21
Every wedding came with its idiosyncrasies, and so far, Danny and Fergus’s was that they didn’t want the ‘getting ready’ sequence of snaps – a great rarity, given Harriet’s price included it, and Yorkshire was known for its thrift.
‘You’re sure? Even in smaller weddings it’s often such a nice part of the storytelling of the day. I don’t want you to regret not having them later?’ Harriet had said, when she met them for the planning session over pints and charcuterie board at Friends of Ham.
‘First of all, don’t you usually photograph the bride?’ Danny said, ‘The bride here is me, so Fergus will sulk.’
‘Actually, I agree, you’re the bride,’ Fergus said.
‘To me, the whole point is us looking incredible at the ceremony,’ Danny continued. ‘The magic is ruined once you know how the sausage is made.’
‘I hope you’re writing all this down, Harriet,’ said Fergus, in his gentle, refined Aberdeenshire brogue, which somehow made his dryness funnier, ‘Gay wedding, but sausage magic must stay secret.’
‘Totally,’ Harriet said, ‘Obviously it’s never a warts-and-all prep session. The wet shave angles as if you’re in an aftershave ad, adjusting your bow tie. But the customers are always right. You know your own minds.’
‘Danny knows our own minds,’ Fergus said.
Therefore, on Friday afternoon, Harriet arrived at the town hall at the same time as the guests, three p.m., under instructions that they pretty much only wanted candids, mingling and ‘general atmosphere’ captured.
The grand Victorian building with its handsome colonnades was an old friend, Harriet must’ve done scores of weddings here. She ran off frames of the clock tower, smoky stone against the overcast sky, testing the exposure. The forecast said they were in for a balmy evening, which was just as well given the reception venue had an outdoor terrace.
The car pulled up and Harriet caught the moment that the couple emerged and walked up the steep steps, to cheers. They each had bespoke, three-piece suits: Fergus in Harris tweed, Danny in sand-coloured wool, and succulents as buttonholes. The cake later was a giant pork pie.
She weaved and bobbed among the throng to get the shots of the grooms greeting their guests. It really helped in her line of work to be a not-centre-of-attention kind of person. She naturally moved around in a way that avoided notice. One of her local rivals, Bryn, was a lovely Welsh guy and a very good photographer, but six foot two and with a voice that could blow the froth off coffee, two tables away. She’d personally not want someone who turned your wedding into a football match where he was the Brian Clough-style manager. You are recording the event, not directing it, you were a documentary maker, not a creator of fictions. (Unless the bride and groom asked for comic photos of her pulling him along by his tie like a dog with a lead, or double taking at cupcakes bearing photos of their faces in their wedding breakfast, which Harriet had occasionally been asked to do. She had to summon a lot of ‘customer is always right’ zen to go through with it.)
‘Harriet! This is my best woman,’ Fergus said, snagging her arm as she ducked past. ‘Isla.’
Harriet shook the hand of a large-bosomed woman in her fifties in a vermillion fascinator.
‘Let me get Danny’s best man …’ Fergus said, standing on the balls of his feet to get a bird’s-eye view of the hairstyles and hats. ‘There he is!’ He made an arm waving and pointing gesture. ‘This is Scott.’
Harriet heard the name, turned, and made eye contact with the thirty-something man who’d been pushed to the fore of the melee to greet her.
Time slowed and then stopped completely, in the way that the seconds before a car crash were supposed to elongate into a small eternity. The collision was in her consciousness: the thought, as she heard the name, that it might be him barely had time to form before it flew smack bang into the visual evidence that it was him.
Harriet blinked, stunned.
It had always been a risk, living in the same city, doing her job, but a bullet she’d dodged for so long she’d forgot to worry about it anymore. If she didn’t know the marrying couple, then he wouldn’t, went the shaky logic, as if they still shared an era. Harriet had started to indulge herself with the belief that he’d moved away. Or better still, gone to prison.
And yet.
‘Harriet, the photographer today!’ Fergus was exclaiming, somewhere at the other end of a tunnel.
Scott didn’t look surprised, which meant he’d seen her from afar already and had the jump on her being here. Scott being a few steps ahead, plus ça fucking change. His expression was a mixture of amused contempt and unspoken challenge. Go on. I dare ya.
He looked a little older, in the pin-sharp HD of daylight – more fine pencil sketch lines around his eyes and on his forehead, but otherwise unchanged. It was like exhuming an old photograph, one where you regretted not holding a lighter to its corner. He reminded her of a previous version of herself, one she hated.
‘Hiya, Harriet,’ he said, in that cocky rock star drawl which, once upon a time, made the hair on the back of Harriet’s neck prickle. Turned out it still did, but in a very different way. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘Likewise,’ she said, with a dry mouth. She’d have liked to include his name, but she couldn’t manage it. With trembling hands, she raised her camera again, as a combination of mask and weapon.
‘Picture of the four of you?’ she said briskly yet sweetly, to reassert herself, to drown out the raging storm inside her.
‘Yes! C’mon, Daniel!’ Fergus said.
