There Goes the Bride

by Holly McQueen

  Ten minutes later and I’ve got out my laptop and already got myself a hit list for phone calls tomorrow morning. Googling wedding venues Cork has led me to a couple of stunning-looking places, only some of which are a bit obviously over the top for Jamie’s taste. My first choice is this sweet little hotel a few miles out of Cork, with incredible views overlooking the ocean. The ceremonies are held in a nice, simple-looking room, only big enough to seat about forty or fifty guests, and there are pictures on their website of all kinds of brides, not necessarily all done up in the kind of pouffy white dress that would make me look like a corpulent Christmas tree fairy and give Jamie a heart attack.

  Oh, God, that’s another thing I’ll need to start investigating: where to find a nice, wedding-appropriate outfit that’s special enough to make me feel just a little bit bridal but not the kind of thing that Jamie would think of as “mushy.” That floaty top and white trousers option I’ve always seen myself in on my wedding day.

  I’m Googling non-bridal bride outfits trousers floaty top not tunic when I remember Polly.

  For fuck’s sake, how could I have forgotten Polly?

  How can I possibly think about making wedding plans when she’s only just gone and canceled her own wedding? When both of us are still getting calls (I endured three of them only this morning, in fact) from our nosiest relatives (aka pretty much all of Mum’s side), asking what’s happened and why it’s such late notice, and whether this means they won’t be setting up a wedding list, then. I can’t ask Polly to stand beside me in some kind of bridesmaid confection, however low-key it would have to be to match my floaty top and trousers, and endure the pitying stares and whispered comments that would ensue. Even if I only invited the relatives that really have to be invited.

  And then there’s the pain I’d be worried about causing her, so soon after she’s started coming to terms with canceling her own big wedding, so soon after falling out of love with Dev.

  Sorry—so soon after she’s allegedly fallen out of love with Dev, that is.

  It’s been gnawing at the back of my mind all evening, actually. My conversation with Dev. And what he told me about Polly saying she didn’t deserve to be married.

  Hmm.

  Look, I know I told Anna that I wasn’t going to spy on my sister. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt just to have a fleeting glance at Polly’s email. While I’ve got my laptop open, that is. I mean, it’s not just so I can satisfy my feelings of guilt about planning my own wedding. At the end of the day, this is my sister we’re talking about. And poor, poor Dev, of course, who sounded so devastated and confused when we spoke earlier …

  In one sense, it would actually be seriously remiss of me not to investigate further.

  Anyway, probably I won’t even be able to access her email. Because even though I can load up her email log-in page easily enough—PollyWollyDoodle@hotmail.com—her password could literally be anything, couldn’t it? Though they do say you can narrow most people’s passwords down to things like old pets, or favorite holiday destinations, or childhood nicknames … I type in Elvis, the name of our old Labrador—no luck. All right, then: Woolacombe, where we used to go for whole summers as children … Nope, nothing. OK, how about a nickname: Dood …

  Bloody hell. Dood worked.

  I have to say, Polly really ought to be a little bit more vigilant about her security. Not that I’m going to be able to say anything to her, but a four-year-old could hack this.

  I stare at the screen as the emails come up. They’re the usual selection of obvious junk (Perfect Rolex C1one; Get Cheaper V1agra), e-vites, and status alerts from Facebook, with a few “real”-sounding emails from friends thrown into the mix. A couple of emails I sent her before she left New York, haranguing her about choosing her hymns and getting in contact with the vicar to arrange the order of service.

  There’s one particular name that crops up again and again—ten or twelve emails in the space of the past week, for example—and that belongs to a Julia247@yahoo.com.

  Wait—Julia? Wasn’t that the friend Dev mentioned, the one that Polly was being cagey about?

  “I thought you were supposed to be a professional cook.”

  The voice takes me by surprise. I spin around—shutting the laptop guiltily as I do so—to see that Liam is standing at the kitchen door.

  “Sorry?”

