The Secret Diary of a Wedding Planner

 

Cindy and I speak on the phone on Monday morning, just before I file my report.  Always the same start.

Cindy:  ‘Hi.  How did the wedding go?’

Natalya (that’s me):  ‘It was lovely.’

What else can I say?

Cindy is a romantic, a fully paid up hearts-and-flowers and whiskers-on- kittens romantic.  She brands her Wedding Planning Advisory Service Your Dreams Come True and she means it.  Cindy enjoys weddings, in spite of her own marital disasters.   Oscar Wilde called it the triumph of optimism over experience and, boy, was Oscar right.  Cindy is so optimistic it makes my teeth ache.

Me?  I’m a pessimist, in case you hadn’t guessed.   In our business you need one of each.  The optimist sees how beautiful everything could be and spins the fairy tale.  The pessimist sees the disasters coming down the pike and deals with them.

She starts.  I close.  We’re a good team.

So every Monday morning, I tell her what she wants to hear.  There were a few problems which we solved.  It was a wonderful day.  We earned squillions.

And then I go and write the truth in my secret diary.

Just so I don’t quite lose touch with reality.

REPORT :  Steel Frobisher Wedding

ISSUES

The main problem arose from the couple being undecided on numbers and venue.  Eventually they opted for an attractive country church near where the bride’s parents now live.   I found a small local stately home which agreed to host the reception, with locally sourced catering support.  It went off very well.  Both bride and groom have sent appreciative emails already, which I attach.

REALITY

You can plan until you’re blue in the face.  What you need, what any wedding planner needs, is luck.  And in the case of the Steel Frobisher wedding, we needed it by the bucket load.

I won‘t go so far as to say that I knew the wedding was in trouble right from the start.  Pessimist yes.  Clairvoyant, no.  But I could see some, let us say, areas of unresolved differences.

Tamsin Frobisher was a primary school teacher.  Everyone told me she was a very good one.  She had feathery golden brown hair and those smiling eyes that say nothing nasty has ever happened to you, ever.  Pain and sorrow, maybe.  But never sheer human nastiness.  Whereas Gerard Steel was one of those super clever policemen who investigate fraud.  Human nastiness was his bread and butter.  Tamsin loved dancing, big family Sunday lunches, country rambles, friends.  Gerard Steel worked ten hours a day and played chess.  Not a lot of overlap, there.

Gerard had been orphaned when he was six and was brought up by a bachelor uncle who taught ancient languages.  No siblings, no cousins; and no playmates either.  He’d spent his childhood holidays on archaeological digs or playing chess.  He found friends at university and, in his quiet way, clearly got on with his police colleagues.  But his list of people to invite to the wedding was under thirty.

Tamsin’s eventually settled at four hundred.

To be more precise, Tamsin’s mother’s list was four hundred.

Tamsin just laughed.  ‘That’s marriage for you.  We share everything,’ she said blithely.  ‘Including barmy Uncle Fred.’

Her barmy Uncle Fred.

Gerard smiled but I did wonder if it was starting to get to him.

Actually, it was Gerard who had insisted on employing Cindy and me in the first place.  He said he wanted  Tamsin to have the wedding she wanted.  I wondered, right from the start, if that meant problems.  I mean Tamsin’s mother had been planning her only daughter’s wedding since she was born.  In this case, I deduced, our job was pretty much bridegroom’s support group.

You’d be surprised at the number of times the Wedding Planner’s real job is keeping the friends and families off each other’s throats.  I’ve often felt we should do a workshop for the United Nations.

With Mrs Frobisher we – well I, really; Cindy doesn’t see conflict, so she doesn’t do conflict resolution – fought to a draw.

Now I liked Karen Frobisher.  She was warm and kind and full of energy.  She could also boss for Britain.  Gerard, who was used to working out his own solutions to problems, developed a technique of silent endurance.  He never argued with her.  But he never followed any of her suggestions either.

‘He’s so stubborn,’ Mrs Frobisher said, frustrated.

But Tamsin just laughed.  She was in love, after all.  Besides, she’d gone into a sort of Wedding Alternative Universe.  You see it quite a lot in my job.  It’s almost as if the brides go into purdah:  lots of pampering sessions with the girls, where they sit round and paint each others’ nails and read Bride magazine aloud.  To say nothing of the girls’ nights out to say goodbye to the single life.

Fortunately Gerard was working hard on a big case, or I suspect he’d have been pretty lonely.

