by Lucy Foley
Dad turns to me. ‘I love you so much … clever, complicated, fierce daughter of mine.’ Oh God. They aren’t pretty tears, either, a subtle glistening of the eyes. They spill over on to my cheeks and I have to put up the heel of a hand, then my napkin, to try and staunch them. What is happening to me?
‘And here’s the thing,’ Dad says, to the crowd. ‘Even though Jules is this incredible, independent person, I like to flatter myself that she is my little girl. Because there are certain emotions, as a parent, that you can’t escape … no matter what a shite one you’ve been, no matter how little right you have to them. And one of those is the instinct to protect.’ He turns to me again. I have to look at him now. He wears an expression of genuine tenderness. My chest hurts.
And then he turns to Will. ‘William, you seem like … a great guy.’ Was it just me, or was there a dangerous emphasis on the ‘seem’? ‘But,’ Dad grins – I know that grin. It isn’t a smile at all. It’s a baring of teeth. ‘You better look after my daughter. You better not feck this up. And if you do anything to hurt my girl – well, it’s simple.’ He raises his glass, in a silent toast. ‘I’ll come for you.’
There’s a strained silence. I force out a laugh, though it seems to come out more like a sob. There’s a ripple in its wake, other guests following suit – relieved, perhaps, to know how to take it. Ah, it’s a joke. Only it wasn’t a joke. I know it, Dad knows it – and I suspect, from the look on Will’s face, he knows it too.
OLIVIA
The Bridesmaid
Jules’s dad sits down. Jules looks a wreck: her face blotchy and red. I saw her dabbing her eyes with her napkin. She does feel stuff, my half-sister, even if she does a good impression of being so tough all the time. I feel bad about earlier, honestly. I know Jules wouldn’t believe it if I told her, but I am sorry. I still feel cold, like the chill from the sea got deep under my skin. I’ve changed into the dress I wore last night, because I thought that would piss Jules off the least, but I wish I could have got into my normal clothes. I’m keeping my arms wrapped around myself to try and stay warm but it doesn’t stop my teeth chattering together.
Will gets to his feet to hollers and whistles, a few catcalls. Then the room falls silent. He has their total attention. He has that sort of effect on people. I guess it’s how he looks and how he is; his confidence. How he’s always totally in control.
‘On behalf of my new wife and I,’ he says – and is almost drowned out by the whoops and cheers, the drumming on the tables, the stamping of feet. He smiles around until everyone settles down. ‘On behalf of my new wife and I, thank you so much for coming today,’ he says. ‘I know Jules will agree with me when I say that it is a wonderful thing to celebrate with all of our most cherished loved ones, our nearest and dearest.’ He turns to Jules. ‘I feel like the luckiest man in the world.’
Jules has dried her eyes now. And when she looks up at Will her expression is totally different, transformed. She seems suddenly happy enough that it is hard to look at her, like staring at a lightbulb. Will beams back at her.
‘Oh my God,’ I hear a woman whisper, at the next table. ‘They’re just too perfect.’
Will’s grinning around at everyone. ‘And it really was luck,’ he says. ‘Our first meeting. If I hadn’t been in the right place at the right time. As Jules likes to say, it was our sliding doors moment.’ He raises his glass: ‘So: to luck. And to making your own luck … or giving it a little helping hand, when it needs it.’
He winks. The guests laugh.
‘First of all,’ he says, ‘it’s customary to tell the bridesmaids how beautiful they’re looking, isn’t it? We only have one, but I think you’ll agree she’s beautiful enough for seven. So a toast to Olivia! My new sister.’
The whole room turns towards me, raising their glasses. I can’t bear it. I look at the floor until the cheers die down and Will begins to speak again.
‘And next to my new wife. My beautiful, clever Jules …’ – the guests go wild again – ‘without you, life would be very dull indeed. Without you, there would be no joy, no love. You are my equal, my counterpart. So, please be upstanding to raise a toast to Jules!’
The guests all rise to their feet around me. ‘To Jules!’ they echo, grinning. They’re all smiling at Will, the women especially, their eyes not leaving his face. I know what they’re seeing. Will Slater: TV star. Husband, now, to my half-sister. Hero: look how he rescued me earlier, from the water. All-round good guy.
