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‘That’s the spirit,’ Eve said, cradling the phone under her chin while she scrolled through the local dog shelter’s website for photogenic mutts for a feature she was writing on Instagram engagements. She had a lovely image in her mind of two cute dogs holding up a sign saying, ‘our humans are getting married’.
‘Are you being sarcastic?’ Tanya barked. ‘This is the only hen do I’m ever going to have, Eve, and I want it to be perfect. I want a country club, a few beauty treatments, lots of champagne and sushi.’
‘You said you wanted it to be a surprise.’
‘Well, I don’t. That’s what I want.’
‘You could have saved me about thirty hours of planning and phoning round if that’s what you had just said in the beginning you know?’
‘You’re one of my best friends, you’re meant to know what I’d like.’
Labelling the two of them ‘best friends’ was a bit of a stretch. Eve was starting to realise that being contacted by Tanya out of the blue to be asked to be her bridesmaid, a decade after they were at university together, had little to do with nostalgia or fuzzy feelings of friendship and more to do with Tanya wanting to take advantage of Eve’s little black book of wedding contacts.
Eve absentmindedly pulled another paperclip out of her stationery pot and added it to a long line of clips that was now stretching across her desk. ‘Fine. Leave it with me.’
‘Oh, and one more thing, do you have your ears pierced?’
That was an odd question. ‘No, why?’
‘Could you get them done before the wedding? I’ve bought all the bridesmaids the same earrings to wear on the day as your gift from me.’
This took the biscuit. ‘Um, not really Tanya, I’ve never liked the idea of it.’
Eve could sense Tanya’s lips pursing over the phone line, possibly accompanied by a hint of an eye twitch too. ‘Maybe you could think about it, Eve.’
‘I have thought about it Tanya, and I don’t want to do it. I’ve got long hair anyway, so you wouldn’t even see them.’
‘Well, I want you to wear it up, nothing fancy like mine’s going to be, just a simple ponytail.’
Eve wanted to say more, to inject her friend with a hearty dose of realism and perspective right into her toned behind, but instead took a deep breath. ‘A ponytail is not a problem, the ear piercing is. But I promise you it’s not going to ruin your day.’ Eve hung up the call and slammed it down on her desk.
Kat looked up from a row of carefully-ordered pink lipsticks that were standing sentry on her own desk for a feature called Kiss-proof lipsticks that will stay on your lips not your groom. ‘Which one of your bridezillas was that?’
‘Tanya. Taking bridezilla-dom to another level entirely. I now have to find a country hotel that can fit twelve women in for beauty treatments in three weeks’ time. And a Japanese restaurant that doesn’t use shellfish and delivers to the arse end of nowhere. Oh, and she wants me to mutilate my body in order to accept my present which has quite clearly come from the heart.’
Sighing, Eve turned back to her computer screen. Her Dear Eve inbox was heaving under the strain of the many unread emails that had come in over the weekend. As well as writing three or four features for Your Wonderful Wedding per month, Eve was also the magazine’s resident agony aunt. But as wedding magazines were beautiful and aspirational, and not angst-ridden drama sagas like her last magazine, What a Life!, most of the questions were about how to stop the groom’s buttonhole from drooping, rather than anything more gritty. It made a nice change to be writing about the highest point in someone’s life rather than their lowest. Writing features with headlines like Blooming lovely, or Love at first blush certainly beat ones like My nephew is also my uncle or Why our 50-year age gap doesn’t matter.
Hi Eve!
I’m torn between wanting a French manicure for my day or a dusky pink to match the roses in my bouquet and the bridesmaid dresses. My mum thinks that a pink will be better, but I’m worried it might chip and look more obvious? At least if a French manicure chips, you can’t really see it. What should I do?
Thanks,
Helen, Staffordshire.
Eve was only meant to select the best five emails for the monthly Q&A page and to ignore the rest. Print-worthy, this one was not, but as she could sense the desperation in Helen from Staffordshire’s email, Eve replied nonetheless.
Hi Helen,
Firstly, congratulations on your big day, and well done for choosing such an on-trend colour for your wedding, dusky pink is a timeless choice. The best solution would be to wear the pink varnish and ask one of your bridesmaids to carry a spare bottle of the matching colour in their clutch bag to solve any chipping disasters.
Enjoy your day!
Eve xx
It wasn’t strictly what she was paid to do, and Eve knew that her editor, Fiona, wouldn’t approve of her taking time out of her working day to personally reply, but it had taken all of fifteen seconds to stop Helen from Staffordshire losing any more sleep.
