Husband Material (London Calling #2)(104)

Uncle Jim gave another gazebo-shaking sigh. “At least that was something. Still, it’s too late now. He’s gone and I’m…”

“Not?” Oliver finished for him.

“Old,” corrected Uncle Jim. “I’m an old, bald, fat man who left it all too late. From telling his brother to go fuck himself to…to everything else.”

Hoping I wasn’t treading on too many toes and that this fell under the broader category of LGBTQ+ community rather than the Blackwoods specifically, I stuck my oar in. “I mean,” I told him, “I suppose it is too late to tell David to go fuck himself unless you wanted to do it to his ashes. But as for the…the everything else bit…

there’s still time on that.”

Uncle Jim gave a snort. “What, should I buy myself a pair of those leather trousers with the bum cut out and go strolling around St. James’s Park?”

Aaaand there was the Uncle Jim we knew and loathed.

“For what it’s worth,” said Oliver with a level of patience that I was at once in awe of and a little worried I took for granted, “I’ve never worn leather trousers with the bum cut out in my life—meaning no disrespect to people who have. Most people prefer to go cruising on the internet these days. Or Hampstead Heath if you’d rather.”

“I still don’t…” Uncle Jim began, but apparently he still wasn’t sure what he still didn’t, so he let the thought trail away into nothing.

Oliver stood and went to crouch by his uncle. “And you don’t have to. There’s no”—he looked at me—“no right or wrong way to be who you are. If you’re happy being…”

“A fat, bald bachelor in his sixties?” suggested Jim.

“If you’re happy with your life the way it is,” Oliver continued doing his best to ignore Jim’s scathing opinion of himself, “you don’t have to change it. But if you want to…to explore alternatives, then there are alternatives.”

Uncle Jim looked down at Oliver. “There aren’t, Oliver. Not at my age.”

“There are apps,” I suggested.

Oliver nodded reassuringly. “And social clubs, if they’re more your speed. The world’s changing a lot for older men, and often for the better.”

“Perhaps.” The look in Uncle Jim’s eyes was the closest to thoughtful I’d ever seen him. “Still, change isn’t something I’m used to.”

“Of course.” Oliver’s tone was achingly careful. “As long as you realise that it doesn’t have to happen overnight and that you don’t have to be in a relationship to be—”

“Don’t,” said Uncle Jim. “Not out loud. I…” He hauled himself to his feet. “Good speech today,” he said. “Really gave the old man what for. Had it coming.”

Then he turned and walked back to the house.





"FOR GOD’S SAKE, LUCIEN." OLIVER’S beautifully tidy living room was now—and had been since Christmas—a chaos of increasingly complex index cards, charts, binders, and calendars. At one point I’d tried to tease him about their impact on our carbon footprint, but it hadn’t ended well. “I’m not asking you to do much, but you should have booked the band by now.”

I wince-cringed. “I know. I meant to do it last week. It’s just… Are we totally sure we don’t want to go with a DJ? It’d be a lot cheaper, and I don’t think anybody especially cares if there’s live music.”

“We had this conversation.” An exasperated tone was creeping into Oliver’s voice. He’d been exasperated for a while. “And we agreed—”

For once, I didn’t let that slide. “I’m not sure we actually agreed. I think we disagreed and eventually stopped talking about it, and you took that as meaning I’d backed down.”

Oliver threw his hands in the air, which was about twelve times more extravagant than any gesture I’d seen him make prewedding and was now the kind of thing he did all the time. “Fine, we’ll get a DJ. We can have a fiftysomething failed musician pumping dad-rock over tinny speakers the whole evening.”

“Good DJs do exist,” I pointed out. “I can get Priya to recommend somebody if you want.”

Invoking people who weren’t us, I’d learned, was a reasonable way to get Oliver to calm down. It was sort of Pavlovian, the spectre of an audience making his what-will-the-neighbours-think instincts kick in. “I’m very fond of Priya,” he said, “but don’t her tastes run a little alternative?”

“It’s a gay wedding, Oliver,” I reminded him for what might have been the hundredth time. “There’s no point trying to make it not-alternative because in the eyes of the law and most of society it’s alternative by definition.” Moving a stack of papers that I tried really hard to keep in the right order, I sat on the sofa. “Besides, it’s not like Priya has no sense of occasion. She wouldn’t send us somebody who’d play lesbian thrash metal over the vows. And also, would there be anything wrong with having a DJ playing lesbian thrash metal?”

Oliver looked up sharply from his spot on the rug. “Yes. The fact that it would be thrash metal. I am not getting married to thrash metal, lesbian or otherwise. I don’t think that’s a personality flaw, I think that’s a very reasonable preference.”