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Non-Fiction
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| Mr and Mrs Simms are proud to announce... | |
| By Snodlander | ||||||||||
| 22 December 2006 | ||||||||||
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My life is a soap opera. “Grace and I had a little chat last night.” She tells me this in a quiet voice, the sort she uses when she has something salacious that she doesn’t want overheard. I look around. The living room is empty. Maybe she doesn’t want the gossip pixies that hide behind the sofa to hear. The kids are asleep, and being teenagers won’t surface for hours yet. “Oh yes?” I take a sip of tea to fortify myself. “They want to get married.” This is not the earth-shattering news I had braced myself for. About this time last year wimp-boy had accidentally let slip that they were going to get engaged on her birthday, but had not realised that he had given the game away. So we kept quiet, and hoped that they would break up before then. Well, I did, anyway. Two weeks before her eighteenth birthday my wife wanted to sell some knitted handbags on Ebay, and Grace agreed to model them for the photos. As I was cropping the photos I noticed something. “Grace. What’s that on your left hand?” “Oh this?” she asked innocently, holding up her ring finger. “Why didn’t wimp-boy ask me for your hand first? I am your father, you know.” “I’d be offended if he did. I’m not your personal possession that you can keep or give away.” “I think you’ll find you are my possession. I’ve paid enough for you over the years.” I know, I know. But there are many ways that a father can find out about his only daughter’s engagement. Ebay shouldn’t be one of them. I wasn’t at my best at that moment. So that fact that they were going to get married came as no surprise really. I think that one of the best reasons to get engaged is in order to get married, so it was always on the cards. So I take another sip of my green tea with peach and reply nonchalantly, “OK” “They want to get married in August.” “What? This August?” Surely not. Not my little girl. “Yes.” “What for?” “I don’t know. She didn’t say. But I think that as they’re not getting any money from his parents, and we don’t have any money, she thought that they might as well get married. And I expect that they want to rent a place together when she leaves Halls, so they’ll need to be married.” “Yes, that’ll be it. Because landlords are all stuck in the Victorian age and wouldn’t want to be responsible for a house of sin. I notice she’s only told you after wimp-boy has left for Bath.” “It’s better than finding out on Ebay, isn’t it?” “Do his folks know?” She shrugs. “He’s told his Mum.” “What does she think?” His parents have never liked Grace that much. Oh, they’ve been pleasant enough to her face, but privately they have let Steve know that they don’t really approve. At least, that’s probably what ‘scum of the earth’ and ‘little gold-digger’ mean. “She thinks that they are far too young.” “She’s right.” “Oh, come on. Steve will be 21 by August 11th. You were only 21 when we got married. I was only 22.” “That was totally different. We had jobs. Oh, and she has a date?” “Yes. She wants me to take her down to the Bishop’s Palace in Maidstone. It’s too expensive to get married in Bath. And she knows the hall she wants for the party afterwards. Lizzie and Emma are going to be bridesmaids. The dress she has chosen is nice, black and red. She is having trouble finding a vegan caterer, though.” “Oh, and after all this, do you have any idea when she might get round to telling her loving father?” “I think she told me so that I would tell you.” “Well, I’m hurt. I have been like a second father to that boy. I have opened my heart and home to him, and I get treated like this.” It is only when I get to work that I realise. I phone home. My wife answers. “23” I tell her. “What?” “23” “23?” “Yes. June 7th 1980 we got married. I was 23, not 21.” Another argument that I have won. But the victory is hollow.
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