George stood looking at her. She swigged more wine. After a little while she turned round and saw that he was standing looking at her. He realized that he was acting a little oddly. But he needed company.

“Scrabble,” he said.

“What?” asked Katie.

“I was wondering whether you wanted a game of Scrabble.” Where had that come from?

Katie wiggled her head slowly from side to side, weighing up the idea. “OK.”

“Great,” said George. “You go and get the box from the cupboard. I’ve just got to go and get some codeine. For a headache.”

George was halfway up the stairs when he recalled the last game of Scrabble they had played. It had ground to a halt during a very heated debate over George’s entirely legal use of the word zho, a cross between a cow and a yak.

Oh well, it would keep his mind occupied.

96

It was all a bit wearing.

For a third of his waking hours Jamie managed not to think about Tony at all. For another third he imagined Tony getting back in time and the two of them being reunited in various melodramatic scenes. The final third was given over to maudlin thoughts of going to Peterborough alone and getting way too much sympathy or none at all and having to remain cheerful for Katie’s sake.

He was planning to head up early on Friday afternoon to miss the traffic. Thursday evening he ate a Tesco pasta bake and a fruit salad in front of a video of The Blair Witch Project, which was rather scarier than he’d anticipated, so that he had to pause the tape halfway through and close all the downstairs curtains and lock the front door.

He expected to have nightmares. So it came as something of a surprise to find himself having a sex dream about Tony. He wasn’t complaining. It was boots-on, fresh-out-of-prison stuff. But what was slightly disturbing was that the whole thing was taking place in his parents’ living room during some kind of cocktail party. Tony pushing him facedown on the sofa, shoving three fingers into his mouth and fucking him with no preliminaries whatsoever. All the details far more vivid than they were meant to be in dreams. The bend in Tony’s cock, the paint stains on his fingers, the knotted vine pattern on the cushion covers pressed up against Jamie’s face in extreme close-up, the chatter, the clink of wineglasses. So vivid in fact that on several occasions during the following morning he remembered what had happened and broke into a cold sweat for a fraction of a second before remembering that it wasn’t real.

97

Jean didn’t realize how bad it was until she went downstairs and wandered across the lawn through the drizzle in her dressing gown.

There was standing water in the marquee. Seventy people were meant to be eating in here tomorrow.

She couldn’t help feeling that if she was still organizing the wedding this wouldn’t have happened, though clearly she had no more control over the weather than Katie and Ray.

She felt…old. That was what she felt.

It wasn’t just the rain. It was George, too. He’d seemed fine for a few weeks now. Then, after supper, it all slipped away. He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to help out. And she had absolutely no idea why.

She was meant to be worried, not angry. She knew that. But how could you keep on worrying when you didn’t know what the problem was?

She wandered back into the kitchen and made herself some toast and coffee.

Katie and Jacob appeared half an hour later. She told Katie about the marquee and felt almost cross when Katie refused to be panicked.

Katie didn’t understand. It wasn’t happening in her garden. If people found themselves wading through mud they were going to blame Jean. And it was a selfish thing to think, but it was true.

She tried to put the thought from her mind. “So, little man…” She ruffled Jacob’s hair. “What can we get you for breakfast?”

“I want some eggy,” said Jacob.

“I want some eggy what?” said Katie, who was deep in the paper.

“I want some eggy, please,” said Jacob.

“Scrambled, fried or boiled?” Jean asked.

“What’s fried?” asked Jacob.

“He wants scrambled,” said Katie absently.

“Scrambled it is.” Jean kissed the top of his head. At least there was something she could do for someone.

98

Mum was right. A wedding without disasters clearly broke some unwritten rule of the universe. Like snow at Christmas. Or pain-free childbirth.

She rang the marquee people and that was fine. They’d come round with mops and heaters later on in the day.

Then Auntie Eileen and Uncle Ronnie turned up with their Labrador in tow. Because their dog sitter was in hospital. Unfortunately Jacob hated dogs. So it was shut outside to keep Jacob happy. At which point it began howling and trying to dig its way through the back door.

Then the caterers rang to say they needed to change the menu after a power failure left a freezer off overnight. Sadie rang to say she’d just got back from New Zealand and found the invitation in the post and could she come. And Brian and Gail rang to say the hotel had lost their reservation and clearly someone else had to solve this problem for them. Like the bride, for example. Or the bride’s parents.

Katie gave up answering the phone and went upstairs and found Dad locked into the bathroom, possibly hiding from Eileen and Ronnie, so she went up to the top loo, peed and flushed and heard the macerator grinding away and saw the water surge to within a centimeter of the rim of the bowl. At which point some kind of death wish took her over and instead of ringing the phone number on the sticker, she thought, I’ll give it another go, and flushed a second time with predictable results.

Two seconds later she was kneeling on the floor holding back a pond of diluted wee with a dam of cream towels saying, “Arsing, fucking, shitting,” which was when Jacob appeared behind her and pointed out that she was saying rude words.

“Jacob, can you fetch Granny, and tell her to bring some bin bags?”

“It smells yucky.”

“Jacob, please fetch Granny, or you will never get any pocket money, ever.”

But the Labrador was back in the house and Jacob was refusing to go anywhere near the ground floor, so she went down herself, and found Mum and Dad in the hallway having some kind of altercation about Dad not pulling his weight but doing it in a fevered whisper, presumably so Eileen and Ronnie didn’t hear. Katie said the loo had overflowed. Mum told Dad to sort it out. Dad declined. And Mum said something very unladylike to Dad which Katie didn’t quite catch because Ray appeared at the other end of the hallway saying, “I hope you don’t mind, your aunt let me in.”

Mum did a horrified double take and apologized profusely for arguing yet again in Ray’s presence and asked whether she could make him a nice cup of tea and Katie reminded her that the loo was still overflowing and felt extremely pissed off that Ray had spent last night in London organizing some secret thing, and Dad slipped away while everyone’s attention was diverted and Ray bounded up the stairs and Mum said she’d put the kettle on and Katie went to grab some bin bags from the kitchen for ferrying the wee-sodden towels to the washing machine and noticed en route the muddy paw prints on the dining-room carpet and tossed Ronnie a disposable cloth wipe and told him to clean up after his bloody dog, which he had to do because he was a Christian.

The macerator man said he’d be there in an hour and Eileen and Ronnie took Rover out for a long walk despite the rain and everything was fine until Katie took her dress out of the suitcase to iron it and found half a pint of coconut body wash soaked into the hem and swore so loudly Eileen and Ronnie probably heard it several fields away. So Ray held up his hands and said, “Hit me,” and she did, repeatedly for some considerable time until Ray said, “OK, it’s starting to hurt now.”