A Beautiful Day for a Wedding: This year’s Bridget Jones!. Charlotte Butterfield

what point are we sacking off the herbal teas and moving onto the champagne?’ Eve said brightly, with a joviality she didn’t feel. ‘We are on a hen do, after all!’

      Despite her initial misgivings about the fun factor of the other hens, everyone seemed to like this idea, and once corks were popped – much to the chagrin of the clean-living staff – the mood lifted a little and the rest of the afternoon was passably pleasant. Passably pleasant. If ever it became Eve’s turn to be the bride to be, passably pleasant was not a term she’d like associated with her last weekend of freedom. In fact, she wouldn’t trust herself not to headbutt whoever described it as that. Not that a hen do in her honour seemed likely any time soon. She was a self-confessed perfectionist when it came to men, and would much rather be listening to jazz on her balcony in her pyjamas than scrolling through Tinder or attending one of those God-awful, soul-withering speed dating nights. When it was the right time for her future husband to show up in her life, he would. There was no point at all in hurrying it. Except she was thirty and her whole family thought she might be a lesbian. But that was neither here nor there.

      After a quick shower and change into their black dresses, which was the standard uniform for the night, Eve and Becca locked the room they were sharing and headed down to the bar. As expected, Tanya had firmly vetoed any type of outfit for the hens, even giving a vehement shake of the head to the suggestion of badges or sash-action. Whilst Eve knew that disobeying the bride’s wishes went against every type of wedding etiquette going, it hadn’t stopped her from surreptitiously handing out twelve rainbow-coloured unicorn horns to the other hens on her arrival at the spa. Now, it might have been the afternoon spent drinking that made the previously stone-faced women happy to go out in public wearing horns on their heads, but whatever it was, the sight of a dozen unicorns in the bar made her burst into spontaneous laughter.

      Even Tanya, who’d managed so far to maintain a concrete-like dignity, was gathering up her friends around her to take a selfie. Sometimes, Eve thought, people don’t know what they want until you give it to them.

      ‘Eve! Get in!’ Tanya ordered. ‘And smile!’

      The sight of a herd of unicorns marching down the high street on a Saturday night was quite the spectacle. Eve guessed correctly that the most fun this Oxfordshire town had seen previously was when the local twinning association got a bit excited on cheap French wine after a boules match on the common.

      Eve had already phoned ahead to the landlord of the Fox and Hounds and warned them to expect twelve lairy women, and to put a few cases of white wine in the fridges. Word had obviously got around, as the pub was packed out with the town’s single male population who gave a raucous cheer as they all filed in. It didn’t take long before an impromptu darts match was underway, the music turned up, and chairs and tables pushed back. Eve was seeing a side to Tanya that she hadn’t glimpsed in years and certainly wasn’t expecting to see tonight.

      ‘Come on Ayesha!’ Tanya shouted across the bar as the familiar start to Can’t Touch This came on. ‘You and me. Right here. Right now.’ Tanya had kicked her heels off under a table and was already flexing her neck and arm muscles. Eve smiled. She’d never say so to Tanya, but this actually did beat a roller disco.

      ***

      Eve knew that the sunlight was going to hurt her eyes before she opened them, so decided not to. She could hear Becca shift position in the seat next to her, so guessed that her friend was stirring too.

      ‘Ow,’ Eve whispered.

      ‘Ow,’ Becca replied.

      They’d missed the curfew the spa manager had sternly imposed upon them as they left the previous evening, demanding that they all return before midnight as the doors would be locked then. It turned out she was true to her word. After the hens had weaved their way through the darkened town centre after a long lock-in at the pub, sometime around 3 a.m., they were faced with a dark, firmly closed hotel. Of course, all eyes fell on Eve, the chief party planner, for a solution, as though she was going to click her heels and transport them all into their cosy beds, or failing that, at least miraculously produce a master key. If Eve hadn’t have been suffering the effects of an endless stream of cheap white wine being poured into her mouth for hours, she may well have come up with a solution more palatable than all of them sleeping in their cars.

      ‘I don’t think my neck works any more,’ Becca moaned.

      ‘My vertebrae seem to have fused together,’ Eve added.

      ‘I think an animal died in my mouth,’ said Ayesha from the back seat. Both Becca and Eve had forgotten she was there, and they both yelped with shock at her voice, before giggling uncontrollably.

      ‘This reminds me of that festival we went to, when our tent got waterlogged so we all kipped in Tanya’s dad’s Volvo,’ Eve said.

      ‘At least that was an estate car so we could all lie in the back, this is a bloody Yaris!’

      ‘It was fun though,’ Ayesha reminisced. ‘Four of us squeezed into the back of it, and Ben in the front.’

      Once again, Eve realised that she’d managed to rewrite history in order to forget that Ben had been there too. Of course he’d been there, he’d even queued up for the tickets for them all.

      ‘Happy days,’ Ayesha sighed.

      ‘Happy days,’ Becca agreed.

      Eve stayed silent.

      ‘Speaking of Ben,’ Ayesha started gently. ‘How do you feel about him coming back Eve?’

      ‘Like you said yesterday, it’s been four years, why would I care?’

      ‘Because we both know you do.’

      Eve swiftly changed the subject. ‘So, how annoyed do you reckon Tanya is this morning? Do you think she’ll be filled with nostalgia like us, or just pure hatred for me?’

      ‘It’s not your fault!’ Becca said. ‘We all forgot the time and wanted to stay longer, it’s not as though she was ready to leave at half eleven, was she? It’ll be fine, how could you not see the funny side to this?’

      Tanya could not see the funny side to this. Waking up in a car, the sequinned black dress she’d paid an eye-watering amount for hitched around her waist, with her stuck-on eyelashes gluing her left eye shut, was not the blissful sleeping-in-a-spa experience she’d wanted. What was Eve thinking allowing them all to miss the curfew? She’d specifically made her the head hen so that situations like this didn’t happen. She and Eve hadn’t been particularly close in years but she had assumed that having a wedding professional in her wedding party would be extremely useful. Eve should have called time on the party, ushered them all back to the hotel, handed out the monogrammed eye masks she’d insisted on Eve ordering, and they’d all be waking up right now refreshed and invigorated ready for the hotel’s fresh juice and homemade muesli. They weren’t twenty years old any more.

      Just then, Eve tapped on Tanya’s car window that was slightly lowered to let the condensation dry out. She had the nerve smile at her, while still wearing that blasted unicorn horn. Tanya turned the engine on, closed the window, and reversed out of the car park back onto the main road and headed in the direction of London.

      ‘Tanya’s just left.’ Eve announced, opening the door of Becca’s Yaris.

      ‘Left?’

      ‘Yep.’

      Ayesha and Becca started laughing again. They’d always seen the funny side to Tanya’s spoiled strops. Which was helpful as they’d both been in the firing line for daring to get married in the same year as Tanya. She had actually asked them both to consider postponing their weddings until the year after, ‘or at the very least autumn’, as though by sending her save the dates out fractionally ahead of the other two she owned the entire summer.

      ‘What about everyone else? Are they still here?’ Ayesha asked.

      Eve looked around the car park. Hens in various states of disarray were straightening