The quartet assembled in a line on the steps, Harriet slightly below them, steadying her weight on her back leg.
As she looked through the viewfinder, she saw the malevolent thrill on Scott’s face.
Harriet fiercely recanted ever thinking fondly of modest, compact weddings. How she longed for this one to be in a marquee so huge that half the attendees were obscured by the curvature of the Earth. She wished Danny and Fergus had known so many people, the wedding would have been like marshalling the cast of an old Hollywood epic, complete with spear carriers.
Instead, here they were in a Japanese restaurant, sound echoing off a hard floor and industrial fittings, with nowhere to hide unless you ducked behind a decorative plum blossom tree. There were only forty-nine people available, minus the staff, to distract from the fiftieth one; her ex-boyfriend, Scott Dyer.
Barmen poured and rattled cocktails, bottles of sake held high with a flourish, waitresses circled with platters of gyoza, and people holding full glasses drifted onto the decking outside to take in the view of city rooftops. The happy couple had their first date here, so it had sentimental significance, and Danny and Fergus had hired the whole place.
Their generosity and style were making things abundantly worse – the contrast between the glamour of it all and the horror of it for Harriet, as if she alone was being set up. There was no first dance but there were speeches, to be bathed in the early-evening glow as the sun went down.
The environment for the next two hours or so was an accidental hellscape of a blissful union, Harriet constantly trying to calculate how many times she needed to pass by the knot of guests that contained Scott. Looking like she was avoiding him was untenable, seeming as if she had a special interest was intolerable.
Scott’s title of ‘best man’ was more than a little satirical. How few men had Danny met, if this was the best one he knew? However, Harriet was unsurprised that Scott was best manning someone he’d not known in their years together. Scott thrived on being a novelty, buzzed on being the latest greatest person you’d met. He poured his energies into winning new acquaintances over like a top salesman with his most potentially lucrative client. He’d have effectively been auditioning as a future best man from their first handshake, whether he got the gig or not. Scott, she had realised only with hindsight, liked to overwhelm people.
Every so often, when the crowd parted and Harriet was sure he’d not see, she allowed herself a moment’s scrutiny. Scott was chatting animatedly and winningly, in his slim-cut violet suit, and still with the expensively ruffled, mop-top hair. Harriet knew the maintenance that went into the unkempt lead guitarist look.
At his side was a petite girl with brilliant blonde hair in a blunt shag cut and sticky, raspberry-bright lips. The combination of her big blue eyes, framed with sooty eyelashes, and high forehead, gave her the look of Tweetie Pie from Looney Tunes.
Her presence was a given, to Harriet: Scott wasn’t the type to be without a partner. He always had an eye for a pretty girl.
She was in a lilac dress – she and Scott had co-ordinated – with diaphanous lace panels that stretched tight across her hips, and Scott had a proprietorial arm draped around them. Her killer metallic heels were so high that Harriet would be weeping for the relief of removing them after five minutes, but she never saw her so much as shift from leg to leg, no sign of wincing or complaining whatsoever.
Scott was doing the talking, and as time went on, in Harriet’s covert snatched surveillance, it started to become a point of fascination: when would she say something? A polite ‘no thank you’ head shake to the tray of lollipop prawns was all Harriet could catch, as the blonde decorously sipped her Passionfruit Something Or Other.
It took a lot of deep breaths, and a quantity of valiant guts that Harriet didn’t quite know she possessed, to stride over at a natural juncture.
‘Could I get a quick group photo?’
Everyone acquiesced, Scott pulling his girlfriend (wife? Fiancée? Harriet hadn’t seen rings, but also not allowed her gaze to linger long enough at any one moment to be sure) sharply to his side, in unspoken taunt, or defiance, a mocking kind of lopsided grin on his face.
‘Fantastic, thank you,’ Harriet said, with a fake smile, moving on, feeling the sweaty heat under her clothes.
Eventually everyone was ushered inside for the sit-down meal, and Harriet had the scheduled hour’s grace to find something to eat herself.
She took the lift down several floors and emerged into the deserted Victoria Gate shopping centre. It was oddly atmospheric out of hours, the monochrome, zig-zagged tiled floor splattered with moody illumination from up-lit shop windows: like the holodeck of some spaceship vast enough to provide designer stores with undulating windows for its passengers.
She should find food, but she had no appetite. Harriet remembered the kindly nurse, when her grandfather died, telling her eating when not hungry – but traumatised – was nevertheless essential: ‘emotional and physical energy aren’t separate things’. KFC it was. She could absently gnaw on hot wings while imagining Scott falling over that balcony.
As she walked down the arcade, she heard the din of heels on a hard surface behind her and turned, to see Scott’s partner also exiting the lift. Shouldn’t she be busy with the wedding breakfast?
