by Anne Brooke
“As long as it’s not the Wife of Bath!”
“Are you sure about that?...”
“Yes!” she gives him a mock-angry look and he subsides, but he’s still smiling. All in all, it’s not a bad idea though – she does love the medieval period and even though they’re not having a themed wedding (perish the thought), having a themed cake will certainly be a light-hearted touch.
“What about you though?” she muses. “We could put something on the cake which is important to you too. A camera?”
“With medieval figures? Not sure that would work. Anyway, you’ve already persuaded me at ‘chocolate’. I’ll be more than happy with that.”
Olivia cuddles up and gives him a big kiss on the cheek. “Thank you. You’re a truly lovely man. Now all we need to do is find a baker.”
This takes a lot longer than she’s anticipated. The first ten bakers she phones up are initially enthusiastic and then increasingly quiet and distant. One of them fades out entirely and Olivia eventually finds herself talking to the disconnect buzz. So annoying! But she’s determined to persevere and makes herself pick up the phone to call the eleventh company on her list.
This time it’s different. No, they don’t have anyone skilled enough to create such a cake, but the woman on the end of the line agrees with Olivia that it’s a lovely idea and has she thought of using an icing expert?
No, Olivia hasn’t thought of this but it makes sense, so she makes a note of the two or three names she’s given, thanks the very helpful woman and puts the phone down.
She ditches the baker list, and starts to ring the icing gurus instead. Ten minutes later, she and Kieran have an appointment with an ‘icing expert’ in a village half an hour’s drive away from her mother’s house the following Saturday, and she can’t wait for the weekend to arrive.
Emma the Icing Expert lives in a tiny cottage on the edge of a tiny village. Almost a hamlet really. When Olivia and Kieran park the car on the verge, the first things they notice are the hollyhocks. There are rows and rows of them lining the pathway up to the cottage, in every colour you can imagine: red and white, yellow, orange, and even a few dark blue ones – so blue they’re nearly black.
“Wow,” Olivia says. “They’re amazing.”
Kieran nods and she can see he’s itching to take a photograph or several but he’s not thought to bring his camera with him. Without warning, the front door is flung open and a small, dark-haired woman greets them with outstretched arms. She’s dressed in a glittering array of light blues and floaty greens, and her hair is tied up into a messy bun with a sparkling silver fabric band. Olivia likes her at once.
“Hello! You must be Kieran and Olivia. How lovely to see you. I’m Emma, of course. It was lovely to talk with you, Olivia, on the phone – I think your ideas sounds amazing. It’s wonderful to speak with a bride who wants something different on the cake. I was very excited by the concept – come in and have coffee and we can discuss it!”
By this time, Olivia and Kieran are already in the cottage’s bijou but welcoming living room, ensconced on a two seater sofa loaded with pink and purple cushions. Kieran is looking dazed but surprisingly not unhappy with the torrent of words coming their way. He’s too busy gazing round the room in wonder, and Olivia can’t blame him. Even though it’s tiny, the room is packed with fabric in the same colours as the hollyhocks in the garden: white and golden with here and there flashes of red. Somewhere all this jazziness doesn’t make the room seem smaller than it is but instead creates an atmosphere of comfort which Olivia, for one, thinks she would find hard to leave.
Emma makes them both coffee and lays an album of cake options in front of them. The coffee comes with chocolate Digestives, but no cake, and Olivia has to smile. The icing expert notices and smiles too.
“I know,” Emma says, with more than a little insight though presumably she has the same conversations with all new visitors. “I should offer cake, but actually I’m really hopeless at baking them. My friend in the next village along does that. I just do the decorating. But don’t worry, because I got her to whip up a sample or two of chocolate cake types to see if they suit you. Oh, and there’s some of her fruit cake too, though I know you weren’t so worried about that.”
At once, she rushes out of the room and then almost immediately rushes in again, carrying an enormous plate of different cakes. Olivia wonders if she’s actually in heaven right now, and Kieran must think the same, because he reaches out and takes the nearest slice of chocolate cake like a man starved of all food for a month.
