A Groom With a View

by Sophie Ranald

  “Let’s have a little look.” Valerie led me out of the fitting room towards one of the huge cheval mirrors, with Katharine following in our wake.

  And she was right. It suited me. It was a good dress. I did a few turns in front of the mirror, waiting for the magic to happen. It hadn’t, exactly, but it was definitely a dress I could wear. Alexa Chung, no. Me in a wedding dress, yes.

  I’d noticed when Valerie had brought the dresses, that they’d all had price tags discreetly attached to them with bits of satin ribbon. But now the price was concealed somewhere next to my spine, beneath the pearl buttons.

  “I don’t think you mentioned how much this costs,” I said to Valerie.

  “Ah, now, let me see,” she said. “This is one of our exclusive, limited-edition designs by Angelo Venetti – you’ll have heard of him, of course – and so it’s at the upper end of the range, price-wise.”

  And she named a figure that would have taken my breath away, had the foundation garment not done so already. It was more than Nick and I earn a month, put together. It was more than we’d spend on a holiday. But then, it was my wedding dress. Most of the women featured in Inspired Bride spent this much, some even more. If Katharine okayed it, I’d buy it, I decided. To hell with the cost. I’d stick it on a credit card. At least it would mean never having to try on another wedding dress.

  I turned to Katharine. “What do you reckon?” But she was looking down at her phone again, and as I watched, a huge tear splatted down on to the screen.

  “Just give us a moment.” I hustled her back into the cubicle and closed the curtain. “Katharine! What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please, don’t worry. This isn’t about me. We’re supposed to be buying your dress.”

  “My dress? Fuck the dress, Katharine. I’m buying you a drink.”

  Valerie may have been finding perfect dresses for brides for thirty years, but I bet she’d never seen anyone get out of one as quickly as I did. I shoved my jeans, jumper, coat and boots back on, left the good-enough dress on the fitting room floor along with the punishing foundation garment, and hurried Katharine out, my arm tightly around her shoulders.

  “I’ll be in touch. Thanks, sorry, we have to dash,” I said to Valerie, and we left her gaping like a headmistress in the process of mutating into a goldfish.

  I didn’t say anything more to Katharine until I’d got us ensconced in a booth in the pub across the road with two huge glasses of red wine and a stack of paper napkins. Then I said, “Tell me what’s going on. It’s Iain, isn’t it?”

  She nodded miserably and blew her nose.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Katharine shook her head and pressed a napkin to her face. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, her voice muffled, “because that would make it real, and I can’t bear for it to be real. We’ve only been married two months. I was going to take him to The Mortimer for our anniversary. It’s paper, you know. Well, two years is, but I was thinking laterally. I was going to print out the booking and surprise him. And then,” she took a big gulp of wine and almost choked, “Oh, God, it’s all shit.”

  “Katharine, whatever’s going on, there are two things you need to know. First, it’s not your fault. Second, whatever it is and however awful you feel now, you’ll get through it. Is he. . . is there someone else?”

  She nodded miserably. “How did you know?”

  I thought, because I’ve known Iain for a long time. I know he’s got form for this kind of thing. He’s a man of many talents but keeping his dick in his pants isn’t one of them. But of course I didn’t say that to her.

  I said, “It kind of had to be that. You wouldn’t be so shattered by a normal row. But are you sure you haven’t got it wrong?”

  “As sure as I can be,” Katharine said miserably. “I’ve been so fucking stupid. It’s been going on for months: suddenly needing to work late, spending the evenings when he was at home constantly texting, getting a new mobile ‘for work’. I told myself it was fine, that there was no way he’d marry me if he wasn’t being faithful. But it looks like I was wrong.”

  I poured us both some more wine. “But hold on. People do work late. When Nick and Iain started the agency they worked stupid hours. We hardly saw each other. And Guido has two phones – it’s not that unusual a thing to do.” I didn’t tell Katharine that the real reason for Guido’s second phone was so he could avoid Florence when he was at work. “So what’s suddenly changed?”

