my friends asked me to help them with their weddings, I’d never have time for anything else.’
‘Welcome to my world,’ Eve muttered.
‘How many weddings do you have again this summer?’
‘Five.’ Eve pointed to the noticeboard that hung on the wall above her desk, which was crammed with save the dates, invitations and gift list registry cards. A couple, like Tanya’s, were classically white with embossed words while others, like Ayesha’s, were colourful and contemporary. Regardless of their style or size of swirly writing, all Eve could see when she glanced at them was the potential of stress and financial ruin.
‘Five? That’s insane.’
‘But it’s not just the weddings is it? It’s all the hen dos and rehearsals, I literally have one free weekend between now and the end of August.’
‘Eve, they’re not your weddings though, you are allowed to have fun outside of being chief wedding planner you know. Look at you, you’re gorgeous, in a very English sort of way, with your long red hair and alabaster skin—’
‘You can tell you’re a beauty journalist,’ Eve interrupted. ‘I’m pale and freckly.’
‘And interesting. You’re young, and you’re wasting the summer by being at the beck and call of people who have already found their other halves.’
‘Cheers.’
‘I’m serious!’ Kat said, emphasising how serious she was by waving a lipstick in Eve’s face. ‘How long have we worked together now?’
‘Two years.’
‘Two years. And in those two years, how many boyfriends have you had? You’re never going to find someone if you don’t put yourself out there.’
What was the opposite of rose-tinted, Eve wondered, because it was exactly the same any time a friend of hers became coupled-up; they looked back on their solo days with hand-on-heart relief that they had dragged themselves out of the cesspool of single life.
‘See, that’s the difference Kat, it barely crosses my mind to look for a boyfriend, let alone “put myself out there!”’ Eve shuddered. ‘When the time is right, he’ll just turn up.’
‘Eve, Eve, Eve,’ Kat shook her head the way you would to a child that’s put their left shoe on their right foot for the fortieth time. ‘Finding a partner requires a massive amount of effort, he doesn’t just “turn up”. Have you learnt nothing from writing about weddings?’
Kat had a point. It always amazed Eve how much effort some of the brides, and some grooms too, had put into finding someone to marry. If she’d had the job of interviewing couples twenty or thirty years ago about how they met, the stories would have invariably included the words ‘school’, ‘pub’, or ‘nightclub’, but nowadays the hoops that brides jumped through to get to the altar were staggering.
‘I like being single,’ Eve said. ‘Anyway, I am far too busy.’
‘It’s just that in the two years I’ve known you, you’ve never had anyone special in your life, and you’re pretty cool so I just wonder why, that’s all.’ Kat started putting the lipsticks away in their boxes. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘There’s no big mystery, Kat. I really liked someone once, and I’m just waiting to meet another person that I like as much, that’s all.’
‘So, what happened to him?’
Eve used the time it took to sweep all her paperclips into her hand and pour them back into their pot to think of an answer that was completely devoid of sentiment. There was no point getting upset about it after all this time. She settled on, ‘I honestly have no idea.’ Which, as it happened, was completely true.
The wedding with the wizards
There weren’t many instances when you could use the word puce in daily life, but as Eve lay on her back in the park looking up at the sky darkening above her, she knew that puce would be a legitimate description of her face at that moment. She’d been so disappointed when her name had been called out as the winner of a series of ten personal training sessions rather than the chocolate hampers in the raffle at her work’s Christmas party. She’d tried to give the prize away, but everyone she knew either had their own gym membership already or were too much like her and couldn’t think of anything worse than being shouted at while you huffed and puffed in a park after work as dog walkers sniggered by.
The personal trainer, Juan, had been in regular contact through January, February, even into March, calling her to set up her first appointment – but it wasn’t until early May, when Tanya had admitted that she’d made a ‘mistake’ with the order of Eve’s bridesmaid dress and it was ‘accidentally’ a size too small, that Eve thought that maybe the personal training sessions might not be such a bad idea after all. The first session had been a success. She was measuring the success of it by the fact that she was still alive. And Eve was very hopeful that at some point later that evening, her face would return back to its normal shade.
‘Same time on Wednesday?’ Juan asked, his kit bag slung over his shoulder, casting a long shadow over the patch of grass where Eve lay. She didn’t yet have the lung capacity for speech, so just weakly raised her hand and gave him a thumbs up. She thought that she’d just wait a little while longer before heading back home. It was a beautiful evening, perfect for lying back and enjoying the setting sun, and her choice had nothing at all to do with the fact that her legs felt like they were made of concrete.
The trumpet player downstairs was in full flow when Eve let herself in the front door of Becca’s flat. She had to stop calling it that. It was now her apartment too, and it was an absolute palace compared to the cupboard in New York she’d called home for two years before moving back to London. Living above a live music pub was a godsend when the iPod ran out of charge, but a tad annoying when the band in question was an avant-garde experimental Cuban quartet. Which, thankfully, tonight’s wasn’t. Toe-tapping jazz seemed to be the soundtrack to her evening, which suited Eve just fine.
Becca had already set up camp on their tiny balcony, which overlooked the pub’s beer garden, placing two beanbags next to a wine cooler that had a couple of bottles already chilling in it. Eve smiled, this was the perfect way to spend the evening. Tonight’s workout had been brutal. Juan’s girlfriend had just dumped him, and his hatred of all women seemed to extend to his clients too. Forty burpees was thirty nine too many for Eve, and every inch of her was crying out for a restorative shower, a glass of something with a strong alcohol content and a night with her best friend listening to Sinatra classics.
‘Evening!’ Eve shouted from the hallway through the open door to the living room. ‘Just going to de-sweat myself and be out in a minute. Have you got snacks out there?’
‘I have the Chinese delivery menu, which is sort of the same thing,’ Becca shouted back. ‘And you had some post, it was heavy, a book or something. I put it on your bed.’
Eve knew what it was. She’d recently organised the delivery of sixty-five guidebooks to addresses all over the world ahead of her brother Adam and his boyfriend George’s nuptials on the last weekend in August. The fifth, and final, wedding of the year. It was in the South of France and they wanted all their guests to get as excited as they were, so despite being three months away, stage one of Operation Hype Up The Wedding was the delivery of the guidebooks about the local area. There were three more deliveries planned over the coming months: a bottle of the local wine, passport holders and luggage tags. All of which Eve had dutifully sourced, ordered and, at the moment, paid for on her credit card.
Ten minutes later, wearing her pyjama bottoms with her long wet hair dampening her hooded top from university, Eve settled down onto the spare beanbag and gratefully took the