Olivia laughs, and he has the grace to redden before offering her the slice.
“No, please! You go ahead. I can try my own.”
In companionable silence, they munch on cake while Emma flicks through her pictures of expertly iced and totally wild wedding cakes, and explains and makes suggestions for them. It’s all wonderful, but both Olivia and Kieran prefer the third of the chocolate samples, because it’s the richest and meltingly good. They can’t decide on the fruit layer, but in the end, Emma guides them to the slightly denser version on the grounds that it will be fun to have a chocolate/fruit/chocolate sandwich for the layers and it needs to hold the chocolate layer up.
Olivia and Kieran are more than happy with these decisions. They’re also very happy that after a good half-hour discussion, they and Emma come up with a more than decent cake decoration plan. The sketch Emma makes is exactly how Olivia has envisaged it, and Kieran nods his approval too.
So, they leave Emma the icing expert, pleasantly full of cake and comfort, and fired up with wedding cake enthusiasm. Olivia can’t wait to pick the eventual creation up, even though when she does a day before the wedding, it takes her triple the time to drive back to her mother’s home as she’s so terrified she might lose a piece.
She doesn’t, though she can’t help laughing with Kieran over the fact they’ve paid double the cost of the wedding dress for the wedding cake. Still, it’s worth every penny and who’s counting?
Chapter Ten: The Bride
Some girls are born to be brides and some girls have to work a lot harder at it, Olivia soon comes to discover. First of all, she isn’t a meringue bride and she doesn’t like fuss. She pays no store to bridesmaids, best men or the thought of having to clutch a posy of flowers throughout her special day. After all, if they aren’t going to have bridesmaids, where on earth is she going to stuff any flowers while she is saying the magic words. Up her knicker leg? She thinks not.
So flowers are out, which saves a bit of money at least. She’ll have flowers in the reception instead. That way tricky Auntie Paula won’t be able to complain too much. Though, if Olivia isn’t going for the traditional bridesmaid/best man/being given away option, then Auntie Paula will have a long list of complaints to raise which will for her be far more important than flowers, or the lack of them.
Maybe she shouldn’t invite Auntie Paula at all? The thought crosses her mind before being firmly put into the Impossible Bin. Auntie Paula and Auntie Jenny will absolutely have to be there. Olivia’s mother will never forgive her if they aren’t. They are the only family who are coming, as Olivia doesn’t think much of her cousins who – to her mind – have always been very scathing about every single one of her life choices. She has no intention of giving them the chance to set about Kieran. The aunts in tandem are bad enough – so her husband-to-be will have plenty to deal with, just with them.
The fact her mother says nothing when Olivia tells her the guest list is sticking to a very small and select group of friends and family shows her just how much a bride is allowed to get away with. If this was an ordinary party – without the wedding – the cousins would have to be there, and Olivia would have to bite her lip and smile, however falsely, when one of the dreaded trio drifted anywhere near her.
Why does she have to be the only girl in a whole generation? It simply isn’t fair, and she suspects her cousins don’t much like the fact either. There, at least, they have somethin
g in common, however tenuous. Miracles will never cease!
Of all the good things about being a bride-to-be however, including the ability to choose exactly how the day itself will turn out (with reference to her fiancé of course, always), Olivia loves this joy the most: the joy of the Bridal magazine. The moment the ring is on her finger, she experiences an overwhelming desire to browse through pictures of women in bridal dresses on an almost daily basis. Lots of women and as quickly as possible. Maybe it’s something they add to the engagement ring?
Anyway, the very next working day after the engagement, Olivia nips into town at lunchtime and buys five wedding magazines. She would have bought six but thinks this is probably overdoing it. All that afternoon at work, she keeps on stroking their packaging in her shopping bag, longing to rip them open and devour the contents. It isn’t a great idea at work though, not with the amount of typing she’s supposed to do before she departs for the day.
