Wedding Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘No,’ she giggles.

  ‘With a fabulous wedding like yours, for example, I would normally have two guys at the church, two with the bride and two at the reception. We do all the before shots – you, the dress, you getting in the dress, you in the dress. Just the other day I was doing a naked bride, getting ready – stunning, she was – and her dad walked in and started taking all sorts of snaps. It was very odd. I felt a little uncomfortable being there, actually. Anyway, we also do the marquee in all its splendour and the food and the drink, all that. We cover all eventualities. Should the camera break, we have a spare each. Should one of the guys accidentally put his camera in the holy water, which they did the other day, we have another. If the lights break, we have back-up. And I am insured should I drive off the road on my way to you!’

  ‘Oh,’ says Keeley, her hands clutching her cheeks.

  ‘My guys shoot about fifty rolls of film each. We use film, not digital, because it is much better. And we are about £600 a hour, or around £5,000 a wedding, and that is excluding the prints. So about £10,000 in all. It sounds a lot, I know, but if your marquee is £50,000 and your flowers are £50,000, at the end of the day what do you have left? Just memories.’

  ‘I see,’ says Keeley.

  ‘Now shots-wise – you want the getting-ready shots, the arriving at the church, the back down the aisle with the husband, the cake-cutting, the first dance and the family. That more or less covers it all, and then you’ve got the extras – the fun things, the reaction shots. But the others are your basics – Oh, hello there, Lucien.’ We all turn in the direction of the door. Standing in the frame, lit by the bright sunshine, is Lucien. Slim, blond, quietly spoken and very posh, he is the second photographer Keeley is supposed to meet. Except that he has arrived, portfolio tucked under his arm, half an hour early. ‘I didn’t know you were pitching for this too.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were pitching either,’ he says in his clipped soft tones. ‘I am terribly sorry. Have I made a mistake?’

  The whole room turns to look at Bernard.

  ‘Christ!’ I say. ‘Is that the time? I’ve got a marquee man to meet!’ I leave the room, pick up my bag and Alice’s wedding dress from the hat stand, and make a very sharp exit.

  Thursday p.m.

  I MANAGE TO get as far as the M23 before Bernard calls me.

  ‘You shit!’ he shouts down the telephone. ‘What sort of fucking wing man are you, leaving at the first sign of trouble?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Don’t come over all innocent with me. You know as well as I do you shouldn’t have two pitching photographers anywhere near each other. It was a total unmitigated fuck-up.’

  ‘I didn’t book them,’ I venture.

  ‘I know you didn’t book them, but at least you could have stayed around and helped me clean up the mess, or have been some sort of buffer zone between the two of them.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’

  ‘What do you think happened? They started to show off, that’s what bloody happened!’

  ‘Oh dear – did Mike tell his—?’

  ‘Yes, of course he did!’

  Mike has a story that he likes to tell about a posh wedding he did a couple of years ago now. It was a very glamorous occasion with some very smart people drinking lots of delicious wine and champagne. He says that he put down one of his cameras somewhere, only for it to go missing and then turn up somewhere totally different half an hour later. A week later, when he came to develop the film, instead of a roll of pretty bridesmaids all he got was a collection of cock close-ups. He didn’t know what to do, so he called the bride and told her what had happened and she asked to see the evidence. A few days later he turned up at her house with the penis pics and jokingly asked if she could identify any of them. She managed to name two out of the five, which he didn’t think was bad going.

  ‘And he told the one about the bride’s mother,’ says Bernard, sounding somewhat exasperated.

  Mike’s other story, about the mother of the bride coming out of a wedding car with her knickers around her ankles, is a little less problematic. Apparently, she smiled at him as he spotted the pants on the floor, but instead of hastily bending down to pick them up, blushing with mortification, she gave them a flick with her shoe and caught them in midair. She popped them in her handbag, gave a little mince in her dress and said, ‘Oh, that’s a lot cooler now.’

  ‘I don’t think Keeley minded any of it really, until he started to show her the photos he has of naked brides.’

  ‘What?’ I say, swerving to avoid a car.

  ‘He’s got a whole collection at the back of his book. Full-on bush shots. The lot. You should have seen the look on her face.’ Bernard sounds like he’s beginning to laugh a bit. Either that or he is becoming hysterical. ‘She was so shocked, and at the same time she was trying to flatter his artistic integrity. I tell you, it was painful to watch.’

  ‘And how about Lucien?’

  ‘He played the posh card and told her about a wedding he did in Ireland where Ronan Keating played to 1,200 guests, where they had a three-tier marquee with fountains and flowing Mouton Rothschild ’95 at £220 a bottle. And about another wedding where he had to photograph the Queen in a family shoot and they put Post-its on all the chairs with things like HRH and DOE, only for the Post-its to disappear after they’d got up. So the Queen had a Post-it on her arse telling everyone she was HRH.’

  ‘And she laughed?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I think he’s got the job.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if she went for her local snapper after that,’ says Bernard. ‘There may be a little too much soft focus and the pictures might all come in an album Photoshopped to hell and covered in silver bells, but at least they’re not a bunch of freaks.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Having said that, half the provincial wedding photographers and video directors do porn on the side.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ I laugh.