  “I thought you were supposed to be a professional cook,” he repeats. He’s unwinding a scarf from his neck and starting to take his coat off. Evidently he’s been out for the evening; I was too tipsy even to notice that the front door had been double-locked.

  “I am a professional cook …”

  “Ah, right. So that’s the professional way to boil milk, is it?” He nods over at the stove, where my pan of milk is doing a worthy impression of a witch’s cauldron, bubbling over with frothy white stuff and emitting a foul, sickly burnt smell.

  OK, I’m definitely even tipsier than I thought.

  “Shit!”

  “It’s all right. I’ll get it.” Liam strides past me while I’m still struggling to get to my feet, takes the pan off the stove, throws it into the sink, and starts the cold tap over it. There’s a long, hissing release of steam. “And is this something a keen amateur cook can try,” he goes on as we both stare at the ruined pan, “or is it something you’d say was best left to those who really know what they’re doing?”

  “Very funny.” I glare at him until I suddenly remember the awful tragedy Jamie told me about earlier this evening. This wipes the glare off my face at once. “Thanks,” I say instead. “I’m not sure I would have noticed that until the smoke alarms started going off.”

  “No big deal. I’m used to that kind of thing. My elder daughter decided she’d make me breakfast the morning I left for London, turned the toaster setting up too high, and almost burnt the house down. Not that I’m saying you cook like a seven-year-old,” he adds hastily. “I mean, Jamie’s always saying what an ace you are in the kitchen …”

  I’m not too drunk to feel a mild sensation of astonishment that Jamie’s mentioned me in conversation with a friend. And to say something unequivocally nice. On the other hand, I’m far, far too drunk to stop myself from saying what I say next.

  “I’m really sorry, Liam, to hear about your wife.”

  The unusually chatty, pleasant atmosphere between us vanishes as he flinches, visibly.

  “Oh. Right. Thanks for saying so.”

  “I mean, Jamie told me, of course, but he didn’t say, you know, how it happened …”

  “Hit by a car.”

  “Oh, God.” I can feel all the usual, obvious sympathetic platitudes deserting me at the sheer awfulness of this. “God, Liam, I … that’s terrible.”

  I think he’s about to bark something at me about it obviously being terrible—after the way I snapped at him for mucking things up with Samantha, I wouldn’t really begrudge him a snarky comment—but all he does is stay silent for a moment or two. A long moment or two.

  Then he shrugs, with a twist of his lips that I recognize only too well. It’s the way people smile when they know the basics (curve lips upwards, display appropriate amount of teeth) but have temporarily forgotten that when you smile, you’re supposed to be happy about something.

  “Yes, it was. Terrible, that is. Still is terrible, actually. When I think about it. Which I don’t, anymore. I mean, not as much as I used to.”

  “I completely understand! I had a terrible car accident myself, ten years ago—it’s the reason I can’t have kids, as it happens …” I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Can it really be simply the booze? I never talk to strangers about what Vito would call “my insides.” For God’s sake, I barely talk to my friends about it. Or Jamie, even. “… and it took me years before I’d totally come to terms with it. Before I stopped thinking about it every single minute of every single day. And that was nowhere near as tragic as what’s happened to you! I mean, widowed! At your age! With two daughters …”

>   “Yes.” Thank God Liam interrupts me before I can paint any more horrific a picture of his life. “Look, don’t ever think about going into PR or anything, will you?” he goes on, with the ghost of a smile—but a proper one this time—forming on his lips. “You seem to have a unique gift for … what’s the opposite of sugar-coating?”

  “Er … savory-coating?” I venture.

  “That’ll do. You seem to have a unique gift for savory-coating. Making things sound even worse than they really are.”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean …”

  “It’s OK!” He holds out a pawlike hand. “I know you weren’t trying to make it sound bad. I was joking.”

  My panic subsides. “Oh. You have a very strange sense of humor.”

  “I never used to,” he says, suddenly looking so sad that my heart breaks for him.

