A Spot of Bother (6 page)

16

Katie dropped Jacob off
with Max and left the two of them playing swordfights with wooden spoons in June’s kitchen.

Then she and Ray headed into town and had a minor disagreement at the printers. Ray thought the number of gold twirls on an invitation was a measure of how much you loved someone, which was odd for a man who thought colored socks were for girls. Whereas the ones Katie preferred looked like invitations to accounting seminars apparently.

Ray held up his favorite design and Katie said it looked like an invite to Prince Charming’s coming-out party. At which point the man behind the counter said, “Well, I don’t want to be around when you two choose the menu.”

Things went more smoothly at the jeweler’s. Ray liked the idea of them both having the same ring and there was no way he was wearing anything more than a plain gold band. The jeweler asked if they wanted inscriptions and Katie was temporarily flummoxed. Did wedding rings have inscriptions?

“On the inside, usually,” said the man. “The date of the wedding. Or perhaps some kind of endearment.” He was clearly a man who ironed his underwear.

“Or a return address,” said Katie. “Like on a dog.”

Ray laughed, because the man looked uncomfortable and Ray didn’t like men who ironed their underwear. “We’ll take two.”

They had lunch in Covent Garden and drew up guest lists over pizza.

Ray’s was short. He didn’t really do friends. He’d talk to strangers on the bus and go for a pint with pretty much anyone. But he never hung on to people for the long haul. When he and Diana split up, he moved out of the flat, said goodbye to the mutual friends and applied for a new job in London. He hadn’t seen his best man in three years. An old rugby friend, apparently, which didn’t put her mind at ease.

“Got pulled over by police on the M5 once,” said Ray. “Wing walking on a Volvo roof rack.”

“Wing walking?”

“It’s OK,” said Ray. “He’s a dentist now.” Which was worrying in a different way.

Her own list was more complex, on account of far too many friends, all of whom had some inviolable claim to an invite (Mona was there when Jacob was born; Sandra put them up for a month when Graham left; Jenny had MS which meant you always felt crap if you didn’t invite her to things even though, in truth, she was bloody hard work…). Accommodating them all would need an aircraft hangar, and every time she added a name or crossed it out she pictured the coven getting together and comparing notes.

“Overshoot,” said Ray, “like airlines. Assume 15 percent won’t turn up. Hold a few seats back.”

“Fifteen percent?” asked Katie. “Is that, like, the standard drop-out rate for weddings?”

“No,” said Ray. “I just like to sound as if I know what I’m talking about.”

She gripped a little roll of flesh just above his belt. “At least there’s one person in your life who can spot when you’re talking bollocks.”

Ray stole an olive from her pizza. “That’s a compliment, right?”

They discussed stag and hen nights. Last time round he’d been thrown naked into the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, she’d been groped by a fireman in a posing pouch, and they’d both been sick in the toilet of an Indian restaurant. They decided to go out for a candlelit meal. Just the two of them.

It was getting late and their best man and woman were arriving for supper at eight. So they headed home, scooping up Jacob on the way. He had a cut on his forehead where Max had hit him with a garlic press. But Jacob had ripped Max’s tarantula T-shirt. They were clearly still friends so Katie decided not to probe.

Back at the ranch she arranged the chicken breasts in a baking tray and poured the sauce over them and wondered whether Sarah had been a wise choice. To be scrupulously honest she’d been picked as an act of retaliation. A gobby solicitor who could give rugby players a run for their money.

It was beginning to dawn on Katie that retaliation might not be the best motive for selecting a best woman.

But when Ed arrived he seemed nervous mostly. A large, ruddy-cheeked man, more farmer than dentist. He’d filled out since posing for the team photo in Ray’s office and it was difficult to imagine him getting onto the roof of a stationary Volvo let alone a moving one.

He was ill at ease with Jacob, which made Katie feel rather superior. Then he said his wife had been through four cycles of IVF. So Katie felt crap instead.

When Sarah turned up she just rubbed her hands and said, “Right, then. This is my competition,” and Katie knocked back a glass of wine straight off, just in case.

The wine was a wise move.

Ed was charming and rather old-fashioned. This did not endear him to Sarah. She told him about the dentist who’d stitched her gum to his assistant’s rubber glove. He told her about the solicitor who had poisoned his aunt’s dog. The chicken was not good. Ed and Sarah disagreed about Gypsies. Specifically whether or not to round them up and put them in camps. Sarah wanted Ed put in a camp. Ed, who saw women’s opinions as largely decorative, decided that Sarah was a “foxy lady.”

Ray tried to move the subject onto safer ground by reminiscing about their rugby days, and the two of them began a string of supposedly hilarious stories, all of which involved heavy drinking, minor vandalism and the removal of someone’s trousers.

Katie drank another two glasses of wine.

