A Mutually Inconvenient Problem

The trouble with a small county is that it is, geometrically, a small county, and the people in it keep arriving at the same rooms. Frankie next encountered Julian Marsh six weeks later, at the engagement party of a couple she was planning for — a couple whose wedding, she was darkly aware, would now not be at the orangery, thanks to the very man currently standing by the canapés looking as though he owned the concept of canapés. She considered leaving. She considered, more seriously, staying and being magnificent at him from a distance. In the end she did neither, because the bride-to-be towed her bodily across the room saying you have to meet my cousin's lawyer, and deposited her directly in front of Julian Marsh, and went away beaming, leaving them in a silence with weather in it. "Miss Doyle," said Julian. "Mr. Marsh. Closed any glasshouses this morning?" "It's not yet noon. I pace myself." He set down his canapé. "You look like a woman about to leave a room very pointedly. Before you do — I find myself, against the run of play, needing to ask you something professional." "No." "You haven't heard it." "I heard the part where it came from you. That was sufficient." Julian Marsh did something then that surprised her. He did not deploy charm, which she had been braced for, and which she had her counter-charm loaded and ready for. Instead he exhaled, and rubbed the back of his neck, and looked, for one unguarded second, simply like a tired person with a problem — and Frankie, who read people for a living, who had to know within thirty seconds of meeting a couple whether the marriage would outlast the band, filed that second away as real. "My sister is getting married in three weeks," he said. "And my mother has decided, in the manner of mothers, that the great unsolved tragedy of the family is that I am thirty-six and unaccompanied. She has spent a year arranging — there is no gentle word — ambushes. Dinners with the single daughters of her bridge friends. And the wedding itself is a three-week siege of family events, and at every one of them there will be a chair beside me that my mother has emotionally reserved for a woman who does not exist, and she will spend the entire wedding grieving that empty chair instead of enjoying her own daughter, and I am tired, Miss Doyle. I am very good at my job and completely defeated by my mother, and I would give a frankly unprofessional sum of money to simply produce a plausible woman, get through three weeks, and have the chair be full." Frankie stared at him. "You're asking me," she said slowly, "to be your fake girlfriend." "I'm asking whether you know the going rate for one. You're in the events industry. You presumably know everyone. I assumed you'd have a — a supplier." "I plan weddings, Julian. I'm not a staffing agency for your emotional cowardice." But she had not walked away, she noticed. She was still standing there. And there was a reason she was still standing there, and the reason had been forming in the back of her mind from roughly the word ambushes, and she hated it, and it was not going away. Because Frankie had a wedding of her own to attend. Not as a planner — as a guest, as the daughter, because her younger brother was getting married, in three weeks, and her own mother had spent the year saying, with devastating gentleness, things like and you'll bring someone, won't you, love, it's been such a long time, and Frankie had said yes, of course, there was someone, there was absolutely a someone, and there was not a someone, there had not been a someone in two years, and she had three weeks to either produce one or watch her mother's face do the soft sad thing across the top table. She looked at Julian Marsh. Julian Marsh, who had ruined her favourite venue. Julian Marsh, who needed precisely, exactly, symmetrically the thing she needed. "How far away," she said, "is your sister's wedding. Geographically." "The other side of the county. Why." "Because mine," said Frankie, with the expression of a woman watching a terrible idea walk towards her with its arms open, "is on the near side. Three weeks. My brother. And my mother has reserved a chair too." She folded her arms. "Don't smile. Do not smile, Julian, I can see it starting. We loathe each other. This is the worst idea either of us has ever had." "It's a mutually inconvenient problem," said Julian Marsh, smiling anyway, "with a frankly elegant solution. Two weddings. Two empty chairs. One arrangement." He picked his canapé back up, looking, for the first time since she had met him, genuinely delighted. "Miss Doyle. I think we should draw up a contract." "Of course you do," said Frankie. "Of course you do."