I managed to convince Magda that I was unable to be a bridesmaid since I would be covering the event for the paper.
‘Fourth estate, you know, Magda. Editorial impartiality and all that.’
For a full account of the event, I refer you to the Free Press of Friday, 11 July 2003, not deep in the paper on the wedding pages either, but slap bang on the front, complete with three-column, eight-inch picture by Danny of Magda making her way up the Tor at the head of the procession.
Both picture and story marked a triumph for Magda in the face of a firm determination by Sophie to have absolutely nothing to do with the event, professionally or otherwise. This commendable aim was entirely thwarted by the fact that by the time the wedding occurred, Magda was a media star, having been on everything from Woman’s Hour to Richard and Judy, not to mention featured prominently on the pages of every national newspaper including my mother’s:
WOMAN TO WED HERSELF
‘IT’S GOODBYE TO BRIDGET JONES,’
SAYS EX-TV RESEARCHER
By the time Danny and I arrived on top of the Tor for the ceremony a small crowd had already gathered, including a small band of Scotsmen who’d taken a wrong turn on the way to Cornwall and were now well down a six-pack of McEwan’s. They watched with consummate interest as Bad Ponytail Peter, dressed in his Aleister Crowley outfit, set up his pasting table at the foot of the tower. First came a black bedspread with astrological signs, which he threw over the table, then candlesticks and a dusty old book, all clearly designed to make him look like some sort of magus. Last but not least came something bearing a strong resemblance to an African fly swot, and which at the end of the ceremony he would shake over Magda’s head for reasons not entirely clear to the rest of us. As he went about his work one of the drunken Scotsmen nudged my arm politely.
‘Wass happening here then, hen? Is it ganna be one of those primeval ceremonies?’
‘Pretty much,’ I said. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
Cresting the Tor, with her flares around her (the torches, you’ll recall, not the trousers) Magda looked as all brides should look on their wedding day, utterly radiant. In lieu of the Wedding March, the tantric drummers started up. Most were female and bra-less (we don’t do bras too much in our town, particularly among the women). Suffice it to say that the effect of their exertions beneath their flimsy Indian cotton tops could be seen to be quite seriously exciting the Scotsmen. Luckily, however, just when things might have turned nasty, a number of the bridesmaids took to hurling themselves to the ground, rolling around and shouting out invocations to Demeter, Great Goddess of Grain, at whose temple Magda had worked as a vestal virgin. ‘Less a divinity, then,’ as Danny remarked, ‘than a previous employer.’ Whatever. All the rolling around and shouting more than diverted everyone’s attention from what might have been a difficult situation.
In all this (and confounding the sceptics among you) I’d have to say the bridegroom wasn’t much missed, not least by one of the Scotsmen, who watched with an expression of shameless enchantment as Peter bound Magda’s hands symbolically with a tatty-looking piece of gold material she claimed was unearthed from some mummy’s tomb, but which I happen to know was a scarf she couldn’t sell in Hocus Pocus even when it was knocked down from £39.99 to a fiver. He then placed twin silver rings on both her third fingers, kissing them (slavering a little I thought, but then as you know he and Magda once mingled more than their auras after a Friday night channelling session), after which she knelt and raised her hands together sacrificially in the air as he read something over her head from that dusty old book. He told us later it was an ancient Egyptian blessing, although, frankly, it could just as easily have been a recipe for camel curry.
Personally, I would have liked a more traditional service, this because I wanted Peter to have to say, ‘Will you Magda take … well … you Magda …’ but no such luck. Thus his damn mumbo jumbo robbed me of probably the only opportunity I’m ever going to get in my life of raising my hand and stepping forward in that wonderful dramatic moment when we, the congregation, are asked if there is any reason why these two should not be joined together. ‘Hello, yes … excuse me … over here … Um, correct me if I’m wrong, and I know it’s a small point … but isn’t there just the one of them?’
