Revenge of the Wedding Planner (17 page)

Poor Gary was so love-bombed in his hospital bed he said he would give Julie the benefit of the doubt and they’d say no more about it. She kissed him tenderly and said she would go straight back to the farmhouse after work and make sure it was all shipshape. Arrange some extended staff-cover for the horses and so on, as Gary wouldn’t be able to ride for a while. Which she did do, I have to say, and then she nipped back to Jay for a quick spanking session on the corner sofa (during which he used her bare back as a plate from which to eat his leftover pizza) before spending the night at Gary’s house, alone. Just in case Gary rang her there on the landline. And he did indeed call her, eight times to be exact. Once an hour, on the hour. For fifteen minutes, exactly.

I suppose he was becoming paranoid.

Julie told me she was having the best of both worlds at that point in her life. She had Gary’s enormous bed all to herself every night and she was happily lying in it, watching
Sex and the City
videos and eating microwave curries, while
Gary was safely confined to the hospital. And Jay was neatly tucked away in the exclusive apartment in Saintfield. Resting up his massive doo-da for the next instalment of Sharpe-inspired antics, no doubt. Jay knew about Julie’s plan to be nice to Gary for a while, but of course Gary was in complete ignorance of the cuckoo in his nest and, to be honest with you, I had no inclination to enlighten him.

As I said, I was far too busy having nightmares about my beautiful daughter being hurt or harmed in a foreign country, and I’d more or less washed my hands of Julie’s roller-coaster love life. Emma was still refusing to eat anything except fresh fruit and stinky raw fish (some celeb-inspired crackpot diet, I expect), and she and Alexander were arguing non-stop about their future. Her thirty-nine-plus boxes of stuff had been stored in the guest room for the time being but she said she wouldn’t unpack properly till the drawing-room bedsit had been finished. I was a little bit shocked at Emma’s eagerness to live with us in a self-contained ‘flat’. Even though it’d been my idea to begin with. But then Emma let slip that her own parents had given her bedroom to her sister’s twin baby girls. So she really did have nowhere else to go. And that rankled with me too, because somehow she made it seem like she was the one doing
me
a favour. If you know what I mean?

‘It won’t be a dream home,’ she said more than once. ‘But it’ll do for the time being. Once I get it fixed up and some of my own accessories on display, it could actually be quite nice.’

I suppose Bill was right (yet again) when he said they’d never stand on their own two feet while we offered them a
cushy alternative. Bill and I still hadn’t decided exactly what to do about the bedsit plan at that point, incidentally: whether we’d apply for another bathroom and a fully operational kitchen and so on. And some top-notch soundproofing so we couldn’t hear our own son having noisy sex. There was a general feeling of restlessness in the house as a result of all these deliberations. I said we should give them the full Monty so Emma could feed and bathe the baby on her own. And hopefully learn some mothering skills early on, without me taking over. Bill worried about the rates going up and said we might be registered somewhere as taking in lodgers. And should we charge them a nominal rent to cover electricity and so on? And would they be allowed to use the phone without paying? It was all very complicated.

Meanwhile, Emma and Alexander were up and down the stairs like yo-yos. Fighting, slamming doors, making up, having
noisy sex
in Alexander’s room. Emma liked to moan at the top of her voice during these make-up sessions (it did actually sound as if she was being stretched on a rack and burnt with hot irons), which is all very well if you live alone in a detached house. You can articulate all you like if you don’t have a party wall. But they weren’t living in a detached house, or even on their own, and Andrew and Christopher were absolutely fascinated by their bedroom business. I overheard them talking about it in the kitchen one morning, wondering what Alexander was doing to Emma and how they could learn to do it too. Not to Emma, no, dear! To some other poor creatures they had yet to meet. Bill started playing
The Last Man in Europe
constantly and frequently went to bed wearing headphones. We never got around to celebrating the blue fringe.

In my ‘spare’ time, I prepared the most delicious meals I could think of. Caesar salad with the croutons tossed in a home-made dressing to soften them up. Honeydew melon slices served with cubes of cooked chicken and garlic potatoes. Fresh cherries (individually stoned by myself) and perfect ‘school-dinner scoops’ of vanilla ice cream. Emma rejected the lot with barely a flicker of her false eyelashes and Alexander was often cross with me for trying to force-feed her.

