by Claire Frost
‘Don’t worry, me and the kids are going to be her wing-family, and whisk her away from any weirdos she meets in coffee shops. Although it’s going to be a bit strange seeing my wife go on dates with men right under my nose!’
‘Actually, that is weird,’ Hannah agreed.
‘The things I do for my best mate, eh,’ Jess said. ‘Imagine if I ended up falling for one of the handsome grooms-to-be!’ As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she wished she’d kept that thought to herself. While her comment had clearly tickled Hannah, Tom’s face betrayed the fact he wasn’t quite so at ease with the situation. Things had been okay-ish between them for the past few weeks, in that they hadn’t had any big arguments – although Jess had bitten her tongue a fair few times at Tom’s inability to help run an organised household – and she was eager to keep it that way. ‘Not that that would ever happen, obviously,’ she added quickly.
Tom cleared his throat. ‘Right, well, I look forward to seeing the fruits of all our labours. Let’s hope they’re not all right plums. I’d better get some work done so I’ll see you later.’
Hannah guffawed loudly as Tom made his way back to the house. ‘Tank is such a good sport,’ she said. ‘I hope my new husband is going to play along with my mad schemes like he does with you.’
‘Mmm,’ Jess replied non-committally. ‘Talking of your new husband, I’m going to spend a few hours this afternoon going through the applications before school pick-up. Would it be safer for me to work from the kitchen table rather than sit two metres away from you? I know you and I know not being able to see my screen will be torture!’
‘You could stay in here and I could have a teensy look every half an hour maybe?’ Hannah replied hopefully.
‘Han! Looks like I will be retiring to the kitchen this afternoon. But maybe when I go and pick the kids up you should knock off early and go to the gym or whatever to take your mind off it all.’
‘Yes, boss!’
By the time three o’clock rolled around, Jess didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. They’d indeed had over a hundred applications, but she’d immediately moved more than half of them to her ‘NO’ folder within seconds of starting to read their no-more-than-two-hundred-word paragraph about why they wanted to apply. Reasons ranged from ‘Getting married will finally make sure my crazy ex gets the message I don’t want to be with her’ to ‘My sister has just had a baby and now I want a family as quickly as possible, too’. Then there were the ones she was tempted to put in the ‘MAYBE’ folder because they were in need of someone to make them feel better, like the man who wrote ‘I rarely leave the house so find it difficult to meet any women, let alone one who would marry me’. But she also knew there was no point adding him just because she felt sorry for him; he clearly wasn’t going to be a good match for her outgoing, wanderlust-obsessed best friend.
It had taken her longer than she’d anticipated, and she was left with forty emails to read through properly, so once she’d coaxed the kids into bed, put the dishwasher on and cleaned down the kitchen worktops, she joined Tom on the sofa where he’d turned on some gruesome-looking Netflix drama. She opened her laptop and pulled up the MAYBE list. This time, before she even started to read their reasons for applying, she opened the image attached to each email. While she didn’t want to resort to a Tinder-esque judgement based on looks alone – especially as that would go against one of Save The Date’s core values – she also knew that the man she eventually chose as Hannah’s groom needed to be someone her friend would fancy at first sight – or at least within a few weeks of getting to know him.
She glanced at her own husband lolling next to her. He definitely wasn’t looking his best in tatty tracksuit bottoms and a grey paint-splattered T-shirt, but even after almost nineteen years together she still appreciated his blue eyes, kind face and slightly crooked teeth.
He turned and saw her smiling at him. ‘You all right, love? Oh, damn, that’s what I meant to remind you about – Lily said the school is having some kind of bake sale tomorrow and the twins need to bring a cake in.’
‘I haven’t seen a letter or anything,’ Jess said, puzzled. ‘Are you sure she didn’t mean next week?’
‘Well, she told me about it when I picked the kids up last Friday and I totally forgot to tell you, sorry. Have we got anything in the cupboard they can take? Or if not can you drop into Sainsbury’s before drop-off tomorrow? I’ve got a meeting about that possible commission first thing, otherwise I’d do it.’
