Revenge of the Wedding Planner (12 page)

But Ann, who was the first to appear on my doorstep, had gone all tanned and toned and glamorous in the intervening decade. She was sporting a short spiky crop of pink hair. Yes, pink! And wearing a fitted (very fitted) two-piece dress-suit with killer heels, and carrying a massive pink handbag with chunky gold-chain handles. She had a tiny little pink hat with feathers on it and her blusher could be seen from space. She was like the millionaire princess of Punk. I mean, she
is
an aerobics instructor at a very posh country club and no doubt has a sexy image to uphold. But, obviously, she’d forgotten we still wear black to funerals in Belfast. Bill nudged me in the back because he knew I’d be struggling to say something kind about Ann’s hat. And I knew that whatever I did say would be hopelessly inadequate so I just reached for Ann and hugged her until she couldn’t breathe.

‘Steady on, love,’ she laughed, her Australian accent having returned.

‘Where’s Elizabeth?’ I said eventually.

‘She’s just paying the cab fare,’ Ann announced to the
general company, swinging her handbag into Bill’s chest. ‘Put that somewhere safe, love,’ she told him, winking crookedly. I supposed she’d had a few gins on the flight. Or maybe it was jet lag.

Elizabeth then lumbered into view. And I do mean, lumbered. She’d put on about ten stone since I’d last seen her! My God, she was big! Her face was still the same, though. The same colour of eyes as me (hazel) and the same pointy chin. But she really had been enjoying her food. She’s a hotel manager, by the way. Elizabeth was dressed in a dark-blue velvet jacket and wide blue slacks with yellow flowers on them. A yellow necklace with beads as big as eggs. And her long black hair was wound into a tiny bun at the nape of her neck. She was well made-up, though. And her fingernails were long and red and quite exquisite. Elizabeth was never very particular about her nails and make-up when she was living in Belfast.

‘Oh, Elizabeth,’ I cried, doing my best to hug her. ‘I’m so glad you were able to make it. How’ve you been?’

‘Well, I can tell you one thing, Mags, I’ve not been on a diet!’

Another discreet nudge from Bill.

‘It’s just so brilliant to see you both again,’ I wept.

And it was. I ushered them up to our bedroom so they could change their clothes and have a sit-down in peace, without half of the population of the city staring at them. Elizabeth could hardly get up the stairs, she was that puffed.

‘Now you know why I didn’t make it home sooner,’ she gasped, as I showed them into my ivory boudoir. ‘I
wanted to lose weight first. This is nice, Mags love. I like your bed.’

‘You don’t know what this means to me. Thanks so much for coming,’ I said, kissing her bronzed cheek tenderly. ‘You’re here now and we’ll have a good long chat about life and everything when the funeral is over. Now, do you want to see Daddy first thing? Or do you want to have something to eat?’

‘We had a bite of lunch on the plane,’ Ann sighed, ‘but I could murder a proper cup of tea, love. Really stewed, the way we used to make it in the old days.’

‘Okay, then. You two get your breath back and I’ll fetch a tray up. And you can come downstairs and wow the rest of them when you’re ready. There’re hundreds of people milling about down there and I think the novelty of my good room is beginning to wear off. I need a new attraction. So be prepared to chat until your jaw drops off!’

They didn’t let me down.

At dawn on the day of the funeral, the last cup of tea had been drunk. The last biscuit had been swallowed. All the booze was gone, even the out-of-date liqueurs at the back of the dining-room cabinet. Any number of songs had been sung, including Dad’s all-time Country and Western favourite, ‘Are You Teasin’ Me?’ – by the Louvin brothers, somebody said.

I’d been asked about ten thousand times how my mother was coping. The implication being that she didn’t give a flying fig about her poor lonely dead husband.

‘Oh, she’s in despair,’ I said. ‘She’s too upset to travel, actually.’ Even though I knew she was merrily grilling
organic pork sausages, and hand-stitching lavender sachets to hang on every handle and shelf of the guest house.

