Husband Material (London Calling #2)(76)
“The naked mole rat and the Damaraland mole rat.”
Ana with one n gave an involuntary shudder. “Mole rats are just the worst animals.”
“Well, what do you expect”—that was Barbara Clench—“for an animal named after two different kinds of vermin?”
“By most objective metrics,” observed Dr. Fairclough, “humans are by far the worst animals, except perhaps in terms of our ability to survive in diverse environments.” She paused. “Although in those terms we are arguably inferior to our own gut flora.”
Given the alternative was fighting with Oliver about complex shit I didn’t want to fight about, I threw myself into the conversation.
“Molerat versus Gutflora sounds like a particularly crap monster movie.”
“You know what,” Rhys said cheerfully, “I’d watch that.”
There was another pause. And then, to everyone’s surprise, Dr.
Fairclough made a second contribution. “I’m not sure how mole rats could fight their own gut flora, and if they were fighting human gut flora, they would need to get inside humans to do it.”
We all contemplated that.
Ana with one n was getting the what-have-I-got-myself-into look that I sometimes saw on Rhys’s girlfriends shortly after they met the rest of us. “Fuck me. That is genuinely horrific.”
“Do you think,” asked Rhys, with the air of a man about to combust his relationship, “that they’d gnaw through the belly or crawl up through the arse?”
THE PART OF MY BRAIN that was rapidly falling asleep and therefore making random connections it might not otherwise have made strayed to the all-important question of why they called it a reception when it always came after the wedding.
There was, at least, the small mercy of the CRAPP crew getting our own table so we were able to ignore everyone else for most of the meal. It also allowed them to ignore us which, given we were still deep in the great mole-rat/belly-arse debate, was for the best.
The food, at least, was excellent and because these were the traditional kind of rich wankers as opposed to the trendy kind of rich wankers, there was at least a decent amount of it. But there weren’t a great deal of vegan options, so Oliver had to content himself with stealing bits of people’s side salads, which at least suited those of us —like me and Rhys—who thought vegetables at an event like this were just a scam to keep you away from the good stuff.
Also to my taste was the father-of-the-bride speech. Because it was short and to the point: doing the family proud, pleasant childhood anecdote, happy to incorporate the vast wealth of the Twaddles into the Fortescue-Lettice estate—the last part admittedly more implied than stated outright. Alex’s speech, by contrast, was…
not short or to much of a point at all.
“Well,” he said, rising slightly unsteadily to his feet, “if it isn’t dashed nice to see such a dashed lot of dashed fine people and…
Gosh, I’m saying ‘dashed’ rather a dashed lot, aren’t I? Anyway, thank you, Daddy-in-law, for your marvellous, marvellous speech, and thank you, Daddy-and-Mummy-in-law, for raising such a smashing, smashing gal as Miffy—I mean, Clara. We call her Miffy you see, for short. Where was I…”
As alienating as I’d found the service, even I had to admit that there was something endearing about watching Alex bumble his way through his groom’s speech. Thankfully, he didn’t try to do any jokes, although given the audience, the summus gag would probably have gone down like “Who’s on First.” After Alex was his brother Cornelius, who everybody called Connie, and he did do jokes—or at least I assumed they were jokes because people laughed. But they were the kind of jokes that were only funny if you went to Eton or, in extreme cases, one specific polo match ten years ago.
If this had been a normal wedding, the speeches would have been followed by dancing of the school disco variety, music provided by a jobbing DJ with a bad haircut or—increasingly—by somebody’s Spotify playlist piped through a laptop. Since this was not a normal wedding, there was no dancing, just mingling, and the music was both live and classical. Apparently, Oliver had been right about the string quartet, and in retrospect, I was glad they hadn’t watched me fuck. One of them had creepy eyebrows for a start.
As it turned out, an all-nighter followed by a long church service followed by a massive meal was an ideal recipe for unconsciousness. So when I felt myself leaning into Oliver like an amateur stripper who had overestimated their skill with a pole, I made a concerted effort to stiffen my lip, gird my loins, stand up, and be sociable. Reacting slower than he usually did—he was also dead on his feet—Oliver got up to join me and we made a round of the hall saying polite hellos to polite strangers who had no interest in us whatsoever.
As usual, Oliver was way better at this shit than I was, even managing to make a few sentences of small talk with some of the more accessible poshos before we moved on.
“I don’t know how you interact with these people,” I told him as we walked away from a short conversation with a Tory MP and her investment banker husband. “We have nothing in common with them.”
Oliver gave a tired shrug. He was doing that thing that people who were good in crowds did where he was really peppy and extroverted whenever somebody was looking and drooping to conserve energy the moment we got out of sight. “They’re just people, Lucien.”