True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop

by Annie Darling

  Not that this mythical man could ever be Johnny. Not when his heart was already taken and he’d told Verity very sternly, on a number of occasions, not to fall in love with him. But as Verity watched the way Johnny neatly folded into the fabric of her messy family – listening patiently to Our Vicar as he wittered on about his bees, standing up to her sisters, even laughing at one of George’s laboured jokes – Verity couldn’t remember for the life of her why she’d been so worried about letting him come home to meet her folks.

  18

  ‘Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.’

  Johnny was still in good spirits the next day even though he’d spent the night in Our Vicar’s Wife’s sewing room on the camp bed that had belonged to Our Vicar’s father in his Scouting days and predated World War Two. It was made of canvas, through which various rusting metal poles were attached and was marginally less comfortable than calling it quits and sleeping on the floor. But all the sofas in the house had been far too small to accommodate Johnny’s six-foot-and-two-inch frame and he wouldn’t hear of switching places with Verity and sleeping in a proper bed.

  He didn’t mind either that breakfast was a makeshift affair of toast and gooseberry jam, because the children had ridded the house of anything more appetising.

  ‘I really don’t mind going to church,’ he also told Verity when she explained to him yet again that he didn’t have to just to be polite. ‘I can’t say I believe one hundred per cent, I’m more agnostic than atheist, but I’m interested to see your father in action.’

  ‘Be warned: he does go on a bit,’ Merry said, who was sitting across the big kitchen table from them and munching toast. ‘Ugh. This gooseberry jam is rank. No wonder there were so many jars of it left in the pantry.’

  ‘If I get bored, which I’m sure I won’t, I can study the architecture,’ Johnny said and when Mr Love did bang on a bit too long about the prodigal son, Johnny’s gaze became quite fixated on the sleek, graceful pillars of the nave, while the female portion of the congregation seemed fixated on Johnny’s bone structure. When he lifted his hand to run his fingers through his hair, some of the more flighty members of the Women’s Institute sighed.

  Johnny’s good-natured smile only dimmed after lunch when Mr Love presented him with a white boiler suit and a big white hat with a veil. ‘I don’t suppose you know if you’re allergic to bee stings, do you?’ he asked.

  Johnny’s smile dimmed even further. ‘I don’t know. I am allergic to mangoes. Do you think that might make me more susceptible to bee stings?’

  Mr Love clapped Johnny on the back again in what he must have imagined was a comforting manner. ‘It’s highly unlikely you’ll get stung but better safe than sorry,’ he said. ‘Now, let’s hasten to the hives, before the onslaught starts.’

  ‘Onslaught?’ Johnny asked over the two long peals on the vicarage doorbell as the vicar hurried him out of the back door.

  Verity wished, how she wished! she could hurry after them but instead she took her place at the kitchen table as Con came in with Sue, Alex’s mother, Jenny, Alex’s sister, and ‘This is Marie, Jenny’s best friend.’

  They all knew Marie but she was an acquaintance, rather than a friend, so what she was doing at a family-only wedding prep bootcamp remained to be seen.

  ‘What are you doing here, Marie?’ Merry asked, because she never shied away from the difficult questions.

  ‘I’ve seen every episode of Say Yes To The Dress,’ Marie said, settling herself at the head of the kitchen table. ‘I’ve even seen every episode of Say Yes To The Dress: Bridesmaids AND I Found The Gown – you need me. Also, my Kayleigh is going to be one of the flower girls. Jenny said.’

  Jenny, who spoke only when she was spoken to and then in the softest of whispers, shrugged and shook her head as if she was no match for the iron will of her best friend. Verity could empathise.

  ‘Con hasn’t even decided if she’s having flower girls,’ Chatty hissed to Verity. ‘She said she’d prefer to have Poor Alan as what she called “Dog of Honour”.’

  ‘Well, try telling that to Marie and Kayleigh,’ Verity muttered back as Marie pulled something out of the carrier bag she’d brought with her.

  ‘A corn dolly,’ she announced with some satisfaction. ‘As a centrepiece. Jenny said you were wanting to go rustic.’

