by Sue Margolis
“In what way?”
“OK, I wanted to spare you this, but I can see now that I have no choice . . . Flick’s considering gospel singers or possibly a band of medieval minstrels.”
Hugh sat bolt upright and slapped his hand to his chest in a gesture of high-camp self-mockery. “For the love of God! Tell me it isn’t so.”
“Would I joke about something like this? And she also wants me to be maid of honor in a purple lace meringue.”
“Purple? Ouch.” He was himself again now. “That is bad.”
“Well, she hasn’t actually said purple, but I know that’s how it will end up. Huge, if nothing else, you have to rescue me.” She could tell he still wasn’t sure. “Please. If you do it, I promise you’ll get to wear one of those cute little headset things.”
“Really?” he said, camping it up again. “You’d really do that for me?”
“Huge, you’re my best mate. I’d do anything for you.”
He let out a long breath. “OK, this does seem like an emergency. I agree. It has to be stopped.”
“I’ll speak to Mum. Why don’t I do it now?”
“Oh . . . kay,” his voice had gone all flouncy again. “But whatever the deal, I’m holding out over the headset, right?”
“Right.” She got up and went over to the phone, which was sitting on a small but ugly Jacobean table with thick twisted legs. “Put it on speakerphone,” Hugh said.
Cyn dialed the number and let the phone ring a dozen or so times. She was just about to put the receiver down when Barbara picked up.
“Hi, Mum, it’s me. Why did you take so long to answer?”
“I was waiting for a call from Fein Platters.”
“I don’t understand. Wouldn’t that mean you’d pick up straightaway?”
“Absolutely not,” Barbara insisted. “I’m playing hard to get.”
Cyn wasn’t quite sure where the logic was in this, since it was Barbara trying to hire Fein Platters rather than the other way round, but she decided to let it go. “Look, Mum, I’ve been having some thoughts about the wedding. It’s going to involve you in so much hard work, so I was wondering how you’d feel about taking on a wedding planner.”
“A wedding planner?” She seemed intrigued. “Goodness, it never occurred to me. They’re all the go, aren’t they? Sylvia Gold from the synagogue Ladies’ Guild had one when their daughter got married. She didn’t stop showing off about it. I remember the planner would always ring during our fund-raising meetings. I’m sure Sylvia organized it. She would get all lah-di-dah and say, ‘Sorry, ladies, do excuse me. It’s Bianca, my wedding planner.’ But they cost a fortune. Your dad would really kick up.”
“Not necessarily. Hugh’s just lost his job and I told you what a wonderful fortieth birthday party he did for Harmony. I thought he’d be perfect to organize the wedding. It would take all the pressure off you. And he’d charge loads less than a real wedding planner.”
“Hang on a minute,” Hugh whispered. “A chap’s got to eat.” Cyn shushed him.
“Ooh, a gay wedding planner,” Barbara was saying. “Gay men have got so much style and flair . . . such panache. I’m sure Hugh has got loads more flair than Sylvia’s Bianca.”
Hugh was rolling his eyes. “Got a wedding to organize?” he trilled. “Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t know where to turn? Why not let Super Faggot come to your rescue? That’s Super Faggot—first for fabulous functions.” Cyn waved her hand in an attempt to shut him up.
“And isn’t Hugh the Honorable Hugh Thorpe Duff?”
“He most certainly is,” Cyn said. She turned to Hugh and gave him the thumbs-up. She knew precisely where this was going.
“I thought so,” Barbara came back. “Not that I’m a snob or anything. I mean, you know me. I don’t have a snobbish bone in my body.”
“Of course you don’t,” Cyn said, realizing that even an old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool leftie like her mum could be seduced by class—particularly if it meant getting one over on Sylvia Gold. Or, in this case, two, since Hugh was both gay and exceedingly posh.
“I don’t want to go too upmarket, though, particularly with the food. I don’t want people to feel intimidated. We must still have Grandma’s chocolate fountain and I thought deep-fried ice cream with black cherries might be fun.”
At the mention of deep-fried ice cream, Hugh put his head in his hands.
