The Wedding Diaries (31 page)

Tony: So I hear Jacki’s divorce is going ahead.

Me: Yes. I’m sure you could have done with knowing that was going to happen when you went ahead and bought the book.

Tony: Too bloody right. But the thing is, this divorce has done nothing to harm sales whatsoever. The massive coverage we’ve got from the whole thing – when sales otherwise might have rolled over and died by now – means that
Jacki Jones’s Perfect Wedding
is one of Polka Dot’s bestsellers of the year already. You’ve seen the figures: this book of yours has already earned back its advance. Which means …

Me: Which means …

Tony: Congratulations, Assistant Editor. I’ll have all the details for you when you get back, but I thought you’d want to know before you went.

Me: Thanks, Tony.

Tony: Well, it was my mother who pushed this one through. You can decide if you want to thank me once you’ve seen the books you’ll be working on this autumn.

So with that I was bustled out of his office and through Polka Dot’s front door, sent on my way to marry and make something of myself, off to the giant supermarket round the corner from Mum, to meet her and Thom to get food for Saturday.

They were both there, Mum ready with a trolley that was all but revving. We went down every aisle, and ended up getting another trolley too for all the salads, fruit, breads, wine, and various other ingredients for Mum’s food master plans. She said she’d ordered all the meat she needed from the butcher and would pick it up tomorrow morning, then worked through her long, long checklist, adding any suggestion we made and crossing off other dishes, before heading for the tills. The boy behind the till widened his eyes at the sight of our two trolleys lined up together like a little train of greed, and Mum smiled and said, ‘It’s for their wedding. My daughter’s getting married on Saturday!’ I thought he’d give a token grunt and scan our things with his head buried in the till to avoid small talk, but he charmed Mum entirely with his interest and suggestions for the day itself. It turned out his sister had just got married and there’d been talk of nothing else in his house for the past eight months, so he was full of great tips for serving the food and what had gone down well with their family. They got on so well while he was scanning everything that it was touch and go whether Mum would invite him along on Saturday, but she settled on shaking his hand and telling him what a blessing he would be on his own wedding day. He nodded sagely and mouthed ‘GOOD LUCK’ to us with a big smile. Unbelievably, the whole bill came to £500. £500! To feed and water (or wine) sixty people, compared to the £3,000-plus at the venues we’d looked at before.

We stuffed Mum’s car and ours with the groceries and headed back to their house to begin preparations. Alan and Aileen met us there, and Mum soon had us working the knives and beaters like pros, as she referred to nine different recipes pinned up on the notice board she’d cleared especially, flitting between each of us (and Susie, who’d come for moral support and was instead put to work, allowed at least to sit down) and giving us precise instructions, plucking bowls and boards away from us then replacing them with new ingredients and instructions. Mum led me upstairs at one point for my last fitting, denying me a mirror but pinning my dress surely and confidently in tiny areas of tuck and dart I would never have noticed. ‘Yes, Kiki, we’re just about done here. You will look lovely.’ I thanked her, but she said we hadn’t finished with the food yet and I could work my gratitude out in the kitchen as child labour. So we all worked until 10, then Mum said her freezer and fridges were full, and that was enough for today. With aching backs and hands and more than a couple of blue-plastered fingers between us, we were allowed back out of her kitchen and home to our beds.

In our flat, as we were getting under the covers tonight, I remembered the gift from Polka Dot. Taking the parcel out of my bag and putting it on the bed, I looked nervously at Thom.

Thom: If this is the Polka Dot backlist, I am not going to be writing the thank you letter.

Me: If this is the Polka Dot backlist, I’m not going into work again.

It wasn’t. It was a big gift box, filled with tissue paper. When we pulled back all the paper, there was a picture frame, and inside the picture frame – oh! Our amazing Art Dept strikes again. They had taken the jacket from an old 1950s book of poetry,
Poems for Love
, and adapted it. The credits on the front now read:

Weddings of Love

Created & Edited by

Kiki Carlow and Thom Sharpe

and the old imprint name was replaced by the Polka Dot logo in tiny letters in the corner. Those clever beasts.

