Page 26 of Four Weddings and a Funeral Director

Lily

Venus Cargill was the embodiment of the verb ‘to swan’.

All long neck and long beak, she glided into Eternal Elegance (Wedding Edition) with the ease of a water bird coasting around on a golf course water feature.

And given the din of the private helicopter that had landed in the amphitheatre, she was going to glide out just as easily.

She took so long to shimmy through the front door that Lily had time to make a quick prayer to the switcheroo gods and bang out a quick text to Annika about the arrival of the heiress.

!! texted back Annika.

Right?? responded Lily.

Their correspondence would be fit for the Smithsonian one day.

(Mom, meanwhile, had just sent Lily seventeen screen-grabbed boomer cartoons from Facebook. She’d figure out a way to respond to those later.)

‘Lily, darling!’ Venus came in for a three-kiss greeting that involved lots of mwah!

sound effects. ‘I cannot tell you how excited I am for you to bring my vision for my nuptials to life. Thank you for taking over from the previous wedding planner at such short notice. She just didn’t get my vibe, you know?

Oh, I brought you some toothpaste. Our new Pearly Whites range, made with natural pearls. It’s the decadence your teeth deserve.’

Typically, the most decadence that Lily’s teeth enjoyed was a bag of M&Ms scoffed while binge-watching Suits . But she wasn’t one to say no to a treat.

Venus passed Lily a tiny gift bag filled with toothpaste tubes and mouthwash and floss. Lily felt like she’d just visited a celebrity dentist, but in a majestic turn of events, the dentist was paying her, which was a welcome change from how these things usually went. (Expensively. Painfully.)

‘So, how are we faring with the tent?’ Venus took a seat on one of the ghost chairs, which Lily had draped with a rainbow kantha quilt in preparation for this visit.

(She’d shoved the more morbid results of the switcheroo into a nearby cupboard, and had run over to Mort’s to grab a few of the bouquets of dried wildflowers that been mysteriously delivered to his shop for reasons that the florist simply could not explain.

She’d even managed to get the Mamas & the Papas playing through her sound system after a few false starts that had involved ‘Tears in Heaven’, ‘I Am Sailing’, and then The Exorcist theme song.

‘The tent is … enormous ,’ Lily assured Venus, who was inspecting a bonsai tree wedding favour. ‘I had a structural engineer come in to make sure it could sustain its own weight, especially once we have the Moroccan lanterns and mirrors added.’

‘Oh, it’s going to be so chill, so relaxed, so zen .

Our very own Burning Man, but somewhere with more acceptable weather.

And proper beds. And honouring me. And of course my love …

’ Venus frowned, then twisted a lock of hair that had clearly come straight from a blow-out appointment.

‘Um, Desmond. Oops, blanked for a moment there, silly me.’

As one did when it came to a small detail like your fiancé’s name.

Venus pulled out a gilded planner. A literally gilded planner. Were those actual pieces of jewellery welded together?

‘Oh this old thing? It’s a family heirloom.

When my grandmother passed she gave me all of her old rings, and I decided to give them new life.

Now I carry them with me forever, just like she wanted.

I mean, her will did say wear , but they were so dated.

And besides, I didn’t want her to feel bad competing with this. ’

Venus waved an iceberg in Lily’s face. Oh wait. That Titanic -sinking chunk of white was actually a diamond.

‘It’s blood-free,’ promised Venus. ‘Canadian. Now, let’s talk vendors.

So, we were in talks with a renowned tie-dye artist from Seattle, someone huge in the textile mural scene, but they refuse to work with the colour blue.

Something about it being unlucky in their life after an open-water boating incident.

So we’ll need someone new. Someone unafraid of blue. ’

Tie-dye artist , wrote Lily.

‘And I had a photographer lined up, but they did this frankly mid Vogue cover. You saw the one for March? The outdoor shoot with the breeze blocks and the Marilyn vibes? Too structured. Too inorganic by far. I need someone free-flowing, unfettered, someone capable of capturing the love of the moment.’

Photographer , wrote Lily.

‘But well connected,’ Venus went on. ‘Media placement is everything. This is more than a simple wedding, of course. Although we do want it to be simple – pastoral, even. It’s two empires coming together to form a dental hygiene superpower. But a flower power superpower.’

??? wrote Lily.

‘And then there’s the food.’ Venus spun her planner around to reveal an extensive list of ingredients.

‘These are all the things my guests are avoiding, whether for allergies, ethical reasons, or just the vibe of it all. I had a raw vegan chef lined up, but he’s taking some personal time away after an unfortunate mango overdose. ’

‘You can have too much of a good thing.’ Lily was now suddenly concerned about her own strawberry intake, which was substantial.

