Summer Flings and Dancing Dreams

F
or my Mum
,

Dance like nobody’s watching...

‘
B
ut Mum
, why?’ she asked, her face looking into mine, tears spilling down oyster satin, bridal bouquet flung to the four winds. No one was there to catch it.

‘I don’t know, love...’ What could I say? My heart was lying with hers on the cold church steps.

‘He seemed fine yesterday, what happened in the last twenty-four hours?’

I looked into her eyes and shook my head. I had nothing to offer her, no plaster to cover the graze, no ice cream to sweeten the bitter taste left in her mouth. All I could think was – how will we ever get over this? And in the middle of my daughter’s devastation came the unbidden thought – would I still have to pay for the fucking finger buffet?

I hugged her. This wasn’t about the wedding, not even about the controversial buffet at £20 per head to be served at 10 p.m. (on the off-chance that some greedy sod would still be hungry after the £60 per head dinner at 5 p.m.). Nor was it about the silk dress costing three months’ salary, the perfect cake covered in fresh roses to match the perfectly pale scented bouquets and table arrangements. Oh the table arrangements – it was March, so roses apparently had to be imported from Kenya – and though I insisted Sophie have everything she wanted, I couldn’t help wonder if it would have been cheaper to fly there first class and collect them myself.

‘What do we do now?’ she asked.

I didn’t mention the obvious – which was that we could make a start on eating that finger buffet for five-hundred. I didn’t know what to say, I ripped off my powder blue fascinator and we gazed out at the church garden, like the answer lay somewhere among the vicar’s host of golden daffodils. The magnolia was almost over, waxy white petals lay on the ground, huge, overblown blooms too beautiful to last longer than a week or two. Is that what happened to Sophie and Alex? Was it all too beautiful, to last? We’d certainly aimed for beauty and perfection with this wedding. As a single Mum I was determined to pay for the wedding with overtime at the supermarket where I worked and late shifts, constant saving and scrimping on everything had paid for the dress, the flowers, and the reception. Then, just when I’d thought it was safe – the vicar had wanted his cut – can you believe it? Even God was on the wedding bandwagon these days. My desire to give Sophie the best of everything apparently gave people the impression I was the wealthy mother of the bride sparing no expense at her only daughter’s special day. This was all true – except the ‘wealthy’ bit.

Nothing was too much, no night shift too long, no sacrifice too great. Our Sophie’s wedding would be the best day of her life – and probably mine too. After years of struggling as a single mum, watching her walk down that aisle into the arms of a doctor would be my proudest moment – and, until about twenty minutes before, she was the glowing, beautiful bride I’d always dreamed she’d be. The beautifully fitting gown in a delicate nude shade warmed her pale complexion, enhanced her lovely figure, and made her long blonde hair glow in the spring sunshine.

I looked at Sophie, my beautiful only child, now twenty four – she would have all the things I never had. Sophie my torchbearer, taking her life into a world I couldn’t even contemplate with her law degree and junior doctor fiancé. Sophie would have the detached home in that leafy suburb and blonde, Boden-clad children. My daughter would enjoy holidays by a foreign sea and her own career, her own life, and even in all this, she’d enjoy financial freedom. I’d never believed the magazines of my youth that said you could ‘have it all,’ but perhaps the fairy tale was finally coming true for my daughter’s generation. If both partners had a career the odds were good that they would achieve the freedom and independence that money brought with it. Money had always been a problem for me – it had never come easy – even as a child we’d lived on very little. My dad, the eternal optimist, had an unhealthy relationship with money and I’d vowed to live differently.

Nothing was too good for my daughter and I’d made sure she was never short of anything, even if that was sometimes difficult. But I knew education was the key and would bring her a life neither me nor my parents had and encouraged her to work hard at school. I was also keen to give motherly advice about boyfriends. There was a slight glitch around 2007 when she brought home an unemployed musician and declared her undying love, but to my relief it was just a phase – and like her 2004 Goth period, she moved on. Sitting in an empty churchyard now with my daughter sobbing on my shoulder, I almost smiled at the irony. When Sophie had introduced me to Alex, the medical student boyfriend from university I thought it was ‘Mother’s Day’, and my work here was done. My daughter had a doctor and I could die happy.

