Husband Material (London Calling #2)(58)

“I was just explaining to Luc,” said Mum before I could get a word in edgeways, “that you were very happy for me to pay for your wedding.”

“Actually”—he started handing out curry—“I’m afraid Lucien’s right. What I said was that it was very kind of you, which is true. But doesn’t technically signal approval. You see, there are also downsides to having a son who’s a lawyer.”

Mum sighed. “So I am seeing. Bon. I have swapped you back.”

“Still not a swapping situation,” I reminded her.

She ignored me. “Stop trying to change the subject. Why do you not want me to pay for the wedding? I am old, I am rich, and I want to be part of your special day.”

“You will be part of my special day,” I told her. “You can walk me down the aisle or something. But I wouldn’t feel comfortable taking your money, and you’re not buying me cocaine.”

She folded her arms stubbornly. “Luc, if anyone is going to buy you cocaine, it should be your mother. I know the best kinds, I know the best people. Of course, a lot of them are dead because…well.

Cocaine dealers, they often have very unhealthy lifestyles. Long hours, bad diet. And it’s a very stressful business.”

“We have some savings.” That was Oliver, poking nervously at the extra-special vegan special curry. “At least, I have some savings.

Lucien made the mistake of going into the charitable sector.”

“Well, that is even worse,” cried Mum. “That means Oliver is paying for the whole thing like you are one of those brides that you order through the mail.”

I scrutinised this analogy from every angle to try and find one that was flattering. “It’s not like that at all. It’s just Oliver’s got slightly more money than me and—” Okay, it was sounding a tiny bit like that. “And anyway,” I finished, trying to steer us in a different direction, “it’s going to be a small ceremony. Just friends and family, and I don’t have that many friends or like half my family.”

Thinking about it, we hadn’t actually discussed the size of the ceremony. Or the date of the ceremony. The location of the ceremony. Or anything about the ceremony at all.

“Then,” Mum went on relentlessly, “if it is going to be so very small, it does not matter if I pay for it.”

Putting aside the extra-special vegan special curry, which always managed to be worse than the regular special curry because Mum took it as licence to indulge her creative side, I tried to have an intense debate with Oliver about whether we should let this happen.

Except, since I couldn’t talk, I was forced to rely entirely on my eyebrows and nose. Unsurprisingly, we failed to reach a firm conclusion.

“Can we,” I asked, “think about it?”

“Well, of course you can think about it,” said Mum. “I’m not a monster. To be honest, I only brought it up now so that I could tell Oliver before I told you so you would know how it feels.” She paused. “It does not feel good, does it, Luc?”

I sighed. “No, it doesn’t feel good. I’m really sorry.”

“You are forgiven.” She took her place on the sofa next to Oliver.

“But the man next door, he was definitely called John.”





WHEN ALEX HAD INVITED ME to his wedding, I’d been…not pleased exactly, because weddings were a faff, but at least mildly cheered. It was, after all, nice in abstract to know that a coworker thought well enough of you to add you to the list of people he wanted around him on the happiest day of his life. Although given the circles Alex and Miffy moved in, I suspected that the list wasn’t exactly short.

And a couple of months later, when Rhys Jones Bowen had suggested that since the entire office was invited, it would make sense to rent a minibus and drive everyone up together, I’d found that mildly cheering too. Then when he’d added that his friend had given us the use of his house to stay in the night before so we didn’t have to get up stupidly early to be on time for the ceremony, I was relieved. Because it was always good when somebody else took care of the logistics for you. It seemed like the lowest-stress big-event wedding I could possibly imagine. All I had to do was show up with Oliver at the end of work, and then we could all pile into a bus like we were going on a school trip. It felt, as Alex himself might have put it, jolly.

Except once we were half an hour into the journey, I remembered that I hated school trips. They involved putting a bunch of people who only knew each other in a very specific context into a very different context and expecting everything to work. And it never did.

We started out okay, with everybody upbeat and pally and helping each other load their luggage, but things quickly cooled off after we realised that most of us had brought somebody we knew better than we knew the rest of the group, meaning there was no real reason for us to interact as a group. Then they cooled off even more as each pair realised that most of the things they’d normally talk to each other about were things they didn’t particularly want to be airing in a crowded vehicle full of people who were strangers to one half of the couple and professional acquaintances to the other.

Even that would have been bearable. But then Rhys Jones Bowen insisted on starting a sing-along.

“Come on, you lot,” he tried with the kind of valour that led brigades of soldiers into valleys full of cannon. “You’re being a right bunch of gloomy Gusses. Everybody join in after me: ‘The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round, round and round…’”