With her inbox significantly depleted, Olivia finally leaves work at just after 6pm and is at Kieran’s by 7pm. She rushes inside, gives her fiancé a swift but passionate kiss, ignores the smell of coffee brewing in the kitchen (a miracle in itself), and hotfoots it to the living room, clutching her bag to her chest.
Once there, Olivia rips off the wrapping of the first and thickest of her precious magazines and begins to flick through, a smile on her face.
“What’s that?” Kieran asks as he strolls in a few minutes later with a steaming – and welcome – cup of Nescafe.
She looks up at him from her rapture on the sofa. “Wedding magazines – aren’t they wonderful!”
As an example of the strange bliss Olivia is experiencing, she shows him the spread of photos she’s looking at: all happy brides on summer days flowing over meadows in dresses of lace and satin.
“Look how beautiful they all are,” she enthuses.
Kieran laughs, and gives the pages nothing more than a cursory glance before depositing her coffee on the table and kissing her. “You may be right, but none of them are a patch on you. On our wedding day, you’ll look as stunning as always, I promise you.”
“Ha! Smoothie!” she teases. “You were never like this when I met you.”
“That’s because I was struck dumb with wonder,” he teases back and then his gaze falls to her bag. “How many magazines did you buy?”
“Just five,” Olivia says, closing the one she’s reading and clutching it to her as if to protect it. “It would have been six, but I thought that might be overkill.”
“Hmm, yes, maybe. Though won’t it just be confusing, having so many of these?”
She shakes her head firmly. “I’m getting ideas. It’s always good to keep the options open. You know how you like to keep all the options open!”
It’s true. Olivia is a woman who makes decisions quickly and then carries them out. If they end up being wrong, she’ll simply remake the decision and do something else. On the other hand, Kieran likes to understand and mull over all the possibilities and ramifications until the very last minute. In the beginning, this trait drives her mad, but she’s got used to it now – and actually on a few occasions it’s saved the wasted time of an initial wrong decision.
“And the other thing,” she continues, “is I’m loving flicking through these. Being engaged to be married won’t happen again – hopefully! – and I’m going to make the most of it by indulging in all my secret girly fantasies.”
This time, Kieran’s grin is wider. “Tell me more,” he says.
***
No matter what her loved one thinks, there’s something strangely gripping about the glamour and romance of getting married. Olivia doesn’t do romance in her life – in fact Kieran is far more romantic than she is. This was proved beyond all past and future doubt at their first ever Christmas being together. Kieran’s card to her was full of hearts, sparkle and flowers and he’d written inside it how much he loved her and loved being with her, and how happy she made him, and how much he was going to spend all his life making her happy.
In fact, it was the most he’d ever either written or said at any one time, Olivia is sure, and she’d been so startled, she began laughing as she read it.
Kieran looked most put out – as well he might. “What’s going on? Don’t you like your card?”
Olivia shook her head, still laughing. “No, it’s not that. I love it, really I do! It just wasn’t what I expected from you.”
Kieran harrumphed. “Because you don’t think men are romantic?”
“I’m sure you are, but you never say a word from one day to another so it’s hard to say!”
“Harsh, but fair,” he conceded. “Though we can be romantic without words, you know.”
Olivia gave him a cheeky wink. “I’ll believe you, thousands wouldn’t. But I’m not laughing because of that. Not really. I’m laughing because you’ve not opened my card to you yet.’
Then she collapsed on the sofa, clutching her stomach and trying not to get hysterical. He gave her a mock-stern look, grabbed her card and opened it. On her card to him was a picture of an enormously fat Santa failing to squeeze into a wobbly chimney pot.
Inside it, she’d written: Happy Christmas, Fishface! Love you loads!
The look on his face only made her laugh all the more, and he leapt on top of her and tickled her into submission, which didn’t take long. “Mine’s romantic too!” she shrieked but he only tickled her all the more. “Pax! Pax! I’ll wet myself if you keep tickling me. Don’t you like my card?”
