Revenge of the Wedding Planner (14 page)

‘I’ll bet,’ was all he said. Meaning moody little Emma likes the best of everything. Doctors, as well as shoes.

Like I said, I can read Bill’s thoughts.

‘Yes, indeed, she does like the best of everything,’ I
told him. ‘Which is why she’s going out with our son.’

Checkmate!

Consequently, the drawing room was soon to be converted into a bedsit for Emma and Alexander, with a small bathroom in one corner and a dinky kitchenette in another. Bill knew I’d offered to have them stay in the house with us, of course, but he’d been thinking that Alexander and Emma would prefer to find a place of their own and get married. He’d not actually gone along with the idea that any son of his would agree to move into the family drawing room and live off his parents.

‘I don’t think they’ll need their own bathroom, though,’ said Bill, looking at the walls doubtfully. ‘We have four bathrooms already. The water pressure will be adversely affected. Can’t she just sleep with Alexander in his room? He’s got a double bed.’

‘Oh, Bill, Alexander’s room is tiny, it’s far too small for a cot and the baby stuff. That’s why I’m doing this because otherwise there’ll be toys and equipment all over the house. The drawing room is thirty foot long.’

‘Well, the baby can have the guest room, then. It’s next door to Alexander’s.’

‘But I’ve already asked a builder to make plans.’

‘What builder? Tell me his name and I’ll cancel the plans, don’t you worry about that.’

‘Oh, Bill!’

‘No, honestly, we don’t want them to get too cosy, Mags.’

‘Yes, we do.’

‘No, we don’t.’

And finally, I told him that Julie was having ‘an episode
of some kind’ in County Galway and was currently enjoying lively sex in a rural setting with a handsome young barman called Jay O’Hanlon, while I was lying through my teeth about her actions to Gary Devine. But the good side of
that
particular situation was, it was costing us nothing whatsoever. Just some extra responsibilities for me at Dream Weddings until Julie returned, of course. And it looked like she would be down in Galway for a few days yet. She was having the time of her life there.

‘Sex for breakfast, sex for lunch and sex for dinner,’ I said, trying to make the whole thing sound hilarious. Hoping the Punk in him would be impressed with Julie’s utter abandonment of the normal rules and conventions of society. Then I sat rubbing a blob of vanilla hand cream into my dry knuckles while my gorgeous husband pondered the tangled web I’d spun for myself.

‘Julie’s off her rocker, isn’t she?’ I prompted him. ‘I never knew she had it in her. Mind you, neither did Gary! I hope neither one of us has a crazy affair one day, Bill. I don’t think I could cope with any more excitement.’

But Bill wasn’t amused at all. He was absolutely bewildered. I’ve never seen him so flustered. Normally, he’s cool as a cucumber. In fact, I was always teasing him and comparing him with Mr Spock from
Star Trek
. (I don’t tease Bill quite so much these days. I think he’s been through enough.) He paced up and down the bedroom with his head in his hands, like Robert de Niro in that disturbing movie with Jodie Foster.

‘We’ll still have some money left,’ I told him in desperation. ‘And God knows Julie owes me one heck of a bonus.’

‘Don’t talk daft, Mags. It’s not the money, pet,’ he kept saying, ‘it’s not the money!’

‘Really, Bill? You don’t mind?’

‘Not about the funeral, no. I might have known you’d be left to pick up the tab when your father died. He never did have any sense with money. It’s the
secrecy
I can’t understand. Why didn’t you tell me about Julie going off like that? The real reason Julie left you on your own to deal with Janine Smith’s wedding? Why did you lie to Gary about Julie’s whereabouts? If you’d told him she was in Galway the same day she set off, he might have caught up with her and sorted all this before it got out of hand. I mean,
why
? You’ve made it so much worse. Why did you bottle all this up, Mags? Why didn’t you tell me? We’re supposed to be best friends. Or have you forgotten?’

All the while I could feel hot tears springing up and my nose was on fire with shame. I knew I was going to sneeze all night with sheer embarrassment – it’s a funny tic I have.

‘Because you’re always there for me,’ I sobbed. ‘Because you always decide what to do for the best and I always take your advice.’

‘But aren’t I usually right? Well?’

He really didn’t get it.