The ceremony being over, there was a great deal of embracing, something in which I couldn’t help noticing one of the Scotsmen participated with more than the average enthusiasm. When it came to his turn to kiss the bride, it looked like a tongues job from where I was standing. This might have been considered offensive, not to say reprehensible, were it not for the fact that the newlywed appeared to show not the slightest objection.
After that it was all back to the Jolly Pilgrim. Despite being Pub of the Year and celebrated for its food, the Pilgrim still couldn’t rise to the fig fricassee and sheep’s eyes in aspic Magda had hoped for, so we had to make do instead with chilli and baked potatoes.
I was surprised to see Fleur waiting for us at the reception, surprised in so many ways, not least at that I hardly recognised her. Gone were the cashmere and pearls. Instead she was all in black leather, a change of image due in small part to the fact that now she was speed-dating.
‘Speed-dating?
‘Yes.’ Her look was challenging.
‘But I thought …’
‘What?’
‘Well, I thought that was for … professional people … you know, busy executives without a minute to spare.’
The look turned severe. ‘I’m doing four mornings a week in the shop now, Riley.’
After a couple more glasses of wine she told me her sex life was now ‘amazing’, this giggling like a teenager. ‘Honestly, Riley, I can’t tell you what I got up to last weekend,’ a vow of silence for which much thanks. On the other hand, taking in the leather bustier and thigh-boots I thought I could probably guess at it. Before I could stop her, she launched into a list of the shortcomings of her sex life with Martin.
‘We hadn’t done it for months. Frankly, I just couldn’t be bothered.’
His main crime, apparently, was that he never did anything interesting (and what that might be I chose not to imagine). That in the final reaches of lovemaking he made a sound like a train coming out of a tunnel shot quickly to the top of my list of Things I Would Prefer Not Know In Life and not least because I knew it would spring instantly to mind the next time I saw Martin.
And so it proved.
I was making my way through the bar downstairs on the way to the Pilgrim’s Ye Olde Outside Toilets, when I felt a firm hand on my arm and there he was. Before I could protest he’d dragged me on to a seat, put a glass of wine in front of me, which I didn’t want, and one in front of himself I judged to be definitely surplus to requirements.
‘You can tell me,’ he said, his eyes bleary. ‘How is she … really?’
I knew what he wanted me to say. He wanted me to say: ‘Martin, she’s devastated.’ He wanted me to say, ‘It’s all an act she’s putting on. She’s bitterly lonely. She knows she’s made a mistake, only she doesn’t know how to admit it.’ Unfortunately, however, I couldn’t say any of these things. Neither did I feel it was the right moment to reveal that thanks to the speed-dating she was currently trying to decide between a rich, black, beautiful barrister and a big blond über-mensch of a stockbroker so hot to trot it was scary.
Thus I contented myself with, ‘She’s fine, Martin,’ whereupon he gave me an irritated look, which morphed almost immediately into suspicion.
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Really.’
Not knowing quite what to say next, more as a reflex than anything else, and to fill up the bottomless pit of gloomy silence, I said, ‘So how’s things with you then, Martin?’
What happened next is a lesson to us all, spinsters everywhere. Beware the mild exchange of pleasantries. More especially beware the dangerous belief that where certain people are concerned, i.e., members of you own extended family, you’re entirel
y safe from surprises.
‘Me?’ Martin said. ‘Me?’ like only a fool could ask. ‘I’m fine.’ He said, ‘It’s a bull market out there … if you understand me,’ and he gave me a wink, so frightful, so retro-lascivious I could scarcely believe I’d seen it.
‘D’you know,’ he said, speaking the words in the firm, confident tones of a man who believes them to be the ones for which I’d been waiting through the long dry summer of my youth, ‘I’ve always fancied you, Riley.’ He was staring at me fixedly, or as fixedly as someone can stare, suffering from serious double vision (it was at this point I realised that Martin was totally plastered). He leant back in his captain’s chair, its front legs lifting rakishly off the floor, only the broad shameless smirk on his face betraying him as a man who for most of his life had considered morris dancing the acme of daring, but now, just for this moment, for this one terrible glorious moment, believed himself to be a Lothario of matchless ability.