Then the mourners gathered on the ground floor after they’d had a final peek round the rest of the house en route to the bathrooms, and the priest began to say the rosary. I saw my poor heathen children creeping down the hall towards the kitchen in case anyone noticed they didn’t know the words to the prayers. It was only then it dawned on me how hard it must be for the first generation of secular children in a long line of devoutly religious ancestors. How strange it is for them when everybody else is blessing themselves and muttering ancient prayers and they’re just standing there, clueless. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. Because I was the one who was supposed to be in charge.

The good room was then officially emptied of all persons except for Bill and myself. I didn’t know what to do so I simply touched Dad’s hands gently and said a brief goodbye to him. I didn’t kiss his cheek – we were never a kissing sort of family. I did tell him I loved him, for the very first time in my life (though sadly, not his). Bill and I then left the room together, holding hands and feeling completely weirded-out. The undertakers screwed the lid down tight over my father’s still-frowning face and it was over. Sixty-eight years of seething resentment and missed opportunities. And the woman who should have been there beside him was busy handing out plates of cooked breakfast to her guests in the B&B in Devon.

What a gold-medal skiver!

Pity they don’t have it in the Olympics.

We Irish, we’d clean up in the ‘Bizarre Funeral Rituals’
and the ‘Avoiding Painful Emotional Issues’ categories.

So, there was me, Bill, our children, my sisters and several hundred strangers in the chapel that morning. And the priest finally understood that I was an odd sort of Catholic when I refused point-blank to go up on the altar and read from the Bible. Not for any political reason in particular, mind you: I just couldn’t face addressing an audience. And Bill and the kids wouldn’t have known where to stand or how to walk off again, so they couldn’t do it. I mean, what are you supposed to do when your father croaks it, but reading in church has a laxative effect? So, yes, I did actually decline to read at my own father’s funeral Mass. Well, the crowd had never seen anything like it. You could hear the gasps of horror a mile away. Somebody actually said out loud, ‘Sweet Jesus Christ, is the daughter not goin’ to do the readin’?’

At the burial, I simply couldn’t cry. I was so angry with my father for ignoring me for forty years. And for letting my mother walk away from him without a backward glance. The two of them had cheated us out of a lifetime of happy family memories. Even though it wasn’t their
fault
they were incompatible, I suppose. Ann and Elizabeth were too shell-shocked by the sea of mournful grey faces, the crowd huddled together in long black coats, to cry either. Majestically turned out (Ann in a bright red trouser suit and matching pillbox hat, and Elizabeth in a sweeping purple cape and jaunty beret), they were the only spot of colour on the day.

I invited all the well-wishers to the post-burial dinner afterwards because I was too much of a coward not to. Mentally, I was hoarding our savings for Emma’s baby,
but they’d given us good value as mourners and they deserved to be fed and watered. But I think they could tell it was a duty rather than a pleasure for Bill and myself when Bill did a rough head-count at the cemetery gates and called the hotel to let them know, all the while totting up costs on his pocket calculator. Needless to say, we were about as popular as dysentery in the hotel afterwards. (Sorry about all this lavatorial imagery, by the way.) They shook hands with us again but there was an unspoken accusation in the air. Middle-class know-it-alls, they seemed to say. I wore the biggest pair of dark glasses I could find and us Grimsdales skulked off into the residents’ private bar as soon as the meal was over. Well, we weren’t exactly residents but after stumping up for such a huge function, how could they refuse us? A glass or two of brandy beside that roaring (gas) fire in the dimly lit bar, and the chill began to leave my aching bones.

Poor Dad.

Poor me.

Dad’s landlord wasn’t so shy, however. When we phoned him the following day, he said could we please have the house cleared by the end of the week? As he wanted to redecorate and get some new tenants in. Also, we had to cancel Dad’s pension, and the milk, and get the amenities disconnected. Mass cards were ordered and his heart medication was returned to the chemist for safe disposal.

There’s a lot to do when someone dies.

We brought the leaning stacks of yellowing newspapers to the recycling depot. All of the furniture was knackered so I arranged for the council to take it to the dump. The
rest of his stuff fitted into two black bags, which we stored in our garden shed for the time being because Alicia-Rose is afraid of ghosts and she wouldn’t let the bags anywhere near our attic. And suddenly that was it. A life over and gone.