As it was, after the first couple of sessions, Your Dreams Come True took our instructions from Tamsin and her mother.  Mostly her mother.  Tamsin would have liked to get married in a field, with a bouquet of dog roses from the hedgerows, followed by dancing to the local folk group under the stars.  Her mother said it wasn’t practical.  With four hundred and thirty guests, I had to agree with her.  There was some haggling, but in the end they settled for the church on the hill in the market town near the Frobishers’ mansion.

After that, Karen Frobisher was unstoppable.  She wanted the full meringue dress and a bouquet from the best florist west of Birmingham.  Tamsin spoke wistfully of meadow flowers but her mother wasn’t having it.  Meadow flowers, said Karen firmly, wouldn’t last.  Cream roses and yellow freesias were much the best choice.  And Tamsin agreed.

I could see Gerard getting quieter and quieter and I thought, Oho, storm coming.

It rumbled on for weeks.  Nothing I could put my finger on, quite, but it was there.  For instance, I told Gerard that he needed to be in Headingford by lunchtime on the Friday before the wedding and he said he couldn’t take time off work.  I mean, I ask you.  For his wedding?

I get this feeling sometimes.  Call it Pessimist’s Thumbs.  Mine were twitching like they’d got an electric current through them, but nobody else could see anything wrong.   Tamsin was blissed out.  The best man wasn’t worried about anything except his speech.  And Tamsin’s mother was deliciously busy sorting out accommodation for the out-of-towners and organising hanging baskets from the High Street lamp posts and barriers to hold back the crowds she expected to watch Tamsin drive by in her finery on Saturday afternoon.  I thought crowd barriers were going too far and said so.  But Tamsin, still on Planet Wedding, only laughed.

Gerard went even quieter, if possible.

So after the wedding rehearsal, I cornered Gerard himself.  The best way to suss out what’s going wrong is to give the clients a chance to say it’s our fault.  That way they don’t have to blame their nearest and dearest and it gives them hope that we can fix it.

‘Is there anything we’ve forgotten, Gerard?’

‘Forgotten?  No.’

‘Anything else you can think of, then?  There’s still time to change anything you really want.   The reception?’

He smiled.

Karen had held out a long time for the reception in a marquee on the Frobishers’ lawn.  Gerard hated the idea.  So, by dint of muttering darkly about loo capacity, I’d managed to divert her to a small stately home instead.  They were only just starting to do weddings so Karen Frobisher could genuinely say that Tamsin was the first person who wasn’t a member of the Family to have her wedding reception there.  And she got a minor aristocrat on the guest list, to boot.

‘It’s fine,’ Gerard said kindly.

But I was still worried.  ‘The menu?  The music?’

He pulled a face.  ‘We wouldn’t get away with fish and chips and Elvis Presley, would we?’  But he was only half joking.

My heart went out to him.  ‘I could give it a try.’

But he gave me one of his rare, real smiles and said, ‘Don’t worry.  As long as Tamsin’s happy, I’m cool.’

And, laughing with her bridesmaids in the kitchen, Tamsin did seem to be happy, in a spaced out, cogs-not-quite-engaged sort of way.

I gave up.

The storm finally hit the afternoon before the wedding.  Not that I knew it at the time, because I was out on a rescue mission.  The chief bridesmaid took a wrong turning, drove into a field and got stuck and called my mobile for help.  I went to pick her up from her hillside bog while organizing a recovery truck.  It left Karen Frobisher at a loose end.

I’d already deflected her several times when she said, ‘I think I ought to have a little talk with Gerard.’  But I wasn’t there.  Her husband, a noisy businessman, out of his depth with wedding management, was playing golf.  So there was no one to stop her.  She just went into town to see Gerard at his hotel.

Well, I’m not sure that she actually set out to see him, to be honest.  She may just have been prowling Headingford to make sure the baskets were blooming and the crash barriers were up and simply bumped into him.

Anyway, as I gathered later from the staff at the Red Lion, she whipped him into the panelled bar and announced that she was buying her new son-in- law a large glass of champagne.  That was typical of Karen.  Bags of good will, of course, but she was like a steam train and about as easy to withstand.

She breezed back to the family house late for dinner, announcing that she had told Gerard that she understood how strange everything would be for him in his new life as Tamsin’s husband but she, Karen, would be there for him always, just as she was for Tamsin.  Maybe it was that word ‘always’ that spooked him.

I don’t know if it was rage or panic, but when the best man arrived in his rich lawyer’s Porsche, Gerard apparently said, ‘Don’t put your car in the garage.  We’re hitting the fleshpots.’