Eve’s phone buzzed again. It was another university friend, Ayesha, who was getting married a month after Tanya. ‘Babe, where can I buy lawn flamingoes?’
Eve looked heavenward. ‘Lawn what?’
‘Flamingoes.’
‘That’s what I thought you said. What are lawn flamingoes?’
‘You know, big sculptures of flamingoes that stand on your lawn. I thought it would be really nice to have one for everyone coming to the wedding and you have to find the one with your name on it and it’s got your table number on it too.’
Eve had to take a deliberately slow breath in before replying in case an expletive slipped out. ‘Um, Ayesha. I thought the theme for your wedding was The Wizard of Oz? At what point in the film were there flamingoes?’
Ayesha laughed. ‘Oh, there weren’t silly, I just really really love flamingoes, and I thought that getting lots of dwarves to stand on the lawn dressed like Munchkins might be in really poor taste. Unless you don’t think so?’
Not for the first time, Eve questioned her choice in friends.
‘You’re too nice.’ Kat remarked as soon as Eve had put down the phone. ‘If I said yes every time one of my friends asked me to help them with their weddings, I’d never have time for anything else.’
‘Welcome to my world,’ Eve muttered.
‘How many weddings do you have again this summer?’
‘Five.’ Eve pointed to the noticeboard that hung on the wall above her desk, which was crammed with save the dates, invitations and gift list registry cards. A couple, like Tanya’s, were classically white with embossed words while others, like Ayesha’s, were colourful and contemporary. Regardless of their style or size of swirly writing, all Eve could see when she glanced at them was the potential of stress and financial ruin.
‘Five? That’s insane.’
‘But it’s not just the weddings is it? It’s all the hen dos and rehearsals, I literally have one free weekend between now and the end of August.’
‘Eve, they’re not your weddings though, you are allowed to have fun outside of being chief wedding planner you know. Look at you, you’re gorgeous, in a very English sort of way, with your long red hair and alabaster skin—’
‘You can tell you’re a beauty journalist,’ Eve interrupted. ‘I’m pale and freckly.’
‘And interesting. You’re young, and you’re wasting the summer by being at the beck and call of people who have already found their other halves.’
‘Cheers.’
‘I’m serious!’ Kat said, emphasising how serious she was by waving a lipstick in Eve’s face. ‘How long have we worked together now?’
‘Two years.’
‘Two years. And in those two years, how many boyfriends have you had? You’re never going to find someone if you don’t put yourself out there.’
What was the opposite of rose-tinted, Eve wondered, because it was exactly the same any time a friend of hers became coupled-up; they looked back on their solo days with hand-on-heart relief that they had dragged themselves out of the cesspool of single life.
‘See, that’s the difference Kat, it barely crosses my mind to look for a boyfriend, let alone “put myself out there!”’ Eve shuddered. ‘When the time is right, he’ll just turn up.’
‘Eve, Eve, Eve,’ Kat shook her head the way you would to a child that’s put their left shoe on their right foot for the fortieth time. ‘Finding a partner requires a massive amount of effort, he doesn’t just “turn up”. Have you learnt nothing from writing about weddings?’
Kat had a point. It always amazed Eve how much effort some of the brides, and some grooms too, had put into finding someone to marry. If she’d had the job of interviewing couples twenty or thirty years ago about how they met, the stories would have invariably included the words ‘school’, ‘pub’, or ‘nightclub’, but nowadays the hoops that brides jumped through to get to the altar were staggering.
‘I like being single,’ Eve said. ‘Anyway, I am far too busy.’
‘It’s just that in the two years I’ve known you, you’ve never had anyone special in your life, and you’re pretty cool so I just wonder why, that’s all.’ Kat started putting the lipsticks away in their boxes. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘There’s no big mystery, Kat. I really liked someone once, and I’m just waiting to meet another person that I like as much, that’s all.’
‘So, what happened to him?’
Eve used the time it took to sweep all her paperclips into her hand and pour them back into their pot to think of an answer that was completely devoid of sentiment. There was no point getting upset about it after all this time. She settled on, ‘I honestly have no idea.’ Which, as it happened, was completely true.
