Authors: Mark Mills
‘Dad, you’re bleeding.’
It’s true; he is. There are scratches all over his arms, some of them quite deep.
‘Your mother’s had me clearing brambles all morning.’
‘Where is she?’
‘God knows. Throwing a pot, probably.’ He grips my hand. ‘Excuse my ill-mannered daughter. You must be David.’
‘Daniel.’
‘Forgive me. No head for names. Or faces, if the truth be told.’ When he makes to hug Edie, she fends him off, worried about her white shirt.
‘Papa, the blood …’
They make do with extended necks and a kiss on both cheeks. ‘Looking more beautiful than ever, my darling.’ He drops to his long haunches to greet Doggo. ‘And you, my little friend, are considerably more ugly than I was led to believe.’
Her mother is indeed throwing a pot. We find her in a converted pigsty that now serves as her studio. Her name is Sibella, and I can see immediately where Edie gets her large and slightly feline eyes from. Sibella’s raven-coloured hair is threaded with silver and heaped on top of her head, held in place by what look like a couple of chopsticks.
‘Darling,’ she says with a swift glance, her foot pumping the pedal, spinning the wheel. ‘Daniel, Doggo, welcome. Now bugger off, all of you. I’m at a critical point.’
The house isn’t exactly a tip, but the downstairs rooms do have a junk shop quality to them. There are books everywhere, bowing the built-in shelves, which fight for wall space with glazed cabinets stuffed with curios of all kinds, most of it of an archaeological nature: fragments of earthenware pots, bronze figurines, fossils and the like. The flagged kitchen is cathedral cold, even on a day like this. The run of quality pans dangling from hooks declares it to be the HQ of a foodie household, as does the armoury of knives stuck to the long magnetic strip on the wall beside the Aga. The music room overlooking the back garden contains the largest collection of vinyl I’ve seen outside of a second-hand record shop. A grand piano, lid down and loaded with sheet music, holds centre stage, but there are other instruments scattered about the place, as if the musicians have downed tools suddenly and shot off as one for a loo break.
‘Do you play the piano?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘The cello?’ It’s propped against a faded peach-velvet divan.
‘Uh-huh.’
I point. ‘The harp?’
‘A little.’
‘No way.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Prove it.’
Edie takes a seat and tilts the enormous instrument back against her shoulder. I watch, mesmerised, as her long fingers flutter around the strings, not appearing to touch them. A little for her is evidently a lot by anyone else’s standards; that’s clear even to me, with my tin ear and my zero talent for music. I’ve heard the piece before but can’t place it.
‘Debussy’s first Arabesque,’ says Edie when she’s done. ‘It’s easier to play than it sounds, but don’t tell anyone.’
My low, beamed bedroom is just down the corridor from hers. We meet briefly in the bathroom, she in her navy blue linen dress, me in my suit, she to fiddle with her hair and apply some make-up, me to adjust the knot of my tie and dab at an old stain on my lapel with a wet flannel.
We just have time for a quick chat and a glass of Prosecco with Elliot and Sibella on the back terrace, where a toast is raised to our recent success. ‘Does she really have what it takes?’ asks Sibella, in that way that only mothers can.
‘In spades,’ I reply.
‘You
will
look after her, won’t you?’
‘If she needs me to, but I’m not sure she does.’
‘It’s a big bad world out there.’
‘Mum …’ groans Edie.
‘It’s true,’ insists Sibella. ‘And success always come at a price.’
‘Yes, take it from us,’ chips in Elliot with a wry chuckle. I opt for a plastered smile, thrown by the self-deprecation (could my own father ever have uttered such a line?) but also uneasy with the idea of laughing along at the failed aspirations of my hosts.
Elliot runs us to the pub in their ancient Golf, which is indeed even more decrepit than my Peugeot, with some impressive dents and a stereo system that harks back to a time when cassettes were the very height of in-car entertainment. The village where the wedding is taking place lies ten minutes away down sun-dappled country lanes bursting with new growth. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect day on which to get married – not quite hot enough to raise a sweat, and with big cotton-wool clouds passing by high overhead like galleons in full sail.
The groom, Jeremy/Jez/Jezza (buzz cut and diamond stud earring), has shoved a bundle of cash behind the bar at the Royal Oak. He’s the oldest brother of Edie’s best friend when she was growing up, a loud girl with a platinum-blond bob called Trisha/Trish, whose boyfriend Richard/Rick/Dickster is a cousin of Edie’s first ever boyfriend, Alex/Al, a short, handsome, nervy fellow who offers me a limp hand and a hostile glare when I’m introduced to him in the beer garden out back. He only begins to relax once he’s figured that Edie and I aren’t an item, just work colleagues.