‘You and I should get together, Riley.’
By way of response I did what all civilised women of my age and persuasion do when fielding inappropriate advances. I laughed. I said, ‘I think it’s forbidden by the prayer book, Martin,’ (he is, after all, a church warden) half rising to go.
Sadly the scene wasn’t over. As I tried, and with some alacrity, to prise myself out from behind the table, he shot forward on his seat, front legs of the chair clattering hard on the floor, and grabbed my hand, sandwiching the tender flesh of my middle finger between the large silver ring that I wear and the hard wood of the table.
‘OW!’
He held on fast to my fingers as I tried to pull them away.
‘There’s no reason why you and I shouldn’t have some fun.’
‘More to the point, there’s no reason why we should.’ I ripped my hand from his. ‘For fuck’s sake. Get a grip, Martin.’
Entirely inappropriate when I think about it.
By the time I made it back upstairs, Magda was attending to the traditional courtesies, complimenting the bridesmaids, thanking the guests for coming, raising her glass and saying how happy she and herself knew they would be, all this while fighting off, although clearly not too hard, the attentions of the amorous Scotsman.
He claimed his name was Hamish, something I thought unlikely, even at the time. However, it turned out to be the truth of it, as did the fact that he was a) surprisingly tender in bed and, b) extremely good at mending roofs, this last of particular importance to Magda, since the tree whose life she had so selflessly saved from the wrath of the Carpet World digger had recently shown its appreciation by crashing down on top of her conservatory.
Other useful attributes would prove to be the number and nature of his tattoos (bleeding hearts, skull and crossbones, death’s-heads, writhing serpents) which, when displayed by him, arms akimbo behind the counter, and even beneath a genially smiling face, would seriously cut down the incidence of shoplifting.* They would also put into perspective what Rochelle had previously thought of as her risqué twin daggers, while an Easterhouse childhood, a kicked heroin habit, and a spell in Barlinnie would have much the same effect on her slavish devotion towards a brace of over-acned young men who had managed to convince her they were cup holders when it came to bad behaviour.
For all this reasons, Hamish is still beneath Magda’s roof six months after her wedding.
‘Hen,’ he is prone to say, still staring at her as though she fell from heaven, ‘Ah thought you were the most beautiful thing Ah’d ever seen in that white dress. Ah still do.’
That night, standing beside Danny in the upstairs room of the Pilgrim, and watching the merry band of wizards, witches, astrologers, druids, Grand Vizors, and assembled all-purpose shamans doing what is always done by sixties people at weddings, i.e., dancing really badly, I said, ‘I tell you, Danny, sometimes I think we’ve shot into reverse in this damn town. Sometimes I think we’re heading straight back to the Dark Ages.’
What happened to Magda, meanwhile, as regards Hamish, has given fresh heart to my mother. ‘It just goes to show.’ This said with pursed lips and an eye cocked in my direction and in what I take to be a highly significant fashion. ‘It’s never too late.’
I don’t bother asking her what it goes to show, or what it’s never too late for, knowing as I do that all such cryptic allusions these days relate to Archie.
To say that my mother got excited when Archie returned a month or so after Fergie’s party and took me out to dinner is to indulge one last time in that deplorable habit of understatement.
‘Well?’
‘Well … what?’ I reached, appalled, for the alarm clock beside the bed the morning after. It said ten to seven.
‘Is he still there?’
‘Don’t be disgusting.’
I could see her at the other end of the line in her pink quilted dressing gown in the kitchen, reaching for her Nimble and her fat-free spread, making those sharp, irritated movements, hands-free receiver lodged between ear and skinny shoulder.
‘So what happened?’
‘Nothing happened, Mother.’
Cass, frankly, was not much better.
‘Nice time?’ she enquired later in the day, much too casually.
