Charlotte Butterfield - Crazy Little Thing Called Love

Lucy carried on talking, ‘I don’t even have time to concentrate on the flowers and centrepieces, it really needs my full attention to get it exactly right, and I just can’t focus on that with work being so full on. I’m so anxious that the wedding is going to be ruined, and you deserve so much more.’

‘Mmmm, you do have a lot on.’ Marcus agreed. Which was always best.

‘I do, don’t I? And I really do want to be the perfect wife to you Marky, and make sure that our new house, when we eventually find one we like, is exactly right, and that we always have nice food in, and I’m just so concerned how I’m going to fit it all in, it’s a little overwhelming.’

Marcus swallowed his last forkful and took a sip of wine. ‘You know what I think? I earn more than enough for you not to work at all, there’s no reason to get stressed about it all. Just resign and concentrate on the things that you want to. Simple. Right, shall I get dessert?’

As Marcus left the room with the dirty plates and busied himself loading them into the dishwasher, Lucy sat twirling the thick-stemmed wine glass in her fingers and smiled. Well, that conversation couldn’t have gone better.

Leila was so bored, she actually wished she was back sandwiched between two car seats trying to guess that ‘I’ belonged to ‘I-brow’.

This was the fifth wedding dress shop of the day and she’d lost the will to live somewhere around dress three of the first shop. Except they weren’t called shops, they were boutiques or salons. She’d learned that after getting the stare of death from one of the ‘bridal liaisons’ (shop assistants). Marcus had called her to prewarn her of Lucy’s impending invitation, and he’d been so earnest, so heartfelt in imploring her to accompany Lucy and Lucy’s mum shopping she couldn’t say no. Well, no that was a lie, she’d tried, but he just batted her remonstrations away and guilted her into submission. ‘She’s hardly got any friends, and those she does have are stuck at work,’ he’d said, completely oblivious to the massive neon warning sign that accompanied this statement. Who didn’t have many friends?

Lucy’s mum, Stephanie, was lovely though, which was a complete surprise. If pushed Leila would have admitted to have been expecting a buttoned-up platinum blonde with manicured talons and a designer handbag. She absolutely wasn’t anticipating this wonderfully bohemian middle-aged woman bounding off the train, wearing a full-length paisley coat, with long curly greying hair. If Stephanie noticed Lucy’s lacklustre greeting and stiff embrace she didn’t say, just gave her daughter and Leila a wide smile as she took their arms and proclaimed excitedly that they were going to have so much fun.

The fact that each salon offered them a glass of champagne had lessened the pain but heightened the boredom. Leila was left sat by herself most of the time as Lucy was in the dressing room, and Stephanie was busy taking pictures of wedding dresses to send them to her son’s girlfriend who was also getting married soon. Every boutique was a carbon copy of the one before. Each had a plush cream carpet, shag, Leila thought it was called, giving an immature snigger inside. Big armchairs or sofas were flanked with side tables, usually circular glass ones, with a box of tissues perched upon them, for teary mothers no doubt.

As the hours ticked by, Lucy was getting increasingly annoyed with each assistant, who kept giving sharp intakes of horror when she mentioned that her wedding date was in five weeks’ time. ‘I’m sure you’re not trying to be deliberately difficult,’ Lucy told the last one. ‘So let’s try and make this work, shall we?’

‘Off-the-peg’ was a term Lucy appeared to find offensive, wrinkling her nose and shrinking back a few inches every time it was mentioned. Her binder was full of princess-type dresses, all carefully cut out of magazines and placed in the relevant colour-coded section of the folder, after Flowers but before Poems and Readings. It’s not that each boutique didn’t have the exact eye-wateringly expensive gown she wanted, it’s just it would take six–eight months to order and make. You’d have thought by the fifth time she heard this, Lucy would start to understand.

‘I could always run it up for you my love,’ Stephanie offered later that afternoon, holding out a tissue to her sobbing daughter. Lucy wasn’t an attractive crier, Leila thought, and felt immediately very bad for having that thought.

‘Run it up for me? Run it up for me? I don’t want a pair of bloody curtains Mother!’

That was a bit harsh, the poor woman was clearly trying to help. ‘Lucy, I think at this stage you have two options, buy something—’ Leila stopped herself just in time uttering a phrase that contained the word peg – ‘already made.’ Good save. ‘Or maybe think about having one of the designs you love made, either by your mum, who I’m sure is a very accomplished seamstress—’ Stephanie shot Leila a look of gratitude – ‘or someone else, but I think you need to call it a day at trying different shops. Salons. Whatever.’

‘I knew you’d try to sabotage today, I just knew it.’

Leila knew Lucy would be mortified if she realised that a little bit of snot was stuck to the outside of her nose and that her eyeliner had smudged on the left side. While this was immensely gratifying to see, and more than a little amusing, Leila knew that staying silent went against everything the new Leila stood for. So she passed Lucy a tissue and said, ‘Wipe your nose and your eyes and how about we both pretend you didn’t say that and I ring ahead to the next two appointments to see if they can do this dress any quicker?’

As luck would have it, there was a cancelled order at the next boutique in very similar measurements to Lucy’s. It was Lucy that cited this as ‘very lucky,’ Leila couldn’t help viewing it from the other side, thinking of the poor woman that drank the free champagne, paraded in her dream dress in front of her emotional mum and friends and then tearfully phoned to cancel a few months later. But for the purposes of familial harmony, Leila kept mute. Now was most certainly not the time to introduce the concept of perspective.

She must admit though, Lucy did seem to be extraordinarily fortunate. In the end Judy and Thomas hadn’t had to cancel the couple on the 1st July, they did that themselves. And Marcus had also bartered a great price for the original couple’s photographer who had already accepted a non-refundable deposit, which he knocked off Lucy and Marcus’s price. It crossed Leila’s mind fleetingly that this could possibly be that poor girl’s dress too, but that would be slightly too weird. If she was indulging her darker thoughts, Leila wouldn’t have put it past Lucy to try to break the other couple up just so she could glide into their day, but it was beyond spiteful of her to even think that. And in no way compatible with her new role of Champion of All Women.

‘So what’s next on the list then?’ They’d just dropped Stephanie off at the train station and decamped to a nearby wine bar to take stock of the day and plan the next few weeks. In the absence of a sister, female cousin or any of her friends at all, Leila and Tasha had been drafted in as bridesmaids. Not willingly. And Tasha was away at a yoga retreat in the Peak District, which was very conveniently timed to coincide with this shopping trip.

Her sister was still reeling from being told that her kids were not allowed at the wedding. ‘But they are your nieces and nephew!’ she’d railed at Marcus. But he was adamant that Lucy had vetoed all children, regardless of blood ties. So Tasha had booked her weekend away to deliberately coincide with dress shopping. Meaning that now it was all falling squarely to Leila. ‘It all’ being every damn detail of the wedding it seemed.