Jess stared at her husband, but his attention was already being drawn back to the screen by the sound of someone being stabbed multiple times. ‘I’ll just go and sort that out then,’ she said through gritted teeth.
‘Thanks, love.’ He smiled at her before turning to watch the victim die dramatically in a pool of his own blood.
She closed her laptop and put it on the side in the kitchen before opening the treat cupboard and staring hopefully inside. She pulled out the emergency Swiss roll she’d hidden at the back and had been intending to eat in three large slices with a giant cup of coffee when only ‘plastic cake’, as she liked to call it, would do. If she sprinkled it with icing sugar and put it in a tin, maybe none of the other mums would be any the wiser, until someone actually ate it, at least. Normally, she spent the evening before one of the school’s sales baking a Victoria sponge that, try as she might to make it look professional, was always obviously home-made, from the cream spilling out of the centre to the slightly burnt bits round the side. The irony that she was now desperately trying to make a professional cake look more home-made wasn’t lost on her, and it only served to increase the anger currently bubbling up inside her. Once the Swiss roll was dusted and placed on some greaseproof paper inside a tin, she strode into the living room ready to unleash her fury at Tom’s inability to pass on the simplest message – only to find him snoring on the sofa with the TV still showing various people beating the crap out of each other.
‘Typical,’ she fumed to herself. ‘Bloody typical.’
* * *
She was still furious the next morning, so when Lily piped up with, ‘Muuuuuum, have you made a creamy cake for the bake sale today?’ she replied tightly, ‘No, your father failed to tell me about it, but we have got this lovely-looking Swiss roll instead so don’t worry.’
‘Isn’t that the one that was at the back of the treat cupboard?’ Sam asked, peering into the tin. ‘I wasn’t looking in the cupboard, obviously, because I know that’s naughty. Lily must have told me about it.’
‘I did not!’ Lily yelled. ‘You are such a liar, Sam!’
By the time Jess had prevented world war three, they were running late and she had to rush the twins into school with Lily carefully carrying the tin.
‘Good morning, Lily, good morning, Sam,’ smiled their teacher.
‘Good morning, Mrs Simmons!’ Lily chorused brightly while Sam muttered his reply and headed over to join his friends. ‘Mrs Simmons, we brought a Swiss roll from the treat cupboard for the bake sale because Dad failed to tell Mum about it, but Mum made it look like she baked it, which is good, isn’t it?’ And with that, she skipped into the classroom.
Jess’s cheeks flamed and she looked anywhere but at Mrs Simmons. ‘I’m sorry, we’ve both just been so busy and—’
‘Oh don’t worry at all, Mrs Taylor, at least you remembered, unlike some other parents, and you made the effort to put it in a tin and everything!’ She grinned and her eyes twinkled, but Jess barely returned her smile before walking quickly back to the car.
‘God, I felt like I’d been reported to the headmistress, thanks to Tom’s stupidity,’ she moaned to Hannah when she finally got to the office. ‘I was so embarrassed. What, what’s so funny now?’
‘Oh, it just made me think of us at school when I’d make you skive PE or ask to copy your homework and you’d get really funny about breaking the rules even a tiny bit. You are such a goody-two-shoes!’
‘Why get into trouble when you can
just do things properly in the first place?’ Jess huffed. ‘That’s what made me so annoyed about the cake sale. If Tom had only told me, then I wouldn’t have had to get so annoyed last night.’
‘No, you’d have spent the whole evening trying to make the perfect cake instead. Jess, I’m saying this as your best friend, but sometimes you need to chill the fuck out!’
Jess stared at her, unsure what to say, until she saw Hannah’s lips twitch and they both started giggling. ‘I know, but I can’t help who I am. As you say, I’ve always been like this, so there’s no helping me now.’
‘One of these days I’m going to bake you some brownies that will definitely make you chill out!’ Hannah laughed. ‘Although knowing you, you’d take them to a bake sale and it’d be the kids who ended up horizontal, not you!’
