The One with All the Bridesmaids: A hilarious, feel-good romantic comedy

It turned out putting her phone on vibrate wasn’t good enough: Bea was slowly being driven insane by the irregular buzzing from her handbag. Something was going on, but what? She tortured herself with images of Nora waiting in the rain outside of Bea’s empty flat, bedraggled and crying – the wedding off – sending text after text to her unresponsive best friend, wondering where she was … Okay, so that was all fairly unlikely, but still. If her date didn’t need to go to the bathroom soon, Bea might just have to suck it up, apologise for the poor date-etiquette and check her damn messages.

‘Oh, we’re at that age, aren’t we?’ the man opposite was saying, rolling his eyes with good humour. ‘For the past few years my entire summers have just been stags and weddings!’

‘Totally,’ Bea agreed. ‘But at least this is two best friends in one swoop for me, so at least it’s a more efficient use of my time.’

‘Isn’t it a bit weird for you?’ her date asked. ‘That your two best mates randomly shacked up?’ Bea considered the question over a mouthful of wine (ignoring the new buzzing from the depths of her handbag).

‘I guess it was weird at first,’ she put it lightly. ‘Me, them and our other friend have been joined at the hips since we were so tiny.’ She dropped her voice conspiratorially. ‘To be honest with you, it was a bit like being told my brother and sister were shagging,’ Bea laughed. ‘But it obviously wasn’t so weird for them,’ she conceded with a smile. It had been sixteen months, one pregnancy scare, two very temporary break-ups and a huge engagement ring since the night Nora had told her she was in love with Harry, and Bea and Cole had agreed that while it would never not be a bit weird it was lovely to see them so happy.

It might be a bit of a cliché, but Nora Dervan and Beatrice Milton had been destined to be best friends. Their young, first-time mothers had met at the local antenatal class and had immediately hit it off. A few months later their two baby girls were born just seventy-two hours apart. When Bea’s mother returned to work after her maternity leave Nora’s mother, Eileen, had taken on the role of Bea’s childminder, and the two girls grew up as close as sisters – closer perhaps, as they’d never bickered, never fought. (Well, actually, there had been that one time. But they didn’t ever talk about that one time, so Bea was happy that it didn’t count, not really.)

And when the girls had gone to primary school there had been little Harry Clarke, who everyone in their class thought was super-cool because he knew all the best song lyrics and how to count to fourteen in Spanish (and ten in French). The two girls, Harry and his best friend Cole had made a blissful, uncomplicated foursome for the next two decades. Even when they were in their teens the notoriously strict Roman Catholic Eileen didn’t insist Nora kept her bedroom door open when ‘the boys’ were in there.

No, for Nora and Harry, love had waited until the most convenient moment, their hearts not catching on one another until they were heading out of their twenties: the fumbling inexperience and the dramas, the cheating exes and the hassle all done and behind them. It seemed unfairly effortless to a more-than-slightly jaded Bea. For her, love was all tossed and tangled with screaming arguments on rainy street corners; discovered flirty text messages; wilful misunderstandings; late nights spent Facebook-stalking exes with a bitterness in her throat that wine couldn’t mask; men that either loved her too much or never enough.

Nora had tried to explain it to Bea once, that first night. Bea had been so completely floored by the sudden and severe change in circumstances between her nearest and dearest that her first question to Nora (once she’d become able to form words) was to ask if they’d been drunk. That was easier to understand, somehow, that they’d got so plastered they’d forgotten who the other was, who they were themselves.

‘No. It was just like, one day, I saw Harry and I thought, oh, there you are,’ Nora had answered, simply. ‘Do you get it?’

Bea hadn’t been able to get it. So she’d got drunk instead and when Nora left the bar (to go and see Harry, no doubt) Bea stayed to see off the bottle of wine, staring at the pockmarked table top, feeling happy and sad and excited and scared, all at once. And here she was, five hundred days later, with another bottle of Pinot Grigio in front of her, telling a stranger all about how crazy in love her best friends were. Her shoes hurt. She suddenly felt ancient, and so tired.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Bea said finally, grabbing her handbag. ‘I just need to check my phone, it’s going mental.’

‘Yeah, I thought I could hear it,’ her date smiled graciously. ‘No problem. Do you want another drink? Or to share some bar snacks, maybe?’