It’s a short stroll up the high street from the pub to the church. We find a space in the sea of hats and hushed conversations. The bride shows up suitably late in a bustled and beaded triumph of excess which no self-respecting fairy would be seen dead in. Tears well in Edie’s eyes during the opening hymn. ‘She had such a tough time when we were younger,’ she whispers to me.
A huge cheer goes up when Jez finally gets to kiss the meringue he has just married, and five minutes later we’re pelting them with rice in the churchyard. It’s only my third wedding, but I already know this isn’t how I’ll end up tying the knot. Inevitably, my thoughts turn to Clara. We sometimes discussed how we’d do it. Clara imagined some exotic location, a humanistic ceremony on a beach or clifftop with a handful of close friends as witnesses, which was fine by me, although a larger gathering at Chelsea Registry Office followed by a blow-out feast in a nearby restaurant would have got my vote too. Not that it matters any more.
That’s the thing about weddings: they stir up memories, not all of them good. They also stir up trouble. Looking around, I see a number of young men in their twenties standing awkwardly beside their girlfriends, avoiding the looks that say, ‘And what about us?’ I also spot Alex sneaking a cigarette by the lychgate. He’s staring intently at Edie, who’s deep in conversation with a wizened old bird teetering on two walking sticks, and I have the uneasy feeling that I’m going to have to keep an eye on him later.
Edie cadges us a lift to the stately home turned country hotel where the party is taking place. It’s a sprawling Georgian pile set in glorious grounds. I don’t expect her to nanny me, and she clearly has no plans to, losing herself in the throng on the back terrace, searching out old faces. There’s a lot to be said for a social gathering where you don’t know a soul: there’s no one you need to avoid, and it’s possible to walk away from a dull conversation without causing too much offence. I drift around, following my nose, which leads me to the far end of the lawn and a tall girl in a floppy straw hat who’s smoking a spliff behind a sculpture of a lion attacking a horse.
‘Police,’ I say.
‘Let’s see your badge.’
‘I’m undercover. And I’m going to need that as evidence.’
She hands me the spliff. I take a drag. ‘Yep, it’s the real deal. You’re busted.’
‘So will you be after two more tokes.’ She’s not joking; it’s elephant strength. Twenty minutes later, when a preposterous little man dressed like a town crier summons everyone inside the marquee for dinner, I still don’t know her name, and I don’t ask. It would spoil the moment.
I’ve had my phone off since entering the church; I now fire it up as I’m checking the seating plan. There’s a voicemail from my mother. I can tell immediately that she’s been crying. Alcohol probably accounts for the slight slurring.
‘Danny, sweetpea, it’s me. Call me when you can. It’s important.’
I try to remember the last time she called me ‘sweetpea’, and I see a boy with a side parting in grey corduroy shorts. A cold hand clutches at my heart. I have a pretty good idea what the message means. If something had happened to Nigel – and let’s face it, a heart attack or stroke isn’t out of the question, given how he carries on – she would have said so. No, this is something between us, something she wants to share in real time.
‘Shit,’ I mumble.
‘You should see who
I’m
sitting next to,’ jokes the old boy at my shoulder.
The food and wine are excellent, unlike the speeches. The bride’s stepfather keeps mentioning how much the bash is costing him, Jez abandons his notes and gets way too graphic about his new wife’s gifts between the sheets, then the best man and the best woman go for a scripted double act with a load of ba-dum-tsshh gags, most of which fall flat.
Edie fires me a look full of apology, and I wonder why she really invited me. She must have known I wouldn’t go down a storm with the likes of her great pal Trisha, who took one look at me and said to herself the same thing I said to myself: not my type at all.
Clara used to dance as if in a trance, as though all the forces of Mother Nature were rising up through the soles of her feet, animating her limbs. Unfortunately, I’ve picked up something of this look: head back, eyes closed, arms raised, swaying like seaweed caught in a cross-current. I know it’s not a good look, but lost in the throes of a club remix of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, it makes perfect sense to me. I’m there. Everyone else is only close. Keep up if you can.
‘Are you all right?’ Edie shouts in my ear.
I open my eyes to see her looking mildly concerned. ‘I’ve got some other moves but I’m holding them back.’
