51
Marianne Wharmby was the loveliest bride that Harriet had ever seen, and she’d seen quite a few.
An audible gasp-sigh went round the room as she filled the doorway, wearing the composed expression of a born princess.
She wore an oyster tulle gown, with a deep V, that nipped in at the waist and flared out into a soft full skirt, spun through with silver diamante, so the fabric glistened. On her head was a full circle flower crown, the floral halo bursting with white jasmine and yellow roses, lending a pagan cult, Midsommar feel. It could’ve been too much, but with her blonde curls and innocent face beneath, the effect was enchanting and angelic.
The man on her arm, giving her away, was barely older than her. He was in a canary-yellow velvet suit, large clear-frame glasses and had an undercut hairstyle, tattoos on both hands. Harriet thought: hairdresser.
When they reached Scott, he was clutching his chest, shaking his head, miming: ‘I am blown away by this vision.’ He got down on one knee and kissed Marianne’s hand, to more noisy ahhhhhing.
Always the showman. For Harriet’s taste, even if she’d not hated him, she’d have thought he was overdoing it. Stop trying to drag the limelight from her, you wanker.
‘Thank you everyone for coming here to witness the marriage of Scott, and Marianne,’ the celebrant said. She was around sixty, with bobbed hair and in a skirt suit. She had the look of a Labour councillor who would promise to tackle the issues that really mattered to local people. ‘Please be seated. I’m the celebrant today and my name is Gwen. To begin today’s service, we have a poem, read by Ralph.’
The man in yellow velvet who’d given Marianne away stepped forward.
‘Hi everyone. This is Carrie’s poem from Sex and the City.’ He paused. ‘Scott wants me to point out that Marianne chose it.’
Laughter.
Carrie’s poem was unknown to Harriet, but very short, and mercifully, had no sex in it, or city for that matter.
‘Thank you, Ralph, that was beautiful,’ Gwen said, as he sat down.
‘Now we move on to the exchanging of vows, and the exchanging of rings. If I could ask the couple to face each other.’
Gwen launched into her spiel and Harriet started hard-sweating. Where was the signal?! Harriet was terrified by its absence and utterly cursing herself for demanding it.
If Marianne had simply understandably forgotten in the turbulence of being visible up there, Harriet supposed she would have to plough on regardless. She was fairly sure Marianne had not had a transformative epiphany at the sight of Scott in bespoke tailoring, and if she had … she could hardly blame Harriet for taking her at her word.
However, it would be excruciating for Harriet to intervene, and discover it wasn’t welcome. The whole reason this was survivable was because everyone was going to understand the bride had wanted her to. She recalled Cal’s advice. People lie, all the time, for no reason.
‘Sorry, I’ve realised I’ve not said hi to my mum,’ she heard in the distance, in a tiny, chirruping voice.
‘Oh, yes …?’ said the politely baffled Gwen.
Marianne faced the audience, scanning the nearest rows. She kissed her hand, waving it at a woman out of Harriet’s sight.
As her stomach tumbled down a ravine and her heart rate spiked, Harriet abruptly switched emergency. Shit. OK. This was real. It was going to happen.
Harriet looked at her own hands gripping her velvet handbag, her knuckles white.
Gwen’s recitation of the formalities was simultaneously dragging on forever and absolutely tearing towards its train-crash conclusion.
A pause, where blood pounded in Harriet’s ears. She looked up at the balloons. The urge to run from the room was overwhelming.
‘Now.’ Gwen paused. ‘We’ve got to the part where I ask: if anyone here knows a reason why this couple should not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.’ Gwen looked out at the assembled company. She accompanied it with the beatific smile that was generally used here, to convey it was an adorable piece of rhetorical silliness. Commanding her limbs to move, Harriet got to her feet, having an out-of-body experience where she was only half-aware if she had stood up.
‘Me. I do,’ she said, in a shaky voice that was apparently hers.
Every head snapped round, and the expectant silence was so taut you could twang it.
Somewhere among the pews, Harriet heard a voice saying Who the fuck is that? and being shushed.
Make. Your. Mouth. Work. Her lips were clamped together, her jaw locked. She cleared her throat. That voice again, which didn’t sound like hers.
‘Scott Dyer is a coercive controller, a domestic abuser. I was with him for four years and during that time he nearly mentally destroyed me.’
The seconds following, felt like years. Every face was a mask of riveted, fascinated amazement. Gwen looked as if someone in a clown mask holding a Tommy gun had zip-lined into the ballroom.
‘I can’t believe you’d do this, Harriet,’ Scott said, eventually, in a hard monotone, like the flat blade of a knife. Every head moved to look at him. It occurred to Harriet he’d be a notch more prepared, having thrown Nina out. The collusion would now be clear. The full extent of it wouldn’t, though.
