Don't Tell the Groom (5 page)

‘Don't you think it might be best if you started by confiding in him?'

‘Look, I just need some advice about the money,' I say, ignoring her. There's no way I can tell Mark. No way at all.

‘OK,' says the woman, sighing. ‘While I usually talk to people about managing debts, maybe we could talk about how you're going to budget your money, if you're not going to postpone your wedding. Have you given budgeting any thought?'

‘Not really. I did try to look into investments and interest rates in the week, but I'm never going to be able to scale my money up four hundred per cent in three months.'

‘OK,' says the woman after a long pause. She starts to talk to me like she is talking to a simpleton. ‘How about you budget your wedding for five thousand pounds?'

I laugh out loud. I laugh like it is the funniest thing anyone has ever said. A wedding for five thousand pounds. Is she kidding? I look up at her face. Evidently she is not kidding.

‘How do I do that?'

My palpitations have started again. I'm beginning to panic and my breathing is getting shallower. I am starting to feel like I'm slowly suffocating.

‘I think it would help you if you made two lists. At first, why don't you write out exactly what you would like – a dream budget – if you will.'

That would be easy. I could practically give that to her off the top of my head, I know it so well.

‘OK, that's easy.'

‘Yes, that one always is. Then in the next budget why don't you try to forecast using the funds that you
actually
have.'

‘But I've got to shave off sixteen thousand pounds. How am I supposed to do that?'

‘Start with making a list and put things under columns of essential, nice extras and luxuries. Then you can go through the essentials and find if there are ways to make them cheaper.'

‘Like how? Get married in a sack?'

‘No, like buy a cheaper wedding dress. Marriage is not all about the wedding, you know.'

Tell that to the magazines I've been subscribing to for the last two years. I don't want to come across as a bridezilla as I am totally in touch with reality. It is just that I do want to have a princess wedding. I don't want to scrape by with only the essentials.

‘Here,' she says. She reaches down into her desk of everhelpful leaflets and she hands me one marked
Budget yourself out of debt
.

‘Catchy title,' I say.

‘Unfortunately, it's our most popular leaflet. It's slightly different for you as you're not in debt but the principles are the same. It is all about making a budget and sticking to it. Now, is there anything else I can help you with? Perhaps you want to do some volunteering work to fill your time to stop you gambling?'

Has this woman not heard me? I'm trying to make money, not give myself away.

‘I don't think so,' I say attempting to be polite.

‘Well, if there's nothing else?'

‘No,' I say. She's already ruined my dreams of a castle wedding and made me feel like I ought to be appearing on
The Jeremy Kyle Show
.

‘Great. Well, good luck with the wedding,' she says.

‘Thanks,' I mutter, pushing the leaflets into my pocket.

What on earth am I going to do now? Thoughts of Mark flash through my mind. You see, it's his wedding that I'm messing up too. I've told him that I'll plan him this utterly spectacular wedding and I've totally fucked up. I've wasted our hard-earned money on empty dreams. And now we're going to be eating something like baked beans on toast for our wedding breakfast.

I go back into the main library and sit, trance-like, at one of the research tables. I cast my eyes over the budgeting leaflet the woman gave me. I don't usually do budget forecasting, working in HR, but this leaflet seems to suggest that it isn't that difficult. I take a pen out of my bag and start writing down the essentials.

I've already blown my budget by the time I've written wedding dress (£3,000), suits and bridesmaid dresses (£1,500) and reception entertainment (£2,000). I continue writing my list, incorporating venue hire, catering costs, alcohol, cars, and before I know it I'm looking at my dream budget of £21,000.

I take a deep breath and try desperately to channel some inner calm from my yoga classes. My pen hovers over the wedding dress total. I can't take any money off that now, can I? I mean, that's the only wedding dress I'm ever going to wear.

But amazingly I do manage to shave something off each of the other totals. I mean, Mark doesn't need a bespoke
suit made in Savile Row, does he? Surely we could hire his suit? And I'm sure the bridesmaids wouldn't mind a dress from Coast rather than made-to-measure ones. And maybe we don't need a hundred guests. If we had, say, eighty, we'd save on both the catering and the alcohol costs. See? I'm a savvy saver after all.

But after doing the calculations, the figures still don't add up to anything manageable. I know what I have to do. My pen hovers over the wedding dress total and I have to use both hands to put a cross through it. There goes any hope of a designer dress.

I look down at my budget on the page and I wince in horror.

I'm practically weeping. If I had never played any bingo, then that would have been the budget for my wedding. And that looks totally doable. But now, thanks to my flirtations
with Fizzle Bingo, that's £10,000 over budget. Damn my attempts to get over twenty thousand pounds! If I hadn't been so obsessed with having a Vera Wang wedding dress, we could have had a lovely wedding.

The more I look at the numbers, the more I can't see how I am going to skim anything else off this wedding. Really, I can't. The figures look as squeezed down as I can make them.

Which leaves me with only one other option. I somehow have to find £10,000 without Mark knowing about it. Great. Another secret to add to my ‘don't tell the groom'. I do the maths on the calculator on my phone. I just have to save £3,300 every month until the wedding. Which would never happen, as for starters I don't get paid anywhere near that. Unless I got a second job, but how could I do that without Mark finding out? I work full time as it is.

