‘I’m sure, Mum,’ Meg said. ‘It’s a bit different this time.’
‘Make sure he stays on the porch, lovie, that’s all I’ll say.’
Ann O’Reilly had been as fond of Stuart as everyone else always had been, he was a charmer after all, but there was a bit of a naughty boy in there somewhere. Her Meggie had gone through quite a life with him, she told people. Time he settled down.
Meg’s view of the sea was interrupted by a slim arm waving in front of her eyes.
‘Can I sit or is this area reserved only for brides-to-be?’ said a twinkly voice.
It was Vonnie, chief bridesmaid on Saturday, a notion which still made Meg wince a little. Did sixty-three-year-olds get to have bridesmaids? Was it tacky?
Vonnie had jumped up and said ‘Bags be bridesmaid again!’ when Meg had told her the news.
‘Yes,’ Meg had said automatically before she’d had time to think about it and say ‘No! We want it to be classy and low-key this time. So no bridesmaids or matrons of honour, or anything …’
‘It’s going to be fantastic!’ Vonnie had said that day, in utter delight. ‘You and Stu – together again!’
Vonnie saw the world in complete black and white. Good and bad. Nothing in between. Stu and Meg had been good together once so they’d be good together again. And they’d all get to have a party.
‘I’m thinking you in dramatic cream, very tanned – we’ll have to have a pre-wedding weekend somewhere hot – and me in—’ Vonnie had paused, considering.
Clothes were Vonnie’s life. She’d worked as a seamstress since she was eighteen and still did. Gerry, her husband, was not one of life’s great providers. It was his back – he couldn’t get it off the bed, Stu joked.
‘Sequins, spaghetti straps, a dress to the knee and my old jewelled sandals, the second-hand Jimmy Choos, although they’re wrecked but I could add a few more glittery bits. The girls will be bridesmaids too, right?’
There was no going back about the bridesmaids, Meg reflected now, as Vonnie settled in opposite her in the café.
All four – Vonnie and three of Meg’s daughters – were wearing bias-cut sheaths in colours that suited them. Savannah and Eden were in coral and Meg was anxious at the thought of how her beloved Savannah’s thinness would be evident in anything strappy. Indy was going for turquoise and Vonnie had plumped for old gold. Rory had said she’d wear a dinner jacket like her father.
‘Of course,’ Meg had said. Meg had considered herself the champion of Rory’s gayness since Rory was a little girl. Upsettingly, Rory did not want anyone to champion her.
‘Muuuum,’ she’d say. ‘I want to be like everyone else! Leave me alone.’
Meg had sighed and cancelled plans to go to the Pride parade where she’d wear her own LGBTQ+ outfit with, well, pride.
Rory was a coolly androgynous person who owned nothing with rainbows on it.
‘I couldn’t sleep last night for excitement thinking about the whole week,’ Vonnie was saying. ‘A week of wedding!’
Vonnie had been one of the first people Meg had told about the remarriage on the grounds that it would ready her for the possibly tricky task of telling her four daughters. Vonnie was the test case. For a start, Vonnie had known her longer than her daughters and it would certainly be easier telling her because Vonnie was a) wildly, crazily romantic b) had always adored Stu and c) had never really understood what things had been like by the end.
The girls were another kettle of fish. They had gone through their father’s gambling, drinking, the arguments, the stopping drinking, the starting drinking again, more gambling, the bailiffs, the promises – which never materialised – of rehab and, finally, Meg and her daughters moving without Stu into the old farmhouse they’d rented on the outskirts of Greystones where they knew nobody.
The farmhouse was ‘charmingly distressed’, which was clearly renting agent-speak for all the furniture flaking, for there being a wasps’ nest in the tree just outside the back door and for hordes of mice to be convinced that it was their home too.
Nobody ever walked barefoot in the farmhouse or left a shoe or a slipper on the floor in case a mouse decided to set up home in it.
Vonnie had been a stoic presence in their lives then but she hadn’tlivedit. Being on the sidelines was not the same. Vonnie’s husband, Gerry, bad back notwithstanding, had never gambled or drunk the family’s home and livelihood away.
Telling Vonnie had been easier than telling Sandra, her older sister, who’d blurted out: ‘Are you mad?’ when she’d heard the news.
Meg, who rarely lost her temper, had hung up and hadn’t talked to her sister until she’d apologised. Which she did – sort of.
‘On your head be it,’ Sandra had said. ‘You never hang up on me. What’s wrong with you?’
‘I don’t tell you how to live your life,’ Meg had yelled down the phone.
‘I wasn’t telling you how to live yours,’ Sandra said reasonably. ‘It’s just Stu and – ah, you know. The past. Marry who you like. I’ll be there. But I won’t wear heels. My bloody bunions are killing me.’
