‘A song you want to play at your wedding.’
It’ll be fourteen years soon. I don’t intend to get married again - but if I were to relive the day we had, the music is one thing I’d do differently. On the day… it didn’t quite go according to plan. During the church service anyway.
I suppose it started when I agreed to get married in my husband’s home town, and in his church. It was where we were going to be living, after all, and some family circumstances meant that it just had to be that way. Anyway. I couldn’t, as I might otherwise have done, have girls from the school where I’d been teaching, singing or playing guitar or whatever in the church, but never mind… we met up with the church organist and talked through some requests and all seemed set to go. A few old favourites: no-one who could play our church organ seemed to be able to play ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ but the organist seemed happy with my second choice: Clarke’s ‘Trumpet Voluntary’, for walking up the aisle. A few hymns were chosen - we went for ones that everyone would know, one of them based on the Prayer of St Francis, one I remembered from Communion and Confirmation, away back - and I was thinking about the Mendelssohn Wedding March from the incidental music to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, secular as it is, for leaving the church. So far, it all felt ok. But then the organist’s mum died, leaving her of course in no state to play at a wedding, but she was kind enough to rope in a substitute for us from another parish.
The afternoon of the wedding came. I arrived at the church, shaking with nerves, none of it feeling real, my parents on edge and seeming almost angry in their anxiety… the early August skies grey, but with a promise of sunshine eventually… the dress on, the shoes more comfortable than I’d expected, feeling strange about wearing a veil. A few photographs, a few final adjustments, a few deep breaths. Someone peeped around the doors and confirmed that the other side of the house had turned up. I gritted my teeth and my Dad and I began the seemingly endless walk up the aisle… my Dad itching to take his usual fast pace and me trying to slow him down. And then it began. The ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ had started off ok. It sounded quite nice, actually, echoing around the simply-decorated church (white roses here and there) - but suddenly, when we were about a quarter of the way up the aisle, the wrong notes started. And continued. Multiplied. And got worse and worse and worse until, about halfway through the agonisingly slow journey, I felt like stopping dead and saying look, just play the notes on the score, would you, stop trying to rewrite the thing! And then, as I tried to distract myself by taking in the outfits of my various friends and try to work out which of my aunts had won the ‘biggest hat’ competition, I started feeling that familiar sensation. I couldn’t believe it. I was having the ‘oh God, I want to laugh in church and it would be completely inappropriate.’ I let my Dad pick up his pace and we arrived at the altar moments ahead of schedule, but at least it had distracted me slightly from my nerves, I suppose. Though I think it did ruin the Trumpet Voluntary for me forever…
The wedding service continued, musically, in that vein, with the hymns proving a bit of a struggle for everyone except a few enthusiastic teachers and my voiciferous aunts from Cork. Again I was remembering Les Dawson in some very old comedy shows. I can barely even remember the music as we walked back down the aisle afterwards, partly because the new organist had point-blank refused to go with my request (and just as well, I think, as it’s notoriously difficult to play); I think we ended up walking back down to an instrumental reprise of the final hymn, or something, but anyway my eyes were fixed on the church door as I could see some sort of activity going on outside, which turned out to be a guard of honour lining up: men in uniform bearing white be-ribboned oars. Cameras were flashing and I was trying to get my head around the idea of being married…
Later, at the reception, there was music again, of course. We had a band from Belfast, and they were to some extent the typical wedding band, but thankfully they didn’t offer the typical playlist which seems to feature at almost every Irish wedding. You know the kind of thing. ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond at least twice, ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba to get everyone on the floor, a slow set of topical boyband fare to encourage bonding among the unmarried and see if the wedding might spark a proposal somewhere, or to afford ageing uncles an opportunity to put a smile on their faces. We had our first dance to ‘Have I told you lately…’ by Van Morrison; ironic, in retrospect, as in the last few years we keep having real-life encounters with this grumpy little man. ‘Have I told you lately your hair’s awful?’ ‘Have I told you lately you’ve a love-child?’ ‘Have I told you lately you lack dress sense?’ These are the questions which strike me when I see him in real life. Still: having grown up in Belfast, it seemed apposite to have a wedding singer from Belfast singing a song by a famous Belfast star to start things off.
Would I choose different songs now, if I had the whole thing to do again? You know: I might not. Sometimes I hear songs and wish we’d known them and used them then. Often I wish the church service, in particular, had been different: that we could have had a singer… a folk group… a harpist… a traditional ensemble. But then I remember how much worse it could have been. I mean, someone, weeks before, had volunteered a family friend to sing in the church. ‘She could sing something really lovely,’ he’d enthused. ‘You know. Like maybe ‘Edelweiss’.’ ‘Edelweiss’, I thought? ‘Edelweiss’, for heaven’s sake: why, why on earth would anyone want ‘Edelweiss’ at their wedding? If we’d had ‘Edelweiss’, I don’t think I’d have had the slightest chance of disguising my inappropriate desire to laugh in church…
When I was a graceless 13 year old, and certain that no man ever, in the unimaginable expanses of future time, could possibly even contemplate wanting to marry me, my Mum used to find the patience to reassure me with the words: ‘Every old shoe finds an old stocking.’ Capture the romance of marriage it did not, but this statement reassured as much as it revolted - though I did wish it didn’t make me equate marriage and weddings with hideous American Tan tights, darned and bobbling at the toes. But it did make me think of marriage as something everyday, not glamorous. That it was the marriage, the union of old shoe and old stocking, not the wedding, and all the superficial festivity of idealised perfection of the day, that mattered. Some people hold the superstition that if the wedding day doesn’t go quite right, the marriage will be all the better for that imperfection. I don’t agree with that, particularly, but I’m glad, thinking back, that our wedding day lacked the perfection of a royal or a celebrity one. It made it all more real. More everyday. More normal. Not so much ‘the happiest day of our lives’ as the start of a whole new stage of life for both of us.
If a marriage starts off with the happiest day of the couple’s lives already past by the time they fall asleep that night, then it doesn’t say much for the years that lie ahead of them. I’m glad our wedding day was not a day of flawless artistry. I’m glad there were moments I felt exasperated and times I wanted to laugh when it wouldn’t have been allowed, and even times I felt a bit upset and tearful. Because that’s how I react to things on normal days, and I wanted to enter married life as myself, not as some sort of artificially preened, perfected bride, as plastic as the tiny one on top of the wedding cake.
Marriage isn’t about being perfect. Marriage is about making the whole tune work, even when the score is difficult. Marriage is about keeping going when you stumble, and reflecting the everlasting compromise of the truth of how you feel alongside the expectation of what other people need to see.
Marriage is about forgiving one another the wrong notes, the fumbled keys, the lost chords.
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