She Found Out at Her Own Wedding, From a Nine-Year-Old

The seating plan took Erin eleven days and four versions, and she was proud of it, which she now finds funny in a bleak sort of way.

She had done it properly. She had done it on paper first and then in a spreadsheet, and then back on paper because the spreadsheet made her lose the shape of the room. She had colour-coded it. She had rung her mother twice about it and her mother had been, Erin thought at the time, unusually unhelpful.

Table eleven was the one she left until last, because it was the one with the difficult geometry. Her father’s side: all of whom needed to be somewhere, none of whom could be next to each other in the wrong combination.

She had put her uncle Gerry there with his wife Lorraine. Her cousin Faye and Faye’s husband Sean. A family friend called Bridget, who is deaf in one ear and had to be on an end. And two spares from Daniel’s side to dilute it — a friend from his rugby days and his wife, both of whom are the sort of people who can talk to anybody.

It was, she thought, elegant.

---

She found out at ten past four.

By then the meal was finished and the tables were at that stage where the cloths have gone soft and there are three glasses in front of everybody and nobody is sitting where they started. The room was loud. Somebody was trying to get the microphone to work for the speeches, which were running late, because the speeches always run late.

Erin was at the top table with her shoes off under her chair.

And a nine-year-old came and stood next to her.

---

The nine-year-old was Molly, who is Faye’s daughter, and who had been sent to sit down twice already and had not.

She stood at Erin’s elbow with the particular upright seriousness of a child delivering something important, and waited to be noticed, and then said:

“Auntie Erin. Nana says I’ve to sit with you, because Uncle Gerry’s at our table and he’s not allowed.”

Erin said, “Sorry, sweetheart?”

“He’s not allowed,” said Molly, patiently, in the voice of somebody explaining an obvious rule to an adult who has not been paying attention.

“Why’s he not allowed?”

“Because of the money.”

---

Erin has tried several times to describe what happened next in her own head, and the best she has managed is that everything in the room stayed exactly where it was and rearranged itself completely.

She looked across at table eleven.

Gerry was there, in the middle of a story, one hand up. Lorraine beside him. Bridget laughing. The rugby friend refilling somebody’s glass.

Faye and Sean were not at table eleven. Faye and Sean were standing over by the doors, near the table with the cards and the box for them, with their coats already over Sean’s arm.

And Erin thought, with total clarity: they have been standing up for about forty minutes.

---

“Molly,” she said. “Who told you Uncle Gerry wasn’t allowed?”

“Nana.”

“Which nana?”

“Yours,” said Molly, meaning Erin’s mother, and then, after a moment, in case this was not enough detail: “She said it quietly.”

---

Erin got her shoes back on under the table, which took longer than it should have, and said, “Right. You go and find your mum, and tell her I said you can have a lemonade.”

Molly, having discharged her duty, went.

Erin sat for a moment in her wedding dress at her own top table with her hands flat on the cloth, and did the thing she has done her whole life when something arrives sideways, which is to go back and re-read the last six months looking for the parts that had not made sense.

There were, she realised, quite a lot of them.

Her mother, oddly resistant to the seating plan and unwilling to say why. Faye, who had taken nine days to reply about the dietary requirements and had been strange on the phone. The fact that Gerry had not come to the rehearsal dinner and had given a reason involving his van.

And, two days before the wedding, a voicemail from the venue’s events manager that Erin had listened to twice and dismissed, saying that they had had a call about a seating change and had explained that this was really a matter for the couple.

She had assumed that was about a highchair.

---

Daniel came over with two glasses and said, “They’re nearly ready for the speeches.”

“Something’s happened,” said Erin.

“What?”

She looked at the doors. Faye had got her coat on properly now.

“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I know a bit of it. I know it’s about nineteen thousand pounds and I know everybody in this room knew before I did.”