August: The White Wedding

      The doors at the back of the abbey church creaked open, and the radiant bride appeared on the arm of her noticeably less radiant father.

      Jenny Rodenhurst looked stunning in her wedding dress, which had achieved that elegance of simplicity which only money can buy. It was entirely white, and successfully combined traditionalism with modernity. Her accessories were extremely spare, in view of all the suffering in the Third World. Her lengthy train was held by two bridesmaids. One of them was very young, and the other one was very fat.

      Her father, Laurence Rodenhurst, was as perfectly dressed as it is possible for a man to be without ceasing to look like a dentist.

      Leslie Horton, water bailiff and organist, who hated to be called Les, launched himself into a hefty rendition of ‘Here Comes The Bride’; and a brief burst of sunlight poured through the memorial stained-glass window dedicated to the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, on whose side God had been in two world wars, though this hadn’t prevented them suffering heavy casualties.

      The sizeable congregation craned their necks with varying degrees of shameless curiosity to watch the bridal procession, as it moved slowly past the stall of devotional literature, past the red arrow that indicated the distressingly slow progress of the Tower Appeal Fund, past the empty back pews and massive columns of the austere Norman nave, towards the less fearsome, more decorated beauty of the Early English chancel. Now the bride and her father were level with the least important of the guests, the third cousins twice removed, the employees who just couldn’t not be invited, and the funny little man with the big ears who turned up unbidden at all the weddings.

      Rita Simcock, mother of the groom and wife of the town’s premier maker of toasting forks, was painfully aware that there were more people on the bride’s side than on theirs, that the people on the bride’s side were better dressed and more stylish. She was painfully aware that her younger son, Paul, the groom, was unemployed, and hadn’t had the haircut that he had promised, and looked a mess. She was painfully aware that her elder son, the cynical Elvis, although he had a philosophy degree from the University of Keele, was also unemployed, there being no vacancies for philosophers at the Job Centre just then, and looked almost as great a mess as Paul.

      Liz Rodenhurst, mother of the lovely bride, a year older than Rita but looking ten years younger, was aware of all these things too, but her main emotion as she watched the slow procession was one of irritation with her daughter for having had her beautiful hair cropped short before this day of all days. It