Ed said he was going to begin his speech by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, this job is rather like being asked to have sex with the Queen. It’s an honor, obviously, but not a task one looks forward to with relish.”

Ray found this very funny indeed. Katie wondered whether she should be marrying someone else, and Sarah, who never liked men hogging the limelight, told them how she got so drunk at Katrina’s wedding that she passed out and wet herself in the foyer of a hotel in Derby.

An hour later, Katie and Ray lay next to each other in bed watching the ceiling spin slowly, listening to Ed wrestle incompetently with the sofa bed on the far side of the wall.

Ray took hold of her hand. “Sorry about that.”

“About what?”

“Downstairs.”

“I thought you were enjoying yourself,” said Katie.

“I was. Sort of.”

Neither of them said anything.

“I think he was a bit nervous,” said Ray. “I think we were all a bit nervous. Well, apart from Sarah. I don’t reckon she gets nervous.”

There was a little yelp from next door as Ed trapped some part of himself in the mechanism.

“I’ll have a word with Ed,” said Ray. “About the speech.”

“I’ll have a word with Sarah,” said Katie.

17

It blew up on
Saturday morning.

Tony woke early and headed to the kitchen to make breakfast. When Jamie ambled down twenty minutes later Tony was sitting at the table emanating bad vibes.

Jamie had clearly done something wrong. “What’s up?”

Tony chewed his cheek and drummed the table with a teaspoon. “This wedding,” said Tony.

“Look,” said Jamie, “I don’t particularly want to go myself.” He glanced at the clock. Tony had to leave in twenty minutes. Jamie realized that he should have stayed in bed.

“But you’re going to go,” said Tony.

“I don’t really have much choice.”

“So, why don’t you want me to come with you?”

“Because you’ll have a shit time,” said Jamie, “and I’ll have a shit time. And it doesn’t matter that I’m having a shit time because they’re my family, for better or worse. So every now and then I have to grit my teeth and put up with having a shit time for the greater good. But I’d rather not be responsible for you having a shit time on top of everything else.”

“It’s only a fucking wedding,” said Tony. “It’s not transatlantic yachting. How shit can it be?”

“It’s not just a fucking wedding,” said Jamie. “It’s my sister marrying the wrong person. For the second time in her life. Except this time we know it in advance. It’s hardly a cause for celebration.”

“I don’t give a fuck who she’s marrying,” said Tony.

“Well, I do,” said Jamie.

“Who she’s marrying is not the point,” said Tony.

Jamie called Tony an unsympathetic shit. Tony called Jamie a self-centered cunt. Jamie refused to discuss the subject any further. Tony stormed out.

Jamie smoked three cigarettes and fried himself two slices of eggy bread and realized he wasn’t going to get anything constructive done so he might as well drive up to Peterborough and hear the wedding story firsthand from Mum and Dad.

18

George was fitting
the window frames. There were six courses above the sill on either side. Enough brickwork to hold them firm. He spread the mortar and slotted the first one into place.

In truth it wasn’t just the flying. Holidays themselves were not much further up George’s list of favorite occupations. Visiting amphitheaters, walking the Pembrokeshire coast path, learning to ski. He could see the rationale behind these activities. One grim fortnight in Sicily had been made almost worthwhile by the mosaics at Piazza Armerina. What he failed to comprehend was packing oneself off to a foreign country to lounge by pools and eat plain food and cheap wine made somehow glorious by a view of a fountain and a waiter with a poor command of English.

They knew what they were doing in the Middle Ages. Holy days. Pilgrimages. Canterbury and Santiago de Compostela. Twenty hard miles a day, simple inns and something to aim for.

Norway might have been OK. Mountains, tundra, rugged shorelines. But it had to be Rhodes or Corsica. And in summer to boot, so that freckled Englishmen had to sit under awnings reading last week’s
Sunday Times
while the sweat ran down their backs.

Now that he thought about it, he had been suffering from heat stroke during the visit to Piazza Armerina and most of what he recalled about the mosaics was from the stack of postcards he’d bought in the shop before retiring to the hire car with a bottle of water and a pack of ibuprofen.

The human mind was not designed for sunbathing and light novels. Not on consecutive days at any rate. The human mind was designed for doing stuff. Making spears, hunting antelope…

The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzettis’ dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel.

He needed a drink. He walked back across the lawn and was removing his dirty boots when he saw Jamie in the kitchen, dumping his bag and putting the kettle on.

He stopped and watched, the way he might stop and watch if there was a deer in the garden, which there was occasionally.

Jamie was a bit of a secretive creature himself. Not that he hid things. But he was reserved. Rather old-fashioned now that George came to think about it. Different clothes and hairstyle and you could see him lighting a cigarette in a Berlin alleyway, or obscured by steam on a station platform.