  The corn dolly looked as if it was possessed by a malevolent spirit. Mrs Love, coming into the kitchen with her sewing basket, reared back in alarm. ‘What is that doing in the house?’ she shrieked. ‘Everyone knows they bring bad luck.’

  ‘I’m a vicar’s daughter, Marie,’ Con pointed out. ‘I can’t have a pagan symbol as a centrepiece. No.’

  The Love sisters and their mother all looked at each other, eyebrows raised. That was a decisive no from Con. Did it mean that she was going to be issuing lots of other firm and fast decisions? One could only hope.

  There was a pause as Mrs Love took a jug out of the fridge. ‘This is the first batch of my homemade elderflower cordial,’ she announced. ‘We did talk about using it in your signature wedding cocktail.’

  Chatty and Immy sprang up from their chairs to gather glasses so they could all sample the golden elixir that Mrs Love made every year while Con frowned. ‘I did?’

  ‘You did,’ Merry said, accepting a glass of watered-down cordial from Chatty. She took a tentative sip and sighed appreciatively. ‘Think this might be your best batch ever, Muv. I say we mix this up with some Cava, or lemonade for the teetotallers, and job’s done.’

  ‘I second that,’ Verity piped up, because if they could get one item ticked off in the first five minutes, it boded well. ‘Dare I ask if you’ve made a drinks shopping list like you said you would so that Alex’s brother can book tickets for the booze cruise?’

  Alex’s brother, conveniently, managed several orchards in Kent and had offered to do a booze run across the Channel as soon as Con and Alex told him exactly how many crates of Cava (which was much cheaper than Prosecco), lager, and red and white wine were needed. Judging from the beleaguered look on Con’s face, she’d done no such thing.

  ‘I haven’t had time yet,’ she said. She visibly brightened. ‘Anyway, it’s only the end of July. We’ve got loads of time. Months and months.’

  ‘Two months,’ Chatty warned.

  ‘Not even two months,’ Immy added. ‘The only thing you’ve done is book the church and that’s only because Our Vicar did it for you.’

  ‘Sounds to me like you don’t even want to get married,’ said Sue, Alex’s mother. She looked like the archetypal farmer’s wife; as if Duncan, Alex’s dad, had found her in central casting rather than at a Young Farmers’ Ball. She was rosy of face, sturdy of limb and usually very smiley, except now as she all but hoisted her sizeable bosom and sniffed. ‘You’ll not do any better than our Alex, young lady, so if you’re delaying the wedding arrangements in the hope that someone more to your fancy is going to appear, then best to stop stringing my poor boy along.’

  ‘I’m not! I wouldn’t. I love him!’ Genuine anguish pulled Con’s brows together until they almost met in the middle. ‘I’d be quite happy to just love him without all this wedding nonsense, but apparently that’s setting a bad example as the eldest daughter of the local vicar.’

  ‘And a bad example to your four younger sisters, who look on you as their spiritual pathfinder,’ Merry said and made the sign of the cross so that Con jabbed her with an elbow and grinned and the tension was broken. ‘Right, so Con, Rome wasn’t built in a day and a wedding can’t be planned in an afternoon, but will you please at least pick your sodding signature colours.’

  Chatty reached for her bag and pulled out a fistful of paint charts from the local B&Q. ‘Not green. You’re getting married in the country, there’ll be enough green as it is. Not yellow. Me and Immy look awful in yellow.’ She threw away a few charts, which still left a hell of a lot for Con to wade through
.

  ‘Orange is quite cheery,’ Mrs Love suggested but was shouted down by her daughters and Jenny’s friend, Marie.

  ‘Pink,’ she said firmly. ‘Our Kayleigh loves pink. It’s her favourite colour.’ As if that settled it, which it didn’t.

  ‘Pink?’ Merry spat, her face squinched up in horror. ‘We don’t do pink. We’ve never done pink. We are, as a family, emphatically anti-pink.’

  ‘Actually, Posy used a clover pink as an accent colour in the shop and it looks quite pretty,’ Verity said, even as her four sisters collectively glared at her. ‘I was only saying!’

  ‘What about blue?’ Immy suggested. ‘A nice duck-egg blue.’

  ‘Urgh, so basic!’ Chatty rolled her eyes. ‘What about a nice silvery grey?’