Specifically, a club sixty miles away.  From what I gathered from the best man, they fell in with a hen night and some pretty enthusiastic body contact took place.  They were drinking shots, too.  At least Gerard was.  The best man’s brain had caught up with the Porsche by then and he was beginning to get very windy indeed.  Particularly when he found Gerard in a corner with the bride to be.  She was dressed in a tutu and tiara and very little else, he said, and was crying in Gerard’s arms because her future mother-in-law was making her life hell.

‘Yes,’ said Gerard, suddenly pale and not drunk at all.

‘I’m going to run away to Spain.  I’m going to run away tonight.’

‘Yes.’

That was when the best man got him out of there. Back at the Red Lion, he took Gerard to his room and pushed him into the shower, fully clothed.  Between the cold water, emotion and drink, they both seem to have passed out after that.

The first I knew of it was when the best man turned up at the church before breakfast.  I was checking the flowers.  He looked terrible and he had a very nasty sty on his right eye.

I sympathised and produced soothing antiseptic from my Wedding Planner’s Emergency Kit.

‘Slept across the door in Gerard’s room,’ he said briefly, smearing it on carefully.  ‘So he couldn’t get out.’  And the whole story of the nightclub came out.

I went into crisis management mode.  ‘Right.  How is he this morning?’

‘Hung over.  Pretty sick, actually.’

‘Good.’

‘That’s unkind.’

‘No it’s not.  It means that he’s not moving fast or thinking clearly.  Which gives us a small advantage.’

‘Us?’ said the best man with dread.

‘If he scratches, you have to marry the bride.’ 

He went pale.

‘Best man’s first duty.  Do you know the wedding vows?’

‘No.  Look -   You’re joking, right? ’  But he wasn’t quite sure.

I took pity on him.  ‘Yup.  Just joking.’  I smiled at him winningly.  ‘Can you pinch his passport?’

‘What?’

‘Plus his cards, his cash and his car keys.’

He didn’t like it but he saw the point.  ‘I’ll try.’

‘Great.  Keep me in touch.’

We put each other’s cell phones on speed dial.

Back at the family home, Tamsin was in the hands of her bridesmaids. Karen was driving the hairdresser mad.  The men of the family were pinning on the huge white rose button holes that Karen had chosen and joking nervously into their beer.  The woman were cooing over the bouquets and drinking coffee.  Noisy Norman was bullying the chauffeurs.  Pretty standard morning of the wedding, then.

I checked in at the reception venue but the keen young management had everything under control.

So I went back to the church and into trouble shooter mode.  The usual too-early guests turned up and I sent them to the Red Lion for a bar snack and the loo.  A floral arrangement by the altar steps lurched sideways.  I anchored it in place with light duty garden wire, another essential constituent of the Emergency Kit.

And every ten minutes or so I called the best man.

And every time he said the same thing.  ‘He’s not talking.  But he’s getting ready.’

Eventually the organist started her selection of Bach – Karen Frobisher’s choice again – and the church filled up, with the ushers zipping about helpfully, handing out orders of service and spreading the Frobisher guests around the bridegroom’s side of the church, so it didn’t look as if Gerard was Noddy No Mates.

It was a bit worrying that there was still no sign of the bridegroom when the bridesmaids’ car arrived, but I told myself that was the hangover effect.  While the girls fluffed each other’s hair and dresses, I nipped round the corner of the old church and called the bride’s chauffeur.

He picked up at once.  He was very experienced.  ‘No show?’

‘Not yet, Mac.  Mind you, not surprising, after the bender they went on last night.  But don’t set off until he’s here, all right?’

‘Right.  I’ll call you when they’re ready to move.

‘You’re a star, Mac’  I said gratefully.  And dialled the best man.

He sounded ragged.  ‘It’s okay.  We’re on our way up the hill now.’

I scurried back to the porch and saw them coming up the path.  It was a lovely day and the church yard was green and full of violets and wood anemones.  Gerard looked as if he were going to his execution.

I hurried down to meet them.

‘You look very handsome.’

I gave him the despised white rose buttonhole.  I even helped him pin it on, broadcasting calm and strengthening thoughts on all frequencies.

Gerard said, ‘Thank you,’ and gave me a shaky smile.

The best man pinned on his own button hole and we walked slowly up to the porch.

‘Rings?’ I said.

The best man produced a little felt pouch from his waistcoat pocket.  He opened it and tipped the rings into the palm of his hand.  I nodded and he put the rings back, just as Mac rang to say that the bride and her father were about to leave.

