Happily Ever After?

I’ve just returned from my cousin Ed’s wedding. It was lovely. They said it would be a no-stress, friends-only, casual do, and it was. The bride was beautiful in a pretty Indian cotton print. Ed was Ed – in immaculately pressed white shorts, white polo shirt, ankle socks and trainers. That’s how he’s comfortable and smartly comfortable he was. They wrote their own vows, spoke with love and made a genuine commitment, their way. I return home with my belief in marriage confirmed.

I couldn’t help but recall my weddings … only two! The first would provide fodder for a farce.

At the tender age of 23, I chose to marry a twice-married man of 44. Yep … I set a new standard in stupidity. My father, not generally a man of principle, drew the line at this and chose to boycott the wedding although he paid for it, which was jolly decent.

Husband-to-be, a Catholic excommunicated on the grounds of two divorces, decreed that ‘God should be involved’. Apparently God had been involved in the first two (and had done bugger all to ensure their success) but third time lucky seemed a good gamble… to him.

His sternly pious sister-in-law didn’t agree. At the engagement party, she sidled up to me and announced: “Of course, in god’s eyes, you’ll only be concubine, not wife.”

I was delighted – I was a tad worried about doing wifely stuff like making jam and tidying sock drawers but I just knew that I had it in me to be a really, really good concubine.

Not many pastors are willing to marry divorcees, particularly double divorcees. We eventually found such creature. He arrived at our home in Harare, noting we had bull terriers. The conversation started with him asking if we had instructed our gardener to beat the dogs to ensure they didn’t like black people. Hmmm … so God wasn’t to be involved after all, at least not via this ungodly racist.

(Lest you worry about my attitude towards men of god, may I add that I have been privileged to know men of faith who have inspired me and enriched my life. But the racist, misogynistic git who married me first time round wasn’t one of them.)

I’d decided to omit the ‘obey’ part from the wedding vows. That didn’t please the pastor. Without any forewarning, the text he chose for his sermon was ‘as you submit unto your husband, so you submit unto the Lord’…

(Yes, really! Ephesians 5:22–24. If you Google it, you’ll find numerous earnest Christians trying to reconcile the text with modern life, with one helpfully suggesting that ‘women should only marry men that they can submit to…’)

But not many people heard the sermon.

The ceremony, in my parent’s garden, was memorable. My husband’s best friend Parker was to be best man. He called off the week before, on account of having a nervous breakdown. But he offered to do the photography instead. As we did the ‘I do’ stuff, his camera jammed (this is prior to digital photography) and he went into the most amazing meltdown… the pastor’s words being drowned by ‘fucking camera…Jesus fucking Christ’ … As I said ‘I do’, he threw the camera onto the ground, literally jumped on it and stormed off to the bar to befriend a bottle of whiskey.

We didn’t get any family pictures or any of that traditional bride with bouquet stuff. Just as well. With Father boycotting the day, Mother was unfettered. She had a bright copper-coloured Afro hairstyle. Such was the fashion then, and she was always fashionable. She chose to team it with a red caftan imprinted with a black devil’s mask from about nipple height to knee. Was it an omen? Could she see into the future? Did she know something I didn’t?

My second wedding was lovely. The man who was to become the Best Husband In The World adored Christmas and birthdays. (I’ll probably dwell on that more later). Deciding that there was wasted party time between Christmas and New Year, he voted that we add a wedding party. So we popped off to the Welsh countryside with a group of friends for Christmas and New Year, with a wedding party to fill the time between traditional celebrations.

It snowed in that part of Wales for the first time in decades. Each day for a week, the snow partly thawed. Each night for a week, sub-zero temperatures froze the thawing snow, and the clouds dusted the ice with a sprinkling of new snow. It was very pretty.

It was also an ice rink.

I stepped out of the bridal car in a cloud of lilac silk and nearly went arse over tit as my leather boots skidded over the iced car park. I plummeted towards the steep flight of steps that forked left the registrar’s office and right to trickle down a hill to an icy moat festooned with cold, glum swans. I hung onto my purple hat for all I was worth, closely followed by my attendants whose heels scrabbled for purchase in the cobbled ice and whose shrieks echoed off the walls of the medieval houses surrounding us.

We tumbled into the venue with hot cheeks and limp hair. The registrar had thoughtfully turned the heating up high in the wedding room, and closed the windows and doors. As arranged, guests and groom had arrived before me and packed themselves into what had become a steaming sauna. I felt as thought I’d stepped into a Christmas pudding.

Himself was a traditionalist.  He had decreed that stag parties were a fine tradition to celebrate a man’s last night of bachelorhood, so it had to take place on the eve of wedding. The pub chosen for this solemn rite was dispensing a guest ale that went by the name of Santa’s Rocket Fuel, with hops liberally laced with cinnamon and nutmeg. The boys had imbibed well. The fragrance of their chosen beverage lingered on their breathe, seeped through their pores and hung in the hot air.

They had gone to bed late, risen early and stumbled to breakfast at the aforementioned pub where the publican thoughtfully served shots of rum, whisky and brandy to revive them. Those gloriously fragrant spirits mixed with Santa’s Rocket Fuel to provide rich aromas … and signalled that every man present was pissed.

I did get photographs on this occasion. I wore silvery lilac silk and overdid the fake tan. The silver blended into the backdrop of grey skies so my disembodied orange face, topped with disarranged purple hat and wild hennaed hair, seemed suspended in space like an intergalactic Orang-utan with a penchant for Mary Poppins’ hats.

Sleepless and benignly drunk, Himself was deathly pale. With dark hair that grew in a widow’s peak from his forehead, he had the look of a newly risen, slightly dim vampire.

But pictures don’t always tell the full story. Ghastly though they looked, Orang-utan and Dracula lived very happily until death did them part …