  “Nookie,” said Katharine miserably. It took me a few seconds to remember that this was her twee term for sex. “We did the sex diet thing, remember I told you? For two months before we got married I said no nookie, so that the wedding night would be extra special. And it would have been, if Iain had been less pissed. And then on honeymoon I was so shattered, to be honest, all I wanted to do was lie in the sun all day and go to sleep straight after supper. So once we stopped doing it, we never really started again, except for a couple of times.”

  I thought, I knew this sex diet malarkey was a shit idea. In fact, it was beginning to sound to me as if deciding to get married had been when things began to go wrong for Iain and Katharine. “But all relationships go through dry patches,” I said. “It’s totally normal. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all.”

  Katharine took another gulp of wine, blew her nose and said, “Pippa, I checked his credit card statement. I know it’s wrong to snoop, but I did. I would have checked his phones, but it’s like he’s surgically attached to both the stupid things, he even takes them to the loo with him. And he’s changed the password on his email, so I couldn’t check that either. So I looked at his Mastercard bill. It was grim, I felt so furtive, like every single cliché of the suspicious wife. I steamed open the envelope and glued it closed afterwards, and everything.”

  I was uncomfortably reminded of how I felt looking at Nick’s blog, as I found myself doing more and more often, and wondering again who ‘B’ was, with her kisses and promises of private messages in the comments. “And what did you find?”

  “Oh, God. This is so pathetic, isn’t it? He’s spent four hundred pounds at Myla, and five hundred at Netflorist, and almost a grand at Pandora. And I haven’t seen a single flower or pair of knickers and certainly not any jewellery.”

  “But couldn’t they be Christmas presents for you?” I said.

  “I’ve been with Iain for four years now, Pippa. The first six months, he bought me flowers every Friday. I got a Tiffany bracelet for my birthday, and on Valentine’s Day he took me to Agent Provocateur and did that thing of watching through the peephole while I tried stuff on. Since we got engaged, he’s given me Lakeland vouchers for every single Christmas and birthday. That stuff is not for me.”

  “Have you talked to him?” I asked.

  “I haven’t had the, ‘Are you fucking someone else?’ conversation, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “I just can’t face it. I’ve asked him what’s wrong, like, a million times, and he just says he’s busy at work. And it’s true, he is busy at work. But I think he’s also fucking someone else.”

  I squeezed her hand. “I just don’t know what to say. It’s awful.”

  Katharine said, “You know what, if I could turn back the clock and not have that stupid, ridiculous, excessive fucking wedding, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Every single gold chocolate dragée and piece of organic rose-petal confetti and pair of bridesmaids’ knickers – I actually bought them vintage-style silk pants to match our colour theme, Pippa, how fucking obsessed was I? – every single one of those things took chunks of my life that I’ll never get back. They took time I could have spent with Iain, going to gigs with him or watching True Blood or sucking him off. Instead I spent it wrapping up miniature bottles of Moët for favours. There were two hundred of those stupid things left at the venue after the wedding. Two hundred. We told the waiting staff to take them.”

  I squeezed her hand again. We’d left our Moë
t miniatures behind, I remembered. I felt a bit guilty about it now.

  “I put everything I had into that wedding and now it’s all fucked.” Then she seemed to remember who she was talking to. “It won’t be like that for you and Nick, obviously. You’ll be really happy, I’m sure. And your wedding’s going to be lovely.”

  I poured the last of the bottle of wine into our glasses. “Katharine, whatever happens, I’m here. If you want to talk, or anything. Because I think it’s important not to rush into anything, and to think very carefully about what you want to do.”

  “I want to disembowel that bastard with my eyebrow tweezers,” she said. Then she started to cry again. “I love him so much.”

  An hour and two more glasses of red later, I finally said goodbye to Katharine at the Tube station. I’d learned a lot about her. I’d learned that there was far more to her than her fluffy, girly exterior, and that she got properly sweary when she was upset. I’d learned that she really, really did love Iain, and would probably have loved him even if he had still been the long-haired bass player from Deathly Hush and living in a Dalston squat. I didn’t know what she was going to decide to do next, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to say to Nick about his best mate’s – and our best man’s – infidelity. But there was one thing I knew for sure: I’d gone right off the idea of buying that wedding dress.

