the hotel where the reception was to be held, along with the in-laws and Josie, but Jackson, Julia and Nathan had opted for the Black Swan in the main square in Helmsley. Two rooms. Julia and Nathan in one, Jackson in the other. Nathan had eaten with them, slumped over his phone and barely looking up from whatever game he was playing. It seemed easier to let him than berate him to sit up straight, eat properly, join the conversation and all the other little building blocks of civilization. ‘The barbarians aren’t at the gate,’ Julia said, ‘they’re rocking the cradle.’ It didn’t seem to bother her as much as Jackson felt it should.
‘Good time with your friend?’ Jackson asked when he picked Nathan up after finally managing to free himself of the aftermath at Silver Birches.
He shrugged. ‘S’pose.’
Jackson had picked him up from the Collier set, where his mother was in her final death throes. He had swapped him for Dido. ‘Fair exchange,’ Julia said. He missed the dog immediately – perhaps he should get one of his own. He had briefly been in charge of a rather unsatisfactory dog with a stupid name. Perhaps he could get a more manly dog – a collie, perhaps or an Alsatian, called Spike or Rebel.
Nathan threw himself carelessly into the passenger seat of the Toyota and immediately took his phone out. After an interval he looked up and turned to Jackson and said, ‘It’s good to be back though.’
‘Back?’
‘With you, Dad. I was thinking … maybe I could live with you all the time.’
‘Your mother wouldn’t let you,’ Jackson said. Happiness had risen up inside him like a big bubble and he hung on to it before it – inevitably – burst. ‘But I’m very happy that you want to.’
‘S’okay,’ accompanied by another shrug. Nathan’s indifference deflated the bubble a little, but not entirely, and Jackson reached out a hand to cradle the back of his son’s head. Nathan batted the hand away and said, ‘Daa-aad, keep your eyes on the road.’ Jackson laughed. Everything was all right, everywhere. For a little while anyway.
A vintage Bentley, pink ribbons on the bonnet, took Jackson and Marlee the short distance from the hotel to the church. She had wanted everything about this wedding to be stylish and in ‘good taste’. Style not substance, Jackson thought. Even the hen party had resisted tackiness, according to Julia, who had been invited. No drunken knees-up in York or Ibiza, instead it had been a pink-champagne afternoon tea in a private dining room in the Savoy. ‘Very sedate,’ Julia reported back. ‘Not an inflated penis-shaped balloon in sight. Bit of a disappointment, really, I was rather looking forward to the blow-up penises. It was ferociously expensive too, I expect.’ Jackson supposed the in-laws paid.
‘It’s just a wedding,’ Jackson had complained to Julia. ‘It’s too much emphasis on one day.’
‘It does rather raise expectations about the marriage that comes after,’ Julia had said.
‘She’s too young to get married anyway.’
‘She is,’ Julia agreed, ‘but we all have to learn from our mistakes.’
Had she learned from hers?
‘Every day’s a learning experience,’ she laughed. It was the kind of thing that Penny Trotter would say. It was all quiet on the Trotter front. The Penny/Gary/Kirsty eternal triangle was low down on Jackson’s list of priorities at the moment. He had been more preoccupied with the fact that he was going to have to buy a new suit.
‘Why?’ he moaned to Julia. And, yes, he sounded like Nathan.
‘Because,’ she said.
The Bentley dropped them off outside the gate to the church. ‘Lych gate,’ according to Marlee. The car was booked for a one-way journey only, and after the ceremony the wedding party would walk back the couple of hundred yards to the hotel where the reception was to be held. It involved crossing a field. ‘I thought it would be nice,’ she said, ‘like an old-fashioned country wedding.’
‘What if it rains?’ Jackson asked. And, on a more practical level, what if there were people with mobility issues?
‘There aren’t and it won’t,’ Marlee said. He admired the certainty of her optimism (not gained from his genes, obviously). Nonetheless he had parked the trusty Toyota behind the church, on the off-chance of rain or sudden disability or both. ‘Or in case you want to run away at the last minute,’ he joked to Marlee. How they had laughed.
They made their way slowly up the path towards the church, where a cluster of bridesmaids in various