Don't Tell the Groom Page 8

  ‘I’m in the kitchen.’

  ‘Wow, you’re actually starting dinner?’

  I hit him playfully with a tea towel as I walk over to him.

  Cooking dinner is a bit of a stretch as I haven’t got out a single ingredient yet. But I was thinking about cooking dinner, so that’s a start.

  ‘Thai curry?’ I ask, opening the fridge to see that we have chicken and an aubergine in there. My mind is still so foggy from the group therapy session that I can’t think to be inventive.

  ‘Sounds great. How was the gym?’

  ‘It was good.’

  ‘Well, don’t you go becoming a skinny minnie for the wedding. I know loads of girls at work who tried to become size eights for their weddings and they looked all bony and horrid in their photos.’

  Fat chance of that. Excuse the pun. What with group therapy on a Tuesday when I usually do body combat and the flower arranging class that is going to conflict with my body blitz, I’m going to be struggling to get to the gym.

  At this rate I’m going to have to start going at lunchtime or else it isn’t just a wedding dress that I won’t get into. We’re allowed to wear jeans to work most of the time, as long as I’m not interviewing anyone. Which used to be lovely until skinny jeans came into fashion, and now wearing jeans to work is the bane of my life. I had to start going to the classes at the gym rather than just poncing around on the machines to make sure that I didn’t look like a beached whale in the skinny jeans.

  ‘You OK? You look exhausted. Do you want me to do the cooking?’

  I nod. Even though according to the rules that means I have to unload and stack the dishwasher. Which I absolutely hate doing. At this point in time I don’t care, as right now I would agree to anything if it means I can go and collapse in a chair.

  ‘Thanks, honey. That would be lovely. So tell me about your day.’

  I get cosy, or as cosy as you can on a wooden kitchen chair, and I listen to Mark describe his day in detail. From his clients who try to get him to minimise the amount of tax they pay to the banter that occurred during his squash match.

  My eyes start to glaze over as I listen to him talking. I can’t believe that I could have done something so stupid as to gamble away our future and to lie to him. Before I know it, I’ve got tears running down my face.

  ‘Hey, hey, Pen. What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I blub. I’m so close to telling him the truth. But I can’t. He’ll never forgive me. ‘I think I’m just tired and hormonal.’

  That’s the great thing about being a woman – you can blame almost anything on hormones.

  ‘Why don’t you go and put your feet up in the lounge and I’ll bring you a cup of tea?’

  I am the world’s worst fiancée.

  ‘That would be amazing,’ I say.

  And then I start crying even harder. What did I do to deserve such a lovely man as my fiancé? And more importantly, what did he do to deserve a lying cow like me?

  Chapter Eight

  Typically, on my very first day volunteering at the museum it is raining cats and dogs and Mark decides to be a fair-weather golfer.

  It took every inch of resolve to get out of our wonderfully comfortable bed. Which is even harder to do when you’ve got a naked man in it, giving the world’s best cuddles.

  He is now so impressed with my dedication to go to my new Zumba class that he says he’ll cook me an extra special fry-up for lunch as a treat as I’ll have burned off a zillion calories. At this rate I’m going to be at the gym every lunch break during the week. Hey, maybe I’ll lose weight just by missing eating lunch at lunch-time.

  I’m pleased to see that the museum looks just as pretty in the rain. At least it did when I was in my car driving down the long driveway. It’s not so nice now that I’ve got out of the car and I’m making a run for it up the sweeping staircase. Images of me sweeping down the stairs in my meringue dress have been replaced by me wearing wellies and yellow galoshes. Please, god of the weddings, let it be sunny on my wedding day.

  By the time I arrive in reception I’m a dripping mess. I take off my mac and hang it – as directed by Ted, the man I want to adopt as my granddad – on the coat hooks. I then make an excuse to head to the toilet where I quickly change out of my gym gear and into my jeans and smart jumper. I want to make sure I make a good impression.

  All I need to remember to do is stick my head under a tap before I leave so I have the just-showered look when I get home. Or alternatively I could just walk home, and then I’d have the just-showered look all over.