(Who could resist the giant strawberries from Farmer Vikram’s stall, which was set up a few lanes over, and which happened to be part of Lily’s just-stretching-my-legs stroll that her smartwatch demanded she take multiple times a day.

Between the strawberries, the honey and the dates, Lily had been feasting like an ancient queen.)

‘You truly can. Hence my ketamine detox.’

Right.

‘How about the vows?’ Lily decided that now was a good time to brew some tea. (Dierdre from The Hot Pot had come by earlier with a calming blend somewhat oddly called GABA-Gool, and it had been calling Lily’s name all morning.) ‘Are you feeling good about those?’

Venus’s phone buzzed. ‘Oh, it’s what’s-his-name. Desmond. Here, I’ll put him on speaker.’

Ah yes, what’s-his-name, perfect pet name for the person you were about to commit yourself to for life. Or at least for a while. She wondered Venus had a prenup, or whether Desmond did, or whether you needed a prenup when you were each as rich as each other.

‘Hello?’ Desmond’s voice crackled over the phone, stirring Lily out of her imaginary prenup showdown.

‘Babe, we’re doing wedding planning stuff.

’ Venus scrubbed her hands with a lotion that Lily only recognised because Honour Nivola had sparked a giant media commotion by saying that her beauty routine was simple, really – she flew to Paris for a tub of this very affordable over-the-counter skin cream made by a local company. Ten euros! Bargain.

‘How are we feeling about vows?’ went on Venus, slathering herself in the scent of gay Paris. Lily could just about hear the dollar signs ringing out.

‘Vowels? I like “e”.’

‘No, vows. Vows . “I do” and all that.’ Venus was on to a fancy lip balm now, which from its tropical pattern was likely from Brazil. So affordable – just a quick jaunt to Rio away!

‘Right. Right. Um, whatever you think. I’m heading into a board meeting about that whole dental floss thing—’

‘Someone lost the top of their finger because they wound the dental floss too hard,’ explained Venus to Lily, smacking her lips.

She held out the pot of – was it gold? Yes, probably – to Lily, who used all of her willpower to politely decline.

Sure, she’d never know the gentle touch of Brazilian royalty, but she also wouldn’t have to worry about cold sores for now.

(She’d learned this lesson the hard way, having shared a straw with a friend back in elementary school.)

‘That’s not the company line, babe.’

‘We’re amongst friends, babe ,’ replied Venus, in a majestically bitchy sing-song tone.

‘You said the same thing about the whole microplastics debacle. My family put that law firm’s entire collective of kids through college.’

‘They did have a lot of kids, didn’t they? You’d think lawyers would be too busy.’

Desmond – or what’s-his-name, which, who knew, maybe he preferred to go by – pressed on. ‘Anyway, I wanted to ask about the mouthwash burns situation. The reputation firm is on it, but that hashtag is moving really fast.’

‘Winston can be the fall guy,’ said Venus airily.

‘He owes us after we covered up the whole … oh. Um.’ Remembering that Lily was in the room with her – or perhaps simply because she’d met her daily conversational quota with poor Desmond – she rang off.

‘Anyway. Back to more important things. Dinnerware!’

Setting a mental reminder to donate Venus’s generous gift of class-action-lawsuit-pending dental hygiene goods to Estelle, her frenemy from college who kept popping up on her social media feeds being suspiciously successful, and whose blinding smile was what Lily had always assumed was how Estelle hypnotised people into doing her bidding, Lily showed Venus over to the art deco cabinet that housed her curated assortment of crockery and silverware.

‘If there’s nothing here that works,’ she said, ‘we can always browse one of the vintage shops in the village.’

‘Hmm, there are some quaint pieces here,’ said Venus.

‘Is this one hand-thrown? I have this wonderful artist out of Puglia I work with sometimes. So sweet, so bucolic. She does all of my scarves, too. You might know her chocolate box collab with Zodiac? You should absolutely bring her on as a vendor. Imagine the bonbonnieres!’

Which reminded Lily: they hadn’t discussed wedding favours.

She’d been thinking something like vintage Loteria matchboxes or personalised fragrances.

But perhaps honey imported from the ends of the earth or hand-gathered meteor fragments would be more suited to Venus’s sensibility, which was somewhat hilariously disconnected from reality.

Or a puppy for everyone. Or a tortoise, a really long-lived one that could see the happy couple through multiple generations of delighted matrimony.