I raise his hand, still interlaced in mine, and kiss his knuckles.
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. We’ll have a chat about money later. Let’s just have a lovely day. Okay?”
He smiles, eyes still sad.
“Done. Let’s have a lovely day.”
And it is a lovely day.
—
In the twinkly mirror-and-oak-paneled ballroom, we sit at a white-clothed table floating adrift on a sea of buffed parquet flooring. A cheerful waiter brings us intricate plates artfully arranged with seasonal fare. Once all the starter options are placed on the table, the maîtred’ explains each one and hands us a discreet card listing the dishes and prices. And disappears back through the oak paneling, leaving us to it. We peruse the card.
Starters:
Lobster with watercress, apple, crème fraîche vinaigrette,
£32 per person.
———
Rock Oysters with shallot vinegar, lemon, brown bread & butter,£19 per person.
———
Asparagus with quail egg, beetroot & celeriac rémoulade,
£22.50 per person.
Times that by eighty people. And that’s just the starter. I look at Mark; he’s gone white. I can’t help it. I burst out laughing. He looks at me, relief written all over his face. He smiles and raises his glass to toast. I lift mine.
“To not having starters?”
“To not having starters.” I chuckle.
We dig in to the delicious entrées. And they’re worth every single penny. I’m just glad we won’t be the ones paying for them.
We opt for a main course of:Café Royal Homemade Chicken Pie with Bacon, quail’s egg, fine French beans, mousseline potatoes, £19.50.
For desserts we go for: Dark Chocolate & Wild Cherries: Dark chocolate crémeux and wild cherry compote, £13.
Plus thirty bottles of house red and thirty house white and twenty bottles of sparkling wine.
We think we’ve done a pretty good job until the maître d’, Gerard, sits down for a post-coffee chat. Apparently the minimum spend is six thousand pounds. They must have told us that last year when we booked, but we obviously weren’t listening, and even if we were, it wouldn’t have seemed important then. Gerard tells us not to worry; we can simply bump up to that price by adding after-dinner coffee and a cheeseboard for eightypeople. Adding another thirteen hundred pounds to our total. We agree. Well, what else can we do? The wedding is in three weeks.
Afterwards, stuffed and brimming with buyer’s remorse, we descend into Piccadilly Station. Before the turnstiles Mark takes my upper arm and stops me.
“Erin, we can’t do this. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. It’s way too much, right? I mean—come on? We need to cancel it when we get home, lose the deposit, sure, fine, but just cancel it. We’ll do the wedding part in All Souls and then go to a local restaurant or something? Or up to my mum and dad’s, they could do a village hall thing, right?”
I look down at his hand tight around my arm. This isn’t someone I recognize.
“Mark, seriously, you’re scaring me a bit now. Actually scaring me. Why are you acting like this? It’s our wedding. We’ve got savings, it’s not like we’re taking out loans to cover the cost. You only do this day once in your life and I personally want to spend my money on this. On us. I mean, not all of my money obviously, but a bit of it. Otherwise what’s it all for?”
He sighs hard through his nose. Frustrated, he abandons the conversation, his hand releases me, and we descend underground.
The rest of our journey is spent in silence. I watch other people on the tube. Wonder about their lives. Sitting next to Mark but not talking with him, I imagine I don’t know him. That maybe I’m just a girl on the tube going somewhere on my own. That I don’t have to worry about what happens next, or with the rest of my life, for that matter. The thought is calming butultimately empty. I want Mark. I do. I just wish I could shake him out of this mood. I wish I could fix it.
—
