It Started With a Kiss (20 page)

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

Wren looked despairingly at me. ‘Have you learned nothing from your many hours wasted watching
The Hills
and
The O.C.
?’ She puffed out her chest, flicked her hair and mimicked a slow, Californian drawl. ‘Honey, you gotta build a bridge and Get. Over. It.’

I knew she was right. So much of what had happened recently presented more questions than had been answered, but underneath it all my belief remained. I had lost sight of it momentarily but I was not going to let that happen again.

When you get to see as many weddings as we do, a sense of déjà vu becomes an occupational hazard. There are only so many ways someone can offer a toast, arrange a room, perform a first dance or bid an emotional farewell at the end of the night: eventually, some overlap becomes inevitable.

Granted, as more locations gain licences to hold nuptials, the scope of themed weddings becomes wider – and we have certainly performed in some strange venues, from a social club in a naturist holiday park (mercifully most of the guests opted for some form of clothing), to a former mental hospital, a fire station and even a restored GWR railway station (the bride and groom tied the knot in the signal box before joining their guests on the marquee-covered platform for a 1940s-themed reception). But at every wedding reception there are universal constants: food, drink, music, flowers, relatives, friends and at least one embarrassing uncle/father/friend of the family/bridesmaid/mother-in-law/former partner of the bride or groom.

Our second wedding in May was a cookie-cutter stately home affair at a rambling Oxfordshire pile we have played at several times before. It’s awful to say it – and I know for the guests it was a perfect day that they’ll remember forever – but from our point of view there was nothing about it to set the event apart. The bride wore an unremarkable strapless gown and her flowers were regulation pink and white. The mother of the bride wore a big hat; the mother of the groom sported a feather and ribbon fascinator. The groom, best man, father of the bride and ushers were squeezed into light grey full morning dress with matching pink cravats they were uncomfortable in and grey top hats they didn’t know what to do with. The speeches overran, the evening buffet was delayed and the guests were pacified with champagne and canapés on the croquet lawn outside.

The worst thing about the event was that the bride and groom appeared to spend less and less time together as the evening went on. To the casual observer, all the elements of a typical wedding were there and they had obviously invested a great deal of money in the day. But something was missing from the perfect, predictable picture: I felt it as soon as we arrived, but it was confirmed when the couple stepped on to the dance floor for their first dance. The groom fixed his gaze above his new wife’s head and she stared resolutely at his shoulder as they made a half-hearted waltz around the floor. Their families and friends looked on approvingly from the sidelines, apparently fooled by the act. But I saw it, and so did the band. It felt hollow, as if the heart of the occasion had been omitted from the list of material requirements.

‘That whole gig felt false,’ Jack said later, as we were driving home. ‘It was like turning up at a station to meet someone and them not being there.’

‘I know. It’s been a while since we had one that bad,’ I agreed.

‘Remember the one where the couple had fallen out on the way to the reception?’ he chuckled. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a his’n’hers receiving line before.’

In contrast, the wedding booking for the last Saturday in May was anything but predictable. Held at Maudlem Hall, a Regency house in the heart of Jane Austen’s Hampshire, the event that was to pass into Pinstripes’ posterity as the ‘P&P Wedding’ was the costume drama to end them all.

Much to the band’s relief, we learned that we were exempt from the dressing-up requirement of the other guests – although I think Wren and I had secretly quite fancied the idea of flitting around the stage in empire-line frocks and bonnets. Two hundred guests had gathered for the event, which was taking place over two days; the happy couple had booked the Hall’s ‘Regency Weekend Package’, according to Gianni, the flamboyant wedding planner charged with orchestrating the whole event.

‘The package is simply
to – die – for
,’ he gushed as he tripped joyfully around the grand ballroom where the evening reception was due to take place. ‘Costumes, carriages,
heeeeaving
bosoms as far as the eye can see, handsome gents and blushing bonnets at every turn – for a whole weekend! Can you believe it? And as for the fabulous price – don’t get me
staarted
!’

‘He isn’t real, surely?’ Charlie whispered to me as we followed behind our guide.

Wren leaned in. ‘Oh, he’s real – I’m taking character notes on him for my drama class.’

I’m not sure if Jane Austen, even considering her delight in the ridiculous, would have been entirely comfortable with the twenty-first-century, middle-class version of the world she created in her novels that we were presented with. I would lay odds on the fact that none of her heroines ever arrived at a ball in a clear Perspex horse-drawn carriage, cavorted for the benefit of a liveried footman with an HD camcorder, quaffed a ‘Pemberley Pimms’ or knocked back a ‘Bennet Bourbon’ at the bar, before bopping in her corset to ‘Mustang Sally’…

However, the most remarkable element of this wedding was beyond the dubious delights of the Maudlem Hall wedding package – and something I think Miss Austen would have heartily approved of.

