July 10
There’s a problem with the tea lights, and Eloise decides it’s best to take care of it herself. Dreadful, but not wholly disastrous. In short: her wedding planner, an expat American named Katie whose capabilities Eloise now realizes were woefully oversold, bought the wrong ones. Instead of arriving this morning at Ollie’s parents’ estate with three thousand Richmond votive unscented white ten-hour-burning candles, she showed up with three thousand Richmond votive unscented crème ten-hour-burning candles. When Eloise pointed out the flaw, and mentioned how the crème might clash with the white furnishings and the white linen tablecloths and the white lilies and the white everything else she had fucking ordered, Katie merely shrugged; she suggested that the flames from the candles would likely distract the guests, and that chances were they’d never notice the difference in color.
“I’m sure your other clients might not notice,” Eloise had said. “But I’m not hosting a wedding for the lowest common denominator.”
Which is why she now finds herself here, parking Ollie’s father’s Range Rover in a small lot in front of a party supply shop off Hound Street in Sherborne—the town where Ollie spent fourteen romantic and idealized years as a public-school boy. The town where, if everything goes as planned, tomorrow she’ll become a romantic and idealized wife. Mr. Horwood had been nonchalant this morning when he tossed her the keys.
“Need three thousand more tea lights?” he said. “Isn’t that always the case. Here. Take my car.”
But that’s just his nature: a casualness that makes Eloise think either that he loves her or that he’s fucking with her. No matter if it’s the latter, though—she loves him. Loves his bushy gray mustache, his gin blossoms, his general ease—a lassitude that’s happily out of place in such a buttoned-up country. The Admiral. That’s what they all call him, at least. A throwback to when he served as an officer in the Royal Navy. He never actually rose to such a high rank, at least according to Ollie; to hear her fiancé tell it, his father never made it past captain before he retired from service to take up work as a private military contractor in Rwanda.
“Why do you call him Admiral, then?” Eloise had asked him. This was on their second date.
Ollie had shrugged and finished his pint. “He just likes the sound of it, I guess.”
Eloise loved this—the reasoning struck her as nothing but solid.
“And what was he doing in Rwanda?”
Ollie smacked his lips and licked away a spot of foam. “Unclear. All I know is that when he came back it was at the request of the British government. Something about an arms deal.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve? No. Thirteen. I’d just started third form at Sherborne.”
“Did your mom go with him?”
Ollie laughed. “No, ma’am. She stayed back and looked after the house.”
Of course she did, Eloise thinks now, locking up the Range Rover. Jane Ainsworth scarcely has the disposition to work in the front yard of Horwood Hall on a hot day; she’d hardly do well in sub-Saharan Africa. Her soon-to-be mother-in-law’s a small woman, a mousy five foot two, with shoulder-length gray hair and sensible, ignorable features. In dealing with Eloise she’s deferential, always asking Eloise for her opinion or permission. It’s a dynamic that initially disquieted Eloise—shouldn’t she be the one trying to win Jane’s approval?—and now mildly irritates her. Particularly with all these wedding preparations, more than anything else Jane has been in the way; she rises early in the morning to brew coffee for the household, then stands back, waiting for instructions as people maneuver themselves around her. Yes, granted, Eloise and Ollie are paying for most of the wedding expenses—they are, after all, thirty-five years old—but would it kill Jane to have an opinion? To put her neck out there and criticize the flowers, or the marquee, or one of Eloise’s other aesthetic choices?
“Consider yourself lucky,” Flossie had said to her when she first complained about Jane. “You’re the only person I know who doesn’t have a dreadful mother-in-law.”
“It’s like dealing with a corpse in a doily” had been Eloise’s response.
She locks up the Range Rover and walks across the lot to the party supply store. Opening the door, she hears the faint tingle of a bell. She orients herself and tries to find the cashier. The shop is longer than it is wide: seven aisles of shelves stocked high with tchotchkes and knickknacks: themed cocktail napkins and Mylar balloons and plastic utensils that she imagines have been sitting there since Britain went to war over the Falklands. Wandering down the center aisle, Eloise picks up a miniature plastic model of Sherborne Abbey, the church where, tomorrow, she’s to be married. Accidentally she pushes a small button next to the abbey’s nave, and the whole thing lights up like it’s being napalmed. From some hidden dwarf speaker, the “Hallelujah Chorus” begins.
“Jesus Christ,” Eloise says, startled, and puts the thing back.
She continues on to the cashier’s desk, which has been left unattended, and rings a small silver bell. After counting to ten, she reaches down to ring the bell again, but just as she’s about to do so an impish woman in purple chiffon emerges from the shop’s back office.
“Hullo there,” she says. Her eye shadow matches her dress, and her cheeks have been rouged to a lethal shade of pink. Eloise catches whiffs of Rochas Femme and Earl Grey tea. “How can I help you?”
She readjusts her purse on her shoulder. “Hi, yeah, I called an hour ago about the candles.”
“Of course.” The woman smiles. “The three thousand white votives.”
“Yes, those.”
“Just one moment.”
She slips away into the back office, and Eloise breathes, relieved. When she called, the woman—Polly, Eloise thinks she said her name is—assured her that they had the candles, all of them, and that they’d be here waiting when she arrived. But past experience has taught her that those types of promises are less than certain. There’s truth in that tired old adage about doing things yourself—if planning a wedding has taught her one thing, it’s that. Take this candle mishap: If she could, she thinks, she’d make the goddamned votives with her own bare hands. She’d buy the wax, cut the mold, fire ’em up. She can’t, though—someone’s coming to do her hair in two hours—and so the whole thing’s become a tragedy of delegation. Blessed are the incompetent, she thinks. For they shall inherit the earth.
Polly reemerges holding a single box.
Eloise balks. “I said three thousand.”
Polly laughs and sets the box on the counter. “The rest of them are round back, by our service entrance,” she says. “I thought it would be easier if you brought your car there so we might load them into the boot, instead of trucking them through the aisles.”