Page 79 of Husband Material
Trying not to let my second wind ebb away before lunchtime, I did something against his shoulder that definitely wasn’t snuggling. “Are wegoingto go poking around?”
“Might be a bit rude at a wedding.”
We pulled up across the road from the cathedral and Rhys ordered us all out onto the pavement. Once we’d disembused ourselves, I realised how utterly incongruous the CRAPPers’ green minibus looked in the convoy of wedding vehicles. There it squatted amongst the gleaming column of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and Daimlers, like a brick that had crashed through a jeweller’s window and was now gleefully displacing diamond rings and strings of pearls.
As the crowds gathered and began flowing into the cathedral, we didn’t exactly stop standing out. I’d thought we scrubbed up okay. Rhys had his shabby chic thing going on, Ana with onenlooked fabulous, and even Barbra Clench had turned out nicely in a rather natty blue dress with floral sleeves. But none of us had outfits that cost as much as a small family home or were wearing a hat wider than our shoulders or those grey pinstripe trousers which were fucking awful but which posh men were apparently obliged to put on for formal occasions.
And actuallyobligationseemed to be the order of the day. I’d been low-key expecting something to go catastrophically wrong with Alex’s wedding because something going catastrophically wrong was the background music of his life. But it seemed like I’d reckoned without the vast institutional inertia of the upper classes. Sure, Alex could spill tea over donor lists, double-book our only meeting room, and get his tie caught in a filing cabinet he didn’teven have any files in. And sure, his peers and the members of his immediate social circle could preside over the collapse of the country’s economy and the accelerating deterioration of its social safety nets. But this was asociety event, and come hell or high water, it would run smoothly and decorously, or the whole system would be for nothing.
We let the crowd carry us in. We’d been seated miles from the actual service, presumably so we didn’t accidentally get middle-classness on the happy couple. And once everyone was in place—which took a while because “everyone” was basically every landowner in the Home Counties, plus us—Alex made his entrance. He looked… Somehow he looked like he always looked. There was something about Alex that meant even dressed as he now was, in a three-piece suit, electric-blue cravat, and silk top hat, his essential Alexness shone through. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe on some level Alex wasalwayswearing an electric-blue cravat and a silk top hat.
After he’d made the long walk down the aisle—in my mind, Oliver elbowed me and said,The nave, Lucien. The aisle is the bit down the side—there was a suitable pause before Miffy madeherentrance. And it was significantly more entrancey. In retrospect, I wasn’t sure why Alex had been so keen to avoid seeing her before the wedding because the gown—and the five others she would be wearing over the course of the weekend—had probably been thoroughly profiled on Instagram and in multiple lifestyle magazines. To be fair, it deserved to be, on account of being a designer masterpiece in silk and lace, modern without being trendy, timeless without being fussy, and with a train that saidFuck off. I am taking up all the space, and I don’t care, but without running all the way out the door like Bridge’s had.
On the earl’s arm, Miffy proceeded down the nave like, well, like a princess. Not like a fairy-tale princess or a princess in amovie. Like an actual, real-world princess. Which is to say, like an incredibly rich, incredibly entitled person living out a social role she’d been groomed for her entire life.
When she reached the altar, she put back her exquisite veil and let it trail behind her. And I hoped to God, inappropriately given the context, that it was going to be a short service. Because I was already at my limit for grace and/or favour.
“A wedding,” began the vicar, or rather, from the robes, the actual bishop, “is one of life’s great moments, a time of solemn commitment as well as good wishes, feasting, and joy. Saint John tells us how Jesus shared in such an occasion at Cana…”
Oh no. We’d been here for fifteen seconds, and we were already getting a story about Jesus and some people who couldn’t be bothered to hire decent caterers. I guess I’d kind of forgotten, or let myself forget, just how, like, God-centric a full-on religious ceremony could be. And as much as I’d found the all-the-rainbows-all-the-queer-iconography-all-the-time setup of Miles and JoJo’s wedding a bitextra, this thing we were doing now waswayweirder. I mean, we were sitting in a medieval building while a man in a triangular hat read to us out of a two-thousand-year-old book.
