As the crowds gathered and began flowing into the cathedral, we didn’t exactly stop standing out. I’d thought we scrubbed up okay.
Rhys had his shabby chic thing going on, Ana with one n looked fabulous, and even Barbra Clench had turned out nicely in a rather natty blue dress with floral sleeves. But none of us had outfits that cost as much as a small family home or were wearing a hat wider than our shoulders or those grey pinstripe trousers which were fucking awful but which posh men were apparently obliged to put on for formal occasions.
And actually obligation seemed to be the order of the day. I’d been low-key expecting something to go catastrophically wrong with Alex’s wedding because something going catastrophically wrong was the background music of his life. But it seemed like I’d reckoned without the vast institutional inertia of the upper classes. Sure, Alex could spill tea over donor lists, double-book our only meeting room, and get his tie caught in a filing cabinet he didn’t even have any files in. And sure, his peers and the members of his immediate social circle could preside over the collapse of the country’s economy and the accelerating deterioration of its social safety nets. But this was a society event, and come hell or high water, it would run smoothly and decorously, or the whole system would be for nothing.
We let the crowd carry us in. We’d been seated miles from the actual service, presumably so we didn’t accidentally get middle-classness on the happy couple. And once everyone was in place— which took a while because “everyone” was basically every landowner in the Home Counties, plus us—Alex made his entrance.
He looked… Somehow he looked like he always looked. There was something about Alex that meant even dressed as he now was, in a three-piece suit, electric-blue cravat, and silk top hat, his essential Alexness shone through. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Maybe on some level Alex was always wearing an electric-blue cravat and a silk top hat.
After he’d made the long walk down the aisle—in my mind, Oliver elbowed me and said, The nave, Lucien. The aisle is the bit down the side—there was a suitable pause before Miffy made her entrance. And it was significantly more entrancey. In retrospect, I wasn’t sure why Alex had been so keen to avoid seeing her before the wedding because the gown—and the five others she would be wearing over the course of the weekend—had probably been thoroughly profiled on Instagram and in multiple lifestyle magazines.
To be fair, it deserved to be, on account of being a designer masterpiece in silk and lace, modern without being trendy, timeless without being fussy, and with a train that said Fuck off. I am taking up all the space, and I don’t care, but without running all the way out the door like Bridge’s had.
On the earl’s arm, Miffy proceeded down the nave like, well, like a princess. Not like a fairy-tale princess or a princess in a movie.
Like an actual, real-world princess. Which is to say, like an incredibly rich, incredibly entitled person living out a social role she’d been groomed for her entire life.
When she reached the altar, she put back her exquisite veil and let it trail behind her. And I hoped to God, inappropriately given the context, that it was going to be a short service. Because I was already at my limit for grace and/or favour.
“A wedding,” began the vicar, or rather, from the robes, the actual bishop, “is one of life’s great moments, a time of solemn commitment as well as good wishes, feasting, and joy. Saint John tells us how Jesus shared in such an occasion at Cana…”
Oh no. We’d been here for fifteen seconds, and we were already getting a story about Jesus and some people who couldn’t be bothered to hire decent caterers. I guess I’d kind of forgotten, or let myself forget, just how, like, God-centric a full-on religious ceremony could be. And as much as I’d found the all-the-rainbows-all-the-queer-iconography-all-the-time setup of Miles and JoJo’s wedding a bit extra, this thing we were doing now was way weirder. I mean, we were sitting in a medieval building while a man in a triangular hat read to us out of a two-thousand-year-old book.
“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” the bishop was saying, “the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you.”
“And also with you,” chorused literally everybody else.
Fuck. Nobody had told me there was supposed to be audience participation. As a child of two eighties rock legends, my upbringing hadn’t involved a huge amount of churchgoing. And, for thirty years, that had been fine. But right now it was making me feel that I was living one of those dreams where you discover you’re in a play and everyone knows their part but you. Also, you might be naked.