“Abbeys are out, ruined or otherwise,” I said, and we discarded the pictures of abbeys in the area.
“How about this? It’s a castle.” I handed Iain a brochure showing a couple and a piper standing before the ruins of Dirleton Castle.
“Where is it?”
“Um… East Lothian, I think. Too far?”
“Aye, if you want to have people here after, it is.”
“Hmmm. How about Urquhart?”
“In February? It’s a wee bit cold on the loch then, love. Are you set on a castle?
There’s Candacraig. It looks a mite warmer.”
We swapped brochures.
“Hmmm. Not very romantic, is it? I take it this is drivable?”
“Aye, it’s in Strathdon.”
“Oh.” We’d been there. The place Iain was pointing out was a registry office that was housed in a quaint little summer-house. I heaved an inner sigh. I didn’t want to admit it, but I did rather have my heart set on being married at a castle. I figured if we were going to be wed outside of a registry office, I wanted the most bang for my buck. Being married at a castle just seemed too good a thing to pass up.
I looked closer at the brochure to find some flaws with the place, and then started snickering.
“Oh, yes, this is a lovely spot. And look, Iain, we can take advantage of their full services. We can have the Tying of the Knot Ceremony, the Quaich Ceremony, and oooooooh ! The Midnight Candlelit Ceremony!” Iain was not the most romantic of men, but he did try. His romantic gestures tended to be low-keyed ones that most people would miss if they weren’t looking for them. He shied away from blatantly romantic actions, though, and I knew full well the thought of gushily romantic ceremonies would ax Candacraig as an option.
“Oh, aye, we could,” he replied, then hurriedly thrust another pamphlet under my nose. “But we haven’t finished looking through these. What about this place?”
I looked. “It’s a hotel!”
“Is there something wrong with that, then?”
“Well, shoot, Iain! We’re in Scotland for heaven’s sake. Romantic, historical Scotland. My family is coming to watch me marry you, a romantic and extremely snack-worthy Scot. I think we can do better than to be married at a hotel!”
He muttered something about it suiting him just fine and picked up the next brochure, then dropped it like a hot potato. I caught him trying to hide it under the pile of discards, and immediately glommed onto it. My shriek startled Biorsadh into leaping up from a sound sleep.
“Oooooh! Medieval Scottish weddings!”
“No, love.”
I pored over the flyer. “Ooooh! Listen to this! ‘A moving and dignified service conducted for couples looking for a meaningful occasion to embellish their betrothment whilst being transported back to a Scotland freed after the Wars of Independence.’ That’s just perfect for us!”
“No, it isn’t, love.”
“And look at the costumes! We could wear costumes! Look at that lovely gown!
This is so fabulous!”
“Kathie—”
“Iain, just look! The men get to wear swords! Swords ! Your claymore would be perfect for this!”
“No, it wouldn’t.”
“Look here, it says I don’t even have to be Scottish, although we do have to recite our lineage back three generations. Hmmm. Bet I could get that from Aunt Amber.”
“Kathie, we’ll not be having a medieval wedding.”
“This is so cool! These guys are actors! They put on a show for your wedding!
And you could bring your sword!”
“Love—”
I peered closely at a picture. “Oh my god! You get to wear a breacan anfheilidhl Iain, this was made for us!”
“No, it’s not.”
“But…” I tapped at the flyer. “The wedding ceremony is ‘drawn from tracts in the time of Wallace and the Bruce.’”
Iain just looked at me and shook his head. I commenced pouting. “There’s a quaich.” He didn’t bat an eye. “And the couple is piped in. Doesn’t that sound perfectly lovely?”
“No, love, it sounds silly.”
“Well, fine. Be that way. Be totally and utterly devoid of any romance whatsoever. Fine and dandy. Suits me just peachy bloody keen.” I snatched up the next brochure for a local wedding company. “Well, here’s a lovely spot, but I’m sure you’ll find something horrible about it.” I waved the picture of a ruined castle at him. “Damp, perhaps? Remnants of the bubonic plague lingering on the walls? Or maybe it’s just too bloody scenic for you, hmmm?”