‘Do you know how Jules and I met?’ Will asks, when they’ve all sat down. ‘It was the work of Fate. She threw a party at the V&A museum, for The Download. I was just a plus-one: I had come along with a friend. Anyway, my friend had to leave the party and I was left behind. I was just deciding whether to leave myself. So it was a total spur-of-the-moment decision, to go back inside. So who knows what would have happened, if I hadn’t? Would we ever have met? So – even though Jules works so hard that I sometimes feel it’s the third person in our relationship, I’d also like to thank it for bringing us together. To The Download!’
The guests get to their feet. ‘To The Download!’ they parrot.
I didn’t meet Jules’s new fiancé until after they were engaged. She had been very hush-hush about him. It was like she hadn’t wanted to bring him home before she got the ring on her finger, in case we put him off. Maybe I sound like a bitch for saying that, but Jules has always been pretty ruthless about some things. I suppose I don’t blame her, exactly. Mum can be a bit much.
Jules being Jules, she’d stage-managed the whole thing. They were going to arrive at Mum’s for coffee, stay for half an hour, then we’d all head off to the River Café for lunch (their favourite place, Jules told us; she had booked). Her instructions to Mum and me were pretty clear: do not fuck this up for me.
I honestly didn’t mean to fuck it up, that first meeting with Jules’s fiancé. But when the two of them arrived, and they first walked in through the door, I had to run to the bathroom and throw up. Then I found I couldn’t move. I sank down next to the loo and sat on the floor for what felt like a very long time. I felt winded, like someone had punched me in the stomach.
I saw exactly how it had happened. He’d gone back into the V&A, after he put me in that taxi. There he’d met my sister, belle of the ball – so much better suited to him. Fate. And I remember what he’d said when we first met: ‘If you were ten years older, you’d be my ideal woman.’ I saw it all.
After a little while – because she had her important schedule, I suppose – Jules came upstairs. ‘Olivia,’ she said, ‘we need to go off for lunch now. Of course, I’d love you to join us, but if you’re not feeling well enough then, well, I suppose that’s fine.’ I could hear that it wasn’t fine, not at all, but that was the least of my worries.
Somehow I managed to find my voice. ‘I – I can’t come,’ I said, through the door. ‘I’m … ill.’ It seemed the easiest thing to do, right then, to go along with what she’d said. And anyway, I wasn’t feeling well – I was sick to my stomach, like I’d swallowed something poisonous.
I’ve thought about it since, though. What if right then I’d had the balls to open that door and tell her the truth, right then and there to her face? Rather than waiting and hiding, until it was way too late?
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Fine, then. I’m very sorry you can’t come.’ She didn’t sound in the least bit sorry. ‘I’m not going to make a big deal out of this now, Olivia. Maybe you really are ill. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But I’d really like your support in this. Mum told me you’ve had a tough time lately, and I’m sorry for that. But for once, I’d like you to try and be happy for me.’
I slumped down against the bathroom door and tried to keeping breathing.
He covered it so quickly, his own reaction. When he walked in through Mum’s door, that first time we ‘met’, there was maybe a split second of shock. One that maybe only I would have noticed. The flicker of an eyelid, a slight tightening of
the jaw. Nothing more than that. He covered it up so well, he was so smooth.
So you see, I can’t think of him as Will. To me he’ll always be Steven. I hadn’t thought of that, when I renamed myself for the dating app. I hadn’t thought that he might have lied too.
At their engagement drinks, I decided I wouldn’t run away and hide like before. I’d spent the couple of months in between thinking of all the ways I could have reacted that would have been so much better, so much less pathetic, than scarpering and throwing up. I hadn’t done anything wrong, after all. This time I’d confront him. He was the one that had all the explaining to do, to me, to Jules. He was the one who should be feeling pretty fucking sick. I had let him win that first one. This time, I was going to show him.
He threw me off at the beginning. When I arrived he gave me a big grin. ‘Olivia!’ he said. ‘I hope you’re feeling better. It was such a shame we didn’t get to meet properly, last time.’