‘Stop it, Mum, you’re upsetting her,’ he would hiss at me on the stairs. ‘She’s on a special diet this week.’

What of, I wondered. Water and air?

Two weeks passed in this bizarre fashion. I could feel a massive sulk descending on me and I couldn’t stop it. It felt like a brick getting lodged in my windpipe and it hurt to breathe. People who never sulk don’t understand this phenomenon. True sulking is not a choice you make. Sometimes, the sulk is bigger than the sulker. It takes you over, much as I imagine class A drugs do. I decided I would just sit back and watch it all unfold with my fingers over my eyes, like I do when they’re blowing up a tall chimney on the television. I spent a lot of time in the bath and a lot of money on wine and downmarket gossip magazines. I’ll say this for the so-called Z-listers (poor mites), they do make you realize you’re not the only idiot in the world, and that’s a good thing. I was so disappointed, you see. I was still smarting that my efforts to help had only made everything worse, so I was keeping my mitts off and my gob shut.

I still hadn’t met Jay at this point and I was glad about that. I worried he might be some sort of alien come to
earth to mate with ‘mature’ women and I was afraid he’d have hypnotic laser beams for eyes. But then Julie rang me from Gary Devine’s farmhouse on the first Monday morning in August and asked me to drop off some cash to Jay on my way home from work, so he could go shopping for food. She couldn’t go herself as Gary was getting out of hospital that evening and she was up to her eyes in homecoming preparations. Not to mention trying to cover up a bruise on her wrist (that pesky bondage again) with heavy make-up and a handful of bangles.

‘They use the euro, you see, in the Irish Republic while we Northerners still have the British pound,’ she told me.

‘Like, yeah, I know that, Julie. I’m not as stupid as I look.’

‘And poor Jay’s broke, in any case,’ she added.

‘Surprise, surprise,’ I muttered under my breath. ‘He ought to charge you for sex, then he’d be rich.’ But of course, she heard me.

‘What’s up with you, Mags Grimsdale?’

‘Nothing. Can’t he wait till you see him tomorrow?’ I said. ‘I’m too tired for a run out to Saintfield in the back of a taxi.’

‘No, Mags, he can’t wait! There’s no food in the fridge and no vodka either.’

Oh, dear, I thought. Can’t have Jay going without his vodka.

‘Look, do me this favour now and you can come into work an hour late tomorrow, okay? Please, Mags? My very dearest friend in all the world, pretty please with ribbons on?’

‘Oh, Julie!’

So I had no choice but to raid the petty-cash tin in the lighthouse and take a taxi out to the converted flourmill in Saintfield, and give it to him. As it were.

Interesting experience.

Jay answered the door with beads of water all over his olive skin and wearing nothing but a
very
small pair of black underpants. Light-reflecting Gigolo underpants. I was embarrassed for him, to tell you the truth. Clearly, he was just out of the shower. And yes, he did have a massive doo-da even when it wasn’t reporting for duty, Sergeant, if you know what I mean. And yes, he did look like Sean Bean when he was twenty-five, and yes, I could definitely see the attraction. I could kind of understand why Julie was risking everything to sleep with him, though I still thought it would end in tears. But I wasn’t hanging around to fall under the spell of those laser-beam eyes, and besides, Bill would have hit the roof if he’d known what was going on. Not that he’s a prude, you understand. But he doesn’t believe in pulling other people into your own difficulties.

So I explained the money situation to Julie’s lover and then I scarpered ‘pronto’, politely turning down his invitation to stay for coffee. He probably thought the lot of us were as promiscuous as Julie, I seethed inwardly. Us heathen Nordies with our loose morals, the direct result of the influence of King Henry VIII, don’t you know? No bother to us to casually drop our knickers and bend over the kitchen table for a two-minute quickie with a stranger from the South. Why, it passes the time till the coffee is stewed, don’t you know? And it’s easier than finding something to talk about in these days of political correctness gone mad.
Anyway, it was very rude of Jay not to wear a robe, wasn’t it? I can’t be doing with people who walk about in the nip. Such total narcissism, it’s positively offensive.

I think I must have made a mean face at Jay O’Hanlon behind his back. In fact, I know I did – I realized with (mild) shame that he’d seen me in the mirror beside the front door. As I left the apartment we both knew I thoroughly disapproved of the whole situation. That was probably why he waved goodbye to me from the sitting-room window, standing up against the glass with his legs wide open. Really, that man could have made a fortune in the porn industry. Shameless isn’t the word. The taxi driver nearly reversed over a bollard with shock. I said, ‘Don’t mind him, he’s from Galway.’

