Wise Follies

by Grace Wynne-Jones

  I look at my sweet pea posy. It was grown in my garden. I rather wish I was in my garden now. Where on earth is Eamon? Ah – here he is – rushing in, fiddling with his shirt collar. Looking the immaculately groomed groom that he is. He gives me a warm smile, and then Matt steers him in the right direction.

  I glance at Mira. She’s looking lovely. Really quite radiant. Her dress looks beautiful on her. It shows off her figure well. Oh goodness, the organ music has started.

  We try to move forwards slowly, serenely, like we were told to at the rehearsal. People are looking at us, smiling. Oh, dear God, I hope I don’t stumble, or drop my flowers or get tangled in my dress. And what if I suddenly need to pee? I’ve been four times already in the past hour.

  The priest has got on his benign ‘here come my flock’ smile. I hope he isn’t planning a long sermon. Some of them really get the bit between their teeth when they see a full church. Warbling on about ‘these two young people’ and all that. I think there should be a little buzzer one could press if they go past fifteen minutes. Jesus, I hope you’re taking close interest in these proceedings because I think we all need a bit of help here. Mira seems surprisingly calm. She’s wearing baseball boots, only you can’t see them under her long, flowing raw silk dress. ‘Marriage involves a lot of standing around. Comfortable shoes are essential,’ she told me. Oh well, at least she’s not wearing her huge furry slippers. She’s always going to be rather eccentric. It suits her.

  Of course, this is all a very spiritual, uplifting ceremony. It’s full of sanctity and solemnity and not at all the time when one might find oneself wondering whether, for example, one has let the cat out. Tarquin has a way of darting into another room and hiding. He’s become very crafty lately. The vicar is getting to the ‘I do’ bit. The bit where one has to speak. I tense, hoping the words come out right. They do. Mira and Eamon say them perfectly. Many months have passed since I myself was supposed to get married. This is their wedding, not mine.

  I had to do quite a bit of matchmaking to get them to this altar. Mira had become quite attached to being an eccentric spinster and Eamon seemed set on becoming a bachelor after our own wedding was called off.

  ‘I can’t really be bothered with all that stuff now,’ he told me reproachfully.

  By that stage I’d told him about Liam and he was understandably hurt. Not as hurt as he would have been if he’d been in love with me, but hurt all the same. Mira was furious with me. I had a very unsettled few months trying to cope with their varying emotions. I became determined that Eamon and I would remain friends and that he would become someone’s Mr Wonderful. He deserved it. Stealthily, slyly, I drew him and Mira together. On numerous occasions I invited him round for ‘lunch’ and disappeared off on a pretend errand as soon as he arrived.

  ‘You talk with Mira,’ I’d say. ‘I just have to get some lettuce.’

  After a while it became obvious, even to them, that they were a match, though they weren’t at all sure about the wisdom of giving romance another try. The fact that they have is a ‘wise folly’ I suppose. I think there are a lot of them around.

  I’m so glad I managed to bring them together, especially now as I watch them kissing. A long delicious kiss. Yes, definitely, that’s how it should be done. My eyes start misting. I am profoundly moved. So is Mira’s dad. He’s standing near her. He walked her up the aisle. Half the church are now reaching for their Kleenexes. Most people are pretty romantic really. Deep down. There’s not much that can be done about it.

  I couldn’t do it in the end, marry Eamon. I’d asked for guidance about my dilemma and I got it. Loads of it. Almost an EU surplus in fact. I looked at Eamon and myself long and hard and I just knew our marriage wouldn’t work. It might have looked all right on the outside, it might even have seemed sensible, practical, wise. He was a definite ‘catch’, but there was another catch too. We would have driven each other up the wall. And anyway it was becoming painfully obvious that he felt more comfortable with Mira. He’s her Mr Wonderful. He’s even bought her a motorbike. Attraction is such a strange thing. Their wedding reception at Cassidy’s Hotel is going to have a ‘South Seas’ theme to it. Eamon even managed to fly in some Hawaiian-type flower garlands. We’re all to wear them apparently. It sounds fun and very unlike the rather sedate reception we ourselves had planned.

  ‘We can’t cancel the wedding now, it will look so foolish,’ Eamon said at first when I told him I no longer planned to marry him. ‘The reception menu’s been chosen, we’ve hired musicians. And what about all the invitations? The wedding presents?’

  ‘We’ll just have to send the presents back. And we’ll just have to contact the hotel and everyone else – we’ll have to explain.’

  ‘But what will we tell them?’ Eamon was in a state.

  ‘Just the basic details. They don’t have to understand, Eamon. As long as we do.’

  ‘It’s Liam, isn’t it?’ he frowned at me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you felt that way about him? I would have understood.’

  ‘I didn’t know until the other day,’ I explained. ‘And it’s not just Liam really. It’s lots of other things as well.’