Iain rolled his eyes and took the brochure from me. “Loch an Eilein Castle. It’s a ruin. We passed it the day we drove up here from Manchester.”
“Yes, and it’s absolutely the most gorgeous site to hold a wedding, and therefore you, Mr. Wouldn’t Know a Romantic Gesture if It Bit Him on the Butt, won’t like it. Fine. You pick a place.”
“You’re acting like a child, love.”
“No, I’m acting like a pissed off woman whose potential husband—and I stress the word potential—doesn’t see fit to allow her to celebrate the most important day of her whole entire life in a manner befitting the moment.”
“Ah, now you’re sounding like your mum.”
“Low blow, Potential Husband Iain. Very low indeed.” Location settled—Iain gave in rather gracefully over Loch an Eilein—my attention was immediately turned to the next most important item on my list: my wedding dress.
“So what does my butt look like in this?”
“Turn around so I can see. Um… well, do you want truthful or kind?”
“Truthful. Kind I can get from Iain.”
“It’s not good.”
I sighed. This was the ninth dress I had tried on in the last few hours, and I was already exhausted. “Well, hell, Joanna. What am I going to do? The wedding is ten days away and I can’t find a dress. If I don’t have one before my mother comes, I’m doomed. She’ll make me buy a wedding dress, just you wait and see. Big and white and frothing with a train and a veil and I’ll look like a giant cream puff gone bad.”
Joanna looked at the discards. “I liked that rose one.” I peeled off the dress and reached for my skirt and sweater. “It makes me look too hippy. Where haven’t we been?”
She thought for a minute. “Well, Miranda told me about a new little place over in Kinrushtie. We could try there, it’s only a few miles down the road.”
“I’m not feeling very good about this, Joanna.”
“I know you’re not, Kathie, but don’t worry, it’s all part of the prewedding jitters. My mum always told me it would get better the closer you get to the wedding.”
I poked my head through the sweater. “And did it?”
“Well, no, it didn’t.” She grinned at me. “At least it didn’t until the hen party!
That was fun.”
“Oh, yes, I want to talk to you about that. Are you sure it’s a good idea for us to do this?”
“The hen party? You mean because the men will know we’re throwing you a party to say farewell to your days as a single woman, and therefore they’re likely to throw a stag party for Iain?”
“Exactly. I’ve heard about these Scottish stag parties. Iain told me what David’s buddies—” Whoops. I had forgotten that I wasn’t supposed to mention that to Joanna. “Yes, I think your idea is a good one. Let’s go to Kinrushtie.” She let me get outside before she grabbed my arm and stopped me. “What did David’s friends do at his stag party?”
“Oh, Joanna, truly I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s nothing to worry about, just the usual sort of hi-jinks guys get up to in the name of poking a bit of fun at a fellow guy who’s about to be married.” I tried to push her toward Iain’s car. She stood firm. “What did David’s friends do at his stag party?”
“Nothing that should trouble you.” Unless, of course, she counted having a prostitute being the evening’s entertainment troublesome. “Come along, I want to get to
Kinrushtie and back before Iain’s in for tea.”
“What did David’s friends do at his stag party?”
I sighed. “You’re not going to let me go, are you?”
“Not until you tell me.”
I looked around the street. “Well, fine, I’ll tell you and then you’ll be all pissed at David, who will tell his father, and then Iain will read me the riot act for telling you. So fine, Joanna, I’ll tell you if you honestly want to make my life a living hell. If our friendship isn’t worth enough for you to trust me on this one, itty-bitty thing, then I’ll be happy to tell you. Just say the word, and I’ll destroy what happiness and trust Iain and I have together, just so you can know what your husband of less than a year, the man who makes you insanely happy and prone to smiles at the least likely moment, the man about whom just hours ago you were raving over and telling me things I really didn’t need to know about and yet you insisted on telling, was doing at his stag party. Oh yes, just say the word, Joanna, and I’ll be happy to tell you.”