I was so shocked I couldn’t say anything. He was pretending we’d never met, right to my face. It made me even start to doubt myself. Was it really him? But I knew it was. There was no doubt about it. Closer up I could see how the skin around his eyes creased the same, how he had these two moles on his neck, below the jaw. And I remembered, so clearly, that split second’s reaction, when he’d first seen me.
He knew exactly what he was doing: making it harder for me to get my own version of the truth out. And he’d also banked on me being too pathetic to say anything to Jules, too scared that she wouldn’t believe anything I said.
He was right.
HANNAH
The Plus-One
There was something weird about Will’s speech just now. Something that felt strangely familiar, a sense of déjà vu. I can’t quite put my finger on it but while everyone around me cheered and clapped I was left with an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
‘Here we go,’ I hear someone at the table whisper, ‘is everyone ready for the main event?’
Charlie’s not on my table. He’s on the top table, right there at Jules’s left elbow. It makes sense, I suppose: I’m not one of the wedding party after all, while Charlie is. But everywhere else husbands and wives seem to be seated next to one another. It occurs to me that I have barely seen Charlie since this morning, and then only outside at the drinks – which somehow made me feel more disconnected from him than if we hadn’t seen one another at all. In the space of a mere twenty-four hours, it feels as though a gulf has opened up between us.
The guests sitting near me have done a poll on how long the best man’s speech is going to last. Fifty quid for a bet, so I declined. They’ve also designated our table ‘the naughty table’. There’s a manic, intense feeling around it. They’re like children who have been cooped up for too long. Over the last hour or so they’ve knocked back at least a bottle and a half each. Peter Ramsay, who’s sitting on the other side of me – has been speaking so quickly that it’s starting to make me feel dizzy. This might have something to do with the crusting of white powder around one of his nostrils; it’s everything I can do not to lean over and dash it off with the corner of my napkin.
Charlie rises to his feet, resuming his MC role, taking the mic from Will. I find myself watching him carefully for any sign that he might have had too much to drink. Is his face drooping slightly in that tell-tale way? Is he a little unsteady on his feet?
‘And now,’ he says, but there’s a scream of feedback as people – especially the ushers, I notice – groan and jeer and cover their ears. Charlie flushes. I cringe inwardly for him. He tries again: ‘And now … it’s time for the best man. Everyone give a big hand for Jonathan Briggs.’
‘Be kind, Johnno!’ Will shouts, hands cupped around his mouth. He gives a wry smile, a pantomime wince. Everyone laughs.
I always find the best man’s speech hard to watch. There’s so much expectation. There’s that tiny, hair-thin line between being too vanilla and causing offence. Better, surely, to stay on the PC side of it than to try and nail it completely. I get the impression Johnno’s not the sort to worry about offending anyone.
Maybe I’m imagining it, but he seems to be swaying slightly as he takes the mic from Charlie. Beside him, my husband looks sober as a judge. Then, as Johnno makes his way round to the front of the table, he trips and nearly falls. There’s lots of heckling and catcalling from my table companions. Next to me Peter Ramsay puts his fingers in his mouth and lets out a whistle that leaves my eardrums ringing.
By the time Johnno gets out in front of us all it’s pretty clear he’s drunk. He stands there silently for several seconds before he seems to remember where he is and what he’s meant to be doing. He taps the mic a few times and the sound booms around the tent.
‘Come on, Johnners!’ someone shouts. ‘We’re growing old waiting here!’ The guests around my table start drumming with their fists, stamping with their feet. ‘Speech, speech, speech! Speech, speech, speech!’ The hairs on my arms prickle. It’s a reminder of last night: that tribal rhythm, that sense of menace.
Johnno does a ‘calm down, calm down’ motion with his hand. He grins at us all. Then he turns and looks towards Will. He clears his throat, takes a deep breath.
‘We go a long way back, this fella and I. Shout out to all my Old Trevellyans!’ A cheer goes up, particularly from the ushers.