‘Mmm, brownies…’ Jess groaned. ‘With all this talk of cake, I could eat a whole tray of them right now! And on that note, I’m going to spend another afternoon in the kitchen reading through applications, so you’ll need to run things in here later – is that okay?’
‘No problem, captain! In the meantime, in the absence of any cake, shall I at least make us a large cup of coffee and we can see if there are any of those old digestive biscuits in the bottom of your drawer?’
* * *
By the end of the following week, Jess had managed to whittle the list of applicants down to ten hopefuls and get them to email over answers to a few additional questions, so she and Tom had as much info to go on as they could at this stage. All ten sounded normal and didn’t look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining (she still couldn’t fathom why ‘Dean from Bristol’ had decided to send a photo of himself posing as his favourite horror-movie character. Needless to say, he wasn’t among the ten she’d chosen).
After dinner on Friday night, with Lily at a sleepover and Sam in bed reading thanks to the promise of pancakes for breakfast if he was good, Jess topped up both her and Tom’s wine glasses and thrust the laptop onto the table in front of him. ‘Right, let’s go through the candidates and their answers to the questions I sent over, and we’ll each give them a score out of ten and see which three come out on top,’ she instructed, reaching for her notebook.
‘Yes, Lord Sugar,’ Tom deadpanned.
‘Tom, I hope you’re taking this seriously – this is Hannah’s future we’re talking about here, not some poxy gameshow.’
‘I am taking it seriously! But you have to admit it is a strange way to set someone up on a date.’
‘On a blind-date wedding,’ Jess corrected. ‘And, no, now I’ve been working on it for a while, it doesn’t sound as strange as I thought it would. It actually makes a lot of sense for someone’s friends and family to be involved in finding them the perfect match. After all, we just want Han to be happy. I’m thinking about adding an element of “what my loved ones say about me” into Save The Date actually – you, know, a bit like that old dating site where your friend had to write your profile for you?’
‘Do you remember going to that dinner party at Pat and Susie’s house years and years ago when we’d just left uni and everyone was trying to be all grown-up, and we all got horribly drunk and ended up persuading Lisa we should rewrite her profile for her? She got loads of messages from weird men with strange fetishes for months afterwards, even though she deleted everything we’d written the next day!’
‘God, I’d totally forgotten about that! Poor Lisa, especially as she ended up marrying Awful Justin. Urgh, I think I’d rather have a man with a strange fetish than that greasy-haired, obnoxious oik. Anyway, enough chat and more looking at grooms-to-be.’ She nudged her husband. ‘What do you think about Brian from Slough?’
‘He’s called Brian.’ Tom pulled a face.
‘He can’t help his name – that’s his parents’ fault, not his.’
‘And he lives in Slough.’
‘Right. But what about him as a person? He sounds nice, no?’
‘I guess. But he’s a bit run-of-the-mill, isn’t he? Surely Hannah deserves someone a little, well, cooler?’
‘Okay. What about this one?’
‘Yes! It should definitely be him.’
‘Are you basing that solely on the fact he’s called Tom?’
‘Maybe…’
‘I knew we should have done this before opening the wine. If you’re not going to take this seriously—’
‘I am, I promise, sorry,’ Tom apologised, pulling his most puppy-dog-eyed contrite look. ‘Tom does sound okay, though, and he lives in north Wales, which isn’t very far away. Have you thought how it’s going to work out if Hannah’s groom lives in Devon and she’s here in Manchester?’
‘I know, location is definitely something to bear in mind,’ Jess admitted. ‘Although I think Brian in Slough is the furthest away of any on the shortlist, and I’ve made sure most of the others live within a sixty-minute drive. So we’re saying Tom is a possible, yes?’
‘Yes. And I like this other guy’s application, too,’ he nodded, pointing at the screen.