  After that conversation Eamon said he thought a round of golf might cheer him up and I asked if I could join him. He was, of course, rather startled, but I could also see that he was pleased. I enjoyed playing golf with him actually. I didn’t think I would, but I did. I can see why people like it now. When I got into a bunker he helped me to get out. He showed me the right swing and the ball landed on the green. As we wandered over the manicured grass Eamon admitted that he was relieved we had called off the wedding. ‘You didn’t seem happy about it,’ he said. ‘Frankly, even before I saw you with Liam, I had started to wonder if it was wise.’

  ‘So I suppose cancelling it is a wise folly,’ I said. He just looked at me and laughed.

  My exhibition at James’s studio went really well. I sold quite a few paintings. It’s encouraged me to take my painting more seriously. I’m taking a year off from the magazine and have enrolled in an art course in Paris. I plan to teach English part-time while I’m there and also do some freelance articles for various publications, including the magazine. Sarah says I can make my own suggestions.

  I know Paris. I like it. Not everything about it, of course, but enough. I’ll take sneering lessons if necessary. I plan to stay with Laren and Gustave when I first arrive. I want to visit Provence, of course, but I won’t make a big deal of it. I think I may have turned it into someplace a bit too perfect. It’s easy to do that with places and people. I did it with my Wonderful Man. Now I’d just like to explore it a bit. Accept it as it is.

  What I’m trying hard to do these days is to be a bit kinder to myself. I see that I put myself under a lot of pressure about a lot of things and it wasn’t really necessary. I am what I am and I am learning to accept myself. Appreciate myself. Show myself the kind of love I want to offer others. And I do want to offer love as well as receive it. I really do.

  I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to having a child myself now. My periods arrived shortly after I broke off my engagement with Eamon, and in a way I was a bit disappointed. But even if I don’t have a child there are plenty I can borrow. Annie’s son, Josh, sometimes comes to the cottage with his friends and I give them painting classes. It’s great fun. I put newspapers on the floor so we can splash around rather wildly. Everything Josh paints, even a duck, ends up wearing a Manchester United T-shirt. He keeps saying that I should marry his mother. He still doesn’t understand the penis thing. Not really – but then maybe I don’t either.

  I visited my parents’ graves the other day. I placed flowers by my grandparents’ and Aunt Phoebe’s headstones too. I told them I was going to Paris and, strangely enough, I got the sense that they were rather pleased. They hadn’t wanted me to go there when I was younger. Maybe they see things differently now, wherever they are. And they are somewhere, I’m pretty sure of that.

  Liam wants to visi
t me in Paris. I want him to, I really do. He’s going to rent the cottage while I’m away. Mrs Peabody was most reassured when I told her this. They’ve become great buddies and Liam and Tarquin have become very pally too. In fact Tarquin lets us pat him now. One day he just didn’t run away when I reached out to touch him. He sat there, terrified, but he stayed.

  I wonder if Liam and I will stay together. I wonder if what we feel for each other will last. Who can really tell? Of course it would be wonderful to have those first four romantic, passionate years – to stretch them out a bit if one could. The ‘less giggly and obvious’ bit sounds pretty good too. And the companionship. The friendship. The marzipan. We’ll do our best. We’ll give it a try and see what happens.

  Lately I’ve begun to suspect something. I’ve begun to suspect that contentment doesn’t have as much to do with circumstance as I’d thought. And that ‘perfectionism and happiness don’t sit too comfortably together’ as James Mitchel said. I also think that life may be a bit more like felt pictures than I’d realized. You have to be prepared to move things around if necessary. Even your beliefs.

  For example, as I look at Mira and Eamon here, in this church, signing the register, I find myself believing that their love may be ‘giggly and obvious’ for a good deal longer than four years. Believing has a lot to do with it I think. Trust. Hope. That leap of faith. I know this because just the other day Liam patted my bottom rather naughtily when I was replanting my lobelias. As we looked at each other and laughed I realized something very wonderful and very unexpected.

  I realized that we looked just like Mr and Mrs Allen did in the B&B with the bouncing bedsprings, all those years ago.

  Grace Wynne-Jones was born and brought up in Ireland and has also lived in Africa, the US and England. She has a deep interest in psychology, spirituality and healing and she also loves to celebrate the strangeness and wonders of ordinary life and love. She has frequently been praised for the warm belly-laugh humour and tender poignancy in her writing and has been described as ‘a novelist who tells the truth about the human heart’.

  Her feature articles have appeared in many magazines and national papers in Ireland and in England and her radio play Ebb Tide was broadcast on RTE 1. Her short stories have been published in magazines in Ireland, England and Australia, and have also been broadcast on RTE and BBC Radio 4. She is the author of four critically acclaimed novels: Ordinary Miracles, Wise Follies, Ready Or Not? and The Truth Club. She has written and broadcast a number of talks for RTE’s ’Living Word’ and ‘Sunday Miscellany’ and has been included in the book ‘Sunday Miscellany A Selection From 2004 - 2006’ (New Island). She also contributed to the travel book ‘Travelling Light’ (Tivoli).

  Please visit her website for more information:

  www.gracewynnejones.com