I went to add it to the list for thank you cards, and thought I’d check on our wedding gift list since I’d been too busy to look for the last few weeks.

Me: Oh, Christ … Thom, I think there’s a bug in our list.

Thom: [getting out of bed and coming over to see with a groan] What’s the problem?

Me: It says that not only has every single thing from our list been bought, but we’ve also got over £2,000 worth of gift vouchers.

Thom: Hang on a second. Look at the buyers and see who’s been duplicated.

Me: [checking]
Holy
…

Thom: That’s … not …

Me: Oh my God. That’s not a mistake.

It seems that the wives and girlfriends of the accountants who no longer employ Thom felt so bad about his redundancy that they took their Black Amexes to town on our wedding list. Every little scrap has been bought up. And when every tiny item had been bought up and there were no huge TVs or designer sofas on there, the wives and girlfriends had to go for vouchers: £400 from Charles and Clara; £200 from Guy and Sara; £500 from Rowland and Fenella, Thom’s boss and his frosty, terrified wife. Apparently not so frosty. Well, well, well. That will keep us in napkins and affordable crockery for many, many years to come.

TO DO:

Final dress fitting with Mum

See if she needs any more help with food

Check all the glasses have arrived

See if I need to do anything about the flowers

Check guest book and pen

Check enough balloons and ribbon

Write vows

August 19th

I had a teeny, weeny, minute moment of breakdown today. Thom was cha-cha-cha-ing round the kitchen to some jazz on the radio, when I suddenly started crying. I wailed, ‘Thom! I
do
want to be married to you more than anything, and we are so lucky, and I can’t wait to be your wife and for you to be my husband, but … I still want a beautiful wedding and everything seems to have gone wrong. I don’t think it’s a sign of anything other than that we aren’t multi-millionaires, but it’s so bloody exhausting to have been faced over and over with why it’s going to be smaller, or cheaper, or more split-into-several-days, or designed entirely by my mum. I feel so awful being so ridiculous when I really am fussing over nothing, but this has …
done me in
. I just want to be married to you, when we want, with a great party for the people we love. Why is that so hard?’ I cried for almost ten minutes, while Thom gave me a hug and rocked me a little, then he said, ‘Listen. We can make this day – or days – into exactly the fun we want. The more our friends and family are involved, the more they’ll enjoy it. Think how boring the Nose wedding was, and think how much fun we had at Jim’s barbecue. Imagine if Jim had just got married at the beginning of that day. How much fun would that have been? You can choose to let this stress define your day, Kiki, or you can laugh at people who spend £20,000 and
don’t even get
tiny toilets
. Mmm? Am I right?’ I said he would be more right if he mixed me a Band on the Run so I could think about all of this. He brought it through – Amaretto, milk and ice in perfect harmony – and I’m writing this slightly mellowed by its excellence. He’s so right. The tiny toilets! Just don’t tell him I said that.

TO DO:

Underwear – cleaned and freshly pressed

Rings – check someone has them

Write vows

Marry the man I love

August 20th

So here we are. Our wedding day.

At 8.30 we got up and showered, dressed – trousers and a jacket for Thom, my favourite summer dress for me – and I headed to the register office with Susie and Rich in Susie’s battered old Ford Fiesta with crumbs all over the back seat. Thom was travelling with his mum and dad so we could make the token gesture of him seeing me arrive, so Susie, Rich and I sang along to Jay-Z’s ‘99 Problems’ at full blast and pulled up to the register office with it still pumping out, like naughty teens on their first day at sixth form. Waiting for us when we got there were Mum and Dad, Pete and the kids, and Thom and his parents, each in various stages of put-togetherness.

By 9.52, Thom and I were married.