Blonde Girlfriend pulled the vertiginous shoes off, one after another, and rubbed her feet, grimacing. She stood barefoot as she rifled in her tiny bag for a cigarette, which she lit with unsteady hands. Harriet had once heard the term ‘restraint collapse’ to describe kids who are good as gold at school and naughty once home. Blonde Girlfriend seemed to be relaxing into her own restraint collapse – after several deep restorative drags on her Marlboro Light, head thrown back, she began scrolling her white iPhone with one hand, while massaging alternate feet with the other. Harriet was pretty sure that her left ring finger bore a showy sparkler that could only be an engagement ring. Her fag was gripped in her mouth like Betty Draper when firing the shotgun. The tableau felt like it featured a different woman to the one Harriet had seen upstairs.
She looked up and saw Harriet watching, at a small distance. Harriet didn’t know what to say, or what expression to make, to transform the interaction from spying on what Blonde Girlfriend thought was an unobserved moment, into something socially understood as mundane and acceptable. After a few seconds of blinking at each other, both transfixed and mute, Harriet turned and continued on, camera bag on shoulder.
She couldn’t stop mentally pulling apart, dissecting and analysing what she’d witnessed, as she picked at fries.
Afterwards, she wiped her hands on paper napkins and hurried back, not out of fear of being late, but because she didn’t want to lose the courage it took to walk back in.
Harriet fired off aggressively frequent frames of Scott giving his best man’s speech. Clack clack clack. Whirr, clack. In the quiet of the room, it sounded like the clatter of shutters you got in the sombre hush of press conferences. Too many! Pump your brakes, Hatley. She needed to calm down before she gave herself away, the same way people who gabbled too much thought they were hiding their nerves.
Scott had the audience in the palm of his hand. He was telling the story of how he and Danny bonded on the hilariously disastrous stag of a mutual friend in Cologne – half the stags fell out and flew home, Scott and Danny discovered a joint love of the divisive local speciality, Mettbrötchen, then the relationship had deepened further back home, when Scott helped Danny through the loss of his mum.
Danny broke down, and leapt up to hug Scott, Scott embracing him and rubbing his back, notecards for his speech gripped in his hand.
‘It’s alright, man. She’s here. She’s here,’ Scott said.
Several onlookers openly wept.
Harriet took more photographs, in lieu of feeling the right feelings. Yeah, that was Scott. Always great in your crisis. Always exploiting an opportunity.
Once again, Harriet found herself lost in the lonely chasm between who Scott Dyer was supposed to be, and who he actually was; the sole person burdened with the dissonance, doubting herself. She hated this wedding for forcing her back there, against her will. She hated everyone in this room.
The Ministry of Ideal Weddings could use the minutes that Scott was speaking as a textbook example of How To Give A Best Man’s Speech. It was flawless. He was witty, but also sincere: the tribute so well judged in its obligatory embarrassing disclosures and gentle mockery, but laden with much touching, genuine praise. There was the sad part, honouring Danny’s missing mother. When he had his audience sniffling, he brought it back to laughter and relief, riding in to the emotional rescue and providing catharsis. It was as if Scott was playing them like a musical instrument, knowing when to ramp up tension, then relax the pressure – a virtuoso performance.
Scott built towards his summing up, describing the great joy of seeing Danny find his equal match and balance in Fergus. How lucky everyone here today was to share in this occasion. How loved the marrying couple were. Having Harriet as spectator clearly didn’t bother Scott in the slightest, didn’t throw him even slightly off balance. Of course not: he’d have to care what she thought for that.
Scott had given an A+ performance of the perfect pal, the dream hire best man. Richard Curtis himself would cast him. It was as if the collective crush that had developed was tangible. Swoon, he’s so caring, so funny, and hey – quite gorgeous, which never hurts? There was a maiden blush on the cheeks of Fergus’s trio of beautiful Celtic teenage nieces.
If Harriet didn’t know Scott, no doubt she’d be as enamoured of him as everyone else.
‘When myself and Marianne tie the knot next month,’ – Scott paused to squeeze the shoulder of his intended, who glanced up and gave him a quick, tight smile – ‘Danny is returning the favour and being my best man. I can’t wait. Just don’t get your own back in grand style, eh?’
Laughter.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to charge your glasses to the wonderful Danny and his incredible husband, Fergus!’
Thunderous applause. Harriet’s Nikon crosshairs zeroed in on Marianne, whose smile while clapping looked … strained. If Harriet didn’t fear projecting, she’d even say anguished. Marrying Scott Dyer. Becoming Mrs Dyer. Did she know what she had let herself in for yet? Had he changed? Was that possible? Was Harriet a very bad chemical reaction?
The light was fading, and Harriet’s job would now be handed over to the vagaries of iPhones wielded in candlelight by amateur enthusiasts, cross-eyed on Taittinger Rosé.
After suitable promises to Danny and Fergus that the album would be sensational and she had everything she needed – apart from the number of a reliable and affordable hitman – Harriet fled the building like it was on fire.
Outside in the city, she took deep gulps of fresh air, flagged a taxi and repeated the mantra: I’m free. He is history. He’s Marianne the Blonde’s problem now.
He’s someone else’s problem.
And even as she thought the thought, she knew that was why he was still her problem.