Bea hesitated. She did want another drink. She did want bar snacks. She wanted to sit here with this nice man for the rest of the evening and find out some of his secrets. She wanted to take him home and take him to bed and wake up with the sunshine, in his arms on Sunday mornings. She was beginning to think, however, that Nice Guy Rob was far too nice a guy for the likes of her. But, hell, surely the universe wouldn’t begrudge her the one last drink.

‘I could have another glass, if you could?’

‘Coming right up,’ he smiled, leaving her with her multiple new messages and heading over to take his place in the queue at the busy bar.

Bea had invitations to join no fewer than nine new WhatsApp group conversations. One was all the bridesmaids with Nora. One was all the bridesmaids without Nora. One was the entire wedding party. One was specifically for discussing the hen do, yet another was for the engagement party Nora and Harry were planning for next month. Bea couldn’t even be bothered to work out what the other ones were for. They were already crammed full of overly emotive messages, pictures and links. Bea did a double-take; she’d assumed they were from Nora, but the invitations were from Sarah. Ugh. Attack of the bridesmaidzilla. This was going to get old, and fast.

Eli had messaged her too, an hour or so ago; Bea clutched at the normality that was a stupid meme image forwarded by an old friend. She was still scouring the Google Image search results for the perfect response to him when her smiling date returned from the bar with her glass of wine.

Chapter 3

We were on holiday in Thailand and, as you do, decided to go for a walk on the moonlit beach. Another couple were there releasing a lantern, and it really was the most romantic of settings. My boyfriend dropped to one knee and did the deed – not that I can remember a word of what he said – and of course, I said yes. Romanticism was cut short however – the crashing waves combined with all the beers I’d necked that evening meant I needed to get back to the hotel and use the facilities, sharpish. Of course then we had to call our parents and all our friends and tell them the good news, so by the time we were ready to go out and celebrate all the bars were closed (except for an Irish bar, which was blasting out ‘Cotton Eye Joe’). Instead we went back to our room and shared a lukewarm can of lager from the minibar. The next day, I woke up with food poisoning.

Katy, Chesterfield

‘Okay so, here’s the thing.’ Nora’s face was far too concerned considering the subject matter. ‘So, Harry prefers documentary-style photography. You know, lifestyle approach. But I think I’m leaning more classic. And I really love the sort of depth that shooting on film gets, right? But Harry thinks digital is much more crisp. I honestly don’t know what to do. Help!’

All four bridesmaids eyed each other in the hope that someone else would speak first.

Daisy bit. ‘Okay, back up here a sec. What the eff is documentary-style photography? What, are they gonna serialise your wedding and stick it up on Netflix?’

‘Do you have some examples?’ Cleo agreed.

‘Did you not see the stuff I pinned onto the Photography Board?’ Nora asked impatiently, grabbing her iPad and navigating to the Pinterest app.

‘I did,’ Sarah assured her. ‘It’s the sort of reportage style, right? Candid rather than posed? It’s nice. Really modern.’

Nora bit her lip. ‘Is modern what I’m going for?’

Sarah laughed. ‘You tell us, sweetie!’

Bea rolled her eyes. ‘How can you go for modern? I mean, when the very concept of marriage is completely—’

‘Traditional,’ Cleo butted in (she wasn’t sure where Bea had been going there, but her word choice was probably less tactful than ‘traditional’). ‘Bea’s right, though, surely you need to think about whether or not you’re going to have a traditional or modern venue, set-up, not to mention the dress …’

‘All the wedding blogs and magazines say that the best photographers are booked up years in advance,’ Nora argued. ‘You need to get your deposit with one as soon as possible. So the whole wedding planning is literally at a standstill.’ She shoved the iPad at Bea. ‘So what do you think?’

Biting back the response that she thought Nora was veering into bridezilla territory, Bea cast her eye over the selection of wedding photos that Nora had pinned for reference. She couldn’t see masses of difference: woman in white, man in suit, bright flowers in bouquets, bright teeth in smiles. She passed the iPad across to Sarah.

‘What was the style you and Cole had for your wedding pics?’ she asked her. ‘I guess I liked that sort of effect.’