‘That sounds wise,’ she quips.
‘Someone once said, “dance like nobody’s watching”.’
‘But they are.’
It’s true, they are. There are even a couple of kids mimicking me.
‘Emulation is the highest form of flattery,’ I shout back above the music.
‘Who said that?’
‘Fuck knows. Who cares?’
That’s when I realise I’m drunk, and that I need another drink. I head outside with a vodka and tonic from the bar. It’s almost midnight in Spain, but that’s okay. Mum’s a night owl; she’ll still be up, waiting for me to phone her back. I dial, then immediately kill the call. I’m sober enough (just) to have the conversation, but I don’t want to, not right now. No, what I want is to spend one more night as me, as Daniel Wynne, son of Michael Wynne and Ann Wynne (née Larssen), brother to Emma, not half-brother. The sky is bright with stars, but I can sense my mood beginning to darken so I head back into the marquee in search of distraction. It comes in the form of a large and well-spoken woman in a taffeta dress who flops down beside me at the empty table I’ve installed myself at. She’s sweating from her recent exertions on the dance floor.
‘You should be out there,’ she announces, pouring herself a glass of white wine.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Defending your claim.’ She nods towards the dance floor, where Edie is gyrating with three blokes, one of whom is Alex.
‘We’re not together. We just work together.’
‘How boring.’
I can’t claim to know the countryside well, but I did grow up in Norwich, a city surrounded by wild swathes of the stuff, so I feel safe in saying that country people are utterly unlike city people. It’s nothing as obvious as having a shotgun or two tucked under your bed; it’s what they do with their time, how they go about putting bread on the table. You meet people who make a living from dredging ditches or thatching roofs or fixing dry-stone walls or neutering cattle or servicing farm machinery or selling fertiliser. Barbara in the taffeta dress stables other people’s horses for a living, although she also breeds ponies on the side. That’s how she fills her waking hours, that’s how she fills the tank of her ‘shit-covered Land Rover’. She’s a close friend of the bride’s mother. She also taught Edie to ride, ‘many moons ago now’.
‘Don’t tell me, she was a natural.’
‘Of course. Things have always come easily to Edie. Except …’ She trails off.
‘What?’
‘It’s not my place to say.’
I slide my hand inside my jacket. ‘I’ll pay you.’
Barbara smiles. ‘Keep your money, it’s on me.’ Then, after a slug of wine: ‘One word. Love.’
‘Love?’
‘She’s always looked for it in the wrong place.’
‘And where’s the right place?’
‘Anywhere you’re not searching for it.’ I weigh these words of wisdom. ‘Don’t look so impressed,’ she says. ‘I got it from
Cosmopolitan
. Full of nonsense, that magazine. You know the sort of thing – “Are you a red, green or blue woman?”’
‘Which one are you?’
‘Me? I’m a happily married woman who’s also been happily divorced twice, so what do I know about anything?’
‘Much more than you’re letting on, I suspect.’
She shrugs the flattery aside. ‘Are you a homosexual?’
‘Promise not to lynch me if I say yes?’
She gives an affronted gasp. ‘Excuse me! We’re not as backward as you city types like to think. In fact, we’re really quite liberal. We have to be. There’s no keeping secrets in a place like this.’
‘No, I’m not a homosexual.’
‘So why aren’t you out there fighting for her?’ Another nod towards the dance floor. ‘I mean, look at her. Don’t tell me you can’t see it. She’s ravishing, and that’s not a word I’d use of many people.’
‘I spend all day in an office with her. Could you live and work with the same person?’
‘Oh, you old romantic.’
‘Could you?’
‘You don’t deserve her if that’s your attitude.’
‘Well, could you?’
She ignores the question again. ‘Just find a way to make it work, or learn to live with the regret.’ She lays a hand on my forearm. ‘No job is for life; love can be.’
‘
Cosmopolitan
again?’
‘No, I think that one might have been
Grazia
.’
Things start to go wrong the moment Barbara’s husband whisks her away to meet someone. Desperate for a piss, I’m heading for the exit when I see Edie gesturing for me to come and dance, an invitation that doesn’t go down too well with Alex, judging from his scowl. I signal that I’ll be right back, but I haven’t banked on the queue for the gents, and it’s at least ten minutes before I return. The first thing I see on entering the marquee is Edie turning away from Alex and him seizing her by the arm and yanking her back. Before I know it, I’m right beside them on the dance floor.