Alex’s parents (a house in Portugal, two cleaners and a Porsche) had offered to contribute to the wedding, but pride got the better of me.

‘No, no, no the bride’s family will pay, it’s tradition,’ I heard myself say, as my brain screamed ‘help... the bride doesn’t have a family, only me and my ageing mother who hasn’t earned a penny in her life.’

‘If I can’t give my daughter the proper send-off I’ve failed as a mother,’ I’d said to Sophie, who to her credit told me I was a good mother and I didn’t need to prove it by going bankrupt.

‘Vol-au-vents would have been fine,’ she’d sighed when I told her they were too seventies and Alex’s mother would be horrified.

‘We could have said we were being ironic?’ Sophie had offered, but I wasn’t giving that smug mother of the groom anything to turn up her nose at. Besides, my own mother would have been repulsed at such lack of culinary taste.

There were moments when I wondered if I’d taken too much on. Alex’s parents with their six-figure salary, weekly flower delivery, and home in Monte Carlo would have been able to pay for the lot in one go without even feeling it. But it was the thought of Alex’s mother Anastasia in her designer gear and pitying face that spurred me on during those endless shifts on the tills. Each ‘hello’ and ‘do you have a loyalty card?’ and ‘pop your card in there please’ took me closer to giving my daughter the best day of her life and showing Anastasia, and her snobby friends that I was just as good as they were.

The catering alone cost me several months’ salary, and when Anastasia wondered aloud if the planned scallops and chorizo were ‘a bit of a cliché?’ I smiled through my teeth, resisted the desire to punch her on the nose and went back to the menu for something apparently less of a sodding cliché.

‘I wonder if pork pies are considered a cliché?’ I’d said in Anastasia’s posh tones to my friend Carole as we stacked shelves and filled freezers at the supermarket.

‘Ooh love – not just a cliché, a working-class cliché,’ she said. I waved a bag of mini pasties and we laughed at the prospect of Alex’s mother and her cronies chowing down on supermarket finger food and frozen pastries from our optimistically named ‘party range’. So it was Anastasia’s cuisine of choice that I was working extra shifts for – and my calloused hands and blistered feet equalled seared pole-caught tuna canapés drizzled with a virgin olive oil and balsamic infusion.

‘How can you even prove it’s pole caught?’ Carole asked.

I shook my head; ‘I’ve no idea, but I reckon they’re charging me for the poles, the fishermen and the bloody boats.’

Even my mother, who was partial to a bit of food snobbery was overcome by the drizzling and the foam.

‘I will never understand why Alex’s mother has to have balsamic virgins on her tarts,’ was her confused response when I showed her the wedding breakfast menu. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the finer things in life, but in order for five hundred people I’d never met to enjoy those fine things, I had to work every hour God sent. And as we know, God was charging me too. So after menus, dresses, cakes and flowers pored over for months it finally felt like we were getting there and I arrived in the bridal car with Sophie a few minutes late as is usual for the bride. Keep him guessing until the very last moment. But as we’d waited by the car just yards from the church it soon became clear that despite forensic planning, and the backing of God and his balsamic virgins, something was missing – we were minus a groom.

There followed an awkward wait outside the church, and many frantic, unanswered phone calls to Alex and the local hospital to check if he’d been involved in an accident. When we finally got the news I couldn’t speak to the groom’s parents, who shuffled through the church grounds without making eye contact. I made a vague and embarrassed announcement and the guests left, mortified, muttering vague clichés and condolences. And here we were now, just Sophie and me both desperately trying to come to terms with what had happened. Black mascara tears ran down her lovely face, her world had, that afternoon in May simply shuddered to a halt.

A text. That was all he’d sent her. He’d been too much of a coward to call and say he couldn’t go through with it. I stroked her hair in the same way I did when she was little and had fallen off her bike. This would need more than a sticking plaster and a mug of hot chocolate. I just kept saying over and over in my head that it was going to be okay and it was all meant to be – I believed in fate – it had helped me through so much in the past. But at this precise moment in time it was hard to see why Alex, the eligible groom with a career in medicine and a car that cost my annual wage, would do this. I knew one thing though – if I could get my hands on the bastard I would probably be up for murder.