My sister has slightly strong-armed me into this, but I know deep down she’s right. Two years ago I thought I had it all – I was engaged to the perfect woman and we were happily planning the rest of our lives together, but then everything changed. To be honest, it’s taken me a long time to get to a point where I feel like I want to settle down with someone again. And maybe that someone could be Hannah. The old me loved travelling, eating weird and wonderful foods and playing guitar in a rubbish band. And the new me likes these things too, as well as pints in proper pubs, live comedy shows and listening to other people play guitar in non-rubbish bands. Now I’m up for a challenge and an adventure – and what’s more adventurous than a blind-date wedding!
‘That’s Toby. I liked him too,’ Jess agreed, ‘but I was a bit worried he had too much baggage.’
‘Maybe, but at least he’s been honest. And he’s, what, thirty-eight? Who doesn’t have baggage at our age?’
‘True. Okay, he’s in. Do we need one more to add to our shortlist?’
Another glass of wine later and Tom had dismissed each of the seven other applicants as being ‘too strait-laced’, ‘too sexist’ or ‘too vegan’.
‘Maybe you only need to meet the two we’ve shortlisted to start with at least,’ he suggested, draining his glass.
‘No, I think we should go through the others again tomorrow, when we haven’t drunk a bottle of wine between us. We don’t want to miss anyone out.’
However, the following day Brian and co. seemed no more appealing to either of them. ‘I’d better call Toby and Tom and set up meeting them for coffee,’ Jess said, shutting her laptop. ‘It’s so weird to think that one of them could end up being married to Hannah!’
Chapter 8 Hannah
‘I bring pains au chocolat!’ Jess announced triumphantly as she walked through the door one Wednesday morning a few weeks later. She threw down her car keys and a slightly sweaty paper bag and marched over to the coffee machine. ‘Large mug of caffeinated drink to go with it?’
‘Yummy! Actually, I’ll have a nice cup of tea for once, please,’ Hannah replied, looking up from her laptop and smiling at her friend’s cheeriness. ‘What’s brought the pastries on? Not that I’m not grateful,’ she added quickly as she ripped open the bag, filling the office with the smell of butter and chocolate.
‘Oh, nothing much, just that I’ve found my best friend a husband.’
There was a beat of silence while Hannah processed what she’d just heard. She knew Jess had been out meeting prospective husbands at the weekend and after school, dragging the kids and Tom along as her ‘wing-family’ to watch from a distance as promised. But she had no idea they’d actually gone ahead and chosen someone – and that he had said yes.
‘You mean, you’ve actually found someone who’s as mad as me? Who is actually up for going through with this?’ She paused, weighing up the likelihood of that outcome. ‘Does he look like a gargoyle?’
‘Wha
t happened to just wanting someone kind?’ Jess laughed. ‘Now the truth comes out – it’s about what they look like after all! Well, you’ll be pleased to know that Toby is very handsome indeed, I think.’
‘Toby?’
‘Yes. Your husband-to-be is called Toby.’
‘Toby.’ Hannah rolled the syllables round her tongue to see how they felt. ‘Okay. What else are you going to tell me about him?’
‘Nothing,’ Jess said smugly. She reached for a pastry and stuffed half a pain au chocolat into her mouth.
‘What? You have to tell me more than that!’ Hannah cried. ‘I know the idea is to marry a stranger, but I need something to go on.’
Jess continued chewing and looking smug. Hannah continued eyeballing her.
‘Oh, all right. His name is Toby and he lives within half an hour’s drive of here.’
Hannah immediately opened Facebook and typed ‘Toby’ into her search bar. After scrolling and tapping for a few minutes, she ruled out all but one of the possible candidates – all the others were either married, old enough to be her grandad, young enough to be her child, or were actually the Toby Carvery pub down the road. It left only the account of Toby Richards, who appeared to be a friend of a friend of Scott.
Hannah looked up from her screen aghast and turned it round to face her friend. ‘Jess, I trust you with my life, but if you have matched me with a Toby whose profile picture is of his right bum cheek, I will never speak to you again. I cannot marry a man who moons.’
Jess giggled naughtily. ‘Deal-breaker noted. But you’ll be pleased to know your Toby’s name is not Toby Richards, and to the best of my knowledge he does not moon.’
‘But you don’t know for sure?’ Hannah’s eyebrows shot up.