Oh, yes, Emma turned up at the hotel later that evening and was reunited with Alexander. They were kissing tenderly in the lobby as the mourners were leaving, and I thought to myself, there’s a new life beginning as another one ends. It was the only hopeful moment in the day until we discovered two things. First, Emma’s own parents had thrown her out of the house and said they wouldn’t be suckered into babysitting yet another illegitimate grandchild. They already had more than enough on their plates what with Emma’s two sisters’ offspring, and so on. And secondly, Emma said she
would
like to keep the baby but could we please pay for a planned Caesarean section as she was completely phobic about childbirth? And that was why she’d left Alexander in the first place.

Bill and I exchanged glances.

‘Certainly, Emma,’ said Bill. ‘We’d be happy to.’

What else could we do?

I said
of course
we would pay for Emma to have private health care and, in a burst of love and devotion, I added that Alexander and Emma could stay in our drawing room (perhaps converted into a cute little bedsit) until they were qualified and on their feet financially. Which basically meant they could live with us for the next ten years or so. Rent free. Bill was so upset he had to have a double brandy in the hotel lobby. He didn’t mind about the baby.
He was delighted about the baby. But he was bitterly disappointed that Alexander was being so wet about the whole thing. We talked about it as we walked home from the hotel bar later that evening.

‘Why didn’t he kick down the front door of Emma’s house the day she left him, push her father out of the way, call her mother a selfish bitch, get down on his knees and propose to the stupid girl?’ he fumed. ‘Have I taught him nothing?’

Once a Punk, always a Punk.

And also, he was plastered drunk.

And then I had to remind my husband that we were only sitting pretty in Eglantine Avenue ourselves because of the whip-round our relatives had organized for us, all those years ago.

‘Still,’ Bill added lamely, ‘the boy could have thrown his bed through the window at least. Some well-intentioned, but ultimately futile, token gesture of rebellion. How the hell did we raise such conservative children?’

With twenty-one years of bloody hard work, that’s how.

9. The Coven

We saw Ann and Elizabeth off to the airport a few days later, with many promises on both sides to phone every week, without fail. And they said maybe they’d come back again for Christmas if they could book enough time off work. Neither one of them had settled down yet with a family of her own and I think they were between romances too. So I supposed they simply fancied a bit of company and companionship over the holiday season. I told them they were more than welcome to stay at our house. They were to visit whenever they liked and stay for as long as they liked. Bill would have preferred it to be just our own immediate family for Christmas but he said nothing. I would have told him I loved him even more that day, for being so understanding, but really that wouldn’t be possible! On the way home from the airport, Bill and I nipped into town for lunch in Delaney’s coffee shop. It was the first time we’d been alone together for weeks and we just sat quietly holding hands in a cosy little booth near the window. Revelling in having nothing to do for the rest of the day.

As we were leaving Delaney’s, it began to pour. We scurried across the street to the shelter of the car, and bumped into none other than Gary Devine. Bill and Gary exchanged pleasant greetings and so on but I felt a bit frozen out. Gary was clearly not my biggest fan, that day. The conversation was very strained. I remembered he’d
sent a gorgeous wreath of yellow roses and trailing ivy to the cemetery on the day of the funeral and I thanked him for it. I said he was very kind and thoughtful and he just nodded back, the hurt in his eyes plain as anything. Obviously, Gary knew I was holding out on him and he resented me for knowing where Julie was. But although I wanted to tell him about the spa I couldn’t risk it in case he landed down there, saw Jay and Julie together (covered in bits of straw, no doubt) and went postal. There’d already been one funeral and I didn’t want to have to go to another couple. I decided it was time to get the Coven on board.

They know Julie better than anyone, I foolishly thought; they’ll know what to do. Julie’s best friends and partners in crime, the Lisburn Road Coven. And by the way, they gave that grand title to themselves. Amanda and Rebecca are prosecution lawyers, Josephine owns a very expensive lingerie boutique (few of the bra and briefs sets cost less than £75) and Veronica and April run big, popular wine bars in the trendy Stranmillas district. They’re a fearsome bunch at the best of times but absolutely terrifying when they’re tanked up. They take no prisoners and they mean what they say. So if anyone can sort out this mess, I thought, it’s the Coven. They won’t tiptoe round Julie. They’ll tell her she’s being silly and fetch her home.

That was the plan, anyway.