She was meant to be worried, not angry. She knew that. But how could you keep on worrying when you didn’t know what the problem was?
She wandered back into the kitchen and made herself some toast and coffee.
Katie and Jacob appeared half an hour later. She told Katie about the marquee and felt almost cross when Katie refused to be panicked.
Katie didn’t understand. It wasn’t happening in her garden. If people found themselves wading through mud they were going to blame Jean. And it was a selfish thing to think, but it was true.
She tried to put the thought from her mind. “So, little man…” She ruffled Jacob’s hair. “What can we get you for breakfast?”
“I want some eggy,” said Jacob.
“I want some eggy what?” said Katie, who was deep in the paper.
“I want some eggy, please,” said Jacob.
“Scrambled, fried or boiled?” Jean asked.
“What’s fried?” asked Jacob.
“He wants scrambled,” said Katie absently.
“Scrambled it is.” Jean kissed the top of his head. At least there was something she could do for someone.
98
Mum was right. A wedding without disasters clearly broke some unwritten rule of the universe. Like snow at Christmas. Or pain-free childbirth.
She rang the marquee people and that was fine. They’d come round with mops and heaters later on in the day.
Then Auntie Eileen and Uncle Ronnie turned up with their Labrador in tow. Because their dog sitter was in hospital. Unfortunately Jacob hated dogs. So it was shut outside to keep Jacob happy. At which point it began howling and trying to dig its way through the back door.
Then the caterers rang to say they needed to change the menu after a power failure left a freezer off overnight. Sadie rang to say she’d just got back from New Zealand and found the invitation in the post and could she come. And Brian and Gail rang to say the hotel had lost their reservation and clearly someone else had to solve this problem for them. Like the bride, for example. Or the bride’s parents.
Katie gave up answering the phone and went upstairs and found Dad locked into the bathroom, possibly hiding from Eileen and Ronnie, so she went up to the top loo, peed and flushed and heard the macerator grinding away and saw the water surge to within a centimeter of the rim of the bowl. At which point some kind of death wish took her over and instead of ringing the phone number on the sticker, she thought,
Two seconds later she was kneeling on the floor holding back a pond of diluted wee with a dam of cream towels saying, “Arsing, fucking, shitting,” which was when Jacob appeared behind her and pointed out that she was saying rude words.
“Jacob, can you fetch Granny, and tell her to bring some bin bags?”
“It smells yucky.”
“Jacob, please fetch Granny, or you will never get any pocket money, ever.”
But the Labrador was back in the house and Jacob was refusing to go anywhere near the ground floor, so she went down herself, and found Mum and Dad in the hallway having some kind of altercation about Dad not pulling his weight but doing it in a fevered whisper, presumably so Eileen and Ronnie didn’t hear. Katie said the loo had overflowed. Mum told Dad to sort it out. Dad declined. And Mum said something very unladylike to Dad which Katie didn’t quite catch because Ray appeared at the other end of the hallway saying, “I hope you don’t mind, your aunt let me in.”
Mum did a horrified double take and apologized profusely for arguing yet again in Ray’s presence and asked whether she could make him a nice cup of tea and Katie reminded her that the loo was still overflowing and felt extremely pissed off that Ray had spent last night in London organizing some secret thing, and Dad slipped away while everyone’s attention was diverted and Ray bounded up the stairs and Mum said she’d put the kettle on and Katie went to grab some bin bags from the kitchen for ferrying the wee-sodden towels to the washing machine and noticed en route the muddy paw prints on the dining-room carpet and tossed Ronnie a disposable cloth wipe and told him to clean up after his bloody dog, which he had to do because he was a Christian.
The macerator man said he’d be there in an hour and Eileen and Ronnie took Rover out for a long walk despite the rain and everything was fine until Katie took her dress out of the suitcase to iron it and found half a pint of coconut body wash soaked into the hem and swore so loudly Eileen and Ronnie probably heard it several fields away. So Ray held up his hands and said, “Hit me,” and she did, repeatedly for some considerable time until Ray said, “OK, it’s starting to hurt now.”
He suggested she go into town to buy another dress and she was about to give him a hard time for thinking all female problems could be solved by shopping, when he said, calmly, “Buy a new dress. Find a cafe. Sit down with a book and a cup of coffee and come back in a couple of hours and I’ll sort everything out here,” and she kissed him and grabbed her bag and ran.
99
George had naively assumed that when Katie and Ray said they would arrange everything themselves this meant he would not have to do anything.
Jean did not understand that if he drove into town to get flowers he might keep going until he reached Aberdeen. She did not understand that he needed to sit somewhere quietly doing very little.
Then the toilet upstairs overflowed and everything got very hectic indeed, so he went to lie down in the bedroom. But Jean came into the bedroom to get sheets and towels for Ronnie and Eileen and she was quite rude to him. So he shut himself in the bathroom, until Jean turfed him out because people needed to use the toilet. At which point it became rapidly clear to George that these complications were only going to multiply over the coming day, and that he would very soon not be able to cope.
He had been wildly unrealistic. There was no way he could do small talk with all these people, let alone stand up in front of them and give a speech.
He did not want to embarrass Katie.
It was obvious that he could not go to her wedding.
100
Jean had been wrong about Ray.
Within an hour of his arrival everything was back on track. Katie had been sent into town. A man was coming to fix the toilet and Eileen and Ronnie had been sent to pick up the flowers with their blessed dog in tow.
And, strangely, he did seem to have control over the weather. She was making him a cup of tea just after he arrived when she looked out of the window and saw that the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. Within half an hour the men from the marquee turned up to dry the place out and he was in the garden ordering them around as if he ran the company.
True, he was a little brash sometimes. Not one of us, if you were going to put it like that. But it was beginning to dawn on her that being “one of us” was not necessarily a good thing. After all, her family were failing rather obviously to organize a wedding. Maybe a little brashness was precisely what was needed.