Chapter 2 (#u7019cb4f-9b3e-5646-94f6-37c809c4000a)
The wedding with the wizards
There weren’t many instances when you could use the word puce in daily life, but as Eve lay on her back in the park looking up at the sky darkening above her, she knew that puce would be a legitimate description of her face at that moment. She’d been so disappointed when her name had been called out as the winner of a series of ten personal training sessions rather than the chocolate hampers in the raffle at her work’s Christmas party. She’d tried to give the prize away, but everyone she knew either had their own gym membership already or were too much like her and couldn’t think of anything worse than being shouted at while you huffed and puffed in a park after work as dog walkers sniggered by.
The personal trainer, Juan, had been in regular contact through January, February, even into March, calling her to set up her first appointment – but it wasn’t until early May, when Tanya had admitted that she’d made a ‘mistake’ with the order of Eve’s bridesmaid dress and it was ‘accidentally’ a size too small, that Eve thought that maybe the personal training sessions might not be such a bad idea after all. The first session had been a success. She was measuring the success of it by the fact that she was still alive. And Eve was very hopeful that at some point later that evening, her face would return back to its normal shade.
‘Same time on Wednesday?’ Juan asked, his kit bag slung over his shoulder, casting a long shadow over the patch of grass where Eve lay. She didn’t yet have the lung capacity for speech, so just weakly raised her hand and gave him a thumbs up. She thought that she’d just wait a little while longer before heading back home. It was a beautiful evening, perfect for lying back and enjoying the setting sun, and her choice had nothing at all to do with the fact that her legs felt like they were made of concrete.
The trumpet player downstairs was in full flow when Eve let herself in the front door of Becca’s flat. She had to stop calling it that. It was now her apartment too, and it was an absolute palace compared to the cupboard in New York she’d called home for two years before moving back to London. Living above a live music pub was a godsend when the iPod ran out of charge, but a tad annoying when the band in question was an avant-garde experimental Cuban quartet. Which, thankfully, tonight’s wasn’t. Toe-tapping jazz seemed to be the soundtrack to her evening, which suited Eve just fine.
Becca had already set up camp on their tiny balcony, which overlooked the pub’s beer garden, placing two beanbags next to a wine cooler that had a couple of bottles already chilling in it. Eve smiled, this was the perfect way to spend the evening. Tonight’s workout had been brutal. Juan’s girlfriend had just dumped him, and his hatred of all women seemed to extend to his clients too. Forty burpees was thirty nine too many for Eve, and every inch of her was crying out for a restorative shower, a glass of something with a strong alcohol content and a night with her best friend listening to Sinatra classics.
‘Evening!’ Eve shouted from the hallway through the open door to the living room. ‘Just going to de-sweat myself and be out in a minute. Have you got snacks out there?’
‘I have the Chinese delivery menu, which is sort of the same thing,’ Becca shouted back. ‘And you had some post, it was heavy, a book or something. I put it on your bed.’
Eve knew what it was. She’d recently organised the delivery of sixty-five guidebooks to addresses all over the world ahead of her brother Adam and his boyfriend George’s nuptials on the last weekend in August. The fifth, and final, wedding of the year. It was in the South of France and they wanted all their guests to get as excited as they were, so despite being three months away, stage one of Operation Hype Up The Wedding was the delivery of the guidebooks about the local area. There were three more deliveries planned over the coming months: a bottle of the local wine, passport holders and luggage tags. All of which Eve had dutifully sourced, ordered and, at the moment, paid for on her credit card.
Ten minutes later, wearing her pyjama bottoms with her long wet hair dampening her hooded top from university, Eve settled down onto the spare beanbag and gratefully took the glass of white wine from Becca’s outstretched hand.
‘Now this, this is pretty darn perfect.’
‘I’ll say so.’ Becca agreed, stretching her legs out in front of her to poke them between the railings of the balcony, which must have looked pretty odd to anyone sitting in the garden beneath them. ‘They’ve been practising since I got home from work,’ Becca said. ‘It’s been great, like having a mini concert in our living room. I’m going to miss this.’
Eve knew when she’d moved in that it wasn’t a long-term arrangement as Becca’s wedding to military man Jack was wedding number four of the summer and Jack had been faithfully promised a family house on the base after the wedding. Whenever the thought of Becca moving out popped into her head, Eve batted it away. She and Becca had lived together all the way through university, sharing a tiny semi in one of Brighton’s less salubrious back streets with Tanya, and another friend, Ben. Even though eight years lay between them sharing that semi and this flat, Eve and Becca had slotted straight back into being flatmates.
‘Have you sorted your costume for Rob’s wedding on Saturday?’ Eve asked, trying not to wince at the word costume rather than outfit. She really didn’t understand why some couples insisted on their guests joining in their theme by donning superhero capes or flapper dresses; what was wrong with a nice wrap dress?