“And do you think Hugh would come with me to My Daughter’s Wedding and help me choose my outfit?”
“She has to be joking,” Hugh muttered. “There’s actually a shop called My Daughter’s Wedding? I can’t do it. I can’t. You’ll have to tell her. It’s all too much.”
“Mum, I know Hugh would absolutely love to help you choose an outfit.” She looked at Hugh, whose mouth was making a series of contorted expressions as if he were having a stroke in installments. “Actually, he’s right here and he’s desperate to talk to you. Why don’t you have a word?”
“You will pay for this, Fishbein,” Hugh hissed, making slitty eyes. “You will pay for this, big time.”
He snatched the phone. “Mrs. Fishbein! It’s so wonderful to speak to you. How are you?” He covered up the phone, turned to Cyn and pulled another face. “I hate you. I hate you.”
Cyn giggled and listened to her mother asking Hugh if he was sure he wouldn’t mind helping her choose a wedding outfit.
“Mind? Of course I wouldn’t mind. I would love nothing more.” Another murderous look at Cyn.
“I was thinking of something in salmon,” Barbara went on.
Again he covered up the phone. “Now she wants to color coordinate with the main course!” He threw a cushion at Cyn.
“Salmon. Hmm. I can see that would be very you.”
“Or aubergine, or pale lemon. Or avocado, maybe.”
“Yes, any of those could work.”
“You know, Hugh,” Barbara said, “I think it would be wonderful to have you as our wedding planner. Of course, I’ll have to talk it over with Jonny and Flick and Cyn’s father, but I’m sure they’ll all agree it’s a brilliant idea.”
“I do hope so,” Hugh said. “And I promise you that I will do my absolute best to make Jonny and Flick’s wedding absolutely perfect.”
“I’m sure you will,” Barbara said.
After Hugh put down the phone, he collapsed onto the chaise longue and lay there in a swoon, hand draped melodramatically over his brow. “Just tell me one thing,” he said to Cyn. “Does your mother ever select colors that aren’t based on food?”
Chapter 9
The following evening, Cyn had to take the bus to therapy. Jonny’s car was having its brakes relined and he had a meeting with a client after work, somewhere out in the sticks. Since he and Flick only had the one car between them, he asked if he could borrow Cyn’s. “This bloke’s a really important client. I wouldn’t ask otherwise.”
“And you think the Butt-Mobile is going to create the right impression on this really important client?” she asked. Jonny said he’d park it on the next street.
Cyn only just made it to her session on time. First she had to wait twenty minutes for a bus and then it started to rain. The entire journey was stop-start in the wet rush-hour traffic. She was the last to arrive—apart from Joe, who had sent a message to Veronica saying he had been stuck in a meeting and would be there as soon as he could.
As she walked in she saw that Jenny-with-the-plait was minus the plait. Her hair had been cut into a short bob and dyed blonde. Whereas the bob rather suited her, the color most definitely didn’t. It was a cheap, tarty platinum blonde that collided spectacularly with her pale skin, mumsy skirt and long fawn cardigan. She looked like a Sunday school teacher on the game. Everybody was busy admiring the new hairdo, though—even Clementine. It was the first time Clementine had ever exercised tact in the group. Cyn decided that was a definite breakthrough.
“So you went for the chop,” Cyn said to Jenny. “It looks great.”
Jenny th
anked her and said she couldn’t begin to describe the trauma of losing the plait. She was wringing her hands as if she were reliving a mountainside air crash in which the survivors had been forced to eat each other. “I’ll never forget what it felt like as the hairdresser cut into it. I cried for two days. I suppose it’s a natural grieving process, though. The only thing that has gotten me through it is making a cushion and stuffing it with the hair. I felt it was important to keep it—you know, like you would keep a relative’s ashes.”