Sarah was visibly delighted with the praise; Bea-compliments were few and far between, even for the people she really liked, and Sarah was pretty certain, most of the time, that she was not of that number. ‘Well we had quite a contemporary photographer. Unusual angles, strong light. But then we had an urban wedding. It probably wouldn’t work as well for those sorts of rustic, burlap-and-lace-type weddings you pinned, Nor.’ She passed the iPad to Daisy, who held it out so Cleo could see too. ‘And I really wouldn’t worry, you know. Cole and I put our entire wedding together in just a couple of months, after all. You have bags of time.’

‘Yeah, but I think you need to think venue first, hun, I really do.’ Daisy passed the iPad back to Nora. ‘All things will flow from there.’

‘Okay.’ Nora deftly switched Pinterest board to the ‘Venues’ one. ‘Well, here’s the shortlist.’

Daisy arched an eyebrow as she saw the number of thumbnails pinned. ‘More like a longlist. So, for starters, I think you need to strike some of these off.’

‘Okay, so here’s the thing …’ And Nora gave her most winning smile, the one that all of the girls recognised as the precursor for asking some outrageous favour.

* * *

‘So should we, like, hold hands or something?’ Eli might be massively out of his comfort zone, but it wasn’t in his nature to do a half-arsed job.

Bea laughed. ‘It’s not like they’re going to be watching out and will take us to one side if they think we’re not touchy-feely enough with one another. There aren’t going to be any Fake Fiancé Bouncers. Relax.’

‘You know, when we made plans to do something together this weekend, this really wasn’t what I had in mind.’

‘Hey, I’d hardly been dreaming that when I visited my first wedding fair it would be with you, you know,’ Bea shot back, slamming the car door for emphasis.

Eli grinned his disarming grin. ‘Really? Don’t you remember our beautiful wedding day?’ He clutched dramatically at his supposedly broken heart.

Bea rolled her eyes but decided not to fight the smile. It was the day Elliott Hale had been formally inducted into their little group of friends. Nora had been to a family wedding the weekend before and was full of utter Catholic pomp about it, promising she’d show Bea how it was done by officiating a marriage between her and a willing boy on the playground that lunchtime.

When neither Harry nor Cole proved willing … ‘You, then,’ seven-year-old Nora had decreed, waving impatiently at a nearby classmate. Young Eli was stretched and gangly (oddly, for someone who would grow up to be of an average height) and had knees that seemed way too large for the rest of his legs. He’d looked up from his Pogs in alarm.

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you.’ Already an older sister several times over by then, Nora had little-to-no patience with slow uptake. ‘Come over here and be the groom.’

Reasonably obedient by nature – back then and now – Eli had obliged, gathering up his snackbox and his Pogs and moving across to stand with the four of them; he’d never managed to completely extricate himself again.

‘Of course I remember, snookums,’ Bea teased, moving closer to fling a companionable arm around her friend’s shoulders as they made their way down the crunching gravel walkway that lead from the car park to the venue. ‘Shame that didn’t work out. At least we’ll always have the playground.’

‘Welcome to Hucclecote Barn,’ a smiling woman in a matching skirt-suit the colour of a new bruise greeted them, handing them each a goodie bag. ‘When’s the big day?’

Bea curled her ringless finger away behind the plastic handles of the bag. ‘We haven’t booked anything yet,’ she lied smoothly. ‘It’s early days. In fact, we’re not just here to see the suppliers at the fair, we’re here to look at the Barn as a possible venue.’

‘Oh, super-duper!’ the lady beamed. ‘Well, why don’t you two have a good look around and later I can connect you with our events coordinator?’

‘That would be … super,’ Eli concurred, thankfully avoiding eye contact with Bea, who was quite sure she had never heard the term ‘super-duper’ used non-sarcastically before in her life.

‘Super!’ agreed the goodie-bag lady, waving them on. ‘Enjoy!’

Bea and Eli chuckled quietly to themselves as they moved away. In front of them was the Barn-with-a-capital-B in question, liberally draped with charming cream and baby-blue bunting flags. They thought they’d be getting there early, but the fair was already in full swing, suppliers hawking out their services and wares from display tables erected in a wonky semi-circle around the main doors. Couples, arm in arm, twirled leisurely around the outside.

‘I don’t think this place suits us or our wedding plans, Bea my darling,’ Eli decided, faux-regretful. He gestured at a stall selling bedazzled bridal wellington boots. ‘It’s a bit twee.’

Bea thwapped his chest with one of the glossy wedding magazines she’d found in her goodie bag. ‘Oh, is that because you’re more a castle-with-a-cream-tea sort of guy, dearest?’