  We stand in silence for a moment. While I frantically try to think of something to say that isn’t … what was it? … savory-coating his troubles.

  “Well, it was nice talking to you,” Liam suddenly says, breaking the silence and nodding at the computer. “I’d better leave you to your work.”

  “Oh, no, it isn’t work, it’s …” Hacking into my sister’s email account. “… nothing, really …”

  “Still. It’s late.” He’s already moving for the kitchen door. “Good night, then.”

  Oh, no. I blew it, didn’t I? Just when we were having a pleasant-ish bit of banter about the burnt milk, and the awful episodes of nakedness and upper-lip-bleaching were fading into the past, I had to go and start bleating on at him about his tragically dead wife and my mutilated sex organs.

  I knew I wasn’t remotely cut out for the role of landlady.

  Well, I’ll write him an apology note and shove it under his door before I have to have the awkwardness of facing him on the way out of the bathroom tomorrow morning.

  Write it after I’ve returned to Polly’s emails, that is.

  Though I should probably just stop, for a minute, and think it through before I go any further. Talking to—OK, talking at—Liam has made me doubt whether or not spying on my sister really is excusable after all. God knows, at the end of the day there are more important things than people canceling their weddings. There are tragic deaths, and horrible accidents …

  Still, I’ve already got into her email account now. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wondering who this Julia247 person is that Dev seemed a bit suspicious about. The Julia that Polly seems to have so very many emails from.

  I reopen my laptop, wait for her email page to appear again, and then click on the most recent of the emails from Julia247.

  All it says is this: I’m here right now. Call me. Julia.

  The other two say almost exactly the same thing:

  Call me whenever. Julia.

  Got your email. In office until 5.30 NY time. Call me? Julia.

  Well, I’m obviously not going to find out much from Julia herself. Whoever she is, she’s evidently a woman of few words.

  I let the cursor wander over to the Sent folder and click on it. Then I click on the most recent email Polly sent to this Julia woman—the day after she got back from New York—and I start to read.

  From:

  PollyWollyDoodle@hotmail.com

  To:

  Julia247@yahoo.com

  Date:

  November 18, 2011

  Subject:

  Home

  Hi Julia. And greetings from sunny London!

  Actually, that’s not strictly accurate. It’s pouring here, just for a change; this particular kind of relentless, uncompromising drizzle that seems to strike the moment I ever hit town. And yes, I know it’s not as if it’s always sunny in New York, but for some reason even the rain never feels quite as oppressive over there as it does over here. All in the mind, no doubt. But still, right now I think I’d take torrential downpours, freak snowstorms, and devastating tornados in New York over balmy blue skies in London.

  I’m already starting to think I should never have come home at all.

  You’re bound to say—in fact, I can almost hear your voice saying it now—that I’ve barely been back twelve hours, that I need to give it a lot more time before I can start declaring that I don’t want to be here. But things just feel … I don’t know. Off-center. Tilting. Like one of those haunted houses you’d go to at theme parks as a child where the floor would suddenly just fall away from underneath your feet, usually accompanied by hollow demonic laughter from a clapped-out speaker system just above your head. (I’m talking about crappy English theme parks, of course, so probably you Americans with your swanky Disneylands and your ritzy Universal Studios would have no idea of the kind of rubbish experience I’m talking about.)

  Maybe, though, the scary tilting feeling is nothing to do with coming back to London. Maybe my world just feels as though it’s off its axis because Dev was my anchor, and because I’m not anchored anymore.

  Honestly, though, I think at least part of the scary tilting feeling is London’s fault. Well, if not London’s fault, then certainly triggered by coming back here. I don’t think I’d thought through the stress of it all—coming back and telling people the wedding is off. I don’t think, actually, that I’d thought about the practicalities of having to tell people the wedding is off at all. Naturally, my sister pointed it out to me first thing this morning, before I’d even had time to digest my breakfast. I know she means well, but I really didn’t need to hear about all the phone calls I’m going to have to make, all the arrangements I’m going to have to cancel, all the people I’m going to be letting down.