‘Yes, you are! I can’t remember the last time you really messed up. And that’s the only annoying thing about you, Bill. Sometimes, you get on my goat, you’re so bloody perfect and sensible.’

Bill picked up the portable television then and, honestly, I thought he was going to throw it through the window.
There were big veins bulging on his forehead that I’d never seen before. But he just raised the telly and lowered it again a few times and then set it back on its silver stand. Eventually, he sat down on the bed beside me and sighed deeply.

‘I don’t understand, Mags. You said you loved me being sensible. You said, if only every other man was more like me, the world would be perfect. If you didn’t want me to be sensible any more, why didn’t you say something?’

‘But I do want you to be sensible! I do, Bill.’

‘Then, how am I supposed to know when to be sensible and when not to be? Can you perhaps give me a list of the situations I am not allowed to get involved in?’

‘But these were personal issues, don’t you see, my love? It wasn’t a case of leaving you out deliberately. Julie is my friend and it was my father’s funeral. I wanted to sort them both out by myself. How can you know more about my relationships than I do? It’s not fair. I honestly thought Julie’s fling would blow over in a few days and it was her business and nobody else’s. I thought she’d flirt with this guy and maybe kiss him goodnight or something. I never thought she would throw caution to the winds like she has. And my father! He didn’t tell me he was on heart tablets. Why didn’t he tell me about the heart tablets instead of his usual blow-by-blow accounts of the irrelevant political blusterings in this dump?’

Even though it’s not a dump at all. It’s very beautiful for the most part, but I was in a fouler of a mood. And when I’m in a bad mood, Belfast is automatically a dump. And everybody in it is a thieving rascal.

‘Look, you’re all upset over this and there’s no need for it! You should have told Gary that Julie had gone away to that fancy spa in Galway for a soul-searching holiday. And organized a modest funeral for your father with no fancy dinner afterwards. And your sisters should have stumped up their share of the cost. Yes, they’re great girls, but fair’s fair, Mags. We have four children to support.’

‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ I said, barely able to get the words out because I was in such a rotten sulk. Easy for Bill to tell me what I should have done. Casually tell my sisters they had to drop everything and fly halfway round the world for a funeral. And bring their chequebooks with them, while they were at it. And just as casually tell Gary Devine that Julie didn’t want to see him any more. Mind you, he would have done it for me. I know that. Bill would have made the phone calls for me. But I didn’t
want
him to. I wanted a little bit of independence, for once in my life.

Well, be careful what you wish for, I suppose.

‘And while we’re on the subject, Mags, I don’t mind about Alexander and Emma moving in together but it’s up to them what they do with the rest of their lives. I’d prefer it if they got their own place and, really, you should have let Emma decide what to do about the baby. It was her decision. Not yours and mine, not even Alexander’s. He would have had to deal with it, Mags, if Emma didn’t want him or the baby. They’ve got to grow up sometime. You can’t look after them like they’re some sort of pet project, like two hamsters in a cage. They’re adults, Mags. Plus, it will cause a lot of disruption in the house for
Andrew and Christopher and they’ve got exams coming up in school. Fat lot of revision they’ll get done with a baby crying half the night.’

(Andrew and Christopher were in the same year at school, being born only eight months apart. Christopher was a month premature, you see.)

‘I know, Bill! I know all of that.’

‘You don’t know. Look, Mags, honey, I’ve seen this happen to other people our age. They start minding the grandchildren on a full-time basis and suddenly they find themselves trapped. Their children get used to the convenience of a built-in nanny and the grandchildren get used to the routine and the old-fashioned dinners. Mashed potatoes and gravy, birthday parties with jelly and ice cream. Next thing, the parents are off to Spain for a fortnight on their own and the grandparents are down at the GP’s waiting for MMR jabs.’

‘That won’t happen with Alexander and Emma.’

‘Are you sure? Because I think that’s exactly what’ll happen. I know you, you can’t stop yourself from taking over. You’ll be up and down the stairs with tea and toast and piles of laundry, and tidying up toys non-stop.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You will. Emma’s obsession with her weight takes up all her spare time – she won’t lift a finger to help you. We’ll never get rid of them, Mags. If they have another baby they’ll be back on the penniless song-and-dance routine, forcing us to pay for everything. We can’t afford it, love. Alexander should be taking charge of this situation, not you and me. It’s his baby now, not ours.’