Eli laughed. ‘I do actually wonder what these allocations say about Harry and Nora’s opinion of our personalities. Like, why do we get the hay bales and horseshit and Baz and Cleo get the stately home, huh?’

‘Barlow begged off this morning, actually,’ Bea told him, looking down at the messages about just that in the WhatsApp bridesmaids’ group. Barlow was one of the other groomsmen, although with a busy pub to run Bea wasn’t quite sure how much help he was going to get to be in the run-up to this wedding. ‘He’d arranged for the assistant manager to come in and cover him but she called in sick. Cleo’s had to call up this guy she knows from work and get him to drive her out there.’

Eli immediately looked interested. ‘What guy from work? Is it Mr Fifty Shades?’

Bea sighed; Eli was always pretty interested in what Cleo was up to, naturally. ‘Seriously, Eli. We’ve talked about this. This is how you start rumours.’

‘I’m just saying! Who calls themselves Gray? He’s just asking for the comparison.’

‘Well, until he’s asking you for planning permission help to build a red room of pain, it’s probably an unfair comparison.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind. Because we architects get that all the time, by the way. Gotta be constantly on the lookout for all the sex perverts. Speaking of which, where’ve they sent Daisy?’

‘Nowhere. Unsurprisingly, Daisy felt like it probably wasn’t a wonderful idea for her to tell the guy she’s been on five dates with and only shagged for the first time last week that they were going wedding venue window-shopping,’ Bea pointed out.

Eli’s fair eyebrows disappeared into his fringe. ‘Fair enough!’ Even though that year he was knocking on the door of thirty, Eli persisted on modelling his look on boybands-of-the-day; he’d had frosted spikes as a kid, greasy curtains as a teenager and now had some sort of floppy, asymmetrical ‘do that meant it took him twenty minutes to style it so it looked like he’d just gotten out of bed. He tended to date equally irritatingly coiffured women; the last one had a severe undercut dyed in an elaborate leopard-spot pattern. Daisy had got so shit-faced once she’d tried to stroke her. ‘Cole and Sarah?’ he queried.

‘Apparently Sarah has a doctor’s appointment today, or something. Jesus. Look at this,’ Bea tutted from the depths of the so-called goodie bag. ‘Mixed messages much? I’ve got a box of gourmet truffles in here, and a leaflet that gives me my first month free at Slimming World.’ She looked up. ‘What have you got?’

Eli rummaged through his (helpfully colour-coded blue) bag. ‘Ooh, truffles too; nice. Er, discount vouchers for wine at Majestic; very nice. Austin Reed catalogue. Erm.’

‘So no subtle signals that you are a fat, hideous creature and that you should starve yourself until your wedding day, then?’

‘Nope.’ Eli grinned and popped one of the truffles into his mouth. ‘Now come on, you fat, hideous creature, let’s get on with it.’ Bea allowed him to push a truffle through her lips, managing to stay atop of the urge to nip at his fingertips. Just. ‘Have you got the checklist open?’

Chapter 4

‘I’m just saying, I think it’s better that we go sooner rather than later.’

‘I appreciate that, love, I do. It just seems a little bit drastic. We’ve only been trying for a couple of months, after all.’

Sarah stared at her handsome, stupid husband. ‘I came off the pill when we got engaged, Cole. It’s been seventeen months. Seventeen cycles.’

Cole winced away. ‘Jeez, do you have to say ‘cycles’? It’s so clinical. What the hell happened to let’s just have fun, have sex; let’s just see what happens. You promised me you wouldn’t turn into one of these nut-job women charting their temperatures and testing the consistency of their cervical mucus.’ He pulled a face of utter disgust. Sarah, who had been doing exactly those things secretly by way of an app on her phone for almost a year now, struggled to regroup her thoughts.

‘Cycles, months, whatever. Whatever wording you want me to use, I think it’s obvious that we have a fertility problem. And we need to see a doctor about it.’

‘How can we have a fertility problem?’ Cole blustered. ‘You only went for that test you have to do this year, and you said it all came back fine?’

‘Cole, a smear test is nothing to do with fertility,’ Sarah snapped. ‘And besides, why do you automatically assume any problem has to be with me?’

The set of her husband’s jaw was mutinous. ‘Hey, don’t pile this on me. I’m doing my bit.’

‘Your bit?’ Sarah repeated, incredulous.