‘I can’t believe I’d do this either,’ Harriet said, feeling her courage rise by a tiny degree. There was nothing equally as frightening as jumping, and she had jumped. ‘It’s an extreme measure, to stop you ruining another woman’s life.’
‘Just because I don’t want to be with you, doesn’t mean I ruined your life,’ Scott said.
Although he was sheet-white and visibly trembling with fury and embarrassment, he’d calculated she had to be spoken to like a stalker. It was his greatest weapon, his best chance of discrediting her: the suspicion of female hysteria. That bitch is crazy.
Undeniably helped along here by the fact interrupting a wedding was crazy.
‘You know exactly the things I mean, Scott. Monitoring where I was, checking up on me constantly. Calling me a liar so often I started to doubt what was real. Isolating me from my friends, telling me they were our enemies. Falsely accusing me of infidelity, or flirting, of embarrassing myself.’
Harriet paused, fully expecting to be interrupted, but the element of surprise was on her side, she had the audience in the palm of her hand. And she guessed Scott telling her to shut up was too much like corroborating her.
‘… Viciously criticising me, calling me worthless. Monstering me if I dared leave the house, until it became easier not to. The sulks, the rages, the accusations, the belittling. Turning me into a dependent, confused wreck, with no one left to turn to, because I’d pushed them all away, to please you. And it’s not only me you’ve done this to, is it, Scott?’
‘You seem to be the only person inventing this horrible stuff, Harriet, yes,’ he said, with an effortful evenness, infusing his tone with a deeply weary regret that implied he’d tried, God knows he’d tried, to help this woman. Scott knew the stakes and was giving the BAFTA-nominated performance of his life. ‘I’ve moved on and I’m happy. You’re here trying to wreck my wedding. You’re wrecking Marianne’s day, which is what hurts most of all.’
He looked at his bride, who was looking back at him, her sparkling Fiorucci-cherub face, blank. Harriet heard the crowd tut and make noises of support.
They were going to believe him? Of course they were. He was always believed. Alright, he had an advantage – he was their groom and she was a stranger. Still, what would it take to get people to set aside their preferred version of Scott Dyer, the one they’d bought into? Why did a woman’s voice have to be a chorus, to count?
‘Harriet is NOT the only person saying this!’ came a ragged female voice from the back of the room. Harriet turned to see Nina. She’d ditched the hat, and acquired a mini bottle of Prosecco.
‘Should’ve locked me out,’ she added, holding the bottle up to toast Scott. ‘Hi everybody, I’m Nina, I’m another ex-girlfriend of Scott’s. I’ve also come here to say, don’t do it, Marianne! Everything Harriet said was true. I mean, I didn’t hear most of it, but I know what she was going to say. He treated me like dogshit too. I say, HEAR HEAR.’
She clamped the bottle under one arm and clapped, one small pair of hands sounding tiny in the yawning silence. To Harriet, they were everything.
‘What the HELL is going on here?’ said a balding older man who’d got to his feet at the front of the room. Harriet recognised Scott’s dad. ‘Get out! Both of you! You’re destroying the happiest day of these two young people’s lives. Do something!’ he said to the traumatised Gwen, as if she was nightclub security.
‘I told you! I told you and you wouldn’t believe me. Now do you believe me?’
With a rustling noise, another guest got to her feet, near the back on the right-hand side. Now Harriet got to be as surprised as everyone else had been. The unexpected contributor had long brown hair with a curl and a golden tan, and was made up to the nines in a cream tuxedo jacket.
‘I had a thing with Scott a few years back, it didn’t last very long as he met Marianne,’ she said in a Scouse accent. ‘What these two women say is ringing a lot of bells. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say so. I’m only here because my boyfriend Martin is friends with Scott …’ She cast a look down at a seated partner who, Harriet suspected, was not on board with her decision to speak up. ‘Behind closed doors, Scott is a vicious little bully. The girl in the veil over there described it perfectly. No one ever believes you, because he’s such a charmer when there’s other people around.’
A collective stunned silence followed this admission, to add to the canon of stunned silences this wedding had produced.
‘Three of us now! Have I got any advance on three?’ Nina said in an auctioneer impression. ‘Let’s try for a fourth!’
Harriet noticed that a glowering Scott wasn’t responding to Nina, or this other woman, because refuting multiple accounts was beyond even his skillset. He’d claim conspiracy, but it was not so easy to paint that in right now.
‘Right,’ said Gwen, struggling to regain control of a hiccup that was absolutely not covered in the How to Officiate Civil Ceremonies handbook. ‘The person who is marrying Scott today is Marianne. I appreciate feelings are running high here. Given there’s no legal impediment, which is what I asked for …’ she made a pursed-lips scold face, as if she was principally upset at their lack of meeting the brief, ‘I’d ask you now to leave these two people to get married in peace.’
