I Heart London Read online

  ‘Oh, it’s super-quaint,’ Jenny said, coming up the path behind me. ‘And it’s a house? Like, a full house?’

  ‘It’s a full house,’ I nodded. ‘It has many rooms. And two toilets. And there are only two people living in it.’

  Jenny seemed puzzled. ‘Doesn’t Louisa have a husband?’

  ‘Yes.’ I looked at her like she was mad.

  ‘Then three people?’ Jenny looked at me like I was mad.

  ‘Three?’

  ‘Grace?’

  Oh yeah. Grace.

  ‘So two people and a baby,’ I corrected myself.

  ‘I know this is a controversial statement to you,’ she said, straightening her hair, ‘but babies are people too.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I mumbled, mirroring her last-minute grooming. ‘She hasn’t got an iPhone. She’s not a person.’

  I knocked on the door, expecting Lou to be ready and waiting, but instead we hung around on the doormat for a couple of minutes, Jenny’s excited face turning quickly into Jenny’s impatient face and me starting to freeze. Late afternoon in May required at the very least a cardigan. I had no such thing. Stupid beautiful sleeveless dress. I wondered whether or not Jenny would be able to whip me up a wedding dress with pockets. I hated having cold hands.

  Eventually the front door rattled into life with the sound of someone struggling with a chain and swearing like a trooper behind it.

  ‘Oh, hello.’

  Louisa’s husband, Tim, opened the door. Tim and I went back. Way back. Throwing-up-on-the-night-bus back. But the last time I’d seen him, I’d broken several bones in his hand with a shoe and so I could understand why he wasn’t swooping in for a hug. Not that Jenny was going to give him a choice.

  ‘Hi, I’m Jenny.’ She flung both her arms around his neck and squeezed tightly. ‘You must be Tim.’

  Jenny’s theory, presumably stolen from Oprah like most of Jenny’s theories, was that hugs and physical contact made people feel closer to one another more quickly and therefore established trust. What Jenny had failed to realize was that she was in suburban southwest London, and hugging strangers made you seem like a developmentally challenged child. Tim immediately backed off and made as if to bolt down the hall.

  ‘You have a beautiful house,’ Jenny called after him automatically before turning to me and making a ‘crazy’ face. I nodded. He was a bit.

  ‘Louisa’s in the living room with Grace,’ he shouted back at us. ‘I’ll make tea.’

  ‘He’s so well trained,’ I said, only to walk straight into my best friend breastfeeding on the sofa. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ I slapped a hand over my eyes and promptly tripped over a Fisher Price baby gym. The carpet, like everything else, smelled ever so slightly like baby puke, and my six drinks of the day threatened to make a return visit.

  ‘Get your ass up. You can’t walk down the aisle with a broken leg,’ Jenny said, dragging me up off the floor while I tried desperately to keep my eyes averted.

  ‘I’m not going to look any better with your fingerprints embedded into my arms, am I?’ I said, shaking her off and trying to ignore the throbbing pain and giant gash in my knee. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Hello, Louisa, how are you, Louisa? I’m very good, thanks. And you?’ Lou sat serenely on the settee, still nursing Grace and staring at both of us.

  ‘We haven’t actually been properly introduced.’ Jenny shook off the moment’s drama and held out her hand. Louisa looked at the hand, looked down at the baby she was holding and looked back up at Jenny.

  ‘Now’s not a brilliant time for handshakes,’ she said, not even a little bit amused. ‘Angela, have you finished trying to destroy my house?’

  I settled into an armchair, rubbed my knee and looked around. It would be a pretty difficult task to destroy it, as far as I could tell. Louisa’s cream-coloured palace had been transformed. And when I said transformed, I meant decimated. Order had been overthrown by the chaos of primary-coloured pieces of plastic, boxes and boxes and boxes of nappies and never-ending stacks of baby wipes. Everything in the room looked as if it would be sticky. Jenny sat awkwardly in the other cream armchair and tried to contain herself. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her look so out of place.

  ‘Had enough of your mum already?’ Louisa handed a very full, very red-looking baby to Tim, who swooped in for burping duties. ‘Did Alex head for the hills?’