  ‘They do. I heard a great story the other day about a bride turning up to check on wedding rushes, only to find a large double-penetration shot on the screen when she walked into the room and three hairy old men watching.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘Went red and asked where her tapes were. The man was extremely apologetic and the hairy accomplices left soon after.’

  ‘At least the family weren’t caught bitching on the tape, which is what happened to my cousin. My aunt was filmed and the audio picked up her complaining about the cost of the wedding, about the groom and how she gave the whole thing six months. Quite hard to deny when it is there in glorious Technicolor.’

  Bernard goes on to fill me in on the key decisions Keely came to after I left. She quite liked the look of the Aquatique water displays and fancied having little fountains all the way along the main path to the reception. She obviously wants a fireworks display, but a big proper one, not something that looks like it’s been picked up at the garage. Boyzone, according to Camilla, are available and on tour in early July, which she liked the idea of. But she would apparently really love James Blunt. ‘You’re Beautiful’ is her favourite song and the one that she wants for her first dance, so if he could be there to sing it in person, then that would be great. Bernard then suggested that they try for Take That as well, and as they are her favourite group she suddenly got very excited indeed. At this rate over half the budget is going to go on bands, leaving us very little left for all the other frills like secret gardens, animals, dancers, magicians and tumblers. I’m about to tell Bernard to be a little bit more abstemious when it comes to booking acts, but I nearly miss my motorway exit and end up shouting that I’ll call him back.

  I only find Alice’s parents’ house by mistake. Or more accurately, by wilfully ignoring the sat nav that sent me around the village three times, dogmatically ordering me to turn right and then left, ignoring the fact that the route finished in Brook End Drive, a cul de
sac by the church. Turning around yet again, I remember a conversation we had about a stream running through the garden and whether we should put a security guard nearby to stop drunken revellers from falling in the water. So with a combination of common sense and luck, I finally pull up at the end of the long gravel drive, forty minutes late.

  The house is a pretty red-brick Georgian rectory at the end of a long narrow lane, which I know is going to cause us problems later. The amount of times I have seen the bride blocked in at her house when she’s trying to get to church by the convoy of staff minibuses arriving to set up the reception doesn’t bear thinking about.

  The slam of my car door is the cue for two overweight elderly Labradors to lollop towards me and take it in turns to sniff my crotch. Both my hands are occupied in keeping the wedding dress above ground, so I am somewhat defenceless when it comes to heading off their interest. I am eventually saved by Alice’s mother, Louise, who comes crunching over the gravel towards me with a headscarf on her head and a pair of secateurs in her hand.

  ‘Casper! Titus! Stop it!’ she yells. ‘You dirty animals. I am sorry,’ she says to me. ‘They have an obsession with male genitals, most especially after a long car journey. Is that the dress?’ She points with her secateurs.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Have they fixed it properly? Taken the button off and shortened it all?’

  ‘Absolutely. There are only twelve buttons down the back of the dress, just as you asked.’ I smile, hoping that the two women are right and that hawk-eye here won’t notice a thing.

  ‘Well, you’d better bring it in with you. Alice will be thrilled. She was beginning to get worried that it was never turning up. Anyway, I am glad you are here. The marquee people have called and they are on their way. They should be here within half an hour or so. Come with me.’

  I manage to knee both dogs in the face before following Louise back up the drive. Dressed in a pale floral dress with short sleeves, her bare freckled legs glow bright English white in the sunshine.

  ‘I hope this weather holds,’ she says as we walk into the house. ‘The last thing I need is people traipsing around the house looking for cardigans and umbrellas.’

  ‘I think it is going to be fine,’ I smile. Truthfully, I haven’t checked. And in fact I always think that it is best to plan for rain at an English wedding, and then you are pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t. All my outdoor weddings have wet-weather contingency plans, right down to where the photographer can place the family for the group shots.

  The inside of the house is not quite as chic as the outside suggests. There’s stuff everywhere. The shelves are loaded down with objects, the walls are covered in paintings and mirrors and framed curios; each room is stuffed with crumpled, gently biodegrading furniture. Even the cloakroom is full of coats and scarves and hats, half of which look as if they haven’t moved off their pegs since 1976. Minimalism is clearly not a word that anyone understands here.

  ‘Alice!’ shouts Louise. ‘The dress is here!’

  There’s a squeal of excitement from the top of the house and the sound of two pairs of running feet.

  ‘Hi!’ shouts Alice. ‘Can I see? Can I see? Have they fixed it?’

  ‘Hi there.’ I smile, standing at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Here it is.’

  She dances down the stairs and practically falls into my arms at the bottom. ‘How are you?’ She grins at me excitedly.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Good journey?’ she asks, kissing me distractedly on the cheek as she picks up the dress.

  ‘Not too bad,’ I say.

  ‘How long did it take?’

  ‘About an hour and a half.’

  ‘See,’ she says to her mother. ‘I told you it doesn’t take two hours from London. It’s going to be fine. No one is going to be late.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope your father and his dolly bird turn up on time to take you to the church.’

  ‘Trisha is not taking me to the church,’ Alice replies.

