‘It looks jolly lovely,’ she called out cheerfully as she spotted the morning suit wandering in. ‘The floral arrangements are simply super, aren’t they?’
The hall was decked entirely in white summer flowers which had given the florists no end of nightmares as James French was very snobbish about carnations or chrysanthemums and had banned them entirely. As a result a wildly expensive range of roses, lilies, irises, phlox, jasmine and orchids dripped and drooped from the foliage-strewn walls with the languid decadence of porcelain-pale nymph’s fingers beckoning from a mystical forest. There were so many flowers banked on the grand piano that it looked as though it had been planted out like a novelty wheelbarrow in a suburban garden, and the florists had even trailed jasmine and ivy around its legs and those of the stool.
‘Where shall I set up, mate?’ The
Cheers!
photographer wandered into the hall behind the best man, loaded down with padded bags, his creased suit scattered with red petals. ‘Christ, it’s like walking into a garden centre, innit?’
Behind him, a scrawny, long-haired assistant was buckling under a tripod, his pockets bulging with film reels. ‘Over here okay?’ He dropped the tripod to one side of the flower ‘altar’.
‘Have we met?’ The photographer scratched his head. ‘Don’t tell me – you were in a film with this Niall geezer? The one about the Scottish rebel, wonnit?’
‘No – but you’re right. We have done some pictures together – quite a few, in fact.’ The familiar face flashed him a wicked smile. ‘And we’re about to star in the best one yet.’
Driving around the narrow, interlacing Fosbourne lanes with an out-of-date ordnance survey map, and a very simplified set of directions drawn by Henrietta which made the tiny, winding Berkshire C roads look like the gridded streets of New York, Matty French found himself ploughing the Audi through the same ford in alternate directions several times. Because his window was open from asking directions, his right arm was now soaked with muddy water. At least it cooled him down slightly; the car was unbearably stuffy.
‘You should know the area better than me,’ he told Sally. ‘Surely you remember where this house is?’
‘I never saw the place.’ She was hurriedly coating her legs in fake tan make-up, most of which was splattering over the car’s upholstery. ‘Why don’t we drive back to the farm and ask?’
‘Shouldn’t think they’d be too keen.’ He turned Henrietta’s instructions upside down and peered at them again. ‘Gus Moncrieff was hardly friendly earlier. If we’d stayed any longer, I think he’d have seen us off the premises with a shotgun.’
‘He was behaving a bit oddly, wasn’t he?’ Sally wiped her hands on the chamois leather from the glove compartment. ‘So was Penny come to that – she grabbed the kids as though it was a ransom swapover. I thought they’d at least invite us in for a cup of coffee until Tom and Tor were settled and dressed. Penny even tried to whip Linus away until I pointed out he wasn’t one of Tash’s pages. I mean, he can barely walk – he’d never make it up the aisle.’
‘Nor will Niall if he’s as pissed as he was the last time I saw him,’ Matty said darkly, trying out a lane he hadn’t attempted before, only to realise that it was the driveway to a remote farm with nowhere to turn the car around until they were practically in the milking yard.
By lunchtime, it was absolutely classic wedding weather. Now flying high in an unblemished forget-me-not sky, the sun hadn’t been crossed by a cloud since dawn, and had strengthened enough to drench the house and grounds in sumptuous, saturated warmth. Arms were bared, sunglasses donned, faces tilted upwards and tights discreetly removed in the privacy of cars before the wedding guests drove into the Fosbourne Valley and tried to decipher Henrietta’s map.
Growing tired of holding on to Beetroot while he waited outside to welcome guests, Rufus tied her to the bay tub – in which he had stashed his cans of lager – and told her to guard them. Donning a pair of dark glasses, he lolled on the steps and lifted his topper as the first cars started rolling up the carriage sweep.
‘Here come the innocents.’ Gus narrowed his eyes against the sun as he and Hugo bounded down the steps from the house, both loaded up with service sheets. ‘I thought you were going to show people where to park, Rufe?’
‘I am.’ Rufus grinned idly and waved his hat in the direction of the car park as a flashy Discovery trundled past. ‘I’m sure that’s Alan Rickman.’
‘It’s Jack Fortescue,’ Hugo said witheringly.
