Futh and Angela’s wedding and honeymoon

Futh and Angela’s wedding and honeymoon are recalled not as a romantic beginning but as a sequence of strained encounters, uneasy absences, and practical failures. The wedding brings Futh’s father, Gloria, and Kenny into the same room as the newlyweds, exposing tensions that Futh does not know how to address; the honeymoon then turns the promise of a shared escape into a catalogue of delays, discomfort, and arguments. Remembered around Futh’s wedding-present suitcase, the event gives material form to a marriage already marked by distance.

Background and the Wedding

The wedding is recalled while Futh sits beside the suitcase he is carrying on his Rhine holiday. It had been a wedding present from his father, who had also served as best man. Before settling on him, Futh asked a man at work to take the role and was turned down. Gloria suggested Kenny instead. Kenny laughed when asked, leaving Futh to approach his father, who shook his head and asked, “Have you got no one else?” He nevertheless agreed, took Futh out for a drink, and raised a toast by describing the French name for a bachelor party as “l’enterrement de vie de garçon”—the burial of a boy’s life. The joke casts marriage as an ending before Futh has begun it.

The reception took place in the function room of a local pub. Its dance floor, buffet, and flashing disco lights form the setting for a celebration in which Futh repeatedly seeks an exit. His father slow-danced with Gloria, while Angela’s mother tried to persuade Futh to dance. Angela, by contrast, repeatedly refused to leave the floor, although Futh preferred an early night. As the buffet dried out and the noise became too much for him, he left Angela dancing and retreated into the corridor.

A back door stood propped open at the far end. Beyond it, rain was beginning to fall across a dark patio and a small lawn enclosed by the pub building and a hedge. A security light came on as Futh stepped outside, then went dark when he moved to the far wall, where he could not be seen from the function room. Standing in wet grass among patches of nettles, he enjoyed the smell of rain and remembered meeting Angela at a motorway service station: the wet coat in her car linked the wedding’s weather to the beginning of their relationship. Even amid the reception, his strongest comfort is an earlier memory experienced alone.

The Wedding Night and Morning

Later, Futh opened the bedroom window to the cool night air and wondered whether anyone was outside. A security light revealed Angela in her wedding dress crossing the patio and disappearing through the back door. He anticipated her return with cigarette smoke on her skin, hair, and breath, and shut the window. When he woke after the reception had ended, he reached across the bed expecting it might be empty. Angela was there, her skin still cold from being outside. He asked whether she was awake; she did not answer, and he went back to sleep. The scene offers physical closeness without conversation, and leaves her absence and return unexplained from Futh’s perspective.

At breakfast, Futh took a small continental meal and poured coffee for himself and Angela, but waited to eat until she returned from the cooked buffet. Instead, he saw her talking with Kenny. Angela noticed Futh watching and came back to the table without breakfast; Kenny stayed behind to fill his plate. Gloria explained that Kenny had arrived after the wedding food had been cleared away. Futh replied that he had not known Kenny was coming, making his presence seem unexpected even to the groom.

Futh tried to introduce Kenny to Angela, but Gloria interrupted to say they had already met the night before. Futh corrected her: they had met earlier, at a university open day. Kenny asked whether Angela remembered, and she nodded gingerly. Futh added that he had known Kenny since infant school. Kenny supplied the intimate, embarrassing detail that they had been neighbours and that Futh had wet the bed at his house. Futh turned to his croissant, annoyed at its brittle flakes, while Angela looked dazed and pushed away her untouched coffee. The exchange sets childhood familiarity beside the newlyweds’ unsettled present, without spelling out what Angela’s reaction means.

Honeymoon and Aftermath

When the taxi finally arrived late, rain had returned. Futh held his coat over Angela’s head as they hurried from the pub, then opened the taxi window to smell the rain. Angela leaned across and shut it; Futh caught the smell of Kenny’s cigarette smoke on her. Sitting in his damp coat and watching the rain, he thought of the night he had first met Angela at the motorway service station. The repeated weather that once carried the promise of their meeting now accompanies a small, uncomfortable discovery and a silence neither of them addresses.

The honeymoon itself was dreadful by Futh’s account: flights were delayed, luggage was lost, the couple had twin beds and upset stomachs, the weather was bad, they argued about Angela having to do all the driving, and the hire car broke down. Angela later summarized the trip to other people as, “It was bad,” adding, “I’m not sure you could have a worse holiday.” The failed holiday becomes a pointed contrast to the wedding’s expected promise of a shared beginning: even the trip meant to celebrate their marriage is remembered as a string of frustrations, with responsibility for it assigned to Futh.

After the honeymoon, Angela took charge of their holidays. She arranged visits at Christmas to her mother, her father, and Futh’s father, while Futh simply went along. The change in routine came last Christmas, when they made separate plans for the first time: Futh went alone to his father’s flat, which was really Gloria’s and had been chosen for its proximity to Kenny and his family. The wedding and honeymoon therefore stand at the start of a pattern that ends in separate arrangements. Their significance lies less in a single rupture than in the widening gap between shared occasions and the couple’s separate experiences of them.