  ‘Well, don’t expect me to sit anywhere near the woman,’ spits Louise. ‘She can sit with Richard’s family. They are much more her speed, anyway. Oh, by the way,’ she continues, ‘this is my other daughter, Grace. This is—’

  ‘I know who you are,’ says Grace, flicking her long blonde hair. ‘And you’re not as good-looking as Alice says.’

  ‘I am sorry about that,’ I reply.

  ‘Ignore her,’ says Alice. ‘She hasn’t had a boyfriend for nearly a year.’

  ‘You’re single, aren’t you?’ asks Louise. I shrug slightly. ‘Well, there you go, Grace, you’ve got a friend.’

  ‘Whoopeedo,’ says Grace, her head shaking with sarcasm as she looks me up and down. ‘What fun.’

  ‘Do you want to see the cake?’ asks Alice, suddenly realizing the attention is not on her.

  ‘Love to,’ I reply. Anything to get away from Louise’s lame matchmaking.

  Alice lays her dress carefully on the sofa in the sitting room and indicates for me to follow her into the kitchen. She takes me past the Aga and a long pine dining-room table, into the pantry. The marble-topped sideboards and old slate floor make the room significantly cooler than the cosy kitchen.

  ‘There,’ she says, removing a couple of tea-towels that have been placed over the top.

  ‘It looks great,’ I reply. The chefs at The Lilac Olive have surpassed themselves. Each of the five tiers has been re-iced and re-piped. The white pillars have been put back and anything that might have looked a little botched or bollocksed has been covered with very beautiful handmade icing roses. To the untrained eye it looks incredible.

  ‘I didn’t ask for the roses. But I think they make the cake, don’t you? It looks incredible. Thank you,’ she says, hugging me and kissing me on the cheek. It takes me all the will in the world not to kiss her right back.

  ‘What are you two doing in here?’ Grace asks, her head poking around the door.

  ‘Looking at the cake,’ we both say at exactly the same time.

  ‘The marquee people are coming up the road.’ She smiles tightly. ‘Shouldn’t you be helping them? Seeing as you are the planner?’

  ‘Thank you for telling me,’ I smile right back.

  Just as I walk through the front door, I hear a high-pitched squeal behind me.

  ‘Mum! Your fucking dog is lying on my wedding dress! Titus, get off!’ Alice is shouting and slapping the dog at the same time.

  ‘Well, it’s your fault for leaving it there,’ declares Louise, running into the room. ‘You know he likes this sofa in the afternoon, it gets all the sun.’

  The shouting continues as I walk across the gravel back down the drive. Over the wall, I can see three trucks moving slowly along the lane. There’s the loud squeaking of brakes and some equally loud swearing coming across the fields as the lorries try and avoid the overhead branches of the oak trees that line the lane. These boys are cutting it fine bringing the marquee in so late. Normally I’d like to see them rolling in on Wednesday morning for a Saturday wedding, but it is high season and I suppose they can’t afford to have them sitting on lawns not earning money. Although the marquee business is a nice little earner once you’ve got your money back on your initial outlay. A good tent will set you back between £30,000 and £50,000, so once you have rented it out about ten times, from then on you are making about 80 per cent profit.

  Finally the convoy turns up the drive. I wave at Steve in his cabin; he’s a nice bloke and we have used his company a few times now.

  ‘You haven’t left yourself much time,’ I yell as he parks up the truck.

  ‘Oh man,’ he says as he climbs down, wiping the sweat off his brow with his bronzed muscled forearm. ‘We were hoping to get here earlier, but the tent was in such a state. Some army bloke had a party in it yesterday and there was food all over the ceiling from a food fight, there were broken chairs everywhere after they had put them all in the middle and made a pyramid and raced each other up to the top, and the black-an
d-white panelled dance-floor was covered in blood after a fist fight. And there were puddles of puke all over the floor and the walls. We have just spent all morning hosing the thing down and trying to dry it off.’

  ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘At least there wasn’t a frost last night. Just before Christmas my guys had to chip the frozen vomit off the sides of the tent.’ He sniffs, exhales and raises his eyebrows. ‘Don’t tell the bride, obviously. This tent is brand-new, of course.’

  Behind him a handsome selection of butch and buff youths jump out of the lorries and stretch in the sun. Students, out-of-work actors and a couple of resting models seem to make up most of the crew. The ex-Mrs Oxford is going to have an enjoyable afternoon watching them all heave and sweat, putting the marquee up.

  ‘So can you remind me where we’re putting this?’ He scratches his thick black hair. ‘We made a site visit a couple of months ago now and I can’t remember.’

  ‘It’s through this gate and on to the main lawn,’ I say, pointing to a small garden gate.

  ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘That’s a long way to carry all the poles and stuff. Can we take the truck into the field just here and chuck it all over the fence?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ I say. ‘Anything to save time.’

  ‘Too true, mate, too true.’

  ‘Let me just go and clear that with Mrs Oxford.’

  He obviously doesn’t hear me, or else he is one of those people who only retains information that is useful or pertinent to him, because by the time I return with Louise, Steve is in the field and has already started to unload the poles and footplates over the side of the fence.