A Groom With a View by Sophie Ranald

another hour before Erica surfaced, and I’d been practising deep yoga breathing and reminding myself that she was the mother of the man I loved, the work she did was selfless and incredibly challenging and if I made an effort, we might be able to rebuild our relationship. So when she emerged from our bedroom, obviously just out of a hot bath and wearing fluffy slippers and an outsized jumper that looked more suitable for an expedition to the Arctic than for our centrally-heated flat, I greeted her with as enthusiastic a hug as I could muster.
    “Hello, Erica, how lovely to see you. Did you have an okay flight?”
    “Hello, Pippa. Don’t you look well? You’ve put on weight, haven’t you?” she said. “My, but this flat is cold! I do find it difficult to be comfortable in a cold place.”
    “I expect it’s having come from a hot climate,” I said. “I’ll turn up the heating.”
    “You’ll feel warmer when you’ve eaten, Mum,” Nick said. “Pippa’s made a wonderful welcome dinner.”
    So I thought. But apparently I had forgotten (and Nick, who’d lived with the woman for the first eighteen years of his life, had never known) that Erica had a severe allergy to mushrooms, so my filo parcels went down like a bucket of cold sick. Erica scrutinised the sumac salad suspiciously and then said, “In cold weather, I always find that what I really fancy is some soup. Isn’t it funny the things you miss most when you’re away from home for a long time? For me, it’s Campbells tomato soup! I’m sure you’ve got some, haven’t you? It was always Nick’s favourite treat growing up.”
    In all the time I’ve known him, I have never known Nick to even mention tinned soup.
    “There’s some homemade tomato and basil soup in the freezer,” I said. “We could warm it up if you like?”
    “Oh, no, Pippa, I don’t want you to go to any trouble! I’d be quite happy with a tin, but if you haven’t got any. . .”
    So of course Nick went out to the corner shop and bought up their entire supply of Campbell’s Cream of Tomato and Erica happily slurped some down in spite of it being absolutely packed with cow’s milk and gluten. And then when I offered her some of the avocado chocolate mousse she said, “Thank you, Pippa, I’ve had quite enough. You do have to watch your figure at my age! But you must understand the importance of that, of course, working with food all the time.”
    And I remembered her earlier comment about my weight and had to say I wouldn’t have any pudding either, actually, and watch Nick scoff the lot of it. He said it was really good, too.
    That night in the too-narrow-for-two sofabed, made even narrower by Spanx, who settled down sideways between us and stretched out to his full length, I downloaded an event countdown app on to my phone. It was clearly designed for weddings, with lots of animated bells and doves and things, but I set it up to keep track of the days remaining until Erica went back to Liberia. Okay, that happened to be two days after our wedding day, but I knew which event I was looking forward to more.

CHAPTER SIX
    From: [email protected]
    To: [email protected]
    Subject: Friday
    Hey Callie
    Hope all’s good with you. This is a very cheeky request so please say no if it’s a problem. Pip and I arranged to go down to Brocklebury Manor for an initial chat about colour schemes etc on Friday afternoon. We were meeting Imogen, the events manager, at 4.30pm. But now Pip’s got to go dress shopping on Wednesday and she says there’s no way she can do two afternoons off work in one week (I don’t know if she’s told you about the South Africa trip she’s got coming up? It’s going to be amazing but take up loads of her time, and she’s mega-stressed as it is). Anyway she says I’m the one who knows about design and she’s happy to leave all that stuff up to me. But I don’t want to screw it up! Any chance you could come along in your