Before I Do(2)

“Maybe a relay? Audrey could walk twice,” Josh suggested. The note of sarcasm made her suspect he’d had a few pints at the ushers’ lunch earlier.

“Then she’d end up at the wrong end,” Lawrence pointed out, his white wispy eyebrows dancing in confusion.

“Josh.” Audrey shot him a playful frown and shook her head. Luckily, Vivien hadn’t heard him. Her focus was on the offending aisle, which was just sitting there, failing to be wide enough.

“I think the whole idea of being ‘given away’ is preposterous,” said Hillary, who sat with his feet up on the pew in front of him, reading a copy of Playbill magazine. “Can’t you just walk yourself down the aisle, Auds?”

“No, she can’t. That would look negligent, as though we have failed to come up with a respectable escort,” Vivien shot back, her eyes darting disapprovingly to Hillary’s shoes on the pew.

“I fear we’ll have to move on from the entrance,” Reverend Daniels suggested with a nervous laugh. “I have another family coming in at seven thirty to discuss a christening.”

“Reverend, we can’t move on until we get this right. I do wish I had been forewarned about the inadequacy of the aisle,” asserted Vivien.

Audrey rubbed a fist against her chest, which had been feeling tight all day. This wedding was making her feel like a plate spinner, watching to see which plate was going to fall, then running to keep it turning. She wished her best friend, Clara, were here. Clara was good at keeping all the plates in the air.

“Maybe Brian could walk me the first half and Lawrence the second,” Audrey suggested diplomatically.

Vivien nodded, satisfied with this solution, and Hillary muttered in a singsong voice, “Crisis averted.”

“Excellent plan. So we’ll position Dad Two on this pew here,” said the reverend, scurrying down the aisle to mark the row with a red hassock, “and Dad One by the door.” Audrey winced at his choice of language. She had always called her stepfathers by their first names, as she called her mother by hers. Vivien objected to the labels of “Mum” or “Mummy” on the grounds that they were ordinary and reductive.

“It’s Brian and Lawrence,” Brian said, gently correcting the reverend, and Audrey gave him a grateful nod. Not for the first time today, she felt wistful about her father’s absence. What would he make of all this—the church, the wedding, the man she was about to marry?

“Most brides don’t like to rush the entrance. The cadence of your step should be: step, feet together, step, feet together,” Reverend Daniels said while illustrating the rhythm of the walk to Audrey. “That way, your guests will have enough time to admire you from every angle.”

Vivien started to imitate the desired step cadence.

“It reminds me of doing the cha-cha on Strictly,” she said, and then started shimmying her hips and cha-cha-ing up the aisle. Vivien was always performing. She was the sort of person who narrated the stage directions of her life and would end arguments by saying, “And scene,” before taking a small bow and leaving the room.

“Would you like to practice?” the reverend asked.

“I’m good,” Audrey said briskly. “Step, feet together, step, feet together. Got it.”

Josh reached out and started massaging her shoulders. She dipped her head to one side, leaning into his touch, his firm hands warm against her bare neck.

“Audrey can hardly walk in a straight line at the best of times. I’d make her practice if I were you,” piped up Hillary, giving her a sly wink.

“Hillary has a point,” said Vivien with a flourish of her hand. “What’s the point in having a rehearsal if you don’t rehearse? Come, come, it’s your starring moment.” She waved to Audrey and then snapped her fingers for Lawrence to sit in the marked pew, before beckoning Brian to take his position at the church doors.

“Life is not a dress rehearsal, until it is!” called Josh’s mother, Debbie, from the back of the church. Debbie had been given the task of checking for drafts, moving herself around the pews, working out which seats would be most appropriate for elderly relatives to occupy. She was using an intricate color-coded system of stickers that the ushers would be briefed on later. A blue sticker meant “drafty, no one over seventy to sit here,” white meant “adequate,” and neon yellow meant “prime seating, little to no draft.” Clearly the system was needlessly complex, but Debbie was having such fun “feeling useful” that it was kinder just to let her cover the beautiful church in hundreds of hideous stickers.

“First rule of show business, Auds, give the people what they want,” Hillary said as Audrey shuffled past his pew and flicked his magazine. She thought he was enjoying his role as heckling audience member far too much. Hillary had been Audrey’s nanny growing up. Her mother didn’t believe in employing professional nannies—“predictable, dull people.” Instead of qualified childcare, she had preferred to hire out-of-work actors to supervise young Audrey. Her logic was that actors would have more energy and enthusiasm for the task. Plus, people in the arts would have more interesting things to teach her child than “finger painting and ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep.’?”

While some of her earlier nactors (nanny actors) had been more competent than others, Hillary had been a great success and had become a permanent fixture in Audrey’s life. Vivien held up their bond as a validation of her offbeat childcare choices. The fact that Audrey, to this day, still didn’t know the words to a single nursery rhyme and had never once done a finger painting was beside the point.