Ridley sat at a table with Laura and Anik, and six guests from Totnes. It wasn’t the table he was meant to be sitting at, but an old friend of Penny’s had arrived by herself and announced the recent death of her husband. Ridley had willingly given his seat to her so she could be with Penny, meaning that places got shuffled round and, somehow, he’d ended up at the back of the room.
It was an eight-seater table catering for nine, so was all far too intimate for Ridley’s liking. He also wasn’t feeling his best and had only eaten half of each plate put in front of him. As the occupations around the table ranged from hairdresser to accountant to estate agent, the three ‘coppers’ were clearly the most interesting people to talk about and everyone felt the need to confess their crimes: shoplifting, speeding, protesting. A large tattooed man boasted about attacking multiple policemen at a Wake. ‘Coppers was called to a bunfight once and I ended up lamping all six of ’em. Got a right slap on the wrist for that.’
Ridley figured that his evening wasn’t going to get much better than that, so he made his way outside to get a taxi home.
For the next three hours, the guests slowly thinned out as people got too tired or too drunk to stand up. At nine, Penny headed home with Hannah. And at ten, Jack and Maggie snuck out and headed off to the Soho Hotel.
The bridal suite was perfectly adorned with flowers in the same colour scheme as the wedding bouquets, with a rainbow of petals on the bed and a bottle of champagne chilling in an ice bucket. As soon as they entered the room, Jack and Maggie leapt onto the bed, settled into the extraordinary number of feather pillows and FaceTimed Penny and Hannah. They were both in their pyjamas and Penny was nursing a mug of cocoa whilst Hannah played peek-a-boo behind the arm of the sofa. It was their special bedtime game because Penny didn’t have to move, and it wore Hannah out very nicely.
After a chaotic conversation with everyone talking over everyone else, but all saying the same thing — what an amazing wedding it was — Hannah brought the FaceTime to an end by gripping the arm of the sofa like a vice and straining so hard that her face went purple. ‘Oh, she’s making room for her bedtime milk,’ Penny joked as she gulped down the last of her cocoa. ‘That’s my cue to go. I love you both, have a wonderful couple of days away from real life, and I’ll see you on Monday.’
Once they’d hung up the phone, the large bridal suite fell silent. Jack and Maggie looked around at the immaculate room, where every detail had been considered and everything was geared towards man and wife not having to leave the room at all if they didn’t want to: room service dinner for two was included, and the contents of the mini-bar were free. They looked at each other and the weight of expectation made them giggle. Jack and Maggie, in unison, slid down in the bed so that, by the time they were comfortable, Maggie was lying on Jack’s chest, and he had his arm around her shoulder.
‘Do you know,’ Maggie said, ‘fifty-two per cent of newly married couples don’t have sex on their wedding night.’
Jack exhaled a silent laugh, making Maggie’s head bob on his chest. ‘Thank God for that.’ He kissed his new wife on the top of her head. ‘I love that that door over there isn’t our front door, so no one’s going to knock on it. I love that my mum and my daughter aren’t in the next room. I love that neither of us has got work tomorrow.’
Maggie turned on her side, so she could see Jack. ‘You know what I’d love to do?’ Jack grinned, knowing full well that she was about to suggest the most perfect way for them to spend their wedding night. ‘I’d love me and you to drink that bottle of champagne in a hot bubble bath. Then I’d love to order room service. You have surf and turf, I’ll have the beef lasagne, and we’ll go halves. For pudding, I’ll get pavlova, you get cheesecake. Then, I’d love to curl up in bed with you and watch a film that hasn’t been made by Disney. It’s got to have loads of swearing, violence and sex. And if we’re still awake, we can have a quickie before sleeping through the whole night undisturbed.’
Jack pulled Maggie closer. ‘God, I love you, Mrs Warr.’
Sunday was spent walking round London and taking the time to actually visit places that they’d walked past a thousand times. They made a pact before they left their hotel that they’d see one park, one museum, one total tourist trap, and then treat themselves to a very expensive lunch cooked by a Michelin star chef. Hyde Park became their first port of call, followed by the London Eye, followed by Tate Modern, and finally they spent a fortune on a snack at Skylon on the South Bank.
When they got back to their hotel, they were so exhausted that they set their alarm for 5 p.m. and settled down for an afternoon nap. Dinner on the second night wasn’t included in the wedding package, so they were slightly more reserved with the budget. After spending two hours eating and drinking, Jack led Maggie into the lift and pressed the button for the penthouse suite. As the lift politely announced each floor, Jack backed Maggie into the corner and kissed her. This was to be their last night together in a hotel before heading home. Everything suddenly felt illicit and exciting. The lift opened directly opposite their suite and, within seconds of entering, they were desperately undressing each other. Maggie fell back onto the plush mattress, Jack stood between her legs and, still half-dressed, they made frantic and noisy love, relishing the freedom to pant and moan as loudly as they wanted. It was over quickly, but that night, they woke and made love again.
Jack and Maggie returned home around ten, to the noise of Penny rifling through the pots and pans cupboard to find the one she needed. This racket was occasionally drowned out by the equally horrendous noise of a high-pitched American voice singing ‘Baby Shark’, and Hannah screaming along. Jack kissed Maggie. ‘Welcome home.’ Then he took their suitcase upstairs whilst she braved the kitchen chaos.
The day was spent with all four of them opening the rest of the gifts that had been piled up in the house for weeks, and any new ones which had been brought to the venue on the day of the wedding. Ridley and the team had bought an expensive set of six knives in a block. Penny particularly liked the fact that the back of the block doubled as a stand for a recipe book or for her iPhone.
In the early evening, their wedding photographer posted a USB stick through their letterbox with a handwritten note explaining that none of the images had yet been ‘touched up’, none of them were downloadable and all of them currently had his watermark plastered all over them. Basically, this was his polite way of saying that the images were impossible to steal. Maggie set up her laptop so the images from the USB displayed on their TV screen. Each image had a number in the bottom, right hand corner, so Penny designated herself as note-taker and, as they scrolled through, she jotted down the numbers of the photos they wanted printing. Maggie suggested they try to choose the best hundred.
An hour later, Penny was in the kitchen making a cup of tea, and Maggie and Hannah were both snoozing next to Jack on the sofa. He was now the one in charge of jotting down the numbers of the images he considered worthy of printing. He was scrolling back through some of the group photos taken at the party, trying to find a nice one of all the hospital staff, because Maggie wanted to give Regina a print of her old work friends. The problem he was having was that these photos had been taken late in the day, so most included drunk police officers, or people purposefully disrupting the shot by doing rabbit-ears behind someone’s head or, worse, by flashing their arses.
Jack scrolled back to earlier in the day when people had still been sober. Outside the registry office, there were some lovely, posed shots where the photographer had put people together in groups around the bride and groom. Jack smiled at the fact that the hospital staff made for a far prettier bunch of human beings than the coppers!