Page 79 of The Cocktail Bar
Chapter Thirty-Nine
RIVER
The big day arrived and Alice couldn’t have looked prettier, careful not to upstage the bride, she was dressed in a simple mint tunic with cream leggings, hair in one of those elegant French baguette buns – and not of the edible kind, a matching cream clutch bag in the hand of her pearl-spangled right arm, all finished off with a pair of mint kitten heels which looked sleek enough to adorn a cocktail.
Maybe when you were a mixologist you just had to go into overkill with the descriptions. Yet none of Alice’s classicism could steal the show from Jonie, and heaven only knew how much that dress cost. But a pavlova she’d always dreamt of – according to Lee, anyway – and a pavlova was what she steered herself down the aisle in, for to all intents and purposes, she really was the epitome of a hovercraft.
But none of this mattered when you were in love. And now River’s two, arguably most loyal customers, stood side by side at the altar of St John’s Church, halfway up Glastonbury High Street, ready to declare that very undying love to an impressive gathering, many of whom could just as easily be quaffing Pimm’s or Manhattans a few doors away in the bar. In fact, River had offered the use of his premises as the reception, but Lee had declined. Jonie had long ago had her heart set on a wedding breakfast in a windmill – not that Somerset could exactly take her pick of those, or was in any way twinned with a small town whose population wore clogs, but miraculously, a small windmill on the banks of the Brue in a village not a million miles away, did have a couple of willing and fairly broke owners, and so a windmill was what Jonie was going to get. Albeit the Top Table only would be dining inside the miniscule monument, everybody else would be spilling onto the river’s banks – but hopefully not into the water.
River brought his attention back to the all-important present moment; the exchanging of the vows – and rings – he felt the small circular piece of platinum embedded safely in the satin lining of his trouser pocket and gave a very private sigh of relief.
“We are joined here today in holy matrimony to…” began the vicar.
It was at this point that against his better judgment, River decided to steal a look back at Alice. Unbelievably, her eyes had been locked on his back all the time, but they fell to her lap immediately when he returned her gaze, and that’s when the emotion hit him and he thought he might just cry in the kind of vast quantities that only his namesake could hold. He would never get to experience any of this with her and that was too bad.
Of course, he had always assumed that she wouldn’t be up for the contractual thing, and he was pretty sure that neither of them would be up for inviting God to witness the joining of their hands either. But all of those protests aside – isn’t that what anybody who wasn’t quite sure of their partner’s commitment found themselves saying these days? Wasn’t it just easier to spout out ‘oh, you know, it’s just a piece of paper… it doesn’t change the way we feel about each other… we don’t see the need, besides, if ever we did, it would be a beach wedding in the Dominican Republic, just the two of us and a witness… blah, blah, blah.’?
If River was honest, he could think of nothing less tragic. For a wedding was a celebration and the bigger the better. A real man should have the balls to stand up in front of a happy crowd and declare his feelings for, and commitment to, the woman in his life. Yes, Heather would practically disown him ifheever declared this newfound thought aloud. But there was something wonderfully knightly about the way Lee had the bravado to do this here, on King Arthur’s land, not even shifting his weight from side to side as he might once have done.
Mind you, the hypnosis sessions he’d been paying the guru friend of Heather’s for, may have set him back a small fortune at such short notice, but they’d undeniably done the trick. River had never seen his friend so calm. It was like watching a millpond. Even if he skimmed a pebble at Lee, he doubted he’d flinch.
“Is there anyone here present, who knows of any lawful impediment, why this man and this woman may not be joined in—?”
The church door slammed shut then, casting the holy building in a most eerie silence. River hardly dared look around, not least because he didn’t wish to see himself publicly rejected courtesy of Alice’s body language once more. But also because he couldn’t believe how late these guests were. Talk about crap timing just as the vicar was questioning the appropriateness of the wedding.
But nobody took their seat discreetly in the rear pews. Instead, all that could be heard by the congregation – who had now strangely grown necks like giraffes, the majority most rudely with their mobile phones in hand, ready to record some kind of evidence – was a commotion. The shuffling of feet seemed to be coming from a salt and pepper haired man in his mid-thirties, who was being thrust forward by a woman donning a giant black fascinator better suited to Ascot atop her head, clip-clopping in stilettos as she projected him mid-aisle:
“Hedoes!”
The silence became a bubbling of hushed whispers. Somebody tittered, as folk do when they bear witness to a situation which is about as far removed from funny as the climax of a crime novel. Elsewhere in the assembly, somebody began to wail. It was an awful version of anybody’s attempt at crying, and he could only hope Lady Rigby-Chandler was not its proprietor, seated as she would have been somewhere towards the middle to back.
“Then…uh…” the vicar broke off to clear his throat, “then kindly step forward and do show us your face,” he continued, with a look of total surprise on his own, for clearly it had been some time since this unwanted predicament had occurred, despite him having been the one to publicly put the question to the floor in the first place.
“Go on,” said the woman behind the man causing the furore. But the figure said nothing and so the female continued to be his mouthpiece.
“He’s the traitor of traitors, the lowest of the low!”
Her voice thundered down the aisle, bouncing off the church’s arches, so that anybody who didn’t catch her words the first time, certainly wouldn’t miss them the second, or third.
It was at this point that the light streaming in through the stained glass window ceased to blind River, casting a spotlight instead on a man who looked the spit of Blake, shielding a visibly pregnant woman behind him, dressed from head to foot in jet black.
Oh dear God, no. Why of all days today? This was Lee’s wedding, Jonie’s big day; her chance to be the centre of attention for once in her run-of-the-mill life. Not that it would ever be remotely mundane after her groom pocketing the jackpot, but still.
“Man alive… this is Lee’s wedding, Jonie’s big day—”
River started to yell uncontrollably, hoping his lips’ movement would come to a grinding halt before they had their way with his musings about Jonie’s golden moment as centrepiece.
He needn’t have worried.
A weighty figure rose from the pew – once more it was difficult to make out precise details, the bright stream of light having moved again now so that River suspected he wasn’t the only one to wish he’d brought sunglasses – she… and it was definitely a she, well, he guessed that much anyway since the figure was clad in a purple skirt, lunged at Blake in an angular fashion. Which was precisely when the bride screeched out: “Oh my God!” and the vicar signalled his apologies heavenward for the unexpected blasphemy that had occurred, “it’s only Hayley taking Blake out!”
And indeed it was.
Georgina had vanished into thin air while Hayley followed up her lunge by using her left arm as a blade, cutting into Blake’s right shoulder, preventing his futile attempts to grab at her leg. Round and around they shuffled for a while mid-aisle, a couple doing the do-si-do on the Wells Cathedral green in the annual country dance competition. Except Hayley was too smart for her partner: with her left hand she cupped the left side of his head, with her right hand she covered his right temple and eye, effectively cranking his neck – so much so, the congregation began to audibly wince – until finally, she managed to disrupt his balance completely, and a couple of nearby male guests stepped in to take Blake away.
Hayley rubbed her hands together as if she’d just taken out the dustbins, granted herself a bow, everybody returned to their seats, the vicar signed the cross skywards once again, before crouching to remove a hip flask of something – and River was pretty sure it wasn’t holy water – from his sock, until now covered by his robe, and took a rather lengthy and shaky swig.
“Well,” he said, pulling out a handkerchief to pat his lips dry, “now that the annual recreation ofFour Weddings and a Funeralis over and done with; let’s get on with the show.”
