Tumbling back into the car, we laughed and gabbled the last leg of the journey away.
If ever a town was designed for romance, it must be Daylesford. Sprinkled over volcanic hills and basins, it has a delightfully colonial atmosphere. A history of gold digging and mineral spas add a touch of glitz. Shops, shaded by deep verandahs, specialise in everything from handmade chocolates to alpaca wear.
With its clear country air, Daylesford’s pleasures are simple and sensuous. If there isn’t a wedding to attend, you can stroll around the lake and have a soak in the hot pools. Good food and wine plentiful. The coffee’s passable too.
A large group of us met for dinner that evening at the Farmers Arms. Tables full of happy faces prepared for a boisterous night ahead. Much as I wanted to join them, the words on the menu started dancing in a sickening blur. A rockslide of exhaustion, combined with a reaction to our lunchtime excesses, rumbled in.
These black holes of tiredness were a new thing. I used to be able to dig deep and push through weariness. But this time, when I’d most wanted it, the energy reserves were empty. I simply had to retreat. It was a reminder that major surgery takes more than five months to recover fully from. I made embarrassed excuses and retired to the cottage where I filled the spa bath and watched the hills turn purple, then suddenly indigo.
Next morning, a roll of thunder startled us awake. Dark clouds clustered malevolently around the hills. While the landscape was parched, and local farmers would be praying for rain, I hoped Rob and Chantelle’s day wasn’t going to be marred by it. I needn’t have worried. The clouds quickly evaporated into transparent blue and the thermometer started sprinting upwards.
Sharing the cottage with Ginnie and Rick turned out to be a bonus. Ginnie had packed an array of fashion accessories to solve every imaginable style crisis. When Katharine realised she’d forgotten the belt to her purple dress, Ginnie whipped a black sash from her suitcase and tied it so expertly around Katharine’s waist that it looked better than the original.
Rob and Andrew, freshly shaved and nervous, knocked on the cottage door. They needed somewhere to iron their shirts.
My throat went dry as the momentousness of the occasion set in. Nobody has to get married any more. When wedding vows were invented, people didn’t expect to live much past their thirties. Staying together for a lifetime probably meant only ten or twenty years. Today’s couples, even those who marry in their thirties, can realistically hope to celebrate a fiftieth wedding anniversary. To promise fifty years of love and loyalty to one person in today’s world is beyond daring.
‘Do you know how to do this?’ Rob asked, handing me an ivory rose with its stem encased in green tape, and a long pin.
Attaching a rose to my son’s wedding jacket was the last thing he was going to ask of me as a single man. While we’d always be close, I was officially stepping back. It was time for him to carve a future of his own making with Chantelle.
None of the surge of jealousies and insecurities mothers are supposed to experience at times like this surfaced. All I could feel was immense happiness for Rob. For a man in his early thirties, he’d had a lifetime’s heartache after losing his older brother. With help from loving friends and family, not to mention Cleo, he’d grown into a fine man. Having recovered from the mire of debilitating illness, he was a successful engineer. More importantly, he had loyal friends – and now love. This day deserved to be celebrated in style.
The only hint of sadness came from Sam’s absence. If he’d lived and grown to adulthood, he’d have been in the cottage with us too. Sam the extrovert, the joker, would be revelling in the fun. He’d be ribbing his brother, throwing his head back in laughter and later on giving a toast designed to cause his brother monumental embarrassment. If he’d lived, perhaps by now Sam would have been married with a family of his own – though it was hard to imagine he would have succumbed to conventional patterns.
I thought of my parents, too, and how much they’d loved a party. Dad, his eyes twinkling, would be raiding the fridge. Mum, ravishing in some outfit she’d thrown together for the occasion, would be waving her hands about and enthralling a circle of admirers with an outrageous yarn.
They were all with us anyway, curling around us like shimmering ribbons. They were in our laughter, our mannerisms, our physical features. They’d always be part of us. Narrowing my eyes, I could almost see a small black cat weaving around Rob’s ankles. Yes, Cleo was with us, too.
As Lydia, gorgeous in her floral dress and makeup, stepped through the door, she brought some of Mum’s glamour. Watching Katharine bounce her freshly tonged curls as she twirled in her purple dress recalled Mum’s theatricality.
Wandering past the bathroom and glimpsing Rob adjusting his gold wedding tie in the mirror, I saw Dad’s style and sensitivity. Past and present merged in celebration.
Handsome as a prince, Rob planted a damp kiss on my cheek. Our son was too grounded to be aware of his movie star looks. He and Andrew climbed into a car to arrive traditionally early at the chapel.
‘Are we ready?’ asked Philip, taking my hand. The girls weren’t quite. Even though they were perfect as summer flowers, they needed one more coat of lip gloss each. Tissues, lipsticks and powder compacts were tucked away in evening bags. I checked my waterproof mascara. The cottage door finally clicked shut behind us.
Celebration
Blessings take many forms
A skylark’s melody pierced the summer air as Philip, the girls and I climbed a grassy lane to the convent, its domed tower looming over us as we reached its gates. Bees bustled in lavender bushes. Petunias dazzled red and white. The rooftops of Daylesford spread below us, melting into golden fields and blue hills.
Rob and Andrew pulled up in their car seconds after we’d arrived. It would’ve been quicker for them to walk. Guests waved from an upstairs verandah. They’d arrived early. We weren’t the only ones excited about this wedding.
The photographer greeted us and arranged us in family groups. He pretended not to be irked by the enthusiastic amateurs clicking away at his elbow, stealing his shots. His photos were going to turn out better anyway, he said.
I’d wondered how a hundred people were going to fit inside the tiny chapel, but they squeezed in four or five to a plain wooden bench. With bare floorboards and lofty ceilings, it was a simple space. More than a century of prayer had seeped into its honey-coloured walls. A trio of candles glowed at the altar alongside a splurge of ivory roses.
Thank goodness there were no windows apart from the stained glass images above the altar. We were insulated from the heat. With luck our more delicate guests would survive the ceremony.
A pair of guitarists plucked out Cole Porter while the room buzzed with anticipation. Standing at the altar in his well-cut suit, hands behind his back, Rob could’ve been mistaken for European royalty. His teeth flashed as he exchanged small talk with his best man.
‘I never thought I’d get married,’ Lydia whispered, taking a tissue from her evening bag and dabbing her eyes. ‘Or if I did I wouldn’t bother with any of this fuss. But weddings are lovely.’
Something inside my ribcage melted. The joy of seeing Rob about to be married was surpassed for a second by the possibility that Lydia hadn’t turned her back on finding fulfilment by conventional means. I toyed with an image of her sitting in front of a flat-screen television with a couple of kids and an adoring husband – but that was possibly taking things too far. Choosing furniture with an architect spouse for a flat in Montmartre, maybe? Or sipping prosecco with a devoted doctor of philosophy in an attic in Berlin? Anything was possible.