Unlike Katie, who didn’t know the meaning of the word
reserved
. The only person he knew who could bring up the subject of menstruation over lunch. And you still knew she was hiding things, things that were going to be dropped on you at random intervals. Like the wedding. Next week she would doubtless announce that she was pregnant.

Dear God. The wedding. Jamie must have come about the wedding.

He could do it. If Jamie wanted a double bed he would say the spare room was being used by someone else, and book him into an upmarket bed-and-breakfast somewhere. Just so long as George didn’t have to use the word
boyfriend
.

He came round from his reverie and realized that Jamie was waving from inside the kitchen and looking a little troubled by George’s lack of response.

He waved back, removed his other boot and went inside.

“What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“Oh, just popping in,” said Jamie.

“Your mother didn’t mention anything.”

“I didn’t ring.”

“Never mind. I’m sure she can stretch lunch to three.”

“It’s OK. I wasn’t planning on staying. Tea?” asked Jamie.

“Thank you.” George got the digestives out while Jamie put a bag into a second mug.

“So. This wedding,” said Jamie.

“What about it?” asked George, trying to sound as if the subject had not yet occurred to him.

“What do you think?”

“I think…” George sat down and adjusted the chair so that it was precisely the right distance from the table. “I think you should bring someone.”

There. That sounded pretty neutral as far as he could tell.

“No, Dad,” said Jamie, wearily. “I mean Katie and Ray. What do you think about them getting married?”

It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.

“Well?” Jamie asked again.

“To be honest, I’m trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.”

“But she’s serious, yeh?”

“Your sister is serious about everything. Whether she’ll be serious about it in a fortnight’s time is anyone’s guess.”

“But what did she say?”

“Just that they were getting married. Your mother can fill you in on the emotional side of things. I’m afraid I was stuck talking to Ray.”

Jamie put a mug of tea down in front of George and raised his eyebrows. “Bet that was a white-knuckle thrill ride.”

And there it was, that little door, opening briefly.

They had never done the father-son stuff. A couple of Saturday afternoons at Silverstone racetrack. Putting up the garden shed together. That was about it.

On the other hand, he saw friends doing the father-son stuff and as far as he could see it amounted to little more than sitting in adjacent seats at rugby matches and sharing vulgar jokes. Mothers and daughters, that made sense. Dresses. Gossip. All in all, not doing the father-son stuff probably counted as a lucky escape.

Yet there were moments like this when he saw how alike he and Jamie were.

“Ray is, I confess, rather hard work,” said George. “In my long and sorry experience,” he dunked a biscuit, “trying to change your sister’s mind is a pointless exercise. I guess the game plan is to treat her like an adult. Keep a stiff upper lip. Be nice to Ray. If it all goes pear-shaped in two years’ time, well, we’ve had some practice in that department. The last thing I want to do is to let your sister know that we disapprove, then have Ray as a disgruntled son-in-law for the next thirty years.”

Jamie drank his tea. “I’m just…”

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re probably right. We should let her get on with it.”

Jean appeared in the doorway bearing a basket of dirty clothes. “Hello, Jamie. This is a nice surprise.”

“Hi, Mum.”

“Well, here’s your second opinion,” said George.

Jean put the basket on the washing machine. “About what?”

“Jamie was wondering whether we should save Katie from a reckless and inadvisable marriage.”

“Dad…” said Jamie tetchily.

And this was where Jamie and George parted company. Jamie couldn’t really do jokes, not at his own expense. He was, to be honest, a little delicate.

“George.” Jean glared at him accusingly. “What have you been saying?”

George refused to rise to the bait.

“I’m just worried about Katie,” said Jamie.

“We’re all worried about Katie,” said Jean, starting to fill the washing machine. “Ray wouldn’t be my first choice, either. But there you go. Your sister’s a woman who knows her own mind.”

Jamie stood up. “I’d better be going.”

Jean stopped filling the washing machine. “You’ve only just got here.”

“I know. I should have phoned, really. I just wanted to know what Katie had said. I’d better be heading off.”

And he was gone.

Jean turned to George. “Why do you always have to rub him up the wrong way?”

George bit his tongue. Again.

“Jamie?” Jean headed into the hallway.

George recalled only too well how much he had hated his own father. A friendly ogre who found coins in your ear and made origami squirrels and who shrank slowly over the years into an angry, drunken little man who thought praising children made them weak and never admitted that his own brother was schizophrenic, and who kept on shrinking so that by the time George and Judy and Brian were old enough to hold him to account he had performed the most impressive trick of all by turning into a self-pitying arthritic figure too insubstantial to be the butt of anyone’s anger.

Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.

Jamie was a good lad. Not the most robust of chaps. But they got on well enough.

Jean returned to the kitchen. “He’s gone. What was that all about?”

“Lord alone knows.” George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. “The mystery of one’s children is never-ending.”