Wren was the first one to notice it, three songs into the first set. Just as Tom was beginning the guitar solo for ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, Wren nudged me.

‘The groom’s grumpier than Mr Darcy – I don’t think I’ve seen him crack a smile since we started.’

I looked over to the questionably happy couple by the bar (garishly pink Pemberley Pimms in hand) and, sure enough, the groom had a facial expression more suited to a divorce than a wedding. The bride – wearing an exact replica of Jennifer Ehle’s
Pride and Prejudice
wedding gown from the classic BBC adaptation – didn’t appear much perkier herself, scowling at her new husband as he haughtily surveyed the strutting guests on the dance floor. Considering the song we were currently performing, the whole scene possessed a delicious irony that would have had Miss Austen reaching for her quill to preserve it.

But this was only the start of the startling similarities between the gathered party and the famous novel’s cast. There was a cousin of the bride who spent the entire night trying to entice all the single female guests to dance with him, with about as much finesse as Mr Collins could have mustered; two teenage girls who set their sights on the handsome best man and wouldn’t leave him alone, giggling louder than Kitty and Lydia; and the poor father of the bride who sat almost unnoticed for most of the night, no doubt wishing he had Mr Bennet’s study to disappear into.

Added to this, the mother of the bride was a huge and decidedly overbearing woman who had been shoe-horned into a corset and spray-tanned to within an inch of her life. She was blessed with quite possibly the loudest voice we had ever heard, and had an uncanny knack of making booming bitchy remarks just as the music ended. In fact, had Mrs Bennet herself been in attendance, I suspect even she would have felt obliged to take the lady in question aside and suggest she tone it down a little …

Driving home in the early hours of the morning with Wren and Tom, our thoughts turned to what lay ahead for us in the coming month. The millionaire gig was getting closer, rising majestically on the horizon, luminous with the promise of bigger and better things.

Wren snuggled down in the passenger seat and closed her eyes. ‘I can’t wait till we’re there, on that stage.’

‘I can’t wait till the money’s in my account,’ Tom added sleepily from the back seat. ‘Maybe then my bank will like me again.’

I smiled as I kept my eyes on the road. The prospect of the gig was undeniably exciting, but for me it took second place to the thought of what Cayte’s article would achieve. Thinking of that brought my thoughts back to PK. What was he doing now? Probably sleeping, given that it was two in the morning. But was he dreaming of me? Or had I slipped from his thoughts months ago, like the motorway miles disappearing behind us? Whatever the truth was, I reasoned, June promised to be a crucial month, both for me and for the band.

Staring at the red rear lights of Jack’s van ahead of me in the blue-black predawn darkness, I could never have envisaged how true this prediction would be.

I was staring at the text in disbelief when my phone rang.

‘Rom, it’s Charlie. Have you seen Tom’s message?’

Despite my shock, it was good to know that Charlie’s first response was to call me. ‘Just. What’s going on?’

Charlie sounded as shaken as I was. ‘I’ve no idea. I just tried calling him but it was engaged.’

‘If you find out anything, will you let me know?’

‘Sure. Talk to you soon.’

Mick was looking at me as I ended the call. ‘Everything OK?’

‘No, it’s not actually. My band just lost the biggest gig and I’ve no idea why.’

‘Not the one for the millionaire bloke?’ Mick’s capacity for remembering random bits of conversation never ceased to amaze me.

‘Yes.’

‘That sucks, kid. Bet you’re gutted.’

I nodded, twisting my chair back to face my monitor and feeling my heart bobbling about somewhere around my toes. Suddenly writing a jingle about underarm deodorant seemed like a booby prize. ‘We all will be.’

Thursday was one of the most depressing days I had endured for a very long time. It didn’t help that I had spent all day battling with the advertising manager of an agency drafted in by a client to ‘pep-up’ their radio campaigns – which, in non-idiot speak, meant interfering with every decision when he had very little creative input to offer. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the product in question hadn’t been a well-known brand of earwax softener …

My day went from bad to worse, especially when my boss Amanda waded into the debate.

‘What Romily is
trying
to say, in her own way – not very well, admittedly – is that the concept you’ve suggested is impossible to realise in a thirty-second commercial. And if you want that commercial to be entirely sung in the style of Sigur Rós, your message will be completely lost on our audience. Most of whom, I would dare to suggest, will have little grasp of the Icelandic language.’

Great. As if the tension in the Bat Cave wasn’t sliceable enough already.

‘Maybe there’s another way around this?’ I suggested. ‘We can write something that sounds like an art-house piece to use as a bed underneath your script – in English, of course. Would that keep the feel you’re looking for?’

For the smallest of moments, I honestly thought the advertising manager was impressed. But my optimism was short-lived.

‘It stays as the agency has designed it,’ he sneered, ‘or we pull the campaign.’