‘Not bad at all. Quite pleasant, in fact.’ Both of which were truthful. The nice thing about going out with a squillionaire, as I mentioned to Danny, is that it ‘sure takes the heat out of feeling you ought to go halves.’
‘I’ll say this for you, Riley,’ Archie said, leaning back in his chair in the dining room of the Jolly Pilgrim ‘You’re wearing well.’*
‘Well, you know …’ I took a sip of sixty-quid bordeaux, which I seemed to be swallowing perfectly well along with my principals. ‘Only one careful owner … me.’
‘So how’s your sex life?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Mine’s pretty thin.’
‘I don’t recall asking, Archie.’
I took a bite of the fancy ceps à something starter. ‘What’s happened to what’s her name, then?’
‘Ah ha,’ he said in the manner of a man who, if he’d had a monocle would have stuck it, roué-style, in his eye and peered at me through it. ‘So you are interested?’
‘No. I’m merely making polite conversation in return for this disgustingly expensive wine, Archie.’
In the end we tracked ‘what’s her name’ down to Feeona.
‘Good God, that was years ago.’
‘Hello?’ I held my knife and fork up either side of me. ‘I don’t keep up with your love life, Archie.’
‘Really? I always kept in touch with who you were going out with, Riley.’ He looked at me coolly over his glass as he said it.
In fact I had kept up with Archie’s love life over the years. Against my will.
‘He’s going out with her that presents that programme on the television.’
‘Well, that narrows it down, Mother.’
He did indeed go out for a while with one of our better-know TV quiz presenters, also a junior doctor, a business studies lecturer, and Fiona the aforementioned corporate events manager (and there’s an occupation we’ll be able to dispense with, come the revolution). All of which I couldn’t help thinking, made my tally of mechanics, painters and decorators, the odd renegade painter and writer (not to mention arch-rascal Lennie) look like a bunch of serious underachievers. Several of Archie’s were live-in relationships – business studies lecturer (Linda) and, of course, Feeeeona. He even married one of them. The junior doctor (Marilyn).
‘What happened?’
‘She went off with an ear, nose and throat surgeon.’
Archie seemed quite comfortable about all of this, tucking into his fillet steak without the least sign of angst or trauma. Looking at him, I had to admit that in the wearing-well stakes, he wasn’t doing that bad either. The tan helped, of course. Sophie likes to imply these days that I’m dead from the neck down as regards sex but it’s not true. Put a man in a good suit, especi
ally a tall one, cut his hair well and splash some French cologne on him and I can feel that faint familiar stirring as well as the next woman.
Around the third glass of wine, I was in the mood to be generous.
‘I guess you must feel pretty good about yourself, Archie.’
‘How so?’
‘Come on. Credit where it’s due. You’ve achieved what most people only dream of.’
‘Yeah … well… money …’ His lips pursed in a self-deprecating gesture.
This unnerved me. I wasn’t used to self-deprecation from Archie. ‘Yeah, money … you bet money. Don’t knock money.’
‘Right. And it really impresses you, for starters.’
I considered this, a forkful of fillet in the air. ‘Actually, it does although I hate to admit it. Still, enough of being nice to you. Tell me, how did you make all that goddamn money?’
According to Archie there was nothing clever about it.
‘Could you knock off the self-deprecation. It’s beginning to irritate me.’
‘It’s the truth,’ and I guess it was. There was nothing clever about it. Mean, perhaps. Sneaky. But hardly clever. All part of that great Nineties Dot Com Gold Rush. The Greater Fool Theory. All you had to do was to keep your eye on the ball – ‘or rather the shit and the fan’ – this so that when the two got too close you could off-load your stock onto some poor sap who was unaware of their proximity.
‘So … you found this greater fool, huh?’ And that was when he paused in the action of slicing through his fillet steak and raised his eyes, which were altogether too mocking and knowing.
He said, ‘No doubt you find that surprising, Riley?’
I could have let that go. Pretended I didn’t get the insinuation. But a lot more water had passed under that old bridge now.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 29