I got into Iain’s car. She stood for a moment on the pavement, weighing our friendship and my future happiness with her need to know something so trivial and unnecessary as whether or not her husband was disporting himself with a hooker on the eve of his marriage. She gave a little shrug. Clearly our friendship meant more to her than mere curiosity. I felt a warm glow wash over me as she got into the car. I sent her a grateful little smile and started the car up.
“What did David’s friends do at his stag party?”
Well, hell. I was cornered and I knew it. “They hired a… um… a professional to entertain them.”
“A professional? What sort of a professional?”
“Oh, for god’s sake, Joanna, they were a bunch of randy men celebrating the last night of David’s bachelorhood. What sort of a professional do you think I mean?”
She started to laugh. I would have stared at her, but I had to get us out of town and onto a road where I could pull over.
“Oh, Kathie you had me scared there for a minute. I thought something really had happened.”
“You don’t mind that they had a prostitute at the party?”
“Cerise? She’s not a prostitute. Or she was, but she’s not now, she’s reformed.
And no, I didn’t mind she was there. I was the one who hired her.” I did pull over at that point.
“You hired a hooker for your fiancé's bachelor party?”
“I told you, she’s not a prostitute anymore. I told David’s friend Ben to hire her. I talked to Cerise first, and told her how far she was allowed to go. She could take off her clothes, and dance around, but no touching.” Uh-oh. That’s not what Iain had told me had gone on. He hadn’t been at the party long, having dropped in only to bring supplies of an alcoholic nature, but his description of the activities and Joanna’s didn’t tally. Silence, I was sure, was the best policy, so I let her go on talking about how she had outwitted the men.
It took two more days of looking, but finally I had a dress I was happy with. It was a vintage-looking dress, almost 1930s in its long, sleek lines, with a pale cream background and big tea roses scattered over it. Definitely not your standard wedding dress stuff, but I wanted something I could wear out to any formal events I might be called upon to attend, all of those formal Sheepherder’s Balls and such. The Sheep Tupping Proms. The Manure Mucker’s Annual Gala. And of course, the highlight of any farm wife’s season; the Sheep Castrator’s Annual Charity Auction. Now I could hold up my head with pride.
A week before our wedding Iain and I attended the funeral of his ex-wife Mary’s aunt. Both David and Archie were mentioned in the will, so they came for the funeral as well. Iain had always gotten along well with Mary’s Aunt Edna, so he decided it would be a nice thing if we attended and paid our respects.
Archie had a row with his father and turned down an admittedly lackluster invitation to stay with us, staying instead at a little hotel in the town where Edna was being buried.
“What did he say?” I asked Iain after he had spoken privately with Archie.
He took my hand and gave it a squeeze. He only did that when he thought I needed comforting, so I assumed Archie had nothing nice to say. “He says he’ll come to the wedding.”
I looked at Iain. The laugh lines around his eyes stood out starkly against his tanned skin. Not a good sign.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. Was he awful?”
“Not so bad,” Iain said, but I knew he was trying not to upset me. I cursed Archie as I had done a hundred times before. I could live with his sniping at me, but it made me furious when he took out his spite on his father. Iain deserved better than that.
“Did he say why Susan isn’t here?”
“No, but I’m gathering things aren’t too well on that front.”
“Oh, dear.” I was secretly pleased for Susan. After our little Christmas bonding session, I had become quite fond of her. She also deserved better than Archie.
Meeting Iain’s ex-wife Mary was an experience unto itself. Why was it that in some families the children clearly resembled one parent over the other? In Iain’s family, he and David were like two peas in a pod, while Archie took after Mary.
Both had sandy, light brown hair and hazel eyes, whereas Iain and David had dark hair and soft, expressive, peaty brown eyes that made me want to melt.
When I saw Mary with Iain at the funeral, I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how they ever married, let alone produced two sons. Two more different people you would be hard pressed to find. Mary was petite, expensively dressed, with lots of makeup and a carefully coiffed head. She spoke a mile a minute, never stopping for trivial things like breathing or to allow another person to edge in a word.