‘What about the honeymoon... and the wedding presents?’ she was saying through sobs. She didn’t really care about any of that, it was, I guessed, part of the grieving process she was beginning to go through, a checklist of everything that had been destroyed by him. All I could think was how many innovative and untraceable ways I could torture and kill my son-in-law-never-to-be.

‘It will all make sense one day...’ I offered, half-heartedly, while cradling my daughter’s head in my arms. I wanted to say ‘come home love, the world’s cruel, you can’t trust anyone – especially men, they leave you... they always leave you one way or another.’

‘Perhaps it’s meant to be?’ I said instead, once more allowing fate to relieve us of any responsibility – it wasn’t our fault, it was that bitch fate. But Sophie pulled away, her mascara-stained face looking straight at me.

‘Meant to be? Being stood up at the altar?’

The look on her face was incredulity.

‘Sorry darling, I wasn’t trying to trivialise the situation...’

‘You just did. How can you say that... even
think
it, Mum?’ she was angry now, taking out her hurt on me. The man who’d caused it was elsewhere, I would be the punchbag – but that was okay, after all it was part of the job description of ‘being mum’.

‘I just wanted to point out that perhaps, in the future, you might think he did you a favour... I mean would you want a man who could do this to you on your wedding day?’ I saw by her face I was making it so much worse.

‘Yes... let’s just fast forward this bit shall we? Oh we’ll laugh about it this time next year – this time never,’ she spat through her tears.

‘Darling... I didn’t mean...’

She pulled away, her head slowly shaking. I spotted the vicar peering from behind the door, he was taking pantomime steps across the gravel and making an ‘o’ shape with his mouth in a clumsy attempt to convey concern. I was torn between bursting into laughter or tears. Was that the best a vicar could do at a time like this? I smiled politely and looked away, resisting the urge to hurl something at him and shriek ‘where is your God now?’ If he thought he could squeeze some more money out of me now for a ceremony that never happened I planned to hit him with my £100 powder blue Phase Eight clutch bag. In fact the only reason I wasn’t hurling it across the gravel now was because I was hoping to take it back to the shop.

I would be sending a very stiff email to ‘God.com’ when all this was over, telling him and his staff to sort their shit out. No wonder people were going to supermarkets on a Sunday instead of going to Jesus. Sophie and I would laugh about the vicar and his silly walk one day, wouldn’t we? I didn’t point it out then, I’d said enough, but like toothache I had to keep prodding it with my tongue and looked at Sophie while searching my brain for reasons why her life would be better without Alex. I was just about to say something quite nasty and probably unforgiveable about Alex’s mother when Sophie spoke, ‘“I can’t go through with it,” he said in his text. ‘He made marrying me sound like a visit to the electric chair. What did I do wrong Mum? Alex was supposed to save me, take me away from it all... from you...’ she held her hands up in the air.

‘Save you? From me...?’ I said gently, my heart suddenly hurting, my head now to one side like a dog trying to make sense of a strange noise.

‘No I don’t mean... that he would save me from you... I meant save me from becoming you, here, in your little life in this little town. I love you Mum, but I don’t want to be you... I don’t want to be left behind here. I don’t want to turn round in twenty years and find myself single, working on a checkout with no future in my forties. I don’t want my life to exist only between series of Strictly Come Dancing on a Saturday night clutching a glass of Pinot and imagining it’s me on the dance floor. I want a real life – a big life – and Alex was my chance... he would have choppered me right out of here.’

I was devastated. I felt the cold stone under my bum and the knife in my heart, the wind rustled through the trees and I pulled the hydrangea blue pashmina round my shoulders.

‘That’s a bit harsh love...’ I started, trying hard not to let my hurt show but unable to leave this alone, she’d never said anything like it before. ‘I’m happy after all... my life isn’t that bad,’ I almost added that I didn’t always clutch a glass of Pinot, sometimes I pushed the boat out and bought a nice Merlot and a bag of Thorntons chocolate caramels. But I felt that might be proving her point... not about Strictly Come Dancing, but about me having a little life.

‘No offence...’ she started, which usually means one is about to be hit with a truck load of offence that hurts like hell, so I braced myself. ‘But Mum... I just don’t want that for me... I want so much more.’ she said quietly.