The third wave is unstoppable. Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation — a triumph of paper engineering — and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.
Mr and Mrs Anthony Killick invite Emma Morley and partner to the wedding of their daughter Tilly Killick and Malcolm Tidewell.
In the motorway services Emma sat in her new car, her very first car, a fourth-hand Fiat Panda, and stared at the invite, knowing with absolute certainty that there would be men with cigars and someone English in a kilt.
‘Emma Morley and partner.’
Her road atlas was an ancient edition, with several major conurbations missing. She turned it through one hundred and eighty degrees, then back ninety, but it was like trying to navigate with a copy of the Domesday Book and she slapped it onto the empty passenger seat where her imaginary partner should have been sitting.
Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers. Frequent rest stops were required to stabilise her blood pressure and dab the perspiration from her top lip, and she reached for her handbag and checked her make-up in the mirror, trying to sneak up on herself to gauge the effect. The lipstick was redder and more sultry than she felt she could carry off, and the small amount of powder she had applied to her cheeks now looked garish and absurd, like something from a Restoration comedy. Why, she wondered, do I always look like a kid trying on her mother’s make-up? She had also made the elementary mistake of getting her hair cut, no, styled, just the day before, and it was still falling into an artful arrangement of layers and flicks; what her mum would have called a ‘do’.
In frustration she tugged hard at the hem of her dress, a Chinese-style affair of rich blue silk, or some silk substitute, which made her look like the plump unhappy waitress in the Golden Dragon Take-away. Sitting down it bulged and stretched, and the combination of something in the ‘silk’ and motorway jitters was making her perspire. The car’s air-conditioning had two settings, wind-tunnel and sauna, and all elegance had evaporated somewhere outside Maidenhead, to be replaced by two dark crescents of sweat beneath her arms. She raised her elbows to her head, and peered down at the patches and wondered if she should turn around, go home and change? Or just turn around. Go home, stay home, do some work on the book. After all, it’s not as if she and Tilly Killick were still the best of pals. The dark days when Tilly had been her landlady in the tiny flat in Clapton had cast a long shadow, and they’d never quite settled the dispute over the non-return of the returnable deposit. It was hard to wish the newly-weds well when the bride still owed you five hundred quid.
On the other hand, old friends would be there. Sarah C, Carol, Sita, the Watson twins, Bob, Mari with the Big Hair, Stephanie Shaw from her publishers, Callum O’Neill the sandwich millionaire. Dexter would be there. Dexter and his girlfriend.
And it was at this exact moment, as she sat pointing her armpits at the air-conditioning vents and wondering what to do, that Dexter drove by unseen in his Mazda sports car, Sylvie Cope by his side.
‘So who’ll be there?’ asked Sylvie, turning down the stereo. Travis — her choice for a change. Sylvie didn’t much care for music, but made an exception for Travis.
‘Just a whole lot of people from University. Paul and Sam and Steve O’D, Peter and Sarah, the Watsons. And Callum.’
‘Callum. Good, I like Callum.’
‘. . Mari with the Big Hair, Bob. God, people I haven’t seen for years. My old friend Emma.’
‘Another ex?’
‘No, not an ex. .’
‘A fling.’
‘Not a fling, just an old, old friend.’
‘English teacher?’
‘Used to be an English teacher, writer now. You talked to her at Bob and Mari’s wedding, remember? In Cheshire.’
‘Vaguely. Quite attractive.’
‘I suppose so.’ Dexter shrugged hard. ‘We fell out for a while. I told you about it. Remember?’
‘They all melt into one.’ She turned to the window. ‘So did you have a thing with her?’
‘No I did nothave a thing with her.’
‘What about the bride?’
‘Tilly? What about her?’
‘Did you ever have sex with the bride?’
December 1992, that horrible flat in Clapton that always smelt of fried onions. A foot massage that had spun wildly out of control while Emma was at Woolworths.
‘Of course not. What do you think I am?’
‘It seems like every week we go to some wedding with a coach-load of people you’ve slept with—’
‘That’s not true.’
‘—a marquee-full. Like a conference.’
‘Not true, not true—’
‘It is true.’
‘Hey, you’re the only one for me now.’ With one hand on the steering wheel, he reached across and placed the other on Sylvie’s stomach, still flat beneath the peach shot-satin of her short dress, then rested it on the top of her bare thigh.
‘Don’t leave me talking to strangers, will you?’ said Sylvie, and turned up the stereo.
It was mid-afternoon before Emma found herself, late and exhausted, at the security gates of the stately home, wondering if they would let her in. A vast estate in Somerset, shrewd investors had turned Morton Manor Park into a sort of all-in-one marriage compound, complete with its own chapel, banqueting hall, a privet maze, a spa, a selection of guest bedrooms with walk-through showers, all surrounded by a high wall topped with razor wire: a wedding camp. With follies and grottoes, ha-has and gazebos, a castle anda bouncy castle it was an upmarket marital Disneyland, available for whole weekends at breathtaking expense. It seemed an unusual venue for the wedding of a former member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and Emma drove along the sweeping gravel drive, bemused and disconcerted by it all.
In sight of the chapel, a man dressed in the powdered wig and frock coat of a footman lunged in front of her, waving her down with frilly cuffs and leaning in at the window.
‘Is there a problem?’ she asked. She wanted to say ‘officer’.
‘I need the keys, ma’am.’
‘The keys?’
‘To park the car.’
‘Oh God, really?’ she said, embarrassed by the moss growing round the window seals, the mulch of disintegrated A to Zs and empty plastic bottles that littered the floor. ‘Okay, well, the doors don’t lock, you’ve got to use this screwdriver to hold it closed and there’s no hand brake, so park it on the level or edged up against a tree or just leave it in gear, alright?’ The footman took the keys between his finger and thumb as if he’d been handed a dead mouse.