The mildest of veil-lifting breezes cooled the faces of the early arrivals as they clambered from their cars in the vast gravel stretch of car park beside the house and stared up at the multi-coloured foliage bobbing jauntily and shaking pollen on them all. Close to, the house smelled as glorious as it looked – a heady mix of honeysuckle, jasmine and trailing roses.
The wind was just light enough to keep hats on heads without the need of a protecting hand, yet cool enough to stop those hats feeling as though they were made of thermal wool with bobbles on top.
‘Couldn’t want for a better wink from God, could you now?’ pointed out one of Niall’s relations who had arrived predictably early and whose rose button-hole was failing to counter-balance the hip-flask weighing down the opposite inside pocket.
Hugo, who was ushering him inside, nodded vaguely and handed him a service sheet. He hoped the day went according to plan, whether or not God was winking at them; he felt unusually nervous. He’d only just realised quite how newsworthy Niall’s wedding was.
The
Cheers!
photographer, who had set up his tripod inside the hall, had left his lanky assistant to guard it and was now roaming around outside taking shots of the arriving guests in the hope of catching one or two celebrities flashing serene smiles. He was furious to find his pitch being queered yet again by a small gaggle of freelance tabloid paparazzi who had been tipped off and were hoping to catch celebrities flashing their knickers as they clambered from the rear of Mercs.
‘Clear off!’ he told them huffily. ‘I’m on an exclusive job here. What are you lot after?’
‘Same as you, mate.’ One of the paps shot him a wink. ‘Piccies.’
They all surged forward as a car drew into the carriage sweep with someone who looked startlingly like one of the Baldwin brothers in the passenger seat, but it turned out to be Tash’s cousin Olly and his boyfriend Ginger, who was most alarmed to find a man leaning on his bonnet and pressing a camera lens into the windscreen of his Porsche.
‘I had no idea wedding photographers were so adventurous these days,’ he said in surprise. ‘I thought it was all about getting into a line and trying not to stand with a tree behind your head.’
The
Cheers!
photographer, who had wasted almost half a reel of film on Olly before he realised his mistake, was furious.
He then enlisted the help of a burly security guard to throw the tabloid stringers out into the lane. But confined there, they simply rushed to their cars, drew step-ladders out of the boots, and set them up at the far side of the brick and flint walls, over which they pointed their zoom lenses.
‘You’d think Princess Diana was coming,’ the
Cheers!
photographer hissed through his teeth, and then almost fainted as a convertible Audi crunched on to the gravel.
‘I say,’ called a soft, plummy voice tinged with shyness, ‘is this the O’Shaughnessy-French wedding?’
‘Y-yes, ma’am,’ the photographer gulped, trying to peer beneath the broad-brimmed hat and dark designer glasses. She was certainly radiant, and blonde, and very, very classy. His eyes automatically darted to the boot, wondering if she had a date stashed in there.
She giggled. ‘Please don’t call me that, however flattering. I’m here incognito – I do so hate being recognised these days.’
‘Of course, I quite understand,’ he oozed, slyly checking the amount of film he had left in his camera.
‘Are you from
Horse and Hound
, then?’ she asked as she put the car into reverse and looked around for a parking space.
‘Er – I don’t quite understand?’
She started to laugh. ‘I thought you knew who I was?’
‘Um—’
‘Julia . . . ?’ she coaxed teasingly.
He started to colour, realising the enormity of his mistake.
‘Sorry, love, I thought you were the other one,’ he gulped.
‘What? Lucinda Green?’
‘Who?’
She laughed even more. ‘Darling, my name’s Julia Ditton. I wouldn’t bother photographing me – I’m not nearly famous enough for you. But I overtook Minty Blythe rattling along the A34 in a Beetle convertible about ten minutes ago, so she’ll be here any sec.’
‘It must have been left back there!’ Matty sighed, close to despair. ‘That bloody ford is straight ahead.’ He started a three-point turn.
‘No, we’ve already tried that left turn.’ Sally was spinning the map around and around almost as frantically as her husband was spinning the wheel. ‘It just goes to Fosbourne Dean, which is useless. What about the lane on the right?’
‘That takes us back towards the farm.’
‘We’ll just have to go back there and ask.’ Sally looked at her watch. ‘We could be driving round in circles for hours. I told you we should have followed that Volvo with all the hats in it – they had to be wedding guests.’