  ‘Not quite,’ I said, waiting for her to put her boob away. This was all very uncomfortable. And not just because of the boob. I couldn’t remember a time I’d been in Louisa’s house for more than three minutes without being offered a biscuit. I knew that baby was going to ruin everything. ‘So, you know Saturday?’

  ‘Your mum’s party?’ She gazed lovingly at Grace as she threw up all over Tim’s shoulder. ‘We’re coming. We’ve been briefed. We’ve bought a card.’

  ‘Well, technically, yes − it is still her party. But now it’s sort of also kind of my, um …’ I looked to Jenny for support. ‘Wedding.’

  The room went so quiet, I could hear Songs of Praise on next door’s telly.

  ‘Your what?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said, even though it wasn’t really. ‘But Mum’s got it into her head that she wants us to get married at home, and, well, long story short, we think it’s a good idea.’

  ‘We think it’s an awesome idea,’ Jenny added eagerly. ‘It’s going to be so much fun.’

  ‘So when you say “we”, do you mean “we”, you and Alex or “we”, you and Jenny?’ Louisa’s voice was cool. She was pissed off with me. ‘Because it doesn’t sound like something you would come up with. Because it sounds stupid.’

  It wasn’t as if I’d expected Louisa to jump up and down with joy − I’d thought she might need a cup of tea and maybe a ginger nut to digest the news; but this was a little bit harsh.

  ‘Hey, I wasn’t even there,’ Jenny jumped in before I could defend her. Not that Jenny ever needed defending. ‘It was Annette’s idea. And Alex agreed to it. Then Angela called me to ask what I thought, and I told her, like I just told you, it’s an awesome idea. Awe. Some.’ She sat back in her armchair and glared at Louisa with a venom usually reserved for the woman who snatched up the last pair of Jimmy Choos at a sample sale. This wasn’t ideal.

  ‘Oh, Angela called you, did she?’ Louisa folded her arms and gave me a level glare. I would have been more upset but her boobs were leaking and I was glad she had adopted the grumpy stance.

  ‘I did.’ I gave up on Jenny and started on my defence. ‘And I was going to call you, but I knew Jenny was at home on her own and you were busy here with Tim and the baby and—’

  ‘No it’s fine, we were very busy,’ Lou said, cutting me off. ‘We’re always busy. Having a family keeps you very, very busy. I know you two wouldn’t understand.’

  Ouch. Jenny pursed her lips and looked at the floor. Under normal circumstances she would have ripped Louisa a new arsehole for that comment, but I could see she was on best behaviour. In all honesty, I was a little bit disappointed because I kind of wanted to punch her in the boob myself, but I didn’t think I’d get away with it. Instead I took a different approach.

  ‘So, would this be a good time to ask you to be my bridesmaid?’ I presented her with jazz hands and as bright a smile as I could manage.

  ‘Are you actually serious?’ Louisa sat forward on the edge of the sofa and leaned over to take my hands in hers. ‘We’re talking about a wedding, Ange. Which means a marriage. Which is a pretty grown-up, serious thing to do. This isn’t another of your wacky adventures, you know?’

  ‘Wacky adventures?’ I pulled my hands away. Since when were my adventures wacky? ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Just what I was trying to talk to you about yesterday,’ she said, actively trying to pretend Jenny wasn’t in the room. Tim had already shown his good sense and left with Grace. ‘This isn’t like running off to New York or punching girls out in Paris − you can’t laugh it all off, come
home and just pretend it never happened. Marriage is a big deal. I don’t want you to take this lightly.’

  ‘I’ve been engaged for six months,’ I pointed out. ‘No one’s pretending anything never happened. I realize it’s a little bit sudden, but that doesn’t mean I’m not taking it seriously. We’re adults making an adult decision.’

  ‘Then look at it this way,’ she said, trying another approach. ‘People spend months planning weddings. I just don’t want you to rush this and regret it for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Some people like planning things for months,’ I countered. ‘I’m not one of those people.’

  That much was true and she knew it. Louisa and Tim were engaged for two years before their wedding, and that was only just enough time for Louisa to put everything together. Every weekend for twenty-four months I had endured cake tastings, dress shopping and a seating plan so complicated that it would have challenged Stephen Hawking. It was going to be a whole lot easier with two tables and a trough full of Monster Munch. I hadn’t told Jenny about my trough fantasy yet.