  The next day, while I quickly devoured my lunch at my desk (it consisted of half a bag of wine gums that I’d found in my drawer and a Diet Coke), I caught up on Nick’s blog. I still, somehow, felt ashamed about reading it, because he hadn’t mentioned it to me and I was sure that he would have done if he’d wanted to share it with me. But I couldn’t shake off the suspicion that there were things he was choosing to share with other people, instead, and that it was vital that I kept a watching brief on what he was writing.

  Hello, followers. Another update on how things are going here as the wedding planning hots up. Only 65 days to go now, and in between Pippa has two overseas trips, plus there’s all the usual madness of Christmas and New Year, and I have loads of work deadlines to get out of the way too (yes, I actually have a job alongside my groom-to-be duties and rather sporadic blogging habit!).

  The good news: our photographer, videographer and registrar are booked, so that’s three of the big ones out of the way. Pippa’s maid of honour, Callie, is having a meeting in the next couple of days with a florist, who looks ace. I’ve never given a toss about flowers (yes, I am guilty of having bought Pippa red roses from Tesco on Valentine’s Day, when I’d forgotten to buy her anything else. She actually pretended to like them, which was one of the many things that made me realise she’s the woman for me!), but Beatrice of Bea’s Blooms (you can check out her website here) is bloody brilliant (see what I did there?).

  A few of you have asked how Pippa’s dress hunt is going, and there’s still no result on that front. She’s getting pretty stressed about it, and so am I if I’m honest, but I don’t want her to know that, because she has so much else on her plate. I’ve given my mum, who’s staying with us and being a total legend about helping out with all the planning stuff, strict instructions not to mention it either and she has managed to cut down to only asking Pippa about it every second day, ha ha!

  It was Mum’s idea to organise a bit of a get-together with Pippa’s parents along with Callie and Iain, who’s my best man. I haven’t posted about this before because I wanted it to be a surprise for Pip, and although she doesn’t read this blog. . . well, you never know. I’m crap at secrets and it would be absolutely typical of me to be outed by my own blog! But I managed to keep schtum and last night was a total surprise for Pip.

  The big event went really well. Pip had actually been dress-shopping beforehand, and she was completely blown away when she got home and there were her parents, Callie and loads of chilled champagne. Iain arrived a few minutes late (take a yellow card, mate!) and her face when he walked in was an absolute picture. After a pretty okay dinner cooked by yours truly (well, mac and cheese with bacon, my speciality), we talked readings and vows and speeches and all the rest, and I think we’ve got those things pretty much nailed down now.

  So, on the to-do list remains finalising our guest list. I know we’ve left this scarily late, but when you’ve got a family as big as mine, it’s pretty damn complicated to try and decide who makes the cut. Watch this space!

  My experience of the event wasn’t quite as Nick described. By the time I got home, I’d decided that I really wanted to chat to him about what Katharine had told me. She hadn’t sworn me to secrecy or anything, and I was used to telling him just about everything, and listening to (sometimes even following) his advice. But, of course, I walked in through the door and there were Mum and Dad and Callie, all going, “Surprise!” And a few minutes later Iain turned up.

  Seeing him was just weird. He looked just the same as usual, with his shaven head and his goatee and his designer suit, and he greeted me with his usual affectionate hug and kiss on both cheeks. And I greeted him warmly too, once I was over the initial shock of seeing him, but all I wanted to do was shake him and demand to know what the hell he was playing at. And then everyone started asking me how the dress-shopping expedition had gone, and it was impossible to tell them without saying why the dress that I thought would do when I tried it on had turned into Not If It Was The Last One On Earth. So I lied, and waffled a bit about how I still wasn’t sure, but something would turn up. I could see Nick and Callie exchanging anxious glances. Then Erica took me into the kitchen (which looked like Typhoon Haiyan had been through it, as it always does in the aftermath of Nick’s cooking) for a ‘little chat’.