Hotel staff appeared menacingly, a foot from Harriet. Word of what was happening had left this room and she was about to be given non-voluntary escorting from the premises.
‘Actually, I asked Harriet and Nina to come today,’ Marianne said to Scott, in a voice clear and sweet as a bell, dropping her bomb like it was a scented handkerchief.
Harriet swore she could physically feel the room shift from Well This Is A Hell Of A Yarn to Oh OK History Is Being Made Here, What The Fuck.
People were urgently whispering their disbelief and at the same time, trying not to obscure a word of the dialogue.
‘Sorry, I can’t remember your name,’ Marianne said to the Scouse girl.
‘Paula,’ she said, half-standing again and putting her hand up, as if they were at a cookery demonstration and Marianne was about to call her up to try rolling her dough.
‘Paula, that’s it. Thank you too.’
Marianne turned to her groom.
‘Scott, I didn’t come here to marry you. I came to tell you it’s over. I hate how you’ve treated me, and I hate how you’ve treated them.’ She pointed back at Harriet and Nina.
Marianne didn’t sound even slightly nervous. Harriet had never been so impressed by someone in her life.
‘There’s a reason I’ve done it in public. What I hate most of all is that everyone here, nice people, good people, our family and friends’ – she swung a hand at the stupefied audience – ‘they all think that you’re this devoted good guy who’d never hurt a fly. I started taking beta blockers last year for panic attacks, because I was so scared of your temper. You’ve been bullying me to stop seeing my mum for how long? It’s not right.’
‘Oh, this is utter nonsense!’ bellowed Scott’s dad, off to the right. ‘I can’t listen to another word of this. I don’t know why you’re all persecuting my son like this. He’s got a heart of gold! Shame on you all. Absolutely disgusting.’
A large blonde woman on the front left stood up.
‘Heart of gold, my arse, Keith. I told my daughter he had a mean streak a mile wide from day one. These girls can’t ALL be lying, can they? You should care how your son’s treating women.’
‘A mean streak called, “paying off her debts”. A mean streak like, “doing up that spare room while she went out with her friends”,’ Keith said.
‘Debts?! I clear the balance on my Santander card myself EVERY month!’ Marianne said, looking dumbfounded for the first time. ‘He did the back bedroom because he yelled at me for being shit at painting. To be fair, I am quite shit at painting, but that’s not the point.’
‘Wake up and smell the coffee, Keith,’ said Marianne’s mum. ‘You’re sleeping in Starbucks.’
Harriet noticed Scott was saying nothing, looking murderous but petrified. Three women’s testimony was damning, but Houdini would’ve still escaped if he had a bride. A cobbled-together, verbal equivalent of a press statement would’ve circulated at the reception. Yes, in his day, he’d been a heartbreaker and a ladykiller. Women tended to get hung up on him, he’d picked a few handfuls and got himself in some tangles. Thank God he’d met The One. His guests might’ve believed him or might not, but they’d have at least pretended to, in order to eat their Chicken Diane without guilt.
‘Right, I’ve said my piece, we’re done.’ Marianne looked Scott directly in the eye. ‘I’m done. This is over, Scott. Have a nice fucking life and don’t fuck up anyone else’s life.’ She turned back to the room. ‘Now. There are free drinks in the bar. Sorry everyone for having a wasted trip today. I know this isn’t what you came for, but it was important that we did it. I hope you understand.’ Marianne said. She turned to the musicians. ‘Please can you play my exit music?’
The cowering string quartet looked unsure, having thought their job for the day was definitively over.
‘Please?’ Marianne said, with an intonation that was a command, and they hurriedly turned the pages of their sheet music.
They struck up what Harriet recognised as Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’, and she wanted to laugh, burst into tears, punch the air and down a dirty Martini in one, all at once.
Marianne had certainly reminded Scott of who she was. She gathered her vast Gone With The Wind skirts in one hand and made stately progress down the aisle.
When she drew level with Harriet, she stuck out her hand and said: ‘Join me?’
Harriet ducked round the back of her row, muttering apologies to the two people she had to pull herself past, and Marianne collected Nina on the other side in the meanwhile. They made their exit as a trio, hand in hand in hand.
As they wrenched open the doors, Harriet felt her heart soar. Something had finished, for her, flown out of her. She was cleansed. It was anger. Her anger at Scott had gone. She was free of him.
She was so elated, she had a moment of pure inspiration. Harriet turned back to the groom, who had a face like …
It was an expression Harriet remembered well. She’d just never seen it in public before. She cleared her throat.
‘Scott. It’s like you said. Love always wins.’