Page 32 of The Woman Who Said Yes

Not being au fait with hair-colouring technology, Sam wasn’t sure what was so remarkable about that. Likewise, what does he know about wedding buffets and wine options, having never planned anything like this in his life? But then Eva’s preferred venue option had fallen through, and with Andie busily chaperoning her dad and Trudy around town, Eva had called him in a bit of a state.

‘They’ve cancelled us for no reason,’ she announced, ‘and returned my deposit.’

My deposit. Eva’s wording sparked a little warning light in Sam’s brain, and he wanted to ask, ‘You’re not paying for all of this by yourself, are you?’ But of course, it’s none of his business and he couldn’t think of a way of raising it without sounding meddling or patronising, or both. And it probably meant nothing, he decided. With the champagne at Niko’s and Eva’s dazzling emerald ring, Dom hasn’t exactly shown himself to be penny-pinching.

‘Could you come and see a couple of places with me?’ Eva asked. ‘I’m worried that I’m going to book somewhere in panic.’

‘Sure, but what about Dom?’ he asked – i.e. the other person involved in the forthcoming nuptials?

‘I know it sounds awful,’ she admitted, ‘but I’m not sure he’d get it, you know?’ Her quirky aesthetic is what she meant – although now, as Sam meets Eva outside a promising-sounding bar tucked away down a side street in Dalston, he’s not sure he gets it either. She’d described the place as ‘charmingly shabby and intimate’, but there doesn’t seem to be anything charming/intimate about the various scrappy laminated notices stuck all around the entrance area: ‘No cigarette butts!’, ‘WCs For Customer Use Only’ and ‘Do NOT allow your dog to mess here. Would you like it if we fouled on YOUR doorstep?’

‘Not especially,’ Sam remarks dryly as they head inside where, hopefully, the vibe will be more convivial. Eva has been tossing around terms like ‘casual glamour’ and announced that, for her wedding hair, she is planning on the ‘cool girl crumple’. All of this is as baffling to Sam as if she’d tried to communicate to him in Latin. ‘Done-undone’ is another favoured term right now, and he can’t grasp that either. It seems to suggest a hybrid of polished and scrappy but how can something be both? For much of the time he just feels done in.

As they glance expectantly around the bar, Sam catches a powerful whiff of soggy dishcloth, of the type the dinner ladies used for wiping the tables at his school. Occasionally, as a ‘joke’, they would plonk the reeking cloth in a child’s face and half a century on, the smell has never quite left him.

Sam glances at Eva, wondering what she’s making of this place. The only sounds are coming from outside, and someone is clattering around, presumably in a kitchen. A young woman is perched on a chrome stool, a curtain of hair falling over her face as she studies her phone, and two men in workwear are nursing pints in a corner. Eva touches Sam’s arm. ‘What d’you think?’ she whispers.

Sam genuinely knows nothing about planning social events. After Bibi left, Theo’s birthday parties would throw him into a panic. Landing upon the Laser Quest option was akin to discovering a new religion, and Sam clung to it devotedly until his unceremonial sacking from having any involvement in the celebrations at all. However, although he is trying to dredge up something positive to say, he murmurs to Eva that the ‘charming’ part of ‘charmingly shabby’ is perhaps lacking here.

‘I’m not sure either,’ she agrees as a woman with pewter-coloured hair cut into a sort of helmet style appears from a back room, and introduces herself as Kia.

‘It’s all there, as I said on the phone,’ she says distractedly, and thrusts them a single grubby menu between the two of them. ‘We can do both options if you like,’ she adds, as if this might surpass their expectations. The options being ‘The Pork Board’, consisting of mini pies, balsamic-drizzled chipolatas and what’s termed ‘puff pastry sausage rolls’ (as if there is any other kind) and a vegetarian offering of ‘our famous sweet potato falafels.’ Over on the bar, Sam glimpses small brown nuggets heaped in a rectangular plastic receptacle that looks worryingly like a cat litter tray. The famous falafels, he surmises.

‘Thanks.’ Eva smiles, handing her back the menu. ‘We’ll talk it over and let you know.’

‘My daughter does helium balloons,’ Kia calls out after them as they head for the door. ‘She can do foil letters but she’ll need a week’s notice for that.’

‘Great!’ Eva thanks her again and she and Sam barely manage to exit the building before erupting into laughter.