‘I’m raiding the school drama department’s store cupboard tomorrow.’
‘If you see something for me, can you pick it up?
Perhaps now, Eve thought, with the chilled wine in hand and the soft jazz rising from the bar below, Becca would be open to talking about the logistics of her own wedding. Considering that she’d been engaged for nearly three years you’d have thought she’d have been further along in the planning process. Eve remembered back to when Becca had broken the news of her engagement, calling her across the Atlantic, as she did most evenings. Their calls were Eve’s favourite part of the day, which she had admitted to no one but Becca, because after all, living in New York was supposed to be fun. If you were to ask any single thirty-year old whether New York was a fun place you’d have to cover your ears with the deafening volume of the resounding yeses, which would be promptly followed by the clink of ice into gin martinis. If you were in media in New York it meant you’d made it. Hit the big time. Written your own success story. You were playing in the major league. Everyone knew that. It was only Becca who knew this wasn’t really the case for Eve.
That night, almost three years ago, Eve had just carried her dinner across the tiny hallway to her windowless bedroom in a dodgy part of Brooklyn, when she had felt her phone vibrating in her back pocket. She had set the hot bowl of microwaved soup down on a pile of coffee table books that doubled up as her dining table, desk and nightstand and answered the nightly call from her best friend.
‘Evening lovely, how’s your day been?’
‘Exhausting, soul-destroying, murderous,’ Eve had replied.
‘Murderous. That’s a new one.’
‘I think that one has staying power. Today, I’ve interviewed a man who lived his life dressed as a baby, a woman whose plastic surgery on her bottom went so wrong it was impossible to sit down, a couple who raised pot-bellied pigs in their house instead of children, and I wrote a feature with the headline “My boyfriend has a Spiderman mask tattooed on his face.”’ Back in the beginning, when Eve had fought off hundreds of other journalists and got the job as Features Editor for What a Life! in the Big Apple, she was horrified at the people knocking on the magazine’s doors to share their stories for the set fifty-dollar fee. There was no way this type of magazine could ever be sustainable, Eve had thought, surely the weirdness would dry up? There must be a finite number of bizarre people around the world? It turned out there wasn’t. And thanks to the page at the front of the magazine listing all the staff members and their contact details, every single weirdo had Eve’s email address.
‘Ask me how my day’s been,’ Becca had demanded.
‘Becca, how has your day been?’
‘Absobloodylutely fabulous. Jack and I got engaged!’
Eve’s face had burst into a spontaneous smile. ‘That’s amazing news! I’m so happy for you, honestly that’s made my day. My week! Heck, you know what? That’s the best news I’ve heard all year. And it’s the middle of December, so the year is almost up.’
‘Jack was such a sweetheart. We went down to Devon to visit Mum and Dad and he took my dad for a pint and asked him, then he took me for a walk through the woods and proposed to me at exactly 3.33pm, my favourite time.’
Eve mumbled through the spoonful of tinned minestrone she’d just scooped into her mouth: ‘You have a favourite time?’
‘Of course I do! Doesn’t everyone? Anyway, stop talking. I wanted to ask you something important. You’re so amazing at planning stuff, and such an organisational fiend, and you’re my best friend, so will you be my chief bridesmaid and also help me plan the wedding?’
‘Yes and yes! Oh my goodness, this is so exciting! What are you thinking? A city do in a posh hotel, or a manor house in the country, or a… oh Becca, we could do it abroad!’
‘I want a really low-key thing in my parent’s cow field.’
Eve stopped chewing.
‘Eve? Are you still there?’
‘I’m sorry, for a moment I thought I heard you say that you wanted to get married in a cow field.’
‘Well, not actually married, we’ll do that at the local church, but I want to have the reception in the field behind my folks’ farm.’
‘Won’t the cows mind the intrusion?’
‘We’ll move them silly. But I love the idea of a festival feel, with bunting and barrels and picnic baskets. Do you think we could pull it off?’
‘If that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get. I’ll start my research tomorrow. This is so exciting, and just the thing I need to take my mind off how shitty my life is.’
‘You don’t have to stay in New York you know, you could just come back,’ Becca had reminded her, not for the first time.
Eve had pretended not to hear her, just like she did every time Becca had said it. Going back to London wasn’t an option. ‘So what time of year are you thinking? If it’s going to be outside, I’m guessing summer?’
