Jenny Oliver - The Vintage Summer Wedding

As he leant over and kissed her on the top of the head, Anna found herself saying, before she could stop herself, ‘Why didn’t you stand up for me in the pub the other day?’

Seb turned and leant against the sink. ‘I don’t know what you mean?’

She looked at the bleeding cuts on the backs of her hand where she’d been lugging boxes around all day, her chipped nails with dirt underneath them, her bruised legs. ‘It just feels a bit like you’re punishing me.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ He shook his head. ‘Anna, I was unhappy in London. I’m not ashamed to admit it. We both made mistakes, we both lived outside our means, the wedding was just the icing on the cake. I promise, I’m not punishing you. By no means am I punishing you. I suppose I just want you to try.’ He paused, his fingers thrumming on the edge of the porcelain basin, ‘Also, I wonder if maybe you weren’t as happy as you think you were.’

Anna guffawed. ‘I was happy!’

Seb shrugged and nodded, then turned and opened the bathroom cabinet, fishing about for some aftershave. ‘I saw the vicar today,’ he said after a moment.

Anna paused, popped a bubble in her bath.

‘He said we were welcome to use the church for the service. Said that it would be nice you know, to go full circle, since I was christened there. I thought that was nice. You know, a nice thing to say. He didn’t have to say anything, did he? But I thought that was nice.’

‘You’re rambling.’

‘It’s because I’m nervous about telling you this. Nervous of what your reaction is going to be.’

‘If you know my reaction, why are you telling me?’ She suddenly wanted to be out of the bath, dry and dressed and having this conversation at eye-level.

‘Because I think it could solve quite a lot of problems. And if we use the village hall it’ll be one hundred pounds. That’s it, Anna. One hundred pounds. That’s nothing.’

‘The hall I did Brownies in and ballet lessons and choir practice and sat with my dad at the antiques fairs? That hall, you mean?’

Seb nodded again, a little less vigorously.

‘The hall where all the old people have their weekly bridge sessions and that smells of cabbage and boiled potatoes afterwards?’

‘That’s the one.’

Anna nodded.

Seb bit his lip and seemed to close his eyes for slightly longer than a blink.

‘And the vicar who counselled my mum to stay with my dad even though he’d been having an affair for two years? That one? Still the same one?’

Seb did a really small nod, almost imperceptible.

‘That it was her duty to stay with him even though he had no intention of giving his mistress up? That the sanctity of marriage meant turning a blind eye.’

‘I had actually forgotten that bit‒’ Seb swallowed.

Anna breathed in through her nose and slowly exhaled like they used to do at her Bikram yoga class that she couldn’t go to any more because there was only one in the next village and it was twenty pounds a class. She was lucky if there was Pilates in Nettleton, and Zumba…Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The bubbles on her fingers glistened in the drooping sun, pearlised pinks and blues like sequins. Twinkling on white, reminding her of the first costume hand-stitched just for her. The individual silver sequins flickering on netting under the heat of the strip-lighting in the shabby costume department. The material as it was ruched and pinned, the corset as it was nipped and tucked, the patterns traced with tiny seed beads and embroidery against her chest and up over her shoulders in trails on fine gauze.

The flat that her mother had rented just off the Charing Cross road was horrible. A dingy little place that lit up bright blue when ambulances and fire engines screamed past at all hours of the night.

They’d had nothing but a couple of suitcases of clothes, some pots and pans and a massive heap of bitterness. There was one bedroom, which Anna slept in, where a lamp in the shape of a white horse sat on a stack of old Hello! Magazines left behind by the previous tenant, flickering from a dodgy connection in the plug. And it was cold. The kind of cold that made the blankets damp and kept toes frozen. That first night Anna had lain staring at the ceiling doing everything she could not to cry and, as if her mum could sense it, she came in from her own make-shift bed on the sofa, a red crocheted blanket wrapped round her and snuggled up next to Anna. She had stroked her hair away from her face and said, We’ll be ok. You, you’ll be fabulous!

Then she had leant over and grabbed a Hello! from the pile. When I was a child we used to make scrap books, she’d said as she’d started flicking through the glossy pages. We’d stick in pictures and postcards of places we wanted to go or people we wanted to be. I had a big picture of the ceiling of the David H. Koch theatre at the Lincoln Center. It’s paved with gold. Did you know that? A gold ceiling. That’s the best you can get, isn’t it? And then I had a picture of Buckingham Palace, can you believe it! Still, we’ve never been. As she talked, she let her finger trace the outline of the big chandeliers, the Caribbean super-yachts, the million-pound stallions in stately home stables, and Anna watched silently as the moisture collected in the corner of her eyes. I stuck in all the things I’d ever wanted and dreamt of.

From that night they sat up together in bed and went through the Hellos! , one by one, staring at pictures of Princess Grace of Monaco, Ivana Trump, Joan Rivers’ daughter’s wedding extravaganza. Caroline Bassette-Kennedy on the arm of John Jnr, Princess Diana photographed by Mario Testino, Darcey Bussell in Swan Lake , Claudia, Naomi, Cindy and Kate draped on the arm of Vivienne Westwood or Jean Paul Gaultier. Houses that dripped in gold, taps shaped like dolphins with emeralds as the eyes, satin sheets and heart-shaped beds, wardrobes that cantilevered to reveal rows and rows of shoes like coloured candy, chandeliers that hung like beetles glinting in the camera flashlight, oriental rugs as wide as ballrooms and mirrors trimmed with gold and giant porcelain figurines. This was a world of faces turned a fraction to the left, a tilt of a smile, a waft of arrogance and confidence. This was a world that made her mum smile when she looked at the pictures, that would forever remind Anna of being tucked up together in that cold, damp bed.

That’s who I’m going to be, Anna had thought as the light flickered in her bare bedroom and the noise of an ambulance howled past along the street below. In this enchanted world they have everything.

The next day she had started her own book, one that until a week or so ago was crammed with scraps of every picture, article, photograph, postcard, ripped-out catalogue page she’d seen over the last however many years.

The book that went everywhere with her. The book that housed pages and pages of her dreams. The book that, when they had packed up their beautiful Bermondsey flat, she had left in the bin on top of her old ballet pointes.

‘The thing is, Seb. ’ Anna said, ‘I think I’d rather not get married than get married in Nettleton Village Hall and be married by that man.’

Seb ran his tongue along his bottom lip and then said, ‘Isn’t it about us, Anna? I understand about the vicar, but isn’t it about us, rather than where it is?’

She looked from her bubbles back to him, she thought about her book, about the stupid, simple promises she’d made to herself all those years ago. ‘It’s not enough for me.’

‘Christ.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to do then. We don’t have the money for more. I don’t have the money. I honestly don’t know what to do.’