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Where the heart is. Marita van der Vyver
Читать онлайн.Название Where the heart is
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780624066767
Автор произведения Marita van der Vyver
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
In our case that would definitely have been after the harvest.
The main reason why the mayor did after all agree to marry us on this inconvenient Saturday in September was that, for the first time in years, possibly decades, there had been two requests for wedding ceremonies. The other couple were, just like my less-than-radiant groom and me, not exactly spring chickens either. It was also a second wedding for them both and they also came to be wed in the presence of their children. The only difference was that they had more guests than children.
And oh yes, the other bride also looked decidedly more bridal than I did. She arrived in a smart hat, with a beautiful bouquet and a professionally made-up face. I was still feeding the baby half an hour before the wedding, with a dishcloth tied around my neck to keep my ‘wedding gown’ more or less clean. I’d bought the dress at a flea market a few days before – after briefly considering wearing the magnificent silk creation in which I’d embarked on my first marriage more than a decade earlier.
Like many inexperienced brides (you know better the second time round), I’d hung my designer wedding dress in a wardrobe years before in Cape Town, in the vague hope that it might one day enjoy another existence as an elegant evening gown. The problem was that I was never really invited to the kind of glamorous events where you’d need an elegant evening dress. A few literary award ceremonies were more or less the highlights of my social calendar, and a writer doesn’t want to look like a bride when she’s receiving a literary prize. Or worse, when she’s not receiving the prize. So the wedding dress stayed in the wardrobe year after year.
When I moved to France, the wedding dress came along, partly for sentimental reasons, partly because I thought that it might finally be revived in another country, where no one knew my wedding dress or me. Alas, in the French countryside my social life was even more limited than in Cape Town. And after my daughter was born it disappeared completely. My second wedding therefore seemed like the very last chance I’d ever have to wear my beautiful wedding gown. Although I shuddered in advance at what any guide to etiquette would say of a bride who got married in the same dress twice.
And yet I knew from the start that it wouldn’t work. You couldn’t wear such an immodest dress to such a modest wedding. And I was determined that the wedding would be modest. My first marriage had begun with an impressive dress and ended with an impressive lawyer’s bill. This time I would do it differently.
Besides, the groom didn’t even own a tie, let alone a smart suit or a pair of suitable shoes.
However, my brother decided to lend his new brother-in-law a suit and, as my brother is also not really the suit-wearing type, it was a fairly flamboyant one with a collar of black brocade and a lining of scarlet satin, something that dated from London’s Carnaby Street in the sixties. Such a wedding suit encouraged the groom’s sense of the theatrical, and underneath the red satin lining he wore the frilly shirt he’d worn in an amateur theatre production a few months earlier.
It was therefore one of those rare weddings where the bride’s outfit drew less attention than the groom’s.
And because it was such a historical day for our little village, the local correspondent for the newspaper La Provence came to take our picture, which was published the following week under the headline, ‘Two in one day’. The other couple’s picture didn’t appear along with ours, which unfortunately created the impression that Alain had married two women in one day. It led to many jokes in the local bar, particularly as we were surrounded in the picture by a crowd of children that couldn’t possibly all belong to one woman. Besides the four children which Alain and I had brought into the world separately and together, there were also the two children of our official witnesses, plus a few of the village children who happened to be hanging around outside the mairie (probably because their mothers were all picking grapes), and who posed with us uninvited.
It certainly didn’t resemble a traditional wedding picture, more like a children’s choir with their two tired middle-aged chaperones.
I didn’t mind. All that mattered was that all those months of filling out forms and signing papers were finally over.
Or that’s what I thought. Soon afterwards we decided to buy a house. And then the paper chase started all over again …
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