  Once I’ve managed to get as much frizz out of my hair as I think I’m going to, I leave the safety of the toilets.

  Ted radios for someone to come and get me and soon I’m following another museum assistant behind the scenes of the museum. It feels a bit naughty to be allowed to go through a door behind a showcase. It almost feels like I’m going to end up in Narnia.

  The museum assistant is in no mood for small talk and he whisks me quickly through the tunnels of faceless corridors.

  If I ever find my way out alive it will be a miracle. I’m finally deposited in a surprisingly bright and airy room somewhere below the main part of the museum.

  ‘Ah, you must be Penelope,’ says a woman walking towards me.

  ‘That’s right. But you can call me Penny.’

  ‘Penny. OK. Welcome. I’m Cathy, the curator here at the museum. And this is our Saturday morning volunteering club.’

  ‘Hi,’ I say, waving my hand at the other three ladies.

  ‘There’s usually a few more of us than this, but this type of weather tends to mean only the diehards turn out.’

  ‘A little drop of rain never hurt anyone,’ says one of the ladies.

  I sit down next to a woman and the curator sits down beside me.

  ‘Now then, Penny, have you done this kind of volunteering before?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Right. Well, we tend to work on different projects. At the moment we’re making padded hangers for our uniform collection. How are your sewing skills?’

  My non-existent sewing skills, I want to say. I hung up my needles after Mark got me to mend a hole in his sock. When he went to put his foot into the sock it got stuck as I’d sewn through the middle of it.

  The curator definitely didn’t say anything about sewing on the phone. The chances of me having my wedding here are beginning to look as likely as me winning The X-Factor, and that would never happen as I’m practically tone-deaf.

  ‘They’re not the best,’ I say, grimacing. Wow, it is quite refreshing to actually tell the truth for once.

  ‘That’s fine. You can do the pattern cutting if you like.’

  ‘OK.’

  That sounds more like it. Put me in charge of scissors. That I can handle.

  The curator spends the next ten minutes explaining how the hangers are constructed and why we have to make them. It’s a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. Who knew that underneath the museum they have a whole set of reserve stores with hundreds of items of uniforms? And that each one of those uniforms has to be delicately stored and preserved? This volunteering is proof that every day is indeed a school day.

  Before long I’ve graduated from cutting patterns and I’m being shown how to wrap the foam on to the hangers to make the padding before they get passed to the ladies who sew. I’ve been introduced to Betty, Lilian and Nina. Betty and Lilian are both retired and Nina is a student who wants to go into conservation when she graduates.

  We’ve managed to exhaust all of what I call the Blind Date topics of conversation (who are you and where do you come from) and we’ve moved on now to my favourite topic of weddings.

  ‘Some of the weddings here have been stunning,’ says Lilian.

  ‘Oh yes, some of them have been. That’s the nicest bit about coming on a Saturday morning – you get to have a good shufti at all the layouts upstairs before everyone arrives,’ agrees Betty.

&nbs
p; ‘And of course you get the occasional shocking wedding,’ says Lilian. ‘Do you remember the pink wedding, Betty?’

  Betty looks like she is trying desperately not to smirk. I’ve got to hear more about the pink wedding.

  ‘The bride wanted everything pink: pink dress, pink shoes, pink cake. She even had a pink tint to her hair.’

  Wow. There are no words for that.

  ‘The funniest bit was when she turned up here and she was furious. Her mother-in-law had only turned up wearing red, and of course not only did she outshine the bride but she clashed terribly with everything,’ says Betty, laughing with a full-on dirty man’s laugh.

  Where did that come from? On the outside she looks like such a nice old lady.

  ‘Oh love, you’re not having a pink theme, are you?’ asks Lilian.

  Betty stops cackling and she suddenly looks very serious.

  ‘No, don’t worry. Pink is definitely not my theme. I haven’t really thought of a theme, to be honest.’

  To be honest I’ve had more pressing matters like trying to have a wedding where the groom doesn’t kill me beforehand.

