Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [42]
‘It’s as simple as that, is it?’
‘Not quite. I want you to pretend to your cousins, your aunts, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all that we’re an item… Think of it as trying me for size.’
‘When I already know you’re a perfect fit?’
‘Shut up, corn man. You know I like weddings. I like your family. Lucy and Patrick will be there, won’t they? I haven’t seen them for ages.’
‘Sounds like an easy way of wriggling out of thinking up a proper F to me.’
‘I resent that. It certainly isn’t. Family get-togethers. Number three on the list of things couples argue about. After money and sex. Crucial!’
‘Where are you getting these statistics, Nat?’
‘Trisha.’
‘Must be true, then. Can’t we deal with one and two first?’
‘You wish. I’ve got no money, and we’re having no sex. So I can come?’
‘I wasn’t even going to go myself.’
‘Well, you are now. Think of the Brownie points you’ll get with your mum.’
‘You win. We’ll go. God knows why, but we’ll go.’
‘Oh, this is going to be even better than I thought!’ Natalie squealed with delight.
‘They aren’t the most stylish branch of the family, it has to be said. You were warned…’
‘Warned? We should be filming this. You’d sell it to Endemol for a fortune.’
The bridal party were having a fag on the pavement outside the town hall. The bride (sticking to tradition by appearing to be six feet wide) was concerned about getting ash down her polyester taffeta so the bridesmaid, a vision in strapless maroon, was holding the cigarette for them and they puffed away, oblivious of the page-boy, with his waistcoat and shaved head, who stood between them, pulling at their skirts and demanding, ‘Toilet.’
Shoppers wove their way through the small crowd, largely ignoring them. There was a wedding on the half-hour at the register office on a Saturday, and, frankly, all this well-wishing and confetti-tossing got in the way.
Tom and Natalie were on the other side of the road. ‘Let’s leave it until the last moment,’ Tom had pleaded.
It was a while since she’d seen him in a suit, Natalie thought. He looked pretty good. She’d bought her suit and hat last year, for the radio station’s annual outing – to the evening races at Windsor – and been almost as horribly overdressed there as she was here, but she loved it. Besides, she was in character, wasn’t she, so it was her costume? The dress was terribly low cut – Susannah had talked her into it – and chiffon, the lightest mint green, with white devore flowers, and the coat, very Countess of Wessex, she’d thought – was a shade darker. The hat was what Susannah called a ‘fascinator’, an unfeasibly expensive concoction of feathers, net and seed pearls that was pinned to her head at a jaunty angle. In the mirror at Dickins and Jones, she had looked, to herself, like someone else. (A surgeon’s wife, perhaps?) At this wedding she was the smartest guest by a very wide margin.
‘Bloody hell,’ Tom had said, when he’d arrived to pick her up. ‘What have you come as?’
‘Don’t be rude. I’ve come as your girlfriend, of course.’
‘You look more like a Tory wife.’
‘Piss off.’
She had the grace to feel a little self-conscious now. Although the groom and his best man had on maroon cravats with their ill-fitting hired suits, most of the men had open collars and gold chains. And tattoos, which was only fitting, since the bride appeared to have Robbie Williams’s face – palm-sized – inked on to her left shoulder.
Tom’s cousin, christened David but known by all as Pinhead, for obvious reasons, crossed the road to greet them: ‘Tom. How are you, mate? Cheers for coming.’
‘I’m fine, Pin – Dave. Thanks. This is Natalie, my girlfriend.’
She experienced a little frisson to be referred to in that way after so long. Even if he did say it a bit funny.
Dave pumped her hand enthusiastically. He had sweat patches under each arm. ‘Nice to meet you, love.’ Then he gestured over his shoulder. ‘Looks all right, doesn’t she, the old girl?’
‘She looks beautiful.’ Natalie fixed her face into an expression of sincerity. Tom, she noticed, seemed fixated by something