Last-Minute Bridegroom. Linda Miles

plan. There were lots and lots of more or less connected children.

      It wasn’t that she wanted an ex-rated wedding—but there wasn’t a single person there who hadn’t made a point of calling her, when his or her own marriage was on the rocks, to say how much they’d always liked her, how much they hoped she wouldn’t drop out of sight just because the formal connection wasn’t there. There was no one who wouldn’t be mortally hurt if left out, or even relegated to a table for friends of the family. Well, what had she been supposed to do?

      She had finally worked out a plan which placed each person between two other persons of the opposite sex with whom that person was not going to exchange insults. The change of groom had meant that about eight hours of solid anguish had been for nothing. Chaz’s parents obviously had to sit next to him, which meant that the whole meticulously calculated plan fell apart and had had to be started from scratch.

      In the end she had just put names in a hat and dealt them out. She was not going through that again. Sure enough three sworn enemies were now sitting side by side; she sat between Chaz and her father, confidently expecting an explosion.

      To her surprise, none came. On the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, everyone seemed to have discovered common ground in their previously undisclosed loathing of Jeremy. Up and down the table people could be heard agreeing that better late than never. The closest anyone came to a nasty remark was the heartfelt wish, by Chaz’s mother, that she had had the sense to trade up before walking down the aisle.

      ‘Still, darling, you wouldn’t be here if I had, so perhaps it’s all for the best,’ she concluded cheerfully, blithely ignoring a black look from the man who should have got away.

      Tasha almost wished they would all start fighting. She ate her way through the dinner, shrinking further and further into her chair, while the marital veterans called out more or less cynical pieces of advice. ‘Don’t make the mistake I made,’ they would begin, and then explain how it had all gone wrong and how she or Chaz could avoid this. Basically the mistake was to assume it would last for ever: what you were supposed to do was assume something was going to go wrong, assume a marriage was going to break up unless you watched it every single second to patch it up again as soon as cracks started to show.

      If she’d been marrying someone she loved, and who loved her in return, she might have stood up to them, or at least believed something else was possible. But how could she believe that with the kind of marriage she’d ended up with? It was as if the one thing she’d always wanted was the one thing she could never have. She’d spent most of her childhood and adolescence on the sidelines of relationships going wrong, waiting for things to fall apart and then finding herself suddenly in the middle of a brand new family being polite to the complete strangers who were now married to her parents. Her father had tried to provide an element of stability, but she’d wanted more than an element of stability. All she’d ever wanted was something she knew was going to last. Maybe they were right, and that was the one thing you could never have and never know.

      Chaz glanced down at his drooping bride, then around the table at their relatives. He rapped on his glass with a knife. ‘Order, order,’ he said. He looked coolly round their startled faces, then laughed suddenly. ‘You’re giving Tasha the horrors,’ he said. ‘Stop it, all of you. The next one to mention a prenuptial contract gets sent out of the room.’

      There was a little ripple of laughter.

      ‘Sorry, darling,’ said Tasha’s mother. ‘You know we just want what’s best for you, and you know what they say; an ounce of prevention—’

      Chaz silenced her with a look.

      ‘I may have missed something in the ceremony just now,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about covering my back or making sure Tasha didn’t take advantage of me. The only things I can remember have to do with doing things for her.’ He gave them all a lazy smile. ‘Now you all know what a monster of selfishness I am. I’ve been to a few weddings over the years, and the deal never appealed to me. In business you look after your own interests, and the other guy looks after his interests, and if you’re me you end up with a lot of money and a lot of people who don’t like you very much.’

      There was another ripple of laughter.

      ‘Now of course it’s true that in the marriage ceremony you exchange vows, so if you promise to do everything you can to make the other person happy they promise to do the same for you. So if they do their part maybe you won’t lose out too badly.’ A black eyebrow slid up. ‘On the other hand if you’re as good as I am at looking after number one, why would you want to delegate?’

      Someone said, ‘Hear, hear.’

      Chaz smiled. ‘Quite.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘Well, it had me puzzled for years, why anyone would want to sign on for something like that.’ He picked up the bottle of wine and filled Tasha’s glass. ‘Then I happened to remember a rather wet story I once read by O. Henry. The story is about a couple at Christmas. The gist of the story is that they don’t have any money, but each has one precious thing. She has very long beautiful hair, and he has a gold watch. So she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain, and he sells his watch to buy her a tortoiseshell comb.

      ‘You might think they both ended up losing out, because they’d each lost the one precious thing they had in the world. But what they actually had was something so rare you hardly ever come across it—they each wanted the other’s happiness more than anything in the world. The hair and the watch were gone, but they still had that.’

      He looked thoughtfully round the table. ‘Well, it seemed to me that that was the point of marriage. You think you care about somebody’s happiness more than you care about the gold watch, and you stand up in front of a lot of people and say so. Of course, you could be wrong—you could both be wrong; you could find you actually care more about the hair or the watch. But the idea of going into it making sure that, whatever happens, you’re still going to have a gold watch at the end of the day strikes me as insane. If that was the thing I cared about most I wouldn’t get married in the first place.’

      Even in her rather depressed frame of mind, Tasha couldn’t help being amused by the range of expressions around the table. These were people who’d been calling Chaz’s girlfriends ‘darling’ for years because if you remembered a name from last time you could bet it was out of date. They’d been complaining of his restlessness, his refusal to settle down, his allergy to commitment. And now to be lectured on the meaning of marriage by the prodigal!

      Chaz smiled at them benignly. ‘Now, only a few hours ago I promised to do everything I could to make Tasha happy, so I obviously can’t let you all make her miserable, and I can see it makes her miserable to think that marriage is all about hedging your bets. So I’d just like to go on record as saying that I disagree. It’s a gamble—everything in life is a gamble. But in my opinion the thing you’re playing for is the chance that you care about somebody else more than yourself. If you start out worrying about how to keep your watch safe, you’ve already lost the thing you were playing for; you’ve already decided you can’t care about someone that much. Well, we may find we don’t care about each other that way, and if so you can all say you told us so. But at least we’ll have played for something worth winning. And after all, in the immortal words of someone or other, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.’

      There was scattered applause around the table. Tasha’s father reached around her to grip Chaz’s shoulder. Chaz’s mother burst into tears.

      ‘Oh, darling,’ she sobbed into her handkerchief. ‘I’m so happy for you. All these years I thought I’d ruined your life, I thought you couldn’t love anybody, I thought you’d marry some society girl as a business accessory and never find true love.’ She gulped. ‘And now you’re marrying dear little Tasha and you’ll have children of your own. This is the happiest day of my life.’ She burst into sobs again.

      Chaz put an arm round his mother’s shoulder and offered her a fresh handkerchief.

      Tasha’s mother said, ‘Chaz, dear, that’s a lovely, lovely thought,