As if that explained everything.

‘Things have fairly changed down South since they got the bit of money,’ he said quietly as we set off for town again.

I just nodded.

I didn’t bother telling Julie about Jay flaunting himself before me that day. That’s probably what he wanted me to do, I reckoned. Have a catty row and fall out with her. Then he’d have had Julie all to himself. The crafty weasel. But I was smarter than that. I’d read thousands of women’s magazines over the years and I knew the first thing a bully does is isolate his woman from her friends and family so she loses her perspective and becomes more submissive to his authority. Well, I had a thirteen-year start on Jay O’Hanlon and he wasn’t getting rid of me that easily. And I didn’t want to get into the whole ‘Are you after my fella?’ thing with Julie either. That’s another curiosity about people
having affairs – they always think everyone else is lusting after their paramour, don’t they? No point in telling Julie I wouldn’t want Jay O’Hanlon in my bed if he was quite literally the last man in Europe. If there’s one thing that turns me off a man, it’s arrogance.

I had a lot on my mind in any case, because the following morning I was going into the university to have a chat with Emma about her suspected eating disorder. Well, she didn’t know we were going to be talking about anorexia and how bad it would be for the baby. And I’d already decided I wasn’t going to interfere in her life or Alexander’s to any great extent. It was just a little nudge in the right direction. Some helpful hints and ideas, that’s all it was. We’d arranged to meet for coffee in the snack bar to finalize plans for the drawing-room conversion. She couldn’t decide on a country-cottage kitchenette theme or modern beech units and a concealed sink. I didn’t want to talk about it at home because Bill was so uncomfortable with the whole thing. He wanted them to live independently from ‘the mother ship’ and pay their own gas bill and peel their own spuds. Fat chance. Young people today are worse than useless at keeping house. They think all meals begin with the words ‘remove lid and pierce film’. If the washing machine goes on the blink they just lie daydreaming on the sofa and gaze at the ceiling until help arrives. My kids do, anyway, and they’re
good
kids. I thought I might get Emma to compromise a little on the bedsit – maybe just go for the bathroom but not the kitchenette? Well, she doesn’t eat much, does she, I thought spitefully.

So, Emma had a diet cola with lots of ice and an
under-ripe green apple. I had a messy cappuccino with three sugars, two sausage rolls bursting out of their pastry at both ends (plastered with salt and HP sauce) and a rather lopsided giant chocolate muffin with a soft chocolate centre, which I didn’t actually want but I was trying to make a point. By the way, that canteen could do with a new manager; they’re far too free and easy with the presentation. We found a clean-ish table and sat down. Emma looked as if she was going to gag as I ate every last crumb of my food. I even scooped up the last drop of brown sauce with my forefinger and licked it off. Then I wished I hadn’t as I’d just been jangling loose change in my pocket, but there you go.

‘So, Emma,’ I said, red in the face from my fatty feast, ‘tell me, how is the world treating you?’

‘Oh, I’ve found this amazing new exercise video,’ she said, sucking an ice cube. ‘It’s so cool, it really minimizes your thighs.’

So does breast-feeding, I thought.

In my opinion, exercise videos were invented for people who don’t do enough housework. But I let her prattle on about stretches and abs for half an hour while I smiled until my face ached. Eventually, pleasantries out of the way, I tried to convince her to go into therapy for her countless food issues. Then, I suggested she ought to gain roughly three stone for her own sake as well as the baby’s. Not to mention marry my son as soon as possible so they’d all have the same name, come the birth.

‘No matter what they say,’ I advised her, ‘I do believe you get to see a doctor earlier on in the labour stages if you’re a married woman.’ And to that end, I wanted
Emma to allow me to arrange an unusual and highly romantic (i.e. very low budget) civil wedding for the two of them. With an outdoor setting, perhaps, and a home-made buffet which I would serve picnic-style at Dunluce Castle, for example? Or we could have had chilled salmon steaks and a medley of salads at the Giant’s Causeway? On an off-peak day when there were no tourists about. Or even just back at our house with fairy lights on the chandelier and white ribbons everywhere.