Husband Material (London Calling #2)(115)

I snagged us a couple of glasses of… Actually we’d gone through the prosecco budget and were now into undisclosed fizzy wine. “And a non-shit time.”

“A non-shit time,” echoed Tyler, raising his glass.

“Of,” I added, “an engaged-person-appropriate variety.”

He nodded. “I was thinking we could drink, dance, lightly flirt on the understanding nothing would happen, and you could get all the art wrong so I could laugh at you.”

“That”—I too lifted my glass—“sounds like my kind of evening.”





IT HAD BEEN MY IDEA that we go back to Quo Vadis—the restaurant where we’d had our first, disastrous date—some time before the wedding. And, at the time, the day after our non-gender-specific animal parties had seemed sensible. Besides, scheduling anything at the moment was borderline impossible because it meant planning an event inside planning another event. Our life was logistics all the way down.

Unfortunately, I’d been working on the assumption that our non-gender-specific animal parties would be fairly low-key and wrap up before midnight. And Oliver’s had: he’d been for a nice dinner with his nice friends, read a couple of chapters of Real Life, and gone to sleep. I, by contrast, had drunk more than I’d drunk in years, partied until dawn with a bunch of artists, had breakfast in—I couldn’t remember, been deposited at my flat by kindly strangers, and woken at three in the afternoon with creases on my face from the sofa cushions where I’d apparently passed out.

All of which meant I was hungover and already late for the emotionally significant, relationship-bookending date I had myself arranged when my dad called.

If I’d been thinking clearly, I wouldn’t even have picked up, especially since the last time we’d spoken he’d made me yet another empty promise and then fucked off out my life. But see above re late and hungover.

“Have you got cancer?” I asked. “Actually, even if you do, I don’t care.”

“I’m doing well,” he told me as if I’d made a sincere enquiry into his health instead of strongly implying I didn’t give a shit whether he lived or died. “Thanks for asking.”

“I didn’t.”

There was the teeniest tiniest of pauses. “I was talking to NME

today, and they wanted to know what I was doing for your wedding.”

Turning onto Dean Street, I paused because barging into a restaurant late, hungover, and on the phone was the wrong kind of triple threat. “I don’t know, Dad. What are you doing for my wedding?”

“Well”—a still teenier, still tinier pause—“that very much depends on you.”

I’d say this was Jon Fleming all over, but everything Jon Fleming did was Jon Fleming all over. As far as I could tell, being yourself all over at all times was basically how you got to be his brand of famous. “Sorry, do you want to come to my wedding?”

“I thought you might want me to come.”

“Sorry, do you want to come to my wedding but also not want to say you want to come to my wedding because you have the emotional maturity of a…of a…a complete wanker?”

“If you don’t want me there, I’ll understand. I’m sure you still have a lot of complicated feelings.”

Oh, fuck him. He was going down this road again, and while this time I didn’t have Oliver with me to call him on his bullshit, that was okay. “Actually,” I told him, “my feelings are pretty simple.” For a start, I was one hundred percent confident that this was one hundred percent about him thinking it would be good PR to be seen at his gay son’s gay wedding and zero percent about anything else.

“I suppose it would be difficult for your mother as well,” Jon Fleming mused. It was a pointed muse.

And just for a moment, I could see the interview as if I was streaming it there and then: Obviously I would have loved to go to Luc’s wedding, but Odile, she can be so unstable. I tried to defug my head, which was difficult given how late I’d been out the previous night. “Are you really telling me I have to invite you to my wedding or you’ll shit on Mum in the tabloids?”

“Of course not.” He sounded offended, the way obnoxious people always sounded offended when you confronted them with their obnoxious behaviour.

Well, this sucked. On one level, I knew my mum could take care of herself. After all, she’d been taking care of herself for years, and she’d got spectacularly good at giving no fucks in her old age. On another, less rational level, I always hated it when my crap blew back on her. But I could do this. I was a strong, independent person and I could handle my dad being a bully. “Are you sure,” I tried, “because it sounds a lot like that is what you’re saying and…well…remember that my fiancé is a barrister.”

Technically, of course, he wasn’t that sort of barrister. I was just hoping that Jon Fleming’s inability to pay attention to anything that wasn’t himself meant he wouldn’t realise.

“I’ve never had much time for lawyers,” Dad replied. And perhaps I was imagining it, but he sounded cagier than he would have if he’d considered it a totally empty threat.

“Yeah, but lawyers are like gravity,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve got time for them, it matters that they’ve got time for you. And if you did start telling the Mail or the Mirror anything about Mum that could be considered, y’know, libellous, then I’d actually know who to talk to now. In fact”—I decided to push my luck—“these days I even know a high-court judge or two.”