‘But he’s still at university, Bill. Have a heart. He’s
penniless. And so is Emma. I just didn’t know what to say to them. How could I leave Emma on the street? She had nowhere else to go!’

‘Oh, Mags. You just don’t understand, do you? They’re
adults
.’

‘I can’t believe you’re being so logical about this. It’s our first grandchild, Bill, and you know as well as I do, Emma is far too skinny and that’s probably why her own parents can’t cope with the pregnancy. Already she’s talking about being off her food with morning sickness. She’s eating nothing, nothing at all. She needs help. Bill, I was only trying to help the girl.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Bill said then, shaking his head with resignation. ‘You’ll be helping Alexander and Emma out no end for the next twenty years. And so will I. Even though I’m totally opposed to all of this interference, I can’t stand by and let you do everything, now can I?’

Oh, dear.

It’s a horrible desolate feeling when you know you’ve got things wrong. But even then I was still convinced there was nothing else I could have done to salvage the various situations. Julie really shouldn’t have had that hayloft spanking session with Jay O’Hanlon, I thought bitterly. Gary will really blow his top now. And maybe if I hadn’t told Josephine about the Sean Bean lookalike, it would never have happened. And yes, I should have asked Ann and Elizabeth to contribute towards the funeral but they’ve been working so hard in Australia, and trying to cope with their homesickness and I just hadn’t the heart to do it to them. And I thought to myself, they’ll never
forgive me if I cancel the headstone. Not really. It’ll come up every time we get together. Not out of any malice on their part; no, it’ll simply go into family folklore. They’ll say, ‘Do you remember the time you promised our wee daddy a Celtic cross and we got all excited about the engraving, and then you changed your mind? Aw, Mags, you’re some kid!’ To top it all, Bill thought I was making life far too easy for Alexander and Emma and that we’d end up babysitting for years while he and Emma just carried on regardless with their lives. Going to gigs and getting legless drunk in the students’ union. Travelling round the world with their backpacks and their arty novels. Enjoying the next decade doing exciting things together, instead of Bill and me. We’d still be reading bedtime stories to the grandchildren and ironing endless piles of laundry, according to Bill. And letting our other children think we were running a free nursery of some kind. So they were free to procreate at will and just give the stork our address on Eglantine.

It was all such a holy mess.

And Bill was being so decent about it, really. He was being his usual loving and understanding self. Patting me on the head for trying so hard and failing miserably. I couldn’t stand it. It was like Dad’s shocking death and Julie’s mad affair and even Emma’s surprise baby were all my fault but he was still going to be nice about it because he loved me. That made me so angry I couldn’t breathe. None of it was my fault,
none of it
. My father was an impossible man and my sisters may have loved him but they’ve never liked him. They were always a bit scared of his temper, to tell you the truth, he used to get that mad
when the DUP political broadcasts came on the telly.

‘Ah, would you look at the cut of them auld so-and-so’s!’ he used to yell at the screen. ‘Look at them, smug as all-get-out with their big red faces! Children, you can always tell a Unionist by his big red face. Look there! Stuffed to the eyeballs with the very best of meat and drink! Lining their pockets with money they stole off the Catholics! Easy to talk about the democratic process when you’re up to your big fat red neck in stolen goods.
Bastards
, the whole lot of them! Ah, would you get back to Scotland where you belong and give us a bit of peace? Planter trash! Get the fuck out of it and then we’ll talk about the democratic fuckin’ process. God bless Ireland! Ah, turn it off, my head’s thumpin’!’

And so on.

We used to leave the room when the British National Anthem started up at the end of the night’s programming, in case he went ballistic and started lashing out.

Ann and Elizabeth could have visited him whenever they wanted to but instead they called me from Sydney once a month and asked me how he was getting on. Like I was his officially appointed carer and they wanted a progress report. Like I should have taken him to the zoo or something in a wheelchair and bought him an ice cream. He was well able to cook and clean for himself, my father, and I will not be made to feel guilty that I didn’t keep house for him. I’m not a skivvy and this isn’t the 1940s. I hadn’t got the time to call round there every day with a packet of J-cloths and a lamb chop and that’s the honest truth. Feminist principles aside. So it was an even bigger mystery to me than it was to Bill, why I was
going to so much trouble and expense now that my father was dead.