Amanda’s face said it all as she flounced out of the studio.

I groaned and let my head drop to the desk as Mick uttered a few choice words.

The thought of seeing my friends after such a tough day should have been comforting, but given the stony silence that had settled over us all since Tom’s text, our impending rehearsal hung over me like a hail-heavy thundercloud.

We gathered in Tom’s rehearsal studio in the old shoe factory at six pm, after the quietest load-in of equipment in the band’s history. We set everything up, but the futility of the act was not lost on anyone in the room. This was supposed to be our final rehearsal before the gig that could lead to bright things for the band; yet now, in light of this week’s developments, it was little more than going through the motions before the inevitable post-mortem of what had happened.

Charlie and Jack slumped against guitar and bass amps in one corner of the room, while Wren and Tom sat motionless on the sofa. I stood by the kettle and mugs, not really knowing what else to do. After ten minutes of this, the door opened and D’Wayne arrived, his expression as stone-hewn as everyone else’s. He managed the briefest of smiles when his eyes met mine, but it was over as quickly as it had appeared.

‘What happened, Tom?’ he asked, finally giving voice to the question we all had.

Tom shook his head. ‘Jules phoned me to say that the wedding’s been postponed, perhaps indefinitely.’

‘How come?’

‘His daughter has been recovering from injuries she sustained in a car crash recently, but on Monday night she took a turn for the worse. Apparently the nerves in her legs sustained more damage than they first thought and she now needs a major operation to repair her injuries. The doctors have advised against her going through with the wedding until her condition has stabilised. They reckon it could take up to a year for her to be able to walk unaided again.’

Charlie groaned. ‘Man, I feel bad now. I thought he’d just changed his mind and booked someone else.’

‘I think that’s what we all thought, Chas,’ Jack reassured him. ‘Tom, mate, next time you see Jules would you pass on our best wishes to his daughter?’

Tom nodded. ‘I’m so sorry, guys. I feel like this is my fault. I mean, if I’d never mentioned us to Jules then he wouldn’t have offered us the gig and we wouldn’t have all built up our expectations.’

‘We probably wouldn’t have been good enough anyway,’ Wren said, picking at a thread in her distressed jeans.

‘Wren, don’t say that.’

‘You know what I mean, Rom! We’ve never handled a gig that prestigious before. Maybe the responsibility would’ve been too much.’

Suddenly everyone began to protest at once, the rehearsal space ringing to the sound of impassioned disagreement. D’Wayne held up his hands to silence us once more.

‘It’s nobody’s fault and you’re more than good enough. So let’s just do what we came here to do and run the rehearsal, OK? Romily, can I have a word?’ He opened the door and stepped out into the corridor beyond. Leaving the others reluctantly beginning the rehearsal, I followed him outside.

He smiled the same half-smile that he’d flashed at me earlier. ‘I didn’t know if you’d seen this, but I thought it was important you did.’

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Intrigued, I reached out for it, but he held it back for a moment, fixing his deep brown eyes on me. ‘I just want to say, I think this is unwarranted and you should ignore it.’

What an odd thing to say. If he thought I should ignore it, why had he brought me out of the rehearsal to show me? I took it from him and unfolded it to reveal a printout of a news article. Looking closer, I recognised, with utter horror, my photo from The Pinstripes’ website at the centre of it:

DESPERATELY SEEKING … ANYONE!

How far
should
you go to find love?

They say that The One is out there somewhere for everyone. But how far is too far to look? CAYTE BROGAN thinks she’s found the answer.

Like many women, I believe in true love. I cry as much as the next girl when Elizabeth marries Darcy, or Bridget snogs Mark in a snowy London street; I listen to songs about the pursuit of love and use them to soothe my broken heart when love goes wrong for me; and I will admit, in the past, I’ve accepted the odd blind date on the off-chance that the stranger I’m about to meet is the man of my dreams.

But would you spend an
entire year of your life
searching for a stranger you’d only met once?

Romily Parker is doing just that. Following a chance meeting with a handsome stranger in Birmingham’s Christmas Market last December, she is convinced he is The One and has embarked on a desperate quest to locate him again. And ‘quest’ is exactly the word she chooses to explain it.

‘I know people will think my quest is mad, but I’m determined to find him,’ she told me. ‘When something like this happens in your life, I believe you shouldn’t let it go.’

Ms Parker, 29, is not undertaking this mission alone. Her blog about the search has, to date, attracted over a hundred followers, keen to see if her real-life fairytale gets its happy ending. So far the mystery man remains at large, but Ms Parker – who hasn’t been in a relationship for over a year – is undeterred. ‘Love doesn’t come along every day. This may be my only chance of happiness,’ she said.