‘I hope not – they looked like retired barmaids on an outing to the races.’ Matty was appalled. ‘Although, in retrospect, it could have been a contingent of Niall’s aunts.’
‘For a card-carrying socialist, you can be such a snob!’ she laughed.
Suddenly he started to laugh too. ‘But I always carry my card in the correct pocket of my ratcatcher, darling.’
Casting the map aside, Sally smiled. If she had levelled the same accusation at him a fortnight ago, he would have bitten her head off and retreated into an indignant sulk.
She tilted her head towards him as they sped along the lane that led back to Fosbourne Ducis. ‘You know Lisette’s been invited to this wedding, don’t you?’
He shrugged, slowing down at a turning point to let a Land-Rover get past.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Do
you
?’ He glanced across at her with his wary yellow eyes.
‘A bit.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘But I guess we have a lot to thank her for.’
‘I hope that’s supposed to be a joke?’ Matty still had his foot on the brake as he gazed at her.
But she nodded, eyes bright with belief. ‘If she hadn’t tried so hard to persuade me that our marriage was over, I might still believe it. Instead, I realised how far down my roots have grown since we married and how irretrievably entwined in yours they’ve become.’
‘You didn’t take much persuasion to uproot and rush down here as I recall,’ Matty pointed out, but his tone was gentle and teasing rather than accusatory. They had talked this through many, many times over the past week.
‘And I missed you like mad,’ Sally sighed. ‘Lisette’s commitment to any one thing lasts about as long as it takes to shoot a film – she finds it as easy to leave a man as a hotel room, and usually in the same total mess. Even if it weren’t for the children, I simply can’t do that to you, and the easier she told me it was, the more I missed you and wanted to make our marriage work, rather than make myself work.’
Matty started to smile. ‘I suppose the fact that she thinks I’m an all-out failure isn’t such a bad thing either. Before she came along, I was the only one allowed to think that. Wallowing in self-pity isn’t nearly so much fun when someone starts calling you a self-pitying jerk.’
‘Did Lisette really call you that?’ Sally looked indignant. ‘The cow!’
‘You called me that, actually.’ He grinned. ‘But it was only when she started luring you away to The Ivy every day to help her lunch a thousand shits that you called me anything at all. Before that you only ever called me into the kitchen for supper. The moment Lisette-your-teeth-on-edge came on to the scene, you developed terminal termagancy.’
Sally stretched back to tickle Linus who was just waking up on the back seat with a groggy, grumpy wail.
‘Lisette didn’t really take me to The Ivy on her important business lunches.’ She bit her lip guiltily. ‘I only said that to get at you. Mostly I just hung around her office feeling surplus and gossiping. That’s why it’s my fault that Tash has probably lost the ride on her best horse.’
Matty’s face tightened at the mention of his sister’s name. ‘The blushing bride – and no wonder! Niall has a lot of groom for improvement too. How they can go through with this bloody ridiculous wedding at all is beyond me. It might be the biggest organisational triumph of my mother’s life, plus a huge media exercise for Lisette, but they’ll make one another miserable. Both Niall and Tash have always been pathetically eager to please. Anyone else would have called things off weeks ago. Knowing them, they’ll probably wait until they’re at the altar to have second thoughts.’
‘You don’t really think that, do you?’ Sally gasped.
‘I’d like to.’ Matty started driving towards the farm again. ‘And I don’t think I’ll be the only one who’ll be crossing their fingers and hoping Niall forgets his lines for once in his life when it comes to “I do”.’ He chewed his lip and thought briefly about Zoe Goldsmith.
‘So by that I take it you haven’t had a last-minute change of heart about handing the ring to Niall?’ Sally smiled sadly.
‘No. I might be a new man, but I’ll never be a best one under these circumstances.’
She sighed. ‘I wonder who Niall’s got after all?’
‘Rory Franks, I think.’
‘That hell-raising louse?’ Sally looked horrified. ‘Talk about “with this vice ring I thee wed”. He’ll have pawned it to buy a gram of coke by now.’
‘He’s been in re-hab, apparently.’ Matty slowed down as a deer dashed across the road. ‘So he says, anyway.’
‘Then he’s a re-habitual liar.’ She muttered. ‘When Rory Franks sneezes, half of Colombia comes out of his nose.’