  ‘Boring!’

  ‘We can’t have our little Kayleigh and the other bridesmaids in grey dresses. They’ll look like nuns and your dad is C of E.’

  ‘Are you even getting married in white, Con?’

  ‘Yes! Or maybe ivory, though I did see a champagne satin dress in Monsoon that I quite liked except it was meant to be ankle-length but it hit me mid-calf.’

  ‘But champagne just looks like a dirty white, doesn’t it?’

  This was going to take hours, Verity thought. It was half two now and she’d wanted to leave by four though it was obvious that by four nothing would have been decided. She glanced towards her mother in the vain hope that she might, as she did on very rare occasions, step in to kick some very mild arse but Mrs Love just smiled vaguely at Verity and carried on mending a tear in a pillowcase.

  Verity’s gaze drifted past her mother to the window behind her and the garden in all its glorious and slightly overgrown splendour. At the bottom of the garden were her father’s hives. She could see him and Johnny clad in their white outfits and beekeeper hats and Poor Alan, in the custom-made canine beekeeping suit and adapted cone of shame her father had commissioned after Poor Alan had been involved in a multiple sting incident and had swelled up to look like a balloon animal. Everyone agreed that what really made his beekeeping outfit were the four booties that went on Poor Alan’s paws and made him clomp around like a doggy zombie. He was clomping about now in the bushes as the two men peered into one of the hives. Verity hoped her father wasn’t asking Johnny what his intentions were towards his middle daughter. Or worse, quizzing Johnny on his favourite Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, which was another of Mr Love’s favourite conversational gambits, mostly so he could break into a chorus of ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair’ from South Pacific.

  Her father pulled one of the frames out of the hive, a cloud of bees hovering about it, and she could see Johnny pointing and nodding so perhaps he really was interested in bees and honey and all points in between. From what she knew of Johnny, even if the subject bored him rigid, he’d pretend to be interested because it was the polite thing to do. Because whatever else they were, he and Verity were friends, and Johnny wouldn’t want to offend her family. Whereas someone like Sebastian would probably yawn in her father’s face and proclaim ‘Boring!’ at the top of his voice.

  As it was, her father was gesticulating wildly, which meant he was in full oratorical flow. One time, he’d got so animated during a sermon about the feeding of the five thousand that he’d knocked his hymn book straight into the font. Of course, Verity wouldn’t swap her family for anything but sometimes she wished that they were just a bit less …

  ‘And do you mean to say that we’ve spent a whole year buying up vintage tea cups in charity shops only for you to decide that you’re going to do mason jars after all?’

  ‘I said, I was seriously considering mason jars. I have to have options!’

  While Verity’s attention was elsewhere, World War Three appeared to have broken out.

  ‘The time for options is bloody well over. Now is the time for decisions!’

  ‘I wouldn’t really go for anything breakable with our Kayleigh and the other little ’uns about. We should get some plastic champagne flutes from Costco.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Marie!’ The last was shouted at great volume by the ever silent Jenny, now as cross as everyone else. ‘Just shut up! No one even asked you!’

  ‘I won’t shut up …’

  Meanwhile Con, Chatty and Immy were bickering over vintage tea cups versus mason jars, and Merry was telling Sue that no one ‘likes rich fruit cake so I wouldn’t bother making one if I were you,’ while Sue was all but hoisting her bosom again and snorting like a furious dragon and …

  ‘Enough! That’s enough, people!’ Verity exclaimed, jumping to her feet. ‘This is not wedding planning or being respectful of other people’s opinions.’

  ‘I’m not being respectful of other people’s opinions if their opinions are rubbish!’ Con snapped with a ferocious scowl at her two youngest sisters and honestly? Verity had expected this.

  Expected it and had prepared for it with the help of Pippa, Sebastian’s director of project management, who had seen them through the shop relaunch with the minimum of meltdowns and a hell of a lot of aspirational quotes and holistic management techniques.

  So, Verity reached across the table to snatch up the evil-looking corn dolly. When Pippa had employed a similar technique, she’d used a beanbag, which had doubled up as a stress ball, but needs must. ‘This … this is a symbol of communication and cooperation. You can only talk when you’re holding the doll of truth!’