  “Nick has gone to a great deal of trouble tonight, Pippa,” she said, gesturing at the carnage.

  “I know he has,” I said. “It’s a wonderful surprise and I appreciate it so much. I’m very lucky.”

  “Sometimes,” Erica said, “I wonder whether you in fact realise how lucky you are.”

  Then she gave me what I can only describe as the mother of all bollockings. Or possibly the mother-in-law of all bollockings, which would be even worse, wouldn’t it? But she did it in a typically Erica-like way. She told me that she and everyone else here tonight appreciated how important my career was to me, Nick most of all, which was why he was so unstintingly supportive of me. She reminded me that my parents and Callie had also gone to a great deal of trouble to be there.

  Then she said, “A wedding is a special time for any girl. But when I married Nick’s father, things were very different. I was expected to defer to the wishes of my family and my future family. We didn’t have the luxury of wedding planners like that nice Imogen. I bought my dress off the peg from BHS and my mother made the cake. We had our wedding breakfast in the church hall, with devilled eggs and vol-au-vents.”

  She paused for breath, and I thought how lovely that sounded, especially now retro food is so on trend.

  “I get the impression,” she said, “that brides today are encouraged to believe that the day is all about them. Pippa, this wedding is not all about you, no matter how much you would like it to be. I want you to think about that tonight.”

  I smarted with the injustice of it. I wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that all this was about what Nick wanted, that I was letting him get on with it because I loved him and he deserved his dream day as much as I did, and if it ended up not being my dream day, well, that was just tough. I wanted to try yet again to persuade her that I wasn’t as selfish as she thought. But there was suddenly a huge lump in my throat and I found I couldn’t say anything at all, so I just nodded mutely.

  “Pippa, we have had our differences over the years,” Erica said. “Now, my son has chosen you and I accept his choice. I hope we shall get along very well. But you’ve been spoiled, like so many only children, and you can be egotistical, as we both know only too well. I think it’s time to get back to your guests.” She made it sound as if I was the one who’d dragged her off to have
a row. I followed her back into the sitting room, choking back my annoyance and the threat of tears.

  She turned and hissed at me over her shoulder, “Take that sullen look off your face and smile!”

  So I did. I spent the rest of the evening smiling, and chatting about the plans, and saying yes to everything everyone suggested, and writing ‘fuck you’ on the roof of my mouth with my tongue. It did help, a bit.

  But the smile was properly wiped off my face later. I was chatting to Callie, who’d offered to stay and help with the clearing up and crash on our sofa, and noticed Mum and Dad making wanting-to-go gestures. But Erica was still in full flow, talking to Mum about co-ordinating their outfits.

  “I thought turquoise,” she said. “Perhaps a trouser suit – so much more modern. And a little fascinator. What did you have in mind, Justine?”

  “I hadn’t really thought,” Mum said. “I expect I’ll find something in the sales. Or failing that there’s always the Westbourne Thespians’ costume cupboard.” I could tell from the note of mischief in her voice that she was deliberately winding Erica up. She’d seen the look on my face when Erica and I came out of the kitchen and, bless her, she was fighting my corner. “We did The Importance of Being Earnest last year. I played Lady Bracknell, and I wore a charming purple frock with a bustle.”

  “With a what?” said Erica.

  “A bustle,” Mum said serenely. “And I had a hat with a stuffed hummingbird on it, but that might be a little OTT, although it was most becoming. Now, Erica, it’s been such a pleasure to see you again after so long, but we really must be off if we’re not going to miss our train. Are you ready, Gerard?”

  I can only think that Erica meant me to hear her, because there were only seven of us in the room and there was a bit of a lull in the conversation while Dad fussed about finding his coat. Anyway, she said quite loudly, “Of course, it doesn’t signify in the grand scheme of things what anyone wears to this wedding. I can’t imagine it lasting more than a year.”