  ‘Well, weddings don’t have to have a theme,’ says Betty.

  ‘I was going to have a princess theme,’ I say as visions of a big dress with a long train and a hundred bridesmaids in tow appear in my mind. My thoughts tail off as I remember with a thud that that wedding is a far distant memory.

  ‘And you changed your mind?’ says Betty.

  ‘I guess I grew up,’ I say honestly.

  ‘I think princess themes have been done to death. All that Jordan and Peter glass carriage stuff, I think it’s tacky,’ says Nina. ‘When I get married I’m going to do it just me and the groom.’

  ‘Oh no, love, that’s not very fair on your parents,’ says Betty.

  Nina shrugs. If only I could do that, Nina. But Betty is right. We have too many family members who would disown us if I took that idea seriously.

  ‘Right. Well, I think that’s me done for the day,’ says Lilian.

  ‘Oh yes, look at the time. Time for a cuppa before home?’ asks Betty.

  I look at my watch and I can’t quite believe that it is 11 a.m. already. Why don’t two hours at my work go this quickly? And then I remember that at work I don’t get to talk nonstop for two hours unless I am delivering training. At which point I am parroting out stuff and taking in none of what I say.

  ‘Penny, shall we have a chat about this wedding of yours?’ says Cathy the curator.

  ‘Yes, that would be great.’

  I follow Cathy to her office. I almost feel like I need to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so that I can find my way back. This place really is a maze. I hope that none of our guests get too drunk and end up taking a wrong turn to the toilets or else they’ll be stuck wandering the white passageways for years.

  ‘Here we are,’ says Cathy, unlocking a door.

  Her office is amazing. One wall is full of bookshelves with an amount of books I haven’t seen since I was at university. Cathy’s desk is stacked with piles of paper and folders and there are odd objects dotted around. There are gas masks and rubber items that look like they belong at a fetish party rather than a museum.

  ‘Sorry about the mess. It always gets like this near the end of the financial year. There’s always spending reports on grants to write, and reports for trustees and the like.’

  I nod as if I know. But to be honest, all I know about year end is we get a million phone calls in our HR department about end-of-year bonuses. They still call us, no matter how many emails or letters we send telling our office that we don’t deal with pay or anything money related. That includes bonuses. We have a fancy head office in Sweden that does that for us. We get all the fun stuff to deal with, like making sure we’re following British law and policies, and the local hiring and firing.

  ‘Right then, let me see. You want to get married in May or June? And I understand that you are keen to qualify for the volunteer discount?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m more than happy to come in and help out.’

  ‘Excellent. It’s always nice to have a mixture of age ranges for our Saturday club. If you’re not careful it can end up feeling like a day trip from a senior citizens’ centre. And that isn’t what volunteering is about. It should be about mixing generations and people coming together.’

  To an outsider it might seem like Cathy has been brainwashed by the Big Society propaganda that the government are banging on about, but she actually sounds like she means it.

  ‘Sorry, I digress. Now, to qualify for the discount you’d have to commit to working at least three months here with us as a volunteer, of course.’

  ‘Yes, that would be fine.’

  ‘And it would have to be pretty much every Saturday. We’re not going to make sure you give us exactly thirteen calendar weeks or anything that harsh, but you can’t turn up to a few and still expect to get a discount. That wouldn’t happen.’

  I suddenly feel like I am back in the headmistress’s office at school. Not that I spent much time in there or anything. Honest. It wasn’t my fault that I had a few growth spurts that left my once knee-length skirts suddenly hovering precariously around my upper thighs.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Good. I just wanted to make you aware. We’ve had cases in the past where people have agreed to volunteer and then haven’t. Then after the wedding they’ve been handed the bill and it can get quite messy. Small claims court, solicitors – you get the drift.’

  Why do I feel like I’m making a deal with the devil here? I can’t understand how it can be that bad to volunteer here every week. I get out of bed to go to work every day and I don’t like that very much.