Too bad that Carnivore Services didn't turn out to be a real escort agency or else I could have gone to them for a job. I am just going to have to find another way to come up with the cash.

‘Are you all right, Penny?' says Nanny Violet, coming up behind me. She is giving me a curious look.

‘Fine, thanks,' I reply through gritted teeth. I know it's not her fault that I'm not going to have the wedding of my dreams, but I can't help feeling a little bit resentful towards her and her suggestion of a May wedding.

‘I picked up a book for you,' says Violet, handing it to me.

It's a WI wedding planning book circa 1970.

‘Thanks.'

‘You're welcome, dear. Should be a doddle planning the wedding with that.'

I look at Nanny Violet and I wish that were true, but somehow I feel that my wedding planning is going to be anything but a doddle.

‘So when's the big day then?' asks Jane.

I'm about to throttle her, but then I realise that she's brandishing a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. I imagine in a struggle that she'd drop it and that would clearly be a waste. Instead, I restrain myself and take the bottle and give her and her husband Phil air kisses.

‘Give the woman a chance - they've only just got engaged,' says Phil.

Thanks, Phil
. At least someone is talking some sense.

‘Whatever, honey. After all our years of marriage you still don't understand women, and you obviously don't know Penny that well either. She's been planning the wedding secretly for years.'

I clearly only have myself to blame for the fact that
this is the only topic on people's minds when they see me now. I used to talk weddings a lot before we got engaged, so people just assume that I'm steamrolling ahead with the planning, and they think it's perfectly acceptable to press me for the details like when, where, and what I'll be wearing.

‘Now, let me see that ring,' says Jane, grabbing my hand before I can do the obligatory wave. I don't need to worry about trying to make the diamond sparkle in the light – she's pulling my hand this way and that to inspect my ring.

‘Excellent choice,' Jane says to Mark as she walks into our hallway.

‘Thanks,' says Mark, beaming with pride. ‘Do you want to come on through?'

We gravitate to the lounge while Mark opens up a bottle of Prosecco that's been chilling in the fridge. I perch on the arm of the sofa and try to tell myself that Jane is not judging me. Just because she and Phil live in a fancy-pants five-bedroom house that's practically a mansion does not mean to say she's judging my living room or what I'm wearing. She's the only woman that would warrant me changing my outfit three times before I settled on something, aka, ran out of time. I'm now wearing a pair of Karen Millen jeans I bought in a sale once and a chunky Warehouse knit. It's about a million miles away from my usual
Saturday slobbing of bleach-stained tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie.

‘So are we waiting for Louise and Russell?' asks Jane, as she looks curiously at the vases by the fireplace. I bet she just instinctively knows they're from Asda.

Yes, thank goodness
, I almost say.

‘Yes, they should be here any minute,' I say, glancing at my watch. I told them to come half an hour ago, so by their late meter they should be arriving any second now.

Please don't think I hate Jane, as I don't. Mark is Phil's best mate, and therefore I've got to know his wife Jane pretty well over the last few years. It's just that she's always impeccably dressed, she never has a hair out of place and her roots never need touching up. She just always makes me feel so ordinary and like the poor relation, which means it takes me a while to relax around her when we're the only females in the room. Lou, on the other hand, is my best friend and she's like the anti-Jane: as down to earth as you can get.

I'm never entirely sure whether it's a good idea to have them in the same room together, but as Phil is best-man-to-be and Lou is maid-of-honour-to-be, we thought it might make for a nice lunch. Or at least Mark did when he invited them when we were out drinking to celebrate our engagement. Personally I'm still trying to avoid all things wedding until
I work out how to beg, borrow, or grow a money tree to the value of ten thousand pounds.

‘I want to hear all the details about your proposal then, Phil tells me it was at Chez Vivant. Such a lovely restaurant. I always go for the venison, what did you have, Penny?' asks Jane.

I'm about to reply when I hear the doorbell ring. I'm saved from having to declare that I boringly went for the steak with pepper sauce. In my defence it's one of my favourite foods, and to be fair to Chez Vivant and its mammoth price tag, it was worth every penny.

‘Be back in a minute,' I say, dashing off to let Lou and Russell in. I take a moment in the hallway just to revel in the silence and the lack of wedding-related conversation. Unfortunately for me we've got a big frosted glass pane and I know that they can see me lurking out here.

‘Hey, hey, hey, lovely,' says Lou as I open the door.

She hands me another bottle of fizz and I take them through to the lounge, where there's more kissing and drink-pouring. Since leaving the room, much to my relief, the topic has changed to Phil and Jane's annual pilgrimage to an exotic destination that the rest of us can only dream of. This year, they've apparently booked to go to the Turks and Caicos islands. Cue lots of ‘if only' looks between me and Lou.

The lunch has passed in a haze of too much food, or in my case, too much wine. The boys are like naughty schoolboys when they are together and today they're on fine form with banter flying around everywhere.

‘So, we haven't talked about your wedding yet,' says Jane.

I nearly spit out my dessert, but then I remember the fight I had to secure the last box of profiteroles from Marks and Spencer's and I try to keep them in my mouth as a sign of respect.