"I'll show you in about forty years," she says, "when you're too old to laugh."
"That's a very long engagement."
"Yes," Cat says, and turns her face into my shoulder. "Isn't it just."
32
CAT
We decide on three weeks, and the village takes it as a personal challenge.
"You cannot plan a wedding in three weeks," Nadia says. She flew in from Chicago four days after we announced it, ostensibly to help, and has so far helped by working steadily through the cellar and providing commentary from a lounger. "It isn't possible. There's an entire industry built on it not being possible."
"We've got a field," Iris says.
"A field is not a venue."
"It's five hectares of lavender."
"It's afield, Iris."
Iris, who has been awake since five and is holding something laminated, regards her oldest friend with tremendous calm.
"Nadia," she says. "There's a spreadsheet."
Nadia goes quiet. She has seen the spreadsheets.
The trouble is that we never actually ask anybody for help. We mention it once, to Monique, and by Thursday the whole thing has been taken out of our hands.
Jacques arrives with a trailer of trestle tables nobody ordered.
Somebody's nephew turns up to "do the lights," does the lights, refuses money, and appears to have brought his own generator.
An old man I have never seen before in my life knocks on the door on Tuesday and explains at length that he tuned Marguerite's piano for thirty years and would like to tune it again for Saturday. He does not want paying. He will be back on Friday. I am not to touch the pedals.
We do not have a piano.
By Friday, we have a piano.
Mathilde, meanwhile, has declared war on my menu.
"You are not doing a fish course."
"It's mywedding, Mathilde."
"It's August."
"It'sOctober—"
"It is my kitchen," she says, which is not a rebuttal, and which ends the argument, because it is.
The guest list is a catastrophe for roughly one afternoon, until Iris works out that we don't actually have one. The village has one. The village has had one for some time, and has simply been waiting, politely, for us to catch up.
"Monique says a hundred and ten," she reports, coming into the kitchen.
"We invited forty."
"Yes."