‘Anyway,’ Johnno says as the sound dies down, sweeping a hand to indicate Will. ‘Look at this guy. It would be easy to hate him, wouldn’t it?’ There’s a pause, a beat too long, maybe, before he picks up again. ‘He’s got everything: the looks, the charm, the career, the money’ – was that pointed? – ‘and …’ – he gestures to Jules – ‘the girl. So, actually, now I think about it … I suppose I do hate him. Anyone else with me?’
A ripple of laughter goes around the room; someone shouts: ‘hear hear!’
Johnno grins. There’s this wild, dangerous glitter in his eyes. ‘For those of you who don’t know, Will and I were at school together. But it wasn’t any normal school. It was more like … oh, I don’t know … a prison camp crossed with The Lord of the Flies – thanks for giving us that one last night, Charlie boy! See, it wasn’t about getting the best grades you could. It was all about survival.’
I wonder if I imagined the emphasis on the last word, spoken as though it were a proper noun. I remember the game they told us about, at dinner last night. That was called Survival, wasn’t it?
‘And let me tell you,’ Johnno goes on. ‘We have got into our fair share of shit over the years. I’m talking about the Trevellyan’s days in particular. There were some dark times. There were some mental times. Sometimes it felt like it was us versus the rest of the world.’ He looks over at Will. ‘Didn’t it?’
Will nods, smiles.
There’s something a bit strange about Johnno’s tone. There’s a dangerous edge, a sense that he could do or say anything and take it all completely off the rails. I look around the other tables, I wonder if the other guests are sensing it too. The room has certainly gone a little quiet, as though everyone is holding their breath.
‘That’s the thing about a best mate, isn’t it?’ Johnno says. ‘They’ve always got your back.’
I feel like I’m watching a glass teeter on the edge of a table, unable to do anything about it, waiting for it to shatter. I glance over at Jules and wince. Her mouth is set in a grim line. She looks as though she’s waiting for this to all be over.
‘And look at this.’ Johnno gestures to himself. ‘I’m a fat fucking slob in a too-tight suit. Oh,’ he turns to Will, ‘you know how I said I’d forgotten my suit? Yeah, there’s a little story behind that one.’ He swivels round to face us, the audience.
‘So. Here’s the truth – the honest truth. There was never any suit. Or … there was a suit, then there wasn’t. See, at the beginning, I thought Will might get it for me. I don’t know much about these things, but I’m pretty sure that happens with bridesmaids’ dresses, doesn’t it?’
&nb
sp; He looks enquiringly at us all. No one answers. There’s a hush in the marquee now – even Peter Ramsay next to me has stopped jiggling his leg up and down.
‘Doesn’t the bride buy them?’ Johnno asks us. ‘It’s the rule, isn’t it? You’re making someone wear the fucking thing. It’s not like it’s their choice. And old Will here especially wanted me to have a suit from Paul Smith, nothing less would do.’
He’s getting into the swing of things now. He’s striding back and forth in front of us like a comedian at an open mic night.
‘Anyway … so we’re standing in the shop and I see the label and I think to myself – bloody hell, he’s being generous. Eight hundred quid. It’s the sort of suit that gets you laid, right? But for eight hundred quid? Better to pay to get laid. Like, what use do I have in my life for an eight hundred quid suit? It’s not exactly like I’ve got some fancy do to attend every couple of weeks. Still, I thought. If that’s what he wants me to wear, who am I to argue?’
I glance towards Will. He’s smiling, but there’s a strained look to it.
‘But then,’ Johnno says, ‘there’s this awkward moment by the till, when he sort of stands aside and lets me get on with it. I spend the whole time praying it goes through on my credit card. Total fucking miracle it did, to be perfectly honest. And he stands there, smiling the whole time. Like he’d really bought it for me. Like I should turn round and thank him.’
‘Shit’s just got real,’ Peter Ramsay whispers.
‘So, the next day, I returned the suit. Obviously I wasn’t going to tell Will all this. So you see I concocted this whole plan, way before I got here, that I’d pretend I’d left it at home. They couldn’t make me go all the way back to Blighty to get it, could they? And thank Christ I live in the middle of nowhere so that none of you lot could “kindly offer” to go and get it for me – as that would have landed me in hot water, ha ha!’
‘Is this meant to be funny?’ a woman across from me asks.