‘Fine.  The bridegroom’s party are here.’

Gerard had another go at a smile.  ‘Come on Tim.  You’d better give me back my passport before you start chatting up the bridesmaids and forget.’

The best man started fishing in another pocket, just at the moment when another car drew up, bringing the flower girl.  I took my eye off Gerard in the flurry of dress-tweaking and petal-adjustment.  But I did notice that he wasn’t in any hurry to go into the church.  I hoped it was because he needed the fresh air, but I wasn’t convinced.

And then, oh God, Karen Frobisher arrived.  She was regal – it is the only word – in a floral silk dress printed with twigs of cherry blossom and a dark cherry silk coat and hat.

She walked straight up to Gerard and said, ’What are you doing here, you silly boy?  You should be in your seat by now.  Tamsin and her father will be here any moment.’

And she made shooing gestures, as if he were five years old.

There was a moment of appalled silence.  Even the flower girl looked shocked and she was only five.  Everyone held their breath.  Everyone except Karen.

‘Well, go along,’ she said.

Gerard’s face lost all colour.  For a moment I thought he was going to be sick.  A muscle throbbed in his temple.

He turned to the best man and tweaked the passport out of his hand.  Then he legged it for the lych gate.

The best man gave chase but he was too slow off the mark.  I was already on my way.  Well, it’s what I’m paid for.  I called Mac as I ran.

‘We’ve lost the bridegroom.   Keep her away from the church until I call you.’

Gerard was heading down the hill, back into town.  I thought I would catch him at the first cross roads at one of those crowd barriers.  But he was more athletic or more desperate than I bargained for.  He just put his hand lightly on the top of one and did a sideways scissor jump over the top.  It barely slowed him down.  When I got there, I simply pushed the damn thing out of the way.

He shot down Market Street, weaved his way round sound some chattering mums and buggies, which slowed him down a bit, and whipped into Farm Alley.  Making for the station, I guess.  He cleared a clutch of garbage bags in a single bound.

I knew Headingford better than he did by now.  I took a short cut through the supermarket loading bay and the railway goods yard and got to the station ahead of him.

Just.

I stood outside it like that lugubrious cowboy in High Noon, braced for the showdown of his life.  I was breathing like a wounded elephant.

Gerard clattered to a stop.  He looked wild.  If he’d been a horse, he would have been showing the whites of his eyes.

‘No, Gerard,’ I said, trying to get my breathing under control.  I’d got a stitch, too.  I bet that never happened to Gary Cooper.  ‘Tamsin.’

That got his attention.  But he was still shaking with all the adrenaline.

He said, ‘I’m no use to her.  I can’t keep her bloody mother off our backs.’

I put my hand to my side.  ‘You can’t let Tamsin turn up at the church and find you not there.’

‘Her mother will deal with it,’ he said bitterly.

‘Do you want to hurt Tamsin?’

That got through to him a bit.  ‘No, of course not.’

‘Think.  If you leave her waiting at the church, you’ll hurt her horribly.’

He looked round restlessly.

‘Humiliate her.’

‘God, no.  But – ’

‘If you don’t want to go through with the wedding, tell her so.  But tell her yourself and do it somewhere private.’

He didn’t seem to hear.

I was desperate.  I did what I never do.  ‘Look, if she gets to church and you’re not there, she’ll worry about you. I’ve been there.  I know what it’s like.’

That got his attention at last.  There was a pause.

Then – ‘What should I do?’

‘Talk to her.  Just – just talk.’

After that he stopped looking wild and pretty soon he agreed that he’d talk to Tamsin.  Only Tamsin.  And not in that bloody church where Karen Frobisher would muscle in.  Or anywhere in this bloody town which Karen Bloody Frobisher bloody owned.

I thought quickly.  ‘Okay.  I know just the place.  I’ll take you there.’

I rang Mac.

Our two cars met in the gateway where the chief bridesmaid had driven off the road.  It was the only place I knew how to get to on the spur of the moment, but it worked very well.  It was a vibrant spring landscape of valleys, gambolling lambs and crisp, newly leafed trees.

I put the handbrake on and killed the engine.

‘Do you want me to talk to her first?’

But Gerard wasn’t a coward.  ‘No.  No, this is my mess.’

He went over to the big limousine with the white ribbons and Tamsin wound down the window.  She took one look at Gerard, pale and tense, and turned to her father, frothing away beside her.

‘Daddy, get out of the car,’ she said, quite kindly but with no possibility of being defied.  Suddenly I saw they were probably right when they said she was a good primary school teacher. ‘Gerard and I need to talk.’