Outside, our group threw handfuls of confetti at us and Dad popped a bottle of champagne which we took turns to take little swigs from. Before any of us could get giddy with excitement (or champagne), we all headed back to the house (us newlyweds crammed into Susie’s crumb-laden back seat), took our semi-finery off and got stuck into full preparation. Thom’s mum and dad followed Mum into the kitchen to complete any chopping, peeling, mixing and stirring that hadn’t been finished the day before, and Dad, Susie and Thom headed over the road to work on the décor. There were more cars out there at this earlyish hour than I’d expected, but Mum explained it was her team of worker bees hard at it, with jars and vases and ribbons. I helped Mum for a while, but she said I was so distracted I’d cause myself an injury and imagine how cross Thom would be if he had to marry a bride with a bloody stump where one of her fingers had been only that morning, and sent me away to check everything was OK with my vows and the Orders of Service. My vows! Oh no. I made my face look as un-panicked as possible and went up to my room. With notepad and pen in hand, I tried to think how I could possibly bind my life to Thom’s with words. How could I capture what I felt for him? What words could I put down to begin to say everything he meant to me? I flicked through these pages for a while, and found some inspiration. Just how much I loved him. Next step: saying those words in front of all our friends and family. Gulp. After I’d spent half an hour tweaking the vows, Mum shouted upstairs and said I was wanted over at the school, so I put the notes away and headed across.

It was …
beautiful
. Mum and her friends had covered the front gates with ivy and white stocks, and Rich and Thom had lined the way from the gates to the school field with white ribbon on low posts to guide people to the ceremony. Dad and some helpers had put up the huge white big top tent from the school fairs; Mum’s sidekicks had festooned it with more ivy, stocks and some full blooms of hydrangea and sweet peas. Inside, the roof of the tent was filled with helium balloons of every colour, and big paper honeycomb balls in white and red hung from the poles at each corner. Tables were already groaning with dishes at 11am, being kept cool by a battery of fans, and the trestle tables of the local village hall had been transformed by vintage linen tablecloths and floral arrangements thrown together by Mum’s friends, with well over three centuries of expertise between them. The tables were laid with lovely old school dining room cutlery, and the long benches along one wall of the tent were piled with mismatched plates, Pyrex school glasses and big glass jugs. In one corner, furthest from the speakers, was a cluster of shabby sofas in brown leather and red velvet and turquoise corduroy, plus a heap of oversize beanbags and a few soft comfy rugs; along the same side was a long table on which were stacked battered wooden market boxes, half filled with bottles of red wine and half with white, the latter about to be delivered to the fridges.

Mum appeared in the doorway of the tent and stood next to me, looking around. I gave her a hug, holding her for ages, stunned at everything she’d done.

‘Mum, this is … perfect. Thank you so much.’ She smiled at me.

‘Much as I’m delighted that you like our flowers, the rest of it is entirely down to Eve and Susie.’ She saw my surprise. ‘Well, Susie was really only Eve’s dogsbody – I’m sure you can imagine. They were here all night, you know, after Eve and her boyfriend arrived with a white van full of this stuff. I thought you’d been discussing it with her for weeks, but Susie couldn’t believe when Eve said it was just some last-minute things she thought you could use.’

I looked around, mouth agape all over again. Eve was involved in this? She’d done all this for me? After all that happened this year – well, particularly after all that had happened – but with everything she felt about us, and everything I’d said to her … It was like she’d waved her wand and made what was in my brain become solid, present and delicious. Some of those things had been in this book for months, tucked into an envelope at the back, and she’d remembered from that night I’d been at her house, gloomy and over-dramatic and ungrateful, describing in lavish detail the wedding party I thought I’d never have but pined for like only the truly un-needy can. Tiny details: vintage tea tins filled with summer wildflowers on the food tables, Eve’s collection of snow-globes clustered together on the table for the wedding cake, little figurines and animals spray-painted yellow and blue and pink and green, nuzzling up to the flower arrangements on each picnic table. Everything was so thoughtful and so perfect. I was suddenly glad that I hadn’t asked Clifton Black to rub her out earlier in the year.