“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” the bishop was saying, “the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you.”
“And also with you,” chorused literally everybody else.
Fuck.Nobody had told me there was supposed to be audience participation. As a child of two eighties rock legends, my upbringing hadn’t involved a huge amount of churchgoing. And, for thirty years, that had been fine. But right now it was making me feel that I was living one of those dreams where you discover you’re in a play and everyone knows their part but you. Also, you might be naked.
Fortunately, I was not naked. Unfortunately, the bishop wasstill talking. “God is love, and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them.”
And then somehow by some bullshit cultural magic, everybody was chanting again.Something something grace something something send your Holy Spirit something something that we may worship you now something something.The only bit I was really confident I got right was theamenat the end, and even that was pushing it.
“In the presence of God,” continued the bishop, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have come together”—crap, had they only just got to the we-are-gathered-here-today bit—“to witness the marriage of Alexander Antony Fitzrovia James Twaddle and Clara Isabella Fortescue-Lettice, to pray for God’s blessing on them, to share their joy, and to celebrate their love.”
How was there so much of this? How could there be so much of this? I wouldn’t have minded, but I’d never seen the slightest shred of evidence Alex was even remotely religious. So all of this pomp and weirdly specific theology about the union between a man and his wife being in a very real sense the same as the union between Jesus and the Church felt like empty ritual. Except no, it was worse than that. Here in this, well, thiscathedral, it felt like a ritual celebration of power and establishment and orthodoxy. I’d heard it said that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer, but until I’d seen a wealthy nincompoop marrying an earl’s daughter in front of an actual bishop, I hadn’t quite realised how literal that could be.
Come back, drag vicar, all is forgiven.
By the time we got to the bit where the bishop was like, “First, I am required to ask anyone present who knows a reason why these persons may not lawfully marry to declare it now” I was half-tempted to leap to my feet and yellHe can’t marry her. He’s already married to mejust to make it stop. But I didn’t because despite outward appearances and years of practice, I’m not acompletebellend.
Then came the vows. Which at least didn’t include the creepyhonour and obeybit, although I was disappointed to discover that apparentlyI dohad been replaced withI willand even more disappointed to realise the ceremony ended not withYou may now kiss the bridelike in the movies but with yet more audience participation. The bishop asked the entire population of Sloane Square and a bunch of weirdos who worked for a poo-bug charity if we would support Alexander and Clara in their marriage, now and in the years to come, and we all dutifully chanted that we did. Or rather, that we would.
Honestly, I felt kind of gross. It wasn’t the God stuff. It was the way everyone else took it for granted that this was…universal somehow. That we were all united in this single idea of what marriage was and should be.
And then just when I thought it was over, there was yet more Bible. And not the lightweight love-is-cool and Jesus-is-groovy Bible stuff. Proper Saint-Paul-to-the-Ephesians Bible stuff. Proper we-are-Christ’s-body-and-women-should-be-subject-to-their-husbands Bible stuff. And nobody seemed to notice or care or realise how totally incompatible it was with the scene in front of them. Because not only was Miffy perfectly capable of looking after her own life and career but Alex was the last person that anybody should be subject to on account of how he was—even by his own accounting—a massive duffer.
At last they let us out and we joined the rest of the guests in milling politely in front of the cathedral, while Mr. and Mrs. Twaddle-Fortescue-Lettice posed for endless photographs. And finally, mercifully, we were permitted to return to our vehicles.
I had never been happier to get in a minibus in my entire life.
Thunking my head against Oliver, I tried not to lapse into immediate unconsciousness. “Thank fuck we’re done with that.”
“Really?” He glanced down at me. “I thought it was rather nice.”
That hadn’t been the answer I was expecting. “Nice? It was wall-to-wall Jesus and heteronormativity.”
“Well, yes,” he conceded. “But that’s what most weddings are like. It’s traditional.”
I wasn’t sureIt’s traditionalwas quite the catch-all excuse Oliver seemed to think it was. “Don’t you find those traditions a bit, you know, alienating?”