  ‘Louisa,’ Jenny piped up in as gentle a voice as she could muster. ‘We’re gonna make this the most awesome wedding ever. Sure, it’s going to be a hectic week and I’m going to work you both like bitches, but it’s going to be great.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Lou leaned back into the sofa, giving me the dead eye.

  ‘I know we can pull it off if all three of us work together,’ Jenny bargained. ‘You’re the local, you’ve done this before, you’re key to this. I’m not going to lie, I’m clearly the most awesome events planner who ever lived, but I can’t do this without you.’

  Whatever magic Jenny had worked on my parents appeared to be casting its spell over Louisa. Her hard expression softened and she dropped her head against the back of the settee before letting out a loud groan.

  ‘I want it on record that I am completely and utterly against this,’ she said, staring up at the Artexed ceiling that I’d been on at her to get rid of since she’d moved in. It was bloody horrible. ‘But I’m clearly going to have to be the voice of reason in this thing, aren’t I?’

  ‘Pretty much, yeah.’ Jenny was entirely serious. ‘So you’re in?’

  ‘Of course I bloody well am,’ she replied. ‘But where do we even start?’

  ‘With wine,’ Jenny said, grabbing stacks and stacks of paper out of her giant bag. ‘We start with so much wine.’

  ‘That I can help with,’ Louisa said, pushing herself up off the sofa and heading for the kitchen with a spring in her step.

  Two hours later we were all sprawled on the carpet, surrounded by the results of brainstorming under the influence. Weirdly, I wasn’t putting it away as quickly as anyone might have expected. Possibly because I’d eaten half a side of cow at lunch. Or possibly because the wedding jitters were cancelling out every other emotion I’d ever experienced. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball with Alex and wake up wedded. Was that too much to ask?

  ‘So, so, so.’ Jenny attempted to bring order to the room by waving around an empty bottle of Shiraz. ‘We have a list, OK? We’re agreed on this?’

  ‘Read it again.’ Louisa’s alcohol tolerance had diminished considerably from before she was pregnant, I noticed from behind my great big glass of red. Still my first, still full. She was hiccupping after one glass, and after two was agreeing with anything and everything Jenny said. The old drunken Louisa was far more bolshy, but for the sake of getting things done, the new compliant version was probably a good thing.

  ‘Without having talked through the logistics with Annette, I’m figuring we’re still going to need to look into the table dressings and centrepieces as well as arranging music and a dance floor for the party,’ Jenny said, looking down her list as she sipped her wine. ‘Plus I’m kinda dubious on the catering and the booze provisions, but I feel like they’re going to be easier to take care of than some other stuff.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Louisa nodded. ‘I can take care of the catering. And the booze.’

  ‘And we need to deal with the cake. I figure that’s going to be a tough one.’

  ‘There’s a woman.’ Lou waved her hand towards the window. ‘She lives around the corner. She makes everyone’s cakes. I’ll call her in the morning.’

  ‘A woman?’

  For once, I knew exactly who this incredibly loose description referred to. Mrs Stevens had been making the neighbourhood’s celebration cakes for the past thirty years and did a fine job. If fruit cake, vanilla sponge, sugar roses and ribbon were your idea of a fine job. While I was pretty sure they weren’t Jenny’s, I was pretty OK with it. As long as I got my trough of Monster Munch.

  ‘She did mine,’ Louisa replied with an edge to her voice. As predicted, Jenny didn’t look utterly convinced, but I saw her put an ‘L’ next to ‘cake’ and we moved on.

  ‘So then it’s simpler things like a memory book for people to write in, pens, disposable cameras, any decorative touches we think of, invitations and RSVPs.’ Jenny paused to click onto another window. ‘And we’ve already sent the email out to everyone in the US. There’s no one else here you want to invite?’

  By everyone in the US, she meant Erin, Sadie, Mary, Delia, James, Craig and Graham. There wasn’t time for handcrafted paper engineering and a calligrapher, much to Louisa’s dismay. I would have been perfectly happy with a Facebook invite, but Jenny said the least we could do was a proper Evite and follow up with paper invitations on Monday. So obviously we ended up with the Evite.