To be honest, I hadn’t been looking forward to meeting her, given my history meeting Iain’s family and friends, especially after Archie had so vehemently stated how close they were and how much she missed Iain. I suspected this meeting would be one long unpleasant, awkward experience. I just hoped Mary would hold back the barbs and nasty comments until Iain was out of earshot.
She didn’t, but not because she couldn’t wait, but because she had nothing nasty to say.
“I live in London, you know, London proper, that is, in Kensington, not one of the suburbs—well, you know how the suburbs can be, some nice and quite pleasant while others are just simply squalid , there’s no other word for them but squalid , but as I said, I live in London.”
“Oh.”
“It’s just me and my dogs now, Charles and Camilla they are—isn’t that too clever? Everyone always asks me why I didn’t name them Charles and Diana and I tell them it’s because I saw that tragedy coming for years before anyone else—their divorce that is, not Diana being killed, that was truly saddening, wasn’t it? So young. But it’s just me and the dogs in our snug little flat, not that it’s little, really, with three bedrooms, but Arthur always did call it our little flat, and I like to honor his memory. And I’m not truly alone, you know! I have Charles and Camilla, and of course, the help, but they don’t really count because they just come in and clean when I’m out during the day, so I don’t really see them, although Simon—he’s my therapist, and oh! Such a good one, I’ll let you have his number if you ever want a really quality therapist—Simon says I am not to trivialize other people’s lives just because they don’t meet my standards, but I say what’s the use in having standards if you don’t adhere to them?”
I nodded, then shook my head, then nodded again, totally confused by the barrage of conversation and unsure of which response was the one she wanted.
It didn’t really matter, I found out later. Mary took it as given that whomever she was speaking to was utterly enthralled with her conversation. So she smiled at me and continued on telling me about her masseuse and how delicious his hands were, how terribly expensive it was to live in London, but thankfully her late husband Arthur had left her a tidy sum, what a lovely little shop she had just discovered that had the most divin
e fabrics from Africa—I should really try them, the jewel-tone fabrics would look lovely with my dark hair and eyes—
and just how shocked she was to hear that old Aunt Edna had finally died. I got the impression she had assumed Edna had died years ago, and was surprised to find she’d only now stuck her spoon in the wall. Mary then proceeded to give me Aunt Edna’s life history as it related to her, Mary, in full, glorious Technicolor detail.
I tried to picture this glittery, fragile, materialistic little creature slogging around the mud at Iain’s farm, and failed. Iain himself was a little wary of Mary. I thought at first it was because they had a less than amicable divorce, but it turned out he just didn’t want to get trapped into conversation with her.
Once she had her conversational hooks into you, so to speak, it was all over.
Only death offered respite, and as poor Aunt Edna had probably found out, even death was no guarantee of escape.
Mary certainly surprised me on another front, falling immediately into the friendly camp. Despite Archie’s grim warnings, she was extremely pleasant to me, going so far as to cut short the details about her recent colonic experiences in order to inquire how long we’d been married.
“Actually, we’re getting married next week—” I started to say, but was promptly steamrollered into silence.
“No! Well isn’t that simply fabulous, although I thought Archie said something about you and Iain living together for some months now, but he must have been mistaken, young men often exaggerate, you know. But a week, why I can do a week quite easily, I was going to stay four days while I sorted through Auntie’s things, so really, three extra days will be nothing to me, nothing at all, and of course, I will put all of my expertise at your full disposal.
Imagine, it works out so perfectly that I am here to see Iain married in style! He was my first husband, you know, and while not the best husband, I’m sure you and he are well suited to one another, you look just like a farm wife should. I’ve told him for many, many years to remarry, you know. ‘Iain,’ I’ve told him, ‘Iain you simply must stop grieving over me and find another woman to marry!’ And now he’s done just that and at last I can breathe easier and know he’s gotten over the trauma of our divorce. Oh yes, I can do a week quite easily.” I wondered, numbly, when she had time to breathe at all. I was so exhausted by the conversation with her that I hadn’t the strength to point out that we were trying to keep the wedding small, and ended up giving in to the inevitable force that was Mary, although I did manage to decline her repeated offer to serve as my matron of honor. But it was a close thing.