  OK, so I get paid to go to work, but here you have biscuits. We don’t have biscuits at work unless you bring your own, thanks to Trevor and Biscuitgate. I did bring a packet to work the first week post Biscuitgate and I ate the whole packet of Jammy Dodgers in one day. Since then I haven’t trusted my willpower and I’ve been biscuitless.

  ‘I thoroughly enjoyed it this morning. The ladies were really nice.’

  ‘Yes, they are really nice. There are only a couple of battle-axes that come, and then their bark is much worse than their bite.’

  I thought Cathy should be selling this volunteering to me, not putting me off. I’m still smiling though, only now it’s through gritted teeth.

  ‘Shall we look at dates for the wedding then?’ asks Cathy.

  Does that mean I’ve passed the test? I can now become a fully-fledged volunteer? I have to resist the urge to make Cathy do a high-five with me. This whole ‘don’t tell the groom’ thing is really tough; Mark would have high-fived me over this news.

  I nod, not wanting to mess it up by saying something stupid like thank you, thank you, thank you with a cherry on top. Cathy doesn’t seem like the type of woman who would appreciate it.

  ‘Now,’ she says. She’s flicking so quickly through the diary that I wonder how she can possibly take it all in. No wonder she has so many books if that is how quickly she reads.

  ‘I’m afraid there isn’t a lot of choice. We’ve got the third weekend in May free.’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ I say, before I even register what has come out of my mouth.

  ‘Do you need to talk to your fiancé first?’ asks Cathy.

  ‘No, no. I’m organising the wedding. It’s going to be a surprise.’

  ‘He does know you’re getting married, doesn’t he?’

  Cathy is giving me one of those looks which makes me think she’s suddenly scared to be alone with me in an office in the basement.

  ‘Yes, he does. He did propose to me,’ I say, trying to laugh in a non-maniac way. ‘We’re just doing the whole Don’t Tell the Bride thing only we’re doing “don’t tell the groom”.’

  ‘They’re not filming you, are they?’

  ‘No, it’s just for fun.’

  I literally want to curl up and die. Cathy is like a proper
serious adult and I just sound like I’m a child.

  ‘OK. Well, I’ll pencil you in. Now, we don’t have a marriage licence so you’ll need to get married elsewhere.’

  ‘OK. I’ll sort somewhere.’

  How hard can that be? Everyone knows the reception venue is the difficult place to book.

  ‘So I’ll put you in here provisionally, and we’ll hold it for a couple of weeks until you can confirm with the venue you’re getting married at. Then, once that’s confirmed, we’ll just need your five hundred pounds. If you keep volunteering that is all you have to pay, but if you don’t, that money will act as the deposit and you’ll have to pay the balance of two thousand five hundred pounds.’

  By hook or by crook I’ll be volunteering here. I can’t believe it. I could actually pull this off single-handedly. I could be the savvy saving bride and no one would be any the wiser.

  ‘Thanks, Cathy. I’ll sort out the ceremony and I’ll let you know.’

  ‘I’ll show you back up to reception then.’

  Cathy is a mind-reader. I was just starting to panic about getting lost in the basement and someone finding me in fifty years’ time as a skeleton and thinking I’m part of a display.

  By the time I get back to the house I’m practically skipping. Well, I have to burn off the calories I was supposed to burn at the imaginary Zumba class somehow.

  ‘Helloooooo,’ I call.

  ‘Hiya, I’m in the lounge.’

  I unwrap all my layers as quickly as possible, getting stuck in my scarf that I probably don’t need today as it’s fairly mild, but I’ve become so attached to it over winter that I can’t go anywhere without it. I’m so excited I have to tell Mark.

  ‘We’ve got a wedding date!’ I say, bounding into the lounge. Then I freeze. I didn’t realise that Mark wasn’t alone. Nanny Violet is sitting in the armchair having a cup of tea. In our house. This is weird. She’s never made a house visit to us unannounced before. Or at least not since she realised that we didn’t keep cakes in the house for unexpected guests. Although secretly I have some mini Battenbergs lurking in the cupboard for such emergencies now. Hidden from Mark, of course. If I’m lucky, they may still be in date.