‘You know what I mean,’ Cole snapped, refusing to take the apology bait. ‘Don’t be like this. God, I don’t remember you being half so over-the-top when we met.’ He grabbed up the navy Superdry hoodie he’d thrown over the back of their armchair. ‘And as you’ve taken it upon yourself to tell my friends that we’re too busy to help them with their wedding planning, I’m going to give Harry a call and see if I can do anything. I’ll see you later.’

And that was that. Cole pulled the front door closed a little harder than was strictly necessary. Sarah sank into the armchair, pulling her feet up underneath herself like a child. She’d known that he was going to be on the defensive like this – she’d practically scheduled in this fight after all, clearing their weekend for it – but the row still echoed through her all the same, for all it was the same old story: Cole could do no wrong; ‘their’ friends became ‘his’ friends; she was taken to task for not being the same person she’d been when they met, like he was thinking of going to Trading Standards and demanding a refund because his carefree, twenty-something girlfriend had become his thirty-something wife: a dress size or two larger, a hell of a lot more stressed and always ever-so-slightly behind with her waxing.

And perhaps with redundant ovaries to boot.

Sighing, Sarah reached for her phone. Although she didn’t know who she was planning to call. Her mum and the rest of her family were all the way over in Wales and her old school and uni friends were now just people on Facebook with new surnames and fat-faced babies as their profile pictures. She could call Nora, or one of the other girls, she supposed, but – as Cole had been very quick to remind her – they were all foremost his and never just for her.

So instead she spoke to Siri.

‘What’s the ideal weight a woman should be to help with conception?’ she asked, ruefully.

Chapter 5

Gray gave a low whistle as he got out of the car. ‘You sure now how to treat a guy, Miss Adkins.’

Cleo couldn’t help but stare too, sliding her sunglasses down from where they were perched atop her pinned-back fringe; she had to – it felt like the crenelated turret of Withysteeple Hall was touching the sun. ‘Christ. Nora would love this for sure. Ooh la la. Very Downton Abbey.’

‘Completely,’ Gray agreed. ‘Why hasn’t she come out to see it?’

Cleo made a face. ‘She’s had to go see a venue with her family. Don’t ask. Long story. Involves God and her overbearing Irish-Catholic mother, who I believe has more power than the former. She said she’d come out here to meet with the wedding coordinator if I reported back it was worth the meeting.’

‘Well, if she’s looking to get married in the splendid manner of a Jane Austen heroine, then I already think, yeah, it’s worth the meeting,’ Gray laughed. ‘This place couldn’t be more stunning!’

Cleo hadn’t had Gray pegged for a regency-romantic – she smiled, filing that piece of information away – but she couldn’t help but agree with him. The manor house sat atop a gentle, natural mound – like it needed to look more impressive, Cleo thought, amused – beatifically crowning a thick carpet of surrounding meadow: fat columbines and forget-me-nots and creamy cow parsley, so dense you couldn’t see the grass.

Okay, so it wouldn’t be so gorgeous come the winter – perhaps it might even be a little gothic for some tastes – but Cleo could already imagine the tall windows of the house lit up with firelight from within, the swollen-globe lights that strung the path from the car park at the gates to the front door glowing comfortingly, perhaps even a few shining flakes of snow swirling gently down from a starry sky. The four bridesmaids, each with fat fur stoles across their shoulders. Nora, all in white, glowing in the half-light of a winter afternoon. Amazing. She hadn’t even seen the inside yet and she was pretty sold.

‘Ooh, the café is open,’ Gray interrupted her reverie, having clocked the delightfully renovated stables selling cakes and concessions off to one side of the main building. ‘I could murder a scone.’

Cleo laughed. ‘I did basically insist you drive me out to the countryside with fifteen minutes’ notice on a Saturday morning – a scone would be the least I could do! But really, thank you,’ she insisted. ‘You saved my arse. I really need to learn how to drive.’

Gray cocked a smile. ‘But then how would I keep in scones?’

‘Well, there is that,’ Cleo nodded. ‘I can’t believe my luck that you had nothing better to do!’

‘What could be better than driving out to the home counties of a weekend to play fake-fiancé with my best friend from work?’

‘Plus getting to eat scones,’ Cleo reminded him.

‘Plus scones, of course,’ Gray agreed solemnly. ‘Shall we?’ He made a move towards the stables’ courtyard.