  As for UK guests, Mum had already invited the family, so that was taken care of, and there really weren’t any old friends I was desperate to have around me. I’d always been a bit rubbish at keeping things going, and since I had been a borderline recluse during the last couple of years I’d lived in London, Mark had claimed any friends I might have thought were my own. Such were the trials of (a) working freelance and (b) only having ‘couple’ friends. No work buddies to come on to your mum or tell lairy stories about Christmas parties at your wedding reception. The relief. Of course, there was a measurable part of me that wanted Mark at the wedding. I wanted to take the high ground, show that I was a big enough person to want him at this special day in my life. And I was going to look a hell of a lot better than I had in the supermarket. Besides, he really needed to meet Alex. And then go home and cry in a corner about how hot he wasn’t. But maybe those didn’t add up to enough good reasons.

  ‘Then we need wedding rings, outfits for the wedding party − groom, father of the bride, mother of the bride, bridesmaids.’ She stopped for emphasis. ‘And of course the bride.’

  ‘Oh.’ I snapped back to attention. ‘You mean me.’

  ‘Well, yeah. You.’ Jenny tutted. Clearly I was in trouble for not paying attention. ‘You’re gonna need shoes and underwear and jewellery and hair and make-up, although I can totally do the hair and make-up myself. Then all we have left is photographer/videographer, party favours and a honeymoon suite. Oh, and I guess we have to send Alex’s ass somewhere the night before the wedding.’

  ‘I’ve got a friend of a friend who does make-up,’ Louisa suggested. ‘And I think her boyfriend is a photographer?’

  ‘So I’ll do the hair and make-up, but we do need a photographer,’ Jenny said, simultaneously acknowledging and ignoring everything Louisa said. ‘Someone to do all the standard shit, but someone who’ll do cool reportage stuff too. I’ll talk to Erin. And Mary. They may know some people.’

  ‘I could ask my old editor at the magazine,’ I added. ‘I know most press photographers don’t do things like weddings, but you never know.’

  ‘You never know.’ Jenny pointed at me with a pen. ‘Good idea, Angie.’

  If I were a dog, my tail would have been wagging. I loved knowing I’d done well. I also loved how excited and engaged Jenny had become. It was ages since I’d seen her so involved with something. With anything, actually. If I’d known all it was going to take to knock her out of her funk was a shotgun wed
ding in another country, I’d have organized it months ago.

  ‘Don’t forget the hen and stag dos,’ Louisa added with an attractive slur on ‘stag’. ‘Although this might have to count as your hen do since we’re going to be so bloody up against it.’

  ‘Dude, if hen night and bachelorette party mean the same thing, there’s no way we’re missing that shit,’ Jenny corrected her. ‘I will make time. I will make an extra day in the middle of the week if I have to.’

  ‘Well, I do have some ideas,’ Lou shrugged. ‘Just things I was thinking about when we were planning all my stuff. Things I thought would work better for Angela when she got married.’

  ‘And I’ve got a ton of ideas too,’ Jenny said, getting excited again. ‘A London bachelorette! This is going to be so awesome.’

  ‘Ladies,’ I interrupted. ‘Really, the hen night is the least of my concerns. Can we just make sure I’m not getting married in Primark’s finest and walking down a non-existent aisle to the romantic yet tinny sounds of my cassette deck first?’

  Both of my bridesmaids looked a bit put out.

  ‘I put music on the list,’ Jenny pouted.

  Louisa brightened. ‘You could always wear my wedding dress?’

  ‘With all the love in my heart, I’m going to pass on that, thank you,’ I said, finishing my wine. ‘And the same goes if my mum even hints to either of you that I should wear hers. That woman got married in a fancy tablecloth. And I’m being nice by calling it fancy.’

  ‘Well, that’s our list.’ Jenny scribbled down a few last notes. ‘That’s the how, what, where and when. What I really need to know now is how you want it to feel. What does your wedding look like?’

  I wasn’t sure, but I knew what my face looked like. Completely blank. What did my wedding look like? I was suddenly reminded of a very awkward session with a career counsellor Mark had organized for me one birthday (the old romantic). They’d repeatedly asked ‘what does success look like to you?’ I didn’t know it could look like anything and was therefore quite thrown. Luckily, Louisa spoke both professional and American and was able to translate.