‘Puff pastry sausage rolls,’ he announces reverentially. ‘That not good enough for you, Eves?’

They are still sniggering as they catch a bus to the second venue she has arranged to visit. ‘She said on the phone that there were various buffet choices,’ Eva announces.

‘Various choices of pork product,’ Sam confirms.

‘Balsamic-drizzled!’ This sets them off again, and as the bus trundles along Sam almost forgets that this wedding is a terrible idea, and that he and Andie are planning to check out some scribbled address from Dom’s notebook. It feels like a larky day out now, and he wishes Andie were here too. But then, slowly, the grim reality of the situation creeps back into his consciousness, and it’s not just about food and decor and – as Eva puts it – ‘the right vibe.’

It’s about Eva marrying Dom. It’s about her giving up her beloved flat that the three of them had painted together, making a party of it with music blaring. Will she sell it or rent it out? Sam can’t imagine Eva as a landlady any more than he can picture her rattling around in some huge house by the river; a house that’s very much someone else’s vision and taste. Apparently, she hasn’t even seen a photo of it yet. What is Dom hiding exactly? Or could Sam and Andie have got it all wrong, and he genuinely wants to wow her with the finished house?

Perhaps, Sam reflects, it’s just running way behind schedule and he’s too embarrassed to admit it. Well, that’s not so bad. Sam knows what that’s like. When Bibi wanted their entire flat’s floorboards stripped and sanded, the promised four-day job had spiralled into three weeks, with the two guys somehow managing to tackle every room simultaneously while doing very little other than eating crisps and laughing at memes on their phones. The dust was horrendous, getting into everyone’s ears and hair and underwear drawers, and somehow following Theo to school and Sam to the shop – there was no getting away from it. As Sam had booked the incompetent pair, he felt responsible: for the mess, the chaos and Bibi relocating temporarily to a fellow dancer’s flat in Covent Garden. Yet still, if Dom is having builder troubles, then why wouldn’t he tell the woman he loves?

Sam casts a quick look at Eva. What would she make of tomorrow’s covert excursion to Boggis Road – the address Andie found in Dom’s notebook – if she were to get wind of it? How hurt she’d be, that he and Andie had planned this behind her back! By the time they arrive in Hackney and find the bar-restaurant Eva has a ‘good feeling’ about, Sam is having difficulty batting down intense feelings that they shouldn’t be going there at all. That it’s treacherous and, at the very least, will prove to be a pointless exercise. Because now they are inside a small but delightful establishment with yolk-yellow walls and a mishmash of abstract art and vintage posters, run by an amenable, remarkably young-looking couple who assure her that they could pull together a wedding party for her, no problem.

‘Take a seat,’ the man says, ‘and we’ll bring you a few plates from the kitchen to try, on the house.’ Of course it’s small plates – Sam is aware that, within certain postcodes, a law has been passed banning dinnerware above certain dimensions.

There is carpaccio and tiny pieces of sea bass, and roasted beets and something called ‘lion’s mane’, which is quite the surprise when it arrives. Sam hadn’t expected an actual lion’s mane, but it turns out to be fancy mushrooms.

As he and Eva agree that everything is delicious, Sam wonders what his own, late parents might have made of this kind of contemporary wedding fare. Their photos depicted their celebration in a community hall in Barnet: all prawn cocktails and cold meat platters and cubes of cheddar on cocktail sticks. Sam had seen smaller hot tubs than the enormous trifle that dominated the cloth-covered trestle table.

Now the young couple are describing how they could decorate the place with fresh flowers from their allotment. Their DJ friend could take care of the music, they enthuse. Apparently it’ll be their first wedding. ‘Mine too!’ Eva announces, and laughter follows as it becomes apparent that they’d assumed she was marrying Sam.

‘Imagine,’ the woman jokes, ‘the groom having some say in the arrangements!’

‘No, he trusts me,’ Eva assures them, and everyone agrees how great this is, how modern.

‘Thanks so much, Sam,’ Eva says, hugging him as they step back out into the street.

‘No problem,’ he says. ‘It was fun.’ She is heading off to meet Dom, and it strikes Sam again how odd it is that he wasn’t curious enough to come along to check out potential venues. As if he doesn’t really care about the wedding day – yet he was the one to propose, to set this whole thing in motion. What does Dom want, really, and why the tearing hurry to get married? Sam still can’t make sense of it all.