  And I certainly hadn’t properly thought through the practicalities of telling Bella. Yes, with hindsight, of course I should have known she’d nose around the matter like a bloodhound on the scent. Of course I should have known that she wouldn’t just leave me in peace until she’d challenged every last little shred of my reasoning. Which is why I ended up spinning her, this morning, some line about not loving Dev anymore. It was the only way I could think to get her to back off. After all, not even Bella would think I should marry a man I don’t love, just for the sake of going through with the wedding she’s been so carefully planning. At the end of the day, she has nothing but my best interests at heart. I just wish I’d always been so good a sister.

  Anyway, hopefully my little white lie will keep her at bay, for a bit, until I can work up the courage to explain to her the real reason I’m not marrying him. If I can work up the courage to explain to her the real reason I’m not marrying him. All that will seem easier—I hope—when I’m a bit more settled. When I’m not living in such close proximity with her (and the annoying boyfriend) anymore. I should be in a temporary apartment in a few days’ time, and then I’m going to start looking for something more permanent. Assuming I don’t decide to jump back on a plane to New York again anytime soon.

  This was a joke.

  Sort of.

  I know you already think I’m just running away from my problems, breaking up with Dev. I know you think I can’t run away from things forever.

  Right now, though, I’m honestly not running. I mean, I’m here, aren’t I? Back in rainy old Britain.

  I’ll call you on Friday, shall I, or whenever you’re next available? Any time you’re able to talk, to be honest, would suit me.

  P x

  Grace

  Tuesday, December 1

  Much excitement in the ranks today because Polly is meeting me and the boys up at Selfridges after school. It was her suggestion, to fulfill a godmotherly duty she’s not been able to exercise before: taking them to Santa’s workshop. Hector was so apoplectic with anticipation when I told them where we were going that he was almost sick on the bus, while Robbie managed to remain laid-back and older-brother-blasé about it all until we actually arrived at Selfridges, when the realization of the joint thrill of Santa and Auntie Polly kicked in. He’s been jittery and overemotional ever since.

  And seeing as Auntie P
olly was due to meet us half an hour ago, that’s been quite a lot of “ever since.”

  I wait to check up on her until exactly the thirty-minute mark, which is enough of a compromise between the fact that I don’t want to hassle Polly and the fact that if I stand in the packed, overheated basement Christmas department with a nauseous Hector and a jittery Robbie for very much longer, somebody is going to throw a tantrum of epic proportions. And that person might very well be me.

  I’m just about to ring her mobile when there’s a sudden flurry of activity on the escalator closest to us and Polly appears halfway down it.

  She looks even less kempt than she did the last time I saw her, at Café on the Green, wild-haired and pale-faced, though obviously still managing to attract lustful stares from every passing male in the place.

  I can tell right away from her guilty expression that she’s late because she totally forgot about the outing.

  “Oh, fuck,” she says the moment she sees us, before clapping a hand over her mouth, too late, to prevent the bad language in front of the boys. “You’ve been waiting. I’m so sorry I’m late! The tube … delays on the Northern Line …”

  “It’s OK.” I can’t entirely hide my irritation. “You’re here now. That’s the important thing.”

  And obviously I’ve pretty much forgiven her about three minutes later, when she’s lavished praise and attention on both Robbie, who remembers her, and Hector, who doesn’t but who instantly falls passionately in love. She puts an immense amount of effort into their whole Santa’s workshop experience, telling them all kinds of exaggerated stories about the Christmases Mummy and Auntie Polly had when they were little, and making them laugh by putting silly reindeer antlers on her head, and flirting with Santa just enough that he not only gives the boys extra time but also slips additional presents—coloring books and crayons—in our direction.

  It’s all so full-on that I’m totally exhausted just being in the vicinity of it. So I’m grateful when she offers, in her final bid for the title of Godmother of the Year, hot chocolate and cupcakes in the nearby in-store café.