It went on like this for twenty minutes: Jenny sharing her pain and anguish, Veronica doing lots of empathetic nodding and people offering Jenny the box of tissues. In the end, Clementine, who had been shuffling from buttock to buttock for a while, seemed unable to contain her exasperation any longer. “For God’s sake, Jenny, stop this bloody wittering. You can always grow your hair again.” Jenny went all pathetic and said she felt Clementine was telling her she was being boring, to which Clementine replied, “You are being boring.” Then Jenny said that even if Clementine was cross with her for going on, she still wanted to thank her for having the courage to be so honest about her hair and giving her the incentive to get it cut. Clementine grunted and muttered that Jenny was welcome. It was quite obvious that Jenny’s helpless-little-me act was infuriating her.
Joe arrived just as Jenny’s post-traumatic tress ended. Cyn had begun to think he wasn’t coming after all and couldn’t get over how disappointed she’d felt. When the door finally opened and he walked in, she felt a rush of excitement. He apologized for being late and sat down next to Cyn, where there happened to be a spare seat. Clementine, who was sitting opposite them, looked daggers at Cyn, but Cyn barely noticed. Joe smelled deliciously of the cold and she was filling her lungs with him. He started to take off his jacket.
“I love your shirt,” Clementine simpered to Joe. “That blue really suits your coloring.”
“Thank you,” he said, looking more than a little self-conscious.
“So, Cyn,” Ken said, clearly jumping in to stop Clementine from flirting with Joe again. “How are things with you?”
Cyn didn’t hear him at first because she was struggling with her own jealous feelings about Clementine flirting with Joe. The comment about the shirt had made her flinch. She realized that she was jealous. Ken asked again how she was. Finally she came to and said she was trying to stop her mother from having a breakdown over her brother’s wedding.
Sandra Yo-yo, who had said virtually nothing so far, suddenly perked up. “I really don’t feel comfortable discussing mothers and weddings. A friend of mine from school got married last week and my mother has gone into an even deeper decline.” Ken asked her in what way. His head was tilted to one side. There was a caring-sharing frown on his face. At that moment, he looked every inch the priest.
“There are three loos in my mother’s house,” Sandra explained, “but yesterday when I went round I noticed not one of them had any blue water.”
Nobody seemed to know quite how to react to this. Cyn broke the silence by saying that she could identify with Sandra. “My mother and grandmother are desperate for me to find a man.”
“Same with my mother,” Ken said morosely. Then he realized what he had said. “Goodness, no. I mean she wants me to find a woman. I’m not . . . you know, that way.” From the way he behaved every week toward Clementine, nobody thought for one minute that he was.
After the session, everybody began gathering up their bags and coats. Cyn noticed that as Clementine passed Joe on her way to the door, she paused for a couple of moments and gave him the briefest of winks. Joe returned it with a rather self-conscious half-smile. At the same time, Clementine seemed to brush her hand down the side of his jacket. Cyn thought this was a strange way of coming on to him. Did the woman have some kind of fabric fetish? A second later, Clementine had disappeared out of the door. Cyn knew the flirting was just Clementine being Clementine, but for the second time that evening she felt her insides perform an uncomfortable flip.
She stayed behind to use the loo.
It wasn’t until she got outside that she saw the rain. It was falling in lumps. She stood on Veronica’s porch and pulled up her coat collar. It was a good ten-minute walk to the bus stop. She cursed herself for not having brought an umbrella. Head down against the wind and rain, she set off down the garden path. She turned into the street. The pavement was so drenched it looked like somebody had poured varnish over it. After half a dozen paces, a car went past. A second later she heard the tires braking in the wet. She looked up and saw the car was being driven by Joe. As he reversed and pulled up alongside her, he leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door. “Come on, hop in,” he said. “You’re going to catch your death.” He saw her hesitate. “Look, I know it’s against the rules,” he said, “but it’s a filthy night and you’re already soaked.” Just then an icy blast of wind and rain took her breath away. She didn’t need telling twice. The next moment she had slipped in beside him. “I really appreciate this. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
She could feel the water trickling down her face. She began wiping it away with her hand. “Here, use this,” Joe said, producing a clean, folded handkerchief from his jacket pocket. She took it and thanked him. “Right, where to?” he said. “Crouch End, isn’t it?” She couldn’t believe he had remembered where she lived. She said the bus stop would be fine, but he insisted on taking her home.