However, not all of her friends and family share her enthusiasm. ‘Romily seems to have latched on to this “quest” on a bit of a whim,’ a close friend confided. ‘One minute she was declaring undying love for a mate of ours, the next she was starting this search for a random stranger. If you ask me, she’s desperate.’

Alice Parker, 49, Ms Parker’s mother, expressed horror at her daughter’s yearlong search. ‘She’s done some preposterous things in her time, but this takes the biscuit. It’s a real embarrassment to the family.’

Die-hard romantics might argue that Ms Parker is simply following her heart and that all’s fair in love. But I believe her ‘quest’ carries a darker, more sinister undertone for women today.

While womankind has progressed far in terms of career choice, civil liberties and recognition, what of our personal lives and relationships? Have we been reduced to this? Wasting our lives searching for some outdated, utopian ideal forced down our throats by society and the media?

Whether Romily Parker succeeds in her ‘quest’ or not, the picture this kind of desperate act paints of today’s young women is not a pretty one. Happily-ever-after? I don’t think so.

I couldn’t breathe. My eyes scanned the scathing article over and over, as if this would eventually wear it away completely. Insult piled upon offending words as Cayte’s damning verdict of my life screamed out at me from every line. A sickening cold rush gripped my stomach and my head was giddy as I held the paper with shaking hands that didn’t look like mine any more.

‘This is – a
disaster
…’ I spluttered. ‘It wasn’t supposed to be like this!’

D’Wayne watched me impotently, his face full of concern. ‘I’m just so sorry.’

‘She told my
mother
.’ I shuddered as the full force of the implications hit me like a landslide. ‘And one of my friends called me
desperate
…’ Who was it? Tom most probably. But what if it was Jack or Wren, or
worse
– what if it was Charlie? I closed my eyes as tears flooded in. Whoever it was knew me well enough to know how long it had been since my last relationship. Why on earth would any of them share something like that with a viciously ambitious journalist baying for fresh blood?

Unwilling to consider this further, my mind switched into damage limitation mode. I needed to stop panicking and try to think clearly: this was a local article in a local paper that only relatively few people would see. Granted, I might encounter some problems with people who knew me and the inevitable conversation with my parents was going to be
hell
– but once the initial interest had died down, surely it would pass?

‘Where did you get this?’ I asked him, wiping my eyes.

‘My sister Shenice saw it on the
Edgevale Gazette
’s website this morning and when I checked the local paper it was on their website, too.’

‘Right. Well, that’s not too bad. Cayte said to me that the articles she wrote were often syndicated locally. Edgevale – that’s Stone Yardley way, isn’t it?’

‘I think so. But …’

I took a breath to steady myself. ‘OK, good, that’s local at least …’

‘Romily.’ I stopped speaking and stared at D’Wayne, suddenly chilled by the tone of his voice. ‘It gets worse, I’m afraid.’

‘Define “worse”.’

‘I think – no, I know – it’s gone viral.’

I blinked. ‘What does that mean?’

‘I Googled the article to see which papers it was in. It’s
everywhere
. Websites, newspapers, blogs … It turns out some columnist at the
Daily Mail
picked up on it and wrote her own opinion this morning. I didn’t bother to print out that one, but you can imagine how bad it was.’

When Cayte said her article would achieve the most exposure possible for my quest, she wasn’t kidding. ‘I can’t believe it. I didn’t say any of what she quoted me as saying.’

‘Why did you agree to speak to her in the first place?’

‘She said she could help me. She said I was an inspiration to other women,’ I replied, even though in the light of what she had written in the article, my reasons now carried about as much weight as a feather in the wind.

D’Wayne laughed in disbelief. ‘She’s a
journalist
. She’ll say anything to get the story she wants. I can’t believe you trusted her.’

‘She’s dating one of my closest friends and she offered to help. What was I supposed to do?’ I stared back at her article, feeling like the biggest fool in the world. ‘Do you think I’m desperate?’

‘No.’ His smile was kind. ‘Not at all.’

When I walked back into the rehearsal room, I couldn’t bring myself to look at Tom. If he was going to find out exactly what sort of woman he was dating, I decided, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. Besides, I was too angry to be able to make any kind of coherent sense. So, although it hurt me to conceal it, I endured the rest of the rehearsal keeping the truth of Cayte’s betrayal secret.

I don’t know if you’ve seen it, but I’m a laughing stock
…

No, that wasn’t right.

Ever felt like you’ve been stabbed in the back?

That didn’t work, either.

Frustrated, I stared at my laptop’s screen on the kitchen table, as if I could summon the right words on to my blog with just the power of my eyes. After the tensest rehearsal in Pinstripes history, I had made my excuses as soon as I could and fled to the safety of my little house. How I’d managed not to tell Wren or Jack was a minor miracle in itself. I think in the end the only thing that stopped me was the fear of saying something that I would later regret. The band was in enough of a state without me kicking off and making things worse.