to appear in my notes. My brain began to release comforting, planning chemicals into my bloodstream.
‘I can’t believe it’s really happening,’ said Emery, her face uncharacteristically animated with delight as she studied pictures of bouquets. ‘It’s just so exciting!’
The mind boggled. ‘You haven’t felt that before now?’ I asked. ‘Like, when William proposed?’
She put Wedding and Home down. ‘No, not really. I mean, you know what he’s like . . .’
‘No, not really.’
‘Well, he doesn’t go in for big gestures.’ Emery sighed. ‘He was quite brisk about it, so, you know . . . One doesn’t like to get too excited about things, you know, in case . . .’ She looked at me, her eyes glassy with emotion. ‘You know how things go wrong with this family.’
I suddenly felt a little bit sorry for Emery. She’d developed chronic avoidance issues for a reason, after all.
‘Still . . .’ she said and picked up the magazine again, beaming fondly at a photograph of a bride leaping gaily off a tractor in full meringue and wellington boots.
Although I didn’t think William and Emery were exactly a match made in heaven, I didn’t feel the burning need to intervene as I had done with Gabi and Aaron. For one thing, beneath that cloudy exterior, I knew Emery was far from daft. She knew precisely what she was getting into, and I had a feeling that, once installed in some big house with William, far, far away from my father’s sniping, the veils of vagueness might lift and reveal a more decisive woman altogether.
William, though I still hadn’t met him, sounded reasonable enough. There were many valid explanations, after all, as to how a man could accrue three wives by the age of forty. And that really wasn’t my business, anyway. Daddy might be a selfish brute sometimes, but he wouldn’t let his daughter marry a serial killer.
Not unless his business contacts were really impeccable.
‘Where’s Mummy?’ I asked suddenly.
Emery looked up. ‘Oooh. Don’t know.’
‘I need her to write some cheques.’
‘Oh.’ Emery’s face fell. ‘I wouldn’t bother. Daddy’s in charge of the money side of things.’
‘Daddy,’ I said, ‘is not here, is he?’
‘No,’ said Emery.
I gave her a stern loo
k. She could be very slow. ‘But, Emery, this is urgent. No invitations, no corporate hospitality, no social debts written off. So let’s find a chequebook.’
‘Oh! Oh, well, quite,’ murmured Emery, letting a small smile play around her rosebud lips.
I pushed back my chair and went to look for my mother.
My granny often insisted to me that the secret of a long and happy marriage was a large house. Big enough to spend significant portions of your day pretending you were in fact still single, she reckoned. Two houses, if it could be arranged, was the ideal, as Allegra and Lars had demonstrated.
If size of house was directly proportional to happiness of marriage, my parents should have been pretty blissful: while my father had his oak-lined study to skulk around in, my mother had her own Wedgwood-blue sitting room, which looked out over the apple trees in the orchard.
Mummy was sitting in the window seat now, her small stockinged feet curled up under her. In her hand was a framed black and white photograph of her and my father, getting into his Aston Martin on their wedding day: it was my favourite picture of them. In it, she looked very young and radiant, he looked handsome and exceptionally pleased with himself. They’d barely changed in thirty-odd years.
‘Hello, Melissa,’ she said when she saw me. ‘Just remembering how lovely it was.’ She let out a big sigh. ‘Of course, it was before the breathalyser.’
‘What?’
‘The breathalyser. He shouldn’t have driven us away from the reception, you know. It was a wonderful car.’ She sighed again and touched the glass with her finger. ‘I still miss it.’
Really, my family were incorrigible.
I sat down beside her. ‘Was Daddy terribly romantic when you first met? I mean, did he woo you with flowers? How did you know he was the one?’
She threw a couple of pine cones into the fire, and squinted hard, as if I’d asked her for the square root of three million. Then she said, ‘You know, your father has the most wonderful gift for making one feel special. When I met him at my coming-out dance, he behaved as if I was the only girl in the whole room. He was even nice about my dress, which I know was completely ghastly, really. I should have known then what a compulsive fibber he was.’ Mummy sighed, but not in an entirely disapproving way. ‘When I was with him, I felt clever and beautiful and . . . and desirable. Because, you know, he desired me. And he was such a catch.’