“This is really embarrassing,” she said as he pulled away. “What do we talk about?”
“Well, I guess it has to be something safe and totally unconnected with therapy. Why don’t you start?”
“OK, this weather’s really foul.”
“Isn’t it, now?” he said in that delicious Kerrygold accent of his.
“The weather forecasters always get it wrong.”
“Don’t they? In fact they hardly ever seem to get it right.”
“Too true.” They fell into an awkward silence. Finally she said that since they appeared to have gone as far as they could with the weather, it was his turn to think of a topic.
“OK,” he said, “what’s your worst vegetable?”
“Cauliflower. Hate it.”
“Me, too,” he said. “What’s your favorite color?”
“Don’t have one.”
“Me neither. What’s your favorite pop song?”
“ ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ No question.”
“No! That’s my favorite, too! I don’t believe it. Right, let’s try something else. M&M’s or Smarties?”
“Definitely Smarties.”
“Me, too. OK . . . nights in or nights out?”
“Nights out in the summer and nights in in the winter.”
“You know what? This is getting spooky.”
She was laughing now. He was flirting with her, but she didn’t mind. In fact she was thoroughly enjoying it. “OK,” he said, “what’s the longest word you’ve ever gotten in Scrabble?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“Mine’s caterwaulings,” he said. “I was twelve. It was when I was at boarding school. This irritating know-all in my class challenged me to a game. He thought he could slaughter me. Anyway he put down cater and I added wauling across a triple-word score, using up all my letters in one go. I think I scored about a hundred points. God, that felt fantastic. Funny, isn’t it, how you never forget things like that.”
“What about the s?” she said
“The s?”
“The s in caterwaulings.”
“Oh, right. He’d put that down earlier at the end of another word.”
Cyn said it reminded her of the time when she was eight and she was the only person in her class who knew the meaning of the word negligible.
More silence. It was then that Cyn noticed the BMW logo on the car steering wheel. On the whole Cyn didn’t pay much attention to the make of car people drove, or what it said about their income, but she couldn’t help thinking that the film-editing
business must pay better than she imagined.
Her eyes moved from the logo to Joe’s hands. As he made a left turn, she thought how solid and capable they looked. In fact the whole of him looked solid and capable. He drove steadily with an easy confidence. Joe was one of those calm, levelheaded men, she decided, who always made you feel safe.
They were approaching Muswell Hill Broadway. “There’s no such word as caterwaulings,” she said.
“There most certainly is.”
“There isn’t. I mean, you don’t say, ‘I couldn’t sleep because of all the caterwaulings.’ It’s caterwauling—no s.” It felt comfortable squabbling with him. It was as if she’d known him forever.
“You’re wrong. There is such a word. Look it up if you don’t believe me.” He pulled up at traffic lights. “I don’t know about you, but I could murder a beer. There’s a pub over there. Do you fancy a drink?”
“Joe, I would love to, but we can’t . . .”
“Oh, get away with you.” He’d lapsed into the Irish again. “The shrink police won’t catch us there. And I won’t tell if you don’t.” He was grinning, egging her on. “I would have thought that after the way you’ve stitched up this Chelsea woman, breaking Veronica’s rules would be child’s play.”
She laughed. “OK, go on,” she said. “Why not?”
“Great stuff.” She was flattered that he seemed so delighted.
Cyn insisted on buying the drinks to say thank you for the lift. They found a quiet table at the far end of the bar. “So, what uniform would the shrink police wear?” she said, laughing. They decided on pince-nez and revolving bow ties.
They chatted away and she found herself telling him about her interview at PCW and how she’d managed to get the job on the strength of coming up with the “salmon that doesn’t turn pink in the tin” line.
He asked about the Chelsea situation. She brought him up to speed and said she kept having moments of guilt. “You shouldn’t feel guilty. She hurt you, and in a sense you are at war. When you are at war—even one you didn’t start—you’re forced to do nasty things. That’s the nature of it. You either fight, or do the Buddhist thing and walk away. I think they call it ‘yielding.’ ”