  ‘My God, Very, have you taken a huge amount of drugs?’

  Verity brandished the corn doll in front of her like it was locked and loaded. ‘Are you holding the doll of truth, Merry? I don’t think you are, so zip it!’ she said in her scariest voice. It was the voice she had to employ when Nina broke the cardinal rule of their living together and tried to engage Verity in conversation as they left the shop for the flat upstairs, instead of waiting at least thirty minutes for Verity to recover from the rigours of the working day. It was also the voice she’d used on Posy when she’d caught her trying to order more tote bags.

  Now it shocked all four of her sisters into slack-jawed silence. There was an actual bosom hoist from Sue, a thumbs up from Jenny and a mild look of bemusement from Mrs Love. Marie stood up.

  ‘Well, I’m not staying here to be insulted,’ she announced and departed with a toss of her head and a slamming of the front door.

  ‘No one asked her to …’ Merry began until Verity shook the corn doll in her direction.

  ‘Zip it!’ Verity said again and, keeping tight hold of the doll, she got up from her own chair to walk to the pantry, where she’d stashed her secret weapon. Verity had hoped it wouldn’t come to this but when she’d explained the situation to Pippa, Pippa had said it was best to expect a worst-case scenario.

  ‘By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail,’ Pippa had warned Verity.

  Except, with a wedding less than two months away, failure was not an option.

  So, with the corn dolly clamped under her arm, Verity brought out the flip chart and stand that she’d borrowed from work.

  ‘We have been Skyping and What’s Upping about this wedding for months,’ Verity told her sisters. ‘Hours and hours of discussions about everything from signature colours to hog roasts and when I went back over our conversations, there were lots of good ideas, lots of times that we agreed about stuff. I’ve collated it all.’

  ‘You did? That must have taken you hours and hours too,’ Con said, in direct contravention of the rules that Verity had just laid down. ‘But I don’t remember much agreement.’

  ‘That’s because you shot down everything that anybody else agreed on,’ Verity panted, as she wrestled with the flip chart stand. Posy had been right when she said that trying to make it stay upright was like trying to hold back the tide. ‘And that … bloody hell! Why won’t this thing behave? … is why, if you haven’t made a decision in sixty seconds, it goes to a vote. Majority wins.’

  ‘You can’t do that!’ Con clenched her fis
ts. ‘It’s my wedding. I’m not having my feelings overrun. This isn’t a dictatorship!’

  ‘Con, I’m not being a dictator, this is coming from a place of deep love,’ Verity protested. ‘And also a place of anxiety that it will be the day of the wedding and we’ll have to do a trolley run in Tesco’s to feed the guests while you’re still dithering over your signature colours.’

  Con wasn’t having any of it. ‘I would never have expected this from you, Very,’ she said, and there was no one who could wound a girl like her own sister could. ‘Merry definitely, the twins perhaps, but not you.’

  Finally the flip chart stand was in position so Verity was able to turn round and brandish the corn doll pointedly in Con’s direction. It was quickly snatched from her by Chatty. ‘Don’t pick on Very. None of this is her fault and actually, Con, you’ll find that putting things to a vote is the foundation of democracy. So, where to begin, Very? Can we start with bridesmaid dresses, please?’

  Verity nodded and flipped her flip chart to the page where she’d already stuck pictures of the three ASOS dresses that they’d all decided that they could live with. They’d been waiting for Con to choose between an empire line cut, a fifties silhouette and a floaty maxi dress.

  The corn doll was yanked away from Chatty by Immy, who demanded: ‘Start the clock, Very. Con, you have one minute to decide.’

  ‘I hate you all!’ Con groaned, her hair in her hands as she squinted at the dresses. ‘The maxi dress, then! No! Very and Merry don’t have the length of leg for a maxi dress. Perhaps the empire line? It’s quite flattering or does it scream maternity dress? Hmmm.’

  Having to witness Con try to reach a decision was up there with listening to people crunching ice cubes or running their nails down a blackboard. Verity gritted her teeth and, from the clenched jaws around the table, she could see that she wasn’t the only one. Con was still hemming and hawing and fifty seconds had sped by. Fifty-five, fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine …