Page 80 of Husband Material
“Why would I?” He gave a shrug that I found genuinely a bit off-putting. “I’m not religious, but neither are most people who get married in churches.”
“No”—I was probably too tired to be having this conversation because my voice got sharper than I wanted—“but youaregay.”
“I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.” He did. I was sure he did. He just wouldn’t admit it because he was slipping into defensive, overly rhetorical Oliver mode.
And I was letting it go. I was letting it go. I was letting it—“Doesn’t it make you uncomfortable, though, listening to a guy standing up and basically saying ‘God says marriage is for a man and a woman and always has been and always will be.’”
He gave another infuriating, ambiguous shrug. “I suppose I’m simply accustomed to traditional ceremonies using slightly archaic language. After all, I do go to work in black robes and a powdered wig.”
“Yes but—” I began, only I wasn’t sure what tobutbecause what I’d assumed would be mutual commiseration had, instead, turned very quickly from a conversation into a debate and was now at serious risk of becoming an argument.
An argument I wouldn’t want to have at the best of times and was particularly keen to avoid having in a minibus in front of my colleagues.
Ana with onenlooked over the back of her seat. “I’m withLuc on this one. All the God-Jesus-subservient-women stuff icks me out even if it is just words to most people.”
Oliver seemed to be considering this with his complex-ethics hat on, and I wasn’t sure that was the hat I wanted him to be wearing. “I do see where you’re both coming from,” he offered, “and I recognise that I might simply be overgeneralising from early experiences, but there’s something I find comforting about a wedding that looks like the weddings I went to as a child.”
Now he’d said it, that made a lot of sense. If there were ever people who embodied the weddings-christenings-funerals-and-nothing-else model of Anglican piety, it was the Blackwoods. Only I sometimes wished I could tell which of Oliver’s values were reallyhisand which he’d inherited from his parents. “And it doesn’t bother you that our wedding literallycan’tbe like that?”
I should probably have phrased that more tactfully because Oliver visibly flinched. “Of course it does. But that just means I wish the Church would be more accepting. Wouldn’t it be rather nice to know that a gay couple could get married in a traditional ceremony if they wanted to?”
“As a regular churchgoer,” put in Barbara Clench from the back—ofcourseshe was a regular churchgoer, “I’d be perfectly happy with a gay couple getting married in our church. What bothersmeare the people who want a religious wedding when they don’t actually attend services.”
“That’s a tricky one.” Oliver swivelled around to face her, and I realised with a mix of relief and frustration that he’d gone from being mildly prickly that I’d implied he might be a bad gay to vanishing down a rabbit hole of abstract reasoning. “On the one hand, I can see why if I was religious, I’d feel that way. On the other hand, I think a quirk of the fact that we have an established Church is that the trappings of Anglican Christianity are part of our secular culture. I mean the Church even gets its own MP.”
I came down on the side of relieved, and by way of an olive branch attempted to get interested in the intricacies of establishmentarianism. “It has its own MP?”
“The Second Crown Estates Commissioner,” he said. “Then there are the Lords Spiritual in the Upper House. The Church isn’t just religion in this country, it’s government.”
When you looked at it like that, the whole setup of the country sounded pretty fucked up. “That feels wrong.”
“Oh, you’ve noticed that, have you?” Rhys was carefully following the absurdly expensive car in front of us, but still had the wherewithal to participate in a debate about the British constitution. “Now try living in a country that you English bastards have basically taken over. Tell me how it feels then.” His voice got a kind of grinning lilt to it. “No offence.”
“The problem,” observed Professor Fairclough, who as ever had been staring out of the window the whole time and still was, “is that formulating an equitable system of governance is impossible outside of a eusocial species. And the only eusocial mammals are two subspecies of mole rat.”
There was the sort of silence that often followed one of Professor Fairclough’s interjections. Then Oliver, taking the opportunity to swap an awkward conversation for an obscure one, asked gamely, “Which species of mole rat?”
“The naked mole rat and the Damaraland mole rat.”
Ana with onengave an involuntary shudder. “Mole rats are just the worst animals.”
“Well, what do you expect”—that was Barbara Clench—“for an animal named after two different kinds of vermin?”
“By most objective metrics,” observed Dr. Fairclough, “humans are by far the worst animals, except perhaps in terms of our ability to survive in diverse environments.” She paused. “Although in those terms we are arguably inferior to our own gut flora.”
Given the alternative was fighting with Oliver about complex shit I didn’t want to fight about, I threw myself into the conversation. “Molerat versus Gutflora sounds like a particularly crap monster movie.”
“You know what,” Rhys said cheerfully, “I’d watch that.”
There was another pause. And then, to everyone’s surprise, Dr. Fairclough made a second contribution. “I’m not sure how mole rats could fight their own gut flora, and if they were fighting human gut flora, they would need to get inside humans to do it.”
We all contemplated that.
Ana with onenwas getting the what-have-I-got-myself-into look that I sometimes saw on Rhys’s girlfriends shortly after they met the rest of us. “Fuck me. That is genuinely horrific.”
“Do you think,” asked Rhys, with the air of a man about to combust his relationship, “that they’d gnaw through the belly or crawl up through the arse?”
THE PART OF MY BRAINthat was rapidly falling asleep and therefore making random connections it might not otherwise have made strayed to the all-important question of why they called it areceptionwhen it always cameafterthe wedding.
