in-laws’ expectations. ‘Well, it’s great that you’ve become a feminist so late in your life,’ Josie had said sarcastically. He’d always been a feminist! He bristled at the injustice of the remark.)
Marlee offered him a forkful of the religieuse. Despite it not being manly, it was a cake that Jackson had eaten in Paris, in a café in Belleville with Julia, and the memory made him suddenly nostalgic for the dusty summer streets and the good coffee. And for Julia, too.
‘Proust and his madeleine,’ Marlee said. ‘That’s a cake, not a girlfriend,’ she added. She always presumed his ignorance before he had a chance to prove it. ‘I’m crazy about Jago.’
‘Crazy doesn’t last,’ Jackson said. ‘Trust me, I’ve been there. Also who wants to be crazy? Being crazy is the same as being mad.’ And now in the space of a month she had gone from being crazy about her fiancé to dragging her feet to the altar. Which proved his point. Crazy was crazy.
And then somehow it had gone downhill from there, the whole dad/daughter bonding experience ending up as an analysis of his politics, his character, his beliefs, all of which apparently belonged to a less enlightened age. ‘You’re not enlightened,’ Jackson protested (foolishly). ‘You just think you are.’
‘You’re such a Luddite, Dad.’
But what if the Luddites had been right all along?
‘Just last-minute nerves,’ he reassured as their pace slowed down even further as the entrance to the church neared. ‘I’m pretty sure every bride gets them.’
He’d forgotten how much he loved Marlee. Not forgotten, you could never forget. She was pregnant, she’d informed him over the religieuse. He was horrified. One more gate snapping shut behind her on the path of life. No return.
‘You’re supposed to say congratulations.’
‘You’re too young.’
‘You really are a shit sometimes, Dad. You know that, don’t you?’
I do, he thought. Something, it turned out, that his daughter wasn’t about to say to the groom.
She looked so lovely. The cream silk of the dress, the delicate pink of the roses in her neat bouquet. He couldn’t see the outrageously expensive shoes beneath the dress, she could have been wearing wellingtons for all he knew. Her lace veil was fixed with a diamond-and-pearl tiara, a family heirloom – Jago’s family, obviously.
‘Take a breath,’ he said. ‘Ready?’ Ready to run, he thought, the Dixie Chicks song. He could hear the wedding march wheezing up on the organ inside, slightly out of tune as the bellows got their breath.
His daughter faltered and then stood still, didn’t put one expensively shod foot any further forward. There was a slight Mona Lisa smile on her lips but it didn’t seem to indicate happiness, it was more like the fixed expression of someone who was paralysed. Sleeping Beauty. The woman turned to stone, or a pillar of salt.
Jackson could see Julia, sitting at the end of the front pew, leaning out and craning her neck to get a glimpse of the bride. She frowned questioningly at him and he gave her a little reassuring thumbs-up. A bit of stage fright on Marlee’s part, he thought. Julia of all people would understand that. He could see Nathan, who had been persuaded into chinos and a linen shirt, squashed awkwardly between Josie and Julia, and from the angle of his head he got the impression that he was looking at his phone. Jackson’s heart was suddenly flooded with love for his son, for his daughter, for his anonymous grandchild. One on his arm, one in his sight, one invisible. My family, he thought. For richer, for poorer. For better or worse.
The organ was in full-throated Mendelssohn mode now and he glanced at Marlee to see if she was ready. The smile had gone, he noticed. She turned to him and said, with so little drama that he thought he must have misheard her, ‘I’m serious, Dad. I’m not doing this. I can’t. It’s wrong.’
‘Let’s go, then,’ he said. There was only one side in this scenario and he was on it. He was there to support his daughter, not anyone else. Not a church-load of people in their finery with all their expectations. Not a groom who was a ‘good man’ and who was about to be devastated, not to mention publicly humiliated. Keep calm and don’t carry on. ‘What we’ll do,’ he said, ‘is we’ll just turn round and walk back down the path as if it were the most natural thing in the world.’
‘And then we run?’
‘And then we run.’
Know