Mac got out and opened the rear door for them.  Class tells.

And big, aggressive Noisy Norman got out like a lamb.  He looked stunned.  Gerard got in.

Mac wandered off up the hill and I walked Norman Frobisher down the road a bit, to give Tamsin and Gerard some privacy.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Norman.

I felt sorry for him.  I offered him a slug from my silver hip flask of brandy.  And if you’re wondering, no I’m not a secret tippler.  It’s just always in the Emergency Kit.  He was certainly grateful for it.

‘I suppose it was Karen,’ he said, in a resigned voice.  ‘Said something tactless, did she?’

I stayed non committal.

‘She’s a good soul, you know.  She just doesn’t see when she puts people’s backs up. ’

He took another swig of brandy.  Behind us, the door of the limousine opened and closed with a clunk.  We turned and he cheered up.

‘Well, at least they’re still talking to each other.’

I looked.  They were indeed; more than talking.  Tamsin had discarded her veil and they were walking hand in hand to a stile on the other side of the road.  It led into a field of sheep.  As we watched, Tamsin bunched the great meringue of a dress into two handfuls and clambered up.  Gerard held her skirt clear of the top.  Then she jumped into the field and he followed.

I was almost certain I knew what they were doing.  I was going to need that gardeners’ wire again

I was right.   When they clambered over the stile again, they were laughing and Gerard was clutching a fistful of meadow flowers – blue iris, buttercups and a whole armful of cow parsley.  Only Tamsin, as it turned out, called it Queen Anne’s Lace.  It figured.

I wound some wire round the buttercup stems and then worked the whole thing together in a sort of loose posy.  Tamsin’s dad got out his pen knife and cut her some ivy out of the hedgerow to go in it as well.  Impressive, I thought.  Mac sheered a couple of feet of white ribbon off the limo’s bow, and we tied it up with that.

Tamsin gave a sigh of total happiness.

‘Thank you.’

She kissed all of us.

‘So you’re going to get married after all, then?’ said her father.  He liked to get things clear.

Tamsin was whispering in my ear but she looked round at that and said quietly, ‘If Gerard will still have me.’

Gerard took her hand and squeezed it hard.  We all looked away, equally touched and embarrassed by so much naked emotion.

‘That’s all right then,’ Tamsin said, serious and not at all embarrassed.  She touched his face.  ‘See you in church, my love.’

I gave them both wet wipes – yes, the Kit again – to clean their hands and their shoes and after that, I drove like a bat out of hell back to the church.  I shoved Gerard in through the vestry door pretty much at the same time as Mac brought the limo to a stately halt by the main gate.  I gave my clothes brush to the bridesmaids and told them to get the mud off the bottom of Tamsin’s skirt, as much as they could.  Then I scampered up to the organ loft, to tell the organist that the bride was arriving imminently and his briefing for the end of the ceremony had changed.

It was a lovely ceremony, what I saw of it.  The Flower Girl was sick from excitement and mostly I was outside, cleaning her hands and face and drying her tears.  She bounced back for the photographs, though.

The only person who didn’t seem to be enjoying herself was Karen Frobisher.

She accosted me to tell me the organist had gone mad.  ‘Did you hear that music they walked out to?’

‘No.’

Thanks to Lavinia Jane Talbot, aged four, throwing up behind the compost heap, that was the truth.

‘Some dreadful pop song.’

A classic, actually.  I can’t Help Falling In Love with You. Elvis Presley.  At the request of the bride.  Especially for the bridegroom.

I didn’t say any of that.

But when she saw the way they were looking at each other, even Karen stopped harrumphing.

Then – ‘That bouquet . . .’she said, her eyes narrowing.

I braced myself.

But she had gone misty-eyed.  ‘He got her all that Queen Anne’s Lace, didn’t he?  When she was a little girl, Tamsin used to bring armfuls of it home every time we went for a walk.’

She fumbled for a handkerchief and couldn’t find one.  I whipped a paper tissue out of the Kit.  Wet Wipes would have messed with her make up.

She nodded her thanks and blotted her eyes carefully.  Then she was her brisk self again.

‘Of course, it stank her room out, horribly.  Smells like cat pee.’

It does.  It did.

‘And Gerard went and picked it for her this morning, anyway.  On their wedding day.  Bless the boy.’

 

Like I always say, you can plan all you like.  But what you really need is luck.

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with thanks to John Allsopp for permission to post his photograph of Ammanford Church