Isabel did what she always does when she’s trying not to cry: she laughed, hysterically. She walked the entire length of the church laughing and blinking back tears, her dress and variable bridesmaids flowing behind her. Only in the last few feet did her eyes meet mine. She smiled; I smiled back with as little significance as I could muster—a sort of thin-lipped, cold-eyed, non-bothered smirk, the kind you’d throw a kid on a bike when he calls you a fecker. She burst into tears anyway.
Still, I passed the four tests…
THE FOUR TESTS OF A BRIDEGROOM
1 The vows. Don’t shout them, don’t whimper them, don’t faint during them. Easy.
2 The speech. Thank everyone—but mainly in-laws, look happy, declare love for new wife and make bridesmaids cry. Had to follow Isabel’s father, who did ten minutes on the traumas of her breech birth and made two members of the audience physically sick. Did fine, though, compared to Andy. I’d chosen him as best man over Johnson because he worked in the diplomatic corps and I’d remembered those Ferrero Rocher ads. As Isabel pointed out, he wasn’t actually an ambassador but doesn’t everyone in the diplomatic corps have tact? No, nerves destroyed his judgement and he never recovered from his choice of opener (‘What’s the difference between a bridegroom and a cucumber?’). His attempt to regain momentum involved raising all three topics he’d specifically been told not to (my scatological university tragedy, the vastly differing weights of the bridesmaids and my Hyde Park Corner fling with a floozy). It wasn’t pretty.
3 The dance. Two lessons hadn’t been enough to master the foxtrot. Isabel’s toe crushed in the first verse of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and an elephantine triple-trampling in the second. I considered stopping in the third to summon a paramedic or podiatric specialist but she blinked away the tears, squeezed my shoulder very, very hard and whispered, ‘Keep going.’ I did, we finished with a twirl, great aunties sighed, friends said how beautiful we looked and I decided to take that at face value.
4 The consummation. Bridesmaids always ask the bride if you did or you didn’t. If you didn’t, they tell their boyfriends and husbands. Who tell all their friends. Who all snigger. So, despite fatigue and room spin and a frankly terrifying corset, we did.
Now it’s Sunday and we can relax for the first time in six months.
Lunch was fun. No ribbons or corsages or speeches or Windsor knots or place mats or chauffeurs or confetti or wish-they-hadn’t-come extended family. Just thirty of us at a pizza restaurant in Highgate going over the post-nuptial-mortem.
THE POST-MORTEM
One Boris Becker. Andy and a waitress—in a cloakroom, though, not a cupboard. He loves her. She loves him. He’s moving to Sydney when her work visa runs out next Thursday. Already started Googling for flats on Manly Beach this morning. It won’t happen.
One hospital admission. Not the vicar. He made a miraculous recovery. It was Johnson, emboldened by ‘It’s Raining Men’, who needed medical attention after he stage-dived into an adoring crowd. There was no adoring crowd. There wasn’t even a crowd. Witnesses say he scored a perfect belly flop, and in so doing broke his nose and his fifth metatarsal, and severely bruised his right testicle. Why not his left? Because it doesn’t hang as low as the right one. I wished I hadn’t asked.
One run-in with the law. My father showing love-sick Andy how to down a bottle of red wine, on the way back to the hotel at 2 a.m. ‘Evening, gentlemen, everything all right?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘On our way home are we, gentlemen?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘A long way, is it?’ ‘Just over there, officer.’ ‘Best be on our way then, hadn’t we, gentlemen?’ ‘Yes, officer.’ ‘Will you be taking the bollard with you?’ ‘No, sir.’
One storming out. Surprise, surprise, Watzerface who is the girlfriend of Alex who is the best friend of my wife who clearly isn’t always a good judge of character.
Why did Watzerface storm out?
Official reason from Alex, while sadly not choking on his goat’s-cheese pizza (amazing, he can even manage to find a pretentious flavour of pizza): ‘She wanted marriage, but it felt too soon. You can’t rush such an important decision, can you? Marriage should be for life, not a month or two. I’m so upset that she couldn’t give me more time.’ Misty-eyed nods from bridal group, eye-rolling from me, Andy and Johnson. He’s confusing marriage with rescue dogs, and the girls lap it up.
Real reason: she’d had to find her own way to the church and reception because Alex, after much begging, had been given the job of chauffeuring. He’d been told ‘nothing flash’ then turned up with a white coach and six horses, none of which he could properly control. He had worn tailored tails and a waistcoat strikingly similar to mine except not from Hong Kong. He’d spent the whole service muttering gloomy imprecations, especially during the vows, which meant the vicar, sensing possibilities, had repeated the ‘Can anyone see any lawful impediment?’ question … twice.
Even before our first dance had finished, he’d tapped me on the shoulder, then refused to give Isabel to anyone else for the next three dances. And, once prised away, he’d marched up onto the stage, handed out sheet music to the band, declared how much he loved his best-friend-in-all-the-world Isabel, spat out how delighted he was she’d found the perfect man, then sang Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’. If I hadn’t been so busy vomiting, I would have stormed out too.
Home late to the flat. More lugging over the threshold on Isabel’s insistence, accompanied by what I took to be slightly sarcastic clapping from one of the idiots from the upstairs flat. India tomorrow. Tired, so tired.
Monday 2 May
‘Someone’s stolen my passport!’ I was completely sure of it.
‘No, they haven’t.’ But Isabel wasn’t.
‘Yes, they have.’
‘No, they haven’t.’
‘Yes, they have.’
‘No, they haven’t.’
It doesn’t take long for the matrimonial harmony to wear off, does it?
‘Yes, they have, I had it on the Tube and that bloke opposite looked shifty.’
‘So you were pickpocketed?’
‘Yes, he must have followed us.’
‘Thought you said you were like a coiled spring when you were travelling, a coiled anti-pickpocket spring.’
‘Yes, well…’
‘That if anyone tried it on with you, there’d be a blur, a flash and a whimper.’
‘I—’
‘That they’d be picking up their teeth with broken fingers.’
‘Shut up and help me look in these bags!’
‘Don’t snap at your wife.’
‘Yes, well, my wife is being incredibly unhelpful, the flight’s about to leave and someone’s run off with my passport.’
‘Is it at home?’
‘What?’
‘Have you left your passport at home?’
‘Of course I haven’t.’
‘You