“I love it – it’s very …”
“… romantic?”
“… heartfelt,” he completed the sentence and finally took pity on her by stopping the tickle routine. “Plus it sums us up perfectly. I’m a deeply emotional and romantic individual tied forever to a woman who does nothing but mock him. What’s this about having a fishface? I have no such thing.”
Kieran demonstrated his lack of fishiness by opening and closing his mouth in a round O shape, which made Olivia feel she’d won the argument. “Stop it! You’ll definitely make me wet myself if you do that. It’s still funny though!”
From then on, Olivia has been happy to be cast in the role of the unromantic one in their relationship. Now, however, as she turns the pages of romance and glamour in the wedding magazines, she catches a glimpse of what other women must aspire to. This time it doesn’t feel as unobtainable as it usually is.
It must be the effect of being engaged – perhaps the marriage proposal has changed everything in a way she’s not thought possible before – not in terms of her outer style which will be much as it usually is and which the wedding dress she chooses definitely suits. But maybe something has changed inside – a sea-change at a deep level she’s not explored before. It definitely feels as if she and Kieran have taken a huge leap into adulthood, or as near as they ever come to it, just because they’re getting married.
Why should this be the case? Loads of other people, and certainly loads of their own friends, haven’t bothered with getting married, and in this day and age there’s no need to. But it’s still true Olivia feels differently now, almost as if everything she and Kieran have done up to now has been a kind of rehearsal and now the curtain is opening onto the real play.
A week or so later, Olivia decides to see what Kieran thinks about it.
“Do you think being engaged and getting married has changed stuff,” she muses apropos of nothing else they’ve been discussing one Saturday morning as they share a slice of burnt toast. “I mean between us. Not in a bad way, but in a good way.”
Kieran gives her a puzzled look. “Have you been reading those wedding magazines again? I did try to warn you …”
“No! Well, yes, but this is something separate. I feel much more adult since we got engaged. Is that just me being weird? And don’t say anything rude or I’ll grab the last slice of toast, I promise you!”
“Me? Rude? Never!” Kieran pauses and rocks back on his chair as he considers the questi
on. Olivia has got used to this over the time they’ve been together. Kieran likes to think things through before he gives a reply to anything, whereas she’ll leap in with her opinion the moment the questioner has stopped talking and sometimes before, to her shame.
“Yes, you might be right,” he says at last just when Olivia is beginning to wonder if he may have fallen into a trance. “It’s the next step in being an adult, isn’t it? I love you and you love me, so we get married. It’s a public statement of commitment which matches our private relationship and how we are together. We’re going to stand up together in your mother’s church and commit ourselves to each other forever, and I’m going to mean every word of it. I know I’m going to be nervous, but I can’t wait. It’s the beginning of something else for us, isn’t it? Something special. And if that isn’t being adult, then I don’t know what is.”
Olivia gapes at her fiancé. She’s never heard him say so much before or say anything so totally lovely. He is – though with her how can he be otherwise? – a man of few words. Well, he must have been saving them all up for now because she can feel her eyes fill with tears she’s desperately trying to blink away.
All but dropping her cup, she launches herself across the table and hugs him. “Darling, that’s so lovely! I really do love you too. That’s such a wonderful thing to say, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, patting her shoulder. He isn’t a great one for hugging either though he’s learning. “You’re not crying, are you?”
“No,” she says, wiping her hand across her eyes. “It’s liquid smiling.”
The rumble of his answering laughter makes her smile again.
“Women!” he says with a sigh. “Why do you always cry when you’re happy? I think you might have been right the first time – you’re definitely weird.”
She probably is too, Olivia thinks later. Which of course makes her a perfect match for Kieran.
His words stay with her all week, and she finds herself thinking about the upcoming wedding in a different way. It’s not about all the paraphernalia associated with the event: dress; shoes; hair; make-up. It’s about Kieran and how much she loves him.
