This episode overshadows our reunion. I am delighted to have slipped through, but aware it may well be the last time I’ll get away with it. It seems quite possible that after two years our relationship has finally run out of road.
There hardly seems enough time for my girlfriend and I to decide what should happen next. To start with, we do nothing. April and May drift by. Finally, in mid-June, we sit down together, me at the little drop-leaf table in the kitchen, her on the worktop, to discuss the future.
So daunting is the prospect of a wedding, much less a marriage, that the first option my girlfriend puts on the table is that we split up and live out the remainder of our lives on separate continents. As unpalatable as this idea is, I have to admit it sounds marginally less horrible than the prospect of having engagement photos taken. After an hour of circular debate, we arrive at what seems a dead end.
‘So that’s it,’ she says. ‘We’re getting married.’
‘I suppose,’ I say.
‘Never mind,’ she says, crossing the kitchen to light a fag on the hob. ‘We can always get divorced.’
Given our deep mutual reluctance to take the plunge, it would be insane for me to make any grand claims favouring marriage over simply living together for a very long time. They are very different arrangements legally – at present cohabitation comes with no rights or advantages at all – and of course they are slightly different constructs emotionally. With one a shared sense of commitment agglomerates over a long period of time, as two lives become increasingly intertwined; with the other you get all the commitment squared away on a specific day, generally before you’ve had lunch. But for the sake of argument I’ll presume that in the long term the result is much the same. If you resisted the pressure to have a wedding, good for you. You probably saved a lot of money. I, on the other hand, have four salad bowls.
I will only say this about the trauma of actually getting married: it may be something you never thought you’d be interested in, and something you imagine to be painfully embarrassing while you are doing it (you imagine right), but afterwards you will consider it a life-changing ordeal from which you emerged stronger; an ordeal that, for all its hideousness, created a special, unshakable bond between you and your partner. In this sense getting married is, I imagine, a lot like agreeing to do Dancing on Ice: you’ll end up being pleased with yourself for enduring something terrifying, difficult and unutterably naff.
When she finishes telling her mother the news on the phone, we go to see her father. I ask him for his daughter’s hand while he is showing me the progress of the work on his new loft extension. We are alone, standing on joists, looking down into the room below us. I consider the likelihood of him pushing me through.
‘How are you going to keep my daughter in the style to which she has become accustomed?’ he asks, looking stern. I don’t know that he’s been tipped off by my future mother-in-law, that he already has champagne on ice downstairs, that he’s only messing with me. I briefly contemplate jumping.
When I speak to my mother, I try to play down the whole business as a tiresome piece of administration, an elaborate exchange of paperwork which must be done at short notice. I don’t want to put anyone to any trouble just because I am obliged to jump through some bureaucratic hoops. Because my mother is a devout Catholic, I am hoping she won’t think a register office wedding counts, and therefore won’t feel she’s missing much. I suggest that after enduring whatever dry little ceremony constitutes the bare legal requirement for marriage in Britain, we will travel to the States, where she can arrange a blessing and throw an embarrassing party for us. There is a silence at the other end.
‘You can do whatever you want,’ she says. ‘But whatever it is, we’re coming over for it.’
Within weeks of us setting a date – just three months hence – my mother has invited sufficient relatives to fill a minibus. In addition to our booking at Chelsea Register Office, my future mother-in-law has secured, on my mother’s behalf, an hour slot in a Catholic church in Wimbledon, and a friendly priest who has agreed to put us through the pre-Cana period of instruction that will allow us to be married in the eyes of God. To my surprise, my new fiancée agrees to all of this without protest. Perhaps she believes that if the marriage is going to stick it must be done to the satisfaction of all concerned. I don’t know; I’m not asking a lot of questions at this point. I think the fact that in many ways it’s no longer about what we want makes us both feel a little better.
As we pull up outside the rectory for our first meeting with the priest, I realize I am far more anxious than she is. My stance regarding God is akin to the author Peter Ackroyd’s position on ghosts. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ he once wrote, ‘but I am frightened of them.’ I am scared of the God I don’t believe in, and also of priests. I’m worried my double agnosticism – doubt, doubtfully held – will be transparent enough to get us disqualified. She has no such fear, and this also scares me. I look over at her as she turns off the headlights.
‘You’re not going to suddenly say that Jesus is a pillock, or anything like that, are you?’ I say.
‘I don’t think so,’ she says.
‘And don’t say, “If it doesn’t work out, we can always get divorced.”’
‘We can, though.’
‘I know. But he might not find your robust outlook as charming as I do.’
‘Christ.’
‘Don’t say Christ,’ I say. ‘Not in there.’
In fact Father Jim is welcoming, kind and prone to reward a half-hour’s earnest chat with an extremely strong gin and tonic. Our meetings with him are the only time we ever discuss topics including love, commitment, children and, more generally, the future with anyone. My wife-to-be, who has virtually no experience of religion and is therefore free to take from it what she wishes, finds it all rather bracing. For me, Catholicism remains an unfinished school assignment, a dropped subject. I sweat a lot during these meetings, but I am grateful that someone took the time to impress upon us the seriousness of the whole undertaking.
Father Jim is not the only person we have meetings with, though. We have meetings about flowers, about venues, about food, booze, music and printed invitations. I’d somehow imagined that our whirlwind engagement might relieve us of some of the stresses associated with a big wedding, but it just means we have to do the same stuff faster. We do have engagement photos taken – I look like a frightened potato in them – and our pending nuptials are announced in a national newspaper. It’s going to look terribly convincing, this sham marriage we’ve hastily arranged just so we can stay together for ever.
I am prone to nightmares in which I find myself back at school or still in college, suddenly facing the prospect of sitting a final exam for a class I signed up for but never attended, taught by a teacher who would not recognize me (they may be dreams, but they’re based on true stories). At the point where the full consequences of my unpreparedness are about to be made plain I wake up and discover, to my immense relief, that I am middle-aged, and therefore closer to the sweet release of death than I am to tenth-grade chemistry.
Waking on my wedding day, the reverse happens: I had been dreaming of mundane things, only to open my eyes and find myself in a foreign country where I’m about to get married. My life’s greatest test to date is scheduled for 11.30 a.m., and I could not be less ready.
I have borrowed a dark blue suit from my friend Bill, without trying it on first. He’s much taller than me; the trousers,