An Entire Family Conducting a Catastrophe Through Small Talk

Erin got through the rest of it. She is not entirely sure how.

She has watched the video twice — once about three weeks afterwards, once about two years afterwards — and she cannot see any of it on her face, which she finds genuinely unsettling. There is a shot of her at ten past four, from behind and to the left, with Molly at her elbow, and then a cut, and then she is laughing at something Daniel’s best man is doing with a napkin.

She looks completely fine. She looked completely fine for four more hours.

---

Table eleven behaved beautifully.

That was somehow the worst part, and it is the part she still describes when she tells this, because it is the part people do not expect.

There was no scene. There was no moment. Nobody stood up, nobody said anything across a table, nobody had to be walked outside. If you had been at that wedding and did not know, you would have gone home having noticed nothing at all, and about a hundred and ten people did exactly that.

Faye and Sean stayed for the meal and left before the dancing. Faye came and found Erin by the cake and hugged her properly and said the food had been lovely and that Molly had eaten three puddings.

Gerry stayed all night. He was, by several independent accounts, extremely good company. He danced with Bridget. He made a small speech of his own, uninvited, at about nine, which was warm and slightly too long and which two people told Erin afterwards was the nicest thing anybody said all day.

It was an entire family conducting a catastrophe through the medium of small talk, six feet from a chocolate fountain.

---

At about half six, Erin went and stood in the corridor by the fire door for a few minutes.

Her mother found her there.

“You all right, love?”

“Molly told me about Gerry.”

Her mother’s face did something Erin had never seen it do, which was to go completely blank for about a second and a half while she decided.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, love, I could have killed her. She wasn’t supposed to be listening.”

And Erin — and she has thought about this a great deal, and she is not proud of it, and she also thinks it was correct — said: “Not now.”

“Erin—”

“Not now, Mum. I’m not doing this now. I’ve got the speeches and the first dance and about ninety people in there, and if we do this now I will cry for an hour and it’ll be in the photographs for the rest of my life.” She straightened her dress. “Tomorrow.”

Her mother said, “Right.” And then, after a beat: “It really wasn’t the time to tell you.”

“Which six months?” said Erin, and went back in.

---

She did not say anything else that night.

She danced. She did the thing with the bouquet. She talked to Daniel’s grandmother for twenty minutes about a cruise. At about eleven she found herself sitting on a chair at the edge with one shoe on, watching Gerry teach three teenagers a dance from 1974, and she thought, quite calmly: you rang the venue.

You rang a stranger at a venue two days ago to try and get yourself moved, and you did not ring me, and now you are the best thing at my wedding.

---

Daniel, who is not a subtle man and who had understood roughly a third of what was going on, was excellent that night in exactly one way, which is that he did not ask her a single question until she was ready.

They got to the room at about one. She got the dress off and hung it on the back of the door and sat on the end of the bed.

“Do you want to tell me?” he said.

“No,” said Erin. “Tomorrow.”

“Right.”

“It’s not about you.”

“I know,” said Daniel.

---

She woke at about seven and lay there for a long time.

At eleven the next morning she was sitting in a hotel dressing gown with the presents stacked against the wall and the dress still on the back of the door, and she said:

“I want to ring my mother.”

Daniel looked up. “Now?”

“Now,” said Erin.